How Anxiety compares to Google

Hi there, my name's Caroline Cavanagh. I'm an anxiety specialist. And now, how would you feel if I said to you that anxiety is a good thing? I have a lot of people that come to me and say, I've got anxiety, and I go, brilliant! So have I! Because, you know, if you didn't have anxiety, you would be putting yourself at risk every single second of the day. Just imagine now you're laying in bed, 3 o'clock in the morning, and you hear a window smash downstairs. You'd be awake with your heart pounding, fearful, yeah? Because that anxiety response has been triggered, because something in your mind knows that something is wrong, you're at risk, and it creates a relationship in your body that allows you to respond to that risk accordingly. So if you didn't have anxiety, you'd just lay in your bed going, oh yeah, anyone come on in, take whatever you want. Anxiety is there to keep you safe. So anxiety is not a bad thing, it's a good thing. It's there to keep you safe. But when people say, I've got anxiety, what they're normally meaning is that their anxiety levels are being triggered too much. It's their perception of risk that has become overly sensitive. And that's kind of where I come in, and the work that I do has an impact. Now, let me explain this through something that I guess we can all relate to. I guess you've heard of Google, yeah? And in your mind, you have something that's very similar to Google. So we've got Google, people put things into Google, and it's there for anyone that's researching that topic. to be able to reference and use. In our mind, we have got our own Google going on. Every single experience that we have is going into our own mental database that is then constantly being referenced to say, am I at risk? If it's triggered, yes, then you get an anxiety, the fight or flight response. There's one very subtle but very important difference though, between Google and our mental database. Google's got guys working for them in Googleland that are trawling through that information and getting rid of stuff that's not appropriate or not serving the general populace. They can take it out. In our mental database though, there's no one— we're certainly not doing that much to monitor the information going in— and there is no way of actually deleting that information. And so we end up with a database that looks a little bit similar to an iceberg. So if you think about an iceberg, there's the bit above the waterline. In that bit above the waterline, all of the information is really, really accessible. So all of us— we say all of us, I can really confidently say all of us— as adults will have a file at the top of that database that says Stay away from something that's hot. Check before you cross the road. Don't drive through red traffic lights. Because these are files that, if you didn't have them, you would do things that would put you at risk, potentially even fatally. So they need to be highly accessible, and they will trigger the fight-or-flight response as a medium to keep you safe if you don't acknowledge them. Imagine standing at the end of a massive cliff, toes dangling over. You'd be feeling anxious, right? Because your body's going, this is dangerous! Get back! It keeps you safe. The other thing that pushes information up in that top of the iceberg is anything that has a very intense emotion attached to it. It can be a scary emotion, it can be a happy emotion, but it makes the information really accessible, a bit like being on page 1 of Google. It's easily referenced. And this is why phobias tend to be still running when people are adults. Typically, they'll have had that frightening experience. Perhaps a bird landed on the cot when they were a really, really small child, but that would have been scary to a little baby. So the file is up there at the top of the database and it stays there. It's on page 1. And so every time, even as a mature adult, that person sees A bird close by, it will be triggered and they will have the same anxiety response. That response is there to keep them safe. It just hasn't acknowledged that you're no longer a baby, helpless. You're a 50-year-old adult. It's being triggered. It's on page 1. But coming back to that iceberg, below the waterline you also have all this other stuff. So if I said to you, what did you have for lunch on the 15th of May 2018? You probably wouldn't be able to answer me because it wasn't an emotional response and it didn't put you at risk. Therefore, it's been archived. It's sent down to a level in the database that makes it really inaccessible because it's not linked to keeping you alive. It's not linked to your safety. And so in very simple terms, a lot of the work that I do with clients that come to me to say that I've got anxiety is to help them change the information in that database so you can desensitize some of that emotion that was in there. So it just goes, sinks down below the waterline, and it's a bit like taking it off page 1 and sticking it on page 56, so it's not referenced in the same way anymore. And this is something that pretty much every client that I work with learns to understand about their own database and how it's filed and how maybe things are being triggered, because it is like being on page 1 of Google. And then together, the work we do is to change that ranking together. The reason I've done this video today is that this week is Sexual Awareness and Sexual Violence Awareness Week. And so there are a lot of people out there in the world, not just women but men as well, That have had a violent experience, especially of sexual violence, that means that that experience is right up there, you know, not just on page 1 but at the top of page 1, because it was such an intense experience and triggered that anxiety response that it becomes easily accessible and easily triggered, even something as simple as seeing another man. If a woman has been raped, will trigger that anxiety response because their brain is going, what do I know about men? Wow! Item number 1: men rape me, men hurt me. Therefore, they have this fight-or-flight massive anxiety response. But as I said at the beginning, you can't take that experience out. That rape happened. But what you can do is do some work to bring that experience down the ranking and even off page 1 so that you do have a different fear response to it that doesn't impact on every single moment that I know is very common with the women that I work with that have sadly been raped experience. So I hope you found that useful. I would love to help anyone that wants to understand a little bit more about their mind works or about how they can change the ranking in their database do get in contact with me. There's loads of information on the website, which is carolinecavanagh.co.uk, very easy to remember. But if you want to have a really confidential conversation with me, either through the contact page on the website, drop me a note, or just from the website you can access all the various social media out there. Drop me a note, give me a phone number, and we can have a chat where I'd love to share more about how the work I do can help you change your anxiety so that you can generally say, yeah, I've got anxiety, and it's so brilliantly calibrated that it's only going to be sparked at those times where I am really at risk and really want my anxiety to be there to help me. Because anxiety, at the end of the day, is there to keep you safe. So for now, please, in these times where there is more risk around, Stay safe. Get your anxiety in a place that works for you and not against you. Thank you very much for listening, and I look forward to talking to you again very, very soon. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye.