628: Overcoming Health Anxiety: Healing practices to improve your mental well-being
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve had a slew of posts about personal health concerns in our Private Facebook Group so we decided to dedicate this week's episode to health anxiety.
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Notes from this week’s episode:
Flooding out fear
Filling our mind and our day with as much hope and inspiration as we can. Actively doing healthy things and reading inspiring things.
Choose healing action
Anxiety can hold us frozen in fear, especially health anxiety. One way to counter it is to be proactive and choose a healing practice to do every day.
This has several benefits:
It breaks the freeze of fear and moves the mind and body from inertia to positive activity
The practices are good for reducing stress and anxiety
The practices are good for your health
They may help relieve symptoms - especially symptoms of anxiety
Daily Healing Practices
Try practicing yoga or QiGong for 15-20 minutes a day. Even 10 minutes is helpful.
Choose a routine that is focused on building calm and simple enough for you to stick with.
Recommendations:
Daisy Lee Beginners QiGong for Women
Lisa B O’Shea QiGong for Women
Lee Holden QiGong for Anxiety
Chunyi Lin
Try a local yoga class or look online for a variety of classes to follow.
Overcoming self-aversion
When we are worried about our health we can start feeling triggered by our own body. Working with yoga or QiGong help us focus on our body with calm healing intent.
Grounding practices can help with this too, for example walking and meditating on your feet connecting with the earth. Or gardening and focusing on using your hands. Practicing appreciating non-anxious areas of your body helps reduce stress and helps you feel safe and at home in your own body.
The problem is usually anxiety - not our health
According to Ayurveda, the anxious mind is quick to create worst case scenarios. It uses our creative ability to project fear into our future and generate stories of the things that could go wrong. This exhausts our mind and nervous system and reduces our resilience in meeting things where they are and making healthy moment by moment choices.
The Sushruta Samhita, an anxiety Ayurvedic text, describes anxiety as a derangement of the bodily doshas (the body types) affecting the nerves and causing a distracted state of mind.
Anxiety causes both mental and physical symptoms, described in the text as including: breathlessness, dizziness, faintness, fatigue, palpitations, chest pains, headache, tremors, insomnia, nervousness, digestive disturbance, forgetfulness, phobias, incoherent speech, visual disturbance, and mental confusion.
Due to our individual nature, we each experience these symptoms differently. We may have a few, or many and they may be mild, or strong symptoms, depending on how anxiety is affecting us.
The symptoms of anxiety alone are enough to cause concerns, especially if we are worried about our health.
The first step in calming this kind of anxiety is understanding that the source is our mind, and working on developing the understanding that this is primarily a problem of anxiety itself creating fear stories. And then, taking all the help and action we can to calm that anxiety and move beyond it.
Proactivity is a powerful antidote to anxiety.
Secondly anxiety stems from disturbed vata, we’ve covered how to calm vata in several podcasts and in our online courses.
RESOURCES FOR OVERCOMING HEALTH ANXIETY
When you feel anxious, the easiest way to feel better is to have someone guide you out of fear and into calm. The guided audio sessions included in this course have been specially created to help you feel better fast. Just press play and follow along with us as we talk you through the techniques and exercises that will help you feel calm in minutes. Have a look at the full course details here