When we understand that anxiety is not our enemy but it is coming from a part of us that is trying to get our attention, we can start to learn from it and heal.
In this episode, we take a practical look at why it is so important to befriend anxiety and five tips for making this happen.
Remember, your system loves you enough to invite you to heal. One way it does this is by using anxiety to tell you something is off and needs your attention.
We can learn to stop resisting anxiety and begin to accept it as a messenger from ourselves to ourselves.
When we understand that anxiety is not our enemy but it is coming from a part of us that is trying to get our attention, we can start to learn from it and heal.
In this episode, we take a practical look at why it is so important to befriend anxiety and five tips for making this happen.
Remember, your system loves you enough to invite you to heal. One way it does this is by using anxiety to tell you something is off and needs your attention.
We can learn to stop resisting anxiety and begin to accept it as a messenger from ourselves to ourselves.
Because, remember, if you can see that anxiety as a part of you, then you can realize that when you're resisting it, when you're pushing it down, you're battling against yourself. You're meeting that anxious energy with more anxious energy and you're causing it to activate even at a higher level. So what we resist will persist. It's not going to go away, it's not going to be suppressed. It's going to keep coming back up because our systems love us enough to get our attention so that we can heal. Hello, this is Jerry Henderson and welcome to the Permission to Love podcast, where we discuss how we can give ourselves the permission to love ourselves. I'm so grateful that you're here and I hope you enjoy today's episode. Hello everybody, welcome back for another episode. Today we're going to be talking about anxiety and, specifically, how can we make friends or befriend anxiety. I know that may sound counterintuitive, but by the time we get through with this episode, I hope that you can see how that approach might serve you better than resisting it or simply medicating it. You know, as a person who suffered from anxiety for decades I mean as a little kid I dealt with it to the point to where I had so many stomach issues that had to go to the hospital. They put me on medication at the age of nine years old, so I've been dealing with this stuff for years and it's only been in the last four years that I've really been able to get my hands around it and start to heal from it. So I want to share in this episode in another episode coming up about how that journey went for me. How did I begin to heal anxiety and I got to tell you one of the absolute key, fundamental things for me was learning to befriend it. So let me just give you a little bit of a picture about how my anxiety was so that hopefully, you can connect with it, relate to it and not just simply think I'm talking about something that I'm not well acquainted with.
Jerry Henderson:
As I said, started for me as a young child. I had a constant pit in my gut and just had this underlying kind of red alarm going off inside of me all the time. That then led to panic attacks. There was about a six month season where I would be in bed for three hours a day just trying to cope with the anxiety and the panic attacks that I was feeling. That then led into panic attacks every time that I would public speak, I mean me. Just doing this right now, formerly, just maybe even a year ago, would have caused so much anxiety for me, so much stress for me, that it would have been extremely difficult to get through it. So I'm well acquainted with it.
Jerry Henderson:
I've tried medications, I've done all kinds of things to figure out how to heal that anxiety. So at times it's been absolutely debilitating for me and I think the most troubling part of it was just that constant pit, that constant underlying current that at any point could get triggered and send me into panic attacks. So that's been my experience. I tried medication and it just didn't work for me. It doesn't work for everybody. It really didn't work for me. My body, my brain, my system did not react well to it. I mean, I tried so many different things to try to deal with it. I really tried to resist it. I tried all kinds of just mental tricks and gymnastics to get my hands around it, but nothing really worked until I started doing these three things that I'll be talking about over the next three episodes, and starting with this episode talking about how to be friended, which was for me, the catalyst to really beginning to heal it and changing my entire energy and relationship with anxiety. That set me on a whole different course. And once again, I want to remind everybody listening to this or watching this that I'm not a therapist. I simply share my journey and the things that worked for me to help me heal from the pain and the things that were causing my anxiety, and so just take it for what it's worth. If you find things that help you, that apply for you, then great. I always say I'm just a normal guy who went through some real difficult times, imploded my own life and then figured out how to pick up the pieces and put things back together. So, once again, not a therapist, not a licensed, trained mental health professional, just sharing my experiences and what has served me and my journey.
