The Science of Anxiety and How to Manage It - Episode 340

And I was able to turn off anxiety for the first time in my life. And all of a sudden, it's like you had— imagine you had stereos playing your whole life and all of a sudden they unplugged them. And I was like, wait a second, this is how everyone feels? Like, this is amazing.

Welcome everybody to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, and we're going to interview a woman, Ashley James, who interviewed me on her podcast not too long ago. She has a really interesting story about how she's conquered anxiety. And if you or anybody you know suffers with anxiety, you're going to want to listen to this because she's actually cracked the code and she can actually get people out of anxiety in a matter of minutes. So she's gonna share that entire process with us, and I think you're really gonna love it.

He went from saving hearts as a cardiologist to rewriting the entire aging playbook. Dr. Jeffrey Gladden believes 100 is the new 30, and he's got the science to back it up. This is the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

Ashley, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.

Thanks so much. I'm very excited to be here.

Yeah. Well, good. Let's see, you're coming to us from Seattle, is that right?

Or Toronto? Yeah, I live just north of Seattle, but I'm originally from Toronto. Toronto, Canada.

Oh, okay.

So you're gonna hear me maybe say about or house. Okay, giveaway.

It is, yeah. A and a few other things.

I don't say a anymore. I've been here long enough. No, I, I almost pass as an American.

Okay, good for you. So tell us a little bit about how you were drawn into the work that you're doing now.

Yeah, so one of my specialties is I'm an anxiety cessation expert. I've been doing that for 20 years. So I have ADHD and as a child growing up in the '80s and the '90s, that it was really hard to diagnose girls. It was easier to diagnose boys. They actually didn't really do research on women with ADHD, but it internalizes a lot as anxiety. And, uh, we, you know, we're kind of like the H, the hyper is not necessarily physical for us. It's more mental, emotional. And so I grew up always in anxiety and thinking that this was life. Everyone had anxiety. You know, I would—

What would that be like? Describe that anxiety.

Well, yeah, I couldn't do sleepovers. I felt very clingy towards my parents, couldn't do sleepovers. I'd call my mom. I tried to do them. I called my mom, she'd have to pick me up. I'd throw up before tests, just being, feeling a sense of foreboding, walking on eggshells, nervous all the time. A lot of social anxiety.

Were there any events that kind of, you know, wired that into you? In other words, you, you experienced some trauma or you were, you felt unsafe at certain times?

No, I think I had a really good childhood. Um, I was, I was blessed to grow up in a great neighborhood in, in Canada and, you know, had loving parents and went to a variety of different schools because my parents were trying to find, you know, programs that met my academic needs. I did a lot of extracurriculars. So no, I didn't have any trauma to trigger like a fear response. I just, as early as I can remember, I had almost like phobia-level anxiety in life, but I thought that was normal, right? And then when I was 26, I was pursuing for years personal growth and development. I was very interested in it. And my, when my mom died, uh, at 22, when I was 22 years old, I wanted to learn how to grieve healthfully. And so I pursued personal growth and development and counseling and all these things to learn how to overcome losing her. And in doing so, I discovered this part of personal growth and development, which looks to help you become your most excellent self. And the contrast with the traditional therapy is therapy for many years either looks at you like you're normal, abnormal, right? It doesn't look at like, let's create— let's take a normal person and help them have an excellent life, which is what really we should go to therapy for. But it's always like just trying to achieve normal is the goal. And I'm like, I don't want to be normal, I want to excel, I want to be excellent.

Yeah, that's a good point.

That's when I started discovering these tools, and it's a combination of behavioral psychology and cognitive therapy, but they're tools that get right to the point, they get to the root. And I was able to turn off anxiety for the first time in my life. And all of a sudden, it's like you had— imagine you had stereos playing your whole life and all of a sudden they unplugged them.

Yeah.

And it's a different world. It's a different— I was like, it opened up and I was like, wait a second, this is how everyone feels like. This is amazing. And when I learned how to turn it off, I was like, I have to share this with people. And so I, I, it, I mastered my own neurology through, through repetition.

Let me interrupt you for a quick sec. So your mom died at age 22.

Yeah.

Did that, did that trigger an exacerbation in the anxiety or fear or phobia or anything like that? Did it really, did the external event have an impact on you internally?

No, I, I went, of course I grieved. I was, I was, you know, upset. I, I went through all the things that I think you would think were normal reactions to losing apparent. And then I dove into personal growth because I wanted to heal.

And is that— have you heard about the difference between mourning and grieving?

You know, I did a mourning process, but I was stuck in grief. And that's, that's why I continued to seek out, because mourning is something that like subtly, slowly dissipates. Right. And the, and real, and our lives come back to normal. My life wasn't returning to normal. I was stuck in grief.

Okay. So probably your predisposition, whatever the, you know, we'll just assume there's some genetic predisposition there, right? Since you kind of woke up and were anxious, that may have also induced kind of this prolonged grieving state also, right? Just like we know certain genetic types are more prone to PTSD.

