Episode Description: Asing What If and Anticipatory Anxiety
In this episode of the More Than Anxiety Podcast, I'm tackling the question, "what if" and diving into the common pitfall of anxious thinking or anticipatory anxiety. Let's explore how this question can fuel anxiety and how to reframe it for a more positive and hopefull outlook.
In this episode, you'll hear:
The Science Behind "What If" Thinking: Understanding how your brain uses "what if" to protect you, even when it's not necessary.
Common "What If" Scenarios: From health anxiety to social anxiety, we'll discuss how this thought pattern manifests in different forms.
Breaking Free from the Cycle: Practical tips and techniques to challenge "what if" thinking and replace it with more constructive thoughts.
The Power of Mindfulness and Present-Moment Awareness: How mindfulness can help you stay grounded and reduce anticipatory anxious thoughts.
The Role of Self-Compassion: Finding self-compassion to ease the fear and stop negative thinking that comes with asking what if and anticipatory anxiety.
Episode Description
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 the More Than Anxiety podcast. This episode is being recorded in early March of 2023. It's great to have you here. Today, we're gonna dive into the burning question that so many of you ask yourself, when you're anxious. I used to do it, my clients do it, and I'm betting that you do too. This question shows up for people with all different kinds of anxiety and it's really at the core of what anxious thinking is about. So remember, anxiety is a feeling inside your body; whatever that feels like for you. Whether It's tense muscles, and tension headaches, or internal shaking, or your hands shaking, maybe It's brain fog, or trouble swallowing, or just getting a good breath of air, it doesn't matter how it feels for you as normal for you. And it doesn't matter what it feels like. If you get caught up in those feelings, your brain is going to try to come up with reasons that you feel anxious,. We're getting right to it today.
It's your brain's job to keep you alive and to keep you safe so the first thing it does is react by making sure you're pumped full of hormones, so that you can escape, fight off whatever the danger is, or hide. The next thing it does, and it doesn't do it well or even truthfully, it start problem solving. It tries to figure out what the problem is and it does this by asking "what if?" If just hearing those words gets your adrenaline pumping, you are totally in the right place. "What if" is the question that you want to answer, but there's no way that you can answer it 100% because the problem doesn't even actually exist. You're only imagining problems ahead of time, just in case. I said this shows up in different kinds of anxiety so no matter what you'd classify your anxiety as or whatever your flavor is, you can experience this. I'm going to give you some examples. So for me, I had health anxiety, and I had it for 30 years. "What if" was the question of the day, all day long. Every day. What if this time I really am having a heart attack? What if It's cancer or what if It's some other disease? What if the doctor has missed something and I need a second opinion? What if they didn't get the right angle on the X ray? That is your brain trying to come up with some explanation for why your body still feels anxious? It's just a thought. It's just a whole bunch of thoughts.
So maybe you have social anxiety, maybe health anxiety isn't your thing. Social anxiety might look like, 'What if I can't talk when I'm trying to have a conversation with these people?' 'What if I don't know what to say?' 'What if they think I'm stupid?' 'What if I fall down when I'm trying to walk up the steps and I embarrass myself?' 'What if everybody in this room hates me?' 'What if they're talking about me behind my back?' This is social anxiety. This is how the same 'what if' questions can show up.
Or maybe you have more like agoraphobia, which is like the fear of going out or being trapped. If this is your flavor of anxiety, that sounds like 'What if I get trapped or stuck someplace and I can't leave?' 'What if I sit down at a table in a restaurant and I can't just go?' 'What if I go out and I get lost?' 'What if I leave, and something bad happens to me?' And you might not even have any idea what the bad thing is, but you're afraid if you leave or you go out into public, something bad will happen to you. 'What if I take the bus or the train and I need to use the bathroom and there isn't one?' 'What if I can't find a bathroom wherever I'm going?' All these what are thoughts can go with agoraphobia.
