73: Why Am I So Anxious?

If your missionary is about to leave—or already out—and your body feels anxious, tense, or just “off,” this episode is for you.

Today I walk you through how your nervous system responds to stress, what Team Hyper and Team Hypo really look like for missionary moms, and how to gently guide yourself back to Team Resilience.

Using tools from Leah Davidson, nervous system expert, and my own framework, I’ll show you what resilient people do—and how you can apply these practices when emotions feel high and control feels low.

You’ll learn:

• Why your anxiety is a normal nervous system response
• The surprising shift from Team Hyper to Team Hypo
• 4 ways to build real resilience (without pretending you’re fine)

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Transcript

Michelle Evans: 0:30

Hello and welcome to the podcast, my sweet friends. I'm so glad you're here with me today. So if you're listening and your heart has been feeling a little anxious, whether you've got a missionary out that's in the middle of it, or you have a missionary that's leaving soon and there's just a lot to get done, I want you to take a deep breath. You're not broken, you're not failing. You have a completely normal. Nervous system response, and your body is interpreting this as a threat, so. I used to think that there was something wrong with me because my friends were sending off missionaries and they love they, a lot of them just loved it, and they always felt like their kid was a lot more safe when they were out on the mission, and I did not feel that way. I felt like this is terrifying. And what I've learned over years of studying is that this is a nervous system response, and my nervous system came to me this way. I have the ability to grow and change and evolve my own nervous system. So I wanna teach you. Some concepts about what resilient people do and how to help you start to build some additional resilience and to how to apply these tools directly to your own experience as a missionary mom, especially when you're feeling a lot of anxiety in your chest or your stomach drops or. Maybe your mind just won't stop spinning, which I have felt all of these at different times. So let's just start with some basics. I have another podcast episode where I have Leah Davidson, who's a nervous system expert on but I want to just. Give you a a basis to really start to understand what's happening. So your nervous system has one job and that's to keep you alive. And it does that by scanning for danger 24 7, and this is called neuroception. And most of this happens without your conscious awareness. So when your missionary is about to leave or you read something unsettling in their email or they tell you something, your body. Might start to feel off like, oh my gosh, what's happening? Maybe you feel sick to your stomach or your chest gets tight or you can't sleep, although nothing big, huge is happening at the moment. Or maybe. You have a response. I remember having one where I like looked down at my body and I was like, what is happening inside of me? Because it felt like my entire body was vibrating. And that is your nervous system saying, Hey, this might be dangerous. So we need to gear up just in case and. What happens is you start to leave team resilience and team resilience is the state where you're grounded, you're flexible, you're calm, and you can really adapt to things that are going on, and you start to move into team hyper. I. So welcome to Team Hyper. It's kind of the fast lane of fight, flight and fixing. It's where many of us go when something feels out of control. This is very common when we have a missionary out because we don't have direct control of our kids anymore, and I don't know. About you. But having a child in another country or even in another state, doing something wildly unfamiliar, can definitely feel very out of control. So here's what team hyper may look like. Obsessively checking your phone for emails, or if you put. A air tag in their luggage obsessively checking it over, researching mission rules or weather or safety concerns or packing lists, replaying the last call or email, trying to find things that maybe you're missing getting snappy. With your friends or family, but not really sure why, and you can't really quite put your finger on as to why you're doing that. So Team Hyper is all about doing, if you think about hyper, it's like a hyper arousal state, a hyperactive state, and it's your nervous system trying to solve the threat so that you can feel safe again. So there's times for me when I have found myself in fixing mode where I'm like, oh, my, my missionary is struggling, or, oh, my missionary is having this issue with a companion and I wanna take it on as my responsibility to to fix it. So what's my brain gonna come up with? I need to email the mission president. Maybe I need to email my stake president. And I'm, and your brain is trying to anticipate every possibility, but the trouble is we can't actually control what's happening on our missionary's mission. And when our efforts don't calm this internal storm, our nervous system starts shifting again, right? So then we start getting like almost exasperated, and this is when we drop from team hyper to team hypo. And this is the part many missionary moms don't realize happening. There's this moment, like sometimes it's brief, sometimes it's longer. When we leave team hyper and we start sleeting sliding into team hypo, and this is a shutdown state, this is the freeze in our ne nervous system, it's the withdrawal. It