Listener Q&A — Your Questions from the Stress Management Series

In this listener response episode, Amanda answers three thoughtful follow-up questions from the five-part stress management series. She digs deepest into a question about reorienting to a baseline mindset stressor — using the trigger vs overwhelm distinction to help listeners diagnose what's actually happening before deciding what to do about it. She also honors a listener's real-life editing win in the middle of profound grief, and offers a few grounding thoughts on going it alone, the impulse to flush everything and start over, and what chronic consumption does to your inner knowing.

3 Takeaways:

1. When something you love starts to feel overwhelming, the most important diagnostic question is: is this the trigger, or is it the final drop? Those two scenarios need different responses. One is primarily a load management problem. The other points toward nervous system associations that need to be slowly rebuilt. Knowing which is which changes where you focus your energy.
2. Your nervous system learned the associations it’s operating from, which means it can unlearn them. But rewiring requires capacity first. You cannot rebuild an association from inside a survival response. Regulation comes before rewiring, and that sequencing isn’t a detour it’s what makes the rewiring actually stick.
3. That immediate felt sense of relief when you make the right edit? Trust it. Your nervous system is giving you real-time feedback. That signal the exhale, the release is data. And it builds momentum for the next edit.

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

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Transcript

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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. One of the things I love about this podcast being a solo show, meaning it's just me episode after episode. At least up to this point, I haven't done any interviews on the show, is that it gives me a lot of flexibility. And if I'm being honest, I often record these episodes just week to week as I go. And in doing so, that gives me the opportunity to speak to some real-time interactions with all of you, which this is the kind of engagement that is really, really fun for me. It also tells me that the content that I'm sharing is landing in a real way, not just conceptually in my own brain, but in your actual lives. So after wrapping up the five-part stress management series, I got some really thoughtful responses and follow-up questions from listeners, from some of you. And I wanted to take this episode to respond to a few of them directly. So today I'm going to read through three specific comments, respond to each a bit in a way that I hope is useful, not just to the person who asked the question, but to everyone listening. The first comment comes from a listener who wrote, quote, Amanda, could you please provide some examples of reorienting items in our baseline stressors? The majority of mine come from emotional and mindset. For example, I love to teach. Since my anxiety reached a breaking point, I cannot commit to teaching anything without spiraling into overwhelm. My mind races and it's miserable, followed by so much regret. I would really like to shift this experience so I can return to teaching. And next, I oftentimes read something like this, or in a live coaching session, something like this is shared, and there are some follow-up questions. My first would be to clarify: did your anxiety reach a breaking point because of teaching or because of life? And maybe it was a little bit of both, but teasing that apart, I think can matter considerably because the answer to that question can point you in two different directions for next steps for how you want to approach kind of managing this, getting back to teaching. And here's why. In part two of the stress management series, we talked about the difference between a trigger and overflow or overwhelm. So a trigger, remember, it's like that boulder. Something in the present experience connects to a past fear, a past hurt, a past experience. So it creates a big, immediate, disproportionate reaction. So you've got a stress bucket, and maybe your stress bucket's only halfway full or two-thirds full, but something triggering comes along and it's like taking a giant boulder, dropping it into your stress bucket. It creates that overflow from the water, which are your symptoms, the anxiety, the shutdown, whatever it is. Then we have overwhelm. And overwhelm is like that final drop to creating that overflow. So it's a small input that causes a big reaction, not because of what that thing means in connection to your past lived experiences, but because your bucket was already full. You are living a life, one drop from overflowing every day, every minute, little things become big things really quick. Not because they're tied to our past, but just because your life is so full right now. So when you spiral into overwhelm around teaching or anything, so I'm gonna speak directly to this person, but you can replace teaching with anything that creates this experience for you. So the question was when you spiral into overwhelm around teaching, is teaching itself the trigger? Is it a boulder dropping into your bucket that creates this wave of anxiety? Or is your stress bucket with your current life right now already filled to the brim with other life things in a way that anything added, especially something as big and effortful as teaching, becomes the final drop that tips you over, creating that spiraling anxiety, your state determines your story, that anxiety, that activation can then kind of trickle into the regret and the other things. So this is a place where personalized support can make such a meaningful difference because those two scenarios often need different responses. It's different work. If your bucket is already filled to the brim and teaching is just the last drop, the work can be a