205. What I Wish I Knew About Anxiety...
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In this week's solo episode, I discuss what I wish I'd known when struggling with anxiety. Through my lived experiences with anxiety as well as my psychology coursework and academic research, I've collected a lot of tips on how to manage anxiety.
In this episode, I share these tips with you, including:
+ A quote about anxiety that changed my entire perspective
+ The best way to attribute your anxiety
+ A DBT skill for stopping a panic attack or thought spiral
+ The evolutionary purpose of anxiety, including social anxiety & panic attacks
+ How to tell whether your anxiety qualifies as a mental health disorder
+ Using cognitive behavioral therapy principles to help with anxiety
+ Benefits of using exposure therapy for your anxiety
+ DBT skills to use for your anxiety in the long- and short-term
+ Why anxiety can actually be a GOOD thing
+ so much more!
Mentioned In The Episode…
SHOP GUEST RECOMMENDATIONS: https://amzn.to/3A69GOC
About She Persisted (formerly Nevertheless, She Persisted)
After a year and a half of intensive treatment for severe depression and anxiety, 18-year-old Sadie recounts her journey by interviewing family members, professionals, and fellow teens to offer self-improvement tips, DBT education, and personal experiences. She Persisted is the reminder that someone else has been there too and your inspiration to live your life worth living.
a note: this is an automated transcription so please ignore any accidental misspellings!
Sadie: Welcome to She Persisted. I'm your host, Sadie Sutton, a 19 year old from the Bay Area studying psychology at the University of Penn. She Persisted is the Teen Mental Health Podcast made for teenagers by a teen. In each episode, I'll bring you authentic, accessible, and relatable conversations about every aspect of mental wellness.
You can expect evidence-based, teen approved resources, coping skills, including lots of D B T insights and education in. Each piece of content you consume, she persisted, Offers you a safe space to feel validated and understood in your struggle, while encouraging you to take ownership of your journey and build your life worth living.
So let's dive in this week on She persisted.
life is impermanent and that impermanence will be on your side.
And I think for a lot of us, when we feel anxious, it feels like it's not going to end. It feels like this all enduring, really intense, overwhelming. experience. Also, when you're experiencing anxiety that feels like it will be a permanent fixture of your life.
You're like, I'll always have this level of uncertainty and discomfort and distress., But I promise the things that are making you anxious now won't be the same things that make you anxious in 10 years.
And arguably you won't be as anxious or as distressed, on a larger
scale.
Hello, hello, and welcome back to She Persisted. I'm so excited you guys are here today. It has really been a hot minute since I've done a solo episode. We've been a bit sporadic with our episodes this semester because I'm applying to clinical psychology PhD programs for graduate school, which has taken so long.
so much of my time. I was also at a psychology conference this past week, which luckily was in Philadelphia, so I only had to Uber like 10 minutes away, but that was ABCT, or the Association of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies, I learned a lot of things this weekend, some of which informed this week's episode, so I'm excited to dive into it, as you probably know from the title, we are talking about things I wish I knew about anxiety.
. I have learned a lot from my lived experiences with anxiety, since the first time I experienced being anxious or having a panic attack, so a lot of coping skills and insights and things that worked along the way, but also a lot of, , Psychological insights from taking classes at Penn, being involved in research, going to conferences.
And so, I wanted to do an episode about how my views on anxiety have changed, things I wish I would have known when I was really in the thick of it and struggling, skills and habits that I implement today to maintain a healthy baseline, or when I feel anxious, the things I do. Because These things weren't intuitive or things that I just, was equipped with when I started to feel anxious.
So I hope this is helpful for you guys if you are actively struggling with anxiety or you have someone in your life that's anxious. Or maybe at some point in the future you get anxious,
You are not worse for the wear and instead have all these insights and things to implement.
So, the first thing that I want to start with is something you guys hear me say all the time . If you've listened to every episode, you're like, we know this. But this is a quote that I heard in episode 28 of the podcast with Dr. Blaise Aguirre. He was one of the clinicians I worked with at 3 East McLean Hospital when I was in intensive treatment.
And that period of time was really, really formative with how I understood my anxiety, how I coped with it, how I asked for help, and I went from being like, this is this thing that really controls a lot of my life and causes me a lot of distress, to like, okay, I get this.
I know how to have an effective relationship with my anxiety, what skills to use when, and it's not this thing that is controlling me. And, We can't control anxiety. We can't will it to go away, but we can work with it and we can set ourselves up for success. the quote is, life is impermanent and that impermanence will be on your side.
And I think for a lot of us, when we feel anxious, first of all, in the moment, it feels like it's not going to end. It feels like this all enduring, really intense, overwhelming. experience. Also, when you're experiencing anxiety at like a medium to low level on a daily basis about lots of things, that feels like it will be a permanent fixture of your life.
You're like, I'll always have this level of uncertainty and discomfort and distress. I'll always view things from this lens of anxiety, or will this cause rejection? Is this? , a safe situation to be in, whatever that fear is for you. And so, speaking from my experience, and maybe you guys can relate, anxiety felt like a really permanent fixture.
And I also remember when I was in my early stages of treatment that I identified a lot with my diagnoses. It wasn't like I have depression. I have anxiety. It was like I'm depressed and anxious. That was very much a prominent fixture of my identity and my life. And part of that was because it was controlling so much of my functioning.
Whether it was, was I able to be at school? What my relationship looked like with family? Was I showing up in friendships? literally just how I felt on a day to day basis. A lot of that was influenced and dictated by depression and anxiety because I didn't know how to effectively cope with those things or I didn't have the right resources and support set up.
And so, my identity, in turn, I really latched on to that because it was like an explanation for why I felt this way. It wasn't a shortcoming on me, it wasn't like, this is just how I respond to life. It was like, it's the anxiety, it's the depression, that's what's happening here. and I remember very vividly being in a partial hospitalization program, which is basically when you spend a few hours of your day in a hospital setting and you do group therapy, Individual therapy, family therapy, sometimes you do medication management. We'll throw in like occupational therapy activities that you do. And you stay at home, maybe you go to school, but you also are in this intense setting to learn skills, do the work, do therapy, and have that structure applied to your day.
