Episode 238 Minisode: How To Get Unworried
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Hello everyone. So I do a daily podcast called Coffee with Colleen inside my emotional sobriety coaching program. These are short, sweet mini-sodes that either give you an inside look at something I’m going through in my own life or a simple, easy strategy that you can implement or both. You may hear me reference other content that only my clients have access to. So if you’re interested in learning more about my program,
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get in the show notes and schedule a discovery call with me or my team. 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.
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so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
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One of the most common forms of the upper limit problem is worry. And so I want to start with a little story to show you how we sabotage our self and block ourselves off from the positive emotions that we think we want to live in, but actually scare the hell out of us. So I was having a day where I was feeling really good about myself, my business, the content. I had just gotten off one of our coaching calls and I felt like I had
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really done a good job. And I was just basking in this amazing sense of success, looking back how far I’ve come over the last three years and the community that I’ve built and the content program I put together. And I was feeling really good. And then all of the sudden, I started worrying about my daughter, Anna. She’s in Key West for the summer.
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And she had come down with some sort of cold or something that was preventing her from diving. And she was just having a rough week. And all of a sudden, this expansive feeling that I was experiencing in my body completely disappeared, like a kink in a garden hose, right? I cut myself off from that feeling and immediately switched my attention to thinking about her laying in her dorm room, not working that day, because she’s staying in a dorm.
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for the summer and is she gonna be hot and does she need medication? I stopped and sent her dad a text just letting you know Anna’s not feeling well. Like, hey, Misery loves company, let’s worry about our daughter together. And it was about 15 minutes later that I kind of became aware. I pulled out of it and I was like, wait a minute, how did I go from feeling good and awesome and expansive and creative and thinking about more projects I wanna work on?
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How did it go from that to all of sudden this manufactured stream of painful images with my daughter suffering and worrying about things I absolutely have no control or no ability to even do anything about? Like what had hijacked my focus? What happened there? Well, because I’m reading this book, The Big Leap, I had this light bulb moment that, oh my God, that’s it. That’s the upper limit. I hit it.
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I was feeling good. was doing things and I was ready to stay in that flow. And my brain diverted me because that feeling itself was uncomfortable. I must’ve had some unconscious fear that I’m gonna get too big or do too well or be too awesome. And my brain just kind of panicked. That feeling was uncomfortable. And so I squelched it. But then I also caught it. And once you begin to
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pay attention to where you’re blocking yourself. Once you see it in action, you can’t really unsee it. If your goal, your bull’s eye on the tree is to feel good and at ease and peaceful, then your brain, your dopamine literally is going to try to get you that right. And then when you’re not getting that, your brain will alert you to that there is a problem. And if you properly diagnose the problem as the workings of your own crazy ass mind,
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then you will be able to pull out of it and self-correct sooner. And if you just set a Google alert in your brain to start noticing when you are worrying, that’s going to be probably like 80 % of your problem. Worry is almost always a sign that you’ve reached your upper limit and your brain is rerouting you back down into normalville. Rarely are we worrying about anything useful.
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In fact, worrying is only useful when it only lasts about 30 seconds because it calls to your attention that there might need to be an action. Like the other day, as I was driving out of my neighborhood, I started worrying, did I shut the garage door? And so instead of worrying about that, I just turned my car around because I was like a minute away from home. And I went back and sure enough, garage door was open. So that was a good call. But spending time worrying about my daughter not feeling well, yeah, there’s nothing I can actually do that.
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And so just becoming aware that often worry kicks in, just noticing this. It kicks in when you’re feeling particularly good and your brain is just going to bring you back down. You’ve exceeded your thermostat of good feelings. It’s a little too hot in here. It’s in the fun department. And your brain starts manufacturing worrisome thoughts. If you identify as a chronic worrier, I want to propose a radical hypothesis.
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Worrying is always the problem and never the solution. Worrying is the problem. It is not the content of the story, of the details in the external world that you’re thinking about that are the problem. It is how you’re thinking about those things that is the problem. It is how you are thinking about those things that are the problem. Problem solving is actually inherently positive experience. It’s very creative.
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So if you’re experiencing anxiety and negative emotions, then you need to understand you’re just doing it wrong. It is the quality of the questions you’re asking yourself that are causing the problem and also preventing you from taking the actions and actually acting on the world in an and efficient manner. And I think it’s a super cool strategy to look at what brought on the worry. What was going on right before that?
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Like hit the rewind button and go to the previous scene. What feelings were coming up for you that you were simply hitting the upper limit. You didn’t want those feelings to expand. And they don’t always have to be positive. But overthinking is always about under feeling. When you are worrying, you’re avoiding some sort of emotion. Just don’t waste your time digging into the emotion of the contents of the worry story. The worry story is just the smoke string.
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screen, the distraction. What was going on right before you switched into this topic in your brain? What was going on? What were you feeling? And why did you need to block the flow of that energy? Now, the moment you start asking yourselves these questions, the worry goes into an idol. Like you could go back into that thought pathway, that neuro pathway and continue to worry and think about whatever it is that’s creating this anxiety or
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You can get curious. Something inside of you was trying to get your attention, and you stuck your fingers in your ears and skipped over it. Go back, look beyond the worry thoughts, and find the fear that caused you to block the flow of positive energy. So here’s a little step-by-step process. Next time you noticed you’re worrying about something, stop and pull out of that stream of thought. Just let those thoughts go.
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and shift your focus to the following question. What positive feelings was this worry manufactured to block? And what new thoughts and ideas are trying to come into my brain? Like, isn’t this fun? Isn’t it fun to realize that you can’t control what’s happened or what happened two minutes ago, what thoughts you’ve been thinking about, but you can.
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change how you’re responding to your own emotional state, to your own thoughts in your brain. You can change how you respond. I love this question. When you realize you’re worried, what positive feelings were those worry thoughts designed to block? Like what a good problem to give your brain to solve. And then, know, blocking feelings is also blocking thoughts. So
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If there was positive feelings that you were blocking, what thoughts are attached to those? What new creative ideas and out of the box strategies are trying to get into your brain and your brain just keeps shutting that shit down? Like open your mind and see what else is possible for you to be thinking about. Have fun with this.
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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.