Anxiety

Anxiety is running WILD especially given this is ELECTION WEEK in the United States. Collective anxiety levels are HIGH right now & we are all feeling it, especially empaths.

In this episode, host Karianne Jean talks about her experience with Anxiety & tactics that have worked for her at various stages of her life managing anxiety & anxious feelings.

Transcript

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[00:03] Karianne: Welcome to Grounding Elevation, the podcast for open minds and open hearts to dig a little deeper and ascend a little higher on a quest to tap into our limitless potential mind, body and soul. I'm Carrie Ann Jean, mom, wife, daughter, sister, artist, writer, learner, rebel, entrepreneur, psychology enthusiast. I have a deep passion for self improvement that has sent me down many roads of growth and learning and unlearning. I believe that God, universe, whatever you call the highest power, the source from where we all have come from, it speaks and it all but yelled at me to do this podcast. This is my leap of faith in spite of my insecurities and self doubt and humanness. So here we go. Join us weekly as we embark together on a Grounding Elevation. Hello and welcome back. Took a bit off a few weeks, life happened, which is cool. Try not to put too much pressure on myself about it because it's really important to me that every episode that we do is meaningful and I'm in the right headspace to do it because I want to always be bringing pertinent and energetically aligned vibes to your ears. So thank you for your patience and your grace in the break. We're going to do a handful more episodes for this season and then we're going to close out season one. So it's been a blast doing these episodes and it's always so fun for me when I get people randomly, friends, acquaintances, telling me that they, oh, they listen to this episode and they really like this, or X, Y and Z. Just knowing that there are ears on the other side of this venture is really, really fun and rewarding for me. So I'd love to know what your favorite episode thus far has been. So make sure to join us on Instagram roundingelevation. Um, I have not been great about posting lately. Again, life. But I'm going to try to do better. So this is my concerted effort to try to do better. Today I want to jump into a hot topic. Seems like it's always a hot topic, but right now it's more pertinent than ever. Pertinent than ever. And I want to talk about anxiety. So it's kind of a buzzword. I know a lot of people talk about anxiety and we have anxiety and I kind of don't love saying things like I have anxiety or I've been diagnosed with anxiety because I think sometimes we over associate ourselves with things like that. Over associate ourselves with quote unquote diagnoses. Right? And it can start to become. It can start to become part of our Identity. And I don't think we should be including things in what the core of what makes us who we are that we don't necessarily want. Right. I always say about myself, I have a tendency to lean on the anxious side. To feel anxiety rising in my body is not uncommon for me. But I don't like to say I have anxiety because it's just something that comes and it goes. And we all have inclinations towards certain things. Some people may be more inclined to feel depressed than others. Right. They might feel those deep, sadden, isolating emotions more easily than, you know, someone else. But to claim something as ours that we don't necessarily want as part of our main core identity. I don't know that that's like the most productive thing to do to say I have anxiety. Oh, it's something that's always with me. I think there's something to be said about not giving it such a powerful position, if that makes sense. You don't want to give it such a powerful position in your life because it can start to make you believe that you don't have control over it and you don't have power over it. And that's not necessarily true. I think we all have power and control over everything in our lives, especially internal. Our internal world. Will emotions come? Yes. Can we stop anxiety from ever knocking on the door ever, you know, rising up in our bodies? No, but there are really helpful ways to cope with it and to manage it and to kind of rock and roll with it. We don't have to be. Anytime we put ourselves in a position to be a victim of something, I think we're doing ourselves a disservice. We are setting ourselves up to dismiss our innate power. And I personally don't ever want to do that. I don't want to dismiss my innate power because we are so powerful and we do have the power, and I use the term control loosely, but we have control over ourselves and our own actions and our own mechanisms. Right. So I don't like giving it that power. Oh, I have anxiety and it just comes and there's nothing I can do about it. Well, it's not necessarily true. Will it come? Yes. Will we encounter it? Yes. Some of us more frequently than others, some of us more intensely than others. You know, I. It's hard for me to imagine, but I know some people who have never had a panic attack. Right. They've never allowed anxiety to get so far that it completely debilitated them and resulted in very physical symptoms. For me, I've gone To urgent care. It's been a long time, but I've gone to urgent care, as in my early 20s, I think I was, or like, late teens. I've gone to urgent care more than once, saying that I was having a heart attack. I was sure there was no ansips or buts about it. I'm having a heart attack. Something's wrong with me. There's something wrong with my heart. And every time I've gone, they say, no, your heart is fine. Everything is fine. You know, I. Have you ever spoken to someone about anxiety? And, like, you know, they're always so careful to not be like, no, you're doing this to yourself. You're stressed out. But in reality, that is kind of what I. What I'm doing. I'm. I'm allowing the anxiety to rise enough within me to result in very physical manifestations that are not made up. It's. It's not made up. It's something that happens that feels very much like you're out of control, which makes me spiral even more. But I think the last time I went to a doctor because of anxiety, essentially, I didn't know it was because of anxiety. I was having heart palpitations. And when I say heart palpitations, I mean true. Like, you can see it on an ekg, and it was four or five years ago, I think. I was in Nashville. I was with my husband, so it wasn't that long ago. But I went to urgent care, and they saw the palpitations that were coming up on the ekg, and they said, you know, yeah, it's there. Like, there is a heart. I think they called it irregularity of palpitations. And you can see it. And I was like, is there something wrong? Am I about to have a heart attack? And I'm like, no, but, you know, we can refer you to see a cardiologist. Right? Because they could see that something was actually wrong. I wasn't just racing my heart that time. I was actually palpitating it. Good times. So I went to the cardiologist, and luckily I got a cardiologist who was very. No bs he was very straightforward with me, and he said he did it. He saw the palpitation pop up, and he did a couple other tests on my heart. And he said, okay, your heart is fine. There's nothing wrong with your heart. You're in your 20s. You're very healthy. You're not overweight. You don't have any risk factors. You know, listening. I don't hear. He said, if there was a structural issue. I would hear X, Y, or Z. If there was, you know, some kind of blockage, I would see this, that, or the other thing. He's like, there's. There's nothing physically wrong with your heart. It's behaving this way probably because of stress. And he's like, are you anxious? Are you an anxious person? And I was like, well, yeah. And I asked so many questions. I was like, well, could it be possible that this is wrong with my heart? Or could it be possible that that's wrong with my heart? And I remember after, like, the fourth question, like, that he was like, do you want something to be wrong with your heart? And I said, no, obviously not. And he's like. He's like, I'm telling you, there's nothing wrong. You're fine. What's wrong is that I think the problem is in your mind and not saying that you're making this up, but your mind is doing this, not your. Your heart is not acting independently here. Your mind is making your heart do this. And he kind of like, you know, I would look into some mindfulness meditations. I think he was. He was Indian, I believe. And he's like, you know, you might want to look into options like this. And I'm, you know, in my head, I'm like, are we sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure nothing's wrong with me? And after the, you know, umpteenth time, I realized that I am actually doing it to myself. And I realized that because when I did start putting into practice meditation to try to stop it, and once I got out of the loop that I had created in my mind of something's wrong, right? That loop of I'm feeling anxious about something, who knows what it was? I really don't even remember what it was now. But I'm feeling anxious about something. I'm having a physical manifestation, and. And then it becomes more anxiety about the physical manifestation, and then the physical manifestation gets bigger, and now it gets more. Because now you have more anxiety. And then the more you feel it physically, the more you feel it in your mind and in your heart and in your body of the anxiety, and it rises more. And all that's to say anxiety is it can be feel very debilitating, and it can feel like you're not in control because your body starts behaving in ways that you aren't expecting or you don't want. Right? Like, why would I do this to myself? Well, it's not necessarily doing it to yourself, but it's not stopping the train, right? Like not spotting. Okay. This is actually anxiety that's happening to me right now and reeling it in essentially so. And we hear so much about anxiety just in this general day and age because I've talked about in other episodes the information overload that we are encountering in the world of social media, in the world of. In the world of the Internet age, in the world of