Our Superpower for Anxiety

There isn’t really any one-size-fits-all magic bullet with anxiety. Except... our breathing. Dr. Andrew Weil asserts, “If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would be simply to learn how to breathe correctly.” Once you learn the oldest and most effective breathing tricks in the book, your anxiety will never look back. Okay, you'll need to put in time and practice, but THEN your anxiety will never look back. This is truly a superpower we all have!

Even though we’ve been breathing since before we can remember, there is still a lot we can learn about doing it better. And it is essential that we do, because not only does our breathing react to different thoughts, emotions, and situations in our lives, but it can actually cause us to feel certain thoughts and emotions.

The reason for this is that our breathing is intrinsically tied to our nervous system. Our in-breath is connected to our sympathetic nervous system, which manages our fight or flight response. And our out-breath is connected to our parasympathetic nervous system, which manages our relaxation response. So within this one system, we have the capability to control both the “gas” and the “brakes.” Pretty cool.

And just like our cars, these two systems come as one unit. In order for us to get a handle on our worry, stress, and anxiety, we must focus on strengthening our parasympathetic nervous system response by making it more dominant than our sympathetic nervous system response. And we do this by practicing “optimal breathing” throughout the day until it becomes our new normal.

Optimal breathing should use your abdomen, not just your chest. It should be deep, slow, and rhythmic and done through the nose, not the mouth. You also want to make sure you breathe out by pulling your belly button toward your spine. Remember, your breathing has a direct impact on your thoughts and feelings.

Now here is the breathing technique to use when you feel your anxiety, stress, or worry arise and you’ve just called out one of your body’s “false alarms.”

It’s called a 4-7-8 breath. Breathe in through your nose for a slow count of 4 (from your belly, not your chest), hold it for a slow count of 7, and then let it out through your mouth for a slow count of 8 (pulling your belly button back toward the spine and pushing out all the air).

Take a moment to try it right now. (Since I'm just throwing this on you, you may need to adjust the counts. Do what feels comfortable. The key is holding for a longer count than the inhale and exhaling for the longest count of all).

Repeat three times.

You can also repeat this technique throughout the day whenever you think of it. I find myself using it when I can’t remember things, when I’m late for an appointment, when I’m starting to feel “off,” or when I think of what Dr. Weil said. Okay, that last one doesn’t happen that much. :-)

Overcome Obstacles!

Let’s face it—no one likes unexpected delays. Troubleshooting on the front end of making changes will pay huge dividends on the back end. Focusing on possible behavioral obstacles to overcoming your anxiety will help you get to your destination faster.

The key to overcoming our worry and anxiety is to label our thoughts false alarms and then turn our attention to something else. Turning our attention sounds easy enough, so you might be surprised that you’d put up any resistance.

There are a few hidden reasons that may trip you up. See if any might relate to you.

• Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve our problems with the same thinking that helped create them.” But you don’t need to think or do things differently because you used to be able to control things your own way.

• You’re afraid you’re going to miss something important if you don’t keep your focus on your worry or anxiety.

• Doing new things takes effort. You promise to do this when the kids go back to school and things settle down a little.

• You read that worrying helps calm the limbic system because it makes you feel like you are doing something to help your situation. Plus it just feels better to worry. So you want to stick with what feels known.

• There are so many things you want to change about your life that you’re not happy about. You actually don’t want to be aware of the here and now. You know it's sad, but you’re being honest.

• You’re afraid to fail. What if you do all this and it still doesn’t work? It’ll confirm that you are going to have this your whole life. You don’t want to know that.

As you know, changing behavior is difficult. We are especially challenged when we are trying to turn away from a highly charged and very familiar emotion like anxiety, worry, and judgment. One possible related reason is that neuroscientists have discovered that shame and guilt activate reward centers in our brains. So if you are feeling a pull to stay your course, it makes sense.

A conscious decision to pick the road less traveled and take on a new response to your anxiety can be aided by this exercise: Identify YOUR main inner obstacle (what gets in your way) to behavior change, either from the list above or a different one you can think of. Then, when you realize you are being hooked by that reason not to change your worry or anxiety, label it a false alarm, grab control of your breath, and focus on something concretely in the here and now.