little bit more logistical. We look at your stress load, your supporter side, where we can gain some leverage and capacity, we can use those three D's of delete, delegate, do differently to bring the overall load down enough so that teaching stops being a thing that tips you over because you just have more room for more things. And I will say that even in this more strategic approach, when it is a full stress bucket, in doing those three Ds, the delete, the delegate, do differently, like I mentioned in the series, we still often run into some of those protective patterns along the way that do need a little deeper attention. But the focus here is the load. It is your overall life load, not necessarily picking apart the things that teaching brings up in you. Versus if teaching itself is the trigger, if it is the boulder, if there is something specific about standing up in front of people, being seen as an expert, preparing lessons, having a consistent schedule, if there's something about the pressure to perform or deliver or be good enough, that's a different conversation. That's not primarily a bucket management problem. That is an experiential nervous system association problem. And that is actually what I'm gonna spend a few more minutes on. Because if that is the case, here's what might have happened. So when I say experiential nervous system association problem, here's what I mean. At some point, probably during or around the time your anxiety reached the breaking point, your nervous system made an association between teaching and threat. Not because teaching is actually threatening, but because you were in a state of significant dysregulation when you were doing it. And your nervous system, which is always scanning for patterns, it's always trying to protect you, it filed teaching under danger. And now every time you approach it or you approach the idea of it, that stored association activates within your system. So the racing mind, the spiraling, the overwhelm, that is your nervous system doing its job. The job that it's assigned to do, trying to keep you away from something that it has learned to read is unsafe. Now, that is only if you're looking at teaching and you don't understand why it's so activating or triggering for you. The other scenario here is that you did have an overwhelming experience while teaching. You did feel under-supported, under-resourced. Nobody is surprised being a teacher in the United States that you might have felt that way. And in that case, it's not a what I would call sometimes like an adjacent association, but there is a direct, clear reason why there's a negative association with the experience of teaching. And I'm gonna sidebar for just a moment and then come back to speaking to this. A lot of times the clients that we work with, they'll come in with something like driving anxiety and they won't understand it. They they won't, they're like, I've never been in a car accident, like I've never had a big fight in the car. Like, what sometimes our nervous system is in a state of activation, in an extreme state of dysregulation, because of something else happening in our life, because of something that we're thinking about maybe while driving. And because you are having the experience of driving in an extreme state of dysregulation, sometimes our brain can make the connection between two unrelated things. The thing that you're stressed out about in driving in that moment are unrelated, but the way that you are experiencing them or together. And if let's say the car is the only place that you have to be in your own head, be in your own thoughts, you're oftentimes internally experiencing challenging things in the car. Your the way your nervous system is experiencing that, it might not be able to tease out the difference between what's happening inside being the threat and the stressor versus what you're doing on the outside and driving. So sometimes there's the direct association. You're like, yes, I know exactly why teaching or driving brings up anxiety for me. And sometimes it may be a little bit more of an adjacent experience that was happening. So I clarify that because oftentimes when I do, somebody goes, oh my gosh, okay, that makes sense. That makes sense why I don't understand why anxiety shows up for me in X, Y, or Z experience. But either way, here's the hopeful thing. Your nervous system learned that association, which means it can unlearn it, maybe never completely or entirely, but we can definitely soften that neural pathway. That is neuroplasticity. That's what it is. That's what it does. It means that the pathways that got built into our mind, body, system, they're ever changing. They can be rebuilt. I would say, but, and this is an important but that process oftentimes requires a little bit of capacity first or requires some support. It is really hard. It is really hard for us to rewire an association when our system is spiraling out in survival mode. Our brains don't have the resources for that kind of learning, that kind of repatterning when they are focused on an active threat or what feels like an active threat. So this is exactly what we talked about in part five of the stress management series when we talked about the healing phases. So regulation has to come before rewiring, or it at least has to come alongside rewiring. You have to have built enough stability or to have enough present co-regulation stability, enough of a regulated baseline before the deep relearning, the deep repatterning can actually happen. And that capacity, oftentimes, like I've nodded to a ton, comes from adding supporters via a friend, a partner, a therapist, a coach, holding some of this work alongside you. So what might this actually look like in practice for something like teaching? It could look like going to get coaching or therapeutic support and saying, hey, help me understand this. Help me add one of those three C's, help me add more context, more connection, more choice around