More Than Anxiety

Ep 81 - Stop Saying I'm Always Anxious

• Megan Devito • Episode 81

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Whatever you tell yourself, especially when you start with the words, 'I am' becomes your truth.

When you say things like,
"I'm always anxious"
"I'm so bad at ____."
"I'm worthless"
even when you don’t want to believe them, and even when you have evidence that it’s not true,
your brain believes it.

And it will ignore the proof you have
that you're good at something,
the smiles and compliments you get from others,
or notice when you feel good.

But when actively decide to look, with intention for what's going well, what you want to see, and call yourself out for saying things that are untrue or unkind,

Your brain starts to change.

Check out Episode 81 to hear more about why you have to stop saying I'm Always Anxious to start feeling better.

To talk more with me about working together, click HERE 

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You know you're overwhelmed, burned out, sick to death of work but also trying to do everyting for everyone at home. TAKE THIS QUIZ to find out why you're so overwhelmed and what to do about it.

Megan Devito:

Welcome to the More Than Anxiety podcast. I'm Megan Devito and I'm the life coach for stressed out and anxious women who want more out of life. I'm here to help you create a life you love to live, where anxiety isn't holding you back. Get ready for a lighthearted approach to managing anxiety through actionable steps, a lot of truth, talk and inspiration to take action so you walk away feeling confident, calm and ready to live. Let's get to it. Hey there, welcome to episode 81 of the More Than Anxiety podcast. My name is Megan, I'm life coach and I'm so excited that you're here today. Whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite platform or wherever you get your podcasts, it's going to be a great episode.

Megan Devito:

We're going to talk a lot about why you've got to stop saying the things that you don't want to believe about yourself. Whether you're telling yourself you're a klutz, or you're telling yourself that you're stupid, or your boss doesn't like you, whatever that is, when you say it too many times, you start to believe it. If you notice that anxiety is always just under the surface, keeping you focused on, maybe, what you're afraid you messed up, what you're afraid you're going to mess up with the future, or how you'll embarrass yourself, maybe what somebody else thinks about you, you are definitely in the right place. If it feels necessary to keep your eyes open and stay on guard, you're in the right place. Let's talk about all of this. Why is your self-esteem and your self-love so important when you're always feeling anxious? It doesn't necessarily seem those two things should be connected because, okay, I feel anxious, but I still think I'm okay. Is that actually true? Because I wonder what you tell yourself that is feeding that anxious feeling inside your body. To be clear, let's remember that anxiety really is the way that your body feels. It's all of those nasty feelings like your heart racing, like you can't get a good breath of air, maybe like you're shaking inside or you're spacing out. That's anxiety. It's all a big chemical reaction inside your body, the thoughts and the habits that you have. Those are symptoms of anxiety. Those are ways that we try to explain why we feel what we feel or how we try to protect ourselves from thinking or feeling those things anymore, and because your brain believes whatever you tell it,

Megan Devito:

when you say things like I can't focus, I'm an idiot, I'm terrible at math - I used to say that all the time, when you tell yourselves that, your brain believes it, even when you have evidence that says it's absolutely not true. Your brain will start finding places where maybe you think it's true, so if you tell yourself my boss hates me and I just can't believe that I say these stupid things to my boss, you'll notice that anytime your boss does anything, you'll take it personally. Or maybe you start people pleasing and kissing your boss's butt, which maybe you know, maybe that's okay or maybe not. But if you notice that you're like oh, I have to do this because I'm pretty sure my boss hates me, pay attention to where that's coming from, because my guess is it's coming from the thought that he hates you and that actually you don't have any evidence to support that. It's just a fear that makes you feel anxious.

Megan Devito:

So anything you say like that is actually spoken as your truth, especially when you start that thought or that phrase with I am, I am, is actually invoking the name of God with such I am a class, I am stupid, I am bad at math. It just turns your entire personality into that thing. So when you say I am anxious, you are saying me as a person. That's who I am. I am just anxious. When your brain reacts as if it's the truth, you just reinforce that. So, consequently, when you say those things over and over and over, your brain starts to create habits of reacting to those thoughts, even when you don't want to believe them and even when you have evidence that they're not true. It just disqualifies the evidence that you have of what's actually going well or how you are doing more than enough. So you won't see when somebody smiles at you, or if somebody compliments you as something that's genuine or true, you'll start to play it off as I think that was a shitty smile, or oh my gosh, they were just being nice. Why would they smile at me? They hate me or they were just trying to manipulate me. Your brain will start coming up with stories, even though they actually were probably giving you a genuine compliment or a really nice smile. Your brain just disqualifies all of that.

