More Than Anxiety

Ep 84 - Stop Trying To Fix Yourself

• Megan Devito • Episode 84

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I recently saw thread by @shanila.sattar who said, “Unpopular healer reality is that many folks get addicted to healing (aka always finding something to fix, improve, change)  Although self-inquiry is amazing , a constant state of “not good enoughness” is really a trap" 

And it got me thinking.

Last year I was in a cycle of trying to fix myself - not just the 2023 version of me, but past me as well, all in an effort to feel less anxious, incapable, or not good enough. 

Episode 84 is about how constantly trying to "fix" yourself, to change your life, and to be more and have more is not only killing your confidence but it's keeping you anxious. 



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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 84 of the More Than Anxiety podcast. I'm thrilled that you're here today, whether you're watching this on YouTube or listening to it wherever you get your podcasts, this is going to be a great episode. I'm going to talk about why you don't need to be fixed and why you are perfectly fine right where you are right now. And if that doesn't feel true, we're going to talk about what you can do to make it be more true for you, so that you can get out of that cycle of always needing to fix something or improve yourself or to be more, and how, when you decide that you're okay right now, everything gets better on its own. I know that sounds like a lot, but let's go ahead and get started.

Megan Devito:

I saw a thread from someone. If you're on threads, I'm actually learning that I love it over there and this was by @Shanila. Sattar, who said "Unpopular healer. Reality is that many folks get addicted to healing, aka always finding something to fix, improve, change. Although self-inquiry is amazing, a constant state of not good enoughness is really a trap. So I saw this. It was actually something that someone had reshared. A former client of mine had reshared this and I thought that's good, that's really good, and it reminded me of where I was in 2023. I mentioned a while back that 2023 was kind of rough for me and it reminded me of where I was in 2023. I mentioned a while back that 2023 was kind of rough for me.

Megan Devito:

I had a lot of things going on in my life, just things that would make anyone anxious and that needed a response. But I got back into this place that I hadn't been in for years. Without going too deeply into my backstory, I had about 30 years of really intense health anxiety that included lots of panic and anxiety attacks that would last, for sometimes those anxiety attacks could last for a month, a month and a half, two months, before I would pause for a minute, refocus and find something else to totally freak out about. And I was just in this place last year where, with some things going on in my life, my anxiety was pretty high and I noticed that I got into this habit of scrounging into my past. So I followed lots of really amazing therapists and coaches and psychiatrists and psychologists and I don't know academics and all these people on different social media that had all of these theories on what makes people anxious and I thought, okay, I'm going to get to the bottom of this. So I really dug into social media and I started journaling these really deep questions and thoughts, thinking that there's obviously something from my past that is broken inside of me that I can't remember. Oh, my God, I have a repressed memory and it's probably so awful that I'm just going to be stuck like this again for the longest time. I'll never get out. It'll be 30 more years. I'm having all of these thoughts about what I have to do to fix myself Deep, diving into podcasts and really just trying to find hidden trauma.

Megan Devito:

And if you don't know what trauma is, I feel like sometimes trauma is a buzzword right now. Maybe that's a good thing and maybe it's not, but trauma is just something that really stressed you out or scared you, that your nervous system wasn't ready to handle, so it hung on to it as a memory. So there's big T trauma, which could be lots of really intense abuse. It could be extreme violence that you witnessed. It could be your house burning down, something that was just a really, really big, overwhelming thing that you're like yes, this happened and this was big. For sure, that happens. But in all honesty, most of us have trauma of some sort and some of those things are just like little baby traumas that are still in there that might still freak us out. So I spent months trying to fix this, months and months and months of going back, trying to just figure out what it could be, to the point where I started just imagining what might have happened, and what I came up with was really not much of anything.

Megan Devito:

My parents are still married. I'm 48. They live a couple of miles from me and I have wine with them on Friday nights. We have a great relationship. My brothers and I get along. I haven't been divorced. I had my grandparents. I still had two of my grandparents until 2020, 2021.

