EPISODE SIXTEEN

Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore there may be some minor grammatical errors.

Andy Griffiths 

Welcome to another exciting episode of tickety. Boo. We’re thrilled to have you join us today. And whether you’re a longtime fan or a newcomer to our podcast we appreciate every one of you that tunes in. In this episode, we’re diving into her rather important topic anxiety. Anxiety was the theme of Mental Health Awareness Week 2023. And today, we’re going to shed light on this often misunderstood and yet incredibly common mental health condition. Now, if you’ve been enjoying our content so far, please take a moment to hit that subscribe button. By subscribing you’ll never miss an episode and you’ll be the first to know when we release new content. Now, in an increasingly uncertain world, our mental well being is constantly being challenged, resulting in alarmingly high levels of anxiety. In the UK, anxiety now ranks amongst the most prevalent mental health disorders. Anxiety now impacts the lives of millions of people around the world. And it can manifest itself in many different ways. So to help us better understand anxiety and its impact, we shall take a bit of a deep dive into the subjects to help you understand it a bit more, and to provide some practical hints and tips along the way.

So let’s get into this. Hi, Suzanne. Hi, Andy, how are you? I’m good. Are you ready to talk all things? Anxiety? Looking forward to it? Are you feeling anxious about not feeling anxious? We’re talking about?

Butterflies?

Yeah, it’s, um,

anxiety is this, which seems to be living in a really anxious world right now, don’t we? I, I can’t recall a time in my lifetime, where anxiety levels haven’t been as high. I mean, I’ve got different opinions on why I think we are this anxious planet. I think some of its got to do with post COVID. But you know, from your perspective, what’s your view on this anxious world we seem to be living in right now.

Yeah, it does seem to be very prevalent at the moment. And a lot of you know, is

the situation that we find yourself in post pandemic, there’s a lot more awareness of it, there’s a lot more discoveries roundabout. You know, what’s,

what mental health challenges there are both in the NHS, and, you know, having looking out for looking out for each other’s mental health and becoming aware of it and having Mental Health First Aiders at work, and being able to diagnose potentially more people, but not necessarily having the support mechanisms around there for the framework to support them in an adequate way, we’ve still got a bit of catching up to do there. But that doesn’t stop the situation from happening. It doesn’t stop people from experiencing these. And we’ve got so many different aspects of it. Just now we’ve got the cost of living crisis. We’ve got, as you said, the post pandemic, that a lot of redundancies happening at the moment, literally, as this future is very uncertain for a lot of people, people feel have lost little control the pulse of the herd over the finances, and their family life. And, you know, feeding into the last episode where we did more, we talked very much about sense of self and how that can lead to insane levels of anxiety.

But yeah, you’re right, I think we, through the media through social media, we’ve created this anxious planet. news and information is coming at us now at a rate of knots that we are just not used to.

And yeah, there’s definitely been this shift post pandemic and

you know, when we talk anxiety, you know, we’ve got this sliding scale, haven’t we? We’ve got full blown panic attacks, the pressure valves gone, or we’ve just got this constant sense of unease. I’m on edge, you know, the impending doom. something’s not quite right. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. So you know, in this episode today, I really kind of wanted to sort of spend a bit of time talking about anxiety and also from a therapists perspective of what we’re seeing in the therapy room, but also give out some hints and tips and things that you can do or you know, maybe your loved one is struggling with anxiety right now, and give that

support access is not just the person who experiences the anxiety, it’s actually the impact and under immediately the tight circle the full circle of the new Yeah, that it doesn’t just stop it impacts of workplace. And, yeah, we definitely need to know how to support people, as well as support ourselves. Yeah. And at a point in life where actually getting access to help, has never been more difficult, you know, we are simply not good enough, certainly in this country, at helping people with with mental health, if you’re in crisis, or you’re struggling, it can be incredibly difficult to get support, or to get good quality, support. And you know, when you’re in crisis state with your mental health, and you can’t get an appointment or your GP, oh, you’ve maybe been referred. And you’re on a waiting list, that could be six months, 12 months, 18 months or 1.2 years.

Where do you go? What do you do?

Because an hour, and anxiety is, to me is hell, you know, I’m just looking at some of the stats in front of me saying that in any given week in the UK, six and 100 people

diagnosed with generalized anxiety, I actually think the numbers are higher than that.

And that’s the people that are actually going to help and have, you know, have the courage to speak to their GP about it, or have reached that that threshold where they just they need that help.

Well, there’s another stat there that leads nicely into that, that less than 50% of people with anxiety, actually get access to treatment.

Wow, I know. Yeah. So they reckon at the moment, there’s around a million people in the UK that are struggling with an anxiety disorder. So there’s approximately 4 million people floating around right now really struggling with anxiety, and they are getting no help at all.

And that creates a bigger problem, doesn’t it? Because, you know,

if left unchecked,

it can lead you down into to depression,

suicidal thoughts,

unhealthy coping mechanisms, drink drugs, food gambling, it can completely destroy lives. It’ll have an impact potentially financially, because you might not be able to function anymore at work. Yeah. The impacted relationships. Yes, your your intimate and your family relationships, as well as friendships. Kids are unable to go to school or do exams, people are not able to go out and socialize and get out into the community and do things.

A significant impact, I didn’t realize it was the numbers but his highest, yeah, that they’re quite frightening. And the thing is, with

early intervention with anxiety is really important. Because the longer it runs on and we’ll talk about it in a bit more detail today, the more slow built in triggers that you tend to build up. And anxiety is very good at kind of gain your world and taking it from this size, to this size. And what we do, as we’ve talked on previous episodes is when we feel uncomfortable, we withdraw. So anxiety leads us into doing lots of avoidance, we avoid the things that make us feel uncomfortable. But what nobody told us at school was avoidance feeds anxiety, the more you step away from something, the more the anxious part of your brain goes, there must be a threat there. So don’t worry, I’m going to keep the anxiety up to keep you to keep you safe. And

I think, you know, our relationship with anxiety has changed.

You know?

I think when I was a kid, I had a lot of anxiety, but I just thought I worried a lot.

Well, that’s a really good point, isn’t it? Yeah, like, I suppose I was too young as a kid to know what anxiety was. But I definitely know I worried about lots of things I probably shouldn’t be worrying about. I think, you know, there’s there’s there’s a definition isn’t there between worry and anxiety.

It’s when that worry starts to interfere with daily life.

Then we’re looking in

I had it becoming some form of

I was about to make the mistake of saying anxiety disorder. And I hate the phrase disorder is a terrible label that you can place upon somebody that they have an anxiety disorder or panic disorder, because they immediately think there’s something wrong

with them. That’s a really good point as just how even with reference, yeah, and implies that there’s, yeah, you’ve got it’s not a disorder, it’s a response, you are struggling with an anxiety response, we don’t go to the doctors and go, I’m not happy with my happiness response when I’m in good situations, you know, I’m not happy with my human response. Fundamentally, we need to remember that anxiety is an emotion. Okay? It’s, it’s a bloody uncomfortable emotion, but it is an emotion that starts out as a messenger, is everything, okay?

The problem comes when left unchecked and not dealt with, or the environment is not looked at that, you know, we’re then talking about something

very different. It feeds upon itself, and becomes self perpetuating, and can build up momentum. Yeah, I mean, one of the best things I could say to anyone listening to this episode is if you struggle with anxiety,

the earlier you can get to deal with it. The quicker the recovery is, the longer you stay in those patterns. And the more ingrained they become into your daily responses, you know, creating these new neural pathways of responses. I’m not saying you can’t undo it, you just need to do more work.

