During the holiday season, it’s often normal to experience high emotions. You may feel anxious, worried, or upset. It’s hard that time with family, and the stress of planning, becomes so overwhelming and challenging that it is often preceded by big emotions. One of the emotions that has been difficult for my clients and me is anxiety.
Have you ever felt like there was nothing you could do about your anxiety? Questioning where the anxiety came from, or why it was so difficult to manage? I have, and so have my clients. Anxiety often overwhelms your senses and triggers your trauma response. Cortisol, one of the main hormones of anxiety, regulates several systems in your body. It increases your blood pressure and raises your blood sugar so that you can act. In small doses, this can be good; it preps you well for action and adds urgency to situations that may warrant it.
The problem is that, even though stress can be good, when it’s elevated to an overwhelming level, it reduces action. When your blood sugar and blood pressure increase, you may find it challenging to think or breathe. Sometimes this will go away on its own, other times it moves to an unregulated level and people suffer panic, shortness of breath, lightheadedness, or fainting. As you can imagine, this is something that most people want to avoid at all costs, which makes it easy to be stressed about the potential that you could have a panic attack. This is one of the main symptoms of panic disorder, being fearful that you may experience panic in the future.
What do you do? There are a lot of things that can work! Grounding is a fabulous option that helps to bring your body back from a panicked state. Grounding can normalize your breathing to a regular pace. Paired muscle relaxation can assist with connecting your mind and body. Changing your temperature or ‘shocking’ the temperature of the body are also great methods to help stave off the detrimental effects of anxiety. However, I want to focus on one that is often overlooked or avoided: gratitude.
Did you know that gratitude, if employed during anxiety, is often helpful to reduce anxiety in your brain? Our minds have a difficult time focusing on more than one thing at a time (All those multitaskers out there, remember, we are best when we focus fully on one thing; it doesn't mean you aren’t incredibly gifted at being great at multiple things at one time.) When your brain is solely focused on your anxiety, we insert some gratitude to help regulate your symptoms and get you to a place where you can be more skillful. I don’t think that gratitude is the only way to manage anxiety, but I do believe that the more we focus on gratitude the better equipped we will be to help ourselves. Bonus points if you are able to share the things you are grateful for with a friend or colleague.
Of course, sometimes gratitude doesn't feel like it ‘scratches the itch’, and that’s when therapy can be a worthwhile commitment for you and your time! Don’t let anxiety get in the way of your holiday, reach out today. We are eager to support you!