And we were doing art therapy or therapy, one of the two, I can't totally remember. And we were doing collages of our identities and ourselves. And I remember that a lot of people in this group, when they were creating this picture of themselves and who they were, depression and anxiety, was a really prominent Fixture of their identity and who they were and myself included.
It was like, I'm Sadie, I have this many siblings, I live in this area, I have a dog, I'm depressed, I'm anxious. Like, it was just, it was part of me, it was part of my identity. And so, I think that can be a really common experience. you are in intensive treatment, you're kind of in an echo chamber.
Like, you're only surrounded by other people that are struggling. But if you're doing well with your mental health At least, as a young adult, you're probably not like, Oh, these are the things I'm doing, this is what works, here's how I speak to myself, here's how I go about creating my daily schedule so I don't feel overwhelmed and burn out.
I think that's one of the biggest challenges with the teen mental health space that I have come across and I'd love to know your guys thoughts if you're like, that's accurate or you're like, there's no way. But I think that echo chamber really exists and I really do think it reinforces that identity piece of anxiety because you're engaging in relationships, you're building relationships with your therapist, with your peers.
based on the fact that you're anxious or depressed. And a lot of your vulnerability comes from that side of you. when we're vulnerable, that's a really formative piece of identity development. And so that can be something to struggle with. And I think it just adds this layer of like, this is a permanent fixture.
This is part of me. And I think it can be really, really, really helpful. To embrace the impermanence of anxiety, and this is pulling in some positive psychology here, but the most effective way to think about life is that when you have losses, you attribute them to external factors that don't have to do with you.
And when you experience wins, you assign them to yourself and your personality traits and things that you could control. So if you do badly on a test, you don't say, I'm dumb, I'm stupid, I'm not good enough. You say, that test was hard. I could have studied harder. I didn't understand the material that was going to be on the test.
But if you do well on the test, you're like, I'm smart, I'm organized, I'm well prepared, I'm a great student
and this pulls from a lot of research in positive psychology, and I don't want to like throw all of that at you right now because we're at number one of like eight bullet points I'm trying to get through. But if you can internalize that and remember your losses, your shortcomings, the quote unquote negatives, attribute that to external things.
And the wins, the positive, the good things in your life, attribute them to yourself. And anxiety is one of those things. It's external. We're feeling anxiety. We're experiencing anxiety. We're not anxious as a baseline. And I know maybe, it subjectively feels different. It feels like a permanent fixture, and you've been struggling with this for so long.
And we know that our personality traits change a lot, not only in adolescence, through adulthood. And especially as a teen, the way that you interact with your emotions and experience them subjectively is so, so, so different from how you'll feel them in 10 years. And the way that you cope with things, the way that you set up your life, I promise the things that are making you anxious now won't be the same things that make you anxious in 10 years.
And arguably you won't be as anxious or as distressed, on a larger scale. So that's my first thing, and a skill that you can use for this is the Ride the Wave skill. And this is from DBT. We're going to talk lots about DBT in today's episode, but this skill's in the Distress Tolerance module.
And so we have this big picture, anxiety is impermanent, we're not attaching it to our it will change, the research supports that. But in the moment when you're having a panic attack, when you're having those thought spirals, when it's all you can think about, I want you to Imagine and visualize each anxiety symptom and each thought as a wave.
These things aren't constant, consistent levels of experience. The thought will be more intense, and then you'll get sidetracked, and then you'll come back. Your heart rate is going to be increased, and then it'll go down, and then it'll go up again. Same thing, your breathing will go up, and then it'll go down.
Your muscles will be clenched, but then you'll release them for a second. All of these things happen in waves. And so if you can bring your attention to whichever one is, most front of mind, is it your Breath. Is it your heart rate? Is it your muscles being clenched? Is it the thought? Pay attention to the wave like nature.
You can picture the wave going up on the shore and then going back and retreating. and really lean into that idea of this is impermanent, it's lessening, right now it's not staying consistent, and this too shall pass. So you can use that long term and short term, and I find that to be really effective in one of my favorite skills here.
The next thing I wanted to touch on was the evolutionary purpose of anxiety. This is one of my favorite things that I've learned in college, which is that the way we experience anxiety serves a purpose. There's not no reason for it. And when we understand why we're feeling the way we do and the reactions we have, I think it reduces a lot of the shame, a lot of the blame, and then you can get into, okay, how can I work with this biological part of me?
And cope with it more effectively.
So a lot of the ways that we experience emotions go back to caveman days and how we evolved because humans evolved very, very, very slowly. And so, Our brains and our bodies have not evolved past what we were doing when we were living in the wild with no shelter and we were hunting and gathering and all these things.
Like, our bodies and brains are not evolved to be living in cities and towns and our biggest stressors being, like, school and the SATs and a conflict in our social group. Like, our bodies are still functioning as if we were living in the middle of nowhere in a cave. And so one of the really prominent ways that shows up is anxiety, and I'm sure most of you guys have heard of fight or flight, like when we experience a threat, we either respond by trying to fight it, or we flee, and we get away and out of that situation, And sometimes people freeze. It's another response to distress and a threat in a situation. And so I'm not going to touch on that as much, because I feel like you've probably heard of the phenomenon. Fight or flight response,
but I want to talk about the specific purposes that each of them, Have because I think it's really interesting. Maybe this is the nerd in me But also again takes away some of that shame and you can interface with these feelings in a different way Like that's funny. That's such an ineffective way for my body to respond I know I can't control it But I don't need this evolutionary response because I actually live in a house and not in a cave with a lion outside so The first one is social anxiety At our core, our number one wiring is relationships.
If we don't find partners and reproduce, our species goes extinct. If we don't stay in a group of other individuals, we would be killed off instantly. Like, we're not very physically strong. We're not a shark. We're not A killer whale, we're not a lion, like, we don't have the physical strength or capabilities to fight a predator.
