How To Use Anxiety To Prepare And Perform

Anxiety can feel like something to get rid of, but what if it’s actually your body trying to help? We sit down with Dr. Peter Montminy from A Mindful Village to unpack anxiety as a normal human emotion and a built-in alarm system. We sit down to talk about why anxiety shows up as anticipatory fear, and how that surge of adrenaline can be either useful or overwhelming depending on how we respond.

We also map anxiety on a continuum, from mild and motivating to intense and impairing. You’ll hear practical ways to tell when anxiety is helping you study, prepare, and stay safe, versus when it’s pushing you into avoidance and shrinking daily life. One of the most memorable tools is the “burnt toast vs five-alarm fire” reality check, a simple way to test whether your internal alarm is giving you a true warning or a false alarm.

For parents, educators, and caregivers, we dig into how to help kids with anxiety without trying to eliminate every uncomfortable feeling. We cover “name it to tame it,” common physical signs like racing heart and stomach tightness, and a two-step coping plan: relax the body, then refocus the mind. We also explain when it may be time to seek professional help for an anxiety disorder and where to start, including your pediatrician or school counselor.

If this conversation supports you, subscribe, share it with someone who cares for kids, and leave a review so more people can find these mental health and resilience tools.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 for immediate support. 

This podcast is brought to you by Jana Marie Foundation and A Mindful Village. 

Jana Marie Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization located in State College, Pennsylvania which harnesses the power of creative expression and dialogue to spark conversations build connections, and promote mental health and wellbeing among young people and their communities. Learn more at Jana Marie Foundation.

A Mindful Village is Dr. Peter Montminy's private consulting practice dedicated to improving the mental health of kids and their caregivers. Learn more at A Mindful Village | Holistic Mental Health Care for Kids.

Music created by Ken Baxter. 

(c) 2025. Jana Marie Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

This podcast was developed in part under a grant number SM090046 from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The views, policies, and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of SAMHSA, HHS or the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services.

Transcript

Welcome And Why Anxiety Matters

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 0:16

Hello and welcome to Ripples of Resilience, a podcast by Jana Marie Foundation, where we explore ideas, tools, and conversations that support mental health, resilience, and well-being for young people and the adults who care about them. I'm your host, Marisa Vicere, and today we're talking about something that almost everyone experiences at some point in their lives: anxiety. For many people, anxiety feels uncomfortable or overwhelming, and it sometimes makes us think something is wrong with us. But one of the most important things to understand is this anxiety is a normal, built-in human emotion. Here to help us understand the emotion and how it can be helpful and when it might be hindering us is our resident expert from a Mindful Village, Dr. Peter Montminy. Hello, Peter. Thanks for joining us today.

Anxiety Versus Fear Explained

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 1:09

Yeah, thanks, Marisa. Glad to be back.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 1:11

So as I mentioned earlier, anxiety is something we all experience. Even though it can feel uncomfortable, it actually serves an important purpose. Can you help us understand how anxiety can sometimes be helpful?

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 1:25

Yeah, absolutely. Our brains and bodies are designed to experience anxiety. In fact, all our emotions serve a certain purpose, right? All our emotions are really a signal coming from our body to say, alert, something is off, or something is important to pay attention to right now. So our emotions are really cues or keys to a call to action for some type of behavior. And different emotions call us to different actions. And that's to alert both ourselves, but also provides a social cue to alert others in our family, our tribe, whatever. So with anxiety, that alerts us to hey, there's a potential threat here or a potential challenge that we need to meet, a potential thing to be concerned about. Let's turn on our alertness and turn towards it and figure out how to take care of ourselves in light of this potential threat or danger. Now we'll look at the nuance of that as we go along today, but that's the basic. And one other thing, a basic way to think about anxiety. If we think about fear, let's start with fear. Fear is a hardwired primary emotion, kind of like the primary colors, where fear is designed for you to feel afraid and juice up your system in the face of what? In the face of an immediate threat. There's an immediate threat right in front of you. You're going to have the fear reaction to juice you up to fight or flight for survival. We can think about anxiety as anticipatory fear. It's you revving up your body thinking about something that might happen or you think could happen in the future, but isn't actually happening right now.

