From Surviving to Thriving: Somatic Tools for Anxiety Transformation

Living with chronic anxiety can be overwhelming and downright exhausting. In fact, it might feel like you’re not even really living. You’re getting by, you’re surviving - but you’re not thriving. Fortunately, this doesn't have to be your experience. What if I told you that you can feel better and that the key to healing your anxiety and actually thriving lies in relatively simple somatic (body-based) tools?

The Body's Wisdom

Somatic tools acknowledge that your body holds profound wisdom. Unlike traditional approaches to working with anxiety that focus on changing thought patterns, somatic practices recognize that anxiety is not just a mental state. At its core, anxiety is a physical experience that exists in the body. More specifically, it comes from a dysregulated nervous system that is stuck in survival mode (a.k.a. Fight-or-Flight).

The Fight-or-Flight response is a primal survival mechanism designed to protect you by enabling you to either fight or run when in danger (hence the name, fight or flight). When faced with perceived threats, your body's fight-or-flight response activates, and a series of physiological changes occur within the body to prepare it for action. This is why we experience physical sensations when anxious, like a racing heart, shallow breathing and muscle tension. This survival response serves us well when we are faced with real, imminent danger like when you’re driving and need to slam on the brakes to avoid an accident. However, unresolved trauma and/or chronic stress can put this survival mechanism into overdrive, causing it to misfire and trigger anxiety in response to everyday stressors. Of course, there is also a cognitive component to anxiety which is worry. This is when you are thinking about the “what if’s” and worst-case scenarios. This line of thought can be painful, but it is not the cause of the anxiety. Rather, it is the chronic state of Fight-or-Flight in the body that creates this cognitive experience of anxious thinking in the mind.

When we understand that anxiety is ultimately rooted in our body’s biology, we can approach it in the right way with somatic tools and practices. This doesn’t mean that cognitive practices are unhelpful; but you’ll get much further in your journey from surviving to thriving by incorporating both cognitive and somatic practices.

Speaking the Language of the Nervous System

Somatic tools aim to restore balance and regulation to your Autonomic Nervous System by engaging your body. In other words, they help us speak the language of the nervous system. Unlike our brain, which communicates verbally via words and cognition, the nervous system communicates somatically, via emotion and sensation. This is why purely cognitive approaches fall short in healing anxiety. You’ll know this to be true if you’ve ever tried to tell yourself to “calm down” when you’re anxious (my guess is it doesn’t work very well). No matter how hard we try, we can’t talk ourselves out of anxiety and dysregulation. Rather than telling our nervous system that we are safe, we have to show it. And somatic tools help us do just that.

Somatic Tools for Anxiety Healing

While there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to which somatic tools work best for healing anxiety, below I have listed five foundational tools that are both simple and effective:

1. Orienting: Anxiety often disconnects you from the present moment, causing your mind to race with worries about the future or ruminate on the past. Orienting helps let your nervous system know that you are safe (granted of course you are in a safe situation - both emotionally and physically) and it is the key to being in the here and now. To orient, use your senses—touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound—to engage with your surroundings, with a sense of interest and curiosity.

2. Grounding: Grounding involves sensing the contact your body is making with the ground (or whatever surface you’re on). It is another way to promote present moment awareness. We use our relationship with gravity and the earth as a practice for settling and stabilizing ourselves. One very simple way to do this is by feeling your feet on the ground and/or your back against the chair, and really sensing into that feeling.

3. Resourcing: Resourcing is the practice of inviting our mind/body to attune to sensations of safety or goodness, however small they may be. The process of attending to a felt sense of “okayness” or even a neutral sense, begins the process of teaching our nervous system that it can experience stress, and then come back to a state of calm. One way you can resource is by taking note of what registers as ‘good’ to your system - this can be anything (a pet, a pleasant memory, a person, dancing, being in nature, etc.) - and paying attention to how your system/body feels in the presence of this resource.

4. Body Scans + Muscle Relaxation: Anxiety can lead to physical tension that becomes stored in your body, perpetuating a cycle of discomfort and stress. Many of us don’t realize just how much tension is being held in our body. Body scans are a somatic tool that help us build more body awareness so that we can get better at noticing tension. If we’re not aware of it, we won’t have the opportunity to let that tension dissolve. You can do a body scan at any point in the day - simply pause and scan your body. Notice any sensations, emotions, tensions or irritations in the body. Once we get better at noticing tension, progressive muscle relaxation can help us release it. By intentionally tensing and then releasing different muscle groups, you become more attuned to bodily sensations and can release stored tension. This process not only promotes regulation but also encourages a deeper connection with your body.

5. Titration: Titration is one of the most powerful and important somatic tools for self-regulation. To heal anxiety we need to be able to feel anxiety. However, if we lean in too hard and feel too much of the fear and anxiety all at once, it can send our system into further chaos and dysregulation. So, we ‘titrate’ and work with little, tolerable bits of the anxiety. We go slowly and we take in a little bit of experience at a time, allowing any overwhelm (anything that starts to feel like “too much”) to settle before moving on to another piece of experience. It looks like pausing and taking time to notice sensations in the body, bit by bit. When we do this, the sensations of the body will often move towards completion of protective responses that were unable to be carried out in the past.

Your Path to Thriving Begins Now

Somatic tools can help you heal your nervous system, break free from chronic stress and anxiety, and foster a thriving life. By integrating these practices into your daily life, you can create a foundation of inner safety, resilience and regulation that will support you in navigating life's challenges. Remember that while transformation takes time, and there is no panacea to heal anxiety, every step you take towards regulating your nervous system is a step in the right direction, and towards profound healing.