Moving Beyond Coping to True Anxiety Healing

When it comes to anxiety, there’s a difference between coping and healing. Coping is everything we do to try and ‘manage’ the anxiety, which for many of us means trying to not feel the anxiety, and this makes a lot of sense. Anxiety doesn’t feel good and we naturally want to avoid things that don’t feel good. ‘Coping’ often looks like distracting, avoiding, numbing out or dissociating. This can include mindless scrolling on social media, overworking, exercising beyond our body’s limits, overspending, using substances to numb out, or evening trying to ‘think’ our way out of feeling anxious. We might also turn to ‘quick fixes’ or ‘life hacks’ that we see on social media in an attempt to find relief, but these also tend to be ‘coping’ strategies. Again, it makes a lot of sense that we do things to try and feel better. So, this isn’t to say that coping with anxiety is wrong or bad. In fact, coping is what’s kept you going for this long. We want to recognize and honour how much work and effort you’ve been putting in to stay afloat, to survive, while also learning new ways to heal it, not just deal with it.

Coping with anxiety is like a band-aid solution; it provides temporary relief, but it doesn’t actually address the root of anxiety. This means that the anxiety will continue and you will continue to have to cope with it. Plus, some of these coping strategies can actually create more pain and suffering for us.

Healing, on the other hand, is the long (but highly worthwhile!) journey of actually getting to and addressing the root of your anxiety. Healing means going deeper. Healing means building awareness and addressing the dysregulation in your nervous system that is causing your anxiety. Healing means seeing your anxiety in a new way and changing your relationship with anxiety. It means learning how to effectively respond to anxiety and interrupting the patterns that are keeping you so stuck in it. It means gently recalibrating and rewiring your brain and your nervous system, to help restore a sense of safety and regulation.

Does healing mean that you will never experience any anxiety ever again? No. It’s important to be realistic here. Some anxiety is a normal and unavoidable part of life. Stress is a normal part of life. We all experience it. It’s normal to experience some anxiety or worry about an upcoming test, for example. It’s also normal to feel stressed when money is tight or when waiting for health test results to come back. These are normal reactions to stressful situations, and when we grow more nervous system regulation and capacity, we can experience these anxieties and stressors without being thrown completely off balance. This type of short-term anxiety isn’t the stuff that needs to be healed, though. What does need to be healed is the chronic anxiety, the chronic fear, the chronic stress - the stuff that takes over your life and keeps you stuck in survival mode. The stuff that’s always there, lingering in the background. This is the anxiety that needs healing. And that’s what “Becoming Free From Anxiety” has been designed to help you do.

"Becoming Free From Anxiety" serves as a roadmap to true healing and achieving lasting relief. Through a comprehensive blend of somatic and cognitive practices, you'll learn how to heal your nervous system, overcome anxiety and reclaim your life with true healing. To learn more, click here.