Life Uncut - What You're Doing To 'Fix' Your Anxiety Could Be Making It Worse - Uncut with Anna the Anxiety Coach

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

Hey Lifers! Today we are joined by the wonderful Anna the Anxiety Coach We’ve spoken about anxiety loads of times before but not in this way.This conversation focused a lot more on the physiological side of anxiety and how we need to use a range of different things to combat the stress of our everyday lives. We speak about: The things that people commonly do to try and reduce their stress or anxiety, and how they can actually exacerbate it Talk therapy is a bandaid, not a solution Personality types that were more likely to develop anxiety Whether anxiety is a product of nature or nurture We also spoke about anxiety throughout different life stages, anxiety developing in kids, whether that be us as kids or in our kids now and whether it actually helps if you can identify the cause or trigger of where your anxiety came from.You can find more from Anna's website and grab her book The Vagus Nerve Reset If you have an question please send it on it to life uncut podcast on Instagram hereJoin us on tiktok Or join the facebook group here Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because WE LOVE LOVE! xxSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Life Uncut acknowledges the traditional custodians of country whose lands were never ceded. We pay our respects to their elders past and present. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. This episode was recorded on Darug Walamutta land. Hey guys and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Brittany. And I'm Laura. And today we have an incredible interview about a topic that I think affects most people at some point of life.

Now we're talking about anxiety and we're talking about it with an anxiety specialist. Her name is Anna the Anxiety Coach. She's the author of the book, The Vegas Nerve Reset, and this is an episode you guys have wanted us to do for a very long time. So we're really happy to be able to bring it to you today. And it's not like we haven't spoken about anxiety before. We definitely have loads of times, but not in this way. this conversation is going to focus a lot more on the physiological side of anxiety and how we need

to use a range of different things to combat the stress of everyday lives because let's face it you might not be diagnosed officially with anxiety but you're going to experience points of it in your life i found this so interesting and like you said we have done episodes before on anxiety actually one of my favorites we did a big episode with osha however i think the thing i loved about this episode is that so often when we talk about anxiety, we talk about the different types of treatment. We talk about meditation and journaling, and we talk about talk therapy. Whereas the thing that Anna gets into in this is not just around the ways in which you can treat it, but she really unpacks the physiological side of anxiety. What is happening in your body? What is attributing to it?

Why are some people more susceptible to it than others? What things can happen in life that can trigger very chronic bouts of anxiety? And I think that's such an interesting place to unpack what it does to your brain, not just how it feels, which is something that I think usually is what anxiety chat circles around. Yeah. And the personality types that are more likely to develop anxiety and whether anxiety is a product of nature or nurture. I think that is a big one because a lot of us are like, where is this coming from? Why am I experiencing it? Joining the podcast today is Anna Ferguson, AKA Anna, the anxiety coach to her 280 plus Instagram family. A thousand plus. Yeah, 280,000. 280k. Anna is a counsellor. She's a speaker. She is now an author

with a degree and quite a few others in qualifications in psychology. Anna, welcome to Life Uncut. So happy to be here with you both. Thank you for having me. Anna, we're so excited about this because I feel like anxiety is something that not everybody deals with their whole life, but at some point in their life, I feel like it's something that everybody is going to come into contact with whether it's just for one moment in time or somebody in their life and we are going to get into that in a hot second but before we do we need your embarrassing story what do you got for us okay so I thought long and hard about this but uh one moment that feels really shameful in my brain even though it had nothing to do with me was when I was

I just started a new school I had a horrific haircut I was already feeling very embarrassed about just going to a new school and meeting new people but I'd done myself up I was feeling really good and I walked down the busiest road in Melbourne to the train station and I was getting honked by every car and I was like okay yeah I'm feeling myself and it wasn't until I got to the train station that this lovely old lady was like um your skirt is tucked up in your underwear it was just as a 15 year old like I opened the train door and I just wanted to vomit on the people that I'd met like already because new girls from my school were right there and I was just like bang bang these two things happened and I was I was mortified but that was just one of those

