How to regulate smooth muscle anxiety
This blog will help you to understand and how to regulate smooth muscle anxiety. I start by explaining what smooth muscle anxiety is, and how it fits into the trauma paradigm. Then we look at how to identify its symptoms, and how to regulate it.
Many smooth muscle anxiety symptoms are phenomena we might experience every day, but not realise as symptoms of anxiety. So the first task in how to regulate smooth muscle anxiety, is to be able to accurately identify it. This includes differentiating between your body’s anxiety signals, and an organic issue. For example; dizziness can be a symptom of smooth muscle anxiety, but it can also be a symptom of dehydration, or inner ear problems.
Why regulate?
You might wonder why it’s important to regulate your anxiety. One reason is, if anxiety is not regulated when it’s in your smooth muscle, it can escalate further, into more debilitating symptoms.
Another reason, is that regulating your anxiety helps to regulate your emotions. This is something you may not have learned how to do, but is an important part of taking good care of yourself, and feeling well.
When your body signals anxiety, can you can choose to listen, and do something about it, or you can choose to ignore it. You might have learnt to ignore yourself, if your parents didn’t know how to help you with your anxiety as you grew up. But now that you’re an adult, you can choose to help yourself.
There is a high cost to your wellbeing if you choose to ignore your anxiety: your suffering continues, you remain on an unregulated rollercoaster, your needs get neglected, and nothing changes.
Anxiety is a clear communication from your body: “please attend to me, I need your help and care”.
Please note, that this blog is about anxiety pathways and regulation, which won’t stop the underlying causes of anxiety. In order to get to the bottom of your anxiety and treat it for good, please talk to a professional psychotherapist or counsellor.
What is smooth muscle anxiety?
In my previous blog ‘How to regulate striated muscle anxiety’ I explained that striated muscle anxiety, is anxiety at a low rise, in your body. It’s the first thing that happens when your body signals danger.
The brain perceives danger when there is either an external threat (an attacker, a natural disaster, etc) or an internal threat. What is an internal threat? If we did not learn to emotionally regulate when we were little, or if our feelings, needs or desires made our main care givers anxious, then our inner experience becomes the threat: it threatens the stability of our relationships and this means risk of death when were little and dependent. And when we experience feelings or needs as an adult, instead of knowing what we feel, need or want, we (unconsciously) cover these up with anxiety.
So our body first goes into striated muscle anxiety, an optimum state to run or fight. It shows up as tension in the striated muscles, shallow breathing, increased heart rate, and it’s under the aegis of the sympathetic nervous system. It’s as if a tiger is chasing us: all our blood is directed away from our extremities (we get cold hands and feet) and into our larger muscle groups, so that we can flee or fight.
Smooth muscle anxiety is what happens when the tiger catches us and takes a bite, or, in a relationship, it’s when we are survivors of repeated abuse, which we cannot escape from (often because we are dependent children). It’s anxiety at mid rise. Our nervous system switches from fight flight, into collapse and/or freeze/faux death. So we go into down regulation, under the aegis of the parasympathetic nervous system.
This means everything slows down. Heart rate, breathing, digestion and blood flow, so that we don’t bleed to death as quickly when the tiger takes a chunk out of us. This wreaks havoc with the gastrointestinal tract.
Symptoms of smooth muscle anxiety are:
Diarrhoea
Nausea, vomiting
Burping
Acid reflux
Flatulence, bloating
Yawning
Urge to urinate
Cold sweaty palms
Feeling relaxed/slumped (jelly legs)
Migraines
Dizziness, faint, light headedness
Step 1: Identify your anxiety
Often patients will start burping or suddenly feel dizzy or sick when talking about something that is disturbing. I point it out to them, and they are often unaware of their symptom, or surprised at its connection to the trauma they’re talking about. We become normalised to our symptoms and don’t think they are worth taking notice of.
Once you’ve become familiar with what smooth muscle anxiety is, the next step towards how to regulate smooth muscle anxiety is to identify the symptoms as they happen in your body. Then, have the option to do something about your anxiety-to regulate it and to be curious about what it’s about.
Sometimes, anxiety is due to unconscious dynamics and repressed feelings from the past, that get triggered by something in your current situation.
Understanding why you’re anxious might involve some reflection and curiosity, and psychic work.
Anxiety is the body signalling that it’s not safe to feel or be your authentic self right now. The more you hide yourself, the more your anxiety rises.
Step 2: Choose to attend to your anxiety
How to regulate smooth muscle anxiety means taking your anxiety seriously enough to want to do something about it. Treating it as if it’s an important message from your self, that what you are feeling is important, and accepting that you are in need of some help and care.
If you are used to ignoring or dismissing your anxiety as silly or insignificant, then this step will take some conscious effort. Without choosing to take loving care of yourself, and respecting your feelings including anxiety, nothing will change.
If we ignore our anxiety, or criticise it, then we treat ourselves as if we don’t matter, there is a high cost: we continue to suffer. . We might have been treated this way in the past, but that doesn’t mean we have to continue to treat ourselves this way.
What can you do about your anxiety? You can notice it’s there, choose to regulate it, and try to understand why it has arisen in this moment. Anxiety doesn’t come out of nowhere, for no reason - it is your body communicating something important to you.
When you are assessing your anxiety, you are looking for where and what the symptoms are: what do you notice in your body? Where the anxiety is showing up will give you important information about how anxious you are.
