The hidden cause of health anxiety: When you shouldn’t close your eyes and breathe deep.
A lot of self-care practices involve closing your eyes and breathing deeply but for someone who’s interoception is out of balance, this can exacerbate feelings of inner chaos.
Your nervous system is designed to constantly scan three domains:
The world around us (exteroception)
Our physical body (interception)
The people around us
In health anxiety, we get hypersensitive to the signals from within our own body.
We might worry that a certain sensation isn’t normal, or that it means we’re sick. Or we might worry that we’ll forget how to breathe, or forget how to swallow.
This is caused by disruption or a confusion in interoception
When we’re very young, we don’t have a clear distinction between ourselves and our environment or ourselves and other people
When our nervous system gets disrupted before the age of 5, we may have a hard time distinguishing what’s going on around us from what’s going on inside us.
We lose trust in the automatic processes of our body because we don’t experience them as belonging to us.
We’ve lost touch with our sense of self, and we’ve lost our feeling of being contained in our skin.
Everyone knows if you’re stressed out and in anxiety you should sit quietly, close your eyes and breathe deeply, right?
That’s how we’ve all learned to calm down.
But what if you try and you just can’t?
What if your head spins and your stomach turns and your lungs seize up?
Then what...
Too often, when we can’t do the simplest things that we’ve been taught should make us feel better, we decide that we’re broken, lazy or crazy
12 years ago, when I was going through massive panic and anxiety attacks every day, and I couldn’t do even the most basic things to calm myself down, I spent a lot of time beating myself up in my head.
I was a certified yoga teacher. I knew all about the benefits of deep breathing. It’s the simplest thing. It’s the most basic function of the human body.
SO WHY CAN’T I DO IT?
First I got angry and frustrated, then I got hopeless. Then I got tired of feeling hopeless and I decided to get curious.
And here’s what I discovered.
Your nervous system is working HARD on your behalf. It’s built to function in the background. It doesn’t need you to do its job. But it does need you to be a good boss. It does need proper support, resources and feedback.
When you stop fighting your brain and nervous system and start collaborating instead, magical things happen.
If this is you, you need to strengthen two capacities:
Your sense of self- who you are, apart from your mind and your body
The boundaries of your physical body, and feeling of being contained.
In resilience,
Caitlin