It’s been a long time since I myself was an anxious teen – over forty years now. Therapy wasn’t a commonly available tool in the seventies, and in my family, the unspoken rule about difficult emotions was not to feel them. So I ate mine. When anxiety roiled up, as it was bound to do in my chaotic and charged family, I soothed myself with globs of peanut butter, handfuls of chips, pints of ice cream, pushing down my rising panic, back below the surface, like the massively looming foundation of an iceberg. On the surface, I was placid and gleaming, the high-achieving daughter, pretty, if tending towards “plumpness” (my grandmother’s word for me, and one I detested), brilliant in school, gracious and kind. But as my body size fluctuated, so too did my shame, in an endless spiral of trying and failing to play by my family’s rules: don’t feel, don’t speak, don’t have any troublesome needs. In my twenties, I wrote a poem about it. It began: “I ate my words until I became epic.” I can’t remember beyond that first line and I’ve since lost the piece. I was trying to tell my untold story, my feelings written in sugar crystals and the chubby creases of pages folded in shame. For me, anxiety has always been inextricably linked to the experience of being a human soul living in a physical body. It’s hard work. If I had a dime for every moment I spent thinking about what I might eat and when, or whether I looked attractive or not, and feeling guilty or shameful about those behaviors and thoughts, I’d be living in a Mediterranean villa, granting my billions to hard-working not-for-profits and struggling artists.
Fortuitously, several experiences have helped me to reset my relationship to living in this body as an emotionally vulnerable, alive, conscious person. The primary of these was finding a form of movement that activates my joy in being incarnate, that lets me sense my body as a source of playfulness, strength, comfort, mastery and vulnerability. For me it’s been dance, specifically a technique called Nia, but I have friends who have found their most authentic relationship to their bodies through yoga, martial arts, distance biking, hiking on a ridgeline, swimming, tennis. These sensations of joyful movement are quite different than the obsessive quality of addictive exercise I felt in my twenties, when all I wanted was to burn calories and remake the shape of my body into something I felt better fit expectations (whose, I wonder…) for how I should look. There is no question that exercise addiction can become as unhealthy as any other. But that hasn’t been the case for me. My journey through forms of movement has brought me home to my body as source of wisdom, pleasure, and this one is important: safe emotional expression.
As an educator in the body-mind wellness field, I am convinced that moving and connecting to our bodies is the most accessible, simple, and culturally misunderstood way to cultivate whole-self well-being. As an anxiety management tool, it is difficult to beat the following recipe: stop, breathe, sense your body, allow the anxiety to be felt physically, and honor it. And then go for a run or a walk. Turn on some music and dance to one song. A typical song on the radio lasts three minutes. Dancing for three minutes can literally alter your sensations, start to shift your brain chemistry, and evolve your mood. How I wish I had danced more with my anxious kids, and worried less about them.
In my line of work, I see so many people trying to think or consume their way around their feelings of anxiety and depression. “I know this is irrational,” they might say. They do their CBT homework, reframing damaging thought patterns enmeshed with their mental and emotional suffering, and this is important work. But feelings are so called for a reason. A “feeling” is FELT, not thought. Anxiety, for example, is typically announced by physical sensations of increased heart rate (“butterflies”), shortness of breath, nausea, restless leg muscles, etc. Moving the body is an immediately doable, free, and effective way of altering these sensations, shifting the biofeedback loop, and allowing emotions to transform. I have a refrigerator magnet that reads “Move a muscle, change a thought.” I don’t intend to diminish the importance of thinking about feelings, understanding their origins, talk therapy, or any other cognitively-based approach to dealing with anxiety. These tools have helped me greatly over the years. But I do suggest that they may be incomplete without bodywork. Or perhaps it’s more balanced to say: these are profoundly augmented by bodywork.
In general, our culture is uncomfortable with both emotions and body sensations. Emotions are swept to the shadows: grief, joy, anger, fear are seldom recognized or validated in our schools and workplaces, because the purpose of such institutions is primarily intellectual or productive, learning, making, doing. Not being. Often, as in my own childhood, it’s not acceptable to feel intensely in your own family– it may upset mom or dad, it unsteadies the status quo. As twentieth and twenty-first century Americans, the dominant culture has taught us pretty effectively how to NOT FEEL our emotions, and hence, our bodies. On top of which, contemporary culture presents a body as something to be either looked at or fixed. Kids are looked at and measured by the going standard of beauty: the stars of “Riverdale,” or Beyoncé, or whoever is currently deemed “hot,” people whose looks are often the result of extraordinary genes and/or air-brushing. They have flawless skin and flowing hair, six-packs and perfect clothes, personal trainers and stylists, their primary value is their hotness. They look so sexy-happy, don’t they? And our kids compare both their own suffering “insides” and their normal, varied, ethnic, pimpled or different-sized human bodies to these presentations of what’s ideal. I did a lot of this, too, when I was an anxious teen. If you are a teenager growing up in 2018, your daily norm is a deeply performative world, where your body’s primary cultural value is presentational: the emphasis on your digital “profile” of selfies and pics with friends, always needing to look hot, happy, cool, popular. What a no-win proposition for you. And If you become sick, physically or mentally, popular culture’s response is to diagnose and treat your symptoms to “make you better.” I.e., fix you and make those symptoms go away.
For our anxious teens, so overwhelmed with unhealthy images and ideas of what they should look like (physically perfect) and how they should feel (happy), engaging in movement can be a rich source of catharsis, mood management, and stabilization of brain chemistry. It’s a stress management tool that can serve them throughout their lives, particularly if the movement activity is one that brings enjoyment and connection to safe body sensations like strength, mastery, fitness, breath, or self-expression. Cultivating the body-mind connection through movement can help to recognize and calm central nervous system cues of anxiety, the rapid heartbeat or restless legs, the breathlessness, the racing thoughts. It’s important to note that parents, teachers and coaches need to be on the lookout for signs of exercise run amok, used addictively in a way that reinforces a young person’s self-harming tendencies. Yoga and martial arts are good starting points, in my experience, because of the way these disciplines integrate body, mind and spirit.
There is so much to be gained in movement for our kids; it galling that schools cut physical education and arts, activities that allow teens to exercise their bodies, their emotions, and their uniquely creative selves. There’s the sense of community from being on a team or in a cast; the proficiency and confidence of meeting a difficult physical challenge– improving your time, or lifting more, or being able to sing that hard line that you couldn’t sing last year. There’s the building of relationship with your own body as a living source of competence, collaboration and pleasure, rather than a sense of deficit, deprivation, dissociation, shame or pain associated with mental illness, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, cutting, trauma, etc. I wish I had been more effective in parenting my anxious children to understand the importance of body over mind – ironic, of course, since it’s my field, helping my students to live into the wholeness of their humanity through body acceptance and self-love. I wish I heard learned this earlier in my own life. I am grateful I learned it at all.
By: Holly Kania, Anxiety In Teens Parent Contributor