What to Do When You Feel Anxious During Breathwork And Mindfulness Practices
Even though meditation and Breathwork are meant to help people regulate and relax, for some people who struggle with anxiety and hyper-arousal, this isn’t so easy.
The more they focus on their breathing or their bodies while feeling sensations and emotions during a practice, the more they become anxious - and not less.
This is not uncommon and definitely not an ‘abnormal’ response, as many people who experience this might think. Nothing is ‘wrong’ with you.
Once we start considering your nervous system and your past history, it is actually very natural.
What is anxiety really?
Anxiety is not anxiety per se - it’s not just a label or diagnosis.
It is an expression of trapped survival stress rising up in your systems. It’s a natural biological response.
This buffered fight/flight energy is essentially misplaced because it’s actually an incomplete survival response from a past event(s) or unresolved trauma staying alive as incomplete stress cycles in your body.
Anxiety is survival stress desperately trying to get out.
Why are you feeling more anxious during meditation or breathing practice?
Reason #1:
Many of us don’t feel safe in our bodies due to experiences in the past that have conditioned us in ways in which we feel more safe in our minds and in our thoughts.
When a child experiences something highly stressful or traumatic, the nervous system protects it from getting overwhelmed or flooded by disassociating and “leaving” the body. Being in the body and feeling its uncomfortable sensations isn’t safe if we are not being co-regulated by a caregiver or we don’t know yet how to self-regulate.
Now, as you go about your day, you spend most of your time subconsciously preoccupying your mind on other things, so that you avoid the anxiety. When you then sit down to meditate and your body and mind don’t have anything to do, the physical sensations that you try so hard to not feel during your day to day become louder in the silence. Or, as you put your attention consciously on your body, you notice all of its sensations that you normally aren’t aware of due to the noise of your daily life.
Either way, your body is calling them to your attention. However, your nervous system perceives the sensations as not safe (even though they are) and goes into a stress response (eg. increasing heart rate) and your brain is producing anxious thoughts as its trying to make sense of the information coming from your body.
Remember, our human brain is designed to look for danger, not for joy. Thus, it’s only doing its job. However, an anxious brain and nervous system are hyper-sensitive to danger (internal or external) due to maladaption.
All this keeps you stuck in the anxiety loop.
Just know that, your anxiety will not kill you. You are not in any danger. And it is ok to feel this way. Instead of trying to push it away, allow yourself to feel compassion for the part of you that gets anxious. It’s only here to protect you.
The good news is - it will get better. Thanks to neuroplasticity, your brain and your nervous system can change - no matter how old you are, no matter what you have experienced.
So please don’t be discouraged.
Reason #2:
Not every breathwork practice out there is suitable for everyone.
Not everyone has the same CO2 tolerance - meaning, the capacity to tolerate higher levels of CO2. But when we look at a practice such as 4-7-8 breathing (inhale for 4, hold for 7, exhale for 8), we need to consider that even though it is heavily promoted on social media for beginners (mainly by not very experienced breathworker), it requires a relatively high CO2 tolerance, which doesn’t make it beginner- nor nervous system-friendly.
Many people who struggle with anxiety often have a low CO2 tolerance, which is why this technique can often have an adverse effect (higher CO2 can trigger uncomfortable activation in the body for people who are sensitive to it).
What to do when you feel anxious during a mindfulness / breathing practice?
During a somatic / mindfulness / breathing practice, when you start to feel your anxiety in your body and anxious thoughts getting activated, there are several ways you can apply the brakes.
This way, you can stay within your window of tolerance so that mindfulness doesn’t become stressful or re-traumatizing.
The intention with any of the suggestions is to use what is called titration and pendulation.
Titration = small amounts of (trauma-related) distress at a time in order to build up tolerance and avoid becoming overwhelmed
Pendulation = moving and refocusing attention on somewhere that is less activating or less intense and then coming back (moving back and forth)
This will help us widen our window of tolerance and increase our stress resilience.
