Episode 247 Minisode: Thinking About vs. Listening To Anxiety
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Let’s talk about anxiety, because for most of us, the go-to solution is to try to think our way out of it. We Google it, we analyze it, we spin in mental loops trying to fix it. But here’s what I want you to consider. Anxiety isn’t something you think your way through. It’s something your body is trying to say. In this episode, I’m going to reframe anxiety, not as a flaw or as a diagnosis or as a personality trait, but as a signal.
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a message from your nervous system. And the more you try to solve it with your mind, the louder your body has to scream. So if you’ve been caught in loops of overthinking and trying harder or just wishing your brain would shut off, this episode will help you get quiet enough to hear the truth beneath the noise. Because anxiety isn’t the problem. It’s the alert system in your body. And it’s not your job to argue with it.
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It’s your job to listen.
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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence-based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine, and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
01:40
So most women that come into this program, and honestly, most women that end up with alcohol use disorder, dudes too, I suppose, but I’m talking to women, most of us have anxiety. And the crux, the loophole of alcohol use disorder is that it is a thinking problem. Like it’s a mental health issue. It has nothing to do, literally the diagnosis in the DSM-5, it has nothing to do with how much or how often you drink.
02:09
it has to do with whether or not you think that you drink more than you should. And so what you need to understand is how anxiety works and reframe the response to your anxiety. So if you don’t have a drinking problem until you think you have a drinking problem, then what happens once you start thinking of it as a problem is you start trying to change it or beating yourself up.
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and we all know the slippery slope is it’s happening in the mind. The more you think about alcohol, because you’re in a state of anxiety in your body, there’s a stress response. And by definition, a stress response takes over your brain. When you’re in a state of stress, the brain gets hyper-focused on whatever the brain thinks is the problem, which you’ve decided it’s alcohol. So the brain begins to ruminate.
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And the quality of your thoughts when you’re in a state of stress, when you’re experiencing anxiety is they are very negative. They are very short term myopic focus. You know, it’s all about the alcohol because when you’re in a stress response, biologically, your brain wants to keep you alive. And whatever your brain decides the problem is, then nothing else can be important. It all has to be about that. We gotta get this problem solved in order to save ourselves.
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And in the modern world, we’re not used to anxiety being about an actual physical threat. All of our problems are in our mind. And the solution to not only alcohol use disorder, but also anxiety itself, is to realize that anxiety, the feelings you’re having, the stress, those are in your body, not in your brain. And your body always only lives in the present moment.
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Which means the more time you spend worrying about the past, trying to make sense of things, figure everything out, and planning for the future, making promises of how much you will or won’t drink, or what people are going to think, or how it’s going to be. When you are in your brain thinking about the past and worrying about the future, you’re not in the present moment. And so understanding that those thoughts are actually fueling the body.
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the anxiety in the body in the present moment, you’re making it worse, you’re pouring fuel on the fire, then you realize how we got here. We don’t understand that anxiety is in the body. And as much as people try to explain that you have to feel your feelings to heal them, you got to feel to heal, most of us don’t understand the actual mechanism of that. And consequently, we’re just doing it wrong.
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We think that we’re feeling our feelings, but in truth, we’re thinking about our feelings. We’re thinking about the story and why we feel bad and feeling bad about ourselves and whether it’s a pity party or a blame game or whatever. We’re stuck in our head. Overthinking is, by definition, under feeling. And so the solution to all of this is to learn how to respond differently to our anxiety. In our culture,
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Anxiety is like a diagnosable problem. We think it’s beyond our control. And while you cannot control the anxiety that you’re experiencing in any given moment, you can learn how to respond differently to it. But we don’t understand that. In our culture, where our biology has not quite caught up with our lifestyle and the technology and
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how we all live in our screens and on our head, and all of our problems are basically mental constructs. There aren’t a lot of us running from tigers or foraging for food on any given day. And so all of our problems exist in our mind. Our biology has not caught up with how to deal with problems. So we take advice from people, but the medical model of our health care system that diagnoses disorders and disease and problems
06:22
that are bigger than us, it’s turning us all into victims. If you are identifying as somebody who has generalized anxiety disorder, you’re under the impression that this is just something you’re going to have to deal with. And that is the biggest mistake. It is so helpful to know and be able to put a label on what it is you are dealing with. Oh, this is anxiety. But thinking that there’s nothing you can do to
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change the way you’re responding, and somehow you just have to cope with it, or you have to manage it. And medications and other tools can be so powerful, they can be the ladder that allows you to crawl out of the hole. We live in a modern world. We need modern solutions. However, identifying as your anxiety, you are an anxious person with an anxiety disorder. Or as it applies to alcohol use disorder, identifying as somebody who cannot
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control her drinking, like you can control it. We talk about that all the time. You control it when you need to. If you have to drive, you have to get up early, or if you’re trying to impress somebody, like you can control your drinking. So the question is, what changes about the quality of my thoughts that makes my behavior change? Like you have to become a scientist and really look into this. For the most part, most of us end up drinking and getting into that habit because we don’t have tools.