constant input and just busyness. I feel like our society has gone in a direction where we are so busy all the time and we are so rushed and everything is rushed and everything is scheduled. And you know, our society and in our culture, it's praised to over schedule yourself and your kids and schedule out every single second of every single day. So you're always rushing from one thing to the next thing. And we never remembered a schedule like taking a breath. The busyness culture has been so over glamorized, I think over valued achievement and busyness and scheduless. I feel like our society has gone so far that way that we've lost the value in intention and we've lost the value in a slow morning and we've lost the value in breathing and being mindful and being present because we're rushing to the next thing. And because we've lost that value, I feel like that also breeds more anxiety, right? Like if you're never present, if you're never just being, if you're never just allowing a moment to unfold, right? And it seems so simple if you're never in that state and you're always rushing to the next thing and to do more and achieve more. I'm sure a lot of it is fueled by comparison, right? Because we are bombarded with pressures of comparison thanks to social media, thanks to media outlets of all kinds and magazines and mainstream media and TV and all the things, right, that make up a majority of what dictates our modern culture. And it has. It breeds more anxiety, it breeds more hurriedness, it breeds more. There's something other than this moment that should be happening or that I should be doing right, and that breeds more anxiety. Not to mention the crazy anxiety epidemic among our youth. One I think the busyness culture and overscheduling them and over committing them and overemphasizing achievement and all those things I think are contribute to the anxiety epidemic in our teenagers and in our youth, but also the fact that they never get a break from the pressures of their peers because social media is omnipresent and is everywhere and is always and they can't go home and decompress from a tough day. Being surrounded by peers, wanting something different from them, right? Trying to fit in. All the things that go along with an already very anxious period of time when you're changing and growing, going through puberty and figuring out who you are and all these things, making decisions for your future, all these different things that breed anxiety. They never even get a break because they go home. And all those sane people that were causing them the discomfort and the pressure or the bullying or whatever while they were at school all day and at their activities for the rest of the day, they get home and they don't even have an hour to breathe because there's more happening online. And if I were a teenager in this teenage, I honestly can't, I really can't imagine what a rougher time I would have had. I already had a pretty horrendous time in high school. I cannot imagine how much worse I would have felt on a daily basis had social media been a thing when I was in high school. So all that's to say, the anxiety that is off the charts in our world today, it's. It's a hot topic for a reason, right? It's a hot topic because there are so many things breeding it and contributing to it. So what I want to talk about is what do we do about it? There's lots of ways that we can cope with it. Like I said, some people are more inclined to be anxious than others. I lean on the more anxious side of things. I'm not going to claim it as part of my identity, but it is something that comes up and that I struggle with, or sometimes I struggle with, sometimes I just deal with, Sometimes I manage well, sometimes I don't. But I think it's so pertinent to talk about right now because even people that have a good grasp on anxiousness and feeling anxious and feeling, you know, those anxious feelings, I think collectively the anxieties, off the charts. So if you follow astrology at all or any kind of planetary stuff at all, you would know this. But the solar flares have a lot to do with our mental health. They can affect us in very physical and emotional ways. The Schumann resonance is another one, which is what's called the Earth's heartbeat. It's the energetic field that's put off by the Earth. Sometimes that gets a little crazy and causes spikes in feelings of anxiety or just general feelings of offness, if you will. And you know, some of you may not be of the woo woo type like myself. But these are not woo woo concepts, okay? These are energetic, scientific, very easy to physically monitor, actually and physically see if I've had a really hard night's sleep or myself and my daughter had a really hard time falling asleep or staying asleep or whatever. If sleep is an issue, I'll always go and check what the planets are doing, right? What are the planets doing? How are the planets acting a fool, leading to these kinds of, you know, eruptions of feelings within us or issue sleeping or just like general not feeling yourself or not feeling your best or not feeling well. So those are things that impact as well