So the ways that humans survived were by staying in groups, and some of us would be hunting, some of them would be protecting the cave, all of us together would fight off a larger animal, but we were not surviving if we were alone. And the survival of the fittest, the fittest were in a group together, and so that's what prevailed.
And so, These instincts we have to be in a group and stay in a group and form relationships are really, really, really strong. And social anxiety is a way that that shows up. Will I be rejected? Will I be accepted? It's the most innate human need to be accepted because your survival depended on it.
And so when you have these moments of like, Oh my gosh, I'm so worried people are going to laugh at me or reject me, or I'm not going to be accepted into this friend group or whatever it is. Remember, that's not a reflection of you not being confident enough. Or you not being brave enough, like, that's just your body doing what it's supposed to do to survive.
your body thinks, oh my gosh, there's so much riding on this, if I don't, have this conversation or be accepted into this group, I'll be attacked by the lion. And that's not the case, but your body doesn't know that. So social anxiety has this really, really strong, arguably, the most intense wiring from an evolutionary perspective.
And so your body's doing its job, it's serving its purpose.
Similarly, related to social anxiety, when you have those, anxiety urges to stay home and withdraw and, stay with family and friends and, like, not do things that put, our resources at risk, that's also our anxiety from an evolutionary perspective. we want to protect what we have and not lose these important resources, whether it's family or friends or, now in modern day, maybe it's something related to a grade, which then would, you know, In turn, potentially impact our success and acceptance.
, we're doing well in a sport or an activity. And again, acceptance and cohesion. Like all of these things are driven by these very internal biological systems.
Now, in a panic attack, like in fight or flight mode, there's some really interesting ways that your body responds. So I'm going to quickly go over what those are because again, I think they're funny and interesting to understand and unpack. So the first one is you sweat.
The reason that you sweat is that if you were, in theory, running away from a predator, your sweat makes you more slippery, so you're more likely to escape from them if they grab onto you. Like, that's literally why you sweat when you're anxious, because you are in fight or flight mode.
And if you're in flight, and this predator tries to grab you, but you're slippery, you're more likely to get away. Same thing, you probably get stomach aches when you're anxious. This is because your body's like, we're not digesting things right now. Your digestive system is on pause and your blood flow, and other systems like your increased oxygen to your extremities and being able to see better and hear better, those are prioritized. So your digestive system's put on pause and then you get a stomachache because nothing's being digested. Again, it serves a purpose. Same thing also, your heart rate increases, your breathing rate increases, that's because you're body is preparing you to run and get away from the threat.
So there's more oxygen being pumped to your limbs so that you're ready to engage those muscles. You might have that experience when you're having a panic attack, like everything is so loud and everything's so bright around me. Your eyesight and your hearing literally gets better and more attuned when you're in fight or flight mode because you have to be aware of the threats and the predator that might be coming at you.
So, we have really interesting ways that we respond from an evolutionary perspective. I think it takes a lot of power away from these symptoms, because that can be the most distressing part of an anxiety attack or a panic attack, is being like, I can't breathe, I can't control my body, I feel like I'm dying.
And when you break that down, you're like, my body's reacting exactly how it's supposed to. And you can take some of that power away. I'm sweating because I'm trying to be slippery and get away from a predator. My heart rate and breathing rate are not increasing because I'm having a heart attack. My body is just trying to get more oxygen to my muscles so that I can maybe run faster and more efficiently.
My stomach's hurting, not because I have this illness or that I need to go to a doctor, but my body has decided to stop digesting my food so that I can run away. And so, engaging with these symptoms, unless like, I don't know what's happening, I can't control this, but my body's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, and the response it's having is kind of funny and kind of dumb that we haven't evolved past that point.
So that's something I wanted to share and point out because I know those physical symptoms can be so overwhelming and distressing. And so I hope those, not alternative explanations because they are the explanations, but I hope that information can be helpful because it's interesting, but also I think holds a lot of utility in taking that power away from it.
The next thing that I wanted to touch on is the fact that Everyone can empathize with what you're experiencing, and you might be like, my friends and family have never had panic attacks before, why isn't anyone else as anxious about taking the SAT or this test coming up? Everyone else seems to be making friends, I can't talk to a single per like, what are you talking about that everyone can relate?
We all experience emotions, again, for evolutionary purposes. Shame keeps us embedded in a group so that we don't end up alone and not able to fight off threats. Sadness prevents us from losing resources that are important to us. , guilt. Forces us to repair our relationships. So again, we don't get rejected and exiled from these really important groups.
Anger, , helps us fight off threats and keep things that are important to us. Happiness motivates us to go out and get more of these resources and things that boost our well being. Keep these things that keep us thriving. , and reinforce these behaviors that allow us to thrive and succeed.
Like having resources, having relationships. And then fear and anxiety keeps us alive. It keeps us from these threats that at one point literally were life or death. So, if you are a human, you experience fear. And the things that we experience fear to today, like a test or a new conversation with someone or asking for help, maybe it's not justified in the larger scale of things.
Maybe it's a disproportionate reaction. But it's still a valid reaction, and we all have those emotions. Everyone can relate to fear on some level because those evolutionary processes still take place, and fear gets evoked in everyone at some point in their life. And so, even though you might be thinking, no one gets how anxious I am, no one gets how much this determines my life, we can all empathize with the experience of being scared or ashamed.
or uncertain or distressed and asking for help about those things, talking to others about their experiences there and what worked and just connecting and taking the power away from those anxious experiences by labeling them and unpacking them is extremely powerful. So I want you to know that everyone has experienced Anxiety to some degree, so you can talk about it, even if it seems like you're coping with it differently, or you're experiencing it to a higher level.
And the other thing to mention here is, anxiety is complicated because we all get anxious, but we might not all have generalized anxiety disorder. And we've done episodes on this before, where it's like, why do we have these mental illness diagnoses, and they serve different purposes, like getting insurance coverage for treatment and being able to do specific research on these specific things.