So, you know, today, I wanted to talk a bit about kind of what I’m seeing in the therapy room, what’s going on in the world, why it’s kind of happening as much as it is, and hopefully give the viewers of this episode some hints and tips and a bit of insight because nobody educates us about anxiety. Do they know? Nobody? Well, certainly, for my generation.

We never talked about anxiety, and certainly my parents and my parents, parents, anxieties, and depression was taboo. You was masked?

You just didn’t.

I didn’t know was there mental health when I was a kid?

Was mental health a thing? Obviously, mental health was a thing. Was it a thing? That was acknowledged? As a really good question I possibly it came under different guises. So for example, we used to have an possibly society was actually really quite cruel and brutal. Back in the day, I can remember certain people, as I grew up, where they were labeled, and labeled as being crazy, you know, all of this sort of terms that we don’t tend to use anymore, because it’s got the negative connotations. It’s quite slanderous is not great. But we definitely had individuals that were labeled as such, but it wasn’t talked about in a mental health capacity, that there was something wrong with them, which is like all 20 of them. Yeah, I can remember the better score with certain kids that now I can look up. And, you know, they were treated horrendously for what I can see now we’re anxiety based conditions and, and, and responses.

And probably traumatized by the way that they were treated, because no one really understood what was going on. And possibly that still even happens today. And he because I don’t know that enough people are aware of. I mean, hopefully we can change it through this. Yeah. And the more we talk about it, the more normalize it and more educate is, can only be for the betterment, especially for kids.

Because I think that still happens today. I’ve certainly had personal experience in the school environment, educational environment, where we’ve had a good response to situations, but also a negative response, which has not been

not been helpful, and it’s actually been quite detrimental. Yeah. The thing is, anxiety doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t care what background you’re from, how much money you’ve got, how healthy you are.

None of us are immune to it.

We talked in the last episode about our sense of self and how sometimes we can lose that a bit and that’s definitely

a breeding ground

For for anxiety.

I know that I talk to my clients in the therapy room about this. There are, there’s a percentage of the population that definitely have an ability to do anxiety better. I’m amazing anxiety. I see if like the UK had an Olympic squad. I would be captain of the anxiety team. Oh,

no, you would not believe I mean, I’m so much better than than I was. You know, I have now what I call positive anxiety which we can delve into later in the episode but ah, like, I was amazing and anxiety from overthinking scenarios. ruminating, you know, catastrophizing.

I didn’t know it was catastrophizing, always just worrying,

trying to control things before they even happened. And there’s this thing that you may have heard of called high creative intellect.

And people with high creative intellect just have this ability to freak themselves out, you know, they can see things almost in full, glorious Technicolor in front of them.

Their thoughts literally trigger their anxiety. You know, almost, you know, I could imagine conversations that hadn’t happened, or I could imagine situations unfolding.

And create anxiety with no real threat in front of me, it was all perceived type threat. But not everyone has the ability to do that. You know, this is smart, they call the 7030 Club. It is about 30% of the world’s population have this high creative intellect. And they’re creative people, you know, people like Steven Spielberg artists, painters, musicians, people that are just very creative.

They’re born with this blessing that turns into a curse. When it’s pointed back at ourselves, and we do we do anxiety, so we can have stuff in the world that happens to us, that creates anxiety, okay, we can get bullied, accidents, pandemics, illnesses, financial issues.

But those things don’t happen to us, unless we’re very unlucky, every single day for the rest of our lives. So what happens from those moments forwards is we start to do

anxiety. How many people do anxiety? We, I’m not saying we sit down and go, I know, I’m going to traumatize myself. But we do sit there and we’d say anxiety is something that we that we do.

Yeah. So for me, I had like, storytelling, I could tell the world’s best horror story to myself about a situation that hasn’t yet happened.

And come out with all of the different outcomes, almost like, if option D happens in this will happen, and Option B happens and this could happen. And before I knew it, I was aware down, working out how I would deal with it, how I would control something. And it was based on something that hadn’t happened, that hadn’t even happened, or one have a different set of games, to know what I was about six different levels down.

Before you’d catch yourself and go,

I need to understand that actually. When you’re in the thick of it, that’s very difficult to catch yourself. Oh, yeah, really bad. Your anxiety loves to turn us into time travelers. You know,

you’ve jumped into DeLorean up at a mile an hour, you’re in the future, you’re viewing the situation in your mind. And you’re working really hard to control something that’s not even happened yet.

Or, alternatively, you’re back in the past, looking at something that’s gone, it’s over. There’s nothing you can do about it. And anxiety is a state shift. We are not in the present moment. You know, it’s, in my opinion, it’s a form of hypnosis, we go into these anxiety trans is where we’re completely shut out. Everything that’s going on around us, we become very aware of what we’re feeling. And we become very

engrossed in thought, whether that’s something bad’s gonna happen. You know, there’s some, you know, I’m losing my head or you know, I must do this. I must do that. Our emotions have completely almost put like this brick wall up around us. Short prefrontal cortex.

next activity down. So there is no rational thinking going on at all emotions are running the show.

And not being regulated. Yeah, no regulation, just chaos. You know,

I often talk to my clients about this in the therapy room or, in some of these, some people watching this may, so this may resonate with them is

our brains, our anxious brain is like a naughty puppy. So if you, you know, for those of you that have ever bought a pet, in particular, like a dog, so you’ve got this puppy, and it’s just belting around the room, it doesn’t know how to sit. So it’s just flipping around the room, that’s that’s your, that’s your brain is just going around the room, 100 mile an hour. And a bit like the dog that needs to be taught the Word sit means sit and be still, we have to train ourselves, our our minds not to do that. So part of dealing with anxiety is using the right set of tools to deal with the feelings, or the thoughts and do it consistently.

Think a lot of people that struggle with anxiety, you’ve probably heard this phrase have fear of fear.

Because it’s our rent, it’s the most horrendous feeling in the world, especially those that get panic attacks, and then maybe work really hard to hope they don’t have another panic attack. So they get like panic disorder, and you know, that life’s about that not happening again. Yeah, protecting themselves. Yes, staying in this kind of protective state. And

the reality is, if you want to get better from anxiety, it’s what you do in those moments of when you feel anxiety that will ultimately determine how quickly you get better.

Because by the very nature of our anxiety makes us feel

we go I just need someone to take this away, take my anxiety

away completely.

But actually, it serves. When you’re not in that state.

It’s there and it’s there for a reason it’s there to protect us. It’s when it becomes like you see something that is out of control and impacts the way we live our daily lives. That’s that’s the bit you can’t ever take. You can take the unnecessary

anxiety, I imagine. Yeah, but not anxiety itself. There’s kind of like healthy anxiety. And then there’s excessive anxiety. You know,

although I’ve, you know, I talk openly about my past with anxiety. My anxiety has also led me to achieve some fantastic things in my life, my anxiety has pushed me has driven me. And I don’t want to lose completely that part of me. Because it’s always trying to figure out where’s the pitfall is just when that gets out of check when it’s allowed to go

too far.

And you know, when you’re walking around with this supercomputer in your head, that nobody’s told us how to use, nobody’s taught us how to regulate our physiology and our psychology. So what do we do we go, I’m really anxious, I need a drink. Or I’m really anxious, I need some medication or whatever unhealthy coping mechanism that you develop from it, that we can we can develop.

But most of most of our anxiety issues again, you know, I’m probably going to say this 1000 times on this podcast, most of our anxiety issues, and most of the people they end up in my therapy practice. Their anxiety is linked to stuff way back. Like in the in the past,

traumatic events,

things that happened during childhood illnesses, the environment that we

that we live in experiences, yeah, we can. There’s there’s quite a lot of books that talk around about though that isn’t there.

