It wasn't a typical day for Jillian Pransky. She was coming home from Maryland after helping to clear out the belongings of a beloved sister-in-law who had just died of cancer in her early 30s. On the highway, suddenly Pranksy's arms started to shake, her vision blurred, and her breath got shallow. "I remember feeling tingly all over and thinking I was going to pass out," she recalls. Thankfully, she wasn't at the wheel; her boyfriend pulled off at the nearest exit and took her straight to the ER. Convinced she was having a heart attack or facing something equally grave, Pransky was shocked when her vitals came back normal. The ER staff told her that physically, she was fine. She was having a panic attack. Pransky remembers arguing with the doctor: How could she be having a panic attack? She was a yoga teacher.
Not only that, but Pransky figured she had the wrong personality for an anxiety disorder. "I didn't feel fragile or vulnerable," she says. "I was naturally strong and optimistic, and I had so much drive to go after my goals." She was a high achiever, climbing the corporate ladder as a young executive and becoming a rising star at yoga. Yet inside, she held buried feelings that came from growing up with episodes of violence, coupled with fears about losing an ill parent who was also the source of that violence and assault. "I don't think I was aware of how deeply I was holding onto things until I had the panic attack," she says. "The trauma of losing my sister-in-law, who was around my age and a lot like me, was a trigger event for facing the vulnerability that I'd been suppressing for so long. The panic attack was a gift, because it revealed all the ways I had felt out of control historically."
Not everyone would consider panic to be a gift. But epiphanies arrive in unexpected packages. After the ER episode, Pransky worked with a somatic developmental therapist who taught her how to use body awareness to loosen anxiety's grip. She also changed her yoga practice, removing "over-efforting" from her time on the mat. Yoga became less about perfectly executing poses and more about giving herself a sense of calmness and wellbeing. These explorations would eventually become the basis for her book Deep Listening: A Healing Practice to Calm Your Body, Clear Your Mind, and Open Your Heart (Rodale Books, 2017). In the months following the panic attack, Pransky experienced a few smaller "tremors," but she acquired the tools to cope with them. "Step one was not analyzing my anxiety or talking myself out of it," she says. "It was calming my body. It was feeling myself on the earth, noticing my surroundings, and deepening my breath." All of this allowed her to look at the anxiety objectively. "It wasn't 'I am anxious' or 'I am afraid,'" Pransky recalls learning. "It was 'I'm having the experience of feeling afraid.' Knowing this let me realize the anxiety wasn't going to kill me."
The Era of Anxiety Is Here
To varying degrees, we all experience anxiety. Stress and worry are its cognitive aspects, yet anxiety also has physical and emotional symptoms—from a racing heart or insomnia to feelings of apprehension or dread. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), about 40 million US adults, or 18 percent of the population, have an anxiety disorder, whether it's generalized anxiety, a panic disorder, or PTSD. More than 26 million adults (over 8 percent of the US population) turn to anti-anxiety medications, sedatives, and hypnotics such as Xanax, Valium, or Ativan—many of which lead to dependency and have side effects like dizziness, confusion, nightmares, and memory loss, especially with long-term use.
With a 24-hour news cycle chronicling heartrending disasters alongside combative politics, these are anxious times, and the need for natural ways to quell anxiety is greater than ever. Anxiolytic prescriptions are on the rise, but a growing number of doctors are recommending practices like yoga, meditation, and mindfulness for mild to moderate anxiety, or as an adjunct or complementary treatment for severe anxiety. A 2017 meta-analysis in the Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine found Hatha yoga to be a promising method for treating anxiety, with the caveat that we need more research in this area. Such research, if not life-saving, could be quality-of-life saving.
"Asana" is the Sanskrit word for a posture of yoga (such as Downward Facing Dog or Warrior I), but it also means "seat": it's about our connection to the earth. Its purpose is not only to help the body become limber and strong but also to ground us so we don't get swept away by our thoughts and worries. Meanwhile, yoga's focus on the breath lets us turn off the "fight, flight, or freeze" response to anxiety and stress. "When the breath is full and deep, that calms the neural circuitry," says Pransky. She offers a simple tip for when anxiety takes hold: Wrap your right hand around your left ribcage and your left hand around your lower right ribcage, and breathe into that hug. Your diaphragmatic breathing will stimulate the vagus nerve, activating the relaxation response of the parasympathetic nervous system.
