Welcome to Destiny. Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning. Oh boy, here we are back in the driver's seat and ready for another episode of Destiny. And this one is kind of dear to my heart. It has to do with anxiety. And as a young person growing up in high school, I had a lot of anxiety. I was just nervous, had an upset
stomach, had a nervous stomach. And when I got into college it didn't go away, and I was on all kinds of and acids and stomach issues, and I even had anti anxiety medicines for a couple, I want to say, a year, and they didn't do anything for me, maybe feel numb. And I eventually grew out of it and I wasn't so anxious anymore. My son inherited my anxiety and he was on aderall for a couple of years. And then at the time my wife is like, no, he's
got to get off of this. He's just numb and he's having other problems. And that's the solution that we deal with today when we have anxiety, and a lot of us have anxiety. We're anxious, be it at work, be it at home, in relationships, just not knowing what to expect in life can cause anxiety new situations, and it's as well here today. It's part of a fight or flight reflex that is innate in our physiology, and we don't want to get rid of it completely. We just want to
be able to understand it better. We want to be able to control it. And for me, one of the solutions is calming the mind at least once a day through a meditative practice. For some people that can be actually meditating for twenty minutes or longer. Some Zen practices are an hour or more. I can't do an hour. I just don't have the time. And the other practices are yoga or tai chi or exercising and clearing the body of cortisol or the stress and being able to react better. This is a big
one right now. We don't get out enough, we don't exercise enough, and we tend to cover up our anxiety with a beer, two alcohol, cannabis. I know people that are anxious and they use cannabis to calm themselves. That's really not a good solution. I mean, I love using cannabis for various issues, but if you're anxious and you're constantly anxious. Cannabis isn't
the solution, It really isn't. One of the other things is like overwhelming the mind through TV, you know, just you know, patches patching our anxiety with television. That's not good. That's not good at all. So I have to say this about our program today. There's a great deal of solutions that our guest provides, things that I wasn't aware of. And here I am former program director for one of the largest wellness conferences in the country, known as Whole Life. So it's you know, it was an eye
opener for me. But the thing about anxiety is that if you're not using the technique that are offered today, if you're simply masking your anxiety by avoiding situations, that's not that's not the way to do it. And I'm I'm guilty of that myself. Rather than get into situations that are causing anxiety, I tend to avoid them. And you know, it's that can be easily
done. But then you're then you're sheltered. Then you're uh, you're ostracized, you're lonely, you're not going and doing the things, you're not being social. We are social creatures. I'm really guilty of this. I you know, I have a team that is spread around the country, actually around the world. I have people in England that we work with, and so it's easy to just sit here in my studio and just say, hey, I don't need to go out and be social. But that's not the way
to to to interact. And again, we're social beings. We need to be interacting. I know I feel a lot better when I'm talking and I'm interacting with people, meaning new individuals. That can be anxiety feeling, feeling kind of situations though, But a little anxiety is good. A lot of anxiety is not good. If you're anxious all the time, it is not a good thing, and you need to have it looked at if you can,
and I talk about this all the time. Try to find somebody who can understand holistic wellness and who can work with you, either a therapist, a coach, a meditative teacher, somebody who can give you holistic advice so you don't have to take these adder all these nerves suppressing or anxiety suppressing drugs, because they just create havoc. They create havoc for your metabolism, they
create havoc for your nervous system and it's not something to be avoided. As I mentioned in the very beginning of this program, anxiety is part of the fight or flight trigger that we all have innately. It's part of who we are. It goes back to our hunter gatherer days where we had to fight off dinosaurs. You know, here comes a t rex. Get the hell out of the way, run baby, run, you know, or confront that sucker with your team and use your spears and put that baby down.
I can't imagine trying to put down a t rex. So if you've seen how big they are, they're monsters. Man, I'd get the hell out of there. You run, baby, run. But anyhow, that's the fight or flight reflex I'm talking about, which is what anxiety is all about. So today's program is Anxiety to Empowerment, and my guest is Amanda Huggins.
I hope you enjoy the program. Oh my god, what we live with today in our world is a lot of stress and pressure and performance issues no matter what you're talking about, and that brings up anxiety talk today. Our focus today is anxiety. We have a new author that we're introducing and I've dealt with anxiety off and on a number of years. And thankfully, when I was a younger person, I discovered meditation, which we'll talk about
a little bit later. But my guest today has written a book called Anxiety to Empowerment, Exercises and Meditations to Stop Stressing and Start Engaging. Very cool title, and we're going to talk about how anxiety can creep up into your life, how you typically avoid it if you're somebody who wants to address it immediately. Sometimes you'll go to a doctor, an all a path and remember people all they have in their bag of tricks is medicine, surgery and that's
about it, or radiation if you have cancer. Let me tell you about my guest today. Amanda Huggins is a anxiety and mindful coach, certified yoga instructor, podcast host, author, speaker, and besides presenting online courses, Amanda offers guidance on her podcast, which is used to be Anxiety Talks with Amanda will Learn to Talk. She just told me with the new title as I forgot it. But she does personal counseling and she does webinars, and
I gotta tell you, I didn't read the whole book. I read enough of it. It's a good parlay into this topic of anxiety. So Amanda, Welcome to Destiny. Great to see you. Thanks so much for having me. Gliff, I'm so excited. Hey, let's talk about you because you opened the book a little bit on your personal anxiety. Was what was triggering your anxiety and what was the key factors for wanting to write this book? That's a great starter question. Oh watch wat y'all. I know,
no, this is what I like. Get right to it, so you know, I can answer that in kind of like a broad esoteric way, which would be what's causing most people's anxiety. It's some level of disconnection from themselves. But when we get down to it and look at the specifics, I was in a period, and I guess I'll just kind of give a brief history first, which is prior to becoming an anxiety coach and energy healer
and all this wonderful stuff. Now, my previous career was in tech and in startups, so my work mind was very much in the achiever energy, right, So I was always reaching for the next raise, next promotion, the next move, and I was good at what I did, so that achiever in me got scratched. But achievement without fulfillment ultimately winds up creating anxiety. So there was a lot of like who am I? What am I? Am? I on purpose? What is my purpose? You know?
