Why Am I Like This?!
We are a therapist and a psychiatric nurse practitioner and we want to share a simplified view of these complex concepts that are often misunderstood, avoided, and even feared.
This is a podcast about being human, adapting to life, and learning from our unique experience.
We try to provide the answers to question: Why am I like this?
Why Am I Like This?!
Why Am I So Anxious?!
Can chronic stress really trap us in a perpetual state of fight or flight? In this episode of "Why Am I Like This?", Laura Wood and Michaela Beaver unearth the complex layers of anxiety, from generalized anxiety to social anxiety and panic attacks. You'll gain a deeper understanding of how our nervous system responds to perceived threats and why some stress can actually be beneficial. We also explore how anxiety often becomes a fear of fear itself, leading to avoidance behaviors that can impact daily life.
Our conversation then shifts to the digital age and its effect on our mental well-being. In today's world, constant notifications and screen time can create a relentless cycle of anticipatory anxiety, especially for young, developing minds. We explore how this digital dependency not only disrupts sleep patterns but can also lead to daytime fatigue and irritability. Moreover, we discuss the phenomenon of anxiety dreams and how a lack of restful sleep can affect social interactions and overall mental health, raising the intriguing question of whether anxiety can be influenced by those around us.
To empower you in managing anxiety, we dive into practical techniques and the importance of acknowledgment and acceptance. Discover how negativity bias influences our perception of danger and how early childhood interactions shape our self-esteem and anxiety levels. We offer actionable strategies like slow breathing, guided imagery, and the "bucket" technique for organizing tasks and reducing overwhelm. By validating difficult emotions and creating mental space, we aim to help you reach a state where you feel capable of handling whatever comes your way. Join us for this insightful conversation and equip yourself with the tools to better understand and manage anxiety.
Laura's Free Course on Emotional Development and Regulation:
https://benavieri.com/neuroception-sign-up/
This show is sponsored by:
Benavieri Counseling & Coaching
www.benavieri.com
Active Healing Psychiatric Services
www.activehealingpsych.com
Hello and welcome to. Why Am I Like this? The podcast for those who didn't get enough hugs as a child? I'm Laura Wood and I'm a trauma therapist.
Michaela:Hi and I'm Michaela Beaver. I'm a psychiatric nurse practitioner,
Laura:so Michaela why are we doing this podcast?
Michaela:I am so glad you asked. We want to help you understand yourself a bit better how the things you learned about yourself and the world in childhood are still affecting you today. We want to figure out why are we like this, those random things about ourselves we might wonder about, like why am I so jumpy? Why am I so anxious? Why do I take everything personally? Why are my thoughts so negative? Why do I feel like I have to fix everything all the time?
Laura:Yes, and today we are talking about feeling anxious. So we're going to try to answer the following question what is anxiety, and is it really a bad thing? Where does anxiety come from and what can we do to reduce the impact of anxiety on our lives? So let's get into it. What's anxiety?
Michaela:There's a ton of different kinds of anxiety. Right, we have our generalized anxiety, we have social anxiety, we have panic attacks, we have, you know, anxiety related to our health and how our body is feeling. But I think that, like, at the base of all of that, anxiety is a feeling or a thought that creates distress in our bodies, which is related to what's actually going on in our bodies. Right, it's part of our nervous system response and kind of we kind of think of it as like fight or flight, right? Yeah, for sure, what do you think? What would you say? Anxiety?
Laura:is so kind of similar. I think of anxiety as a nervous system response to threat. So the perceived threat and the real threat are interchangeable in this case. Right, so our nervous system is designed to keep us safe and is designed to regulate our nerves and our body functions, right. So if we're perceiving a threat, then our body is going to do certain things that are going to prepare us to evade said threat, and that is what anxiety is. It's this response that is created by the threat, and so the problem, I think, when we have chronic anxiety, is that the threat is imagined or perceived, but it isn't actually real. The threat is imagined or perceived, but it isn't actually real, and so we lose the discernment to be able to tell the difference between a real threat and a perceived threat. Yes, that makes a lot of sense.
Michaela:But there are types of anxiety that are not necessarily bad things right. So we need a little bit of a fear response to motivate us. Sometimes we have a test coming up right and we're we want to get a good grade on that test, and so that little bit of stress actually is beneficial for us to help us to do the things that we need to do, to feel prepared for that test or presentation or whatever it is right. So not all stress is necessarily coming to that chronic, you know big stress type things.
