There are so many articulate stories, podcasts, and documentaries about anxiety now, so I am going lightly on the overview and focusing on the things that have actually stood out to me: what is happening in your body, how to interrupt it, and how to live with it when it is a regular part of your life.
What anxiety actually is
Everyone has a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is home to the fight-or-flight system. In caveman times, it triggered when you spotted a genuine physical threat: a predator, a fall, an enemy. Your body flooded with adrenaline, your muscles tensed, your heart rate spiked, and you were ready to run or fight. It was lifesaving.
The problem is that the amygdala cannot reliably distinguish between a saber-tooth tiger and an upsetting email. It responds to perceived threat, not actual danger. So the same chain reaction that would have saved your life in the wild gets triggered by a difficult conversation, a looming deadline, or a sudden noise. Your body is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It just has the wrong target.
For people recovering from concussion, this system is often running hotter than usual. The brain after a concussion is in a state of metabolic stress, with disrupted sleep, elevated inflammation, and a nervous system that has less capacity to regulate itself. Anxiety is not a character flaw in concussion recovery. It is frequently a direct neurological consequence of the injury itself.
What happens in your body
When the amygdala fires, the body responds in a predictable sequence: adrenaline releases, breathing quickens and shallows, muscles tense, heart rate rises, and digestion slows. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for rational thought and perspective, goes partly offline. This is why it is so hard to think clearly when you are anxious. It is not weakness. It is literally what the system is designed to do: override thinking with action.
Thoughts are as automatic as breathing. You can let the mind run without direction, or you can learn to interrupt it deliberately. That interruption is a skill, and like any skill it improves with practice.
Interrupting the fight-or-flight response
Before adrenaline kicks in: thought-level tools
If you catch the anxiety early, before the body has fully activated, these approaches can prevent the full cascade:
- Notice without judgment. Just naming the thought, "there is an anxious thought," creates a small gap between you and it. Practice this when you are calm so it becomes available when you need it.
- Thought defusion. Observe the thought from a slight distance. Ask: "Is this thought helping me live right now?" You are not trying to argue with it or suppress it. Just asking whether it is useful.
- Do I need to do something right now? Most anxiety is about something that is not happening in this moment. If there is genuinely nothing to act on, the body does not need to be in fight-or-flight.
Once adrenaline is already running: the dive reflex
If you are past the thought-level window and adrenaline has already started pumping, breathing has changed, muscles are tight, and your heart is racing, you need a physical intervention. One of the most effective is activating the mammalian dive reflex.
Imagine yourself in cold water. What does the body do? It immediately shifts into conservation mode: blood pumps back to the heart and core, heart rate slows, breathing slows. This is a survival response, and you can trigger it deliberately to move your body out of fight-or-flight.
The most direct way to activate it is cold water on the face, specifically across the nose and mouth, where the vagus nerve is closest to the skin. Practical options:
- Hold a bag of frozen peas or an ice pack across your nose and mouth for 20 to 30 seconds while holding your breath
- Keep a face cloth in the freezer, run it under cold water, and place it across your face
- Splash cold water on your face at a sink
- Get in the shower and turn the water cold
This is the T.I.P technique from DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy): Temperature, Intense exercise, Paced breathing. The temperature component is the most immediately powerful for acute anxiety. It is not comfortable, but it works faster than almost anything else.
Living with anxiety day to day
For many people, anxiety is not a crisis that needs emergency intervention. It is a background hum that shapes how every day feels. These are the things that make the most difference over time:
- Daily movement. Even 20 to 30 minutes with your heart rate slightly elevated can measurably reduce anxiety. It does not need to be a gym session. Walking further, taking stairs, moving your body in whatever way is available to you.
- Time in nature and sunlight. Being outside regulates hormones, supports vitamin D, and provides the nervous system with low-demand sensory input. The Whenua articles go deeper on this.
- Nutrition. Processed sugar and high caffeine both amplify and dysregulate the anxiety response. They are quick fixes that cost you later in the day.
- Sleep. Disrupted sleep raises the anxiety baseline. Everything else works better when sleep is better. The sleep hygiene article covers this in detail.
- Medication. For some people, including myself at various stages, anti-anxiety medication is helpful and appropriate. It is not a cure, and it works best alongside other tools rather than instead of them. It is also not something to be ashamed of.
- Therapy. Having someone to process with, who can help you understand your patterns rather than just manage symptoms, is genuinely different from the tools above. The talk therapy article covers what is available.
For a long time I denied I had anxiety. I was someone who got things done, who kept going, who pushed through. Anxiety felt like a word that applied to other people. Until it didn't anymore, and I hit a wall I could not push through.
In many ways concussion enabled a persistent anxiety that I have had to learn to manage. But here is where I have landed: I no longer experience anxiety as something happening to me. When I feel the hum starting, I recognise it for exactly what it is: a warning system. My body telling me to slow down and pay attention. Now when it creeps in, I slow down and dig a little deeper. What is actually going on? What does this feeling need me to notice? That shift, from anxiety as threat to anxiety as information, has changed everything.
The cold face technique I discovered in an anxiety class, and it was the first thing I found that worked when I was already in the middle of a spiral. I remember holding frozen peas to my face in my kitchen thinking this is the strangest thing I have ever done, and then noticing, almost immediately, that something had changed. That experience is part of what eventually got me into the ocean. Once I understood the dive reflex, the cold water made a different kind of sense.
What has helped me most over the long term is understanding the mechanism. When I know why my body is doing what it is doing, I can work with it rather than fighting it or being frightened by it. Anxiety is not a sign that something is wrong with me. It is a system doing its job. Sometimes the job is just not needed.