Anxious? Quick fix - run in place for 15 seconds...

Posted on August 04, 2020 by Jacquelyn Hurley, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

The technique comes from our primal evolution. Feelings from anxiety include increased heart rate, sweat, shortness of breath, increased heart rate, and feeling like you want to flee while at the same time feeling frozen. Anxiety has been critical to human survival. Anxiety symptoms are warning signals telling you to avoid something.
Back in the day, if we came across a lion across the river, our first reaction was to freeze. We froze in hopes that the lion hadn’t see us. Then, your body would start to sweat because it’s preparing to run. The body sweats before you start running because the sweat will cool you down which allows you to go farther. The heart rate also increases as it raises its efficiency in preparation of you running for your life. The other thing you’ll do is hold your breath. This raises blood pressure and forces blood to go into your big muscles so you can run faster.
Fast forward to modern day. You’re sitting at your computer and you start to feel anxious thinking about a project that’s due. Your chest feels tight as you hold your breath and your heart rate increases. You feel frozen while at the same time you feel like you want to flee. Now you understand where these feelings come from!
Anxiety is all a matter of degree. It can go from minor to extreme. Dr. Doug Lisle, an anxiety expert says anxiety isn’t an attack, it’s an adaptation. It’s an adaptive mechanism that is there to help you deal with a life or death predator situation. “It’s not a flaw but rather a feather.”
How do you fix anxiety? “Let the system do what it wants to do” says Dr Lisle. The system doesn’t want to sit, it wants to contract the large muscles of the body. Remember, the system is programmed to run for its life. Dr. Lisle recommends that you immediately break the freeze. Get up out of your chair and start to jog in place for 15 – 20 seconds.
What you’ll find is after 15 seconds of jogging in place, you’ll be gasping for air and extremely tired. This is interesting because you haven’t even come close to hitting your capacity tor run. The truth is, your body isn’t that afraid because there is no predator. You feel like sitting down. As you sit down, you’ll start to breathe deeply and you’ll begin to feel very calm. What just happened is that the brain told the body that your safe and you have escaped the predator, otherwise you wouldn’t have stopped running.
He discusses the origin of anxiety and this technique in this YouTube interview you can easily find.