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Anxiety 101
194 Plays2 years ago
Ever wonder what’s happening in your body when you can feel your anxiety? Today Julie shares some important info on what anxiety is, basics on how our nervous system works, and tips for taking control of your anxiety!
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Outside of Session'
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to outside of session. I'm your host, licensed clinical social worker and therapist BFF, Julie Hilton. We're going to cover all the things here, whether it's mental health, entrepreneurship, relationships, trauma, or just life. Nothing is off limits. Hopefully you'll laugh a little and learn a lot, but most importantly, feel encouraged on your journey to live empowered.
What is Anxiety? (Anxiety 101)
00:00:33
Speaker
Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of Outside of Session. I am super excited about today's episode because we are gonna be talking about all things anxiety. And I really wanted to record this episode because I feel like anxiety is just something that so many people can relate to, so many people live with and are trying to get a handle on constantly. Honestly, it's probably the number one reason why people reach out to me for therapy. So I work with anxiety a lot.
00:01:02
Speaker
So today I just wanted to do a podcast on just like Anxiety 101, some of the very basics about anxiety and understanding it and learning where does it come from and how you can take care of it a little bit better.
00:01:16
Speaker
So before we dive into what is anxiety and how can you keep it at bay, I wanted to point out that anxiety has always been around. People just haven't always used that language before. People haven't always called it anxiety. So I definitely don't think that our generation is more prone to anxiety. I don't think that there's something different about us and we're just this like,
00:01:42
Speaker
crazy anxious generation. I think that like our parents and grandparents generation just weren't, they weren't using the word anxiety. Like I don't think any of our grandparents would have said like, yes, I have social anxiety. I think that they would have used words like stage fright or nervousness. Like I can remember my mom when I was a kid growing up
00:02:05
Speaker
we would just be doing, so I'm the youngest of three and we were pretty rowdy when we were kids. And so I can remember us just being like running around or whatever and inside the house and somebody, I feel like one of us always had a broken bone of some kind. Um, and so my mom would say, stop it. Like y'all go sit down. Y'all are making me nervous. And she would say nervous. And I remember being like, why are you nervous? Because in my mind, nervous was like,
00:02:32
Speaker
when you were about to read a report in front of the class or something like that, that's what nervousness was. And so I was like, how are we causing her to feel nervous? But now I understand what she was really feeling when she was anxious and all of the, she was probably overstimulated and having us run around and because we did have a lot of like broken bones and injuries and stuff like that as kids, like it was making her anxiety increase. So I just want to point out that while I don't think that
00:03:00
Speaker
there's anything different about us to be like a more anxious generation. I do think a couple of things impact us in ways like why we are seeing more anxiety.
Anxiety and Modern Society
00:03:11
Speaker
First of all, I think social media definitely is causing a lot of anxiety. And second is our access to so much news. So with social media, I feel like obviously the reason why it sparks a lot of anxiety is the comparison game, right?
00:03:31
Speaker
I feel like in the past, years and years ago before social media was such a big thing, people still compared themselves. That's nothing new, but you only really compared yourself to the people you were seeing. So the people at your school, your community, your neighborhood, your job, the people that you interacted with day to day. Other than a few movie stars on TV,
00:03:55
Speaker
who didn't seem relatable at all because it was only like in acting, you really only compared yourself to people who were kind of like on your level. But now with social media, we're comparing ourselves to everybody, not just like in our community or in our state or in our country, but across the entire globe, we're comparing ourselves.
00:04:13
Speaker
And the thing is like people are in such different places in their life, but we're acting like we're not. We're acting like we're all on the same page. So we are literally out here comparing ourselves to people that have access to so much money that they can like design their lifestyle exactly the way they want to. And we're telling ourselves that we should be able to live up to those standards. And I think that like money has a really big
00:04:38
Speaker
place with that, right? We are looking at people that have had so many plastic surgeries and they just have access to things that we don't necessarily have access to. And I think that that is causing a lot of unfair comparisons.
00:04:54
Speaker
And then the second thing is also are constantly being bombarded by news outlets where we are seeing traumas go down in live time and that is something very new for our generation because think about it before like when there was something going on across the globe you might be able to watch it on the news a week later or read it in a newspaper a few weeks later. You didn't see
00:05:21
Speaker
actual footage as it was happening of people. Of people's traumas you know what I mean like I think about the war in Ukraine and every all the footage that we've seen for the past year like our exposure to that and even really starting and nine eleven like I think I've heard a lot of people talk about like that was the first time.