Change isn’t easy. BUT it does get easier every single time we do it. Eventually “not worrying” or “not feeling anxious” will become your second nature.

Unexpected Roadblocks

There is no denying that we are creatures of habit. So much so that many of our anxiety roadblocks and detours come from unexpected places.

These are our hidden thoughts and beliefs that range from being right under our radar to off our map entirely. Let’s try to bring some of our hidden thoughts to light, because they have the power to keep us hooked in our anxiety if we don’t.

Do any of these fit you?

• Your success at work demands that you’re constantly worrying and thinking of all the things that can go wrong in order to troubleshoot.

• Your mind is always creating and coming up with new ideas. You’d get bored if your mind wasn’t going 24/7.

• You are the hub that holds your busy family together. It is essential that you are thinking and looking ahead all the time or things will start to fall apart.

• You’ve been this way for so long, you don’t know any other way.

Or on a more hidden level:

• Your mom or dad seemed to worry a lot or have anxiety. In a way that is hard to explain, you feel more connected to them when you worry or have anxiety too. Especially if they are no longer with you and you miss them.

• You’ve always been really sensitive and intuitive. Although it has its downsides, you’ve always considered it something that made you special. When you feel anxious or worrisome thoughts, it may be a premonition, and you don’t want to risk not listening to it.

• Growing up, you had questions about religion and were told just to have faith. So you learned not to question and believed everything, just in case. Now, you feel like you should not question whether your worrying is helpful, just in case it is. It seems too risky. (This isn’t a knock against faith or God, just a potential misdirected belief that could be getting in your way.)

• You grew up vowing not to be __________ (e.g., poor, alcoholic, overweight, sick, unhappy, etc.) like your family. If you aren’t hypervigilant and constantly on the lookout for dangers, you’re afraid you might follow on autopilot in their footsteps.

• Growing up, you would have given anything for your parents to have shown a little more concern about where you were and what you were doing. Worrying shows that you care and are keeping the problem front and center in your mind. If you stop worrying, it’ll be like you stop caring, and you know how bad that feels.

• You don’t believe you deserve better.

If any of these resonate with you, start noticing each and every time you might have that thought.

The fact is, these thoughts may have good intentions and at one point probably served you well. But if you are struggling with worry and anxiety, it is time you test the waters and see these thoughts as unhelpful, then start labeling them false alarms.

Don’t Give your Anxiety the Time of Day

Just ignore it.

Sounds like a Herculean task at first I know. It’s almost like asking a person to not look at a car accident when passing by. Impossible. Until you realize it is just a movie screen and you have seen the movie a million times before.

Our anxieties’ physical symptoms are like a movie we’ve seen a million times before.

Wait, I haven’t even had anxiety a million times!?!

I know, but the anxious feelings in our body are the exact same feelings we’ve experienced in tons of different situations up to this point. Let’s explore some of those other times we have felt them when they didn’t scare us.  

We’ll use these four examples: rapid heart rate, sweating profusely, difficulty breathing, and shaky hands. Now let’s identify some of the times we had these exact same physical sensations not affiliated with our anxiety.

Rapid heart rate: Think of that time you had too much caffeine, or watched a scary movie, the moment before your child’s first recital, or when a fire truck whizzed by you with blaring alarms out of nowhere.

Sweating profusely: Think of, summer on the east coast of the U.S., the end of a workout in the gym, walking during your lunch break, or any time during that new “hot” yoga class you love.

Difficulty breathing: Like when you took the 5 flights of stairs instead of the elevator, were in the middle of fun zumba class or went hiking with a friend.

Shaky hands: Think about the time you had low blood sugar before lunch, drank too much caffeine, or after spending the whole day helping a friend move.

It is important to recognize that when we are panicking or feeling anxious, we are interpreting physical sensations as disturbing when they feel  normal in other situations.

So take a moment right now and identify 3 specific body sensations that you have when you’re anxious. Then identify everyday activities and situations when you feel those same uncomfortable physical sensations.