moments that stuck out in my brain where I was like you know it just humbles you when you get brought down a level when you think you're feeling good. Anna I feel this so deeply but you might not remember this but when okay we years and years when we very first started the podcast the exact same thing happened to me I was walking along the main thoroughfare like like it's a main main street it's four lanes it's full of busy traffic and I thought this guy was checking me out he was there with his kids and I was like mummy vibes yeah look at me I just had my little girl anyway I thought I still had it fucking did not have it he was not checking me out he walked up to me was like I'm so sorry to embarrass you but my skirt was tucked into my g-string so it was just like

everything you do still have it though I don't know that's debatable I think he was checking you out simultaneously. He was checking you out and then he's also like, I do need to like this woman. No, I do not think he was a single man. I think he was just mortified for me. And I was assaulting him in the main street. He was like, this is indecent exposure more so now. And I feel like there's so many more conversations that are being had around anxiety. Even in the last 10 years, the visibility around conversations, talking about anxiety, people being aware that that's what they're experiencing. We've seen such a massive shift. And a big part of that is also because of social media, people like you discussing it. Do you think that anxiety is on the rise or do

you think it is just more visible? I think it's probably a combination of the two. I think we live in a society now where we're so digitally connected with one another that it's become almost isolating and that isolation in and of itself has really made it difficult to not compare yourself to other people to not fear going out and being judged to not understand the uncertainty what social media does really is give us certainty in our life like we could see what's out there we can understand what other people are doing and then compare our lives to it so yes I think there's probably a slight increase I think the pandemic probably increased a lot of people's anxiety levels as well like having to be at home 24 7 really changed the way in which we interacted

with ourselves, but also we just are better at noticing the signs and symptoms too now. And there's less stigma involved with mental health too. You just mentioned this idea of certainty and social media. And I think it almost works twofold because in one hand, you have the certainty of seeing what other people have achieved or the way in which other people are living. And I don't think that that's the only reason why people have anxiety, but obviously it attributes to it. But then there's the increased uncertainty as to how one can achieve that for themselves and how we can have the things that maybe we aspire to or want all that gap between where we want to be in life. Yeah, which can be a really positive and motivating factor for some people. But that gap

without knowing how to bridge it sometimes can be so anxiety-inducing because we become perfectionists. We start to compare ourselves to other people. It's never enough. We're a failure if we're not succeeding the way that other people are. And so maybe the definition of success is not our personal definition of success instead we've kind of like delegated that for other people to decide what that is for us and that can be very disempowering and anxiety inducing because when we're trying to live up to these standards and norms that aren't necessarily our own then you're always going to be chasing something that doesn't feel fulfilling for yourself or authentic yeah Anna how did you come across this and what was your experience with anxiety that made you want

to go so deep on it. Yeah. So I was in a roller coaster accident when I was 10 years old. But from the experience of being in that roller coaster accident, I was angry. I was angry all the time. I was angry at my parents. I was angry at myself. I was 10 years old. I had no idea what was happening. So I became so rebellious and so disconnected from myself, from my peers. I used to own that label of being the black sheep all of the time. What was the accident? I was just tall enough to be on a roller coaster we went down a dip and the cart in front of us malfunctioned and stopped and we smashed into the back of it a few times with my sister and i it's like your worst nightmare especially as a parent you just trust it like your parents being there yeah and i think

that's probably the hardest thing is like my dad was on the cart behind us and my mom was watching from below and i just can't imagine what that would have felt like for her to be witnessing this from such a different perspective from the rest of the family. But from that, like physically I was injured. My sister was injured. I had a bruised heart. That was like the most severe part was that I had a bruised heart. So my heart rate was really high. They were worried I was going to have a heart attack. I was in hospital for quite a while. I had to go back to hospital every six months and do fitness tests until I was 18 years old. Wow. From 10. Yeah. So it was always one of those things that I absolutely hated because I had to wear a halter monitor to

school. I felt like a freak, like it was just something that really, it ground my gears. So I was really angry. And so as a result of that, I would abuse substances and go out and just be really rebellious because I didn't know how else to feel something different other than what I was feeling. And so when I decided that I, one day I decided to go and do martial arts because it was a very vacuous reason another girl at my school was doing and i loved her legs i was like she's got great legs she does i'll do what she does yeah so i was like what's your secret she was like mma i was like all right done i'm like gonna go and join a martial arts studio but i went in there i had no idea what i was walking into like this male dominated sport but i loved it like

