Episode # 123- Unlearning Anxiety

Anxiety is a symptom that goes hand in hand with chronic pain and disease.

In this episode I talk about what anxiety is, how it affects the body, why it's so common, and how to unlearn it!

I give an example from my own life, and some techniques you can use to teach your brain to produce anxiety less and less.

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Transcript-Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, Episode 123, Unlearning Anxiety. In this podcast, we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.
Become unstoppable body and mind. Hello, my loves. I really wanted to talk about anxiety today because it is a very common symptom for people who have chronic pain or disease.
In fact, it's kind of like the chicken or the egg, which came first. Many people who have a tendency towards more anxious thoughts, they're more likely to develop this neuroplastic chronic pain. Alan Gordon said in his book The Way Out that the fear of his symptoms becoming chronic is actually what caused his symptoms to become chronic.
And once you have pain or symptoms that don't go away quickly, it's common to develop a health anxiety about symptoms in your body. So I think of anxiety as just another version of one of the neuroplastic symptoms your brain can produce. So first, just a definition of anxiety.
It's intense, excessive and persistent worry, and fear about everyday situations. So anxiety could be normal if you have a stressful situation, like public speaking, but it becomes a problem when anxiety feelings become excessive or interfere with your daily life. You might identify with some of these symptoms of productivity anxiety.
This is what I really associated with before. So feeling like you're not doing enough, feeling guilty or ashamed when you take breaks or rest, feeling like you're always behind and you can never catch up, obsessively planning, checking emails, messages or to-do lists, feeling irritable or easily frustrated if things don't go according to plan, or feeling so overwhelmed that you procrastinate and avoid tasks. And you could feel on the edge, irritated, and like your mind is always racing.
This can affect your sleep, and you could even have night anxiety where you can't stop worrying about the next day. You have intrusive thoughts that come up at night and a racing mind. You replay the day and keep thinking about what happened.
You're tossing and turning in bed, and you're worried about not getting enough sleep, which causes you to get less sleep. And even though you're feeling physically exhausted, you can't sleep. With anxiety, you could have memory issues and trouble focusing.
You notice that you worry a lot and overthink. You have a lack of patience and need constant reassurance, and you could even have panic attacks. Anxiety is this activated state of the nervous system.
So it's like fight or flight. It's more in the flight. Like you're running from a tiger.
You're running to try to constantly find problems and fix them and solve them so that you'll feel safe. And this can be depleting to your body if you're in this flight state of anxiety for too long. It takes its toll on your body.
You could have a racing heart, shortness of breath, tightness in your chest, numbness, dizziness, or spinning vision, headaches, muscle tension and body aches, shaking, excessive sweating even when you're cold. You could feel a lump in your throat, again, because of this muscle tension, preparing you to run for a tiger, but there's no tiger chasing you. And during fight or flight, your digestive system turns off because digestion isn't as important as finding safety.
So this can lead to stomach issues and stomach pain. For people who have health anxiety or a lot of focus on the symptoms of their body, they may feel these symptoms of anxiety and focus on them and how uncomfortable they are and worry what is wrong, which actually leads the brain to produce more anxiety because this danger signal is heightened. Eventually, you might start to avoid activities that might cause you anxiety, and so you're getting less interaction going out and pleasure in your life, which also tends to produce more pain and anxiety.
A study from Pennsylvania State University even found that negative moods and anxiety affect your immune system and the production of inflammation. When we're used to living in this anxious, high alert state, it actually might feel uncomfortable to start feeling good. So we might have anxiety when things go well.
If you could imagine sleeping in the jungle, you kind of want to be on high alert. You don't want to let your guard down. You want to see what possibly could happen.
You don't want to relax and let go. It's like waiting for the other shoe to drop, this high alert, constant anxiety state. Renee Brown talks about this as rehearsing tragedy.
So even though there may not be something to necessarily worry about, we start feeling good and safe, and that actually promotes more feelings of anxiety and fear. Dr. Joe Dispenza says, You can eat all the right foods and do all the right things. But if you're living in anxiety and fear, you're viewing the world from the worst case scenario because that's what you do in survival.
