Episode Description: Morning Anxiety: Waking Up Anxious
Welcome to The More Than Anxiety Podcast! If you’re a motivated, ambitious woman who’s tired of anxiety ruining your morning, this episode is exactly what you need. I’m talking about why mornings can feel so overwhelming and sharing the tools you need to manage anxiety so you can start your day feeling calm, confident, and ready to go.
Here’s What We’re Covering:
Why Anxiety Feels Worse in the Morning
Understanding cortisol (the stress hormone) and how it impacts you when you wake up.
The connection between your body’s natural response and those spiraling anxious thoughts.
Create a Morning Routine That Works for You
Simple habits like opening the blinds, moving your body, and eating the right foods to feel grounded and energized.
What to skip so you don’t sabotage your morning before it even starts.
Tools to Feel Empowered, Not Overwhelmed
Practical strategies to break the cycle of anxious thoughts and take charge of how you feel.
How to handle mornings when anxiety feels impossible—and still move forward with confidence.
Real-Life Stories and Strategies
My teenage daughter’s journey with morning anxiety and how we worked through it together.
My own experience overcoming morning dread—and how I’ve turned it into a non-negotiable part of my coaching process.
Why Your Success Matters
The ripple effect of managing anxiety: when you take care of yourself, you show up stronger for your family, your career, and your dreams.
If You’re Ready to Stop Waking Up Anxious:
This episode will help you take back control of your mornings and help you create systems that lower anxiety all day long.
If this episode helped you, please share it with a friend who’s also ready to take control of her mornings. Don’t forget to leave a review—it helps more women like you find this podcast and take the steps to feel better.
Podcast Transcript:
Welcome to the More Than Anxiety Podcast. I'm Megan Devito and I am a life coach for stressed out and anxious women 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 have more of what you wan without anxiety holding you back. Let's do this.Welcome to Episode 31 Of the More Than Anxiety Podcast. I'm Megan. and I'm a life coach for women who are anxious and stressed out who are trying to do all the things they want to do, but anxiety keeps putting the brakes on so they can't get there. In this episode, I'm going to talk about what it's like to wake up feeling anxious, why this is a problem for you and how to deal with it. And also what you can do to have better days no matter how you feel when you first wake up in the morning. This is something that I've had several questions on recently. and it's also something I've talked about with my teenage daughter. So if you're a parent of a teenager who wakes up feeling extra anxious, you can use this information today to help yourself and help them as well. This is also true, if you're friends with someone who wakes up anxious or if your partner wakes up anxious; you can help anybody with this. And that's really the beauty of everything you learn on this podcast or when you work with me. Everything is shareable. You get to feel better, and use what you know, to help other people who are feeling anxious as well and I 100% believe, if anyone I help help someone else, we can cut this anxiety crisis off at the knees and we can start healing. And It's going to be an incredible change for the whole entire planet when we're not all anxious from the moment we open our eyes in the morning, Isn't it. So let's just go ahead and get started.Let's begin by talking about the hormone that wakes you up in the morning that also happens all day long when you're stressed out and anxious. It's the same hormone; cortisol. You might have heard me talk about this before but cortisol is responsible for waking you up and its highest first thing in the morning because it's doing its job. That cortisol starts going through your system, just like it does if you're stressed out and anxious. So when you wake up in the morning, yeah, you've already got it going. If you are sensitive to how anxiety feels in your body, you're starting the day one step behind simply because your body is doing what it's supposed to do. It doesn't really seem fair, but It's really efficient, and it does wake you up. That's a great thing. In fact, the whole anxiety response is a really great thing. It's keeping you safe and alive; it just feels pretty rotten and if you are afraid of the way those feelings feel in your body, your alarms gonna go off and you're gonna start thinking.So you wake up, you're already feeling the cortisol, your body feels anxious, whatever that feels like for you, and you think something is wrong, just because of the way you feel. So to feel better, you might start practicing some breathing techniques that you learned. Or you might kind of give yourself a little pep talk. If you're absorbed in how you feel though, you're going to revert back to those thoughts, which makes you believe something is wrong. So you might think that you're sick, you might think that you should stay home. Even if you felt this nearly every morning, it still draws you in. Here's an example of how this played out in my home. I told you that I helped my teenage daughter with this: I got her permission to share her story in this episode. So we're going to talk a little bit about her. She's 14, and sometimes she wakes up feeling a little bit nauseous on days when she has something really important that's happening. It could be something at school, it could be something at her sport, practice whatever it is that's happening, if she's excited about it, or nervous about it, or if she just wakes up with a little bit of extra cortisol from the day before, she feels it. So