The Liz Moody Podcast - Feel Less Anxious Now: Solutions To YOUR Top Qs

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you deal with anxiety, the first thing that I want you to know is you are not alone. Literally, right now, you are not alone. I have been dealing with a ton of anxiety lately. And I figured what better time to check in with you guys to answer some of your biggest questions about anxiety and to share all of the tools that I find most helpful. Whether you are personally dealing with anxiety or you just want to better understand someone in your life who is, this episode will be full of tips and tricks and insights. Welcome to the Liz Moody podcast where we share science-back tools and tips to empower you to live your best life,

Starting point is 00:00:33 but we do in a way that's fun that makes space for vulnerability and the realities of our actual lives. That's where a lot of anxiety advice falls down for me. It doesn't acknowledge my actual life. I feel like it's being given by people who haven't actually been there who haven't felt the way that I feel. If you are new to my story, I have had anxiety pretty much my whole life. And at one point, I was struggling with agoraphobia that was so big. bad that I would have panic attacks whenever I would leave the house. I have an entire episode about that that I can share a link to. And generally, anxiety is something that I'm always kind of working to find a baseline around that maybe other people might come more naturally to. I have a lot of

Starting point is 00:01:17 specific fears like flying and lightning. And I also have a lot of anxiety around sleeping, which is what I am dealing with right now. We just moved into a new house, which is amazing. If you have been around for a while, you know that Zach and I gave up our last house in a mess of grief. And then we spent almost six months just kind of unmoored without a place to call home, which was really hard on my anxiety because anxiety thrives with structure. But this house is maybe half a mile from a highway. And I flagged that. So when we came to look at it, I was on the lookout for road noise and I swear there was none. But then we moved in and you can definitely hear the highway. And it is driving me nuts because this was supposed to be this peaceful oasis. Like that was one of the things

Starting point is 00:02:05 that we optimized for. Which brings me to two action steps right off the bat. One, Zach and basically all of my friends pointed out that I do this with every single place that we move into, which makes sense. When our brain is exposed to new stimuli, like the sound of a highway in the distance, it clocks it as a threat because it is trying to keep us safe. But if that stimulus hangs around for a bit, your brain is like, ah, is normal and it backs down. It's how people can live next to trains and highways. Bella was the loudest cat in the world. She was part Siamese, so she would meow at the top of her lungs for like hours. And people would come over and they would be like, oh my God, how do you live with this? And Zach and I would not even notice because our brains had gotten

Starting point is 00:02:49 so used to it. And then two, and I think that this is far more universal than the noise thing. one of the big reasons for anxiety often has to do with this underlying anger at ourselves and our choices. Like I have been absolutely beating myself up for making the wrong choice for not knowing that of course there would be road noise here. And we do that a lot with our anxiety, even though it's often a bit buried, but underneath that first low humming layer of anxiety, there's often this voice being like, if you'd been smarter or if you'd been better, you wouldn't be here. There's something. wrong with you. And recognizing that and changing that self-conversation is a key step of anxiety that I think a lot of us miss. I made the best choice that I could at the time. I made the best

Starting point is 00:03:40 choice that I could when I chose this house. And I made the best choice that I could when I did a bunch of drugs on a beach in Brazil and I ended up having a seizure that gave me PTSD that led to my agoraphobia. I made the best choices that I could at the time when I did a bunch of I was a child, which is obviously when so much my anxiety took root. And you know what? My parents did too. I used to get so mad at them because after they got divorced when I was five, they made me fly by myself between California and Arizona all the time. And I distinctly remember those flights being traumatic, like screaming and crying as the flight attendants pulled me off of one of my parents. And of course, my adult brain is like that obviously impacted my current fear of flying,

Starting point is 00:04:22 which is excruciating and one of the most limiting, debilitating things that I deal with in my life. And they did the best they could as the people that they were with the information that they had at the time. It's a small shift, but it allows our anxious brains to stop going, what if, what if, what if? And that what if is like throwing logs on that flame of anxiety. Okay, I want to get into some of your questions. I asked you to send me your trickiest anxiety questions over on Instagram. I'm at Liz Moody if you want to come hang out there. So let's just jump right in.