and just the general overall collective. So all thoughts have energy, feelings have energy. Everything that happens in our mind puts off a frequency that can be monitored with the proper super advanced scientific equipment. So everything that we think and we feel and that we experience have an energetic field attached to it in addition to our actions. Right? Our actions have an energetic, you know, energetic component, an energetic field attached to it. So everything that happens is energy that's scientifically provable. Right now, at the time of this recording, we are in like days, maybe a week out from election time, if we want to be exact. I can tell you. Let's see. Yeah, we're almost exactly a week from today. We are out from in the U.S. the United States. We are having our presidential election. As everyone in the United States knows, whether you care about politics or not, whether you are team one side or the other or not, you know that anxieties run very high the closer you get to an election. And that is, in my opinion, by design, because fear is a great motivator. And if nobody cares what politicians are doing, then they really don't have any power over the collective. They don't have any influence. If people don't get invested in divisive, it does not breed high voting numbers. A lot of people don't necessarily may not participate if they don't feel motivated to do so. And the strongest motivator is fear. So you've got your own beliefs of how you'd like the election to go and what you think the results will breed, right? If your candidate wins, then things are going to be great, or they're not going to be great if your candidate wins. If your candidate doesn't win, then you know the sky is going to fall down, whatever. So you have your own beliefs around that. And those fears that you have are intentionally stroked and intentionally, intentionally amplified by everything. The mainstream media, the candidates camps, social media. You've got people on both sides telling you why their side is the correct one and the other one is wrong. It's a lot. And even if you aren't deeply invested in one side or the other or very engaged in the political process, it's still a lot. And I think we all feel it because of our connectedness to each other. We are of one. We are of one by one, right? We're all energetically tied, we're all energetically connected. And because of that, we feel the effects of the overall feelings of the. Of the collective, if that makes sense. So when you have an entire country feeling fearful and stressed and anxious about who the next president is going to be in a very short amount of time, we all feel that stress and that anxiousness and that stress and anxiety. It lives in the energy of our energetic field. And when everybody's feeling it, you're going to feel the effects of it. So all that's to say anxieties are running high now more than ever for all of us, even those who may not necessarily engage or be overly invested in the political process, you're still feeling the anxieties of the collective, and that's going to take its toll. So main thing I wanted to talk about is that if you're feeling that right, all that's to say, if you're feeling that, it's totally normal, I think we're all feeling it, even those of us, not me, but those of us who aren't necessarily anxiously inclined. It's totally normal and natural to be feeling that pressure. And it does feel like weight pressure, that fear energy is thick. And that's just on top of our own personal things, personal fears, personal anxieties, things going on in our own personal lives. When the collective is experiencing something like an election week or election month or election year even, really, um, we're going to feel. We're going to feel all of our personal stuff as well, even stronger and even more so. What do we do about it? There are lots of things that I like to do, so I wanted to just kind of share briefly what I've learned over time has helped me. When those feelings of anxiety come up and when they're more intense and more harder to get a handle on. You know, there's sometimes when I can just do a meditation and I feel better and, like, my anxiousness goes down and my pulse rate goes down and I'm able to have, like, a normal heart rate, and I'm not experiencing, you know, physical manifestations of it. And then there are other times where, you know, some of my Initial go tos are just not cutting it. And I need something a little more. So the initial go tos for me, I love getting in touch with the frequencies of different crystals. I know some people have a bad taste in their mouth about crystals. There's a misconception. I don't know anybody who does this. I'm going to preface this by saying it, but there is a misconception. I think it's a misconception. It's a misconception for me anyway, that if you have crystals and you enjoy crystals and you believe they hold some kind of quote unquote power, then you're like worshiping them or praying to them. There's only. The only divine power is whatever you would call God. So God, universe, source energy, the source from where we all have come