episode
112
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Emotions

Navigating Anxiety—Practical, Powerful Tips to Recognize and Transform Anxiety In Your Life

Episode Notes

What if anxiety isn't your enemy? What if it's trying to help? We all feel anxious at times. As we close out this series on Inside Out, we're bring you some powerful tips about how to transform anxiety into a powerful ally.

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Here’s what we cover:
  1. The most important strategy when you feel anxious (12:59)
  2. How to recognize the voice of anxiety (14:03)
  3. The relationship between anxiety & numbing (18:07)
  4. Healthy “escape” vs. unhealthy numbing (21:22)
  5. How to understand passages like “Do not be anxious” in the Bible (22:36)

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‍Thanks to our sponsors:

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Additional Resources:

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‍Related Episodes:
  • Episode 67: The Link Between Faith & Emotional Healing—Gen Z, College Life, & A Hidden Search for Meaning with Cindy Gao
  • Episode 39: Boundaries for Your Soul—How to Navigate Your Overwhelming Thoughts & Feelings
  • Episode 41: Boundaries With Fear And Anxiety—How to Calm the Chaos Within and the Joy of Internal Boundaries

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Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author.

While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.‍

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Transcript:

Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here this week. We wanted to take this week to answer some of your questions. We noticed that there were several questions about the topic of anxiety, which made sense in light of the fact that we've been talking about the new Inside Out movie, Inside Out 2, where anxiety is a main character in the movie.

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So we wanted to take the opportunity to respond to some of your questions about anxiety, how it shows up and how it relates to different parts of your internal landscape. To facilitate this conversation, I asked my media coordinator and assistant Cindy Gao to come on and join me to have this conversation about anxiety.

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Cindy's story is a fascinating story and does involve confronting some of own experiences with anxiety when she was an undergraduate in college, and how that led her to an experience of faith in Jesus. You can find her story in Episode 67: The Link Between Faith & Emotional Healing—Gen Z, College Life, & A Hidden Search for Meaning with Cindy Gao. It's a powerful episode. She's also studying to become a counselor herself so this is a really rich conversation between Cindy and me as we try to answer some of your questions about anxiety.

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We also mention in today's episode a masterclass I did on the topic of anxiety. It was called, “I Shouldn't Feel Anxious”. It was a pre-order bonus item for those of you who ordered my book I Shouldn’t Feel This Way. I Shouldn’t Feel This Way takes you through three steps to name, frame, and brave painful or conflicting emotions.

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This masterclass was a bonus item I wanted to give you specifically about the topic of anxiety. So toward that end, if you listen to today's episode, as we're talking about it, and you want to get a recording of that masterclass, for a limited time here, I'm going to reopen access to that class. If you're interested in getting the recording of that masterclass, email your receipt for your purchase of I Shouldn’t Feel This Way to infodralisoncook@gmail.com. It could be the audio book, ebook, or the paperback copy.

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That's infodralisoncook@gmail.com and we'll send you a link to that masterclass. It's really designed to work in conjunction with the book. So we'd love to get that over to you. I know there is so much happening in our world right now that evokes feelings of anxiety. It's a normal emotion–all people experience anxiety from time to time, which is why I'm so glad that one of the questions that we address at the end of today's episode is specifically about those passages in scripture that caution us not to worry and not to feel anxious.

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We get into what I really believe Jesus wants us to know as we experience worry and anxiety, soi please stick around to hear that portion of this episode. I think it's so needed by so many of us right now, including myself. I'm so grateful that you're here. And I'm so thrilled to bring you this conversation between myself and Cindy Gao Higgs, all about anxiety.

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Alison: All right, Cindy, you've gone through some questions and you have some questions for us from listeners about anxiety. What are you finding? What are people asking?

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Cindy: Yeah, so the first question is inspired by Dwayne. Can you talk about the internal dialogue that our anxious parts might engage with when they're activated?

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Alison: Interesting. So he's asking how we become aware of the internal dialogue. Yeah. The voice of anxiety, it sounds like?

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Cindy: Yeah, or what might those anxious parts be saying to us, and what might the consequences be?

