The Anxiety Beneath the Anxiety - Paperback

by Lisa Reidsema (Author)

The alarm keeps going off even when there is nothing in the room. You know, intellectually, that you are safe, and yet the body does not get the message. The scanning continues, the bracing continues, and the exhaustion of being on alert in a life that looks, from the outside, like it should feel fine continues alongside it.

This workbook is about the anxiety underneath the anxiety. It is not about the surface presentation or the symptoms that are easiest to name. It is about the nervous system that learned, under very specific conditions, that safety could not be assumed, and that has been operating from that learning ever since. Understanding where that learning came from is the beginning of being able to do something about it.

The Anxiety Beneath the Anxiety traces the origins of hypervigilance and chronic activation, maps what that state has cost in the body, in relationships, and in the capacity to rest, and builds the practice of teaching the nervous system something different. Not by overriding what it learned but by understanding why it learned it and creating the conditions in which something new becomes possible.

The alarm was installed for a reason. This workbook is about understanding that reason and learning, gradually and at your own pace, to recalibrate.