Managing Anxiety Triggers with Mindfulness

Transcript

This is episode nine of In The Messy Podcast. I'm your host Jan, a practicing psychotherapist in Ontario, Canada. This podcast exists because we envision a future where every relationship, no matter how messy it may seem, has the potential to evolve into something beautiful and thriving. And if you like this podcast, love if you could hit the subscribe button, and if you want to make my day, please leave a review. It's one of the only ways I can interact with you all. So today we're going to talk about how to deal with our anxiety when we get triggered. So when you're ready. Let's begin.

So I had a previous client tell me about her experience. She came crying into session and had a lot of anxiety around a specific situation in her life. She had gone through a breakup with an ex who didn't treat her well, and initially he was super sweet and they quickly moved in together, but over time he became quite manipulative and tried to cut her out of her friendship circles and family relationships. So she finally developed the courage to leave him. And let him know that it was her time to go, and I was super proud of her because she didn't blame him, but just wanted to leave on positive terms. She gave him a month's notice that she would be moving out and packing all of her stuff. And he agreed that he couldn't make her stay and even cried and told her that he would change, and he tried convincing her to stay, but she stood her ground and she moved out. Now weeks goes by and she feels so free and so much more herself. Then she gets these angry text messages from him about how he treated her so nicely and she burned him, and that he will pursue legal action to the extent of the law to seek damages for what she did to him and that really freaked her out. Fortunately or unfortunately, you can't control what other people do.

Only you can control how you feel, think and behave. And while we cannot change the ex, she's learned to manage her anxiety around this situation. So in this podcast, I'd really love to give you some of the tips and tools that I've trained in her to help her get through what she was going through. She was experiencing a lot of anxiety, especially in her chest area, in her heart, because she really cared about her ex and really wanted to make sure that they left on good terms and she really cared about him, and the fact that she left, it took a toll on her as well. It wasn't a decision that she came to lightly, however, it was just because she was burned so many times by her ex that she decided, you know what? It's not worth it. I'm gonna find someone who can treat me well because I deserve it. And one thing, if there's nothing else that you've learned from this podcast, I want to drill it into your mind that anxiety and stress is neutral. It's a signal that your body is sending you that you gotta pay attention to something.

When you look at the Yerkes-Dodson Law of Stress and Performance, and if you need a visual, think of an upside down U on a graph on the horizontal axis. Imagine anxiety levels going from zero to 100, and on the vertical axis, imagine your performance going from zero to a hundred, and you can see that the mild or moderate levels of stress lead to the highest ability to perform. So it's not that we want to eliminate anxiety, it's that when we get too stressed, we're not able to perform optimally. In therapy, I help those who are experiencing higher elevations of anxiety to examine what are the ways in which it's contributing to the anxiety, as well as what happens to them when they're experiencing burnout. Just like chronic levels of anxiety, which are debilitating to them. And I think you know that when your anxiety, it's are too much to handle. In a normal situation when you feel there's stress. It's not overwhelming, you. It doesn't debilitate you. It doesn't stop you from actually doing what you need to do, whether it's breaking it down into little chunks so that you can figure it out and say, okay, what is the next step and the next. And over time you realize, okay, I got this. I can tackle this problem. But when you are feeling extremely overwhelmed about a situation, the thing about it is that it kicks you into action, kicks you into high gear to do something about it, or does it not? And if it does, or if it. Doesn't, you have to make sure, okay. Is my Fear center response in my brain, the amygdala being activated now, and how you know is whether you can think logically and also bring your emotions in to make the best decision for that moment. And we call this the wise mind. So are you able to think clearly, not be overrun by your emotions, but not also be void of your emotions and be able to combine the logic and the reasoning with the emotions together to help you figure out what is the most effective solution for this problem?