Starting point is 00:05:00 How can I deal with 3 a.m. wake-ups when I can't fall back asleep? So two things here. One is that 3 a.m. wake-up is often because of a blood sugar dip. So eating something with high protein fat and fiber before bed can be really, really helpful. Desert can also cause this, unfortunately, because sugar spikes your blood sugar and then it comes crashing down and it wakes you up. So if I am dealing with 3 a.m. wakeups, one of the first things that I'll do is I'll move any sweets to earlier in the day. And then I'll have like a little protein drink right before bed. And then the next thing is I used to stress so much when I woke up

Starting point is 00:05:37 in the middle of the night or I couldn't fall asleep in the first place. I was like, this is going to ruin tomorrow. I'm not going to get my work done. I'm going to be miserable. I'm not going to be able to show up as the partner or the friend or the boss that I want to be. And then I started collecting all of these proof points of days that I hadn't slept and I'd been fine the next day. The night before I went on the Today Show, I slept for maybe three hours and I crushed it. The night before my wedding, I slept for maximum four hours and I still had an amazing time. I would love you to take a second right now and reflect on a time where you did not get the best night of sleep and you still performed well or you had a good day the next day. I bet there is at least one. And then I want you to

Starting point is 00:06:23 use that as a proof point that it can happen. So the next time that you're up in the middle of the night, you can reflect on that. And often taking that pressure off saying it is okay if I don't sleep, it's exactly the thing that lets us fall back asleep. Do you know anything about Parts slash IFS work. I do. I did an entire episode with Dick Schwartz, who's the founder of IFS. He actually does like a mini session on me in that episode, which I can link in the show notes for you. I have a lot of friends who found it incredibly helpful for anxiety. Help me with my anxiety with chronic fence sitting. Okay, if you are unfamiliar with the term fent sitting, it means being undecided about having kids, which I have been really open about in terms of my own journey. And I would say the single thing

Starting point is 00:07:08 that has helped me the most is a conversation that I had with Dr. Bob Waldinger, who is currently the director of the world's longest study of happiness ever. It's at Harvard. And he said, look, if you have kids, there are parts of your life that are going to be better and there are parts that are going to be worse. And if you don't have kids, there are parts of your life that are going to be better and there are parts that are going to be worse. There is so much anxiety that comes from trying to make the perfect choices, but they're all just choices. I'm sure. if I become a parent, there will be things that I miss from my old life, things that I'll regret. And if I don't, there'll be things that I'll feel a pang for with that untaken path. And just sort of

Starting point is 00:07:49 freeing up space for like, there is no perfect choice. That has been really helpful for my anxiety around this. And if we're being honest, whatever choice you make, you're likely going to post-rationalize a lot. So your brain will do a lot of work to convince you that it was the right one. Any advice, re phobias. My arachnophobia holds me back a lot. My biggest phobia advice is that exposure therapy is really effective, but most of us are doing it wrong. The idea is that you expose yourself to the trigger for your phobia and your brain is like, oh, this isn't a real threat and then you right size it. And for years, I thought I was doing this with my fear of flying. I was flying all of the time and I was like, shouldn't this count as exposure therapy? I am exposing myself to flying all of the time.

Starting point is 00:08:36 But I was getting more scared, not less. And then I had Dr. Michael Jervais on the podcast. He is a psychologist and performance coach for people who do crazy things, like jump out of planes from space. I can link that episode for you. It's incredible. He's, his wisdom is bananas. And he was like, no, girl, you are actually training yourself to make your phobia bigger.

Starting point is 00:08:58 Because every time I flew, I was terrified. So I was training my brain. When we are in a plane, we are terrified. So it is really ideal to work with a therapist to actually expose yourself to your phobias. But they're going to do it in a really intentional way where they're just doing like a taincy, teensy, teensy bit at a time. And they are working to regulate your nervous system while you are exposing yourself to those phobias. So you're actually training yourself that the thing that you are afraid of is safe.

Starting point is 00:09:30 And if you cannot do that for whatever reason, if you don't have access to that, I would really focus on utilizing any tactics that you can to relieve stress when you are in these phobic situations. So like deep breathing or putting some ice on your face or your chest or some people like sour candies. But do whatever you can so that you are not reinforcing to your brain that the situation is unsafe during the exposure. So I put a lot of effort in now to doing everything that I possibly can to feel as calm as possible in the moment when I fly. So I'm like deep breathing. I'm meditating. I listen to this track called floating. I have my noise cancelling earphones. I'm doing everything that I can to feel calmer so that I'm not reinforcing that phobia in my own brain. Do you have OCD? I do. Yes.