every part of my body. It was the first time that I felt my body just like say, yes, like I actually feel good right now. And so that was like enough for me when I was 18 to go like, okay, like this feels good. I want to do more of it. I haven't felt good in a while, but that was kind of the catalyst for me going like, okay, well maybe I've done years of therapy now and it's not quite getting me anywhere. This feels therapeutic. So I'm going to do this for a while. And that kind of started the like the escalation of my exploration into the mind body connection and how these two things kind of uh not separate from one another but very much a complex interplay and how we can kind of support both of those things to work in synergy as opposed to intention with one another

what is happening physiologically to somebody that's sitting at home now saying i don't know if i've ever actually had anxiety or if i'm just stressed i'm one of those people i know i've had anxious moments, but I would never have classified myself as having anxiety. So what are people experiencing physiologically? Yeah. So I think it's first and foremost, really important to understand that everyone will experience anxiety at some point. Like you said, you have anxious moments from time to time, but anxiety in a, like a disordered sense of the term is where physiologically our sympathetic nervous system is in an activated state for a prolonged period of time which means that our body is basically operating at full tilt we're on high alert our

eyesight gets better we are good at hearing we're very honed in on what's in front of us we're stronger there's more blood being pumped around our body and as a result of that we have an increased heart rate our breathing rate increases we're often breathing through our mouth we might be really tense as well so is it like living in a constant state of fight or flight yeah yeah absolutely constantly on edge like that inability to wind down at the end of the day that's from your body being in this state of fight or flight and what is for somebody who is then suffering with chronic anxiety if we're operating in this state what does that then do for you long term yeah so long term it has some pretty uh difficult and challenging symptoms that come up

because obviously your body's not meant to operate in this full tilt state all of the time which means that autoimmune conditions chronic fatigue obviously just burnout in general are going to be one of the most common things that happen but just the rise of inflammation in the body can lead to so many different issues physically and emotionally for us because our body is constantly trying to combat something that it shouldn't necessarily be combating and so we tend to see people especially I see a lot of autoimmune conditions is probably the most common thing digestive issues, autoimmune conditions, muscle issues, like sore back and sore shoulders. These are all really common things that occur over a long term when we're in a chronic state of fight

or flight. And I guess then in terms of how somebody experiences anxiety, is it very similar to stress? So fundamentally, if you look at trauma, stress and anxiety, like physiologically, they are the same experience in our body. But what the manifestation of it when you look at on a day-to-day basis, like we can get stressed and we can get anxious, but if we're able to move back down into that state of safety and feeling calm again, then we kind of down-regulate that fight or flight response. When it stays on, that is when it becomes a disordered kind of state of chronic stress or chronic anxiety. What are the telltale signs for someone when it tips over into, okay, this is actually, you have a chronic anxiety condition, something that you need to actually go

and do something about versus it being environmental or circumstantial or there being a reason as to why you feel the way in which you feel about your anxiousness. Also just that you're not living a stressful life like everybody. You know, cost of living gives you anxiety. How am I going to pay bills next week gives you a level of stress. You know, how am I going to pay my kids' school fees? It's all pretty high levels of stress too.

I think individually once you start to realise that it's hard for you to not be in that stress state. Like anytime that your state of anxiety or stress becomes something that you no longer feel like you have control over or it's impacting your day-to-day life. So you've changed your behavior so that, okay, for example, you're under financial stress. So you're working way more, which means maybe you don't get to spend time with your family. So it's changed your behavior in your day-to-day life, which means that you're being impacted in a way that you weren't being impacted before. So I think fundamentally we start to look at what has changed behaviorally. That's probably first and foremost. And second of all, you tend to know when

you start to feel out of control, right? That horrible sinking feeling that you're like, I'm just a passenger right now and my body is doing things that I no longer am choosing or can stop from doing. So having those physical symptoms of a racing heart rate or breathing too fast. And I think when we can notice that and get very good at noticing those stress states and when we're not able to bring ourselves back into a state of calm, if we aren't able to do that, that's a good time to attend to anxiety and stress. The moments that I have felt like maybe I'm having an anxiety attack or a moment in time where it's usually like a couple of week period, it's for me presents as I don't sleep at night. And when I do sleep, it's really subconscious.

