, 12 min read
Five things that helped me fight anxiety
Reason for this video
I'm always waiting for the perfect moment to talk about anxiety and what I've learned about it. But as I was driving today, I was like,
"I need to say something. I need to record something,"
Because pretty much the last time I recorded anything regarding anxiety, that was helpful, was at least a few years ago. What I'm going to say today can strike some people as "duh" information. It could be something that a lot of people are well aware of, but I still have to record it for the people who have not heard this yet because I was that person.
I grew up very isolated, and I didn't know a lot about a lot of things, and I had to learn things, and I probably learned things slower than others. But if there's one thing I've learned, it is that I am not the only one.
So, for people who are currently struggling deeply with anxiety — social anxiety and general anxiety, which would be like trying anything new, any small task like going up to a checkout or making a phone call or going through a car wash or driving in a big city — all of those things were triggers for me, anxiety triggers, and I couldn't do a lot of them when I was younger.
So, I want to share the journey. Basically, this is like a "where do you begin" video, and I have to say it's not going to be perfect, but I still have to record it and post it because even if it's not perfect and I don't say everything I need to say, I can still share a couple of things that I know are helpful.
Step 1A: concentrate on yourself
So, when you are struggling in the depths of anxiety and you don't know what to do and you feel like you can't do anything, to me, I think the first thing that's in your power and control that you should focus on is your relationship with yourself. I genuinely think that that is the first step. Feeling like you are incapable of doing the things that you want to do can lead you to feeling helpless, and it can lead you to feeling like you are useless, and it can cause so much frustration within yourself. Frustration and anger at yourself that leads to like self-hatred or feeling worthless or feeling like you're incapable or like you can't do anything. And then you are constantly criticizing yourself, like, "Why can't I do that? Like, it's such an easy thing," and shaming yourself as well, saying like,
"Everybody else is doing this with no problem. It's just me who can't do this."
All of those things, all of those frustrations and anger pointed at yourself, you need to focus on cultivating a shame-free internal dialogue. So, focus on how you are talking to yourself and don't—no period—decide to not allow yourself to say anything that is self-critical or degrading of yourself or showing anger towards yourself. And instead, focus on celebrating your small wins. Always say, instead of saying,
"I was so awkward when I ordered that coffee. I was so embarrassing. That was so awful."
Instead say,
"I am so, so proud of myself for doing that. I did something that I was afraid of, and I'm so proud of myself."
So, this might seem like it wouldn't make the biggest difference, but I was shocked, and you will be shocked at just how crazy big of a difference this makes. It's the first step because it is the one thing that is fully within your control at this time. Because if you don't do this step first and you try to jump into the next step, forcing yourself to do the things that scare you, it could actually ruin your chances because if you're still self-critical and still like shaming yourself and yelling at yourself all the time, and then you try to do something scary and then you punish yourself for doing the scary thing, you are literally like,
"Why you say that? Why did you do that? Why you are so embarrassing. You should never do that again."
So, literally, your brain will learn to not do that scary thing again.
Step 1B: research anxiety
So, that's the first step. Second step—there's—there's a lot of steps, but this should also be the first step, that the first one I listed was 1A, and now this one is 1B.
So, step 1B is—actually, I switched them.
See, this is the thing. This is what I was waiting this whole time to record this, so I could do it perfectly, but I would say alongside that first one, and probably before, would be to research anxiety as fully as possible. You need to understand what anxiety is, what causes anxiety, and understand that it's extremely common, and most people — not most, lots and lots and lots of people struggle with different forms of anxieties, and they can understand and sympathize with you. You are not the only one, and it's not embarrassing to struggle in the ways that you're struggling. It's pretty normal. But gaining as much knowledge as possible and as much understanding as possible of anxiety helps you in so many different ways to understand that it is a mechanism your brain uses to try to protect you.
Okay, I'm going to stop doing the steps because that's just too hard to do like step one, step two, but another thing that is very helpful to know is that the way anxiety works is your brain.
Your brain
Let me see if I can word this all correctly. But your brain's job is to keep you safe. That's how the human race continues, is that your brain avoids anything that it perceives as dangerous. And when you are young and you haven't done certain things before, your brain associates anything new, anything that it has not done before, as potentially dangerous. And then, through learning that it is, in fact, dangerous, or if you have one bad experience with something, you will get anxiety from it forever until you can retrain your brain that it's not dangerous. So, your brain perceives anything new as dangerous immediately, and your job is to consciously try to teach your brain that it is not a scary thing.
Because we all know, something like a phone call is absolutely terrifying, and yet we know consciously that it's not going to hurt us. It's not going to physically hurt us, and yet we can feel the same amount of fear as if it was like a seriously dangerous situation. Like, I've been in dangerous situations, and I feel the same amount of fear as I did trying to make a phone call. They're equally scary, and it's this cycle where this part is backed by research — well, everything I'm saying is backed by research. You should go check out the research.
If you continue to avoid the things that you are scared of and not do them, your brain is going to continue to associate it as a danger because just the act of avoiding it gives you a huge sense of relief, correct? If you can avoid those things you're scared of, you feel this relief,
"Thank God I didn't have to do that."
And that feeling of fear leading up to something and then relief when you don't do it is training your subconscious brain that it was a dangerous thing that you avoided because you felt the fear, and then you felt the relief when you didn't face it, and that is what happens. So, by avoiding your triggers, you are making the fear stronger.
