Anxiety Through a Nervous System Lens (Part 1)

Anxiety Mini Series Part 1

I mismanaged my anxiety for SO LONG because I didn’t understand it. Understanding anxiety through a nervous system lens was the turning point in my healing journey where I went from feeling a lot of inadequacy, shame, and lack of control – to a softer place of self-compassion, personal responsibility and hope in healing. I want to help you understand anxiety in a new way that gives you those things too and helps you create a more strategic path towards healing. Hit play to learn more!

3 Takeaways:

1. Reframe: Anxiety is a Feeling Problem, Not a Thinking Problem The #1 reason people struggle to heal anxiety is because mainstream approaches focus on thoughts and cognition. But anxiety originates in your body as an alarm state. Healing happens when you turn toward that alarm and learn to work with it, not when you try to think your way out of it.
2. Understand Your Childhood Programming Most of the alarm you feel today is based on stored stress energy from childhood experiences. Since 80% of your brain developed by age five, your current anxiety patterns often reflect that young child’s understanding of safety and threat. This isn’t your fault—it’s how nervous systems work.
3. Trust That Anxiety Changes Your Physiology Anxiety creates measurable changes in your heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing. This means there are tangible, research-backed tools that can influence these systems to calm the alarm. This is root-cause healing, not just symptom management.

CLICK HERE for the full show notes, resources, and 3 tangible takeaways!

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Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

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Transcript

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00:00

Welcome to regulate, and rewire and anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong. And I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life.

00:23

Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in. Hey, everyone, today we are going to dive into all things anxiety. And today, it's just part one of a three part anxiety mini series that we will cover today and in our next two podcast episodes. So today we're going to talk about how to understand anxiety through a nervous system lens. In part two, I'm going to help you make it personal by exploring your unique anxiety blueprint and more about what that even means. And in part three is where we'll take a deep dive into how to actually regulate your nervous system when you're feeling anxious. And this is where I'll introduce some of the tangible tools that you can use in moments of activation and tangible tools, and lifestyle practices that actually heal anxiety. 

01:11

So I mismanaged my anxiety for so long, because I didn't understand it, I floundered in my healing, because I was told things like, this is just the way that I am, my brain just works this way, I was born with anxiety, and we just have to manage it my whole life. And I heard these things from friends, family, but also doctors and psychiatrists. And I have come to learn that that's not true, I now live a life on the other side of anxiety. And if I can do it, I know that you can, too. But in my healing journey, because I didn't really understand what anxiety was and where it was rooted. I didn't have a clear roadmap towards healing. 

01:51

And so understanding anxiety through this nervous system lens, what I hope to do for you here today was the turning point in my healing journey. And this was also where I shifted from feeling so overwhelmed, inadequate shame, I felt this lack of control. And I don't know how to better say it than this perspective. And this understanding led to a much softer place to feel my healing journey, a place of self compassion, personal responsibility, and ultimately hope that I could actually heal that life didn't always have to look or feel like this. 

02:28

And so I really want to help you understand anxiety in this new way, that gives you those things to to create a more hopeful and strategic path towards, towards healing. And before I dive into the kind of nuts and bolts of today's conversation, I want to start with a gentle invitation for you to just for the short time together to set aside what you think you know, about anxiety. Maybe it's what you've been told by friends, or family, even doctors, other practitioners you've read on the internet. And you can pick up all of those beliefs and all that information back up at the end of this episode. But I want to gently invite you to make space for our conversation today for what might be for some of you a totally new way of understanding anxiety. 

03:19

So let's for a minute, assume that you're not broken, that you did not come just anxiously hardwired at birth, and that what you're calling anxiety might actually have or, or did have, at some point, a very important function. So again, let's assume for a minute, that anxiety isn't the cause of all your problems. But that anxiety might actually be the result of how you have needed to adapt to get your needs met. And as far as your nervous system is concerned, it might be the way that you need to operate in the world to survive. So your anxiety today, it is not some hardline diagnosis that you simply have to manage for the rest of your life. It is your nervous system stuck in a state of survival mode based on a very specific combination of your past lived experience and your current life circumstances. And we'll take a deeper dive in a little bit into what I mean by that. But to kind of set the stage and help you understand anxiety in the context of your nervous system. I'm going to reference the nervous system ladder again and go over that briefly. 