And I have nightmares about the things that I've been stressing about. Yeah, absolutely. And I see it as our body goes through stress response cycles. So everything is a cycle and like you stub your toe you have a stress response cycle you forget your coffee or you spill it on yourself stress like these things happen all of the time but the way in which our body naturally wants to complete them is to have this response and then for you to take an action so with fight or flight for example it wants you to move it wants you to get away from something it wants you to like do something and when we don't do that thing then we kind of leave that loop open. We don't actually bring it back down to kind of downregulate. And when we have all of

these open loops across days, weeks, months, years of our life, that is when it really starts to kind of cause this like cascading of events in our body and mind. And it could just be a few open loops that cause that, but everything in our life causes stress and it's not a bad thing, but it's just how we kind of handle that stress. And if we're bringing ourselves back into that state of down regulation. Anna, can you talk to us about your book, The Vegas Nerve Reset? I think that's a really interesting title because the book is holistic and science-based. Why is it so important to be resetting this nerve and how does that connect to this dysregulation in our nervous system? Yeah. So the Vegas nerve is such an interesting nerve because it makes up almost

75% of the parasympathetic nervous system. So if you think about that, your parasympathetic nervous system is basically your pathway it's your one kind of key to unlocking calm and your rest state and being able to connect with other people and that's basically all housed within this vagus nerve and so if we look at it from that physiological perspective it gives us the capacity to actually go how do we strengthen this pathway in order to access calmer states in order to feel more at home in our body in order to connect people and with ourselves as well so that is why i think the vagus nerve is fundamentally going to be one of the most powerful things that we can look at and integrate into our healing journeys well so then how do we

how do we strengthen this one nerve to engage in a more calm life is this meditation practices like what does it look like in somebody's day-to-day because you know obviously we can't get into our brain and be like she's gonna work on that nerve like give it a bit of keratin and get on with it you're not doing bicep curls on the nerve you know i wish we could and it is interesting because they are doing lots of studies on like different stimulation devices and stuff now for the vagus nerve but fundamentally this nerve if you look at what you do in a day-to-day life your vagus nerve is going to be impacted by what you eat how you exercise how you breathe so like one of my favorite things to do is look at how people are breathing and whether that is

an optimal way for them to be breathing so a lot of us are mouth breathers and like you'll walk around you start to notice people are breathing all through their mouth and what this does is it keeps our breath very shallow and when our lungs are not expanding the way that they should this impacts our vagus nerve because those receptors are sending messages to the brain to say hey our lungs aren't functioning properly and so when we can correct our breathing pattern we really give our vagus nerve a very healthy signal that things are working fine and that starts to down regulate our brain and our body. So my favorite thing to do when it comes to, I'm not a huge proponent of meditation, but when it comes to breathing, correcting your breathing pattern. So understanding

how to breathe diaphragmatically into your belly so that your belly expands outwards. I feel like my belly's always expanded outwards now. You're pregnant. We breathe into our belly so that when we inhale, our belly expands out and when we exhale, it contracts. And this is a really new process for a lot of people. But if you can start with your breath, that fundamentally changed my life when I was able to correct my breathing pattern because I was over breathing all the time and I was having all sorts of weird symptoms like losing feeling in my fingers and my toes. And so that breath is kind of that foundational autonomic process that we really have access to that strengthens our vagus nerve. What are the most common things that you see that people are

doing on a day to day that are actually inflaming their anxieties? Yeah. So you said two really good ones obviously lack of sleep and alcohol are a really really common one breathing patterns is another really common one our posture the way that we hold our body is going to impact our vagus nerve and nervous system our environmental toxins so you know what we're breathing in on a daily basis and not to alarm everyone because i've gone down rabbit rabbit holes before and i'm like oh my god i'm covered in toxins i've dated a lot of toxins but just like looking around your house and understanding like what it is that impacting your like bio individual physiology so understanding the food that you eat the things that you kind of uh expose yourself to including people like

you said you've dated a few times i mean that was a joke but yeah yeah so like that impacts us because if I'm looking at you and I'm not getting signals that I'm safe and things are good, then my body's going into a state of fight or flight. And that's really going to weaken our parasympathetic nervous system. And so we need to be really aware of all of these different things that are happening from a very holistic perspective, because all of them are going to play a role when it comes to anxiety. It is something that makes sense that we've had this enormous rise in the amount of chemicals that we're being exposed to. From the research that you've done and everything that you've read into what impacts is that having on us a huge impact on our nervous

