Hanna: Hey friends, if you heard my previous episode, you know I took a few questions from my audience members and did a quick Q & A episode, which was super fun and I do plan to do that again in the future. But one thing I noticed when I polled my audience about the questions they wanted to hear answered was that there were more than a handful of people asking about how to feel better about what’s going on in the world at large, or how to not get totally bogged down and derailed when the world is quote fucked.
Some of the exact comments I received were:
There’s alot going on and I can't handle this.
How do you do this? How do you deal?
Why can’t I stop worrying and stressing out about this?
It feels never-ending and I just want to feel free from the burden of the world's problems.
How do I care without caring so much?
Someone even said to me, “I have been waiting to have a baby until things are less messed up but I feel like that time might never come.”
And so on.
I am sure you can relate to some of this especially if you haven’t worked with a Coach or haven't done any work around navigating your own anxiety in an extremely imperfect world with lots of shit to be upset about.
So I’m creating a mini series for you with a focus on how to move through this time, and ANY TIME, with less anxiety that cripples you and more openness to the human experience of being a deep-feeling person living in a deeply-fucked world. So it’s called Everything is fucked… And It’s Okay a Mini series. And what I’d love to introduce to you during this series are a few of the basic tools and coaching concepts that I used and still use in my own life every day and also some of the processes I take my private clients through who are battling with anxious thoughts and feelings and having a hard time coping with things like despair and grief and even anxiety guilt, the like feeling of “I shouldn’t have such a hard time with this, other people aren’t as messed up about this as me, I should just be able to think positive thoughts, Hanna is in a good mood what the heck is wrong with her, or what’s wrong with me?!” All of the stuff that comes up for us humans when we are quote, holding the pain of the world and trying to still live our lives and be there for our people and not lose our shit.
Handling your anxiety through this time, the pandemic, the war, the social and cultural injustices, political what have you, I’m going to share some new ways of seeing the world and seeing yourself and your role in it during the next few episodes. I’ve created a rough outline of what I’m going to talk about and it looks like it’ll be about 5 or so episodes long, but we will see, I’m open to being flexible depending on what comes up and if you guys have feedback that leads to more than I’ve got planned so far we will see how it goes.
But here are some of the things you’ll learn about in this series:
So I am going to talk I think a little bit about Why your brain gives you anxiety and how to begin to not make that a problem or isolate yourself and make anxiety worse.
We’re also going to learn about how to separate your thoughts from facts in the coming episodes so you can find more neutrality and create a little bit of relief on the spot.
I’m going to walk you through allowing anxiety/fear/despair/grief in a way that doesn’t consume you or eat at you or paralyze you and we’re going to learn about creating safety for yourself through thought work AND nervous system regulation.That’s going to be immensely helpful for a lot of you I hope. Learning to hang out with your nervous system and cozy up with your body, actually be in your body and get out of your head a bit. I am going to demonstrate how being WILLING to face the world instead of buffering against it or looking outside of yourself to relieve the pain of your anxiety because you’re running scared of your own emotions is one of the keys to cultivating bravery and befriending yourself, having your own back through anything and not just in a oh I got you way, but I’ve got something for you to do here, way. I also want to help you learn how to witness other people’s pain or the injustices in the world without taking that on as your own pain if you don’t want to, but rather choosing on purpose to feel your pain because you can hold it.
And then I will likely be talking a little bit about how to stop putting your life on hold because of what’s happening now. Or you know, people are like I feel like I can’t get anything done because all I can think about is what’s going on in Ukraine. Or I need to wait to prioritize my life needs or goals for things to calm down with COVID or whatever so I’ll talk about how to embrace what is currently happening so that you can stop putting yourself in anxiety jail. That’s what I call it, anxiety jail.
Ok so if any of that sounds intriguing to you, you’ll want to look out for all the episodes coming up called Everythings Fucked and it’s okay. I’ll be releasing some of the regularly scheduled episodes as usual so this mini series may not all be right in a row so you’ll need to scroll through and look for those as they come out.
Alright, so to kick it off today I am going to teach you a little about what is going on with your brain if you’re feeling this extreme anxiousness or stress around what’s happening in the world. So that maybe we can begin this process of implementing some new tools and practices from a place of self compassion.
