The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Stepping Off the Path of Anxiety

Episode Date: January 17, 2022

Many of the most painful or troubling emotions we experience are reactions to events that have actually happened - but one powerful and sometimes paralyzing feeling can be provoked by things as yet to occur. Say hello to anxiety.Psychotherapist and meditation teacher Andrea Wachter spent much of her life being stalked by the physical and mental manifestations of anxiety - the brain fog and the pit of the stomach dread of something bad looming on the horizon. She's amassed a wealth of strategies to overcome the thoughts and sensations that make up anxiety and she explains them to Dr Laurie Santos.You can try her meditations and courses on insighttimer.com/andreawachter, and for her books and blogs can be found at www.andreawachter.com Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. it's uncomfortable to sit with our messy feelings. Committing to getting curious about these sensations and facing them head-on might be an unexpected key to a happier life. In this episode, we're going to tackle a nasty feeling, one that I suffer from a lot. Today, we're in the company of anxiety. Well, I sort of feel like I was born bracing for impact. I came out what I call a sensitive breed, and many people who struggle with anxiety can relate to that. Just always felt more fragile than certainly my siblings and most of my friends. And that level of sensitivity led to a lot of anxiety. This is psychotherapist, author, and meditation teacher, Andrea Wachter. Nobody decides I'm going to wake up at two in the morning and worry.

Nobody decides I'm going to have a pit in my stomach all afternoon and feel shaky. It's just, it's these takeover mechanisms that happen automatically and unconsciously. And that's why I think we need so many tools to help us out. Andrea knows how awful anxiety feels because she's experienced it a lot herself, but she's also developed a suite of tools we can all use to face this emotion head-on and to feel better. I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and this is the Happiness Lab. Andrea is no stranger to anxiety. For more than 30 years, she's been passionate about providing people with strategies they can use to regulate this emotion. Well, I have two anxiety relief classes on Insight Timer so people can go through these lessons and gather the tools that resonate for them and then practice and practice and practice.

Andrea knows the importance of practice. She's had her own decades-long journey with dealing with anxiety. I used to just be walking around with fight or flight constantly and constantly thinking and obsessing. Unfortunately, the tools that I turned to when I was growing up were in the form of drugs and alcohol and cigarettes and a really terrible eating disorder. I used those things, I believe, in an attempt to try to cope with and tamp down my anxiety. After many, many strategies that didn't work, Andrea finally tried something new. A guy she dated asked her if she'd be interested in checking out a new class. And I said, what's the topic? And he said, presents.

And I said, like gifts, like stuff you get on Christmas. And he said, no presents, like being in the present moment. And I thought, well, I have very little experience with that. I might as well try a class. And I went to this class and it was all about being present. And they talked about Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now. And I got the book and literally felt like a bag had been taken off my head. I had really been haunted by my thoughts, but only for as long as I could remember, and just started practicing being present. And it was life-changing. But before getting into the idea that we can arm ourselves with tools to navigate anxiety, I wanted Andrea to help us better understand what anxiety actually is. Anxiety can manifest in several ways, mostly physically and mentally. It's worrisome thoughts, it's fight or flight in the

body, and it can be a variety of a spectrum really of how that plays out for people. And so you mentioned this idea of a fight or flight, you know, talk a little bit about what this means like physically in our bodies when these systems get activated. Oh, physically it can manifest as that pit in the stomach, tightness in the chest, shaking, nausea, headaches, fatigue, brain fog. There's just so many ways that people can feel taken over by anxious feelings and sensations. And those anxious feelings, as you mentioned, seem to go along with anxious thoughts. So what's going on there? Give me a sense of kind of what anxious thoughts feel like. Well, anxious thoughts are usually in the form

of what I call what ifs. What if this happens? And what if that happens? And just worrying. And we're usually, when we're worrying, we're not in immediate danger. Because when we're in immediate danger, we just deal with it. We don't have time to worry about it. So anxiety is usually about the future. It's kind of a sense that something is going to go wrong. It's often based on the past that things have happened. It's like a hostage takeover of just worrisome thoughts. One of the things that can happen when you're in the grip of anxiety, particularly anxious sensations, is it can be hard to believe that they don't necessarily need to be that way, that you can change them around, that you can take action against them.