So you can see that this isn't just restricted to one kind of anxiety. It could be social, it could be health anxiety could be any of these kinds of anxiety, even like emetophobia, which is the fear of throwing up. If you're afraid that you're going to throw up, 'what if I throw up?' You're still going back to that 'what if' question. And in a nutshell, like if we were just to put a big label on this kind of anxiety, it's anticipatory anxiety. I'm anticipating something going wrong ahead of time, just to keep myself safe. So I could go on and on about this but 'what if' is just anticipating disasters and this can come from a past experience, or what you're really really terrified of happening down the road, or things that are stressing you out. Right now, when you are expecting the worst, this is catastrophic thinking. This is worst case scenario and it feels like you are preventing things from happening. No matter where It's coming from, it still circles back to your brain looking for control and for certainty, when honestly, life is completely uncertain.
One of the things that we know is that watching the news on repeat, or tuning into social media has a really enormous impact on anxiety levels. And so much of the stuff that we're seeing in the social world right now, whether It's on Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, or the news is terrible, because one, it sells and two, it makes you feel an emotion that keeps your brain reacting. You just tune into it. You notice so much more of it. It brings up these really big emotions, and it makes you think what you're seeing is normal, even though it's only what other people are showing you. Your brain is latching on to that stuff. It's scaring you. It's making you anxious. We're seeing this in teenagers like crazy, especially all this controversy over... I know some of the controversy is like is China spying on us with tik tok, but really another problem that to me feels bigger is the fact that we're seeing what's happening on tik tok, and we think that stuff's normal. And it's not! Teenagers and adults are really struggling over what they see, and how it's influencing their worldview. And yes, there are some scary and terrible things going on out there but I just want to offer that there's always been scary and terrible things going on out there. So much of this isn't really new. I mean, I grew up in the Cold War, but the like the end of the Cold War and I feel like I'm just seeing a lot of 2.0 going on this whole thing was Russia. I'm like, Yeah, I've done this before. I remember Gorbachev. Yes, I really do. Remember Gorbachev.
So there have always been religious and cultural wars for centuries. We had plagues in the past. COVID wasn't an anomaly. We've had plagues in the past; I'm old enough to remember the AIDS epidemic, when if you got it, you were a goner. The Crusades or the Cuban Missile Crisis... all these things these happened and they were scary. We're just seeing so much more of it and in real time right now. And because these things are so in our face, and they're getting our attention and making us feel anxious, if you don't decide what you allow yourself to consume, and what you decide to think it will come out and how you feel and what you do. And I'll get more to that in a minute. But if the news and social media are making your anxiety worse, just get rid of them. They're not necessary.
If you've listened to my past episodes, you might remember that your brain really loves certainty and you're certainly not seeing that on the news. Except for that you're certain it's going to be bad. And it likes to do the same things over and over again, which is why you keep watching it. Because it is predictable. Even if you don't like the outcome that you're seeing, or you don't like the feeling that you're feeling, it's still safe, because you're still watching and you're not dead yet. You've already survived that experience without dying or be embarrassed or being hurt. So It's stored in your body and in your thoughts as safe. This is true for things that you want to do and also for things that you don't want to do, like staying locked in your house, or being afraid to talk to new people. You can want to do things and still not do them because your brain will give you all the thoughts about why you shouldn't. And it will ask you 'what if.' 'What if you do that and you die?' 'What if you do that and you're embarrassed?'
So let's go back to the caveman example that I always bring up. If your caveman thinks that it is going to have to go out and hunt for nuts and berries alone, and be shut out of the cave in a snowstorm and die, it will keep you in the community. It will keep you checking to make sure no one's mad at you. It will keep you doing the things that you've always done, because they've always worked. It's very efficient and very crappy at the same time. So there's lots of ways that we can handle this. One thing you can do is you can start by calming your body down. You can Google grounding techniques or tips to stop feeling anxious and I use these tips with my coaching clients. And I use them if I'm feeling anxious, too. They can be really helpful. So for example, journaling your thoughts and how your body feels helped me recover from health anxiety. It was huge. And I'm working with another person who was really afraid of feeling trapped and feared throwing up and we focused on when those feelings weren't there and what the results were. Did that happen? Okay, it didn't. How did it feel? And how do you feel now? I also worked like a long time ago with a woman who was really anxious about being in her daughter's wedding, and people seeing her and what she assumed they wouldn't think. So we practice breathing so she could calm down and we practiced focusing on the facts of what were true about her. And by the way, this person, I've worked with her for quite a long time on all kinds of different things... First of all, she killed it at the wedding and she had a great time at the wedding reception. But now she is doing new amazing things. Even when those thoughts still sneak in for her, 'What will people think of me', this is so common: these aren't our problem anymore because she's actually putting herself into situations where she's going to be very, very seen. She's a fitness and a macros coach now! I'm totally jealous of her abs, by the way. She's killing it. She's gone from hiding to bodybuilding. That is amazing. And this started with being afraid someone would see her walking down the aisle at her daughter's wedding. That's crazy, incredible improvement when we look at the what if, as only a thought.