system because we first of all a lot of these chemicals haven't been studied over the long term to see like what that impact is but as you could like in society we see a lot more autoimmune conditions so just increased inflammation so if your body meets a chemical for the first time its way of dealing with it is to have an immune response so it creates inflammation to go is this safe or is this not safe now the chemical might not kill you immediately but it might just create this inflammation response and then your body's like i still don't know about this thing it doesn't seem like it's doing a good thing for our body so it keeps creating that inflammation response and as a result of that probably the most common things is like crohn's disease ibs ibd lots of

different digestive issues that occur from just being exposed to chemicals like even just the receipts that we receive from supermarkets and stuff covered in BPAs and all these chemicals that we shouldn't be exposed to. But at the end of the day, you can't avoid them. And there's no point living your life in a fear of them all of the time, but it's about minimizing the impact that they might have on you. So understanding what you do have control over in your home, for example, is really going to allow you to kind of reclaim a little bit of that control. What is the connection with anxiety to our gut and this response we have? We make a joke here that Laura's a nervous poo-er.

Like you get that nervous before something and you're like, ah, I quickly have to poo. It's a quick way to flush it out, everyone. A bit of anxiety, clean as a whistle. But I used to be like that before sporting competitions or things like that. Like, fine, you do not need to go to the toilet. And then when you know you've got two minutes, you're like,

oh, let's quickly do a quick poop. What is that connection? So the gut and the brain and the gut and anxiety and all of these things are so closely interlinked. So basically what happens, why we do nervous poos is like when we enter into a state of fight or flight our body doesn't need to digest food so what it does is it either evacuates your bowels or it holds on to it and most people will evacuate their bowels when they enter into a state of fight or flight because it's much easier for your body to kind of

pump blood into different areas you don't want to be pumping blood into your gut when you are trying to run away from someone it's literally easy to run on an empty stomach you don't want to be eating something while you're trying to fight off someone so that is why it happens but like the connection between the gut and the brain is is so important because fundamentally what happens in our gut is going to impact the neurotransmitters that we have like serotonin and GABA in our brain and when we're in an anxious state you don't feel like eating you're you're having trouble like not going to the toilet regularly or being constipated and so it wreaks havoc with the kind of ecosystem that's going on in our gut as well so super common so never feel

embarrassed about nervous poos. They're so normal. I know we're talking about the physiological effects it has on our bodies and also in terms of like long-term the impacts it can have, but also like the impacts it has on your relationships. It's this feedback loop that affects every part of your life because if you're anxious, you can't have great relationships with the people you love because you're so inward facing in those moments. What is the long-term effect or net effect of not dealing with severe anxiety. Yeah. That's going to be so varied for everyone else, but you poo a lot. You might be pooing a lot by yourself. We laugh. It's not funny, but the reality is the longer that we don't pay attention to the signals that our body is sending us,

the more disconnected from ourself that we feel. And when we're disconnected from ourselves, it's really difficult to make decisions that feel good and empowering it's really difficult to get up each day and keep going and doing what you want to do in your day-to-day life it's really difficult to find pleasure in the things that you once found pleasure in right because you're just you're in your head you're not actually having this human experience of the physical and the spiritual and the emotional all intermingling together and so I see like the reclamation journey is really the journey that we're on every single day like of our lives no matter whether you have anxiety disorder or not but that finding that connection to yourself is kind of like the

antidote to having anxiety disorder experiencing trauma reconnecting the dots between the mind and the body is such a powerful thing that we can do because that is essentially what is broken when we start to continue on this long-term tear of not paying attention to what's going on in our body if somebody is now like listening to this feeling as though they do maybe struggle with anxiety above what might be a normal condition what are the first steps what should they be doing to try and resolve this I think the first step is that great you have so much beautiful self-awareness that is really all you need to take that first step and then the next step is totally up to you as to whether you want to reach out to someone that you feel safe reaching out to and I think

this is often where we kind of miss the point is like I get so many people reaching out for the first time to me because they feel safest with me on social media because maybe it's less intimidating to reach out to someone that you don't know which is why our mental health care system is so important because it gives you the capacity to actually share this information without feeling judgment or fear of family and friends now if you have someone that you feel comfortable with is your family and friends and by all means sharing that with them but I think what we kind of fundamentally miss out on is often we head straight into like the talking aspect and this is kind of the gap that I'm starting to bridge is let's start with the body and attending

