Hey, so this is my first try filming outside.
I thought, what better place to do a video about generalized anxiety disorder and cognitive
behavioral therapy than sitting outdoors on my porch on a beautiful sunny day.
It's getting towards the end of summer and I definitely want to enjoy these last few
sunny days and I hope that you're able to do something today that you enjoy.
So let's get into the story.
I'm going to start with a story of Matt and he walked into my office about a year ago,
sort of a typical looking millennial.
He had a short crop beard, he had the requisite round glasses and he exuded an air of calm.
And yet when he sat down and began talking to me, I realized how much was going on in
his head.
He was worried about his work.
He had a job he loved, but he worked way too many hours and he worried about his job all
the time.
He had gotten married in the last year and he and his wife had been trying to have a
baby for about three months and he was worried what happens if she doesn't get pregnant?
Um, he had a brother who wasn't functioning well and he was worried about his brother
and worried about his mother and the worry, worry, worry, worry, worry.
And he said to me that he had pretty much always been a worrier and always been able
to hide it and he wasn't sure he had an anxiety disorder and he wanted to know what's the
difference between an anxiety disorder and just a lot of worry.
So I'm going to talk you through that and I'm going to give you three tools that will
help you reclaim your life from worry.
For those of you who don't know me, my name is Barbara Heffernan.
I'm an anxiety and trauma specialist and I've been helping people recover from anxiety and
trauma for over 15 years.
And that's my dog George.
He's breathing heavy in the background, so I'm going to let you meet him.
If you find my videos helpful, the most supportive thing you can do for me is to give me a like,
to subscribe to the channel and leave me a comment below.
What is the difference between worry and anxiety?
The way that I look at it is that we have these human brains that can project into the
future.
They can project problems in order for us to figure out a solution.
So it's actually been a very helpful brain for our species functioning.
So if we worry about something or we project a possibility that we can prevent or we can
do something to lower the risk of that, that could be considered productive worry.
So let's say I worry about my house burning down.
I could buy a fire extinguisher, I could make sure I don't have candles burning.
I could make sure that everybody knows fire safety habits around the house.
I could check my dryer lint.
That's an important thing to do.
So those are practical steps that you can take to keep yourself safe.
But if you take those practical steps and then you just continue to worry and worry
and worry and what if and what if and what if it's completely nonproductive worry and
what it is doing internally in your body is setting up a cycle of adrenaline and cortisol
which is very damaging to your health.
Probably gives you a lot of muscle tension, might interrupt your sleep at night, might
make you irritable and generally can lead to a pretty miserable life.
So if you go to a doctor or a therapist, these are the ways that they will diagnose whether
or not you have generalized anxiety disorder.
It is a condition where there is excessive anxiety or worry, which is difficult for the
person to control and it has lasted for more than six months.
The anxiety and worry occur about a number of different types of events and activities.
It's not somebody who has a particular phobia, an agoraphobia, fear of spiders, a fear of
flying.
It's a broad range of worries.
If you're worrying about this one thing, then the next day you'll be worrying about that.
If that could get solved, you're worrying about something else and somebody with generalized
anxiety disorder would need to have three of these following symptoms, either feeling
restlessness or keyed up or on edge, being easily fatigued, difficulty concentrating
or your mind going blank, irritability, muscle tension and sleep disturbance.
If you have three, at least three of those six symptoms and it's been going on for more
than six months and it does cause you what we call clinically significant distress.
Then you probably have generalized anxiety disorder and the good news is that it is a
treatable condition.
You can get better.
The main therapy technique used to treat generalized anxiety disorder is cognitive behavioral therapy.
So one of the first things I did with Matt is I walked him through how the cognitive
behavioral therapy cycle works, which I will show you just briefly here.
The cycle is basically that we have our thoughts, we have our feelings, and we have our behaviors
and they all interact.
They all influence each other and with anxiety they all spin out of control.
So another thing I shared with Matt is this Mark Twain quote or it's attributed to Mark
Twain.
We don't really know if it's his or not, but the quote is "I've lived through some horrible
things and some of them actually happened" and I love this photograph that I found to
go with it because it's this truck like barreling out the side of a building, a highly unlikely
event.
However, people with anxiety will very often create events that are just as unlikely as
this and maybe, sure maybe possible, but highly unlikely.
The first tool is to label your thoughts as anxiety, really label it.
This is my anxiety.
It helps to create some distance from the thought.
And the thing to keep in mind is that when we have anxiety, the anxiety exists, it exists
in our bodies and it will pick this problem and then this problem and then this problem
and it will worry about those three problems.
And then if this problem gets solved then it will pick this problem and then it will
look for that problem.
And then those two problems get solved, it will come back to this problem.
And then it will go to that problem.
And there will never be a time where you don't have a problem to worry about.
But that's because your anxiety will attach to whatever it can.
