“I’m tired of feeling like this.” The knot in your chest, the pit in your stomach, the relentless headache, the sweaty palms, and racing thoughts. Some of my clients come to me with panic attacks or asking, “why is my body nervous when everything is fine? Why do I overreact some much? Why can’t I control my emotions?”
What if you do not understand where your anxiety is coming from
If you have ever said, “I do not know why I feel like this,” you are not alone.
A lot of the people I work with are highly capable, intelligent, and used to thinking their way through life. They can explain their choices. They can track patterns. They can tell you what happened and why it happened.
And yet their bodies are on edge.
They wake up with a tight chest. They feel a clench in their throat. They have a sudden flush of panic in a perfectly normal moment. They feel irritable for “no reason.” They cry and then feel embarrassed. They snap and think, what is wrong with me.
The mind goes looking for a clean explanation.
But anxiety does not always arrive through the front door of logic.
Sometimes anxiety is your body trying to get your attention again.
What if you are not overreacting, what if you have been not listening
One of the most common things I hear is, “I overreacted.”
People say it with shame. Like the emotion itself was the problem. Like the emotion was evidence that they are irrational, immature, dramatic, too sensitive, too much.
But your emotions are going to be whatever they are going to be. They do not care what you think is right or wrong. If you have a feeling, that is how you feel.
When you tell yourself you overreacted, it often comes from the inner critic. The part of you that wants to keep things in the shadow. The part that says, do not have it out there in polite society.
That does not mean the emotion was wrong.
In my experience, big emotions are often a sign of imbalance. Not because you are broken. Because something in you has been shoved down, shoved down, shoved down, until you have shoved so many things in the closet that the door jamb breaks and it all piles out into an avalanche.
When you cut yourself off from emotions, you wind up having eruptions as an internal balancer.
Why your anxiety feels confusing if you are an over-thinker
I am an intuitive thinking type, which means I want to think everything out. The other side of that coin is that growing up, I did not have a very good relationship with my emotions.
I was raised by mathematicians. My mom’s hero was Spock. If you were having an emotion, you should go to your room until you are not. Figure it out. Get yourself together. And when you can be rational, you can come back.There was no emotional processing.
So the feelings did not go away. They just went underground.
That is one of the reasons anxiety can feel like it comes out of nowhere. The body carries what the mind tries to outrun. The body carries what never got processed.
And in our culture, emotions are generally looked down upon. They are considered feminine and irrational. Unless you are happy or passionate or angry, those are acceptable. The rest of them are not really okay.
So for a lot of people, the solution becomes control. Clamp down. Be reasonable. Be “fine.”
But the more you try to control what you feel, the louder it gets.
Because the emotion is not asking to be managed. It is asking to be listened to.
Anxiety can be a signal, not a malfunction
I believe that anxiety is your body trying to get your attention again.
When we have a good relationship with our anxiety, we can see why it is popping up and what it is trying to help us with. But if we have been completely severed from our body or from our emotions for too long, then anxiety starts acting out and being over reactive because we have ignored it for so long.
A lot of times, as people start to get more embodied and grounded, they begin to realize, I am not overreacting. I have been not listening to my body, to that small voice of my inner compass that was silenced a long time ago. This is why I work with women with childhood trauma.
How can I listen to this next time. What can this really tell me.
Sometimes it takes a while because the value systems of the different modes have been cut off from each other. They do not understand each other’s language anymore. So it takes time to understand what it means rather than what it is saying.
That is true internally too. My inner monologue sometimes says some really awful things. And what it usually means is, I am tired. But it does not say I am tired. It says some real rotten stuff. So part of the work is learning how to translate. This is really common for perfectionists and people pleasers who have learned that life is emotionally safer when those in power are happy.
Not just taking the mind’s words at face value, but asking what is actually underneath.
Nightmares are a good example of the unconscious using force
Nightmares are a really good example of this.
You have a nightmare and you are flooded with emotion. Your heart might be racing. Maybe you are sweating. There is adrenaline. So much so that it wakes you up.
That amount of affect is psychic energy.
It is saying the unconscious is allowing all of this psychic energy for you, enough that it wakes you up to the situation. That you are no longer unconscious to what it is trying to get you to address and connect with.