04:27

So if this is the first time you're hearing me talk about this, the nervous system ladder is based on polyvagal theory. And in my opinion, it's one of the best maps we currently have for understanding how the nervous system is impacted by our everyday thoughts and actions, behaviors, stressors, etc. So visually in your mind, imagine a ladder. I'll also just attach the visual in the shownotes as well. But imagine there's a ladder that has three different sections. And each one of those sections represents our three main nervous system states. So that top section is our green zone. It's a green box. And that represents our state of regulation. So this is where we feel good, we're pretty calm or present, we feel like we have coping tools to manage life regulated, things feel good, then below that is our state of sympathetic activation. And underneath that on the ladder is a state of shutdown. So, on this ladder, I want you to Again, imagine that you're standing at the top of this ladder holding a bucket. And that bucket represents your nervous system. So when the load on that bucket when the load on your nervous system is light, when there aren't a ton of stressors, there aren't a ton of triggers, you are at the top of that ladder in that green zone, able to stay in this place of regulation. Now, as you experience real or perceived stressors throughout your life, or throughout your day, water or weight gets added to this bucket representing the stress load that gets added to your nervous system. And as that bucket gets heavier and heavier, it pushes you further and further down that nervous system ladder first into that state of activation. This is that yellow zone, this is your fight or flight survival response. And this is where anxiety lives. So anytime that you are feeling anxious your nervous system is in a sympathetic activated state. 

06:18

You can think about this, just like you I often refer to it as activation emits a state of alarm. It is a mobilized state, we feel this in our body, right? We feel our heart racing, our muscles get tense, we breathe faster. We also see this reflected in our mind with our spiraling thoughts constantly jumping to worst case scenario trying to predict things and worst case scenario to be prepared hyper vigilance. And so we see both this body based, and this mind based reaction to us being in this activated state. And you can even think about this state like pushing the gas pedal on a car, right? It's all about Go, go, go. 

07:00

Now, understanding that there is both kind of this physiological experience this experience in our body when we're in this state. And also that translates to a different mindset, right? Our thoughts are spiraling, etc. This feels like a great point to have the conversation around most people are where most people and myself included, for so long, have had anxiety wrong. 

07:25

So most people assume or associate anxiety as this mind based thinking problem, when really, it is a state of alarm or activation that originates in the body, often with roots in our childhood. And before you roll your eyes, at a mention of your childhood. Again, we'll get to that in a little bit. But just really understanding that anxiety. activation is a body based function first, it is a state of alarm in your body. And I will use the words alarm and activation anxiety pretty interchangeably throughout this conversation, especially for those of you who have associated the word anxiety with spiraling thoughts in a very mind based experience for so long, it may be helpful to just give you some new terminology, some new words, to bring you into awareness and conversation with that the physiological part of anxiety, this body based experience that happens as well. 

08:23

So in in helping illustrate how it first starts in the body and then becomes a mind state, you might have heard the phrase that your state determines your story. And if you haven't, you'll hear more from him many times. But essentially what this means is that the state of your nervous system, what you're feeling in your body, that green, yellow or red zone, sets the stage and determines the story in your mind the thoughts that you think about any situation in your life. 

08:51

So the example that I use most often for this is to imagine that you have a friend who always texts you back pretty quickly. But this time, it's been hours. So on a day when you're feeling anxious, your brain is probably going to offer up the story that they're mad at you or they've been in an accident, something's gone wrong. Did you say something wrong? You're gonna reread that text a bunch of times. If this situation happens on a day when you're feeling more shut down or depressed, your brain may offer you the story that they don't care about you that you don't matter. What's the point even reaching out, right versus a day when you feel pretty regulated or connected with yourself. Your brain may offer the story of they're probably busy to no big deal. If I don't hear from them. I'll call them in an hour. 

09:30

And so we've all experienced to some level all of these days. And what was happening didn't determine how we felt or we thought about it, the state that our nervous system was in debt. Our nervous system state sets the stage for what goes on in our mind and how we feel. So just kind of summarize that just bringing it together is this that thoughts are not the root cause of anxiety. The root of anxiety is a felt alarm in the body. Thoughts are the best I product thoughts are a symptom of that alarm. 

10:04

And for those of you who are maybe a little hung up on this, because thoughts are such a huge part of how anxiety shows up for you, let's talk about how and why spiraling thoughts come so quickly, and are often associated as what we experience as anxiety. 