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Alison: Got it. Yeah. So this is very relevant to the movie that we've been talking about a little bit in this series, Inside Out 2. You've seen it, right Cindy? There's one scene in the movie where the anxiety part of Riley, the main character, there's a great big office cubicle with all the workers and every single one of the workers is busy trying to come up with worst case scenarios. Do you remember that part?

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Cindy: Yep. That was a great visual.

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Alison: And it's really a great creative depiction because it's not like we necessarily hear in our minds or in our spirits all of those worst case scenarios, “you're going to fail, people are going to hate you, you're going to look like a fool”. We don't necessarily perceive anxiety like that. It feels so chaotic inside of us. 

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But when you can slow the tape down, often it's those kinds of really self-defeating messages. Sometimes I like to think of anxiety like an antenna part of us that is serving the future. It's very future-oriented, looking for all the things that could possibly go wrong. Every single thing that could go wrong. 

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It's very subtle, though, especially when we use language from the internal family systems model, the IFS model, we're blended with it. We're not aware that it's the voice of anxiety–we think it's ourselves. It can be very subtle, but it's very futuristic. It's very oriented toward preparing for the worst. 

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Cindy: And I appreciate the language you've taught me from IFS of how it really is trying to protect us. It's not trying to ruin our lives, and you can see that in the movie as well. The character of Anxiety really wants the best for Riley. But, I don't know if there's too many spoilers in this–

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Alison: We'll give a blanket spoiler alert. If you haven't seen the movie, we're probably going to spoil it a little bit. It's still really worth seeing. These are not key plot points.

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Cindy: Right. So I'm thinking about when anxiety creates this hurricane, and what was also really beautifully depicted in the movie was Riley being able to ground herself with her five senses. Also, an embrace of anxiety is what ultimately led to her reaching a more calm space, not shaming anxiety because that would make the situation worse.

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Alison: Exactly. Exactly. Now they showed that so beautifully. I would say that in general, if we're really thinking about this internal dialogue that anxiety is feeding us, in Riley's case, it was all rooted in this fear of not being liked, not being loved, not being accepted, not being valued by her peers, a sort of social anxiety in a way.

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An interpersonal anxiety, almost terror that she had, that she wasn't going to have any friends. She had found out that her two best friends were not going to be joining her in that next season. She was feeling really alone and rejected. This is a really common route of anxiety. I'm reverse engineering here–let me rewind that to your point, Cindy. When you're working with anxiety, the paradox of it is that you're often trying to get to the root of the fear because the fear is usually really valid. 

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And by valid, I don't mean it's going to come true, but that it's a really normal human fear. What if I do fail? What if people don't like me? What if I do completely bomb at work or at school? And we see that in Riley's case, there was a deep fear that was really legitimate and really understandable about not being liked by her peers, by being left out, by being rejected, by not being accepted, but because she wasn't really dealing with that fear head on, the anxiety, like you said, like a hurricane was swirling around or trying to scenario plan to avoid something she hadn't really even come to terms with in a realistic, grounded way.

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I see that in my life. I'm curious about you, Cindy but in those moments where I notice that anxious dialogue, it's usually what about this? What about this? What about that? It's this very erratic, chaotic, it's not manageable. It's trying to help. It's trying to show you all the things that could go wrong. And it shows up as a lot of chaos and turmoil and kind of that amped up energy. 

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It's definitely more in the fight/flight side of the nervous system response. It's energizing in that way. We can get a lot done when we're really anxious. I can feel it in my body, all revved up. I get all the things done, because it amps us up. In that sense, it is protective. When we are able to slow ourselves down, we do want to get really curious about: what is at the root of all of those fears, all those constant fears?

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What's the real deeper root? So in my case, often it comes down to, what if I make a miserable fool of myself? What if I fail? What if this is a catastrophic failure? What if I get exposed in some way that feels really vulnerable? And when I can get to the root of that failure, I can actually then address that in a more meaningful way.

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How about you, Cindy? Are there ways that you notice anxiety showing up in your mind? How do you become aware that it's there?

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Cindy: Yeah, for me, Inside Out 2 really resonated, because I think the core belief that Riley started building for herself was the idea of “I'm not good enough”. And that's something that I notice in myself that kind of turns into a hurricane. If something happens, then that thought will come into my head and then I will feel the fight/flight like you described. And I usually notice myself shutting down afterwards.