The Anxiety Continuum

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 3:00

Thank you so much. As you mentioned, all of our emotions exist on a continuum and they're telling us all these different messages throughout our life. And so anxiety can be helpful or not helpful depending on things like how often it shows up, how intense it is, or how long it lasts. So can you talk to us a little bit about this continuum that we all exist on?

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 3:24

Yeah, absolutely. So now let's put that idea on this continuum from mild to severe. If we have a mild alert system, like, hey, wait a minute, I'm a little nervous about how I'm gonna do on this test, so it's motivating me to study for it, that's a good thing. Hey, I'm concerned, I'm paying attention to there's traffic we're approaching on the corner. I'm gonna be worried about what if my kid runs out onto the road, I'm gonna pay attention to an alert and act to help guide the child to be safe as we approach the intersection. So some of this anticipation of what if this happens or what if that happens can be very adaptive and helpful when it's on the mild end or when it's tied to kind of realistic, proportionately realistic to the difficulty that might be arising. And then we can go down this uh continuum where we might feel worries about things more frequently or more intensely, and we start kind of just being on edge and being super kind of careful about things. And we have a normal range of differences. Of some people who are more risk takers go for it and more cautious and careful. And that can still be well within normal limits that we have these normal variations of differences and the degree to which we might anticipate and worry about things. And it still actually helps us function through our daily lives with our different temperaments or maybe kind of innate wirings for how much we'll be careful or cautious or not so much. Then we can slide on the continuum for these normal differences onto having some anxiety difficulties, where it might be an acute or special situation where all of a sudden I'm being extra nervous about this one thing, and it kind of triggers me more to be extra hyper-vigilant or even maybe a little hyper-reactive. And we can take a look at that and say, all right, how do you want to manage that difficulty when you have extra intense emotions of anxiety? How do you want to handle that? All the way to the far end where if that happens frequently enough that you're triggered disproportionately to be extra worried about things, where your anxiety becomes goes from productive, guiding you to take healthy precautions, to unproductive of becoming paralyzed or fleeing and avoiding things that disproportionately you really don't need to, or isn't helpful to you to avoid in your daily life. And it keeps impairing your ability to function in daily life. Now we reach the level where we'll call it an anxiety disorder. It's very important nowadays, everybody's feeling anxious and on edge. We're living, as we've talked a lot about, in the stress-filled world. That's why we're doing this podcast about building resilience, the capacity to face adversity and stress, right, more adaptively is what we're all about. But because we're often so dealing with so much stress nowadays, people are very quick to say, oh, well, I'm anxious, or my child's anxious, so they can't do that, or we've got to keep them from feeling anxious. Rather than again, pause, breathe, there's a normal continuum. Let's take a look about where we are in that continuum and how to take care of ourselves. And we'll get into that more, I'm sure.

Turn Nerves Into Better Performance

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 6:37

I love that. That we're coming back again full circle to that power of pause. So taking that moment to just really reflect on how is it impacting me in this very moment? And that reminder that some discomfort is okay. Absolutely, right. We need that in our life. So let's come back to like that helpful side of anxiety. How can it help us perform a little bit better?

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 7:04

Well, it can absolutely kind of pump us up or juice us up. It really activates the body and turns on, for example, the stress hormones of adrenaline and cortisol. It literally pumps you up to meet the challenge. So if you have to perform academically or artistically, theater, music, a presentation, a public speaking thing, or even just you have to perform on a test, or you want to perform well, so to speak, and do well socially, as you step up to meet any challenge, being a little nervous about it is actually very helpful because it starts to juice up your system. All of our emotions, and anxiety in particular, can be thought of as a combination of a physiological arousal, your body getting this arousal level going, combined with what we call cognitive attributions, with how you think about that arousal and how you name it. So there's literally fascinating studies that if you need to give a speech and you start feeling sweaty and jittery and your heart's pounding, if you name it, I'm getting pumped up to kick ass on this presentation, or I'm getting juiced up to meet the moment. And you literally use your thinking brain to name that arousal that way, it increases performance. The exact same arousal, and you start saying, Oh no, oh no, I'm getting too nervous. I'm not going to be able to do this, and you start naming it as anxiety and wanting to avoid it, that can impair performance. So there's how much you're juicing up, and there's how you look at it and relate to that juicing up that can turn it to being a performance enhancer or inhibitor.

