The Therapy Edit - On a revelation about anxiety

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

In this solo episode of the The Therapy Edit, Anna helps us to manage our worry about potential future loss. A great listen for those who suffer with anxiety and worst case scenario thinking. We hope it's a real help to you.

Hello and welcome to the Therapy Edit podcast with me, psychotherapist Anna Martha. I'll be bringing you weekly 10 minute episodes to encourage and support your emotional well-being. Hello, everyone, I hope you are well, whether you're listening to this in the car on the way to a school on a nursery drop-off or you're just, I don't know, lying in the bar. I often have a little wonder what people are up to when they listen to this podcast. Do you have, do you listen to it every week when it comes out or do you just sometimes people say that they listen to kind of six in a row? It just, yeah, just love to think of what you're up to. So feel free to jot me a DM on Instagram and just let me know.

How do you listen to the therapy in it? And also feel free to send me questions because sometimes I, answer listener questions as the podcast. So you can email me at hello at anamatha.com with any questions that you have. But today I am going to share with you this. It's a line from a book actually that I took a photo of on my Kindle. Over the summer, I've been reading Carrie Soto. Carri Soto is back by Taylor Jenkins read. Now I've read so many of her books. I've oh my gosh yeah I've just read loads of them I'm going to tell you which ones because I'm probably going to get the titles wrong and I don't want to dishonour her by getting the titles wrong or make you wait for me to to Google to make sure that I'm getting them right but anyway she's an amazing author and I am often kind of scribbling down lines she writes really beautifully about grief and anxiety and the nuances of relationship and emotion so sometimes I just think oh my goodness this is incredible and I write down the line and or two. So she's an author that I often go back to. Anyway, I wrote down this line and took a photo

of the page from Carri Soto is back. It's all about anxiety. And she wrote this. And I wonder for a moment, why I have spent all of my time worried about losing things when there is so much here. Now, of course, we know that this is often what we do, isn't it? We worry so much about losing things, about things changing, about bad things happening. It interrupts our sleep, our thoughts, our days. It affects how we feel in our bodies when those anxious thoughts pick up and we find our attention slipping away from what we're doing and where we are and what we have and what is real and racing off to those often horrible thoughts of losing those very same things.

And I just thought, isn't it so true and so beautifully captured how often we look past what we have and what is right in front of us now and thinking about what we could lose? So I think the revelation for me, although I think about this stuff and talk about it so often, It's just sometimes you see it written in a particular way and I just thought how deeply intertwined gratitude is with our experience of anxiety. Anxiety is worried about bad things that might happen whereas gratitude is a decision to turn off focus

onto the good things that are already happening in and around us, the good things that we have, the relationships, the connections, the experience, I've described anxiety or living in an anxious state or struggling with anxiety as feeling like you're just living in a waiting room for bad things to happen, literally sat in this room, waiting to be called for your turn, for something bad to happen. Now, for those of us who have experienced trauma in our lives, we know those moments of curveballs where you're just kind of going along and suddenly something happens where the rug is

pulled from under your feet and you question whether you might ever feel okay again. So as a way of protecting ourselves, often we can just think, you know what? I'm just going to stay in the waiting room. I'm going to get called up at some point. I might as well just set up camp here. The thing is in a waiting room. We think about waiting rooms. They're really dull, aren't they? I don't know about your GP surgery, but they don't really do this anymore. But I just remember it used to be really old issues of magazines and leaflets. And that's what you would have to keep you entertained. We didn't have phones back then. Whilst you waited, waiting rooms are often quite sparse and boring. They just serve a purpose, really. There's not really a lot of fun stuff that goes on in a waiting room. You sit in a

room and then you wait to get called. And I think many of us as a way of protecting ourselves from just all bracing ourselves really. It's kind of that bracing, isn't it? You're waiting, you're waiting. We're putting life on hold. Not a lot goes on in the waiting room. Everything goes on outside the waiting room. Everything goes on down the road in our homes in our lives. And I think sometimes we can metaphorically just brace ourselves for bad things to happen. And that causes us to overlook the good things that are happening. It causes us to feel distant and disengaged and lack presence for those good things that are happening. So as I've mentioned in recent podcast recently, something we did have one of those carefuls and it did totally swipe the rug for

under our feet. But I was so grateful that I had inhaled a lot of the good things in my life because I'd been practicing grassroots so intentionally. In fact, it wasn't even that intentional anymore because I've been doing it for years, but when I started it was really intentional and it took a lot for me to draw my attention away from the things that could and might go wrong

to the things that were going well, the things that were going good. And it's not to say that you ignore the fear and the worry it's not to say you ignore or don't think about the tough things that are going on in your life it's just saying you also welcome awareness to the good things that are going on as well and I definitely felt that this served me well that I didn't feel like I'd taken some of those good things for granted as I might have done before perhaps in gratitude so I'm also just really glad that I wasn't living my life in the waiting room I'd chosen

not to just camp up in the waiting room embrace myself, I had been embracing some of those good things. So next time you feel your mind stray to that fear of loss and bad things happening, just introduce that awareness of the good things happening too. It can feel like just switching on a light in a darkening room, just bringing some light in because gratitude brings balance to anxiety. And I wondered for a moment why I have spent all my time worried about losing things when there is so much here. Don't let it be those colorful moments that you think, damn, I wish I had just embraced more rather than embraced myself. I wish instead of just living in that waiting room bracing myself, I had embraced the good things going on outside of it. So if you

are sitting in the waiting room, embracing yourself, consciously choose to step outside of that waiting room. The door is open. Think about those things in your life that are good, turn your attention to them. It doesn't mean you ignore the hard and the bad and the sad. It just means that you bring some balance to it. And I wonder for a moment why I have spent all my time worried about losing things when there is so much here. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Therapy Edit. If you have enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and review for me. Also, if you need any resources at all, I have lots of videos and courses on everything from health anxiety to driving anxiety and people pleasing they are all on my website anamatha.com

and also don't forget my brand new book Raising a Happier Mother is out now for you to enjoy and benefit from. It's all about how to find balance, feel good and see your children flourish as a result. Speak to you soon.