We can't control what thoughts pop up in our minds, but we can control how we respond to them. And that's the work. That's when we bring in compassion. That's when we bring in questioning our thoughts. That's when we bring in mindfulness coming back to the present moment. You've talked about the idea that once we kind of recognize this cycle, there are these paths that we can take to kind of deal with anxiety. So share with me this metaphor that you've been using with your students. So imagine that you're on a path and this is the path of anxiety. You might be walking on it, you might be stuck or crawling, but you're on this path of anxiety. And on this path, there's often these anxious sensations in the body, like we just

talked about, these fight or flight, this cortisol and adrenaline just coursing through you. In addition to the anxious sensations in the body, when we're on the path of anxiety, there's usually worrisome thoughts in the mind. Now, oftentimes the worrisome thoughts in the mind cause anxious sensations in the body, but sometimes people can have anxious sensations and they are not aware that they were having any worrisome thoughts. So many times people will say to me, I wasn't even worrying. I was just in the shower doing my day and just taking over. So then people have worrisome thoughts about the sensations. So we can have anxious thoughts about our sensations and we could have anxious thoughts that cause sensations. In addition, when we're on the path of anxiety, we often have a sense of self-blame. Just like, I can't believe I'm still anxious after all that I do. After all the meditating I do,

I'm still anxious. All the work on myself, I'm still anxious. So then in addition to sensations and anxious, worrisome thoughts and self-blame, there's often a disapproval of the anxiety itself. I hate this feeling. I can't stand feeling this way. And I understand because it's unpleasant, it doesn't help. And in fact, it usually makes things worse. So here we are on this path of anxiety. Maybe you've been on it for two hours or two days, or as long as you can remember, And you come to a fork in the road and you see that there's an alternate path. And those are your anxiety relief tools. And this fork in the road is when you become aware that you've been on the path.

You've been lost in the trance of worry and obsessing on sensations and beating yourself up. And that's when we have the chance and the choice to choose a new path. And we go down that path as many times a day as we need to. And every change is preceded by awareness. So we have to wake up from the trance of anxiety and say, okay, I've been on it. Now I'm choosing. Even if you still feel it in your body, we're going to choose a tool at that moment. When we get back from the break, we'll talk about how we can wake up

from the trance of anxiety and find the alternative path Andrea was describing. We'll hear about some specific tools she's used to help her clients manage anxious sensations and why finding ways to just allow these negative experiences might, ironically enough, be the best path to stopping them. The Happiness Lab will be right back. I've been talking to psychotherapist and

insight timer teacher Andrea Wachter about anxiety. Andrea's own experience with anxiety has made her quite familiar with how this emotion shows up in our bodies. Just this pit in my stomach, this dread in my stomach. I didn't know that my thoughts were largely causing the sensations. I didn't know how to quiet my thoughts. I didn't know how to come into the present moment. I didn't know my thoughts were made up, that they weren't even real. And so when we think of kind of what our system is doing, you know, I think we often get really mad at the system and we feel guilty about it and so on. But in some ways, you know, having this fight or flight reaction is a smart reaction.

It is. It's the body's attempt to protect or prepare. It's a good try. It's just that the mind doesn't know the difference between really being in danger or thinking we're in danger. So when we're sitting there obsessing or worrying, the mind's going to respond with those stress hormones in the same way as if it would if we were just had a car accident. And so this is one of the reasons you often recommend sort of treating your anxious feelings like you'd treat kind of an

anxious child, you know, with this sort of self-compassion and kindness that comes with that. Why is self-compassion sort of so important when we're feeling anxious? Because we need compassion. Imagine talking to a child that came to you that was scared, and you yelled at them. Not only would they not feel better, they would feel worse. So we just as human beings, we soften when we're compassionate. We soften when we're given empathy and love and tenderness and soothing. And we tighten and get more stressed when we're given anger or more worry. You know, another thing we do that I think just absolutely doesn't work, I've done this myself, is this, all this resistance we bring to these feelings.