Avoidance And False Alarm Checks

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 8:42

Thank you so much. And I know that we for me, I sometimes break down mental health in like the most simplistic way, is that it impacts the way in which we live laugh, love, and play. So when we start seeing anxiety or any emotion really impacting us to live, laugh, love, and play to our fullest ability, that's when it starts to become more of that unhelpful moment.

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 9:06

Yeah. Yeah.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 9:07

So talk to me a little bit more about that. And how does that show up? Or how might that become more disruptive?

Helping Kids Notice And Name Anxiety

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 9:14

Yeah. The main way is when, again, the frequency or intensity of what we're feeling anxious or worried about starts leading us to number one behavior action when we're anxious is what? Avoidance. Right. So when we start avoiding again tasks of daily living rather than being able to notice, name, and tolerate that distress and move through it, then it starts being a difficulty. And if it's often enough interrupting our daily life, it might be a diagnosable disorder and need some extra professional treatment. But either way, when it starts interrupting our ability to kind of do our daily tasks and we become more avoidant of situations, more physically tense and on edge all the time, then again, it goes from productive anxiety to unproductive. How do you know? Just keep doing reality checks. Wait a minute, is this helping me get through my task? Or is this hindering me and harming me and preventing me from getting through my task? It's a pretty simple little litmus test you can do yourself. And another little kind of coping skill I offer when you start wondering, is my anxiety disproportionate or not, is to think about whether this is a true alarm or a false alarm going off in my mind, because the emotional alarm system's going off, right? Anxious, worry, worry, you know, uh uh attack or avoid, mostly avoid in these situations. So let's think about that. If you have, I say this with kids all the time that I work with, if if you you have a fire, uh, you know, fire alarm at home, you have a smoke detector probably at home, right? And sometimes all of a sudden the fire alarm and the smoke detector is going off, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, what do you do? What do you do immediately? And people say, Well, you you run out of the house and you call the fire department. No, you don't. The first thing you do is you check to see, is the house on fire, or is there a little bit of smoke coming from the toaster that set off the alarm? And if it's nothing but burnt toast, you open the window, air it out, you know, uh pull the battery on the smoke detector for a minute so it starts, stops beeping in your ear. But you do a reality check. Again, you pause, breathe, and say, wait a minute, alarm's going off. Is this really the living room drapes and couches are fully engulfed? Get the heck out, or no, it's a little bit of burnt toast. So we want to pause and teach ourselves, let me ask myself, how much of this is burnt toast or a real five alarm fire? And is this a false alarm or not? So it's just a little way to visualize maybe checking yourself on it.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 11:48

Yeah. And that's such a great thing that we can do as adults. How can we also help our kids who experience anxiety? Are there other strategies that we can use besides kind of modeling this behavior?

