Energy Work, Anxiety & Overwhelm

There was a long stretch of my life where I thought the goal was to get rid of anxiety. To become someone who didn’t spiral, didn’t dissociate, didn’t feel like the world was sometimes too loud or too close. I believed healing meant becoming someone solid, steady, unaffected. Someone who had outgrown overwhelm entirely.

But the longer I’ve been on this path, the more I realise that healing is not about removing the intensity of life — it’s about developing the capacity to stay with yourself inside it.

Energy work didn’t erase my anxious tendencies. It didn’t magically take away the moments where my chest feels tight or my breath shortens or my thoughts start speeding ahead of my ability to reason with them. What it did was help me learn to recognise those shifts sooner, to notice the subtle signals of dysregulation before the wave crests and crashes.

It’s like this: my system used to go from 0 to 100 without warning. One second I was “fine.” The next, I was overwhelmed.

Now I can feel the shift at 2.

At 5.

At 7.Which means I have the choice to respond while I am still in my body.

Energy work helped me develop a relationship with my internal landscape — not as something to manage or suppress, but as something to listen to. The body always speaks before the mind interprets. The breath changes. The shoulders tense. The belly contracts. The thoughts start looping. The energy shifts.

Learning to feel those moments has been the biggest gift.

So when anxiety comes, I no longer treat it as an enemy.

When depression pulls at the edges of my day, I don’t assume I’m failing.

When overwhelm rises, I don’t immediately collapse into it.

I ask:

What needs care right now?

What have I been holding alone?

Where have I abandoned myself?

This is what energy work gave me — not a cure, not an escape, but a way back to myself.

Healing was never meant to make us invincible.It was meant to make us present.

And presence is what allows us to soften, even inside the storm.