4 Agile Steps to Overcome those Inner Obstacles!

The secret to making changes is through WOOP. What the heck am I talking about you say? Let me explain. 

Dr. Gabriele Oettingham was intrigued by the trendy belief that if one just thinks positively, one will reach their goals. So she conducted her own research. From it, she synthesized four steps (with the acronym WOOP) that really do enable people to meet their goals. Positive thinking was part of it but needed the other three steps to really work. Here are her four steps.

1. What is your Wish? What is your most important wish or struggle to overcome?

2. What is the best Outcome? If your wish is fulfilled, where would that leave you? What would be the best, most positive outcome? Think and try to visualize how fulfilling your wish would feel. (This is the positive thinking step.)

3. What is your main inner Obstacle? What is it within you that holds you back from fulfilling your wish?

4. Make a Plan. What can you do to overcome your obstacle?

Try it for yourself!

1. Pick a Wish around your anxiety.

2. Identify your best Outcome and take a moment to imagine it as fully as you can.

3. Identify your main inner Obstacle and take a moment to imagine it fully. 

4. Have a Plan for yourself. Identify one action you can take or one thought you can think to overcome your obstacle when you experience it. (Hint: Try the label “false alarm,” grab control of your breathing, and refocus concretely on the present).

It is important to have a positive thought or goal, but research also suggests that you need to identify what is likely to get in your way too. Then you need to have a plan of attack ready. Only then are you likely to succeed! Go ahead, give WOOP a try. I'd love to hear how it works for you!

Like Unicorns and Rainbows? No, just optimism.

Dr. Martin Seligman's research points the way toward learning how to strengthen our sense of personal agency (our ability to positively impact our lives) and even learn how to be more optimistic with our life situations.

Not unicorns and rainbows optimistic, more like the Little Engine that Could optimistic. And since both personal agency and optimism are extremely helpful in transforming our anxiety I’d say that is good news indeed!

Dr. Seligman found that optimism largely comes down to how we “explain” the events in our lives.

As you read the following terms, try and figure out how you tend to “explain” factors in your life in general and toward anxiety in particular.

Permanence refers to the belief that negative events, situations and/or their causes are permanent, even when evidence, logic, and past experience indicate that they are probably temporary ("I’m always going to be be worried before work" vs. "I’m worried right now before work, there have been mornings that I wasn’t worried.").

Pervasiveness refers to the tendency to generalize so that negative features of one situation are thought to extend to others as well ("I lost that contract I really wanted" vs. "I’m stupid". Or "I wasn’t invited to lunch today" vs. "Nobody likes me").

Personalization refers to whether one tends to attribute negative events or situations to one’s own flaws or to outside circumstances or other people. While it is important to take responsibility for one’s mistakes, it’s important to be aware of whether one’s self-blame over a particular event or situation is realistic and appropriate. (“I’m anxious because I’m not good enough” vs. “I’m anxious because I’m watching too much bad news on tv.”)

In order to restore your confidence, optimism and sense of personal agency with your anxiety and worry, work towards cultivating a less permanent and pervasive explanatory style.

Oh, and try not to take everything so personal too.

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!