And it’s better to sort of express your emotions and to keep them suppressed and inside

because they will come back they actually don’t disappear if you keep them inside. So Andy, you mentioned about the different types of anxiety there and how you wouldn’t want to remove it altogether. Is that something that clearly you are now or is that something that you work on every day? No. So don’t get me wrong now and again.

My anxiety can get out a check

for the difference

says I know the tools to deal with it.

When we’re tired, mega stressed.

It is much harder to regulate our emotions, we’re fundamentally anxiety is an emotion, we cannot is always more difficult to regulate our emotions when we’re tired woman IE, well, when we’re when we’re really stressed. But I would say I’ve now got a much healthier relationship with anxiety. Anxiety doesn’t run me the way that it did in my past, you know, where I was anxious Andy, everything was was a stress was was a worry.

But left unchecked, a bit like going out and leaving the kids in the house, a certain age.

If not kept in check. i My brain has definitely got the ability to go off and do anxiety. And I think, you know,

you have to realize that there are certain people out there that just have this ability to do anxiety to a different level. That’s the way that they were born.

And that’s the way that their mind operates. And that’s okay. You can live a perfectly good life

as long as you’ve got the strategies to keep your anxiety in, in check.

And the problem is, most people haven’t.

So yeah, I mean, I’m you know, I compared to how I was back in the day, I mean, I was an anxious fruitcake,

like, like even believe.

Horrendous panic attacks, constant anxiety everywhere. People pleasing.

Yeah, having to be liked.

Worrying about everything looking for the danger in every situation. Yeah. Horrible, horrible place to be in. I can, I can imagine I had a conservative control side of things. But what you’re describing,

it’s almost overwhelming, did it? what point did you realize

this has got to stop or it’s going to take me down, or it’s going to completely SAP my energy and overwhelm me as an individual and the way I live my life,

you know, it’s easy for me to look now and say, I was anxious for a massive part of my life. So, you know, there were certain events that have happened to me over my life that were traumatic.

Not necessarily in the way we would think, when we use the word trauma. But they were traumatic to my mind, you know, from experiencing

my mom, dad splitting up on the fallout from that, and I’m at a very early age and not really understanding what was going on other than things have changed and life wasn’t the same anymore, but had no idea how to handle those emotions. Nobody spoke about them. Nobody checked, you were okay.

So I did anxiety from a very early age, probably the age of six or seven,

right up into my 30s. But it was

building. It was great, you know, that we were we started here, and we got here. So what went from worrying every day, and overthinking and the ability to overthink stuff turned into horrendous anxiety attacks and horrendous panic attacks were driving to somewhere or jumping on a plane. I mean, one of the most horrendous panic attacks I ever had was on a plane and I was convinced I was dying on that flight. You know, anyone that’s ever had a panic attack will tell you. It is the most horrendous thing. I would rather break a bone

and have a panic attack because I know I can go to the hospital they can put a blast because I actually ended up in a&e Once Well, no tantalite I ended up in a&e Lots of times with panic attacks. But this one particular time I ended up in a&e and you know the blood pressure and heart rate off the Richter scale. And I remember this doctor turning around to me again, you just need to calm down.

Really?

And does it work? No. Oh my god. Yeah, it was all the things you could have said to me in that moment. It was it was probably the worst thing.

And I

I got so fed up of legal living with anxiety

At that, I decided to educate myself about anxiety.

I think probably a lot of people that have struggled with it in their life have just kind of gone. I just need to get on with it. This is just the way that I am. But it’s it doesn’t need to be like that. And I’m, you know,

GPs are getting better. But they need to get much better. Because

automatic medication is in my opinion, not not the answer. It’s not, it’s not the solution for anxiety, yes, you can bring about a period of stability, but something needs to change.

So it’s almost hopefully giving them that space, from the anxiety to, to look at and do the actual work as to what’s happening. Yeah, because most people, I believed in order for me to get better from anxiety, I shouldn’t feel anxiety. So I spent so much of my time trying to control my environment, and risk assess everything.

And do avoidance. So I didn’t feel anxiety. And if I did that, I convinced myself that I was getting better.

The problem is, sometimes you do need to get on a plane or drive a car or do these things, then what do you do?

When you’ve got an alternative, and you actually have to do this very thing that you get anxious about? Yeah. And, again, you know, when I look back at life back then,

because of the way that anxiety makes you think, feel and behave, the things that you do actually make your anxiety worse.

Okay, yeah, we create this perfect breeding ground for anxiety. So, you know, and we should maybe spend a bit of time talking about the things that we do that actually makes our anxiety worse.

I mean, I was suppose I was lucky in

the latter part of my anxiety. More so But Google wasn’t about when I had anxiety.

Oh, that’s a really good point. Actually, did you have many books in the library that in a school library or the community likely that no, anxiety just wasn’t?

I didn’t, panic attack was in my world before the word anxiety was in it. And there was a point in my life where I couldn’t link panic attacks and anxiety together, I didn’t understand the hangs, you know, a panic attack is just anxiety getting to

the limit the pressure valve in that pressure cooker, the valves ready to go. And that’s, that’s where the panic attack comes from. So I didn’t, you know, I can remember a point in my life where I didn’t know what anxiety was.

But I knew what a panic attack was.

But fortunately, I didn’t have Google because if God if I went and googled symptoms, my anxious brain would have latched on to anything that I read and gone. Yeah, I can manifest. I can manifest anxiety from that. So if you are watching this episode, and you’re struggling with anxiety, stay of Google, don’t research anxiety.

I, because gonna anxiety is my sort of niche, I very often get asked to join these Facebook groups,

anxiety sufferers, and

very most of them, not all, but most of them, they’re just all in there triggering each other, send each other off, or this has happened to me today, and blah, blah, blah, you know, and

my view is if you want to get better go and hang around and speak to people that have either got over anxiety or who aren’t anxious, don’t hang around with a bunch of anxious people.

See that?

Again, that’s self perpetuating. Isn’t you just gone, you’re constantly

triggering yourself comes back to that revolving, just conveying that Groundhog Day rather than evolving and coming out of it. Yeah. So most people can’t understand how they end up feeling anxious. Some have got very clear, you know, lines in the sand. You know, I was in a car accident, I was ill I nearly died. I was you know, I was assaulted. A relationship came to an end, I lost my business. You know, there’s 101 reasons and you can go, I can put a pin in the map and go, that’s why I’ve got anxiety. But there’s a whole other category of people that go, I’ve never had, you know, I’ve had a good life. My parents were good to me. My school days were great.

But I’ve got really bad anxiety how

Um, and fundamentally, that person is just struggling with their brain firing off all of these false alarms. You know, the

anxiety response is very primitive, you know, the part of the brain, the amygdala, you two tiny things in the bottom of the brain that run the fight or flight response. It’s a really primitive part of the brain, it hasn’t evolved at all, really, compared to the rest of the brain.