Laura:Absolutely. So there's a difference between chronic stress and acute stress, right? Chronic stress is just this constant, you know, everything is going all the time and you're always in fight or flight and you're flooded with all of these hormones and adrenaline and cortisol and all these things that are keeping you in fight or flight and that could be a result of just chaos in your home, in your environment, in your family, et cetera. And then there's acute stressors at your job yeah, absolutely. And then there's acute stress, which we need in order to push us forward, right, like even the sense of, like pain. A sense of pain is telling us something, it's sending us a message.
Laura:So, in my opinion I'm going to go really extreme on this end which is that anxiety is an adaptive response to threat. It's helpful, it's a good thing, and it only becomes a problem when it becomes a problem when it's chronic. So when you are in a regular environment with your friends and socially, like, let's say, you're in a social environment and you have a little bit of nerves because you're meeting a new person, like, those nerves are not a bad thing, that's a good thing. It's going to help keep you, you know, behaving in a way that is socially acceptable and so that you can grow these relationships. It's going to your nerves, are going to tell you, are telling you that this is important, that there's stakes attached to this, right, like maybe it's not super high stakes, but it's like low stakes, low anxiety, but still some level of that tangle of like anticipation, right, so it can be a good thing anticipation right.
Michaela:So it can be a good thing. But we don't like how it feels to feel anxious. We don't like to have that little heart start racing. We don't want to get a little flushed or sweaty. We feel like people can see that we're responding in a way or that we're acting differently, and so we start to actually fear being anxious and so that creates disordered behavior, right. So it's almost like anxiety is a fear, of fear.
Laura:Yeah, we're anticipating the anxiety from the said event. So then we avoid it, right. Then we go into like an avoidance behavior there. Then we go into like an avoidance behavior. There's like an, there's approach behavior and there's avoidance behavior. There's social connection and then there's disconnection and defense.
Laura:So like your nervous system is operating in either a perceived like safety and what I heard recently called discovery mode, which is like I'm curious, I'm open, I'm not expecting everything to be bad, I'm not anticipating a threat, but I still might be like, ooh, that's interesting. Like, oh, I have a little, I'm a little nervous about that, but I'm ready enough to try it. Right, like a roller coaster, I'm excited, right. So that's a different type of anxiety than the anxiety that you feel when you're afraid of feeling afraid and you're afraid of what's going to happen next and you see everything as a perceived threat. And then you're in this defense state all the time. And so we, what we want to do is we want to shift from the defense into that discovery zone where we can be curious and be open and we can be inviting and accepting of our anxiety, like, hey, anxiety, come sit next to me on this couch and we can go through this together.
Michaela:Yeah, I always tell and maybe this is silly, but I always tell my kids or people I'm working with. I'm like we like this anxiety right. It's a warning signal, like you said. I call it the spidey sense it's going off. It's like, hey, there could be danger. Then you're like, thank you, thank you, body for doing what it's supposed to do, but like there is no tiger here, so I don't need to be at this level. I can tone it down a little bit. But thanks for letting me know there's something to pay attention to. And I got this. I can handle it.
Laura:I love that. That's where my phrase for that is. I always say it's difficult and not dangerous. Yes, I like that. This is difficult, it's not dangerous. There's different things. So once I learned to discern between difficult and dangerous, then my anxiety level can come down to a reasonable, appropriate level of anxiety versus an inappropriate, unreasonable level of anxiety, which I don't even like. The terms unreasonable and inappropriate Like I feel like they're shamey, blamey words. Yeah, when that's not what I mean. I guess what I mean is we're overusing that skill. Yes, our nervous system is overusing the skill of sending us the signal that something might be coming.
Michaela:Right. So that leads me to the next question is why? Why do we get to a place where we have a need to use too much of that skill?
Laura:My gosh, why so many reasons? I think there's a lot of reasons, like one thing that I think about is just our temperament. Like we're born with that we have some level of fear-based temperament. It's part of our personality that we inherited or that we were just sort of created with, and then we maybe have experienced things in our environment that validate that or that don't contradict it. Maybe we are sort of timid and cautious and then our caregivers are overprotective, validating our need for being cautious and validating our need to be timid and reinforcing our fear, and then we just sort of cycle and cycle and into this chronic state of anxiety.
Michaela:Yeah, that makes sense. That makes me think of epigenetics and that kind of this idea that we all have. Our DNA isn't that complex and it's not like so so different from each other's. What makes us different is these genes, that kind of flip on and off, and it's epigenetics is that you know what happened to our great great grandma and the things that they experience in life, like if they were in the, you know, depression and they were. They experienced war or they had, you know, an alcoholic parent that they were scared of, and so all of those different things change their, the way that their genetics are. That these epigenetics they flip on and off different ones and by doing that that is actually passed down from child to child and so we can be part of what makes us predisposition to be more of an anxious, shy kid is probably related to kind of things that have happened in the past to our relatives.
