Transforming Anxiety using Heartmath

I’m on a Heartmath theme at the moment; dropping down into your heart really is hugely healing. It’s changing the way I feel and the way I approach life as well. Clearing my heartwall was step one, these exercises are solidifying the changes.

Anxiety is rampant today; persistent anxiety can quickly change into an anxiety disorder. Heartmath’s solution is about harnessing the way the brain and the heart communicate, and being able to release the patterns that the brain automatically defaults to as a way of coping, even if it’s dysfunctional.

A maladaptive pattern can form in the brain, causing you to feel familiar with things like worry and anxiety, and when you’re not anxious you feel there’s something wrong, you’re uncomfortable. This is how habits are formed.

Heartmath helps to recorrect by intervening and recalibrating the brain through easy heart-focused techniques, so a new reference pattern is formed, one the brain tries to match with outside references. This becomes the new baseline on how to be.

Overidentifying and overcaring is the most common cause of anxiety. We all know what not caring about something feels like, but overcaring saps your energy to the point that you are out of balance. Passion for something is not the same as overcaring. Overcaring is anxiousness and the situation loses its real meaning.

Caring is programmed into our DNA, but when it’s not managed properly and we overidentify, then overcaring turns into anxiety.

Close on the heels of overcaring is overattachment. You care so much that you are overly attached to the outcome, to a person, to a situation. You become obsessive.

Aside from the exercises I told you about in my last article which you can try, there are a few others you can add. These exercises will work on changing the default pattern of your brain from anxiousness to being calm and serene. You will feel resistance doing these exercises because it feels normal to go to that place of worry and overcare.

Remember it’s not the problem that drains you, it’s the significance you have attacted to it. So the idea is to start to siphon off some of that accumulated energy that has been stored.

One way to do that is to breathe love in through your heart and out through your solar plexus for about 30 seconds. Your brain may want to pull you back into worrying as it feels natural. Just keep going.

Something I found really helpful is an exercise called heart soaking. I place the issue that’s bothering me in front of my heart and soak it with love.

Once you’ve tried a few of these techniques, go back to the situation and see if it looks different. Have you been able to bring yourself back to a normal level of caring?