If you are stuck in your mind, ruminating or intellectualising about your problem, then you have disconnected from what is happening in your body, which raises anxiety. You will need to make a conscious effort to turn your attention to your body.
Step 3: Know the three types of anxiety
There are three different types of anxiety, and you can read more about these in my blog post here.
Each one has a different set of regulation techniques. Using the wrong type of regulation can make your anxiety worse.
For example, if you try to regulate smooth muscle anxiety with breathing, - which is a striated muscle anxiety regulation tool - then it makes smooth muscle anxiety even WORSE. Because breathing down regulates, and when you are already stuck in freeze you don’t want to down regulate yourself even more.
This is why it’s so important to understand what is happening within your body, so that you can accurately identify which type of anxiety you have at any given moment (it can quickly change), and regulate it. Sometimes, we get striated muscle mixed with smooth muscle anxiety, or our anxiety goes from striated muscle straight to CPD (cognitive perceptual disruption). Learn the difference between these three and observe what your patterns are.
Step 4: Choose your method of anxiety regulation
These techniques will help you to regulate your smooth muscle anxiety. Memorise the one that feels best for you, so that you can always have it in your back pocket when you need it, and know how to regulate smooth muscle anxiety.
This is not an exhaustive list, but these are the techniques that I see best results from in my clinic. You might want to try them all, and see which one/s work best for you:
Arm pumps
Prayer hands pressure
Full body engage and release
Lifting weights
Step 5: Instructions
A. Arm pumps
Anything that engages your muscles will work. This one involves your upper body.
Method:
Sit or stand with a straight spine. Extend your arms outwards and make fists with your hands. Imagine you are holding dumbbells. Pump your arms, bending at your elbows, bringing your fists into your shoulders, then extending your arm out again.
Continue for a few minutes, or until you feel your anxiety coming back into your striated muscles.
Once you’ve finished, spend a few moment reflecting on how your body feels overall, notice what has changed. Repeat if necessary.
B. Prayer hands pressure
This one engages your upper body and core and sometimes the legs as well.
Method:
Sit or stand upright with both feet on the floor. Bring your hands together into a prayer position. Keep breathing. Push your palms together, with as much pressure as you can. Hold for a minute or two, and then release.
Once you’ve finished, spend a few moment reflecting on how your body feels overall, notice what has changed. Repeat if necessary. If you notice your anxiety symptoms have eased off, or that you’re now in striated muscle anxiety, then it has worked.
C. Full body engage and release
This one works well if you are lying down, but can be done standing up. It is sometimes used in yoga classes to help with the final relaxation at the end of class.
Method:
Lying down, take a deep inhalation and squeeze and engage every single part of your body, right down into your feet, and squeezing your hands into fists. Screw your face up into a prune. Hold for a few seconds or however long is comfortable, (you might keep breathing if holding longer), and then with a relaxed exhalation, totally release. You might want to sigh as you release all of your muscles, and as you exhale out, feel as if you are completely letting go.
Once you’ve finished, spend a few moment reflecting on how your body feels overall, notice what has changed. Repeat if necessary.
D. Lifting weights/resistance training
If you go to the gym and lift weights, then congratulations, you are already doing a fantastic thing for your smooth muscle anxiety! Lifting weights engages your muscles and will automatically regulate your smooth muscle anxiety.
This one obviously can’t be done in the moment, as it requires you to be in the gym. So it’s slightly different from the other regulation techniques, which can be applied the moment you recognise your anxiety.
Method:
If you have no experience with lifting, then please employ a personal trainer to help you learn how to lift safely. If you are not able to lift weights, then using resistance bands will also work, or you can use your own bodyweight: holding plank, press-ups, squats, or anything that engages your muscles.
Once you’ve finished, spend a few moment reflecting on how your body feels overall, notice what has changed.
Bringing anxiety down a notch
You might know from my blog ‘What are the three different types of anxiety’, that anxiety rises in the body as different sets of physiological symptoms, as it escalates.
It starts with striated muscle anxiety (which can escalate into panic attacks), then rises into smooth muscle anxiety (which can be debilitating when it develops into inflammatory bowel diseases). And lastly, anxiety goes into your mind, and disrupts your capacity to think, which is cognitive perceptual disruption (CPD).
So it is natural then, when smooth muscle anxiety is regulated, that your body may move into striated muscle anxiety. This is a good thing, because you’ve brought your anxiety down a notch, and in doing so, you are one step closer to feeling your emotions. Feeling our emotions in a healthy, understanding way, is always the aim: it is how we process them and regulate ourselves. For some of us, this will take a lot of patience, hard work, and practice.
Conclusion
I hope this blog has helped you to know how to regulate smooth muscle anxiety. We started by looking at what smooth muscle anxiety is, and what the symptoms are. We then looked at the steps you can take to regulate it, which start with being able to identify smooth muscle anxiety as it happens in your body. The next step is to choose to attend to your anxiety by taking it seriously. The third step was knowing the difference between the three types of anxiety, so that you can choose the right methods of regulation, as they are very different depending on what type of anxiety you have. The final step was to choose which regulation method works best for you, and to put it into practice.
If you can relate to this, would you like some help?
I hope these tools will help you to know how to regulate smooth muscle anxiety. If you can relate, and think you need professional help, I work with individual adults, and would be happy to hear from you. Book a free, 15-minute telephone consultation to talk about how I might be able to help you.