Starting point is 00:10:19 Although I prefer to say that I am experiencing OCD because it is not something that I find particularly helpful to identify with. I think a big thing about diagnoses is to keep an eye out for if it is helping you. Is it making you feel not alone? Is it giving you new ideas for treatment? That's amazing. Diagnoses can feel like huge reliefs, but they can also make us feel stuck and trapped and like the way that we feel is really out of our control. It's a really fine and nuanced line, but it's something that I am always, always asking myself. Is this useful? Is it helping or is it hurting? And even though I have been diagnosed, with generalized anxiety disorder and with OCD. I tend to find identifying with those a little bit limiting just for me personally and for

Starting point is 00:11:10 where I am at in my life. So I personally find it more helpful to just call out when I'm experiencing those things. So like I'm experiencing some obsessive compulsions. I'm experiencing anxiety and that is working much better for me at this phase in my life. Next step. How can a friend best support someone who is spiraling? with anxiety. First of all, this is a really sweet question. I so appreciate the people in my life who are there for me in my more anxious periods. One thing that I have found really helpful is pointing

Starting point is 00:11:43 me in the direction of other people out there experiencing anxiety, especially people who are living big and thriving lives despite anxiety because it helps a ton to just know that I'm not alone and I'm doomed. So sending them something like this podcast can be really, really helpful. Two, Make sure that you're taking care of yourself. So you're not taking on their anxiety as yours or extending yourself to the point of making your own mental health worse. And then just being there. You being a calm and grounding presence around them literally helps them co-regulate.

Starting point is 00:12:20 So just you being there will make them calmer. I would also try not to problem solve. Anxiety often isn't logical. So I would at least ask, do you want comfort or do you want solutions? before you start brainstorming, so you don't feel like you're dismissing their feelings. And then taking them to do stuff that helps them feel better, like taking them to the gym, taking them for walks, that can be really helpful too. I also find it really helpful to ask in times where they're not anxious, what might help them

Starting point is 00:12:49 when they feel anxious in the future. When we're out of that state, often we can have insights that aren't as available to us when we are in that state. So like prepping ahead of time can be really helpful. If you have headaches, allergies, brain fog, skin irritation, or you've been dealing with hormone issues, you are especially going to want to listen to this ad. Every single thing that I just listed has been linked to chemicals and household cleaners. One study found that regular use of cleaning sprays was associated with a lung function decline comparable to smoking 10 to 20 cigarettes per day.

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Starting point is 00:14:32 systems. And they're running around on their little paws and then they're licking them. So I'm protecting them too. Branch Basics is now available at Target, Target.com, Amazon and branchbasics.com. So it's easier than ever to make the switch. And if you want to grab their premium starter kit, you can use code Liz Moody for 15% off at branchbasics.com. That's code Liz Moody for 15% off the premium starter kit at branch basics.com. And when they ask you where you heard about us, please make sure to mention the show. That is branch basics.com and use code Liz Moody. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out or good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters.

Starting point is 00:15:21 But there is a biological foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline and what I've learned has genuinely shifted how I think about my own health. Every single movement that your body makes every step, every workout, every muscle contraction depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria. Here's the thing that nobody tells you, certainly nobody told me, starting around age 30, our mitochondria naturally become less efficient, more get damaged, more become sluggish, and over time that is, impacts your energy, your strength, your recovery, and your resilience.

Starting point is 00:16:01 Most of us respond by pushing more. We're like noticing these things and we're adding in more protein. We're trying to fix it with more supplements. We're trying to do harder workouts. And those things do help. But timelines research suggests that we also need to be supporting the cellular machinery underneath. And that is exactly what their supplement, mitochondria, does.

Starting point is 00:16:20 It contains urolithin A, which helps your body clear out damage mitochondria and support healthier ones so that your cells can produce energy more efficiently. Because this is happening to your cells, it's going to impact your entire body, your immune system, your muscles. One study found that taking mitochondere increased muscle strength by 12% in four months with no change in exercise routine, it's going to impact your energy, your sleep, your skin, your cell health impacts all of this, and urolithin-A keeps your cells healthy. Timeline has done over 15 years of research and testing on this one product, urolithin A, which, by the way, most of us lack the gut bacteria to synthesize naturally. That's why many of us need to supplement it to get the benefits.

Starting point is 00:17:02 This has become a staple supplement for me. It is my top way to support how I want to look and feel as I age. Support yourselves and how you age with mitopure gummies from Timeline. Visit Timeline.com slash Liz and save up to 39% on your mitopure gummies. That is timeline.com slash Liz. I'm genuinely confused how master class gets literally the absolute top people in every single field to teach every single one of their classes. I use it when I want to learn things directly, like the cooking class from Thomas Keller has all of the wisdom that you would normally have to go to culinary school for. But also, I'm being honest, this is like a use case I don't hear a lot of people talking about. I'll just watch it for entertainment when I want to do something that's far more

Starting point is 00:17:47 interesting than scrolling. Christina Aguilera taught me to sing, Shan Boudrum's Art of mastering confidence and sex appeal class. It's 10 out of 10. There's menopause classes with leading doctors. There's script writing with Mindy Kaley. Literally, you name it, they're on masterclass. And it is such a good way to get off your phone, but have something that's like not quite as long or hard to get into as a TV show or a movie and that it just keeps you entertained and interested. And you are learning. There are over 200 classes from the world's best, all for just $10 a month when billed annually. and you get unlimited access to every class on the platform so you can learn at your own pace whenever you want on your phone, your computer, or even in audio mode like a podcast.

