5 Somatic Exercises for Anxiety: Alleviate Stress and Tension
Anxiety is a common mental health condition that affects millions of Americans every year. According to the Anxiety & Depression Association of America, over 19% of adults are impacted by an anxiety disorder every year. Anxiety can arise in many different ways. You may experience a racing heart, shortness of breath, rapid thinking, and/or difficulty concentrating.
The good news is that there are many different models of treatment to help work with anxiety. One of these modalities is somatic therapy, which incorporates an exploration of the emotional experience in the body in order to more deeply understand it. With somatic therapy, individuals look at not just the thought patterns of anxiety, but the physiological response and experience.
Before jumping in to the post where I explain what somatic exercises are and offer a few different practices, I want to encourage you to seek professional help when needed. Please contact a mental health professional if you are experiencing severe anxiety.
Understanding the Experience of Anxiety
We often think of anxiety as an experience in the brain or mind. However, if we look closely at the experience of anxiety, we can see part of anxiety rests in the body. Just look at a few of the side effects of anxiety: headaches, stomach pain, and sweating. The brain is part of the central nervous system, and when it is activated it certainly has impacts on the rest of the body.
It may be a strong generalization, but in American culture we have grown to put a lot of emphasis on thinking and the brain. Although the brain is interesting and powerful, we sometimes forget to check in with our bodies. When we do tune in to what our bodies are telling us, we can see that anxiety is actually a both mental and physical experience. Sometimes it may be a subtle tightening of the shoulders, while other times you may find yourself with uncomfortable levels of upset stomach or headaches.
What are Somatic Exercises and How do They Help Anxiety?
Somatic exercises come from somatic therapy, a therapeutic modality originally intended to help treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Although it is mainly used with individuals with a history of trauma, research has shown it to be beneficial to both traumatized and non-traumatized individuals (see this study from the European Journal of Psychotraumatology in 2021). Somatic therapy is not strictly body-based; it may include talk therapy or incorporate practices from other modalities as well.
Somatic exercises are practices used in somatic therapy, or somatic experiencing, to help an individual strengthen their connection with the body. This increased awareness of the mind-body connection gives the ability to work not just with the mind, but also with the body. Somatic exercises for anxiety are methods to bring awareness to the body and connect the sensations with your emotional experience.
When an emotion or psychological experience like anxiety is present, it may become “stuck”. In somatic experiencing, stuck refers to the way in which your nervous system holds on to emotions and stays in survival mode. Utilizing somatic exercises, you can work to free some of these emotions and re-engage the rational brain. The somatic exercises for anxiety can be used in moments of anxiety to explore and release some of the distress, or in moments of calm to help encourage and feed the calmness.
Somatic Exercises for Anxiety
There are many different somatic practices you might find for various difficulties you are facing. A great thing about somatic exercises, as with many other forms of therapy, is the individual has options to choose from to find what works for themselves. Here I am going to offer five somatic exercises that I have found useful in my clinical practice in working with individuals with anxiety.
5-4-3-2-1 Grounding
There are many different grounding exercises you may try for anxiety, but this is one of my favorites. It’s fairly simple, and you can do this practice in your head or out loud. I encourage you to investigate for yourself which is more useful!
Name 5 things you can see
Name 4 things you can touch/feel
Name 3 things you can hear
Name 2 things you can smell
Name 1 thing you can taste
You may go through the 5-4-3-2-1 practice one time, or do it a few times with new things if you wish.
How Grounding Exercises Work for Anxiety
So how does this exercise work? It brings us back to the present moment! By tuning into our different senses, we are pulled right back to where we are. We disengage the thinking mind, and tune into the experience elsewhere in the body, specifically in the eyes, skin, ears, nose, and tongue in this exercise. The goal is to arrive back in the present-time experience in the body, and this is simply a tool to help us re-center ourselves into the here and now.