10:22

So when the amygdala This is the part of our brain that is involved in every fear reaction that we have, when our nervous system, right, our nervous system scans our environment, and it's constantly trying to pick up for danger or safety cues, when it registers anything in our external or our internal environment, that could be threatening, the amygdala sounds the alarm. So the amygdala has this superhighway down the brainstem that controls your body. So the minute a threat is detected, our blood pressure increases heart rate increases respiration, and everything that goes with that. So we get this immediate physiological change that is mostly motivated by this part of our brain called the amygdala, that brings us into the sympathetic state of alarm. So all of a sudden, then the left hemisphere of our brain registers this physiological change in our body, this alarm in our body, and the left hemisphere of our brain goes, Oh, my gosh, we're alarmed, we're alarmed right now what do we have to be alarmed about what's going on around us. And so what happens is, when we feel the alarm in our body, we go up in our head, to escape it, because it's uncomfortable, and to try to figure it out. So we have again, this left hemisphere fixation on figuring out what's creating the problem. And again, this is when you're not going to solve anxiety, as an overthinking problem with more thinking. 

11:45

So you feel this alarm in your body. And as soon as your body starts to shift into the state, the left hemisphere of your brain has to do something about it, it has to make up worries or thoughts that are consistent with the state of alarm. And so you start stacking these stories, and the which creates more worry, it creates more alarm in your body, it creates more worry in your brain, which causes more alarm in your body. And this is what gets us stuck in the anxiety cycle. 

12:10

So for example, let's say that you are just pouring your cup of coffee in the morning, and all of a sudden you feel anxious, right? What triggered that immediate state of alarm could be that something in your environment or a feeling in your body reminded you of a past experience. It could also just be that you have you're operating with chronic stress right now you have a lot on your plate. So all of a sudden, what feels like out of nowhere, but there is a reason why your nervous system sends something, you go into the state of alarm. And your brain goes, Well, why do we feel the state of alarm and it looks around your apartment? It's like there's no immediate danger here. Like, logically, I'm safe. So then it will oftentimes turn it back on you. Well, you messed up, you have a looming deadline, what did you say to that person, today's gonna be a bad day, maybe I'm getting sick, maybe my best friend is sick. And we start to create the story of alarm to make sense of the feeling of alarm in our body. 

13:07

So again, all of this context is really just to help you understand that the root of anxiety is in your body. And this is why so often cognitive therapies or mindset work, fall short, because let's even go there for a second. Let's for a second, imagine that maybe the isn't overthinking problem, you are still not going to solve an overthinking problem with more thinking any more than you're going to solve an overeating and over drinking problem with more eating or drinking. And I have nothing against cognitive therapies or mindset work, they can be really helpful. And at some point in healing anxiety, we need those tools to we need to repattern but that alone won't help you heal. 

13:53

And here's maybe a helpful other nugget to understand why. Research shows us that when this internal alarm goes off in our body, when we go into this sympathetic state, it actually impairs your cognitive function. So when you're activated the part of your brain involved in big picture thinking, being logical planning, decision making, etc, literally goes offline in some way. And so the bottom line here is that learning how to regulate your nervous system, how to calm this body based alarm First, is the key to healing anxiety. Anxiety is a feeling problem, not a thinking problem. Or more accurately, it's a feeling problem first, that often fuels and creates thinking problems that exasperate the issue. But coping with and healing with anxiety has to start with and happens through the body in turning towards and learning how to calm the state of alarm. 

14:47

And so I think a logical next place to go with this is what causes the state of alarm in the first place. And the state of alarm goes off in our body for one of two reasons, either a, an actual stressor, so Oh, this is a car swerving into your lane. And thank heavens, you have a nervous system whose job is to constantly scan your environment for safety or danger cues. Because within a split second, it can switch modes from casually chatting with your friend on this road trip to slamming on your brakes and making a sharp left to avoid being hit. Right. Or maybe it's something less life threatening, just like a first date or a work presentation, you're feeling nervous, a little bit activated, this can actually be really helpful, this state of being a little bit activated, makes you more present alert, you're more observant, able to read the room. 

15:35

And the key here is that it doesn't become overwhelming, which is again, where learning to regulate your nervous system is not only helpful when dealing with anxiety, but it's also very helpful when you put yourself in situations where you want to be more high achieving and goal oriented. So either this alarm goes off, because there's real danger or real need for it. And we're really grateful for that system and that it works properly, or to perceived stress or threat. So this is when you are actually safe, right like in your apartment, pouring that cup of coffee, no one and nothing is actively threatening your safety, but you don't feel safe. And so this is always a reflection of your past lived experience, or your current life circumstances. 