In the career aspect, And then when we look at relationship to self, there was just deep, deep self worth wounds that needed to be healed. In my romantic relationships, you know, friendship, familial relationships. Most importantly, like my relationship with myself. I was not tending to my nervous system. I wasn't listening to my feelings. I wasn't connected to my intuition. And you know, all of it is, in my opinion, divine,
because in hindsight, it led me to where I am today. But I sort of kind of I piece meal together healing for myself because I do have that part of my brain that I'm a virgo too, So I love logic and steps and organization, and I thrive with some structure. And yet I felt this deeply spiritual, emotional, intuitive kind of bug start to turn on
within me, and so I'd read spiritual texts. I was starting to dive into yoga teacher training, and that really resonated and then I would read self help books and they would have all of these great mindset techniques that also really resonated, but when it came time for implementation, it all went out the window. Yeah exactly, you know. Yeah, And that's what I mean
when I say I kind of piecemealed healing together. Was I was like, I know that this stuff works, both the spiritual, energetic, esoteric and the tactical. That I have an anxious brain and I need to figure out how to get my brain and body to actually not just understand the concepts, but to practice and create healing so that me peacemealing my own healing together wound
up becoming the programming that I used to serve my clients. And you know, after about a year or two, I was like, I should probably write this down, you know, I think I think people might wanna they might find it helpful. Talk about could you talk about this in the very beginning before you were enlightened, let's just say, to how to working naturally with anxiety? Were you taking any drugs? Were you did you have a prescription for medication? And if so, what did your doctor say to you
about your anxiety? Because they're doing the best they can. I mean, I have doctors in my family, but they just are just so they just don't get it, you know. I I'm friends with, I have people very close to me within the medical community. I will say that people close to me, I have an understanding of the holistic side too. But when it came to like my early stage doctors, first of all, no one, no one talked about anxiety as a kid. No one talked about it
when I was in college, and even after college. It was in the media a little bit, but it was always that like quirky, weird character who just like was a little stressed all the time. You know, it wasn't Uh it was hard to find representation for what was actually happening because everyone's experiencing it and we're all really good at masking. Uh. So when I had first gone to a doctor, I was living in LA and there was there was no conversation and this is one experience, right, but it was
I sat down. I remember I was somewhere in West LA. We talked for about five minutes. They said, are you depressed? I said, I don't think so. Okay, here's some xanax VNIX. Yeah, that's one of the big ones. Yeah, and I'll save you the long story.
But I basically had that same experience with two other doctors specific to anxiety, and then when ADHD came in, that was a whole separate slew of prescriptions and every single time, I feel like, you know, when I was younger and before I'd gotten into this work, I had like a lot of hope. I placed a lot of stock and like, maybe maybe this pill will be the thing that makes me feel better. Yeah, but like anything in life, there is no one pill that makes you feel better.
In my experience was anything that I was prescribed would knock something else out of balance. So sure I might not be feeling anxious, but I'm really not feeling anything. Yeah, you're like totally numb, right, Yeah. I
felt more like a zombie than anything else. And this was also while I was going through my first, uh maybe my second yoga teacher training, and that's it's such a physically, emotionally and spiritually demanding experience and I'm sitting there like, huh, nothing's really, nothing's really going through, you know, because you were like shut off to the sensitis. Yeah, so that's funny you mentioned that that's typical when you go to an allopath, they don't have
time for you to do a real in depth history. Maybe your childhood you had anxiety, you had depression perhaps, and so Xanax and these other mood altering drugs were prescribed, and what was the period where you're like, this is not doing it for me. You know, it's funny because you're talking about yoga, becoming a yoga teacher, where you're really not only holding these very important poses that trigger all kinds of hormonal releases and things like that.
Your body probably fought against those drugs. So talk about your translate a transition from the prescribed medications to awakening. I mean kind of an inner heeler. You know. There is one very specific day, and I'll be honest with you. I had changed jobs, right, so I was still I was probably like twenty five or six, I want to say, yeah, And I had just changed jobs, jumped to a different startup, and my health insurance hadn't kicked in yet and it wasn't going to kick in for two months.
And I was like, oh, you know what, I'm not going to be able to renew these prescriptions and I only have a couple of pills left. It was like three of xanax and I think I had I don't know, probably under ten little adderall pills. And I just was like, I why am I waiting until this is done? For me to be done with it? And I flushed everything and just remember it because I was like what am I doing? There was no like drama to it, you know. It wasn't like in the movies, like oh, it's all going away.
It was just like a very clear but simple yeah, I'm done. I like, if I'm going to try to feel better, let's like really try from the inside out and if that doesn't work, we'll figure something else out. But why not give holistic mind, body, soul healing a fair shot first? Yeah, I mean you're intuitively picking up this vibe that I'm
feeling good about stretching, I'm feeling good about becoming a teacher. I don't know if you were doing meditation at that time, but that's all kicking in and dumping the drugs and getting into more of a holistic lifestyle, right. Yeah. Yeah, It's just like anything that once something is no longer in alignment, you either naturally allow the thing to fall away or the universe like gives you something to knock that thing out of your life, and I feel
like mine was probably more of the former. Yeah, where it's just it didn't make sense anymore for me. Talk a little bit about anxiety in general. What is an anxiety in your definition and what do your clients experience? Yeah, so I like to think about anxiety as an umbrella term. So when we're talking about it in our day to day, like, oh, my friend is so anxious, I feel anxious, we're almost always describing the
physical manifestation of emotional unrest. And I say almost always because anxiety is still a somatic experience, right. So you know my last apartment that I lived in when I was in New York City, I could be happy as a clam, but there was construction above and below me, and my nervous system was a wreck. So I was in physical anxiety, but there was no emotional attachment outside of the discomfort from like, God, these noises, because
it's a fight or flight response. But the anxiety that most of us are actually dealing with, that's not just the oh it's my life in danger in this moment. It's psychosocial. So we say we're anxious to describe all of the things we're feeling that we haven't yet worked into or haven't yet healed. So, for example, if you know the classic host breakup or dating right, trying to meet someone new experiences, Oh well, if that person hasn't responded to me, or you know, at this great time and I haven't
really heard anything, and now I'm feeling anxious. It's not about if that person responds to you or not. It's not about if they ask you on a second date. That anxiety you're feeling, the core of it is about your connection to your own self. Wark it's do I know, no matter
what happened, that I am love worthy and whole. Right, when we're talking about, you know, financial anxiety comes up, and yes, there's something really tangible there for folks, but often it's the energy of fear or the energy of scarcity that's presentent in you know, way more than just your bank account. So, and I'm using these just as examples. So when I sit down with a new client, I say, tell me about your anxiety, but I also say, describe it without using the word anxiety.
