I was back in a restaurant, and just like in the good old days the nausea and other symptoms appeared. They never missed a restaurant meal. At first, my anxiety still rose like it used to and I had thoughts like, “Djeezs, why is this happening now? And look, my plate is still SO full. I can’t stop eating now! If I do, the waiter is going to ask me what was wrong with it... ”
But then I switched tracks.
I changed my thinking to, “Wait, stop. Who cares about the waiter? I am me. If I want to stop eating for ANY reason under the sun, then that’s my decision. I have the freedom to decide that. If I throw up and cause a major scene, then I’ll deal with it! If I faint, get a red face, or make a fool out of myself in any other way, we may laugh at it during Christmas parties for years to come. Or I may decide to hide under a rock and live there happily ever after, who cares? I’m going with the flow. I’ll wait until the nausea subsides, and if it doesn’t, I’ll stop eating. I probably ate something my body didn’t like and that’s why I’m nauseous.”
Interestingly enough, if I had eaten one of the ingredients to avoid, the nausea often stayed, but the anxiety left. In all other cases where it was simply the social restaurant setting that had caused the discomfort, even the nausea dissipated as soon as I was ready to let go and not be ashamed about it.
And it did happen that other people asked me, “Is everything all right?” Then I always chose to show my authentic and real self: “Well, my hunger is gone all of a sudden. That’s a bit weird. How’s your food?”
We need to learn to not make a big deal out of everything and not be ashamed about our uniqueness.
Hereditary?
Some anxious people notice that they are not the only ones in their family that is more anxious than average. It turns out that part of the anxiety can be hereditary. This simply means that your genes might cause you to be more anxious than the general population. If you are an HSP (highly sensitive person), chances are one of your parents had the same trait. First of all, this is not bad news. My father is a man with a lot of anxious tendencies; he loves to worry about the little things, and my grandfather was definitely a very anxious man too. He would get migraine headaches every Sunday just because Monday meant going back to work. So with all that anxiety in my family tree, I must live a life filled with anxiety, right?
Not true. Yes, my predisposition made me walk down the path leading to Panic Ville because it made me more anxious than the average, not-so-anxious Joe. But you can choose to pack your bags and turn back whenever you want. If it were hereditary, I wouldn’t have been able to totally overcome my panic attacks more than ten years ago. Your genes are simply a predisposition. A lock. You still decide whether you turn the key or not.
When I look at all of the people I’ve helped, I believe learned behavior plays a much bigger role. If you had an anxious mother or father while growing up, chances are you’ve taken over their view of the world.
Did you know for example that babies have no fear of spiders and snakes? Studies show they learn to fear spiders when they hear their mother’s reaction to the one that was slowly crawling down the shower curtain one morning.[3]
We have a tendency to take over many of the anxieties of our peers as we are growing up. This, in my opinion, can play a major role and make anxiety seem truly hereditary when it’s in fact just learned behavior.
What’s the one sentence some parents are repeating over and over again to their children? “Be careful!”
The Nervous System (So Important!)
Your nervous system takes care of just about everything that’s going on in your body. From making your mouth water when you’re about to indulge in your favorite meal to briskly pulling your hand away when you decided to lean on a sizzling hot stovetop.
There are two major parts to your nervous system, the voluntary and involuntary part.
Every movement you consciously make is part of what the voluntary nervous system takes care of. When you reach for your phone to see how perfect the lives of everyone on social media are, that is your voluntary nervous system at play.
The involuntary nervous system (or the autonomic nervous system), on the other hand, takes care of you without any direct input. Your digestion belongs to this piece of the nervous system. When you eat something, you don’t have to focus on your stomach to release exactly one cup of stomach acid and enzymes to break down the burger you just ate. All of that goes on behind the scenes, automatically. Imagine how big our to-do list would get otherwise!
Your heart rate, pupil dilation, and temperature control (sweating or getting goose bumps) are other examples of the involuntary part. We have no direct control over it. But your nervous system does! When you’re angry, your heart rate goes up (your nervous system asked for it). When you’re madly in love, your digestion behaves differently thanks to all of those butterflies taking up space (that’s your nervous system again). When your amygdala thinks you’re in danger, it tells your nervous system that. In turn, it fires up the entire fight-or-flight response.
Our emotions affect our organs via the involuntary part of the nervous system.
The challenge is that when you misuse it for a long period of time, your nervous system will become so fatigued and worn out that its sensitivity will go up dramatically. It will take less and less to put it in full force and deliver all of the consequences of a bout of anxiety, even though the trigger was something that wouldn’t scare other people, not even the ‘old you’ of a couple of months earlier.
