What is stress, what is anxiety
Stress and anxiety are physical and emotional experiences that we have when we feel overwhelmed by different situations in our daily lives: Too much or too little work, financial problems, problems in relationships, or when just postponing a decision…
These experiences are very individual: Some people have a sensation of urgency, tense their shoulders and neck, others are scared, close their chest, breathe little and with difficulty, others are nervous, sweat in excess, their heart goes fast, and the have sometimes a knot in their stomach. Sometimes it goes together with difficulty to concentrate (we forget things, we think on many issues at the same time and cannot focus on one issue, etc.).
When these experiences last longer than we want, together with the sensation of not having options, we suffer.
How we create stress and anxiety
We create stress and anxiety mainly when we don’t want to feel the fear that is provoked by the situations that overwhelm us. When trying not to feel the fear, we do what we know best (search for solutions in our minds, have urgency, become emotional, be worried). This does not really work (the nervousness and uncertainty stay), and, as not knowing what to do else, we tend to do it even more. In this way, we create in our body and in our attitude a set of efforts that exhaust us and hinder us to face the challenges with energy and quietness.
How I teach to deal with stress and anxiety
We create the experiences of stress and anxiety in an automatic way, without being able to control them.
With touch and instructions, I teach my clients to pay attention to their individual way of creating and maintaining physical, emotional and mental efforts, when they suffer anxiety or when they are stressed. When gaining attention on these efforts, the person can learn to drop them. As a result, the person will meet the fear he wanted not to feel. Part of my work is to teach the clients to stop fighting the fear, and to integrate it as an additional aspect of our human experience. In this way, the client does not only recover the energy that was invested in not feeling the fear, but also learns to use the fear as source of energy, to deal with his life in a more efficient way.