Megan Devito:

So I want to tell you a quick story about a person that I talked to not too long ago, and this person was on a call with me to talk about how anxious that she had been. And she told me that she'd been divorced for about five years and she realized after going through everything that she had gone through during her marriage that she allowed herself to be treated horribly for I think she said she was married for maybe 20 or 25 years. So she thought that she was only worth what she had gotten from her husband or what he said about her and she ended up feeling all of this resentment towards her ex-husband. Of course, because when somebody tells you that you're a horrible person or you're lazy or you're worthless, there's some resentment that's going to build up there. So we get that. So she had so much anger throughout her marriage and even after her divorce that she started piling all of this on top of the people she cared for, maybe on top of her parents, or on top of her kids, her friends, her coworkers. It was just kind of rolling out of her. She felt like she was worthless, she felt angry, she felt resentment. So that's really what she brought to the world. But the thing I think that really stuck with me was that she was angry with herself and she felt like she had damaged her kids and her relationships with other people almost to the point where it was beyond repair, like she was just trapped like this.

Megan Devito:

So we talked a little bit about what she wanted instead, and she told me; she said I don't have any goals for myself other than to make sure that my kids finished school without being totally wrecked. And that's a great thing: I mean, we want our kids to be happy and healthy and to finish school and to be successful and not to be mental disasters, right? Of course she does. She's a mom, she's a good mom, but when it came to herself, she couldn't think of anything for herself beyond that, because she just said that she learned that she was worthless and that she was lazy and that she was stupid. And this all came from what someone else said. And so we talked a little bit longer and eventually she admitted that she would like to take some classes. She said I like my job and I'd like to get healthy. I'd like to do more things, but I'd really like to take some classes and to be able to learn new things. So maybe I could get a promotion, I could make a little more money, I could offer my kids a little bit more than I can right now, and I was like, okay, this is great.

Megan Devito:

So when I talked with her, it just broke my heart to hear how much shame that she was carrying around with her, just thinking people were embarrassed and burdened by her, but also that she was really burdened by herself because part of her knew that what her husband had told her or what her ex-husband had told her was total garbage. She's like I just can't believe I let this happen for so long and then I let my kids see this happened. And then she went down that spiral of what kind of mom am I that I would let this go on? Or what kind of person am I that I would let someone do this to me? And yes, that's a pretty Intense example of what I'm talking about, but for me that really stuck about the things that she had just adopted, that people had said about her as who she was. So all of those things that maybe you have heard, maybe on the playground when you were in elementary school, maybe you heard them from your sibling or hopefully not, but maybe from your parents.

Megan Devito:

Some people had crappy parents. I was actually really blessed in the parent department, so that's not one for me, but any time there was something that was said, but especially the things that you say about yourself, will make you feel negative emotions like anger or resentment, and then, when you feel those emotions, you start to hide away and you decide that your life is not worth setting goals because you don't have anything left. You're just hoping you can get your kids out of the house without too many scars. So you start to fade away. And this is not okay, my friend, because if I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, I 100% believe that you were created for something amazing, that you have a huge purpose and that everybody on this planet has something to bring to the table. You've got gifts, even if you don't know what they are yet. But you have to have good feelings and good love for yourself before you can find those.

Megan Devito:

So when I'm working with people who are anxious, often they have some pretty big, sad and untrue things that they believe about themselves. That really rotten self-talk that you've got, that maybe happens on repeat, might come across as the way to start, but you might play it off as like, well, I'm just being modest. I don't want people to think that I'm arrogant or I don't want to brag, so I don't say those nice things about myself. Lots of times when we dig deeper, we find out it's because you actually kind of believe those things. I don't believe I'm worth, you know, I'm not worth what my what I do in my career. I'm really not that good at it. Well, I'm just gonna have to argue that point, because how did you get the job if you're not that good at it? I've had people tell me I mean, I did, I did, I won this award, but I Don't know. I mean, there's a lot of really talented people. I don't want people to think I'm arrogant, I'm sorry, what? Didn't you just tell me you won this big award? Those people on that panel didn't know anything about you. They just know that you were incredible at what you did.

Megan Devito:

So when I told you, or when I said that your brain believes what you tell it, sometimes there's something as simple as changing what you are looking for and noticing what you say makes all the difference. But you have to do it on purpose. There has to be intention behind it, because right now your brain has grown lots of neurons out there to start finding everything that's not working. Every little piece of evidence that you really do suck or that nobody likes you. It's just a habit. It doesn't mean it's true, because not everything you think is true. Most of the things you think are just garbage thoughts that happen on habit. Okay, so, like I said, this takes practice because you believe what you say about yourself, because you've practiced it for so long. You've created those neurons. We're going to create new neurons. This is what I help people do through coaching. We really dig into what they secretly think about themselves, that they might not even notice that they say. I had a habit for a really long time of saying that I suck at math - like I cannot do it.

