Have you ever felt like you've tried everything to manage your anxiety? But no matter what you do, it still finds a way to take over. You've read the tips, you've listened to the advice, you've told yourself to calm down, think positive, or push through. But anxiety keeps showing up. That's because you're not missing effort. You're missing a strategy. And actually, more than that, you're missing courage. Not the be fearless kind, but the kind that lets you take action even when you're scared. Today, I'm going to show you why courage is the piece that's been missing and how this method gives you the real tools to face anxiety in a way that finally feels doable. Hi, and welcome back to Block Out the Noise. This is the go-to podcast for teens and young adults who are ready to quiet the noise of anxiety, self-doubt, and overthinking. I'm Jessica Davis, a licensed therapist, mindset coach for teens and young adults, and the creator of the Courage Method, a framework designed to help you take control over your thoughts, trust yourself, and build the confidence to move forward. Before we get into it, I want you to know something. You don't have to use every tool. This isn't a rigid step-by-step system. You don't have to do all of them. And actually, you don't even have to do them well. Instead, think of these as options. You get to take what works for you, leave what doesn't, and use these tools in a way that fits your life. Also, just a quick reminder: this podcast is here to support and guide you, but it is not a substitute for professional mental health care. If you're in a crisis, reach out to a therapist or contact emergency services. And if you ever need extra support, the anxiety survival toolkit is there for you too. You can grab it for free in the show notes. Alright, let's cut through the noise and get started. When we talk about courage, it's easy to picture something big, like standing on stage or running into danger. But real courage, the kind that matters when you're struggling with anxiety, it often looks quiet, personal, unseen. Courage is breaking up with someone you feel dependent on. Not because it's easy, but because you know deep down the relationship isn't healthy and you deserve better. It's walking into school even when your anxiety is screaming that you don't belong. You're scared of judgment, you're afraid of messing up, but you still go. Courage is getting behind the wheel even when driving makes your heart race. Because deep down you know it's a step toward independence and freedom. Courage didn't mean you didn't cry. It doesn't mean you didn't have a panic attack or feel sick to your stomach. It just means you kept going. Courage is what you do after the breakdown when the fear and doubt are still there. And that is what the courage method is all about. It's not about being fearless, it's about building a relationship with yourself where you believe you can handle hard things. Let's walk through what the courage method really looks like. So you don't just hear the words, you know how to actually use them. C. Catch the negative patterns. When you feel yourself spiral with anxious thoughts, I'm going to fail, or everyone's judging me, pause and name what's happening. Say to yourself, I'm in a loop right now. Or you can say, I'm just being really negative, and these aren't really my true thoughts, they're just my fears. By just catching the negative pattern, you're already on a good start. You're also taking a major step and not letting your thoughts dictate your actions, dictate how you feel about yourself. Oh, open up to possibilities. Anxiety closes you off to what could go right. It closes you off to options, it closes you off to relationships. It really keeps you isolated. Opening up to possibilities allows it to be two things. One is doing things that are outside of your comfort zone, but also giving yourself the chance to say, what if it goes right? I think it would be great if you write down one possible positive outcome and focus on that. You understand that fear isn't fact. Oftentimes, when we're in a really anxious state, our negative thoughts almost feel as if they're coming from a place of knowing. Like it can read the future and it's going to happen. That's why anxiety is so hard, because not only do we have signs that our body is telling us, such as increased heart rate, sweaty palms, difficulty breathing, stomach aches, headaches. Not only do we have that, but we also have these thoughts that feel as if they're all knowing thoughts, that they're actual fact. When reality is they're not, right? They're just our fears. So the next time you're having these negative thoughts, really take your time to pause and tell yourself, this is not accurate. This is not the truth. This is just the worst case scenario playing out in my head, trying to protect me. But I don't need that level of protection. I can figure it out, I can handle it. Just by saying a couple of those things, you're going to find yourself getting better and better, stronger and stronger on managing these worst-case scenarios or these negative thoughts that just constantly pop up. Respond with