Alison Zeidler empowers chronically stressed. anxious and overwhelmed women live fulfilling lives with passion, power, and confidence. Women cannot be at their best if they are trapped in frustration, anger, despair, trauma, sadness, or apathy. She is an author, speaker, mentor, and healer, making it her mission to help her clients rediscover their zest for life.
Worry and anxiety are normal human emotions, but when they start to dominate our thoughts and become chronic, they can become overwhelming. These emotions impact every aspect of our health. While it might be easy to tell ourselves not to worry, that’s usually ineffective.
Nor does it help to suppress these emotions. Doing so leads to more anxiety and worry, along with deeper mental health concerns, physical illnesses, isolation, and losing our connection to others and our own hearts. While suppressing these “negative” emotions can lead to temporary relief, it is not a suitable coping mechanism.
On a physical level, constantly ignoring and pushing down these feelings can cause inflammation in the body, chronic pain, tight muscles, exhaustion, digestive issues, a lowered immune response, heart disease, disrupted sleep cycles, and poor coordination. Emotional and mental health concerns include feeling numb, isolating oneself, depression, panic attacks, or constantly feeling sad, frustrated, or angry. People may experience higher incidences of general anxiety disorder, PTSD, panic disorder, or phobias.
Emotions are neither good nor bad, they provide us with information. Sometimes we are completely justified in our anger, sadness, or frustration. The issue arises when we remain stuck in feelings that drain our energy such as anger, worry, fear, frustration, and depression.
While traditional therapies have their place in teaching us to manage these emotions, including medication and counseling, holistic therapies also have their place in teaching us to access emotions that increase our energy such as gratitude, love, and compassion.
Holistic modalities empower us to take more control of our well-being. And I’m all about at-home tools we can use in the moment! I don’t know anyone who can afford to see their counselor every day or see a massage therapist every few days. I teach my clients tools they can use at home to help relieve chronic worry and anxiety.
Practical, holistic tools to manage worry and anxiety
There are many holistic approaches to reducing, managing, and relieving the effects of chronic worry, anxiety, and overwhelm. Some more common tools include mindful breathing, meditation, physical exercise, and energy healing sessions to help you maintain emotional balance, but here are a few others.
The importance of identifying your emotions
When we are stuck in draining emotions, being able to identify the specific emotion we are feeling is an incredibly powerful tool. For example, my ‘go-to’ emotion was always anger. That was the only emotion I could feel. I didn’t realize there were emotions underneath that anger. Sometimes I felt insignificant, or disrespected, or pressured, or disappointed. By identifying the specific emotion I was feeling, I could work through why I was feeling it, and what steps I could take to address the situation and release them. There are many feeling or emotion wheels you can find on the internet.
HeartMath®
HeartMath® offers tools to increase our heart coherence, which occurs when our emotions, breathing, heart rhythms, brain rhythms, and hormonal responses, are in sync with each other. While this may sound very complicated, HeartMath® teaches us an easy way to move from feeling overwhelmed, anxious, frustrated, or worried to calm and more peaceful. Did you know that our emotions affect our bodies more than our thoughts do? Here’s the basics of the Quick Coherence® Technique:
keeping your eyes open or closed, focus your attention on your heart or chest area
imagine your breath flowing in and out of your heart or chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual (try a 5-second inhalation and a 5-second exhalation)
find an easy rhythm that’s comfortable
as you continue this breathing pattern, make a sincere attempt to experience or re-experience an uplifting feeling such as appreciation, compassion, gratitude, love (for a person or pet), a place in nature that filled you with awe or peace, a fun experience you had in the past
continue breathing and re-experiencing that emotion for 30 seconds to 3 minutes
The Quick Coherence® Technique can be done when you first wake up in the morning, in the car while stopped at a light (keep your eyes open!), before a difficult conversation, or when you are worrying about something you can’t do anything about. What this simple exercise does is reduce the impact of anxiety and stress on your body and help to counteract any emotional reaction in the moment. You can find some free resources here.
Emotional Freedom Technique® (EFT)
EFT is a form of energy healing, also called tapping, that combines principles from traditional Chinese medicine with modern psychology. By tapping on specific points on the body, EFT helps reduce the intensity of anxious feelings, calms the nervous system, and allows the mind to focus. Meridians are energy channels in the body used by acupuncturists for thousands of years, and each meridian corresponds to organs, emotions, muscles, and more. EFT allows the body to release trapped emotions and stuck energy, stopping the cycle of stress, worry, and anxiety.
To begin, rate the intensity of an emotion you are experiencing when you think of an event in your life, from 1 to 10 or 1 to 100. While the entire sequence is a bit more than can be covered here, a quick, short version of EFT is to tap with two fingers on specific points on your head, face, and torso, while verbally or silently acknowledging and accepting the emotion you are feeling. An example could be “Even though I’m feeling very anxious right now, I love and accept myself”.
A quick tapping sequence is the:
top of the head
the inside of both eyebrows
outside of both eyes
under the eyes on the cheekbone
under the nose
below the lower lip in the crease
just below the collarbone between the first and second rib on both sides of the body
both sides of the body about halfway between the waist and armpit
Continue to repeat the statement and the tapping for a few minutes, or longer, and as you continue to tap, you’ll often notice a reduction in the intensity of your feelings. You may need to repeat this sequence several times to feel calmer and less anxious.
It’s important to know that this is not the entire sequence, but this is a quick version that can help. If you are drawn to this, you can check out EFT in greater detail at
Emotional stress release points
Touch for Health® uses a form of manual muscle testing (biofeedback) to find imbalances and stress held in the body and then assesses how best to release that stress. One easy-to-use technique is utilizing the Emotional Stress Release (ESR) points on the forehead.
To use, firstly rate your level of anxiety, worry, and frustration on a scale of 1 to 10, or 1 to 100. Then with a very light touch, take the first two fingers of each hand and place them about an inch above your eyes on your forehead (known as the frontal eminences, the bumps on the forehead).
A light touch on these reflex points can often act within a few minutes to restore a sense of calm, increase your focus and attention, and positively affect your parasympathetic nervous system. You can combine an affirmative statement with this, such as “I am calm”, “I am safe” or “I am feeling peaceful”. You can even review the situation or event that occurred and imagine how you wish it had unfolded.
Hold these points for between 30 seconds and 5 minutes, or until a light pulse is felt under the fingers. And then rate the emotional level you are feeling afterward. This technique does not change the memory of an event but it can lower the intensity of the emotions around that event.
Integrating holistic tools into your daily life
The key to managing our emotions is to make these practices part of our daily routine. Starting our day with a few minutes of Quick Coherence® Technique and practicing the ESRs or tapping when we become overwhelmed with worry and anxiety gives us the power to be in more control over our emotions.
Feelings of anxiousness, worry, fear, anger, and frustration don’t have to control our lives. With tools like ESRs, EFT, HeartMath®, and other holistic practices, we can learn to move through our day with greater ease and balance, living with more freedom and grace.
Alison Zeidler, Wholistic Wellness Facilitator
As an adult child of an alcoholic, Alison Zeidler struggled with anger, depression, and an overwhelming need to please combined with an inability to express herself. Through trial and error,and hard work, she found the tools that shifted her life. Her mission is to empower others to transform their lives, discover balance, reconnect to their hearts and wisdom, and reclaim their joy for life.
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