Energy Medicine for Anxiety
Anxiety, stress, and health are intimately related, and it’s not just energy medicine that sees a clear correlation. Western medicine agrees. It’s estimated that anxiety and stress account for 75 to 90 percent of doctors’ visits and up to 90 percent of disease. That is a staggering statistic. Fortunately, there are many ways to address anxiety and stress to support our physical, emotional, and energetic bodies.
Anxiety and stress often go hand in hand, and some people may use the terms interchangeably, but there are important, yet subtle, differences. Anxiety is a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease. It’s a sense that is often about something that will happen soon, and the outcome may seem uncertain. In contrast, stress is a feeling of tension that may be emotional or physical and stems from thoughts or events that trigger anger, nervousness, or frustration.
In terms of specific health issues, anxiety and stress have been linked to serious conditions including high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, headaches, arthritis, asthma, and depression, among many others.
If anxiety is negatively affecting your life, one of the first steps you can take is to get curious. What causes you to feel anxious? And in what ways does your anxiety manifest? Everyone’s triggers are different. Some people feel very anxious on airplanes, while other people who are highly anxious may find they fly with ease, but have great difficulty with public speaking. There are differences as well in the symptoms of anxiety, which can include nausea, rapid heartbeat, and insomnia.
When it comes to energy, working with self-testing or with a practitioner can help you determine how anxiety affects your unique energies. Often, anxiety goes hand-in-hand with being ungrounded and with triple warmer reactivity.
People often derive substantial benefits from therapy. There are also many self-care tools and techniques that help. Some great ones are exercising, being out in nature, listening to music, dancing, meditating, gardening, engaging in creative activities, spending time with loved ones, being around animals, and breathwork.
Combining any approach with energy medicine — whether with self-care techniques and/or with a practitioner — can help enormously, and energy medicine on its own can also be a huge support. There are dozens of simple energy medicine exercises for working with our triple warmer meridian, which governs our fight, flight, or freeze response and plays a major role in anxiety. It’s so important to realize that we can address anxiety in multiple ways, that we have the power to help ourselves, and that energy medicine is a powerful ally.