229. 4 ways to make your anxiety work for you

one day. What might that be like? Or we've considered, you know, what our lives would look like if we weren't held back by these hypothetical fears about what may or may not happen, what others might think, what disasters await, what terrible things could go wrong in our future. It is a huge burden at times, even if it comes and goes in waves. Me and my anxiety, my power,

we go way back. I remember distinctly, so clearly, having my first effic panic attack about the movie The Never Ending Story when I was eight years old at like a school movie night, and since then, I've always had these moments of just extreme panic and anxiety that can go on for months or or just be this baseline of just nervousness for kind of as long as I

can remember. I think I said in a recent episode that there have even been times in my life when I've worried about the fact that I'm not anxious about anything, which is absolutely bizarre. I really begun to, you know, realize that my anxiety was almost comforting in a strange way. It provided me with an illusion of security that felt quite nice, when actually, although it was making me feel nice, was making me feel like I could anticipate every single

problem that would happen in my life. A that wasn't the case. Things happened that I never could have thought of, and B it was actually taking away from a lot of my experiences and a lot of the joyful experiences that made up for the anxious ones. You know, I would just sit with my anxious thoughts and try and problem solve them, which I think is something that we've

all done. I would try and think my way through a scenario that in you know, is completely irrational, and that is just never going to work, because even when, on the rare occasion I would get through it, my brain would just present me with a bigger and even trickier hypothetical. So it felt quite never ending. And then a few years back, I started doing things differently. I stopped letting my anxiety kind of be the loudest voice in the room. I stopped letting it, you know, always

be in control. And I kind of started finding ways to almost play with my anxious thoughts, to like beat them at their own game, combining what I knew scientifically and psychologically about anxiety and how it operates, but also by kind of playing these mind games, these mind tricks and establishing like some pretty really really useful tricks and tips and strategies through trial and error, and what actually

made me feel better. Did require a little bit of work, but it really helped me change my thinking from anxiety as a burden to anxiety is something that is a part of me that I can make work for me, that I can leverage in some small way. And that's exactly what I want to talk about today. Four of them there ways that I've really been able to make anxiety work for me even in really really tough times,

terrible times, really panicky, anxious times. These strategies have been like my greatest tools, and recently I've really had to put them to the test again and slowly but surely they have helped me out of a tough situation. So I wanted to share it with you. I hope that you can learn something. All of these tips are really practical and accessible. You could literally try them all today if you wanted, so I really hope it at least changes how you think about your anxious thoughts, even if

it doesn't change your life. Without further ado, let's get into the four ways that we can make anxiety work for us. Having a refresher on what anxiety actually is might sound really simple to begin with, but sometimes when we're really wrapped up in our feet and our panic and our worry, we think that our anxiety means more than it does, and we really need to be firstly grounded in the fact, grounded in the facts of what we're going through. You may think you know all the

information about anxiety. There is a lot to know, and you probably do know quite a bit, But when you're operating from a place of survival and pure fear. Your ability to actually remember this valuable information becomes quite clouded.

You know, you're just not thinking straight. And we think in those moments that our anxiety is much more valid than it is, that we should believe every single thought that passes through our brains, that every opinion made up situation could be true, because we've been hardwired to prioritize thoughts that relate to our survival, that relate to fear, that have an emotional tone to them, even if they're

actually not that useful. I think, essentially trust that our mind and our body and a certain extent must be doing what it thinks is best. It must know what's best. It must be making us pay attention to these hypotheticals because we are in real danger. But what we need to realize is that our trust is misplaced. Because anxiety's job, and this might shock you, maybe it won't, but an anxiety's job is to be irrational. That is literally its job.

It is to present us with the worst case scenarios, to catastrophize, to stress, to project, not to be truthful. That is not part of its job description. It's not to see a situation realistically. And why exactly is that the case. Well, because anxiety is your body and your brain trying to protect you against a perceived threat or a stressful situation, often by exaggerating an outcome or exaggerating the reality of the situation to you know, either a help motivate you or be try and get you to

problem solve before the situation occurs. You know, I often think about anxiety like your mind trying to give you a practice exam. But all the questions and scenarios are questions and scenarios that you'd never actually encounter in the real world or in the real exam, and they're often impossible to answer. They'll never show up in real life. And all the while you're convincing yourself or your anxiety is convincing you you know, this isn't a practice exam.