Here’s a quick illustration of this process. Imagine that you’re swimming in the ocean and you’ve had to fend off two hungry sharks. They didn’t get to bite you because you swim like a dolphin, but they came awfully close and you had to really call them nasty names before they finally decided to turn around. Your nervous system is still stressed because of this encounter and you’re quite fatigued considering you’ve just had to fight for your life, for real this time.
As you’re swimming back to shore, you see the fin of a small, elegant, and not at all dangerous baby whale near you. A magical event that would otherwise have made you happy. But now you go into a full state of anxiety exactly because your nervous system became super sensitive. Something good just scared you.
The more anxiety or panic attacks you have, the more sensitive the nervous system will become. Even events that should not make you anxious at all can then launch you into a full state of anxiety.
That’s why, over time, you might feel that it takes less and less to make you freak out. This is the very reason why the nervous system is a major cause of anxiety. We’ll work on calming it down and allowing it to restore itself in part two. Are you ready for it?
Part 2: This Is Where You Get Your Life Back
You now understand what happens during an anxious moment, what the most important causes of anxiety are, and how your nervous system plays a fundamental role. It’s time to get your life back and recover.
A little heads up. If you skipped ahead and arrived here without completely reading part one, please go back. Part one is the foundation. You’ll need the knowledge I’ve given you there for part two to work effectively. There are no shortcuts.
The anxiety you have now has forced you to take action. You have reached the “I’ve had enough of this!” point. Therein lies the gift of becoming a better version of yourself, even better than who you were before your anxiety-related problems started. We’ll fight this battle on all fronts, together.
What follows will be built around a couple of pillars.
The mind. What happens in your mind plays a major role as you’ve learned. We’ll go over how you should talk to yourself when you’re anxious and how you can respond to the different types of negative self-talk and “what if?” thinking. This is also where you’ll learn how to get your self-esteem back. How to feel safe and sane wherever you are. You don’t need a safe place or a safe person. Everything you need is already within you. You’ll also learn how to not try to control eve
rything or be a perfectionist. You’ll learn how to calm yourself down without outside help from other people, medication, or fleeing to a safer place. You’ll learn how to do it then and there, wherever you are.
The body. You’ll learn techniques to calm down your nervous system and you’ll learn some of the causes of those weird sensations you might feel. I’ll also explain what your body needs to stabilize internally since an unstable body is one that will be sensitive to anxiety and panic attacks.
What follows is your toolbox. Each and every tool will help you swipe some unwanted anxiety off the table. The power comes from using a combination of multiple tools. Try all of them on and see what fits you best. Also see what works best in certain situations (e.g., if you start to feel anxious during a conversation, you won’t have a lot of time to go through the more enhanced techniques. That’s OK. Simply pick some of the easy and short ones).
It’s important to memorize and practice every tool well. The more you practice, the better you will become at it.
The Mind and Your Inner “What If?” Voice
The Skill of Overcoming Anxiety
In order to overcome anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder, panic attacks, phobias, and all related issues, we’ll need to create new pathways in the brain.
No worries, this is much easier than it sounds, you’ve been doing it all your life.
Do you remember that, as you were a toddler, walking was out of the question? How about riding a bike? Do you remember how impossible that seemed? What about using a hammer and a nail for the first time? These may all have been accompanied by pretty painful learning curves.
You’ve had to consciously put in time and effort to learn how it worked, why it worked and what the rules were. Then after days, weeks, or often months of practicing, you became better and better at it, until at one point it became an automatism. You had created a habit and you could do it without consciously focusing on it.
Something amazing happens when we learn a new skill. Our brain starts to form new neural pathways so that something you first had to consciously focus on can become automated. That’s pretty powerful stuff. Now let’s use this principle on your anxiety.
If you’ve suffered from any anxiety-related issue for some time, that anxious or at least negative way of thinking has now become an automatism. That’s why you probably seem to get way more negative thoughts than positive ones. For the moment, it’s still just a habit of your brain, one that we can change.
Your brain has only so much energy and willpower every day and tries to become as effective and efficient as possible. In order to do so, it cuts corners.
If I tell you I flew from Chicago to L.A. yesterday, your mind will most likely think about airports and airplanes, right? Who says I didn’t fly with a helicopter, a hot air balloon, or even a zeppelin? Your mind didn’t even consider these options because it would be silly to. When people fly, they most often do it by airplane, so that’s the automatic reaction your mind is used to.
Everything we repeat or think often becomes an automatism.
Both the good and the bad repetitions. Your mind makes no distinction!
