My Favorite Anxiety Equation (+ Personal Update)

In this episode Amanda shares her favorite anxiety equation (Anxiety = an overestimation of threat + underestimation of your ability to manage the threat) through a lens of two personal examples. She also shares a little life update and upcoming plans for the next segment on the podcast.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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. Hey friend, welcome back. Today we are gonna talk about one of my favorite anxiety reframes, which is that anxiety is the result of an overestimation of a threat paired with an underestimation of your ability to manage that threat. Now I'm gonna repeat that in a few minutes. And if you have been listening to the podcast for a while, you've already heard this. I have talked about this many a time across many different episodes over the last few years. And it is still something that I refer back to almost monthly inside the membership in a variety of different contexts, in the things that people bring, the triggers that they present, the situations. And I say, okay. And then we use this not just as a theoretical reframe of anxiety, but as an actual working model. In client work that I do, I say, okay, in what ways are you overestimating the threat? Usually, more often, we take it first from the other side. In what ways are you underestimating your ability to manage that threat? And can we actually build up your conscious awareness of the resources you have available to you, of the track record of resilience, the evidence that you have that not what if, what if, what if, what if, but even if this thing happens, you will be okay. And so while I want to get into that conversation a little more detail, here's a quick personal sidebar and to let you know kind of what's coming over the next handful or so of episodes here on the podcast. So right now, it is later than I want to admit, I'm staying up. The night before I'm catching an early morning plane with me and my whole family, three tiny humans, across country to California to spend a couple of weeks with my family. And the plan for this month was to produce a three-part series on mind-gut connection. It's something I've spent a lot of time researching. I feel like I have really good outlines for those episodes. It's really important information, and it was perfect timing because inside the membership, we're focusing on gut health this month and talking about that. And inevitably, here I am the night before I leave on this trip, trying to get these recorded and produced. I get part way through and I realize that there's been a tech glitch at some point, and my microphone gave out and stopped recording, and I just don't have it in me to stay up for the next two hours that it would take for me to re-record and produce and publish those. So here's what's happening in my life: summer is just insane bananas, and it's unpredictable. And I have had to give more resources towards some family things and some personal mental health things than I expected. And so, to give myself the time and the space that I need to also create the quality of well-researched, well-produced podcasts that feels important for me to put out here, I am going to reshare a series that I did about a year and a half ago. So if you've been around a long time, you are probably familiar with the Back to the Basic series. In fact, I know a number of you found your way to the podcast through that series. Today's episode, we're gonna have a conversation on this anxiety reframe. I promise the mind gut connection series is coming, is coming soon, is coming soon. But in the meantime, to get myself and my family through Insane Banana Summer, I also have two really big projects behind the scenes that I'm working on. One is a new author project that I cannot spill the beans on yet, but I'm excited to share with you. And another is a really robust back-end system that I'm hoping I can make accessible. Again, there's just not a lot of details that I can share, but I'm just working on some really impactful, really fun, creative things behind the scenes. And so when I want to do more in one area of my life, I have to be willing to do a little bit less in another area. And this podcast is something that I love. I love, I love, I love. And it asks so much of me, friends. The research and the outlining and the scripting that I do week after week for this podcast, it's a big ask. It's a big ask. And it's something that I am entirely uncompensated for. It feels so important to me to put this information and these resources out there completely free for anybody to be able to learn and to do what they need to, how to apply, however, they want to apply this information to their mental health healing. So, in the meantime, we're gonna have this conversation we're gonna have today, totally off the cuff, unscripted. Because again, what I have prepared for you is a gut health episode that didn't record. Over the next handful of weeks, I am going to republish the Back to the Basics series. And in doing so, if you are listening to it for the first time, amazing, wonderful, phenomenal. If you are listening to it for the second time, I actually want to encourage you, if you're like, well, I already listened, like maybe I'll come back in a couple months when you've moved on to something else. I want to encourage you to listen again. To listen again from the lens that you currently find yourself in. Because the last time I published this was a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago. Your life is different. You're in a different season, you're in a different phase of your mental health. What has shifted? What has changed for you? How are you hearing this information differently in a new way? How does it apply to you differently? And the other context that I will offer is that my business has changed slightly. Since I did the Back to the Basic series, we have rebranded. We used to be Rise as We, and now we're regulated living. And so there are a couple linguistic things that may be less accurate. The regulated living membership used to be the Rise membership. So take those things with a grain of salt. But that's what's coming. That's what's coming. And that's a little sneak peek at what's going on in my world. Now, back to what I wanted to cover today, which is just a really candid discussion on understanding anxiety through this