Laura:Yeah. So in the way past let's say generation after generation maybe there were natural disasters or there were, you know, difficult like family environments, or there were maybe illnesses or there were things that caused a lot of stress for our family members. Then that high stress, high anxiety sort of clicked on and then it was like OK, we need this high stress, high anxiety. So I'm going to pass this on to the next generation because this is helping me. This is a good thing, this is serving me really well because I'm surviving this natural disaster Right, and so it's like help. It's like here you go, you have this high stress, high anxiety, because it's really helpful in our situation. However, it's a different situation.
Michaela:And we're not having to survive in that same way, and so our nervous system tends to, you know, signal that there's danger. So much easier.
Laura:Yeah, so I'm going to anticipate that everything is a threat instead of anticipate that most things are like not a threat and they're kind of okay, like it's almost like glasses half empty or glasses half full, like I'm anticipating things to be negative or have negative consequences, versus I'm anticipating things to be positive or neutral. I think neutral is really what? A parasympathetic like state of you know, just calm, like rest and digest. It's like neutral. It's not like I'm just like excited about everything. Right, I don't have to be super thrilled and happy, but I'm essentially net neutral. I'm just like that could go either way.
Michaela:Right and I think that that's a really good point to make is that, like neutral is probably most of our natural state and we don't have to feel like this excited feeling constantly, and I think that that can sometimes be like not what people expect.
Laura:Well, yeah, that just made me think of because if you're addicted to your phone, you do have to have this excited feeling constantly. It's dopamine, it's literal addiction. So when we don't have that, the mechanics of the addiction make it so that our baseline dopamine levels are much lower. We have a deficit. And when we have a deficit, then us engaged and keep us clicking and keep us online and you know they're advertising and you know every single app is sending us alerts. Like we could get hundreds of alerts a day on our phone, a conversation with somebody like me and you.
Laura:Right now, you know I could get an alert and be and just I would check the alert, like mindlessly right and not even think about the fact that we're doing something else and we're having a conversation in real time. But every single time I get that alert, I have a potential positive that I could be chasing or I have a potential disaster that I might be needing to attend to, right? So I have this anxiety, this anticipatory anxiety of like what could this alert possibly be? And it could either be a good thing or a bad thing, but that's what kind of keeps the addiction going, right Is that? I don't know what's. It's like gambling, like what's it going to be? Is it going to be, you know, am I going to hit the jackpot and it's going to be somebody like reshared my post. Or is it going to be, you know, I'm going to totally bottom out and it me, and somebody like said something horrible about me or something right Like what, what is that going to do to me?
Michaela:Depending on whether you're glass half full or glass half empty person, you might be anticipating one or the other, but I think that there is something to that. Like you're like, you're constantly feeling like that Pavlov dog kind of situation, classic conditioning to hear the ding and need to check it and see what it is. Did somebody, did somebody text me? Do I need to respond to that? Or if they didn't text, oh man, I'm disappointed because they're ignoring me. They must be mad at me.
Laura:Yeah, and even adults have problems with this, but especially kids, whose minds are like being wired in this moment to determine whether or not the world is a safe place. What is our actions teaching them in this? You know, with our social media and with our phones and with our texting and communication styles today, I think we're really rhyming kids to be anxiously addicted and to be sort of stuck in this cycle of, you know, of compulsion and like I have to do this and if I don't check it, then what you know, then I'm missing out, and then I'm going to be anxious because I don't know what I'm missing and it could be all these things happening without me of how you know, we most commonly are like, oh, I have these blue light blocking glasses and so I can watch all the TV.
Michaela:I have a blue light filter on my screen, so like, I'm good, I can watch all the TV because I'm blocking that and my melatonin is going to be great for that. But you're missing out on the fact that one our brains are designed to be like excited by what we're watching. And we're watching something we want to know the end of it, we want to see what's going to happen and we're just getting really invested in it. Maybe it's kind of scary and that's causing our fight or flight, our adrenaline, to start going. And then we think, oh, I'm going to turn off the TV and I'm just going to fall right to sleep, I'm going to stop rolling and I'm just going to fall right to sleep because you know, I, I I'm done that. That helps me fall asleep.