to how the body feels because that's going to give you back control over how you're feeling and then we can start to look at talking through what the limiting beliefs and the mindset work and all of the different things that come from being able to actually feel into the emotion instead of intellectualizing the emotion as well so for most people I would say it's time to like listen to your body like what is it actually saying to you is it saying like I want to go for a run is it saying that I need to connect with other people is it saying that I just want to make myself small or hide from someone like listen to that nudge and start to see if you can play those out in a safe space in your own home so that you start to feel a little bit more connected with yourself

which is going to allow you to take that next step too. You did write in your book that talk therapy is a band-aid, not a solution. And I think that is probably going to surprise a lot of people, me included. So you're saying that you truly believe the talk should come second. I mean, I guess simultaneously is great as well. This is my experience. So I'm by no means saying that this is for everybody, but it's also many of the clients that I've worked with is that we can, as humans, we are so good at intellectualizing,

at creating distance from our emotions like I can tell you a story that's once upon a time was so painful but now I've told it so many times that I'm like yeah it's like over there it doesn't hurt me anymore we also witness it with the you know the so many people that we've interviewed over the years there's people who have been through immense traumas but they have said their story so many times that it's almost like rote memory for them it's like they're telling a story that happened to someone else yeah yeah and the brain is really good we have this capacity for a reason because it's a defense mechanism so it protects us from actually feeling the really painful emotions or the physical pain that comes from the traumatic experience that has happened

in our life now if that is the case and it's really difficult for you to actually feel and you're feeling like i'm okay like everything's fine but then you have triggers coming up all over the place that is a very good sign that your body is actually still in a state of like something is wrong we need to deal with this but your brain is trying to tell everything that it's okay right and so the reason why i say it's a band-aid not a solution is because like fundamentally we can trick ourselves into thinking i've dealt with this i've talked about it it's all good but we our body is still reacting as if it is still happening and so if we're not attending to that physiological response system then we're always going to be kind of pulling ourselves back

into that state and then we start to beat ourselves up what's wrong with me i've been in therapy for six months now i should be feeling better some people have been in therapy for years and they're like i've worked on all these limiting beliefs and i'm still not feeling like confident and comfortable in my body and so i think if we kind of just rejig the sequence a little bit and we start to attend to like how is the body responding what are your triggers what is the physical manifestation of this and then we kind of open up the channel for actually being able to talk about it from a much more connected space as opposed to an intellectual one. Do you think that there's personality types who are more susceptible to deal with anxiety and

to struggle with anxiety? Absolutely. I mean, we're all born with different kind of preconceived characteristics and how we're nurtured as a child. All of these things are going to play into it. Obviously, if you have certain characteristics like higher neuroticism, which is not a bad trait to have, then you're probably more vulnerable to experiencing something like anxiety. What about for the people who have anxiety and they can't pinpoint where it's come from? Because I think if you've been through a big trauma or there's something that's been significantly difficult in your life, you can kind of figure out the trigger. And so therefore, and I'm not saying it makes it easier, but it makes it identifiable. And then there's definitely

people who have anxiety but they may have had a seemingly great life in comparison and it doesn't seem to have come from anywhere does that make it harder to manage and to treat or is it the same like would you take the same approach whether you know the source of your anxiety or not? I don't necessarily think knowing the root of your anxiety is necessary in order to successfully treat yourself because at the end of the day we could look at the body and how the body and mind are interacting and go okay what are we responding to and it goes back to what I was saying about those open stress response cycles like we don't need to have a big trauma in our life to experience anxiety we just need to have not attended to the stresses that we have in

our life in order for this to come to fruition so really I support individuals the same way because it's looking at how our body's reacting why is that reacting can we start to down regulate that reaction or to finish off these stress response cycles in a really healthy way for our body to actually go, I'm safe. This is my home. It's okay for me to be here. Do you find that anxiety gets worse over time as people get older or is it something that can, the severity of it can hit at any stage of life? Because I mean, when I speak about it personally, I feel like as I've gotten older, I have gotten more anxious because of the things that I have, like having children, there's more things to worry about. Yeah. And that's an interesting thought because I have

