Disordered Anxiety: Mindfulness vs. Avoidance

Mindfulness! You may have used this practice as a means of escaping your anxious feelings, but it can be used more effectively to help you overcome disordered anxiety altogether. In today's episode I share my experience using mindfulness while driving, and I give some tips on how you can practice mindfulness without giving into safety behaviors that are you keeping you stuck. Thanks for being here!

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Transcript

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Welcome to the 18 Minutes Podcast and Happy Friday. I have to talk to you really quick about a movie that I saw this week. I have been wanting since it came out on Valentine's Day to see Wuthering Heights. I saw some previews and I assumed incorrectly that it is a historical romance. And I was in the mood the other night to go see a girly romantic period piece, and that is not exactly what I got. That movie was so stressful. It was the opposite of what I was going for. I mean, the first scene of that movie I'm still confused by. I think it's probably a great movie. I don't know. You can let me know if you liked it or not, but I wanted like Pride and Prejudice, and I got something much weirder, and I can appreciate the art of it. Don't get me wrong. The scenery, amazing. The camera angles and the lighting, super cool. The music, incredible, the costumes, obsessed. The store it's just not, it's not what I wanted. I think I'm gonna watch it again now, knowing what it is, because I really couldn't soak it in at all because it was so different from my expectations. Like I thought I knew what it was gonna be about. So I've also heard a lot of mixed reviews, especially if people have read the book. It seems like the movie is not really the vibe. So if you have seen it, leave a comment somewhere or send me a message and we can like start a discussion about Wuthering Heights because I have very strong feelings. And I have to believe that other people also have strong feelings about it. Um, but we had a great night. It snowed lightly as we were in the theater, and so when we came out, there was just this light dusting of snow, and the movie theater that we went to is in this historic, gorgeous part of Minneapolis right on the river, and it looked like this idyllic Christmas village. It was so beautiful. So it wasn't all bad. And I'm gonna give the movie another shot. I just have to be in the right headspace. Speaking of historical romance, though, I did watch the first episode of the final season of Outlander. I'm obsessed. I am devastated that this show is coming to an end. I think when it's over, I'm gonna read the books or listen to them on audiobook. I think it's my favorite series of all time, and I never want it to end. Okay, now you're caught up on everything I've watched this week. Let's talk about anxiety. As always, I'm not a licensed therapist or medical professional. This information is based solely on my own experience with disordered anxiety. So please take what is helpful to you, leave what isn't, and heed any advice you get from your mental health professional. Okay, so I titled this podcast mindfulness versus avoidance because the two are really very different. And I don't want to cause confusion when I talk about mindfulness practices when it comes to overcoming disordered anxiety. I mention a lot that anything can be a safety behavior. Um, a safety behavior is a tactic or a way of avoiding anxious feelings, and that includes things like deep breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, box breathing, um, meditation, progressive muscle relaxation. And I have told you that those things can be safety behaviors, especially when you're in the midst of a panic attack, because you're using those techniques to try to calm yourself down to avoid feeling the anxiety. Avoiding our anxious feelings is teaching our brain that the feeling of anxiety is dangerous and something that needs to be treated or at minimum avoided because feeling that way is dangerous. And so when we practice things like progressive muscle relaxation to stop feeling anxious, to calm ourselves down, we are sending a message straight to the fear center of our brain that whatever we're feeling in that moment is not okay. And it needs to send this fight or flight response because we are in danger. People with disordered anxiety physically behave in a way that teaches their subconscious brains that not only is this place or this situation a problem, but our feelings are a problem and are, I would say at best, a problem or an issue or something to uh be aware of. At worst, something that is life-threatening. And that's when we end up having panic attacks because we have taught our brain that feeling anxious, not even just the driving or the going to the grocery store or the exercising, but actually feeling our feelings is a dangerous activity. That is a sticky situation to get yourself into, but something that can be undone. Because we behave our way into this disordered anxiety. We can't think our way out of it. We have to walk back out of this disordered anxiety the same way that we walked into it. I do say have to because a lot of people, myself included, when I had panic disorder, really hope that there is a way that we can just reason