Michaela:But what's really happening is is it's engaging that part of our brain that's like I want to know what's going to happen, so like, if it's a TV series, you just can't stop watching because you want to just keep going and keep going. And then, before you know it, it's one o'clock in the morning and you get no sleep. Yeah, so we want to know what's going to happen. It's engaging fight or flight, it's making us feel anxious and it's going to take some time for our body to settle back down after engaging in those behaviors.
Laura:Do you think that it affects our dreams? I have anxious dreams sometimes.
Michaela:I find that if I'm like I deserve to watch this show, I have worked so hard and I've been wanting to watch it and I watch it. I actually don't know about having weird dreams, but I wake up more in the middle of the night, or I wake up earlier in the morning and that's tied to just not getting into that full restful state because I stayed up too late or because I was wanting to watch that thing.
Laura:Yeah, Like I can't let go of it or something like that, Like I'll have in maybe it's instead of waking up in the middle of the night, like I'll have what I call anxiety dreams, where it's just like something is going really, really wrong and you can't fix it and it's just like you're so stressed, and then I'll wake up just feeling really stressed and I have so much anxiety as I'm awake like I'm just flooded with it. And I know that that night I did not get a good night's sleep. Even if I slept for 10 hours, I was anxious the whole time.
Michaela:Sure, and that carries over into the rest of our day, right? So then we're more tired because we didn't get good sleep, and then we're a little bit more short with our coworkers or with our family because we didn't get the sleep that we needed. We've been feeling kind of off and anxious the whole day because of having that.
Laura:You know, all those things adding up together, yeah, and then we're just exhausted and we're not able to really fully function and we're not able to really do our best and be our best and feel our best, and so maybe then we start to overthink and start to have, like the even, you know, even more anxious behaviors and thoughts. You know, and I think about, like is our anxiety influenced by our partner? Is our anxiety influenced by the people around us? Do you think we have?
Michaela:like contagious anxiety. Sure, how could we not, right? I think. What I think of when I think of that is like mirror neurons. That's what I was just thinking about.
Michaela:Yeah, those, those mirror neurons are, are we're feeding off of that. We're feeding off of the fact that, you know, we're not getting attuned to by our partner. They're not able to recognize what's going on for us because they're so caught up in what's going on for them or how they're reacting to our kids, because they had a bad day and they're having, they're being short-tempered and that's affecting us because the kids are now in distress. Like every bit of it is connected to what's going on in us.
Laura:Yeah, and now I'm walking on eggshells because I'm afraid that you are going to be freaking out or that you're going to have a blow up, and I'm.
Laura:So now I'm walking on eggshells because I'm afraid that you are going to be freaking out or that you're going to have a blow up, and so now I'm anxious because you're anxious, and then the kids are anxious, because we're both anxious and we're sending all these signals and we're saying like, basically what we're saying is like something is dangerous happening here, and so in our community, when there's danger in the community, we warn each other, and so essentially, we're all just like getting worked up together and really isolated from each other because we can't connect with each other, but we're just anxious together.
Laura:Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of that happening right now. We collectively become afraid of things, or there's like these trends in behaviors and fears and like all of a sudden it's you know, everybody's talking about this and I just think how information, and especially fear and, like you know, bad information travels really really fast, like we pick it up from each other really really fast and we spread it really really fast, and I think we just do that more than we do about neutral or positive information. We're sort of more primed to spread the fear and danger, probably because we're trying to protect each other.
Michaela:Sure, what is the negative? Things are so sticky, they stick to us and they don't leave where, like the positive things, we just can let them go and we can discount them so easily. I mean that is a fear response thing, it's a safety thing.
Laura:Yeah, it's that. Negativity bias is basically, if we're not looking out for it, then we're going to fall in the hole that's right in front of us If we're not paying enough attention, if we're not seeking out the danger. But you know, when I think about all of this and then I think about how do we deal with the anxiety, one of the things that sounds counterintuitive, but it's you don't go towards it, like you don't, you don't engage with it in the first place, right, Like you don't fight the anxiety, and that's how it actually, like, alleviates itself, cause if you fight it, then it grows bigger.
Michaela:What we resist persists.
Laura:What we resist persists. That's really good. I really like that.
Michaela:I don't remember who said it Carl Young or something like that, I don't know but yeah, it's so true, it is, it's very true. Um, so like I I think that I was probably an anxious kid and didn't like know that I was an anxious kid. Um, but I think about um you know I made. We lived in this one area and the school system in that area was not as good as the school system in the other area, and so we moved from the school system that wasn't as good to the school system that was like a little bit more tough and rigorous, right, and I moved in second grade and it was I, my mom says I was nervous to go to school that first day and I think that, like, my interpretation of it was like at the time I just had a bad teacher. She was really mean.
