Anxiety & panic
Most people who live with anxiety notice their body before they notice their thoughts. The chest tightens, the breath turns short and high, and the whole thing starts to feed itself. It is one of the most common things clients bring into the room, and it is also one of the most workable. Changing how you breathe will not make anxiety disappear, but it gives you something concrete to do while the rest of the work happens.
Try the exercise above a couple of times a day, ideally when you are already reasonably settled rather than in the middle of a difficult moment. It takes a few weeks of regular practice before the technique is available to you under pressure, and that is normal — you are training a habit, not learning a trick. Breathing is only half of it, though. A good deal of what makes a feeling hard to sit with is that we cannot name it, and an unnamed feeling tends to get treated as one undifferentiated lump of distress.
Naming a feeling accurately does more than tidy up your vocabulary. It tends to take some of the heat out of the feeling itself, and it points you toward what the feeling is actually asking for — anger at a crossed boundary asks for something quite different from sadness at a loss. Once you can name it, the next question is what to do with it, particularly when the feeling is large enough that doing what it wants would make things worse.
The exercise above walks through two skills from dialectical behaviour therapy: checking whether the size of a feeling fits the facts, and acting opposite to what the feeling pulls you toward. Both take practice, and both work better with someone alongside you. If anxiety, anger or low mood is affecting your sleep, your work, or the things you used to enjoy, it is worth talking it through. We offer consultations and are usually able to see new clients within a fortnight.
Feelings rarely arrive on their own. Usually a thought gets there first, often a quick, harsh one that sounds like a fact. Catching that thought and looking at it squarely is one of the core skills of cognitive behaviour therapy, and it is something you can practise on your own.