Anxiety and Depression
Anxiety turns on all the lights.
Your anxiety is busy seeking certainty. It may manifest as decision fatigue or perfectionism. Or it’s the over-achieving, workaholic version of you – the one where your brain is searching for reassurance, looking for that one correct answer. And it will continue to look until it finds relief.
On the inside, anxiety creates those physical changes people talk about – shallow breathing, racing heart, tight digestion, tense muscles. What’s more unsettling? Some researchers suggest that anxiety itself can become addictive. Over time, those habituated anxiety patterns leave us worn down and tired. It’s like the body gets stuck on a setting it was only meant to use occasionally.
Is it anxiety or your intuition? Here’s something clients ask me all the time: “How do I know if it’s anxiety or intuition?” They can seem so similar, but upon closer examination, intuition is flexible and grounded; it possesses a quality of quiet knowing. Anxiety is full of urgency and pressure and is often paired with plenty of “what if” thoughts. Anxiety, like all emotions, signals an unmet need. When we suppress those signals repeatedly, intuition breaks down. We lose trust in ourselves.
In therapy, we learn to go beneath the urgency and feel what the anxiety is trying to tell us. Once we accurately hear and respect the emotion (and sometimes act based on what we discover), the nervous system settles. The body returns to balance, and we can finally feel ease.
Depression is the dimmer switch.
While anxiety is your nervous system speeding up, depression is your nervous system slowing down, like your life forces are dimming. Your body conserves energy by slowing down the regulatory systems. This often creates isolation, fatigue, and that feeling that you’ve withdrawn from everything that used to matter.
Depression makes simple things feel impossibly complex to plan your day, take care of yourself, and even find pleasure in things you used to enjoy. It’s a state of being where your nervous system has placed you in a kind of protective shutdown.
It’s a bumpy wheel. The Buddhist term for suffering (dukkha) originates from the concept of an uneven wheel. With depression, every bump seems to sink you deeper into a rut. The healing process involves recognizing pain and the patterns of the nervous system, and detaching from the meaning of our suffering or the stories associated with it.
Somatic and experiential therapies let us separate the pain from the suffering. Sitting with your experience in a tangible, body-based way re-establishes safety, bringing activation and awakening the system again.The goal isn’t to eliminate the bumps of life (that’s not realistic). Instead, with wisdom and compassion, we detach from the story of our suffering
Support is possible.
If anxiety or depression has been shaping how you think, feel, or move through your days, you do not have to navigate it alone. Therapy can help you understand what is happening beneath the surface and develop steadiness, clarity, and relief over time.
If you are curious about working together, you are welcome to book a free consultation to learn more.
Let us explore what healing could look like for you.
