when you start thinking about those things that you worry about you might feel your stomach get upset you might get dizzy you might feel all sorts of physical symptoms or you may not you also might start with a physical symptom and then the worries kick in so people experience their anxiety differently but so many people are trying to navigate life with daily anxiety so if you're trying to quiet your anxiety and you haven't yet found the solution I am hoping I can help I'm going to lead you through an understanding of what's happening and give you some exercises let's see if we can change this pattern so cognitive behavioral therapy exercises give you actions you can take to begin to change this cycle of anxiety most people want to change how they feel when I was a psychotherapist people would come to me and be like Barbara I don't like feeling anxious I want to change my feeling but the key here is that it's nearly impossible to change those feelings if we don't first change a thought or behavior so let me explain how this works your body your physical body has a parasympathetic nervous system and a sympathetic nervous system we need both both are great but most of us in modern society have underdeveloped parasympathetic nervous systems our sympathetic nervous systems are in high gear so your sympathetic nervous system that's what wakes you up in the morning that's what gets you moving that's the part of your nervous system that responds to I need to eat I need to move I need to go to work we need the sympathetic nervous system the parasympathetic nervous system is what calms everything down that's what helps you fall asleep at night the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in when we feel safe and calm and relaxed and if we're never feeling that way our parasympathetic nervous systems are not being exercised so your parasympathetic nervous system and your sympathetic nervous system coordinate with your brain coordinate with your thoughts and coordinate it with your behaviors we are all connected so the cognitive behavioral cycle for anxiety can happen in a couple different ways let's say your anxiety starts with a worry a thought it might be a thought that was caused by an external situation let's say your partner gets mad at you or you crash your car something happens and then your cognitive anxiety kicks in oh no I crashed my car again my insurance so it's going to go up I'm not gonna be able to get to work now some of those things could be real issues but what's happening the second that your mind jumps into all those problems is you are hyper stimulating your sympathetic nervous system your adrenaline and cortisol is flooding your old brain does not realize that these are problems that actually need sort of thoughtful calm response your old brain thinks you gotta run away or fight or freeze that's all your old brain thinks so the second you kick into all of that my partner's mad at me oh they're gonna leave me oh I can't stand it oh what will I do you are generating all of that and your sympathetic nervous system is just kicking in to help but it's not really helping so some people will say to me no my anxiety never starts with a thought my anxiety starts with a panic attack that's the first thing that happens is I go into Panic so let's say that's true and your anxiety starts with a feeling in your body and then your brain kicks in and is like oh I gotta support a thought that confirms that feeling so if my heart is racing I need something to worry about so I'm gonna have a reason my heart is racing now maybe that reason is I'm gonna die I'm having a heart attack or maybe it is simply like a feeling of dread something terrible is going to happen but your feeling goes into a thought and then both of these Cycles whether it started with the thought or your awareness is that it started with a thought or if your awareness is that it started with the physical feeling either way those thoughts and feelings contribute to a behavior so just to keep going with the examples I was using let's say you're worried your partner is upset at you and they're going to leave you so therefore you're like well I may as well not do the dishes because why should I bother doing the dishes they're going to leave me anyway so you don't do the dishes which makes your partner even more upset and then maybe you don't even go to work because you feel so bad and you are just spiraling from this thought so there are behaviors that are following that aren't helpful so my first suggestion for you if you are struggling with anxiety is to really look into how does this cycle work for you what's the trigger event and what's the trigger event in you so let's say there's the external trigger event car crash partner being mad boss being mad whatever the external trigger event that actually doesn't cause your anxiety I know that's really hard to take in but it really is true that that trigger event isn't the cause the cause is how you're responding to it so where does your response start does your response start with a stomach ache does it start with a thought what's the initial thing within your cycle and then what does that lead to so if it starts with a thought What feelings does that lead to what behaviors does lead to if it starts with a feeling what thoughts does that lead to what behaviors does that lead to and then where can you intervene to change this cycle so that is a summary of cognitive behavioral therapy of the cognitive behavioral cycle and it's really key to begin to understand this deeply and the more you look at this the more the whole process will begin to kind of slow down which gives you more agency to choose a different response and again sometimes people feel like talking about it in this way is very dismissive of their problems so this is not I really want to be clear on that