00:05:41
Speaker
that a generation was watching over and over and over again, like just flooded in the media of the images of these like crazy traumatic things happening in our world. And we're aware of all of them that are going on at once. And that to me is just like an auto normal thing. I don't think our brains are prepared to be able to see
00:06:00
Speaker
that many people's traumas at one time. So I think that those are the two things that have really impacted our generation and it makes a lot of sense why we probably are experiencing a lot more anxiety is because we live in just a very different world. I don't think the state of our world is necessarily any worse than it's ever been personally. I think that we are just more aware of not just our own suffering but of other people's sufferings and we naturally, especially empaths, take on what other people are experiencing as well.
00:06:31
Speaker
So, with all of that said, I want to start by saying anxiety in and of itself is not bad.
Understanding Anxiety's Warning System
00:06:39
Speaker
It is supposed to serve a purpose in our body and in our life to help protect us. It is our brain's way of telling us that something in our environment or something around us could potentially be dangerous and that can be physically or emotionally dangerous.
00:06:56
Speaker
even if we have no real awareness of what our brain is picking up on. Um, so we're going to start with just like a quick cyclist in here, a quick like anxiety one-on-one, um, to understand like what's going on in our brain and what's going on in our body when we're experiencing anxiety.
00:07:13
Speaker
So I always use this language with my clients and it helps me compartmentalize and picture what anxiety is. So we have basically two brains. We have a logical brain and we have an emotional brain. And those two parts of our brain
00:07:30
Speaker
don't always agree with each other and they don't always understand each other. So our logical brain consists of our frontal lobe and that's the part of the brain that holds things like logic and reasoning and judgment and morals and language. So it's like our more developed brain. It's what makes us human. It makes us be able to do all the things that animals can't do, right?
00:07:57
Speaker
The emotional brain, on the other hand, consists of the limbic system, and a lot of people call that, you might have heard it being called before, like the lizard brain or the reptilian brain. That is our more primal brain, and it's more of like our survival. It's survival instincts, you know what I mean? And that part of the brain houses our amygdala, which is essentially our fight or fight response system. So the fight or flight system
00:08:27
Speaker
Is triggered and activated when we are in some kind of danger so what that has to do with anxiety is When you think of the amygdala as the alarm system when you're having anxiety all it is is that the alarm is being sounded your amygdala is worried about something in the environment and
00:08:47
Speaker
Sometimes that thing might be very obvious, but most of the time it's actually not. So this is a really cool fact. The way our brain receives information is from all of our senses. So what we're seeing, what we're smelling, what we're hearing, what we're feeling, like physically feeling in the environment, that is, it's like collecting all of this data and our senses put it together and send it to the brain for processing.
00:09:14
Speaker
And all of that information actually passes through and gets to the more primal part of our brain a millisecond, like a very small amount of time. There's not a lot of lag time there, but it actually receives the information before the frontal lobe does, before the logical part of our brain does, which makes total sense why, let's say,
00:09:37
Speaker
Let's say you see a garden hose and in the past you have been bit by a snake. So when you see a garden hose you're going to jump and like your body is going to move you away from it before you have time to process what you're actually seeing. So that's like a good example of how when our emotional brain or primal brain or protective brain
00:09:57
Speaker
gets information a millisecond before our logical brain does, you've already jumped, you've already moved away from the thing before you even have time to process what it actually is.
Personal Experience with Social Anxiety
00:10:11
Speaker
So it's really easy to understand the system in those terms, because that's like,
00:10:18
Speaker
That makes sense, right? It makes sense that if you have been bit by a snake before and that was a trauma and you know it was really painful and really scary, you know that your brain has had that experience before so it's gonna try to protect you from going through that again. So when you jump away from it and you are flooded with anxiety, like it makes sense, like our logical brain can make sense of that too.
