Aware & Aggravated - 7. Reset Your Anxiety- What Therapists Never Told Me

Episode Date: September 15, 2024

How to stop attracting chaos and finally feel less anxious.   Social Media:  https://www.instagram.com/leoskepi https://www.tiktok.com/@leoskepi https://www.snapchat.com/add/leoskepi   Merch: https://shopleoskepi.com/collections/   My App Positive Focus: (Apple) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/positive-focus/id1559260311 (Google) https://play.google.com/store/apps/detailsid=com.positivefocusapp&hl=en_US&gl=US&pli=1   FaceBook Support Community:  https://m.facebook.com/groups/851294735925522/?ref=sharehttps://m.facebook.com/groups/851294735925522/?ref%3Dshare&exp=7ffb&mibextid=I6gGtw   Business Inquiries: [e-mail] 

Hi friends, let's get back to saying that I missed that. This week I'm going to help you reset your anxiety. This is what I've learned about overwhelm, why I constantly was in a state of overwhelm, and why every time I try to like sit down and relax, it didn't work. Why my brain was constantly running and fucking me up and thinking about all the things I need to be doing, should be doing, all that. Also what I learned about attracting experiences that contribute to the chaos.

There's plenty of videos online with how to manage your anxiety and help yourself with that. That's not what I wanna talk about. You don't need help with managing the chaos. That's what you're comfortable with. That's how you know how to live and how to function is with anxiety and chaos.

So I wanna talk about why you keep actually attracting the chaos and attracting the anxiety and why it can't leave you. Because like I said, you're good at managing the anxiety. You know how to function in it. You know how to function in the chaos. That's all normal to you. I'm going to go into and talk about dealing with the emotions that come with being calm and how to feel safe to be calm. Because if you constantly are in an anxious state and you have anxiety really, really bad, like I said, if you're on the couch and you try and relax for a minute and then your brain is thinking about everything you should,

could and better be doing that comes from anticipating a negative experience or something unwanted happening. So feeling calm makes you feel vulnerable and makes you feel like an attack is So feeling calm makes you feel vulnerable. It makes you feel like an attack is coming and it makes you feel anxious. So let's go into all of that on a way deeper level. First thing I wanna point out is anxiety keeps you safe. Anxiety is only coming up to keep you safe.

And this is the whole thing to understand about the emotion of feeling anxious. It's a safe feeling because when you're anxious, it puts you in a state of high alert. You are able to assess and observe everything. You are on high alert because to feel calm or to feel like nothing's going bad or nothing's going wrong makes you feel vulnerable to something happening that's bad.

So anxiety keeps you on high alert. And when there's actually no threat, you're just anticipating one, and then you feel anxious and you get on high alert, you start identifying things that aren't actually a threat. So your anxiety is helping you be better at perceiving a threat. And it's a hard flip to make,

where you're like so used to feeling anxious and you think it's the cause of all of your problems And you hate the fact that you're anxious. It makes you do crazy shit. You don't like it You don't want nothing to do with anxiety But that emotion is serving you and this is the way that it's serving you it puts you on high alert Because you have a negative and a subconscious association and a fear of being calm So that's the question to ask yourself when you feel anxious, you're being put on alert, put on alert for what?

What's the issue? What's the problem? What you scared about? And most of the times, if there's not an actual threat, it reveals that to feel at peace is vulnerable and it's scary. And you're anticipating something bad happening. Let's keep going. I love this shit. So let's go into how being calm and being at peace and feeling okay is unsafe and how it could have been wired in your brain to associate that unsafety.

The first thing comes from being attacked while you're in a calm state for being calm. So if you get attacked or you are punished or bad things happen because you are calm, you will set up that association. So an example of this is like if you're a kid and you're done with your shit for the day, you don't put your homework and you're sitting on the couch and your parent comes home from work or your guardian, whoever's taking care of you, they come home from work and they're anxious or they're stressed out or they're in a bad mood, they're angry, whatever it is, they come home and they see you relaxing. Did they shame you and say, oh, I'm so glad you get to just sit down and relax. Like I'm over here, got to go to work all day. I'm over here stressed out and you're not even going to help me? Like, oh, you're just relaxing. Did you get attacked for it?

