Reducing Anxiety (And Trusting Yourself)

Offering a primer on how to begin to reduce anxiety in your life. I offer five suggestions of what has worked best in my life thus far. Under the heading of Reducing Anxiety has to be the invitation to Trust Yourself ... or realize that perhaps you already do trust yourself. Each of these suggestions do need to be practiced consistently to prove to yourself that you are not broken, your system is not broken, you are ok as you are in all of your exquisite humanness.

Transcript

Hi there.

A dear friend of mine texted me this morning that he just got on Insight Timer for the first time and asked my recommendations for how to deal with anxiety and there are so many amazing offerings.

What would I recommend?

And I could recommend many many many offerings.

There's so many different ways of approaching this.

And then I thought I'm a teacher on Insight Timer.

Why don't I offer my own suggestions and how I work with anxiety and what are my best tips.

So that's what this is.

My first best advice is to reduce anxiety is to learn to trust yourself.

Now I know that is a very tall order and it's kind of been a lifetime in the making of how to do this and I'm sure I'm still learning how to trust myself but that is the overriding concept for me.

The way I reduce my own anxiety in my life is to learn to trust myself and to remember that I already do trust myself and that I have made it through every single thing I've ever been through up to this moment and I will continue to do so.

Some I've done more gracefully some have been pretty darn bumpy but overall I am having the perspective that I can trust myself.

So then that power is not someone else's hands it's in mine.

So under that umbrella of reducing anxiety and learning to trust myself these are the five things that I consistently do and teach to others and so I'm going to go through them.

Here are the five things.

The first one learn to cultivate stillness.

This yes yet again I am advocating meditation.

It can start with just mindfulness.

Noticing where you are in any given moment,

Slowing down,

Taking in what you're doing and this could literally be anything.

It's easier to probably start with nature,

Listening to the birds,

Feeling the Sun on your face,

Stopping and looking at a tree,

Feeling your feet on the ground.

It can also be meditation where you are actively sitting,

Working with your mind,

Working with your body,

Taking some deep breaths,

Feeling your system,

Being okay in who you are.

And then under that there is a level of stillness.

It's kind of the sediment falling down to the bottom so you can have a little bit more of a clear scene.

It's not erasing your problems or your difficult thoughts or what your body's feeling.

It's just allowing for some space and finding some clarity with allowing your body to settle,

Allowing your thoughts to settle.

You see it differently when you're settled.

So that's my first suggestion is to learn to cultivate stillness and you can do it by just actively meditating a couple minutes a day,

Five minutes a day,

Set the gong here on Insight Timer,

Find your position,

Take a few deep breaths and just see what bubbles up knowing that you are creating the atmosphere to see yourself more clearly,

To be kind to yourself,

To slow down.

And it gets it gets better and better.

You still have all the stuff bubble up but you start to trust that there is this underlying basic goodness that you can tap into and it has an element of stillness to it.

But you're not forcing stillness,

You're just working with yourself.

Number two,

Big perspective.

Learn to have an eagle-eye view over your life and that does take some practice.

You would need to slow down and allow yourself all the crazy things that are happening in your day-to-day life,

In your thoughts,

In your body.

But then you take a few breaths and you kind of back up.

Almost like you can look at the whole timeline of your life or maybe look back at the age you are now to all the other ages you've been and imagine what you were really frustrated with in high school or in college or with that first girlfriend or boyfriend.

Does any of that really matter that much now?

It was all instrumental to be who you are now but any one of those particular things you were frustrated about,

None of that matters in your life today.

And so the things you're worried about today,

How much will they matter a year from now,

Five years from now,

At the end of your life?

So just kind of backing up and looking at your whole timeline and just seeing kind of the transient quality of that,

How it ebbs and flows,

That you've weathered all of it.

You're probably a better person now than you were before because you've made more connections,

You understand how life works a little bit more.

So again this is a way of learning to trust yourself by taking a bigger view and physically go to a place where there is a broader vista.

Go to the top of a mountain and look down over your city and see that there's a bigger view here.

And then of course you're gonna snap right back into your day-to-day moment by moment concerns and that's okay.

Let that be okay.

And then every so often,

Whenever you remember,

Back up and get a bigger view of your life.

And breathe.

All of these need deep breaths and a connection back to something that's bigger than you.