reframe. I have a million different reframes for anxiety and for depression and for mental health topics, but this is one that I come back to with the most frequency. And again, it is that anxiety happens as the result of overestimating a threat paired with underestimating your ability to handle the threat. So anxiety is an overestimation of a threat paired with an underestimation of belief in your ability to handle it. It comes as a result of this energy that sounds like, well, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if? And when we are in this sympathetic, activated state, it does change the way that our brain works. It does create a lot more urgency, it creates a lot more narrow-mindedness, narrow focus. We feel like we have to be hyper-vigilant. We have to prepare for all the worst-case scenarios because that's going to give us some sense of control. And then it also inhibits our perspective. We forget, we forget all of the things that we have already overcome. We forget that we have been able to have a panic attack and reset from it. It didn't actually take us out. It didn't kill us. And so we underestimate our ability to handle the hard thing. One of the things that I have worked on the most in therapy over the last couple of years is a version of this. Is oftentimes my therapist will catch me, like, okay, but if this happens, like then I'm okay. And she's like, Okay, Amanda, what if I mean, let's just like, what if you just stayed here now a little bit more and you said, I trust myself to handle whatever comes. I trust myself to handle whatever that relationship brings. For a while, I had a lot of anxiety around before my daughter was born, my most recent kid, who oh my gosh, she's almost a year. She's almost a year. I don't know where time went. What is time? Especially because, as far as we've planned, she's our last baby. It all feels warped. But I had a lot of anxiety going into her birth because birth of my second son, really everything that could go wrong went wrong. Um, and I remember having a conversation with her, and I was like, okay, so something called a uterine rupture happened. My first birth was a c-section. I wanted something called a V back, which is when you attempt to have a vaginal delivery after you've had a previous C-section. And there's risk involved, but it's like 1% of V backs end up in a uterus rupture. Well, someone needs to make up that statistic, and that someone is apparently me. So my uterus ruptured while I was in labor with my second son. And that can be life-threatening for baby and mom. And it, and it is, and it was. We came out of it with a happy story. I was okay, my son was okay, and it was still quite traumatic. It was not the experience that I wanted. Um, physically and psychologically, it was really hard. We still decided we were going to move forward with a third pregnancy. And the doctors said that it had to be a scheduled C-section because my risk for rupture considerably goes beyond 1% if you've already ruptured. So the long story short, I've digressed. That's context for I was, I remember being in a therapy session, and I was like, okay, well, I know that if my uterus ruptures, I have like, I think 20 minutes or 12 minutes, whatever it was, tops before there's like brain damage to the baby and da-da-da-da. And so the hospital's really close. I think that uh we could get my me to the hospital before. So my husband needs to call the hospital. Guys, I understand how like neurotic this sounds in hindsight. I was telling her, I was like, I can feel calm about birth if my husband calls the hospital ahead of time to know exactly what door do I bring my wife through if we are in an emergency and her uterus has ruptured before. Like, it was wild the way that I was like, I need to know every detail for every single scenario, even though we're minimizing risk. I was a scheduled C-section this round at 36 and a half weeks. Like the odds of me going into labor before 37 weeks wildly, like, wildly unlikely. Also, I live two blocks from the hospital. If I started to show any signs of labor, I would go to the hospital. I'm not just gonna spontaneously rupture. Anyways. Anyways, anyways, anyways. What she said in that moment, she goes, Amanda, regardless the situation, you're gonna call 911. You're gonna call 911. That's that's the step to take. You don't need to think about, well, if I'm here when I rupture, or if I don't rupture, if I go into labor, or this, that, or that. She's like, you're just gonna call 911, or you're just gonna drive to the hospital. And the harsh reality is like, if that horrible thing that's so unlikely to happen does happen, like you're gonna make it or you won't. And like, what if you just like trusted yourself to like you'll it'll it's figure outable. So that was one instance. And then months later, my husband and I, in this postpartum period, my mental health took a dive. Our marriage just felt hard. It felt really hard in a way that it didn't feel in some of the other postpartum seasons. Uh, we are currently in marriage counseling, big fan. And I remember talking to her around like, well, if this pattern doesn't change in my marriage by five years or by this point, like then I might da-da-da-da-da. And she was like, maybe. And I was like, What? What do you mean, maybe? And she's like, you might have really good reasons for making a different choice then, like you have right now. What if you just trusted future Amanda to know what the right decision is, given whatever the circumstance becomes, that you cannot possibly predict or know? And her, I know what her maybe does, it was to like interrupt my spiral. And those two experiences that were many months apart in therapy really had me sitting with this anxiety equation in these particular arenas of my life. Okay, so anxiety is this overestimation of threat paired with an underestimation of my ability to handle it. And I would argue that I'm a pretty confident person, I'm a pretty resilient person. If you were to ask me point blank, I'd be like, Yeah, I can handle it. I can handle anything. I've done so many hard things. Like, I can handle it. And yet, what my system was doing with this constant cognitive overfunctioning, this constant catastrophizing was my internal system doesn't actually have a calm sense of trust in my ability to handle the what if. Because if it did, it wouldn't need to make a case and a plan for every possible