self-compassion. With anxiety, it's easy to beat ourselves up. It's easy to go down a place of shaming ourselves for the decisions that we make and telling ourselves that, see, that anxiety was there trying to help us and we didn't follow through or we ignored it, and now we're in this situation. But life isn't going to go perfectly. You're going to make mistakes. We all make mistakes. And it's important for that reason that we provide ourselves self-compassion because beating ourselves up doesn't make us feel better. It doesn't fix the problem. But also it allows us to be human, right? It allows us to say it's okay to make a mistake. And you know what, you tried and it didn't work out. Or, you know what, I made just a poor choice. And now I'm going to make a different one going forward. Self-compassion just gives us the opportunity to honestly provide self-love, really believe with anxiety without self-compassion. It makes anxiety stay longer. It increases its hold over us. But when we learn to treat ourselves with love, when we learn to be compassionate to ourselves, at some point, then we also realize that we're human and we make mistakes and that's okay. And the anxiety then realizes that it doesn't need to go into this overprotective piece because it starts to realize that we'll be okay. We can figure it out, we can handle it. Part of handling things is sometimes taking accountability and yet also cutting ourselves some slack. A act despite uncertainty. Waiting to feel 100% ready keeps you stuck. We often want to feel confident in the decisions that we're making. It makes sense, right? If we feel confident in the choice, then we feel more prepared, more ready for what's next. But we don't have crystal balls. We can't see through the future. So usually there's always a piece of uncertainty in the decisions that we're making, especially big life changes, right? Could be what college we're going to, where should we even apply? Where do I want to work at? What do I want to do in terms of a career? All these things are feel like big life decisions. And ultimately, act despite uncertainty. The real, I guess to me, joy in this when people embrace it is that just because you make one decision, regardless of if it works out or not, you get to make another. So let's say you decide to try out for a team. You make the team, you feel afterwards that, gosh, this is just not what I want to do. You're anxious all the time, you're overwhelmed. You get to make another decision, right? You can choose to stay in a sport that you're really overwhelmed by. You can also choose to have a conversation with your parents. You can also choose to have a hard conversation with the coach. There's a lot of choices that you can make. And I don't think any of those choices is the wrong choice. That's the beauty of choices, right? It's just making it. Maybe you have a conversation with your parents and you're like, okay, I'm gonna, you know, try to finish out the season and see what happens. Regardless of that choice, right? You've already done the hard job. You've chosen something. That's what act despite uncertainty is all about. It's about understanding that you're taking some type of risk, but that with risk comes reward in all different types of ways. The reward might be that you did something new and now you feel confident to do something new in the future. Maybe that risk is that I did something and I really love it. And I didn't expect to love it, but I do. And maybe it is that, gosh, I took this risk and it didn't pan out how I thought it was going to pan out, but I learned something from it, which really lends into the next one. G, grow through experience. Because once you act despite uncertainty, now you grow through experience, regardless of the outcome. You have the opportunity to learn something from every situation. I learned from my car accident a thousand percent. I learned from falling on my face in front of the men's volleyball team in college. I learned from getting in front of a class and giving a speech and bombing part of that speech. I've learned from relationships that didn't work out. I've learned so much from a thousand different situations. And that's growth through experience. Even if we make a decision and it doesn't pan out how we want it to, you know, applaud yourself. The whole reason why I feel like it's so important is that it lets you know that despite what you choose, despite the decision that you make, you can always grow. Always. The problem is sometimes we just don't sit still long enough to really do the work and ask ourselves, what did I learn from this experience? We just jump into the next thing. And we jump because we don't want to sit with our emotions. We don't want to sit with our feelings because they're uncomfortable. And for my overthinkers out there who are like, I think about things constantly to the point where, you know, I'm doing this deep dive and it's still not leading to resolution. I would just challenge yourself to come up with three things that you really learned, right? Not to dissect something so much where, right, I'm replaying a conversation over and over and over