This is the real deal. You have to take this seriously. This could actually be happening right now, you know. Take feeling anxious about the future. What you're really experiencing is a fear of uncertainty because there is a lot you don't know. You might not know how your career is going to turn out. You might not know whether that big risk will pay off, whether you're going to meet your people, whether you're going to find love. So there is a lot of empty space, There are a lot

of unknowns. Our anxiety likes to feel that space with the worst case scenario to basically say, okay, well, if you can handle this, if you have a plan, then we'll be fine if it comes true. Here's the thing, though, those scenarios rarely, if not ever, come true. The scenario in which you lose everything in a fire and you make a huge mistake at work and you never get a job again and all your loved ones die, that

isn't going to come true. The fear of you know, suddenly being diagnosed with a rare disease when you are otherwise healthy, that isn't going to come true. Or you know, your thought that everyone secretly dislikes you, you've somehow said something to upset all your close friends without anyone mentioning it.

That is false. It's not going to come true. It is your brain serving you up scenarios to give you a really vigorous mental and physical workout, so if they were to happen, you would be okay because you've already experienced the anxiety towards this situation beforehand. Hopefully that makes a lot of sense to you. I think when we begin to acknowledge that this is our brain trying to protect us but just not doing a very great job or being very helpful at all, we see our situation

a bit more clearly. And it has always always helped me to remind myself that my opinion about a situation is just an opinion, nothing more, nothing less. There's often very little evidence for what I'm thinking, and as much as I try, you know, I can't tell the future. I'm not I don't have that rare magical ability. I cannot anticipate how this will work out, So I just have to be accepting of what comes. Of course, you

know that's very easy to think. But when your anxiety is accompanied by a number of physical symptoms like shaking, like a rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, trembling, nausea, sweating, or that feeling of disassociation or being unreal, it can become even more unpleasant. And I will say it makes it feel a lot more immediate. As much as those thoughts may not be true, what you're going through certainly is the physical feeling you're going through is very real.

Whether that is displayed through panic attacks, through like consistent underlying anxiety, or just intrusive, repetitive thoughts, it is definitely not a comfortable experience. I don't think anyone is like, oh yeah, I love feeling anxious. That's one of my favorites. And I'm not going to be like some guru who's going to sell you snake oil and say that I can make that go away immediately or that I can

cure you. But what I do want to talk about is four ways that we can take that feeling and not just completely eliminate it, but make it work for us, and make do leverage the anxious hand, the anxious mind

that you've been dealt. You know, like I said before, it's been at least sixteen years that I've kind of been in the business of anxiety, but only in the last like two to three that I've really started approaching this tension, these feelings, these thoughts in a way that initially felt so counterintuitive but actually which really really worked. And that's the thing that I've learnt with anxiety that I've found you kind of have to beat it at

its own game. And just be as irrational and delusional in your belief that you'll be fine as your anxiety is irrational and delusional in its belief that the world is falling apart. You need to be just as persistent as your anxiety is and just as imaginative. But the thing is is that you already know that you can be all those things, because your anxiety is displaying that you have that capability. So you can use the methods that your anxiety is using to scare you to kind

of scare it back. This really brings me to the first way that I've stopped fighting my anxiety and really made it work for me, And that is really tricking myself into believing that anytime I feel anxiety, it's actually just excitement, and choosing to label the sensations differently to how my mind wants to label them. If my anxious mind wants to make things up, wants to label things differently as a threat when they're not. If my anxious mind wants to lie to me, well I can lie

right back. You know, it sounds like I'm fighting this mortal enemy. But here's the thing. Right Like, there's a perk, not so much a perk, but something unusual about feeling anxious that works in our favor. Anxiety and excitement are actually incredibly similar on so many dimensions, and they tend to actually activate the same kind of arousal pathways in