But When we have these colloquial discussions about, like, I have anxiety, I'm anxious, versus I have generalized anxiety disorder, or I have social anxiety disorder, the key thing there, and how to evaluate that for yourself, which, of course, you need to get a diagnosis from a doctor if you're going to bill your insurance for that kind of treatment, but if you're kind of like, do I need help?
Do I want to ask for help? Like, Do I just feel anxious sometimes or is this something I need support with? What we look at with abnormal psychology or psychopathology is, is it causing you distress? Does the way that you're experiencing anxiety not just like, oh my gosh that thing made me anxious, I coped with it, it went away, I moved on with my life.
Is it causing you significant distress to where it's interfering with your quality of life and your well being? And the second question there is, is it interfering with your functioning? Are you able to go to school, to work, complete your assignments, show up in your relationships? And if the answer is yes, it's causing distress, and yes, it's interfering with my ability to function, that's when it's time to ask for help and get support.
And not to say that you can't get help or support, Before that point absolutely do and I would recommend that but that's kind of what we look at when it's psychopathology versus like typical human experiences that we all have and struggle with so basically just to add that nuance and layer to this episode because it's It's complex in that we all have anxiety, we all get anxious, and we might not all have anxiety disorders, and we might not all need intensive treatment.
, but again, we can all empathize because we all get anxious and experience anxiety and not to take away from these really intense experiences that for some people cause a lot of distress and absolutely interfere with our lives. with life as a whole. The next thing we're going to touch on is CBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and I went to ABCT this weekend which was so fun and I listened to a lot of panels about CBT and ways that that is used for depression and anxiety and exposure therapy and we're going to get into all of it.
But one of the basic parts of CBT is the CBT cycle, which is that we have the cycle of thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. And it's like a continuous loop. When we feel something, we then think something, and then we have a behavior and response.
And then the behavior and response then causes feelings, which cause thoughts, which cause behaviors, and it just goes on and on and on.
And so why people get CBT treatment or pursue support in this area, is the idea that some way that we're thinking and behaving with our emotions is ineffective. Maybe it's how we're coping with them. Maybe it's how we're thinking about situations. Like when you're in a new social environment and no one immediately comes up to talk to you if you think, I am not good enough.
No one wants to be friends with me versus, okay, no one knows me. They're also probably nervous. And it's not really like a thing where everyone just approaches everyone in every situation to introduce themselves. Someone has to like make that brave leap and maybe you have to be the one to initiate it.
So CBD kind of has this. Idea behind it, that something about the way we're behaving and thinking is ineffective and is therefore, a lot of times, causing us distress and interfering with our quality of life. like I mentioned earlier in this episode, we can't will away our anxiety. We can't wake up and be like, I'm not gonna be anxious.
I'm not gonna have anxiety. It's just, it's not me. It's not happening. Not part of my life. It just doesn't work that way. But we do have a lot of agency over our thoughts and our behaviors. And I'm sure you're like, What are you talking? I, I've tried to think differently. I try and behave differently. It's really hard and it's really impossible.
And I totally get that. And one of the reasons for that is you've been thinking in the same way for so long and behaving in the same way for so long that it's almost like a habit. You've reinforced that way of thinking and acting that it takes so much power to then overcome that way of thinking and behaving.
And so this can be really hard and really challenging. And, This is the way to interrupt these ineffective patterns. And so, to shift our feelings and to shift that anxiety, we adjust the way that we think about situations, or appraise them if you want to use the psychology term, and how we behave in those situations.
So how we cope with anxiety. Do we avoid? Do we run away? Do we think, this is never going to get better, I'm just not even going to try. Or do we say, okay, I'm I'm feeling anxious right now. That's okay. What are the coping skills that I know work for when I'm feeling this way? All right, my behavior, I'm going to do some deep breathing.
I'm going to give myself a minute. I'm going to give myself a mental pep talk, and then I'm going to move forward into the situation. So, that's the kind of CBT
And we're going to talk about some DBT scales but we're like, rather far into this episode. And we can do a whole other episode just about CBT if you guys wanted to. But I think it's a helpful thing to remember in the context of anxiety that we can't necessarily control the feelings themselves.
Remember they have really, going say that. But we can change we think about them, and we can change how we behave in response to them. And if you've been feeling this way for a really long time and maybe not coping as effectively as you could, it's going to be hard. And also, it's very possible.
The next thing I want to mention is that the biggest thing with anxiety, if you take nothing away from this episode except for this, is that the TLDR, avoidance amplifies your anxiety. Every time you avoid something that you're anxious of, you become more anxious the next time you encounter it.
So, if you're scared of, flying and you never get on a plane, you never go near an airport, you don't watch any videos or read any books that have anything to do with flying. If it has to do with a plane or flight, you ignore it, you run away, you go the opposite direction.
Every time you've avoided. that thing that might cause you distress, the level of anxiety you experience the next time gets even bigger because you've reinforced that idea that this thing is scary and dangerous and I shouldn't go towards it and it's just going to make me anxious and give me bad feelings, so I absolutely should not put myself in that situation.
So every time you avoid that thing, you're reinforcing the idea that it's dangerous and bad and it'll cause you distress, and so the next time you approach it, you're even more anxious. And yes, the urge to avoid is even stronger. So the best thing that you can do, if anything brings you distress or makes you anxious, is exposure therapy.
This is a CBT principle and it's really, really, really effective. We use it in anxiety, we use it in OCD, and the idea is that you expose yourself to things that make you anxious in a way that is manageable to cope with and you build mastery over that anxiety and over that thing. So say you are scared by social interactions. You're scared to make friends, you're scared to approach people in new places. You would start out small. . Maybe you reply anonymously, like, on a Reddit thread or a pen we have side chat. So you start anonymously, and then you're like, oh my god, anxious, like, what if someone, figures out, even if it's a nice comment, you're like, if someone figures out it's me and then they respond to me and it becomes a whole thing.