Michaela:Looking back, I don't know, maybe she wasn't mean, but maybe, like, I had an experience of her that wasn't great and that created a lot of fear in me and a lot of like thoughts because I wasn't good enough, because I had to go to reading class, like because I had to catch up, and like all of that was put on to me without having attunement to, like my nervous system. Looking back now I can see that and so, like, I've just always thought all these years that she was just a bad teacher. She was so mean, like you know, she wasn't helpful, which I'm like, looking, I don't know, maybe that maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't true, I don't know, but that created a lot of, I think, the anxiety in me as a kid because it wasn't a good experience and then creating that, you know, social fears of like people are going to think I'm stupid and I really think that's carried over into my adulthood. Like, having that like fear of people who could be smarter than me, could have, could know more than me, that like imposter syndrome type of stuff, having that like has continued. But I'm able to more recognize like oh, I don't need to, I don't need to engage in that.
Michaela:Like you said, I don't, I don't have to believe that. That's true, that I, I you know I can choose a different thing to think, but I think about like, the power that that teachers have in kids. Because we're talking about like, why are we like this? You know, I think of the power that a teacher has over whether a kid will be like recognized, attuned to, supported, or if they're going to feel like they're being called out, or they're going to feel like you know they're not supported and nobody's there for them and they're on their own.
Laura:Yeah, and that's not a good feeling. I wonder if the difference between you know, feeling avoidant and feeling afraid would have been someone saying to you like hey, first impressions aren't everything, and even though you had that bad experience, it might not be bad the next time.
Michaela:I don't know, maybe that seems like that would have been helpful, as, like a second grade person, like I didn't have the words to say I, I think that I'm stupid. Like I feel I'm dumb, like I didn't have those words, I just knew I didn't like my teacher.
Laura:Yeah, I think that we have to allow for some of that to happen in our lives too, like some problems aren't problems to solve, we just have to sort of accept them as they come. And so, like as you're telling me this story, I think about, like if a kid is feeling down or if an, even if an adult is feeling down, like to just say, like man, that's really hard, you're going through a really hard thing. That's a hard feeling to feel I'm here with you. You know you don't have to do that alone, we're going to be okay.
Laura:Then I'm not resisting the anxiety or the sadness or the pain. I'm not resisting the anxiety or the sadness or the pain. I'm saying like I'm so sorry that that's happening. That's a really hard feeling to feel we're here together and we can do it together. And then it just goes away on its own. It passes through you as part of like information. Your nervous system takes that in, responds to it and says, like this is hard. And then you get to a place where you're like and I can do it, yeah, and that evolution will happen naturally, if we don't fight the problem, we just let it be a problem which is hard to do.
Michaela:It is hard to do and it's hard to sit and watch someone struggle, and I know that you always say do less, and I think about that a lot when I'm in different situations and I'm like do less, I don't have to fix this right. Right, and it's hard not to. I think we all have this need to like make our kids be okay, and that's why we, or people help people feel okay, and that's why we say things that aren't super helpful. You know, we think we're being helpful, but maybe we're not being as helpful as we could, and so I love that. Like just validating them is the key.
Laura:Yeah, and acknowledging like sometimes we have to feel hard feelings. I talk a lot about keeping our kids physically and emotionally safe, right, but part of that is to teach them that feelings aren't dangerous. So I can't prevent all pain, I can't prevent hurt feelings, I can't prevent hurt bodies, right Like in our kids. And when kids are growing up, they need to experience some of those acute stressors that we talked about earlier, like we need to experience stress in order to overcome, in order to learn how to navigate in that environment. And so part of that is, as a parent, saying that was really hard and you did a great job.
Michaela:I love that and I think that that's so true. I think that we, because we want to protect our kids from all the things we take, we take away their ability to experience stress, and when they don't learn from little things, when they start to experience big things, they they don't know how to handle that, you know. And things keep getting harder. As we get older, we keep encountering harder and harder things. Um, and that's just part of life. We're all going to experience hard things, but when we believe that we can handle it, it makes it a lot easier. If we think that it's too hard, if we think that we're not going to be able to handle it, that's what I always talk about. Anxiety is literally this idea that the worst case scenario thing is going to happen and that we are not able to handle it, and in that that, if we believe that, then it's going to make it harder for us to be able to handle it.
