What if Your Anxiety is Your Friend instead of Your Enemy

What if your anxiety has never once tried to hurt you?

For nearly 30 years, licensed psychotherapist Jennifer Moore has watched clients declare war on their anxiety. Fight it, try to numb it, or drink it away, and the next day it comes back 10x louder. Because you can't evict a bodyguard.

In this episode, Jennifer breaks down what anxiety actually is, why it lives in your body before it ever becomes a thought, and how to finally stop fighting it. Through the lens of Internal Family Systems and Polyvagal theory, you'll learn to see your anxiety for what it really is: a young, tired, devoted protector that never got the memo you survived.

Plus: five body-based tools you can use today, how to tell the difference between anxiety and intuition, and a guided befriending meditation you'll want to return to again and again.

Your body isn't betraying you. It's trying to protect you. 

IN THIS EPISODE

• Why 99.9% of us fight our anxiety, and why it always comes back louder
• The good news first: your brain is neuroplastic and your nervous system is trainable
• Fear vs. anxiety: one is about now, the other is about what might happen next
• The vagus nerve, the "wanderer," and why 80% of its fibers carry information UP from body to brain
• Why anxiety shows up as a dropped stomach, racing heart, nausea, or hives before you have a single anxious thought
• Jen's high school hives story and what her body was really doing
• Polyvagal theory 101: Dr. Stephen Porges and your nervous system's protective states
• The Inside Out 2 image: Anxiety gripping the control panel with both hands
• The IFS reframe: anxiety as a loyal protector part still guarding the 7-year-old you
• Meet "Anxious Annie": why naming your anxious part changes your relationship with it
• You don't fire a loyal employee. You thank her and update her job description.
• Anxiety vs. intuition: quiet or loud, specific or global, settles or loops, present or future
• Five tools that speak the body's language: the physiological sigh, humming, orienting, cold water, and the befriending practice
• A guided IFS-style befriending meditation (save this one)

KEY QUOTES

"You can't evict a bodyguard."

"Your body isn't betraying you. It's trying to protect you."

"Your nervous system would rather give you a thousand false alarms than miss one real threat. That's a loyal protector."

"It doesn't know you grew up. It's still protecting the 7-year-old you."

"You don't heal by fighting yourself. You heal by befriending yourself."

THE 5 TOOLS FROM THIS EPISODE

1. The physiological sigh. Two short inhales through the nose, one long slow exhale through the mouth. Three rounds.
2. Hum. The vagus nerve runs right past your vocal cords. Hum, chant, or sing. Low and slow.
3. Orienting. Slowly turn your head and name five things you can see. Tell your nervous system: we checked, no tiger.
4. Cold water. Cool water on your face or wrists activates the dive reflex. Heart rate drops.
5. The befriending practice. Turn toward your anxiety like a frightened child. I see you. Thank you. I've got it from here. (Guided meditation in the episode.)

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

• Dr. Stephen Porges and polyvagal theory
• Internal Family Systems (IFS)
• Pixar's Inside Out and Inside Out 2
• Previous episodes in this series: the Chiron in Taurus wound identity work, Patty Griffin's "Sweet Lorraine," and shadow work

CONNECT WITH JEN

Jennifer Moore is a licensed psychotherapist and founder of the Therapeutic Coach Approach™.