And then you do your deep breathing. You cope with that anxiety. It's okay. You are still alive. The next day you're like, okay, I handled that anxiety. I worked through it. I was okay I am going to leave a comment on someone's Instagram Maybe you start with like the New York Times or like a big page that isn't gonna see your comment And you are like love this so interesting, whatever it is.
You're probably a little anxious. I'm gonna be your heart is beating Maybe you're breathing faster. Maybe your thoughts are spiraling a bit You breathe through it. You're like, I'm feeling anxious. That's okay. That makes sense. I've avoided this in the past. I'm worried about being rejected or judged.
That's a completely normal thing to feel. And, I'm going to be okay. You work through the anxiety. You cope with it. Then maybe you leave a comment on an Instagram of someone that you know and you work through that anxiety and you keep moving your way up the cycle. So then maybe you go and order a coffee and you ask the barista how their day is going.
Maybe you ask for help in the library to find a book or at a store. Be like, do you have this size in something? You get practice. And then you go somewhere like, A conference or a class where you never have to see that person again. It's like a one time thing. You talk to someone, you leave, you're never going to cross paths again.
Then maybe you do it in a class where you'll see them every week. So you introduce yourself. You say hi, and there's that increased amount of, like, you'll continue to see them if this goes badly. Then you work your way up to introducing yourself to someone. Maybe you, ask if they want to study together, , or if they want to go and, like, do an activity.
like, go get coffee or something like that. So you work your way up to this really big scary thing, which is approaching a stranger, making small talk, and then trying to have a next step that would then continue into a friendship. And some people call this rejection therapy, some people call it exposure therapy, it's big on TikTok right now, like people will stand up on airplanes and be like, I hope everyone has a great flight!
And I saw they had a news segment on it, but this works! There's a lot of research and literature showing its effectiveness, and I think this is one of the best skills you can have in your pocket, and for anyone, whether you have an anxiety disorder, or we all feel fear at some point, anytime something brings you distress, you should absolutely do a little bit of exposure therapy.
So maybe that Anxiety is about raising your hand in class. Practice with staying after class to ask a question. Practice going to office hours. Work up to asking that question in class in front of everyone. Maybe you're really nervous about your final exam. You're gonna start by doing, a smaller quiz somewhere earlier in the semester.
Maybe you go to the room where your exam is and practice mentally. Okay, I'm sitting down, they're putting the timer on the board, I'm taking the test, that type of thing. , so anytime anything brings you distress, know if you avoid it, it will amplify that anxiety. So do that small step to expose yourself to that anxiety in a healthy and safe way.
And then if you have a really big fear or a really big phobia, typically you'll work with a therapist or a clinician. You'll do hierarchy. So you make that list that we talked about. Like, this is the scariest, worst thing possible that I could imagine. Like, approaching a stranger and trying to make friends with them.
The first thing I want to start with is leaving an anonymous comment. So that's the exposure hierarchy and then you make all the list in between and you check your way up and you go through the list and you get therapeutic support. , we had , Dr. Hans Schroeder on the podcast from the University of Michigan.
We talked about depression. I'll leave that link in the show notes, but I am a member in his lab now and I hope he's okay with me sharing this. , he emailed us week and was like, I'm so sorry. I'm super sick. We're going to have to reschedule for the following week. And he comes on zoom and he's like, guys, I was doing exposure therapy with a patient as I do every week.
And I ate a cookie off a toilet seat as I do every week, and I got violently ill and we were like, what? And it just was like a funny story. If you go to therapy for the first time, they're not going to like throw you into eating food off of toilet seats, it's going to be okay, I promise. But this is something that is used all the time in therapy.
There's like really cool and fun creative ways that they implement it. , again, lots of research showing its effectiveness. It really works. , I'm trying to think if there was any funny exposures that I did in treatment. We had vulnerability groups. Every week we'd just practice sharing something vulnerable.
We did karaoke group, which honestly was my biggest exposure. And I do think that fear serves a purpose because if I sing And I'm being a little hyperbolic here But like I should be rejected by everyone that knows me because I'm so bad at singing Like that fear is serving a purpose because this is not a skill.
It does repulse people. So yeah, we did karaoke which brought me a lot of anxiety. I think I i'm pretty sure I lip synced I like had another friend do it with me and I was Lip syncing happy birthday because i'm so bad at singing guys. I really wish I was good i'm completely tone deaf And I wish I was better I'm just not.
We did a more rejection therapy type thing. So we'd pull, , different tasks from a hat, and one of them would be like, go up to someone in the cafeteria and bargain with them to trade lunch, or go up to someone and ask for their phone number. These tasks that people will likely say no to, but you practice getting rejected.
, so there are really fun ways that exposure therapy is implemented. It's great. It's not a downside to doing it. It's a great skill to build to kind of be able to tolerate that distress and practice coping with it and then overcome these things that you might be avoiding. And that's a really, another big kind of philosophy and part of DBT is that you're avoiding things in life and there's that, that level of not wanting to engage with your emotions because of the level of distress they're causing.
So now we're going to talk about skills. We're going to talk about long term skills and short term skills that you guys can use with anxiety. And I wish I knew these going into it. And then last we're going to talk about why anxiety is good, which also is something we don't talk about a lot. , so long term skills, we're going to talk about three DBT skills, which is coping ahead, building mastery, and the please scale.
So coping ahead is one of the best skills. If you have. a situation that you're really anxious about. So not just day to day like, oh, I always feel like I'm kind of anxious, my thoughts are always kind of going, like I'm never just calm and at peace. But if you're like, I have a public speaking thing coming up, or I'm starting a new job, or the first day of school, or a final exam, like these big things where you're like, I think this situation is going to cause me anxiety, this is when we do a COPAhead.
And so basically what you do is you write out the who, what, when, where, , and then you talk about how you're going to cope with it. So like, I have a final exam on this date in this classroom. I am going to feel anxious because I'm really worried about my grade in this class and how I'm going to do on this test.
