Anxiety & Depression
Jennifer Scott, RCC, RSW, BC-DMT
Anxiety and Depression often affect the whole person: mind, emotions, and body! With recent research discoveries regarding the Triune Brain, we now know so much more about how arousal in the nervous system can create symptoms and how to treat them. Anxiety and panic tend to indicate a high arousal in your nervous system with resulting tension or unpleasant body sensations along with fears, worries, and other emotions. Depression can be a result of low arousal in your nervous system and often manifests as lack of motivation, fatigue, or apathy along with sadness, hopelessness, anger, fears, or other emotions.
So what influences the arousal in your nervous system? Any emotional, psychological, or physical stress can influence the arousal system. The ebb and flow of arousal is a natural bodily process, but overwhelming life events or unrelenting stress or trauma, relationship problems, losses, attachment issues and so on can overwhelm your nervous system and negatively influence the arousal system in your brain and body.
These new findings about the arousal system and how the body and mind respond to stress and traumatic events in our lives has led to new mind-body innovations in treatment. With this mind-body approach tracking your body sensations and impulses for movement are just as important as working with your thoughts, cognitions, and emotions. For more information on this topic please see the articles in this website on Sensorimotor Psychotherapy.
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