If you're like me,
Then you.
.
.
May have a tendency as you look out on the future often to feel overwhelmed and feel like it's too much.
People with anxiety have a tendency for their brains to view the future as too much for their resources.
There's different types of responses to stress,
And there is a type of response to stress that is harmful,
And we call that the threat response.
But there's a type of stress response which is helpful,
Which facilitates your performance,
And that's called the challenge response.
It's not the stressor itself that will determine the type of stress that you are going to experience,
But that it is your relationship with the stressor.
It's the way your brain views the stressor and it all comes down to the way that your brain sees your demands and your resources.
So if you tend to have a lot of anxiety,
Your brain has a default towards seeing your demands that you come up against as too much for the resources that you've got to meet them.
And it can be hard sometimes to figure out how to change your brain's view of this.
This is really the key to be able to convert a threat response into a challenge response,
Is to work on the way that your brain sees your demands and resources,
But it can be hard to figure out how to balance that.
Get under the hood of your brain,
So to speak,
And figure out how to tweak your vision of your demands and resources.
I wanted to bring in two different coaching examples for you,
People that I coached on this issue,
So that you can see a series of different questions that you can ask yourself that can help manipulate the way that your brain sees your demands and resources as you look out on your immediate,
Troubling,
Problematic future.
So the first client I want to talk about,
I'm going to call her Jill.
She was a student in a nursing program,
A lot of stress from school,
Really high stress program.
She was also looking at having to move in the near future.
She was feeling stressed because her husband's job was insecure.
He was kind of in limbo and they weren't sure if in the next couple of months he was still going to have a job.
And so then that brought up all kinds of financial worries for her.
Was she going to be out of a job right at the time when they had to move and right at the time when she was under all of this school stress?
So we were talking through these anxiety issues,
And I asked her to start out.
Okay,
This is a lot of stress,
This is a hard time for you,
But.
.
.
Was there any other time in your life when you went through something hard?
And she was pretty young,
But she had actually been through some really hard stuff and she told me specifically about a time when she was just graduating from high school when a whole bunch of stuff fell on her shoulders.
Her parents were getting a divorce and so they were emotionally occupied with that.
They weren't available for her and for her siblings.
It was a time of a lot of upheaval for her and her siblings,
As you can imagine,
And she found herself having to act as this caretaker figure for her siblings to take over for her parents who were not.
Stepping up to it because of the things that they were facing.
In addition,
She was graduating and she was needing to move on and she was having to move out of her house and having to negotiate all of the all of the difficulties of that transition into college life,
Finding an apartment and Starting out on her own.
So as she described all of this to me,
I could sense what a terribly difficult time it was for her.
Having to basically be a parent for her siblings in the place of her own parents.
Deal with all of the emotional upheaval of her parents getting a divorce and also navigating this major life transition between home and living on her own.
Kind of alone without orientation,
Without support,
Just having to figure it out herself.
But I asked her,
While acknowledging all of the difficulty and all of the hardness of that experience,
I didn't want to discount any of that,
But I asked her if with all of the negative parts of that experience,
Was there anything positive that you felt like came along with it?
For example,
Something that you learned from it,
A way that you grew,
Something that you realized,
Some skills that you developed.
And she said,
Yeah,
Absolutely.
I found out that I am strong and that I can do really hard things.
I also found out that I am good at caring for other people because I had to care for my siblings.
I realized that I enjoy doing that,
That it feels fulfilling,
And that was part of the reason why I decided to go into nursing school,
Because I realized that that was something that I want to do as a career.
I want to take care of people.
So after we had talked through all of this,
All of these questions,
And she had given her answers,
I asked her how she was feeling and she realized that she was feeling more centered and more settled and more in control and like she could handle this.
Pointed out to her,
I wanted her to be able to understand what it is that we did together so that she would know how to be her own coach in the future.
So we went back to this model of the two different stress responses.
The threat response and the challenge response.
And how it's all about the way you see your demands and your resources.
And I pointed out to her that when we talked through these hard things that she had been through before,
And that she had found a way through them even though they were incredibly difficult.
That this helped her to realize that she had done much harder things in the past.
And that what she was up against right now was hard,
It was difficult,
It was challenging,
But she was going to be able to handle it just fine because it was way easier than this hard thing that she had gone through before.
And so I pointed out to her that what we did when we were talking about that was we helped her to view her resources differently.
When she started to see that in the past,
Her resources had been enough for an enormously hard,
Brand new thing that she had to navigate without help,
Without orientation.
Then she realized that,
Wow,
I really do have great resources that I can dig down and find when I need them,
Because I've done it before.
I've seen it.
And that helped her to view her resources as really big.
It helped her to remember that she has big resources.
And then going through and asking her if there were some positives that came out of her negatives.
Her negative experience helped her to realize that,
You know,
If I do go through something hard right now,
If something does happen where I have to learn something new and navigate something I've never done before,
I might also gain something from it.
I might also learn something about who I am and what I'm good at and I might develop some new.
.
.
Skills that I can use in my life going forward.
And so I pointed out to her that what this did was that it changed her view of the demands in the situation.
That here it helped her to see the demands as something that could possibly be a resource.
So we're shifting them,
Taking this pile of things that's over here on the demand side,
We're taking some of those demands out of the demand pile and we're sticking it over in the resources pile.
So we're changing the way that she sees the demands,
Making them look smaller and making her resources look bigger.