So we get these primitive fight or flight responses, which fundamentally is go back to your cave, light the fire, and just never come out of the cave again, and will stay alive, which to be fair has served us well today, because the human race is still we’re still here. We are here. So it’s done its job and maintain our well being and our survival. But yeah, when a lot of today’s stresses and triggers,

we don’t need the same responses as we had back in the Neolithic days when we were literally were looking to fight for our lives. But that part of that brain hasn’t developed, which in one sense is fantastic. Yeah. But then you get the flip side, we live in a different world. No, totally different world. And that response of run, hide, curl up in a ball fight, freeze. Okay. Yeah, one time it served a purpose. And to a certain extent today, it still serves a purpose. But we’re living in a very different world, you know, we can’t say to your boss, I’m not coming out my cave, because the amygdala won’t let me because that’s what my response was do Sorry, I need to avoid coming into work to keep my anxiety

in check. So you know, to to understand why you know why anxiety is bad. We need to look at the way that the amygdala works and the way that our brain works. So

our brain works very hard to avoid things that make us feel uncomfortable. Yeah. So if you’ve had something bad happen to you, whatever that may be, the moment that that happens, your brain goes, Oh, that sucked. That really sucked. So from today, you don’t even ask me to do to ask me to do this. I’m going to do this for you. I’m going to create anxiety when you try and go and do that in the future. So you know, you think about, right? Yeah, as you had been, maybe you did at school, you had to stand up and read in front of the class or

we had been Steven, you had to stand up in front of the school if you’re good enough in senior poem, and sit in front of the entire school. Yeah, wow. So

you teach the points that you write, you stand up, you read that chapter, in front of the class, you’re dead, anxious, you stand up, you fumble your words, your mates are all laughing at you, the teacher kind of goes, you’re an idiot, or whatever, or sit down, you know, you’re rubbish. And fast forward 20 years and your boss is going we need you to do a presentation on Monday to the team about so and so. The brain went, Oh, there was this time in life where we had to stand up and it was eyes on and we got criticized and it was really uncomfortable. I don’t want that happening to you again today. So here’s anxiety. So you’ll run back to your cave light the fire and and not come out. And you know, this is

there’s everyday scenarios where we can we can understand this, you know, so if you decided to leave your house today, go for a nice walk through the park, beautiful summer’s day. And suddenly out of nowhere, this vicious dog appeared and you’re like, Oh my God, where did the dog come from? And it bites you that’s an unpleasant experience, you know, you have been traumatized you’re probably gonna have to go to the hospital, get some stitches have a tetanus shot.

It’s very easy for us to go well, I can understand after that event, that I would probably have a bit of an issue around dogs or walking through the park or spaces or spaces because your your brain is doing his job. It’s going this really uncomfortable thing happened to me.

And in order to stop it happening again, this is this is what we’re going to do so probably to the new generation though. Watching this this episode. The way I like to explain it is think of your mind as Netflix. Yeah. So you know when you go into Netflix, you’ve got all these different box sets, but they they tip them into two genres done the horror documentaries. Bolivar tried to think as you know your brain has got like a Netflix catalog in there. That’s an interesting movie.

Can edit, okay. And then for everything that you do in life, there is a box set down in the basement that predetermined how you respond to events. So you’ve got a box set for driving, you’ve got a box set for doing sports or for relationships, we’re going on holidays. And sometimes these box sets are populated with bad stuff. So we go back to the kid who was humiliated standing up in front of the class, in their boxer around public speaking. Whenever he and his boss has said to him, right, Monday, you’re doing a presentation to the team, outside of his awareness. Conscious mind goes down his unconscious mind goes to that episode and goes public speaking, what do we expect to happen about this? Oh, it’s horrendous avoid, here comes all these feelings of anxiety, that triggers stuff that stuff, stuff that sets you off. And this happens to all of us on an ongoing basis, our Netflix catalog is constantly

been updated, updated, good and bad. So. So that catalog is that almost like experiences? And then from on the back of that beliefs that are formed off of the back of those experiences? Yeah, in order to keep us safe? Yeah, probably the best way for me to explain them in this all is more visual. For those who are watching on YouTube, I’ll try and do some audio commentary forever. But for those that aren’t, is that the amygdala is kind of like this sort of sphere. And in its off position, it’s like this. Yeah. And you know, we use the example of you’re walking down a dark alley, and you walk down a dark alley, and somebody jumps out of the shadows and they’re made.

And, you know, you fight or flight response then kicks in the amygdala hijacks the clear, calm, rational thinking of the brain says, I’m taking control now. Yeah, and it decides what you’re going to do. And then you run away and you get home and you’re safe. And well, and and all the rest of it. And it should come back down. Yeah.

Now, what nobody ever certainly told me and I like to educate my clients about is the amygdala is part of the brain that learns through experience, it doesn’t understand language. So as a clinical hypnotherapist, one of the things people say to me is hypnotize me to take anxiety away more. First of all, that’s not going to work. Because this doesn’t understand language, it learns through experience. But it’s actually what happens when the amygdala is activated. That’s really, really interesting. is So whatever you’re doing, you know, we’ll use the analogy of the kid that stood up in the classroom, stood up, fumbled the words, everyone started to laugh, anxiety responses done, amygdala was fired. What actually happens is the amygdala takes a picture. So it takes in so think the amygdala turns into my this scanning video camera, and it takes in what can I hear? What kind of feel what kind of see what time of day was it? Where was I standing, you know, all of this information, like a freeze frame, gets all of that information as a packet of fear, and goes right, we’re going to store this information in the amygdala now. And now what we’re going to do is we’re going to scan, we’re going to constantly scan your environment to look for any data that matches this fear that we’re now holding into the amygdala. And if we see anything, that’s exactly the same as this situation, mildly the same as that situation, or so vague, you would go how have you made that match, I’d rather be safe and I’m going to tip you into fight or flight.

So, you know, you get in the amygdala firing off constantly. Most of the time, they’re false alarms. You know, the, the the class is not laughing at you. The you know, there’s not a vicious dog coming towards you. It’s a perception of a threat, because the amygdala is using data from past events and go, I think this is like this. So I’m going to activate you. So it’s got all the meta data around about it. So they make the data plus the information from your senses that you haven’t experienced and at the time, and it’s still not all of

this is another problem with this is that we don’t actually need the thing in the room with us to create the fear.

Because our minds don’t really know the difference between something we’re experiencing, and something we’re actually vividly imagining. So

We can think ourselves into anxiety, if you think about standing up in front of all your colleagues, and freezing, and not being able to speak and they’re all laughing at you, you know, you make a bit of a fool of yourself, you will actually start to feel like that’s happening. And the amygdala will actually start respond or start to respond, some our thoughts can trigger our anxiety, as well. So when we talked about time traveling earlier, where we’re off in the future, and we’re back in the past, we’re actually triggering ourselves. So you’re just walking around in your daily life, just trying to get on with things and the amygdala is just firing off, left, right, and, and center. And this is the issue, you know, what’s actually happening is, you know, it’s a bit like you’ve walked into your kitchen, and you’ve pop the kettle on, and suddenly the smoke alarm starts going off, and you’re like, it’s, it’s steam, and it but the maintenance guy know, it’s smoke, it’s fire run. And these triggers just build and build and build and build. And that person just walks around and goes, I don’t understand why I’m like this, and what much more we actually have to do is get the amygdala to reprocess the information that’s stored within it. And, you know, for people that have had panic attacks, certainly for me, there was data about each panic attack, because one was on a plane, so didn’t want to be on a plane, another one was on a car, you know, another one, I had a panic attack in an accident and emergency