crashing car it's a big big bummer there's probably a number of things you're gonna have to figure out but the anxiety the extreme anxiety isn't helping you figure those out we figure things out best when our whole brain is working all of it working together when we're in the anxious State our amygdala is driving the show poof so no matter where your cycle starts these are some things to think about and some exercises to do that will help no matter what know that your thoughts are just thoughts we give our thoughts way too much importance we all have kooky thoughts that like pop into our head somebody with a lot of anxiety about intrusive thoughts is going to hold on to that kooky thought why did I have it why can't I get rid of it and the more they do that the more they're going to have it but even if it's not a weird intrusive thought and it's simply a projection about a horrible thing that's going to happen it's just a thought so bringing in our Observer mind that's the part of our mind that kind of can be like oh look there's my thought pattern there's my CBT cycle happening again and even if that Observer mind is only like twenty percent volume and the other is at the eighty percent volume paying a little more attention to that Observer is going to strengthen its voice as that Observer strengthens you will begin to feel more distance from your thoughts and that's a concept called cognitive diffusion cognitive diffusion is bringing together I don't have to believe all my thoughts and I can have some distance from them so instead of saying I'm having anxiety you can say I'm having an anxious thought about what's going to happen with my car I'm having an anxious thought about what's going to happen with my partner simply changing how you're referring to this in your own head so both externally if you want but also mainly how you're talking about yourself putting it in terms of I am having this thought is going to help you begin to build distance from that thought and if your cycle started with a physical pain that made you begin to go go down the worry hole of having some kind of disease instead of thinking I'm having all this anxiety because I had that pain change it into I am having the thought that I might have a disease I'm having this thought it's not the truth it's a thought so that suggestion combines The Observer mind and the cognitive diffusion how you are thinking about your thoughts very important the next suggestion I have for you is to Think Through cognitive distortions cognitive distortions are very very well proven distortions that almost all of us have to some extent but a distortion means it's distorted so cognitive distortions are things like catastrophizing my car you know I had this car crash so everything in my life is going to fall apart projecting a horrible ending out into the future so if you can begin to recognize oh I'm having a cog negative distortion on catastrophizing it's going to help you once again build distance from the thought and not necessarily buy into it so other cognitive distortions are black and white thinking everything is either all good or all bad my partner's mad at me so they must hate me is black and white thinking no your partner can be mad at you still love you still care about you and not be happy with you today there's a gray almost everything in the world is in between the black and white Sioux magical thinking that kicks in with a lot of anxiety when we worry about what other people think and we start being like oh she's mad at me she didn't text me back so she must be mad at me that's magical thinking you don't know why she didn't text you back but you project and you make something up and you believe your story so there's a number of other ones and I do talk about them in a couple of other videos I'm not going to go into all of them now but as you begin to really analyze what kind of thought you're having it gives you that first little angle to get in there and question it so I'm going to give you an exercise that helps you strengthen that parasympathetic nervous system our brains are so powerful that if we imagine something calming and enjoyable our body begins to feel it so one thing I love to do is to like be on a float and float in a pool or a body of water so if you enjoy that just bring that to mind right now really picture it really breathe it in and I'm going to give you a different thing to imagine if you don't like that do you like to be on a hammock in a backyard do you like to be in the woods what do you like to do that makes you feel calm and peaceful is there a beautiful place you like to go whatever it is bring it to mind really picture it closing your eyes can help really picturing it breathing it in think about all the sensory impact of it the smells the sounds all of that and feel your body a relaxed now that is an exercise you can do every day you could even do it a couple times a day you don't have to be anywhere special your mind will do it for you but that will help your parasympathetic nervous system strengthen giving yourself those little mini it's almost like an oasis it's almost like an oasis in the midst of all the chaos you're going to give yourself a couple of minutes of an oasis where you can imagine being in a place you love to be being calm and comfortable so again whether your anxiety is cognitive or somatic that exercise will help the next one I'm going to talk about the third round it's not quite as concrete but learning to let yourself feel what other emotions are there if your anxiety is super cognitive you might not you might be like all up in your head right I used to be like that actually at one point in my life like it was sort of like everything went on here and I had no awareness right it's really important to begin in to develop the awareness of what am I feeling in my body now if you