My own war with anxiety began in 2014. I’m from Donetsk, Ukraine. Three months pregnant, with my three and a half year old daughter, I jumped on a train and never saw my home again. I know what it’s like not to sleep for months, with a head like a swarm of bees. Nothing below comes from textbooks alone.

I’m a Jungian analyst, and in our tradition anxiety is treated differently from the way pop psychology treats it. We don’t “beat” it. Anxiety is two things at once: a siren, which you must learn to switch off with the body, and a letter from the psyche, which you must learn to read. Most people spend years doing only one of these, endlessly silencing the siren or endlessly introspecting. It only works when you do both together.

Useful anxiety has an address

A job interview, a child’s test results: useful anxiety points at something. You prepare, you act, the tension drops.

Exhausting anxiety behaves differently. Close one worry and it instantly finds the next. Thoughts loop, the body stays braced, you wake at 4am. People call it “free floating”, but the Jungian view is sharper: it does have an address, and the address is inside. Jung wrote that “hidden in the neurosis is a bit of still undeveloped personality, a precious fragment of the psyche”, and, more bluntly, that “the whole task of his personality lies in the very thing he sought to avoid”. Exhausting anxiety is not a broken alarm. It is the persistence of a psyche that has something to say and isn’t being listened to.

First, switch off the siren

You can’t read a letter while the siren howls, so the first step is always the body. A nervous system can’t be talked down: anxiety fires faster than conscious thought. But the psyche expresses itself only through the body, and through the body it can be regulated. Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory describes the mechanics.

Somatic therapist Peter Levine made a famous observation: an impala caught by a predator freezes; if the predator gets distracted, she first breathes deeply, then visibly trembles, shaking off the charge mobilised for escape, and only then runs on. Humans are the only creatures who interrupt this sequence: we tremble, and we clench, ashamed, “keeping face”. The charge stays inside. The impala simply got up and ran.

So here are five small practices, two minutes each, none requiring willpower.

1. Shake on purpose: If stress leaves you trembling, amplify it: stand and deliberately shake your whole body for a minute (the logic of TRE, a method born from observing people in bomb shelters). The body finishes what it started, then lets go.
2. Let “flee” happen: Can’t sit still? Don’t. Run on the spot, pace fast, give the mobilised energy the outlet it was raised for.
3. The butterfly hug: Arms crossed, palms on opposite shoulders, tap alternately like a butterfly’s wings for a minute (Lucina Artigas and Ignacio Jarero’s bilateral stimulation technique, created after a hurricane in Mexico). Its message: I’m here, I’m in my body.
4. The full exhale: Mid panic, forget counted breathing protocols. Just exhale, fully, folding forward as if pouring the air out. A long exhale engages the nervous system’s braking branch.
5. Orient: Slowly turn your head and let your eyes wander the room. A brain that scans and finds no threat lowers the alarm itself. This is the innate orienting reflex.

One honest number: of three hundred people who took the stress response test on my website, 40% score moderate or higher on the clinical GAD-7 scale. But these techniques are half the work. The siren is off. Now, the letter.

Then, read the letter

Jung saw the psyche as self regulating: when conscious life becomes too narrow or too “correct”, the unconscious compensates. Anxiety is one form that compensation takes.

In practice it looks recognisable. A woman holds a flawless role: strong, convenient, competent, “the one who copes”. Jung called that role the persona, a mask we once put on because it protected us. But the person grows and the mask doesn’t, and when the gap between persona and living person becomes too wide, the psyche starts signalling, often precisely with “causeless” anxiety that in fact points very accurately: you no longer fit inside your own life.

The second source is what Jung called the Shadow: everything we’ve disowned. The anger we’re “not allowed” to feel. The ambition we’re ashamed to admit. The exhaustion we’re forbidden to show. The disowned doesn’t disappear; it knocks from inside, and we feel the knocking as anxiety without an address. This is why exhausting anxiety so often wears the mask of virtue, hyper responsibility, perfectionism: behind that stern inner judge, something alive and unpermitted is being kept under guard.

And the third is dreams. Jung called the dream “a spontaneous self portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious”. People send me dreams every day, and anxious plots repeat with striking regularity: the chase, the exam you’re not ready for, the house with rooms that aren’t yours. The Jungian question is never “what does the dream book say” but: what daytime one sidedness is this compensating? The person who never says no is chased in her sleep. The one who controls everything misses the train. The dream paints in what consciousness refuses to see.

The practice for the letter is written. In the evening, five minutes, honestly: “If my anxiety could speak, what would it be trying to tell me? What am I turning away from?” If a dream stayed with you, note it in a sentence, no interpretation. After a month, people usually see it themselves: the anxiety was talking about the same thing all along.

And know when not to stay alone with it: real panic attacks, months of wrecked sleep, a shrinking life, that’s work for a professional. Going is the common sense that sends you to a dentist.

There’s a phrase I often repeat: “Died at 40, buried at 80”, a life eaten by an anxiety that was silenced but never read. Switch off the siren with the body. Read the letter. Inside it, as Jung said, lies a precious fragment of yourself.

Anna Bulat is a Ukrainian Jungian analyst specialising in anxiety, dreams and trauma. She teaches somatic self-regulation to clients across Europe.