at a hospital. So my anxiety said, A hospital is not safe. So I started to avoid that, you know, you’ll get people that have maybe had a panic attack in the supermarket, don’t want to go to the supermarket. But it’s not just about having panic attacks, it’s about feeling uncomfortable in any situation, where the amygdala is activated. And then it starts to use that data going forwards, and it’s running. It’s running the show. It sounds like it’s definitely running the show. And to a certain extent, it then also means that anxiety is different for everybody, how you experienced that, and what the causes as well as the effect on you, because everyone will probably have different symptoms, you hear a lot about the different symptoms. So it’s very much a personalized experience. Yeah, yeah. And that can be that doesn’t need to be your afraid of public speaking, that can be anything could be a dog, it can be a cat, it can be certain foods, it may be as a child, or you know, at any point in life, you’re eating a certain food and you’ve had an unexpected texture or taste or something happens to you. And there’s a stress state that’s activated, and suddenly this anxiety starts to happen. But it’s, it’s all driven by that. And you know, the problem is that our brain promises and pinky plunky brain science right now, but our brains basically do something called jaw processing. I don’t know if you’ve read the Chimp Paradox, kind of think of the inner chimp. So our brains doing this job processing where we’ve got fast brain, very fast brain thinking, that’s our emotional brain, our emotional brain is super fast, bearing in mind that anxiety, emotion. And then we have prefrontal cortex activity, clear, calm, rational thinking, problem solving part of the brain, the part of the brain that actually helps us regulate emotion. When only thing tends to happen to us in life, the emotional brain is there, like, like, in seconds. And then a few minutes later, like the rational brain, kind of like a bit of an old man comes dawdling up. And so what’s going on here, then, by which point the emotional brain is going, it’s all it’s all going wrong, we’re all gonna die. It’s all absolutely horrendous. And the rational brains trying to get a look in an emotional brain is is, is running the show. And anxiety recovery is actually about using tools to give the chance for the rational brain to turn up to the situation and help you regulate what was happening. Rather than the feeling been that intense, we avoid the situation.

Because the amygdala when you avoid something gets a negative experience, you go see didn’t want to go walking through that part because there’s danger there. I’m justified in keeping the anxiety up. So it’s got a fast track effectively. So whenever you get the feeling in your stomach, or whatever it is that’s causing it. Those signals have always got a fast track straight to your amygdala

before it actually reaches that part of your brain. Yeah.

That’s understandable. Because really, when you’re in a fight or flight, a genuine fight or flight situation, you don’t want to think what do I do now?

You don’t need to emotionally regulate, you don’t need to do any of these things. You just need to survive. Yeah. So yeah, that’s really interesting. It’s got that fast track with the amygdala removes the ability for you at a rational level to work out what’s going on. Because if you sit at a conscious level and go, Oh, should I do this or shouldn’t do that, you could die. So if you’re about to step off the pavement and a car nearly hits you, and you get that, and you jump back, if amygdala didn’t jump in at that point, and you stayed unconscious, sort of prefrontal cortex like go left or go, right.

Yeah, yeah, blue dead. So it shuts off that ability, and it starts to run the show.

So certain set sets of circumstances, absolutely. You 100% need the amygdala, Berry Prime’s you for real world danger. But we’re talking about me earlier, because during the earliest stages of my life, my relationship with my amygdala was not a healthy one. Because there was a lot of worry, there was a lot of anxiety, there was a lot of uncertainty. And this happens for a lot of people. So what actually happens is for long periods of life, the amygdala is going on and off, on and off, almost daily, weekly, on and off, on and off. So what the amygdala does is it goes like, rather than me doing this on and off, I’ll just kind of stay on. Let’s just stay primed. So take a hyper alert, COPPA vigilance, where’s the attack coming from? Where’s the next bit of, you know, where’s the next threat? It’s a bit like, those poor soldiers during the war down in the trenches, and they’re waiting for the whistle to blow to go up over the top, you’re in this hyper vigilant state waiting, you know, and while you’re in this state, what does the amygdala do or, you know, what happens to our physiology is all of our senses get cranked to the max, they do. And you also really release all of those, those chemicals, that gets your body ready to react. So you’ve got that cortisol spike, you know, that adrenaline you keep you. So you’ve got your cortisol to your stay a week. And then you’ve got your adrenaline to take action and get energy and run.

But that can’t be in a good place to have that all the time. Because then, of course, that was the silent killer, isn’t it? It’s not good to have that gun. It’s there to serve a purpose and a crisis. It’s not there to be consistent. Yeah, we’re not designed to be in sort of permanent fight or flight mode. It’s designed for short periods of activity. And the problem is, you know, so if we use the dark alley analogy, you know, you’re walking down a dark alley, and somebody jumps out here that

is, you know, the amygdala activates. And you get this bucket of adrenaline and cortisol, floating out, dropped into the system floods the system, and you either fight, you freeze, you run, or sometimes you fall and you curl up into a ball. When you go through life, and there’s this been going on a lot. The adrenaline and cortisol is like a tap that’s been left dripping, drip, drip, drip. So it’s constantly in your system. And lots of cortisol in your system can lead to a fatigue, brain fog, but been in, in in and out of fight or flight a lot changes the way that you think, feel and behave.

The anxiety will create notions, you just think differently. I you know, it’s like your spidey senses are dialed to absolutely maximum, you’re very aware of feelings that are going on in your body, your sense of smell, you’re hearing everything is just really super, super vigilant because you’re you’re on edge, you’re waiting for that next attack. And it’s a horrible way to exist. And the way that you think, in that situation is

internal dialogue changes to lots of wire for I thinks, because you are, what the amygdala is doing is anything in your life. It’s looking at it and it’s risk assessing it, where’s the danger? Where’s the danger? Where’s the danger? And actually, what’s happening is that your internal security system is just working way too efficiently. It’s in full blown,

overdrive, and it’s just not a nice place to be at all. And because of the way that we feel as a result of this, our behaviors actually keep us trapped in fight or flight.

That makes sense. Yeah, it’s not it’s not a good one, but it makes sense as to why that’s happening because it replicates. Yeah, and the body then says, I’m anxious. Yeah. And here’s another experience over so again, that you’ve got that

heightened awareness. Yeah, and thing is anxiety actually requires our attention? Do you think about it? If your attention is elsewhere,

anxiety really does lose its power. And there’s, you know, there’s, this is really useful for people that are struggling with anxiety to listen, you know, we can’t have two thoughts at the same time. But either thinking anxiety, or we’re somewhere else. Yes, the feelings of anxiety can take a while to dissipate. But people with with anxiety, what they need to understand is that their brain or our brains, the human brain is a problem solving machine, our brain loves to solve problems, how to get from A to B, you know how to do this thing? How to learn that? Yeah, what do I need to get from the shops later, all of the the brain loves that stuff. But when you have anxiety, the brain kind of flips mode and goes, we don’t solve problems anymore. We create problems. So the problem the brain goes into problem creation mode. What if that goes wrong? I think this may happen, what ifs. And it’s that that does that time traveling that we were talking about earlier off into the future trying to predict outcomes and controlling? How can you control something that’s not even happened yet? You’re gonna ask them questions, then to create the problems to give you something to solve?

Well, to keep you busy solving problems doing anxiety, yeah, it needs to keep you busy doing anxiety, which is we need to risk assess everything in our environment. And it almost gets to the point where they may does that I just think everything’s trying to kill us, nothing appears safe. A lot of people with anxiety, tend to have what I call Safe Spaces. I’m at home with my mom, or as if I can just get to this place as some of the rules that we write. I had a rule once when my anxiety was so bad years ago, I could go no more than 15 minutes from home. If I could get home in 1015 minutes, I would be okay. But any further than that?

bedlam.

Is that an arbitrary value that you created that 15 minutes? Yeah, I know how it happened. What happened was I was out with friends. Once we were at a pub, and my anxiety really high of check, I was sitting there and I was masking. Try, no one knew.

I had a drink to see if I could take the edge off it. And I could just feel the anxiety building and building and building and I knew there was a panic attack coming. And

I knew I could get home in about 1010 minutes. And I jumped in a taxi and I went home, and my anxiety then.

