How to Navigate Situational Anxiety

Do you ever find yourself tense or anxious when dealing with new situations? This could be traveling to a new place, interviewing for a job, or simply a changing seasons in your life. This is often referred to as situational anxiety, which is a form of anxiety that happens in response to a new, unfamiliar, or stressful (to you) situation. Today I'm going to offer a nervous system reframe and other tools to help you navigate this better. Hit play to listen!

Here's the 3 takeaways:

1. Reframing Anxiety: Labeling experiences as "activation" rather than "anxiety" can reduce overwhelm and foster self-compassion. Understanding that your nervous system is responding naturally to new or unfamiliar situations helps shift from helplessness to curiosity.
2. Self-Compassion: Normalizing your experience, especially during life changes, is crucial. Your body's heightened response is often a reasonable reaction to uncertainty or shifts, and you’re not wrong for feeling it.
3. Support & Regulation: Regulating your nervous system with grounding techniques, breathwork, and movement, along with seeking support, can help ease situational and anticipatory anxiety, allowing you to navigate life’s transitions with more clarity and calm.

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Transcript

0:00  
Amanda, welcome to regulate and rewire an 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. Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in. 

Let me start today with a question. I want to invite you to pause for a moment and ask yourself, if you ever find yourself feeling tense or anxious when dealing with new situations. This could be traveling to a new place, interviewing for a job, maybe you're entering into a season of your life that's changing, or there's an element of your life that's changing, and if your answer is yes, taking it maybe one step farther and asking yourself, How often do I feel tense or anxious about new situations? How big does this anxiety get? For me? Is that I'm a little nervous, this makes sense, or does it feel overwhelming, debilitating? And this is often referred to as situational anxiety. And part of today's conversation is going to be about why I think labeling these sensations as something like situational anxiety could be really unhelpful for navigating it. And then we'll also talk about how labeling something can be helpful, as we often find here, there's a lot of nuance, and this is probably just scratching the surface of what should be a greater conversation around identifying with our diagnoses and labels and the ways that it does serve us, but also the ways I believe it can considerably hinder our healing. 

And today's conversation, though, is mostly going to be about this experience of situational anxiety, what it is and what you can do to support yourself, because it has come up a number of times, semi recently, within the membership, and I'm going to briefly share two of the examples from coaching calls inside the membership, so that I can reference them throughout this conversation. 

So one woman a few months ago came in and was looking for support because she was having considerably higher anxiety throughout her days, and she attributed it to the fact that her last kid was soon going away to college. She was going to be an empty nester. She had a lot of anxiety around like, what does this look like? It shifts her identity as a mom, not having kids at home who need her. What does this do for her relationship with them? What does this do for her relationship with her husband? How's that dynamic gonna shift and change? And the other example was a client talking about specifically social situations, and anytime she was presented with needing to go to a social event, there was so much overthinking and anticipation that came with them. So with those two examples in our back pocket to refer to, let's start this conversation by defining or discussing what it is. And then I will chat through both sides. Number one, why I think labeling it is unhelpful. And then also why I think giving it a label can be helpful. Because, you know, just doing what we normally do on this podcast, living in the nuance, in the gray, in the both and. 

So what is situational anxiety? It is a form of anxiety that happens in response to a new, unfamiliar or stressful to you situation, and this heightened anxiety usually passes when that situation is over. I want to offer a reframe through a nervous system lens. So Let's ditch the word anxiety and apply the context that is that we know our nervous systems like predictability. They like things that are known to them. So instead of saying something like, I have situational anxiety about my last kid leaving for college, you might say, I'm noticing a lot more activation in my system than normal in anticipation of my last kid leaving for college. Now to some of you, this reframe may seem trivial. It may seem pointless, but for others of you and for many, many of our clients, this shift is really powerful for a few reasons, the most obvious being that the words that we use matter, because the word anxiety is a socially and experientially loaded word. It often comes with a sense of helplessness, of overwhelm, like, Ah, here's this anxiety monster attacking me. I can't handle it. There's nothing I can do about it. Versus this alternative word of activation. Activation is more descriptive of the physical sensation, so it's already tuning you into being with it instead of pushing it away. And this word activation, layered with an understanding about how your nervous system works, can create more context for. You're experiencing, and that context softens your system. It already makes what you're experiencing a little bit less intense, and it gives you this propensity towards more curiosity, or even just simple acceptance at your humaneness, like this statement, quote, I'm noticing a lot more activation in my system in anticipation of my last kid leaving for college. I'd likely respond to that with like, Of course you are that makes perfect sense. How human of you. It makes sense to be a little bit more on edge or activated in anticipation for what will be a major life shift for you. 