Starting point is 00:18:29 If you're looking to stop scrolling and start consuming entertaining content that makes you feel excited and helps you learn, Masterclass is it. And the best part, every membership comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can start learning risk-free. Right now, our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership at Masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. That's 15% off at Masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. Masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. What do I do if I feel like my therapy sessions are going nowhere? Tell your therapist. I grew up surrounded by therapists. My sister's a therapist. My dad and my mom are therapist.

Starting point is 00:19:10 My father and mother-in-law were therapists. And the one thing that they all make so clear is that they want feedback. You can literally say, I feel like. like these therapy sessions are going nowhere. You can say, I am thinking of ending therapy with you. You can tell them what success in therapy looks like for you. A good therapist wants to hear this type of feedback and honestly, they want to help you deal with any feelings of discomfort that come up for you around sharing that type of feedback. For a good therapist, that is a great opportunity. And if they react poorly, that's a really good sign to get a new therapist. How do you handle making sure that your anxiety isn't a burden on others. I feel guilty for my husband. I used to worry

Starting point is 00:19:56 about this a lot too. And then Zach and I talked about it and he was like, this is part of being in a partnership. You know that thing that people are saying a lot on social these days? Like everyone wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager. Sometimes it's uncomfy to show up for the people we love and we do it anyway because that's part of what being in relationship is. Also, Also, this is something hugely important and it took me years to realize it is up to your partner to communicate their own needs and boundaries. Us trying to constantly monitor them and preemptively look out for our anxiety being a burden is actually yet another way of us exerting control on our environments, which is of course

Starting point is 00:20:42 the thing that anxiety makes us constantly want to do. So in a way, one way that we work on our anxiety is to avoid. avoid doing that and to trust our partner to express their needs. If you want to say once, hey, please tell me if this gets too much for you or if you need a break, great. But beyond that, you are really on their side of the street and that is on you and you need to learn to trust them. How do you figure out what your triggers are? I've been having panic attacks lately and I don't know why. This is a hot take, but I sometimes don't think it's that helpful to sit around and try to figure out what your triggers are, and here's why. My dear friend, Dr. Ellen Vora, is a famous psychiatrist.

Starting point is 00:21:24 She wrote the book, The Anatomy of Anxiety. And one of the things that she talks about are these anxiety spirals that we can fall into where something physical happens that usually happens when we are anxious, like we have sweaty palms or we feel a little bit nauseous. And then our brain is like, oh, I feel this way when I'm anxious, I must be anxious. And then it tries to figure out what the anxiety is about, and it can always, always find a reason. And then you start thinking about whatever your brain serves up for you on a silver platter, and then you feel more anxious and you end up in this doom loop. So I think sometimes when we go hunting for the reason for our anxiety, we just end up with more reasons to be anxious. So what Ellen recommends and what I agree with is starting with some of that

Starting point is 00:22:12 symptom management before you go hunting for causes? Is your blood sugar stable throughout the day? Are you protecting your sleep as much as possible? Are you staying off of social media as much as possible? Are you exercising daily? Those are the places that I would start and only once I checked those off would I go hunting deeper. And I also want to say, and therapists can disagree with me on this, but I don't think you need to know every childhood connection for your anxiety. to make progress on it. I have a really intellectual, really analytical brain. I can tell you all sorts of things that happened in my childhood and exactly how they resulted in me behaving the way that I do now. And I often get stuck there in the perpetual awareness cycle, which stops me from taking action.

Starting point is 00:23:04 If you are anything like me, your brain might not need more analysis. It might need action. any action. We think we need to change our mood to feel the motivation to do the things that make us feel better, but it's actually the reverse of that. Doing the things that make us feel better is what changes our mood. I'm not dismissing the importance of acknowledging or exploring our past and our hurt, but don't get stuck there. Often forcing myself to do the exact opposite of what I want to do at that moment. So like going out with friends when I want to hibernate. or going to the gym when I want to scroll on TikTok, changes my mood way more than any amount of diving into my childhood does.