And whenever I take tests, I just get really anxious. Like, my mind goes blank, my heart goes really quickly, I can't catch my breath, sometimes I feel nauseous. my stomach is hurting, like, What are you expecting to feel in this situation? Who's going to be around you? You're like, there's so many people in this class, everyone else is writing and seems like they're so on top of it and my mind is just blank and I'm distressed and the teacher's in the front staring at everyone and the timer's going off, like, get really detailed about what's happening.
And then a really key part of the cope ahead, and you can do this for a realistic situation and then a non realistic situation, is like, what is the worst thing that is gonna happen? And this is really great, especially for social anxieties. say you're like, I'm walking into the first day of class next semester with new people I've never met before, and I fall on the floor and get a giant black eye.
Like, maybe that's the worst thing that would, or you just faint. And then you, wake up and everyone's staring at you. How would you cope with that? would you do some deep breathing? Would you be like, I'm sorry, I'm going to the nurse now? Would you pay attention to your heartbeat to try and ground yourself?
Would you look around the room and five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can touch, two things you can Smell one thing you can taste like grounding your senses How would you cope with that situation because you would cope with it and you can cope with it And then once you've done that cope ahead for the worst possible situation you then can go bad for like, okay Realistically checking the facts what is likely to happen And so you want to be really specific with what skills you're going to use.
Imagine yourself going through a situation and coping with it. Like, I'm sitting down, I'm going to get out my water, I'm going to get out my pencil, and I'm going to start doing deep breathing as soon as I get there. And I'm going to get there 10 minutes early so I can feel really grounded and ready before this test.
And I'm going to go to my teacher's office hours before and say, hey, , I get a lot of test anxiety. I know that maybe you might not be able to offer accommodations, but I'm going to get there early. I'm going to sit in the front row. I just want you to be aware that, like, , if it's okay with your testing policy, like I might need to go to the bathroom or get some water.
This is just something that I expect to bring a lot of anxiety and I want to keep you in the loop as much as possible. So what is everything you're going to do to navigate the situation and cope with it? And mentally go through that process. And then, if it's helpful for you, Dayev, maybe like write down, okay, if I feel anxious, I'm going to do my deep breathing, I'm going to do the five things around me, and I'm going to count backwards from 100.
Like, what are those skills that you're absolutely going to use? If I'm having a panic attack, I'm going to ask for help and go to the teacher and say, I need to step out and use the restroom for a minute, So that's COPE AHEAD. We love COPE AHEAD. And I do think an important part of COPE AHEAD is checking the facts.
Like, is this realistically going to happen? Are you going to pass out? Probably not. Is it possible? Yeah. why not do the cope ahead for that? But like, realistically, not super likely. Even in Princess Tyree, she doesn't pass out. She just runs out of the room. She doesn't actually throw up, presumably.
And she copes with it, she survives it, and then she becomes Princess of Genovia. Building mastery. This is another DBT skill that kind of has some crossover with CBT. We talked about exposure therapy, building mastery over your coping skills, and getting really good at like, I feel anxious. I'm gonna do deep breathing. That is gonna help you a lot and so. Anytime you feel a little bit of anxiety, use those coping skills, practice those coping skills.
And with time, you will get better at building mastery not only with your ability to implement those skills and know when you need them and how to execute them, but also building mastery over the feeling itself and becoming less anxious and less responsive to these things that in the past brought you a lot of distress.
And then the play skill. This is arguably the most important thing for anxiety. There's a lot of things that can make your anxiety worse, and I know you probably hear this all the time, but it's really important, so we're going to talk about it.
The PLEASE skill in DBT is kind of talking about our emotional vulnerability, so it stands for physical illness, Eating balanced, avoiding mood altering substances, sleeping enough, and exercising balanced. And so, it's taking care of our physical health so that we can reduce our emotional vulnerability for our mental health.
So, emotional vulnerability is basically like, at your baseline, how reactive are you to various stimuli? if you get enough sleep, if you have eaten well, if you haven't had caffeine, if you were able to get out on a walk and get some movement in, , if you're not sick, how susceptible are you to feeling anxious? Versus you slept for two hours last night, you had three Celsiuses. Don't do that. That's really bad. I've never done that. But don't, don't drink three Celsiuses. I think that's against the FDA guidelines. , you haven't eaten yet today, you have not done any exercise whatsoever, and your like heart rate's going crazy, , if you have 3 Celsius, maybe see a doctor, , you can't catch your breath, your thoughts are spiraling, you're exhausted, so you're sleep deprived.
Like all these things make us a lot more reactive and a lot more anxious and our baseline is just so out of whack. And so taking care of these things is really, really important, sleep especially. There's so many, like, I want to do an episode for you guys about sleep and how it impacts all these different things.
But one of the purposes of sleep is just like an inside out, we process through each emotion. We process them through our dreams. That's one of the reasons psychologists think that we dream is like process through these unresolved emotions. We catalog them, they go back in the memory ball chamber, whatever the heck it's called an inside out.
, sleep plays a very important role there. We feel more anxious when we don't get REM sleep for that reason. There's also the physical aspect, our heart rate variability and how much our heart rate is increasing and decreasing in response to things connected to how much sleep we get. And so it's absolutely pivotal, especially if you do have those intense physical anxiety symptoms that can be really debilitating.
Avoiding mood altering substances, we have to touch on this from the caffeine lens I know you guys probably hear it, but it really does have such a difference. When I was in middle school, I went through this phase of drinking a lot of coffee. Like, I'd wake up and make a hot coffee and, drink a large amount of caffeine because I was not sleeping at all. It was really ineffective. It made my mental health exponentially worse. And that was one of the reasons I saw such a shift in, my first couple weeks at McLean because I started getting actual sleep and it was like, wow, I am no longer astronomically depressed and anxious the moment I opened my eyes.
And then even when I was getting sleep, whenever I would drink coffee, my heart rate, my breathing rate, just the way that I was thinking and interacting with the world was overwhelming. So I didn't have caffeine for years after that initial experience of like having too much caffeine and being so anxious.