When it comes to situational anxiety, obviously, activation, anxiety, all of it, it happens on a spectrum. Are you feeling anticipatory butterflies navigating the situation, or are you having anxiety attacks or paralyzing shutdown in response? And that's going to shift and change how you navigate this. Because the other story here is that, oh well, like, I shouldn't feel this way. I I shouldn't feel nervous or worried or scared, and so, like we talked about last week, this adds that layer of, like, shame and judgment and guilt instead of, well, yeah, it makes sense. Like, it makes sense that I have some questions. There's some unknown that I'm a little apprehensive about this. And so often, when we can just name what we're feeling, when we can say how human of me for feeling that way, it automatically takes some of the edge off. 

We have a really powerful opportunity to mitigate that intensity by the way that we respond to these sensations. So this is even maybe just an extension of this conversation about how often our anxiety about our anxiety is more problematic than the original anxiety. When this client in particular brought this to coaching, there was a story about how they were somehow wrong for feeling this way, how it was somehow not acceptable for them to be having this higher level of activation in their system, that feeling more activated over the situation was problematic, and they originally came into this call seeking a fix. Like, hey, hey, Amanda. What's the thing that will make this anxiety go away? What's the regulation tool? What's the thing that you can tell me that I can just be like, Yep, I'm cool with this as again, how human of you to want that. But after our conversation, her biggest takeaway, the thing that gave her the greatest sense of ease from working through this on that call, was simply normalizing her experience. And what was really incredible was because this was a group coaching call. It wasn't only my reflection that normalized her experience, my explanation of the physiology, but it was so many others present on this call who dropped into the chat who were like, I've struggled with a similar thing. This makes so much sense, like, you're not navigating this alone. And so not only did the community give her that gift of, you're not alone in navigating this, but she was able to give back to the community this gift of, hey, I'm also experiencing something that you are and this is one of my favorite things that happened specifically inside the membership, is that we're constantly having these supportive conversations that rarely ever only apply to the initial person who asked. 

But coming back to her example, there's a lot of ambiguity. So coming back for a moment to what she came to this call for, she initially was there hoping that I would tell her the tools or the practices that would make this activation go away, and instead, what she was able to experience was a safe space and a moment to offer herself self compassion. She recognized some burdened and protective parts of herself and the stories that they were carrying around her, worth her identity inside motherhood outside motherhood, her resilience for navigating change, and that was able to not just give her a quick do this breath or do this practice right now, but hey, this is a lifelong skill to learn how to turn towards ourself with curiosity and compassion, and when you feel like you have the capacity, it might be helpful to look at pattern, A, B, C or D, so that shifts and changes in your life. In the future, don't feel so big, don't feel so activating.

So what I hope I've offered between the lines in the last handful of minutes is a peek into how shifting the way that you label your experiences might change the way that you experience them. For this client and a number of others in the room, it made a big difference for them to go from Oh, I have situational anxiety around x to I'm noticing that my system is active. In anticipation for this, and I do have tools that help me to manage the activation in the moment. And it could be really helpful to pause and ask myself, why does this feel so big in the first place? And do some of that deeper work. I want to take a minute now. 

So that's why I think labeling things can be really unhelpful, because it can get you stuck in a this is a thing that's happening to me, and I don't know if I can control it, but let's speak to the other side. How can labeling and experience be helpful? Well, number one, it's allowing you and I to have common enough language to be having this conversation right now. You read the title of this episode and went, yep, I have that, or I know what that or I can deduce what that is descriptively. So labeling experiences can give us access to supportive resources. It can maybe provide some validation for what we're experiencing, I would say, and my encouragement to you is still not to get caught up in the labels. Do not make an identity for yourself around something like anxiety or situational anxiety. Of like, well, I struggle with situational anxiety, therefore x, y or z will be hard for me, because that internal feedback loop can exasperate and create those things for you. 

And again, this will be a longer conversation, but for the sake of this next part, let's lean into the label and repeating this definition. We're working with that situational anxiety happens in response to new, unfamiliar or stressful situations. You might experience it immediately before, something before the situation, like a social gathering, or to the example we've been speaking to most often, where she was experiencing more of an ongoing and daily heightened level of anxiety in anticipation for this new season of life. When faced with a situation outside your comfort zone, your body's natural fight or flight response kicks in, and oftentimes there's no real danger. But that doesn't stop your body from responding with feelings of stress and anxiety to things that are unknown or ambiguous or triggering for us, and when your body is signaling stress to your brain, your brain does what its job is to do, which is to make sense of this felt sense of danger, to help you identify the danger. And when there's not an actual threat present, it makes one up in the form of spiraling thoughts. And what ifs for me, it'll often turn on me internally, make me the threat or me the problem. 