our body. There's a really amazing article from the Harvard Business School titled Get Excited, Reappraising anxiety as excitement, and it talks about how both anxiety and excitement are or not knowing what to expect. They're based on high levels of arousal, so basically meaning a similar level of bodily response to a stimulus, and they're based on a sense or a loss of control. When you're excited, you're going to feel perhaps equally jittery, kind of nervous. You're going

to feel your heart rate go up. Maybe all these thoughts start swirling around about what is possible. That's very similar to an anxious state. The only difference is what we would call positive or negative valence. So valence or valency is this idea in psychology that describes how different emotions have a different emotional effect even if they feel the same on a physical level. So anxiety and excitement

they feel the same on a physical level. But as anxiety has a negative valance, whereas excitement has a positive valance, meaning that the emotional effect of excitement is appealing, it's desirable, it makes us more attracted to a situation, whereas anxiety has that negative valance, it makes us scared, fearful, uncomfortable. So I want you to tap into that positive emotional valency. If the only thing that is different is how we interpret a feeling, then tell yourself, actually, I'm excited by

this feeling. This is an anxiety. This is excitement about how this is going to turn out. I'm excited to see how I manage this. I'm excited to be able to have this human experience. And you know, I used this technique a lot when I was getting over my fear of flying. I would get incredibly panicked, especially during takeoff, and so I would just keep repeating that, you know, this is actually an excited feeling. I'm excited by this feeling.

This is not anxiety. These are butterflies. This is not adrenaline, its enthusiasm. And that same research paper from Harvard that I referenced before actually concluded that using this technique can improve our performance like a lot in certain situations, especially when it comes to things to do with social anxiety,

public speaking, specific phobia situations. And it's a much better strategy if you then trying to just completely shut down our anxiety completely, because going from anxious to calm is a lot harder. There are a lot more nuances and differences compared from compared to going from anxious to excited because they are on the same kind of end of the spectrum. That is Tip number one. But we're going

to take a short break. I hope that you stay with us, and I hope that you are excited for the next three strategies I have for you when we're back. The easiest way to tell if something is an anxious thought is when it starts with what if? What if the world collapses? What if my worst fear comes true? What if I never achieve what I want? What if I lose it all? A true fear something that is actually dangerous in the moment wouldn't require that what if

prefix because you would know what was happening. It would be happening right now in the moment. And this is really valuable to pay attention to because the moment you find yourself spiraling overthinking, getting repetitive with your thoughts, and they all start with what if that is anxiety? That is not reality, It's a thought, not a fact. Here's how you can make this work for you Again, what

you're really fearing here is the unknown. And it's not uncommon for us to have, you know, five six seven different hypotheticals about what could happen, or going at once or swirling around or feeling equally scared and unlikely. What we forget to realize is that they can't all possibly come true. But yet we feel bombarded with an almost cumulative worry right that each of these hypotheticals could be

a possibility. And that's one of the first ways that we see that anxiety is a really, really irrational because that's not possible. And I want you to fight these unknowns with nones. Yes, you don't know how the future will pan out or what will happen in this situation, but you do know a lot of things, and you are certain of a lot of things. You know that you are capable, you know that you've survived every situation you've been in before. You know that this is just anxiety.

What else do you know? You do know that your fears rarely ever come true. You do know that you are not alone. You do know that you you know many others have been through this and come out the other side. There is one uncertainty. The uncertainty is what's going to happen in this situation, What's going to happen now? But there are many, many certainties, and that is what

