Episode Description: How To Break Anxious Habits
Are you struggling with anxiety? You're not alone. Millions of women struggle with anxiety, and it can be debilitating. But what if some of the things you're doing to feel better are actually making your anxiety worse?
In this episode of the More Than Anxiety Podcast, Megan Devito, a life coach for anxious women, shares how to break anxious habits that can fuel anxiety.
These habits may feel helpful in the moment, but they can actually keep you stuck in an anxious cycle.
Here's a sneak peek of what you'll learn:
Why constantly talking about your anxiety can backfire
How sleep deprivation can worsen anxiety symptoms
The dangers of seeking reassurance and how to break the cycle
Why avoiding triggers can be counterproductive
The problem with fighting off anxiety (and what to do instead)
Megan also shares practical tips on how to overcome these habits and start feeling better.
You'll discover:
How to interrupt your anxious thoughts and choose new responses
The power of self-compassion and self-acceptance
How to listen to your body and understand what your anxiety is trying to tell you
Strategies for creating new neural pathways and rewiring your brain for less anxiety
If you're ready to feel calm, and confident, and have more fun, this episode is a must-listen!
Podcast Transcript:
Welcome to the More Than Anxiety Podcast. I'm Megan Devito, and I am the Life Coach for women and teenagers living with anxiety, who want more out of life. I'm here to help you create a life you love to live, where anxiety isn't holding you back. Get ready for a light hearted approach to managing anxiety through actionable steps, a lot of truth, talk and inspiration to take action so you walk away feeling confident in your ability to live a life that sets your heart on fire. Let's do this.
Welcome to Episode 27 Of the More than Anxiety Podcast. My name is Megan Devito and I'm a life coach for anxious women who are fighting off anxiety and fighting for their goals at the same time, It's great to have you or to have you back. If this is your first episode, I'm super grateful that you're here and that you chose to spend your time with me. This week, I am sharing what I think are the top five things that you're doing to feel better, to stop feeling anxious, that are actually making your anxiety worse. This feels like it might be a little bit of a shorter episode, but we'll see how it goes; sometimes I go off on a tangent, but I will try to keep it buttoned up for you.
So these are things that I used to do and that I see happening and people that I coach, people I come across online, my friends or when I'm just out and about. These are things that you'll probably notice in your own life and you'll probably catch yourself thinking, Oh, crap, this is what I do! It's alright. Everybody does this stuff when they feel anxious, and it feels like you're doing your best to calm down so that you can focus on something other than how you feel or what you're thinking. So no shame, no judgment, we're just noticing today. It's totally normal to do whatever you need to do to make yourself feel better, as quickly as possible. Everything in your body feels really scary and wrong. And you can't think straight. And maybe you're about to cry, or you just feel like you're going to roll into a ball inside of yourself, However you feel It's really miserable and it feels absolutely 100% real. You think everybody is looking at you or that they're mad at you. You think you're in danger, or you think you're going to have a heart attack or you think you're going to go crazy. You think you're being judged. And over time, when you have all of these thoughts and you get really overwhelmed, you create ways to cope that give you a hint of relief for just a little while until you notice that you feel anxious again. Then your brain starts to chatter and you just go back and you do the same things again. Remember, brains love familiarity. They love habits, they love patterns. So It's totally normal. If you're stuck in this cycle, you just have to create an off ramp.
These are the five things that I see you doing that feel like they help, but they actually make anxiety worse. There's not science behind this. It's just me talking to and working with a lot of people. I'm going to tell you what you are doing and then I'm going to tell you why you do these things and what will actually help. And it might not be exactly what you think.
Let's start with talking about anxiety all the time. Because it is such a huge part of your life, it's always at the front of your mind. It doesn't matter if you're in the shower, if you're driving, if you're at work, or if you're out for dinner with friends. You feel it constantly so it has your focus all the time and it sneaks into your conversations. It feels really important and dangerous. So It's natural that it has your attention and focus, but it doesn't have to and talking about it is keeping it front and center.
The second is not sleeping. So if you caught my webinar last week, you learned how to sleep better and you know that anxiety is keeping you awake. But you also know that staying awake is making you more anxious. When you can't sleep because you're anxious, then you fall behind on sleep, you get even more anxious, and then you sleep less. Anxious people sleep. So if you have this thought that you can't sleep because of anxiety, I'm here to challenge that people in the Ukraine are sleeping. People slept during COVID. You're just not sleeping right now because anxiety is taking over your thoughts on your body.
The third thing is asking for reassurance. This one is big, and I talk about it so much because we do it in the sneakiest and also the most obvious ways. Asking for reassurance happens in a lot of different ways. Sometimes It's actually asking someone if how you're feeling is normal or if they think it's dangerous or bad. You just straight up ask, 'Does your heart feel weird when you're anxious?' Or, 'does anyone else feel like a bad mom?' Other times It's more subtle and It's like asking leading questions or pretending to laugh off how you feel to read people's responses. Maybe so you can hear them say, 'That's crazy because I've done that too'. This is more like bringing up a headache that you've had for a few days to watch for reasons or to be scared. Or it could be asking if everyone has a problem with Chris at work, or if It's just you. Another way you can find reassurance is by researching, or reading post after post on Instagram or Facebook - wherever you go for your information. This is also where Dr. Google comes in. Learning and researching feels like you're taking action but what happens instead is that you find information and you use it against yourself. And I'm going to talk more about this in a minute.