Why do you feel anxiety? People’s answer is always like I don't know it sucks though. But I want you to think logically about what the benefit of anxiety is from your primal brains perspective.
The primal brain or the animal part of our brain, like the parts that we had when we were like, lizards, namely the amygdala right where the fear response is generated. The primitive brains job is to look for danger. If you’ve been listening to this show I’m sure you’ve heard me say this before, but your brains evolutionary success story is dependent on it’s ability to gift you with enough fear and anxiety to keep you out of danger and in comfort and aliveness. Your brain is supposed to be obsessed with whatever might be dangerous to you. With respect to anxiety I like to tell my clients, you are literally here today because your ancestors grew their amygdala’s so large that they always ran when there was something that could catch them, they hid when there was something that might find and kill them, they preplanned and prepared and postulated about every possible death scenario that might arise so they could avoid dying and as a result, you were born with a brain wired to protect you at all costs. And the way that anxiety protects you is it creates sensations in your body that signal you to fight, flee or freeze, or sometimes fawn. We don’t have to react to anxiety that way and I will teach you how to step in and create something new from anxiety, but essentially anxiety is a survival tactic. That was extremely helpful and necessary or your survival back in the day…and back in the day meaning like cave man day. Now your brain has evolved to house a prefrontal cortex or what I call the human part of your brain, and we can learn to use that part to override or retrain the primitive brain by doing thought work, which we will get to, but just because this is happening, your unconscious thoughts about what is bad, hard, awful, scary, potential death are running the show, doesn’t mean anything is wrong or bad about you. This is the first key to really notice. Nothing has gone wrong here. Your brain sees danger and it’s like HEY, think about this, this could kill you, this could be real bad, and here’s anxiety to speed up the process of getting away from it and freaking out about it so it doesn’t kill you. Whatever it happens to be. Yeah?
So whether you’ve had anxiety for a while or this is newly activated due to the state of the world right now, either way, your brain is trying to protect and love you. And think about like how much it’s being inundated with triggers today as compared to even a few years ago. News and media and social media and the technology that puts these world issues in front of our brain screen constantly, it makes sense right that your brain would be like oh shit. Like back when your ancestors were living in caves they didn’t have constant updates about like the location of the saber tooth tiger, what they were doing, how many other clans it had attacked, how many teeth it had, coming through on their smart phones, right?
Today we have a constant stream of info about what’s going on and what might be harmful, sad, upsetting, on repeat. Even if it’s not even new info it’s still there and to our brain it feels like something new to be concerned and anxious about each time. So we don’t need to make this about the media or technology though, because that’s just part of the circumstances that we live in, and we don’t need to change the circumstances to be able to feel better. The situation now is that the primitive brain is being subjected to so much stimulus it doesn’t even know how to deal so it’s just like anxiety anxiety anxiety. I’ll default to anxiety. And without realizing it you are locked into the cycle because you haven’t interrupted your primal brain yet. And that’s okay.
When your brain is manifesting alot of stress or anxiety about the world or anything, it’s doing it’s job perfectly. And because you have a brain that’s predisposed to obsess about danger or bad stuff, and you haven’t been tapping in to the parts of your brain like the prefrontal cortext that can course correct for that anxiety, it defaults to what feels important,
The anxiety, stress, worry, despair. Ok. So there’s nothing wrong with you. There is nothing messed up with your brain. I want you to begin to see your self as separate from your brain. When you have anxiety I want you to try this thought instead, “my brain is offering me anxiety for what it believes is a good reason”. Start to notice that your brain and you are separate entities. You are a human with a brain that can (and has been) working unconsciously. So we can start to get conscious by observing our brain’s intentions and why it makes total sense that it would offer thoughts that create anxiety.
Now, I also want you to notice the second thing that makes it totally okay to feel anxious about what’s going on in the world, and that is that we, humans, conscious humans who are aware of how the primal brain works to send you into panic without you even being conscious to it, also consciously choose to feel anxious, sad, distressed, upset, despair, and heartbreak
Because they are important, justified, needed human emotions when things are fucked up.