this, right? If we think about the anxiety equation, anxiety is an overestimation of the threat paired with an underestimation of your ability to manage the threat. Okay, you can work in a therapeutic setting on either one of those. In what ways am I overestimating this threat? Can we actually, in a calm, co-regulated space, can we play out worst case scenario? And can I show myself that I actually could handle that? How do I build up my belief in my ability to handle hard things? So we want to work with context choice connection, decreasing perceived threat, increasing perceived ability to handle the hard thing. This also, in practice, sometimes we need to take baby steps experientially towards the thing that we want to do. So this might look like starting at a much smaller scale, maybe even smaller than you think you need to. So maybe it's you're not going back to teaching full time, or you're not teaching alone, you're not teaching a full class. Maybe it's that you just start to prepare lessons as if you were teaching. You explain it to a friend over coffee. Maybe it's recording a voice note of yourself teaching a concept just for you. Maybe it is a five-minute micro lesson to a kid or a grandkid. The goal is to start rebuilding the association between teaching and safety, between teaching and ability, confidence. And in doses that your nervous system can actually tolerate right now without spiraling out into that regret or anxiety. And this is where we can step into that curiosity that we need that I talked about in part four for the doing differently. What if we're not deleting teaching from your life because you love it and it's clearly aligned with who you are and what you value? But can we find a version of it that asks less of your nervous system, at least for right now? A version of it that can start creating this new pattern, this new association, new experiences with teaching that don't overwhelm your nervous system so that it can file it differently for the future. And then alongside that experiential dosing, if you will, working on the mindset and emotional pattern category of your baseline stressors that you said was really big for you. So the stories, the protective parts, the beliefs about what teaching means or what it might require of you, or what happens if you're not good enough, that's the deeper work, the rewiring work that there needs to be enough regulation, enough capacity, enough support to shift. So to directly answer your question, reorienting a baseline emotional or mindset stressor like this one, it's typically not primarily about those three Ds. It is about building enough capacity to approach the thing again, starting smaller than probably feels necessary, creating those new associations slowly and intentionally while doing that deeper work on the underlying patterns when your system is resourced or in a place where your system is resourced and supported enough to actually integrate that new awareness, that new perspective. And this process of building capacity, identifying patterns, creating a personalized roadmap for moving towards things that matter to you. This is exactly the kind of work that we do with our one-on-one clients, both inside Restore, but also for folks who are inside the regulated living membership. They always have the option to do some add-on one-on-one coaching sessions to move through this process with a specific situation in their life in a really tangible way to get them closer and closer to being able to do the thing that they want to or need to or love without experiencing so much dysregulation, activation, or shutdown. So if that resonates, if the type of support that I talk about here on the podcast feels like what you might need right now, there is a link in the show notes to always book a discovery call with me to learn more about Restore or to jump in and join us inside the membership. Now, the second email I got, so we're gonna move on from that. It reads, Quote, I did this recently. I let go of something to give time to myself, and the relief was immediate. My mom died about eight months ago from ALS. And I have been supporting my stepdad, who has been lonely and a bit lost since she died. But I did this at the cost of my own self-care. He was coming over for dinner two nights after I worked, and we saw him most Sunday to support him. I work full time to support my husband and two kids, so I had little time to myself, but I knew he needed help. After eight months of putting myself aside, after eight other months of also doing that to be the primary caregiver for my mom when she was sick, I finally chatted with him about skipping one dinner so that I could have time for myself and my kids. Happily, he was very understanding and genuinely seemed okay to lessen the visits. I love your podcast, by the way. So I want to sit with part of this together for a moment. You lost your mom eight months ago to ALS, which means you watched it coming, you were there for it, and you carried that alongside everything else your life was already asking of you. And then you moved directly from being one of her primary caregivers through all of that into being your stepdad's primary source of support and his grief while working full-time, while raising kids, while navigating your own loss in this. And I just want to name that weight clearly because I think this message can easily be read. And with your comment, we could really easily just focus on the practical win. And it is a win, and we are gonna get there. But I do not want to skip past what is actually the load that's actually in your bucket that's on your nervous system, because that is an enormous amount of stored stress, grief, a caregiving load that's accumulated over a significant stretch of time. And so the fact that you were functioning at all is a testament to your capacity or to your supporters. And the fact that you are here listening to this series, doing this work, amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing. And