So these are just three quick examples of what came to mind with people who've I'd helped, or with myself, and I just want you to understand the asking 'what if' isn't a problem unless it goes down the scary corners of your brain? You can change what if. You can make it be whatever you want. 'What if I give the best presentation of my entire life?' 'What if I'm fine?' 'What if they love me?' What if they want to come work with me?' 'What if they're looking at me because I am the sexiest person they have ever laid eyes on?' The question isn't the problem, it's where it takes you. Instead of going worst case scenario, you have to be the boss of your brain, and not the other way around and that starts with letting yourself feel anxious, and not falling into the thoughts that follow the feeling. Notice, I didn't say that you should find the feeling and make it stop or push away the thoughts. When you do that you're making it worse, you just need to know the feeling is anxiety, and just start listening to it.
Yes, it is honestly that simple. Whatever made that alarm go off is trying to warn you that your brain found something that made it think and give you a big shot of adrenaline and cortisol. That's the only thing that happened. It's not a problem to solve. It's just a feeling to feel. And you might not even know what it was that made that happen and that's okay. This goes back to that idea of triggers and why I say triggers don't even really matter. Because if your plan is to say, 'I can't do this thing, because it triggers me,' and you never go there, you're not actually recovering or healing. You're just avoiding stuff to never feel anxious. And That's not life. So go ahead and feel it. Let it be there. And listen to the alarm that's going off to find out what needs your attention. Anxiety is not there to hurt you, It's there to help you. And we can talk about how to handle actual problems that make you anxious, like big ones existential threats that you have no control over, like climate change, or war. We can talk about those things when we work together.
But before anything else, it starts with trusting yourself and learning to let go. When you give up trying to control everyone and everything around you, you are freeing up all kinds of energy to focus on what it is that is actually in your control, and what you can do to make your life and I mean this moment - right now - the only thing that matters. This helps you develop risk tolerance and life is full of risk. It is inherently risky. I can't tell you what's going to happen in five seconds, and you can't either. So sitting around worrying about the next five seconds isn't doing anything to benefit you. There are absolutely no guarantees. Does that freak you out a little bit? Because if you are risk intolerant, it probably does. It's okay, we can work through this because when you stay in the moment, you are safe right now, and everything is fine. And the next moment, and the next moment, and the next moment. You will learn to let go because you start to notice what's working and where you are, and that you're successful and safe. Your body isn't anxious as much so your brain just stops trying to figure out why you feel anxious because you don't feel it as much. You don't have to ask 'what if' anymore.
This is about living instead of existing. It's about your outlook on the world and your view of humanity and it all starts to shift for the better, including your outlook on what your life can be. You don't have to stay stuck and you can change 'what if' to be something entirely different than 'what if' bad to 'what if' good. All of this is available to you and coaching is the answer to getting you to the bottom of your thoughts so that you can stop asking 'what if' and get unstuck.
You can talk with me about how I can help you feel less anxious less often and it can just be a blip in your day instead of cycle of fear and being trapped. All you have to do is go to the show notes and click the link or go to www.megandevito.com/workwithme, you schedule a time to talk to me, and then you call me on the phone. The call is simple, it's super duper fun and even if your brain is screaming right now, 'What if I can't talk on the phone?!" you can just step in and find evidence that you actually can talk on the phone, because I bet you've done it before in the past. If you've never done a consultation, call or talked to a coach before, of course, it's trying to stop you! Of course, your brain is telling you no. It's new! Your brain doesn't like new stuff. It's doing its job. It is not a problem. Your brain is just telling you it is. Schedule your call, and dial me up. And I'll be back next week to talk to you again.
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 shownotes click the link and schedule a time for us to talk. See you soon.
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