And from a physiological perspective, this shift into a more activated state when we're facing something unknown or triggering. For us, this can be helpful. It can help us stay alert. It can motivate us. It can get us ready to do our best or to be adaptive, but when this physiological activation is left unchecked, that's when it can become debilitating. So if you find yourself in a place where it feels unmanageable, what can you do if you are somebody who really identifies with this label of situational anxiety, and I have it in a really heightened way right now because of X, Y or Z situation, or I know that I experienced this in a heightened way around these predictable certain situations. What can you do? And in my opinion, the place that you want to get to is to this place where you can unpack why this thing feels so big for you in the first place? 

Keeping with that same example we've been using, not every mom who's about to have their last kid leave to go to college is anxious about it. Some moms might be relieved, others excited for this new chapter. I'd imagine most parents feel a mix of things, some sadness, excitement, relief, apprehension, of course, how human of you. 

And this comes back to side tangent, why I love parts work as a modality so much because it normalizes this experience, each of the varying emotions that you go through in any given circumstance. These are all different parts of you using parts work language or ifs language, these are all different parts of you that have a different story about what's happening. There might be a part of this mom that feels relieved, oh my gosh, I'm gonna have time for me. Maybe again, being a parent is a big ask, one that you've done for at least 20 or something years. If your last kid is going away to college, it makes sense to feel relieved. Then there might be another part of you that feels guilty, that you feel that you feel relieved, maybe you have a story that you're a bad mom, if you feel relieved that your kids are finally out of the house. And there was another part that specifically came up for this client that was feeling some fear or nervousness around what her and her husband's relationship was gonna look or feel like in this new season. 

And. Yeah, and there likely is this season of unlearning and relearning when the bulk of your job as a parent is done. And it's really easy for me right now to take this bird's eye view to this situation and to do what's called parts mapping, to see these different parts and talk about this. But if you are in the thick of it, if you are in that heightened state of anxiety or activation, you're not in a place to sit down and calmly unpack with perspective and ask yourself this question of like, why might this be really hard for me right now, you're just trying to get through the heart. 

So there are two things, in my opinion, that you can do from that place to get to a place where you can be reflective, you can be more grounded, you can try to unpack this, get some perspective, maybe do some rewiring so that it doesn't feel continuously as big for you. And the first is to do some somatic resourcing, to do some regulation tools to help your nervous system, source for safety, to increase capacity, to hold the discomfort, or to help settle your system, to show it, hey, this the real there's no real danger present. And the second thing is to get support. This is an amazing thing that coaching or therapy can provide. It's this safe space and regulated container to look into the deeper why? If you're not regulated enough to pause and ask those reflective questions, that's what a practitioner can support you on as they create this container to help you settle, and they can drop those questions in and be there as just a safe other to navigate this with and somebody to help guide you in the RE patterning, the rewiring that's going to be needed for a lasting shift so that you aren't continuously this activated about new situations. 

I want to give you a little bit of both. I've given you some reflective questions, some different perspectives. If you're in a milder state of situational anxiety, that you can sit down and journal, or you're already have a support person you can go talk to. But what can you do if you were in the middle of situational anxiety? So here's a few tools that could potentially help you regulate your nervous system. 

The first is any kind of grounding technique. So grounding techniques are the quickest ways to come back into the present moment. This could be noticing or feeling your feet on the floor, noticing the texture of an object in your hand, taking a deep breath and becoming aware of that sensation in your body, some of my favorite grounding techniques are just to go outside, to tune into my senses. What can I see? What can I hear? What can I feel? So what can you do just to ground to be here and now in your body, in your space.

Breath work could be another tool here. Oftentimes, when we are in a heightened state of anxiety, we have shallow, rapid breathing, and that shallow, rapid breathing is going to keep our sympathetic state activated. And so what does it look like to just bring more conscious awareness to your breath? Don't immediately try to take a slow, deep breath, but meet your fast breathing where it is. Can I make it a little slower? Can I move it to nasal inhales, using your breath to help settle your system. 

You can also move your body. When we're in an activated state, our nervous system is primed for mobilization. We can do gentle movement. We can go for a walk. And this can help us release some of that built up activation, or at the very least say to our nervous system, Hey, I see that you want to move. I'm going to let you move. This could even be stretching, doing a little somatic shaking.

