[00:00:00] Vesna: Welcome to the Peak Revival Podcast. My name is Vesna and today I'm going to talk about understanding anxiety and how to calm your brain.
[00:00:44] Anxiety can be debilitating. It can be an interruption. It can be exhausting and it can even be a real barrier to the way that you want to live. To be successful in reducing your anxiety, it's important to understand what is being blocked by your anxiety? How does it interfere with the life that you want to live or the work that you want to do? If you were to say to yourself, if it weren't for my anxiety, I would be able to Finish that sentence.
[00:01:14] What is your XYZ for that sentence? Right? What is it stopping you from doing? You know, I was watching a documentary on Netflix about Avicii, the DJ. It was inspiring. And it was also very sad because he had suffered through a lot of anxiety. He said it was there with him.
[00:01:32] All the time it never left. Okay. And he tried to get so much treatment for it, but it was unsuccessful. And obviously he had a lot of other things going on. It wasn't just anxiety and I don't know really the behind the scenes of his life, but I know that anxiety can be a barrier.
[00:01:49] I know that it can really stop you from showing up as your best, and it can even make decisions for you because.
[00:01:56] We avoid situations
[00:01:58] because we don't want to be anxious in them. I'm going to share some of my stories of, I've done the same. For those of you having anxiety at work, and maybe it's just before you give a big presentation, before you even get to your laptop you can feel your heart racing, you've got a dry mouth, and you're, just full of anxiety, right?
[00:02:16] Or maybe it's on a Sunday night where you're even thinking about going to work on a Monday. Now, there are some reasons this is happening that might change your view on anxiety. your brain processes anxiety before you're even conscious of it. So we've got a part of the brain called the amygdala and this tiny part of the brain, which is so fascinating that it creates such a huge reaction in the body compared to the cortex, right? But this tiny, tiny little thing in the brain called the amygdala.
[00:02:47] is where anxiety begins okay, so this tiny part is kind of your security system for your brain and your body. And so it can sense things before you even are consciously aware of it. Now, Anxiety doesn't mean something bad is going to happen, okay. What it means is that your amygdala has detected something, whether you're consciously aware of it or not, and is preparing you in case something bad does happen.
[00:03:15] But it can't predict the future. Okay, it's not that intelligent. So really, anxiety is a defence response that our body has. It's scanning for danger, the amygdala, right? And it makes decisions about levels of threat in our life or in our environment before you're even conscious of it, before it's even been picked up.
[00:03:36] So imagine it this way, you're finishing work late at night and you get to your car to drive home and as you're walking towards your car Your eyes detect a shadow off to the corner of your eyes, right? Now you don't even sense it, you don't see the shadow yet, but your amygdala has already seen it.
[00:03:56] And then it produces the fight or flight response before your conscious mind has even kicked in yet, right? Before you even consciously detected, oh, there's a shadow. So you're already feeling anxious before you've processed that. And that's pretty amazing, right? So it's really, the amygdala is really trying to keep us safe, but it's not intelligent.
[00:04:14] It can't discern between a real threat and a made up threat. Because you can trigger your amygdala with your thinking. So, there may be no shadow, you may be walking to the car, and you may think about, Oh, I wonder if I'm alone in this car park. Oh my goodness, it's so dark, I could, someone could totally jump me in this car park, right?
[00:04:36] So we can imagine something is happening, but the brain doesn't know the difference, right? It is going to trigger the amygdala, and we're going to get a full blown, protection response, okay? The fight or flight response. It's going to trigger anxiety. It's going to move all these resources in our body for us to fight or flee.
[00:04:54] So you might have something happening at work, something, you know, happened in a client meeting or you've got a big presentation or just walking into the office already triggers this anxiety. And this is the way that our cortex, a part of our bigger brain is working with our thinking to trigger the amygdala and the anxiety response.
[00:05:14] So what's really important to understand here, if you're getting this anxiety at work or at home or in different situations, it's not a sign of weakness. It's not a sign of anything wrong. It is a sign that your body is literally or your brain is trying to protect you because it is a defense response.
[00:05:31] Now if it's triggered by too much thinking. The anxiety is really alerting you to, hey, your brain is way overactive, you need to slow down. And it's almost like our body brings on these symptoms to kind of get our attention, hey, slow down in there, right? You're going too fast. There's too much going on. I want to give you an example of mine.
[00:05:51] I had a podcast interview. I love teaching, I love coaching, and I love doing interviews, right? I love talking about this stuff. And I had this podcast interview with a bigger company and for some reason my brain decided it was a big deal, that I shouldn't mess it up. I should get it right. Okay. And so therefore It triggered anxiety for me.
[00:06:10] My brain went into overdrive about it. And I can honestly say, I haven't experienced that level of anxiety for years. And it was almost comical, but it was still stressful because I was like, Damn, snap out of it, right? And I did everything you've probably been taught to do, right? I was telling myself, just relax.
[00:06:29] Oh my God, my thinking is just so sped up. I know it's coming from my thinking. That didn't help. I tried deep breathing. I tried push ups. I tried taking, different remedies, different herbs. I mean, by the end of it, by the time I had to jump onto the interview, I was so much worse. I was so wound up. It was just crazy, right?
[00:06:50] So my thinking triggered the amygdala. So it triggered the anxiety, but then what made it worse, and you might recognise this, is that I was resisting it, because I said, I don't want to be this nervous for the interview. So I had this full blown resistance, which all it did was make it worse. So the thing that really accelerates anxiety is, the need to get rid of it, okay?
[00:07:16] You just want to feel better, and I understand that, but that drive to push it away, to make it go away, to fix it, to get better, is actually escalates anxiety really quickly, okay? So the best solution to ease anxiety is to just do it with anxiety, okay? And I'm going to explain more about this. So That resistance that you have is making it worse, making it stronger. And if you understood that you could do everything that you wanted to do, but do it with anxiety, it would eventually completely go away.