What emotions do you feel most often that you don't like and that's where we start usually, right, how about like the fear of the unknown, feeling powerless, stressful at work? I mean, there's so many different definitions of anxiety that we fall into, especially in our culture, where it's almost like performance issues. You know, not just relationships, but at work. You talked about your work environment and and socially, it can really catch up big
time. I'm looking at performance as the bigger issue around anxiety and how we have expectations. Talk a little bit about expectations, you know, the second you started talking about performance and you mentioned this, I think when we first hopped on too, I don't think we can talk about performance anxiety without talking about non judgment or you know, dare I say, even compassion, Because the whole thing with performance anxiety is there's a fear of if I don't do
it right. We're a fear of you know, getting it wrong, losing out in some way, failing. We're not actually afraid of the failure. We're afraid of how we'll feel in the failure. We're afraid of how we'll feel after we've messed up. And the reason we're afraid of that feeling is because most of us don't know how to practice self compassion right when we fail
or we feel we haven't done well enough. What we want to do for those who struggle with performance anxiety is going to the judgment say well, you could have done this better, you should have done that, and we beat ourselves up. That's what we're actually feeling anxious about, like on a core energetic level. So if we want to I don't even want to say oversimplify, but if we really just want to simplify performance anxiety is what is the
solve for it? It's practicing deep, deep compassion. Now, if we put this in the context of a client, a lot of folks have really struggled to practice compassion with themselves because it had somethen modeled to them as a child, because they haven't had relationships where they've seen healthy expressions of self compassion.
So when we look at like, how does that work in a one on one session, what I'm often doing with clients is actually figuring out, well, what happened in the past that is created a narrative in both mind, body and all mind, body and soul that you can't it's not safe to be compassionate, it's not safe to comfort yourself when you've failed. So you have to like look at and heal and undo and process a little bit
of that stuff without rolling in it, without getting stuck in it. And it's the healing, the processing, the feeling of the past stuff that makes it so much more safe to actually practice compassion in real time in the present moment. Does that makes sense? Yeah, I'm just wondering. You know,
you're this anxiety I call you the anxiety guru. When we look at anxiety, what's a natural reaction to say, a relationship problem or a work problem, And how do we define when we can't deal with the situation and it turns into anxiety Because I think life, interactions, relationships, just living is going to have situations where you develop anxiety, but there's a natural give and take. I think at some point we can't deal with it anymore and
that's where the problem is. Yes, yeah, So my general approach is we start with the body, we tune into the soul. We work with the mind. So if we're just having like, yeah, life created anxiety, right, you're in a job or a new relationship and some new stuff has started to come up, that's where we first I mean, no, matter what, we're always going to start with the body, right, understanding what your physical anxiety symptoms are, so that we can figure out how to
spot, treat and how to I say triage anxiety right. But really what we're doing is or nourishing the nervous system, and that I mean that really is a piece of the compassion work too, is being present enough with yourself to recognize, hey, I'm just regulated. Let me figure out what I need to do to bring myself back to some level of center. But with thematic anxiety, right, this theme has come at my whole life, I
can't escape it. That's really where we're doing the deeper like tuning into the soul, looking at the core wound, doing some of that healing, and then this working with the mind. That third step is about really starting to train our mind to think differently, to reprogram our thoughts, to create a new belief system. And the reason that I really feel mind work has to be last is because most you know, neural reprogramming or mental training approaches,
you know, they talk about this. I don't think it's clear enough. It wasn't clear to me in the books that I had read. In order for your brain to really believe. To have new thoughts, positive thoughts about yourself reprogrammed, you have to have the feeling attached to it, right. So there's no use in sitting and saying I'm not anxious. I don't feel
anxious. Life is great if you don't feel that is true. So we start with the body, We tune into the soul to get a felt sense of what's possible, and then we come back in with actually starting to reprogram the mind so that the work you're doing solidifies, rather than you're kind of just grasping its straws and trying a few things. Yeah that makes sense, Yeah it does. I'm just trying to for our listeners who may have had
anxiety as children and how they dealt with it. You're talking about a natural reflex, and we're going to talk about the techniques you offer. There's a couple in here that are brilliant and I think are part of a natural response to anxiety. But when we have parents who don't understand, who are also dealing with anxiety, that's where we get into the medications. But let's transition
real quickly. You talk about breathing. I want to get into some of the healing techniques, and it seems like you talk about the the autonomic nervous system and the vegas nerve, which is really a key. It's funny because I haven't been to my yoga class in about a year, but I have a yoga teacher who's very big on the vegas nerve and working that area to help the body respond naturally to anxiety. So talk about the importance of some
of the techniques. Let's get into the breathing. How breathing can trigger a downstep from an anxiety situation. Yeah, So, just to put some language to the vagus nerve, it is a nerve that connects into your heart and it's when it's triggered, it releases a tranquilizing substance onto the heart that asks the heart to calm down basically. And so we trigger the vagus nerve with
different types of stimulation. It can be you know, weights, tapping, but the most successible for most people is through breathing and through deep, long tuned in axhalations. You know. So when people are looking for a quick anxiety solve, I always say there is no quick anxiety solve if you're looking to heal a pattern. But in terms of you know, immediate or near immediate relief. And I know it's the most annoying thing to say, like, oh, take a deep breath, but it is true. It is
so true. It's really where we've got to start. And you know, for a lot of my clients who can't just you know, midday, leave their office or leave a meeting they're in and go meditate, we need to find solutions that help them to self regulate while they're still at their desk or their kids are in the backseat or what have you. So my favorite, because it's easy to remember, favorite technique is square breathing. Because there are four sides of a square, there are four counts to the breath. That's
all you need to remember. Four is the magic number. So to practice square breathing, we inhale for four seconds, we hold the breath for four seconds, we exhale for four seconds, and then we hold empty for four And the reason we want to hold is because those holds, especially at the bottom of that exhale, it's what's allowing the body. We're really the vegus
nerve to release vegust off onto the heart. It's really that's the whole goal when we're starting to feel anxious is we want to bring our heart rate down, because the heart sends more messages to the brain than anything else in the body. So when the heart is beating out of anxiety, it sends a million messages to the brain. Hey, something's wrong. Let's go freak out.