then what's also amazing, what you did. You took the stress bucket series and you applied it. You made it real and tangible in your life. You looked honestly at your life and you made one edit, one dinner, and you said that relief was immediate. And that felt sense of relief is such important data from your nervous system. That is your system giving you real-time feedback, that physical exhale, that sense of something releasing. Some of us have experienced this because we proactively said no to what was too much. I also think some of us have experienced this when we had that friend cancel the plans. And maybe we wanted those plans, but we also just wanted time. We wanted to rot in bed, right? That sense of, oh. So I want all of you to pay attention to when you feel this sense of relief within your system and what that relief might be pointing to. Oh, did I not want to do that specific thing? Or is it just that I needed a little bit less overall in my life? So in episode three of the stress management series, we talked about how editing is not just this cognitive exercise and how sometimes when we edit, we do get lucky and we edit in a way that is well received, or in a way that we get that immediate relief. But I do want to remind you that there are other times we make edits that come with a sense of grief or guilt or blaming from the other person or loss of relationship. This time for you, it was immediate, unmistakable, well-received relief. Awesome. I also want to say that even if it wouldn't have been super well received, even if there would have been a little bit of disappointment on your stepdad's side, it still could have been the right decision for you and for your family. But I do love that for you this time, it gave your nervous system that experiential connection of, oh, I can edit things, I can state what I need clearly, and it can be well received. Maybe we'll try to do that again. And what strikes me about your particular edit, and honestly, I might be projecting a little bit right now, is that maybe it wasn't actually specifically about the dinner. I think it's also underneath that, I do think having one less person at dinner definitely all of it, all of it can decrease load. But I also think that it sounds like you have been carrying around one of those unconscious contracts that I've talked about, one that says your needs come last, that showing up for the people that you love comes first, even if it means running yourself into the ground for them. You had been honoring that contract through your mother's illness, through her death, through your stepdad's grief for so, so many, many, many, many months. And you finally, gently, kindly, and with care for your stepdad, put down a small boundary around one night and the world didn't end. He is fine. You got a little of yourself back in that. So not only did you get that night back, but I do think that you chipped away at this kind of unconscious contract. My needs come last. And that's the work. That is exactly what that series was pointing towards. And I am so, so proud of you for doing it. And I'm so grateful that you wrote to me about that experience. And to anybody else listening, I want to use this as a little bump of encouragement, maybe to just try editing one thing. And whether it goes right, whether it goes terribly wrong, tell me about it. Send me an email. I would love to hear from you. Now, the third and last email that I'm going to touch on today, for context, I send out a weekly newsletter. It's really fun. It's a short read. If you're not on my newsletter list, head to my website, get there. So this email was in response to my weekly regulated notes. And the conversation I was having in the regulated notes was kind of adjacent to and pointed back to the stress bucket series. And at the end, I invited, I said, you know, what is one small shift, one small change that you could make in a regulating direction? And if something comes to mind, like write me back, share it with me. So this person wrote in, quote, this resonated with me. As a yoga teacher, I sometimes think I should be able to figure this out on my own. But oftentimes I can't. So I'm learning to reach out to my therapist who has chided me for going it alone when she's literally there to support me or turning to my friends. Okay, I'm gonna pause here really quick. How often do we go at it alone? Or do we try to figure it out alone, try to do it, white knuckle something? Because we don't want to be a bother. First of all, we don't want to be a bother to our therapist, who we literally, I literally pay my therapist so I can be a bother to her. That's her job. It's for me to be a bother. Or to our friends. How good does it feel for you when a friend reaches out for you for support? I'm not talking about the friend who reaches out to you to trauma dump, but the friend who says, Hey, I'm having a hard time. This is this is the support I need. Or, hey, do you have the capacity to listen while I talk something, while I verbally process something out right now? I love being that friend. I bet your friend wants to be that friend for you. Stop. Stop thinking that we should be able to figure out everything on our own. Okay, coming back in. They continue to write. I also have had the feeling of wanting to flush my life down the toilet and start from scratch many times. And I have actually done it. It's sometimes easier when everything is new because any decision seems to work. So this week, I am going to work on not binge watching TV shows when I am avoiding moving forward in my life. I heard recently that when you fill your mind with a constant stream of TV shows or Instagram videos, you can lose touch with your inner knowing and creativity. So I am going to try to rediscover that part of me. End quote. Thank you for this. So insightful, so genuine, so honest. And there's a few things that I want to talk about here first. Number one, I'm gonna revisit this. I