Although anxiety can feel powerful and even overwhelming, anxiety itself isn’t a feeling, it’s a brain-body state. Our ‘state’ is how activated or deactivated our mind-body system is at this given moment.
When we feel anxious there is a natural urge to try and shift the anxiety, to ‘get rid of it’ so to speak. To this end, many people reach for breathwork, meditation, or other practices that are popular for ‘creating calm’. What isn’t so well understood is that when humans are faced with stress, our body reacts on a metabolic, cellular level by releasing energy into the bloodstream so that we can fight or flight. (Kuti et al., 2022) When we don’t use this metabolic energy, it remains in our system trying to find release in other ways. This can come out as through irritability, tension in the muscles, etc. These after-effects of stress can sit in the body for up to 24 hours.
What our body wants after stress is to complete its reaction. This natural drive helps the body physically release the energy of stress so that it doesn’t accumulate and become anxiety (Levine, 1997). For this reason, the body will resist our attempts at creating calm before its had a chance to disperse this excess energy.
A recent animal study showed that all stress causes complex metabolic reactions but the most impactful was unpredictable chronic stress (Kuti et al., 2022). This means if you experience a string of stressors that are all different, it may have more impact on you than a repeated stress that is the same over and over again.
So how do we support the body in processing the energy of stress?
Next time you experience stress of any kind, try moving. Meet fire with fire by going for a run or having a workout, allowing time afterward for your breath to return to a calm baseline, sitting with that slow breath for at least five minutes. How slow? Slower than it would be if you weren’t paying attention. There is no need to bring in numbers or counting of breaths, just be with your body and follow where it would like to go as you allow the breath to become slower and soft, breathing through the nose. A good practice to try is the Long Exhale.
Alternatively, try shaking it out, moving arms and legs vigorously, or use some superventilation breathwork, such as rapid nasal inhales with exhales through the mouth for a minute or more. Follow this with at least two minutes of downregulating breath described above. A video guide to Patrick McKeown’s technique, Breathe Light, can be found below.
Whatever technique you use to honour the body’s genuine reaction to stress, end with several minutes of slowing and softening your breath. This builds patterns in the brain that help us return to calm more easily in the future.
References
Bentley, T.G.K., D’Andrea-Penna, G., Rakic, M., Arce, N., LaFaille, M., Berman, R., Cooley, K. and Sprimont, P., 2023. Breathing Practices for Stress and Anxiety Reduction: Conceptual Framework of Implementation Guidelines Based on a Systematic Review of the Published Literature. Brain Sciences [Online], 13(12), p.1612. Available from: https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13121612 [Accessed 24 October 2024].
Chu, B., Marwaha, K., Sanvictores, T., Awosika, A.O. and Ayers, D., 2025. Physiology, Stress Reaction. StatPearls [Online]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing. Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK541120/ [Accessed 11 March 2025].
Kuti, D., Winkler, Z., Horváth, K., Juhász, B., Szilvásy-Szabó, A., Fekete, C., Ferenczi, S. and Kovács, K.J., 2022. The metabolic stress response: Adaptation to acute-, repeated- and chronic challenges in mice. iScience [Online], 25(8), p.104693. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.104693 [Accessed 11 March 2025].
Levine, P.A., 1997. Waking the tiger: healing trauma. Berkeley, Calif: North Atlantic Books.