Let's go think about the ten million things that could go wrong. So if we can get the heart under control at least slightly, right, We're not looking for perfection here, but the more we can practice slowing the heart rate down, the higher probability we have of reducing the negative signals the heart
is sending to the brain. And if we can make our headspace two percent clearer, ten percent more clear, we're really really increasing our ability to not go into any anxiety spin We're going to keep ourselves a little bit more on the logical end of a thought process rather than you know, jumping into the
metaphorical swimming pool of anxious thoughts. Right, if you're in a spin cycle, it's like one thought, then another, then another, and after a while you're kind of living and a lot of fear in your own mind. Yeah, I want to talk real briefly about the evolutionary fight or flight response, and how anxiety is part of that. So we don't want to get rid of anxiety. We want to work with it. We want to incorporate
it because it's useful. Yeah, and we won't get into that because that will take a whole show to get into how to use anxiety in a positive mode. But I think we're talking about it by mitigating the intensity real quickly. Talk about what you call this spin cycle of it, or the anxiety loop that builds and builds and builds and builds, and has to do with observation, sensation, thought. You have like six different emotion and reaction,
reaction and so forth, and how those can overwhelm a person. Yeah, you're really not able to function. You're so overtaken by these anxieties, these fear and flight when a flight response that they are, they're just too much. So talk a bit about that and then we're going to move into some
your wonderful healing techniques. Yeah. So the anxiety spin cycle is just what I call that place that almost all of us have gone to where you know, one thought becomes a runaway train that leads to some sort of depreciation of your self worth. So you're you know, let's talk about performance anxiety. Oh shoot, you know, I I just noticed Linda didn't congratulate me or say that I did a good job on my presentation. Yeah, oh my god, no one did. Oh does everyone think that I'm bad at my
job? I am bad at my job. I'm that at everything. I can't stand myself? Why why do I always do things wrong? That's a major loop, right, And you know I'm saying that in about thirty seconds, but and sometimes it does happen in that amount of time or less, but it's most often this slow creep that really starts to pull our pull. I'm doing this as a visual. It's like we pull out of connection with ourselves because all of a sudden we're going into self blame or self shame.
And it was maybe an anxious thought that spurred it. So this may be. I'll try to make this as easy to follow as possible for listeners. I will say there's a full diagram and then an entire chapter to break down in my book of the anxiety spin cycle. But the first step is observation, right, So we observe something a thought, a text, the lack of a text, or email, a tone in someone's voice when they speak to us. An observation is a neutral event, right, so it's not
good or bad. But once our brain receives the information that we've observed based on your history, it will file that information as safe or unsafe. Okay, And now that's why if we're talking about deeper emotional healing with anxiety, we got to go back and figure out what are the things that cause our brain to file this experience as unsafe. But I'll try to say on track here, so we observe that, and that creates a thought. So, oh huh, maybe Linda's mad at me that thought or excuse me. That
creates a sensation. First, So when our brain receives information that's unsafe, the heart starts to speed up. Right, this is when we go into fight or fight. And now that our heart is telling the brain and the rest of the body, hey, we're hyperactive. We start to create thoughts and the thought can be oh, I'm bad at my job. A thought ultimately will turn into an emotion if it's left unchecked. So I'm bad at my job becomes I'm a bad person, and I'm making a couple jumps here
just for the sake of this example. When we're in that emotion, I feel bad about myself, you know, lower self worth, maybe I'm not good at anything. We then often react from that place. So for one person, their reactivity might be, hey, Linda, why didn't you tell me I did a good job. Or it might be they do receive praise and they push it away. It's like, no, I'm not good at
anything. You don't have to say that. So what winds up happening is when we're in that state of reactivity, we wind up retriggering ourselves because then our mind is now attuned to look for anything that's in alignment with that anxious feeling. So we wind up just retriggering and kind of like re emphasizing the
same wound, whether it's self worth or scarcity or what have you. So in my book, we talk about the two main places that you have the best chance of breaking the cycle, and then a couple of skills to basically practice continuing to be mindful of that cycle when it comes up. You can't eradicate it forever. Right, This is how our minds work. But we're just trying to help ourselves to eliminate or reduce a pattern. Really, I want to get into before we get into the healing, because you have a
huge of the book talks about healing technique. Some of the problems associated with anxiety are sleep disruption, which is a huge one. We're going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly with my guest today, Amanda Huggins, discussing her latest book, Anxiety to Empowerment. We'll be right back. My guest today is Amanda Huggins. She is a anxiety therapist who has written a book called Anxiety to Empowerment,
Exercises and meditations to stop stressing and start engaging. So we're learning techniques for reducing anxiety. It's funny because you suggest in your book that if you're having anxiety consistently, think about naps, think about meditation. And it's so funny. I'm not anxious for the most part, but I still do do like a half an hour nap at three o'clock every day. It's just so busy. I work for myself, I have my own business. But it's
really helpful to consider rest breaks. Talk a little bit about the importance of sleep in anxiety. Yeah, I actually want to start with rest breaks really, because you know, great sleep is what we're mapping towards. Maps would also be a great thing to map towards too. Yeah. I also know for folks who don't have the luxury of being able to take a nap because they have kids, or they're working multiple jobs, or their body just won't
let them sleep. The ground level that we want to start with is any form of deep rest so your eyes can be open, and it doesn't have to be meditation spoiler alert. If you're breathing and relaxed, it is meditation at least from my perspective. But it's this idea of finding pockets of time where you can really just practice, whether it's full body muscle relaxation or a grounding visual so sitting feeling for a grounding cord, imagining a grounding cord from
your root chakra grow down. Really, you can even just I'm looking out my window right now, finding ten minutes to not have your phone, to sit in the grass, have your feet touched some dirt. All of these things are forms of rest. And if you can only get two minutes today and one minute tomorrow and ten minutes on Friday. Let that be enough to start, Because I think the thing with anxious folks not I think I know, is there tends to be this all or nothing mentality. Right If I
can't get a thirty minute nap in why bother resting? If I can't get a full night of sleep and I haven't in years, why while they're trying to shift anything. And when we're talking about like almost yeah it is, it's it's like a seemingly noble way of giving up, right, It's like, well, I just got to keep going, well, like like sacrificing in kind like yeah, wow, yeah, yeah, So you know,