variation and version of that. And so in the last few months, handful of months maybe, what we have worked really hard on, what I have worked really hard on, is to create this much calmer sense of not needing to plan for every what if, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if, but instead being more, I don't know, comfortable. I don't know if comfortable is the right word, but in the even if. Even if something goes catastrophically wrong with my health, we'll figure it out. Like we'll figure it out to the best of our ability. And like if something tragic happens, like it's we'll it we'll just figure it out. If this pattern in my marriage doesn't change in five years, well, then five years from now, Amanda can figure it out. And I have become so much more comfortable with the unknown because I have become so much more trusting and deeply believing in my ability that I can, I can handle it. And so, in any situation in your life right now, where you feel anxious, where your system really gets activated, I want you to just put it into this, into this reframe, into this context, into this formula, if you will, with this situation, in what ways are you overestimating the threat? And I would argue that that is actually the harder place to start or the harder place to do anything about because when we are anxious about something, when we are in this hyper-vigilant, activated, sympathetic state, we can make a case for the fact that we are not overestimating the threat. In that moment in that therapy session, I could make a case for why I was absolutely not overestimating the threat. Another uterine rupture was a very real threat. I'd lived through it. I was already the 1%. Who's to say I won't be again? Like, what do you mean when I was talking about this relational pattern and my marriage that was just not working for me? I was like, no, I can really make a case for like if this doesn't change, I can't do this, blah, blah, blah. Like, so I just want you to like really curiously and maybe even humorously, what case are you making? What case are you making for that threat being really big and really huge? What evidence do you have for it? And then can you pull a couple of those tools out of your toolkit, take a couple deep breaths, and say, is that an overestimation of this threat? An exercise I like to do is I like to take the three primary nervous system states we talk about a lot, right? Regulation, that green zone, activation, that yellow zone, and shut down that red zone. And I'll take a situation. So, like let's say it was, let's let's take, let's take the uterine rupture, for example. And I would journal this and I would say, okay, when I'm in a and I would take the state that's the most default, and I do that first. So for me, I had a lot of activation around that experience. So I would say, okay, when I'm in the yellow zone, when I'm really activated, what is my story about this experience? And it's like pretty accurate to what I said in therapy. I was like, okay, if this happens, I need to know all of the details about what hospital entrance I would go into, what how many exactly minutes do I have? Like, what is the process? What should we do? Da-da-da-da-da. Like it could happen. It could happen. And then I don't know, like I take a sip of water, I go for a little walk, I shake it out. And then I say, okay, when I'm in my most regulated self, how does that story differ? If I can come at this situation from a really regulated place, or maybe let's take the persona of my most reasonable friend, if I can't even get out of my own head, and what story are they gonna tell about this? Right. And it's like what my therapist came up with. Like, first of all, Amanda, can we see like how unlikely that actually is? Secondly, even if it does happen, like you call 911, you get in the car and you drive to the air, like you don't need to call the hospital and get those details and have that, like, no, like it's it's much simpler than your brain wants it to be. And sometimes if I feel like I need even to see more flexibility, I might ask myself, what is my story in yellow zone? And then I'll go, what is my story in red zone? Like if it was a day where I was feeling really overwhelmed and really shut down, really frozen and stuck. And I don't write that story down or that narrative down because I want that to be real for me, but I write it down because I want my system to see that my state can determine my story and that my story can change on a specific situation based on whether I'm in an activated state, a shutdown state, or a regulated state. And obviously, I want to be living as much of my life through the story of a regulated state. And so, okay, take this thing that's really, really triggering for you, really activating for you right now, and work that part of the equation. In what ways am I overestimating the threat, or in what ways is my story around this thing different depending on the state that I'm in? Then we're gonna look at the other part of this equation, right? An overestimation of threat paired with an underestimation of your ability to handle it, to manage it. Okay, how am I underestimating my ability to handle this? Or more accurately, what would I need to feel more confident in my ability to handle this situation? So let's say you cannot get out of your worst case scenario brain. Or let's say for real, there is an upcoming situation that is really hard and it is really emotionally loaded for you. And it's just, you're like, it's just gonna suck. Like it's just gonna suck. Can we take a situation that is gonna be genuinely hard, is genuinely gonna suck, and not pair it with the underestimation of your ability to handle that sucky thing? So, okay, if we can't turn down the volume on the perceived threat or actual threat of the situation, can we turn up the volume on your belief in your capacity? So, who can you call when it's hard? What are the things that you can do to prepare for the situation? What do you need to put in place? Or is it hey, I have a great track record of surviving hard things up to this point? Sometimes it It is like it was for both of these situations for me in therapy. And it was more just getting to this calm, resolute place of I don't need to actually have all the answers now. I don't need to have a plan now. I actually do when I can take a breath and get connected to my regulated self. I can honestly believe that however