#11 Anxiety Is a Pattern, Not a Personality

You feel it when you're alone. When plans change. When you're overthinking every decision or trying to keep everything “just right.” Anxiety is showing up in all the little moments — but what if it’s not the problem… but a signal?

In this episode, we’ll explore what anxiety is really trying to tell you — and how to finally feel safe in your own body again.

You’ll learn:

• How anxiety is actually a biological response 
• Why your past — not your present — is often what's fueling it
• Three steps to shift the daily patterns that are keeping you anxious 

If anxiety feels like it’s running the show in your life, this episode will help you understand why — and more importantly, what to do about it.

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Thanks for listening!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Do you ever wonder why anxiety seems to be everywhere? Kids are experiencing it. Adults are on meds or taking supplements just to function. Even our pets are anxious. We've normalized it. But underneath it all, something deeper is happening. Hey, it's Jenny and welcome back to the Rebellious Healer. If you're new here, I help women break free from fear-based healing, reconnect with their body's wisdom, and become the healer they've been waiting for. In today's episode, we're pulling back the curtain on anxiety, not just how it shows up, but why it's showing up and what it's really trying to tell you. So if anxiety has been hanging around like an unwanted guest in your life, stick around. This one's for you. So let's start with what anxiety actually is biologically. Because despite how complicated it seems, anxiety is really your body doing exactly what it's designed to do when it senses you're not safe. Your subconscious mind is like your internal control tower. It's constantly scanning your environment and thoughts for signs of danger, and it reacts whether the threat is real or just perceived. Let me tell you a story to illustrate this. Years ago, during my healing journey, I remember standing in the shower and suddenly feeling like I was gonna pass out. My heart was racing, I felt dizzy, short of breath, and completely panicked. I was gripping the sides of the shower thinking, what if I hit my head and die and no one finds me? Now logically, I knew I was just taking a shower, but to my brain and body, that moment felt unsafe. Why? Because over time I developed a subconscious association. Being alone meant I was vulnerable. And vulnerable meant danger. The moment my subconscious picked up that I was alone and in a situation where no one could help me, it sent a signal to my body, we're not safe. And here's what happens next: that chain reaction. The amygdala, your brain's fear center, gets activated. It signals the hypothalamus, which kicks off the stress response, your body releases cortisol and adrenaline, your heart races, your breathing quickens, your muscles tense, digestion slows, all so you can either fight, flee, or freeze. That entire response, it's not broken. It's your biology protecting you. But when you're constantly perceiving your life through the lens of fear and powerlessness, your body gets stuck in that state. I want to explain this using a metaphor that just sums it up really perfectly. Your subconscious is like a smoke detector. It's always scanning for signs of danger. And the moment it picks up the slightest whiff of smoke, which could be a thought, a situation, or even just being alone, it sends the signal, fire, and your body, that's the fire department. Sirens blare, alarm sound, and emergency crews rush in. That's your anxiety, the racing heart, the shallow breath, the tight chest. All systems go. Even when the smoke is just burnt toast. The system isn't broken. It's doing exactly what it's designed to do. But if your smoke detector is too sensitive, programmed from past experiences to go off all the time, your body will keep sounding the alarm, even when you're perfectly safe. And what makes this even trickier is that the subconscious doesn't know the difference between a real threat and a made-up one. If you're imagining a future where something bad happens, your body will still respond as if it's happening right now. To understand why anxiety is showing up in our daily lives today, we have to look at where it's established. From the moment we enter this world, we are completely dependent on others to survive. We cry and someone feeds us. We fall and someone picks us up. We feel scared and someone sues us. Safety begins as something external, something we receive from others. As children, our nervous system learns to associate safety with how others respond to us. If our caregivers were attentive, calm, and predictable, we may have built a foundation of trust. But if they were inconsistent, anxious, emotionally unavailable, or reactive, we learned that safety was uncertain, and we started to look for ways to create it externally. We might have learned to perform well in school so we could hear, I'm proud of you. We might have learned to be the peacemaker at home so we didn't trigger someone else's anger. We might have learned that being quiet and agreeable kept us out of trouble. Or maybe we learned to always achieve, always hustle, always stay a step ahead, because then we felt in control. These were all ways we tried to create a sense of safety, not from within, but by managing the world around us. This wiring doesn't magically disappear when we become adults. In fact, it becomes the blueprint for how we relate to the world. We try to manage how others see us, overachieve to gain approval, control our environment to avoid discomfort, all in an unconscious attempt to feel safe. Imagine a child learning to ride a bike. At first, they need a hand on their back to keep them steady. But what if no one ever removes their hand? What if the child never learns to balance on their own? That's what it's like when we don't learn to build safety internally. We grow up still needing a hand on our back, still believing safety has to come from something or someone outside of us. And this is how we fall into the powerlessness cycle. And it looks like this. Number one, you feel unsafe or uncertain. And unsafe does not have to just mean physical. It's emotionally, meaning I don't feel safe being myself. I don't feel safe speaking up. I don't feel safe in front of other people because I'm gonna be judged. So safety is beyond just the physically being safe. Most of the time, this is emotionally not feeling safe. Number two, you tried to control everything outside of you, your schedule, your diet, how people see you, what they think of you. And number three, but that control is an illusion. It doesn't actually give you safety. It just gives you more things to manage and more things to be anxious about. So now you're not only feeling powerless, but you're also mentally exhausted from trying to control everything. This is the powerlessness cycle. And that's when the anxiety spikes, because your subconscious is screaming, this