4 Things to Try for Anxiety Before Starting Therapy

Hello friends! This solo episode from Cassandra covers four things to try for anxiety before you ever step into a therapist's office: why thoughts are just thoughts (and the garage sale sign vs. billboard difference), getting specific about self-care with blue and green time, why you should get your labs done, and how to build a panic attack bag that does the thinking for you. Cassandra is a licensed therapist and EMDR Consultant at Seen Therapy Services in Springfield, Missouri, offering EMDR therapy, EMDR intensives, and couples counseling in person and via telehealth throughout Missouri. Visit seentherapy.org or call/text 417-708-7909 to get started. Get a taste for the episode below. If you enjoy your listen, give us a follow, share, or five star review. Have a good one!

"Some signs are garage sale signs. You could easily go pluck them up on your own. Some are full billboards. You're not pulling the billboard up on your own."

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Hello, hello, hello friends. Welcome to the podcast where we simplify everything about mental health. Just kidding. But here's what we are gonna do. We're gonna sit down together, a licensed mental health professional, that's me, and a regular old Joe, as my husband Garth would describe himself. We're gonna talk about the nitty-gritty of the MBR, some nervous system mapping, how couples can help each other heal, what's healthy parenting actually look like, maybe a little bit of good old banter mixed in. All with the goal of making mental health a little bit simpler for you. Quick note, because my lawyer says that I have to, I'm a therapist, but not your therapist, unless I am. Even if I am, this is still just a podcast, okay? Now have a good listen. Friends, today we are talking quick solutions for anxiety before you go to therapy, says the therapist. Obviously, single episode today. Garth is not joining me, but I am excited about our conversation today because obviously I am a clinician. I think that therapy is very beneficial, but I also think that we can do a lot of things at home to improve our mental health before we ever walk into a therapist's office. If you are already in therapy, that doesn't mean that these tips and tricks won't help you. It just means that I am focused today on what you can do for yourself before you go see an LPC like me. That was completely on the fly. Okay. So I'm gonna keep it really simple today. We're going over four things, and I'm gonna look at my notes so that I don't miss anything, and then I'm gonna kind of more organically walk you through it. Thoughts are thoughts. How can basic self-care help us with anxiety? How we can monitor our physical health and how it impacts our anxiety, which like it's all connected, but yeah. And then specifically, I wanted to take the last piece that we're gonna talk about and focus just on how we can manage panic attacks. Okay, because if not everybody who's experiencing symptoms of heightened anxiety or an anxiety disorder is experiencing a panic attack. But when you are experiencing a panic attack, anybody who's experiencing panic attacks will tell you they want to know all the solutions. And potentially before we wrap up our anxiety series, we're doing just a podcast episode on panic attacks. Stay tuned. Okay, so quick solutions. First, anxiety. I'm sorry. Whoa, reeling it back. Thoughts are just thoughts. Okay. Thoughts are just thoughts. That's all they are. Oh, wait, we didn't bant. Do we bant? I don't know if I can bant without Garth. I am not good at coming up with bant questions. You guys would not be impressed with whatever I came up with. We're not gonna ban it. Instead, I will just take a moment to chat about Olipop. Hashtag not sponsored. Love Olipop. Fun fact about me, love ginger. If you are a longtime listener, you know that I am deeply impressed by ginger, whether it is drink or food form. Either one. Okay. Back to your regular, regularly scheduled programming. Okay. First, biggest heavy hitter by far that I think can just real quickly reduce anxiety. Thoughts are just thoughts. Now, obviously, you don't just hear that and suddenly you walk into this beautiful zone where you believe this is true. But if you can really start wrapping your head around thoughts are just thoughts. They are not you, they are not representative of you, they are not in any way indicative of how good you are or what you value. There is a difference between the thought running through your mind right now and what you actually desire and value as a human being. The faster that we accept that, the faster that we can see some reduction in our anxiety. Does that mean everything is fixed? No, does not mean everything is fixed. An visual that I'll provide for clients is that thoughts are just signs on the side of the road. And the thing is, some signs are garage sale signs. That's it. They're garage sale signs that you could easily go and pluck up on your own and keep driving if you did that sort of thing. I don't know. Or you could just drive by it and let it not have real impact on your day, which is what I would encourage you to do. So signs could be garage sale signs, they could also be entire full billboards. Okay. Now pulling the billboard up on your own. You can drive faster past the billboard. You can remind yourself that it's just a billboard. It's nothing more than a billboard, but you're not going to be uprooting the billboard by yourself. When you're experiencing anxious thoughts that are billboards, you should have someone help you with those. You're not getting it up. The roots of that sucker, they're staying in. Okay. So thoughts