No-fuss anxiety tips #6
Make use of your ANS
Welcome! You’ve joined us at the sixth blog in this series on anxiety, made up of 20-short articles with simple tips and techniques for managing anxiety. Each no-fuss post draws on therapeutic thinking from a range of psychological and psychotherapy theories. If you’re new to this series, you can find the first post here.
What these tips won’t do is explore the origins and purpose of anxiety for you – this type of deeper exploration is what therapy offers. That said, having strategies for managing anxiety is a great place to start. Each article is designed to be quick read, no-fuss. So, let’s get into our sixth technique: make use of your ANS.
Your ANS is your automatic nervous system.
It includes the parasympathetic branch which restores calm and balance to your body and mind.
We all have an ANS – an autonomic nervous system. Your ANS is the mechanism behind your anxiety. It’s a body-based system that regulates processes for rest and activity and it consists of two main branches: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic.
The sympathetic branch of the ANS stimulates your body’s fight, flight or freeze response. When faced with a danger, or potential danger, the sympathetic system causes changes in your heart rate, rate of respiration, digestion and muscle tension so that you’re physically primed to fight, flee or freeze to protect yourself. This process kicks in rapidly as soon as your brain detects threat, even if your brain is mistaken. For example, on seeing a coil of rope from the corner or your eye, your heart may begin to beat fast. In a fraction of a second, the limbic system within your brain has processed the visual clue of the rope as a “snake”, even before your thinking brain has named the fear. Your limbic system recognises the potential threat to life and uses the ANS to trigger immediate action via increased heart rate. Blood is pumped rapidly to your arms and legs so you can run or fight. The same process is likely to happen if you see a real snake from the corner of your eye. This process is extremely useful to our survival. However, when you remain in a state of heightened sympathetic stimulation, your body remains tense, on edge and anxious.
The parasympathetic branch of the ANS is focussed on restoring calm and balance to our bodies after sympathetic stimulation. It prevents your body from overworking and brings your breathing, heart rate and muscle tension back to a more regulated state, facilitating rest and recovery.
When you experience anxiety that persists for any length of time, your sympathetic process is activated and can become overactive. Your parasympathetic system doesn’t get much opportunity to restore a sense of balance. It is, however, possible to take action, and activate your parasympathetic system to restore that sense of equilibrium to your nervous system.
Steps you can take to boost your parasympathetic system and regulate your ANS include:
Chanting, humming and singing.
Quality sleep.
Massage.
Yoga
Deep breathing.
Meditation.
Today, consider one of the steps you could build into your day to regulate your ANS. Set yourself a daily goal of how you can implement one of these into each day across the next week.
To help develop your repertoire of managing anxiety, look out for more blogs within this series. And, if you’d like to talk through how counselling can help you towards a deeper exploration of your anxiety, do get in touch. We can work together through online counselling or through face-to-face counselling at my therapy room in Preston.