16:20

So this is your nervous system, saying, hey, something about the situation feels familiar to a time in our past when we didn't feel safe or heard or seeing when we didn't get our needs met. Or this is when your nervous system is saying this feels like too much or bucket is already heavy. This added loud sound or bright lights or to do lists like this is too much. Right? 

16:41

Anxiety is this warning that we either need to pay attention or that something is too much. And it's the second category, this perceived stressor threat that we want to learn how to regulate from we're grateful for the state of activation, when it actually is survival based. But it becomes really, really pesky. When, again, another analogy, right? A car alarm serves a really important purpose. It protects the car and protects the things in the car. But can you imagine a car where the alarm was so sensitive, that it went off every single time somebody walked by every single time a fly landed on the windshield? Right? That's annoying. That is an alarm system that has become on helpful. 

17:25

And because of your past lived experience, whether that's you know, just trauma or chronic stress, and your current life circumstances and the stress load that that holds. Some of our nervous systems are stuck in the state of activation. We have hypersensitive alarms that go off when they don't really need to when we are actually safe. They're reflecting past danger on our present situation. And of course they are it's how they're hardwired. It's how our nervous system is hardwired to work. And that's what creates kind of this generalized anxiety. 

17:58

So when thinking about anxiety, and what do you think about it this way that anxiety is an overestimation of a threat, paired with an underestimation of your ability to manage that threat. I'm going to show that one more time because this anxiety reframe has been so so so valuable for so many of our clients. Anxiety happens when our nervous system overestimates a threat and underestimates our ability to manage that threat. Okay, so why does it do that, again, coming back into this very specific and personalized combination of your past lived experiences, combined with your current life stressors, just like we understand, you can only put so much in a bucket before it becomes too heavy to lift, or before it starts overflowing. We can only put so much of a load on our nervous system before it also becomes dysfunctional, too heavy to lift, overflowing and symptomatic. And so I've said this a few times, kind of this combination of past lived experience current life circumstances, let's talk about what this looks like. 

19:02

So none of us had the luxury of waiting until we were adults, to figure out how to get our needs met, connect with other people stay safe or navigate this world. A tiny, much younger version of ourselves had to do that. And recent studies show that 80% of our brain is developed by the time that we are five years old. And so a lot of the alarm programming that runs the show today was coded by a much younger version of you. So as a child, anytime as a kid, you experience an overwhelming stress. And what I mean by this is that anytime you can reset your nervous system from an experience, so a natural and a healthy stress cycle. 

19:47

Yes, there's natural and healthy stress cycles is when a stressor or a threat presents itself. You go into that state of fight or flight, you handle the threat it passes and then you reset to your common regulated state. Just like on that road. You're with your friend, right, the car swerves into your lane, you immediately react, your heart is beating, you're a little bit scared. And then slowly over time, you just return back to that normal road trip chatting with your friend. Again, you reset from that. 

20:13

But if you grew up in a chaotic environment with unpredictable or emotionally immature parents, maybe even absent parents, In more severe cases, if there was instances of abuse, etc, your nervous system might not have had a chance to get to a place of reset, before it needed to be on high alert again. Or maybe if you simply had parents that weren't great at self regulating themselves. And so when you would have age appropriate outbursts, they sent you a way to deal with your big feelings, or maybe you got in trouble for them, as opposed to what tiny humans really need in that moment, is for well regulated adults to hold space for that emotional intensity that is developmentally totally appropriate, until the intensity of that passes, and then provide safe communication and context. 

21:04

So I'll give you an example of this. Because I feel like a lot of times I talk with clients, right, but my childhood was pretty good. And I don't know why I have anxiety and like I didn't have abuse, etc. It could simply be that your parents didn't have self regulating skills. And when they didn't have those skills, of course, you don't have those skills, because they weren't modeled for taught to you. They weren't in many ways modeled for or talked to me, I as an adult have had to take responsibility for understanding my nervous system and teaching them to myself so that I can model them for my children. 