Laura:Yeah, absolutely. And it's that story that we're telling ourself. Right, it's the thought and the belief that comes along with it is that I can't, it's too much. One thing I tell patients and my kids is like I say that it's not too much, like, yeah, this is a lot, it's a ton, but it's not too much. We can do it. It's hard, but it's not too hard, we can get through it. And what I'm saying in that moment is it's okay, hard things are okay, negative feelings are okay, a little bit of anxiety is okay and it's helpful.
Laura:It teaches us, it tells us when things are kind of a big deal.
Laura:It tells us when we need to be paying attention and when we can orient to what's really happening. Like, let's say, I heard a loud noise right now, my anxious, like my signals would go up and I would look around and once I see that that loud noise was not like a crash or anything dangerous, it was just something fell down. Oh, okay, I'm okay, right, so I get the alert, I check it out and then I come back. And so what we have to get better at is checking it out and then coming back, versus, when we get the alert, say no, it's nothing, it can't be anything. I can't have this. Like I'm wrong, right, like you're just counter. You're basically, instead of checking out the alert, like, oh, what happened? I noticed that I feel this way, like that must have, something must've happened to make me feel that way, like, oh, I see that everything's okay, no big deal. But what we do instead is we don't do that checkout part, we sort of just respond to the alert like stop having anxiety, you don't need to have it, and then that doesn't help.
Michaela:Yeah, or if we check it out, but we can't believe that there's nothing bad there, we start believing that. They're like oh, I can't believe myself because I know that there's going to be something bad that happens, right, and so then they just keep thinking that something really bad is going to happen.
Laura:Yeah, and then that's when we get into, like the compulsive areas of like I have to do all of these things in order to settle my anxiety down, like in the case of like OCD or something like that, in order to alleviate this distress, I have to take these actions and I have to do these things in order to feel better. But if we don't have, you know, those compulsions, if we can realize and this isn't necessarily an easy thing to do but if we can then notice that the compulsion is really designed to alleviate the anxiety, if we can realize we can alleviate the anxiety without doing that thing, we can be okay, even if we don't do the thing we think we have to do, then we can recognize and get that settled feeling.
Michaela:Yeah, it's all coming back to trying to protect ourselves. And when we feel like we pay so much attention to what's going on in our body and I had this pain what does that mean? Right, those are all us going down those rabbit holes of trying to fix or figure out what that pain means. Is a is a mechanism of trying to create safety and figure out what's going on, so that you know that you're not dying, for example, or that there's not some cancer there or something. So you know you're going to that catastrophic thinking and you're trying to figure out what's wrong with me when maybe it was just like a pain and it didn't mean anything.
Michaela:And so sometimes those loud noises aren't necessarily coming from outside. They're coming from inside of us as well, yeah for sure. Also, like our nervous system is tied to our gut. And so have you ever been doing something and you're like going along and then you realize that like you did something stupid or you forgot something and all of a sudden, like you have a pit in your stomach, like all of a sudden, your stomach just feels like you have a rock in it. That is literally fight or flight, taking over and stopping your digestive system from working. Because if we need to run from a dangerous situation, we need all of the energy diverted to running, and we can't be diverting energy and using energy to digest our food. We have to be diverting and making it so that we can run, we can fight, we can flee right.
Michaela:And so, like our GI system is, you know it's all connected. We have our enteric nervous system that's connected to our vagus nerve, and our vagus nerve touches all the things all the way down to our gut, and they communicate back and forth. And, interestingly, serotonin and dopamine are actually well, serotonin is like 70 to 80% of what's in our gut and they're also used. They're used in our brain, but they're also used in our gut to help with peristalsis, to help things flow through our digestive tract, and so all of the things are connected together. Things flow through our digestive tract and so all of the things are connected together, and when we feel anxious and nervous we get those bodily, physical sensations. Maybe our you know our our gut stops digesting because we became nervous and anxious and we entered into fight or flight. And so we want to try to calm our nervous system back down. Once we realize that there isn't a threat that we need to run from, that we need to fight for our lives, then we calm our nervous system down so that we can go back into the normal body functions of rest and digest.
Laura:And so this comes back to that parasympathetic nervous system reaction to calm down. So how do we calm down? What do we need to do? What can we do to calm down?
Michaela:So we can breathe.
Michaela:Breathing is a great way to calm our nervous system down.
Michaela:So thinking about our vagus nerve is responsible for parasympathetic nervous system. Rest and digest, it's touching all those things, right. And so what is there? Our lungs and our heart. And so by breathing we're activating that parasympathetic nervous system. And so we're taking that big breath, we're holding our, we're getting that full lung expansion, pushing our diaphragm down, and we're taking that deep breath so that we can activate that. It's actually putting pressure in the chest cavity, it's helping to slow down our heart rate and so we're affecting our nervous system when we take that deep breath. And so you can do a lot of people like square breathing box breathing, where you go in two, three, four, hold two, three, four out two, three, four, hold two, three, four. Or some people like four, seven, eight, and I think that like you breathe in for four, you hold for seven and then out for eight. And there's something with breathing in for four and out for eight, where you're having half the in and double the out. That helps activate that parasympathetic nervous system.
