Hanna:
Hey everyone. Welcome back to our mini series. This is the 4th episode in this mini series about anxiety. I hope you’ve found some helpful insights thus far. Go ahead back and listen to the first 3 in this mini series called Everythings Fucked and It’s Okay, if you havent yet.
Today I’m going to talk to you about creating safety in your body, and feeling safe enough to allow your anxiety on purpose…or what I call processing emotions. So actually feeling and processing the anxiety that comes up. And you’re like well why would I want to do that, I thought this series was about how to eliminate anxiety! Why would I allow it on purpose? Didn’t you just teach us about how to think differently so we didn't have have to feel anxiety and now you’re telling me to go ahead and like welcome it in? What gives?
Ok so, here’s the golden gem of insight I will give you now: even though you know that you can change your thoughts to change how you feel, the best way that I’ve found to eliminate anxiety even faster is to get really good at feeling anxiety. Getting really good at feeling anxiety, and allowing it to be there without reacting to it, trying to outwit it, avoiding it, distracting yourself from it, all the things we normally do to try to get it to go away, getting practiced at actually feeling it will help you to fast track making changes in how you can think. And how much anxiety you consciously and unconsciously invite in.
Think about it, if you weren’t afraid to feel anxious, then there wouldn’t be a problem. If you weren’t thinking that anxiety was the worst, it wouldn’t be a problem, and you could easily ask your brain to feed you thoughts that make you feel good and peaceful and calm. When you’re thinking you need to avoid anxiety, get rid of it, distract yourself from it, because it’s horrible to feel anxious, what happens then? You can only think more horrible thoughts not only about whatever circumstance you think causes your anxiety in the first place, but also the anxiety itself. Ok.
Because even though you know now that it’s okay for you to feel anxiety, right we worked on self compassion in the first part of this series, and you know now that your thoughts are what cause anxiety, and you can neutralize your thoughts to lessen the anxious feelings…you’re still going to feel anxiety sometimes.
And that is because a neural link in your brain has been created and strengthened over time and your anxiety will happen unconsciously because you've been living in an unconscious state for long enough now that it’s like automatic. AND because you haven’t processed anxiety all the way through until it leaves your body. Most people I work with, have never done this work, ever. Processing emotions is brand new to them. It’s brand new to a lot of coaches and healers too to be honest. So don’t feel badly if you’re like omg I’ve been living under a rock. You have not, it’s just not something any of us learn about. So with clients in my program we create a protocol together to come to anxiety, and move into it and try to stay there, and when you come and work with me we will do protocols for you and your specific triggers, but if you have random anxiety or consistant anxiety or wake up with anxiety or have it come and go without warning… You haven't given enough space in your physical body to that emotion, to allow it to be there and actually notice what is this thing I call anxiety? And likely because you’re trying NOT to allow anxiety, you’re spending energy trying to do stuff about it, you’ve also not had enough practiced, purposeful, intentional, believable thoughts yet to deflect the anxiety in the first place.
Your thoughts are just coming, ding ding ding, and you dont have the know-how to filter them out yet. It’s like when you first got social media and didn’t know that you could turn off notifications and block people and you’ve got all your settings on your IG or your Facebook turned to on, notifications on, profile set to public, no restrictions and emotions just sliding right into your DM’s all day, popping up outta nowhere all the time. Binging you constantly. Without a thought from you, without your settings turned to filter out and block who and what you don’t want, it’s just going to happen without much control from you. Right, and that’s when people are like I just get anxious out of nowhere, it just happens. I don’t even have to be thinking about the war or plane crashes or covid or any of that and I just feel anxious. And that tells me you haven’t felt your feelings yet, havent build a resilience to the actual feelings by showing yourself what feelings really are–vibrations in your body–and you haven’t been able to give yourself safe space to even look for the thoughts that are causing anxiety.