And there's no energy for growth and repair. The living in chronic anxiety is living in these survival states, and it causes these physical effects in the body, and you're not getting to that calm, rest and repair state. And if you do, that could even be a source of anxiety because you're not used to feeling that good feeling without worrying and fear.
But the good news about all of this is that that habit of the brain of going into anxious thoughts is just like these neuroplastic habits of chronic pain. And it can be unlearned, it can be treated the same way, and we can actually rewire our brain to produce less and less anxiety. The first way to do this is to realize that anxiety is false information.
It's a false danger signal. It's a misinterpretation of the brain of thinking something safe is actually dangerous. So we want to see it just like other forms of neuroplastic symptoms that when we are getting this very real symptom in our body, these feelings in our body, that it's not an actual threat, it's just this habit of the brain of finding danger where there isn't really any.
This can be hard though, because again, there's these physical symptoms. You're producing adrenaline and cortisol to activate you, to get you motivated to do something, to solve something, to fix something, to run away from that tiger, to feel safe. So the feelings of anxiety are really prompting you to do something and take action at a physiological level.
So we need to actually respond to them differently in order to train the brain to produce them less. Just like when we have a pain signal, we want to respond with more calmness, with messages of safety. And when we react differently to it, the brain doesn't continue amplifying that anxiety response.
One way to think about anxiety is that our brain really dislikes the unknown. Having something that we don't know what's going to happen is distressing to our brain. Anxiety prompts us to do something to solve that unknown, to eliminate that feeling of the unknown.
But what we want to do is actually start to tolerate that feeling of the unknown and not react to it. And as we know with neuroplasticity, when we have a different response, it trains our brain to produce that anxiety less and less. So things like mindfulness to the present situation and positive feelings like gratitude can actually help rewire those pathways of anxiety.
So I think of resolving anxiety or any of these other physical symptoms in two main ways. There's the top down and the bottom up approach. So the top down is changing your thinking.
And sometimes you're able to reframe things. You're able to remind yourself, oh, I don't need to worry about this. You're able to know, oh, this is just the unknown that my brain doesn't like, and that's all that I'm feeling.
But other times, trying to rationalize, trying to send messages of safety cognitively through your brain and your thoughts is not quite cutting it. And your body still has this response, and then that affects actually what you believe and think. So there's the bottom up approaches, which are more somatic, meaning using your body.
So I want to give you an example of what happened with me last week. That's actually why I thought about recording this podcast, and I recorded it last week, but it didn't work, had to re-record it. And so here's an example of what happened.
I was sleeping and woke up in the morning, actually about 3 a.m. with anxiety, and I could feel just this uncomfortable feeling in my body and heart racing, and I started thinking about what was going on. And for me, the unknown was, I had a week coming up where my sister was out of town and my family was in charge of helping my dad, and there were some things that I still wanted to get done that week, and I was worried about schedules and how we'd work it all out and how I'd make it work.
So my brain was in this state of, there's something new going on this week that's out of the ordinary, out of the routine, something we haven't dealt with exactly before. How are we gonna figure out? How are we gonna solve it?
And there was this like racing mind and then just a lot of body symptoms that were uncomfortable. So the first thing that I did was I labeled it. I identified, okay, this is anxiety, and it's because my brain has an unknown.
And then what I did was actually somatic tracking, just like you would do somatic tracking with a pain signal describing how it feels in your body and the shape and the color. I did that with anxiety. So I said to myself, this is anxiety.
It feels like my heart is racing. It feels like it's hard for me to breathe. My chest feels tight.
My stomach was really tight and hurting. That's one of my big cues for me that I am having some stress since most of my issues were GI issues to begin with. I feel this energy to try to go do something, even though I'm tired and I want to sleep.
And I just tuned in to how my body was feeling and described it. It kind of felt like a lot of fast moving energy, like a buzzing, tingling and activated feeling. And it was mainly throughout my chest and I was also feeling it in my head.