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I feel overwhelmed. But being able to notice that process is incredibly helpful and I can know that I'm really overwhelmed right now. I'm not going to be able to make good decisions when I'm feeling this way. And I usually give myself some time to try and reach a place of calm.

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And then I can actually, it almost feels like reality testing, of what are these things that I'm believing? What are the conclusions that I'm drawing about myself because of what happened? I can't do that when I'm super anxious; the reality testing aspect doesn't work when I'm in that mentality of high stress, high anxiety. I have to wait.

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Alison: You're exactly right. We talked about this in the masterclass on anxiety. To Dwayne's question, when those parts of us start their chatter, it's usually more than one part. There's usually a little bit of anxious energy with all the different parts of us when they're getting ramped up.

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It's also often heady. It's often in our minds. We're not gonna fight the logic of an anxious part with more logic. It's too much. We really have to drop into our bodies, which as you said, they show in the movie Riley finally drops into our body and begins to notice the puck and the ice and everything around her.

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She drops into her body, which slows down all that firing. And it's when we get a little bit of that calm and we drop into our body and get a little bit more grounded that we can begin to realize, oh I'm scared. There's that root fear underneath all of that. And that's when we can begin to confront it.

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As you're saying, it's very hard to do when we're in that activated anxious state. So I think as far as the question goes, really learning yourself, learning what it feels like in your body, in your mind, learning the behaviors. Sometimes the behaviors can be your cue about the voice of anxiety in your life. I know for me, when I start compulsively need-meeting and people-pleasing.

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That is a cue that I'm anxious. And sometimes I don't experience it as anxiety. I experience it as being a helpful, nice person. But when I start to compulsively, I've got to do this, it’s like being in a batting cage where there are baseballs flying at me and I have to hit every single one and I'm exhausted, but it doesn't matter.

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That's how I become about meeting needs, responding to emails, responding to texts, getting things for my kids. And my husband will notice it. He'll be like, take a breath. There's an anxiousness in those responses, even though I'm doing things that conceivably could be good things. Again, we see that in the movie with Riley; initially, the anxiety helps her make a lot of goals. She's getting that puck, but it was the intensity with which she was doing it and the fear-based feelings behind it.

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Cindy: Yeah, that's really helpful, to notice behaviors that can point you to your inner experience. Because sometimes it can be hard to be super clear about all these inner thoughts you're having. But you can definitely notice your own behaviors. And that's a really helpful pointer to what you're feeling inside.

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Alison: Yeah, we can have high-functioning behaviors, overachieving behaviors, over-helping behaviors, that actually point to anxiety.

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Cindy: Great. We can move on to the next question that's inspired by Hailey and Sierra. The question is, is there a relationship between anxiety and the emotional numbness or lack of pleasure I feel?

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Alison: Wow. That's a great question. So to answer that question, I want to talk a little bit about the three categories of parts, according to the IFS model. You can get a deeper dive in Episode 39, where I go into a map of the parts of your soul. We talk about it a lot on the podcast. It's the topic of my book, Boundaries For Your Soul.

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There are two categories of protective parts of us. The manager parts are protecting us by trying to prevent pain from happening, and anxiety is very much a manager part. Usually there are more than one manager parts, and anxiety functions as a manager. It's trying to prevent pain. If I can work harder, if I can please more, if I can do more, if I can be more perfect, I won't have to experience pain. 

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Numbing parts belong to the second category of protective parts of us called firefighters. They're called firefighters because they're trying to put out the flames of pain after pain has surfaced. So if we have an injury, we get our feelings hurt, someone says something, we don't make a team, we get a bad grade–something happens and it hurts and we don't know what to do with it. So we numb, we shut down the pain. 

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These are parts of us that reach for the chips, reach for the food, reach for the booze, whatever it is, the shopping, the relationship. This is again, very academic. We don't always experience it this way in our systems. Anxiety amps us up. There's a proactive component to it. And we need a little bit of anxiety because it does help us in planning.

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It does help protect us when it's within healthy boundary lines. The opposite thing goes into effect when we're numbing, we're trying to shut it down. And you described that a few minutes ago, Cindy, when you notice the anxiety and the overwhelm, the next thing that you notice is shut down.