Anxiety getting stuck in the body and coming “out of nowhere” is a sign of unprocessed anxiety. Ok so the emotions always come from a thought, and those are the things that are just binging you unconsciously, but over time, of putting yourself into anxiety jail, where you just sit and “wait out” the triggers so that you can resume your life, right where you’re like ok as soon as covid is over I wont feel anxious. As soon as the news stops reporting about Ukraine I won’t feel this way. You’re like in a state of disempowerment because you just wait it out, or avoid or deflect and never allow or process the anxiety, it never actually get’s cleared from the body and it becomes easier and easier for the body to make the connection for you, automatically and send you into an anxious state at seemingly the drop of a hat. Right? Lot’s of clients say this to me, “it comes out of nowhere” and I always encourage them to get curious about how fearful they are of anxiety itself and if I told you I was going to snap my fingers and have anxiety come into your body right now, what do you think about that? Would you brace for impact? Would you get nervous about that? And if you’re like oh shit I don’t want that to happen, I’m like okay we need to work on processing emotions, getting comfortable allowing this emotion in.
When you allow the emotion and the more you can be with it, the more determined and focused you will become at finding intentional thoughts that will make lasting and permanent change with respect to your overall emotions.
When you buffer and escape you end up creating more results that you don’t want, compounded. Right like you feel anxious or stressed and you try to get out of those emotions, by overeating or yelling at your spouse or hiding under the covers and becoming a hermit. All results that you don’t want either.
The reason you’re not able to feel better is because you’re unwilling to just explore feeling bad without letting that emotion drive your actions.
So this series is called everything’s fucked AND it’s okay, not everything’s fucked and it’s okay because I will just distract myself and pretend that it doesn’t exist and pretend my anxiety doesn’t exist until the circumstances change. Right? What happens when there’s no distraction? It’s still there. Your anxiety is still there. When you resist it gets bigger. And when you ignore it it gets bigger. So yes I taught you that you need to look for and become aware of the thoughts that create anxiety for you, but if you are not processing your emotions you will have an extremely difficult time finding them. When you go unconscious with your feelings you lose awareness of thought too. If you can’t be willing to know your feelings, you will never be able to find out what thought is behind it. Your willingness to feel anxiety is directly correlated to your ability to see your thoughts and then creating what you do want to feel.
You know my perspective about feelings right? That the goal is not to feel happy and good all the time. You’re going to feel shit 50% of the time no matter how you slice this life, but learning how to process the negative emotions will expand your ability to feel it all, hold it all, feel more good more often and feel bad more often without feeling afraid of it.
Because that’s the other reason why you’d want to feel anxious on purpose. Or with purpose. I think processing is feeling with purpose. Like there’s a reason for this and I’m here to get the work and the comfort of this emotion.
But the other reason to choose to feel and process anxiety is to find proof of what anxiety really is. What it really is is not the scary messed up fucked off thing that you think it is. It’s sensations in your physical body. And we spend SO MUCH time up in our heads, that we want to make sure we’re getting into our bodies too. Again, thought work, awareness of thought is what I’m always on about yes, but the value of strengthening your amygdala, the part of your brain that understands physical sensation and helps you name what it feels like in your physical body, is immense. Growing that part of your brain to be able to name what you feel and actually feel it, it opens up another way of knowing yourself and feeling the fabulous, invigorating, tingly goodness in your body, and noticing that your body is a fun place to go too. Out of your head and into your body. To truly feel.
And so when we process an emotion we desensitize ourselves to the fear of that emotion. Over time of being in the body, we find out that feeling is nothing to fear. If you listened to the last episode of this series I was using an example of a thought that was like “The whole world is on edge” and then feeling terrified. And then you don’t want to feel terrified so you try to distract yourself from terror by doing something else, but why don’t you want to feel terrified? What is “terrified”? It’s a collection of sensations in your physical body. So now you’re feeling terrified and feeling terrified of feeling terrified and the negative emotion compounds. But what if we were like ok this is the part where I feel the sensations of terrified. What is that feeling in my body?
I have another podcast episode where I give you a sample process of allowing emotions, so I’m going to direct you there to go through the process it’s episode number 27, I’m sad and I don’t like it, but this is the general gist, of what processing emotions means, it means naming the emotion and noticing the sensations in your physical body, and letting them be there, without reacting or acting anything out, just allowing. Noticing. Being present to the physiological episode and seeing it for what it is. And staying there and continuing to welcome it in until it dissipates. Sometimes that takes minutes. Sometimes it takes days of repeating and coming back and letting the feelings come again and again.