So this simple little chat helped her to see her resources more accurately in light of things that she had already done and realize what was at her disposal and also to see her demands as not quite as bad as what she had originally felt because some of those demands are not demands.
They're actually resources.
And so this helped her to shift out of that threat state and into a challenge mindset where she could approach the problems that she was having to face coming up and not feel overwhelmed by them but actually feel ready to meet them.
Another client that I'm going to talk about.
I'm going to call her Carla.
She was going through a lot of angst and anxiety because of a teenage son.
Who had made some choices that were They were just kind of stupid.
They were things that she had tried to help him avoid,
But he had.
.
.
Snuck around and been rebellious and done them anyway and he'd end up in a situation with some possible semi-serious legal consequences.
So besides being just absolutely dismayed that he had done this,
She was extremely worried and anxious about what this would mean for his future.
How this would affect him and how he would see himself and how it affect his options in the future.
And she was so tied up about this.
It was just consuming her day and night.
But she didn't want to be this super anxious,
Worried parent.
She recognized that she saw her son there and that he needed a certain type of mother.
He needed someone who could show up for him and offer stability and guidance and wisdom and love.
She wanted to be that kind of a parent,
But she didn't really know how to access that type of parent inside of her because she was so consumed with anxiety.
And exasperation about this situation.
So I asked her to step back a little bit and just think.
If there was some time in her own past or someone in her family that she'd been close to.
Who when they were younger had been kind of dumb and done some rebellious things and had a period where they had made a lot of foolish decisions,
And if That was the case if she could see.
If that person had learned anything.
From that experience.
And she said,
Actually,
She herself had been that person.
She herself had been someone who had had a period where she had kind of thrown out several of her parents' values that they had tried to transfer to her.
She had been rebellious.
She had had a period where she had just gone her own way and made a bunch of choices that later looked kind of stupid to her.
She told me that she.
.
.
It really formed who she was because she learned so much from that experience about who she didn't want to be and what she didn't want to do and what she did want that when she decided to return to the values of her parents.
And turn her life around,
That it was because she really wanted that.
It was something that she had a lot of conviction about and she felt a lot of desire to fix the things that had gone wrong in her life and make a course correction and be a new person.
But that she wouldn't want to have not gone through that,
Because if she hadn't,
She wouldn't have learned.
That she wanted to be this person and she wouldn't have gained the wisdom that she gained from choosing the things.
That caused.
Undesirable consequences in her life.
So this period had helped her to learn important lessons and helped her to become who it was that she was today,
And she wouldn't want it otherwise.
This little exercise helped her all of a sudden to start to see her own rebellious phase,
Not as a demand,
But as a resource,
As something that actually gave something to her.
Gave her learning,
Gave her experience,
Gave her growth,
Gave her wisdom.
And she started to see that this present situation with her son,
Although it seemed just pure demands,
Was actually resources as well,
That he too,
Just like her,
Could learn from his own stupid mistakes.
And this could be a really important point in his life when he learns some of these lessons that he needed to learn to become the person that he would be in the future.
So as she took some of the demands in her situation and started to see that they were resources,
Stuck them in the resource pile,
Then she started to get a different balance of how her brain was seeing demands and resources,
And she started to see that her resources were bigger.
Than what she had seen before and she was able to shift out of threat and back into challenge.
When she was in the threat mindset,
She was so consumed with anxiety and we know that the threat response cuts off,
Reduces blood flow to your brain and so you just can't think very well to problem solve and so she hadn't in that state been able to figure out what kind of a parent she wanted to be to her son because because her brain just wasn't working very well.
But as she was able to shift into the challenge response,
She was able to give the resources to her intellect that she needed and perceive what kind of mother she wanted to be in this moment.
That she wanted to be supportive,
That she wanted to be loving,
That she wanted to be wise,
That she wanted to be firm.
So she was able to see what it was that she wanted to do in the situation rather than just seeing what it was that she didn't want and just feeling like she wanted to run away from everything.
Instead,
She was able to shift from avoidance to approach,
From threat to challenge,
Just by being able to view the current situation at hand.
A little bit differently.
If you are starting to feel like the problems that you can see approaching you.
Are kind of overwhelming and you're starting to feel anxious and threatened by the future that is coming your way.
Try going through this experience by yourself.
Just write down in your notebook,
Have I ever gone through something hard before?
And describe it.
If you don't want to write it down,
You can record it in your phone on a recording app and then listen to it.
But describe in a lot of detail if you have gone through anything hard before.
That's the first question.
And the second question is,
Did you gain anything from it?
Was there anything that you learned or any way that you grew or skills that you developed or things that you realized about yourself or about your identity or about who you want to be or about what you want your future to look like.
These two simple questions,
Have I gone through something hard and did I gain anything from it?
Helps your brain to view your demands and resources differently,
Because first of all,
It helps you to see your resources as bigger.
When you see that you've been through something hard before and you got through it,
Then that reminds your brain that,
Hey,
I can dig down and I can find the resources to meet these demands right now.
And when you ask yourself,
Did I gain anything from it?
This helps you to see how the demands in that past situation were actually not just demands.
Also resources,
So it puts more weight over on that resources side and takes weight away from the demand side.
A lot of times it's difficult to change our brain's default appraisals of the world because a lot of this is unconscious,
But this is a simple two-step exercise that can help that can help bring things to your awareness that can change the way that your brain sees your resources in comparison to the demands that you are facing right now.
It'll help you to see the demands as less scary and your resources as a lot more strong.
So that's my suggestion for you today.