Jerry Henderson:
So, making friends or befriending Anxiety. You might be thinking, man, I hate this stuff. I know I did. I don't want to make friends with this stuff. I want to get rid of it. I want to push it out of my life. I never want to experience it again and it's the last thing that I want to do is to make friends with it. And you might be asking yourself how could you make friends with something that has been so damaging, so debilitating, and has had such a negative impact on your life. How could you possibly make friends with that? Well, here's what I would encourage you to do keep an open mind as you listen to this episode and then consider that maybe the other approaches that you've used haven't served you as well as you'd like them to, and be open to maybe a different path, maybe a contrarian path that could serve you better and serve you in a different way. So let's go ahead and dive in.
Jerry Henderson:
We'll talk about the first point, which is in befriending anxiety. What we're trying to do is we're trying to change the energy, we're trying to change the relationship that we have with anxiety. We're trying to get away from pushing it away. I want to read you a quote about some research that actually support this approach of befriending our anxiety, and it's research done by Dr Judson Brewer that suggests that pushing against anxiety can often amplify its effects. According to him, when we get anxious or fearful, we try to make those feelings go away and, paradoxically, that only adds fuel to their fire.
Jerry Henderson:
So here's something that really helped me in changing my energy with anxiety. I began to see it as a friend, as something that was trying to speak to me and I really began to understand that it wasn't so much anxiety that I was dealing with, but I was dealing with a part of me that was unhealed. I was trying to speak to me, was trying to get my attention and was trying to serve me. So at that point I stopped trying to push it away, because what I was doing was pushing myself away.
Jerry Henderson:
And when we realized that anxiety is this energy that's rising in us, trying to get our attention, trying to tell us something, and then it's actually a part of us that can change the way that we approach it, it can change the way that we see it. So it might be helpful to look at it as a part of you that loves you, that's trying to get your attention, and when we're combative with it and we push against it, we're actually pushing against ourselves, and so that's why I think the research shows that it actually is going to increase the anxiety, because we're fighting against ourselves still and there's a part of us that says, hey, I love you, I'm trying to get your attention, I'm trying to let you know I'm raising this energy in you that there's something that we need to deal with and if we're pushing against it, we're actually pushing against ourselves and so we're going to war with ourselves. So when we see that we can change the energy and have a more loving energy because we realize that that's the energy that we're giving to ourselves and not something that we're calling anxiety so let's go ahead and talk about tip number two in helping us befriend anxiety, and that's giving it a different name or calling it something else, because I don't know about you, but when I hear the word anxiety, it can cause me to have anxiety just hearing that word sometimes, and it certainly doesn't cause me to want to befriend it. It has a lot of judgment that seems to be associated with it, a lot of baggage that goes with it, and there's all kinds of things that happen, at least for me in the past, when I'd hear the word anxiety. So if that's the case for you, it might be helpful to give it a different name. Is there a name that you can call it so that when it shows up, naming it that can reduce the energy around it that causes you to get more anxious? Is there a loving term or a playful term that you can give it, or is there a way that you can see the part of you that's wanting to heal, that's trying to get your attention, and give that part of you a loving name. And so, when that anxiety starts to show up, you can begin to see it as that part of you visiting, instead of just seeing it as anxiety and something that's negative, because, remember, we're trying to change our energy with it, we're trying to change our relationship with it. So, giving it a different name, based on seeing it as something that's trying to serve you instead of something that's so darn negative, that can really help, and it can really help change the energy that you have with it in the way that you view it. Okay, so let's go ahead and move on to point number three.
Jerry Henderson:
In talking about befriending our anxiety, and that is how we greet it when it shows up, we've got two choices we can resist it or we can accept it. And so what does it look like when we resist it? What happens, you know, we all know that feeling right Is that anxiety begins to rise, we start to sense it coming on and then we start to say, oh no, I don't want this to be here, this is going to ruin my day. I hate it when this happens. And so all of this energy starts to come up and we want to start pushing it back down. Well, that doesn't service very well, because if we can see anxiety as energy, energy that first wants to get our attention and then second wants to release from our system it's energy that's responding to a thought or an event or something that's taking place and it's trying to pass through us.
Jerry Henderson:
It's a very normal process for that anxiety to want to go through us. It's exactly like what happens with a gazelle that's trying to outrun a lion, and once it escapes, what it'll actually do is it'll land on the ground and it'll start to shake and it'll start to tremor and it'll start to have these little almost convulsions that's trying to clear that energy out of its system. And so what's happening with us is we're having that energy start to come up and then we're resisting it and pushing it back down. So we're actually keeping it in our system and we're keeping it in a loop, and so it's just going to keep coming back up. It's just going to keep wanting to release. And so if we can begin to lean back and we can begin to accept what's happening, it allows that energy to pass through us in a more healthy way.
