The loop of resistance
Anxiety is fundamentally a physiological event. It is the sympathetic nervous system mobilizing energy to deal with a perceived threat. The heart beats faster to pump blood to the muscles. The breath becomes shallow and rapid to take in more oxygen. The digestive system shuts down to conserve energy.
When you feel these sensations and your immediate thought is, "Oh no, this is happening again, I have to stop this," you add a secondary layer of stress. You have just identified your own nervous system response as the threat. The brain receives this signal, assumes the danger is escalating, and releases more adrenaline and cortisol. You enter a loop where the anxiety feeds itself.
Ahimsa: The practice of non-violence
In April 2026, I wrote in the Be Aligned newsletter about Ahimsa — the first yama in the eight limbs of yoga. Ahimsa is usually translated as non-violence or non-harming. We often think of this in relation to how we treat others, but it must begin with how we treat ourselves.
When you are anxious, the practice of Ahimsa means refusing to be violent toward your own experience. It means noticing the racing heart and the tight chest without immediately trying to force them into submission. It is the profound shift from "I need to fix this" to "I am noticing this."
"If you look after the root of the tree, the fragrance and flowering will come by itself. If you look after the body, the fragrance of the mind and spirit will come of itself." — B.K.S. Iyengar, Yoga: The Iyengar Way
How to interrupt the loop
You cannot think your way out of an anxious body. The mind is what triggered the override in the first place. To interrupt the loop, you have to speak the language of the nervous system: sensation, breath, and alignment.
In therapeutic Iyengar yoga, we don't start by telling an anxious person to "just relax." Instead, we might start with standing poses to ground the energy and give the mobilized sympathetic nervous system somewhere to go. We focus on precise alignment to physically open the chest, creating space for the diaphragm to move. When the body is placed in a shape that mechanically allows for deep, steady breathing, the nervous system receives the signal that the emergency has passed.
The goal is not to eliminate anxiety forever. The goal is to change your relationship to it, so that when it arises, it doesn't have to escalate.