Another facet of yoga and meditation is observing self-talk. "We can't tell ourselves not to be afraid," says Pransky, "but we can say, 'I feel afraid and that's okay.'" During her "panic year" she developed a fear of flying, yet she had the opportunity to travel to Australia, a place she had dreamed of visiting. Her anxiety was too big to ignore but she boarded the plane anyway. Providentially, the seat next to her was empty. "I said, 'I'm going to let my fear sit here.' I gave it that space," she recalls. "If we can acknowledge our fear and do it anyway, that strengthens our resilience. Then we can walk through the world with our anxiety, meeting it as we would a friend, child, or partner and asking, 'How can I help?' We can meet our anxiety with acceptance and curiosity, instead of trying to push it away."
We're Becoming a Flotation Nation
While Pransky grounds herself (or in her words, "lands") with yoga, others calm their anxiety the opposite way—by floating. Around since the 1950s, flotation therapy is hot these days with float spas opening nationwide, including at least two in the Hudson Valley: Mountain Float Spa in New Paltz and Zephyr Float in Kingston. Also known as sensory deprivation, flotation involves easing yourself into a tank reminiscent of an oversized bathtub that's filled with water mixed with so much Epsom salt that you easily float (no raft necessary). The temperature of the air and water are both set to match the temperature of your skin, about 94 degrees, so you hardly notice where the water and air end and where your body begins. Without sensory stimulation (people generally turn out the light), the mind and body get a profound rest—a "beyond consciousness" state that some describe as deeply meditative.
People float for various reasons, from alleviating chronic pain to jump-starting creativity, but relieving anxiety and stress is a top draw according to Olga Schoonmaker, who co-owns Zephyr Float with her husband, Ryan. "A lot of our anxiety comes from the constant stimuli from our surroundings," she says. "You're either on the TV or your phone, and sometimes you're doing both at same time. You're checking your email while you're getting text messages. Our minds and bodies weren't meant to handle all that."
One researcher, neuropsychologist Justin Feinstein, is so convinced that flotation is the antidote we need for information overload and anxiety that he opened a float lab to gather state-of-the-art research: the Float Clinic Research Center at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Feinstein is studying the brainwaves of people before, after, and during a float to see how the experience activates particular areas of the brain. Preliminary research suggests that flotation decreases activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain that controls our autonomic response to fear. One previous study published in 2006 found that for people dealing with stress-related pain, 12 float sessions helped relieve their pain, stress, anxiety, and depression while positively impacting their sleep and optimism—and the benefits lasted for four months after the treatment ended.
"Floating has really changed my quality of life," says Brittany, 27, who prefers to go by first name only for this article—and who's been floating about once a week since she started working at Zephyr Float last February. "I grew up around a lot of trauma and assault, and I developed the symptoms of PTSD after I got out of that situation and went to college. I have heart palpitations; sometimes I can even feel myself stop breathing, like being in a frozen state. In the tank, I'm more aware of it and I can use my breath to come out of it." Notably, Brittany learned breath techniques in a yoga workshop for people affected by domestic violence and sexual assault, designed by the organization Exhale to Inhale. She combines flotation with breathwork and noticing self-talk, and she says floating has helped heal her relationship with her body and replace feelings of shame with self-empathy. "I feel such a difference, and I even see it in my face—it's not as puffy and there's less tension in my jaw. Flotation is a complete letting go. It's way more powerful than therapy."
Floating is not for everyone, as some people have a hard time hanging out in nothingness. Brittany says the first 20 minutes are the hardest, with thoughts and issues rising to the surface, but once that passes she enters a cozy state (float sessions last either 60 or 90 minutes). Schoonmaker says that most of her clients report feeling safe and contained, like being in the womb. (In addition to her float spa, Schoonmaker also co-owns a CBD oil business called Highborne Essentials, specializing in topical CBD [cannabidiol], the non-psychoactive component in marijuana—another area that holds promise as a natural anxiety treatment. Watch this space for more about CBD in a future article.)
Ideally, with practice you can train your mind to return to that therapeutic state even when you're outside the tank in daily life—and that's where the sustainable benefits come in. The same kind of transference happens with yoga. Unlike psychiatric drugs, yoga and flotation don't just mask the symptoms of anxiety. Instead, they help us develop ways to cope and walk hand-in-hand with it.
"Anxiety separates you—it makes your neighbor seem like the other. It makes you build walls instead of bridges," says Pransky. "But when we meet ourselves with care, warmth, and presence, we can change our neurology. We release oxytocin, the hormone of love and connection. Our anxiety is not a personality trait. Neither is our connectivity. Yet the more we practice the latter, the better we get that feeling of love and connection."
Jillian Pransky will lead a "Deep Winter Renewal" weekend yoga retreat at the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, January 11–13. Kripalu.org.
RESOURCES
Kripalu Center Kripalu.org
Mountain Float Spa Mountainfloatspa.com
Jillian Pransky Jillianpransky.com
Zephyr Float Zephyrfloat.com