Megan Devito:

I did not have anything really huge, but the one thing that did come to mind in the middle of all this past exploration of trying to dig out what in the world could have possibly made me anxious for so many years, was that one of my good friends when I was in kindergarten. Her parents got divorced and she had to move a couple of hours away. I still saw her every once in a while, but I think that there must have been something about that situation, perhaps, that tripped me up. I remember at that point really being afraid that my parents would been something about that situation. Perhaps that tripped me up, because I remember at that point really being afraid that my parents would get divorced or that someone would die or something like that. But you know I was what, five or six years old. So, however, my little brain processed that at that time. Maybe that was it and maybe it wasn't. I mean, I don't really know how to know, but that's not really the point of this episode.

Megan Devito:

I did come up with one thing. I'm also really sensitive. I'm, like I'm one of those highly sensitive people. So the more I looked, though, the worse it got, until I realized that what was happening was I was spending all of my time and all of my energy trying to fix my anxiety by focusing on it 24-7. I mean, I would wake up and say, okay, what do I have to do today to make sure that I'm getting to the root of the problem? I was doing the exact opposite of what I coach people on on repeat, with the absolute best of intentions, because my thought was one, who

Megan Devito:

I had some big thoughts. One of them was who am I to be coaching people on anxiety when I'm right back here where I was? That one I worked through pretty quickly. I thought, okay, well, I'm the person that gets it, like I get it, because here I am again back where I was, although really not to the same level that I was like what, eight years ago now. But I also had a thought that if I can figure this out, if I can take all of the really great information that I'm seeing out there and figure this out, my coaching is going to be amazing, because I'm going to have all of these other things that I've discovered on my own.

Megan Devito:

So here's the truth. It didn't help me. My coaching was good already and I wasn't taking my own advice, because what I was doing was focusing exactly on how I felt and what I was afraid of. I was seriously sabotaging myself and after a while I was like wait a minute, what is going on here? What am I actually doing? So I saw this quote from Nancy Collier in Psychology Today. It was just in an article that she had written and it said "if we boil it down, we keep fixing ourselves in the hopes that we can finally just be who we actually are. Once we're fixed enough, or worthy, whether that means more compassionate or more disciplined, or whatever shape our mores have formed into, then we'll be entitled to feel what we feel."

Megan Devito:

I was judging myself big time for feeling anxious again, because I had things going on and in that need to not feel what I was feeling, I was trying to fix something that didn't need to be fixed. Guys, this is what I've coached people on forever, and it was like not hitting in my brain, which I suppose was a really good lesson for me to remember when it's not hitting sometimes in my clients' brains. But I think it's really important to bring this to you today, because everybody wants to feel better, everybody wants to improve themselves, but when you are always trying to fix yourself, it means you're always seeing yourself as broken or unworthy or damaged, and not as a person who's exactly where they need to be right now and not as enough at all. Always wanting to be perfect, for example, means that you're not someone else who you're not - you're not somebody else who you think is perfect. It means I'm not them or I'm not that, instead of just realizing that, yeah, but this is who I am and that's perfect for me. This is some major thought work right, because you might be like, yeah, but I've seen perfect. No, you've just seen what you think perfect should be.

Megan Devito:

We work through all of these thoughts with coaching. So - Another thing that you might notice is that you think that you're working on yourself, like I did, but you're actually showing yourself how you're messed up, which is exactly what I was doing, and maybe you've done that too, like, oh, I'm going to work on myself because I really feel like I should be more organized. And in your brain here, your brain hears you're not organized. You are doing this wrong, maybe, but are you getting things done? Maybe, but those are really good questions to look at. Those are some things that we can talk about. Okay, what would it be to be organized? What would it look like to be organized. You know, what would you do differently if you were organized those kinds of questions but maybe you're organized exactly the way you should be right now. Maybe it's working for you. Maybe you have to accept where you are right now to be able to move forward. That's a big thought, isn't it?

Megan Devito:

You probably have noticed that you just feel this pressure because there's so much out there about self-improvement and self-help or maybe it's just the algorithm showing me all of these things, because I do follow a lot of accounts, like I said, that are therapists and coaches and people like that. But this idea that I always have to be improving myself and I always have to see what everyone else is doing, which we are all experienced with so much social media exposure, or I have to do more and be more and I have to be out there more and put myself out there it just leaves us feeling less capable and more stuck, because the list of things that we have to fix keeps growing instead of getting smaller. Like, oh my gosh, I did this great thing today. We are judging ourselves into the ground. What I noticed in my situation is that it can happen to the best of us and with the best of intentions, you just keep finding more things that you want to change or fix and improve on, and I just am going to offer that this is a really good time to pause and ask yourself why.