from, that is the source. That is the oneness that we all are a piece of. That is the only quote unquote power that exists. And that power, in my belief, comes through in many different ways. But a crystal itself necessarily doesn't hold independent power. It holds frequency, energetic frequencies. So like I said, everything has an energetic tie. Everything is energy at the end of the day. Every thought, every action, every feeling has an energetic component. Every physical thing in the world has an energetic component which is from the only energy is source energy, if that makes sense. The motor of energy is God. But there are different energetic frequencies on this planet that we can engage in. So different stones hold different energies, hold different frequencies. And when you encounter those frequencies, it's easier to get yourself to match that energetic frequency, which will result in physical manifestations within you. So let's use, let's use rose quartz, for example. Rose quartz is a grounding energy. All crystals are pretty grounding. Some are a little more heady than others, but rose quartz is pretty grounding. All the dark, like black, brown, like darker toned stones, are going to be really grounding. Grounding, meaning just steadying, if that makes sense. They hold a certain frequency. Rose quartz is known for its frequency of love, so it holds the same energetic frequency as the feelings of love. So if you are to encounter the energetic frequency of love, it would be easier for your body to match that frequency, because our bodies are continually trying to match the frequencies of what it's around, of what it's, what it's, it's trying to balance, essentially. So when you encounter a crystal with a certain energy, it's easier to match your energy to that. So when I'm feeling anxious, I'm feeling it kind of in my heart. Center. I'm feeling it in my head, right? It's kind of buzzy, right. It doesn't feel like my feet are firmly planted on the ground and I'm stable. Right. Anxiety does not breed feelings of stability. So to bring myself into a state of more stability, right. Anxiety is uncertainty. It's doubt, it's fear. It's all these frequencies of not opposite of stability. What I want is a stone that has a grounding frequency, a frequency of stability and of love, because love is the opposite of fear. So if we put ourselves in love and in gratitude, if we can get ourselves into that frequency, the feelings of anxiety will pause. Now, once we feel that feeling and once we get to that frequency, it's a lot easier to get to a frequency that you are encountering than it is to get to a frequency without having any anchor to get there. And because our physical bodies want to match the frequency of what it's physically around, that's why crystals can be really helpful, because everything is on a frequency or an energetic plane. So for anxiousness and anxiety, the crystals I love to go to, to try to match their energy and get out of the feelings of fear, doubt, uncertainty that I'm experiencing. I like a rose quartz, any kind of quartz is pretty, pretty strong. There's also, like, really calming stones. Like, you know, anxiety can be very buzzy and it feels not calm. And the way that it. Way that it manifests for me is my heart rate will just kind of get crazy. So amethyst is a good one. The, like, darker purple stones, there's a few. I can't think of all the names right now. I'll post them on our Instagram. But those are going to be the stones that help get our bodies to that frequency of calm, of stability, of groundedness. Another option that is typically really helpful for myself is actually physically grounding. So if you go outside in the grass, in the sand, in the dirt, even the sidewalk, even if you don't have any, like, dirt, grass, sand type materials, even just the sidewalk, if you can get outside and get your bare feet on the ground and just be present in that moment and feel the energies of the ground, it's been proven to decrease inflammation, lower anxieties, and just get you in touch with the heartbeat of the earth and in touch with the energies of the earth. Because sometimes for me, grounding feels certain, right? You have two feet on the ground. That's a sense of security, of certainty, of stability. And the ground itself can give those frequencies back to you, which is amazing. If you've never heard of grounding and you're like, yeah, that sounds crazy, dig into it a little bit. I'll probably at some point do a whole episode on the science behind grounding, but what I'll just say for now is that it works great. My daughter has a sandbox, and I find that when we're both having, you know, a lot of emotions, a lot of big emotions. She's two and a half, so, you know, we've. We've got all the emotions going on in her sweet little body. Being in the sandbox and just feeling the sand on our feet and playing with our hands and just being on in the earth is extremely calming and extremely grounding and can take that feeling of instability and just wash it away. It's really powerful. Now, if you only have a couple minutes, just putting your feet in the grass or