So I'm gonna say that like, I can see where you're coming from and I can agree with it partially, but I can also say that with the work I've done last 20 years in rewiring my nervous system and my brain and also helping others do the same, that your genetics might make you more susceptible, but that doesn't mean it is baked into the cake.

Oh yeah, 1000%.

Anxiety no longer runs my life. I don't have it. And if it, if it, when it rarely comes up, it is a 0.5, like 0.5 out of 10. And it's a blip on the radar, which is actually healthy because it's letting me know that I'm going off course in my thinking, that I'm letting myself go into the stress response triggered by my thoughts and my focus. And then I, and then I do the tools that I teach. And it immediately goes away. So we— I train people to not only have anxiety no longer run their life, but to then use it as a tool when it does come up. And it comes up— when it comes up, it's tiny, tiny and manageable.

Yeah.

And it's letting you— it's notifying you. It's kind of like a minor headache would remind you you haven't drank water for the last 3 days, right? As opposed to like a giant migraine event. So it's manageable.

The thing for me about the genetics is not— genetics are not our destiny, but for the audience, they are a set of proclivities, right? They're a set of predispositions. And so if you understand that about yourself, that you have the predisposition, the reason that's important is because it gives you leverage over it.

If you think it's just the way it is somehow, then you shouldn't, we should not, we should not be, we never settle, never settle with this is just the way it is. Or like, oh, well, I have really bad hot flashes because my mom did, my grandma did. So that's just the way it is. Like, no, don't just settle.

That's right.

Don't, don't just settle because genetics— like, the genetics are— if you're feeding your body junk and you're nutrient deficient, then the genetics are predictable. Whether it's like, yeah, heart disease runs in the family, sure, but you don't have to— you could be a black sheep and eat healthy and take care of your body and never develop heart disease, right? So, but yes, my, my whole family has some form of ADHD, which is definitely more wired towards anxiety. But no, I've overcome it. I no longer have it. But for the last 20 years, I've taught people how to overcome their anxiety. And you don't even have— you don't have to have an anxiety disorder. You don't have to be neurodivergent. Every single person I talk to, I— when I say to them, is there something coming up in your future when you think about it you can feel anxiety right now? It's always a yes. It's always like, yeah, my, my taxes or dental visit or my mother-in-law's coming into town. Or, you know, like everyone's got something that when they think about it, they can, they can feel some level of anxiety. It's a, it's a thing we feel, but what we don't know is how to control it and how to listen to it, how to learn from it and how to shift our thinking so that we get ourselves out of that stress response that our thoughts have put ourselves back into.

So, I think everybody listening to this has experienced anxiety. It's such a universal thing, right?

Yeah.

And some people are more prone to it than other people, but everybody's experienced it. And then, you know, in your work and your own story, if you will, you've discovered ways to kind of get outside that box, look at it from another perspective on some level, I suspect, and be able to no longer need to live with the anxiety or feel the anxiety or whatever, right? It would be really interesting for you to talk to us, and I'm just throwing that out there. It's maybe a different course altogether, but the point is you went through some process to get to your insight. Maybe you could share that with us. What was the actual process that led you to the insight?

Well, simply learning these tools that I, that I now teach.

Okay.

It was, it, I, I, yeah. So, well, I have a, I have many tools in my tool belt, but I use 7 to, mainly 7, sometimes depending on an individual from working one-on-one with people. They'll come and need to pull out a different tool. But my tool set comes from Neuro-Linguistic Programming, NLP, and Timeline Therapy. Timeline Therapy is created by Ted James, of no relation. And there's other therapies out there that have named themselves something along the lines of timeline, but no, it's the Timeline Therapy created by Ted James. And it's a process of having a conscious experience of your unconscious mind resolving stuck issues, unresolved issues in the body. But there's a specific technique which I'm going to teach today on how to turn off anxiety. And I'm going to unpack it so that people understand what causes anxiety in the first place, the most common cause of anxiety, which is our focus on our thinking.

Yeah, walk us through that.

Yeah, okay, great, cool. So when I teach this, there's two ways I can, I can walk everyone through it, or what I like to do, if you want to be a guinea pig, do you have anything that's coming up in your future that when you think about it you have anxiety?

You know, I'm a bad subject for this. I'm pretty relaxed, quite honestly.

Yeah, no, I know you, you definitely have, you Your vibe is chill, and that's okay. You don't have to.

I can imagine something.

No, I don't want you to make it up. It's better if it's real. So if you're not feeling any anxiety about anything coming up in the future, then I'll just walk everyone through it. But sometimes it's fun if the host has something that's sort of bugging them in the future, and it's okay if you don't.

Just trying to think.

I know the whole audience is going, man, this guy's lucky. I wish I was him.

Right. Um, well, I am thinking about getting a motorcycle again, and I really, really love riding motorcycles. It's a very Zen sort of flow state activity for me. So that's the joy of it, right?

Yeah.