Next time you start to feel your anxiety, remind yourself that you’re familiar with those physical sensations and they’re nothing to worry about. After you do this and label them false alarms, you can turn your attention away from your body and onto something you are doing, effectively not giving it the time of day.

What do you say now Hercules?

That said, when you first start experiencing physical sensations that worry you, please consult with a physician. Once you are cleared of any health issues, you’ll be able to practice the “don’t give it the time of day” strategy without second guessing yourself or sabotaging your efforts.

What we Know and What we Don't

Here’s the part you probably know. Currently, when your anxiety acts up and disrupts your life, your alarm system is going off when you don’t need it. So let me tell you the part that many people don’t know. And it happens to be the crux of how to start fixing it.  

Since we know our fear or anxiety isn’t rational, analyzing it or thinking through it won’t help, nor will positive affirmations, reverse psychology or calling ourselves mean names. That said, we might conclude that we need to get out of our heads entirely and just let minds wander.

But before we go in that direction, research on the subject of mind wandering completed by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, and described in the journal Science, found that people spent 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they were doing. And this mind wandering typically made them unhappy.

Mind wandering for many also seems to lead to feeling anxious or worried. It seems the tendency for us to slip into habits of ruminating about the past or projecting worst-case-what-ifs into the future has little resistance when we are letting them wander willy nilly.

So then, how do we calm our minds and our nervous system?

Glad you asked. We need to bypass our normally helpful intellectual brains and communicate in a language that calms our mind and our nervous system. The way we do this pulls together the steps on how to be a buffalo with an antidote to  mind wandering.

1. Label our anxious and worrisome thoughts false alarms and

2. Grab control and slow our breathing and, here’s the new part,

3. Focus our minds back on to what we are doing at that moment.. And we can literally be doing anything. That part doesn’t matter.

A great strategy to help us focus on what we’re doing in the here and now, is to use the 5 Senses Strategy. To use this strategy, you pick one of your five senses and identify something that fits in that category. For example, say you are at work and you feel your anxiety starting to rise. It is right before a big meeting in which you are on the agenda to present.

So, you label those anxious thoughts and feelings false alarms. You grab control of your breathing and slow it down. Then, you focus on the smell of the lavender essential oil you have at your desk. You take a big smell and really allow yourself to take in the fragrance that you love and that reminds you of other things.

As you do so, you ground yourself in the present and effectively make your anxiety do an about face.

Nature vs Nurture

It’s understandable to just want to skip to the punchline and know the specific cause for your anxiety, but let me unpack this a little. Because the fact is, even for doctors and scientists, the jury is still out.

According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, the exact cause of generalized anxiety is unknown. There is evidence that biological factors, genetics, medical factors, environmental factors, substance use and stressful life experiences play a role.

Pretty broad and not very comforting I know.

Often we feel if only we could just put our finger on the exact cause we would be able to understand why we are the way we are or do things we do. And actually our brains do too. They crave understanding things. Unfortunately we can’t always satisfy our brains in this regard.

And this turns out to be okay because no matter how nice and reassuring it is, information and understanding by itself doesn’t create change.

So, knowing that we won’t be able to totally identify why we have anxiety, here is the comforting part. We can make huge gains in overcoming it without “connecting all the dots” in our personal history because of something called neuroplasticity.

Have you heard the saying “neurons that fire together wire together”? Neuroscientists have found that the brain is more amazing than we ever knew and they call it neuroplasticity! And this is a huge reason why we don’t need to do a deep dive into all the nitty gritty of our past.

Meaning, our anxiety or chronic worry caused by factors from the past can be changed in the present thanks to our brain’s ability to create and strengthen new neural pathways.  

And the way we do this is by:

• Labeling our anxious and worrisome thoughts and feelings false alarms.

• Over and over, every time we have those thoughts or feelings.

And with this continued and repeated practice, you’ll out-do both nature and nurture.

So you can see, the main “dots” we have to connect have less to do with nature or nurture and more to do with our perceptions and self-talk.

An important caveat being if we have experienced some sort of trauma in our lives. Trauma adds a complexity that goes beyond the anxiety many people face. To honor that, I’d highly recommend working with experienced professional, in addition to following these strategies, to help you see the results you deserve.

