Happy Monday and welcome to your mental health mini. This week's guest is Tara Bixby and we are talking anxiety. I think we are overcomplicating anxiety and if you talk to helping professionals, we're all going to have different views on anxiety. But this is something that I've recognized from my own life and what I've seen with my clients and patients is that I believe there's three pathways that can ignite anxiety. The first pathway is triggers in
your environment. So sight, sound, smell, feeling, taste, whatever can trigger an emotional memory that's been stored in your amygdala. So that's one way, another way that I think anxiety can be ignited is by our thoughts. You know, what are we telling ourselves? What are we worrying about? What are we thinking? Because your thoughts can essentially scare your amygdala into activating your anxiety. And the third way is gut health
is internal stressors. Because if something's going on inside your body, you know your amygdala and vagus nerve, they're communicating with each other. And if your amygdala perceives a threat inside your body, it's going to activate your stress response. I think people when they feel anxious, they think it's a message that's saying things are going to get real bad. Something's going to fall apart in my world. Somebody's going to die. I'm going to die. They think it means something bad.
I wish people would think of anxiety as stress activation. When you feel anxious, just like, Oh, my nervous system's activated again, you know, reshift that focus to just being a nervous system because because a lot of people fear anxiety because they don't know what anxiety is.
So I would just encourage people to know about anxiety, know about your nervous system and to know that those physical sensations, while they're terrible and horrible and nobody likes them, that it's just your nervous system activating. But you have the power to retrain your nervous system to not be so responsive. But I think if somebody's listening to this and they're struggling with anxiety, I have a couple things. I would definitely encourage
movement. If you can get your heart rate up for 30 minutes a few times a week. When you get your heart rate up and you're moving, your amygdala thinks that you're escaping danger. And so it thinks, OK, you know, they've escaped that danger. I no longer need to be activated and it'll close that anxiety loop for you. I want people to really understand also with movement, your anxiety activates your nervous system, your sympathetic nervous system and energy is
mobilized within you. And if you don't burn off all that energy that was mobilized, it becomes stored in your body. So that's also like a really good reason to move your body when feeling anxious. I would encourage people to prioritize sleep. Like are you getting good sleep quality? And I'm not saying, oh, I sleep 8 hours, Are you sleeping good? Because when you don't sleep good, it pisses off your amygdala and therefore you feel
anxious the next day. The other thing I would encourage is just grounding, like really ground in your body. Send your amygdala signal of safety.
Let it know that you're safe because if you're able to calm your nervous system, whether you go for a walk in nature or you know, you sit on the couch and you sip your coffee in the morning, whatever you can do to just really ground yourself in your environment, in your body, it's going to send that signal of safety and your amygdala is going to think you're OK and therefore it's going to basically stop activating.
I would start by just checking out your lifestyle, You know, what's your diet and lifestyle look like? You know, like do you drink a lot of caffeine? If you are drinking a lot of caffeine, try to start cutting back and see if that helps or makes an improvement. Let's get in nature, you know, let's expose ourselves to sunshine. Let's go for walks, let's ground, let's do movement practices and then really going
inward. And once you know what is activating your anxiety, if it's your thoughts, OK, cool, go focus on CVTA little bit. If it is trauma, because a lot of people have not made the connection that trauma is, you know, it's causing dysregulation in your body and it's igniting anxiety because of triggers in your environment. So then once you get to that, you know, let's let's do a somatic experiencing, let's get in your body, discharge the
storage stress. And I want people to know that because they get so discouraged when they go somewhere and they're like, why is this not helping me? And it's probably because you're treating a pathway of anxiety. That's not the pathway that's igniting your anxiety. It's not a one-size-fits-all. So that's why it's always tricky. And I always encourage many different changes. I want everybody that's listening to this. I don't care if you're anxious
or not. I want everybody to use the tools because the more you strengthen that within yourself, if you do feel anxious in the future, it's more likely to be easier to reduce your anxiety because you've already strengthened that skill. Your body's like, oh, I know what I'm doing and it jumps in. If you enjoyed this mental health mini, you can listen to the full episode. It is episode 91 featuring Tara Bixby. A link to the full episode is in the show notes.
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