6 Spiritual Symptoms of Anxiety
Are you struggling with anxiety and looking to dive deep into the spiritual meaning of your anxiety symptoms? You're in the right place. With over 10 years of experience as a licensed psychotherapist and a strong foundation in transpersonal (spiritual) psychology, meditation, yoga, and mindfulness, I understand the profound challenges anxiety presents, as well as the deeper spiritual implications of its symptoms.
When you get curious about the spiritual meaning of anxiety, you can identify and explore the deeper parts of yourself that are out of alignment, have been long ago abandoned, or are simply not integrated yet.
This article will help you understand the spiritual nature of anxiety symptoms and provide practical steps you can take to support your healing journey with holistic mental health practices.
What is the Spiritual Meaning of Anxiety?
Anxiety is both a symptom and a signal, guiding you back to yourself. When you learn to quiet your mind and listen, you'll often find that anxiety points to your next area for growth.
From a spiritual perspective, anxiety can be seen as an invitation to inner work, helping you align more closely with your true self and explore the possibilities of deep healing. Its effects go beyond physical symptoms to include emotional and energetic experiences that reveal deeper imbalances in your life.
It’s important to recognize that whatever the symptoms, they are not signs of weakness or a lack of spiritual depth; they indicate areas for deep work, highlighting where you may be out of alignment, avoiding your truth, or even spiritually bypassing.
When you can recognize anxiety as a beacon guiding back home to yourself, instead of an indication that there is something wrong with you, deep healing and integration can happen.
Ready to dive in? Let's do this!
6 Spiritual Symptoms of Anxiety
1. Lack of Connection to Your Intuition
You might feel pressured to conform to social norms, including hustle culture, burnout and a focus on worldly achievement; all of which can overwhelm your nervous system and interfere with your ability to identify and eventually trust your intuition. When anxiety surfaces, it might signal that your inner voice is being overshadowed by external noise. It's time to realign with your inner wisdom.
2. Feeling Stuck or 'Lost' in Life
Spiritual anxiety often manifests as a profound sense of unease in your body, and in your life. You might feel unmoored and adrift, unable to find your purpose or the deeper meaning in your life. This can be an invitation to align your daily actions with your core values and soul path. Sometimes we have to spend a significant amount of time disentangling from past programming in order to unearth our true purpose and desires. If you are not feeling aligned with your soul's purpose it's time to commit to some inquiry work.
3. Constant Worrying about Your Health, Future, and Relationships
Persistent worry signals that your spirit is unsettled, and that your ego mind is in the drivers seat. While we want to honor and use our mind to help us act and execute our desires in this world, when it's given too much power it manifests as worry, anxiety and overwhelm. The constant fluctuations of the mind can also keep us stuck in the future, trying to control things that just can't be controlled.
Learn practices to soothe an anxious mind.
Download our Holistic Guide to Healing Anxiety.
4. Feeling Ungrounded or Unmoored
Anxiety can leave you feeling ungrounded and dysregulated, as if life is happening to you rather than through you. This can be a result of not fully connecting with your true self for guidance and meaning, or not feeling in control of your life. If you find yourself constantly reacting to the world around you, rather than responding from a place of aligned wisdom and self-compassion (at least some of the time!), it's time to explore ways to reconnect with your highest self.
5. Negative Self-Talk
The whispers of anxiety often manifest as negative self-talk, a harsh inner critic or even a freeze response (due to the ego feeling overwhelmed and getting triggered). When your ego and inner critic is running the show it's typically due to a deeper disconnect of the mind-body-heart circuitry. Healing looks like learning how to care for your mind, not just avoid it.
6. Self-Sabotaging Behaviors
When spiritual anxiety takes hold, you may find yourself engaging in self-sabotage, aka repeating old or unconscious patterns. The truth is, self-sabotage is actually a much younger part of your trying to get its needs met in maladaptive ways. Learning to identify, unearth and reprogram these patterns is part of the healing journey.
Holistic Mental Health Tools For Healing Anxiety
Addressing the spiritual symptoms of anxiety requires an integrative approach that honors the mind-body-spirit connection; otherwise we are just treating symptoms or are at risk of spiritually bypassing.
Here at The Holistic Counseling Center we treat anxiety with a holistic approach. Here are some practices we use:
Nervous System Regulation with Somatic Therapy and Polyvagal Therapy
Inner Child Work with IFS Therapy
Shadow Work with Depth Therapy
Breathwork
Unearth and reprogram outdated ways of being and childhood programming with Psychodynamic Therapy
Holistic Spiritual Therapy for Anxiety Treatment
No matter how intense your anxiety symptoms are, healing is possible.
By cultivating self-compassion, practicing mindfulness, and engaging in holistic spiritual therapy practices such as inner child work, depth work, and shadow work, you can work towards finding alignment, purpose, confidence, and peace, in your mind, your heart, and in your life.
And a gentle reminder: Healing from spiritual symptoms of anxiety is a continual process of self-discovery and growth. Healing takes time. As you get to know yourself and learn how to identify the next best step to take on your healing journey, you will start to see the snowball effect in your life.
If you're tired of the chaos anxiety brings to your life, I want you to know that healing is possible.
Our therapists can help you address the root cause of your anxiety symptoms and support you on your healing journey. We take traditional talk therapy and infuse it with mindfulness, spiritual wisdom, and tools for change and transformation rooted in the latest research from neuroscience and Western psychology to support you on your healing journey.
We offer a variety of modalities and types of therapy including: CBT, IFS, Somatic Therapy, Mindfulness, Solution-Focused, Psychodynamic and Transpersonal Psychotherapy.
We are currently accepting new clients for psychotherapy both online and in-person (San Francisco and El Dorado Hills), with evening and weekend appointments available. You can learn more about working together by booking a free consultation call here:
About the author
Kim Burris, LMFT is a licensed holistic psychotherapist, founder of The Holistic Counseling Center, and author of ‘The First 90 Days After Birth.’
She honors the mind, body, spirit connection and offers evidence-based psychotherapy with a heart centered approach that helps people find relief from anxiety and self-sabotage so they can live life with more joy, freedom and ease.
Kim and her team currently offer holistic counseling to individuals in California. Click HERE to book a no-cost consultation call.
PS. Are we connected on Instagram? Come find me at @kim.burris.psychotherapy.
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