Hanna:

Hey friends, welcome to episode 34 and the 2nd episode of an anxiety mini series I’m creating for you called everything’s fucked and it’s okay. If you’re new to the show, I swear and talk in sex metaphors a lot so maybe don’t listen with your kiddos but also if you’re new you may want to head back to the beginning of the show and listen to at least the first few episodes where I introdduce some concepts that I may be referencing here and moving forward. I just want you to have a clue about the lingo I’m using like when I say “don’t get in bed with your brain…” which is what we’re talking about today. I’ve talked about this concept before so just a suggestion, go back and take a listen to earlier episodes. And even those that have been listening, you know it takes like so many times of hearing the same thing for it to sink in so there’s only more value in more repetition. 

Today we’re going to talk about how to relieve some of the pain and pressure we put onto ourselves simply by believing everything we think. Or, as I say, getting in bed with your brain. Making out with your brain for every thought she offers you because you just think she’s soooo right about everything.  So today I’m teaching you one of my most basic principles and the tool that kicks off almost every coaching program I take individual women through and that’s how to differentiate between thoughts and facts. It’s simple but proves not to be easy for most of us so you’ll definitely want to listen to this one. 

Inside private coaching with my clients we are healing anxiety and trauma and overwhelming stress cycles so that we can be free to live and love our lives . I want this anxiety mini series to invite those of you who are not in private coaching with me yet to to come on this journey with us starting right now with this series and give you some pointed value that you can go and apply to your life now so you can become more intimately acquainted with your brain and then come on in and join us inside private coaching. If your goal is to feel better, heal anxiety, handle everything with grace and build self confidence you will want to be in private life coaching and I know a lot of you who struggle with anxiety or stress or overwhelm right now might need to do some work now to be able to manage your mind to follow you into this epic work with me. Right I want you to use this series to compel you out of your comfort zone and into the work of your life which is Coaching. 

And then for those of you who already work with me (hey girls) this mini series is just extra sprinkles, for you and something to follow along with any time you want to hear me express these tools and steps in a different way than maybe we’ve talked about privately. 

And gosh I am just so turned on by this work right now. I always am. I’m always obsessed with being a thought leader and building this self coaching practice within me and sharing what I know to be big important mental health shifts with you but right now I’m like extra turned on by it and I’m loving seeing the impact of coaching more and more in the world and getting to know the most open growth minded women who like don’t even know that they are that usually when they come to me because it’s like ugh everything’s fucked and it’s not okay…but the more women who come to coaching and interact with this work the more my heart literally explodes with awe at the change that we are making from cellular level to a universal level. 

Every time you actively and purposely work to change one tiny iota of cellular structure in your brain or body, it changes the world. And maybe that’s why I’m so lit up talking about this topic in particular about like how to handle the vast imperfections of the world because I see that the more people that learn the tools to do that, the more the world will change. The more people, women, who take action in their seemingly insignificant lives to think differently and feel differently and act differently, the more we change the narrative of our species evolution and of the world at large. Like think about this: we have the ability to solve big world issues. We do. Hunger crises, climate change. It’s not like the resources, money, intelligence, capability isn’t there. But we also as a collective species have done little evolutionarily to get out of our own ways and actually take action BECAUSE most people aren’t doing the thought work to change their feelings into ones that drive action versus keep them hiding or staying stuck or second guessing and not doing it.

Taking action on healing your own anxiety or dealing with your own anxiety and getting to work on your own life’s goals like, um homeschooling your kid or initiating more passion with your partner or finding love or whatever you think anxiety is holding you back from…

Those actions, to me hold just as much value as actions toward solving global issues. Maybe even more. Because it’s not what you’re trying to do that’s important, it’s whether you’ve retrained your primitive human brain to follow your lead instead of just hiding in the perceived safety of inaction.

The woman who stays silent or let’s go of boundaries in her relationship because she’s afraid of conflict or to feel disappointed is just another version of the woman who has ideas about providing clean & safe drinking water to the entire world but is afraid to work on it because she’s afraid of the pain of failure or of feeling disappointment if it doesn’t get approved or funded or taken seriously the first time. Right? 