Jerry Henderson:
Because, remember, if you can see that anxiety as a part of you, then you can realize that when you're resisting it, when you're pushing it down, you're battling against yourself. You're meeting that anxious energy with more anxious energy and you're causing it to activate even at a higher level. So what we resist will persist. It's not going to go away, it's not going to be suppressed, it's going to keep coming back up because our systems love us enough to get our attention so that we can heal. So if we don't greet it with resistance, how do we greet it with acceptance? Well, you accept the truth that it is there. I know it's uncomfortable, I know we want to do everything to get rid of it, but the truth is it is there. And so, as a part of our journey of learning acceptance, we need to accept the fact that this anxiety has shown up, and it's shown up for a reason. So how do we practice accepting it? What would that look like in the moment?
Jerry Henderson:
Think about doing the exact opposite of what resisting is. When we're resisting it, we're tensing up, we're starting to fight, and so acceptance is asking us to lean back, to relax, to let that energy begin to flow through us, to not tighten up, to let the hands relax, to let the body relax and just let it begin to flow. And here's some tips that will help your body respond in a way that is more relaxed and allows that energy to pass through. The first thing you can do is get control of your breath, because the first thing that happens for me when anxiety comes is my breathing changes, my heart rate changes, my entire system begins to go get haywire right. So I'm going to take my breath as my first line of relaxing, not first line of defense, but my first line to relax. So I get into what is called box breathing Four seconds in, four seconds held at the top, four seconds out, four seconds held at the bottom, and beginning to repeat that and put my attention on my breath and beginning to relax my system. So I'm taking my attention off of resisting and into breathing, because my breath has changed, my body's starting to change, and so I'm coming back to the breath and beginning to relax through going through a rhythm of breathing in a more relaxed and controlled way.
Jerry Henderson:
The second thing you can do that might help you relax and allow that energy to pass through is called EFT, and EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Training, and it's actually called the tapping method in a more kind of practical way, and that's basically finding these pressure points within your body. You can look it up on the internet, you can Google it, there's all kinds of information about it. But you find these acupuncture points on your body and you begin to tap them and repeat a positive affirmation. You can say things like I'm okay, even though my body is experiencing this sensation, I'm safe, or whatever language will work for you, as you begin to tap on that part of your body and that'll send the message to your system, both by the physical touch and by the speech, that everything's okay and I can begin to relax and allow the energy to pass through. Another method you might find helpful in that moment is called self-havening, and you can look that up as well. But that's basically giving your body this comfort sensation. As you hold yourself, begin to stroke parts of your body, palms together, rubbing them together gently, so you're trying to once again send the message to your system that you can relax.
Jerry Henderson:
And then the final thing that might be helpful in learning to relax is self-talk, beginning to tell yourself. I'm okay, I'll be okay. I've experienced this before and this time I'm going to allow it to pass through my system. I'm going to relax and let it do its work. So, even that self-talk instead of I wish this would go away. Why is this here? I hate that I have to deal with this, what's wrong with me, and cycling into that, instead of cycling into that, beginning to do that positive self-talk that comforts you, lets you know that you're going to be okay. You've survived it before and you'll survive it again.
Jerry Henderson:
So, if we can remember that, we're trying to befriend anxiety, so when it first shows up, we want to greet it not with resistance, not with hostility, but with acceptance and beginning to relax. That first little moment when it shows up is absolutely crucial on whether we're going to cycle down and get pulled down into that energy and begin to restrict and all of that tension and the things that make the anxiety worse, or we're going to relax, we're going to accept it and we're going to greet it as something that's trying to instruct us and not as our enemy. Alright, so let's talk about the fourth thing, which is talking to the anxiety, having a conversation with it. I love the poem by Rumi that talks about the house guests. Right that we have these emotions, we have these things that show up in our life and they're there to do a work.
Jerry Henderson:
So have the conversation with the anxiety, let it know that it is welcome, let that part of you know that it is welcome to be here, and then begin to ask it what is it trying to teach you, what is it trying to show you? Why is it here in this moment? And that's why it's so important to do that work of when it first shows up, to not resist it but to accept it and to begin to relax, because now we can be more open and more relaxed to hear from that part of us. Instead of shutting it down and really resisting it, we're getting into more relaxed state to hear from it. Why are you here? What are you trying to show me? What can I learn? In this moment?
