Nothing is wrong, but dang!
You're feeling anxious.
So you spend time trying to figure out what caused it,
and what you need to do to make it stop already.
And the more you think,
the more anxious you feel.
Check out Episode 71 to learn how you can break the
thinking and feeling cycle of anxiety and get back to living your life.
Help others find this resource so they can calm, confident, and have more fun by leaving a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review wherever you listen.
Find me on Instagram
Find me on Facebook
Schedule your consultation and let's talk coaching!
Thanks for listening!
Nothing is wrong, but dang!
You're feeling anxious.
So you spend time trying to figure out what caused it,
and what you need to do to make it stop already.
And the more you think,
the more anxious you feel.
Check out Episode 71 to learn how you can break the
thinking and feeling cycle of anxiety and get back to living your life.
Help others find this resource so they can calm, confident, and have more fun by leaving a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review wherever you listen.
Find me on Instagram
Find me on Facebook
Schedule your consultation and let's talk coaching!
Thanks for listening!
Welcome to the More Than Anxiety podcast. I'm Megan Devito and I'm the Life Coach for stressed out and anxious women who want more out of life. I'm here to help you create a life you love to live, where anxiety isn't holding you back. Get ready for a lighthearted approach to managing anxiety through actionable steps, a lot of truth, talk and inspiration to take action so you walk away feeling confident, calm and ready to live. Let's get to it. Welcome to Episode 71. Happy New Year.
Megan Devito:I am recording this on January 1st of 2024. I can't believe we're here. I have given so much thought about like in the last couple of weeks, about 2023, all of these lessons that I've learned about anxiety, and about myself, and about my life and where I am going, that here I am on the very first day of 2024 and honestly, I kind of feel like very excited for what's going to happen this year, but also kind of, in this place of now, what? So I'm recording this episode thinking about all the things that I've learned and the past year, about you guys as listeners, and as about you know about my clients and what they're experiencing and what they're going through and really what my 2023 was like, which, I have to be honest, it was a roller coaster. I had some of the biggest best adventures with my kids, big vacations and big fun things that I've been wanting to do for a long time, and I've had a lot of really stressful and scary things also happening in my life that brought a lot of anxiety back to the surface for me. So really putting all of the things I use with my coaching clients into practice in my own life and learning how to navigate through those ups and downs which are totally normal when you're anxious, and it just brought me full circle back to this idea of me asking the question oh my gosh, why am I not past this? Why am I so anxious? And realizing that that's life. That's really what recovery is about and that's what so many of you get stuck in sometimes when you've had these periods where you feel really, really good - and for me it was seven or eight years of virtually, I mean very little anxiety in the sense of what I would say that most of my anxiety was about for so many years, and then all of a sudden just getting slammed with with just some really old triggers and really old, just some things that were really traumatic in my past. That kind of came back to the surface for me. So I wanted to bring you this episode this week to answer the question why am I so anxious again?
Megan Devito:And just to let you know that here I am on January 1st, really on the other side and back to, feeling the way I felt last year on January 1st, which is so much better than how I felt in, say, April or July or September, like different points in the year, when things just got pretty overwhelming and really where I was like, okay, I'm practicing, I can make it through, never, ever getting as low as I had in the past, but still feeling it. So if that sounds like you, you're not alone. That's pretty normal. That's what happens when you have a lot of stress in your life. Sometimes, when we're holding on to it a little too tight, we end up in that place. So if you notice that you feel anxious and you don't know why, because nothing is wrong, because really nothing was actually wrong this year; there were things that my brain was telling me were wrong, or things that I was afraid were wrong, or things that I was afraid would be wrong in the future, but nothing was actually wrong.