Nathan Spreng, a neuroscientist at Cornell University, did a scientific meta-analysis on this, together with many other scientists who have been studying the brain for decades.[4]
Whenever you repeat a process, your mind believes it must be important, so it memorizes and automates it. Can you see how essential this is?
Because you repeated being anxious, freaking out, or worrying about everything so often, your mind believes it must be very important to you. Why else would you practice it so frequently? It’s probably not for fun.
So it strengthens that pathway in your brain, making it easier for you to become anxious... automatically! I was mind blown when I first had this realization.
This, luckily, is reversible because the brain plasticity remains, no matter our age, as other interesting studies prove.[5] And as my clients older than 80 have proven too.
Right now, whenever you have an anxious thought, your mind still habitually goes into the “what if?” mode. We’ll just need to reverse that step by step, and this is much easier than you think.
Before we move on, let me prove this both to you and possibly to your negative voice that may be skeptical right now.
Please think of something you do often nowadays, without fear, while it made you anxious at first.
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For some people, it’s driving their car; for others, it’s swimming, riding a bike, horseback riding…
I still remember the first time I learned how to swim. I was traumatized since, as a toddler, I once stumbled into the kiddy pool and as I was rolling in the water I didn’t know where the surface was.
I nearly drowned (so I thought), until my auntie saved me and pulled me up.
Then the first time I hit the big and frighteningly deep pool for a swimming lesson, my heart was beating through my chest as I was super anxious. Not just because of the swimming lesson, I kept waiting for the shark from Jaws to surface and eat me alive. But as the lessons progressed and the shark never surfaced, swimming became more and more of an automatism, and my anxiety gradually subsided until it was totally gone.
Have you had similar experiences?
This is the usual way we conquer normal anxiety. By exposing ourselves to it over and over again, we learn that it’s OK. The anxiety vanishes, and that scary thing becomes embedded into our comfort circle. We can then partake in it without fear.
Nonetheless, as I’m sure you found out, pure exposure is not enough to conquer irrational fears. For those irrational fears, we’ll need to take out the heavy toolbox. And that’s what part two is for.
Exactly What to Tell Yourself to Overcome Anxiety and Panic Attacks
Your internal dialogue and what you keep telling yourself plays a major role as we’ve seen. It is what makes the difference between feeling anxious for less than a minute, developing generalized anxiety disorder, having panic attacks, or suffering from phobias.
First, imagine that you’re looking after an eight-year-old girl who says, “Hey, I feel scared. I think there’s a monster in my closet. I’m afraid.”
How will you respond?
Suppose you say, “Oh my! You should be afraid! You’re right. Even though monsters don’t exist, there may be a burglar, a kidnapper or even a serial killer in your closet. And don’t get me started about snakes and spiders... And ghosts! Although the jury is still out on those, I believe they exist. Anyway, bad things are about to happen to you either way, my dear. And it’s not just your closet you should be afraid of! You have no idea how tough life will get from here on out! Don’t you read the newspaper or watch the news? Life is bad. Trust me. I’m an adult. I know everything.”
Can you picture the face of the little girl you’ve been explaining this to? Will this advice help? Of course not! You’ll make her cry and scare her even more! That’s obvious.
But if this is so obvious... the question is, why do anxious people talk in that exact same way to themselves? Their minds go on and on and imagine things that could indeed happen, but where the possibility of it actually occurring is less than 1%.
What kinds of things do you say to yourself when you’re anxious? I’m sure it’s not kind and soothing. You may also be disappointed in yourself just because you had the thoughts or the anxiety in the first place. That disappointment is harsh as well.
Imagine lashing out at the eight-year-old girl with, “Why does this always happen to you? Why are you having these fears? I’m so disappointed... ” That wouldn’t help either.
If you kept track of your self-talk, your inner dialogue, you’d be surprised of
how badly you’re often treating yourself.
Our internal dialogue during moments of intense anxiety would often be classified as verbal abuse should we use the same language outwardly toward others.
If a real eight-year-old sought your reassurance, I’m sure you would calm the little girl down and say kind things. And that’s what you’ll need to do with yourself. Self-compassion is crucial!
At every moment of the day while you’re awake, you’re talking to yourself, all the time. And the road you pick will strongly color your mood, your feelings, your stress level, and of course, your anxiety level.
If you react badly to one negative thought, you’ll probably still feel fine. When you keep reacting negatively, you’re setting yourself up for constant anxiety.
Here’s a common example that I give in my audio course as well:
Badass Ways to End Anxiety & Stop Panic Attacks! Page 6