Laura:Because you have to go in slow motion, so like that's one other thing that you can do is you can start going in slow motion to like, let's say, it's hard to calm your breathing, but you can move your body slowly, like so, because you're so. This is like the opposite, right? You're saying breath to get the body to slow down. I'm saying body to maybe get the breath to slow down. So what wires together fires together. So my opposite action that we could do in order to slow down and calm down is to literally move in slow motion, so like I tell all my kids in you know, know, in session and just in life. I tell people all the time, like if you're looking for something, if you lost something, like I can't find my keys or I can't find my wallet, like literally go in slow motion and just move like you're slow, you're so slow and you'll be able to find it. It'll bring your cognition back online, It'll take back your and it's hard to do, it's so hard.
Michaela:That would drive me crazy, yeah. And so like I feel like I can't do this, I don't have time to move slow.
Laura:That's so funny, Right Cause it's counterintuitive. It's like I'm in a hurry, I need to find something, and I'm telling you to slow, like go in slow motion, but with the breathing too, like it's kind of counterintuitive because your heart and your lungs and your nervous system activation right, is saying go fast, go fast, go fast. Here you are saying no, I'm going to breathe slow, I'm going to. You know, hold my breath, I'm going to go out slow. So we're operating, we're activating that counteraction that we need to do when we're really amped up and we need to bring it down.
Michaela:But I think the important thing is is that you cannot be in fight or flight and rest and digest at the same time, and so by doing these things, as silly or as hard as they may feel like at the time, they are actually activating the part of the nervous system that counterbalances and that will help you get out of that place.
Laura:Yes, you need to counteract the activation and in order to do that, sometimes it's not the best idea to like, go down the rabbit hole of like why am I so anxious Right, like in this moment, right now, as you and I are talking it through, like this is a perfect example of debrief and like sometimes, you know, I tell clients and I tell my friends even too, like, don't go through that process of figuring out why, unless you're in the presence of a therapist or a friend, like when you're on your own and you're feeling anxious, like until you've settled that nervous system down, your brain and the chemicals in your brain, like, and the activated parts of your brain are not going to let you, like, you know, dissect and get insight and like, really, you know, learn from this experience anyway.
Laura:So you have to be in that rest and digest or that discovery mode or calm, you know, learn from this experience anyway. So you have to be in that rest and digest or that discovery mode or calm, you know, basically being an okay enough zone in order to then process the information and learn. You can't do that when you're in fight or flight.
Michaela:No, so don't try to debrief your kid in the moment. Don't try to tell your partner what they're doing wrong and how to fix it in the moment. Right, that's a debrief type of situation. Is what you're saying Like in the moment?
Laura:That is what.
Michaela:I'm saying Don't do it right then, wait until they're calm to have a conversation about the things, because it will not go through. They will not remember because you know you, you think about this all the time. You're like I we've had this conversation a hundred times. Why can you not figure out that you can't do X, y and Z? Well, yeah, because you did it when they're like crying.
Laura:Right, right. And if I'm like super activated in fight or flight, like my thought process is literally like, don't die. It's not. Like, let me please like understand you know what I did wrong in this moment. Like it's, that's not what I'm trying to do in that time. Like if we had to cognitively think about every single action that we were going to take over in fight or flight, it would take us so long we would die. Right, if I'm running from a lion, I don't have time to remember my grocery list. That's not helping for me. I need to turn that stuff off. I need to turn off my thinking brain and I need to turn on my body and my heart rate and my lung capacity and all of those things. I need to turn up the energy and turn down the thinking. And so in that moment I can't learn.
Michaela:No, which is also why our brakes are shut off right, and so we're trying to get an outcome or someone to do something or something to happen in this elevated state and like they yell at us or they want to like kick us or punch us right, like their brakes are shut off at this point, like their brain is flooded with chemicals that shut off the thinking brain and the brakes are off and they're going to do things that are maybe not great choices during that time. So probably also a good idea to help them calm down or give them time to calm down, because we're less likely to get a shoe thrown at us.