in the ground or in the sand or whatever, just taking a few deep breaths, that's awesome, too. That can help a lot. Um, any amount of time with your bare feet on the ground is going to be helpful, and it's going to be beneficial, especially when lowering feelings of anxiety. Another one is breathing, right? We'll do that while we're grounding, but when we intentionally take deep breaths. I love box breathing. That's kind of my go to, just because it's easy to remember. Box breathing is four seconds in. Hold for four seconds, four seconds out. Hold for four seconds. So we're going four, hold, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. And just doing that over and over. If you can do that at least four times, it sends a message to your nervous system that you're safe, everything's okay, you've got oxygen. And it also gives you something else to focus on, right? When you're focusing on breath, you're not focusing on fear. When you're focusing on breath, you're not focusing on the next thing that has to happen. When you're focusing on breath, you're not focusing on. On anything else, right? You're. You're in the present moment, and it's a great way to get you out of that loop in your head, the fear loop, the anxiety loop. It's. It's a good way to pull you out of that. When you're focusing on breath, you aren't focusing on those other things, which automatically helps to kind of, at the very least, pause, if not sever the cycle of anxiety. Now, those are my easy go to. My easy go to things. Oh. The other thing is meditation. So if you have 10 minutes, you know, I'll, I'll usually do this while my daughter's napping before I nap with her. But there are some awesome just 10 minute meditations that you can find on YouTube that are really helpful, really beneficial and do not take a lot of time. You know, it's. You can find the ones that are, you know, one hour, two hour chakra balancing, kundalini activating, you know, all the things. But I find that when dealing with feelings of anxiety or just a state of not feeling yourself or not feeling that stability, a 10 minute meditation is really helpful just to get you out of that loop. And it's hard sometimes if you're deep in an anxiety spiral. Sometimes it can be really challenging to stay focused on a meditation if you were just to do it yourself. Sometimes it's hard to stay focused on even a guided meditation when you're in that state. But if you can make the concerted effort to try and just keep bringing your mind back to the guide, back to the present moment, I found that it can be really beneficial just doing those quick 10 minute meditations that you can find on YouTube. So those are my quick, easy access, like can do it in a moment's notice. Go tos. When it comes to anxiety, there's also things that you can do to help with the like physically. I love lemon balm. I actually grew a lemon balm plant this last season and it took off. It's so beautiful. It smells amazing. It smells like lemon, which is crazy because it's just a leaf. But it's a beautiful plant. It's a beautiful herb and it's extremely calming to the nervous system. I love to give it to my daughter. If I've made a lemon balm tea, I'm currently trying to make tinctures with it. So we'll see how those turn out. But as of late, I will just go out and I'll pick a bunch of lemon balm and I'll rip it up into a pot and boil it and it makes a beautiful, really subtly tasting tea. Doesn't taste like the earth, tastes like lemon, and if you add lemon to it, you could pass for lemonade. So lemon balm is really wonderful. If you don't have a fresh lemon balm plant growing in your backyard like I am grateful to have, they have lemon balm tea at the grocery store, you know, in your tea aisle. Lemon balm, Lemon balm tea is really beautiful. So lemon balm is a great herb. If you are a cbd hemp Lover. CBD oil was the first thing that I ever tried that made me realize that I have general anxiousness flowing through my body because, you don't know. I felt like I didn't really know what calm was until I actually experienced what calm was. What we always think are homeos, whatever we feel on a regular basis is how everyone feels. And that's just like normal. So CBD oil was the first time I was like, oh, maybe I'm kind of anxious a lot. Maybe that's something that I didn't even realize was happening because I felt such a calmness with the CBD hemp oils. So that's a really great option, especially if you have like a really racy mind or those physical manifestations of a racy heart. Doing something, taking something internally can be really helpful, like a lemon balm, like a hemp or a cbd. Those are really helpful options that I've encountered. Other things that have been really beneficial that are not necessarily like, quick go to things in the moment, but can really help with the type of anxiety that is just. It's gotten to a place where it's hard to bring yourself back from, or when you're stuck in a constant state of anxiety and you have a hard time getting out of that state, or it's last. It's, you know, been so chronic that you don't even know how to begin to get yourself