our way out of an anxiety, an anxiety disorder. And I don't know of a single person that has ever worked for. We want to be able to read the perfect book, listen to the perfect podcast episode, um, take in the right combination of information that just makes us not be afraid. But you'll know if you suffer from disordered anxiety that you can be perfectly safe at home where you're comfortable and still have a panic attack because a lot of what's going on is subconscious. Our brains are constantly taking in stimulus and processing it and sorting it and then kind of doing with it what it will without us having any say in it. I was scared to go to the grocery store and no amount of reasoning telling myself grocery stores are safe. People go to the grocery store all the time. I used to go to the grocery store all the time, and I actually liked going to the grocery store. There's no statistically significant reason why I should walk into a grocery store and have a panic attack. And yet it would happen every single time I walked into the grocery store. Part of the reason for that is because every time I did walk into the grocery store and start feeling anxious, I did something about it. I treated those symptoms and those feelings by having ice water with me that I could sip on to focus my attention on a different kind of feeling, to avoid my feelings of anxiety, or deciding in the moment that I'm gonna actually just get half of this list and cut this trip short because I'm just feeling too anxious. So I'm not going to get all these groceries. I'm gonna avoid being here for too long, or even call my husband and talk to him on the phone the whole time I was in the grocery store to have this reassurance that if something happened, he would know about it immediately and maybe he could do something about it, or just be calmed down by distracting myself with talking to him. So those are behaviors that taught my brain that not only is the grocery store a dangerous place to be, but my feelings when I'm there are also dangerous. Now, a quick side note: I say you have to overcome fear by facing it, you have to feel your feelings, you can't just think your way out of this, and all these things I say like you have to, and I do believe that. There is research now that things like ketamine therapy can actually aid in creating these new neural pathways. They essentially make our brains more plastic, which in this context essentially means like flexible, so that when we do have new experiences, our brains are like primed to make a new neural connection. And so it can aid in something like exposure and response prevention because you're actually using chemicals to um make this process a little more robust. The fascinating part about this to me, because I believe that ketamine therapy works well, I've heard of people um finding it really useful for them. There are probably other treatments I'm not aware of that do similar things, but the part I'm fascinated by is the fact that we can change our neural pathways and change the way that our fear center of our brain relates to feelings of anxiety simply by making a small behavioral adjustment today. That is so powerful. You have the power and the control to make behavioral adjustments to change these neural pathways without it costing you a bunch of money and potentially some negative side effects. The mind-body connection is absolutely incredible. And the fact that we can actually affect our mental health situation simply by changing our behaviors to send messages back up to our brain, unbelievable. I'll never get over it. It's my favorite thing. And each of us is equally as capable of doing this as everyone else. It's super exciting. So, so one of the tools that I want to talk about is mindfulness. If you don't live under a rock, you have heard this term before, likely in the context of mental health and wellness. All mindfulness really means is being aware or being conscious of something. You can be mindful of anything that you can think about. We hear about it all the time when it comes to stress and anxiety, but you've probably heard the term at work, um, at school, in the news, something like, as you're working on this project, be mindful of X, Y, and Z. It just means to be aware of something. In this context, mindfulness is an incredibly powerful tool because it's essentially the opposite of avoidance. Instead of doing everything we possibly can to not feel our anxious feelings and to calm ourselves down so that we can avoid this situation that we hate, we can actually turn our focus inward to the anxiety, bring our attention, our focus, and our awareness to the anxiety and the anxious feelings as a means of sending a clear message to the fear center of our brain that paying attention to these feelings and really feeling them is not dangerous because nothing bad is going to come of it. So we can create a new pattern by choosing mindfulness instead of avoidance. So, what this might look like for someone who experiences disordered anxiety is shifting our focus to our feelings of anxiety, whatever they might be, focusing on them, noticing them, and trying and practicing, because, like I always say, this all this takes practice, practicing, looking at the feelings objectively. This does get easier as you practice. The first time you try to look