Healthy Anxiety Habits Gone Wrong

Some of the most common "healthy" habits in the wellness and anxiety recovery world (breathing exercises, grounding techniques, meditation) can actually be the thing keeping you stuck. In this episode I walk through five of them, the genuine pros of each one, the trap each one falls into when it turns into a safety behavior, and the simple way to tell whether a habit is helping you or holding you in place. The line is almost never the habit itself, it's your intention. 

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Transcript

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Welcome back to the 18 Minutes Podcast. I'm Amanda, and this is the show where we take everything that is confusing, scary, and isolating about disordered anxiety, and we turn it into something that you can actually work with. Today's episode and the following are going to get into the weeds a little bit on why some of our attempts at recovering from these anxious patterns might not be so fruitful. I'm starting today with a list of healthy habits that might actually be working against you. A lot of the habits that you've been told are healthy, the breathing exercises, the meditation, the careful sleep schedule, the third anxiety podcast this week can end up being the very thing that's keeping you stuck in an anxiety loop. Not because those practices are inherently bad, a lot of them are genuinely good for you, but because of the way you're using them. So that's what we're talking about today. We're gonna talk about some of these healthy habits that get talked about a lot in the health, wellness, recovery space, the pros of using them, and the traps that you can fall into that cause them to work against you. By the end of this episode, you'll have a much clearer sense of what your habits are actually doing and how to tell if something is actually helping you or if it's holding you in place. Before we dive in, I just want to remind you really quick that if you are not subscribed to my newsletter, that is where everything happens first. If you want early access to new resources, if you want the weekly encouragement, um, that is where that happens. So that's sort of um where I build my community. If you are someone who's working on moving from fear to freedom in your life, then um signing up for the newsletter is a great place to start. I send out a letter every Monday morning just with encouragement, sometimes a preview of the upcoming podcast to get you thinking about things before it comes out. And any announcements or news about upcoming resources and projects get announced and talked about in that newsletter first. You can go to the18minutes.com and just type your name and email in there and it'll subscribe you right away. As always, I am not a licensed therapist or medical professional. Everything that I share on this show is based on my own personal experience with disordered anxiety, my journey through recovery, and the research I do for the show. This is not a replacement for therapy. Please take only what is helpful to you, leave what isn't, and listen to your medical and mental health professionals first. If you're new here, welcome. Thank you so much for joining. Please go hit follow or subscribe wherever you're listening because a new episode comes out every Friday, and I would hate for you to miss the next one. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. Okay, let's talk about the healthy habits that might be keeping you stuck. Before we go through specific habits, I want to go over sort of the overarching principle because I think if you understand this, you can apply it to any healthy habit on the planet, including the ones that I'm not going to get to today. The difference between a healthy habit and a safety behavior that keeps us stuck with anxiety is almost never about the habit itself. It's about the intention behind it. It's why you're doing it. If you're doing breathing exercises because they help you feel grounded, they help you sleep better, and you genuinely function better when you do them, and you know you'll be okay if you don't, that's a healthy habit. If you're doing breathing exercises because you're convinced that if you don't, the panic will get you, that's a safety behavior. And safety behaviors keep us stuck. Same action, two completely different relationships to it. One comes from self-care and the other comes from fear. The tricky part is that the same habit can be both. Sometimes you might use a habit out of self-care, and sometimes you might use that exact same habit as a safety behavior. And the only way to know the difference is to check in with yourself honestly about it. So as I walk through this list, I'm not asking you to throw any of them away. I'm just asking you to look at the why, because that's what actually shapes the outcome. I have a whole episode on safety behaviors. So if you need a refresher or if you're new to the concept in general, go check out that one. Okay, let's go through some of the big ones. First up, breathing exercises. I want to start with this one because it's the one that I hear about the most. Box breathing, 478 breathing, the long exhale, you know what I'm talking about. The pros are very real. There is a lot of research that diaphragmatic breathing and the long exhale does downregulate our nervous system. It's not woo. There's solid psychological and physiological mechanisms that are happening when we use the long exhale, for example, that slow our heart rate down and actually pull us out of that activated fight or flight system. As a baseline practice, breathing exercises are incredible. Here's the trap: the moment