So I’m on a bit of a tangent here but I think this is important for those of you that say to me anxiety stops me, the world is such a mess now that I don’t feel like I can do the things I want to do without guilt, or this is bigger than me my goals don't really matter right now…This is Why is it ok…more than okay…to put a high value on your own growth now or your own desires, goals and needs right now? Because when we succumb to the false narrative that what we do in our lives is unrelated to what happens in the world at large, there is a 100% guarantee that we will never see change in the world. 

People are like I can’t think about me right now because of the state of the world. Right? It’s to hard to think about my own shit when all this is happening. But that cannot be true. You can’t let that be true. 

We need people to train themself to take action. We have the ability to right lots of wrongs in the world but that takes individuals taking action. Individual people. And we are conditioned not to take action. We learned about this in the first part of this series, Our primal brains are predisposed to use the fear of the bigness of the worlds problems to also trickle down into fear of facing our own. 

To conquer your fears about the unknown, the bigness and vastness of the world’s problems, you’ve gotta be willing to release your death grip on the familiar. You literally are holding onto your shit so tightly. You’re holding onto the familiarity of your fear even. There’s perceived comfort in your anxious life. But familiar is not actually the same as comfort. And every time you cling to the familiar ways of “dealing with it” or “living with it” you strengthen the bond with your stuckness. And you add to the stuckness of the world at large. 

Release your shoulders now. Open your mouth and unclench your teeth and take your tongue off the roof of your mouth and open your hands wide. And breathe out.

Instead of avoiding the unknown or bracing yourself against it or using it against yourself, I want you to use that death grip energy to invest in learning tools to help you actually face your fear with eyes open and hearts forward…because the world’s bigness and tomorrows unknown is inevitable. And what you can bet on is yourself. 

I want you to know what it’s like to be all in on you. I want you to stop stalling and come to coaching. It will change your life. YOU will change your life. I’m so freaking jazzed about that. You get to create this life, this life doesn’t get to create you. But right now if you’re frozen, death gripping your comfort zone, you’re exhausting your power in places that won’t grow you and won’t grow the world. I know you don’t want to be there and I know you can say yes to yourself where you used to say I dunno or I’m too scared or I can’t or no. 

So to the women who said like I can’t have a kid right now even though I’ve been planning for it my whole life because the world is so messed up I need to put those desires on hold. This is why you must honor your desires anyway. This is why your own life and dream and goal and need is the most important thing you can focus on creating. 

Because the work of managing your own mind, your single human brain, your individual human brain, matters to the world at large. This series is not about needing the world to change to feel better about it, but the craziest shit ever is that the more of us who learn to manage our minds to feel better, the more it will change. 

We can change the world and it doesn’t even require you to fix the war or the pandemic or any of it. It requires something maybe more difficult which is finally changing our own minds. 

Alright thanks for sticking around for that sidebar. 

So let’s dive in today. So, Did you listen to the first episode of this mini series at least? If you did not that would be a good place to begin, so go back and listen there. 

I want to know what did you learn from the idea of meeting your anxiety with compassion? We talked about how we talk to ourselves about our anxiety and where we need to begin this journey from a place of compassion instead of where most people try to heal from which is frustration or contempt or like bullying themselves about it without even realizing it. 

One of the most profound things I learned when I started practicing compassion for my emotions is that I could be more compassionate outwardly because I had a better understanding of what compassion means. Self compassion is like hey you sweet and messy human, this isn’t ever going to be perfect, and that’s so perfect! And then that starts to spill over into how you meet other humans with their imperfect emotions and their imperfect actions. Hey other sweet and messy human, this isn’t ever going to look perfect for you either and that’s so perfect! And finally, it starts to creep into how you show up and meet the world at large. Oh world, you sweet and messy place. It’s not ever going to look perfect and that’s okay…because I see now that that is just perfect. 

How many times can I say perfect. Haha

But here’s what: this series is not called everything’s fucked and it’s okay because we can just ignore that part and look for the good things to see and think about and use them to cheer us up.

No, if everything’s fucked and even if that’s true, which we’ll talk about why it’s untrue in just a second but even if that were totally true, it IS actually okay that way. 

I’m not here to convince you that things are not fucked. Things are fucked. 