out of that state. Or it feels like it's just gotten so far that you just. You feel like you've lost control of it. There's three things that have been really impactful and really beneficial for me that I definitely want to share. One of them is acupuncture. Acupuncture for anxiety is so effective. And so the first time I got an acupuncture, an acupuncture treatment targeted at anxiety, I was. It felt like waves of just peace and relaxation and calm. And it was like my nervous system couldn't even fathom that level of calm. So it would have been near impossible for me to get there on my own. Acupuncture is really magical. And a really great acupuncturist can also target certain things in that might be going on within your organs or emotions that are specific to you. So not necessarily a one size fits all, but a really great acupuncturist will tailor treatments to you. I went for months when Camila was really little, was a really little infant. She was probably. She was probably like a few months old when I started going and I went for I don't know, three or four months. And it was really awesome. It basically teaches your nervous system how to get there on its own and to establish that as the new baseline rather than the feelings of anxiety being your baseline. So acupuncture, I swear by it's a wonderful tool for anxiety. Another one that's a little newer is called neurofeedback. And it essentially, I don't have a great handle on the science of it, but it essentially retrains your brainwaves and it gets you out of the cycle of lots of things. So it can help with depression, adhd, any kind of mental health stuff, but also it can help with so much focus. But anxiety being a big one, it helps get the brain out of its trauma loop. It's a huge, huge benefit for those that struggle with PTSD or any kind of complex trauma to stop your mind from being in a loop of whatever it is that you're experiencing. The trauma, the anxiousness, the fear, the depression, the sadness, whatever you're stuck in, it just interrupts that and does a really great job of creating a new baseline, much like acupuncture does, but just in a different way. So definitely look up neurofeedback in your area. I know there's a wonderful neurofeedback practitioner in Tuscaloosa, Alabama that my mom loves and swears by. She is a huge success for new for neurofeedback. I'll have to have her on again to talk about her experience with that. And I know that there's a practitioner in the Nashville area. I don't know about other areas, but I do have a map. If you are in an area you're looking for a neurofeedback practitioner, reach out to me and I'd be happy to help you find somebody near you because it's a really, really awesome tool. Another great tool is Body Code or Emotional Code. My friend Georgia, who we're going to have on the podcast this season, she is a body code and emotional code practitioner to give you a brief overview. And when I have her on the podcast, I'll be able to give you more in depth information about what this is. But Body Code and Energy Code are essentially the practice of tapping into your subconscious and energetically clearing energies that may be stuck in your body or emotions that are stuck. So what she does is a little more on the woo woo side, but it is still dealing with energy and it's clearing the energetic stuckness, if you will. And I actually got to see her a Couple days ago. And I was just, I felt so stuck in anxiousness and anxiety. And I was like, I just want to see if this could even help a little bit. And she did a session on me and it was like you could see how much lighter I felt after. And all the things that had been racing through my brain on my anxiety loop, making my anxiousness worse, all the things flowing through my brain came up in our session and she was able to clear them. And I felt a significant difference since then. So that's also a great option. Now if you have a tendency to veer on the side of anxiety, of anxiousness on a chronic basis, on a general basis. There are a few things that I recommend doing on a regular basis, not just doing when, you know, it gets really bad or it pops up. But there are things we can do to help lower the general sensitivity we have to anxiety, the frequency of when it pops up. And these are lifestyle stuff. So for me, it's number one thing to avoid is caffeine. I do not do well with caffeine. It, especially coffee. For years. I really like the taste of coffee. I love the smell of coffee. For years I loved, especially as a teenager, you know, Starbucks, Sing it Up and all the goods. But it's just it, I don't do well with it. I don't do well energy drinks. I feel like in my teenage years I was so hopped up on so much caffeine that like my nervous system just has had enough. And caffeine is a stimulant, so it's going to stimulate your nervous system. A overstimulated nervous system is an anxious nervous system. So anything that's like going to trigger that kind of stimulation, if you will, of the nervous system, like energy drinks, caffeine, caffeine really of any kind. I think I can sometimes do like a green tea because it's a