the breathing exercises become a thing you have to do to stop the panic and the sensations of anxiety, it's not really a breathing exercise anymore. It's a safety behavior. Because what the brain has learned is that panic or anxiety is the danger and the rescue was the breathing exercise. Every time you reinforce that loop, you are feeding the fear, not the calm. You are also teaching yourself, teaching your brain that you cannot handle the sensations of anxiety, that you can't tolerate them without using these specific techniques, which will make you even more anxious in contexts where you can't use them. So here's the question to ask yourself: are you doing it to feel better generally and to build a long-term self-care habit? Or are you doing it to get a specific anxious moment to stop? If it's the second one, and more than just once in a while, that is an anxious, fear-based pattern that is reinforcing that fear cycle, that fear loop in your brain. So here's what to do instead. Keep breathing exercises in your life. Just don't use them as a means of avoiding panic. When the wave of anxiety hits, let it be there. Breathe as you normally would and let it pass. Keep the breath work, just use it in a context that's not in the middle of an adrenaline surge. Okay, so the next one is the same family but a slightly different appearance. Grounding has a great reputation in the wellness community and it deserves it. In an acute, full-blown panic moment, naming five things you can see can genuinely bring you back into the room. There's a place for it. But here's the version that tends to keep people stuck. You start doing the 54321 exercise every time you get even a flicker of anxiety. You carry ice packs with you. You start looking for grounding objects in every room that you're in. What's happening underneath is the same trap that we can fall into with the breathing exercises. You're teaching your brain that anxiety is something that you cannot tolerate, that you cannot experience, and that grounding saved you from it. And you're shrinking your tolerance for sitting with those sensations. So here's the tell: if you can't be anywhere without looking for grounding items, then the grounding practice isn't actually grounding you. It's just managing your fear of panic. Instead, keep grounding practices for times when you're feeling unmotivated, unfocused, um, tired, or other less than desirable head spaces. Or for the rare moments where you actually do really need to come back into your body. So much of the practices in this concept, this framework of fear to freedom involve a certain level of workability. If you are in an important work presentation and you feel like you're gonna start going crazy, then scanning the room for something or scanning your body to ground yourself is perfectly okay. If you can honestly check in with yourself and you believe that you can practice having a full-blown panic attack in the middle of a work presentation, by all means. But I'm never going to tell you that you can never ever use these safety behaviors, as we call them, when that's not realistic. Sometimes there are real consequences on the line, and we need to do something that is just workable, that's getting us through to the next time that we can practice acceptance and willingness. But I do want to encourage you that you can build your tolerance for sitting with discomfort and fear. Practicing sitting with those sensations without using a grounding tool is what gradually builds that tolerance over time. Number three is researching anxiety. And I think this one is probably gonna hit close to home because I know you and I know me, and I'll say up front, this is probably historically my most intense safety behavior. I lived this for years, and it's probably partially why I'm so good at what I do now. The pros are real and they're big. Psychoeducation is genuinely very helpful. Understanding the mechanism of panic, learning what safety behaviors are, hearing other people's recovery stories, all of that helps. It reduces shame, it gives you a map. I am very pro anxiety research and anxiety studying. That's why this whole podcast exists. But here's where it can turn. When learning about anxiety becomes a way to manage anxious sensations as they're happening, then it's not just learning anymore. It's reassurance seeking. This could be the eighth podcast on the same topic this week, or pulling up the 18 minutes TikTok account every single time you start to feel anxious. Or the one I hear a lot about lately is typing, is what I'm feeling really a panic attack into an AI bot in the middle of the night every time you feel anxious. You're not absorbing new information, you're scratching an itch. And here's what the loop looks like: you ask, you get an answer, you feel a little bit better for 10 minutes, then the what if question shows up again because that's how reassurance seeking works. Every answer you get teaches your brain that you needed that answer to be safe and to overcome that wave of panic. And the next time the question comes up, it's going to probably come up even louder. When you've already heard the information 10 times and you're still searching, that's a fear-based loop and it's not learning anymore. What you can do is do the learning when you're calm. Read the book at home in bed, listen to the podcast on your morning walk. When you're actively spiraling, don't go searching. Just notice that urge and let the question be there without answering it. That's how you actually do exposure work for that reassurance loop. This next one is a little nuanced, so stay with me. Meditation has plenty of evidence behind it. Mindfulness, used