I do know that it’s 50/50. 50% fucked and 50% amazing. And I know that our brains are obsessed with seeing the bad 50, for survival purposes so it sometimes feels like it’s more fucked than not. And that it’s EVERYTHING. That’s again your brain just trying to do its job. 

But it’s okay. It is okay.

The alternative is that it’s not okay and how does that serve you. It doesn’t. 

It does not serve you to argue with reality, and what I want to show you right now is how you can argue for yourself and for reality at the same time and how doing that will actually serve you much better than what you’re doing now, which is to jump in bed with this thought that “everything is fucked”. 

So let’s start with the question, what do you want with respect to your anxiety or stress?

Probably you want it to go away. You want to feel better. And what we just learned from my little rant is that when we relieve our own anxiety and stress it is helpful at a cellular and universal level. So it is never selfish to do this work. Arguing for your own happiness is never a problem for others. So just remember that, when you take care of your mental health you are better equipped to take care of the world however that looks for you, and you aren’t adding more stress to the world. So if you want your stress and anxiety to go away, one thing to start to do is notice what is true in the world and what is your brain's interpretation of the truths. 

We think we know the difference between facts and thoughts but when your brain starts spouting anxiety inducing things at you, like “it’s so fucked up” and you don’t question it, you don’t argue for your happiness, then you’ve basically bought into a lie that messes with your happiness. 

So to stop buying in to the untruths that our amygdala offers us we need to cultivate awareness about what we think. How do you do that? The easiest way is to ask yourself: what do I think about this? And pick apart the facts from the thoughts. 

A fact is a undeniable truth, everyone would agree with 100% certainty. Anything else is just a thought. And I say just a thought but thoughts literally create how we feel, so its not “just” anything. It’s just the freaking reason that you feel and those feelings drive what you do and what you do creates your life. 

So let’s say that you reading the news or see an article. I just saw one today I’ll use as an example but you see this article that says “Soaring Food Prices Amid War in Ukraine” and this guy Raj Patel, a research professor at the University of Austin Texas says that “farmers and working-class people around the world may face the brunt of the impact of growing food prices. You also read that he says, coronavirus, climate change, conflict and capitalism are working to compound one another and underscore the transition to sustainable, agroecological farming”

Ok so you see this article and you just go into a panic because you have all these thoughts like “ugh this is a disaster, I should have stocked up on more food, I am not going to be able to feed my family what with food a gas prices being so outrageous, we might lose the house, I should go look for another job, it’s just a never-ending shit storm, I don’t even know how people are surviving at all, the economy is going to collapse, my husband will lose his job, I should have learned about investing, my kids are going to get coronavirus and die or be living on the streets, we’ll never have sustainable food programs because it’s impossible, everyhtings fucked. 

All of those are just sentences in your mind. Maybe some of them sound dramatic to you as I say them but I promise you that when you start to explore what your thoughts are there will be things that come out of you that sound just like this because, why, your brain is trying to create the worst case scenarios to keep you out of danger. But we can take a moment and observe that actual fact is that Raj Patel said, Farmers and working class people may face the brunt of growing food prices. A professor made a prediction about what might happen. I read his words. That's it. Even just the difference between what actually happened, a professor shared a prediction with a news outlet about food prices going up, and then all the things you made that fact mean with your mind, is incredibly different. Like the fact alone is not really scary. A guy with a degree said that right now it’s difficult for a transition to a sustainable farming infrastructure to happen. 

The thoughts you believe to be true based on your interpretation of the facts, are what are sending you spinning and giving you anxiety and freaking you the fuck out. 

So what I want you to do is get curious about what you think, bringing awareness to what you think. And when I first started this work I tried to do this by just thinking about it but to be honest writing it down is 1000% more helpful. So taking a piece of paper or a journal and writing down everything that you think or wanna say about the world right now. Sometimes I notice myself say something like “ugh it sucks so bad” or “These gas prices are going to really make things so difficult” or “it’s not fair that people are dying” or “It sucks I can’t do anything to help”. What comes out of our mouths are mostly just thoughts too, so notice those too. What you have to say ABOUT topics that you think are the reason for your anxiety, and notice that the topic itself, the fact itself is not what’s giving you anxiety or stress, it’s your thoughts and opinions about the facts. 

