Mental Health, Anxiety, Counselling Support

Explore Counselling Support for Anxious Minds

A gentle look at how anxiety shows up in our bodies, why those reactions made sense for our ancestors, and how counselling and simple calming exercises can help us respond with more ease and awareness.

There are many different levels of ‘anxiety’ and we may all experience most of these in a life time.

They range from heart stopping terror at one end of the scale to a sense that ‘something isn’t right’ at the other end. We may be so anxious that we have difficulty sleeping or have constant worrying thoughts, being easily startled and unsettled in general. We may not even be aware of what it is that isn’t right.

At any level, our bodies let us know in specific ways – signs of significant anxiety may include a racing heart, a dry mouth, ‘butterflies in the tummy’ or actual nausea, shakes in the legs or hands and a sense of being on the alert.

All of these signs are a throw back to our cave men ancestors – when faced by danger, they had to be ready to either runaway (flight); stay absolutely still until the danger passed (freeze); or stand up to the danger (fight).

We are still programmed to respond in one of these three ways today when faced with something that may be a risk to our safety and comfort.

Simple grounding practices can gently calm the body’s fight, flight or freeze response.

It can be quite frightening in itself to experience these signs – sometimes people fear the symptoms without being aware of the reasons for them – they actually can feel like a heart attack or people may feel that they are about to pass out – this is very scary!

We need to be aware of these bodily responses and to listen up and act rather than ignore them. If we ignore them we stand the risk of sending our bodies into a frenzy of over-reaction which can result in them becoming over stressed and sick – maybe seriously so.

The reasons for anxiety may need quite a lot of investigating and self exploration, but it helps enormously to start by doing simple exercises aimed at calming the body.

By doing this, we can focus more on what the scary thing is and use less energy on reacting. Below are some useful exercises which will tend to your body and allow your mind to ‘unfreeze’ enough to pay attention to what is causing the emotion.

Counselling and Calming Exercises

Counselling has been shown to be a helpful way of exploring the causes of anxiety and teaching ways of dealing with the effects.

💡 Pro Tip (from a developer’s desk): Just as we inspect logs to understand why an application is misbehaving, gentle self exploration and counselling help us read our body’s “logs” instead of ignoring warning signals.

Some helpful Resources:

• A Calming Breath Exercise

• Progressive Muscle Relaxation

• A Centering Exercise

A Developer’s Tiny Helper Script for Practice

As a senior software developer, one simple way I remind myself to pause is by using a tiny script that nudges me to take a calming breath during long coding sessions. You can adapt the idea in any language or tool you prefer.

You could pin a small reminder like this to your terminal, IDE, or task runner. The goal is not to “fix” anxiety with code, but to build gentle pauses into a busy, often high-pressure workday.

Author

Author: Ronald Cruickshank