Can staying home cause anxiety? When I first wrote this article, it was 2018. It’s now 2020 and we all know what that means. Staying home is a way of life for a lot of us, and I now feel like I have a deeper understanding of what staying home can mean for anxious folk.
I’ve gone through many phases while staying home. I initially drank a lot more at home, but then I cut right back on alcohol and caffeine because I was getting anxiety after drinking.
I’ve relished my me-time, but I’ve also felt great periods of isolation and feeling lonely. I missed having a 40th Birthday party. I’ve missed weddings and baby showers.
Related: Grounding meditation
Ready for a trip back in time to 2018? The lessons still stand to this day.
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Can staying home cause anxiety? My personal story…
After I’d had my first baby and became a mother for the first time, I really struggled to adjust and I relied a lot on my husband and my family to help me with the baby and I remember very vividly the first couple of times that I was left at home alone with the baby.
I just felt like I couldn’t do anything right.
The baby wouldn’t stop crying.
My biggest fear was that the baby wouldn’t stop crying and I wouldn’t know how to stop him crying.
It was a situation that I just felt completely powerless in and yes, my anxiety was through the roof at that time of life.
So if you’re feeling lost and alone, and you’re wondering: can staying home cause anxiety? My answer is definitely yes.
There have been other times as well when being home alone has caused desperate loneliness in myself and that was mainly in my late teens, early 20s when anxiety was just starting to kind of build up in my life.
I hadn’t yet been diagnosed and I was just experiencing the symptoms of anxiety, kind of feeling like they were just part of life and just part of normal everyday struggles.
I didn’t know that it was part of an anxiety disorder that I had.
But I remember times when I would be left home alone – and I’d be 17, 18, so,completely able to care for myself – but it was like the house would echo with emptiness and loneliness and I would feel quite vulnerable and silly little thoughts are going through my head like, what if a stranger knocks on the door? What if a serial killer tries to break in?
I never stopped to think and ask can staying home cause anxiety – all I knew was, I felt scared and alone.
Of course, those fears are very, very remote but when you’re experiencing anxiety and fear of being home alone is one of the ways anxiety manifests, those fears can feel very real indeed.
So, I totally know where you’re coming from, and I do know that feeling of isolation, loneliness and feeling out of control.
There are three ways that I have personally and have helped my clients get over this fear of being home alone.
Step 1: Grounding
So the first step is grounding. If you don’t know what grounding is, it’s where you take your energy and you stop where you are and you purposefully bring your energy down into your body and you imagine it in your mind going down through your legs, through your feet, down through the floor, down through the earth beneath you and you feel your energy connecting with the core of the earth.
What grounding does is it gives you energy an anchor point so it’s like when you’re not grounded, your energy is sort of flailing around in the atmosphere and doesn’t really know what it’s doing or where it’s going.
When you are grounded, your intention is taken away from that can staying home cause anxiety question.
When your energy is grounded, it feels more purposeful and it feels calmer and you will notice the difference in yourself very, very quickly.
When you ground your energy for the first time, you feel such a massive difference – there really is a big difference between being grounded and being ungrounded and just returning yourself to home by grounding yourself is so important onyour anxiety recovery journey.
Download my free grounding meditation to help you feel calm and connected.
Step 2: Energy protection
Once you are grounded, those anxious feelings brought on by the ‘can staying home cause anxiety’ conundrum will feel settled. But you can go one step further with energy protection.
If you think of your energy field as being like an electrical circuit, you need to ground it and you also earth and insulate it.
So that’s what protection is – and the way that I teach people to protect their energy is by using white light.
So, quite simply, you imagine yourself in a bubble of white light and nothing can get in or out of that bubble of white light, you’re completely safe, you’re completely encapsulated and white light is healing energy.
It gets into your energy field, it gets into your cells and delivers healing where it most needs to go so it helps to heal your anxiety in that way as well.
Download my free White light protection meditation.
Step 3: Acceptance – gently move forward
The third step is to accept yourself as you are for now.
Can staying home cause anxiety? Definitely. But will fighting the anxiety make you feel any better? Certainly not.
So, you’ve grounded your energy, you protected your energy and now, you simply just need time to do its job, to do its work.
Energy healing does rely on time to really bolster and support all of the changes that have been made and the changes within energy healing are so intricate the often, you don’t feel them right away.
In some ways, you can feel them immediately – with the grounding exercise, you definitely can feel it immediately.
With the protection exercise, you may or you may not feel it immediately, but the key ingredient is time and acceptance, moving forward.
So, the way that you accept is just to relax: completely relax every muscle in your body and sort of feel yourself, feel all your muscles, all of your cells, all of your skin – everything kind of melts, in a way, and you’ll feel where you’ve been holding tension because that is where you will feel the most difference between holding on to everything and really coming into acceptance.
So, to accept, just relax everything, across your thyroid, down into your neck, into your shoulders, relax your tummy muscles, relax your back, relax everything – your legs, your feet – relax everything and really just breathe into your relaxed body and focus on relaxing and accepting yourself as you are without trying to force yourself into loving being at home by yourself.
Just accept the fact that this is how it is and you are the way you are for the time being and that really combined with time is the way to heal.