Megan Devito:

For me, I had to remind myself on purpose that I had been okay for a really long time, like eight years, with really no anxiety attack. Yeah, anxiety that went up and down, because that happens to everybody. Some days we're under more stress so we feel more anxious. Sometimes things happen and we feel a little more anxious. But for years I had felt great and I had been very present and very like the way that I wanted to be, and because I had some things going on, I naturally felt more anxious, and that didn't mean I had to go back and find some hidden trauma that I had to feel or that there was some problem that I had missed. The more I looked for problems, the more I found problems.

Megan Devito:

When you have thoughts that start with "what if, like? What if I need to find this? What if I need to get to the root of the problem, those thoughts are ideas and creative thoughts. They're not based in fact. It's like oh, what if the sky were purple? What if I grew another arm out of my side? Those are just creative thoughts, and when you think those thoughts, they're based in anxiety and your anxiety will go up. And this is why, when you say, what if I'm not doing it right? What if it's not perfect? What if I'm not organized enough? What if I'm not a good enough employee? What if I never get to where I want to go? That's why you're never going to feel like you're enough.

Megan Devito:

But what about setting goals and reaching goals? Because, let's be honest, goals are important. We want to have goals. We definitely want to move forward. I'm not telling you to be stagnant. What I'm saying is goals are great. I want you to have them. They're the building block for coaching. So of course, I'm going to help you make and set goals.

Megan Devito:

But the problem here is that we often think that reaching that goal is going to make us happy, or that when you reach it, that you're going to have some major epiphany or something amazing happen. And sometimes that's true, but not always, because a lot of times what happens is we just set a new goal and we take a few more steps forward and we just keep chasing and chasing, but we never really pause to celebrate who we are without the goal, because even if you didn't set those goals and please set goals, but even if you didn't set those goals, being great with yourself who you are before you ever achieve the goal, is going to make it easier and it's going to soften the process along the way. It's going to take that cycle that makes it really hard to ever feel satisfied and like you're always missing out on something because you still feel anxious, and it's going to make it feel okay to be exactly where you are in the moment and give you the motivation to keep moving forward. So when you know that you are capable enough with or without anxiety, with or without goals or the perfect living room, or the next level in your career, when you know that you're okay there, then everything gets to be easier and you get to love yourself, no matter what. The resistance goes down and it's not giving up, it's just surrendering to. I am exactly the person who I need to be to achieve this.

Megan Devito:

So my solution to feeling really anxious last year was really drowning myself in all those techniques that I've talked about. I was critiquing my childhood and my responses to how I was handling my life in the moment and what was going on in my nervous system, and I was examining my coaching and trying to find more things that I was doing wrong and more ways of trying to make myself better. I was comparing myself to all of these anxiety experts and coaches. Instead of going back to what I knew already worked for me, I was just grasping for something new that could make it go away faster. But I had the benefit of hindsight and you might not have that yet, but you will. You just don't have it yet, but you'll get there, and it starts with learning to accept yourself. Learning to be okay with that feeling of anxiety without having to dig deeper is enormous, and I know that might sound big, because who wants to feel that feeling? But what I also know is the more that you push it away, the more you try to fix it, the more it hangs on. I could have solved my problem so much quicker if I would have gone back into that thought alone. It is okay to feel anxious.

Megan Devito:

You also have to understand that you're not perfect, and neither am I, and neither are the celebrities or the influencers that you see, nobody is. So, whatever your idea of perfect is, it's just an idea and it doesn't mean it's true. So we learn to say, okay, that's their perfect, this is my perfect. And if you decide that you don't like your perfect, we can look at ways to be more of yourself, not more of someone else. So we're going to let you be you and we're going to let go of comparing yourself in your real life or on social media or to whomever you work with. You get to be you and we're going to find out what works for you, not what works for them. You're going to focus on what you already like about yourself.

Megan Devito:

This is a great place to start, because my guess is there's at least one thing that you like about yourself. And if you can't think of one thing, it is definitely time for us to talk, because I don't even know you, maybe, maybe I do know you, but if I meet you, I can almost instantly find at least one and lots of times, a handful of things in the first 20 minutes that I'm like oh, this person is amazing. We're going to make a list every day and I want you to really do this. I want you to make a list every single day. It can be a short list. I always had a calendar next to my bed where I would write down some things. This is really a huge step for me in my progress in really recovering from anxiety. So get yourself a calendar or a notebook, keep it next to your bed and do this every night before you go to sleep.