However, I'm aware that riding a motorcycle has dangers associated with it. And so I've ridden them for many, many years now, but I always gear up with all the special safety equipment and everything else, because for me, it's not a question of if something's going to happen. It's just a question of when. Wind. So you may as well plan for that rather than riding around in your shorts and your flip-flops. So, yeah. So I will say that when I get on a motorcycle and throw my leg over it, there is a, there is a, a moment when I'm like, really? You're really going to do this? You're, you're really going to get on this thing and go? It's, it's, there's a little bit of anxiety about the potential danger that I'm putting myself into because there's uncontrolled variables. I'm pretty happy snowboarding or mountain biking where I control most of the variables, but now there's other people on the road and other things, right?

And yeah.

And so I've got more variables in play. And then I usually get to a point where I say, yeah, yeah, we're going to do this, but we're going to do it wisely. And we're going to, you know, being in a flow state, we'll, you know, it's going to be joyous and we'll be able to, we'll be able to handle what comes our way. Right. And so I kind of go off in that fashion.

I don't know if that helps. Yeah, so this is actually great. Uh, I love that you brought up motorcycle. We're going to talk about that today. But I, I want to ask, when you think about throwing your leg over your motorcycle right now, do you have any anxiety? Are you experiencing any anxiety in your body?

Um, there's a bit of excitement.

Um, right, there's excitement, which I expect because of how you were talking. I really doesn't hearing anxiety, so I just want to know. So excitement is the flip side of the coin of anxiety.

Okay.

Excitement is imagining a future you want to have. Anxiety is imagining a future you don't want to have.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, that's an interesting—

very similar. And in terms of the submodality of their location in the body, when you experience excitement, it's about 1 to 2 inches difference. So anxiety is down here by like the upper stomach, and excitement is just above it by the zygoid process. So they're in the submodality of the body. They're, they're very similarly located.

When she says the xiphoid process, just so you know, that's the, that's the bottom part of your sternum.

Right. So it's like 2 inches. You can't really see on the camera, but it's, it's like, you know, there's anxiety is a little, little bit more in the stomach and excitement is just a little higher. So a lot of times people confuse the two, right? Or you could have a mix of excitement, anxiety, because you're thinking about a really fun trip, but worried about a few things on the trip.

Sure.

So when you imagine what you don't want to have happen, even for a split second, you're triggering anxiety because you're triggering the stress response. The body cannot tell the difference between what's imagined and what's real. So you and I could go watch a zombie movie. We're safe, all the doors are locked, we're in a safe neighborhood, and we could hook ourselves up to machines, and, and the machines would notice that we have, uh, our heart rates go up, our breathing changes, our pupils dilate, or, you know, the galvanic skin response would change. Like, they could measure our bodies go into a state of stress even though we consciously, logically know we're safe. We're watching a fun, scary zombie movie. You know, why do we do things? Why do we go on roller coasters? Why do we jump out of airplanes? Why do we do things that are like, you know, that have potential for danger? Why do we watch scary movies? The body perceives it as actually real. It's actually happening to us. Now, the body also can't tell the difference between time. So if you're imagining a bad thing happening in the future, the body thinks it's happening to you right now, and the body responds. Now, part of your brain that is responsible for flipping the switch into the stress response— and the stress response shunts resources away from areas of the body that aren't responsible for immediate survival. So let's say digestion. Right? Um, blood flow to the prefrontal cortex gets diminished because we don't need our logic centers of our brain to do, you know, critical thinking when we need to run away from the bear, right? We need the amygdala, like, to have all the blood flow. We need our limbs to have all the blood flow. So this is why people get ulcers, right, if they are in a state of stress a long time, because blood flow gets shunted away from our core— not from our heart, but away from, like, you know, the liver and the stomach and the small intestines. It still has some blood flow, but it's less— it's less resources. We shut down digestion. So people who have been in a state of stress have remembered that it's like they eat and it feels like a rock is in their stomach. Like either they get, they completely shut down, they might even throw up or they get diarrhea. Like the body's just voiding itself because it can't digest. And so that's the physiological response that we recognize. There's, there's minor ones too. Like, you know, you're, you might have tunnel vision, you know, you might feel dizzy, you might have sweaty palms, but the body is physiologically changing into a state of stress. And there is like a scale, right? So, you know, that you hear a weird sound in your house, you're not going 10 outta 10 running away from a bear level stress, but you're, you got a shot of norepinephrine or adrenaline or whatever it's called, the cortisol, right? You got a bit of shot of that. Like you're like, now you feel awake. Maybe you feel prickling on your skin and you just like, your body goes like, oh, like a gopher, right? Like, do I have to, do I have to fight? Am I okay? And so we might have a little bit of that alertness come in, the physiological response come in. And this is good. We want this, but we don't want to live in this. And the problem is our thinking and our focus is constantly triggering that physiological change. And that's what anxiety is. Anxiety is an emotional experience of the physiological shift into stress response because you cannot feel stress. Stress is not an emotion. And I've worked with clients who are clearly stressed out. And I had one client, her, her mom was dying of cancer, so she was taking care of her. She worked a very, very demanding job. She was raising a young child and it was just everything, right? She burning the candle on both ends. And I was attempting to give her tools to help her manage her stress. And she, and she was doing great at all her other homework, like all the other homework I gave her for eating better and for, you know, implementing exercise and, you know, sleep hygiene. Everything was going well, but she would not do anything to lower her stress. And I asked, finally asked her after a few weeks of her sort of failing that level of her homework, she's like, I don't feel stress. And I'm like, oh, thank you. Thank you for saying that. Stress isn't an emotion. You don't feel it. You're just, you'll like keel over, right? Like your body. I have actually met a woman who just fainted from stress, right? The body just eventually just gives up and has to like reset. But we don't want that. And, you know, coming from the perspective of a woman, I know that women drag their bodies through the mud. Like we, we are so stubborn mentally that we'll drag ourselves through stress and, and deteriorate ourselves. Because what's happening when you're in stress mode is the shunting of the resources away from health and healing towards immediate survival. In the long term, you have shut down epigenetically, shut down processes and enzymes for repair, for immune function, for preventing cancer. Right? So it's very common.