on top of feeling sick to her stomach, she's just waking up, which means her brain is not completely on yet and she's still sleepy, and she's nervous about whatever's on her agenda for the day. Lots of times she'll come upstairs and she'll tell me, "Hey, I just feel sick today. I think I should stay home." Especially in the beginning before she wasn't totally clear and I wasn't completely clear on what was going on, she would say "I just feel sick today. I feel sick." And I'd think, ..."well you know, did you actually throw up? Do you have a fever? Is anything wrong? "No. I just don't feel good."So in the process of learning what was going on with her. Sometimes she would wind up in tears and there were a couple of times that she had an actual anxiety attack. This happened because she just kept focusing on the fact that she felt nauseous. The more she focused on feeling sick and the things that she wanted to do, she really wanted to go do these things, and she wanted to do well, the sicker she felt. And the sicker she felt, the more stressed out she got. And the more stressed out she got, the more cortisol her body produced. So after this happened twice, I knew what was going on. It was not a mystery to me anymore. I knew all of her signs of anxiety, I saw the timeline on how it was working. I was listening and asking her questions, basically coaching her through this, and I let her know, like, this is what's happening. This is just an anxious response. This is how your body feels. And far be it from her to believe me, because she's 14. But I made sure in the process that she was up in the mornings, that we were exhaling, and we were doing everything we could to calm her body down and get her out the door, even when she was anxious and not feeling well because I'm the mom that is compassionate, that will hug and love my kids, but I will also hold their feet to the fire. And I know that letting her off the hook, when she felt sick or felt like something was wrong, was going to reinforce that fear. So at this house, we do things afraid with lots of love and lots of celebrating so that those fears and those anxieties don't hang on. There's a line and we go toe to toe with it. And I learned this from personal experience because I avoided things and I asked for reassurance. and I skipped out on things, and it just reinforced everything that I was afraid of for a very long time.That's the way it used to be and this is the way it is now. As I'm recording this podcast, she woke up this morning, and she had a really big swim meet this weekend so she was excited. She had had a lot of fun and she was getting tired. Like it was it was day three at this point and she she's getting pretty tired and she came up and she said, "I feel sick." I kind of looked at her and I nodded and I could tell she was annoyed and very tired. So she she told me again how she felt, she ate a peanut butter and banana sandwich, and she grabbed her bag to leave, because now she knows how her body feels when she's anxious in the morning, and that she'll be fine and no time. Because even though cortisol levels are highest in the morning, they also start to come down after about an hour or an hour and a half.The same thing can be true for you. You already know you feel anxious when you wake up and now you know why. You know that cortisol levels are highest in the morning and you might know that cortisol is that hormone that goes through your body and makes it feel anxious. It takes all of the unnecessary things that your body does, and turns them off. It redirects blood, and it makes your arms feel heavy, or your heartbeat faster. Or it makes you have brain fog. Because you don't need to think or digest a cheeseburger or do anything except for fight or flight if there's actual danger. That's all It's doing. Since you know this is normal and you know how your body feels is normal for you, you get to make a choice on what you do next, the same way my daughter did. She knew she felt sick, she knew I was gonna make her go anyway, so she ate her peanut butter and jelly, and she grabbed her bag to go to the meet. You can choose to stay wrapped up in how you feel and be afraid that something is wrong. Or you can choose to let those feelings be there and step forward into your day. It's just a choice.So as your coach, I can help you know your body better and lower your cortisol levels all day long and that makes an incredible difference on how anxious you are in the morning. This is what that looks like. One of the things that I do is I help people get to know their bodies individually, because your body isn't the same as anyone elses. We know the cortisol wakes you up but let's start paying really close attention to how your body feels if you wake up a little too early, or a little too late. Maybe you feel shaky, or just kind of off kilter off balance. You might notice that you wake up and your heart starts to pound because you stood up and your blood pressure went up. That's normal. and cortisol does that as well. How does your body feel on a good day, or on a really bad day and once we know all those feelings, we can start figuring out what anxiety is trying to tell you. "I just woke up. I feel anxious," and your brain starts to go, but what's the feeling about? I can help you get really clear on that.I can help you create a calming and centering morning routine that includes things like getting up without hitting snooze, and opening the blinds to let in some natural light. When you do that, you reset your internal clock to go to sleep easier and to wake up easier. I can help you find time to eat breakfast and choose foods that lower your anxiety and give you energy. We can come up with ways that you can move your body, even if you absolutely hate to exercise. I don't