Agitated? Anxious? Can't settle? These tips might help.
Have you ever had that feeling where your insides are all zooming around and agitated and you just cannot find a way to settle? Whether we call this anxiety, nervous system dysregulation, or “the zoomies,” I think we can all agree that it feels really bad.
One of the many reasons I love being a therapist and a yoga teacher is that I get to care about and help shift human suffering. Every day I get to be with amazing people, and together we get to work on figuring out how to feel better. Increasingly, one of the types of suffering I work with (and perhaps am no stranger to myself), is that feeling where your inner world just starts swirling around in a really unsettled and restless way. This feeling reminds me of a plane zooming around and around and around. It just can’t land. Our inner world can feel like this eternally circling plane when something triggers us, when we get overwhelmed with either our life or the larger world around us, or sometimes for no discernible reason. This inner agitation is a strange and consuming feeling that robs us of our ability to be fully present in our lives.
Lately, when I think about reducing this specific type of suffering, I contemplate how humans might land that anxiety plane. People are often motivated to reduce the zoomies only when it’s happening, when they're deep in an anxiety spiral. But you know what's less difficult and more effective over time than only working on a thing when it’s inflamed? Working on it when it’s not the headline news. Building inner runways for your plane to land on when you're NOT so stressed.
Then the question is how do we do the daily, sometimes plodding, work of tending to our inner world so that over time we know how to land the plane? There are actions you can take that absolutely help. And I bet you know in your brain every thing in this list. And I bet you’re not doing them regularly. Let’s be honest with ourselves ... we have access to lots of information. It's the integration of it into our lives and bodies that's the hard part. So to seriously help the situation, try these things:
Speak with kindness and respect towards yourself both in your mind and in conversation. Accept help and care from others.
Move your body and tune into your breath.
Stop and connect with nature.
Accept the fact that you’re amazing; and you’re a little nutty. Welcome to being human.
My suggestion to you is to practice these and actions like this every single day. Even in teeny tiny microdoses. Do anything that helps you to feel MORE (not less) connected to you. The work you do to build a respectful relationship with yourself is also the work of building internal runways. Each practice that encourages this self-connection builds a little bit more space for your plane (your thoughts and feelings) to land on. How can a plane land without a smooth, solid, clear runway to touch down on? So it goes with our inner world. Much of our work as humans is to build these internal spaces so our agitated mind and feelings have somewhere to land. I wish that for you … more landing, less zooming. I wish that for all of us.
Don’t be shy to reach out to me with questions or comments, or bring up your hopes or reactions to your amazing therapist. If it seems impossible to speak kindly to yourself, for example, your therapist can help you figure out the first step. There's always possibility for change and good change is generally slow. And remember you don’t have to do this work alone. It takes a village. And we're honored to be part of yours.
