How to Quiet Your Anxious Mind

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you love this podcast, you wanna get some mindset tips and tricks delivered to your cell phone. If you live in the US or Canada, text me right now, 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. Today, I'm gonna talk to you about how to quiet and calm your anxious brain down. Have you ever felt like your brain was just working against you? Like it's hardwired to imagine the worst, to feel unsafe for no reason, or to spiral over things that haven't even happened yet.

0:53And if you've ever been stuck in this situation, you're not broken. You're just stuck in an ancient survival system that hasn't been updated for the modern life that we live in. Your brain, as crazy as it might feel, is actually doing its job. The problem is it's actually doing its job too well. So the problem here isn't fear, isn't anxiety. It's the volume level. It's the control that you don't have over your brain. And so today's episode will show you how to turn it down with science-backed tools and a few perspective shifts where you'll learn how to reclaim the calm that's naturally inside of you without pretending like everything's fine.

1:35The first thing I want you to realize with anxiety is that anxiety is actually natural. Anxiety, believe it or not, is a really good thing. Now, if it's all day long, it's not a good thing. But your anxiety that you feel, every human has. It is a natural response to stress, to uncertainty, and to perceived threats. Now, that phrase right there is the most important part of today. Perceived threats. threats it's a good thing that humans have anxiety because our brain what it's doing is it is projecting a future and then telling your body to prepare for possible threats. Now that's a really good thing when you're on the planes and you're trying to avoid animals that could attack you like lions and tigers and bears oh my but the core of anxiety is the thought I'm not safe.

2:31And today, if you're sitting inside of your house and you're air conditioning and you have food inside of your stomach and you've got water and you've got clothing and you've got shelter and a few people that love you, you're probably not not safe. But you're still wired to try to find all the places where you're not safe. And so you have to understand your anxiety is your brain and body going, there's some sort of threat around here. And you think, whether that's consciously or unconsciously that your safety is threatened. Whether you believe that you actually are or not that's what your response is.

3:07And so let me give you an example, right? Like if you have public speaking that you have to do and you're not really a big fan of public speaking how anxiety is going to show up inside of your body? It's going to show up with sweaty palms, a racing heart. You're going to stumble over your words. But the fear behind it that is actually driving that anxiety is I'm not safe. And I'm not safe because I might be judged. I might be ridiculed. I might be humiliated. I might be fired from my job because my boss can be like, that presentation was so terrible. You're an idiot and get rid of you. And so what's happening is it's showing up in your body is showing up in your brain, but it's the fear behind it is once again, I'm not safe.

3:50If you get anxiety before you go to social events, the way that it will show up when you go to a social event is you might avoid eye contact. You might overthink all of your conversations. You might be quiet when you want to actually speak up. And the fear behind it was once again, I'm not safe. Because you feel like if you might say something wrong, you might be rejected, you might be humiliated, you might get other people's opinions and judgments. So it's the feeling of once again, I'm not safe. If you have health concerns and you have like obsessive Googling and you do body scans and you do frequent doctor visits, the fear behind it is I'm not safe because something might be seriously wrong with me and I need to make sure that I'm gonna stay alive.

4:35You know, and so you have to understand all of these different things are some feeling of I'm not safe. And that's what really anxiety comes down to it. So when you realize that anxiety is a projection in your mind to some sort of imagined future where you're not safe, that's what we really need to work through. And so anxiety is a good thing, but anxiety all day, every day, that's not a good thing. And so when anxiety becomes chronic and it interferes with your daily life, that is when you really need to address it and realize that you're not broken. This isn't something that can't be solved.

5:10It's something that can be solved, but you're gonna really have to really put some time and intention and energy and effort in order to actually start to rewire yourself. And so I wanna give you a few science-backed techniques to help you overcome anxiety and your anxious thoughts. Real quick, before we dive into it, the actual definition of anxiety, because so many people have like, what is anxiety to you and you and you, and everybody would give you a different answer, is a feeling of unease, such as worry or fear that can range from mild to severe. And it is normal, essential emotion for humans that serves as an adaptive response to danger or challenges.

5:48And so anxiety can show up in two different ways. Number one, it can be emotional symptoms, which is like worry, fear, irritability, difficulty concentrating, restlessness, all of those things. And it could show up in physical symptoms, which is where people usually recognize at first, which is like muscle tension, headaches, trembling, rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, any of those things. And so the first strategy to overcoming this, which if you've been listening to this podcast, if you listen to hundreds of episodes, which I know many of you have, the first thing that you always got to go to is deep breathing.