21:34

So I have a two and a half year old little boy right now. And he was riding his bike in our front yard. And he knows that he can only go to the yellow line and back, because on the other side of that yellow line is this weird, like driveway street thing. And he's nine out of 10 times, at least up to this point, has never crossed that yellow line. Well, yesterday, he decided to go past that yellow line, I told him to come back. And he didn't. Instead he decided to double down on, you know, testing boundaries, again, a developmentally appropriate thing for two and a half year old. And he sat down in the middle of this street driveway thing. So I told him, You need to get up and go back to the yellow line, or I'm going to pick you up, because it's my job to keep you safe. He didn't get up. So I picked him and his bike up and we went kicking and screaming back to the house. And this resulted in 20 minutes of absolute meltdown. My kid is angry, he's sad, he's disappointed. He's frustrated, he's trying to open the door. And I sat there with him, and I just let it play out. It's not my job to determine whether this is a big deal for him or not. It is my job to hold safe space, while he experiences totally normal emotions. And occasionally, I would say like, I know you're mad, it's okay to be mad. It's still my job to keep you safe. Or like I'm here, if you need me, I'd offer him distractions like, Would you like water? Do you want space or hug, I'm here, if a hug would help you calm down, I want you to have fun and to play. But I also need you to be safe. And that's my job. As a mom, your job is to listen when I need you to be safe, right. And as I'm saying these things, 90% of them were totally pushed off. And some of these statements even escalated him. But on about the fifth time I offered him a hug or to hold him. He came over. And I held him. And we took deep breaths. And for about two to three minutes. We just stayed in that space. And then we got to a place where he was regulated. And I have a conversation with him about it about why it was important that he didn't go into the street. And why it was important that he listened to mom in those situations. And he understood and then he goes, Okay, I'd like to try again. I said of course let's go back outside and try again. 

23:41

This is an example of a child of space being held for a child in a way that they can reset from a developmentally natural and normal, stressful situation. Now, I don't do this perfectly. Last week, I wasn't able to regulate myself, and I did yell. And that was scary for him. And we did get to a point where we talked about it. And we're days and days later and he's reminded me like oh yeah, mad mommy yelled. And I said, yeah, yeah, she did. And I did that because I was really overwhelmed. Mommy had a hard time staying calm. I don't write this story that mom yelled because you were bad. I write the story of mom yelled because she was having a hard time regulating herself. 

24:20

As parents, we're going to frustrate our children. As parents, we are going to show up in ways that feel less optimal than the parenting we'd like to. But this is what helps children learn how to self regulate not by being perfectly regulated parents, but by being willing to be in this process of learning and teaching with our children. And we'll have future conversations about you know, regulating as a parent or you know, helping to regulate your children. 

24:42

All of this is just to illustrate what I mean when I say reset, and anytime as a kid that you experienced an overwhelming stress where you did not get this reset, where you didn't get to come back into a place where you felt totally safe. That excess stress energy didn't just dissipate or discharge. It got stored in your body, literally in your fascia, in your muscles in your tissue. And over and over and over again, if this happens, we start to have a reset baseline, our nervous system is no longer mostly regulated and sometimes activated, our nervous system becomes mostly activated, because what we have learned is that our environment or our people, or the places or the world, is less safe than safe. So we need to stay on guard. And your nervous system remembers every single situation from your past, where you felt alarmed, you didn't feel safe, seen supportive, you weren't able to fully express yourself, where we had to sacrifice, you know, some of our authenticity for the sake of getting our needs met or being attached to our parents. And we'll have a greater conversation about what I mean by authenticity and attachment in the future. 

25:55

But just know that a smaller version of you wrote the programming and wrote the rules for what it means to move through the world to get your needs met. And anything in your current life that pings is familiar to any situation in your past that didn't feel safe, seen, heard, needs met, etc, are the things you've heard me say a million times at this point, that body based alarm goes off. And so we've talked a little bit about kind of what it means, or what part of our past lived experiences could contribute to the current baseline state of our nervous system. But it's also impacted by our current life situations and stressors. 

26:31

So the reality is that we are biologically still community based hunters and gatherers. But we no longer live in that environment. And that lifestyle isn't likely something we're ever going to go back to. And that's just a reality. But understanding how this hardwiring, how your nervous system is conditioned, and how that kind of contrast the reality of modern day life can help you create a map for how you can best use and work with the hardware and you have in the environment that you live in. Right, we live in a toxic culture that prioritizes productivity over purpose, competition over connection, we are overstimulated and under rested, play is deemed as frivolous and rest is seen as something I don't know, at least for me something that I had to earn. And I've subscribed to all of this, and taking personal responsibility and accountability, that living a life of chronic stress is part of what fuels our crippling anxiety. 

