Coping with Anxiety: How to Manage Stress and Tension

In my last article on getting your anxiety under control, I focused on addressing uncomfortable and distressing physical symptoms that come with anxiety. Getting your body under control is often the very first step to reducing the effects of anxiety on your body and putting you back in charge.

In this next article, I want to highlight another group of symptoms that often come with anxiety: Stress and Tension.

My clients often complain of constant tightness in their bodies, which doesn’t seem to go away. Shoulders, necks, and jaws often remain in an almost constant state of tension. This tension can often lead clients to feel on edge, unable to relax, and may give them feelings in the pit of their stomachs that something is just wrong. More serious health problems can develop from undealt with stress like TMG, ulcers, IBS, migraines and hives.

Go In the Back Door to Reduce Tension and Stress

If these particular symptoms seem to be plaguing you, then the following techniques will help you combat them. The key to the next approach is recognizing that you are probably going about addressing this all wrong.

The second group of techniques is called Going in the Back Door. All too often, when anxiety hits, we tend to fight the anxiety head on by frantically exploring what worry or situation could be causing these feelings of tension. We ask ourselves the question, “What is bothering me now?”

Going in the back door means taking some alternate approaches to getting at tension and stress and avoiding the trap of “solving the problem” of our worry. The truth is, much of your tension isn’t based in a real circumstantial problem but stems from the mind-body connection, which can look like a tense feeling triggering you to search for its cause, unreleased emotions, and lack of joyful experiences, to name a few. You can stay locked in that state for minutes, hours, or sometimes days, and as your body is being filled with tension and stress, your stomach is being inundated with crampings and sick feelings.

Methods for Coping with Anxiety

Here are a few ways to go in the back door and reduce those feelings of tension and stress:

1. Don’t Answer the Door when worry comes knocking in the first place.

Many times, my clients with Generalized Anxiety Disorder are very successful in their jobs because of the way they go about finding problems and fixing them. They generate solutions and think of out-of-the-box strategies because of their fabulous brains. But the downside to this is that the same brain that answers the door when a problem comes knocking in their job is the same one that opens the door when work is all done, or they are home with their kiddos, or out for a relaxing dinner on the town.

Sometimes it can even feel like worry calls to you when nothing is wrong. “Worry now!” it says. Once worry makes the invitation, a feeling of dread can come take residence in the pit of your stomach. What clients don’t often know is that that feeling in your stomach is comprised of low-grade fear. When your body experiences enough of this type of fear, symptoms are exacerbated and stomach problems can arise in the form of ulcers and IBS, headaches can become migraines, TMJ and hives can develop. This feeling of dread comes from the physical symptoms of tension masquerading as an emotion.

When the feeling of dread hits, I teach clients to think to themselves, “I am not going to answer the door.” Rather, we develop a progressive muscle relaxation strategy paired with an image or word that cues a state of relaxation. My clients learn to counteract worry by creating a state of relaxation in their body on demand.

It’s important that you know that the physical dread you are feeling is the result of your brain triggering tension as it “looks for” for something new to be worried about. You don’t need to answer the door and start looking for reasons to worry, or reasons why you feel sick. Simply ignore the knock and cue relaxation.

2. Another Back Door technique is to Free Feared Feelings.

Often times tension is coming from holding in emotions that you have learned to avoid or feel uncomfortable or afraid to express. Anger is a common emotion that those with anxiety tend to stay away from. Whether it’s because you are wired to be more sensitive or you saw anger modeled inappropriately or experienced pain and abuse from the ways people expressed this emotion, you may fear showing anger or other emotions.

Some of my clients simply want to keep all emotions hidden because of past experiences. When this happens, those unreleased emotions can also result in chronic tension and stress, as your body is acting like a container for the unexpressed feelings.

It’s often helpful to understand that simply being aware of your feelings does not mean you have to show them or act on them. Hypothetically asking yourself if you were angry or upset about something, what it might be, and then writing down what comes to mind and just talking about those feelings can be enough to relieve the tension of holding them in.

3. The last Back Door technique is to Discover Joy.

Remember, chronic tension and stress cannot often be eliminated by finding out what the problem is and solving it. However, you can change your regular pattern of experience and relieve the stress by inviting joyful, fun experiences into your schedule and life.

Those with GAD are worriers. It’s not often a worrying thought that leads to planning something to do just for fun, or getting back to what makes you laugh. Seriousness is often the name of the game and plans and worry go hand in hand. Just think back to the last time you did something just for the fun of it without scheduling it or worrying what someone might think if you did that thing. You might find it’s been a while.

One client of mine, while doing a visualization to help with relaxation, noticed that what felt most relaxing to her was the feeling of dirt in her hands and the taste of lemonade. I encouraged her to reconnect with that feeling of being carefree and playful. She came back the next time saying she had spent some time outside in nature, not worrying about getting dirty, and felt free for the first time in a while. She later recreated another joyful experience from her visualization of making lemonade for herself and friends. Simply discovering joy worked wonders in releasing her from the grip of tension, and her stomachaches began to diminish.

These Back Door techniques may seem counterintuitive when you are faced with lasting tension, stress, and regular feelings of dread. However, when you better understand the mind-body connection and have a variety of solutions in your toolbox, you can change the tide of anxiety in your life and get back in control.

Check back in for the final article in this series, which will address the third symptom category of Ruminating Worry.