Like ultimately, they're just feelings, but we kind of hate them to the point that we're going to stuff them away or, you know, get busy or run away from them. You talk about why this is like not the best way to react to these anxious feelings. We don't necessarily want them, but like I tell my clients all the time, it's not going to be 70 with a light breeze every day. We have to deal with weather patterns and we have internal weather patterns. And in order to be healthy, emotionally healthy, and not need to use substances or behaviors to stuff down our emotions, we have to befriend them. We have to make peace with them and learn how to welcome them, accept them, and tend to them in a way that soothes them until they pass. welcome them, accept them, and tend to them in a way that soothes them until they pass. And then they come back again and we repeat.

And so this is why the toolkit for dealing with our anxious sensations can be so important. And so one of the tools in your toolkit, I know, is the idea of kind of working with your anxious sensations through the use of your breath. Why is the breath such an effective way of kind of dealing with anxious feelings? Well, for starters, it's an anchor that brings us home into the present moment, but it's also bringing oxygen into our bodies and really literally calming and slowing down our systems. Our breath is shallow when we're anxious. When we begin to deepen our breath and slow down our breath, it literally calms our system. Another move though is in some ways like the opposite, which is to kind of get the system moving, to kind of let the fight or

flight system kind of run its course. And you've talked about doing that through processes like exercise, but exercise in a particular way where you're really moving your body in a loving way. Yes. And this is also why I like to share such a wide variety of tools, because we don't always need the same thing in any given moment. Just like if a child is crying, they don't always need the same thing. And so we sometimes might want to get moving. We sometimes might want to get still and do a meditation. We sometimes might need to reach out for safe support. We need different things. So it's being able to tune into yourself and your body like a loving parent would tune into a child's needs. And one of those ways of tuning

in really involves like becoming one with your anxious sensations, no matter how they might feel, right? It's actually leaning into those anxious sensations by noticing what it means to be there with those sensations right now. And so what are some strategies in your toolkit that you've suggested for how people can kind of be with these sensations or just be in their body when they're going through something like this? Well, one thing is simply observing them, observing them without judgment, observing them like you would observe a painting on the wall. And again, that's challenging, but when we let go of the notion that they're bad and they should be gone, then it helps to be more of a neutral observer. And then many of the tools are about shifting. So shifting to something else, a healthy distraction,

so to speak, or using a tool. But yes, just being able to notice those sensations and even to talk to them, even to soothe them. I see you put your hand on your stomach or your chest and I am with you. You're okay. Imagine it, having a conversation, a compassionate dialogue with the sensations. Another tool that you talk about for kind of dealing with anxious sensations is what's called self-havening. What is self-havening and how does it work? Well, self-havening comes from havening, which is kind of bringing yourself into a havening place, a safe haven. And it was developed by a neuroscientist, Ronald Rudin. And he discovered that there were several parts of our bodies that when we use sensory touch, and in many cases,

adding calming words and images, that we can actually calm our systems. We can actually bring ourselves into delta brain waves, which are calming. And the three areas are the palms of your hands and your upper arms and the sides of your face. I hear from students often that they'll start this lesson out thinking, oh, please, I'm just going to rub my hands together and stroke my arms and feel better. And then they say by the end of the lesson, they are actually calmer and more relaxed. So it really works. Another thing you've advised is really just to start actually paying attention to your sensations more directly, not necessarily even the anxious sensations, but just the

information your sensory system is giving you. Yes. Well, this is basic mindfulness. So lots of people probably know that word and it basically means coming back to the present moment, bringing yourself here to what's actually factually here, where the mind is going to play those mind movies and take us away from the present moment. We can come back to our senses. So you can actually look around. What do I see right now? What shapes and colors do I see right now? What do I hear

right now? What am I touching right now? My body breathing, this inhalation right now, this exhalation. And even if you're still feeling anxious while you're focusing on your senses, that's okay. I like the idea of looking at if a fire has been burning for a while and you start to put it out, it still may be smoky and warm, but you still keep putting it out. Another tool that you use particularly for anxious sensations is this idea of finding a way to get the sensations without the stories. What does it mean to separate the sensations from the stories? It means noticing the sensations in your body without judgment, noticing the sensations with neutrality, which is challenging to do if you've