The fourth thing is avoiding triggers, you know, this one. This is purposely avoiding anything you know is going to cause you to feel anxious. It could be as small as a news story or a post on social media, or as big as not leaving your house because you're afraid of everything outside of your bedroom. If you know something is going to make you feel anxious, and you specifically exit stage left and run, you are making it so much worse to try to feel better.
And the fifth one is fighting it off. This is the biggest and the one that feels like a necessity. When you try to stop feeling or pushing anxiety away, you are actually making it worse. Look, I know anxiety feels miserable and real, and you're doing the best that you can to make it stop. But It's backfiring. And it is keeping you stuck.
So no judging. Remember, these are super common, and they really feel necessary and helpful. If they didn't, you wouldn't do them, I did them too. The urge to keep checking and to avoid the things that make you feel anxious can feel overwhelming, because it helps you feel like you're doing something, whether It's to make the anxiety stop, or to be sure you're safe, or to make sure no one is upset with you. It's action. But this action is doing more harm than good because your brain uses these little habits and behaviors as evidence that something's actually wrong and there isn't.
Every time you talk about being anxious all the time, or you remind yourself how anxious you are. You are giving attention to feeling anxious. When anxiety gets attention, it grows. When you identify yourself as anxious, it becomes your truth. So start paying attention to how often this happens, then challenge yourself to change your thoughts to something else. Anything is better than talking about anxiety. The next time it comes up, switch and talk about something that went well for you yesterday, talk about your favorite kind of pizza, it doesn't matter. Just don't talk about anxiety. Peel the label off of yourself and learn to create a new part of yourself that Isn't anxious. It starts with not talking about it all the time.
Okay, let's talk about sleep. Laying in bed overthinking and not being able to relax, or finally relaxing than waking up super anxious is taking away the time your body needs to dump all the toxins out to repair your body, and to give you energy to think clearly. When you're exhausted, your brain doesn't think clearly. Think about a time that you were at work, or you were at home and you were trying to really think about something important and you were anxious, and you couldn't think at all. Now go to that same situation, but a time that you were exhausted and you couldn't think when you're exhausted. Your brain doesn't think when you're anxious. Your brain doesn't think when you're exhausted and anxious, it's double trouble. I talked about this last week, and I'll have another webinar coming up on sleep and you're going to want to listen for that so that you can sign up because it is so important when you're anxious but also when you're not anxious. Did you know that humans are the only mammals to purposely avoid sleep? We've got all kinds of issues you guys. Sleep is necessary and I'm gonna keep pushing this one.
Okay, reassurance. I want to tell you a story about reassurance and how sneaky it is. I was working with someone and I was coaching her on learning to trust herself and she had some anxiety issues that we were working through. So she had a lot of anxiety around her kids health and her safety mechanism was Googling symptoms that she thought her kids had to find a diagnosis. This felt like something that would help her protect her kids so that they wouldn't get horribly sick. And she also had a thought that being a good mom was keeping your kids safe, so Googling to look up the symptoms was keeping them safe. And let's be real; she's an incredible mom. She loves to play outside with them. She teaches them right from wrong. She loves them like crazy. And she is doing all the things: she's working, she's taking care of the kids, everything. And she was locked in this very anxious habit loop of grabbing her phone to check every behavior or sniffle they might have and often she wasn't even finding anything when she would look up their symptoms or what she thought was going on. So she would go deeper, just to find keywords, just to have a reason to back up her fear. She was seeking reassurance and it backfired every time. Because even when there wasn't an explanation because nothing was wrong, her brain told her to keep looking, because she still felt anxious. The thoughts were still coming. She was still playing into how she felt. So we coached hard on this. And we talked about listening to her mom gut over her anxious thoughts and she finally recognized that her phone was always next to her or within reach. So at one point, we decided, let's just move the phone away from your immediate reach, so that you have time to pause before you grab it to look things up. So she started being able to feel anxious, and let it go. She learned to trust herself and to let her kids just be kids. It is so much more fun than always fearing that they have the scariest disease, or that they're injured.
This is how you do it. When you want to do your normal anxiety routine, you stop and you notice what's up. And as a coach, I help you know what that feels like so you know exactly when to step in without question. You learn how to pause, you learn how to feel anxious, and to listen to what your anxiety is saying, Did you know that anxiety has a voice? And even though this might sound strange, it is screaming at you to keep you safe, not to keep you feeling like crap. I'll teach you how you can hear what It's saying. And that you can find the truth. The truth is buried in all of the thoughts that your brain is giving you and in the way your body feels. All of those thoughts that you have about not being good enough, about yourself being sick, or someone else being sick, maybe about something that you said 10 years ago, are only thoughts, trying to explain how you feel. When you know the truth, you get to choose a different response. Just like the lady I was coaching did. She decided to move the phone away so she had time to pause before she Googled something. You can create a break in your routine and choose differently and lots of times that looks like choosing to do absolutely nothing. Doing nothing is powerful.
