Healing From Within: How Somatic Therapy San Francisco Can Help Professionals Overcome Anxiety
Introduction: The Growing Need for Mental Health Support Among Professionals
It doesn’t matter where you live or what job you do, anxiety and stress are a pervasive part of our work culture. Anxiety can be more intense when working in San Francisco, where the high cost of city living can add extra pressure. People can find that they need to make a really exorbitant salary in order to live what seems like an ordinary life. When all this stress adds up, it makes sense that working professionals need extra mental health support. It may feel like they are spinning their wheels in a career that is not getting anywhere, or burnout is happening before they get ahead. Whatever the work situation that is causing stress and anxiety, somatic therapy can help.
What is Somatic Therapy? Understanding the Mind-Body Connection
Somatic Therapy is any modality that uses the body to help heal the mind. Examples are somatic experiencing, dynamic attachment repatterning, and dance therapy, to name a few.
Somatic therapy helps professionals by addressing the physical symptoms of anxiety when they first occur. Symptoms such as rapid heartbeat, racing thoughts, shallow breathing and muscular tension can all arise with anxiety. Somatic therapy helps clients recognizes and cope with the physical symptoms of anxiety as they happen. Movement such as dance as well as specific sequences of soothing self-touch and breath work may prove useful when learning to cope.
Why Professionals Struggling with Anxiety Need Somatic Therapy San Francisco
Traditional talk therapy may fall short when trying to alleviate anxiety. Many approaches emphasize changing your thoughts in order to change how you feel. However, a key component of switching thought patterns is being calm enough in the first place to learn how to think differently.
With the chronic stress that many professionals experience, our nervous system is reacting as though a predator is continually chasing us. If we imagine our bodies responding to stress as though a tiger were chasing us, it makes sense that we can’t merely change our thoughts and banish anxiety. Our body needs to feel safe and then we can examine the thoughts we are thinking. However, most of us don’t feel safe and calm enough to examine our thoughts in the first place. This is where somatic therapy can help.
Somatic therapists work with engaging the body first—rather than simply approaching anxiety as something our minds can solve. For many of us, we think very quickly and end up ruminating on the same thoughts when anxious. That is our brain attempting to solve anxiety. . .and it rarely works. Anxiety can often come from having trouble feeling our feelings and since feelings occur in the body, using our brain alone is not the solution. Somatic therapy can teach you how to feel your feelings in a way that doesn’t feel intimidating. The therapist can help guide you and serve as a witness as you learn to feel the feelings you have been ignoring or pushing away. The more you allow yourself to feel the more your life will change.
Somatic Therapy San Francisco: Techniques to Alleviate Anxiety for Professionals
The first thing any good somatic therapist will do is assess whether you are listening to your biological needs. Are you getting enough sleep? Are you eating enough? Are you exercising? As simple as these things sound, when we do not have a good self-care routine in place, anxiety can be heightened and difficult to treat. Once a somatic therapist sees that you are doing a good job with your self-care, it is easier to delve more deeply into the causes of anxiety.
The second thing a somatic therapist will do is help you gain an awareness of your body and how you are feeling. Some of us are so cut off from our bodies and our feelings that it is difficult to recognize emotions. Others of us may be able to recognize emotions but not know where they originate from in the body or what to do with these feelings when they appear. Wherever you are at in your journey towards recognizing, expressing, and appreciating your emotions, a somatic therapist can help you to connect more deeply to yourself.
Lastly, both in and out of session, a somatic therapist will provide you tools to process your anxiety and cope with anxiety when it occurs. Techniques such as grounding and self check-ins will often be incorporated into daily life. Best of all, many of the techniques can be applied during the work day to help manage stress in the moment.
Finding the Right Somatic Therapy Practitioner in San Francisco
If you are looking for a somatic therapist, your first step is to research what modalities might be useful to you. Each modality may offer something slightly different and a bit of research can help you understand what is out there to help you heal. Somatic therapy can definitely help you understand parts of yourself that talking alone may not be able to access.
Embrace Healing from Within with Somatic Therapy
Somatic therapy can have a profound effect on your emotions and your life. If you are ready to begin healing and/or having any questions about somatic therapy San Francisco, please email me at lisa@lisamanca.com. I look forward to hearing from you.