After I was aware, like, okay, okay, what I'm experiencing is anxiety and this is a really tough thing to navigate. I did not have coffee or caffeine for years. And so. If you are someone who has a generally anxious baseline, being aware of how caffeine interacts with your body is really, really important and really, really helpful.
So, Being really aware of substances, how they impact your mood, especially if you have anxiety, because. across the board. These changes that we make with our physical health have a really, really big impact on our mental health as well. The last part of the PLEASE skill that we're going to talk about is movement and this varies from person to person. I think also if you're navigating depression or depressive symptoms and anxiety, it can be a whole complex relationship, but movement is really, really effective for moving anxiety through the body, having that physical release because we hold a lot of tension and energy.
I know everyone and their mother has been like, have you tried exercising? Have you tried moving? It'll help your mental health. But this semester, especially dealing with the stress of grad apps and all these things, it's I have never walked more in my life, like I'm not running, I'm not lifting, I'm just walking myself around.
I put on my headphones, I blast my Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams and Sabrina Carpenter because that's all I listen to, and I walk myself in laps around campus like I am a suburban dog. And it works great. It helps me sleep better. It helps me feel like I've worked through some of that anxiety. After it, my heart rate's lower, I'm feeling calmer.
Like there were certain days of the semester where I was like, I need my walk, or I'd go in the morning and bake. This has to be an afternoon activity so I can work through some of the anxiety I've built up. Figuring out what kind of movement works for you. And for me, I want to enjoy it. If I'm jogging, even though it's probably at a similar speed to what I'm walking, I don't enjoy it.
I'm not happy. If I'm walking and I'm outdoors and I'm listening to music, like that's a positive experience for me. So I'm getting that benefit of like physically moving through the anxiety, which there's so much research on it being effective. And I'm also, getting the positive benefits of just , I saw the pretty views, I listened to my music, I walked around, I feel productive.
So figure out what kind of movement you like. Maybe it's cycling, maybe it's walking, maybe you like running, maybe it's weights, maybe it's Pilates, dance, I don't know. Whatever it is that you enjoy, adding movement to your routine can really help to work through anxiety, but also from a preventative perspective of keeping that baseline low and effective.
So those are the long term skills I like to pull from and I use on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. And then the short term skills, so these are things you use when you're feeling really anxious, when you're having a panic attack. And the key with short term skills or distress tolerance, if you want to go from the DBT perspective, is that we use them to tolerate distress.
We can't use them to cope with things long term because they lose their effectiveness. So we use these when we're feeling really, really anxious and then we lean on those longer term skills of like. Lifestyle changes, asking for help, doing exposure therapy, coping ahead, building mastery over that anxiety.
So if you're having a panic attack, these are the skills that I would recommend. The first one is STOP. It's an acronym from DBT that stands for Stop, Take a Step Back, Observe, and Proceed Mindfully. This seems so intuitive, but when you're having a panic attack and you can't breathe, it's not. So stop physically, mentally, just freeze.
Take a step back. If you can, take yourself out of that situation. Walk outside, leave the conversation, get out of the room that you're in, observe mentally and physically. Okay, what happened? symptom check? Is my heart rate going really fast? Is my breathing rate really intense? are my thoughts spiraling?
Where am I? What caused this? Observe, kind of, how we got in this position. And then you make your plan to proceed mindfully. And then proceeding mindfully, a lot of the time, is using coping skills, which we'll talk about here in a second. Bye. We often skip that step, like we just run into deep breathing, or like oh my god I need to drink water, oh my god I'm anxious, I better walk around.
But taking that step to be like okay, what is truly happening physically and mentally, what am I anxious about, and how did I get to this point of feeling so anxious? distressed and overwhelmed. The TIP skill is the next one. You guys know I love the TIP skill. this should be common knowledge. It's just, it's such a game changer and it works 100 percent of the time, which is hard to say for a mental health thing.
So, TIP is an acronym in DBT and it stands for temperature, intense exercise, paced breathing, and paired muscle relaxation. So, temperature, This pulls from a biological phenomenon called the mammalian diving reflex, which is stimulated by your vagus nerve. I might get this wrong because I am not a biologist, but your vagus nerve runs underneath your eyes.
I believe it goes down your neck, your chest, and then it like ends kind of in your stomach near your kidneys, liver area. And your body has this thing called your mammalian diving reflex. And so when you come into contact with cold water, your body's like, okay, I'm going to go swimming now.
I'm going to need to be underwater. And so if I keep my heart rate at a high level, I'm going to produce a lot of carbon dioxide really quickly, and I'm going to have to get up to the surface really quickly to release that carbon dioxide and get more oxygen so that I can survive.
And that's not efficient or effective. So your body has this system in place where when cold water comes into contact with your vagus nerve, your body immediately lowers your heart rate and lowers your breathing rate, so that you're not producing carbon dioxide as quickly and you don't need more oxygen while you're quote unquote underwater.
And so we can hack this, we can use it to our advantage. And so when we're having a panic attack, you're going to get a bowl of ice water, or you can use an ice pack, or you can just use cool water if you're in a situation where you can't access a bowl of ice water, but a bowl of ice water will be most effective.
This is what we use in residential. They have like so many ice cubes and so many bowls of water and towels because they use them almost on a daily basis to help people get through anxiety. You fill up your bowl of water, You put your ice in it, you take a deep breath, and you submerge your face. You count for maybe like 10 seconds, however long you need, before you take another breath, and then you submerge your face again.
You'll probably repeat that four or five times until you're no longer breathing really quickly with a really fast heart rate, and that physiological distress will go away a hundred percent of the time. You might have to repeat it a few times. You might have to do a few cycles. but it will work. That physiological distress will lessen because we're using this biological mechanism that is foolproof.
You might have seen this on TikTok. People will be like, lowering my cortisol after my hangover, and then they'll do an ice dive. But It works for mental health, for anxiety. I wish everyone knew this and if you're ever around someone having a panic attack, this is a skill you can offer them that will work 100 percent of the time, The rest of the tip skill is intense exercise, paced breathing, impaired muscle relaxation. So intense exercise, is a similar idea that when we are exercising, our body can only maintain a certain level of outputs for so long. So if we're sprinting and we stop sprinting, our body's like, I'm no longer moving.