And when you have brought the edge off some of those big physical symptoms of anxiety, that's where you can work on a simple reframe. Oh, I'm feeling really anxious right now. Oh no, no. Remember, I heard that podcast. How does it feel if I shift the statement to I'm feeling a lot of activation right now. Another reframe is this is uncomfortable, but it'll pass. You've been uncomfortable before, and you're not uncomfortable forever. It'll pass. Or offering a little self compassion in a reframe statement of, yeah, how human of me, for me not to like change, how human of me to be anticipatory about something new.

And then a more proactive approach is to incorporate Regular, regulating habits and practices into your daily life. So whether this is through somatic practices, vagal toning, consistent movement, getting enough sleep, eating nutritional food, when you regularly attend to your health, to your nervous system, it creates a more solid foundation. So. That when situational anxiety arises, you have greater capacity. You're not as depleted when you go to meet that experience. 

And I just want to reiterate that second suggestion I made, that if it's available and accessible to you, get support, especially in seasons of shifting and change, especially around situations or things that have a pattern of activating your nervous system, those are all pointing to deeper healing work to be done, and if you choose doing that work will help these things not feel so big in the future. 

Now, before we end today, I do want to reiterate that not all anxiety, not all activation is inappropriate. We've talked a little bit about how, oh yeah, our nervous system doesn't like new things. How human of me. But also, sometimes the situations in our life are devastating. There's been a job loss, there's been a person we loved, loss. Sometimes the situations that are creating activation for us are big and hard, and maybe we find ourselves on the receiving end of somebody else's really, really crappy choice, and we have to clean up the mess that it created in our own lives. It makes sense for you not to be calm and grounded and thrilled about navigating those things and this deeper work, making regulated living a habit in your life, making self compassion and active practice in your life makes the hardest things less hard because you have more internal resourcing you have, or you're working towards a belief system that I can handle the what ifs and it's the even if I know how to take care of myself, it's going to be hard. I don't have an aversion to hard anymore. I worked through that. I don't have a story that life shouldn't be hard. I don't have a story that when I'm activated, something's gone wrong, or there's something wrong with me. And that's what it means to create a bigger container, to have a bigger capacity. It's not that your feelings are too big, it's that your container is too small. And this deeper work layering habits and practices that create a condition in which your nervous system can heal and thrive and have capacity. That's what we label as regulated living helps you to meet these inevitable situations and seasons of your life with more groundedness to offer and all of the self compassion the self groundedness in the world is still never going to exempt us from needing others support. Life hands us things that are just too big, too hard, too messy for us to always figure out and be fine on our own. And so it's so important to understand that not all activation is inappropriate, not all situational anxiety is inappropriate. Those sensations that you label as anxiety are there for a reason. They're your brain and your body doing its best to keep you safe. It's your brain and body's way of communicating to you, hey, this feels familiar to that one time something bad happened or hey, this is familiar. Be aware. Proceed with caution. We've never done this before. We've never been here before. Here before. There could be a tiger around any corner.

But by understanding what situational anxiety is and how your nervous system is involved, and at this point, it's really up to you to discern in these moments whether this level of activation feels like a helpful or appropriate response to what is at hand, and if it doesn't, how do you want to navigate that? And by understanding what situational anxiety is, why it happens, how your nervous system is involved, you can begin to recognize that this activation might be an appropriate response to certain situations, or if it feels disproportionate, it is pointing to some deeper work, a need to slow down, to regulate and to do your best to be with it and to navigate that intentionally, with as much self compassion and curiosity as you can, 

Alright, three takeaways from today. 

Number one is reframing anxiety, that labeling experiences as activation rather than anxiety, can reduce overwhelm and foster self compassion, understanding that your nervous system is responding naturally to a new or unfamiliar situation can help you shift from that sense of helplessness to curiosity. 

Takeaway number two is self compassion. Normalizing your experience, especially during life changes, is so crucial so. Your body's heightened response is often a reasonable reaction to uncertainty or shifting in your life, and you are not wrong for feeling it. 

Number three is support and regulation, regulating your nervous system with grounding techniques, breath work, movement, community support, seeking out professional support. These can all help ease situational anxiety and allow you to navigate these transitions and experiences with more clarity and more calm and as always rise as we with our one on one program or our group coaching membership is a place where doors are open if you don't know where to go to get the support, we would love for you to join us. 

All right until next week, sending so much hope and healing your way. 

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 rise my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one on one anxiety and 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 you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai