Do you feel anxious for “no reason”?
I took an instagram poll and 96% of people said yes they felt anxious.
Of those, 63% said they felt anxious for “no reason”.
There’s no big work deadline.
No public speaking event on the horizon.
The bills are paid.
But you still wake up with a pit in your stomach.
Why?
Many reasons.
Today I will share one.
And I’ll share the wierd reason I got anxious every day around 4 pm, especially in spring.
Logically, you’re all good, but…
Logic doesn’t create anxiety.
Anxiety is stress.
Stress is cortisol.
You know what creates cortisol: Your body.
Your sympathetic nervous system.
Your nervous system’s job is to keep you alive without any conscious effort of your own.
It constantly scans your environment for danger.
It scans the noises in your space: Safe or not safe.
It scans the sensory experience: Safe or not safe.
It scans the visual input: Safe or not safe.
When its scanning system spots danger, it shoots out cortisol so that you will be ready to respond.
Example: Your BBQing and you hear TV from inside. Someone is yelling on screen. You recognize the actor’s voice. It’s that comedy your kid’s love.
Twenty minutes later you’re sitting down to eat, wondering why you feel “anxious for no reason.”
Little do you know (until now) that your nervous system was scanning for noises. It heard yelling. It dredged up a dozen memories of being yelled at as a kid and surged your blood with cortisol.
You’re grown now. Your dad hasn’t yelled in decades. Even if he did, you’d give it right back to him. You’re not even consciously thinking about your dad or how scary it was to be 4 years old and yelled at for making another mess.
But your nervous system remembers.
Its job is to remember, or how else would it keep you safe?
Remember, it’s not logical.
The sound of yelling is SAFE NOW.
But, your nervous systems is stuck BACK THEN.
The very sound spikes your cortisol and leaves you anxious for no reason.
Another example: You are filing taxes.
You feel anxiety as you gather all your numbers. You even close your computer and procrastinate for two weeks until your CPA hounds you for your profit/loss spreadsheet.
Why do finances make you anxious?
You have the money.
You’re not comitting fraud.
Your nervous system is scanning your visual space and it can’t forget the many times you logged into that same bank portal expecting to see overdraft charges.
Tax season shouldn’t be stressful, but your nervous system remembers.
Its job is to keep you safe.
Your money situation is SAFE NOW.
But your nervous system is stuck BACK THEN.
Can I share something personal?
Every day around 4 o’clock I become low-key anxious (or at least until a few years ago when I got to the bottom of it).
Maybe I am at happy hour with friends…
Or on a walk…
Or doing some work..
But when that window of time rolled around and the sun dipppes low in the sky, I felt that familiar pit in my stomach.
I would reach for a happy hour drink.
I would procrastinate on social media to distract myself from the feeling.
But it always came.
After years of this pattern, I decided instead of numbing or distracting I would ask myself a question I teach my EFT level 1&2 students:
What does this feeling remind me of in my past?
I am safe now, but what is my body remembering?
I saw myself on the side of a street, the street in front of my childhood home.
It is early March.
The sun has already dipped below my house which I can see from across the four-lane street.
It’s a particularly warm day in the Spring of 1993.
It is the day my brother decided to cross our street without looking.
Around 4 PM in the afternoon something very bad happened.
At around 4 PM when the sun got low, my body witnessed something that I would never forget.
30 years later, I could be at work, or out for dinner, or on a walk, and I would feel that pit in my stomach.
Was I anxious for no reason?
Or was there a very understandable reason why my nervous system was firing alarm bells?
I am safe now.
My children are safe now.
I purposefully live at the end of a dead end street where no cars will pass while my kids play out front.
But my nervous system doesn’t understand these facts…
Your body doesn’t understand mantra or prayer or positive affirmations.
4 PM is when the very bad thing happens, when you will see your brother for the very last time and my nervous system remembers.
I’ll say it again: The body is not logical.
Before I found EFT tapping, I found affirmations and mantras and read books on the logical reasons why I had anxiety (like traumatic loss or cortisol levels etc etc)
The problem is that these mantras are in English, or Spanish or French or whatever language you prefer.
The problemo is that the nervous system doesn’t speak English.. or any langauge.
It’s like a crying infant. You don’t tell a crying infant that there’s no reason to cry. You rock. You shush. You hold. You use somatic soothing.
Somatic just means body based.
Somatic therapies are the language of the nervous system.
Of all the Somatic modalities I’ve used, EFT Tapping has been the quickest and most soothing.. and the one that sticks.
When I first went to a level 1&2 workshop, I learned how to soothe my anxiety with tapping.
As I pursued becoming a practitioner, I learned from my mentor how to go back to the moments when my body learned it was unsafe: to my brother’s death, to the disappointments, to the many mundane things that happened throughout life that teach us to feel anxious.
It is only once I found the root cause at the shifts stuck.
You have to learn to go back in time to the moments where it learned “yelling = danger” or “bank account login page = scary” and speak its language.
Want to try EFT on your anxiety?
When do you feel anxious? Think of the last scenario when you really felt it. It doesn’t matter if you know the cause or not. Just put yourself in the time and space and try to tune back into that feeling.
Then tap through each of the EFT points for one full breath. Try to extend the breath as you repeat the sequence for five minutes.
Notice how high your physical anxiety is before the tapping compared to after the tapping. If your breath is longer, if your heart beats calmer, if your jaw is more relaxed, if your thoughts are slower… it means your nervous system is getting the message.
If you don’t know where the tapping points are located, head to my Instagram page @jackieviramontez where you can find a plethora of free videos teaching you how to tap. If you can’t find a resource you’re looking for, just click reply or DM me on social.
If you want to fully commit to teaching your nervous system that it’s safe despite a plethora of conditioning in your past, the EFT level 1&2 workshop was personally life-changing (but if you wanna start with something free, just reply or DM me and I’ll send you the resources I have!)
I hope you open this at the perfect time.
And I hope the message lands not just logically but physically ;)
Sending love to you and you’re very wise yet wildly inconvenient nervous system (lol).
Stay in touch,
Jackie