Megan Devito:

I know exactly where this came from. I remember being in, let's say, sixth grade maybe? Back in the day we used to have to take these times tests with multiplication. I've always been a really good storyteller. I could tell stories. I love history, I love English, I love writing, but math - I was not very good at memorizing my multiplication tables. I would get the numbers backwards. One of my really good friends who I just happened to sit next to, she was a whiz, which is why she grew up to be a math teacher. Now she does accounts and financing for some big company. She taught math for a while, so I just made sure to sit next to her so I could copy her answers.

Megan Devito:

It's probably the only time I've cheated in my life because I'm very honest. But I remember thinking, is it better to cheat on this and be able to pass to the next level test or to fail? So I chose to cheat. I will admit it. I'm sorry to my math teacher in middle school but I did on the times test because it was the only way I was going to ever going to pass like level six or something like that. The sixes were hard, you guys. So I developed the story in the sixth grade that I was terrible at math and I carried it with me all the way through college. I chose a degree that required very little math because I was terrible at math. The funny part is that after graduating from college and when I started teaching, I taught at a school for at-risk students for quite a while and I taught algebra, geometry and algebra two. Which pretty much tells me that I was good at math, I just couldn't do it quickly. But when the pressure was off I was able to do it. I carried that story with me for years and it wasn't true it was all because of some stupid time to test.

Megan Devito:

Your story might be that you are a klutz because one time you tripped going up the stairs, or maybe somebody was having a bad day and yelled at you and told you that you were annoying or you were worthless or stupid, which wasn't nice of them at all. But you may have just adopted that story on your own because somebody said something to you. Maybe you were trying to talk to somebody and they were spaced out because they were having a bad day at home and you developed this thing that nobody listens to me. Nobody listens to me. It may have happened once, but your brain will register that as proof. You start creating this self-fulfilling prophecy. You believe even more that nobody wants to hear what you have to say, or that you're terrible at math, whatever your story is, and that habit loop keeps going.

Megan Devito:

When you want to change that habit, or you want to change that thought, or you want to stop believing those things, you have to choose to find other things on purpose. Let's think of this as like an Easter egg hunt. You're looking out and you're trying to find the golden egg, but right now all you can see is the blue ones; blue, blue, blue blue, because you've been thinking all I ever find are the blue eggs. But as soon as you tell your brain find the gold one, it looks for it. You have to tell it what to look. It has to look for the golden egg.

Megan Devito:

What I help my clients do is notice the sneaky things that they say about themselves, because these are the things that you've practiced so much that you likely don't notice some of them. But we start catching you and we immediately change what you said, or what you saw, or how you reacted, because here's what happens. Something's going on in your life and you have a thought about it, and maybe it is my boss hates me. Let's just go back to that example my boss hates me. I have this thought that my boss hates me and it makes me feel inadequate, it makes me feel anxious, it makes me feel like I have to say yes to everything my boss wants. So that's what I do, and when I do, I just create this self-fulfilling prophecy of oh, I did this thing, so he let me not, or he made sure I didn't get fired this time. Or she made sure that I didn't lose my position on the team. So you think that that behavior is keeping you safe, but what it's actually doing is keeping you anxious.

Megan Devito:

So what we do is we find the thoughts that you're thinking that are causing you to act that way. What are all the different ways that you found that maybe you aren't inadequate or that you were actually doing a really good job on the project. Maybe that's why you're on the team and we start exploring those thoughts that are holding you into that belief that your boss hates you or that you're bad at your job. Whatever it is, those are just examples I'm coming up with off the top of my head. We start really small, but every time you gather another piece of evidence to show your brain was actually true and what you want to believe, it grows in the direction of that new belief and it starts to disqualify the thought that you had that was making you feel anxious in the past. So this takes a lot of practice and it takes some time and help in finding the thoughts that you actually think, because a lot of times they're just buried in your subconscious and you don't really recognize them.

Megan Devito:

This is not specific to people who are anxious, by the way. This is true for everybody. We all have sneaky thoughts and this is why I really believe that everybody needs a coach, because that's our job is to help you see what's actually going on inside your brain. Unfortunately, you don't know what you don't know and you don't know what you're thinking isn't true until you have somebody say, hey, why'd you say that? Or if you're really good at introspection and going into it yourself, in which case, do that, do it, do it, do it, okay. So this is also true when you have a habit I'm sorry I can't talk today.