Megan Devito:

Write something that went well for you today, even if it has to be the same thing every single day, like I survived. That's a great start. You're still growing your brain in the way you want it to go, but write down something you did that made you proud of yourself. I'm really proud. I didn't freak out and flip out that person in the car next to me today Amazing, because if you would have done that in the past, that was incredible progress. And there are days. But write it down. What are you proud of? What went well? What did you improve on? I got a tiny bit better at this today. I did a better job than I did yesterday.

Megan Devito:

Where were you strong? I almost freaked out in this one place, but I wasn't. I was strong. I held a boundary. I said what I needed to say. I talked to somebody, even though I felt anxious. All of those things are incredible. Write them down and then write down where you let go. You know what I screwed up today. Whatever, everybody screws up at least once, mostly over and over again. But force your brain to see what's working and what already feels good. It's a powerful, powerful step in getting you to this place where you don't feel like you constantly have to fix everything and if you can't think of anything that makes you unique or worthy or proud, get coached on your self-concept and how you feel about yourself.

Megan Devito:

A simple goal of wanting to be proud of yourself and feeling confident is a dream client for me, because when that happens, when someone really starts to appreciate themselves and to feel proud of themselves, their confidence grows and they just automatically become the person who they already are, without fighting it so much. You don't fix yourself because you're already the person you want to be, but you have to learn who that person is and you have to believe in yourself first. So what would be different for you if you made those changes for yourself? If I felt really solid about who I was right now and didn't feel like I had to fix myself, what would be different in my life, what would be different for my kids? What would be different for my boss? What would be different in my business? And then how will you know if you've actually achieved that goal? When you can take a break from all of the pressure you have to fix something else and just be real for a while, how would you know that you were at that level? That's a really good question to think about and then really just enjoy the process of getting better and better, instead of criticizing yourself and not getting to this end result that you've imagined. Okay, this is how I can help you.

Megan Devito:

Coaching makes all the difference in how you feel about yourself, because it deals specifically with what you think, which comes from yourself. Coaches listen to what you say and we ask questions and we help you come up with new ways of thinking and new ways of behaving and feeling so that you automatically start to love yourself more, to feel more confident. Your anxiety goes down, your stress goes down and when those things happen, there's not anything to fix. It's just things that you want to do. But once you stop fighting yourself and who you are and how you feel, including how anxiety feels in your body, it becomes a really familiar part of yourself, without something to fix or solve or to heal.

Megan Devito:

I can help you do this on a phone call. All you have to do is message me, whether it's on Instagram or Facebook, and say hey, Megan, I want to talk. You can find me on Instagram, facebook and threads at @CoachMeganDevito just all one thing, no underscores, no anything. I also have a website. It's just my name, megandevito. com. You can click the work with me tab and you can schedule time for us to talk. We'll jump on the phone for about an hour and we'll talk about what it is that you've been chasing.

Megan Devito:

What do you think you need to fix? What? If that's not it? Tell me what that would be like for you. We just have a really normal, casual conversation it's lots of fun about what you want, why you think you don't have it now, which is really telling. If I were to ask you, well, why don't you just have it? You would tell me all the reasons why you think you don't have it and I'm gonna tell you that that's probably not the reasons and we'll figure out what would actually work for you. Okay, please remember that it's okay to not be perfect, because perfect is a myth. Please remember that it's so much better to focus on being so proud of yourself and happy with yourself. I want you to practice being nicer to yourself this week and I'm looking forward from hearing from you, whether it's on social media, whether you leave a comment on YouTube, whether you message me or reply to one of my emails.

Megan Devito:

I send out a weekly email. I want to hear how it's going for you, because I am cheering for you all the time, even if I've never met you. I am constantly cheering for people who are messaging me or just say, oh my gosh, I don't know what to do. Hey, if I tell you I'm cheering for you, I mean it. I've been known to dance in my kitchen, you guys.

Megan Devito:

Okay, I hope this was helpful. I hope that you're seeing that you really don't have to constantly chase some new goal and new self-help thing. Goals are important, but it's really important that you understand how great you are right now. I'll talk to you soon, if not this week on a phone call, then next week right back here. 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.