One of the
things I observe about most of my clients is that they don't breathe
from their diaphragms. There is an old Zen aphorism, one breath, one
step, which is appropriate here, because often the first step with
anxiety is to recognize the biology behind the disorder.
The
importance of why poor breathing maintains anxiety states is rooted in
what happens when one becomes short of breath. Our bodies work using
negative feedback loops to maintain homeostasis, which is a bit of a
mouthful to say, let alone understand. Put in simple terms a negative
feedback loop regulates change by reducing changes, and homeostasis just
means stability.
Anxiety effects breathing and people
tend to do things to control their breathing that may end up causing
positive feedback. A positive feedback loop builds up a bigger reaction
in the body, which may lead to panic attacks. What drives the feeling
of increasing anxiety is a combination of two things; oxygen and
adrenaline, which known as epinephrine in the USA.
Therefore
when people present with anxiety I will want to understand the persons
beliefs about what will happen if anxiety were to run out of control.
This involves me asking uncomfortable questions about what it means and
how certain they are that what they believe is true? I will then ask
them to do an experiment with me to test those answers. Afterwards we
will then discuss what actually happened versus what they believed would
happen, and that will then become the first behaviour that we will work
on changing together.
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