Megan Devito:

This is also true when you have a habit of saying that you're anxious, because when you tell your brain that you're anxious for years on end, you become anxious as a person. Remember, 'I am' says this is my whole being anxious. I am anxious. Everything else is just the byproduct of the anxiety. I did this as well. I told myself that I was anxious from the time I was in third grade, when I didn't even know what the word was because nobody talked about it when I was in third grade, it was like 1980 something, until I was 40 when I realized that sometimes I feel anxious. That's a subtle shift, but 'I am anxious' and 'sometimes I'm anxious' is registered in two very different ways inside your brain. So notice the difference of those two statements. I am anxious, as stated as a fact and it becomes your identity. I feel anxious is just a feeling. It's something in the moment, it's something that goes away. Your brain knows and feels the difference. The truth is that you're not anxious 24-7. Even if you feel anxious most of the day, there are still moments in time where you're not anxious.

Megan Devito:

My job as a coach is to help you find the things that you think that make you behave in certain ways, and the times when you're not anxious, the ways that you can calm down and really notice what it feels like to not be anxious. This is what my body feels like when I am anxious. This is what my body feels like when I'm not anxious. When I feel this way, I know I can't believe when I'm . When when I feel not anxious, I know that I'm thinking clearly and we start creating those new patterns.

Megan Devito:

Remember that an anxious body is not thinking rational thoughts, because that part of your brain isn't working when you're all anxious and worked up. So we settle down in your nervous system and we find ways for you to think clearly and the things that are keeping you stuck repeating the same habits, and we do that in all kinds of different ways, just depending on what might work for you versus what works for somebody else. There are gobs and gobs of incredible grounding techniques and strategies and things that everybody is sharing on Instagram or Facebook or Threads or YouTube or wherever. These are the things that help me. Yes, absolutely, and everybody's got things that help them, and a lot of those techniques work for lots of people. But what works for one person might not work for you. We just need to figure out what it is that works for you so that you've got the next step, and you don't need 10 ways to do it. You just need one. You just need one way to calm yourself down so that you can remind yourself what is going on inside your body and your brain.

Megan Devito:

But you also have to stop saying that you're anxious so that you can start creating those new ways of being. This is called neurolinguistic programming. It's like what I think and what I say becomes my programming, and when you change what you think and what you say, you actually change who you are. So you start noticing that you're less stressed at work because you have space between being anxious and feeling anxious to start to notice that people actually hear what you say, and they like what you say. People smile at you and they know that you're valuable, and they want you on their team. You may not have noticed that before, and since you're less critical of yourself and you're not noticing that you're anxious all the time, you start to notice that you're calm instead. That's a big change and when you're calm during the day, you actually sleep better at night, and wake up more refreshed Which means you're not already waking up tired. And when you're tired, you're naturally more anxious and prone to stress. So you start to feel more confident and you start saying what you need to say and you even have energy left over to maybe go out at night instead of hiding away and worrying about what everybody else thinks about you. And when that happens, when you start feeling confident, you start communicating with your partner and your kids better. You're not so grouchy, you're not so short, you're still worked up all the time, and that creates space for you to have actual conversations with people, so your relationships improve.

Megan Devito:

What All of this happens from changing what you say about yourself. You start to feel proud of yourself, your stress level goes down and you can start remembering details when you thought you had a bad memory, and you start challenging yourself to do new things and you end up having so much more fun and more confidence. It really is that. Much from a simple change in words. That's just how it's done. So you can talk with me about how I can help you change what you say and believe about yourself so that you start to experience those results and to finally be able to be proud of yourself and to do all of that stuff. And it's super duper simple.

Megan Devito:

All you have to do is message me.

Megan Devito:

You can find me on YouTube.

Megan Devito:

You can find me on Instagram. I am Coach Megan Devito on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Or you can go to LinkedIn and just go to Megan Devito. Send me a message. I promise I'll answer you and we can just talk about what's up. Tell me the crappy things that you're saying about yourself and what would you rather believe instead. Let's schedule a time to jump on a call. Let's talk about what you want and how I can get you there. I hope this was eye-opening for you and that you know that loving yourself is absolutely necessary to lowering your anxiety and to loving your life. And if I don't talk to you before, I will be back next week, take care. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the More Than Anxiety podcast. Before you go, be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find this resource as well. And, of course, if you're ready to feel more relaxed, have more energy, more confidence and a lot more fun, you can go to the show notes, click the link and talk to me about coaching. Talk to you soon.