So from that moment on my brain went, as long as I’m within that distance, but if I probably been 20 minutes away, I would have ended up having a full blown panic attack in in the taxi. So I then started to create all these rules, all the safety checks. So if people invite me out, right where we go, and I’d look how far away is it? Can I sit near the exit? Is it dead open? Or is it enclosed? How many people are going cat you know, can I drive there Can I park near the door is there a buses, there’s lots of taxes around, because my brain started to write all these rules, I am safe, as long as

all these things are in place. And that’s where of life can get very, very small.

And that’s where the brain is just constantly looking at the dangers and it’s amazing the rules that the brain will will write. And it’s because of all this data that that’s you know, down in the Magdaleno I’ve had clients who’ve

even at a superficial level, somebody said something to them early in life, something about their physical appearance. You know, I’ve I do a bit of work with people that work in trichology and I work work with a hair and somebody said to them early age, your hair seems to be very thin.

Maybe you’re losing your hair.

And that sets my very, very early age, but later in life, they’re checking hair out in mirrors, or, you know, they’re they’re worried about something else happening to them.

And this is what this is what anxiety will take something and literally turn it into a threat. So you know, it’s that’s how you can get OCD traits or you can get

you can get social anxiety because you want to avoid these crowds because you don’t want that attention or you don’t want to be humiliated. And here’s here’s a must not funny thing, but to show you the way that an anxious brain works so years ago.

My symptoms of anxiety were I would have tight

Chest. So I’d have chest pains. Yeah.

And I would start to do safety checks. I’d like checking my throat was clear, and I don’t sound stupid and go, can I breathe properly. That’s for people that have struggled with anxiety, this ability of can I breathe properly is quite a big deal. So he started to do the safety checks. But anyway, again, back to the point, I’ve had this chest pain, and it had been going on for a couple of weeks. And I was like, something doesn’t feel right here. So it was like, back to almost my personal ward a&e with like, I’ve got this chest pain. And it actually turned out that had a blood clot. And

so when a and did the procedure cleared, and all the rest of it, and this was back in the day where the day you were due to be discharged, you had to wait for like the doctor to do his race. So I was actually in quite a good place. This was before the wave of chronic panic attacks came after this episode. So hospitals were a safe space to me. So anyway, they stopped us come around, I can still see it now as the last bed was right at the end. And he came up to me. And he picked up my chart. He’s like, My God, when you came in your heart rate was this and your blood pressure was that was really high. Let’s just do your, your heart rate now. And your blood pressure is fantastic. It’s really, really good. And then he kind of hung the clipboard back up on the end of the bed. And he he went to turn away and I’ll never forget this. And he looked back and he went, you’re really lucky boy. And I was like, What do you mean? He went, why don’t block light hit your heart, you would have died.

And I’m like, Oh, right. Okay, put my clothes on and left. But that was the beginning of a whole new chapter of anxiety because any pain in my body any sensation. My anxiety was now going we mustn’t die. Any pain in your body is a threat. So we all get aches and pains and things. Don’t worry, but I was like, my fingers are tingling. This is another blood car. This is this. This is my health things is actually huge. Oh, the health COVID. Yeah. And people going back to work and everything. That has been that I’ve seen a huge spike in the health related anxiety. Yeah, on the back of it. So is that what you’re almost describing there? So yeah, I ended up in four. So I already had anxiety, I now had health anxiety. And my fairly infrequent panic attacks now turned into almost daily panic attacks. I mean, at my worst, I would have four or five panic attacks that day. Some of them were absolutely horrendous. And some I ended up in a an AMA with and people may laugh at this, or you may not understand it. But when a doctor stands at the end of your bed and said you could have died, that’s trauma.

And that moment, you suddenly realized you were very close to death. So it’s like PTSD didn’t know that at the time. So I leave the hospital with this traumatic thing that’s now happened to me. And those words are that doctor in my head. And now the amygdala is now gonna need to look out for this. I need to look out for that. And yeah, that was a whole different battle with with with different anxieties. But what I’m trying to get across on this episode is that how, really, it doesn’t need to be major life events like a blood clot or an accident, it can be standing up in a classroom, been chastised by somebody by having a critical pair. And by having a fall or you know, that can lead to horrendous anxiety because our brains are amazingly quick, putting us into survival mode. That threat system kicking in, our brains are very reluctant to let us back home. Now we’ll go I’ll just keep you here because it might not be fun, but you’re alive.

And that’s where we have to do the work. It’s

okay, it sucks. It’s not fun. It’s hard work. It takes consistency and effort. But if that’s you, you’re gonna have to do the work. Because there is no magic wand, there’s no silver bullet, you have to do work on yourself to to get yourself out of that.

So you had said at the beginning, Andy, taken action earlier, makes for a quicker recovery on the back of that is that we know that neuroplastic neuroplasticity in the brain makes for longer things and becomes more habitual and it’s habitual habits

that take longer to fix it. So when you say you can, it’s easier to recover quicker. Is the at that point, still stuff without referring to Google that people can do

Yeah, so themselves. Yeah. So going back to your, the longer you leave it, the more difficult it is.

What I meant by that was there’s two things that happen when you value anxiety for a long period of time, you get lots of triggers,

things that set you off that fundamentally need to be collapsed, you need to get the amygdala to no longer see them as a threat, they need to be reprocessed, released and let go. So the longer anxiety has been running, the more triggers, there are the slow building triggers that need to be collapsed. But on top of that,

there are habits that are created. So safety checks, protocols that you’ve run, that actually are part of you starting to do anxiety, checking how far away is, is there going to be any dogs there, how many people are in the room, checking your throat, but you can breathe, looking at your hair in the mirror, checking your skin, you know, all of these things. You’ve, if you’ve had anxiety for a long time you’ve ran those behaviors, they’ve become habitual, your brain is now wired

to do those things. So you’re right, neuroplasticity is the key to getting over anxiety re wiring

the brain to actually I know we used to do that. But when I want to do this response, instead,

you know, the old phrase old dog new tricks.

It does take consistency. And go back to your question about what can we do?

You your anxiety recovery

has to involve structure and process with consistency. So you need the right set of tools for the right form of anxiety that you’re struggling with. So some people have a lot of what we call cortex based anxiety is very much their thought, their thinking, yeah. And then there’s other people that have got amygdala based anxiety where they feel like they’re just walking around, and suddenly they’re going in and out of fight or flight, and they’re not so aware of thoughts, or they might have both of those. And they’re both dealt with slightly different differently. So

the, for things like thoughts, you know, therapists should be working with you on pattern interrupts stuff about protecting your state, bringing you back into the moment and closing thoughts down, one of the things I teach my clients for dealing with thoughts is to stop technique. So when they become involved in internal dialogue, and they’re trapped in thoughts, to bring themselves, I just get them inside their heads to say to themselves stop. And let’s get him to count 54321 and just pull the nine back into what they’re doing.

You know, some people will twang, an elastic band or, but it’s about protecting your state, with amygdala based anxiety, where you just minding your own business, and it’s firing off left, right and center. Because the amygdala has picked up on something in your environment, it’s not happy with, it has to be shown that that’s a false alarm. So what do we do in those moments? We have to regulate the emotion, we have to take care of our physiology, we focus on our breathing, we keep our thoughts very much in the moment we try to reactivate the prefrontal cortex to actually say, No, that was a false trigger. I don’t want you firing that says you remember I said earlier in the episode is about what you do in those moments when you feel anxiety that will determine how quickly you get better.

That’s where recovery happens. We don’t get better by trying to avoid feeling anxious. But nobody ever tells the stuff.