6:25So the first strategy is you have to have some sort of relaxation techniques to reduce your anxiety. Deep breathing is really the best one to start with. Breathing is the very first thing that changes whenever your state changes. And so the reason why you want to bring your breathing in is because when you're in a really heightened state, when your emotions are high, your logic is low. You're actually not thinking very well. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. When you're really anxious, your brain and your body tap into fight, flight, or freeze. And that's where the animalistic part of you, the survival part of you turns on.

7:06The thinking, the processing, the executive decision making all turns off. The reason why is because when you're in a fight or flight or freeze moment, your body's preparing to run and protect yourself from danger. And so it stops sending as much blood flow to the prefrontal cortex of your brain, which is the decision-making part of your brain. And so you've got to at least get yourself feeling a little bit better before we go on to the next few strategies. And that starts with deep breathing. Deep breathing can help activate your body's relaxation response, which is your parasympathetic nervous system, so that you can start to calm down.

7:39And so it's really simple. You can just breathe in as deep as you can through your nose, five seconds in, 10 seconds out. Five seconds in, 10 seconds out. Do it for a minute, do it for two minutes. What it does is it slows your heart rate down, it releases more carbon dioxide from your blood, and it reduces your stress levels. The first thing you need to do is try to bring yourself back down to some state of homeostasis, of calm, at least a little bit more calm, before you actually start to do something different. So that's the first thing, which is strategy number one. You got to do some deep breathing, calm yourself down.

8:13The strategy number two, what you need to do is something that's called cognitive restructuring. So cognitive restructuring is a technique that involves identifying and then challenging your negative thought patterns that are the things that contribute to your anxiety. So a lot of times when people feel anxiety, they're not really sure where it comes from because what happens is you're just stuck in an old animalistic pattern that you've been stuck in probably since childhood. You don't need to really know where it comes from, but just know that it's a protection mechanism. Anxiety is your body trying to protect itself.

8:46And so what you want to do is you want to take a step back and actually start to identify these negative thought patterns that are giving you anxiety. And so this approach of cognitive restructuring is rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy, and it's been shown to be effective to treat many anxiety disorders. So here's the first thing you're going to do. You're going to identify your negative thoughts or your fears or whatever it is that is the cause of this anxiety. So the first step is to become aware of them. And then notice that this is really what happens is most of the time, once again, you don't notice a thought, but what you do is you notice the feeling.

9:24So the first thing that we usually notice in this situation is that you don't feel really good. And then so what you got to ask yourself is, what was I just thinking? And you've got to try to bring yourself back to it. I've given this example before, but a few years ago, I was making eggs in the morning and I had a great morning. and I was sitting there making eggs in my kitchen and I just started, I felt like a flood of anxiety. I was like, what the hell is going on? Like, I don't know what's happening inside of me. And I was sitting there, I was like, okay, I'm noticing a feeling. If I'm noticing a feeling of anxiety, what was I just thinking?

9:54And I had to like kind of trace my mind back and trace my mind back. And I realized, uh, I was, uh, I had done the terrible thing of reading a YouTube comment about me and somebody was talking a whole bunch of trash and I read it and they're like, I'm going to make a reaction video because this is, you know, what I had said was, was you can use journaling as like your own therapist. And the person like, this is stupid. This guy's saying, don't go to a therapist and journal. I'm like, it's not what I said. And so I had this feeling of like, I'm being misunderstood. And then I was like, okay, cool.

10:23I shut my computer. And like 15 minutes later, I felt like this flood of anxiety. And I was like, what's going on? And I noticed I had to trace my thoughts back. I didn't notice the thought, but what I noticed was the feeling. And so I went back and I was like, okay, there's the thought. So I had to identify the negative thought first with anything else. The second thing you need to do after you identify the negative thought is to challenge the negative thought. If you're going to believe the negative thought, you also need to challenge it and see if you can poke holes in it to find out if the opposite of this thing is true.

10:53So once it's identified, what you want to do is you want to evaluate the accuracy, see if it's rational, and then try to see if maybe there's some alternative explanations for this. Like how valid is your thought that's making you anxious? You know, studies have found, psychologists have done studies have found that 85 % of what we worry about never happens. And out of the remaining 15%, only 3 % of what we worry about actually happens, which means that 97 % of what we worry about doesn't even happen or it turns out better than we thought. So maybe we should identify our negative thoughts and actually start to challenge them, right?