isn't working. Why? Because to your subconscious, all of this effort, the control, the overthinking, the people pleasing still isn't making you feel safe. So it interprets that as a threat. It's like you're running on a treadmill with a tiger behind you that never goes away. The more you run, the more tired you get, and the more convinced your brain becomes that you're in danger, because if you're this exhausted and still not safe, something must be seriously wrong, right? This is the trap of chronic anxiety. Your subconscious doesn't care whether the threat is real or imagined. If it believes you're not safe and you don't feel safe in your own body, it will keep your nervous system on high alert. That's why it keeps saying, this isn't working. Not because you're doing something wrong, but because the strategy of controlling everything outside of you was never going to work in the first place. All right, so let's go deeper because anxiety isn't something we're born with, it's something we absorb. And often we absorb it without even realizing it. If you were raised in a household where anxiety was the norm, where everything was a potential threat, where the mood shifted quickly, and where fear was the dominant emotion, then your nervous system learned to live on high alert. You watched how the adults around you reacted to stress. You listened to the language they used about the world, about the future, about themselves. And through observation and repetition, those beliefs became a part of you. You didn't choose anxiety, it was most likely passed down, modeled, and rehearsed until it became your default setting. Maybe your mom constantly worried about money, safety, or health. You saw her double check the locks, stock the medicine cabinet with every supplement imaginable, embraced for the worst. Maybe your dad held back emotions, avoided discomfort, or micromanaged everything to maintain control. All of that got downloaded into your subconscious. That's how generational anxiety works. It doesn't need to be taught directly, it just needs to be witnessed repeatedly. Think about the phrases you heard growing up. Be careful, don't do that, you might get hurt. You can't trust anyone. What if something goes wrong? Now think about how those phrases shaped the way you think and feel today. Paula was a client of mine who couldn't be alone without feeling anxious. When we traced it back, we found that as a child, she was surrounded by fear-based thinking from her parents. They were always worried about the worst-case scenario, and she absorbed that as truth. As an adult, her mind was on high alert all the time. What if something happens? What if I can't handle it? What if I fail? She was never in the present moment, always in the future, always in the what if. And that constant future thinking kept her anxious and powerless. And that's the thing. Anxiety becomes the air we breathe. We don't question it because it's all we've ever known. But once you see it for what it is, a pattern you picked up, not a core part of who you are, that's when you can start to change it. So a quick question for you. How did your parents respond to fear or uncertainty? How much of their behavior do you see in yourself today? These are reflective questions that will help you connect the dots to why you have anxiety. Now that we know how anxiety shows up as a sign that we're looking outside of ourselves for safety, let's talk about what it actually means to shift back into your power and what these three steps really involve. Step number one, you need to identify your power leaks. This is about becoming aware of where you're placing your sense of safety in things outside of your control. Maybe it's obsessing over a perfect routine, overexplaining yourself to avoid being misunderstood, or staying constantly busy so you don't have to feel. These are the places where your energy is leaking because you're trying to manage the external to calm your internal. So you need to pay attention to the moments where you feel most anxious. Those are clues pointing to where your power is leaking. Step number two, you need to identify what's driving the leaks. Before you can truly shift your power back inward, you have to get curious about what's created the leaks in the first place. The question isn't just where your power is going, it's why it's going there. What beliefs are underneath the actions that make you feel anxious or powerless? If you're obsessing over being perfect, what's driving that? Is it a fear of failure, a fear of being judged? Ask yourself, where did I learn that making a mistake means I'm not good enough? These beliefs didn't just show up one day. Most of them were formed in childhood based on experiences or perceptions you had long before you had the maturity to process them. Maybe you were ashamed for getting something wrong. Maybe love felt conditional. Maybe success was the only way you received praise. The subconscious doesn't care if those beliefs are outdated. It just runs what it knows. But as an adult, you have the power to question it, to ask, does this belief still serve me? Or is it keeping me in fear? Shifting these beliefs isn't about ignoring them, it's about changing the meaning you've assigned to them. If failure meant rejection as a child, you get to redefine it now as growth, as resilience, as part of becoming the version of you who can handle anything. And that rejection that you felt from your parents, that was their limitations. And you don't need to take that on anymore. This step is the foundation for building true internal safety. Because once you uncover the root, the belief behind the fear, because the fear is just the surface external thing that we see, but there's something underneath that fear, and it's a belief that is driving it. You can start responding differently once you understand what that belief is. Not from survival, but from trust. Step three is where you challenge the control illusion. This is where the real empowerment begins. When you feel anxiety creeping in, ask yourself, what am I trying to control now? And what would it look like to surrender to this instead? Most of our anxiety is rooted in trying to micromanage the future. But the truth is the future isn't controllable. What is within your control is how you respond in the present moment. And sometimes that means choosing to let go, trusting yourself, and learning to feel safe even when the outcome is unknown. This isn't about doing these steps perfectly. It's about practice. It's about showing up for yourself in small moments again and again until your body starts to believe I don't need the outside world to be perfect in order to feel safe. I can create that safety within myself. Anxiety isn't the problem, it's a signal. A signal that you've been living in fear, disconnected from your power, and trained to look outside yourself for safety. But that stops now. This is how you stop letting anxiety control you and start leading your healing like you were meant to. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next time.