think this is important. The quote, I should be able to figure this out of my own belief. Especially as somebody who teaches wellness to others. You're a yoga teacher, right? I teach wellness to others. This is one of the most common, unconsciously signed contracts that I see. We work with a lot of therapists in my practice who come in to be clients themselves. And the story that knowing the tools means you should be able to use them on yourself without support. Nope. Or that needing help is somehow a contradiction to what you teach or the fact that you are a helper, it is not. If anything, the people who understand this work most deeply are often the ones who understand most clearly why having someone alongside you matters. So your therapist is right. Let her help find the couple good friends who are also safe, helpful, thought, feeling partners in this. And then to your comment about wanting to flush everything down the toilet to start from scratch. This person mentioned that because that was in direct comment to me saying that I often feel that way in my life. So in that email they were replying to. And I think a lot of you listening have probably felt this that impulse is often a nervous system response to overwhelm. This impulse, I just want to flush all down the toilet. I just want to run away when your bucket is too full, when that seesaw is too imbalanced and everything feels stuck. Starting over can feel like relief because it removes a lot of that accumulated weight, theoretically. Everything is new, so nothing is heavy yet. But what you're really longing for, I think, probably isn't an entirely new life, but it's a lighter one. And that is available without burning or flushing everything away. And that was what that series was all about. And the final thought here that I thought was it's it's in my noggin, is the TV and the consumption piece. Yes, when we fill every single quiet moment with inputs, we do not give our nervous system the space to process, to integrate, to hear itself. Stillness oftentimes feels uncomfortable when we've been dysregulated because our system has been using stimulation, activation to avoid that discomfort. But that inner knowing, the creativity, that sense of what you actually want and need, that lives in the space, in the quiet. And it's worth protecting some of that space. It's worth creating some of that space. And again, real time for me, I had therapy yesterday. And that was kind of the ask at the end of that session. Was my my therapist said, I want you to commit to going out on a daily walk, either alone or just with my baby. She's like, it's a very different experience to go on a walk with your five and three-year-old, where you're having conversations with them, where you're pretending to be super interested in the stick or the rock that they're showing you, versus just you out on a walk, you pushing the baby who's contained in the stroller and having the space to think about what in my life is working right now, what in my life might need to shift, what internal and external supporters that I need, giving yourself space. And that space is uncomfortable. Things come up in that space that you might be like, I think I want to shove that back into the dark corner. That those are the things that we often need to see. And oftentimes in keeping our lives chaotic and activating and go, go, go, in some ways, we we benefit from that activation, from the discomfort of that, because it buffers or it mitigates the discomfort from seeing some of the obvious pieces in our life that might need to shift, or some of the places in our life where there might be obvious lack that we don't know, we don't know how to fill. So, wrapping up, I want to thank everyone again who reached out after this series or really who's sent me an email or a DM at any time. I so enjoy reading and responding to these messages. And I've enjoyed responding directly to this one so much that the next few episodes are going to reply directly to some of your write-ins on the podcast forum. So if you don't know, at the bottom of the show notes of every episode, there's a little line that says, Want me to talk about something specific on the podcast? Let me know here. And so over the next handful of episodes, I'm going to address some of those write-ins. So keep those responses coming. And if anything in today's episode resonated and you find yourself wanting support that goes beyond what a podcast can offer, there also in the show notes are details on my regulated living membership and restore. The membership is an ongoing community practice space for nervous system regulation for regulated living. And then restore is for those of you who want deep personalized support, somebody to walk with you alongside you in learning how to regulate your nervous system and looking at these deeper patterns, doing some of this part work. And if you want to learn more about that, I'd love to hop on a completely pressure-free, free 30-minute discovery call with you. Now, to wrap up today with one more thing, here's our three takeaways from this conversation. Takeaway number one, when something you love starts to feel overwhelming or like you can't do it anymore, I want you to ask yourself, is this thing the trigger itself, or is it just the final drop in an already full bucket or life? Because those two scenarios need different responses. Takeaway number two, your nervous system learned the associations it is operating from, which means it can unlearn them. But that rewiring process oftentimes needs support, capacity, co-regulation. Where can you find that? Takeaway number three, that immediate felt sense of relief when you edit something. Trust that. Notice when your nervous system gives you this real time feedback about what you need in your life. And can you get a little curious about that and offer it a little bit more of that? All right, friend. Thanks for being here. And until next week, I am sending hope and healing your way.