Can You Have Anxiety Without Worrying?

If you’ve ever wondered if you have anxiety – you pick at your nails, bite your lip, and jiggle your leg – but thought you must not be anxious because you really don’t worry… keep reading!

The classic form of anxiety is pretty recognizable for most people: fretting that a car will crash, fearing you have cancer at 2am, and replaying conversations on a loop. These difficult-to-control thoughts are a cognitive form of anxiety, and there are lots of great treatments available for cognitive anxiety like cognitive-behavioral therapy and exposure therapy.

But what if you’re not exactly worrying? What if the anxiety isn’t living in your thoughts nearly as much as it is living in your body?

Physical Symptoms of Anxiety

See if some of some of this list feels familiar:

·      Nausea or GI distress

·      Dizziness

·      Sore muscles for no reason

·      Fast heart rate

·      Fast, shallow breathing

·      Teeth grinding & jaw tension

·      Panic attacks

·      Insomnia

·      Headaches

If you experience some of these symptoms and have ruled out medical problems, or your doctor has suggested that you have anxiety even though you don’t worry, consider whether trauma might be part of the equation.

Cat in hiding

Trauma-Based Anxiety

You’ve probably heard this before: the brain operates on a use-it-or-lose-it basis. That’s why people do the crossword to delay dementia onset and why musicians notice their skills slide when they skip a couple days of rehearsal. If you’ve ever seen the Pixar movie Inside Out, you’ll remember the vast chasm that was the memory dump: your brain prioritizes what it perceives is needed and dumps what it suspects is unnecessary.

So when you have lived in chronic fear, stress, or unsafety for years, it can feel like your brain has put all of its chill pills into that memory dump and instead focused on adding to the vigilant parts, until you have a skyscraper of hypervigilance scanning everywhere all the time. Peacefulness went into the memory dump, and hypervigilance took over the control panel. This can produce a bodily experience of anxiety, even when you’re not worrying.

See, trauma doesn’t just live in a narrative – “When I was XYZ years old, ABC happened to me” or “I’m worried that 123 will happen again.” Even more than words, trauma lives in the body, leaving you poised to react to anything similar again in the future, even if you don’t realize that’s what your body is braced to do.

Some other coping mechanisms might have come on board, too:

• Busyness. If you run from one thing to the next, perform at a high level, and struggle to sit still…. Consider whether you could be using busyness to manage body-based anxiety.

• Helpfulness. If you are always helping people, ask yourself: Would you feel okay inside if you had higher boundaries, said no more often, and asked others to help you? If not… consider whether body-based anxiety is part of the picture.

• Zombie mode. If you frequently check out and stare at a screen while time ticks by, consider whether you’re managing body-based anxiety by dropping into a zombie state of false chill.

• Substances. If you turn to alcohol or some other substance before going out with friends, consider whether body-based anxiety is part of the underlying clamor in your body.

While home-grown coping mechanisms can help get you through today, they extract a heavy ongoing toll on your body because they don’t address the root issue that keeps stressing your body. But what if you could lower the overall anxiety, not need coping mechanisms as much, and feel the weight lift a little bit?

Chill cat

How to Release Anxiety From the Body

Lowering the baseline of anxiety in your body is an opportunity to rewire your brain. I have often likened the process to filling a jar with grains of sand, one grain at a time. The first dozen times you put a grain of sand in the jar appear to make no difference - the jar is still essentially empty. But if you keep steadily at it, the jar does begin to fill and look visually different. Therapy for body-based anxiety works a lot like this: chipping away steadily until one day six months later when you realize, “Oh, wow, things are different now!”

Start with breathing and mindfulness exercises. Throughout the day, day after day, pause to slow your breathing, to notice the sensation of air coming in and out of your nose, to pay attention to your torso expanding and contracting. Slow down and notice for a moment – and that’s a grain of sand in the jar.

Then, if traumatic experiences are part of you experience, consider deeper trauma treatment as well. EMDR and somatic work begin with that initial breath and mindfulness practice, then go deeper to heal the places that trauma is stuck in your brain and constantly signaling danger and hypervigilance to your body. Trauma therapy can help turn off the alarm signals that keep your body braced and anxious.

If body-based anxiety or trauma are experiences you’d like to work through therapy, schedule your free consultation today! Let’s talk about what the future could look like for you with less anxiety.

Elizabeth Peters, LMSW is a licensed therapist seeing clients in person in Wichita and online across Kansas. She provides EMDR and somatic therapy for adults who are overwhelmed by anxiety, trauma, painful relationships or spiritual harm.