Yeah, we have a lot of data now that people in stress, not only are they accelerating aging, but even if you do regenerative procedures on them, they don't respond to them because, or as well as they would if they're in parasympathetic nervous system tone.

Right.

And to your point also, we're, we're able to test the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system tone here in the clinic with a device that we have. And it's interesting how many people will say that they're not stressed. And we think that part— and some of them are not, but some of them are. We think part of that also is that the nervous system kind of accommodates to stress in a way where they no longer perceive it. It's like a backpack they've worn for so long that they don't really know what it's like until they take it off.

Right. I, so I could see what you're saying. And I would suggest when you find people who clearly have been living, living in an environment that would nor— you would think would normally give people stress, but then all the tests show that their body's not in stress. I would dig a bit deeper into their thinking, their philosophy, their focus in life, because I bet you those are the type of people that focus on what they want, don't focus on what they don't want, don't lament about a future that they don't want, that are considered more optimistic people, just like— and they have a— maybe they are spiritual or they're religious, they have a belief that the universe is conspiring or God is conspiring in their favor. Those people have less stress.

What we see is the opposite, though, is that people that show a lot of stress will suggest to us that they don't have any stress rather than the other way around. And then those folks, that's where we feel like they've been carrying the backpack and they're not able to really recognize they have it on because they've kind of normalized it. Right. We do that with everything. To your point, it's not an emotion, but there are some physical cues to being in stress, right? A dry mouth, sweaty palms, all these different things.

And anxiety is a very common one that people don't know they're in stress. But when we dig a bit deeper, we find out that they have a lot of anxiety because anxiety is the message. It's the red light on the internal dashboard letting you know that you're internal focus is triggering your stress response.

I like the way you're breaking this down, that stress is essentially the body or the mind, really. It's the nervous system imagining a future that it doesn't want to have. Yes. And excitement is the nervous system imagining a future. I suppose it could be a future or present since it can't tell the difference, but imagining something that it does want to have.

Yeah, it boils down to that.

So Is there going to be an element of metacognition in this?

No, see, that's what, that's what a lot of people kind of, that's what they initially think like, oh, is this like The Secret, you know, where it's like if I imagine something that I can create it and—

No, it's not that. Metacognition is more the ability to look at your thoughts from outside yourself and say, hmm, I'm thinking this or I'm feeling that. I wonder what that's about.

It's— Oh, okay.

It's a, it's a coming at it from a different level, so to speak. And then it's like, then from there with metacognition, you can then say, oh, okay, I'm actually feeling this because of that. And because of something that happened to me, but that's not what's happening here. There's no reason to be anxious. And then your anxiety can go away. That's sort of looking at it. Yeah.

So telling yourself, yeah. Telling yourself, well, I shouldn't be anxious. I promise you people tried that. That's silly. I shouldn't be anxious. No, no, I agree. So I like that concept and I do use it, the observe. Observer observing yourself.

That's it.

And making those questions. That is some of the processes that I do. For the tool, which I will be teaching, I want everyone to learn this tool and do it anytime they have anxiety, and it turns off anxiety. And so we're not going to do it with you because you don't have enough anxiety to do the tool. Because you have this fleeting, like, what the crap am I doing? And then you get back on the motorcycle and you go and you have fun. I would just say, like, that might be like just that little like, this is dangerous thought that triggers a tiny bit of anxiety that's fleeting. I think that's healthy. I, you know, I think that's— I think that's keeping you in check of like, I'm not gonna do stupid stuff on my motorcycle because I know the realities. Like, I think that's a healthy level, like 0.5, you know, anxiety. That's— it's just allowing you to remember. Now here's the thing, there's something called target fixation. You probably know what it is, uh, but I'll, I'll explain it to the audience. I love that you brought up motorcycles. If you go to YouTube and you type target fixation motorcycle, for example, you're going to see a guy like driving in a— imagine an empty Costco parking lot and he's like learning how to drive a motorcycle and he hits the, the pole, like the, the, the lamp. It's like a huge empty lot and he finds the one thing to hit. And this is target fixation. It's, uh, when you first learn to ride a bike, for example, do you remember you'd be like, hey, and you'd see your friends and you'd like, you, you'd look over to like wave at them and all of a sudden you're like driving in towards where you were looking. This is what we do. We, we go, we steer towards what we're looking at, what we're focusing on.