over focus on how you're feeling which then causes anxiety it's important to look for the other feelings I hesitate to say really let yourself feel because unfortunately the interpretation of what you're feeling is causing your anxiety but the anxiety might be covering up other feelings is it easier to worry about what kind of health problem I might have than it is to address a real concrete problem in my life or make a choice I kind of know I have to make but I don't really want to make maybe this is the easiest thing for me to worry about I'm not really sure right like this complex stuff and everybody's a little bit different but we have other feelings we have sadness we have regret we have anger all those feelings it's good to feel them even if they don't feel great but feeling all of our feelings then also gives us the space to feel the lighter feelings the more more joyful feelings the fun ones so I know that suggestions a little more amorphous but I want to share with you that one of the things that helped me the most in developing The Observer mind for watching my thoughts and the ability to sit with my feelings was meditation and I know a lot of people with anxiety will say it's too hard I can't meditate and recovering from anxiety is not necessarily going to be easy so I know you might have to do hard things and I want to encourage you to learn meditation but I also know that for people with anxiety sometimes guided meditations are much easier than trying to learn to just sit on your own even though eventually I do think that pure mindfulness meditation on your own is what is going to help you the most with that strengthening of your Observer mind and the ability to really feel what's going on with you but to start guided meditations are great and I did recently join an app so I will put the link below for an app called Aura health and there are a lot of guided meditations they have guided sleep meditations which I've actually really been enjoying I think it's a super useful app I actually joined it both to use it and then I also do have some meditations that I am posting on there don't have too many on there yet but I'm building up a library in there as well so that might be something to consider but there's also other meditation apps guided meditation can be really helpful with all this all right so the last exercise I want to share with you which is very concrete is that set aside time for yourself when you have anxiety set aside five to ten minutes to write all your anxious thoughts down one right after another write out the whole anxious story or if it's just random anxieties I'm anxious about this this this is this put them in an actual box could be just a little box that you like that you keep on your shelf just write things down put it in some kind of box put it on your shelf put it in a closet it gives them some type of container and then as you go through your day every time one of those anxious thoughts comes up you can be like gonna put it in that box and just imagine yourself pulling it out of your head putting it in the box so if you have a lot of repetitive anxious thoughts that are about things you can't control you know there's really no help to having them just pull them out of your head in your mind right imagine pulling them out of your head putting them in the box do the same thing the next day so you're giving yourself like a contained period of time to let yourself go into your worries and the rest of the day focusing on something more positive now for anxiety like OCD I believe these tips will be helpful but they probably won't be enough it's a very specific type of anxiety particularly if you have compulsions that go with the obsessive thoughts the exercises and the treatment are a little bit different because not engaging in those compulsive behaviors is super important so let me know if you're interested in a series on OCD or not I haven't done one yet let me know if you're interested in it now I want to share probably the most important thing to understand about anxiety and you probably don't want to hear this but there are two things that are really driving your anxiety one is that you don't want to admit you are powerless over certain things so life is uncertain that's really hard for people with anxiety I have a feeling a lot of people will get upset at me for saying that but life's uncertain it truly is denying it is not helping anybody along with that uncertainty we do not have control over many things we are powerless over many things so spending our lives worrying about those things we can do nothing about because we don't want to accept the uncertainty is really ruining our lives if I think through my life like the most negative things that have happened to me I never would have expected actually and a lot of the things I worried about if not pretty much all of them never happened now again I know accepting that can temporarily increase your anxiety but it's really necessary it really is we don't have control over everything life is uncertain and it is our attachment to a particular outcome that's really driving our anxiety we think we know what's going to make us happiest in the future and we get frustrated that we can't guarantee that's going to happen and we can't guarantee it partially because we're powerless over the outcome and partially because life is uncertain but we're so attached to it we can't let go and our mind is just going to stick with it so practicing with these concepts of it's okay that I'm powerless over some things it's okay that I don't get the outcome I think I want and life's uncertain I know that's sort of ending on some harsh realities but I do believe those lead to peace if you like this video please do give it a like and if you're not subscribed to my Channel please do subscribe and I'll see you next week foreign