The Life Of Bryony - 40. The Life of YOU: Why You Cancel Plans Last Minute – The Hidden Cost of Anxiety

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

Welcome to The Life of YOU! The bonus series where we tackle your dilemmas and share advice to navigate life’s trickier moments. Today, I’m joined by the brilliant Dr Alexandra Shaker, psychologist, researcher, and author of The Narrowing, for an insightful Q&A on anxiety, mental health, and breaking the cycle of overthinking. Today: 💬 Simon struggles with anxiety making him socially withdrawn—cancelling plans, avoiding messages, and feeling guilty. 💔 Niamh can’t stop seeking reassurance in relationships—how can she break the habit? WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU 🗣️ Got a question or a story to share? Text or send a voice note on 07796657512—just start your message with LOB. 💬 Use the WhatsApp shortcut: https://wa.me/447796657512?text=LOB. 📧 Prefer email? Drop me a line at [e-mail] If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone who might need it—it really helps! CREDITS: 🎙️ Presenter: Bryony Gordon 🎙️ Guest: Dr Alexandra Shaker 🎧 Producer: Jonathan O’Sullivan 📢 Executive Producer: Mike Wooller A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to The Life of You, the bonus episode where we tackle your questions and share advice to navigate life's trickiest moments. This week, I'm joined again by Dr Alexandra Shaker, clinical psychologist, researcher and the author of The Narrowing. Alexandra's work is all about understanding anxiety, not just as a mental health issue, but as a whole body experience. We cannot eliminate the possibility of bad things happening. There is nothing we can do in most instances to fully eliminate the possibilities of bad things happening.

All of your questions answered right after this. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. I feel like my anxiety makes me socially prickly. I cancel plans last minute, avoid answering messages, and then feel guilty for being a bad friend.

You can see my hands like, oh, I know this. How do you balance protecting your mental health without completely isolating yourself? And that's from Simon. I mean, this totally speaks to me. Like I am supposed to be going out for dinner tonight, Ali, and I am just like, how can I not go and do this thing? And I know that if I cancel, I'll get a relief.

But what I'll also be doing is reinforcing my anxiety. I wholeheartedly agree with you. I think that in those moments in which we cancel a plan, especially a social situation that's giving us anxiety, we get momentary relief from avoidance, essentially. And we actually miss out on an opportunity to potentially spend time with people we love, to have an experience that is one of genuine connection.

I think generally speaking, the actually anxiety relieving thing to do is go to the thing. When you, for Simon or whomever, when you, I don't know, yeah, when you cancel, you also are sort of telling yourself that you can't manage it. You're reinforcing to yourself that the thing that you've decided not to do is sort of telling yourself that you can't manage it. You're reinforcing to yourself that the thing that you've decided not to do is sort of beyond you, it's too much. And I think that with the sort of like costume of protection of maintaining your mental health, et cetera,

it's often sort of like undercutting in fact. It's really interesting though, isn't it? Like I have this terror of being out after 6 p.m. Like it's, I just want to be at home and I know this is anxiety and I need to address it because it is starting to limit me a bit. I find the evening really difficult and I don't know, and I always have,

like I found going to sleep when I was a kid really hard. And I wonder sometimes if that's why I used to drink quite a lot, you know, cause it was like a way to get through, but I just wanna hunker down and numb and disappear. I think many people with anxiety notice points in the day where their anxiety peaks. And I think to your point, there is probably,

and I don't have data to support this, but I would not be surprised if it exists, to support drinking and that particular shift into evening for many, many people. There are also a lot of people who find anxiety peaking in the morning, sort of like right at the start of the workday, but sort of pervasively even on the weekends and so forth.