00:10:42
Speaker
What happens though is when you're not an actual physical danger and your body is still having that response, that's when people don't understand where their anxiety is coming from. And that's usually because it's more of an emotional danger that is harder to pinpoint. So a not so obvious example of why that alarm system would be going off is
00:11:06
Speaker
Okay, for example, I had a really bad experience, hard experience in high school for a lot of different reasons, but there were a lot of times where I felt like really judged and I felt a lot of like shame and embarrassment. That's just part of my story. And the hardest thing was that I didn't always expect it when it was about to happen. And I think that that's one of the most crucial elements of trauma is that
00:11:35
Speaker
having a hard time processing it because you didn't see something coming, right? And so I now have a tendency for a little bit more social anxiety because of what I experienced in high school, I kind of feel like I never know when that's going to happen again, right? So I never know who's going to judge me. So I can have the tendency to stay in like a constant
00:11:58
Speaker
state of like heightened awareness or heightened fear when I'm in a new surrounding where I don't exactly know how it's going to go and then I have a fear that I might be judged, right? So especially when I'm putting myself in a really vulnerable position of doing, I don't know, something like a podcast where people can leave really bad reviews. Like that would probably send me back to high school, right?
00:12:21
Speaker
So that's an example of how an emotional trauma can lead to a state of anxiety in the present. And I don't know a single person that doesn't have at least one high school or middle school memory of a mean girl that
00:12:39
Speaker
Even if we hate to admit it, it honestly, it really did deeply impact us in some way. And we have built up protections around ourselves because that's another thing you'll probably hear me say a hundred times is that we are hardwired to protect ourselves.
00:12:54
Speaker
Also, I hear people say a lot of times that anxiety isn't logical, but I don't necessarily believe that. I think it just takes a little bit of work to trace back and understand its origins. I literally, in my practice, have never met someone whose anxiety we couldn't trace back to some kind of deeper root. If you've done therapy before and it hasn't been helpful with your anxiety, it may be because you didn't really explore what the foundation was that
00:13:24
Speaker
gave you that anxiety, like what those little emotional traumas, those little T traumas were. And so I'm definitely gonna recommend like trying to dig a little bit deeper and not try to just stay on the surface of physically what's going on with anxiety, but I'm gonna say you should probably dig a little bit deeper and find out like what the initial injury was or that like old wound where it is.
00:13:49
Speaker
So now that we know a little bit about like what's going on in our body with anxiety, which actually, let me backtrack and say this as well. Like when you think about anxiety, most people describe it as very physical symptoms. Um, and also racing thoughts like sweaty palms, heart racing, um, heart pounding. Um, you get really like short of breath and
00:14:15
Speaker
That is all very intentional. So when we talk about the amygdala, when we talk about it telling you that you, it has sounded the alarm and it's telling you that you either need to fight or flight, that is a very like literal meaning. It is telling you that there is a threat and you need to either fight it or run away from it.
00:14:33
Speaker
And that, again, is very primal because when you think about how that served our ancestors who were being chased by really dangerous threats, you had to be able to either stand your ground and fight it off or you had to be able to get yourself away from it.
00:14:49
Speaker
So what you're experiencing in your body is all the things that you would actually need to be able to do those things. So if you were about to run away from something or like buckle down and fight it, you needed adrenaline in your body. You needed your heart rate to increase so that it can pump more oxygen to your muscles so that they can be more active so that they can actually defend you. So a lot of what you are feeling in your body
00:15:15
Speaker
is things like the stress hormone cortisol increasing, you're feeling adrenaline. It's just that when you are sitting like at your desk at work and you're not about to run away and you're not about to fight someone, it feels very uncomfortable in your body. But if you were actually about to run or fight somebody, it would serve you very, very well. And so when we talk about anxiety, a lot of times we only recognize the physical symptoms that are really uncomfortable
00:15:41
Speaker
and we're seeing them as a problem, not seeing them as our body's solution to what it perceives as the real problem, which is the emotional threat that it is picking up on in your environment. So that also leads to something that I wanted to mention about the difference between coping with anxiety versus curing anxiety.
Coping vs. Curing Anxiety
00:16:04
Speaker
Um, and maybe curing is not necessarily the best word for it, but more like releasing the source of anxiety is probably a better way to describe it. So coping skills are great and everybody needs to have an entire like toolkit of coping skills to be able to manage your anxiety, decrease it in the moment when you're already experiencing it.
00:16:27
Speaker
And you can do things like therapy for that. So CBT is cognitive behavioral therapy. That's really good for learning like different coping skills for anxiety. But CBT again is cognitive therapy. So it works on the
00:16:42
Speaker
rational part of your brain because it works more like with your language. So it's helping you change the way you think about things like reframing or seeing how powerful your thoughts are and what kind of influence they have over your feelings. So again, I do like CVT exercises at times, but it's not really getting to the emotional part of your brain that is housing and storing
00:17:05
Speaker
The emotional trauma that is being triggered by the amygdala, right? So again, coping skills are great. CBT is great, but it only works on the rational part of the brain. Medication is great, but it works chemically to help suppress the symptoms, the uncomfortable symptoms of anxiety.