So tool number one is to know that your anxiety exists, if you have anxiety.
So we're going to have to treat the anxiety.
We can't focus on the problem you're worried about.
If you go to a therapist and you're like, okay, this week I'm worried because my wife
didn't get pregnant.
And then next week I come in and I'm worried about this project that I'm doing at work.
And then the next week I come in and I'm worried about the dynamic at my parent's home.
Well, you'll never get to the root cause.
A therapist could talk to you about those issues and help you brainstorm them and help
you figure out what you can and can't do, but you'll never get to the root cause, which
is that you have anxiety.
So we need to treat the anxiety, we need to take care of it.
And thinking of it as a separate thing almost can really be very helpful.
And that's going to lead me to tool number two, which might sound a little odd, but tool
number two is to create a cartoon character that represents your anxiety that you can
like put on your shoulder.
And then when you have an anxious thought, you can put that thought into the character's
mouth.
And here I have this picture of this a, this is actually some street art.
He looks pretty anxious, right?
He also looks pretty self-destructive and pretty negative so he could easily represent
somebody's anxiety.
So if you look at that character on the screen with some compassion, what does he really
want?
Like what does that character want?
That character probably wants to be happy.
Your anxiety wants to keep you safe, your anxiety thinks it's doing you a favor.
And it can be very, very convincing.
I have many clients in my office and once we sort of piece through the issue that they're
struggling with and they realize like, wow, this really is just my anxiety.
But I was fully convinced that it was something I had to do something about and there is nothing
for me to do about it.
So your anxiety can be incredibly convincing and it is trying at every moment to convince
you to pay attention to it, to convince you that you need it to exist.
But the thing to do with your anxiety is not to like reject it and be angry at it and then
blame yourself and have all sorts of negative thoughts about it.
It's more to like take care of it.
So once you have that cartoon character on your shoulder, you can treat that cartoon
character with a little bit of a sense of humor and a little bit of compassion, which
leads us to tool number three and tool number three is to do something you love regularly.
Do something you love that has no other purpose other than you enjoy it.
It makes you feel calm.
It makes you feel peaceful.
It makes you connect to your soul.
Now, Matt, my client Matt, he loved to be outdoors.
He loved to hike and when he came to see me, he been hiking in six months.
He was just rushing from one thing to another and taking on all sorts of things that really
weren't his responsibility.
And trying to take care of people he actually couldn't take care of and worrying about things
that didn't need to be worried about and he hadn't taken any time to nurture himself by
being outside in nature, which is so, so important.
It is so important to physiologically calm ourselves.
Diaphragmatic breathing is super important and there's a lot of videos on youtube that
you can find to demonstrate it.
And I also have a little free mini course that you can sign up for.
The link is below, I call it the "aah mini-series" and it teaches diaphragmatic breathing, it
teaches a safe place exercise and it teaches some mindful grounding techniques.
And all three of those things are things you can do to help yourself physiologically relax.
Because if we go back to that CBT cycle, one of the main ways to feel better is to engage
in behaviors that help you physiologically calm down.
And by doing that you can calm down your thoughts, you can end up feeling better and the cycle
will go in the opposite direction in a positive direction instead of spiraling into a negative
direction.
So Matt made awesome progress with therapy.
First by acknowledging that, yes, he had an anxiety disorder, second by beginning to separate
from it, to identify it as a separate entity, create this cartoon character, put the anxious
words in that character's mouth and then engage in activities to physiologically relax.
And of course on top of that we did all sorts of CBT.
We went through unhelpful thinking styles.
I've done a video on that that you can access or there I'm not quite sure where, where it
will show up.
And we really did talk through the specific things he was worried about.
For example, he and his wife had been trying to get pregnant for three months and he was
very worried that they weren't going to be able to get pregnant.
And yet statistically it takes about nine months on average to get pregnant.
So to have tried for three months and not be pregnant, there was zero reason to worry.
There was no family history that would cause the worry.
And yet Matt was projecting and projecting into the future all the different possible
scenarios of what might need to happen and just sort of bringing that in and realizing
like, okay, I really don't even have to think about that yet because everything is okay
now, really helped him.
So recovering from generalized anxiety disorder takes practice.
It takes a consistent effort to really become aware of your thoughts and piece through them.
Are they productive worry?
Is it unproductive worry?
Probably it's unproductive.
Is there anything you can do about it now?
Is there anything you can do about it today and if not, attempting to let go of the thoughts,
which I know is way easier said than done, but that's why I come back to the physiologically
relaxing activities.
Whether that might be skiing for you or hiking or running or meditating or just simply the
diaphragmatic deep breathing or sitting on a porch on a beautiful day like this.
If you find my videos helpful, the most supportive thing you can do for me is to give me a like,
to subscribe to the channel and leave me a comment below that helps you to promote my
videos so more people can find them and people can watch them.
And of course you can share this with a friend till the next time