Is Anxiety Sucking the Joy Out of Your Life

Explore how anxiety hijacks your joy and drains your energy—and what you can do to reclaim calm, connection, and meaning in your daily life.

When anxiety is running your life it’s time to reach out for help

Noah Buscher-unsplash

There are times in our lives when we need extra help. All of us need some help and support at some point. When it seems like anxiety is getting the upper hand, running the show, running you into the ground, intruding on your thoughts, taking you down a rabbit hole, and stealing your peace of mind and happiness, it's past time to get some support. There is real help for anxiety to help reduce your anxious experience.

Anxiety isn’t just a joy stealer—over time it can even lead to depression

Anxiety, even low levels of constant anxiety, can become a lot to deal with over time. Coping with out of control anxiety, a sense of overwhelm, burnout, or a nagging newer lack of motivation isn't just stressful and disheartening. It can lead to low mood and even depression. Most anxious folks are used to solving problems for themselves and others. When we bump into something we can't solve, it's disconcerting. And even a little alarming.

It seems like we should be able to manage anxiety on our own, like everything else. And we do, for a time. But when we can't solve something as seemingly (or deceptively) simple as anxiety, it hits us where we live. Our sense of self takes a hit. Our sense of competency is undermined. Our (false) sense of control is threatened. When exerting control is how we've coped with life and emotions up to now, we can be caught up short when we can't control our own thoughts and responses. Our own moods and irritability. Our reactivity. Depression often follows unabated anxiety. They travel together. For one thing, dealing with our out of control stress and anxiety is exhausting. It requires a tremendous amount of mental energy. It takes an increasingly physical toll, too. Anxiety and stress are expensive to finance, energetically. When we become discouraged or exhausted enough, our mood may start to falter, as well.

Christopher Lemercier

I specialize in working with highly anxious adults. A therapy incorporating depth-oriented, somatic (or body-oriented), trauma-informed, holistic approaches to reducing anxious experience can improve the overall quality of life. A big part of the work I do is supporting anxious folks on their path to reclaiming their lives. I know this gig from the inside out. When our adaptive skills tend towards anxious management of ourselves, our lives, our jobs, our favorite people, we won't always recognize our own anxiety for what it is. It's just the way we are. It's the way life is. It’s what we feel we “have to” do. We don't know another way.

The things that set us up for anxiety—our history, the situations we've gone through, the lives we've led, our current challenges, which somehow seem too big—also set us up to find it hard to allow help and support. Even therapeutic help. It can feel too vulnerable. Threatening. I get it. Relying on others may have never been possible in the past or has led to painful results and disappointment. There is a better way. A less isolated way. A more connected way. A more interdependent and rewarding way to live. We can work together to create that more satisfying way of living and relating.

Online therapy—you can work through your anxiety from home

Bruno-Emmanuelle—unsplash

Online therapy and telehealth. These days, due to COVID, most therapy is taking place online or over the phone. You can do it from the comfort of your own home. You can even manage it at the office, given you have the privacy to do so. Or from your parked car. There's no commute, so it takes less time on your calendar. Us overscheduled, overfunctioning types appreciate that, don't we? Besides, I get to meet a lot of great dogs!

Therapy is now more convenient and accessible for more people than ever. I am finding it a very popular option for my clients. There's something very powerful about accessing therapy from the comfort of your own home, in your nest, with your favorite mug of something warm to drink, and surrounded by your pets. I’ll share something else with you. After 15 years in private practice as a therapist, and now one of those years fully online,

I can report online therapy works. It’s working just as well for my clients as sitting in my office and we don't have to manage masks in order to work together.

There’s room for more happiness in life

Lowering your anxious experience helps you feel closer to those you love. When we bring our anxiety and overwhelm down, we are able to live more connected and relational lives. Why would that be true? Anxiety takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of our reserves just to manage ourselves and not lose our shit. Anxious thoughts, worry, and rumination take up a lot of head space. They preoccupy us. Our thoughts will take us out of the present moment. We'll end up alone in our head rather than being with the people we are actually interacting with. They feel our absence. Our inattention. Our irritable distracted edge. And we end up feeling isolated. Isolated, unseen, and alone. There are better relationships on the other side of reducing the hold anxiety has on us today.

You can make the time to feel better now

Caroline Hernandez—unsplash

An investment of your time and energy now can change everything. Given some time, exploring the genesis of your experience, relearning the way you talk to yourself, exploring unreasonable self-expectations, bringing negative intrusive thoughts to heel, working through and establishing boundaries, and utilizing time-tested somatic or body-oriented approaches to relaxation, there is help with reducing anxiety and claiming or reclaiming a happier life. Personal work is a journey of sorts. Therapy and talking to a trained helper can smooth your way and provide a map for moving forward, one step at a time.

I help people who feel bad feel better. Let’s talk.

Learn about online anxiety therapy in California.