So I think it depends on the person, but it sounds like for you, there is this association to evening, and you kind of expect it. It's associated with sleep for so many people, they lay down and their fears are really front and center and so forth. I mean, I suppose what that means is that we have to sort

of know ourselves, we have to know the points in our day or our week when we're most likely to kind of want to pull back, want to avoid so that, you know, to the extent that it hinders us, we can do something differently. I mean, I think it's okay, of course, to have our sort of natural inclinations. It's okay to want to be at home. Yeah. You know, some of the time, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but at the same time, when we know that what's driving it actually is anxiety,

rather than like, I'm just tired. I need a night at home. That's, you know, that's something else. It's so difficult to know what is your gut feeling and what is anxiety. It's really, really difficult to decipher, I think, for many of us. And I think it's something that you sort of work out all the time. I mean, I think as women especially, we are trained to ignore our gut instincts. We are trained to see them as sort of like, frivolous garbage.

And so it is a constant effort to kind of shift toward paying attention to them, seeing them as valuable, you know, sometimes life-saving pieces of information. This is a paid advertisement for better health therapy online. What are some of your relationship green flags? We often hear about the red flags we should avoid in the dating world. But what if we focused more on looking for green flags in friends and partners? If you're not sure what they look like,

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The credit card that rewards your good financial habits. Earn points for paying your credit card bill in full and on time every month. Level up from bill payer to reward slayer. Terms and conditions apply. Oh, this is another one that could have been sent by me. It's from someone called Neve. I struggle with reassurance seeking in relationships. If my partner seems quiet I immediately assume I've done something wrong. Oh, this is making me feel so like Neve, I'm there with you. I know it's exhausting for them but how do I break the habit of needing constant emotional

proof that everything is okay? Help us, help me and help Neve. Well, okay, reassurance seeking is the sort of anxious cycle where the reassurance feels really good in the moment, but actually perpetuates anxiety in the long term. So it's not the same as finding a company for your nervous system. I think there are shades of gray, to be honest with you, but I think that we can think of them as for this purpose. I think we can think of them as different. I think there is an overlap in the center, but for our purposes here,

I think we can think of them as different because while it's one thing to want feedback from your partner, which is healthy and important, it's another thing to seek it quite a lot, especially in a situation when there's sort of nothing about the circumstances that actually ties the quietness or whatever back to you. So I think that when it becomes sort of a perpetual cycle of feeling that you are the reason for your partner's discomfort or quietness or whatever, that's something else. And so the more the re- so you might seek reassurance and maybe you get reassurance that no it's not you, it's you know I'm

upset about something else and everything's fine. That act will feel really helpful and comforting for a short time, but it will also kind of perpetuate the same scenario happening again soon. So the more that we can sort of learn to get reassurance from ourselves and not require it to come from an outside force, I think the less powerful and frankly less disruptive in a relationship setting those conversations will become.

So does Niamh and I possibly have to look at why it is that that's our sort of go to? Like is there something deeper in us that like we were taught as kids that maybe, you know, that was you ask, are you cross with me and you got the reassurance and it felt nice and it felt good or whatever or you were taught you were maybe made to feel like you were the problem. Right so I think the important deep work will be sort of person to person understanding what is driving this particular sort of anxious feeling in response to a relationship. That would be incredibly important work and well worth doing and I think the sort of more global part of it is,

which would be true for any kind of reassurance seeking, is almost like looking yourself in the mirror and saying, okay, so what if it weren't okay? What if he was annoyed with you? What if they really were annoyed with you? Or maybe it's something worse, you know? Maybe it's something more sort of life altering. What if the thing you're scared of happens?

Then what? And kind of looking at that fear directly and sort of saying, okay, I think learning, learning to say perhaps to yourself, I would survive. I would survive. It would be horrible and painful maybe, but I would survive. And that is, I think that is at the crux

of so much treatment for anxiety and for OCD is sort of tolerating the not knowing and the potential for the fact that we cannot eliminate the possibility of bad things happening. There is nothing we can do in most instances to fully eliminate the possibilities of bad things happening. No reassurance will be enough for that. A massive thank you to Alexandra for her wisdom today and to you for sending in such brilliant, honest questions. If you want to dig deeper into all of this, her book, The Narrowing, is a must read. To be fair, do you know what I'm recommending this week?

I think we've got, we've had so much conversation about our nervous systems and needing to regulate them and to let them be. But what I'm gonna recommend you all do is go and have a walk or just get out in some fresh air look up at the sky and not down at your phone. Take care, be kind to yourself and I'll see you on Monday.