like to say the word exercise unless you are in it. Like if you love it, let's use it, and if you don't, let's just not. Let's do things like take a walk or stretch. I'm not going to tell you to go workout, but I can help you move your body because that's really, really important in burning off cortisol. I'm also going to encourage you right now and when we work together to stay off social media first thing in the morning. It is such a huge trigger for stress and anxiety for people and we wake up. and the first thing we do to stop thinking is to get on social media, which just makes us feel more anxious! We're not going to do that anymore.Instead, we're going to get up and around, especially if you feel anxious and low and it might take everything you've got for the day, but doing that one thing is still one thing you've done to take care of yourself. One of the most powerful things I think that I did during the entire pandemic was I refused to spend days in my pajamasa and I've talked to other people who've done this as well. We had a routine that we had created and included getting up getting in the shower, and putting on pants, and shoes sometimes... although I do love my slippers at home. But getting up and putting on pants sets the tone for the day. On days when you spend the day in your pajamas and you have a lazy day... and everyone is entitled to lazy days... but if you do that day after day, after day, your energy level goes down and your mental health tanks. There are statistics to prove it.So we're gonna get up and get around, we're gonna find out why you need to get up and get around. Why not just lay down and lay around all day? We use your reasons to get up and to feel good to help you get what you want, and to get you where you want to go. So your goal might be not to feel anxious in the morning but other goals might include, I'd really like to take my family on vacation, or I'd like to get a different job, and if those are your goals, we have to create the energy and the routines to be able to get you less anxious so that you can go after those things. I'm going to get you what you want. So let's find a reason why that's important to you.I'm going to help you choose truthful thoughts about how you feel, and what you're thinking because your brain is going to offer up a load of crap. Those thoughts aren't necessarily true but there is truth behind how you feel. So let's get to the bottom of it. Let's find out what's really going on. What are you feeling? Are you feeling bored? Are you feeling scared, or guilty, or negative? All of those negative emotions sometimes knot together and create a feeling of anxiousness. And when we can get to the real feelings and emotions, then we can start solving real problems instead of just letting your brain run wild and create guesses.Once you know what you want, we set some goals. We find out why you want it and what anxiety is trying to tell you, then we can move through the feelings and have better mornings and better days. When you have better days, you have a calm mind, because the thoughts aren't a problem. You already know what the feeling want so you could just let the thoughts go. When that happens. You lower your anxiety all day long, which means your body isn't producing as much cortisol during the day. When it doesn't produce as much cortisol during the day, it doesn't have to burn as much off or process as much through your body while you're asleep. If it doesn't have as much to process through, that means there's not as much left when you wake up in the morning so that level of anxiety that you experience, when you first wake up, goes down. You have less anxiety waking up when you process through it during the day, even though cortisol is still going to wake you up. You just don't have as much of the cortisol in your body, your level is lower, there's less intensity.So we're going to create an awareness of how your body feels, and ways that you can move your focus away from the thoughts so that you have a calm body, fewer anxious days, and less intense anxiety. Even when you do feel anxious, because let's be honest, you are human, and so am I and everybody is going to feel anxious from time to time, it doesn't have to be a problem. It can just be a feeling that you feel that you kind of shrug your head to and say, "well, that doesn't feel great," and you move on. I imagined that's the way the rest of the world experiences it, and you can too. You're going to start doing the things that you're avoiding right now because you feel anxious. and the way that you're going to do that is to jump on a phone call.So I want to invite you right now to a consultation call and on this call, we just talk about how I can help you have better mornings that leads you to have better days. Waking up anxious doesn't have to ruin everything for you and it doesn't have to be something that you live with forever. All you have to do is learn how to handle the feelings of anxiety in your body. So let's talk about what mornings are going to look like when you're not stuck in a cycle of feeling anxious when you know how to recenter and to let everything go. I can help you do this, It's simple and you can get started by scheduling that call using the link in the show notes, or by going to www.megandevito.com/workwithme. So thanks for listening this week. If this episode was helpful to you, please take a minute to leave a review and if you know someone who's struggling with waking up anxious, share this episode with them as well. We can work together to help everybody feel calmer, and have more fun. If I don't talk to you on a call, I'll be back next week with another episode. Take care. 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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