But with anxiety, for me, and many of my clients at least, it’s going to take patience and compassion. Hey this is anxiety. It feels like it’s in my head and my head feels cold and like fuzzy. Being extremely sincere about what is actually happening. This is just a sensation that you’re feeling right now. Here’s what it feels like, where it is, how it moves, what it looks like, in my body. I don’t have to do anything to get away or try to make it go away because all it is is sensations.
Ok I teach you the process for this in private coaching. I will give you the full protocol for how to do this there. And we will figure out how you are going to benefit most from a process that really works for you. Because the reality is there is no wrong way to feel feelings. No wrong way to process an emotion. I share the ways that I like and that work for me and alot of my clients publicly, but privately you are free to discover what the actual protocol looks like for you in your mind and your body ok? There is no wrong way to do this, the how part is up for debate.
Feeling your anxiety just means you can let it be there and not do anything about it. Processing through it means staying there until it dissipates. As long as it takes.
But what you’ll notice even if you just use a few simple phrases like “Oh here is anxiety” “Come on in” “It’s okay for me to just feel this and stay here now.” and then process it however that looks for you, letting it stay, and come over you, is that you will start to feel less exhausted by your emotions. Because that’s one of the main issues people have when they complain about having anxiety, is that it exhausts them. But then I say you need to allow it, process through it and people are like uh that sounds exhausting. Haha. It sounds like a lot of work, that sounds like I’m just going to be so tired after that, just feeling anxiety for a period of time that sounds like I’ll be totally knackered, but the truth is that what you’re doing now, is expending a ton of unconscious energy to try to avoid or fight against or distract yourself from your anxiety, and that’s what’s causing you to feel exhausted by it, but when we just allow it, it starts to feel less like a battle and more like a cuddle with yourself. More like just coming home to yourself. And that to me is MUCH less exhausting.
And what you are doing is creating a more pure relationship with your emotions versus a tumultuous one where you use the emotions as a benchmark for how your life is going overall. Lots of us use our emotions to indicate how things are going in life. If you’re feeling anxious it’s like that becomes the tagline of your life story. Anxious and exhausted by anxiety. Which only leads you to become more immersed in living into that emotion, as part of who you are.
That’s not fair to your emotions to put so much pressure on them! Your emotions are meant to be felt. That's all. They don’t have to be the story of who you are or what your life is. They can come and go and flow and say what up to you.
Remember that nothing is inherently wrong with feeling emotions. And nothing is wrong with you. You can’t die from feeling. Believe me I have tested it.
Sometimes though, for those of you who are really deep into anxiousness having had a longer experience not processing anxiety and not having awareness of how your thoughts are creating anxiety and not having self compassion and feeling really fearful of anxiety itself, you might need to take the time to reel your nervous system in with some techniques that help to calm the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the long nerve strain, the main nerves of your parasympathetic nervous system, that starts at your brainstem and essential connects to all the organs, the lungs heart liver intestines, and sends signals to your body when you are under stress to perform certain involuntary functions. Like any of your that have experienced panic, you might have felt the sudden urge to use the bathroom or puke, your vagus nerve is sending the signal of danger and since danger might mean you need to run away, you need to clear your bowels so you can run faster. When you stimulate or what I call soothe the vagus nerve, it sends signals all over your body to relax. Ok, I teach about this alot more with my clients and we look at specific practices that they can do to support the nervous system in this way, to make it easier in the moments of intense anxiety to lean into processing the feelings instead of running away.
Ok so you can look this up yourself but some examples are like Hum or rock side to side and rub your arms with your hands. Like think of things that soothed you as a baby, right? Like I used to rub my own belly. And if you’re processing really heavy emotion like if the anxiety is really tethered to some trauma and an experience that really triggers, maybe you need to physically do s state change, like get up and move your body. Go outside, or go inside, or literally find a physical space that feels safe to you like a comfy spot in your house or whatever before you dive into processing through the emotion.