been hating them and arguing with them and wanting them gone for so long. It is a big shift, but it's extremely powerful. So far, Andrea has given us strategies for managing the anxious sensations that take over our body. But becoming truly curious about this emotion means listening to, and maybe even learning from, our anxious thoughts and stories directly. But how truly curious about this emotion means listening to, and maybe even learning from, our anxious thoughts and stories directly. But how do we face all those scary thoughts head on? We'll discuss some effective strategies for doing that when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. The mind movies can certainly feel very convincing and very enticing and so we want to learn how to question them i mean personally i was a mind movie with limbs for most of my life before i started

learning about mindfulness and learning tools i really was just hijacked by my thoughts and they were not all pleasant thoughts. Psychotherapist and meditation teacher Andrea Wachter knows how awful it feels to be stuck in the grip of an awful and seemingly never-ending stream of anxious thoughts. Our stories literally can take us down. So we want to be aware enough of when our mind has taken over the house, so to speak, and how to bring ourselves back to present moment reality. And that's the powerful thing because once you become aware that these things are thoughts, I think two things happen. One is that you can separate them a little bit

more, right? They're just a thought. It's an odd thing to realize, but it can be so powerful to be like, hey, this is just a thought in my head. It doesn't necessarily mean it's true. Right. And sometimes people feel so taken over by their thoughts that that really feels like that's all there is, that 100% of them is anxiety right now. But then if they can't find a part that's compassionate or a neutral witness or that they can speak to the anxiety from their heart, then we bring in another resource. Perhaps, how would you talk to somebody else right now? How would you treat a child right now? Because we all have compassion inside of us.

It's just being able to resource that to your most challenging feelings and thoughts. One of the interesting tools that you've given your students for how to deal with their thoughts and kind of make people, help people realize that their thoughts are not themselves is through some creative ways of talking back to your thoughts, which I quite love. So talk to me about this tool and some strategies for talking back at your thoughts in these kind of creative ways. Yes. Well, one lesson was strong, soft, silly, and silent. And just being creative with how you're going to talk back to your busy mind or your unkind mind. So it might be for some people or in some moments, it might be a stronger voice. That's not happening right now. And I'm going to

need you to focus on what we're doing. Right now, sweetheart, we are driving to work. Or it might be soft. Like, I know you're scared. I know life is big sometimes, but right now we're safe. Let's take a deep breath. Or silly, just, oh, you again, I've heard of you back again. Or silent, where you just shift your focus to something that's healthy, a healthy distraction, and you don't give it a lot of power, those thoughts. Have you had students use these kinds of different voices with some success? Like, what are some of their stories about these voices working for them? kinds of different voices with some success? What are some of their stories about these voices working for them? All the time. In fact, just yesterday, I received a note in my course

classroom from someone taking one of the anxiety classes. And he said that the notion of making his anxiety into a separate part, when he first listened to the lesson, he thought, oh, please, that's ridiculous. And then he tried it. And he said he was able to talk to his anxious part the way he would a friend. And he began to look forward to it, like, how am I going to roll up my sleeves and help my friend that I care about? And he said it was really calming his anxiety. Another one of the famous tools you've talked about in your anxiety course is this method, the work. What is the work and how do you do it? So basically the work was discovered by Byron Katie. She's an author and spiritual teacher. She goes by Katie and these questions came to her when she was at the bottom of the barrel

with addiction and eating disorder and suicidal and completely anxious. And she took or came up with these four simple questions and what she calls a turnaround. And you take a thought that is causing anxiety and you walk through these four questions and a turnaround. Should we try it together? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. So let's say someone is thinking the thought, I'm never going to be okay.

So the first question in the work is, is that true? And Katie asks for a yes or no answer. So I'm never going to be okay. And you go inside and you feel, is that true? I'm never going to be okay. I want to say, I don't know, but she says, nope, yes or no. If I say yes, it feels true. I would go to the second question. Are you absolutely sure it's true? She gives you a second chance. So am I absolutely sure that I'm never going to be okay? And I would really feel into that, really think about that. Probably I would come up with, no, I'm not absolutely sure. I mean, I don't really know anything if I think about it. I don't really know that that's true. Question number three, how do I feel when I believe that thought? And I really feel into it.