00:17:24
Speaker
So I'm all for these things. I have four medication if you need it and I have four different types of therapy and different kind of coping skills and I teach those a lot in therapy like deep breathing and different things that you can do when you're feeling anxiety.
00:17:41
Speaker
But I just feel like that is a band-aid for the deeper issue. And again, band-aids are very needed. Like you need to bandage your wounds so that they don't get worse, right? Bandages are very helpful, but they are not what help to cure the wound underneath it.
00:17:59
Speaker
I feel like a good example is a snowball. So anxiety is kind of like a snowball because when you are experiencing something in the present, all it's really doing is adding onto your experiences from the past. So it's like this snowball that keeps
00:18:15
Speaker
rolling down the side of the heel that's gaining momentum and getting bigger and bigger over time, which is why if you were in your teens and you had anxiety, maybe you were able to push through it, likely because you didn't have the language for it or you didn't have parents that would help you deal with your anxiety, but you somehow got through it. And in your 20s, it got a little bit worse. And in your 30s, it continues to grow and grow until it's finally to a point of you're like, I really have to do something about this. It's because the snowball has gotten so big.
00:18:43
Speaker
So I feel like rather than just coping with how big that snowball has gotten, we really have to work on melting that snowball so that it's not as big. And the way you do that is different types of therapy that don't just work on the logical and rational part of the brain. They really work on the emotional part of the brain. So it's things like EMDR, which I'm sure you've probably heard of before. And I use EMDR a lot in my practice.
00:19:12
Speaker
And I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here on how it works. I'll have to do a whole episode on that. But things like EMDR are really working on going straight to the emotional part of the brain so that it can actually release some of those fears and some of those protective instincts that it's been holding onto so that your amygdala is not
00:19:31
Speaker
hyper reactive. You want it to be reactive to actual dangers in your environment because again it serves a really good purpose but you don't want it to be hyper reactive to a point where something that shouldn't really be perceived as a threat all of a sudden has you going into a panic attack.
00:19:48
Speaker
So I will eventually do a whole episode about things like EMDR and other types of therapies and how they work. And while yes, there are different ways to address the core of this, you still have to do
Taking Responsibility for Managing Anxiety
00:20:03
Speaker
your part. And this is something that a lot of people probably don't want to hear, but this is going to be a little bit of tough love. You still have to do your part to better manage your anxiety and not only depend on
00:20:17
Speaker
what we can do in therapy. Like there are still things that you can be doing outside. A couple example of those are number one, decrease your caffeine.
00:20:28
Speaker
And I get it. People do not want to hear that. If you are a Starbucks babe, I totally understand that. I am a coffee addict too. So please understand that I have had to go through periods of my life where I have had to cut back and almost eliminate my caffeine too to help with my anxiety. And I know it is not fun, but it's still necessary because caffeine directly impacts the parts of our brains that
00:20:52
Speaker
can make you feel those symptoms of anxiety more. So grab a decaf. It still has a little bit of caffeine in it, so it probably will at least hold off on causing you to have a caffeine headache. You're not going to go into complete withdrawals if you get a decaf. I know people think that that is like a cardinal sin to get a decaf coffee, but I'm telling you your anxiety will thank you for it.
00:21:21
Speaker
Another thing is really like limiting your screen time on social media and your access and how much you're exposing yourself to the news. That's why social media breaks are so important and are so good for you is because you're able to check out from constantly seeing
00:21:38
Speaker
everything that you're not and also all the traumas that other people are going through. And I realize that a lot of people feel that that is coming from a place of privilege if you can disconnect from what other people are going through and I completely understand that and agree with that to a certain extent.
00:21:55
Speaker
But when our ancestors, when the generations before us didn't constantly know what everyone else across the entire globe were going through, it wasn't because they were privileged. It was because the technology didn't exist and they were better protected from it than we are. So there has to be some kind of balance between
00:22:16
Speaker
not leaving in a bubble where you're only worried about yourself and only concern for yourself, but at the same time saying it's okay to check out for a little bit so that you can maintain your sanity. And I don't think that there's anything wrong with being able to do what you can and give where you can and then check out a little bit so that you are able to function yourself. And the same thing with social media. Like you don't have to have any reason to say like, I'm getting off of it.