well, builds your capacity to be with whatever is in front of you without grabbing onto it. And that is exactly the kind of skill that helps us recover from disordered anxiety. But meditation has a sneaky way of becoming the next thing on the list of things that I need to avoid panic and keep myself from spiraling. And for some people who are already prone to monitoring themselves, sitting still and focusing on the breath can actually lead to more body checking, not less. You can also get into a loop where you're using meditation as a means to make anxiety go away, which puts you right back into the fighting it stance that the meditation was supposed to help you get out of. So ask yourself, are you meditating because it adds something to your life, or because you're afraid of what might happen or how you will feel if you skip it? Are you gradually learning to be present and non-judgmental? Or do you only meditate to save yourself from panicking? Instead of using meditation as this emergency lifesaver, practice meditating when you're already feeling reasonably calm. If you notice you're using any kind of mindfulness session to suppress anxiety rather than allow it and accept it, that's a sign of a safety behavior and you can reset it. Another suggestion I have for people who want to practice meditation. If you've tried the classic interoceptive meditation style, which is where you focus on your body and sensations within your body, typically focusing on your breath or like a body scan, and you find that it makes you more anxious, first of all, you're not alone. That happens to so many of us. Second, I want you to try exteroceptive meditation. You can focus on something outside of yourself. Personally, I like to focus on a leaf on a tree if I'm outside or at a window or on a flower in a vase in my house. And I study it as if I was going to paint it from memory. I think about how it might feel in my hands, how it smells. This helped me so much when I was trying to practice getting outside of my own body and my own mind. When I would get a little too worked up about how I was feeling physically. But again, practicing when you are calm and not in a heightened state of your sympathetic nervous system activation, your fight or flight system going off. But when you're more, you don't have to be perfectly calm, but just not in a state of intense anxiety or getting worked up. Okay, last one for today, and it's one that I'm bringing in from last week's episode because I think it's important and I want to go over it again. Sleep, hydration, movement, going easy on the caffeine, the perfect wellness regimen. All of these things are actually good for our health, period. There's no argument from me. The potential downfall is when we cling to these things out of fear. It's when one bad night of sleep sends you into, oh no, I didn't get enough sleep, I'm definitely gonna panic at work tomorrow. I better bring all of my safety items so that I don't have intense anxiety. Or when you refuse to have a sip of regular coffee because you don't want anything to feel different in your body. Or when you rigidly schedule some kind of exercise or movement routine because you're worried what will happen if you skip it. This is not a wellness regimen anymore. This is a fear-based control system pretending to be a wellness regimen. The tell that I gave you last week, and I'll give you again, is this. If you're doing these things because they help you take care of the body that you live in, that is maintenance, and that's good. If you're doing them because you are terrified of what will happen if you don't, that is a safety behavior and it will keep you anxious in the long run. Your amygdala, the fear center of your brain, will not learn that it can tolerate things outside of that routine. So instead, practice holding the basics loosely. Move your body because it feels good, eat food that nourishes you, and let the occasional bad night of sleep, a missed workout, or a little extra caffeine be a non-event. You are not that fragile, whether you feel like it or not. Your brain just needs to be given the opportunity to learn that. Okay, so here's a quick recap of the main ideas. One, the line between a healthy habit and a safety behavior is almost never about the habit itself. It's about the intention, how you use it. Why are you using that habit? Is it from a place of self-care or is it from a place of fear? Two, every safety behavior, even a wellness-coded one, teaches your brain that anxiety was dangerous and the habit or the behavior saved you from danger. The more you lean on them, the more you reinforce that loop. And three, you don't have to throw your tools away. You just have to use them from the right place. And let yourself feel anxiety sometimes without reaching for them at all. That's how you build real capacity, and that's how you start getting your life back. That's all for today's episode on how healthy habits might be keeping us stuck. As a reminder, sign up for the newsletter. You can also get the free recovery guide at the18minutes.com as well, which will in turn sign you up for the newsletter. I do have some really fun announcements coming up, and that's where you're gonna hear them. If you have questions about today's episode or you have a topic that you want me to dive into on the show, send me an email. It's uh Amanda at the 18minutes.com, or you can send me a DM on TikTok or Instagram at the 18 Minutes. If you enjoyed today's show or you found it helpful, please leave a rating a review. Those are genuinely so helpful in other anxious people finding this podcast. Thank you so much for being here, and we'll see you next time.