Perhaps you’ve looked at the physical reasons for anxiety, and maybe your anxiety stems from a trauma or disorder. But what about another perspective to help you identify what’s going on? Maybe you resonate more with some of the spiritual reasons for anxiety. If so, here’s four spiritual reasons for your anxiety and how this can be a welcome spiritual alert.

First I want to remind you that you aren’t alone. According to statistics gathered by MHFA England from the Health and Safety Executive data, 792 million people are affected by mental health issues worldwide. In the UK in 2018/19 there were 602,000 cases of work-related stress, depression or anxiety, responsible for 44% of all cases of work-related ill health and 54% of all working days lost due to health issues.

What’s interesting to see from this data is that stress, anxiety and depression are continuing to rise even though there are a wide range of mainstream and holistic therapies available. Add to the mix the Covid experience and significant numbers of people just aren’t getting the support they need.

We are highly likely to be moving from any preventative work to crisis support in our mental health services which puts a huge strain on finite mainstream resources (by mainstream I mean referrals from the GP to NHS anxiety counsellors, and therapists/counsellors/ mental health social workers/mental health allied practitioners and voluntary mental health organisations).

Anxiety at a personal level can be debilitating and perceived as having a hugely negative impact upon having a good quality of life. Yet is doesn’t have to be. It can be the breakthrough- the crisis- we need in order to break free from our current way of being into something uniquely beautiful and where we can flourish.

Anxiety is often only acknowledged when its manifested as physical symptoms such as sleep disruption, comfort – or -not eating, acid reflux, back and neck pain. From a spiritual perspective this discomfort is your early warning system that something is not right within. The more acute the discomfort, the more likely you are suppressing, denying or resisting your inner truths. In many respects we have lost the art of really listening and honing into what our body- and intuition- is trying to tell us.

Instead of taking a break and asking your body (yes I did say ‘ask’ your body!) what is going on for you, you’re doing the perfect Western approach which is to aim to ‘power through’, take a pill, or ignore it in the hope it will go away. For a while any of these approaches might just work. But in my experience of 30 years in mainstream mental health and social work education and practice and 10 years of holistic practice, I know it’s going to bounce back and bite you on the bum.

Essentially you’re denying that energy, yet it’s still in motion. Your e-motions can only be suppressed, ignored or denied for so long.

Four Spiritual Reasons for Anxiety

A Cultural need for immediacy: Our society in the Western hemisphere has very much been about getting people up and moving as quickly as possible through the use of medications (headache? take a pill, acid reflux? take some liquid stomach liner). The speed at which we give out medicines means that we fail to really listen to our bodies, to our inner self, and find out what we truly need.

Our conditioning is that when in angst, get out of it as soon as possible. All that does, in my experience, is delay pain for a while. That temporary relief is just that- temporary. On top of that you’re then dealing with iatrogenic effects of those meds and you still haven’t got to the root of the problem.

A significant lack of connection: People with anxiety, stress and depression tell us that most of the time they are seeking to avoid other people. They want to isolate. It’s too tiring to keep going, to keep up the facade. When you’re isolated you’re really stuck with the thoughts in your head and you naturally seek solitude and the simplest of tasks to allow your body to process the emotions.

Some of this processing is unconscious, but the more awareness you bring to it, the more your body can communicate with you and release the discomfort. Sometimes our physical body needs to catch up with the mental and emotional turmoil that’s been going on inside for quite some time.

A really helpful way of re-connecting is to play a game of ‘truths’- when you acknowledge your own truths, you find you can navigate through the emotions and get to your root/truth. If you’ve not experienced this before then this is something I help with as there are some lovely strategies and techniques to help you face your truth so that you work with your truth, not against it.

Ungrounded and information overload: Apparently us humans now have less than the attention span of a goldfish! Embedding the art of the social media scroll-through has meant that we barely can attend to more than a few seconds before we’re off onto the next thing. This, in spiritual terms, is about being ungrounded and lacking your anchor. So you fly off in all different directions, picking up all sorts of information but never really absorbing it slowly and digesting it well. It leaves you ‘heady’, ‘flighty’, and lacking in solidity.

Grounding (anchoring yourself to the ground) is a way of helping you really slow things down, make things more solid, and take things one step at a time. It stops the overthinking from multitasking. You’ll also know another grounding technique such as mindfulness really brings you into the present moment rather than spinning off into the future.

Lack of an energy body map: So this may sound a bit more on the woo-woo scale than perhaps you’re used to. An energy body map is a tool that can really get you present with the energy in your body and determine where in your body the anxiety is residing. This in turn gives you clear messages as to where the anxiety is located, how it’s manifesting to you and what your body is trying to release. This could be past trauma, unresolved anger, grief, old programme patterning coming from parental or ancestral figures, or old paradigms and beliefs from society.

Based upon these four spiritual reasons for anxiety, there are a number of energy healing modalities that can be used to understand anxiety better. EFT, colour therapy, sound therapy & gong baths, hypnotherapy, past life regression- these former ‘fringe-type’ energy modalities are now experiencing a shift towards mainstream as science -and people- have begun to report value and efficacy, though there’s still much controversy around their use, especially from mainstream health and wellbeing providers. Y

et given the deep collective trauma that we have experienced in 2020 & still ongoing, I believe we need all the help we can get to love life and thrive irrespective of the circumstances around us.

Let me know your thoughts about these four spiritual reasons for anxiety. Do you feel that anxiety should only be defined within the confines of health and absence of disease, or are you someone who uses a broader definition? Let me know in the comments.

Would you like to explore how I can help you with your anxiety messages? Maybe you came to my webinar and you’d like to know more. Or perhaps you’d like to go deeper into the four controversial spiritual reasons for anxiety and maybe offer others your insights? Please drop a comment below and contact details and I’ll be in touch.