That's right.

Um, so that's target fixation. So this is in the real world, in the outside world, when you're driving and there's a big boulder in the road and people are trying to avoid it. Do you keep staring at the boulder, or do you look in your rearview mirrors to make sure that you can do an emergency lane change? Now, where you look is where you're driving towards. If you keep staring at the boulder, you're hitting it. And this is what we do in life. Our target fixation determines what our results will be. So your internal target fixation— this is why I said this is not metaphysical. Sorry. I, you said metacognition. I love that word. I don't know why I thought metaphysics, but it's not metaphysics. It's, is the simple truth. If you focus on something, you're more likely to create that outcome. If you're focusing on the thing you don't want to have happen, I really don't want to screw up this meeting. Oh, I don't want this to happen. I don't want that to happen. I don't want this to happen. You are more likely to screw up that meeting because that is your focus.

That's right. That's why there are pileups on the highway, right?

Right.

Everybody's looking at the crash and they crash right into it instead of the escape route.

You have to look, you have to shift your focus towards what you want. When we shift our focus 100— and I have several tools that rewire the brain to do this, because grabbing the reins of your thinking every moment of every day, it is tiresome at first, but the more you do it and the more you steer your thoughts, you can rewire your brain. Your brain has neuroplasticity, and this is how we retrain the brain. So when we focus on what we want and we focus on future we do want, and there's going to be a little tiny niggling, nagging part of you that says, like the Doubting Thomas, like, what, but, but what if it doesn't work out? Or what if it— it doesn't matter, because imagining a future that hasn't happened yet that's negative is just as fictitious as imagining a positive future that hasn't happened yet. Both are equally fictitious, but if you imagine the negative, you're more likely to create a negative outcome simply because you have shunted resources away from the prefrontal cortex that now you're automatically less likely to be successful in your meeting or whatever you're anxious about because you don't have the full use of your cognition.

It's a really interesting point that you make because some people might be listening to this and say, well, it's just a mind game, right? It's just a mind game. But actually everything is a mind game. There isn't anything.

This is where this is our entire reality lives in our brain. But, but we can rewire it. We can rewire the filters.

You can choose which game you want to play. That's the whole point. You get to choose and decide which game you want to play.

Right. And then another point that comes up, people go, well, if I don't imagine the bad, then how can I prepare for it? And I will tell you, you are not preparing, you're lamenting. Preparing looks like this. I live in the Pacific Northwest. There's bound to be some big earthquake one day. So what have we done? We've, we've got storable food, storable water, emergency first aid kit. We have a family plan. We have flashlights, you know, like just the things we're supposed to have. Right. And then we stop thinking about it because that's it. I'm prepared. So that's preparation. But you haven't stopped thinking about it. You're lamenting. You're, you're thinking about that cyclical loop of all the things that could go wrong. You haven't actually prepared. So in terms of preparation, you would have to imagine going and seeing a successful outcome, like knowing you had that challenge, go past the challenge in your mind, see a success, and then look back to now and go, how did I solve the problem? And think about the solution. People don't do that. They only focus on the problems that could come up.

I can imagine that there could be a person in the Northwest that has prepared, but their mind is still worried. It's still—

So they're lamenting. Those are two separate things.

They prepare again. Now they have twice as much water and twice as much food and whatever else. I'm making it hypothetical here.

Okay.

But the point is they go through that cycle of trying to prepare, and yet no matter how much they prepare, they still can't break out of that fear or perseveration that they're not going to be safe if the earthquake hits.

Right. Because they're imagining a future they don't want to have. They're imagining things going wrong, and whatever they prepared for, they're not imagining is the solution to it. So if you imagine what you don't want to have happen, which is fictitious because we can't predict the future, we can We can guesstimate, right? But what if good things happened? What if your house didn't fall down? Like, what if everything was fine? What if it's just a half a day of cleaning, you know, things that fell off the shelves, right? Like, so when we're in anxiety, we're imagining something we don't want to have happen. And sometimes we're not conscious of it. We kind of have to dig a little, like, what are you anxious about? And some people don't know. And that's what I call generalized anxiety, when they just kind of have like this baseline all the time. And so I do have a technique for that too. So I'm going to teach— I'm going to teach the tool. Okay, so you do this tool when you have anxiety. So a scale of 1 to 10, the first thing we do is we ask ourselves, how much anxiety do I have? 10 being the most, 1 being the least amount, you know, possible, or 0.5, right? So you just kind of get, get in touch with your body, right? And then you ask yourself—

that's a really interesting point you just made, get in touch with your body, because I think there's a somatic element to this, right? In terms of feeling the anxiety, not, not just thinking the anxiety. Is that what you're going for, is to allow people to actually get in touch with—