And to me, it was like kind of warm and the color red. So one way to start creating some new neural pathways is not to go down the rabbit hole of, how do I solve this problem and how do I fix it? And what should we do this week in order to feel better?
It was just stopping, labeling that this is what's going on and actually tuning in to how my body felt. Because I want to send the message to the brain that this is not something I need to worry about right now. This is a danger signal that is a false danger signal.
I was actually in no danger at that moment laying in my bed, thinking of something that was going to happen later in the week. And so I wanted to reaffirm to my brain that at this present moment, right now, in time, you're feeling sensations. And all of those thoughts around them are not what we need to focus on right now.
And they're not even really dangerous. Once I was able to notice how my body was feeling with anxiety, I started working on some somatic approaches, some bottom-up approaches of changing my body state so that I would feel better. I chose breathing and I actually tried a few different breathing methods to try to put that roadblock up and distract my mind and form these new neural pathways to start to focus on the breath rather than the thoughts in my mind.
For me, since I was having those stomach tightening issues, I really found that the breathing method that helps that for me the most is diaphragmatic breathing or it's called belly breathing. So basically, you imagine that you're inflating your stomach, you're breathing all the way down into your belly as you inhale and really let that stomach expand and stretch out as you bring the air down there. And then as you exhale, your stomach comes in.
So I was trying to breathe through my stomach. And I know from experience that with some of my clients, that's not even always possible. They can't even quite take a full breath.
So there are many other breathing methods you could try. I did some box breathing, which is breathing in for four, holding for four, holding for four, exhaling for four, and holding for four. I did a few rounds of that.
I tried the physiological sigh, which is breathing fully in, and then you breathe in a little bit more, and then a long exhale. Anything with a long exhale helps engage that parasympathetic calm state, the rest and repair state, and decreases that fire flight or sympathetic response. So there are many different breathing techniques.
You can experiment with them, find different ones to try and see what works for you, but just know that breathing is one of the ways that you can change your body state, and then that can change what's going on with your mind and your thoughts. So for me, just focusing on the breathing for a little while and even just trying some different methods of breathing helped calm me down quite a bit. When my thoughts would return to the planning or the fear, I just noticed I was going into the thoughts and into the story, and I tuned back into my body.
And for me, since it was the middle of the night and I was in bed, I didn't really want to get up and do any of the physical moving techniques that can calm anxiety. And so I laid in bed and found a meditation, a guided meditation that I listened to, and I was able to focus in on that rather than the thoughts that were swirling around. And I was actually able to get back to sleep by listening to that soothing context of this guided meditation.
What I was able to do is show to my brain that I'm able to shift my focus. I sometimes think of a spotlight where the brain is spotlighting these certain thoughts, these certain feelings, and I'm moving the spotlight to something else that's more calm and more neutral and not even related to this false danger signal. Sometimes when I have anxiety during the day, I may move my body, go on a walk, or use some of my other senses to calm my nervous system.
So you can use your vision with a peripheral vision technique where you focus on something and then expand your vision so that you're seeing more of the periphery. I've used tapping sometimes, which uses the acupressure points and helps calm the body through pressure. There's things like humming or going and getting a glass of cold water that can help.
There's a variety of different techniques that you can try for calming anxiety through your body, but all of them involve doing something that's distracting or focusing on something else rather than engaging those thoughts and going into those thought loops of trying to solve this quote unquote dangerous problem. And sometimes for me and my clients, I found that once the body gets a little bit of soothing, then we are able to better access some of those top down approaches. Here are a few other ways to think about anxiety that have helped me.
One thing I've heard is that anxiety and excitement use the same physiological response in the body. So if you think of excitement, it's actually very similar to those feelings of anxiety, maybe like a tightness in your stomach or in your chest or racing heart. That can happen with excitement too.
Imagine you're about to go on a roller coaster and you're feeling that excitement of it. And so I've heard that anxiety is excitement without the breath. So sometimes when I'm feeling those feelings of anxiety, I can remind myself how closely they resemble those feelings of excitement, but without the breath so I can remember to breathe.