11:27That's number two. And then number three, which is part of the cognitive restructuring, which is replace your negative thoughts with the thoughts that you want. After you challenge your negative thoughts, you're going to realize they're not very valid. They're usually pretty ridiculous. Like most of the time when I challenge somebody's negative thoughts, they're like, yeah, this doesn't make any sense. I don't know why I believe this. And so what you do at that point is you replace them with a more balanced and realistic thought that can help you reduce your anxiety levels. Okay. So that's number two for strategy number two to help you get rid of your anxiety.

11:58Strategy number three is to do something that's called exposure therapy. There's a proven technique called exposure therapy that involves gradually and systematically confronting your fears with whether that be situations or whether that be objects, whether that be thoughts about the anxiety until the anxiety itself actually subsides. And so this process helps you learn that your fears are often really irrational and that that you can tolerate way more discomfort than you think that you can. And so what's really important about this, if you're like, well, how do I take my thoughts and how do I actually like do exposure therapy with my thoughts?

12:34There's a thing that's called, we've all heard of visualization before, where you visualize the thing that you want. There's a thing in psychology, it's really, really like it works well, sometimes better than normal visualization. It's called negative visualization, where you actually visualize everything that you are afraid of. happening in real time. And what happens if you do this enough with exposure therapy, it stops becoming something that you fear. You start noticing, Hey, it's not that big of a deal. I'm not going to die. I'll be okay. And it has less and less power over you. The same way with exposure therapy.

13:07If somebody is afraid of a snake, they take a snake and they put it in a box and the corner of the room and say, Hey, there's a snake over here. The person's going to freak out the longer that they go, the more exposure that they have to it, the more so to calm down, They can bring the box closer and closer and closer. And over a few days, that person can be holding the snake that was just flooding them with anxiety before. And so what you do is you start to use exposure therapy to actually calm yourself down by visualizing the thing that you think that you're so afraid of. And so when you visualize and identify your anxiety and things that you're afraid of, over time, you're like, you really, it's not that big of a deal.

13:44It's kind of okay. Okay, now a few things that you can change in your lifestyle to help you have less anxiety. One of them is really regular exercise. Physical activity has been shown to reduce anxiety because it increases endorphins, it promotes relaxation, it improves your overall mood. And people who put themselves through something that's strenuous usually learn how to calm themselves down from that strenuous thing. So one thing that I like to do when I work out, I'll work out really hard. And then in my 60 second break, I'll close my eyes and try to get my heart rate back down as much as I possibly can.

14:17So it's like I put myself in a heightened state, try to calm myself down. Heightened state, calm myself down. Heightened state, calm myself down. And I'm actually improving that muscle of calming myself down when I do that. Next thing that's really important as well, you should start paying attention to stuff that you're eating. You know, like obviously if you're eating McDonald's every single day and you're drinking a whole bunch of Cokes and pounding coffee, you're going to have more anxiety than the average person will. So try to eat more whole foods. another really important thing have less sugar and i'm sorry everybody less caffeine excessive caffeine and sugar intake really can exacerbate your anxiety symptoms so try not to have as much caffeine try to have less sugar try to stay hydrated what this is a crazy thing drink water so many people are just so dehydrated and it makes them more anxious another thing that really helps with it, drink less alcohol.

15:08If you drink less alcohol, you will be less anxious as well. So your body sometimes is responding not only to just like what you're imagining, but the fact that some people listening just don't take care of their body. And your body's like, let me try to send out the signal of you need to prioritize me. Okay. Another thing that helps with that, prioritize your sleep. Quality sleep is a really important part of mental health and poor sleep worsens anxiety for a lot of people. It makes your cortisol levels higher. And so having really good sleep hygiene will help you with it. Establish a sleep schedule that makes sense.

15:42And then another thing that's just really important for every single person is limit your screen time. There have been study after study after study that shows that people who are in front of their screens more often have way higher levels of anxiety than somebody who doesn't have as much time. So spend less time in front of your computer. Spend less time on your phone. Get off of the social media apps. Stop paying attention to Netflix so much. Like just limit your screen time and your anxiety will go down as well. And so I want you to understand anxiety is something that is natural inside of every single human.

16:12And if your anxiety levels are higher, there are steps that you can use, the exact steps I just taught you to help you lower your anxiety. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me at Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And if you're out there and you want to learn more about coaching with me outside of this podcast, you can go to coachwithrob.com. Once again, coachwithrob.com. And with that, I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.