[00:07:49] So I want to share another story of what that looks like. So I was with a PR agency and they were getting me onto TV, right? So I wanted to go onto TV to talk about this stuff. Talk about burnout and I had this chance, I was, basically they rang me, well they emailed me actually, I was on a holiday. In Thailand, me and my partner were in this beautiful hotel resort.
[00:08:08] I get this email, I'm like, Oh my goodness, this is amazing. This is great. And I responded back with a absolute, yes, let's do it. And then as soon as I sent that email, I was like, the dread started filling me, right? The anxiety of how am I going to go on TV? Oh my goodness, goodness. This is going to be so nerve wracking for me, right?
[00:08:25] I was, I was really anxious. I was really worried, right? I was like, I can't mess this up. You're on TV. You're going to look ridiculous, So a lot of the story, so my thinking was tripping up my amygdala, my amygdala didn't know that I wasn't in a physically dangerous scenario, right? I wasn't under a physical threat, but my thinking, my cortex part of my brain was tripping up the amygdala.
[00:08:47] And it was trying to protect me, it put me into a defense response. So while this TV, co hosting position was months away. I was already in dread. And I remember having a session with my coach about it. And I was like, I need to get over this. I need to not be nervous. I do not want to be nervous on TV.
[00:09:05] It's going to look so unprofessional. I do this stuff all the time. It's going to look so, right? I had a lot of stuff around it. And, you know, through that session I really understood that, yeah, you'll be nervous. And you just do it nervous. And that may sound again, this was another insight for me. That may sound like, yeah, obviously, but it wasn't obvious to me.
[00:09:29] I thought I needed to get rid of the nerves in order to do it, to do it at my best, but that's actually wasn't true. And so what I did was I really planned thoroughly for it. And I didn't on the day I wasn't trying to push my nerves away. I was like, yep, I'm going to be nervous. It's okay. I'm just going to do it nervous.
[00:09:45] And honestly. I wasn't that nervous. I was nervous, but not as nervous as that podcast interview. I've been more nervous for so many other things than I was for that TV presentation, okay? Because I wasn't resisting it. I was allowing the nerves and the anxiety to come and go, come and go. I wasn't pushing it to a side.
[00:10:04] I wasn't trying to fix it. I wasn't trying to change it. I wasn't trying to make it go away. I was already made up my mind that I was going to do it with anxiety or nerves. And I was going to be totally fine because I was prepared.
[00:10:14] So, we can think our way into anxiety, but we can't talk ourselves out of it. Right? So you might know that, you've noticed that. When you're anxious, you can't tell yourself, Oh, don't be nervous, just relax, be calm, it's all going to be okay, it's all going to be totally okay. You can't, that doesn't work, right?
[00:10:32] And the reason why it doesn't work is that,
[00:10:34] we can't directly control our amygdala
[00:10:37] through rational thinking
[00:10:39] we don't have that direct link, So, that's why we can't talk ourselves out of things.
[00:10:44] But you can teach your amygdala to be safe in situations.
[00:10:49] So let's start with that. So let's give three practical takeaways that you can do today or use it whenever you're feeling the anxiety is rising. And the first thing is to recognize that anxiety isn't your enemy, right? Those physical symptoms, the racing heart, the dry mouth, right? It's all the ways that your body's preparing you for you to perform at your best, okay?
[00:11:09] It can be telling you that you've got too much thinking, right? It's trying to protect you from that. But it can also be preparing you to perform at your best. I remember hearing, Bruce Springsteen, you know, people said to him, don't you get nervous when you go out in those crowds, a huge audience. He goes, I don't know about getting nervous.
[00:11:27] He goes, but my whole body just kind of, my heart rate is super fast. I'm sweating. I'm shaking. And they're like, yeah, that's nerves. He goes, Oh no, I just. I figure my body's getting me ready, getting the energy moving for me to perform at my best. Right? And that was such a simple shift in the way that he thought about it, which didn't actually become a barrier to him performing.
[00:11:50] So it's not your enemy, it's not a sign of weakness, it's your body mobilizing your resources. And it's also, like I said, a warning sign that you've probably got too much thinking around it.
[00:12:00] So your thinking, as I said, will trigger the same response as a physical threat. Okay, so if there is a threat in your environment and the amygdala is triggering you to try and protect you, but your thinking is going to do the same thing, it's going to look like information about what's going to happen in this scenario, but it's absolutely not.
[00:12:17] Nothing about your amygdala can, see the future. Okay, what it is, is that. It's just responding to your thinking. And so the best way to, to reduce the anxiety here is, just do it with anxiety. Just do it anyway. Even though you feel anxious and nervous, prepare, get thoroughly prepared for what you need to do.
[00:12:38] But do it with anxiety anyway. Okay, don't resist it. As soon as you resist it, it's going to accelerate.
[00:12:44] And the third and really important tip is that exposure is your friend. So every time you face a scenario and you survive it, your amygdala learns that it's a safe environment. Okay? once you've delivered your 10th presentation, it doesn't feel so nerve wracking anymore.
[00:13:01] So the amygdala has been trained that it is okay, that it's safe, that it doesn't need to, resources in those moments because that's actually a safe environment. And so if we avoid exposure, we avoid the amygdala learning that it's safe. Okay. And so therefore we can't ever push through that scenario. So sometimes if people have social anxiety, They stay home, okay, and they reduce their social contact, but that makes the anxiety about that situation so much worse because then we have so much thinking around it, okay?
[00:13:31] But if you just did smaller doses of exposure you would overcome that anxiety and that fear because the amygdala would be trained.
