Regulate & Rewire: An Anxiety & Depression Podcast

Why We Underestimate Our Ability (Part 3 - Anxiety Equation Series)

• Amanda Armstrong • Season 1 • Episode 130

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In the final episode, Amanda tackles the most empowering part of the equation: the “Underestimation of Ability.” Discover the science behind why we forget our own capacity and resources in the exact moments we need it most and learn how to actively reconnect with your deep well of resilience.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

  • Why anxiety makes you shrink and feel like a younger, less powerful version of yourself.
  • That stress hormones can temporarily block your access to memories of past successes
  • How to recognize your everyday actions as powerful evidence of your capability.
  • The game-changing mindset shift from asking "What if?" to knowing "Even if..."

Tools to Reconnect With Your Ability:

  1. Evidence Gathering: Make a list of hard things you’ve already survived. Your track record is proof of your strength.
  2. The Resource Reality Check: Actively list your resources—skills, knowledge, and especially the people you can turn to for co-regulation and support.
  3. The "Good Enough" Reminder: Ask, "What would handling this 'good enough' look like?" This frees you from the paralysis of perfectionism.

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Amanda Armstrong  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.

Amanda Armstrong  0:27  
Welcome back to our final micro episode in the anxiety equation mini series. That's a mouthful. Last time we talked about why your nervous system is wired to overestimate threats, and today we're going to talk about the other side of that equation, why we so often underestimate our ability to handle that threat, our ability to cope, our capacity. We are going to explore the wild but true idea that in the exact moments that we need to remember how capable we are most our brains actually make us forget. 

Amanda Armstrong  1:04  
I want you to think for a moment about what happens when you are feeling anxious, your heart races, your mind spins, your body gets really tense in that state, you don't, or at least, I know I don't feel very powerful or resourceful. I feel small. I often feel like a younger version of myself who couldn't handle big things, yet there's insecurity there. It's like all of the evidence of my competence in the decades of my adult life just vanishes. So why does this happen? And I want to start this conversation with what trauma and chronic stress do to our self perception when we are in survival mode, whether it is from past trauma or current overwhelm, our nervous system literally changes how we process information. We lose access to the part of our brain that holds the memories of our success, our resilience, our problem solving. I want you to think about it this way. When you are panicking, think about a moment in which you were really overwhelmed, in which you were panicked. 

Amanda Armstrong  2:12  
Can you remember times where you handled difficult things? Well, I know that. I don't. I can't, not in that moment, and it's not because those experiences didn't happen. It's because stress hormones temporarily block access to those memories. And here's what's even more intense when we are triggered or highly anxious, we often regress to feeling like we did at the age when we first felt overwhelmed or helpless. So if you first felt truly overwhelmed at age five, when your stress as an adult, part of you feels like that five year old facing a problem with five year old resources, but in reality, you might be a successful professional who has navigated countless challenges since you were five, but In that triggered moment you feel as powerless as you did when you were small. Your nervous system does not update its files to include all of the skills and the resources and the wisdom that you have gained since then. It at least doesn't update those files in a way that you can access when you are dysregulated. 

Amanda Armstrong  3:16  
You can remember those things when you're regulated and in hindsight, often but in those moments of high activation, it's almost like we don't have proper timestamps to say, no, no, that was then, this is now and then. 

Amanda Armstrong  3:31  
Another reason I think we underestimate ourselves is because we fail to give ourself credit for the hard things that we do every single day, because we fail to collect real, live evidence and context for the hard things that we do on a regular basis. We forget that we are constantly doing hard things. Do you know what's hard, getting through a day of work on no sleep, managing an entire household, navigating relationships, watching all of the chaos that is unfolding in the world today, and still like dropping your kid off at school with a smile on your face, because you know that they need to see that you are calm, cool and collected, so that they can feel it too, even if you are feeling like chaos on the inside. You know What's hard is keeping yourself and possibly other humans alive and fed. 

Amanda Armstrong  4:20  
But we dismiss so many of these things as just life, instead of recognizing them as evidence of our capability, plus, we compare our insides to everyone else's outsides. And I'm going to say that again, because I know I need to hear it again. We oftentimes lack evidence or context for how well we actually are doing for how many hard things we are getting through on a daily basis, because we are comparing our insides to everyone else's outsides, we see other people seemingly handling things with ease, and that makes us assume that we are uniquely incapable, but we don't see their 3am anxiety spiral. All or their meltdown, to their partner or to their friend, what we also forget is that we are living in a world that our nervous system doesn't want anything to do with. Our nervous system was not built for the systemic problems of modern day life. Our nervous system was not built for the way that we live in such separation and such isolation and such polarization. Our nervous systems were developed in tribal, intimate communities where everyone you knew and loved sat around the same fire every single night, where you didn't know about the devastation or the heartache happening a mile away, let alone half a world away. But here's the truth that I want you to remember, if you are listening to this podcast, your nervous system has already carried you through so much the fact that you are here, breathing, learning, growing, it means that you have capacity, even if your body forgets that in the moment, a nervous system resilient enough to survive what you've been through to live every day in this world, I believe, is also a nervous system resilient and flexible enough to adjust and to heal. 

Amanda Armstrong  6:21  
So the question becomes, how do we reconnect to our actual capacity in general, but especially in these moments of anxiety? And so here are three powerful tools or reframes that I want to offer you today. 

