How do you feel when you’re anxious? No, not just your mind—how does your body feel? Have you ever stopped to notice? You might feel a tightness in your chest or a racing heart. Maybe you feel short of breath, nauseous, and fidgety. Do your eyes tend to dart around or do your feet freeze to the ground? The mental feelings of anxiety are a lot to handle on their own, and how your body reacts can make them even worse.

Some therapy methods, like somatic therapy, help you recognize how your body feels when you have anxiety and what you can do to calm it down.

What is somatic therapy?

Somatic therapy is a type of psychotherapy (talk therapy) that involves the mind-body connection. Everything that the body does influences the mind and vice versa, which is why the somatic therapy approach flips from “top-down,” like many popular methods, to “bottom-up.” Instead of just talking through thoughts, someone in somatic therapy will focus on physical sensations and experiences.

This “bottom-up” approach is evident in some of the ways somatic practices help people work on their mental health:

• Mind-body connection – Your mind and body are connected in everything you do. Learning more about how your body stores stress, processes trauma, and reacts to different situations can help you handle new challenges more effectively. Plus, having a better mind-body connection can help you set boundaries by recognizing when you’re getting stressed during certain situations.
• Mindfulness – Sometimes, just being aware of your thoughts and physical reactions can help decrease your stress. It can be hard to know when you’re anxious until it’s out of control, and mindfulness can give you space to recognize stress early.
• Self-regulation – There’s always a chance that your anxiety gets out of hand before you can even recognize it. Grounding techniques can help you feel safer and more in control so you can start calming down again.

Somatic therapy is very common in trauma treatment, but it can also be helpful for anxiety, chronic stress, grief, and even self-esteem issues.

Noticing the physical symptoms of anxiety

Stress can come from anywhere. Family, friends, past experiences, nerves about the future—you name it, it can bring you stress. Your body recognizes that stress and, if it remains unresolved, can store it in your body and cause uncomfortable symptoms. That’s because it’s very influential on your nervous system, which connects your body and your brain.

You might even write off some of these physical symptoms of anxiety if you’ve been dealing with them for a while, chalking them up to something else or just how you normally feel.

• Headache
• Jaw pain
• Neck and back aches
• Queasiness or nausea
• Shakes or tremors
• Chest pain and/or racing heart

Over time, if you don’t address these symptoms or your anxiety, you may just come to expect to feel these things—and your body will adapt, resorting to feeling bad when you feel stressed.

How somatic therapy can relieve anxiety

Somatic therapy can help you find relief from the physical pain that anxiety brings. By giving you space to process how you feel—physically and mentally—you can release tension to feel better and progress in your healing. You’ll learn how to recognize when your anxiety is starting to rev up due to different behaviors. Maybe you pace around, clench your fists, or breathe quickly. These can all be more noticeable than how you feel inside, which sometimes might just seem blank.

Once you learn to recognize how your body physically reacts to stress, you can link it with how you’re feeling inside. You can see that blankness, dread, sadness, or uncertainty with better clarity so that you can express it before it gets too bad. This is called self-regulation.

With your behaviors and feelings recognized, you can express them physically. Breathwork is a very approachable part of somatic therapy that uses different breathing practices to calm down. Your therapist might also encourage some different movements or exercises to help you channel your anxious energy outward. “Resourcing” is identifying internal cues and external resources that allow you to express your anxiety physically. That way, you can return to a state of calm and relaxation instead of bottling up anxiety.

Somatic therapy exercises that may help you

5-4-3-2-1 grounding

Grounding is especially helpful when you’re feeling extremely overwhelmed or in the middle of a panic attack. 5-4-3-2-1 grounding makes it a little more approachable, allowing you to focus on your senses. You’ll stop and identify:

• Five things you can see
• Four things you can touch
• Three things you can hear
• Two things you can smell
• One thing you can taste

This is a great exercise that can help you regain control when you don’t feel like you can anymore.

Physiological sigh

Some breathing exercises, like the physiological sigh, also help bring stress down quickly. To feel relief, just:

• Quickly inhale twice
• Slowly exhale, making sure to control your breath

Work in the physiological sigh when you feel stressed and need to calm down. You can also try other breathing exercises, like box breathing or “4-7-8” breathing, which add time to your inhaling, breath holding, and exhaling.

Body scan

Checking in with your body to see where stress might be hiding can be a good regular practice. To do a body scan:

• Focus on your head, including your face, and see how it feels physically. Do you have a headache? Are you clenching your jaw?
• Move down to your shoulders. Do they feel tight or sore? Are you slouching forward?
• Next, check on your chest. Does it feel tight? Is your heart beating quickly?
• Keep moving down to your stomach. Do you feel nauseous? Is it sore?
• Finally, move down to your legs and feet. Are they jittery? Do they feel relaxed?

As you move through each step, you can do some breathing exercises to help you relieve stress.

Somatic exercises might be better with other therapies

Many people find somatic therapy relieving, but there’s still not a lot of research that’s been done on it. Pairing somatic processing with other talk therapies like cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) or dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). At Family First Adolescent Service, we include somatic therapy programming for many of the teens we support. We know that talking about emotions and stress doesn’t always come naturally, and somatic exercises can help identify and express those feelings.

Treatment at Family First is always personalized for each teen we help. Your teen’s plan might involve somatic exercises, CBT, and expressive therapies to help them verbally and nonverbally process stress and trauma.

Our team is experienced in treating the common and most complex mental health conditions, including trauma and anxiety. If your teen struggles with stress, we can help. Call 888.904.5947 or contact us online now.