Hello everyone let's talk about general anxiety disorder. I'm Emma McAdam and
welcome to part 4 of rewiring the anxious brain. In part 3 we talked about
how micro threats in your environment and how habitual distraction actually
keeps stress stored up in your system and that can lead you to feeling anxious
when you don't know why. So if you haven't seen that video here's the link
and really when it comes down to it what we're talking about is general anxiety
disorder. That's when you feel anxious all the time but that feeling isn't tied
to any specific event or situation and to understand what we're gonna talk
about in this video you really will want to watch part 1 and part 3 if you
haven't seen those. and that's gonna help you understand the anxiety cycle, the
fight flight freeze response, and how that gets stuck and we end up spiraling
in anxiety. But in my experience most anxiety develops as something we learn
and something we habitually do. It's not a permanent character trait it's
treatable. so you really can learn to rewire your
brain to be less anxious and to be healthier and happier and we do this by
learning skills to get better at feeling. so today we're going to talk about four
more reasons why you might be feeling anxious but you don't know why and how
learning to do something different can help you learn to overcome general
anxiety disorder.
I'm Emma McAdam I'm a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and I just wanted
to remind you that if you want to learn more skills to get better at feeling
check out my in-depth mental health courses. I'm working on an anxiety course
right now and I've got some courses on coping skills and how you can change
your brain to be healthier and happier. so check out the link in the description
to learn more and you can use the code nutshell to get 25% off. So general
anxiety disorder is about feeling anxious much at the time without really
having a specific reason and when you don't know why you're feeling anxious it
can be hard to solve the problem. In part 3 we talked about how constant
distraction and avoidance increases our long term anxiety and I encouraged you
to start a new habit of sitting down and writing about what's going on when you
feel anxious. Now we're gonna talk about reason number three how we think. now if
you feel like you are facing your anxiety, or you're thinking about it all
the time or you're writing about it but things aren't getting any better or when
you do think about it your anxiety just spirals like bigger and bigger.
the more you think about it the worse it gets and I'm not talking about like five
or ten minutes I'm talking about like you think about it you ruminate on it
and it just gets worse and worse over and over again. If that's the case for
you then odds are good that you've developed some thinking patterns that
are making your anxiety worse so most of us don't notice our internal dialogue.
we've developed these habitual responses that exacerbate anxiety but we don't
realize that the way we're thinking makes our anxiety worse. So if you want
to work on your general anxiety you could start by checking yourself for distorted
thinking that's making you anxious so this includes cognitive
distortions like black-and-white thinking, mind-reading, jumping to
conclusions, mental filtering, and catastrophizing. So
let me give you some examples. let's say your boss asks you a question in a work
meeting and you don't have the answer. black and white thinking says I'm a
complete failure or I am the stupidest person in the world. can you see how
thinking this way will make you more anxious mind reading says everyone must
think I'm so dumb they're all probably laughing at me they must hate having me
on their team. we don't usually knows our thoughts we
just believe them but thinking this way will make you
anxious mental filtering says I never do anything right I always mess everything
up I don't know anything. mental filtering is all about noticing
your mistakes only noticing what's going wrong not noticing your skills and your
successes it's filtering out the good and only noticing the bad.