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to properly manage our anxiety. We’re trying to shut off our brain. But the big fork in the road in terms of understanding is understand anxiety lives in the body, not the brain. And the body lives in the present moment. There is no future. There is no past in your body. It is just a present moment experience while your nervous system is detecting a threat. And if you respond to that anxiety as an invitation to
08:16
Perhaps explore something. There’s situational anxiety that it’s there for a reason. It’s alerting you that you need to pay attention to something or there’s something to figure out. But that’s far less often than we want to make it out to be. When you have chronic anxiety about an issue you’re having in your life and you’re living in a state of anxiety, as we do with alcohol use disorder, the problem cannot be solved by thinking about it. You can’t think your way out of a thinking problem.
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And so the solution is to learn how to go into the body and put your hand on your heart and say, everything is OK. In this moment, everything is OK. And if you have time to think, then that’s always true. If you’re running from a bank robber or trying to save your house from a flood, you don’t have time. That’s not anxiety that you’re dealing with. It’s go time, right? But if you have time to think, then the problem is
09:13
the quality of your thinking. And anxiety is actually an alert, an alarm that your body is telling you that your thoughts are shitty. And because we think that our thoughts are true, not understanding, you we all love to say feelings aren’t facts, right? Well, when they apply to other people. But what you don’t understand is your thought is your feeling. feelings are just the felt sensation of the words in your brain. You feel what you think.
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just like you can hear what I’m saying. And so we don’t understand that it is our thoughts that are not the facts. And our body is telling us, this thought is a very low quality, and it’s making me feel bad. And because any thought can be true, all the thoughts are true, none of the thoughts are true. Whichever ones you believe, whichever ones you attach to, whichever ones you perpetuate, that’s what determines how you’re showing up in the world. It creates your reality.
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But if any thought can be true and also none of the thoughts are true, then your body is telling you it’s your internal guidance system of which thoughts you need to pay attention to and which thoughts are harmful and toxic and are going to lead you in the wrong direction. You guys, if you could just really wrap your minds around that your truth is whatever your experience is in the present moment. Your truth is in your body.
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and healing your relationship with yourself is that your number one priority is to feel what’s going on in your body and attend to your body. Where I’ve always gotten confused is that I think that I have to heal my relationship with myself and that myself is my personality and my past and my preferences and all my opinions and my sins and my strengths and my weaknesses and my wins and my losses. it’s like, no, if you think of yourself as your body,
11:06
and it’s your job to take care of your body, then it’s also your job to manage the brain in your body so that any thoughts that are moving through there that don’t feel good are discarded. Your body is your support system. It is your vehicle for moving throughout life. And your body only lives in the present moment.
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And so yesterday’s truth that felt really good, like I love drinking wine every single night. Life is good. It did feel good, right? But now when you do that and it doesn’t feel good in your body or the thoughts about yourself, about the fact that you’ve been drinking wine every night or whatever it is, those thoughts don’t feel good in your body. This is where your body is guiding you, showing you that the thoughts in your brain about the truth that you think was true
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before or should be true now or will be true in the future. If those truths, those words don’t feel good in your body, listen to your body. Respect the truth that is in your experience of the present moment and reject the words in your brain that don’t resonate with positivity, happiness, openness, curiosity, learning, abundance, power, confidence, healing anxiety.
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is recognizing that anxiety is an emotion in your body and it is a call to action to pay attention to your body, to get out of your head and move into the sensations of your body and attend to the needs of your body in this present moment, turning off the alarm, soothing the nervous system, moving the body, resting the body, feeding the body, stop feeding the body, change the song on the radio or the channel on the TV.
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or change your location, your environment, or the situation that you’re in, or the people you are around. Your anxiety is not telling you the truth about you as a person or the outside world situations. It is telling you your truth in this present moment. Anxiety is your body’s way of letting you know the thoughts in your brain, the questions you’re asking yourself,
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The ideas that you’re considering, the perspective that you are taking, the mindset that you are using to evaluate the situation, the story you are telling yourself is not serving you. Anxiety is your body’s way of getting your attention and saying, I don’t feel safe in this present moment. And your felt experience is the only truth that exists.
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Everything else is your brain telling you a story about the past or the future. All time is now. The truth is your experience of the present moment. Anxiety is in your body, not your brain. And it’s telling you, inviting you to take control of your brain. Your brain is a tool. And if you are not directing it, it’s directing you. You have to learn the difference between listening to what your brain is telling you and thinking.
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on purpose as the creator and designer of your own life. And I’m going to end this with a call to awareness. I want you to notice the difference between listening to your brain and thinking in a way that is you using your brain on purpose. When you’re just listening, you are running the old programs. You are living in the past. And when you’re living in the past, the future is just a trajectory.
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you’re gonna get more of the same. When you understand the difference between listening and thinking and you allow your body to alert you when you have slipped back into old thinking patterns and you trust the truth of your body because there are no truths in your brain. You can think whatever and however you want. You can change your mind at any time. So just start noticing when you’re listening to your brain and how that’s making you feel.
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And when you’re thinking from a place of power and choosing your God given right to choose what you pay attention to and what goals you set and the actions that you take to achieve those goals, that is your power. You have the ability to choose how you respond to the thoughts in your brain, to the feelings in your body, to the circumstances in your life and the people around you. It is not ever what is happening.
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to you or what has happened to you. It is how you respond. And 80 % of this skill is simply noticing, becoming aware of the difference between listening to the anxious bullshit in your brain and thinking from a place of power.
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All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80%, so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.