I want, I want them to measure it because in, as part of the technique, it, it, it goes down and it either goes to zero or it gets lower and everything's feedback. It's, it's now it's become biofeedback, like, you know, so as listeners are listening, and if you're driving, I'd like you to listen, but don't necessarily do the technique because for the first time when I teach it, I want you to close your eyes. After you learn it, it'll take only 15 seconds or less to do, and you could do it with your eyes open while driving. So, but the first, you know, few times you practice it, it's better to just kind of give it your 100%. So give you 100% attention. So for listeners who have anxiety or can think of, can you think of something right now that something coming up in the future that when you think about it, you have anxiety in your body? So go ahead and take a moment. You can pause the the, the podcast if you want, and just think what's coming up. And it doesn't have to be the biggest event. And I— everyone always thinks of the biggest thing. You don't. You could pick the small thing, like I have a dental cleaning and it's uncomfortable and I feel a little claustrophobic when I'm at the dentist. Like, it's a 2 out of 10. You can pick a small one. It doesn't have to be the big one. Any, any number. So, so, so pick something that's coming up in your future that you have anxiety around, and when you think about it You have the anxiety right now. It's not a concept. You actually feel it in your body. So now go ahead and close your eyes. So now you have your number. You, you've asked yourself, where's my anxiety at on a scale of 1 to 10? So you have your number and you have an event that's in your future. For the purposes of learning this technique, I actually want you to pick an event that has a date and a time, right? Not just like, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm worried about if a wart grows back or something like, I'm just something that's kind of like may, might happen, but doesn't have a date or time. Just for the purposes of me teaching this to you. So I want you to pick something that has an absolute, like, next Tuesday at 11:00 AM kind of, kind of date and time. Now I want you to go ahead and close your eyes, and I'd like you to imagine that your life is like a timeline, that your past is in one direction, your future's in the other. And I want you to float above this timeline, and I'd like you to float 15 minutes past the successful completion of the event for which you have anxiety around. I'd like you to float there looking down in your body, whatever you're doing, 15 minutes after the successful completion. And now just take a moment and check in with your body in the now. Where's your anxiety? Is it there or is it gone now? And now if it's down to zero, completely gone, come back to now, open your eyes, you're good. If you have any anxiety left, like some people say, well, there's residual, like that's still anxiety, you're staying here. So stay floating above that event. Now remember, we are going 15 minutes past the successful completion. Sometimes people just go 15 minutes after the event. They don't, they don't imagine it being successful. And I'm like, they're like, well, my, it was 8 out of 10 and now it's still 8 out of 10. I'm like, yeah, that's because you didn't imagine. This is, by the way, this is a practice in imagination. We're actively imagining. We're making this up because imagining bad is just as made up. It's just as fictitious as imagining good. So I want you to go 15 minutes past the successful completion. Now, what does that look like? A lot of times it's really mundane. I'm driving home. I'm talking to my friend. I'm doing the dishes. Like, it's 15 minutes. Like, after the success of something. If you still have some anxiety now, I want you to check in on a scale of, of 1 to 10, where is it now? Most people, it is diminished. It's gone down maybe from an 8 to a 6, or a 6 to a 2. I, I worked with a woman earlier today. She went from an 8 to a 0.5. I'm like, 0.5 is still something. We're going to keep doing the technique. So sometimes there's layers. So for you, if you have that layer effect stay there floating 15 minutes after the successful completion on it and hold, you know, holding that number that you have now, I want you to ask yourself, what's up? What's up with this anxiety? What am I anxious of now?

It's a great question.

And you're just taking a moment to ask yourself, what am I anxious of now? And sometimes it's like an aha moment. You're like, oh, there was a layer. Okay. I want you to now go 15 minutes past the successful completion of that. Now sometimes you can, 'cause it's like, oh, I'm actually worried about the midterm. I'm worried about something that like has a date and time. If it doesn't have a date and time, like, like I'm worried, like I, I got a negative cancer screening, but I'm worried it might come back in the next 5 years. Great. You have to ask yourself how many years or how many months or how many days, right? What, how much time needs to go by successfully, meaning having successful outcome for, for you to be convinced. Past that it's 100% successful. So some, some women go 25 years in the future, success— successful negative cancer screenings, and they— that then they believe it's like 100%. I definitely know it's 100% gone. Great. You have to go. So now I want you to float 15 minutes past the successful completion of that anxiety. Okay, so some people might be when they retire. I had a woman who was like I'm gonna have these weekly meetings and, and it's not gonna be until I'm done these weekly meetings. I'm like, great, go, go to when you retire. And then her anxiety went to zero. So I want you to go to a time in the future when you, when it's 100% successful, whatever the thing is that you're worried about, that you have the anxiety around. And now your anxiety should be to zero. If it's not, here's the final step. So sometimes there's layers, sometimes there's like 2, 3, 4, and we can learn a lot. About ourselves when we do this tool, when we do the layers, if there are layers. A lot of times it's one and done. It's like go 15 minutes past successful completion and now it's zero and I come back to now and it's like a less than 15-second experience.