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That's your system trying to vacillate between the fight/flight of anxiety and then that rest and digest, that parasympathetic nervous system. Instead of being activated, you're trying to shut down the activation, but it's an overcorrection. Neither of those responses really help us look at what's hard, which is usually a vulnerability, that exile.

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We have to really be present to it from that calm place inside. So there's definitely a relationship between numbing and anxiety. Often we can turn to numbing to try to help shut down the overwhelm of anxiety.

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Cindy: Yeah, that's really helpful. And I can see a relationship of being anxious for so long, and then your body is just burnt out, and then it can very easily lead to numbing, because you can't be super activated and anxious forever. That depletes a lot of your energy, and you have to find a way to rest somehow.

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Alison: That's right. And we turn to these strategies. Again, you can look at it by the behaviors. Numbing behaviors might be, I don't know why, but I binged watched Netflix for 12 straight hours. Again, sometimes we do need to check out through watching a show for a few hours, because we had a really hard day.

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And I talk about this in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way. The difference between numbing in an unhealthy way where we're trying to avoid what's going on versus healthy comfort, I need a break, is our level of conscious awareness. Am I waking up the next day and going, wow, I shut myself down for a day. What's going on? What's going on inside of me? 

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Or where we get an unhealthy inner landscape is where we're vacillating from the hyped up anxiousness to the shutdown of numbing. And we're never really engaging in that calm, clear place inside the Holy Spirit-led self, which is a calm nervous system, where we can really be conscious and wise about the decisions that we're making. 

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Cindy: Right. So moving on to our next question. This one is paraphrased from Rebecca: what do we do with Paul's command from Philippians 4 to have no anxiety about anything? And Jesus’ instructions in Matthew 6, “do not worry, for which of you, by being anxious, can add a single hour to your life?”

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Alison: Oh, I love this question. This is a great question. I am curious, Cindy. What have you bumped up against with these passages in your own life?

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Cindy: Initially, as I've read these passages, I have this feeling of, this is not nuanced enough. What do you mean do not be anxious about anything? And these instructions feel, just, I feel uncomfortable. But then I remember other parts of scripture, like in the Psalms, when David sounds pretty anxious about his enemies coming after him, and he's very honest about his anxiety.

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And I see that there is a place for anxiety; it's been canonized in scripture. I hold both of these at the same time, and it helps me realize that I don't think God is calling us to never feel anxious, that whenever you feel anxious, it's a sin. I really appreciated your masterclass on anxiety where you talked about how there's different types of anxiety and anxiety could be rooted in something that is more close to reality and other anxieties can be rooted in something that's less real, not really close to reality. And depending on the level of anxiety you feel, the consequences and the behaviors that it leads you to, some can be helpful forms of anxiety, and others can not be helpful. 

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So I think there's nuance when we take in all of scripture. To understand that, okay, these parts of the New Testament, we're told to have no anxiety, but in other parts of scripture, anxiety is present and it's not condemned. It helps me have a more nuanced view on anxiety when I take everything into account.

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Alison: I love that, Cindy. And one of the things I think about as you're talking is, what do we know to be true about Jesus and about his character? Was he condemning? Was he shaming? Was he judgmental? No, we know that this is not Jesus' character by anything we read about Jesus in the gospel or by anything we know about the fruit of God's spirit.

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What are the fruits of God's spirit? What are the signs that God's spirit is present? It’s love, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, joy, self control. We have to take, to your point, the whole context of what we know to be true about Jesus and God from all of scripture. So that's number one–I do not believe there's a tone of condemnation in these scriptures. 

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I think to myself, so what is Jesus trying to say? And I return again to IFS. We talk about this in Boundaries For Your Soul. I imagine Jesus, when you do IFS work and you engage an anxious part, or you engage the fearful, vulnerable, exile underneath that's terrified, we imagine how would you be with a young child who was scared and fearful? 

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You wouldn't say with a tone of harshness, don't be anxious. You would say, honey, I'm here. I'm here. It's okay. You don't have to be anxious. You don't have to worry. I'm here. I'm with you. That presence, that attunement, that secure attachment of I'm here. I'm with you. There's nothing to worry about because I'm here. I've got you. 