are just thoughts. This can help you move down the road in reducing your anxiety symptoms. Got it? Okay. Now we're moving on to our second guy. Checking my notes again. I'm staying on track. Okay. Basic self-care. I'm gonna give you some specific things. We all know the gist. Sleep, sleep, eat, good food. All the things, right? Okay. Studies in the past couple of years have indicated 45 minutes a day of blue or green time. Not just outside time, blue or green time. What does that mean? Well, for me, I'm walking through my neighborhood and I'm like, and my neighbor's grass. That's my green time. No, just kidding. Some days that is the best that I'm gonna get in, right? Is like going on a walk. Most days those it's not. Most days I am going to a park with my kids. I am going to a lake. I I know that not everybody can do that, but we want to structure our weeks so that we can try to average 40 minutes a day, 45 minutes a day, where we are getting some green-blue time. Outside time, though, if you can get 30 minutes of outside time a day, huge reduction in stress in stress. Going back to recent study that looked at 45 minutes of outside time per day in a green or blue space. I didn't write this down in my notes, so I may be butchering this, but I do believe that it reduced premature death by, I want to say it was high 20s, like 29%. And I could even be flip-flopping that and it could be 70. Oh goodness. I told you I was gonna butcher it. I'll put this in the show notes. But even if it's 30, let's say it's 30, if you spend 45 minutes outside a day in a green or blue space, and that reduces your chances of premature death by 30%. What's happening in your body that is leading to that reduction? Like, holy mackerel. I want whatever is going on physically. I want that for myself. I want that happening for me. All right, let's see how fast we can find this. We're just gonna keep the pod running. If you're listening, I'm gonna look up real quick. Green and blue space study how much reduction in premature death. Let's see what we've got. Can Google handle it or do we need to go to Google Scholar? We're going to know. So soon. Are we though? We're not gonna know. Bummer. Okay. Here's the deal, guys. Green and blue space. Do it. Okay. Yeah. Alright. Now we're moving on to our next point. And our next point is have you had a blood draw recently? Because here's what I want you to do before you come to therapy. I want you to start internalizing that thoughts are just thoughts. I want you to be spending at least Cassandra says 30 minutes a day outside, preferably in a blue or green space. Okay? And then if you have not been to your primary care in over a year, I want you to schedule a primary care appointment. I want you to get your regular yearly blood labs done. If it's relevant for you, I want you to do a full thyroid panel. And I want you to get your hormones checked. Okay? If your primary care doesn't do this, find somebody who does. It doesn't mean that you don't need to come to therapy, but at the very least, you're coming to therapy really informed. Okay? Because I want to know this stuff. I want to know if we are having significant anxiety symptoms. When's the last time that we had our like even just our blood pressure checked, right? Okay. Moving on along. Panic attacks. Let's talk about panic attacks. Okay. We've talked about panic attacks in previous episodes. Here's what I want you to know with panic attacks. When someone is experiencing a panic attack, they are not able to use frontmost part of their brain. And for those of us interacting with that person, we should not expect them to be using the frontmost part of their brain. Okay. Not all panic attacks look like someone hyperventilating. In fact, a lot don't. We were just talking about blood pressure. For some people, it means they have a blood pressure spike. They start to get clammy. They're talking less. It doesn't look like them having difficulty breathing or talking rapidly. Panic attacks can look really different in different people. So what are we going to do if we start to experience a panic attack or someone else appears to be experiencing a panic attack? The nice thing about what I am going to explain to you is that the things in and of themselves cannot be harmful. So if we're wrong about the panic attack, not a big deal. Now, there's a caveat to that. If this is someone who has not historically had panic attacks and they have risk factors for a cardiac event and they are showing symptoms of a cardiac event that overlap with panic attack symptoms, please take that seriously and take them to medical professionals that can assess for a cardiac event rather than a panic attack. If a cardiac event is not indicated and the medical professionals indicate that this is the case, then we can probably move forward knowing that this was a panic attack, but they do need to be assessed by medical professionals first. Okay. Okay. So someone's having a panic attack. We need to ground them. How are we going to do that? I love if you know that you have panic attacks, having a bag ready for you. And I love a few things being kept in that bag consistently. First thing that I love in that bag that's really effective for folks that are having a panic attack is something that they can smell that's grounding. Our sense of smell is really strong. It brings people down from that heightened state really quickly. Also good for people who are in a dissociative state, but that's another episode. When we're thinking about things to smell, we're not thinking about relaxing things. We are thinking about obnoxious things. I'm talking decongestants, right? So if you want to put even like a little container, you