Is the layering many times related to the fact that the risk, let's say the feeling of not being safe, that's how I'm kind of understanding this, that the feeling of not being safe is projected further out into the future than just past—

Oh, not being safe. Okay. That's a good— yes, that is a good way of putting it. That's a very good observation. But it can sometimes— it can be not what they expected. So I worked with an author who was publishing his second book, and he had a lot of anxiety about it, which he thought was weird because he didn't have anxiety about his first book. But his second book, it was like, now the pressure's on to like perform and be better than his first book. And so he had a 6 out of 10. So we went 15 minutes past the successful launch of his book, um, you know, all the sales are coming in, right? And he still had anxiety. And I thought, okay, that's interesting. What are you anxious of now? And he went, oh, all the reviews. And I'm like, okay, so it's like Amazon, so it's gonna have to— you have to go 1,000 years into the future, right, till, you know, the very last review. So go 15 minutes past the successful completion of all the reviews. And his anxiety went away. But what he then shared with me, he had this profound breakthrough, which most people don't have profound breakthroughs with this technique every time, right? But it was like it uncovered something for him specifically. So it's great when it does. It shed light on something that he was, had this worry that there was this angry mob out there that didn't like him. And it kind of just always was in the background for him. And like, you know, like, like he was Frankenstein's monster and people were like with pitchforks, like you know, we don't like you, which you all of a sudden realized was completely ridiculous. But, you know, if you're imagining this mob coming after you in your mind, but of course you're gonna have anxiety, you're not feeling safe. So like you said, it was another layer of not feeling safe. But like, you know, one could be a woman who is cancer-free but had breast cancer, and so she's like, okay, I've been cancer-free for 3 years, but it's not technically, you know, considered success until it's 5, and So we go 15 minutes past successful completion of her cancer screening in, you know, 2 years or 3 years. And then it's her anxiety is diminished but not 100% gone. I have to ask her how many 5-year anniversaries, like how many 5-year screenings do you need to have negative to believe that you're in the clear? And that's that. There's no right answer to that. It's an individual experience. So for those who still have a little bit of anxiety, my last part of this technique, which I also do with people with generalized anxiety, they're like, I have anxiety and I don't know what I, what I'm anxious about. So you can go ahead and close your eyes. And this is so for people who have, still have some anxiety, but it hasn't gone away using that technique. There's still some left, or they have generalized anxiety cuz they're not like, they didn't, we're able to pick a vent. They can't really think about one thing in particular. What I'd like you to do is close your eyes, imagining that timeline again, so past is in the one direction and the future's in the other. And I want you to float above that timeline and float out 15 minutes past the very successful, very long and successful completion of your life, whatever that looks like to you. And just, just be there in a moment. Now, for me, this is— I've died 120 years old, surrounded by generations of my family. We're all happy. I've accomplished everything I set out to accomplish, and I'm in heaven bathing in God's light and love. Like, that's, that's what successful completion of my life looks like, right? 15 minutes past successful completion. So when you go 15 minutes past the successful completion of your life, it has to be very successful. Like, you have to imagine it all worked out the way you wanted it. The nervous system goes back into safety mode because you are not sending in any signals of being unsafe, right?

That's it, right?

This technique works in the moment. This is the in-the-moment technique, and I want you to do it every time you have anxiety, and it ends up being very quick. You catch yourself, go 15 minutes after, get it to zero, come back into now. This, it'll take time. This alone could rewire the brain, but I have 6 other techniques that we do proactively that restructure and rewire the brain and the way we think so that, and they're only, they're little homework, little exercises you do throughout the day. They're really easy to implement, really fun to implement, and they align yourself so that you don't trigger the stress response in the nervous system. And then your life feels so good when you have that state of peace inside you, right? You know, when the brain fog goes away, that your sleep gets better, your— I mean, hormones get better because you're now— their body goes into repair mode, goes into that healing mode. And digestion gets better, right? Like your whole body comes back online when you're able to master this. So, so we're given this amazing tool called the brain, this 3-pound, you know, organ that unfortunately we weren't given the manual. And I feel like these tools are like the manual that I wish we were all born with because it, it, it teaches us that we have control over it. Do not let your thoughts control you. And your emotions control you. You know what I mean? We have the tools now to be able to live the life we want.

I tell virtually all my clients that all life comes down to one thing, just one thing. And they always look at me a little bit askance. And then I say it's optimizing your nervous system.

Yeah.

Right? How you think, how you feel, the stories you tell yourself, what you believe is true, how you move through space, how strong you are. It's all the nervous system. Quite honestly, how agile, how much joy you can experience. It's all about the nervous system. So it's interesting that we are born into a planet that's a bit chaotic, quite honestly. And then we're— nobody really teaches us these things, right? We're just kind of brought up, right? We're fed and put to bed and instructed, but nobody really teaches us strategies or tools or tips and tricks, so to speak. Tools is probably a better word to help us control and optimize the performance of the nervous system. And the reason that I think it's so critical from the longevity perspective is that when you take all that stress out of the system, your body now has the ability to, number one, not age as quickly, and number two, to rejuvenate, regenerate, and you're youthful, right? So it's a, it's a win-win-win all the way. And not only that, your relationships get better.