catastrophizing says today it's gonna be a terrible day I'm gonna get fired I
can't handle this it's imagining the worst possible scenario. now most of the
time we don't even notice our habitual thinking patterns our thoughts happen
without us realizing how we think. so that can be a huge source of anxiety
that we don't know where it's coming from now quick tangent why do we get so
anxious about work. now remember how anxiety stems from the fight play freeze
response in your body it's all about escaping physical threats and ensuring
survival well your deep brilliant brain knows that your job is your source of
food and shelter and then not having a job as a survival threat. so if you think
that each time you mess up you think. I'm a complete failure everyone hates me
they're gonna fire me then that sends the message to your brain that your
survival is at stake and your brain kicks on these ancient survival
techniques the adrenaline surge, and the muscle
tension, and these ancient instincts really aren't that helpful in a work
meeting. so anyways how you think, and how you think about your work, and how you
think about other micro threats in your environment really is gonna impact your
anxiety. But how we think is something we learned if we developed this habit to
think this way we can also rewire our brain to think differently. So you can
change how you think and that will change how you feel. So to change our
brain we have to take our silent inward thoughts and make them outward. Write
them down say them out loud or share them with someone like an honest friend
or a therapist and hopefully this person can point out to you when your thinking
is leading you to be anxious. so talk therapy and specifically
cognitive behavioral therapy can be so effective at treating anxiety because
you can rewire your brain to respond to problems with different thoughts. so
here's an example. instead of thinking oh my gosh I'm so
stupid you think well I didn't know that answer but that just means I need to do
some research or instead of thinking everyone on my team hates me you think I
can check in with my team to see if I'm working well with them or instead of
only remembering every bad or stupid thing you've ever done you say I didn't
know that answer but there's so many things that I do contribute to the team
and instead of catastrophizing you can say well let's make the best of today
who knows how it will go but I'm just gonna try my best. Now I don't have time
in this video to go into too much detail about each of these thinking patterns
but I do talk about two of them in my other videos and I'm making more videos
on the topics so please subscribe if you'd like to see more content about
thinking patterns and how that impacts anxiety. So distraction and how we think
I would say are the top two reasons why people feel anxious when they don't know
why. Reason number four this is that your mind is telling you that you're ready to
face the past. So sometimes when anxiety seems to be coming out of nowhere it's
not because you're avoiding your problems or because of distorted
thinking sometimes when painful or anxiety provoking memories are coming up
from your past it's actually your brain telling you okay now you're ready to
work through this whole trauma before maybe you weren't quite ready you were
still in survival mode or you weren't in a safe place. But now you're ready to
face this old crap and process through it and heal. So sometimes if old trauma
or anxiety is coming up and you don't know why. IUt's actually a sign of growth
and healing and in this case again the treatment is to slow things down examine
what's going on for you listen to your body and your sensations and your
emotions and your thoughts and then you you know write things down and let your
brain and body process through some old trauma. If you do think trauma is
involved I you know of course I recommend working with a professional
who specializes in trauma treatment. Okay reason number five let's talk about the
body. So anxiety is a bodily response to the perception of danger it's the fight
flight freeze response combined with worry which is thoughts of danger so
let's just check in with your body for a minute.
if you're drinking a lot of caffeine if you're using drugs or alcohol if you're
not sleeping you're not exercising or you're eating a bunch of garbage your
body's gonna have a hard time regulating emotions your brain is a physical organ
in your body and so you you have to manage whole body health if you want to
manage anxiety. so if that list of changes feels too overwhelming just stop
the video to a quick scan and see if there's like one area you can make one
small improvement on for a week. so maybe it's like going to bed a little bit
earlier or going for a five-minute walk every day. you could also go to the
doctor to rule out any physical condition. So sometimes you know if
anxiety seems to come out of nowhere it could be some something physical that's
causing it so you could get some blood work done you could check your levels
make sure everything's functioning fine or your checkup might tell you that
you're deficient in iron or magnesium or vitamin D or something and you could
improve your anxiety by taking that needed supplement. ok we're on to the
last one this is reason number six. you might be feeling anxious because you're
not living your values. so remember emotions aren't just
something that happened to us they serve a function they they serve a purpose is
your anxiety trying to tell you that there's something in your life that you
need to change. If that's the case then changing how you think or thinking more
positive or taking vitamins or whatever that's not gonna fix your problem. So if
you're treating people poorly you're gonna feel anxious and that's a signal
that you should change and be kinder, if you're stealing something from your
employer, or you're cheating on tests at school you're gonna feel anxious. This is
not general anxiety disorder this is anxiety functioning the way it should be
it's like a warning sign that things are not as they ought to be now when you're
experiencing mental health concerns it can be really hard to tell the
difference between cognitive distortions or depression which says you're a
terrible human being and values which say I want to be a better human being.
but here's one way that I think you can tell the difference values give you the
choice to make one small change to do one small action to be better. Depression
and anxiety disorders encourage you to shrink down to hide to avoid your
problems. so if you're feeling anxious and you
don't know why just it might be helpful to check and see if there's some area of
your life that you really want to change there's some value that you want to be
living but you're not and then just choose one small step to take like just
one tiny action when it comes to anxiety there are so many ways that we can
rewire our brain to get healthier and happier and as always I recommend that
you see a therapist who can give you individualized help and advice and
really I do believe that you can get feeling healthier and happier you don't
have to struggle with anxiety forever. so I'm gonna keep encouraging you to start
making these little changes everyday and these little changes can add up to like
a massive change in your life so I hope this was helpful thank you for watching
and take care.