You're listening to life kit from NPR.
Hey, everybody, it's Marielle Seguera.
If you've ever had anxiety, it can feel like your body is under attack, your mind is racing.
Maybe your heart's pounding or your palms are sweating, your stomach hurts, your skin gets red and hot.
Psychotherapist Britt Frank says she gets it.
Anxiety feels awful, and it can be debilitating.
I've had anxiety issues my whole life, but anxiety doesn't attack us.
Frank is the author of the book the Science of Stuck, and she specializes in something called somatic experiencing, which is.
A very fancy way to say that you have a brain attached to a body and your body does things.
Frank says anxiety can actually be like the check engine light of your brain.
Anxiety is an indicator light.
It is something that happens in our body in response to either an unsafe situation, to an injury from the past, or to a perceived or real threat coming from the future.
And if you think about things that way, anxiety can give you a lot of information about what feels right to you, about how you want to spend your time and about who you want to spend it with.
But to get to those insights, you've got to dial down the overwhelming symptoms, even if that's from a ten to a seven.
On this episode of Life Kit, we're going to give you some practical, research backed ways to do that in the moment and then help you listen to what your anxiety is trying to tell you.
What's happening in our bodies when we're feeling anxious.
So when we're feeling anxious, we have the amygdala, and the amygdala is the panic signal of the body.
When that goes off, it's preparing our body to fight or flight or flee.
And we don't get to decide which one our bodies default to, nor do we get to decide how intense that is.
If you're in that moment, there are a few steps that you can take to dial it down, to dial that response down and bring your body and mind back to a calm state.