I could harp on this for a million years. But find the time wherever you can find it, even if it's sitting on the toilet and closing your eyes and breathing. And that's the only place I have. I have clients who are moms, and it's like that is the only time someone's not literally tugging at them. So it's like, turn the shower on, turn some music on, mommy's taking her shower, and for five extra minutes you're just going to sit and breathe, and no one's going to die and everyone's going
to be fine and you're all going to be all the more better. Or if you can just take a little bit of eyes closed or open, breathing, grounding time, that's it. What winds up happening is it feels good, and like anything that feels good, you start to find more time for it. But is there is there a release of I don't know, I don't know if it's serotonin or something. Is there a release of healing hormones or talk about these short minutes of taking a break and why what what do
you think is happening? Yes? Okay, So if we're talking, if we want to use like the most standard language, I guess when we're talking about rest, what we're doing is if you just imagine, I use this visual with a lot of clients, close your eyes and you imagine your cortisol levels or your stress levels on a dial right or on a you know, like a temperature thing, right, and if you're at a ninety eight practice whatever it is, you're going to do the five minutes of rest, the
ten minute walk outside and then tune back into that visual dial of your cortisol level and see where it's at now. Their visualization of their cortisol levels is not going to be a direct like, oh, I lowered my cortisol by X percent. I genuinely don't care about numbers. I care about how someone
feels and understanding. So making that visual connection of when I am resting, when I am grounding, when I am recharging, I'm lowering my cortisol levels, if we can put a visual to that to just help them along, that's great. When we're talking about deep sleep though, or just sleep in general, there's the part of our brain that's responsible for regulating anxiety, our medial prefrontal cortex, if it recharges essentially or replenishes overnight when we have a
certain amount of deep sleep. When we don't get deep sleep, and when I'm saying deep sleep without putting language to it, so non dream sleep. Yeah, if we don't have and it's about it's only about an hour to two hours of deep sleep we need each night unbroken, we're locked in. But if we don't get that, that part of our brain that's responsible for
regulating anxiety essentially doesn't get to recharge. So the next morning, when you're already feeling anxious, you're sort of one foot below or below ground level because you're waking up with anxiety and the part of your brain that's supposed to help you with it isn't online now. So when we're talking about working towards great sleep night, we are also talking about how do I reduce dream based sleep.
And this is where for a lot of folks, medication really interferes because we have all of these medications that can spike really crazy dreams, and then you're active while you're sleeping and you wake up not feeling refreshed really, and that's something I wasn't taking any drugs. So that's a reaction to the drugs, is having weird dreams. You know, everyone's experience is different. I've certainly experienced that with things like Xanax and a couple of other ones prescribed sleep
medications. I mean, I have clients who don't take melotonin because it makes them have crazy dreams. I really think that it's just the way the subconscious. Let me rephrase that. I feel like there's a certain activation and that happens with someone subconscious and the drugs that they're taking that either pokes into some stuff that needs to be exercised in a dream or maybe not, but that's kind of what I think. Right. So when we're taking something and it's
it's all of a sudden, we're having these crazy dreams. Uh. I I do a lot of dream work as a side of my work I'm doing, I mean, going to try to pull myself back a little bit. I mean they're saying, now that you know a healthy lifestyle seven hours of sleep, some people can't sleep like I might. Well, I have a brother who only sleeps like four or five hours a night, and his wife goes crazy because he wakes up in the middle of the night and that's but
that's healthy for him. Yeah, we a degree, So the seven hours doesn't really work for everybody. But in the situation you're talking about as someone who's had a day filled with anxiety, who's working to get over the anxiety or the anxious feelings, they need to have deep rest exactly, feel the mind, body, and the spirit exactly. And I just as like a quick, well, what can I do if that's me for your listeners is
I'd say two things. One is, as best you can try to pull away from the perfectionist mindset of like I have to get the best sleep tonight because that almost is going to guarantee you won't because there's that attachment. Right. But then in terms of the tangible practice full body relaxation scans, progressive body relaxation, there are I mean thousands of free meditations like that on YouTube Spotify. Any sort of meditation that drops you into your body and then allows
your body to relax is a great place to start. And then it really is just like anything else, it's hygiene, so it's continued practice. So so your suggests and this is great because I think I read this in your book Discovering, Learning and practicing a meditative technique is going to be a way to reduce the anxious episodes? Or is it just something that heals the physical,
mental, and spiritual side of our existence. Well, when we're talking about sleep specifically, it's a little bit of both, right, So we need that physical healing. Our brain needs to recharge overnight, so ideally some deep sleep will work to solve for that. But the practice of a progressive body scan is more of an integrat of mind, body, and soul, because in order to do any sort of meditation, relaxation exercise, you have to tune into yourself, right, So that continued practice, it starts to
work that muscle of connection to self. The only kind of meditation that I really tell people to avoid before bed is anything that's very active, so like a manifestation or a very intense meditation that's going to bring other parts of your psyche online. Like we're trying to calm everything down. Get the book Anxiety to Empowerment. She's got a lot of great meditations in there. I want to bring up one more thing and then I want to get into some of
the healing you bring up. You talk about this in a chapter. It's called masking anxiety, and this is something I think a lot of people do, which is drinking alcohol, watching or binge watching TV. So you're just like, or my one of my big issues is like to talk scrolling for our YEP. And I am so addicted to TikTok right now because some people
are really really good producers and they're producing animals talking and they're talking. They got people singing together, and it's like it's like, you know, Andy Warhol is fifteen Minutes of fame is everywhere, Yes, And so I'm like, I'm just like entranced with these little episodes that can go hours and hours and hours. But you make a very very big point. If you are dealing with profound anxiety, you've had an anxious day, you need to turn
off the stimulation and alcohol masks it. Talk about this and what you need to be cognizant of anxiety of what you call anxiety of Yeah, yeah, I mean that's funny you bring up TikTok. I was just talking to a client about that earlier. So I'll just I'll probably repeat a little bit of my last call, which was I genuinely believe everything is just a tool.