different component. But in general, I just don't do well with caffeine. And I do notice a difference. And I think it's because, you know, it naturally increases your heart rate and because I'm so. It like gives me an awareness of my heartbeat and then I get stressed out about that and then my heart rate goes up more and then now I'm even more stressed and it just, it's. It's an on ramp to an anxiety loop of something, of the, of the lie that something is wrong with me when I engage with caffeine. So cutting caffeine is essential. Anything that, anything that doesn't make you feel good for Me is an easy on ramp to anxiety. And the anxious loop in my head of something's wrong, right? Something's going on, I should. Something shouldn't be acting this way or I shouldn't be feeling this way, right? Anything that doesn't make me feel good. So I'm currently pregnant with our second child, our baby, another baby girl. Yay. And when I'm pregnant, I'm more anxious anyway. And I think most mamas can tell you that pregnancy brings. Brings with it a baggage of anxiety to be dealt with and cleared and handled. Just because there's a lot of changes, your very own body is very much different. You're feeling things you've never felt before, sensations from the baby, and just hormones. In general, pregnancy is a breeding ground for anxiety to skyrocket, especially if you're already easily inclined in that direction. So this pregnancy, I found I have more of a sensitivity than I did before to gluten. 1. I mean, anytime I eat gluten, I feel like a little bloated. But when you have a baby taking up all of your stomach space a little bit bloated is like more than you can handle. I feel like my stomach's just gonna like pop open. But besides that, I've actually also noticed. I've also noticed like a dizziness if I eat too much gluten. Like that lasts for a long time. I don't process it well. It takes me a long time to break it down in my stomach, in my body. So the effects of the negative effects of feeling the gluten, swelling, bloating, just general discomfort last longer. Anything that makes me feel like something is wrong is an on ramp to anxiety for me in this pregnancy. Especially. So being mindful of your food sensitivities. If you err on the side of anxiety, it's something that you deal with on a regular basis. Doing your best to avoid things that you know aren't going to make you feel feel good is pretty great advice. I know for me, sugar is another one. Anything that stimulates like any kind of heart rate increase without me doing something is not a good look for me. Now, what is helpful, which is increasing your heart rate is working out. So getting a really great workout in it kind of expends a lot of that buzzy, unsteady energy. For me, doing like a good workout where I get my heart rate up and, you know, I feel exerted, if you will, is a good, good way to try to combat general anxiousness that you may feel on a regular basis. So I Hope all those tips are helpful. There are so many other ways to cope and to deal with anxiety. Lots of really great tools, but those are the ones that have served me the most. Anything that relaxes you, like, massage is another great one. Reflexology is another great one. Um, but the easy things that I talked about early on, I think that's. Those are stuff that we can do in a moment's notice. We can all walk outside and get our feet on the ground. You know, we can all take a minute and just close our eyes and take some deep breaths. Those are things that kind of help in the short term and can help manage it along the way. And then, oh, the last thing I always talk about chiropractic, but sometimes I'll feel anxiousness like in my upper chest, like back region. And getting an adjustment can really help because like, a tightness in your upper back can lead to anxiety and a misalignment in that area can tie to anxiety as well. So lots of different options. I know it's a stressful time. I'm here to just send you my heart and tell you I'm right here with you. We don't have to just struggle and muddle through anxiety day to day. I know it's hard to imagine coming out of an anxious loop when you're stuck in that space. It's so hard to shake yourself out of it. And that's when I really recomm more heavy hitters like the neurofeedback, the acupuncture, the body code. If you need a body code or emotional code practitioner, please reach out to me and let me know. My girl Georgia is amazing. She does virtual visits. She's actually in the United States now, but she is from Australia. And so most of our sessions have always been virtually online. And that's something that it works great. It works just as well. So she's amazing. I recommend her to everyone. You will not be disappointed. So reach out to me if you'd like her information and also leave some of her her info on our Instagram as well at grounding elevation. Thanks for staying tuned. And we've got some more fun episodes coming up, so make sure you subscribed so you never miss an episode. Hang in there. We're making it. If there's any way I can support you, please let me know. And until next time, I love you. Ciao.