Here are a some brake suggestions:
focus on part in your body that feels good and safe
focus on the lower part of your body (eg. feeling your feet, feeling your feet touching the ground, feeling the area below the belly button and your pelvis and hips..)
open your eyes, orient to your surroundings and move your attention on somewhere that is less activating or less intense - eg. focus on a resourceful, external object in your environment
if you get too anxious and need to stop the meditation - do some grounding (name 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell and 1 thing you can taste)
during breath awareness practice: pick another sensation to observe the breath (instead of your chest, you could try to focus on the sensation of air passing through your nostrils)
engage in a soothing form of self-touch (e.g. put one hand on your heart or belly)
touch something around you and pay attention to the fabric and being in connection with that (eg. the seat you are sitting on or your clothes)
hold on to a safe resource (eg. a pillow, a rock in your hand, a blanket…) and focus on it and it’s surface area or fabric
take a break from the mindfulness practice (e.g., walking, stretching…)
Experiment with these and see what works best for you.
Use the Brakes Early, Often and at Any Time!
You could for example engage in the practice for 30-60 seconds (or even less or longer, depending on how easily your system gets activated) and then take a break for 30-60 seconds or until you feel calm and safe again to return to the practice. And then slowly increase engaging in the practice minute by minute with breaks in between.
Even if you are doing a guided session, you can always take breaks in between. You don’t have to follow the instructions. Follow the messages of your body and then slowly expand your capacity.
If you are doing a self-guided practice, start with shorter practice times (even just 1-3 minutes) and then slowly increase your sitting time.
However, the goal is to slowly increase your capacity - so find the middle path between feeling safe and pushing yourself a little bit.
Expanding Your Capacity to Feel Anxiety
Once you trust your body a bit more, you can experiment with practicing to stay with the sensations of anxiety until your capacity is reached.
By this, I don’t mean to stay with the thoughts of anxiety but to let the emotion of fear and the sensations of anxiety move through you without attaching to your thoughts.
It helps to understand and remind yourself in this moment that anxiety is a physiological response in your body and caused by stored stress energy in your body.
Tell yourself “this feeling is uncomfortable, but I am not in any danger and it is ok and safe to feel this way”.
How Breathwork Can Help You
A daily gentle Breathwork practice and somatic meditations can help you increase your capacity and slowly teach your nervous system to regulate itself. Daily is the keyword here.
Check out my course “Breathwork and Nervous System Foundations” to get started on that.
It might also be a really good idea to hire a trauma-sensitive mindfulness and/or breath coach who can help and support you on your journey to finding back home to your body in a safe way.
However, you must also fix the root cause. The root cause is the FEELING of alarm that is still stuck in you from the unresolved wounds of your younger self.
In order to fully heal your anxiety, you need to do more than learning to self-regulate and increasing your capacity for stress. This is where deep dive transformational breathwork sessions come in (in which we breathe for 45-60+ minutes).
The big question is:
Can I do deep dive Breathwork sessions using conscious connected breathing when struggling with anxiety?
Here is my trauma- and nervous system-sensitive take on it:
Once you feel more regulated and safe in your body utilizing balancing techniques and practices, you can experiment with a deep dive Breathwork session, in which we use conscious connected breathing to access deeper layers of our unconscious and to facilitate emotional release and the completion of stress cycles.
It’s important to know that conscious connected breathing is an activating breathing technique. And it might not be what you need right now, considering that anxiety means that you’re nervous system is already over-activated and hyper-aroused.
However, some people do these deep dive sessions despite their anxious tendencies, are able to close running stress cycles and experience amazing results.
Others first work on regulating their nervous system with balancing breathing practices for a while before diving deeper with conscious connected breathing.
Beyond Breathwork - Recommendations
In addition, I highly recommend you work with a somatic psychotherapist, who is trained in Somatic Experiencing or NARM.
Talk or behavioral therapy will only get you so far. We need to work on the level of the body and our emotions to truly heal anxiety and past wounding. Trying to work out a feeling issue (anxiety) via the mind by talking or changing your behavior only will most probably not be very effective or sustainable.
Also, check out the book “Anxiety Rx” and the author’s Instagram account @theanxietymd.
Let me know if you have any questions!