know, like the like Carmax VIX Vapor Rub, it's like really, really strong. You could do an essential oil, like tea tree oil that's really strong or peppermint. We're not actually putting it on us, we're just smelling it. Okay. So we want to engage our smell, want to engage sound. So if you want to keep some headphones in your bag and play some music, again, music that you're not necessarily familiar with. So I've had clients that have panic attacks in the past make a playlist that's just their panic attack playlist. We're not listening to like Screamo, but we're also not listening to soft jazz, right? Like we're finding something we're not super familiar with that's engaging. We're putting a playlist together whenever we're not in the middle of a panic attack. Okay, another thing that's really helpful. Okay, so smell, super helpful. Sound, yeah, it's okay. Having something that you have to react to. Okay. So this can be as simple as you put a small bouncy ball, stress ball, what have you, in your bag and you toss it back and forth between your hands. When you toss the ball and you're planning on catching it, you have to be responsive with that other hand. You can also do this against a wall, right? So you're putting something in the bag that you have to be responsive to. You can also do this with games on your phone. You can find a game on your phone that you have to be responsive to. I like more body movement, so I really love putting something, like I said, like a ball, a slinky is something else that you have to be responsive to. It's hard to beat a good bouncy ball. Gotta be pretty responsive to a good bouncy ball. And you can kind of escalate how you're using the bouncy ball. So by that I mean you start off just bouncing the ball against the wall and catching it. And then you move up as you're grounding to I'm going to only use my non-dominant hand. So for me, my left, I'm going to only use my left hand to throw this ball and catch it. That's engaging my brain in a different way. I'm having to work harder to be present in that moment and throw and catch the ball. I'm not used to throwing and catching a ball with my left hand. And so there's a different part of my brain that's participating in that. Okay. We could go on, but I'm going to give one last thing for panic attacks and then we're going to wrap up. In your panic attack bag, give yourself directions. Whenever you're in the midst of a panic attack or you're working with somebody that you know you love that's in the midst of a panic attack that has a history of panic attacks, it might seem easy to remember these things, but it's not in the moment. So write yourself a list of what your options are of things that you can do. We just walked through three of them. There are several more that you can include in your bag. And you're not going to necessarily remember in the moment exactly what to do. You know, and I know AI at this point, my stance may, you know, so this is, let's see, September 9th, 2026. At this point, I think that AI is a tool that can be used to produce good things and be used to produce not so good things. A year from now, maybe I will think that AI is not great, no matter how you're using it. I don't know. But when I say all this to say, at least right now, my stance is it's a tool. And with AI, you can do so many fun things for your panic attack bag. You can make a QR code to slip into your panic attack bag. And when you scan it, it automatically populates a text message to send your mom that says you're having a panic attack, or you put in a QR code that automatically brings up that playlist that you want to listen to. So when you're making your panic attack bag, think how can I make this the easiest that I can possibly make it for myself when I'm in the midst of a panic attack? Okay, summarizing, checking out my notes again so I don't miss anything. Thoughts or thoughts, folks. Thoughts are thoughts. Thoughts are not you, thoughts are not me, thoughts are not our values, thoughts are not who we are anymore. Judgment on us. Thoughts are thoughts. Do not underestimate basic self-care. Okay. Am I I just went over getting outside. Goodness gracious. I got distracted looking up the stat that I didn't end up finding. Okay, basic self-care. How much water are we drinking a day? Like down to the ounces. Measure your good old water bottle. I've got one that's my daily drinker. Know how much you're drinking. Okay. Get outside at least 30 minutes a day. Know how much you're drinking. Eat enough protein. If we can do those things, those things, we are going to be in a much better spot, likely, with our anxiety symptoms. Okay. Go to your primary care appointments, guys. Do it. Please do not walk into my office and tell me that you have not been to your primary care and had any labs drawn for the last six years. Please don't do it. Don't do it. Go get your labs done. If it's relevant for you, full thyroid panel. Okay. Hormone levels. I work mostly with women. I especially want women to be women of to be checking their hormone levels. I was gonna say a reproductive age, but that's irrelevant. Check your hormone levels. Okay. And then panic attacks. If you have them, if you love someone who has them, put together a panic attack bag. Okie dokie. Ladies and gentlemen, when I am solo, I can keep an episode at 20 minutes. Thank you. Well, that's all, folks. Please see our show notes for ways to connect with us or go give us a follow on Instagram. You can find us at Simply Mintal. If this episode resonated with you, send it over to a friend. Give us a five star rating, subscribe, download all the things that cool kids are doing these days. Thanks for having me listen.