Be the Buffalo

Has a well meaning friend ever told you, “It’s just your imagination. Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Did your fear go away? Of course not. We’re rational beings, we know there is nothing to really be afraid of but we still are. And our anxious bodies follow suit, as if something real is threatening or something bad is going to happen. Right here and now.

Thanks to these “false alarms” in our minds and bodies, we and millions of others fail to accomplish our goals and live the lives we want. Let's change this.

How you ask? Be a buffalo. Wilma Mankiller, the first ever female chief of the Cherokee nation once said, “Cows run away from the storm while the buffalo charges toward it – and gets through it quicker.  Whenever I’m confronted with a tough challenge, I do not prolong the torment, I become the buffalo.”

In a totally counterintuitive twist of fate, avoiding things that make us anxious or run away from things when our anxiety strikes, actually makes our anxiety worse. Repeatedly connecting avoidance or running away with things we fear strengthens our brain’s understanding that there is something real to fear. Dr. Hebb’s neuroscience research helps explain this connection when he found that, “Neurons that fire together, wire together”. Simply, what we repeat strengthens.

So, let’s start making different connections and transform our anxiety. Let’s learn to be the buffalo.  

In doing so, we need to approach it head on. We need to label those anxious, pessimistic and worrisome thoughts false alarms and then grab the controls of our breathing.

As it turns out, our breath is one of the only major systems in our bodies that we can take control of. Seriously, once we realize that we can control our breathing, and our breathing majorly impacts our anxiety, we have at our disposal an amazing system hack!  

So, after labeling, focus on purposefully taking slow, deep belly breaths. That’s it. The slow exhale sends a signal to your nervous system that everything is A-OK and aids in our confidence to get head first into our great, big life.

And this will work in every situation that is holding you back because, with practice,  it will retrain your brain out of sending you those irrational and paralyzing messages. Remember, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” And you get the back-up help you need by using your breathing to temper and avoid your fight/flight/freeze response.

How can you Be the Buffalo with your anxiety?

Ice Cream Flavor Intervention

I learn some of my best tricks from the clients I have worked with in the past. They'll see something or try something new and, if it works, will pass it on to me.  I consider myself very lucky in this regard AND I get to pass it on to all of you...that's like lucky squared!

The 10 Second Anti-Anxiety Trick came to me in just this fashion. My former client passed along this gem from an article in July's issue of Prevention magazine. It seemed so good and right up our alley that I couldn't resist making it July's feature. 

Here it goes. "The next time you're feeling anxious, ditch the happy beach thoughts and rattle off as many ice cream flavors as you can. The exercise leverages a technique known as "grounding", which can help bring your brain and your body back to the present. "It's a distraction technique", says Vaile Wright of the American Psychological Association. 

"It frees you from overwhelming feelings and unhealthy thoughts spinning in your head." Why ice cream instead of, say, state capitals? The familiar dessert adds a level of comfort and nostalgia, researchers say." 

Give it a shot and let me know how it works for you! 

"You want the truth?!? You can't handle the truth!

It’s road trip season! What "truth" will you find?

How awesome would it be if our worrisome thoughts would take a break from replaying past situations and projecting us into future ones? How wonderful would it be if we weren’t on constant plan mode? Mapping out everything in excruciating detail by excruciating detail? How sane would it feel to stop practicing conversations in our heads of how we may respond to possible situations in the future? Seriously, please tell me I’m not alone on this last one :-)

On a recent road trip I discovered something quite surprising. It was an actual “Aha!” moment around these very things.

Over the years I've worked on ways to focus my attention away from ruminating on the past and feeling anxious about the future. I've learned how to place my attention on the present and have strategies to use when I get caught in an unhelpful spiral.

And during my busy day to days, it works great. More times than not, I feel present and grounded.

Enter my recent experience. Driving for hours on a solo road trip, I discovered something that gave me pause.