Jerry Henderson:
And as you're having that conversation with that part of yourself, you can begin to see it as a messenger. And if it's a messenger, now we need to listen to it. We need to listen to what it's trying to tell us, which, once again, continuing to relax, continuing to allow our systems to be calm and now start to listen, opening our hearts, opening our minds to what that part of us is trying to say to us. Because here's a great part about listening to it it gives us something practical to do, because anxiety sometimes just seems useless, that we're just kind of spinning in a cycle. So if we can now take it to a more practical and productive part by asking it what is it trying to tell us, and then listening, now we have some practical things to begin to act on and we're taking that energy in a more positive route as it's beginning to pass through us and passing through us into something that can now become actionable.
Jerry Henderson:
So you might hear things like man, I'm afraid that X is going to happen, or I'm afraid of losing so and so, or I feel so overwhelmed because we've taken on so much, because we're trying to people please, we're trying to prove ourselves. I just feel like I can't hold it all together anymore. You might hear things like why I keep having memories of the things that have happened or my past failures or things that people have done to me, and I keep recycling those through and I need to find a way to release those thoughts and I need to find a way to heal from those very origin wounds that have been a part of my life. And as we hear those things, I find it really helpful to write them down. To write down what I'm hearing, because that's going to do two things. One, it's going to take my attention off of just being pulled down into negative energy. It's going to allow that energy to pass through by writing it out. That is one way that energy gets released from our system is by taking an action and actually journaling or writing about it so you can write it out, take that attention away from just feeling like I don't know what to do. I'm so overwhelmed. Now you've got something that you can do for that energy to pass through. But it also then allows you to remember what was said to you, what that part of you said to you, so that now you can do the fifth and final step, which is take action.
Jerry Henderson:
So why is taking action a key part of befriending anxiety? Well, you're sitting with it, you're listening to it, you've asked it what it needs and if you're not taking action on it, you're not telling your brain that you're serious about honoring that part of you and healing. Taking some type of action shows your brain that you're listening to that part of yourself that you want to heal and that you're serious about your growth. Because we have to remember that our brains don't believe just what we say. Our brains believe what we do. Our brain seeing us doing something, taking action, reinforces to us that we actually believe what we're doing and what we've said, because we're taking an action.
Jerry Henderson:
And another reason taking action is so important is that it gives relief in itself in going forward and doing some type of forward momentum. It's getting our attention off of being stuck. It's actually giving us hope. We're actually beginning to see progress because we're moving in a direction towards our healing. So that in itself brings relief to that anxiety. Over time. We're talking about a stacking effect. This doesn't happen overnight, but as you're practicing this befriending process and you're beginning to say you know what? I've asked you, I've listened and now I'm taking an action, you're beginning to see forward momentum. It's bringing hope to your system and you're beginning to see little micro changes and that in itself begins to reduce the anxiety.
Jerry Henderson:
Because a lot of times anxiety comes from just being trapped in a circle, in a cycle, and we can't seem to get out of that trap. So just moving forward in some way will help. I love the analogy that you can't steer a parked car, but if you get the car going, if you get some direction in it, then you can begin to steer it. So that's a lot of what's happening when we're taking action on the things that we're hearing, as we're asking our anxiety what it's trying to tell us, and we start to move forward and we start to take that action, that car begins to move, we're making progress, we're seeing we're making progress and that in itself begins to reduce the anxiety. So there you have it Five things that I think can help in serving you and serving us and learning to befriend our anxiety, change the energy that we have with it and not see it as an enemy but see it as a friend.
Jerry Henderson:
Now, I know this can be difficult, so I once again want to remind you that I do offer coaching services to help if you're feeling stuck in this and you can't figure out how to change your energy with your anxiety and just need some encouragement or somebody to help you or walk with you in that process.
Jerry Henderson:
You can find out more information about the coaching services I offer at jerryhendersonorg. I'd really love to hear how these tips are helping you in your journey of learning to befriend that anxiety. So feel free to reach out to me. You can find all the ways to connect with me in the show notes of this episode. And then, finally, if you've not had a chance yet to subscribe or to follow, please take a moment to do that as well. If you wouldn't mind, give it a thumbs up rate it, review it. That's going to continue to help to reach of this podcast and then, last but not least, share it with somebody, because you never know the impact that it's going to make in their life. Thank you again for taking your time to listen and to watch. I want to remind you, as always, you are worthy of your own love.