I'm lowering my heart rate and my breathing rate to conserve energy. Basically all our bodies ever want to do is conserve energy. They don't want to be having a lot of output or moving. So Any time and any place we can conserve energy, we will. And one of the ways is by exercising and then stopping exercising.
So when your heart rate's going really fast, when you can't catch your breath because you're having a panic attack, do sprints. Do a bunch of squats. Do burpees. Do something really high intensity. Run in place. Do jumping jacks. Your heart rate will get raised past the level that it was at from that anxiety, and then your body will lower it below that threshold, and again, alleviate that physiological distress.
It also, again, helps move that anxiety through the body, which is also very helpful, and you release endorphins because you're doing some exercise. So, added benefit. And then paired muscle relaxation and paced breathing. Pretty intuitive, but basically, we carry a lot of stress in our body. Our muscles get really tense and tight when we're anxious.
And so, this works really well in tandem. But you're going to breathe in. As you breathe in, you clench your muscles. Pause with your muscles clenched and then as you breathe out you release the clenched muscles You could do this one muscles at a time So like starting with your fist then your whole arm move around your body more of like a flashlight Meditation situation or you can do this like your whole body breathe in tense your muscles release them And again, you're tensing them past the threshold that they were tensed from the anxiety and releasing it again below that threshold So you let go of that tension and then the key with Pace breathing.
You could do whatever count works for you. For me, normally I do two slower counts in pause and then three out. Some people like to do three counts in four out. The key is that your exhale needs to be longer than your inhale, and that will also lower your heart rate, lower your breathing rate, and doing that for a few minutes is really, helpful.
And then the last thing that I'll mention, and this is the last one, because. Again, it loses its effectiveness, but distract. If you're having a panic attack, if you're really anxious, have your list of distraction skills that works really well. Is it watching your favorite TV show? Is it blasting music?
Is it, , doing a workout? Is it Coloring, drawing, like, what is it that distracts you from your emotional experiences that you can lean on in the short term to survive through that crisis? Again, these are crisis survival skills. We don't use these on a daily basis because they lose their effectiveness and it's a crutch.
But in those moments where you are really, really anxious, it's really helpful to have a list on your phone or a photo or know, like, if I feel anxious, I listen to music. If I feel anxious, I. Bake. I pet my dog. I go on a walk. what is that answer for you? , and lean on distraction in the short term. So those are our distress tolerance skills.
the last thing we're going to talk about in this episode of Things I Wish I Knew About Anxiety is that anxiety can be good. It serves a purpose and it actually benefits us in some situation. Again, this is the difference between we get anxious, we feel anxiety, and like generalized anxiety disorder or social anxiety disorder where it's causing us distress and interfering with our quality of life.
But anxiety is a feeling, can be good, and it can serve a purpose. , we talked about How anxiety is sending us messages about potential threats. And a lot of the times it's like, we don't want to be rejected. We care about these people. We care about love and acceptance and feeling supported. , we're worried we're gonna lose something that matters to us.
That person, that thing, that, acceptance, that matters to us. We care about that. That is of value. , so it's good and sending us those messages. There's also this really interesting thing in psychology called the Yerkes Dodson Law. If you've taken intro psych, you've probably realized that. But, if you're completely calm, like you're a Buddha, you're meditating, there is no anxiety in any bone of your body, people don't perform very well.
Similarly, on the other side of the spectrum, if you're having a full blown panic attack, you don't perform very well. And performance, I mean like mental activity, so taking a test. So if you take a test completely calm, You don't do great. If you take a test having a full blown anxiety attack, you don't do great, but somewhere in that middle range, it's like a bell curve.
When you have a medium amount of anxiety, you are using those physical symptoms that we talked about. Increased attention, increased awareness, better eyesight, better hearing, more awareness. , there's something riding on that. You care about it. And so we actually perform better mentally when we're a little bit anxious.
Anxiety helps us perform at our best. , and so it can be good in small doses. And then we talked about this in another episode. In this episode he talked about how procrastination is like natural adderall. That's a really clickbaity, overgeneralization. But when we procrastinate things, we have this boost of anxiety before the deadline. And then we work faster, we work more efficiently, because now it's like, okay, adrenaline, I need to get this done, there's this deadline, this is a threat, like I got to work through this.
And so this is another way that anxiety shows up, it gets us motivated, it gets us to act, it gets us to behave, it causes that adrenaline to be able to get us to get things done. So anxiety can be good, it does serve a purpose. But when it's causing us to stress, and it's causing us to avoid and it's interfering with our quality of life, we got to work through that, we got to be more effective.
And hopefully, So, everything I talked about today will help you do that. So, those are some things I wish I knew about anxiety. If you have something you wish you knew about anxiety, let me know, send me an email or an Instagram DM, or Tag me on Instagram stories any of the things I'm always here and make sure to share this episode if it was helpful I really hope it was and I'm glad we're back to the solos I love these and it's just been so busy, but I miss talking to you guys.
So we're gonna do more of these I'm also gonna do with things. I wish I knew about depression. So get excited for that episode Really happy topic. No, it'll be good. But yeah, I hope you guys are having a good semester. This is going to come out before Thanksgiving, so happy Thanksgiving. I'm thankful for all of you.
You guys are the best. I love you loads and leave a review, share all the things. I hope you're not experiencing too much anxiety, and if you are experiencing anxiety, hopefully now you know how to cope with it. So have a great rest of your week. I loved and missed you guys. So with that, I'll I'll see you next week.
Sadie: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of she persisted. If you enjoyed, make sure to share with a friend or family member, it really helps out the podcast. And if you haven't already leave a review on apple podcasts or Spotify, you can also make sure to follow along at actually persisted podcast on both Instagram and Tik TOK, and check out all the bonus resources, content and information on my website.
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