Megan Devito:So if you feel anxious and you've felt really good for a while, or you're suddenly anxious for the first time ever and you're like what is happening? It's okay, we're gonna talk about it in this episode. So one of the things you might notice is that you start to think and try and figure out why do I feel this way? And, depending on what comes first for you, it might be that something happened in your life, there was a circumstance, whatever that is and it caused you to feel anxious inside your body, which is really what anxiety is. It's a feeling in your nervous system that can cause you to have all kinds of different symptoms, whether it's a racing heart or feeling like you can't catch your breath, maybe feeling like you're shaky or you're spacey all those different symptoms. So that could happen. You could have something like an outside circumstance that makes you feel that way, or you might just notice that something triggered you that maybe your brain didn't catch, and you notice that your body feels that way and it makes you start to think. Either way, for me it doesn't matter. It's kind of the chicken and the egg syndrome, right, which came first, the chicken or the egg it? For me it doesn't really matter, because the truth is, you're gonna handle it the same way.
Megan Devito:We're going to get to this point where we say, okay, I need to know how I feel. I feel anxious. And when I feel anxious, your brain starts to figure out. You know, my brain says, okay, I have to figure out what's actually wrong, and this is what you really want to notice. What you probably do when you notice that you feel anxious is start to think. And it might be, I think this thing is wrong with me. I think these people thought that I was ridiculous in this meeting I was in today. I think these people don't know what I'm talking about. I think I have something really wrong with my health, whatever that thought is. So maybe you think that first and then you feel anxious, or you feel anxious, and you start to create stories. But the more you feel and the more you think to figure it out, the more anxious you become. And when that happens, you get stuck in this cycle of thinking and feeling, because your brain's job is to think.
Megan Devito:Now, one of the things that you need to know is that, even though we might have these different thoughts or these different feelings inside your body, your memories are also held in your body. For a really long time we thought that memories were only stored in your brain, and that's just not true. We're finding out more and more that muscles and organs hold onto memories. Maybe you've heard these stories about people who've had organ transplants Like maybe somebody's heart or they got somebody's I don't know, maybe even corneas or something like that, and all of a sudden they have memories that aren't theirs. They belonged to the person who maybe donated that organ which sounds bananas, doesn't it Like? I just I got a lobe of this person's liver and all of a sudden I've got this memory of from their past. And they actually have studies where people will develop different tastes for different types of music or different foods, or they'll have a memory that doesn't actually coincide with their life but with their donor's life. So we're learning more and more that those memories are actually held inside ourselves.
Megan Devito:So when you really get to know your body and you know that our memories are held inside of our bodies, then you can start to know where and how your body feels when you're anxious, as soon as you notice that feeling. That is step one to really untieing all of those anxious feelings is getting to know your body, whether you have your own liver or somebody else's. You have to get to know that feeling and just say, oh, as soon as I feel this way, I know exactly what it is. I feel anxious. Because the truth is that nobody ever had anything bad happen from feeling anxious, it's just a memory that's stored in your body. It's really uncomfortable and definitely it's not something that you want to experience, but you get to use it as an alarm to tell you pause, just stop right there. My body feels this way. I know that it's anxiety. I know that I have these symptoms. I know what they are.
Megan Devito:I also might notice that my brain is questioning what's going on and starting to think. This is your brain's job. It's just like your heart. You can't tell your heart okay, now stop beating for a little bit. That's not going to happen. Your brain is going to think. This is, you might notice this when you meditate, that the really the job meditation is to be able to slow those thoughts and to let them pass through because they don't mean anything. So when you notice that you feel anxious, you also have to realize that this isn't the alarm that is telling me to stop paying attention to my thoughts, or to stop thinking or noticing those thoughts, and they're going to be loud, right? Anxious thoughts are loud because they're scary, they're causing you to feel more anxious, they're making you think you have to do something.
Megan Devito:But when you can say this is how my body feels and now my brain is thinking about it, then you can just go back to that feeling inside of your body, which is uncomfortable and it's definitely a feeling that you don't want to feel. But it's also not something that you have to figure out because it's familiar. Your thoughts could change a million times, but the way your body feels is usually something that, when I've talked with clients, they can say oh yeah, I know what. I'm anxious because my hands start to shake. Or I know when I'm anxious because my throat feels tight. Or I know when I'm anxious because everything looks funny or cloudy or blurry, whatever it is. For you that's familiar and it might scare you, but you really do know what it is. So you get to say I feel this way, I don't need to figure anything out. This is anxiety. It's going to make me try to figure out things, so you just need to attend to it, like you would if you had a headache or if you were thirsty.