I want you to focus on. What you do know, what you are certain of, compared to what you are uncertain of, and see how like the certainties end up stacking up in your favor. Here's a really great visualization exercise that I use with this as well, is I like pretend that I am holding these certainties in my hand, and they are these big golden orbs, these big, like weird golden balls, and I like mentally throw them at

my fears, at my anxious thoughts. And I think about the fears as like this big shadowy, you know, shadowy figure, and I'm throwing these big certainty golden orbs at them, and they're just crashing through this shadow, making it smaller and smaller and smaller, making it fall apart until it's gone. And these certainties really pierce through that uncertainty, both in like the visualization, but also in your life, like you really start to believe that, yes, you do know that

this is going to pass. You do know that there are all these factual things that you can rely on. You do know at the very least, that you trust yourself to get through this. That is something that you are absolutely sure of. The reason that I find this so effective is because it gives me the opportunity to remember that I am capable no matter what situation I encounter. Again, anxiety's job is to be irrational, but so often afterwards we never get the opportunity to remember what it was

we were fearing because it doesn't come true. So anxiety's job is really to torment us, not to give us factual scenarios that we actually are going to encounter. You can instead use this situation to learn about yourself, to reinforce that you are confident that you trust yourself, rather than trusting your anxiety. And you've got to remember a lot of people don't get tested this way. A lot

of people go through life just assuming things. And you're someone who is going to instead take that discomfort, take all those situations in which you felt fear and really pay attention to the fact that you got through it, and really remember that for the future, that you are an incredibly strong person to be facing a battle that is originating from you, that is originating from the deepest fears that you could possibly encounter. Being made to feel real.

I just think you will experience true pride and joy that you persevere, and I want you to have that experience. I want you to make that happen for yourself. Now. The third way that I make anxiety work for me rather than against me is by personifying my anxiety as something that isn't threatening. So my mum was actually the one who really inspired me to kind of start thinking about my anxiety this way because of something that she said to me once when I was really really stuck.

You know, she's seen me kind of battle with some pretty existential fears for a long time, and one day she was like, the fears you have now are no different to when you were a kid and you were scared of the boogeyman or you were scared of the monster in your closet. You know, it's just all smoke, right, And thinking about my anxiety is this tangible thing that wasn't scary, except for in my imagination turned a lot

of it around for me. So now I try to personify my anxiety as this is so strange, but as Boo from Monsters Inc. Now, if you've ever seen that movie,

it's a classic. I'm assuming that you have. But you know, Boo is the little girl and when she's she's like wearing this little monster costume and she jumps out and she goes like Boo and obviously, like Sully and Mike Wazowski like get really really scared, But it's like it's just a little kid, right, And that's how I like to imagine my anxiety trying to scare me, like a little kid that's like playing and I'm like playing along with them, and they're like Boo, and I'm like, oh,

I'm so terrified. How scary. But really I can see that it's just this little harmless being, this little thing that is, you know, not actually going to hurt me, because you know, really your anxiety is just like a little kid playing make believe. It can't jump out and rip off your limbs, it can't pull your hair, it can't do anything to you externally. It is a feeling and one that has originated from you, so it will

not harm you as uncomfortable as it feels. Giving it a name, giving it a little costume, giving it an identity, maybe it lets us remember what we're really dealing with. Here is a boogeyman, or in my case, you know, a little kid playing dress up who's trying to scare you. This has the additional benefit of meaning that you can kind of almost speak to your anxiety like it's a person, Like it's you know, an annoying visitor in your house

or a little kid. You're asking it to leave. You're in control, and you can kind of also tease it and joke around with it and tell it to chill out. One of my friends calls her anxiety Brian like brain, but with the eye and the a swap to get the picture. And she's so cute because she'll be like, oh, you know, Brian is just holding us up today, so I'm running a little bit late, or you know, Brian is really overthinking this. Can you tell them to chill out?

Can you reassure me? Now? You know it's like if she needs to cancel plans, she needs more information, she needs reassurance. It's not her asking for it, it's Brian. Maybe in a way that kind of reduces some of the stigma or the sense that you're demanding or that you're the problem, because this separation of you and your anxiety into a character makes you realize that you are,

in fact, not your anxiety. You are just a person doing the best they can with what they have and the hand that they've been dealt, even if that hand involves a little friend who likes to jump out and scare you. My final tip today for making your anxiety work for you rather than against you, for reprogramming our relationship with this state, is to take the tension, take the hopelessness, take the nervousness, and channel it into something creative.