Self-Massage
Self-massage is exactly as it sounds: the technique of massaging your own body. It may sound a bit silly at first, but it can be incredibly useful in working with anxiety. Individuals often find a place they prefer to massage, but for the first time you probably want to investigate how it feels to massage different parts of the body. I recommend exploring the places you often hold anxiety in your body, including the neck, shoulders, and head. You also might try the hands or feet, or your lower back
How Self-Massage Helps Anxiety
By now you may have guessed that self-massage helps anxiety by encouraging us to come into our physical experience. By massaging the body, we are giving ourselves something in the body on which to focus. Furthermore, massage in general can be greatly beneficial in individuals with anxiety (see this research from Sherman et. al. in 2011). As we massage our bodies, we encourage relaxation and might release the emotions a bit.
Body Scan Meditation
Body scanning is a form of meditation in which you move through the body bit by bit. As you pay attention to each part of the body, you simply tune in to the experience as fully as possible. Here are some instructions to do a body scan meditation, with a guided body scan exercise below:
Find a comfortable position. It may be lying down or sitting.
You can close your eyes or leave them open, whatever works for you.
Start with your toes, simply bringing your attention the physical sensation in your toes. Can you feel your toes in any way?
Move up through the body slowly, through the feet and into the legs, into the hips and torso, chest, shoulders, neck, and head.
Once you reach the crown of your head, take a moment to feel your whole body sitting or lying there. There’s nothing special to do; just pay attention to what it feels like to have a body in this present moment.
How Body Scans Help
The body scan exercise is just another way to arrive into our bodies with awareness. As you move through your body in this manner, you may notice where you are holding the anxiety. It’s a somatic exercise that offers some structure in order to explore the body from head to toe and connect a bit more with the physical experience you’re having.
Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Progressive muscle relaxation is a somatic exercise for anxiety that builds off the body scan. Rather than moving through the body observing each part, you are going to move through the body and intentionally relax each part. You can do so by simply relaxing the muscles, or you may find it helpful to tense the muscle slightly for a moment and releasing. Moving from toe to head in this exercise like the previous, progressive muscle relaxation is a bit more of an actively deactiving exercise rather than a simple connecting exercise.
Why Progressive Muscle Relaxation Helps
As you know, anxiety manifests in the body as well as the mind. By moving through the body in this way, we are being proactive about the tension building from anxiety. Rather than allowing our bodies to activate and grow more tense, we work to actually deactivate and calm the body. This way our anxiety in the mind isn’t fed by tension in the body, and the snowballing effect of anxiety is cut short.
Walking Meditation
Finally, we have walking meditation. When you think of meditation, you may think of someone sitting still on a meditation cushion. Walking meditation is actually a very common form of meditation in many traditions, and an integral part of the mindfulness path. Unlike sitting meditation, we are moving the body and bringing awareness to the active body rather than the resting body.
To do walking meditation, here are the steps (see what I did there?):
Find a place where you can walk back and forth. It may be 10-15 steps, or it may be 50 steps. Investigate what works for you. Ideally this is a place free from others, and where you can perhaps walk barefoot if desired.
Being by simply walking along the path very slowly. Feel your feet lifting up off the ground and placing down in front of you.
When you reach the end of your path, slowly turn around. Again walk to the end of your path. Tune into the experience of walking. Can you feel your feet moving? What about your legs? Your torso? Notice the way the weight shifts as you lift and place each foot.
For more instructions, you can visit UC Berkeley’s Greater Good in Action.
The Benefits of Walking Meditation
As with the other somatic exercises for anxiety, walking meditation brings us back into the body. One thing I personally like about walking meditation is that it is active. As we stand up and walk, we actually release some of the energy in the nervous system. For some people or situations, walking meditation may be a useful and active way to work with anxiety. You can also practice walking meditation almost anywhere. You can do it walking to the bus stop, walking from your car to the grocery store, or walking to the kitchen to get some food!
Making a Habit of Somatic Exercises
Although all of these exercises are useful in moments of anxiety, you also may benefit from incorporating them into your daily routine. Rather than waiting for anxiety to arise in the mind and body, you can start your day (or end your day) with a little work on the mind-body connection. Maybe before bed you lie down and do a 5 minute body scan. Or take a 5 minute mindful walk before starting your day. It doesn’t have to be much. By making these somatic exercises a regular habit, you can build awareness of the sensations in the body and begin to understand anxiety on a new level.