And you know that you're not overwhelmed when you can think straight, but when you can't think straight and you're feeling really stressed and overwhelmed, it shows that you are what we call outside of the window of tolerance. You are either going into one of two things, which is hypo arousal. Which is when you feel numbed out, you freeze. You're frozen, you can't do anything about it, and you're just stuck. Or hyper arousal, which is extremely uncontrollable. You're just trying to do as much as you can, but you're just spinning your wheels and nothing is actually happening. So it could be a lot of worry, a lot of stress, but no result.

Those are the two poles that stop you from actually using your anxiety for your benefit. It does become unhealthy and debilitating when you aren't able to function properly. When you're experiencing a lot of anxiety, it's easy just to get knocked over by the storm. It's almost like you're a kite. And you're just being blown by the wind, the rain, the thunder, the lightning, and it feels like you're out of control. So in order for you to stay grounded, I would recommend a few things. The first thing is the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 technique, that's something that I do with my clients all the time. Everything that I've coached, my clients have been vetted by me.

Only if it works for me will I offer it for my clients. So what is the 5 4 3 2 1 method? Essentially what it is, is you go one by one. Through the five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. So oftentimes when we're not okay, we need to look around and use our senses.

So five things that you can see, and usually what I would recommend is to describe them out loud so you can slow down your thoughts. So what are five things you can see? And actually go and describe the five things. So for example, right now as I'm recording my podcast, I'm in my office and I'm looking out the window. And what I see out the window are some trees. Right now it's almost winter, so there are very little leaves on the tree. The tree leaves that are still on there. They're yellow and orange, and some are brown. None of them are green. The branches are brown too. They look very twig like. There's also wind, so it's blowing the trees around. Another thing that I see is there's a bird feeder. The bird feeder is red, it's smaller. It has a hole for birds to get to the bird feed. There's also a place for the birds to sit. It looks like a little metal dish and everything is made out of wood, and you go on so forth and you describe the three other things that you see just one by one and slowing down your thought process. And as you do that, you might notice that, okay, my thoughts are actually not on the tough situation that causes me a lot of stress, but it is on what I'm actually looking at right now, objectively. The next one is the four things that you can touch. So you would essentially go and touch something.

Describe it, how it feels, whether it's hot, cold or warm, whether it's smooth or not, and just describe how it feels. As many descriptive words as you can until you've exhaust every description word, okay? And goes through that four times with four different objects. And then the three things that you can hear, describe those.

And then two things that you can smell. So for example, you can smell the air, you can smell your shirt, you can smell the coffee. Those are some examples. And then the one thing that you can taste, whether it's tasting your saliva or maybe you have a candy or you can taste your coffee or your tea.

After you've done all of those things, notice your anxiety. Notice what is going on inside of you. Maybe you feel like you're back in your body. Maybe you feel more grounded. If you do, fantastic, if you don't do it all over again, go through 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 until you feel more at ease. And another way to decrease the anxiety when you're right in the moment is the word Stop. STOP. It actually is an acronym, and STOP stands for stop, take a step back, observe and proceed. So again, STOP. It stands for stop, take a step back, observe and proceed. So when you stop, you literally stop. There's nothing like it. You just freeze in the moment. You don't do anything. You don't say anything. You just stop. Okay? I'm not saying stop breathing, right? You can still breathe, you just stop everything, right? Stop those thoughts from coming, almost even stop yourself from feeling in that specific second. And what I want you to do in your mind's eye is take a bird's eye view of what is actually going on.

And that's the take a step back. What is happening? Is the whole world crumbling now? Is it an assignment? Or the fear of your ex or the fear of your boss or something else that is going on. What is it trying to say to you? Have we ever seen it before? And then observe. How does our body feel in the moment? What does it need to feel better? How can we move closer to our window of tolerance? Maybe we need to use the 5, 4, 3, 2 1 method, maybe we need to debrief or incorporate mindfulness. Then P stands for proceed, which means based on what you've observed, and using what we call the wise mind, figuring out what is the best line of action, whether it's taking a few breaths, taking a step back, doing something else for a little bit, or whether it's actually getting the thing done. Whether it's talking to a friend, getting some support or seeking support elsewhere, contacting your therapist or whatnot, so you would proceed wisely. So these two tools, so the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, as well as the stop technique, they're extremely helpful when you get triggered with anxiety. And all of these tips and tools are research based from Dr. Marsha Linehan. She was one that created Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, DBT, which is where these techniques draw from, and it helped her and many other people manage their anxieties and helped them to tolerate very difficult and stressful situations. The question that I get time and time again is, but isn't doing these techniques, preventing us from solving the problem?

