Letting Go for Anxiety Relief

Anxiety. Remember when this word wasn’t part of our day-to-day vocabulary? When it wasn’t one of the common ways we described ourselves? I do. Perhaps we weren’t so anxious back then, but stressors have always been there. Were we more resilient, or did we just not have the word to throw onto every sensation that didn’t feel calm?

For some of us, anxiety has just been part of life regardless of whether or not it was trending. This is the reason I focused on anxiolytics while in grad school. However, over the years as a clinician specializing in this area, I’ve come to learn firsthand that dealing with any health issue- whether it’s anxiety or digestion or allergies- requires a bit more than just swapping out your prescriptions for the herbal equivalent. If this is your mentality when you choose to go down the holistic route, you’ll quickly learn that this is short-sighted and can often prove ineffective.

Let’s break it down for a second. When you want to calm anxiety, you need to focus on the nervous system. There are wonderful and powerful herbs that can help relax the nervous system, as well as those which can help restore it to a balanced state. This isn’t typically an overnight remedy. What has taken time to gradually chip away at the nerves, finally getting to a point where a person is experiencing a physiological response- often affecting other systems of the body- takes just as much time (if not longer) to restore. True- you might begin to feel more relaxed and settled after a tincture of calming herbs, or a pleasant, grounding cup of tea, but that is often a superficial experience. 

Here is the problem:

You need to FIX the PROBLEM.

And there’s not one magical fix for us all, unfortunately. What healing requires is to find the root of the issue.

The issue is not your nervous system. The issue is what you are doing to your nervous system.

Yep. I said it. Sorry. 

We can work hard to nurture the nervous system, doing all the herbs and yoga and breathing exercises. Those are definitely good things. But we also need to understand what caused it in the first place. 

This is one of the first steps in working on getting better and feeling less anxious. We need to find out what the triggers are. 

Ideally, one day there is a time when the trigger is no longer triggering. I think of this as the Nirvana of mental health. The zen-like state where nothing affects you. I imagine this takes decades of work, if that is even possible. 

Identifying the trigger is important. If doom scrolling is your trigger (as it is one of mine), and you’re drinking your beautiful anxiety tea or magical tincture while scrolling, how effective do you think that herbal formula will be? Chances are you’re not going to feel much of a difference because you’re still incorporating part of the problem. It’s hard to kick a habit when you allow yourself to continue to do it. 

The herbs are supportive in cases of anxiety. They’re helping the body do what it should, but it’s not a free pass to continue behavior. When a person is trying to alleviate anxiety through an herbal protocol but does not avoid things that amp up cortisol, the results are going to be limited at best. 

Sure, we can’t avoid all the stressors in life. But we can control some of them. We can avoid situations that are detrimental to wellness. We can work on our approach to relationships with others and our boundaries. We can put away the screens and go outside for a walk instead. Eventually, with work and dedication to protecting our hearts and minds as we work toward healing the nervous system, we should be able to expose ourselves to those situations which had previously been problematic and experience less of a stress response. That is the goal. 

So drink your tea. Take your tinctures. Go outside and breathe. Take care of yourself. But remember that in order to really benefit, it’s not just about what you DO, but also what you DON’T do. 

Light- Hearted & Free tea for anxiety