again. That's not the right question to be asking. The question we should be asking ourselves is, what did I gain from this experience? And what did I learn? Those are the questions we want to ask. Those are the ones where we'll produce more fruitful information. If I went on a date and the date went horrible, what did I gain? I gained practice. I put myself out there. Those are gains. What did I learn? Maybe I learned I talked too much. Maybe I learned I didn't say anything at all. Maybe I learned to be on time. It doesn't matter what the answer is, but I think, right, it just proves that you are doing the work to actually figure out for yourself what I can improve on by asking these questions. So it's me the E. Embrace the winds. Embracing the winds, as I've said in previous episodes, but embrace the winds to me is vital. If all you get from this episode is embrace the winds, I'll be happy. Because honestly, I feel like it's really a missing piece with anxiety. We often beat ourselves up over and over and over and over again. And that doesn't help. Embracing the winds allows us to recognize our strengths, it allows us to acknowledge the difficulty and what we're doing. The reason why I like embrace the wins as well is because it's personal. You get to dictate what a win is. And each person's win is different. And the more you practice this, the better you'll get because each day will be different. And we will all struggle with different things at different times of our life. Some points I've had clients struggle showering, getting out of bed, going to school, driving, meeting new friends, dating, asking someone out on a date, handling rejection, dealing with a lower grade, managing frustration and sports, so many different things. Gosh, even ordering a pizza, everyone has a different thing that they're struggling with. And when we acknowledge that and tell ourselves when we actually do it, that's a win. It helps us to keep pushing forward. It helps us to take another step. It helps us to take a risk. The older you get, you realize that you're not going to get the round of applause for doing something. Most people are dealing with their own stuff, struggling with their own things. And so you hardly get recognized for the things that were hard for you. And I personally believe that the better you are at embracing your own wins, the more you feel like you can handle and conquer different things. Because you know you'll acknowledge the effort that you put in. If you're writing a paper and it took you weeks to complete it, no one's going to know the work that you put in, but you will. And if you acknowledge that work and you're proud of what you did, that's a win. People won't know how many times you read over a text message before you hit send, and that maybe you didn't even want to hit send in the end, but you did. You recognize that. You know that. You celebrate that win. Life is hard. Teens and young adults get told all the time that previous generations had it harder, and that really these generations don't have as much to worry about or have the same difficulties or stress levels. But to that I say they're not living in your time. They're not going through what you're going through. And ultimately, it's always easier to be on the outside looking in and decide what's hard or easy for one person or another. You know your own struggles. You know what's hard for you. So celebrate when you do something. The more you practice this method, the more natural it becomes. It helps you shift the focus from what's going wrong to what's possible, what you're learning and how far you've come. So, what would it look like for you to use a little bit more courage this week? Not to be perfect, not to be fearless, just to show up even when it's hard. Maybe it's being honest about how you're feeling. Maybe it's facing something you've been avoiding, or maybe it's simply being a little bit more kind to yourself when anxiety shows up. You don't have to use every part of the method all at once. Just start with one letter, one idea, one moment of courage and see what happens. And if you forget what some of the letters mean or what to do, of course, you can always download the anxiety survival toolkit, but just tell yourself, have courage, and you will know what to do. Often anxiety makes you believe that you need someone else to tell you what to do because you're afraid of making the wrong decision. But I really believe life is learning to accept the choices we made, and sometimes the wrong decisions help mold us into better human beings. Challenge yourself to just do something with courage. And no matter what the outcome, you will have tons to be proud of. If this episode resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone who could use a little encouragement today. And don't forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you ever need extra support, the anxiety survival toolkit is there for you. You can grab it for free in the show notes. Thank you again so much for listening. Until next time, keep moving forward, trust yourself, and never forget you have what it takes to block out the noise.