Megan Devito:So some of the things you might want to do when you notice that you feel anxious is start paying attention to your breath. Now I'm going to tell you a few suggestions here, and I'm not saying that all of these work for everybody or what exactly will work best for you. That's one of the things that we figure out when I work with somebody in coaching is what works best for you because some people will say that breathing thing doesn't help me that much. That's okay. There's lots of other things we can figure out, but one of the things you could figure out is breathing. There's some really simple ways to use breathing to flip the switch on your nervous system. One of those ways is just exhaling a lot more than you inhale. When you're anxious, you probably hold your breath. You probably don't breathe deeply. So paying attention to your breath could be a great way to say oh, there's that feeling. It's time for me to start doing this breathing method that I learned.
Megan Devito:Another thing you can do is you can get up and dance, you can turn on music or you can sing a song in your head. It doesn't matter. But moving your body moves that energy through and anxiety is just a lot of stuck energy in your nervous system, and when you dance, you're not going to feel as anxious. So you could breathe, you could dance. Another thing you can do is hum, and yes, this is just like when you picture a Tibetan monk on the side of a mountain and they're ohming and they're ohm. When you make a humming sound in your throat, it massages your vagus nerve, and I'll talk more about the vagus nerve in the next couple of weeks. But when you massage that vagus nerve, the vagus nerve is actually a nerve that goes from your brain all the way down into your digestive system. It's a regulatory nerve and your gut is super important when you feel anxious. So when you massage that nerve, you are actually creating a clearer path for all of that serotonin that gets absorbed inside of your intestines to communicate to your brain. That's a totally different topic, but I promise we'll talk about it soon.
Megan Devito:Another thing you can do when you notice that you feel anxious instead of thinking is Journal. If you don't have a journal, I'm gonna challenge you this year to get one and to just start simply maybe writing gratitude, something that you're grateful for, something that you want, something that went well. You can also dump all of those anxious thoughts, as long as you're not dwelling on them and buying into them. If you're getting them out of your head and writing them in those journals, it's a great way to get those thoughts out of your head so you could journal, these are the things that I know that are true. These are the things that are going well for me. These are the things that I'm grateful for. These are the thoughts that I'm having right now that make me feel anxious, and you might even be able to come up with some counter thoughts like, but I know this isn't true because I've thought this before and I'm still alive. Or I know this isn't true because I went back to work the next day and I didn't get fired. Whatever your thoughts are, you might be able to counteract them if you've got yourself on a pretty like, you've lowered that anxiety enough, and that really happens through practicing with, you know, starting with gratitude, start with what's working, start with just noticing how your hand feels when you write, and all of those things bring you back into the present moment.
Megan Devito:Something else that really helps and I love this is to do something creative for me. When I feel anxious. I can grab paper and my paint and watercolor paint, just random stuff, even if I just paint the same thing over and over again. You can use a coloring book. Those adult coloring books are no joke, you guys; they make them for a reason. You could cut out snowflakes, you could tie dye a t-shirt, you could whatever it is that you. Crocheting is magic. I'm not even kidding that repetitive stitch thing. Crocheting, even if you just make a really really long line of single chains and tear it apart, it will calm your anxiety right down.
Megan Devito:And another really really great thing that I think is so powerful and I wish everybody would make this part of 2024 is to go outside, be in nature, and you get a barefoot bonus. If you can take your shoes off and get your feet in the dirt, even in the frozen dirt, maybe even in the snow for a minute, even in the like really cold, icky mud, if you can get your feet in the dirt and just stand there for 30 seconds to a minute, it levels out the energy in your body. This is grounding. It is so powerful. So the more you can be outside and if it's really cold and you don't want to go barefoot, I get it like I'm a weenie. I hate it when it's cold. But you know, put on a hat and a coat and go outside in the winter and look up at the sky, walk in the trees, just smell the air and let it be in nature. That's gonna ground you and it's gonna bring you back to center and it's gonna be so helpful to help calm you down.
