361 ~ Breaking The Anxiety Loop

If you keep getting stuck in anxious thought spirals... this episode was made for you 🪬

you are not your anxiety

love, Madison Mindset x

Chapters

• 0:18 Welcome And Today’s Focus
• 1:12 Guided Breathing To Reset
• 2:42 Why Anxiety Is A Healthy Signal
• 4:26 Step 1: Ground With Touch
• 5:47 Step 2: Slow, Nasal Breathing
• 6:38 Step 3: Use Peripheral Vision
• 7:48 Step 4: Soften Body Tension
• 8:29 Insert A Pause, Not Suppression
• 8:29 AD: Yogi Peace Club
• 9:30 Reframe Anxiety As A Messenger
• 10:47 Practical Self-Talk And Closure
• 11:07 Free Coaching Call Invitation

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:18

Hello, magical human. Welcome back to Madison Mindset Podcast. My name is Madison. I am a yoga teacher, a mindset and spirituality coach, and a complete lover of helping people find peace and getting out of anxiety, which happens to be the topic for this podcast episode. Today we are looking at how to get out of the loop of anxiety. So imagining anxiety as a bit of a spiral, it starts with one thought and it just keeps going, it keeps going thought after thought after thought, response after sponsor after response, and it just keeps going. And you just end up in this loop and it's quite hard to get out of. I have struggled with that for a long time. Anxiety is my jam. We're good friends, been hanging out for a long time. So I've been working on how to get out of these anxious loops. And this practice today is going to help you learn how to break that anxious cycle, spiral, whatever you want to call it. To begin this episode, we're going to take a moment to take a few mindful breaths. If you are not driving and you are safe to do so, you might like to pause and close your eyes and maybe place a hand on your heart, hand on the belly. If you are driving or you're working or something, just follow along the conscious breaths, keeping your eyes open, keep yourself safe. Taking a moment, exhale, inhale deeply through the nose. Exhale completely through the nose. Inhale deeply through the nose. Notice how different that is now. Such a simple practice. Just a couple of breaths. A couple of breaths, and it changes your entire energy. So let's jump in. I'm going to walk you through what anxiety is first and a four-step process to help you break out of the anxious loop. Anxiety is healthy. Okay, we're going to go right there and say anxiety is healthy. Anxiety has always been around. It is a response in your body, it is a warning signal. It is a red light flashing. It is something's wrong. You might need to run. You might need to escape. You might need to, you know, watch out for your physical safety. It is looking to protect you, to keep you alive. So when we were living very naturally among nature, this was a very healthy response. Run when you need to run, hide when you need to hide, climb when you need to climb. You know, it kept you alive. These days, because we're living so out of sync with nature and the way that we're supposed to be living, that anxiety trigger is getting triggered all the time because of stress. The world that we're living in is thriving off stress, stress about work, deadlines, money, all kinds of things. These are not natural stresses. Our body doesn't know how to process them. And to your brain, all of those stresses that are not technically life-threatening seem life-threatening. So of course, your anxiety button is going off. It's going off. And so people are always anxious. And now we have people who literally refer to themselves as an anxious person. I was one of them. Stop saying that. You're not an anxious person. Your button's just being pushed, rightfully so. Look at the world that we're in. We can't change the world that we're in right now. So we need to find better ways of adapting and of reprogramming ourselves to react in life and be in life in a much healthier way. So let's go through a four-step process to get out of an anxious spiral. Let's say that you are in an anxious spiral. Maybe you've had one thought and now you're in this loop of negative thinking and it's overwhelming, it's stressful, it's causing all kinds of responses in the body. The first thing I want you to do is focus on touch. When you're in an anxious spiral, all of your energy goes up into your head and you're just thinking, thinking. Clogs are turning, turning, right? You're all very much out of the body and up in the head. So focus on physical touch with your own self. Okay. So for me, depending on the environment, this can look like stroking your legs, stroking your arms. Sometimes even just having your arms by your side and just scratching your thigh or your outer hip or just scratching your lower back or tapping. Any kind of tapping can help. You could go all the way down your head with your hands, all the way down. I'm doing this in the video version if you're not watching, but all the way down your head, just kind of brushing the energy down. You could give yourself a little face massage or a little bit of a squeeze. You know, when you're, you know, maybe up in your head and someone squeezes your arm and kind of grounds you and brings you back to earth. That's what you're doing for yourself. You're just giving yourself a little, come on, back to the body, back to the body. And that can make a massive difference. So go into physical touch with your own self. That will bring you out of your head and down into your body. Step number two is to breathe. When you're anxious, one or two things happen. Either your breathing stops altogether, you're holding your breath, or your breathing goes super, super fast. Very, very rapid, stressful, sympathetic, right? Response is going to bring you into fight or flight mode because that's what anxiety is supposed to do. It's supposed to help you stay alive, right? So of course, you're going to go into this fight or flight mode. So what you're going to do is deepen your breath, just like we did in the beginning, in and out through the nose, long, smooth breaths. And you can even place your hands on your body so you've got the touch and you've got the breath as well. I apologize, the lighting's kind of bad on this video. It was good, and then a massive storm has just come over. So everything's gone dark and my window's gone dark. But we're just going to roll with it because that's what everything's about, right? Let's just keep going. Number three, eyes. Focus on what you can see. And something