Why Somatic Experiencing—Five Reasons Your Treatment Center Needs a Somatic Therapist

Bring in a somatic therapist to boost engagement, accelerate healing, and embed trauma-informed nervous-system care throughout your treatment center.

1. Talk therapy alone isn’t always enough

Mokhalad Musavi—unsplash

Cutting edge treatment centers have integrated body-oriented therapy into their services for the last ten or twenty years. Why? Because it works. Because it works and because clients respond.

I love talk and insight oriented therapy. It's a beautiful thing. And it's not always adequate by itself. After over a decade of practicing as a somatic therapist, I'll admit it. I'm biased. For some of our clients, talk therapy will never be enough. Not in the long term. We're not just intellectual beings. Or emotional beings. Or mindful beings. Or physical beings. We're all of that and more. The most effective therapeutic approaches recognize and exploit this reality fully. Somatic Experiencing (SE) is one such approach

2. Your clients’ nervous systems have been storing experiences of all kinds in their bodies since they were born—and maybe before

Your addicted, chaotic, eating disordered, and highly traumatized clients have been storing experiences of all kinds in their bodies since the day they were born. Perhaps, since conception. We all have. Layer enough of the right kind of experience into the nervous system and bodies and systems react the way they react--seeking numbing experiences and experiencing high levels of activation and internal chaos. Impulsivity. Destructive relationship patterns. Addictions. Somatic Experiencing can begin to loosen and resolve the issues driving such behavior patterns and do so in a non-retraumatizing and elegant manner. Smooth.

Victoria Wallace Schlicht

3. Your clients need stabilization and the ability to self-regulate and self-soothe in order to benefit from the rest of their treatment program

Deepening the ability to self-soothe, cultivating resiliency, identifying triggers, reducing impulsivity, establishing and maintaining healthy boundaries, getting in touch with a renewed sense of safety, and understanding emotions as they emerge are important skills each of your recovery minded clients needs to have. Somatic Experiencing is a real boon in this way and a perfect pairing with DBT and other approaches you are already employing.

Not every client is stable enough for EMDR. Lovely and powerful as EMDR is, not all your clients have enough resource or ego strength in these early days to navigate EMDR. In addition to being a strong stand alone therapy, Somatic Experiencing is great tool for creating resource and resiliency in your clients' nervous systems and prepare them for entering your EMDR program over times.

4. The desire to numb pain is at the bottom of many client behaviors

Michael Discenza—unsplash

Deepening the ability to self-soothe, cultivating resiliency, identifying triggers, reducing impulsivity, establishing and maintaining healthy boundaries, getting in touch with a renewed sense of safety, and understanding emotions as they emerge are important skills each of your recovery minded clients needs to have. Somatic Experiencing is a real boon in this way and a perfect pairing with DBT and other approaches you are already employing.

Not every client is stable enough for EMDR. Lovely and powerful as EMDR is, not all your clients have enough resource or ego strength in these early days to navigate EMDR. In addition to being a strong stand alone therapy, Somatic Experiencing is great tool for creating resource and resiliency in your clients' nervous systems and prepare them for entering your EMDR program over times.

5. The brain has a natural negative brain bias

Our brains are designed with a negative bias. Not just some human brains. All human brains. We have a big juicy frontal lobe, which has evolved as wonderful problem noticing, problem solving organ. We've spent eons identifying risks, avoiding catastrophe, scanning for danger, noticing and attending to what is wrong in our environment and in our bodies. We need to know when we are in trouble or injured. It's simple survival, really. Apparently, noticing the positive and what was quietly going well wasn't nearly as important to survival of the species as identifying pain and trouble. As I tell my clients every day, the anxious survived and we're the result. Fun stuff.

Overcoming that natural negative bias is one of the tasks of evolving as a person and creating a happier existence in an overstimulating and chaotic world. Somatic Experiencing, with its focus on sensation, can be a wonderful tool for noticing what is going well with the body, what is neutral, or even great, despite the concurrent presence of pain, discomfort, or anxiety. SE can form a huge learning in being able to be with both, hold both, the good and the bad, the positive and the troubling. Learning how to cultivate an awareness of what is actually okay in our bodies and our lives can be a very stabilizing and encouraging support for recovery of all kinds.

Utilizing a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) as part of your treatment plan can increase your clients' overall success.

Ana Curcan—unsplash

Treatment centers are always striving to increase their clients' success rates and satisfaction with services. It's good clinical work. And good business. Increasingly, I see this desire for excellence and a competitive edge includes acknowledging the body-mind connection in a manner that is both accessible and least activating for clients. Somatic Experiencing, which can be provided within the treatment center or as an adjunct individual service or as part of your regular group rotation, can satisfy this need in a safe and titrated way. Learning how to be present to the body, aware of but not overwhelmed by strong emotions or sensations, constitutes a hugely powerful, empowering, and healing experience for our clients. Isn't that the exact thing we are wanting for all our clients?

Interested in hearing how a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner can increase your quality of care? I’d love to speak with you.