Megan Devito:And when you notice in this process that you're starting to think again so whether you're breathing or dancing or humming or journaling or doing something creative, or you're outside and you notice your brain starts to go back you want to remind yourself that the thoughts that you're thinking are not truths. They're just thoughts and they do not require your attention. Remember, you think around 60,000 different thoughts a day and about 98% of them are total garbage. So, just especially when you're anxious, just know that your brain is trying to protect you from something that's not really dangerous. It's just a feeling and your brain is only making up stories. So when you can cut off that cycle of think and feel and think of feel, you start to feel less anxious for longer periods of time, you'll notice like, oh, I wasn't as anxious for quite as long and you're gonna have a longer gap before you notice that you start to feel anxious again.
Megan Devito:So if you're chronically anxious all day long, you might get you know, maybe it starts small, maybe it's an extra hour or two or even an extra day and it builds up. You're like you know what? I haven't been anxious for a few days and when I was anxious, it didn't last very long. You're gonna notice that those spans of time stretch to stretched out and you get to know yourself better Every single time that you have to practice. So you get to learn to trust yourself and you start to grow your confidence like, oh, I've already been through this, I can do this again. This was really my model for model for 2023, when I thought, oh, my gosh, this is insane and I've already done this, I can do this again, which got me to where I was to have an amazing like the second half of November, December, and then all of those weeks in between where I'm like I feel really good, and then I would just get bumped again. I turned 48 this year, so I blamed this on my hormones, so so much, but also there were some big things going on.
Megan Devito:So another thing that happens is, as your confidence grows, you learn that your thoughts aren't necessarily true and they don't mean anything at all. So you start venturing out and doing the things that make you feel anxious maybe right now and anxiety starts to lose its power to control you. So you have more freedom to go live your life even when you feel anxious, and you might even start using that feeling as a signal to do the things that make you feel anxious, because you know that you've already proven yourself right and your anxiety wrong so many times. It kind of gets to be a game of like dare. Like a game of dare with no truth maybe truth or dare. So I think I used that on an episode not too long ago or maybe it was in an email where I talked about truth or dare and how you could play that with your anxiety. So this is how I can help you do this.
Megan Devito:What you can do is you can schedule a consultation call with me, and the consultation call is really about understanding what's going on in your body, to help you figure out some of the triggers or thoughts that you might see now that are causing you to feel and stay anxious. We're just going to find that loop in that consultation call. So you'll find what you're doing now to stop feeling anxious as well. So these are the things that I do to try and not feel this way, and sometimes those things might be making you feel worse or they might be keeping you stuck in that cycle. We'll find those on the consultation call and you get to come up, or we get to come up together, with a first step for you to break that cycle of thinking and to learn to calm your body down using some technique that will work for you. Let's find what works for you so that you don't feel as anxious as often. And we'll also talk about what coaching looks like and whether you and I are a good match. And if we are, you can decide whether or not it's the right time for you to get started coaching or not.
Megan Devito:And it's really easy to do. All you have to do to schedule that consultation call is go to the show notes or you can go to my website. It's just my name, megandevito. com, and you click the link that takes you to my calendar. You choose a time that works for you and for me, and then you give me a call. It's super duper simple. So if you're wondering why am I so anxious? What the heck is going on, it's okay. We have all been there.
Megan Devito:2023 was a rocky one for a lot of people and we're on the other side now. It has been a whole day. It's been a great day. I just had my mom's birthday tonight with my dad and my family, and I am looking forward to a great year for me, but also for you, because you get to decide how to get there. So happy New Year to you.
Megan Devito:Even if you're listening in May. You can start your New Year any time You're listening to this episode, because really we don't need a new calendar or a ball to drop to tell us that we have a new beginning. All right, I hope this was helpful to you and if I don't talk to you on a phone call, I will be back next week. Take care. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the More Than Anxiety podcast. Before you go, be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find this resource as well. And, of course, if you're ready to feel more confident, please leave a comment. To feel more confident, have more energy, more confidence and a lot more fun, you can go to the show notes click the link and talk to me about coaching. See you soon.