such a diverse range of clients and people that come into my space and I think it can really hit you at any point of your life with any amount of severity but I'm 20 weeks pregnant now definitely feel that anxiety building up like there's something else that I have to fight for be worried about like think about what's going on in my environment constantly so that you're putting yourself into a state of hyper alertness so it would make sense that would happen I think it's a really interesting question and a statement you made before Laura was that you know anxiety usually increases with age but we are seeing now a lot of younger teenagers and children that are being treated for anxiety how much of that do you think is a nature versus nurture something that

we're born with with these predetermined character traits and how much is you know my mom is full of anxiety she's flying around the house yeah I definitely think that no one is born with an anxiety disorder like you look at our environment now we're exposed to so many more chemicals we're exposed to so much more the hustle culture our parents working like go go go all of the time then you add in like generational trauma and the ways in which maybe we are inadvertently passing on our own worries and fears to our child which is totally normal if we're aware of it we can do that with like tact but if we're not aware of it then we're kind of instilling this fear of the unknown. So I think it's probably more so the nurture side of things, the environmental side

of things and nature in and of itself, because even if you are more vulnerable or predisposed to something like anxiety, what happens to you in your early years of life or how you're brought up or what you're exposed to can give you resilience and can make you more strong, allow you to actually navigate that with more ease than if you didn't. For anyone who is a parent and they're listening to this and they have a child who is experiencing anxiety it's so hard for you as a parent to know what they're feeling in their body because you're like well you're a you're your own little human and you're too young to maybe understand what those feelings are as well how can you support your kids not just through going to a therapist or a child psychologist or

whatever it is but to try and tap into the way in which they feel how do you support that framework but for a child and for them to understand it yeah so i think kids are really good at going like I feel angry and they make themselves look angry or like move their body because that's what it feels like when we're angry we tense up and make ourselves big so actually asking those questions like what does that feel like in your body right now I notice you're a bit tense like can you explain what's going on for you breaking it down onto that granular level really helps kids go like yeah I am feeling this and they'll play it out with you but facilitating that conversation in almost a fun way so that you go when I feel sad I might make myself small so you're modeling that

for them and so it gives them the language first and foremost in a really simple way but it also gives them the way to connect what's going on internally with their physical expression of it as well and I think that's a really powerful tool that we can give kids to start to be able to express maybe when they don't have the vocabulary to really go into their experiences. How do you take the step if you are experiencing anxiety and or depression and I say depression because we do know that they're often linked how do you take that next step of saying okay I need something a little bit more therapy's not helping MMA for my legs isn't helping I need medication so I'm definitely not a doctor and I will 100% always refer people to go and speak to their GP their

trusted medical professional medication is a life-saving tool for so many people and if that is the pathway that you feel like you need to take, then you need to go and speak to a GP and a medical professional to talk about how you can do that safely. And if this is going to be an ongoing thing, say with antidepressants or SSRIs, how you're going to have a plan to come off of those as well, because that's a really important stepping stone too, is to go in with a plan of this is a tool to use in the short term. Not forever. Yeah. And so it gives me the capacity to feel different and to have the motivation to do things like I utilize this time while I'm using this tool to then go talk to someone to utilize my body to do somatic therapy whatever it is that

you choose but it's not the it's not the cure to the issue that you're experiencing so using everything as a tool I don't think one thing on its own is going to be the be all and end all it's like okay yes talk therapy yes somatics yes medication if needs be all of these things play a roll and make up this puzzle. So definitely talking to a medical professional, if that is something that you feel, you know yourself better than anyone else and don't let anyone else sway your decision one way or another, like not even me. That's what I say to people is like, you need to be in control of making these decisions for yourself. And I thank you so much. For anyone that does want to find out more, you can get your book literally anywhere. The Vegas Nerve Reese.

Anywhere you can get a book. Good bookstores, bad bookstores. It'll be at all bookstores. they'll be they'll be there yeah the vegas nerve reset we are also going to put the link in our show notes if you guys are interested to hear more well we hope you guys loved that episode and if you know someone or have someone in your life that you think could benefit from that in some capacity please send it on to them because i feel like everybody can do with a little helping hand sometimes yeah absolutely share it with your friends share with people you love and also if you have loved this episode you can go and follow us at life uncut podcast on instagram you can also join the discussion group and talk about the topic in that and that's on facebook and you guys know

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