00:22:43
Speaker
for a week. I mean sometimes it only takes a week to feel a little bit of a reset.
00:22:48
Speaker
Another thing that you can be doing is working on your sleep hygiene and that's probably something that I could do a whole episode on too, on just everything that I've learned about sleep patterns and how restorative sleep is that your brain really needs that time and especially women, we actually need more sleep, more hours of sleep than men do because our brains do more to restore us during that time.
Importance of Regular Practice in Coping Skills
00:23:15
Speaker
So making sure that you are getting good quality sleep and for all the new moms out there,
00:23:22
Speaker
I apologize for being another person that says get better sleep because I know that that is just not an option for you right now, but I promise mama you will get back there one day and be able to make it a priority again. Um, but those are the kinds of things that you can be doing now to help your body have a better fighting chance against anxiety. Also another one, actually do the coping skills that you know work for you.
00:23:48
Speaker
Like I can't tell you how many people know what they should be doing and they don't make it a regular practice. And that's why it's called a practice is because you're supposed to be practicing it. So a lot of people, they know that meditation helps. They know that deep breathing helps. They know that journaling helps. Um, all of these coping skills that they have, which is essentially keeping the bandage over the wound to make sure that you don't have a spike in your anxiety.
00:24:12
Speaker
but they don't use the coping skills until they are almost in a panic attack and then they try to use them and they wonder why they don't necessarily work. Like these are tools and you have to know how to use a tool before you're in like a crisis situation. Like for example, okay, I don't know why this just came to my mind that I'm thinking about tools. And this just came to my mind.
00:24:42
Speaker
You know in the movie Titanic, which is one of the best movies ever, you know when Jack is handcuffed around the pipe, whatever it is, the pipe or whatever, and Rose can't find the key. So she randomly goes and finds an ax, which is her tool, right?
00:25:02
Speaker
The likelihood that she would actually be able to hit that chain hard enough and accurately enough to cut through without chopping off his hand is very low because that is not something that she had practiced, right? But if she was someone who was practicing
00:25:19
Speaker
like wood chopping or axe throwing, the likelihood that she would be able to accurately use that tool in the moment would significantly go up, right? I have no idea why that just came to mind. I have no idea. I haven't watched that movie in forever, so I don't know why that just came to mind, but it's a really good example. So if you were practicing things like deep breathing outside,
00:25:41
Speaker
like when you're at your baseline of anxiety, like not experiencing a lot of it, you're going to know how to use that tool when you are experiencing an increase in anxiety and you're going to do a better job. It's going to be more effective and you're going to connect with it better because it's a tool that you're used to using. So make sure that you are practicing your axe throwing so that if you get in a bind and you need to use it in a crisis situation, the tool will actually be more effective.
00:26:09
Speaker
So all that to say, make sure you are literally practicing your coping skills. If you are someone who has high anxiety, you need to be practicing them every day.
00:26:20
Speaker
So that's kind of all I have. I feel like that's anxiety 101. I hope that helps to give you a little bit more understanding of what is going on in your body when you're experiencing anxiety, how anxiety actually does have a root cause. It doesn't just pop up in your life for no reason. It really is your body saying, I've experienced something in the past that was really, really painful. And I think it might be about to happen again. And I'm just trying to keep you on guard from ever experiencing that pain again.
00:26:50
Speaker
And also that there are two ways to approach it. You can either learn to cope with it or you can learn to release it. And hopefully you're going to do both by doing a combination of learning and practicing coping skills, getting medication if that's needed, but also doing the types of therapy that work on the emotional part of the brain, things like EMDR, brain spotting, parts work,
00:27:15
Speaker
Those are my favorites and those are all that I can really speak on being effective. So find a therapist that is trained in these types of therapies to be able to help you melt that snowball so that it's not as big as maybe you're experiencing it right now. That's all I have for today. Make sure that you like this episode, leave me a comment, leave me some feedback. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them. I will always respond and if you don't mind, give me a good rating so that this show can reach more people.
00:27:44
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Outside of Session. Remember, while I am a licensed therapist, this podcast is not a substitute for individual therapy. The contents of this episode are for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you are having a mental health emergency, please dial 911 for immediate assistance or dial 988 for the suicide and crisis lifeline.