Did you know that when you experience the feeling of anxiety, you also experience physical symptoms? At the moment, these symptoms can feel terrifying! “Am I having a heart attack?”, “Why can’t I breathe? “Am I going to pass out?”. As uncomfortable as they are, these symptoms happen for good reasons – to prepare your body to survive.

Our bodies are evolutionarily designed to maximize the physical resources we need to fight, flight (run away) or freeze when we are faced with life-threatening danger. The part of our brain that senses danger is an automatic part that doesn’t think…it just reacts. When our brain senses danger, our body’s physical response is immediate, for the sake of safety and physical survival.

While this is extremely helpful in real-life-or-death situations, it is not so helpful when we are not. Unfortunately, our brains do not always understand the difference between danger and our perception of danger…Meaning, our brain responds the same way if we were, for example, to run into a bear in the forest OR if we were to just think long and hard about how terrifying it would be to run into a bear in the forest. This is often why we experience anxiety or the fight, flight, freeze response, even if we feel like we are not in an actual life-or-death situation.
Your thoughts can be very powerful