Everything is neutral or most things. I have some strong opinions about certain things, but when we're talking about most things we used to mask, you know, alcohol substances, scrolling, TV, binge, eating, all of these things are just tools. What we're really talking about is our relationship to the
tool and what it's doing for us. So we don't have the mind doesn't do anything if there isn't a payoff, right, So when we're scrolling, there is a payoff, right, there's a dopamine hit or honestly, and there's studies that have come out about Instagram and TikTok, the way they set up their algorithm, the way they push notifications by either withholding likes or withholding comments. You keep checking, right, there is there's a chemical addition that
winds up happening. But we go to these things because there's some payoff. Eventually we get the dopamine or we get the laugh and the same thing when we're eating, right, we get this feeling of satisfaction, but never full satisfaction if we're binge eating, or it's just one more episode or whatever. So we have to ask ourselves the question, what is my relationship to the tool and what am I running from? So another way of saying that is
what am I avoiding feeling? What am I not equipped to look at yet? Because sometimes that's the case for people. It's not that we're actively in emotional avoidance, it's I don't have the resources. I don't know how to fix that thing that I'm feeling, you know. So let's let's take someone who's scrolling on TikTok, since that's what we're talking about, and I do
it too. I know I can feel it in my body when I'm scrolling for enjoyment, for laughs, for education, versus when I'm scrolling because I do not want to do something, or because there's there's maybe an unnameable kind of unrest happening within me, a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of discomfort, and that's a good in air quotes place to put my energy. So again, when we come back to this overall format of start with
the body, tune into the soul, work with the mind. When we're avoiding, when we're in a you know, an attachment or an addiction based habit, what we really want to ask for ourselves is yes, yes, yes, what am I running from? But what's going on within me in this moment? What am I feeling? Right? So? How is my heart? How is the rest of my body? Am I feeling tight? Am I feeling tense? Am I breathing? And if we can come back to our body while we're scrolling, it'say, oh wait, I've been actually
on my phone for a really long time. Let me take a couple of rats here. Why am I doing this? What is? You know? My favorite simple question to ask is what's really going on with me right now? And if we can just ask that, what's really going on with me right now? Sometimes the answer is not that deep. Sometimes it's I overstepped a boundary. I'm up past my bed time. I need to go to bed. But then, great, you have the answer and you have a
next step. If we don't pause, tune in, and then ask ourselves that question, that's where we really go into the avoidance of something bigger. I like that a lot. It's like why am I masking? Why am I watching three four hours of TV? Why am I on TikTok for you know, it's past midnight, I'm still scrolling those are That's a great question. Let's get into perhaps the anxiety issue coming up and what you call relief,
how to begin using relief? Now we talked about yoga. Talk a little more about yoga, but you also offer things like eft tapping, which is also a good one. But what are you suggesting to your clients who have real anxiety issues that are you know, not just a little discomfort, that are you know, become real manifestations of problems. Yeah, so I'd love that you use the word relief because that's been that's been a theme for the past week or so with a couple of folks. I don't know if
if you're familiar with like Abraham Ester Hicks, and their teachings. But there's oh yeah, channel relief is the cure. That that's one of my favorite things that's come through is relief is the cure. And obviously they're speaking at a very high level, which I adore. That's a piece of what got me into the esoteric and the logical component of it. But just thinking about
relief for someone who's experiencing chronic anxiety isn't going to work, right. It is the work of practicing the feelings of relief in the body that ultimately allow the space for you to actually work with your thoughts or to change direction and career, or to go find a new partner or whatever the thing is that
you're working on. So when we talk about what does that actually mean to practice the feelings of relief in the body, another way of looking at that is practicing the feelings of safety, justiceing the feelings of comfort in the body. So this really does become an iterative process based on someone's upbringing their traumas
their life experiences. You know, I have a couple of clients who, you know, I would say probably have experienced more soft trauma, right, things that happened throughout the course of their lives that made them fearful or resistant to certain things. With softer trauma, they tend to be able to drop into feelings of self comfort, of safety, of relief a little bit more quickly because those with hard trauma have you know a lot of memory and emotion
and thought patterns that have been locked into the body. So, you know, I wish there was like a very quick way of answering like how does that type of person get to a state of relief? But it really is through a series of different types of practices. There is this nurturing of the nervous system, but then there is you know, talk therapy, counseling, There has to be some sort of processing component, and then there is the
rewriting of patterns in someone's mind. So that's like the holistic path forward, but it does become so situational when when we're really like looking at just an individual life story. So my book, and this is like a piece of the intention behind my book is I want to and if I could, I would work with every single person that wants to work with me because I love
this stuff. But because that's physically not possible, my book offers some starting ground, especially for someone who might not yet be able to, you know, afford to go to therapy, afford to work with a coach, and maybe they have a self help book that didn't work because it's not connecting in some way, or the spiritual books are too hard to really comprehend, or
they don't resonate. This is at least a starting point, especially if there's some harder trauma that's been really really challenged by or I should say is I don't want to phrase this harder trauma that challenges or elicits more anxiety. Does that make sense? Yeah? And somebody who has had childhood unresolved childhood trauma probably has taken it into adulthood and it's become overwhelming at some point, you know. I mean that's where a therapist has to come in. But your
book offers a great deal of possibilities, which is fantastic. And the other thing about your book that you mentioned in the very beginning is you can sit down in part of a day and read it from cover to cover and really get a lot out of it, which I really like because some of these books are like four hundred pages and it's like, oh my god, when is it in you know I need help, now, help me, So talk a little more about some relief you have EFT in here, and you
actually have a diagram where these are these trigger points. My brother used to be a teacher of ef T and he taught a lot of people how to use it as and I don't remember for anxiety, but I'm sure anxiety was one of the major areas that were triggered through certain actions. So talk a little bit about why you feel ef T is a great tool. Yeah, So ef T, I would say, I put EFT into a larger bubble,