Amanda Armstrong  6:35  
First is what I call evidence gathering. Grab a pen and paper. Take time to do this. I want you to write down three challenges that you have survived, not conquered, not thrived through. Survived because survival counts. That breakup that you thought would kill you, you're still here. That job loss, you figured it out, that health scare. You navigated it, or you are navigating it. I want to remind you that your track record of survival rate is 100% so far. So what does your unique evidence gathering look like that? You can do hard things. 

Amanda Armstrong  7:15  
The second is what I call a resource reality check. Take some time again, grab a pen, grab paper, maybe the same pen and paper, maybe a new one. And I want to invite you to list your current resources, both internal and external resources, so that when you are anxious, you don't feel like you are facing these threats empty handed, but you have this list, or the experience of making this list to remind you of the skills that you have, the knowledge, the experience, the creativity, and I think crucially, the connections that you have, this is where CO regulation comes in. A huge part of your resource list is the people, the places and the things that help you to feel safe and supported. Can you identify somebody that you can borrow support from, a partner, a friend, a therapist, a higher power, even a pet. Sometimes our capacity feels so small because we are trying to carry it all alone. Safe connection is a resource that multiplies and then multiplies that multiplication. It multiplies our ability to manage. 

Amanda Armstrong  8:21  
The third thing is what I call the good enough reminder in those moments, ask yourself, what would handling this good enough look like, not perfectly, not impressively, just good enough. 

Amanda Armstrong  8:37  
This is the one that I probably come to the most often. I juggle a lot of things. I have a newborn right now. Who is my youngest of three children. I run a business. I am a partner. I try to be really active in my community. When you are juggling so many things, when you just live in the world that we live in, good enough just has to be good enough sometimes, because if I try to take the level of perfectionism that my system has been hardwired for in every area of my life, I burn out. I crash every single time, and oftentimes for me, I'm underestimating my ability to manage a stressor, a threat or a situation because I'm filtering it through this expectation that I need to manage it perfectly. I need to manage it right. Especially when it comes to parenting. I'm like, I've got to do this the perfect way, the right way, or I break my kid. But when I can take a deep breath and I can just say, hey, what does handling this good enough look like? What is handling the situation in my business, good enough? What is handling this parenting moment? Good enough? Look like I start to realize that I'm completely capable of good enough, and that's actually exactly what I need in that moment, the anxiety equation isn't about toxic positivity or pretending like everything is fine. It is about. Are providing for yourself a more accurate assessment, especially in the moments that you need it most, because the reality is, most threats aren't as big as they seem in the moment, especially in moments of activation, and you are more capable than you remember in those moments of activation, 

Amanda Armstrong  10:18  
both sides of this equation get so distorted by our nervous systems attempt to protect us when it is triggered or chronically dysregulated, but with awareness and practice, we can start to see more clearly. This is the work that I've done in my life. It's the work that I've supported hundreds, if not 1000s, of people to do and support them with on a daily basis in restore our one on one coaching program and inside the membership, helping you to have the skills, the ability, the capacity to regulate in the moment, just enough so that you can more accurately see things as a right size threat and to remember your actual ability and capacity. It is about shifting from what if to even if, there are going to be moments where you cannot stop overestimating the threat, or moments where the threat is real, where the worst case scenario might actually be a viable possibility, but in those moments, you can still create less anxiety for yourself by remembering your ability and capacity. What if to even if, can you look at that worst case scenario and think even if this terrible or hard thing happens, I know I can figure it out. I know who, where or what I can turn to for help if I don't think I can do that alone. 

Amanda Armstrong  11:36  
And what is at the heart of this whole mini series is that anxiety makes sense when you see it as this math equation, threats feel too big, capacities feel too small anxiety. But both of these variables can shift with awareness, with practice, with support. That's what can help you rebalance this equation so that you can have less anxiety overall, and so that those moments of big, big anxiety don't have to happen as frequently, or don't have to be as big. 

Amanda Armstrong  12:07  
And as we wrap up this series, just a quick reminder, my invitation from part one was in moments where you feel anxious to ask yourself, what is the specific threat that my brain is perceiving right now and then to follow it up with, what is my brain telling me about my capacity to handle it? And then in part two, I invited you to help to shift that first part of the equation, that overestimation of threat, by doing that reality check question, by asking, What do I actually know to be true right now, if I had to bet money, what percentage chance is there that the worst case scenario will happen. And then third, to use that friend filter, if my best friend came to me with a situation, what would I tell them? 

Amanda Armstrong  12:48  
And then my unique invitation from this episode part three is to really build up the evidence that you are more able, you are more capable through evidence, gathering resource, reality check and the good enough reminders. And I have walked so many folks through these exact things to help them shift and recalibrate their anxiety equation. And the more you practice these things, the more I've practiced these things, the more my system has learned. I'm not powerless. I have options. I can handle more than I think. 

Amanda Armstrong  13:24  
And in closing, I want to offer you just a final reminder that whatever you are going through right now, you've got this you always have. You do not have to go through it or figure it out alone. 

Amanda Armstrong  13:36  
And if you are looking for support, I'm here. My team is here. We are here, and we would love to support you. 

Amanda Armstrong  13:44  
all right, friend, take care, and until next time, I am sending so much hope and healing your way.

Amanda Armstrong  13:50  
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