In this solo episode of the Dr. Zoe Show titled “Why Strong Women Have More Anxiety,” Dr. Zoe Shaw opens by affirming that anxiety is neither a sign of weakness nor a lack of faith. She introduces the series “Redefining Your Superwoman” and shares a personal “win” (reframing a frustrating run with her daughter into a bonding experience) and a “fail” (obsessively checking temperatures during COVID), illustrating how stress can morph into anxiety. Dr. Shaw defines a “strong woman” as someone who speaks truth, sets boundaries, leads yet submits, takes calculated risks, and lives with kindness, faith, and authenticity. She argues that strong women often experience heightened anxiety because they take on more stress and, due to higher cognitive ability, are more aware of potential problems, leading to rumination. Stress is described as external pressure, while anxiety is the internal manifestation when stress is allowed “inside the house.” The episode then offers concrete coping tools: productive worrying (planning and resolving imagined scenarios), challenging catastrophic thoughts, using a “done is better than perfect” mantra, regular exercise, progressive muscle relaxation, enlisting help, minimizing unnecessary triggers (especially media), and confronting fears directly. Dr. Shaw also recommends the Headspace app and encourages listeners to follow her on Instagram, subscribe to the show, and text “strong” for weekly encouragement. The overall message is that anxiety is a by‑product of strength, not a deficit, and that strong women have the capacity and resources to manage it effectively.
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I have a couple of things I want to point out to you today. Your anxiety is not a deficit in your strength, and your anxiety is not a reflection of your faith. Today we're talking all about strong women and their anxiety. Hi there, I'm Dr. Zoe. I'm glad you're here. This is the place for developing your strength as a woman and helping you navigate difficult relationships in your life, including that sometimes difficult relationship with yourself. Being a strong woman is not about what other people can see, and it's not about how loud you are about it. It's a quiet knowing. This isn't therapy, but you may feel like you've been to therapy after one of my episodes. Here, we also explore the intersection of psychology and faith, all with the purpose of creating a new kind of strong. Welcome to Redefining Your Superwoman. Hey there, it's Dr. Zoe. I'm so glad you joined us today. The topic today is why strong women have more anxiety. But first up, Superwoman win and Superwoman fail. So I don't know about you guys, but I am tired of talking about COVID but it is still a reality in our life. We're all dealing with it, and so my win is that I've been trying to get out for my workouts. You know, the kids are there constantly, and they need to work out too, so they've been coming with me when I've been going on a run, and I have to admit that I've been feeling a little frustrated about it because my runs are my therapy. It's my time alone with God, with myself, where I can just, you know, Run, move my body, think, write, pray. Write meaning I talk sometimes into my recorder as I'm running. And so my kids have been coming along with me and I was actually frustrated because my daughter was, she was biking with me and she slowed me down. But then all of a sudden I was able to recognize my negative self-talk, which was grumbling about how My workout was being ruined and I wasn't getting exercise and I wasn't getting my time alone and she was slowing me down. And I was able to reframe it and really just focus on how amazing it is that my daughter can work out with me now, that she's old enough to ride her bike while I'm running. And when I was able to reframe it, I actually started enjoying our time together. And even though it wasn't the best run, it was the best time. And since then, she's been biking with me while I run. And now this girl is passing me up and it's beautiful. And we're enjoying our time together. So my win is that I was able to reframe it, and now my daughter and I have a new thing that we do together that we've never been able to do before. So it's beautiful. My fail, and I'm recognizing that this is all about my daughter today, I have been obsessively checking my kids' temperatures and my temperature and my husband's temperature for reasons we all know. We're here in the middle of COVID and my daughter coughed, and I think I probably just reached over and got a thermometer and checked her temperature. And she looked at me and she's like, Mom, you know people cough. It doesn't mean they're sick. It made me realize that maybe I have a little more anxiety than I thought I did, and my fail is that I've been letting it get to me. And actually, there's a win in there because I was chastised by my 7-year-old girl, and she's right. I wonder what effect my checking has on her. She's a no-nonsense, super smart girl, but she's a little human, and none of this is lost on her. So I've reduced my checking, as if it could really control anything anyway, and I've recognized that I need to let some things go. Talking about letting things go and anxiety is a perfect segue into our topic today: why strong women have more anxiety. I put out an Instagram video where I talked about why your anxiety is not a deficit in your faith, and I got a lot of good feedback from women that the video spoke to them. So I encourage you to go watch it. I hope you're already following me on Instagram, but if you aren't, it's just Dr. Zoe Shaw. Pretty easy to find me. Check it out. So here's the thing. We are all experiencing an increased level of stress. It's in the air, y'all. Even if you're enjoying your self-isolation, even if you're not really affected by COVID-19, the anxious energy is affecting you. And if you're listening to this decades in the future, it all still applies. Because life brings stress, but stress doesn't have to equal anxiety. But it's definitely a gateway drug for anxiety. So what's the difference? Stress is external. It's a bombardment of outside things. Stress is moving. It's having a baby. It's losing a job. It's a global pandemic. Stress is happening outside of you. Anxiety is internal. When you open the door to stress and you say, "Come on in, mi casa es su casa." Stress has now turned into anxiety. Anxiety is the physical and emotional manifestation of your stress. So stress is always going to be there. I think we should work hard to remove drama from our lives, but it's not productive to try to remove stress. What we need to do is know how to manage stress and manage anxiety when we've let stress in the door. And it's also not possible to completely rid ourselves of anxiety. The people who seem to have done that are really just super good at managing it so that they're stopping it very early after it stuck its foot in the door. Now I have a number of clients who judge their own anxiety, and these are strong women who feel that if they're strong enough, if their faith is deep enough, if they're smart enough, that