What is anxiety?

What does it look like?

Can Osteopathy help with it ?

Anxiety is a branch where it's more than just feeling anxious but worried or stressed collectivity . It can happen through a response to a situation where you can feel under pressure or can happen in the absence of a cause/reason and the anxious feeling doesn't go away. This can be overwhelming right! There are different types but the most common is generalised anxiety (excessive worry about multiple concerns over 6 months)

Symptoms can be physical (feeling tens, heart racing & fast breathing), psychological (over thinking, catastrophising & worry) and behavioural ( avoidance of anxiety-provoking situations)

Some more tell-tale signs can be fatigue, difficulty concentrating, irritability, muscle tension, restlessness, sleep disturbances, feeling on edge, and gut irritations like IBS symptoms (stomach aches or diarrhoea).

When the body is in an anxious state our biological state goes into overdrive as our nervous system over-stimulates in which the frontal cortex of the brain which regulates impulse, emotions and behaviour to go into a state of fight or flight. This is where the body increases the production of cortisol (steroid hormone) to combat the situation. For the body to tackle this heightened situation the nervous system goes into overdrive, so symptoms like shallow breathing can take hold, this makes our body work differently. With the fast and short breath the body isn’t utilising it’s full diaphragm to breathe so our upper ribs are doing a lot. This can cause things like rib sprains, tight upper back and neck muscle which then cause headaches/ dizziness and even nausea.

As osteopaths we can help reduce some of these symptoms and help with any restriction, tight muscles or tension build up. We look at the body holistically, so understanding that the body works collectively is important in how we approach taking care of what is going on within the area but also above and below.

Take home exercise you can do at home to try and help with reducing some of these symptoms is a simple as breathing (really?). Haha, yes breathing! This is a great tool as when we use deep diaphragmatic breathing it can help moderate the sympathetic signals to create a gateway to rest our nervous system to parasympathetic which is known for rest and digest.