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 12:02

Yeah, absolutely. And of course, you hit the nail on the head. The first thing is we want to model this behavior. We often have kids who are struggling with anxiety, not to blame parents, but to recognize the reality of that, because often the parent is feeling anxious. Kids download our emotions all the time, right? So we want to be able to pause, breathe, and catch ourselves and model distress tolerance, as well as then teaching our kids to notice it and name it and be able to tolerate it, right? So we start with modeling it, as you just said, and then we add the ability to really talk about it. I keep saying notice it and name it, and we have the fun phrase, name it to tame it, again, borrowed from Dan Siegel, where we notice it and say, Oh, I'm uncomfortable, oh, I'm a little worried about it, oh, there's worry. And notice the difference between. So here's a little advanced tip of the day. The difference between saying, I am worried and oh, I'm noticing some worry right now is the difference between being what I call inside the tornado when you say, I am anxious, you are literally identifying with it and you're swept up inside the swirling emotions of the anxiety. Versus the little subtle practice of the mindset and language of naming it differently, of naming like, oh, there's some real anxious butterflies in my stomach. Oh, I'm noticing my body's getting jittery. Oh, I'm noticing that worry that if I don't do this, something bad will happen. Versus, oh my gosh, if I don't do something, something bad will happen. You're inside the tornado. Pause, breathe, notice it and name it. Name it to tame it. Oh, there's that worry thought again about worrying if I don't do this, something bad will happen. And in that moment, you create a little space from it, you step outside of the tornado, and you're able to say, Oh, there's a tornado in my head right now. And that creates literally firm footing or a basis, a grounding for you to relate to that anxiety differently and start to make wiser, thoughtful choices rather than just emotional reactions from being inside the swirling. Does that make sense?

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 14:14

It absolutely does. And we talk about it a lot with noticing these worry thoughts that are there, but are there some other symptoms that our kids might be able to be aware of in terms of anxiety?

Relax Body Then Refocus Mind

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 14:28

Yeah. So you want to recognize those physical signs of anxiety first, like we've talked about sometimes, right? So often it goes with a racing heart or quick, shallow breathing. Often there can be tight feeling in the stomach, butterflies, or just a tightness or a yucky feeling in the gut, right? There can be, again, uh shaking or jitteriness or just like your your body feels restless and on edge. So literally starting to notice and name these normal range of physical experiences. You can do that simply by doing awareness practices with your kids throughout the day. Hey, let's just pause. What do you notice about what your body feels like right now? Not waiting to just do this when somebody's having a full-blown panic attack. Not even doing it just when you see that they're worried, doing it where you're going to start to name the normal range of our body's reactions to things. And again, the normal range of differences of different feelings we have. So just get in the habit of, hey, let's just pause and check in. What do you notice your body's telling you right now? We walk around so disembodied in the digital age. We're just always up in our head, always thinking, thinking, thinking. And we get lost and think that being we can literally get lost in thought and think the thoughts in our head are reality versus pause, breathe. No, let's get out of our heads and drop into the body and really become more familiar with that. It feels kind of weird, goofy, or awkward at first, precisely because we don't do it enough. But when we can help kids learn to pay attention and listen to their bodies, it's the early warning detector for then how to notice it, name it, and respond to it differently, right? So we absolutely want to start there. And then we can teach them to do the same thing again with those thoughts in their head. Oh, there's that worry thought, as I've already said. So just building up that self-awareness is the first step to self-regulation.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 16:18

Oh, yes. Thank you. That's so important. And then when it comes to that self-regulation, what are some of those techniques that we can use to really help them in those moments?

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 16:29

Yeah. So I I have a simple two-step dancer process for us to remember here. And it's simply called relax and refocus. Relax the body and refocus the mind. The first thing is to pause, breathe, as we always talk about, and downshift that emotional arousal, that adrenaline rush that's coming from the downstairs limbic brain, from the uh amygdala alarm system, right? The emotional alarm system. The first thing we need to do is pause, breathe, and downregulate or relax that body, relax that agitation. Tense and release the muscles, get a hug, go for a walk, movement, shake it out, press on something, squeeze a pillow, take slow, quiet, deep breaths. So we're breathing in to a count of four, maybe, in, one, two, three, four, and out to a count of six. One, two, three, four, five, six. Come on, breathe with me now. In, two, three, four, and out, two, three, four, five, six, and one more in. And out. Yeah. And you may notice a subtle shift in your body or your energy right now. The longer exhale than the inhale turns on the parasympathetic nervous system. It literally pumps the brakes on that anxious adrenaline rush that you're getting. So if you don't relax the body first, it's much harder to refocus the mind on rational thinking, more helpful thinking, more realistic thinking. So we do that first, and then we can refocus the mind on, wait a minute, I'm noticing this worry thought. Wait a minute, how realistic is this? What's a reality test? You know, how likely is it that I'm really going to fail this test or that the kids are really going to hate me, or that whatever our worry might be. And you can play with that reality and then hopefully talk to a parent, a trusted friend, a therapist about working through ways to refocus the mind and get a more reality orientation to it. But for today's time that we have, we want to think first step, relax the body. Second step, let's refocus the mind on more helpful, realistic thinking.