Okay, the next one is avoiding triggers. And this seems like an easy way to stop feeling anxious, doesn't it? If you're never triggered, in theory, you're never anxious. Have you ever sat and wondered what triggered you and It's a total mystery. You're anxious and you cannot figure out why because your normal triggers didn't happen. Triggers don't have to be obvious. And even though you don't want to feel anxious, avoiding them won't stop you from feeling anxious. You feel anxious, because you feel anxious. And that's not a problem unless your thoughts want to make it a problem. I'd like to add that I'm never ever going to give you a trigger warning here. Not to be a jerk, but for two reasons. One is the world is not responsible for your triggers; you are. You can learn to let them not take you down anymore. You do not want to hopscotch around triggers for the rest of your life. It's a lot of work and there's a lot of fun and a lot of life out there. And two: as a coach who knows what helps make anxiety shrink and lose its power. It's a disservice to you to avoid words or topics that might make you anxious, so you can practice the feelings. You can listen to what anxiety is telling you. I can you can choose new thoughts and actions. This is what I do and this is how I can help you. But I'm not going to give you trigger warnings: I love you but no.
Okay, last one. Everytime you try to make anxiety stop, or push away the feelings, even by diving into something that focuses your attention on your phone, or you take a Xanax, you are telling your brain that anxiety is bad, and you are actually in danger and you have to fight it off to stay safe. Instead, you have to learn to feel it and make it mean absolutely nothing so you can move through and it goes away on its own. When you push it away, your brain says it's dangerous. You have to choose new responses to feeling and thinking anxious if you want to feel better. Otherwise, you're going to be stuck in the same circle around and around and around. Have you seen European Vacation where he is stuck and he's like, 'I just can't get left!' and he just keeps going like Big Ben! Parliament! And he just goes around the circle in London forever. This is what It's like. You've got to get left. You've got to find an exit.
When you choose to do something different, you are updating the system. You know when you get an update on your phone, and you might have only changed one thing with the update and you don't even notice. It's like that. It's a small change that creates a new process in your brain. You might not notice the change, but it's there and your brain knows it's there. You created evidence that you don't have to do the same thing. So maybe one time you choose not to talk about anxiety, and your brain, like takes a little note of that. Each time you choose to do something different, or you choose to do nothing at all, that update expands, and your brain literally changes and re learns new ways of being, and feeling anxious. It's always learning new things. It can learn how to stay anxious and how to survive, or it can learn new ways of thinking and new ways of acting. And it can learn that feeling anxious doesn't have to be a problem. When you do that, you get a couple of months down the road, and you start to notice that you're not intensely anxious, or you're not anxious as often. You don't have the same reaction, because your brain is changing. This is what coaching opens up for you. It's a new way of thinking about how anxiety feels, what It's saying to you, and what you believe about yourself. You start to recognize the feelings as something that isn't dangerous, but really just only a nasty feeling. Sometimes that feeling is from a past trigger, and it comes back. Sometimes It's from hormones. Sometimes it's from not sleeping enough. No matter what causes you to feel anxious, whatever your "trigger" is, you handle it the same way.
You can schedule a time to talk with me about anxiety, and what it's like for you...maybe what habits you have now that feel really necessary and helpful, and maybe what you'd like to feel instead, by going to the shownotes and clicking the link or by going to megandevito.com/workwithme.
Wait, before you tell me that you're too anxious to talk on the phone, let's talk about this. I'm going to stop you and I'm going to offer that that's a habit loop and you have a chance to break that habit right now. You can use what you just learned in this episode right now. So feel in your body how it feels to call someone on the phone. If this is an anxious thing for you know that It's just anxiety and choose to do it anyway. This is taking action and it is a step towards creating less anxiety. It is a download to your brain you are showing it, 'Oh look at that I actually can make a phone call!' The call is totally free and I guarantee you you're gonna have so much more insight into what's keeping you feeling anxious, and to what you need to do to break your habit loop. And you're gonna have a really great time in the process. You're gonna go to my calendar, choose a day at a time that works for you and when that time arrives, you call me. I answer the phone. We chat and within five minutes, you're going to be right over the anxious feelings of making the call and into what you want. Because you are a boss! Thanks for listening today. I hope this episode was helpful. And if you know someone who else who needs to hear this, share this episode with them. Let's help them feel better too. I'll talk to you soon.
I hope you've enjoyed this episode of The More than Anxiety Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find this resource as well. And of course when you're ready to explore coaching with me, jump to the show notes. Click the link and schedule time for us to talk. See you soon.
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