So when I write down everything in my brain about something that I am stressing about I go through and try to find the facts in what I’ve written. Usually, the facts only make up about one sentence. The news is reporting X. I read something that said X. This morning I paid $78 to fill my gas tank. Like those circumstances alone are not anxiety inducing, it’s when you have these cascading thoughts that go unchecked by your human part of your brain, your prefrontal cortex that does have the ability to decipher fact from thought, and that can work for you, argue for your happiness versus doing what your amygdala does which is essentially arguing for your suffering. Your amygdala is like no but look, this news means I might die alone, this lockdown means my kids are going to be antisocial, this prediction means I need to shut down and hide and overthink this situation.  

So what I want to start to do is neutralize the facts. And bring them back to where they belong on the scale of good or bad, horrible or amazing. Facts are always neutral, until we have a thought about them. 

What actually happened, without any interpretation or opinion, is neutral, it doesn't mean anything, it’s just a fact, and then what are your thoughts about it? 

The truth is not a reason to feel anxious unless you want it to be. Unless you think that it is. Ok, so you guys are going to argue on this because your brain has been arguing for your suffering not your happiness or peace, for so long that it doesn’t want you to believe me that your thoughts are optional. But they are. And the first step to really believing that is awareness of them. 

Ok so self compassion, it’s okay to feel anxious, it’s not a problem I’m safe to feel anxious I’m good, I got my back on this, AND now, let’s figure out WHY I’m actually anxious. Let’s put my human brain to work. Let’s find out what exactly I’m thinking, what I’m choosing to think, that is causing me to freak out and feel anxious and stress and be overwhelmed. IT’s okay that my primal brain is hyper focused on scaring the shit out of me right now, it’s okay she’s trying to love me the best way she knows how. But it doesn’t mean that every thought I have is accurate and true and it doesn’t mean I have to keep on thinking this way if it’s not serving me or its not what I want to think. 

So one thing to notice if you’re the person who is like no but my thoughts are true, and they feel real and I don't think I can choose them… Have you ever had contradicting thoughts about the same thing? I’m sure yes. But look at even something you are quote stressed about. One day you’re like “this is the worst and I can’t handle this” and the next day you’re like “I can get through this it’s going to be okay” and then back again. Those thoughts both can’t be objectively true, right? They are just two ideas or imaginings about whatever the actual circumstance is. The circumstance didn’t change, your thoughts about it did. The fact is neutral just means like the facts don’t require a specific thought. When your mother in law calls and says she’s coming to stay with you, that fact does not require you to be stressed out. You get to be stressed out if you decide to think “this is gunna be a nightmare”. But you could also get to be calm or level headed if you decide to think something else like “I am in charge of how I feel around her.”

And moreover, more proof for you that thoughts are malleable and choose-able, tons of people have different thoughts about the same exact thing, right? Gas prices went up in the town where we live and my first thought was “What a bummer” ok, then I started thinking, “you know, this might be a great reason to finally sell my old car and it’s perfect timing because in the summer I can bike more places and we don’t really need two cars” 

And then my friend who I said that to was like “Ok no, just wait it out because its going to be too hard to share a car that sounds awful”. Which of us is right? Neither! And both! Right, like her thought is right for her, and mine is right for me, because we chose them. We chose to think differently about the same circumstance. And then guess what happened, I talked to her for a while and she changed her mind and now she’s thinking about selling her own car! Ok, so the circumstance did not change at all. We choose our thoughts. Unconsciously or consciously. And I prefer to try to do it consciously as much as possible. Ok.

Keep doing this practice of observing thoughts versus facts, to get more perspective on how you are thinking. Write it down, it will help. And we will get into this next time but noticing how our thoughts about something create how we feel. Anxiety comes from how you think. Stress comes from how you think. Feeling upset or overwhelmed or worried or broken down or emotionally drained, it all comes from how you think. 

Go do the work or come to coaching and I’ll help you fast track it. 

I love you, thank you for valuing this work and bringing more of your uniqueness and splendor to the world. Keep going. I’ll talk to you next time.