No and that are different. We’re all different. So again, some some some strategies will work if you’re working individually without the use of a therapist. Yes, there will be some strategies that will actually just click with you that will work with you. So for example, I think it was Beyonce for coming out in stage performance. She has an alter ego, where she creates this additional person,

Nick character who’s a big I’m a big fan he has.

He has his anxiety, buddy, when it’s called. He’s called Frank, where he actually places the behavior into somebody else, which then lets them view it from externally and manage it from that perspective. You’ve got internal dialogue, you’ve there’s so many different ways that you can do it. Yeah, there’s no one size fits all mentality. For the generalized thing what works for you might not work for me and vice versa.

So there’ll be certain there are certain sets of tools that I just refined slightly to work for you. But the key thing, self help done for me. Yeah. So So yeah, there’s, there’s so much that the internet is a sea of misinformation. When it comes to anxiety. Anxiety fundamentally has two stages inclination and take old, right?

inclination, that’s where you start doing the work, you read all this stuff on the internet that you know, in the middle of a panic attack, name, five things you can touch, you can’t do anything. When you’re in a panic attack, rational thinking is switched off. The secret is don’t get to panic attack, start to regulate your breathing and your thought patterns with the right sets of tools. When I work with people in the practice that are struggling with panic attacks, we have to be very careful with the different types of breathing exercises that they do. Because people who have had panic attacks have a strange relationship with breathing, they think about it a lot. And actually, weirdly, focusing on your breathing is like a threat. So, you know, using my own personal experience of struggling with panic attacks, we take things very gently, very easily.

But the thing is my your ability to heal yourself from anxiety is way better than any tablet out there. Don’t get me wrong, some medications can provide that period of stability and calm for you to do the work.

But fundamentally, medication is not changing anything, it’s not reprogramming the amygdala, it’s hoping that it calms you down for a bit, then during that period of calm, something changes. But that information still trapped. It’s still there. It’s so you’ll get a lot of people going, Oh, my anxiety went away for three years. And then it came back again. It didn’t it was always there. It was all you know, wow, that is so common. Yeah, I thought it was healed. And then suddenly, this, this thing needs to reprocess some information, and some of your old habits and patterns. Maybe your life has just been in a way that you’ve accommodated your triggers, you’ve managed to live your life in a way where your triggers don’t get to fire off, but the information is still down in your Netflix catalog.

You know, so? Yeah.

So I was just actually thinking about what you were saying there about when so I’m aware of the make the five second drill the hole protection thing, one of the aspects that I’ve always found interesting is that when you go into that, that flight,

you were seeing about

40 to one technique, then you’ve got the ping something or other CBT initiatives.

A lot of people don’t realize that are tend to forget that when you go into that fight or flight, you do have that hormonal rush, the your body, your body has been flooded with cortisol and adrenaline.

And to do that your prefrontal cortex has been switched off the blood supply to it’s gone.

So you don’t have the capacity to stop and think.

But you are flooded with this

capability of high energy state. Yeah.

So for some people doing something with that high energy to process to get rid of that adrenaline in that cortisol to actually work its way out. Can that help them then come down from that 100% 100%. So anxiety is a state shift. So when we generally do an anxiety, what tends to happen is the shoulders drop forwards, the head will come down.

And we kinda like that, or we’re very much focused on the thing, the hair, this, that the breathing the pain in the chest, and we become absolutely fixated on it. There’s a pattern, I promise you, any of you listening to this do and anxiety. When you find yourself in a better place, if you stop and think about what happens. Generally what happens is so for me, what would happen is I wish to start to feel something in my chest. And the next thing is I would feel something in my throat. And what I would do is I would do this

and I’d start to check that I could swallow properly. That was stage two of about five of me going towards a panic attack. If I can do something to stage one or two differently. The likelihood of me going into panic attack is hugely different. And you know, human beings were funded, we’re all wired the same. We all respond, you know, our stress responses when we’re stressed. We do one or two things we either go

and hold our breath or our breathing. We kind of start to breathe in quite a bad way. You know? If you

So I’ve experienced somebody having a panic attack, that gulping in air and they’re like,

sucking in air like it’s going out of fashion, but they’re hardly breathing, these tiny little out breaths, we can’t help it. It’s just what human beings do. But if we can regulate the breathing way before panic attack stage, where, you know, I like 345, breathing, emphasis three of 405, where the emphasis is pushing the carbon dioxide out system, and regulate that breathing. But also, let’s look at what we’re doing. Doing something like three, four or five, we’re using numbers, and we’re knowingly breathing prefrontal cortex activity, I need to get this bad boy back in the game, not in the emotional brain. So getting up and moving, breathing, we’re counting numbers, there’s loads of different things that you can do. But at low levels of inclination stage, you’ve got to have the emotional regulation to go, my anxiety started to come up. So I’m going to use the tools and processes to bring it back down. So you know, I anxiety, I’ll work with it on a scale of one to 10. One is on fine 10 is going to be a paramedic. As soon as you notice these come up to like a three or four, you’re taking action to get it back down into those single numbers. Again, you’re not learning to get up to eight 910, where there’s going to be a crescendo, it’s going to blow up, you don’t let it get to that point. And here’s the thing, when anxiety comes up, you push it back down, you start to grow personal confidence. And every single time you push that anxiety back down, that’s one more step to you coming closer to not ever having to do it. Here’s the thing when you stop worrying about being anxious, and you just don’t care if that emotion turns up, and you don’t give it the attention. It ultimately goes away. It put it requires your focus. It does require it requires that focus and attention doesn’t. It requires it’s like a tennis match if you if it’s thrown your ball and you don’t hate it back. Yeah, it’s good. Nothing to bounce off of. It’s no no response. A lot of people that struggle with anxiety, whether they’re at work, or they’re doing something they enjoy, or a TV program, when they’re engrossed in something else, anxiety will leave them alone. But, you know, anxiety to me is like this little ninja that sits on your shoulder and you’re just walking around and it’s like they’re busy now leave them alone, their senses are engaged in other things. But maybe watching the telly and it’s not really competing for your attention. So you’re not in it, but your mind is away somewhere else or lying in bed with nothing but your thoughts, anxieties, like Yes, look at all that headspace I can go and consume. So you know, if you if you’re somebody that does anxiety a lot, take a look at where you are when you’re doing it and what your attention is on and work on coming up with

solutions. So you know, quickly I talked to you about my horrendous situation with panic attacks on flights. So as soon as I get on, well, he was a death march going towards the plane. The boarding gate was like the final curtain. That’s why you know what’s going to die. So, you know, I’m a level 789 10 getting on the plane, like this. What’s going to happen and all the rest of it. One day a very sweet old lady pattern interrupts that whole thing for me. So I was British Airways flight. I was going to America. Member Bennett a guy going this is the flight. This is the one where you know, I’m going to die and got on the plane or sat down and the sweetest old lady was sat next to me. She was like, Could you do me a favor? Could you put my bag up for me tonight? Yeah, no problem. I put a bag up there like sweat pouring off me dying and I sat back down. And she was just one of these lovely people that started talking to me. She had a really interest in life. She was telling me about it. She was telling me about that. She was asking me questions. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Next thing I noticed we were up in the air. We done the whole seatbelts on taxi after and I went and she and I’ll never forget this. It was a bit like there’s a wandering Werther’s Originals out though she opened a baby. Do you want it? You want a mint? And I had this surreal moment of going, Oh my God, I’ve not done anxiety. And we chatted a bit more and she fell asleep and the rest of the flight was fine for me. At that point in time, I didn’t have the ability to go Why did I not do anxiety at that point. But I didn’t do it because my attention was elsewhere. My brain was dealing with a different set of problems, which was this lady’s asked me to put a bag up. She’s asking me questions. I’m listening to her story, my mind is elsewhere. But there was really useful information in that. You know, my pattern of doing anxiety was suddenly interrupted by by something else if that had been a row or three seats and it just been me game over.