might feel like you're exhausted, you don't wanna talk to anybody. You feel numb, you feel disconnected. You think things like, what's the point? Or I can't do this. You also can, it feels like I can't get outta bed. I can't face the day. This is when you've burned through all of your fight or flight fuel and now your body is trying to hibernate to survive the stress. So there was a time when my missionary, my older son was out and I had done everything I could in the anxiety team, hyper. I had emailed the mission president, you know, his response had been, you know, very abrupt and then there was nothing else I could do. And so I actually moved into team hypo and it was so. Hard for me to get outta bed and to face the day. And I had other kids, I needed to be there for them. And it was, it was like I hit this wall and I just wanted to check out and I didn't wanna be there in that moment any longer. And this isn't failure, it's just biology. And this is where resilience work really matters. And for me a long time I didn't like I'd heard of high fight flight freeze, I've heard in my nervous system, but I didn't understand how to start queuing safety to myself because your nervous system doesn't know the difference between. A Bangled tiger walking in and ready to pounce on you and an email from your missionary all, all your nervous system knows is that there's danger, and so it feels like the house is burning down. But you have to start to cue your nervous system to be able to calm back down. Like, oh, actually this isn't an actual threat. This is hard. Yes, it's difficult for sure, but it's not life threatening. And most of the time on missions, they, they do run into things. I would say sometimes it may feel life threatening, especially for them And for you as a mom, my son was mugged multiple times. That wasn't something that I was accustomed to. You know, we had. I'd never been mugged. My, I, I grew up in a relatively safe environment. My kids did too. So when, you know, my son was mugged, you know, all of a sudden my nervous system, of course, was on high alert. So what do resilient people do, I guess, is the question to really start to shift back into team resilience and. There's a lot of research done on this, but we're gonna walk through four of them and how they help you shift back to self safety, calm and connection, and really start to cue yourself. And this is not hustling to get back to feeling better. This is you being able to acknowledge what's happening. So. Number one tool. Number one, they name what they're feeling. So what I like to do is I like to look down at my body and if something you know is, is happening, I like to name it. This is anxiety. This is grave grief. This isn't the ache of letting go. This is loneliness. So when you start to name your emotion, your nervous system go, oh. Oh, okay. Everything's okay. She's paying attention and it turns the volume down on all the alarm bells, so it starts to really bring your nervous system back down. If you try saying it out loud, you may, you can even try placing a hand on your heart. I love to put up my hand on my heart and just really acknowledge what's happening in my body. And also thanking, thanking my nervous system for being aware, because if my nervous system is trying to keep me alive, it's also trying to keep my kids alive. The second tool is you start to notice the story that you're telling. Our brains love a dramatic story, especially we're in team hyper. He's not okay. He needs my help. She's never gonna like this companion. They're gonna come home early. Everyone will think I failed. So this is an opportunity for you to pause and ask yourself like, what else might be true? Maybe it's, they're learning. This can look messy. There are hard days, but it doesn't mean mission Missions are necessarily bad. It just means they're hard. I. And just small reframes can start to gently guide your bat body back to team resilience.'cause we don't wanna stay in team hyper. We can reside in it for as long as we need, but when we stay in there like an excessive amount of time, that's when trauma starts to happen because your brain actually gets like, it's almost like an injury. So it. It creates like a trauma response and so we don't have to hustle through it, but just having the awareness so that you can like really have some awareness of what's happening. And then also another thing that's really helpful is if you have good friends or family members or somebody that really can help you. Walk or talk, and just being able to talk through things helps you organize your brain, helps you organize what's happening and put it into a way that you can understand. And what we don't want is we don't want somebody that's gonna start lecturing us, right? Because we all, we all have those people like, oh, you just need to read your scriptures more. Oh, you just need to have more faith. That does not help your nervous system when somebody is telling you that. Now, reading your scriptures. May help your nervous system. I don't know. You're gonna have to try that out and see I've tried it a few times. It depends on my level of where I'm at in team Hyper. If I'm super activated, it doesn't help it. I'm mildly activated. It does, but everybody's response is a little bit different. So it's being able to get to know what works for you if I'm super activated going on a walk. Doesn't help. It actually escalates me further until a few years ago. I didn't know that. So now I do. And just being a, having a lot of grace for when you are in team, I. Hyper