Feeling anxious? You are not alone. In this age of high work stress, rising expenses and health issues, anxiety can take a tough toll.
In ayurveda, anxiety is a symptom of excess vata in the mind. When vata is balanced, you feel creative, imaginative, intuitive, and free-flowing. However, when there is excess, this same wind can quickly escalate into a tornado. When we are always multitasking, working while eating while moving around etc.., this causes confusion within the body, causing us to do none of these things with full efficacy. Vata is fixed on the future, while pitta is acutely present, and kapha is in the past. When you are anxious, you’re thinking only about the future without being aware of the present or past. Therefore, you must bring more pitta (fire) and kapha (earth) into your life to bring you back into balance.
Three steps to eliminating Anxiety:
1. Increase pitta: To increase pitta (fire), rev up the digestive fire. In Ayurveda, we do digest not only food but also thoughts, emotions, and experiences. When our digestion is weak, we have a more difficult time digesting everything life throws at us. To become more capable human beings, we must stimulate our digestive fire, called agni in Sanskrit.
2. Increase agni: To increase the agni, eat warm, easy-to-digest food with stimulating spices such as ginger, cumin, fennel, and coriander. Avoid raw, cold foods, which will increase vata (the dosha we want to decrease for anxiety). Instead of your usual smoothie and salad, go for a warming breakfast and cooked lunch inclusive of the six tastes.
3. Increase kapha: To increase Kapha (Earth), you want to create routine. When you’re doing something totally different every day (including eating and sleeping at different times), your body doesn’t know what it’s supposed to expect. Adapting a routine creates grounding and stability for the body, which will counterbalance anxiety-inducing vata.
A few other lifestyle changes include:
Sticking to one task at a time instead of overwhelming yourself with multiple things to do, sleeping soundly and deeply to give your mind a chance to detoxify from negative emotions as well as practicing earthing, the act of walking in nature with bare feet to receive the balancing negative ions of the earth.
Leading Ayurvedic Hospitals In Kerala conduct regular therapies too cure you from anxiety related disorders.