27:31

And that you do have a say in some of that, it is up to you to decide what you want your life to look like what hamster wheels you are or aren't willing to ride. And there are a lot of parts of this life we don't have control over. But we do need to take responsibility for the parts that we we can control and how that's contributing to our dysregulation to our anxiety to our depression. nervous system regulation is a lifestyle. It's not a quick fix. It's not a hack. It's not a fad diet, it is learning how to get back into conversation with your brain and body, to listening to yourself and to repatterning the thoughts, the beliefs, the habits, the trauma responses that are no longer needed, or no longer helpful or useful for the life that you want to live. 

28:16

Your anxiety is not a moral failure. It's not a personal failure. It's also not the way that you were born, there may be some genetic component to your anxiety. Sure. But by and large, your anxiety today is a result of the patterns that are laid by your past life experience and your current life circumstances. And the way that your nervous system interprets that, and reacts based on that in your present day life. All right, let's bring this all together. What does it mean to understand anxiety through this nervous system lens?

28:47

It means to understand what it actually is, why it shows up and how you can heal it. Anxiety is activation. It's an alarm state in your body. It is your nervous system in a state of activation because of an actual or perceived threat. Right? That answers the question of why does it show up? It shows up because of an actual or perceived threat because something about your situation or your environment feels familiar to a time in your past where you weren't safe or felt disconnected. The current state of your nervous system is always this reflection of your past lived experience in your current life circumstances and the load that that's putting on your nervous system. And how can you heal it? You heal anxiety by learning how to work in and through the system by learning how to regulate your nervous system by turning towards the body instead of running away and getting trapped in your head. And exactly what this looks like is something that we're going to talk about more in the next couple episodes of this mini anxiety series. This reframe of understanding anxiety through a nervous system lens shifted everything for me in my healing journey. And it's such an aha moment for so many of my clients, realizing that you're not simply at the mercy of your anxiety that feels all consuming and sometimes like it comes out of nowhere. But it means really shifting your understanding of anxiety. 

30:07

From some diagnosis you're born with, you have to manage the rest of your life, to understanding it as being stuck in a state of survival mode that makes perfect sense based on your past and your present life. And when you can learn to regulate that activation in the moment using tangible tools to push back against that body stress response that alarm in real time, you can turn towards that inner child and repattern and rewrite that past programming of you simply going from surviving, to truly coping with and healing your anxiety. 

30:38

Oh, man, I could spend probably forever on today's episode, but I want to wind it down. And I really want to give you those three tangible takeaways from today's episode. 

30:46

And the first is this reframe that anxiety is a feeling problem and not a thinking problem. And the number one reason why so many people are struggling to heal their anxiety is because the mainstream tools and approaches are often from the neck up their thinking approaches. And the reason we go up into our head is because we don't want to be in our body, that's where the pain is, we go into our head because our left brain needs to make sense of this alarm in our body. But it's when we can turn towards that alarm in our body, and know what to do with it that we really start to heal. 

31:18

And this leads to takeaway number two, which is that most of the alarm you feel today is based on stored stress energy from your childhood, that 80% of your brain that 80% of your operating manual that's developed by the time you're five, on how to get your needs met what is safe, what makes you feel connected. And this reframe of anxiety is an overestimation of a threat paired with an underestimation of your ability to to manage that threat. And we overestimate the threat because one time in our past, we didn't imagine all the possible ways something could go wrong. And it did go wrong for us. And we underestimate our ability to manage that threat because we don't have a lot of context or evidence that we can. And because in those moments, we are suddenly that little child again, in an overwhelming experience. And by learning to regulate your nervous system, not only can you calm that overestimation in the moment, but mostly, you increase confidence in your ability to move towards this alarm system, to deactivate it when it's not necessary and find regulation. 

32:23

And the third thing I really want you to take away is that anxiety changes your physiology. This is an activated state, your heart rate, your blood pressure, your respiration, and there is compassionate awareness and tangible tools that can influence those systems to help you come that alarm. And this is root cause healing, versus just symptom management, meeting yourself in your body. And I'll get to those tools more in the next couple episodes. But for now, I just want the takeaway to be that there are powerful and research supported tools to help you turn towards your body, shift your state and soothe this alarm. 

32:59

You can heal anxiety in real tangible, measurable research based ways. And in our next couple conversations together we are going to take a look at what some of those first steps in healing through a nervous system lens might look like.

33:22

Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside Rhys, my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space or apply for our one on one anxiety depression coaching program restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes. Again, thanks so much for being here. And I'll see you next time.