Did you get physically hit for it? That will set up that association in your head. Also the punishment side, were you given more things to do because you were relaxing? Did your parent or a teacher or somebody, when you didn't look busy, did they come in and see that you were calm and you were at peace and punish you by giving you more things to do? Because if they were like, oh you're just over here laying on your ass, how selfish of you that I'm over here stressed out, how about you get up and

come help me? How about you go clean your room? How about you go mop the floor? How about you go do something? Did you get punished with more things to do because you were calm? That's a big thing that will wire this in your brain. And that leads to the whole thing where I was talking about being on the couch and anticipating other things that you need to do. When you sit on the couch and you relax for a second and your brain starts kicking in, you could be doing this. You could be working on this. You could be going to the gym. You could be eating. You can be making food.

You'd be cleaning. kicking in, you could be doing this, you could be working on this, you could be going to the gym, you could be eating, you could be making food, you could be cleaning. Your brain keeps going because it's anticipating you looking relaxed and being calm comes with a threat. You cannot be in a relaxed state physically or something will come and take that from you. So your way of protecting your peace is one, by being alone, or two, by looking busy. And a lot of people have an issue with looking busy and just doing busy work and pretending like they're always got something to do, always something coming up. So if you notice that you constantly just make issues for yourself,

or you can't just sit down that you've got to go find something else to do, or constantly keep going, you might have this association set up in your brain where to be calm or to be at peace is unsafe. You are subconsciously emotionally perceiving an attack is about to come because if I get caught in this state of being peaceful or calm, I'm done for. It's going to be ruined. It will be taken. I will be attacked or punished and this is not okay. The second way that I've noticed this can kind of come about from my own experience is if you are blindsided by something and you're in a relaxed state

and then something happens that will snatch you out of it. If it happens enough times, like I talked about before, with your parent coming home or someone coming home and finding you relaxed or calm, there's always just some random thing that will snatch you out of that state. And it's like more bad happens and you don't understand that this is happening, but your brain will associate a feeling of calm with an immediate feeling and a random feeling of panic and fear. Like you have to get up and do something.

A ball has just dropped. Someone's hurt. Something's urgent. Something needs your attention fast. You will have an association and you will emotionally get anxious as hell anytime you're calm because you have a feeling signature of calm comes with panic. So to stay in the panic state keeps you on alert. You're not going to get blindsided by something random coming up. Being blindsided is one of the scariest and worst things that can happen for someone who's anxious because you've already thought about every way something could happen and you get

blindsided by something and it makes it worse. So that's another thing that can happen is if it happens too many times, you have that feeling signature of calm comes with panic and it's never safe to fall into that calm state because you're going to get snatched back out of it. And it's like, I don't want to have to do the whole energy thing of like calming down and then getting ramped back up and then going and doing something. And then you calm back down and something else comes back up. It's like the constant up and down is more exhausting than just staying up and

alert and anxious and on your toes, if that makes sense. Okay. And the third point that I want to talk about is one that's going to relate to social anxiety and why that kind of happens and a lot to do with your body and why you nitpick your body and why you're never happy with it, you're never happy with your style. You're never happy with how you look or how you talk or how you walk. And it comes from being nitpicked by people around you and people who are your friends, your peers, your parents, teachers, whoever it is in your childhood. Usually it's early when these associations are made.

But if every single time you were happy with something that you did, or you were happy with the way that you looked, or you were just relaxing and you weren't in a state of like anxious stress to change something or improve something, it was attacked and it was nitpicked. So if you put on an outfit that you liked, you come downstairs or you go to school and everybody makes fun of you. For you to be happy and be relaxed and to feel confident,

you will create a negative association with that if you've been nitpicked too many times. Like I said, the feeling signature thing with the last point, it also can happen with the happiness of trying to do something new with your style or be out in public and do something like anything that got you made fun of. You will not want to go back to that state.