I was just thinking that, like, your communication with your family Like when I'm in stress mode, I'm like, I kind of feel ashamed of myself and how I interact with my family. You know what I mean? Like in retrospect, right? When I calm down, I'm like, I really wish I didn't say that and, or talk, like talk with that tone. Or I homeschool our son and that takes a lot of patience. And when my nervous system is stuck in reaction mode, like I, the patience gets thrown out the window, right? So we want to be a loving spouse. We want to be a gentle patient. Loving parent, right? And, and, and sibling and friend. And so our, yeah, our communication and our relationships definitely improve when we're able to train our nervous system to stay out of stress mode as needed, right? And then be able to, you know, I think stress mode is great when we, when we need it, right? It's like if I'm lifting really heavy weights in the gym, like, I want some of that. Give me some of that, right? But then we want to be able to turn it off, right? And not stay stuck in it.

For me, I instruct clients also about that the real goal in life with the nervous system, I show them, you'll get a kick out of this. I show them a video of a Canadian who is doing mogul skiing, is a pro mogul skier. And there are, there's a mogul field, of course, that he's going down and yet he's not looking at the moguls. He's looking beyond the moguls at the finish line, right? And his upper body is still, right? And yet he's committed. His, he's down the fall line, right? His upper body's down the fall line. His legs are, he's allowing his legs to do all the work. Right. And each mogul is not a problem. Each mogul is an opportunity. And now he has the ability to dance with the moguls, right? And he goes into a flow state, right? Which is when you get yourself out of anxiety and you get back to a place of neutrality, you might be asking yourself, well, what, what's the, what's beyond that? Well, for me, it's being able to go into a flow state. Where you, you're just allowing things to happen. You're not overthinking them. It's like being in the zone or whatever. I experienced it on a motorcycle on a, well, I can experience it anytime. I can experience it in a conversation for that matter. But it's a, it's a really joyous place to be where you really, you're operating from this place of relative neutrality and yet you're adapting and enjoying dancing with the moguls. And it's a, it's a really cool thing. It's really fun.

So now imagine if you stared down at the moguls and you were worried about each one as they came. Can I do it? Am I going to? What if I fall? What if I, you know, that's anxiety. Exactly. Is seeing what's coming up as a threat and imagining bad things happening.

That's right. That's right. As opposed to good things happening and even joyous things happening, you know, like fun to dance with these moguls, right? So fun. Very cool, Ashley. Well, you've obviously been on an amazing journey of self-discovery and self-resolution. I know you, obviously we all have had help from insights from other people to get there, but the way that you've put it together and packaged it up for people is, I can see why you're so passionate about it.

It really helps change people's lives. Like it gives them freedom. That's why I called my course Anxiety Freedom. Because it's that, that's, you deserve that. Everyone deserves to have that freedom. Everyone deserves to have these tools. When I first learned the tools, the, the neuro-linguistic programming tools for shifting how I think, and, and, and, you know, like, for example, I had a phobia of spiders, like full-on phobia of spiders. And now I'll let spiders crawl on me. I don't care. But I had a full-on phobia, like, and what's really cool with with NLP is we can completely rewire our brain to be, to be what we want. Like, I didn't want to be afraid of spiders. Now I'm not going to go like shove my hand in a cage of poisonous spiders or whatever. I'm not going to go do stupid stuff. But like, if a spider lands on me, I'm going to be like, hey, that's so cool. Like, look at this. Whereas before I'd be screaming my head off inconsolable. Right. So we can retrain our nervous system. We can retrain our brain. And in optimizing our life for success and for joy and for better relationships. And, you know, we can get over addictions. And we— I also wrote a book called Addicted to Wellness because I wanted to give people the toolset for taking that part of your brain that does addiction and turning it to your advantage right now. Now, like, kale makes— I have a Pavlovian response to kale. Like, I get excited when I think about a delicious kale salad.

Make it an asset, right?

Yeah, right. Make it an asset. That's— I love that. That's exactly— yeah. So you can, you can take your brain and, and take— turn that chaos into an order, into asset.

Yeah, beautiful. I love it. So where would— where do people get a hold of you if they want to track you down?

Right, so they can go to learntruehealth.com. That is my main website. Um, I've done a podcast for the last 10 years. Learntruehealth.com.

Okay.

And I, I loved interviewing you. Uh, absolutely loved it. Loved having you on my show. And, um, I'd love to be on your show. But yeah, that's learntruehealth.com. My anxiety course will be there. My book is there and all my podcast episodes that I do are there as well.

Beautiful. Okay. Ashley, such a pleasure to see you again.

Yeah. Thank you so much. This, this has been wonderful.

Yeah. Likewise. I enjoyed it.

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