After immersing my attention in the deep red sandstone cliff walls and the lush green brush punctuating the hills. As I was admiring the roaring river racing over huge boulders, tumbled there centuries before by rockslides. While I was feeling the warm, fresh air and looking over hundreds of miles to the distant white peaks of a favorite mountain range…

I got, well...bored. What?!? It seemed so weird. And confusing.

It was like pulling myself through a grueling marathon and then being bored quickly after the finish line. Not what I was expecting.

My thoughts went sprinting back to all the things that my thoughts usually sprint back to. And before I knew it I was fully back in my head, racing along in past and future.

Why couldn’t I just linger in this place of presence and awareness? Why did I get bored when there was an infinite expanse of amazing presence and awareness to be experienced?

I hear Jack Nicholson’s voice from the movie A Few Good Men screaming at me, “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” :-)

My road trip “Aha truth” moment was realizing how entertained I am by my thoughts, even the irritating and nagging ones. So much so that I even sometimes choose them over being in the here and now! What?!? I know!

Good thing mindfulness is an ongoing practice! My practice now includes looking at ways to redefine and rework my relationship with being mentally entertained by my past and future repetitive thoughts.

Because in another weird way, I think I might choose to be “entertained” by some anxious, fearful thoughts too.

Okay, I may need another road trip to tackle that one :-)

Drop me a line to tell me about your Road Trip Truths! I'd love to hear about them.

5 Steps to Stop Worrying When You Want to Fall Asleep

Does it seem like your thoughts are on overdrive when you lay down to go to sleep? Are you making progress in decreasing your worrying during the day but bedtime seems to make up the difference?

Often we get into the pattern of worrying at night as a stopgap measure to make sure nothing important slips through the cracks.

This stopgap measure may start out seeming helpful in the beginning. It may be the first quiet time you’ve had all day and reflecting on all these things really feels like it is helping keep all your plates spinning and balls in the air.

But, like many patterns or habits we establish, there comes a time when it crosses over to the “unhelpful” side. Worrying is one of the most common of these habits, regardless of the time of day.

If you find your mind is on overdrive when your head hits the pillow, these 5 Steps will be a lifesaver.

1. Recognize and identify worry myths. Recognize the role worry plays in your general belief system. Read over the Top 5 Worry Myths and identify which of the myths are your biggest hooks. We often confuse worrying (or even over analyzing) as problem solving and build up a false sense of comfort by doing it. Once we can see worry for what it is, we can start breaking our strong connection to it.

2. Thank and label false alarms. At night, part of your struggle is that you’ve gotten into the habit of receiving a level of comfort with worrying. Your brain actually thinks it’s being helpful when it starts the worry-machine as you lay down. You need to thank it for doing it’s job and label the thoughts as false alarms. They are false alarms not because they are about things that don’t exist or that may not be important, but because the timing is coming when you do not need to be alerted and you won’t be doing anything productive about them.

3. Write down the to-do’s. As you lay down and your brain revs up, thank and label the false alarms, and then write down the things you think you need to remember or something you just thought of. Keep a pen and paper by your bed to jot these down so you don’t feel tempted to continue to play them over and over in your mind. It is frequent enough that we think of something valuable at this time of night that having this pen and paper by your bedside will create peace of mind that the gem you thought of won’t disappear by morning.

4. Get up and read a book. If you do the above 3 steps and you find your brain just won’t turn off, get up and move to another room to read a book. I know, the thought of leaving a warm, cozy bed just because your brain isn’t cooperating doesn’t sound that appealing. But, it is important to physically interrupt the bedtime/brain overdrive habit that has been started.

5. Focus on counting slow breaths.  When you have identified, labeled, written and read and are ready for sleep, turn your attention to your breath. Breathing in through your nose and out through your nose, Count to six each way. This is called coherent breathing and will help you as you continue in the direction of awesome sleep. If the count of six in and six out is too slow, figure out the slowest you can do. The slow, steady rhythm is more important actual count here.

There are other things to keep in mind, like making sure you minimize your caffeine intake, start winding down your energy and activity level an hour before bedtime and try to disengage from the tv or internet at least 30 minutes before trying to fall asleep. BUT if you don’t specifically address your worrying then you will continue to struggle. These 5 steps will help tremendously!