Deep breathing isn’t helping your anxiety

For many, anxiety is a recurring theme, showing up every day like an overstayed house guest. You try everything to avoid the Groundhog’s Day recurrence, only it doesn’t stop. For many, the anxiety shows up unwelcomed and unforeseen through a pain in your chest, tightness, migraines, fast heartbeat, or antsy behaviors like fidgeting, pacing, angry outbursts, sleeplessness… or all of the above. Anxiety can show up:

• First thing in the morning
• On the drive to work
• When logging off work
• Going to bed

It can impact your relationships, your productivity, and keep you in a heightened state of discomfort.

A common way many people cope is to try to calm themselves. They try everything:

• Change their diet
• Change their sleep patterns
• exercise more
• track their sleep
• track their steps
• track their heart rate
• take deep breaths, or 
• distract themselves. 

It’s incredibly frustrating when your efforts only keep the anxiety at bay for a moment before it reemerges, like a firefighter who puts out a fire, only for the house to burst into flames the moment you roll up the hose.

Deep breathing isn’t helping.

Deep breathing doesn’t stop your anxiety from resurfacing

There’s a reason your anxiety keeps reemerging. The more you tamp down your anxiety, the worse it will become. It will get louder and louder. The emotional energy pushing your heart rate up, messing up your sleep, causing you to pace is much stronger and more resilient than any breathwork you can do. For many, the anxiety peaks into a panic attack, IBS issues, back pain, addiction, or relationship problems. 

“Why is this? Why doesn’t the deep breathing or sleep tracking work?” People often ask. “I must not be diligent enough. I’ll double down on my tracking and be more strict about meditation.” 

I see this cycle all the time in my practice. Clients treat their anxiety like a tumor they must remove, or an invasive ivy they must uproot before it takes over. It’s an aggressive metaphor in which we battle against anxiety to try to achieve peace.

Using a battle metaphor profoundly shapes the way we see the problem. In this metaphor, anxiety acts as a villain we need to defeat.

There’s a historical reason some people use a battle metaphor to understand their anxiety.

Early experiences impact your perspective on anxiety

This isn’t your first time handling anxiety, not by a long shot. 

Your first time handling anxiety was when you were a baby. You’d cry, you’d get scared, and you learned a certain way to manage yourself in tandem with your caregivers. For some, they learned an aggressive way to handle anxiety – called avoidant attachment.

These children learned that when in distress, it was their crying that was the main problem to be fixed. “Stop crying or else something bad will happen” was the message reverberating in their minds. Instead of focusing on solving the larger reason for their tears, their parents focused on turning off the tears. 

This strategy teaches a child that their cries aren’t actually useful for solving a problem. They learn to see their cries as unhelpful and disgusting to others, not as signals that something is needing attention.

• The kid with a splinter who cries out and is dismissed may end up with an infected toe.
• The boy who bites their lip to keep from crying when they’ve been rejected at school may fail to elicit their parent’s support to make new friends.
• The young adult who learns to silence their own cries after being unfairly treated by a partner will lock themselves into a hellish relationship.
• The adult who silences their anxiety may be completely unaware of the ways their life is needing care and mending. 

Instead of deep breathing, reframe your perspective on anxiety

Anxiety is not the villain. It’s actually the signal that will point you toward healing.

I’m aware how that sounds: woo-woo, therapy speak, lofty. But consider it with me for a minute. The reason tamping down a fire alarm doesn’t work is because when there’s smoke, the fire alarm will sound – it’s doing its job to point you toward the fire. 

Anxiety is a signal. It’s fear. It’s telling you you’re feeling unsafe where you are. If we even make this small shift, what starts to come into focus? Why might you feel unsafe? What might feel threatened or fragile or lost in your life?

Take a moment to think on these questions.

Sometimes the answer is immediately apparent: a current relationship, or work stress, or direct worries about finances or job stability. Other times the worry is less apparent: There’s a sense of instability, but you can’t pin it on your current situation. Our minds are incredibly intuitive. Most of the time, our fear response precedes our rational mind. Anniversaries of difficult moments, reaching the age our parents were when a major crisis hit, our own kids reminding us of past trauma, our friends’ situations reminding us of our own pain that needs attention. 

Instead of deep breathing, cultivate curiosity about where your anxiety is leading you

Curiosity is the right stance. You want to be in an open, curious stance toward your anxiety, as this will lead you toward security and healing. 

In fact, you want more than to constantly combat and suppress your anxiety. You want more than constant vigilance about your anxiety. Not only does it not work – it’s overwhelming and frustrating. What you really want is security. Here’s what that looks like:

Secure People Identify Their Pain

Secure people are adept at recognizing when something isn’t right. They don’t see pain as an enemy but as information. They notice the signs of anxiety not as failures but as prompts to dive deeper into what might be causing distress.

Secure People Soothe Themselves

Instead of suppressing their feelings, secure individuals learn self-soothing techniques. This process is something natural to our nervous system. Secure people develop a calming internal presence that reassures them of their value and their safety.

Secure People Ask for Help

Understanding that no one can manage everything alone, secure people reach out for support when needed. This could mean talking to friends, consulting with therapists, or joining support groups where they can share and learn from others’ experiences. On a more immediate level, they express what they feel and get support then needed.

Secure People Create a Plan

Once they understand their anxiety, secure individuals take proactive steps. They don’t just name their feelings and move on. Instead, they listen to their anxiety as feedback about things that might need to change, they set expectations in relationships and work, they plan breaks and self-care activities, and they confront conflicts directly to get resolution. All in all, they listen to their feelings to help them  discern a plan for enhancing overall life satisfaction.

Secure People Help Others

Finally, secure people often extend their understanding and skills to help others. By sharing what they’ve learned, they contribute to a community of support, teaching others how to navigate their own anxieties. This not only helps others but reinforces their own sense of security and belonging.

Anxiety will lead you toward health

Instead of treating anxiety like it’s some intruder to be expelled, and suppressing it with deep breathing, let’s consider it more like that annoying alarm clock that never seems to let you snooze. It’s irritating, yes, but it’s also trying to wake you up to something important. It’s time we stop fighting the signal and start listening to what it’s got to say. 

So, when anxiety next comes knocking, don’t immediately reach for the bolt. Maybe sit with it for a bit, hear it out. You might just discover that what you thought was an enemy is actually your mind’s way of telling you where you need to look next for healing.