So if you have an association with being happy and then being made fun of, so happiness will come with embarrassment or being relaxed and calm and feeling good about yourself will come with a sense of embarrassment. So anytime you feel calm, you will immediately shift to anxiety to figure out what is the threat. What about my body is not good enough? What about my style is not good enough? What about the way that I'm walking and talking? What about the joke I just said that wasn't good enough? Because it's trying to find that threat before you get snapped to that place of

embarrassment and being made fun of. And that's really something that will stick with you for a long time is embarrassment and getting made fun of and being nitpicked constantly. It's like if your appearance is not on ten you will be an anxious wreck because you feel vulnerable to attack. So if you're not constantly improving yourself or dieting or going to the gym or all these things, this anxiety comes up and that anxiety is just trying to get you to go do the things that make you feel like you have less of a threat and less of a target on your back in a situation when it comes to that, when you've been nitpicked forever,

it sucks. But this is an association that can also be set up in your head that will keep you in that anxious state because it's safer. And the other thing the anxiety is trying to do with this situation is make you cater yourself to everyone's preferences because you won't be nitpicked. If you can chameleon yourself to any person around you and figure out what every single person's preference is and then match that so you can hide certain things about your personality that you think they would nitpick. And that's the other thing the anxiety is trying to make you aware of is what do these people think? What are they like? What is safe to show? You're trying to assess how safe it is and what to display that is safe. So the anxiety is not there to attack you and beat you up.

If you don't know how to deal with conflict, your only option really to avoid conflict is to hide things and adapt yourself to the situation. So the anxiety is putting you on alert to make yourself safe. That's a big thing with people who think that their empaths. Being an empath is not some spiritual thing. It is a learned trauma response for a lot of situations. This is one of them. Like I said before, with example one, if your parent came in the door, all freaked out, you will think that you're an empath because the way that they open the door, you can notice and figure out what mood they're in.

And that doesn't come from being so intuitive. It comes from a learned experience of certain patterns reveal certain behavior. And you're trying to predict the attitude that someone is about to walk in the door with. You can sense when anything is off. You can sense when anything is different or what mood that anybody is in because you've learned to adapt to that, to protect yourself and prepare for whatever consequence you think might become it. Being an empath is a good thing, but it can also destroy you.

But like I said, if you don't know any way to protect yourself from conflict and you don't feel safe to stand up for yourself, you constantly just cater yourself to what other people like. That is the whole meaning behind my new merch coming out. The collection is called Fuck Forgiveness because you don't need anybody's forgiveness to live by your own preferences and do what makes you happy.

If they don't like it, they don't like it, that's fine. I don't need your permission, I don't need your forgiveness to be who I am and to like what I like. So this is the flip side of this whole experience of letting the anxiety run you turns into, I don't need anybody's permission to do what I like. So this is the flip side of this whole experience of letting the anxiety run you turns into I don't need anybody's permission to do what I want. I don't need your forgiveness for being myself. If you don't like it, you don't like it. And now that you're at a point where you understand your anxiety around catering yourself to other people's opinions is not to harm you, it's just to

keep you aware. You can now go into it with the mentality of, mm, wait, I don't need their permission to do what I want to do and dress how I want to dress and be who I am. So keep that in mind. And when I drop the fuck forgiveness collection, you could buy a shirt, you could buy a hoodie, you could buy the slides, whatever it is that's gonna help you remember that and keep it in the back of your head. You don't need anyone's forgiveness. But Halloween is when it all drops. It's finally official. So get ready, Halloween. Before we keep going with the anxiety stuff, speaking of taking a break, let's take one. Big thank you to the sponsor of today's podcast, which is HelloFresh. With HelloFresh, you get

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Sorry, no shade to the other ones. I've worked with a bunch like they're all great. But HelloFresh is the one I go back to. Even when they stop sending me stuff, I still order things if I need it. Like if I have a busy week, I'll just order a few meals and then it's easier to eat because I eat five times a day. Also everything's always very very fresh which is a really really key part. Like it doesn't feel old or fake or bad. Like nothing's been bad that I've ever

gotten. It feels like you just went to the grocery store, bought everything, and it's ready to go. Also for free breakfast for life, you can go to HelloFresh.com slash free aware. That's one free breakfast item per box while your subscription is active. That's free breakfast for life just by going to hellofresh.com slash free aware. If this is something you're interested in and you give them a shot, you will understand why they're America's number one meal kit, trust and believe.