That energy you have has to go somewhere, and yes, it can definitely be expressed through tears or panic or muscle tension or trembling, but it can also be expressed emotionally through creation. Now I'm not saying production. I'm not saying to take all that nervous energy and that false alarm focus and be productive and work on your school project or whatever it is, or work on your assignment

or doing something that's necessarily helpful. I'm saying be creative for a reason because what I think really helps us process and anxiety is building something, molding something for the sake of just making something beautiful. Anxiety puts us in the state of helplessness, scarcity, starkness, deficit. We feel like life is kind of meaningless at times, or like everything could be taken away from us. Our safety, our lives

are at risk. Creativity is the exact opposite painting, buying four dollar clay from your craft store, knitting, building legos, scrapbooking, diary entries, writing, poetry, whatever it is that shows abundance, that shows healing, that shows that you can be in control. You can put beautiful things back into the world and channel again, yes, that anxiety, channel it into something meaningful

rather than something meaningless. I cite this paper all the time, so for my regular listeners, I am going to sound

like a broken record. But a twenty twenty one paper on the positive effects of creativity looked at over five hundred adults who were asked to just engage in a small creative task each day for less than ten minutes, and after two weeks, their subjective wellbeing was measured and What they found was that for those who were given the direction to be creative, they were so much happier, and the biggest area where the researchers saw a shift was reduced anxiety. In my mind, anxiety is just energy,

and energy doesn't disappear. It needs a place to go, it needs direction. When you begin to master your anxiety more, you can kind of channel it in the ways that you want, and creative expression is one of the easiest ways to do that. Initially, you take that energy that is all yours, It is yours to use, and you use it to create, to expand, to build, rather than to let your anxiety convince you that nothing changes or your fears come true. They won't, I promise. This is

just a survival instinct. This is just a stress response. Your brain is doing its best to prepare you. But it's best. It's also very imaginative and out there. You know, you've got a really creative mind, That's what you know. I've had a friend say to me once. She was like, yeah, you're just very creative, and so take that creativity. You can either use it to make up cook up like the most crazy hypotheticals, or you can use it to create something beautiful that's going to add to your life.

So as a refresh before we wrap up, here are the four ways that you're going to try. Maybe you can try one. You can try to You're going to uses to make your anxiety work for you. Hopefully you will go away and when you feel panic, worry, stress, you will tell yourself that it's excitement. You will have an ongoing list of the things that you do know to engulf the things that you don't know. You will put a name to your anxiety. You'll visualize your worries,

you'll make a character out of it. And finally, when your anxiety tells you to be small, tells you to deconstruct your life instead, be creative, build something, make something, even if it's like terrible, even if it's shit, even if you don't think it's particularly pretty. You'll enjoy the process and it will give the energy again somewhere to go when you turn that creative energy that you have away from the scary hypotheticals and into something beautiful and magnificent.

So I really do hope that if you're going through an anxious period, I think that the biggest comfort for me has been knowing that I am not alone and you're definitely not alone either, because I can say, hand on my chest that I am feeling it pretty intensely at the moment. So we're in the same boat, I promise you, and we'll get through it. We definitely will get through it, because your body cannot be in this

state forever. It just can't. We know that biologically, we know that just when we learn about the stress response, then it's not possible. So please hold on, try some of these tips. I promise it gets better. I promise this is just your imagination working over time, which is a beautiful thing sometimes but sometimes less than helpful. And yeah, I hope that you find some peace in your day today. I hope that this episode has brought you some peace. If you did enjoy it, please make sure that you

are following along on Spotify or Apple podcasts. Leave a five star review, especially if you're listening on Apple actually, because we actually don't have many listeners over there, so any reviews really do help. And of course I read every single one of them so they don't go unnoticed. And if you have an episode suggestion, if you have a follow up to this episode, a question a query. An additional tip that you think people might also benefit from,

please share it with me at that psychology podcast. Until next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself, and we will talk soon.