Number three,

Reassign your body's cues.

This is a big one for me.

I used to always connect the anxiety I would feel as something is wrong.

I'd feel kind of a tingling in my hands,

A little knot in my stomach,

Blood pressure,

Kind of a little bit of anticipation and I would label all that as anxiety.

And that for me meant something was wrong or I was doing it wrong.

I don't use those body cues anymore in a way to hurt myself by labeling it as anxiety.

Instead I actually label it as just being alive.

Like that is the electricity running through my system.

That is my body telling me something.

That is telling me I didn't probably need that second glass of wine because my heart's beating and it doesn't feel so good.

I could have stopped at one.

Or I'm feeling some anticipation and that's a good thing.

I'm having some energy behind me to pursue the next thing.

It's my life force.

These are all messages in my system telling me that I'm alive.

I decide how I label those messages.

So noticing the different aspects of your body,

What's happening in you.

And of course some of it might be your nervous system and the fight-flight-freeze aspect where you just need safety because it's scary or you're out of control in some way.

And you might need to get that grounding under you and the breath under you so that you can trust yourself enough to know that you have options and you can kind of get back into your higher mind to access your choices.

But ultimately how you assign what is going on in your body really does matter.

So be careful with the words my anxiety and my depression rather than just the momentary feeling of anxiety.

And you can even break it down further into just saying what that feels like in your system.

I notice my heart racing or my stomach clenching or just some electrical charge in my hands,

My feet.

I notice some tension in my head or a little bit of excitement to do something and maybe some fear.

So you're just reassigning your body signals to something that is helping you not hurting you.

Number four,

Let your heart be broken.

This is how you know you're human.

I don't know why we all want to escape our hearts being broken.

This life is painful.

And this is the old Buddhism adage of birth,

Old age,

Sickness,

And death.

None of us will escape these things.

And there's beauty in all of it as well but we cannot escape the heartache of it all.

People we love have died.

People we love are sick or disabled in some way.

We all have pains and hurts and scrapes and disappointments.

We all have heartache and it's ridiculous to imagine that we shouldn't.

So we bring our broken heart to every moment and we acknowledge it's there.

Okay that's number four.

Let your heart be broken because you're a human being.

Number five,

Under the fear,

Under the anger,

Under the disappointment,

And the broken heart is love.

Underneath it all is always love.

No matter what you get to,

No matter how disappointed you are,

Under it you still have a heart.

You care.

You care about humanity.

You care about common sense.

You care about your family.

You care about your children doing well.

You care about your own health and happiness.

You care.

Under that is love.

So just don't forget that.

Know it.

Know that underneath the whole thing is love.

You are that.

Trust it.

Trust yourself.

So again to reduce anxiety,

Learn to trust yourself.

And the five ways you learn to trust yourself,

And I know this is not flipping a switch,

It's a daily devotional practice to learn to trust yourself,

Is you learn to cultivate stillness.

You take a big perspective,

An eagle-eyed view of your life.

You reassign your body's cues if it's telling you that you're wrong,

You're off,

You're feeling anxious.

It's just your body being alive.

You let your heart be broken because this world and being human,

It's a difficult place to be to be human.

You let yourself have a broken heart.

There's no other way through it if you're going to be human.

And then the last one is you don't just stay in the brokenheartedness.

You can tap into it and then see that under that,

Over that,

And through that is love.

And you are that love.

And everyone else is made of it too.

It just takes a very courageous vulnerable person to acknowledge it and let themselves be touched by it.

And we're all made of the same thing and we're all in this together.

So it's painful.

There's a roller coaster of ups and downs and that's how we know that we're in this human body.

We're living the contrast.

We know the beauty and the light and the love and the connection because we have experienced the opposite of all those things.

And we will continue to until the day we die.

So enjoying the ride as well.

So those are my best tips on reducing anxiety and learning to trust ourselves.

And I'm learning to trust myself more and more.

And I want you to know that I trust you.

I trust you that you are already doing this.

We just want to increase the volume on the perspective,

The kindness,

The curiosity,

And the care that you give yourself.

Okay?

Thank you so much.

I love you.

Talk to you next time.

Reviews

Very Helpful 🙏

Fantastic. Love the ideas. Soothing and calming vocals. Thank you