And if we go back to my client, for her, it's really scary to be in her shoes because she's so scared of her life and all of these things that he wants to do. When she came to me, she was spiraling. She was in her survival response and couldn't think straight. So it's like her car was in a whole bunch of mud, and no matter how much she was spinning her wheels, it couldn't get out of the mud. Doing these techniques would help her. When we can bring in that mindfulness, it also brings in the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex, which actually goes offline when we go into the fight, flight, freeze, fawn mode. And so when we can bring in our actual understanding of what's going on inside of us, what's going on outside of us, and then the anxiety has an understanding, has a story, has a place to go. It's almost like when we are mindful we can create the situation as we want it to be. For example, in the case where my client was just freaking out about her situation, we did a lot of mindfulness.

To go through what she was experiencing and she just wanted to end it all. She just wanted to quit. She just wanted to give up. Maybe it would be better if she just went back to her ex. We thought about it and instead of listening to that part of her that says, you should go back, she realized that was the emotional part of her brain that was saying all these things and that emotional part of her brain wanted her to survive. It was the fear part saying, we shouldn't do this. We shouldn't go ahead, we shouldn't want this for ourselves, we shouldn't be selfish. So she was able to be mindful and say, you know what? Actually I do deserve this. I do deserve somebody that loves and cares for me. I do deserve to be in a relationship that doesn't cut me out from the people that are closest to, and I do deserve the support in a very deep way.

And I think what is important is that the more mindful you are, the more you can understand the puzzle that you're experiencing. What's the situation? How do I go about it? What to do about it? How do I feel about it? And so on and so forth. And based on being mindful of your emotions and mindful about your situation, then you can decide for yourself, what is it that I wanna do here? Do I wanna keep on cowering and fear? Do I wanna let the anxiety stop me from reaching my potential? If you say yes to those things, okay, that's fine. But at least I made a choice, an active decision.

What a lot of people feel is that if you try to avoid anxiety, the anxiety will go away and actually it won't. You actually have to deal with it first. You have to go to the source, and sometimes the source is the exact thing. The obstacle is the way. An example would be if you have an assignment, it's due. You need to finish it. And once that assignment is done, it's finished, your anxiety drops. It's in situations where it's not easily clear cut. Sometimes the anxiety is tied to something else. Whether it was a failure in the past or something you could have prevented, or perhaps it could have been something that somebody said a long time ago that has stuck with you that was quite negative and it really affected you. It could be something that you haven't completely overcome yet and it's life that is trying to teach you this lesson and it's gonna try to keep teaching you until you master it.

So there's so many different misconceptions about anxiety. You can't step it down because it's just gonna be like a balloon. It's gonna pop right back up if you shove it underwater and anxiety is usually tied to something else. Whether it's some kind of negative thought about yourself, whether it's not enough. I don't deserve this. I'm not important. I can't do this. I'm never safe. So if you understand where your anxiety is coming from, you get to make a choice. Am I going to continue through this anxiety or am I going to choose differently this time? How am I going to choose differently? Not out of fear, but out of balancing the positive and the negatives and figuring out what is the best choice for me at the moment.So as we wrap up our ninth episode. We went on a journey of learning how to manage events that trigger our anxiety. And if ever you need to review this or you feel like, I need to continue to learn more about myself.You can feel free to replay this podcast and others that I've done as many times as you need. Some of them are progressive muscle relaxation techniques. Some of them are helping you with your attachment.

So if you found this episode helpful, please subscribe, share or leave a review, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and any questions that you may have.

Take care.