these situations do or don't work out, I will be okay. I will figure it out. It will be what it will be. And if I can't figure it out on my own, I trust in my ability to seek out the resources that are going to get us through it. And sometimes I think that's it. Sometimes I also think it is, for example, just in our QA inside the membership today, flight anxiety came up. And so it could be okay, let's say you do have a flight. You've decided it's worth facing this fear and booking this flight to get this experience. And you are thinking about this and on the verge of a panic attack. You are overestimating the threat, maybe, but maybe you can't convince yourself that this flight is not threatening because of any number of reasons internally in you. So maybe we don't try to dial down our threat detection of this flight, but can we dial up your ability, your belief in your ability to manage it? And so for this particular person, we talked about okay, what are the things that you can do to maybe visualize this experience before? Are there things you can do to regulate yourself in the morning? What are the things you need to have in your bag that are resourcing for you? For some of our clients, this has been like having ice or a crunchy snack. Is there certain music that you can have cued into a Spotify playlist that you know can ground and regulate you? So that you can go into this experience feeling well resourced and supported. Because we're not necessarily trying to make it comfortable. We just want to make it more tolerable. Anxiety is the overestimation of threat paired with an underestimation of your ability to manage that threat. And in a very real, reflective way, I don't love it. I've never done this in the the two, almost three years I've been running this podcast. Only one time have I republished an old episode. There's been maybe three to five weeks where I've just missed, like last week, for example, I just missed because summer's summering and it's crazy. There is definitely an internal voice that's like, Amanda, you can't just replay like an eight-episode series. Who cares if it was some of your best performing episodes? Who cares if that was where you got the most emails saying, like, oh, this made a really big difference for me? This finally helped things click. Like, you like they could, if they want to, they'll just go find those episodes before. I also know that that's not how podcasts work. New people are tuning into this podcast every single week. And for a new person to come into this series right now is wildly beneficial. Also, like I said, I think it can be wildly beneficial for some of you who've been around a long time to re-listen to those episodes. And so even in this situation, there is part of me that's like, oh, but Amanda, people are gonna stop listening. People are gonna be annoyed with you. Who does that? Like, get your life together. Why can't you just get more ahead on podcasts? Why can't you time manage better? Like, I don't know because I have three children and I'm a solopreneur running, like, you're right. And that's where I often go. It's like I come to my deep defense and I try to make a case for it. Versus, you know what? Maybe replaying this series, maybe it does tank my listener stats. And maybe I like, but I do I trust that I'll be fine? Do I trust that I'll figure it out? Do I trust that after this series I'm gonna show up really intentionally? That that doing this is gonna give me an energetic buffer to move the needle on some of these really exciting projects behind the scenes that I'm working on, to be able to show up more intentionally in the episodes that I'm creating versus just trying to put something out there to put something out. Yeah, all of it. And so I wanted to offer a reminder of this anxiety reframe to you and share some personal anecdotes. And even in making the decision right now, immediately tonight, when my mic went out, I was just like, I can't. I could, I could stay up for three more hours and re-record and try to produce those. But then I'm just gonna get back from my trip in two weeks and immediately gonna need to record the next, the next, the next. What if you just gave yourself this space and this time and yapped on a microphone? Right now, what I'm doing, saying whatever comes to mind, whatever I want to say, give yourself the space and the time. You worked really, really hard to create that series a couple years ago. Repurpose it. Let people consume it if, when, how they choose to, and then keep on doing your thing with new episodes and new content and all of it. So that's it. That's what I have for you to today, friends, is to just take this anxiety reframe, this anxiety equation is what I often call it. Overestimation of threat, underestimation of your ability. And if you want to put your own experience in this, get curious. Maybe you take that to your therapist or to coach if you're in the membership, do a one-on-one session with one of our coaches and say, okay, help me explore this thing through the lens of how am I overestimating the threat? Where am I underestimating my ability? How can I change those variables a little bit so that I can move forward or look at or think about this situation or this arena of my life and have less activation brought up over it. And as we are replaying this back to the basics series, a couple things that I want to remind you of. Number one is that in the show notes, there is a form where I am always taking topic requests. I love to create episodes specifically in response to you, the things that you're struggling with, the things that you'd like insight on, something that you heard somebody else say that you want feedback on. And so as I am using this time and this space to be really intentional about upcoming podcast episodes and topics, if you want to say in that, I would love to hear from you. And then an absolute shameless ask and plug is that if you are here listening to this podcast and you love it, I would be so, so grateful for you to leave a five-star rating and review. I read all of those reviews. They are so, so valuable and meaningful to me. And most importantly, they do help get this show out to even more people who need it. So that is my ask and my share with you today. And until next week, friends, or especially until we kind of get through this back to the basic series, um, I am sending so, so much hope. So much hope and healing your way.