which is active anxiety processing or active nervous system regulation. So for someone who's highly highly triggered, or for some reason it doesn't feel safe for them to sit still, meditation might not be the answer, right. What would actually be needed is to bring movement or life force into the body to help break up some of that anxious energy. You know, for some woman,
I have them dancing or stumping or what have you. And that's amazing when it's in the comfort of your living room or your bedroom and you can really like shake out some feeling. But what happens when you're at a party and you're feeling anxious or your grocery shopping and there's a lot of people around and feeling a little bit of roophobic or what have you. So TOPPING to me is just a really lovely effective, non attention drawing tool that you can use
to help you feel one to five percent better, very very quickly. This was mentioned real quickly. That stands for Emotional freedom technique, which is that's the whole design behind it is to release these anxiety trigger points, so forth and so on. So EFT is really a great tool, I would think, isn't it. Yeah, it's fantastic. I mean the tool that I tell everyone to at least try, because not everything's going to work for everyone. Yeah, but I haven't met someone who doesn't like this one, which
is the most simple EFT tapping point. It's your you know, I say, my girl scout fingers, but it's your pointer and your index finger and you tap your thimus right so the center of your breast phone and you just breathe very deeply. And the reason this type of tapping and this particular pressure
point I'm doing it right now for those on video. The reason it's effective is because that light vibration of your hand hitting the bone is helping to trigger the vegas, which releases a substance that asks your heart to calm down. So for me, this is just so nondescript. I could be playing with my necklace. Most people are so in their own heads they're not going to
notice that you're doing this. But it winds up being a really lovely somatic release, and if you pair your breath with it, you will help your body calm down. The book's called Anxiety to Empowerment. My guess has been Amanda Huggins. As we close. We talked earlier about the fight or flight reflex that is part of our homo sapien sapient mechanism, our physiology. It seems like anxiety is just part of the whole makeup. Is natural. We
shouldn't well never get rid of it. It's part of our humanity. Would you say that being aware of it is a good thing? Would you say that people who are experiencing overwhelming anxiety just need to pay attention more? What are some final thoughts on working with anxiety? Because we can, we'll never get rid of it. It's part of who we are, and I don't
want you to get rid of it. That actually raises your chances of dying sooner, you know, because all of a sudden, your instinct for when I'm crossing the street, Wait, did I just hear a car beat at me? Yeah? If that makes instincts gone, you're gone. You know. I don't want that. What I want for everyone is to practice a deep reframing of anxiety, so it is a part of you, and you can either avoid it and keep it in the shadow where you can embrace it.
Dare I say even as a friend, right, Because the way most of us think about anxiety, we're shaming it, We're keeping it in a corner. It's a part that we don't like. But if it's a part of you, it's worth learning to understand. It's certainly worth learning to love, because when we love something, when we bring it into the light, that's when the healing occurs. So if you can just start to shift the perspective a little bit, say hey, I am not bad for feeling anxious.
My anxiety isn't bad. It's actually trying to keep me safe. What I really am trying to understand, and I want to understand it like a friend, Like I'm having a sit down conversation with someone. What I want to understand is how can I help my anxiety feel more safe? How can I train my body and my mind as I listen to what my soul is asking, right, if it's to increase my self worth, if it's to ground my body more, if I'm following those cues, how can I do
that in a way that's going to make me feel better? And it's through befriending the anxiety. You're not bad for having it, you're not alone for having it, but you also do not need to live with chronic psychosomatic anxiety. Where we create store is in our head and then we live in that fear. Yeah, that's what I don't want, just freaking out all the time we're flighting, flighting that. Hey, you mentioned something I want to just touch on real quickly, the soul. How do we connect with You
have a section in your book on the soul connection. Why is that important, recognizing the soul? And how does that recognition work with anxiety? Yeah, it's And I'm realizing now we didn't really chat about this all that much. I know. I'm bringing it up now because I think I know.
Yeah, So my more philosophical perspective on anxiety is that the reason we're having this physical manifestation of emotional unrest is because our soul is trying to get our attention and saying, hey, there's something whether it's a belief system, it could be a person, a line of work, there's something in your life that is no longer in alignment with who you are interest and we're bringing this
physical discomfort to get your attention. So, you know, that physical discomfort maybe the soul's nudge to be like, hey, you got to heal this because you're carrying this trauma from your mom, from her grandma. It ends with you. We're going to create this sensation enough so that you recognize and deal with it, you know. Or it could be like, hey, this partner of yours, y'all have outgrown each other, and so there's a
reason you're feeling deeply uncomfortable, right. So, and I think that perspective on anxiety. Also being spiritual can soften it a little bit because sometimes when one it's faced with anxiety, it's like, well, what's the point or what am I tracking towards? And this this concept of well, hey, nothing's bad, this is just soul signaling. It's just saying there's actually more
or better available for you. Right, So, when you're staying soul signaling, though, are you saying that the overseer, your higher self, whatever you want to call it, your soul guidance, is saying you need to look at this. Now. Now, where does this come into anxiety? Are you saying, like a rule, somebody who's not typically anxious, if they get a major hit of anxiety, is that something to look at,
is what you're saying. Oh, that's a whole separate podcast episode. Uh oh yes, yes, So I actually don't get into this so deeply in this book, but in that example you just shared, and I do think it's important to talk about if someone's not generally super anxious and all of a sudden there's a wave of anxiety one hundred percent that is and listen, it may not be your higher self guidance so much as it's you are picking up
on the frequency of someone else. You could be experiencing energetic overwhelmed. Right. There are a lot of non physical reasons why someone might experience a swell of anxiety. And we're seeing this happen more and more because this is you know, I do think that we're waking up more to our energetic gifts as a collective. So someone who describes themselves as being empathic or sensitive and they're always really anxious, one of the questions I haven't ask is is this mine?
How much anxiety are you carrying of your own? Versus You're out in public and there's a bunch of people around you and you're feeling their energy. Your mom, you know, one hundred thousand miles away, is going through a panic and she's not calling you, but you are energetically connected to her, right, so you're feeling that, right. I love that talk. I love that energy talk. That's another show. Yeah, it is.
