Danielle Jhiani explains that anxiety persists through avoidance and rumination, not actual danger. She teaches how to interrupt it: notice the anxious thought, challenge it, then do the opposite physically, like going to the party anyway. Repeating this retrains your brain.
Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton Gianni. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach. Helping people overcome anxiety, insecure attachment and ocd, just like I have so you can live a happy life and have happy healthy relationships. Today we're going to talk about anxiety and how you can get rid of anxiety in your.
First let's talk about what anxiety is. Anxiety is the excessive emotional and physical reaction in the absence of a realistic threat. You can have fear in response to a true threat, but anxiety is excessive and there isn't an actual true threat. The reason why you're struggling with anxiety is a couple things. First, you probably have a parent with anxiety so it is somewhat genetic as well as learned behavior or the absence of helpful coping techniques. The reason you struggle is because of unhelpful coping mechanisms. You're reacting to these situations in one way that's making it worse. Instead of reacting in a way that everybody else without anxiety does that you can start doing to make it better. Some of these unhelpful coping mechanisms are avoidance. Avoiding uncomfortable thoughts, feelings and situations only reinforces our fear, discomfort and anxiety makes our anxiety response in the brain more anxious and it gets worse over time. Then you might be doing things like ruminating, overthinking and over analyzing which is typically just a negative thought spiral that keeps you in these negative thoughts, negative feelings and fear based perceptions. You might be doing this before an uncomfortable situation, during an uncomfortable situation, or after and it is never helpful. And lastly, you're seeking comfort instead of moving towards these uncomfortable situations. When you seek comfort, you're teaching yourself that you can't handle it and that I have to be comfortable to be happy and safe. When in reality, when you move towards discomfort, you build confidence. You learn how to deal with these uncomfortable situations. You can retrain your brain's anxiety response so that you're no longer anxious, you're actually confident with yourself and your life is growing and thriving instead. So how do you stop anxiety? The way that you stop it is that you catch each and every micro moment when it shows up. Typically it starts with a thought or a situation that causes discomfort. If you can determine the situation and then you catch the thoughts that are causing the uncomfortable emotional and physical reactions, then you can learn to work with those. When you change your mental and emotional responses to these thoughts and then you change your physical reactions, you can completely change your life. Rewire your brain to no longer be anxious. Let's see how this looks. Let's say you have an upcoming party to go to and you're really anxious about going and your thoughts are telling you that I'm going to be really anxious. When I'm there, I'm not going to have fun and nobody's going to talk to me. Lots of negative thoughts there, right? Someone with anxiety is just going to believe this. They're going to engage with these thoughts, believe these thoughts, and then the physical reaction is going to be not to go. What I want you to do is start responding differently mentally first. Instead of just believing this thought, you're going to respond differently and say back to yourself, yeah, maybe I'm going to be nervous or a little bit anxious, but I'm going to go anyway and see how it goes. Maybe I'll actually have fun. Obviously that thought and perception is going to feel a lot better than the first one. Next, you're going to focus on your physical reaction. Instead of staying home and not going to the party because you're afraid that you're going to be anxious and that no one's going to talk to you, you're going to go anyway. When you do this, you're able to see that most of those fear based thoughts that were happening don't even happen or they don't come true. You may be a little nervous, but you're going to go and you're probably going to meet some people and you might have a really good time, even if it's not perfect. By going to this party instead, you're teaching your brain that this anxiety and these negative thoughts and this nervousness is not going to stop me from living my life. When you choose to go anyway, you're also able to see that most of those fear based thoughts aren't true and you have more confidence in the future to face. When you listen to those negative thoughts and you stay home anyway, you feel defeated, you feel lonely, and you've just reinforced those negative beliefs. That's what we don't want. Each moment of anxiety is an opportunity for change. And the way that you're responding mentally, emotionally and physically is either making your anxiety worse or making it better. Noticing what's happening in each of these moments and responding differently both mentally and physically can completely rewire your brain. You can become somebody who's confident, who doesn't get anxious and who doesn't let anxiety overtake you. You may still be nervous in realistic fear based situations, that's healthy. But when we take a situation that doesn't have an actual threat and we respond as if it does, our anxiety response gets worse over time. If you need help with this, click the link in the bio. Please comment, like and subscribe. Let me know what you thought of this video if you and we will talk to you soon.