at your feelings objectively, you're gonna feel like you did absolutely nothing. And that's okay, that's normal, that's part of the process. It does take practice to get good at this. For example, if I'm driving in my car, which is something that always made me feel panicky when I was in the throes of panic disorder, I can instead of sipping my ice water, blasting the air conditioning, eating sour candy, having an ice pack on my neck, all of these things to avoid feeling my anxious feelings. I turn to the anxiety. All I mean by that is just thinking about it. Just think about how you're feeling, notice how you're feeling. You can even say out loud, my chest feels tight, my throat feels tight, my neck feels tight, my heartbeat is elevated. Um, just notice how you're feeling. Bring your awareness to your feelings without, and again, this takes practice, adding into the thought process, um, my heart is elevated, so that means there's a problem here. What do I do about this? What do I do about this? Do I need to pull the car over? Do I need to go to the hospital? And you practice just looking at it objectively. Okay, I'm noticing right now my shoulders are tense, my heart rate is elevated, and it's making me really uncomfortable. It's making me scared. I'm feeling fear, I'm panicking, my breathing rate is um is elevated, I'm sweating, I feel like I'm lightheaded, or am I just scared of getting lightheaded? Okay, I'm definitely scared of getting lightheaded, and just keep noticing how you're feeling and bringing your awareness to it without using these avoidant behaviors to calm yourself down. Almost always bringing my awareness to the anxious feelings I'm having made me feel more anxious. The point of these exercises is not to calm your anxiety down immediately. It's it doesn't work that way. If that's what you're looking for, you can continue to use safety behaviors, but you're not going to recover from an anxiety disorder and you're gonna have the same situation over and over and over again. So, this technique, this mindfulness technique, which you could also call doing the opposite, it's just noticing how you're feeling instead of doing what anxiety is telling you to do, you can actually recover from disordered anxiety. So, because we are shifting our awareness to a situation or a feeling that we have taught our brains is dangerous to us, it is going to almost without fail raise the fight or flight alarm bells, and you're going to feel more anxious because you have not practiced allowing yourself to feel these feelings. So that is a normal part of the process, and you should expect when you do this at first that it is going to ramp things up a little bit, and that's totally okay. The reason we can practice these things is because panic isn't dangerous. I make a lot of TikTok videos about that because I think it's an important reminder that having a panic attack uh in your car at the grocery store, at the movie theater is not more dangerous to you than having a panic attack at home. I get a lot of pushback on that because people say things like, you know, you could crash your car if you have a panic attack in your car. That's fine. I'm not trying to argue that a panic attack has never caused a car accident. What I mean by that is that the feelings of anxiety are not dangerous no matter where you are. And a lot of people who have disordered anxiety feel like if they have a panic attack at home, they are physically, medically safer than if they have a panic attack in their car. And that is not true. If you have a panic attack at home and it gets so intense that you faint, which by the way has happened to like two people ever, so please don't worry about that. You are not safer than if you go to the grocery store and have a panic attack so bad that you faint. In either case, you're gonna come to go get checked out by a doctor and move on with your life. And that's worst case scenario. Maybe I'll do a whole episode on the fear of passing out because for some reason we all have that same fear. I don't totally understand it. Well, it's probably like a lot a lack of feeling in control if you're unconscious. That's gotta be it. But anyway, so as I'm driving my car, I'm focusing my attention on how I'm feeling. I'm saying things to myself like, okay, I'm having uh skipped beats, I'm having heart palpitations, I don't like this. This is uncomfortable for me. I'm feeling scared. Now I'm worrying that I might have to go to the hospital, but I'm on my way to work, and then I'm gonna have to call my boss and tell him that I went to the hospital, and then it's just gonna turn out to be anxiety and that's gonna be embarrassing, or maybe something is wrong. Okay, I'm getting worked up. I'm I'm noticing that I'm feeling very afraid of what's gonna happen if I'm anxious while I'm driving. And just keep redirecting your attention back to this objective awareness. I promise you that this gets easier the more you do it. And eventually, once you have practiced accepting that you can be uncomfortable and be afraid and that it's not gonna cause you harm, mindfulness does actually calm you down. I don't think you can get there without feeling your panic and the feelings that you're afraid of. You do have to overcome fear, which means feeling fear and allowing it to sit with you and be present in