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It's a whole different tone. And we know this. When we're with a young child, where we're holding them and they're scared, we're not judging them or shaming them. We're with them in that fear or in that anxiety. That's how we also can learn to be with the young parts of ourselves when they get fearful and anxious, and we're reparenting them and we're showing them that compassionate attunement. 

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We're not saying don't do this, don't feel this. We're not saying don't feel this because it's bad. In Jesus' words, of course, there's anxiety and fear in the world because he's constantly telling us, don't be afraid. I'm with you. But it's from that place of a loving parent, a kind, gentle, patient, loving parent saying, I'm with you. 

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One of the things I love the most is about bringing God's presence deeper and deeper into the parts of our souls. It's not cognitive. It's not a “don't be anxious” up here, head to head. It's a deeper layer of us. These parts of us that have been buried so long that have these fears all the way back, usually to childhood where Jesus is getting in there. I think about the healing, getting so deep into the marrow of our bones. I've got you. I'm with you. You don't have to be afraid. I'm with you. It's never shaming or judging. So that's a little bit about how I think about that.

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Cindy: That's beautiful. I felt that like in my body as you were talking about the compassion that God has. When he's telling us to not be anxious, he's saying that as someone who cares so deeply about us and not from a place of condemnation. That's a great message.

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Alison: And I think for folks, when we haven't experienced that really deep sense of having been soothed in fear as children by a caregiver, by a parent, we have to relearn this process of repairing it. We don't have that feeling in our bodies.

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The thing is, when we've experienced that sense of God with us, it doesn't always means that the thing that we're afraid of isn't going to happen. Sometimes we get afraid, like we're afraid of a medical diagnosis or we're afraid of bombing a test or maybe something happening at work. And, sometimes the thing we fear happens. Sometimes it does.

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It's not God trying to gaslight us or, but there's that deep sense of no matter what, I am with you, you will be okay. And it is powerful, the more we do this work of opening up to those vulnerabilities deep inside that anxiety is working so hard to protect, but actually keeping us from that deep, grounded sense of our belovedness, of our okayness. 

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I would encourage folks even now, as we're talking about this, to read those passages, read. Matthew six, not from that heady place of, oh, I'm not supposed to worry, which actually triggers more anxiety. Oh, I'm not supposed to worry. Now I'm doing something bad. That activates more anxiety, but instead, imagine Jesus kneeling down right next to you, speaking to the most tender part of who you are saying, “do you not know that I am with you? Look at the birds of the air, and you know I feed them. Are you not so much more valuable than they are”? 

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He's speaking directly to those most tender, most vulnerable parts of who we are, speaking words of love and value over those parts of us. When it is the voice of God, it grounds us and it actually equips us to be brave. It equips us to be brave.

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Cindy: What you said at the end was really beautiful. For those who never got to experience that sort of soothing in their lives, maybe you've felt like you have to be super strong and push down your fears and your anxiety because you've learned that you might get shamed for admitting that you're fearful.

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It's so encouraging to hear that there is a God who loves you, who cares for you, who wants you to receive his gentle love for you, and for you to dare to believe that he will give you what you really need and want deep inside, but have been scared to ask for.

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Alison: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. I want every person to really hear what you said. And every listener who's listening right now, I know these are anxious times. There's a lot in the world right now. That does feel scary and chaotic on a lot of levels from the big things, the macro things to the little things in each one of our lives.

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As you said, Cindy, there is a God who. man, by the power of the Holy Spirit, comes in and gives that assurance to every single part of us. I'm with you. Do not be afraid. It's not a shaming command. It's an empowering “I'm with you”. I'm with you. So I love that. Thank you so much for having this conversation.

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I know we have a few more questions and we'll have to do a round two. These are great questions and a great reminder for how, when we're feeling anxious, we can notice those behaviors, notice the inner thoughts and the inner feelings, but as well as the behaviors that kind of cue us that we might have a little bit of anxiety.

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And then to practice those grounding exercises, those calming exercises. I go through a lot of those in the chapter on numbing in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, ways to ground yourself instead of numbing to calm that nervous system. There's a lot in that chapter on that. And then number three, knowing that God meets you right there in the center of that storm. It's such beautiful deep tissue work with the Holy Spirit.

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Cindy: That's great. That was a great conversation.

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