Starting point is 00:23:50 Have you taken or do you take any anxiety medications? I have only taken things intermittently, so never continuously, never every day. And that reason is really specific to my personal anxiety. Basically because a lot of my anxiety is tangled up with this PTSD that I had after I had a seizure when I was 19 years old. I am really anxious around things that impact my brain in any way, even though the seizure likely had far more to do with my eating disorder and the questionable sourcing of my weed than anything else. And this is convoluted, but I grandfathered in Clonopin and Xanax because I'd taken them

Starting point is 00:24:28 before I dealt with that PTSD, if that makes sense. So I do tend to have one of those on me just in case, mostly Xanax these days. And I will take that maybe four or five times a year, but just knowing that I have it, that I have that option has been really, really helpful for me. I'm not against medication by any means. I'm just very pro being very intentional about taking it. One huge caveat is I would not take something like Xanax or Klonapin daily. Part of my dad's job was to help people with benzodiction, which is the category of drug that both of those are in. And And the stuff that he saw was fairly grim. I have friends who self-medicate and they end up taking Xanax to sleep most nights a week.

Starting point is 00:25:14 And I would just caution you to please not do that because there are fairly well-documented long-term effects at this point. The episode that I already mentioned with Ellen Bora talks about all of that stuff in way more depth and also about SSRIs, SNRIs, all of that stuff. But please, please, please just work with a good doctor on all of that. In terms of supplements, which a lot of you asked about, I take magnesium glycinate most nights, which noticeably helps with my sleep. And then I will do aschwaganda, which is an adaptogen, in periods that I am particularly anxious for some extra support. And then I have also started really trying to be good about my fish oil because research has found that it has a huge impact on mental health. And when I got my blood tested recently, I was really low in it. So I'm trying

Starting point is 00:26:01 to be better at my compliance there. Okay. Let's. Let's do this as the last one. If you could give one piece of advice about anxiety, what would it be? That it's not something to push away. The more you try to push anxiety away, the stronger that it often gets. Instead, I would suggest that it's something to get curious about. It's something to explore. It's this little part of you that is trying to protect you, even if it's in a really

Starting point is 00:26:31 maladaptive way. and there's something that's so tender about that. And I would also add, it is all temporary. When I am in it, it is so easy to think that this feeling will last forever, but it never does. I can look back at every single anxious season of my life and I have always come out the other side, every single time. And I trust that I will this time too and I trust that you will this time too. If this episode resonated, if you are in your own anxious chapter right now, please know that you are not broken and you are not alone.

Starting point is 00:27:10 I hope something in here helps you feel a little more grounded, a little more compassionate with yourself, and a little more hopeful that things can change because they absolutely can. This podcast is about using science to help you create your happiest, healthiest life, but it's also about honoring the full human experience, the messy, the vulnerable, the vulnerable. the real parts too. If that sounds like your kind of thing, I would love if you hit that follow or subscribe button. New episodes drop every Monday and Wednesdays. Mondays are short solos like this, and then Wednesdays I sit down with some of the world's leading experts to unpack the science behind living well. You can find all of my favorite partner codes from research back supplements that

Starting point is 00:27:54 actually work to the skincare that I swear by, the workouts that I do every single day at Liz Moody.com slash codes. supporting our partners keeps the show free for you and it helps you save money on products that I truly love and use myself. I love you guys. I am rooting for you and for all of us learning to live alongside our anxious brains with a little bit more ease, a little bit more lightness. I will see you on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional.

Starting point is 00:28:38 I very rarely get genuinely excited about skincare, but this is one of the most innovative products that I have come across in years, and I am so obsessed with it. I've been telling all of my friends to get it, so now I need to tell you guys. Here's some science first. Your skin isn't just getting older. It's being actively broken down by something called senescent cells. These are cells that have stopped functioning but refuse to die. They sit there, releasing a little. inflammatory signals, breaking down your collagen, degrading your skin barrier, and accelerating every visible sign of aging. Scientists call them zombie cells, and as they accumulate, they are one of the primary drivers of how old your skin looks and feels. The team at one skin, a group of

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Starting point is 00:29:53 I've been using the face moisturizer for almost six months now and I love it so much. It feels amazing. It goes on really smoothly. It's not tacky at all. and I actually see a difference, which I just feel like is never the case with skincare. You want to always like see a real difference and you're kind of like, do, do I? Do I? And this I genuinely do. Because it's clearing the senescent cells, it doesn't just target one thing.

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The Liz Moody Podcast - Feel Less Anxious Now: Solutions To YOUR Top Qs

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