Even though nightmares can be unsettling, they are also trying to reconnect you to your body, reconnect you to parts of yourself that you have suppressed, and give you a way to access it in that moment with all that extra energy.
If you have something on your mind that you are wrestling with in the middle of the night, there is a reason you are awake. You might as well use that time. There is a reason I am awake. There is psychic work to do.
It is aligning with the unconscious rather than aligning with a linear, blocked out, rigid schedule.
Why dissociation and overstimulation make emotions harder to access
It is very difficult to be connected with your emotions if you are dissociated, zoned out, doom scrolling, overstimulated, or too dead tired.
There is a fog or a wall that happens from burnout and trauma, or lets face it, the demands of life.
That channel does not speak to itself. In other words, you cannot ask your body what it feels if you are not in your body.
So part of the work is not cognitive analysis.
It is contact with your soul, with your body, with your dreams.
If you’re interested in exploring these concepts more, I recommend the Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel Van der Kolk, Trauma and the Soul by Donald Kalsched, and Marion Woodman’s work about the body.
How to listen when you do not know what you feel
If you ask people, “How do you feel,” they often go blank.
Or they answer with thoughts.
Or they answer with what they think they should feel.
So I give people something very simple: 
- Draw a little circle.
- Ask, how do I feel right now.
- Add some color.
- Then see if you notice any sensation that is a response to that.
The art becomes a mirror and a conversation.
You might notice you just clenched your throat.
You might notice your stomach dropped.
You might feel a rush of irritation, and then you can ask, what do you want now. What would make it better.
This is not meant to be rational.
It is a creative conversation you start to have inside yourself.
When I try to verbalize it, it sounds strange. But when it is happening in the therapy room, it makes sense.
It is a different type of language that does not translate perfectly.
A morning practice for anxiety that feels like it comes out of nowhere
Jung started doing something like this when he was in his mid thirties. He was extremely depressed. He had broken with Freud.
Every morning in his notebook, he drew a circle and made a design in it to see what was coming up for him right now.
At the end of the day, he looked at it and said, what does this tell me about my day and what my internal weather was.
Circles represent wholeness.
Jung noticed that people in the psychiatric hospital started to draw circles when they started feeling better. There is something about drawing circles that has a convalescing ordering process.
A circle also helps because the page is no longer blank. You have containment. You have a boundary. You are not staring into a void.
I prefer materials that blend, like watercolor or oil pastel, because it stays fluid.
In general, I do not give people pencils in my art therapy practice because you can erase and get really defined about details. It has associations with school and perfectionism. I do not want people in perfection drafting mode.
Erasers are overrated with this kind of work.
Nobody has to look at it again. You are not trying to make something impressive. You are trying to listen.
A lot of times the inner critic does not know what it is talking about. It is there to criticize and it will criticize no matter what.
So you also find a way to talk to that voice.
If you want to control your emotions, start with respect instead
People often ask, how can I control my emotions.
But controlling is not the same as relating.
Your emotions are not problems to be solved. They are messages to be received.
The question is not, how do I stop feeling this.
The question is, what is this trying to change in my life.
I would say some of the biggest, hardest decisions I have ever made came from seasons where I felt extremely emotional and like I was losing it.
And then the emotion said, you have to change something. It is that serious.
The status quo does not work right now. It is too far out of balance.
That is what anxiety can be.
Not a malfunction.
A signal.
Closing
If your body is nervous when everything seems okay, consider that something in you does not agree that everything is okay.
Consider that you might not be overreacting.
You might be waking up.
You might be getting a message that you have been too busy, too rational, too responsible, too polite to hear.
Start small.
A circle.
Ten minutes.
One honest question.
How do I feel right now.
And then at the end of the day, look again and ask, what does this say about my internal weather.
Not what did I intend.
What do I actually see.
What is the mood.
What am I curious about.
What bothers me.
This is not about being dramatic.
This is about becoming whole.
Reach Out
If you want support making sense of anxiety that feels confusing, learning how to listen to your body, and working with dreams and emotions without being ruled by them, I am available for individual sessions. Reach out through my website to inquire about art therapy and dream analysis. Breathe deeply, and art your feelings out.