Okay. Now back to the podcast. All right. Point number four, where this one's rough. So it comes from a self-punishment standpoint. This one is going to be the one that hits you the hardest and hits you the worst and makes you the most anxious and the most of a wreck and you constantly attract chaos. So if you are in a calm state and something happens that you didn't expect or something rips you out of it, or you experience anything bad in this life,

anything unwanted or anything that didn't go how you wanted it to go. If you automatically blame yourself for, if I didn't relax, if I didn't take time off, if I didn't just calm down and take time to myself, I would have been able to do something and prevented this from happening. Well, I could have done X, Y, Z, and you will beat yourself up mentally and convince yourself that you are the cause and your relaxation and your being calm

was what made this situation worse. Another way that the punishment side of how you punish yourself will come in is if you were not drained and dog tired when something went wrong, you don't feel like you are safe from taking on punishment. Like you will punish yourself if you have any energy left. So the anxiety that you feel is trying to protect you from that attack you're going to have on yourself of like, if I just drained myself and made myself tired, if I didn't take this time to relax, if I was up

and doing everything I needed to do and I prepared for this and I thought of anything that could go wrong, it wouldn't have gone wrong. That also creates an association with being drained and tired is safe. Just to let you know, relaxing is productive and it's very unfair to punish yourself for not preparing for something you didn't know was gonna fucking happen. So let me yell with the voice in your head for you. Shut the fuck up, leave my friend alone, all right? You didn't know it was gonna happen. It's okay. It's not your fault. You're gonna be able to handle it. Whatever happened, happened how it was meant to. It didn't get bad and your life is not worse and things are not worse because you didn't prepare for something you didn't know was going to happen.

It's like if you have some unexpected expense come up and a couple of days before you saw something in the store and you loved it and you bought and you like it, you got a new pair of shoes, you got a bag, whatever it is, you did something to make yourself happy. Do not a few days later when something bad happens, take away and punish yourself for doing something that made you happy when you did not know what was coming. Because if you knew what was going to happen,

you would have taken precautionary steps and maybe not have bought that thing. But do not go back and punish yourself for doing anything that made you happy and look at it like it's your fault for doing that because you could have had extra resources or could have been doing more for this thing that randomly just popped up. If you didn't know, you didn't know. And I'm someone who's dealt with that a lot. I was really really really bad about punishing myself but it's not fucking fair. You didn't know what was gonna happen. You didn't know to prepare for it.

And I know, I see you. If you knew something was gonna happen, you would have prepared better. So, if you got your new shoes, you got your new bag, whatever. Keep it, have it. Have that happiness. Don't remove and don't rip that happiness from yourself

and ruin that for yourself because you do not wanna set up an association of doing something to make me happy is now a feeling signature with doom and punishment. That I'll go into in another episode, but do not punish yourself for being happy and doing something that made you happy and make that the reason that things hurt worse.

Well, if I didn't do this thing, this wouldn't be so bad. Nope, that's not logical. Do not beat yourself up like that. It's not fair because that's what's gonna continue this cycle of anxiety because next time you try to go do something for yourself, you're gonna be over here anxious because you're anticipating, wait, I don't know what's about to come up,

so I don't wanna make myself happy. So you make yourself be unhappy to prepare for something you don't know might or might not happen. Don't do that. So those are a couple of ways that anxiety kind of is serving you and it's there for you. And I wanted to flip it in your head and reveal some of the associations that come up because now I'm going to point out you will get relaxation and you will get rest without

realizing it. You do not have needs that are unmet. You will meet them subconsciously in a manipulative way. And the way that I used to meet them with situations like this is constantly being so strung out, anxious, a wreck, freaking out, overthinking. And I would get so irritated and angry. And it pushed me to a point where I was like, you know what, I don't care no more.

I'm so drained, I'm so tired, I'm so stressed out, I've pushed myself past my limit, I've earned the ability to relax. And I don't care what happens. If things go bad, if things get worse, so be it. I have to go relax. Do not punish yourself to earn relaxing and being calm. You do not have to make yourself earn the ability to relax and be calm.

You do not have to earn relaxation with pain and suffering and stress. That is not something that has to be earned. You are allowed to relax and you are allowed to be calm. You are allowed to be happy without having to earn it with pain. That is not a real transaction. That's not how things go. That's not how things go emotionally. That's not how things go with God or the universe, whatever you want to believe in. That's not a transaction that exists.