When Anxiety Becomes A Disorder

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 18:54

Excellent. Thank you very much. And so just looking at the other side of the spectrum or the continuum, when anxiety becomes severe enough to affect daily functioning, that's when we may consider it more of an anxiety disorder. So if we start noticing that anxiety is so frequent or intense that it interferes with our daily life, we may need to reach out to some additional help.

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 19:21

Yeah. So we want to get the that if it's more intense or persistent, not going away and again, kind of making day-to-day living at home, school, life in any way difficult, then getting professional therapy or therapeutic help can be very useful. We have the different subtypes, I'll mention just briefly, of common childhood anxiety disorders that we deal with, includes generalized anxiety, where they just worry about a whole lot of different things very often. And it's hard to turn the blurry brain off. It's hard to quiet the intrusive thoughts. Some of you out there are listening and shaking your head right now, oh, I know that, right? In either me or my kiddo, then there are absolutely cognitive behavioral therapies, mindfulness-based therapies that can help us retrain our brain and start to quiet that degree of generalized worry about too many things too often. Then there's more specific anxiety difficulties. Separation anxiety is common in kids where if it's disproportionate, right? Preschool, kindergarten, every kid maybe cries a little saying goodbye to mom or dad, you know. But if it's persisting over time and really paralyzing them, then you can get treatment for that. Social anxiety up through the teen years, especially, and often even into adulthood, very common challenge nowadays, especially when we're used to being, as we'll talk about in an upcoming episode, online more. Kids are more and more anxious about facing face-to-face social situations or relationships. They're a little less familiar with it, less skilled with it. So we can help treat social anxieties, more specific phobias. You might be specifically afraid of spiders or swallowing pills and you need to take your medicine, but you're afraid you're gonna choke on it, and then that interferes with your life, all different specific phobias, and all the way to, of course, panic attacks, where you have this severe, intense physiological reaction where it's really hard to breathe and you really feel like you're gonna die, and you don't feel like you can get through it in its extreme. So we help people professionally with their panic disorders as well.

Where To Find Professional Support

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 21:24

Thank you so much. And I know one of the big questions that we always get asked is how do I start reaching out for help, or where do I go to get connected to those professionals?

Speaker 21:34

Yeah. When we're dealing with kids here, my simple two-step response for this is: can't go wrong going to your primary care physician, your pediatrician, or family practice doc and asking them for referrals out, or your school counselor is a great rich resource of maybe where else I could get some help as well. And they'll get you to the professionals, the clinical psychologists, the professional counselors, the psychiatrists, If needed, that are good in your area for treating anxiety with kids.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 22:05

Great. It's always so helpful to know like where are those entry points? And our primary care physicians know our kids. We, you know, they build those relationships over time. Um, and same with our school counselors, and so both great entry points.

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 22:18

And they know the therapists. So they they the entry point or connection start there, absolutely.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 22:25

Wonderful. So thank you so much, Dr. Montminy, for joining us today. As you discussed, anxiety is something we all experience. It's part of how our brains and bodies help protect us and prepare us for challenges. The key isn't eliminating anxiety entirely, it's learning how to understand it and respond to it in healthy ways. When children and adults learn to recognize their feelings, understand their body signals, and practice coping strategies, they become better equipped to navigate life's challenges with resilience. So thank you everyone listening to Ripples of Resilience. This podcast is brought to you by Jana Marie Foundation, where we're dedicated to opening minds and saving lives through conversations that matter, and by A Mindful Village, where Dr. Peter Motminy provides holistic mental health care for kids and their caregivers. If you found this episode helpful, consider sharing it with a friend, educator, or caregiver. Small conversations can create powerful ripples of resilience in our communities. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.