Another way I've thought about this habit of anxiety is that our brain actually likes solving problems. It gets a little bit of dopamine when we have a problem and we fix it in our mind. And so we may have inadvertently trained our brain to look for more problems to fix so that we get this little bit of dopamine.
So this is the habit that is going on, looking for problems, trying to find things to solve. And so it's like the brain is kind of throwing a stick for us to go chase. And every time we chase it, it reinforces this pattern of when there's a stick thrown, we have to go chase it.
So I try to think when some of these anxious thoughts come up, I don't have to chase every stick the brain is throwing. Or if the brain is opening a door with these thoughts of anxiety, the brain can keep opening these doors, but I don't have to walk through them. So the point here is that we're not trying to eliminate anxiety.
We're not fighting it once it comes up because we're in this habit. Anxious thoughts will come up. That's just not even a problem.
It's just how we react to them that will change how our brain keeps producing them or not. Then you can go to maybe some mantras or affirmations that resonate for you when you have anxiety. So I've gathered a few that I want to read to you, and you can see if some of these, even just one of them, resonates with you that you could use during times of anxiety.
It's okay that I'm feeling this way. It's uncomfortable, but it's safe. This moment is temporary.
I'm in control. I can do hard things. I'm enough.
My anxiety is lying to me. I'm allowing this sensation in my body to be present. I'm not in any danger.
This is just my mind playing tricks on me. I can get through whatever life throws at me. I have the power to control my thoughts and feelings.
I'm stronger than this emotion. I'm in full control of my body. I'm confident.
I'm not afraid to make mistakes. I'm good at solving the problems in the moment. So if or when it comes up, I will solve it easily, and I don't have to think about all of the what-ifs right now.
I know that I'm able to ask for and receive help if I need it. I've survived this before, and I can survive it again. This is the feeling of the unknown, and I can get used to it.
My feelings are allowed to be here. I'm in control. When you can lean into those feelings of anxiety or the unknown and tolerate them more and more without reacting, then, as I've said over and over, your brain will produce them less.
This is the way to unlearn anxiety. And then one last thought is that the opposite of anxiety is not calm, it's trust. So often you'll hear people say, just calm down and calm your mind, and if that seems really hard, going to calm may be too far of a leap for you, and you don't even have to get to this calm state, but you could maybe lean into trust.
For me, starting to trust is this feeling of, if this thing comes up, I'll figure out how to handle it. I have a very powerful mind that can solve problems, but I don't need to solve all of these problems right now. I can trust that if it does come up, I'll know what to do or I'll ask for help if I need it.
So I hope this helps if you identify with having any kind of anxiety. First of all, knowing that it is very common. It's a survival state that your brain has learned and gotten very good at going into.
It may even be a state you've lived in for a long time, and that is still okay. You will be able to rewire it. You'll be able to teach your brain not to go into it as often as you allow it and understand it and react in these other ways rather than getting into all of the thoughts and problem solving.
And lastly, what I'll say is, I've found it very common that people start with symptoms of chronic pain, and when those symptoms go down, they actually have an increase in anxiety. So maybe they haven't really thought of themselves as a super anxious person, or maybe that was something they dealt with in the past, and then the pain has preoccupied their mind. But it can be one of those symptom imperatives.
It's kind of like whack-a-mole. You hit down that pain, and then something else pops up, a new symptom. And often one of those symptoms can be anxiety.
So it's very normal. It's also able to be reversed, and just takes patience and compassion with yourself and consistency. It's like training a puppy.
You don't have to eliminate that behavior of the brain, but you just respond to it differently over time, and the brain learns to produce it less. If you are struggling with anxiety or other physical symptoms, and you're ready to take it to the next level, apply all of this work, have a community of people around you that are going through something similar so you don't feel alone, then please check out my group coaching membership, Alignment Academy. I have the link in my bio, and you can check out more about how you can support yourself through this time of change, rewiring your brain, and healing in a compassionate way and in a way that will get you the results faster than if you were doing it on your own.
Okay, thanks guys. Have a good week. Thank you so much for listening.
I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. And of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an unstoppable body and mind.