There are ways to soothe the vagus nerve through things you won’t do in the moment, like exercising or getting a massage or cold plunges, practicing breathing techniques. But remember there is a difference between doing those things, those practices and believing that the solution to your anxiety lies outside of you, and using those practices to strengthen the connection to your own nervous system and work on building easier access to your own calming rituals outside of the moment so that in the moment you can actually be free to feel your feelings and access your thoughts. That’s what we want to be able to do in the moment, to process the anxiety and open the door to accessing our thoughts and understand what we are thinking and how we can choose into more helpful thoughts. Right? If our nervous system is fried, its alot harder for us to even think about what we are thinking about because we are so overstimulated by the sensation of anxiety in our body that thought goes out the window and we’re just feeding the anxiety with more fear of the anxiety itself. Ok so to practice calming the nervous system on purpose, and helping to connect you with your physiological experience without fear, creating safety for yourself outside of those moments of level ten anxiousness, is to help create safety in your body. To be able to even access the thought, it’s safe in my body. It’s safe to be here with my emotion now. Because the repetition of anxiousness without allowing or processing it has taught us to feel unsafe in our own bodies. Right? That’s the worst part about anxiety. It’s the feeling of being unsafe in your home. Your body being your home.
Ok so we can talk to ourselves with compassion and stay IN our bodies when we have anxiety instead of trying to escape from it. Make your body a safe place with whatever techniques you want to use and with the thought “I am safe to feel this way”. In fact, practicing the thought I am safe to feel is going to lead you to more actions that feel like safety to you, right? When I feel anxious, and I think “I am safe to feel this way now” I start to do the nerve soothing exercises almost automatically now. For me it’s some eye movements, rubbing my arms, and humming.
Ok so you can build up your resilience to feeling your anxiety by staying a little longer each time you decide to process your emotion. When you get practiced at this, you’ll find that you will get more and more functional when you are feeling anxious. Ok, this is one of the most important components for those of you that asked me this original question that sparked this series: how do I handle my anxiety and still live my life? This is how. Showing yourself, through allowing and processing your anxiety consistently and on purpose , that you can function alongside your anxiety. I’m not saying you need to sit around feeling all day, that’s not what Life Coaching is, even though it may seem that way because I talk about feeling so much on this show, but Coaching isn’t just taking up all your time sitting there feeling shit. In fact, I get more done in a week than most people get done in a month because I feel my feelings. I don’t just sit around all day feeling, but I feel the feelings and take them along for the ride. I let them be there, I have become really good at identifying what feelings are, what exactly each vibration in my body is about, and I can actually process emotions on the fly. I don’t need to like go lay down and do nothing else. Ok, so to become a fully functional human with feelings flowing. I can feel anxiety while I record this podcast, and still do it, because anxiety is not a problem. I can feel anxiety and take care of myself, my family, my work, whatever. But because I practice this. I need you to notice that you need to never give up practicing this because feeling is part of life, forever. You can do INCREDIBLE things, while feeling anxious.
Ok so just a few more things I want to share about this today. I want to bring some attention to the thoughts that you might have or even be having right now, that are going to keep you from doing this most important work of allowing and processing your anxiety. I’ve shared a lot already here on the podcast in general and even on my social media and I’ve even done one off courses about the how of allowing and processing emotions. Anyone can go and find that information from me, you can come to coaching and I’ll teach you in a way that resonates for you, right, it’s here for you, the how and what to do. But what I think might be even more helpful for you today is to clear out the thoughts that are keeping you from actually trying it, actually doing it. Because the info about how will be a waste if you’re stuck in your thoughts about how it’s not important, or you can’t or it takes too much time or energy or whatever else. So this is the dirty little thoughts part! Let’s talk dirty, right? These thoughts are ones that I have heard potential clients and current clients say to me, and thoughts that kept me myself from this work for too long.
So one of them is “This doesn’t seem important enough to make time for. Or I just straight up don’t have time to do that.” Right? Like look out for anything about not having the time. That’s going to keep you from this work for sure, and it’s a shit thought to trap yourself in in general, a whole other podcast episode for sure, but you are the keeper of your time, and what better use for it than learning how to manage your emotions and care for yourself in a profound way?
Another dirty little thought that is related that might keep you from this work is “It’s taking too long.” Like it’s supposed to not take this long to get through an emotion, to feel better.
The result of that thought it it taking longer right? So get to the belief that it’s taking the perfect amount of time and the exact amount of time it’s supposed to take. There’s acceptance there and you’ll need acceptance to be able to process emotions so that’s a great feeling to practice generating now.