• Website 
• Facebook community
• Subscribe to the newsletter

If this episode landed for you, share it with someone in your life who's been at war with their own nervous system. And if you have a minute, a rating and review helps more people find the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The enemy. Yes, sometimes it can be a little bit too overwhelming, overprotective, and it can keep us from feeling fully alive and living in the moment. But what if I told you its intention is protection, not punishment? And yet 99.9% of my clients come to me and have declared war on their anxiety. They have fought it, they have numbed it, they've tried to breathe it out, journal it away, drink it away. And we all know what happens after that. The next day that anxiety is 10x. Guess what? You cannot evict a bodyguard. Today, we're gonna stop fighting and start listening. And I have good news. The brain is neuroplastic and the nervous system is trainable. You can teach your body something new today so that it will do something different tomorrow than it did yesterday. I'm Jennifer Moore, licensed psychotherapist and founder of the therapeutic coach approach. And this is Isn't there more? Welcome back, friends. If you've been with me the last few episodes, we've been talking about the wound identity. We've talked about Chiron and Taurus, the wound identity, and how we build an entire life story around a thing that may have hurt us that wasn't even ours. And how we may talk about my anxiety or my back pain or my hip, whatever it is, it becomes mine and that becomes your whole identity. We even talked about Patty Griffith's sweet Lorraine, you know, that sweet song where Lorraine goes and builds a whole new life and her mother throws stones at her because she's trying to leave the trauma behind and her father calls her a slut and a whore. That's the wound identity. She's trying to get away. She's gone to school and trying to do better for herself. And how many people do you know who have tried to do better and yet their family feels like they've been rejected and treats them poorly? That's the wound identity right there. So we've talked about shadow work, how we try to hide those parts that we don't like about ourselves, not just from other people, but we hide them from ourselves. And as we've been doing this work, it's naturally stirred up some deeper emotions. And without fail, every single client that I talked to this week has asked me about anxiety and how it's manifesting in their bodies. And it's almost debilitating and paralyzing. So we're going to talk about what anxiety is, why it exists, and I'm going to invite you to befriend it instead of battling it. Let's start with the science. Most of anxiety that we struggle with day to day is not actually what's happening right now, it is predicting what may or may not happen. It's imagining or maybe it's remembering something that happened yesterday or last year or 25 years ago. A lot of anxiety isn't actually responding to the danger that's happening right now. It's predicting what might happen based on past experiences. So it scans the environment, your body, your memories, your forecast. It creates a forecast. And sometimes that forecast is accurate, but sometimes it's running on old data. And I want to make a distinction between fear and anxiety. Fear is about what's happening now. Anxiety is usually about what might happen next or has already happened, and you're carrying it. And then the mind creates a story that loops on what may or may not happen or what might have happened yesterday. And the mind is trying to solve a problem that isn't actually in front of you right now. But I'm going to tell you something fascinating. And the more I learn about this, the more fascinated I am with it all. I think it's magic. I really love it and I think it's magic. And I'm so excited about knowing this, sharing it, teaching it to my clients, and teaching it to you, sharing it with you. And I hope that you will share it with somebody because I guarantee you, either you or someone you know has struggled with anxiety. All right, so we have this nerve. It's called the vagus nerve, and it is your longest cranial nerve in your body, and it wanders from your brain stem all the way down through the heart, your lungs, and your gut. The word vagus actually means wanderer. Same root as vagabond. Yep. Fun note. Anywho, 80% of the vagus nerves fibers carry information up. Let me repeat that. 80 of the vagus nerves fibers carry information up from the body to the brain, not the other way. So your gut speaks first, your heart speaks first, and the brain interprets those signals and begins making sense. This is why anxiety often shows up in the body before it becomes a thought. Maybe your stomach drops, you see something or you feel something, and your stomach just boom, you feel that sucker punch, or you feel nauseated, you feel those butterflies in your tummy. Maybe you got to run to the bathroom, got diarrhea. Yeah, that's why we talk about treat from the inside out and the outside in, because before a presentation or an important conversation that you've got to have, I've got a client who says she throws up all the time, just the thought of having to show up. I remember I had a friend in high school and in elementary school. She would throw up before the first day of school every year. That is a perceived threat. Like it's gonna be scary whenever I go to school and have to see all these people. Others may feel it whenever they eat or they can't eat at all. Your gut has its own nervous system with hundreds of millions of neurons. Maybe you feel it in your chest or your heart races or your hands get sweaty or itchy. Even that burning sensation, you can get hives. I used to get hives before any presentation. I remember I was in a contest in high school, silly, anything. It was a beauty contest. And the course of I had on a strapless dress, and wouldn't you know, I broke out in hives all over my chest, all over my neck, everywhere, right before I went on stage. It was god-awful terrible. Not trying to be dramatic, but I'm just saying before you do something that may feel like a perceived threat, your body will send signals. Those are messages. Your body is not being dramatic. It is doing what it evolved to do when it