they wouldn't have anxiety. But anxiety is a human condition. Even if Jesus experienced anxiety— and watch my Instagram video where I talk about that— then you will too, because you can't escape your humanity until you are dead. So first, let's just get a working definition of a strong woman. Now I've begun this definition of what I think a strong woman is. I don't feel like it's perfect yet, but it's a good base for what we're going to talk about today. A strong woman is someone who shares her opinions and speaks her truth even when she's afraid. She listens, but she refuses to accept others' problems as her own. She can be leaned on, but she's nobody's doormat. She leads well, but she possesses the wisdom to submit to leadership. She takes calculated risks and she makes her failures work for her. She knows when to persevere and when to quit. She prays for wisdom over wealth and power. She's filled with kindness, generosity, faith, compassion, integrity, a willingness to be vulnerable and authentic. No matter what, she's true to herself. Now, if you're thinking, but I'm not strong, that definition is not me, This is just an aspirational definition. No one is all of that all of the time. I'm not, nor will I likely ever be on a consistent basis, but that's who I strive to be, and in striving, I get closer and more consistent every day. So strong women, and those striving to be, sometimes we have an extra dose of anxiety for a couple of reasons. One, Because strong women take on more stress naturally. If you're adept at what you do, if you've grown strength in an area or multiple areas of your life, you're going to naturally take on more than a woman who hasn't, which increases your opportunity for anxiety to take hold. Number 2, strong women are smarter. Why do I say that? Because it takes a level of intelligence to pursue strength. Surviving something is not the same as becoming strong. And you don't get strength unless you've pursued it. Becoming strong is a purposeful journey. We have to work through the mind's natural inclination to acquiesce to life's burdens. So strong women are smarter. And guess what? The higher your IQ, the more likely you are to experience anxiety. It really is true that ignorance is bliss, because if you don't understand all the possible ways that something can go wrong, Then you're going to be considerably less stressed than someone who's really quite aware. There was a study by a psychologist named Penny, and he and his colleagues wrote, a worried mind is a searching mind, and smarter people have the cognitive agility to examine multiple angles of any situation, for better or for worse. More verbally intelligent individuals are able to consider past and future events in greater detail, leading to more intense rumination and worry. Basically anxiety. So anxiety is not a weakness, it can actually be a byproduct of your strength. Your anxiety is also not a deficit, but it is a byproduct of allowing stress in the door. So now we understand that the flip side of strength can be anxiety, but the light in this tunnel is that we also have the mental capacity and strength to tackle it just like we do all the other things in our lives. By the way, there's this great app called Headspace. I've used it and my clients have been raving about it, and I highly suggest that you use it for helping to tackle any anxiety you might have. So here's some tips. If you're gonna worry, worry productively. Part of being a strong woman is having some wisdom, right? Wisdom sees the big picture. And so looking ahead can cause worry. Looking behind causes depression. When I speak to strong women about staying in the moment, I often get pushback from them. Well, I have to plan. I have to see ahead. I need to plan for what might happen. And they're right. Yeah, you do. But we often mislabel worrying for planning. Planning is not the problem. It's worry. What we often do is we come up with all the possible horror story scenarios, but we never resolve them in our minds. And that causes anxiety. I had a client just tonight, and we were in session, and she was talking about feeling claustrophobic, and she asked herself, what if I get stuck in here? But she didn't answer the question. Leaving yourself hanging like that causes immense anxiety. So if you're going to plan for all the possible outcomes, if you're going to worry, then you must also take the time to plan the resolution of those outcomes. I asked her, okay, so what if you get stuck? Then what? And she's like, oh, and we figured it out. Well, then I'll walk out of the car. Okay, now you've just relieved some of your anxiety. You've told yourself, if this happens, then this will be my plan of action. That is productive worrying. Once you've resolved it in your brain, then you can work on coming back to the present. Now, if you tend to come up with more and more scenarios, like a jet plane and a tsunami hitting your house at the same time, you got to challenge that self-talk. The likelihood that it would even happen, right, is super, super small. So we're going to let that one go. That's when you need to distract yourself and bring yourself back to the present. When you're feeling overwhelmed, it's also helpful to enlist help. Make a mantra for yourself: done is better than perfect. Perfect doesn't exist. Repeat that. Done is better than perfect. Perfect doesn't exist. When you start to believe that, you're going to see some changes in your life. Next, of course, we know you got to exercise. Exercising daily gets all that anxiety out. That's why exercise is my therapy. Another really good one is progressive muscle relaxation. Lay on the bed or the couch. You can do it in a chair at work too. Identify a muscle group like your arm or your leg, and then tighten it as tight as you can and hold it for 10 seconds and then release it, completely release it. So it's kind of like a rag doll. Do this all over your body in different areas once or twice, and you'll notice that it helps to relieve tension that you hold in your body. Next, you can't avoid your fears. You've gotta confront them head on. Now we strong women are pretty good at doing that, but we're not so good at not creating them to begin with. So we've gotta minimize unnecessary triggers. Right now, for a lot of people, an unnecessary trigger is the media. You can't always minimize or get rid of triggers that you can't control, but some of them you can, and you've gotta just let those go. Being a strong woman can come with its perks, and it comes with its deficits. What's most important is that we face our deficits Head-on, we acknowledge them, we know what they are. Anxiety can get the best of any of us. Recognize it for what it is, enlist the help of others, and practice tools to take care of yourself. You've got this. Thank you for listening to the Dr. Zoe Show, Redefining Your Superwoman. New shows go up every Tuesday. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode and text the word strong to 38470 to get my weekly encouragement. I look forward to connecting with you amazing women on social media throughout the week. Have a super week!