That's just what makes you feel justified to finally relax without the anxiety, without the headache. You use anger to protect yourself from that anxiety. It's like, I don't care about you right now. It's your only protection you've learned. And I get it. So don't beat yourself up for it. But knock that shit off.

You're allowed to be calm. You are allowed to take time for yourself. You are allowed to relax on the couch and do nothing for a minute. If you've been doing what you need to do, take a second. You're allowed to, nothing bad's going to happen. And the way you can trust bad things won't continue to happen because you intentionally choose to relax is because you do not need to attract an experience to save

you from being calm. You now realize it's safe to be calm. These things in the back of your head and the things you've experienced weren't logical. You can't tell yourself, oh, this is the way that it's going to go. It doesn't make sense. You can choose to if you want, but you've already become aware of it. Your vibration shifted. So you don't need these experiences to come rob you of being calm.

So like I said, you're not going to be a match to this shit. You're not going to be a match to things coming in and ripping you out of the calmness because it's not unsafe. You see that being calm is a safe thing. You need to relax and be at states and points of being calm, or you're going to have to get it with anger and exhaustion, or you will manifest an illness. You will be a match to an illness because it will force you to stop and relax and be calm.

Everything is looking out for you. All these emotions, all these feelings are on your side. You just have to clear up how they've learned to be there for you. You don't need the anxiety to protect you from being calm because being calm is not unsafe. You are allowed to be at peace. You are allowed to feel relaxed for a minute. And like I said, you need it. Every single human being needs it. But as soon as you start to intentionally give yourself a minute to relax,

you're not going to need an illness and you're not going to need anger to justify you finally having a boundary and saying, I don't care. You're not going to need to force yourself to be calm. If you just choose to be calm for a minute, take five, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, whatever it is every single day. And when you notice the feelings of anxiety come up, reassure yourself, look around your environment, do it when you're alone.

Do it in a place when you're safe because you're about to reprocess this whole experience and look around your environment when you start feeling anxious when you're sitting down. Every single thought that comes up is valid. It's fine. But you have to reassure the thoughts and reassure your anxiety. There's no threat. I'm safe.

This is literally what you say to yourself. I'm safe right now. I can relax, I'm taking five, 10 minutes. All the things you're telling me I need to be doing, I'm gonna get to them. I'm gonna sit here and relax for five minutes. I'm safe. Literally get in your body, experience everything,

observe the emotions coming up, and then remind yourself that you're safe. You feel like there's a threat. The anxiety is coming up to get you on high alert and you can calm yourself down by seeing that there's no threat and reassuring yourself you'll get to it in a few minutes. You're taking a second to just relax and recharge. You deserve this. And the last thing I want to say about this whole shit and shebang is

you do not have to earn your feelings being cared about with pain. You do not have to suffer for how you feel to matter. As soon as you decide how you feel matters, it matters. You don't have to earn it. You don't have to suffer to be calm. You don't have to suffer to relax and you don't have to suffer to care how you feel. You can start to care about how you feel right now. And I highly encourage you that you do. But with that being said, that's all I've got for this episode. If you're listening to this on the audio version on Apple podcasts and Spotify,

hit the download button. That's one thing I didn't understand was like a big thing. Hit the download button every time you listen to an episode because it helps me a ton. Like it actually helps me so much more than you know. That's the way you could say thank you. So hit download, also rated five stars. That helps too, but the downloads help more. So love you.

Also let me know what emotion you want help with resetting and getting a new perspective on. This one was about anxiety. I will leave the link to everything you need for me in the description, all my social media is where you can keep up with me, my app, everything you need. Also, don't forget, new merch drops on Halloween.

So, if you're hearing this, your means you're at the end of the episode. I will be dropping it like a little passcode for you guys to get it early from the podcast. Because I love you guys to death. I wanna make sure you guys get priority and you can make sure that you get what you want.'s not sold out you get the size that you want and everything You can also get a sneak peek before everybody else

So just keep the date of Halloween in the back of your head very me very spooky holiday scary Okay, I'm done now for real everybody be safe. Take care of yourself, and I'll talk to you guys next Sunday