I'm never going to be okay. Dread, perhaps hopeless, perhaps throw in a little anxiety and depression. And then four, the fourth question, sometimes I feel like it's not even in the language of which I speak. It feels so deep and foreign. It's who would you be without that thought? And sometimes a thought can be so sticky and so convincing that it's hard to imagine who you'd be without it. But she asks us to

meditate on it, to really go inside and think, if I didn't have that thought, that I'm never going to be okay. And I would feel like I am okay, actually. I'm just sitting in a chair. I actually am okay. So we realize that it's the thoughts that take us down only every time. And then the turnaround is basically you play with that original thought, the opposite. I'm never going to be okay. I am okay. I'm always going to be okay. My thoughts are never going to be okay. You play with the thought and see how that feels. I love the work because I think it. You play with the thought and see how that feels. I love the work because I think it's just so powerful because when you get to that fourth question, this idea of like, who would I be if I didn't have this thought? Often you're like, I'd be badass if I didn't have this thought. I'd be fine. I wouldn't be shaking. And so I've found

the work to be helpful for dealing with anxious thoughts, which are often untrue or at least uncertain, right? Because that's the nature of them. But also just for so many of my negative thoughts about myself, it's like, well, if I didn't really believe this, who would I be? Like, well, I'd be better. Maybe I need to go back and work on those thoughts and kind of make them a little bit different.

Is this the kind of reaction you get in students? Have you had stories of them using the work for their anxious thoughts to make a difference? All the time, people are really affected in a positive way by the work for their anxious thoughts to make a difference? All the time, people are really affected in a positive way by the work. It really is one of the keys to breaking free from thoughts because it's so easy to think that our problem is what's going on in the world or our bodies, but the problem is what we think about what's going on in the world or our bodies. Certainly, there are real-life issues, but when our thinking is clear and present,

then the problems lessen and the anxiety really diminishes. And so we've now heard a bunch of different strategies, both for thinking about our anxious sensation and thinking about anxious thoughts. But I know when I'm like in the grip of anxiety, it can be very hard to remember how to do them. And so any strategies you can share for how to remember what to do and to remember to use this toolkit when we're kind of in the thick of our anxious moments? Absolutely. Well, one of the things that I recommend to my students a lot is to gather a list or a toolkit, if you will, of what your favorite tools are, whatever tools resonate for you,

and practice them till you really know how to do them, till they're second nature. So that way, when anxiety takes over and your logical mind might be a little quieter, you already practiced. And put that toolkit, put that list in a place where it's easily accessible and set yourself reminders, whether they're on your phone or post-its on your computer or your dashboard or a piece of jewelry sometimes people will wear to remind themselves to use a tool. And even if you're still anxious while you're practicing your tools, keep going. Because if you quiet your mind and question your thoughts and soothe your body enough times, it can't help but quiet down the anxiety. Speaking with Andrea made me realize that we don't need to run away

from our anxious thoughts and sensations. I mean, I'll be the first to admit that hanging out with anxiety can feel very uncomfortable. But by making the choice to sit with anxiety, by agreeing to listen to it and talk to it kindly, we can find ways to really learn what this sensation is trying to teach us. Andrea's living proof that with practice and patience and even more practice, your anxiety will start to relax over time. I hope Andrea's toolkit is a resource that you

can come back to whenever you find yourself in the path of anxiety. When you notice you're at that fork in the road, remember to take a moment and tune into what you need. Take a deep breath and remind yourself that you are not your thoughts and that you can start down a new path, one of calm and clarity. In our next episode, we'll focus on an emotion that I find to be the absolute scariest, especially when I see it in my friends or in myself. That emotion is anger. But it doesn't feel good. Like it doesn't feel good in our body and there's a physiological reason for it.

Our body is pushing us to do something. It's a very protective mechanism. And so the body is determined to force us into action in order to protect us, which is why it's so incredibly uncomfortable to feel angry and to want to do something about it as soon as possible. We'll look at what anger actually is, how it works in the body,

and what it's trying to tell us. We'll see that even a potent emotion like anger might be there to help us more than we realize. So I hope you'll join me again soon for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening

for only $4.99 a month. As a special gift to Pushkin Plus subscribers, I'll be sharing a series of six guided meditations to help you practice the lessons we've learned from our experts. Pushkin Plus is available on the show page and Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Ann Vaughn, and Courtney Guarino. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Christina Sullivan, Brant Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos. To find

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