Danielle Jhiani explains why anxiety and OCD spike during the holidays. The pressure for events to look perfect fuels fear-based thoughts. Avoidance feels safer in the moment but reinforces anxiety, while approaching feared situations actually reduces distress over time.
Foreign.
Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton Gianni. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach. Helping people eliminate anxiety, avoidance, OCD from their lives so you can have an amazing, happy life with happy, healthy relationships. Today we're going to talk about the holidays and why anxiety, avoidance and OCD can get a lot worse during this time of year. There's a lot of pressure for the holidays to look a certain way and anxiety and OCD wants things to look a certain way in order for us to be okay. This is the brain's way of seeking safety. If things can look the way that we want them to, then we're okay. And if they don't, then we're not going to be okay. Not true. You will be okay. And sometimes things turn out even better than you thought when they don't look the way that you want them to. But the anxious mind wants certainty. And so if you start to worry about, am I going to have anxiety during Christmas dinner? Am I going to ruin this vacation that we're going on? Is my birthday going to look the way that I want it to? Am I going to have fun? Am I going to enjoy it? Even family dynamics can play a part into this. Is my family going to like my partner? Is my family going to give me a hard time because of my OCD or my anxiety? Are they going to trigger me somehow? These are all just thoughts, fear based thoughts that are coming up about the holidays. And when we let a fear based thought take over and we start ruminating about it, worrying about it, or needing things to look a certain way, then we start to go down the rabbit hole. This is the spiral of what ifs and negative stories and thoughts that actually makes you feel worse and makes your anxiety worse. Now if you are more avoidant, you might start to avoid certain things that will trigger these things. And that avoidance doesn't work either. It feels safer sometimes, but it actually just reinforces that discomfort or anxiety, whichever one you're feeling. And you have to avoid more and more to feel okay, which only affects your life and relationships. Even worse when you learn to recognize these fear based thoughts or the discomfort and the need to avoid, and you start just accepting the uncertainty but not giving them attention. I know that's easier said than done, but when you start doing this, which you may need help to do, what's going to happen is you're focused on the present moment, you're focused on work that day, you're focused on your friends or what you want to do to go enjoy your life and you're not focused on this discomfort and anxiety that you're feeling and it fades away. The more you focus on these worries and anxieties and potential negative stories, or the more you avoid out of discomfort, it just gets worse and worse and worse. And then leading up to these days, you're more anxious, you're more uncomfortable and you're going to create more of that type of situation than what you really want. When you don't listen to these fear based thoughts, when you don't act based on fear, when you don't avoid, you go do those things anyway, you go be with that person anyway and you stop the thought patterns. What you're going to find is that things turn out much better than what your brain is telling you now. At first that doesn't mean that you aren't going to have some discomfort in that situation. Maybe you will. But with consistency and time you're going to build comfort by exposing yourself or facing these situations and eventually you're comfortable and it's actually quite normal. If you want help with this, I have several programs that can help you. I have personally been there myself. I have overcome all of this and you can too. So like, subscribe, comment, let me know what you thought. Check out the link in the description of this video if you want help and we'll talk to you soon.
It.