I would have done anxiety and I would have done it

really, really well. So interrupting those patterns is is really key.

Definitely you have got when you get that cortisol and everything else dumping at the same time that has other effects on the body doesn’t cute. So, for example, not all IBS, but your body’s designed to literally dump your bowels and your bladder. So there’s no trace when you rearrange on the line, so we can’t be faked through smell.

There’s a whole host of other different things that it also does, dries up your mouth, there’s no saliva. So there’s lots of different ways that anxiety can come into your life and affect to

be each one’s almost a topic. And it’s, it’s saying, absolutely, yeah, so you know, you’ve got symptoms of anxiety that can present themselves in so many different ways. OCD traits, acrophobia, IBS, you know,

picking a scan, you know, sort of self harming, and all these different things that we can have. But fundamentally, we don’t treat the symptoms, we go direct to the cause. And you’re right, everybody’s different. Everybody’s different. Some people feel sick,

some people their bowels just gonna go go to pieces, it’s different for everyone. But fundamentally, it’s because your anxiety is just, it’s just too high.

And if you deal with that, those other symptoms go away. My panic attacks went away when I dealt with my anxiety. But I had them as two separate, not linked things. And their intrinsic, there isn’t one without the other, get your anxiety levels down.

But because I was like, here’s a prescription Off you go, say, these are three months, see how you go on, they’re not working, try these off the dose, Do this, do that, because I hadn’t processed the amygdala information. And also, anybody that’s going to therapy, or whatever kind of therapy is right now, if they’ve not been given by their therapist, system, a structure, a process and a set of tools to use between sessions, so they’re empowered, we’re not going to get better. They’re not, you’ve got to take personal responsibility for healing your anxiety. Yes, you can get help. Medication can help regulate some of the emotions. But fundamentally, you have to do the work. In those moments of anxiety, you have to use the tools, but so many of us don’t want to be uncomfortable, and we’re afraid. And it’s almost like everything else. You can only use those tools, and they’ll only come naturally a second nature to you if you practice them. Yeah. So the very time was that you want to be doing it, and practice and those elements is when you’re not anxious. Yeah. When, when you’re when your prefrontal cortex switched on, so that you can then establish a new habit. So you know what comes next. And I do this, this and this and this in a positive way, just like driving a car. Yeah. So that when it actually comes in, your subconscious can run with EP Starlix, they can run, you need to anxiety recovery is about what you do in those moments when you feel like almost going to hell.

But also in those moments when you feel good, because in those moments where you feel good, you build resilience, you put a buffer between you and the anxiety response on that day, like I feel great today. Good. Still doing these techniques, I’m still using these tools, because that’s where recovery really accelerates. So it’s that balance of the two but fundamentally, you have to turn up with the right tool structure and process as much as anxiety does. Anxiety doesn’t take a day off, it doesn’t get furloughed is invited to everything as well. It doesn’t seem to have any innocent people, it’s not invited. The worst house guests that just came for a weekend is still there. 20 years later, they won’t they won’t leave. But the thing is, when you do run a system, a structure and a process with the right set of tools and you become empowered. The first situation you find yourself in where you feeling anxiety, but you use the tools and you get through it. The growth the shift is huge. I didn’t realize that thing that I did on that flight that day unintentionally gave me a massive shove in the right direction. And the next flight was 40% easier and the next night after that was so much easier and and all the rest of it. But if you’re going to therapy or you’re just taking medication the harsh reality is you know I hate to be the bearer of bad news is

you’re gonna there’s people being taken anti anti

anxiety medications for years and years and years and years and years, and they still have anxiety. They’re not working, because they’re not changing anything they’re either trying to suppress,

make it more bearable. It’s like, why am I having anxiety in the first place? What’s the information my brain is deciding to use to create anxiety? What trauma have I been through? What am I trying to avoid? What’s the problem in my environment? What was the initial message, has the message been acknowledged and doing the work and that,

for me afterwards, once, you know, I found effective forms of therapy, and dealt with, you know, the blood clot issue and the flying issue and some of the stuff that happened to me in childhood and reprocessed it, so only then I could have a positive relationship with with anxiety. But I think when you’ve had anxiety, and you’ve had excessive anxiety, your relationship with anxiety is different for the rest of your life. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. You just have this level of awareness about yourself and your needs. And you, you probably will use a lot of the tools, you’ll keep yourself in a good place. Because all of us have this ability for anxiety to go Jek every single one of us even if you’re the most chill dude on the planet, that system can decide to come in, and you know, take over and you know, it fundamentally, anxiety recovery is about doing the work. When you feel least like doing the work. Just like getting fit going to the gym. It’s it will work in the muscles, the brain.

No, absolutely. And one of the things that when I had the anxiety, I had a lot of OCD. And a lot of open behavior loops. Yeah. And that impacted the impact of my work that impacted everything. And looking back at it, you can see it clearly for what it is, then. But when you’re in the middle of it, it just all makes sense. It makes sense to you to do things this way.

And then the latterly, I just lost my voice, my voice went completely and utterly, right comes back to the first that I knew about it was for my voice just went

and took me a long time to learn the tools. So that I didn’t get to the stage of losing my voice. And it would normally be mid and that

Okay, right. I can see that. Actually, I have no past that. Please hold. Yeah, it was really, the body and the mind have these fascinating ways of making us sit up and pay attention and do things. It was effective. Yeah, really effective, late to talk. And it was really obvious to people that I wasn’t gentle. So it was it was one of these, it was probably the most effective way of communicating to me that

I need to sit back and address this. But so yeah, if you’re listening to this episode, and you are struggling with anxiety, and you do not have a set of tools in your toolbox to deal with the thoughts and to regulate the emotions, to regulate the feelings to protect your state, you need to stack that all box with breathing techniques. A lot of people roll their eyes at me when I talk about breathing. But the impact on our psychology and physiology is huge. And it’s been proven by science. No, actually isn’t it more. So. Wim Hof. And all these people know talking about it and activation of the parasympathetic. So

actually, everything’s good. Yeah, you need to you need to calm that system down, you know, think of your anxiety system as like a crying baby. It needs to be calmed. It needs to be nurtured. And it needs to be done consistently to bring this sense of calm about. And there’s a set of tools to do that. Different tools work for different people. So the more tools you can stack in your box, but if you go for anxiety therapy, you’re not being given tools.

You’re heading off down a path that’s not going to work if you’re ending up going to speak to your GP today about anxiety. You need to go okay, I’ve got this medication. But what happens now?

I need a set of tools to help me deal with this. If they’re not talking to you about significant events that you’ve been through in life,

then they’re missing a key point. We didn’t just your brain didn’t wake up one day went, Oh, I know. This will be fun. Let’s just do a whole load of anxiety. Something has happened. You may be consciously aware of what that thing is. You may have no idea what that thing is. But something has happened that switch that system on. And until that information is reprocessed, released the Lego this thing the amygdala is going to keep you

in fight or flight, you need to retrain the D D response. And you will it will attach a PDF to this episode with some hints and tips and tools that you can use to help you. But fundamentally, if you are struggling, you’ve got to do the work. You really have got to do do the work and you know, future episodes, we’ll talk about some of the traits you’ve mentioned today like OCD.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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