And we, conscious humans, know that negative emotions make up half of our experience here, so there’s nothing inherently wrong with feeling negative emotions. We just got it in our heads somewhere that we’re supposed to be happy all the time, or most of the time. We’re not. What if that was okay? Sometimes just that like oh it’s okay that half my life I feel shitty, like that’s what it’s supposed to be, even that can create alot of relief. To remind yourself you know, hey, sweet girl, this right now is one of those moments where you experience the tough emotions, it’s not here forever but it’s here now because it’s supposed to be. You’re good.
So this series is not going to teach you about turning everything into a positive. Because that’s some serious hooey. It is an absolutely appropriate emotional response for you to feel outraged, stressed out or saddened when bad things happen. We want to be upset about shit. And if you are having an anxiety attack or screaming at your phone or feeling any big feels and reacting to those emotions in an explosive way, internally or externally, that does not mean that you cannot also be a human that is full of awareness and peace. This is not an either-or game. You don’t either have unbearable anxiety OR you’re an enlightened being walking on water. You’re not either a total spaz OR an angel of love and light. You don’t have to be afraid of your negative emotion because it does not rob you of the ability to feel the positive ones. You can be both and I hope you will be.
Ok so your brains not fucked, it’s working perfectly.
You are not fucked for choosing anxiety or any other negative emotion, you’re human-ing perfectly.
The world can be fucked and we can learn how to stay attentive to it without getting stuck in our emotions.
That’s what I hope you’ll take away from this series for sure. That all emotions are welcome, because they are meant to flow. We don’t need to pretend that the world isn’t full of injustice and terrible things or try not to see it because when we can accept a complex and authentic view of the world, we can then begin to choose how we act based on our intention for our life, not based on the default response to anxiety we’ve been having up til now.
I’m going to teach you how to do that. But for today let’s start with a self compassion. A Non judgmental awareness of what’s happening for you and not connecting additional thoughts to it. What I mean by not connecting additional thoughts to what’s happening for you is just being aware “I feel anxious about X” or “I read 6 news articles today and felt overwhelmed and out of control.” Without over dramatizing it by omg what’s wrong with me what is my problem why would I read all those articles no I’m so stupid for doing that I hate anxiety it sucks. And also not downplaying what you’re observing. Downplaying might be like “I feel anxious about X” but it’s nothing, everything is fine, lalala. Whatever. No need to be a crybaby about shit there’s people that have it way worse than you.
Ok. Having self compassion is observing the truth of how you are right now without judgements about it. In fact, it’s more like “huh, of course I would feel this way. My brain is offering me anxiety about this because it’s saying this thing could be so awful and kill people and I care. Of course I have anxiety. Of course many people have anxiety. Of course I feel frustrated by my anxiety because I haven’t yet learned the tools to manage my mind but I’m starting now by choosing compassion for me in this moment.”
Think about what your dramatization of feeling anxious is. What are the thoughts you have about yourself for feeling anxious? I suck, it’s never ending and I can’t do anything about it. It’s so annoying and I’m just so lost. Why the heck can’t I just get a grip? I want you to notice that that isn’t being the BFF to yourself that you need to be. What you need is not shame or judgement. You can’t shame or judge yourself out of anxiety. You don’t need to someone berating you for having a human experience of feeling. That is not accepting what is happening for you without judgment. It’s attacking yourself for something that can’t get better if it’s under attack.
So, again, we’re beginning this series with the knowing that nothing has gone wrong with you or your brain. And noticing without judgement what you feel. Talk kindly yourself now, because when this work gets hard, and it will, and when you don’t get it the first 100 times, because you won’t, you’ll need someone to have your back. And I’ll be so proud of you if that person is you.
I have your back always, I’m so excited for you to learn more about yourself and anxiety and “how to deal” in the coming weeks. So stay tuned for the next episode in this mini series and if you’re ready to dive into this work with me as your guide, one to one private coaching is your safe space to flail and fail and fall apart and finally learn how to lovingly steward your own brain and nervous system into a life of balance and peace. I cannot wait for that day for you.
Talk soon!