And now the last thing that helps — I mean, this is pretty much in order. So, the last thing, once you have kind of mastered the relationship within yourself and the negative self-talk and the beating yourself up, once you can reframe everything as,
"I'm proud of myself for even doing that, and it's okay that I messed up. It's okay that I did or said something wrong. I'm still proud of myself"
Reframing discomfort
Oh, here's another one before I share the last one. You can reframe discomfort and fear. So, people with lots of anxiety, we want desperately to avoid anything that makes us uncomfortable or afraid because we associate those two things as bad or dangerous or unsafe. But if you can consciously force yourself to reframe that feeling of discomfort into a positive and to put yourself into those situations where you feel fear or discomfort, even if you completely fail at whatever it is you were doing, you can be like,
"I did it. I was uncomfortable. I put myself into a situation of discomfort, and I'm okay."
And you need to consciously tell yourself,
"I felt the fear. I felt the discomfort. I came out of it, and I'm okay, and not only am I okay, but I'm proud of myself, and I'm stronger."
So, instead of trying to avoid the awkwardness and avoid bad situations and all of this — I'm not talking about putting yourself in dangerous situations! I'm talking about putting yourself in situations that cause anxiety, which are always safe situations, like socializing. So like putting yourself into a situation where you are socializing with people and you feel extremely uncomfortable and you feel like you're awkward — gosh, me, I used to leave those gatherings or parties just absolutely obliterating myself in my head, being like,
"You're stupid. You're an idiot. Why'd you say that? This is—like, I can't believe you did that."
That instead of being like,
"You did it. You just went to a party with a bunch of people you were terrified to do it, but you did it, and that is a success and an achievement, and it doesn't matter what you said."
Okay, even if you can go and you can be silent, that's enough.
Exposure therapy
All right, finally, the final thing, which I was kind of touching on in that last one, is once you feel like you've got the researching down and the negative self-talk down and the reframing discomfort and fear to being a good thing rather than a bad thing — that's important — and being proud of yourself instead of beating yourself up, then you can constantly force yourself to face those fears. And I know, like, it's a tough, sticky situation because you're like,
"I can't force myself to do it because I can't do it."
Like the whole point of anxiety is that you cannot do something because you are so afraid. I think the way to get around that is to first make sure that you are your own cheerleader and best friend because that's the most important piece to this, but also, to start with the small things. Start with the small things that scare you. You don't have to start tackling the biggest things that you're afraid of. Please start small. And as you start — I don't know this word. I forget this word. It's a therapy, actually. What I'm talking about is a therapy — exposure therapy.
Don't quiz me, though. I have not done lots and lots of research on exposure therapy, but I actually had made up this strategy myself when I was young, and I didn't know that it was actually a therapy. I need to do more research on that. But you start exposing yourself to the things that you are afraid of, forcing yourself to face it and to do it, and no matter if you feel like you have failed or you have succeeded, you still celebrate. That is extremely important, extremely important.
If you are not celebrating when you succeed or fail at forcing yourself to do something or experience something that you were scared of, your brain is going to get worse. I just can't, like, stress that enough, that if you are beating yourself up when you do fail, which will happen, your brain is going to learn that it is dangerous in your brain's head. No, but like the part of whenever I say "your brain," I'm saying the part of your brain that you have very little control over. It's the subconscious part of your brain. But what you can do is kind of fight with it. That's literally what I do, is, I fight with a part of my brain with — using my conscious brain, which is like what I consider to be me. And you can reframe everything and fix things, but it's a slow, years-long process.
Wrap up
Okay, let's see if I can wrap it up. I think I can wrap it up. Those are such important things. I honestly think I did a good job at explaining this overall because these were basically the keys to how I overcame so much of my anxiety — not all of it, and I still struggle, and I still kind of have baseline anxiety of everything. But I challenged myself over the course of seven years, every day of exposure therapy and forcing myself to do things, that everything has gotten easier.
I do want to stress again that when you're young, like a teenager, if there's a teenager listening to this, it might — it's easy to beat yourself up because you might be scared of things that everyone else is doing with no issue, like ordering a coffee or buying gas. Those things I couldn't do those, or ordering at a drive-thru, I couldn't do it, couldn't. So those things, it's easy to beat yourself up because you're like,
"Everybody can do this. This is an easy, simple task, but I can't do it. I must be broken and incapable."
The fact that I can't do it makes me incapable and broken. But remember that even though, it feels like it's not true, it's actually true that your brain is only as old as it is — only if you're a teenager, 15 years old, it's only been, like, conscious for maybe 10 years or a little more, but it knows very, very little about the world, and it knows very little about what you are capable of or what it is capable of. And that's why it needs to learn things for itself, and the only way it can learn things is by you forcing yourself to do something. It can't know what it doesn't know. And, yeah, for me, like, my anxiety was super bad because I was super, super isolated, and I didn't have exposure to any normal thing. So I had to do so many things for the first time that probably lots of kids were doing when they were kids, but I had never done them before, and there was thousands of things that I had to do for the first time, so it makes perfect sense why it was so overwhelming.
But anyway, I'm blabbing now. I think I have said everything that I wanted to say, and good luck, and I would love your questions. I hope this helps. I hope that any of you have heard at least one thing that you hadn't heard before or thought about in that specific way. And also, I'm just telling you what worked for me personally, and I hope it works for you, but I can't guarantee.
Thanks.
Merry Christmas.