Laura:That's a good point. I think we need to give ourselves space and time to get calm or to get regulated, just to get back to neutral. Right, we need to be neutral. We don't even need to be calm and like relaxed. That's like calm is like a misleading term, right. Like when people think of calm, they think of like a hammock on the beach. That's not what I'm talking about here. Like we're talking about neutral, like at least I know I'm not going to die, I can handle whatever's coming at me. I'm okay enough that's kind of my phrase, for this is like I'm okay enough, right, yeah, I like that. And so we need to get okay enough, right, what are maybe one or two other ways that we can reduce this impact of the anxiety? What can we do? We've got slow motion, we've got slow breathing. What are maybe one or two other ways that we can help slow down or calm down or get back to okay enough?
Michaela:or two other ways that we can help slow down or calm down or get back to okay enough. Yeah, I talk about like a guided imagery, sometimes as another option, kind of in that like mindfulness kind of type of thing. So find your happy place and imagine what your happy place is. Happy place and imagine what your happy place is, some place that has really no negative stuff that's happened, really just tied to positive things. Maybe it's a place you've been, maybe it's a place that you've never been but you'd want to be, and so you know, you kind of imagine yourself.
Michaela:So, like, the most common thing is like a beach. Right, I think of this lake that I go to in Minnesota and you just kind of imagine yourself there and you take yourself through. What does it look like? What are you seeing? What are you hearing? Right, you can hear the waves rushing onto the shore and you can hear kids playing in the sand and making sand castles. You can hear the birds. You can smell the pine trees that are all around you. You can smell the lake and the way that smells and you can feel the sand in your toes. So you're kind of imagining yourself there, you're immersing yourself into the senses and you're allowing that place to provide a calm, safe space for you to go to when you are kind of needing that, you know, to come back into a rest and digest.
Laura:That's really good. As you were saying that, I even was like feeling it on my toes and like listening to the waves. I was trying to go through that process and it did make me feel more calm, even just in this moment. So I love that one. That's a really good one. It did make me feel more calm even just in this moment. So I love that one. That's a really good one.
Laura:Another one that I think of sometimes is to sort out just to get order.
Laura:So sometimes, when we are feeling really anxious and it's because we're overwhelmed and we have too many thoughts all at one time, and so I like to kind of put my thoughts in buckets all at one time. And so I like to kind of put my thoughts in buckets, so like I like to imagine that I have like a bucket or a container for each like category of things, and then I can sort of visualize putting all of those thoughts into that particular bucket. So if I have maybe a red bucket for the things that are like bothering me right now, and then I have a blue bucket for things about work, and then I have a yellow bucket for things about, you know, whatever else, like whatever else that's bothering me. I can sort of sort out my thoughts into those buckets and when I give my mind order then I find myself feeling more settled, because sometimes I think the disorder and the disorganization can make it really difficult to bring yourself back into like a stable, settled feeling.
Michaela:I agree.
Michaela:I think that as adults and kids too but as adults we have so many things going on and so many things that like checklists in our brain that are undone, and it can really add to that feeling of of inattention and lack of focus because we were trying to accomplish one thing.
Michaela:But we really have all these subconscious thoughts in the back of our head of like oh, I didn't do the laundry and I better start dinner. Or like I need to go to the grocery store, don't forget to get the ketchup, you know. So we have all these things going on in the background that we're not really actively always thinking about, but it feels like it's not done and it gives us that feeling like I'm forgetting something, I didn't do the thing. And so, like by potentially being able to sort these things into your buckets, you could get rid of some of that unsettled feeling. For someone like me who can't imagine a bucket and see it, I feel like writing it down or like having a thought of being like oh, that would be the red bucket and just thinking about like, oh, that's a red bucket thought, oh, that's a yellow bucket thought, and kind of like just thinking about it, like that way could be also really helpful for those people out there that don't you know, see images in their brain.
Laura:That's a perfect way to explain it. Yeah, I love that. I think these are really helpful tools. I'm going to use your guided imagery and I'm going to try to use your breathing technique and hopefully I'll be able to get myself settled the next time. I'm feeling a little anxious. Yeah, I think.
Michaela:I'm going to try your bucket thing and see if that works to help organize all those undone tasks that I have.
Laura:That sounds awesome. Well, this was really great. Thank you so much for this conversation. It was extra helpful and fun. Yeah, thank you, and thank you for listening to. Why Am I Like this? If you like our show, please leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform, follow the show and share it with your friends. This episode was written and produced by me, laura Wood and Michelle Bieber. Our theme song is Making Ends Meet by Thick as Thieves, and a special thanks to Benefairy Counseling and Coaching and Active Healing Psychiatric Services for sponsoring this show.