I learned recently was to focus on peripheral vision. So this is something my mom taught me. She's incredibly, incredibly intelligent. She's a movement and postural neurologist. So she goes, she's got a really lot of really cool tips and tricks for this kind of thing. We're talking about presence, and she said, focus on your peripheral vision. So if you're not sure what peripheral vision is, if you're looking at me right now, directly looking at me, I'm focused in your vision. Everything around me and everything outside your screen and everything beyond that is in your peripheral vision. You can still see it, but you're not looking at it. Right. So that is your peripheral vision, not what you're looking at, but what you can see around what you're looking at. So focus on something. You know, look at whatever, look at a picture on the wall, something. And then instead of really looking at that, focus on the peripheral vision. Don't turn your eyes. You're not turning your eyes, otherwise that's what you're focusing on. Right. So you're not going to turn your eyes, but you're going to look straight ahead and then focus on what you can see around you. That is incredibly grounding and brings you right into the present. Very powerful for the brain. Keep that trick in your pocket. And number four, soften everything. A response that anxiety brings up in the body is stiff, stiffness, this tension, stress, right? Your body goes on red alert and everything tenses up. If you choose to relax, that can help the mind relax. So notice all of these tips and tricks have nothing to do with the mind. They're to do with the body. Because if you can change the way the body is responding and the way the body is feeling, you can interrupt an anxious spiral or a loop. You can interrupt that. Yes, what we're looking to do is not stop the anxiety. We're looking to put a pause in there. We're looking to break the cycle so that we can introduce another thought. Hello, Magical Human. We're taking a pause for a moment so I can tell you about my favorite yoga brand ever. Yogi Peace Club has been my favorite brand to buy yoga clothes from, to buy mats from. We bought my entire class set of yoga mats from Yogi Peace Club. They are beautiful. The clothes are incredible. The mats are the best mats you can buy. They are literally my favorite, and the people who work there are absolutely gorgeous. So I have partnered with them to be able to bring you a sneaky discount code. You can go over to Yogi Peace Club and get yourself or someone you love a beautiful yoga mat. You can get yourself a beautiful piece of clothing. You can get yourself a yoga prop, like a block or a strap, and you can really set up your space and your body for a beautiful practice. I'll put the link in the show notes below. Go down there, click on the link, go and see what you like, and then use the code MadisonM A D I S O N 10 at checkout for a discount from me to you. Let's get back to it. A final step I want to give you, because we spoke in the beginning that anxiety is not a bad thing. It's actually a natural response. It's a healthy response. And it's coming up. Wow, I don't know if you heard that. Massive thunder. It's a healthy response. The reason it's coming up is because there is something triggering and pressing that anxiety button in your life. So it's not a bad thing. We're not going to push it away. Why has anxiety come up for you? Ask yourself, what is anxiety trying to protect me from? What is anxiety trying to protect me from? What is it? If you ask yourself that, instead of trying to push the anxiety away, you can't push the red button away. But you can ask yourself, why are you here? Why are you here? What are you trying to warn me about? What are you trying to protect me from? It might be you've got a bill coming. And if that's the case, it's not a life or death matter. You've got it. You say to anxiety, thank you for the warning, I'll handle it from here. Soften. Repeat the four steps we did in the beginning. If you can do that and go, you know what, I really don't, this is not a life or death situation. I don't need to run. I don't need to flee. I don't need to do any of that. So thank you for the warning, anxiety. I've got this from here. If you can take the lessons and the messages that anxiety is trying to point out to you, anxiety has permission to soften and to calm down. It doesn't feel the need to warn you all the time because you're listening. Thank you so much for being here, Magical Human. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you got something out of it. And I hope that you can take these steps into your life and allow it to help you with your anxiety. If you were really struggling with anxiety in your life, it's coming up daily, it's really interrupting your day. You spend most of your day up in your head or dealing with unhealthy coping mechanisms like scrolling or procrastination or whatever it is for you. I want you to go down below and book yourself a free 30-minute anxiety coaching call with me. This call is for people who struggle with anxiety and are looking to change the way their mind is functioning. You're looking to get out of anxiety into and to step into a more abundant mindset. If that is you, I want you to go below and book yourself that call. For a select few people I speak to, I will be offering a place in my new program, Anxious to Abundant. This is a program that is going to take you from an anxious state of being to an abundant state of being to change the way you're programmed, to deal with this life so that you can actually enjoy your life with peace and joy and make the moves you want to make. I have dealt with anxiety my entire life. This has been my mission. Anxiety is the reason I started yoga. It's the reason I started this podcast. It's the reason I started self-growth. I needed something to help myself. And now I've collected so many tools, so many beautiful practices that help me. I want to help you as well. So if you are in that same boat, if you understand where I'm coming from, go and book yourself a free 30-minute call. I'm going to do everything I can to really help you in that 30 minutes. And again, for the select few people that I vibe with that it suits, you're going to work with me for seven months and potentially beyond to get out of that anxious state. Go down below, book yourself a call. I can't wait to meet you. Have a beautiful day. I'll see you in the next episode.