Ok, another one that I used to use to avoid this work is “you don’t understand, my anxiety is different.” Like I kept the intense fear of my own anxiety live with thoughts like my anxiety is way worse, other people don’t have anxiety like me or as bad as I do, like you don’t understand, It’s too hard to feel that way. Or even like thinking that if I let this emotion come up on purpose, it might never go away. And you don’t understand how horrible that will be to be stuck in this feeling forever. Ok so, I implore you to notice that you are not alone.Over 40 million people in just the US have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. That doesn’t even count the number of undiagnosed. So you’re not the only one who feels how you feel. I do understand. I understand completely. So stop isolating yourself with your thoughts by literally just looking for proof that other people do know how it feels. Self-isolating thoughts are always thought errors. Human experience is shared, always.
A great intentional thought for this series of stopping thoughts might be All that’s happening is an emotion in my body. I’m safe. I’m ok. All that’s happening when I have anxiety is emotion manifesting in my body.
Another thought that I’ve used here is that I get to connect with myself more. Processing my emotions is an opportunity for me.
And to the thought of like this might never go away if I do this processing thing, I would say what if it does? What if it goes away? What would that be like? It might go away. That would be my intentional thought there. Because I can see that what I’m doing now, is not actually helping my anxiety to go away, it’s helping it to grow and stay stuck in my body, so what if something different helped to loosen it, or helped it along it’s way?
Another dirty thought that will keep you from this work is “It will just go away on its own with time. Or when this circumstance resolves.” We kind of talked about this already but I want you to notice that this is going to be a great thought that your primitive brain will use with LOTS of circumstances to prove to you that you have zero control over your emotions. You brain wants you to believe that you don’t have control over your emotions. Why? Because when your brain sends you into anxiety it wants you to believe that you’re in danger and respond with fight flight freeze, right? It doesn’t want you overriding your primal instincts. But now we know better right and we can be like okay no I can control how I feel, and I want to because then I have all the power. If I wait for “time to heal” I’ll be waiting forever, because the anxiety will still be there, unprocessed in my body, and because there’s always a next version of the weight of the world, right? We talked about that on the last episode. So my intentional thought to work on if right now you’re thinking that it will resolve when this circumstance goes away would be something like “I am working on taking back the power over my emotions.” Or, “I’m not willing to outsource my power to life’s circumstances.”
Ok, so if you’re waiting on time to heal you, what you’re really doing is keeping yourself in anxiety jail, instead of processing through it and releasing it, giving it the opportunity to flow through you and out. So maybe the new thought needs to be “JAILBREAK!”
Right, if you’re like “once covid is over I’ll feel better” “I’m waiting for Russia to pull out so I can stop stressing” “If this circumstance changes I’ll be okay”....change your thought to JAILBREAK. Get out of anxiety jail. Why wait when you can free yourself now?
And finally, one more example of a thought that might be keeping you from this work is “I should just be able to deal with this on my own.” I should be able to figure this out myself. I should have had this figured out by now. I shouldn’t need these crazy tools. I shouldn’t need help. I shouldn’t need a Life Coach.
The shoulds are killing your spirit. And by spirit I mean that place in you that compels you forward toward the things that are aligned with who you are becoming. Your spirit is asking you for things through the signs you’re waiting for but are actually already here. People are always waiting for signs, but missing the fact that asking for a sign is the fucking sign. It’s the spirit of your life coming through you wanting. Setting you up with eagerness and desire and when you should on that, it crushes your spirit and blinds you to your signs. So yeah, figure it out yourself if you want to. Find different tools that don’t seem so crazy. Dont have a Coach. That’s all available to you, but also when something is in front of you and you believe that you shouldn’t use it, take it, have it, deserve it, need it, want it…you’re just putting your spirit in anxiety jail too. Haha. I mean, when you use the word should I would just question, “says who?” Like who is it that said you should have figured this out yourself by now? Do you wanna listen to that person now?
Alright I have more on this coming at you next time, so stay tuned.
Do what you can. Work up to sitting with your emotions and processing through them. I know that it’s scary at first. If you want someone in your corner that will help you to make it less scary, I’m here for you. You’re ready for a Coach now. There’s your sign. There’s no better time to see a sign than right now. Come do this work with me and I’ll teach you how to manage your emotions for life. See you there.