believes that there's danger. The blood flow shifts away from digestion and toward the muscles that would help you fight or flee. So your digestive slows down, or for some, it speeds up, which is why anxiety can cause nausea, stomach pain, or diarrhea, or even vomiting. And then your mind tries to explain to the body what it's experiencing. So if you ever thought, what is wrong with me and why can I not calm down? I hope that this will give you some relief. Your body isn't betraying you, it's trying to protect you. Your body is constantly sending you information upward, and your brain interprets those signals and creates meaning from them. This is why the anxiety shows up in the pit of your stomach or in your hands or your chest, and you feel that tightness and you feel like you can't breathe. So the body responds before consciously you were even aware of it. Then your mind is like, what's going on? All right, so Dr. Stephen Porgis actually gave us the framework for this polyvagal theory in action. Your nervous system has different states. So when you feel safe, regulated, connected, present, when your system detects a threat, real or perceived, it shifts. Heart races, breath gets shallow, thoughts start looping. All of it is protection. When your system detects a threat, perceived or real, it shifts into a protective state. Your nervous system would rather give you a thousand false alarms than miss one real threat. That's a loyal protector, my friend. Which brings me to IFS, Internal Family Systems. If you haven't seen Pixar's movie Inside Out and Inside Out 2, I want to invite you to see those movies. Yes, they're kids' movies, but they are so informative. If you've seen the movies, then you know what I'm talking about. But I'm going to introduce it through this concept. The movie, the movies imagine different emotions sitting at the control panel inside this Riley's mind, one of the actors' minds. So the emotions are parts: joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust. In the second movie, they introduce anxiety. Different parts step forward at different times depending on what's happening. So it gives a name for these different things that you feel. IFS takes it one step further. It says, We all have different inner parts with their own inner feelings, beliefs, and jobs. I like to imagine like a school bus full of kids, a bunch of kids on the school bus, and all those kids have different needs and wants. Look at me, look at me. I need this, I need that. And the real self, you with capital S is so overwhelmed with all those parts, with their own feelings and their own beliefs, their own jobs, gets overwhelmed, gets pushed to the back of the bus. And then that means one of those parts is driving the bus. So those parts carry our wounds. Some work hard to protect us, some strive to people please or criticize or worry. They all have different jobs. Underneath all those parts is what IFS calls self-energy that was pushed to the back of the bus because she was overwhelmed with all of that noise. Self-energy with the capital S is always calm, compassionate, stays curious, is confident, and centered. That's where the wise center of who you really are. So let's talk about anxiety. In IFS, anxiety is usually the voice of a protector, and its job is to keep you safe. Somewhere along the way, probably before you were seven years old, that protector decided I never want us to experience that again. Maybe you grew up in a house where there was chaos. Maybe you grew up where there was a real danger. But from so from that moment on, it became hypervigilant. Scanning every room, every relationship, every email, every conversation for danger. Danger, Will Robinson. Danger. Imagine anxiety sitting at the control panel, gripping the steering wheel, that school bus. It's not trying to ruin your life, it's trying to protect you. The problem isn't that anxiety showed up. The problem is that it is actually driving your bus. So here's the shift. We don't want to kick the anxiety off the bus. Remember, you cannot evict a bodyguard that's protecting you and has been around probably since you were six or seven years old, maybe even younger. It's been doing a really good job of protecting you. We want to befriend it and thank it for its service. It's been a loyal sidekick that's been helping you because you're but it didn't get the memo that you are now older and wiser and you have tools. So the wiser self that is calm, grounded, centered, and compassionate, who is fully capable of driving the bus, can ask that protector part to move over and ride in the backseat or in the drive in the passenger seat. The anxious part, that protector, doesn't know that you're grown up and that you have choices, that you've got wisdom, you have boundaries, you have resilience, that you actually know something, that you've been doing this work. So I'm gonna invite you to not fight with your anxious parts, but rather to get curious. Thank them for their hard work and let it know I got you. I actually like to name my parts. Anxious Any is one that I like to say. I've I have lots of parts and lots of names, but I get curious with my parts. I see you, I hear you. What are you afraid of? What are you afraid of? Because that part is protecting you as if you were still a young person. A seven-year-old little girl, a seven-year-old little boy who is scared. That part does not know that now you are 30, 35, 40, 45, 56. It's still protecting the seven-year-old self. So we cannot fire it, we cannot tell it to go away, we cannot hate it, talk mess to it. Because you don't fire a loyal employee. You thank them, and you give them an updated job description. Ask them if they would like a new job, because it doesn't know that you no longer need that. So I'm gonna do a short meditation at the end to help you with that. But remember, we're in Chiron right now. Chiron is in Taurus until September 17th. We're in this window to do this deep dive work. The protected protector formed around that wound, and that wound came first. The anxiety was the response, not the problem. It was the solution to a problem that you had a long time ago. So now I do want to talk about one little nuance because a lot of you are empaths and very intuitive. And I want to, I just want to speak to that for a minute