your body and in your mind in order for mindfulness to have this relaxing um effect on you. When I would use mindfulness in the context of exposure work, it would, as I said, make me feel more anxious because I have taught my brain that noticing anxious feelings is bad, is dangerous, is potentially life-threatening. But I would do it anyway. And over time, I taught my brain that feeling anxiety and noticing that I'm feeling anxious is just noticing that I'm feeling anxious. It doesn't mean anything else because I practiced this objective attitude towards my feelings. So now when I'm feeling stress, maybe things are piling up at work or I have a relational conflict or whatever, I can use mindfulness to notice how I'm feeling. And it actually relaxes me because when I tell myself at this point, oh, I'm feeling anxious, I'm immediately soothed and relieved because anxiety doesn't mean anything. I am also very willing to feel anxious. I've been increasing my tolerance for discomfort and fear for years at this point. And so I don't fear the feelings of anxiety. And so mindfulness actually works to uh relax me. So when I talk about managing symptoms versus overcoming anxiety, this is a really good example of that. When we just manage our symptoms and cope with our symptoms and use safety behaviors to find any semblance of relief in the moment, we are going to be stuck with disordered anxiety as long as we keep doing that. When we are willing to accept feelings of anxiety, we can actually move forward in overcoming the disorder altogether so that our brains don't send those anxiety signals. And the goal within anxiety disorder recovery is not to never feel anxious again. One of the goals is to regulate and sort of rebalance and reorder, I guess, um, the way that our survival mechanisms are working. And part of that is being able to notice anxiety without having a panic attack. But we're not going for perfection. This is a process, it's a journey, it uh takes practice. I'll say that a million times. It is really difficult when you first start to do these things, and you will feel like um you'll you'll wonder if if it's working, if anything is changing. And it does get easier the more you practice. If you stay consistent with these um doing the opposite kind of techniques like mindfulness, you will notice that it becomes easier to practice, and you'll notice a lack of fearfulness, a lack of symptoms when you put yourself in situations that used to give you a full-blown panic attack. But you will make mistakes, you will inevitably use a safety behavior to escape panic because it just feels too much, because you're in the habit of doing it. But habits can be changed and new pathways in our brains can be created so that our brains also respond differently. Every panic attack we have is a stressful situation that needs to be processed. I like to think of anxiety as something you like uh digest or you have to process. If something stressful happened to you every day of your life, even just for 20 minutes, and your consistent response to it was to not think about it, not talk about it, not feel how stressful it is, not feel any of the feelings associated with it, and do everything you can to just pretend like it's not happening, that would be a blatant pattern of suppression. Panic attacks and disordered anxiety is something that needs to be felt. It needs to be processed. You have to let it move through you. And when we avoid feeling it, we're actually putting up this block that does not allow it to move through and out of us. It is scary, it is difficult. Overcoming panic disorder is the hardest thing I've ever done. But the most rewarding, the fact that I can live my life exactly how I want to, even if I want to do something that's scary to me, is freedom and is something that I want everyone who has disordered anxiety to experience, and something I believe everyone can experience if you just choose to start changing behaviors one small step at a time toward the opposite of avoidance and toward acceptance because anxiety is not dangerous, panic attacks are not dangerous. You are safe, you can do this, you have all of the power, all of the capability, all of the control to start making changes today that will affect your future self. I hope that this episode helped to make. Make clear the difference between using safety behaviors and calming techniques to avoid anxiety and using mindfulness as a way of actually accepting and allowing anxious feelings to uh sit with us. If you have any questions about mindfulness or safety behaviors or anything anxiety related, you can send me an email at Amanda at the18minutes.com or send me a DM on any of my social accounts. If you found this podcast helpful, please leave a review. It's really helpful in other anxious people finding this resource. As a reminder, I do go live on TikTok every Thursday at 3 p.m. Central Time. If you have specific questions that you want to get answers on about your disordered anxiety, you can always pop in from 3 to 4 p.m. Um on TikTok and I read through every comment. I try to answer as many as I can. Um and also they give me great ideas for uh podcast ideas to go and deep dives on. So I would love to chat with you there too and get to know you better. Thank you so much for being here today, and we'll see you next time.