and like trying to figure out how to soothe yourself and console yourself without creating like the bad habits, like foo buffering or you're buffering away from the emotions like using food or online shopping or Netflix. It's like being very, very aware of what's happening. The third tool is that resilient people do is they offer themselves a ton of compassion. So when you're in survival mode, your inner critic, that radio station that's running in the, in your mind, it gets louder, but compassion is actually what brings you back to safety. So being able to, try on some thoughts like, this makes sense that I feel this way. I love them so much. Or of course, my heart is aching. I'm human and I'm a mom and I love this child of mine that is walking around outside my body with a name tag on. Maybe when you start softening towards yourself instead of spiraling, you start to soften. And I ask myself that question, how can I soften into this? How can I embrace this without spiraling and making it worse? Because that internal critic will help you spiral. So just being hyper aware of that. All right. The fourth tool that resilient people do is they don't. They connect, they connect with other people. They don't isolate. They reach out. Connection sends the strongest signal to your nervous system that you are safe, and team resilient is anchored in safety. Call somebody, join a group, send a voice note to somebody who gets it. Even listening to this podcast, this counts, this helps. And you'll, you'll notice sometimes when you're listening to an episode, like you'll start out kind of worked up about something that's team hyper and then being able to really soften into like, oh, I can see what's happening here. You can start to acknowledge it. So if you're feeling anxious or tired, or your nervous system has gone rogue, I want you to know that you're, you're okay. You're doing things right. There's nothing to matter with you. There's nothing to matter with your faith. Resilience isn't about being strong all the time. It's about coming back to yourself with a level of kindness. So you may leave. Team resilience. We all do. We. You may hit team hyper or you may even dip into team hypo, both of those. Okay? Totally normal. And the goal isn't to stay regulated all the time. It's to notice and to try and find your way. Back, like one breath, one thought, one moment of connection, and, and you can tell when you're masking it because it'll start coming back up over and over again. But when you actually soften in it, into it, then you're moving through it and that allows you to really embrace it, but not have it overwhelm you. So I just want you to know that you're not alone in all of this. I'm right here with you. I'm doing this work right alongside you. I work on my nervous system. One of the best ways that I have found is to really try to start my day out in a, in a calm way. If I wake up, you know, anxious having some anxiety in my body, I try to acknowledge it right out of the gate and then I try to spend some time with it. I also have mentioned this before, but I love. Inside out two where it talks about anxiety being at the console. So if you, if you haven't watched that movie, definitely go watch it. It helps you just create enough awareness so that you can kind of see what's happening inside of you and it gives you a picture so that it's helpful to be able to s. You know, oh, I have anxiety at the console right now, which isn't bad. It's just having that awareness. And I'm going to be diving a little bit more into this. Team, hyper team, hypo, just a little more deep diving where it shows up how you can help yourself, and hopefully it will help you be able to get to know what's happening for you and being able to acknowledge it and knowing that you're okay. And the more that you understand it, the more resilience you start to create, and you really start to cue to your nervous system. And I lived, I think for years in Team Hyper, and I don't even know if I knew what it felt like to feel safe in my body. And through this work and really learning about my nervous system and giving myself a ton of grace, I've been able to create that with myself and help many other people create it with that themselves as well. So that is what I have for you today. And just so that you have a, just a kind of a concept of how my podcasting works. Normally I batch create, I'll have a ton of ideas and I'll want to kind of get those down and I create a framework and then I record, and then I go and I go in and I'll record three or four episodes at a time. Then I edit them and I get them scheduled. But sometimes, sometimes I get off in that cadence and I won't get one scheduled and published on the Monday morning like I like to. And that's what happened on Memorial Day. So if you're. Following me in real time. I apologize this didn't come out on Monday, but I will definitely have things scheduled out for the next few weeks so that I can stay on top of those and give you guys the best content and the best support that I can. All right everyone. You have a great week and. Lots of prayers going out to every missionary mom that's getting ready to send a missionary out into the field this summer and this fall. And if you have one coming home, we're gonna talk about that this summer too.'cause I have one that's coming home and that is a transition. That is an interesting one, and so try to give you some help and some tools to make it a little easier transition for you and your missionary. With that, we will see you next week. Bye-bye.