because I don't want you to confuse anxiety with intuition. Sometimes it can, anxiety can feel you, oh sorry, intuition can feel like anxiety. It's a messenger. Pay attention. Something's off. One of my clients just told me a story about pulling up to a get some money out of a what a cash machine. I can't think of what it is. ATM. And the Spidey Sense came up and took a took a look around to see where his surroundings were. That's your intuition. That is your gut speaking to you. Because remember what I said, your gut has its own nervous system with hundreds of millions of neurons. Some scientists call it the second brain. When your gut sends that message up the vagus nerve, it's picking up on something that is real. All right. So pay attention to that. Listen to the spidey sense. Intuition tends to be quieter and more grounded. Anxiety is loud and repetitive. Intuition is usually very specific, like pulling up to the ATM, seeing that strange person watching, lurking around. That's intuition. Anxiety can be more global. Intuition says don't trust that person who's staring at you. Anxiety says no one can be trusted. Intuition lands and settles. Anxiety loops and loops and loops and tells a story and tells a story and tells a story. It's like a hip a hamster will. Intuition lives in the present. Anxiety is usually about the potential future that may or may not happen, or what happened yesterday or last year, or 20 years ago. When the signal comes up, pause and ask, is this loud or quiet, specific or global? Points, or is it looping and am I creating a whole story around it? All right, let's get to some tools. I have five tools and then a short meditation for you. All right, tool number one, the physiological psi. All right, two short inhales through the nose, one long exhale through the mouth. The double inhale pops open little sacks in your lungs. The long exhale slows your heart rate. This is the fastest known way to calm the body in real time. Three rounds. Try it. Try it right now. See what happens. See if it calms the body. All right, number two, I really like this one. The hum. The vagus nerve runs right past your vocal cords. When you hum, chant, or sing, it stimulates the vagus nerve. And I've heard this for years and I actually stumbled upon it last year and really have developed a strong practice in chanting now because of this. I sat down one morning to do my morning meditation and I just could not sit still. I was totally that Lainey Wilson's song can't sit still. I was coming out of my skin. And I got up and I turned Krishna Dash chanting. If you don't know who Krishna Dash is, look it up, Google it, find him on Spotify. He is fantastic, has lots and lots of chance, but I I do lots of chants. So I turned on Krishna Das, started chanting and moving my body, and lo and behold, all my anxiety went away. And I felt like a whole new person within 20 minutes. So the chanting works. Another is the. So think about this. When we go to yoga and you start with or you end with the uh, that that humming, the noise, you are stimulating your vagus nerve. Or a hum in the shower. Think about when you're a baby, or if you've ever rocked a baby and you sing or you hum low and slow, that baby all of a sudden stops crying. You have calmed the nervous system. You can try it. Cost you nothing. All right, orienting. When anxiety spikes, your vision narrows, literally. So reverse it. Slowly turn your head, let your eyes land on five things in the room. Name them a lamp, a window, your dog, your cat. You are telling your nervous system, look, we checked. No saber-tooth tiger. I am okay. I am safe. I am okay. All right, number four, cool water on your face or splash it on your wrist. This activates the dive reflex. And so your heart rate drops and your nervous system calms down. Number five, the befriending practice. This is a big one. This is the IFS piece, and I'm gonna walk you through it right now. If you're driving, maybe just listen. But if you're in a safe space, I invite you to take a seat and maybe even soften your gaze or close your eyes. Take one breath in through your nose. Let it go slowly. Now bring to mind something that's making you anxious lately. Don't dive into the story, don't get into the details, just touch on it lightly. Notice where you feel that in your body, your chest, your stomach, your throat, your shoulders. Find it. Feel it. Instead of trying to make it go away, turn toward it. Like you would turn toward a frightened child, and silently say, I see you. How long have you been protecting me? And just listen. And you might get a sense of an age, an image, a color, a memory, or nothing at all, and that's fine. But just ask the next question. What are you afraid would happen if you stopped protecting me? Whatever came up, just let that be. This part of you has been carrying that fear for a long time, all alone. And now say thank you. Thank you for keeping me safe. But I'm grown up now, and I know you've worked so hard to keep me safe. But I have resources now. I can do it. You don't have to work so hard. If we could find another job for you, would you want another job that would be more fun? That's not as hard. Notice what happens in your body when you say that. Even one percent softer. One more breath in, let it out. Now gently come back. You can do that over and over. Just ask it. What does it mean? So here's what I want you to carry with you today. Your anxiety is not your enemy. It never was. It's a protector, a devoted protector that is tired and it's been working to protect you. It didn't get the memo that you're grown up and you've survived. And we don't heal by fighting ourselves. We heal by befriending. Befriending every part. There are no bad parts, even the loud looping 3 AM parts. So this week, when anxiety knocks, try one of these things, one of these tools. Before you fight it, greet it. I see you. Thank you. I've got it from here. So if this episode landed with you, share it with somebody you know. Because I guarantee you know someone who has struggled with anxiety or their nervous system. And we do not have to be at war with our nervous system. We can befriend it. So I'm Jennifer Moore. This is Isn't There More? And the answer is yes, my friends, there is more. Life is happening for you, not to you. Namaste, my friends.