How can people get a hold of you? You have a website, let's see, it's Amanda Huggins Coaching dot com your website, and you are on TikTok and you are on Instagram, And so when you're at how active are you are you just like giving tips talk about your practice? How can people get more information if they want to do a one on one with you?
Yeah, so there's a way to submit for a one on one on my website, but truthfully the best way is to either send me a direct message on Instagram and on both Instagram and TikTok, my handle is It's Amanda Huggins or just send me an email. So what I really like to do when someone reaches out is first just get a sense for what are the needs. Yeah, it may not be just coaching, it might be an energy healing
and coaching integrated session. There's so many different options. And I also just like to have conversations with folk and actually get to the heart of what's going on. So please don't be shy to say hello, and then if there's a way conserve, we'll figure that out along the way. Fantastic. The book Anxiety to Empowerment Exercises and Meditations to Stop stressing and start engaging. The
book just came out, I think a couple of weeks ago. It's on Amazon and wherever you get your books, and it's published by Llewellyn, who is a great publisher. So Amanda, real pleasure, great success on this and thanks for joining me. Thanks so much, Cliff, it was a pleasure. Amanda's new book is not more than one hundred and I want to
say, what, what is it? One hundred and well, it's a couple hundred pages, but it's really filled with insightful practices and techniques to quickly rid yourself of anxiety and develop a system where you are not at the mercy of your anxiety. And that's the big problem is that people are helped they feel helpless. I know my son felt helpless for a long time. He grew out of it. I actually got him to start meditating and that was
the conclusion of his anxiety. He doesn't have the same levels of anxiety. He has occasional anxiety, but he doesn't have the levels of anxiety that you know caused him to have to take an assets to caused him to avoid interactions with people. That's the problems. That's what you want to avoid is being so anxious that you don't want to see people, you don't want to meet people, You want to just go crawl up in a ball and go to sleep. That's not what you want to be. You want to have a
good life. You want to have a active life. You want to have a interactive relationship with your friends, with your loved ones. And that's what we're here to do. We're not here to be hermits. So and anxiety can cause a lot of problems. So here's the name of the book again, Anxiety to Empowerment Exercises and meditations to stop stressing and start engaging. So really good suggestion, really good interview, and it was fun to talk to
Amanda. Hey. I want to mention the Cosmic Summit conference is coming up. It's June fifteenth and sixteenth. It's going to be held in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I gotta tell you they have a phenomenal lineup this year. We are a sponsor and if you want more information go to cosmicsummit dot com forward Slash Earth Ancients they have and we're going to be featuring many of these people. They have Randall Carlson, Provine Mohan, got Walter, and
you know, the list goes on. It's really a good program. If you can't make it to Greensboro, you don't have to necessarily be there in person. They have a wonderful streaming program that allows you to see all these people and more for about one hundred bucks for two days, fifty bucks a day, unheard of price. Again, check out the program cosmicsummit dot com for Slash Earth Ancients and if you can make it to the program do so it's always good to be there in perfect person. We had George Howard,
the producer on he's planning on feeding everybody. It's pretty funny. You got breakfast every day, you got lunch every day, and I think you're on your own for dinner. But that's like what we do on some of the tours. We take people on tours. You get your breakfast, your lunch, and you have to take care of your own dinner. So what a great what a great program, great deal and check it out. Check it
out out, take a look at it. You can see the full eight itinerary, see Who's who and sign up Cosmicsummit dot com, Forward Slash Earth Ancients. Yeah, I want to mention we just finished our Grand Egyptian Tour, but we have a brand new tour that we have are trying out this year. It was designed by Mohammad and an archaeologist in Turkey. It's our
first ever granted Grand Turkey Tour. It sounds kind of funny. We're gonna be at places like darren Kuru, the Underground City, Cappadocia, tons of museums of course, the wonderful go Beckley Tepee and we're gonna see those ten feet tall beans at Carahan Teppe, which is just a few miles I think it's south of go Beckley Tepee. And this is the first time we will
be visiting this. For the full itinerary and to join us, go to earth Ancients dot com forward slash Tours, look for the Turkey itinerary and check it out. First time we're going to do this, and so it's going to be a blast, because you know, Muhammad is noted for creating a VIP environment. That means the best food, the best beverages, private bus, private visits, and a chance to jump on a jumper jet from one
side of Turkey to the next. To see these sites. For more information and the full itinerary, go to earth Ancients dot com, forward slash tours, and if you have any questions, send me an email send it to earth Ancients for you at gmail dot com. Now, the last tour of the year is perhaps the best for those of us who live in America. This is the Sacred Temples of Mexico. It's gonna be November eighth through the seventeenth of this year, one week. And I gotta tell you there's a
brand new series of unveilings we'll be able to see. But the most important thing is you really get to climb in the pyramids. We have chosen and found noted sites that will be able to climb the pyramid. And the reason we want to climb the pyramid is that the epicenter of these pyramids sits on top of a trilluric field. That's another word for a geodesic center, a lay line energy point. When you sit on top of it, on these pyramids and this close your eyes for a minute, it's like you're sitting on
a battery. But this energy is healing. It's proactive. You can use it for enhancing your thinking, wanting to know more about the sites we're at, and manifesting what you want in life. These are what these pyramids were designed to use for. So we'll be going to all the classics China, ushmo Ekpalam, Mayapan, Labna, Sail and so much more for during our seven day visit. Come out and join us. It's very reasonably priced and we stay in Mereada, so if you want to fly out, you can
fly to Meredith from the United States, only a few hour flight. But this is a site that is important because we're understanding now that the Maya are very old and very very earth centric people. They were very focused on connecting with the Earth and the Earth energies, and so their buildings, their pyramids, their temples are all aligned to the constellations and they're plugged in. So this is a universal energy and we'll be working with that energy on these tours
November eighth through the seventeenth this year. For more information, go to Earth Ancients dot com, forward slash Tours tou rs. All right, that's it for this program. I want to thank my guests today, author of Anxiety to Empowerment, Amanda Huggins and always a pleasure to work with Gail tor Mark Foster and everyone who makes this thing happen. You guys rock all right, take care of me well, and we will talk to you next time.