Dr. Nicole Cain narrates a brief personal anecdote about suddenly experiencing chest anxiety during a busy morning. She describes pausing for ~20 seconds to notice the sensation, identifying background anxious thoughts about her jaw triggered by teeth clenching the previous day, and framing a next step of self-regulation now that the trigger is identified.
Chapters
Okay, so I'm sitting here having a really good morning, drinking my burdock tea, and I'm having chest anxiety. I have a lot of things to do today. In fact, I'm going to be getting on a call. We're going to be talking about the nine types of anxiety. So now is not the time. And so normally I'd be like, okay, what can I do to make it stop? Go grab some theanine, some hawthorn. But we could do something better. So I just set myself down for 20 seconds, and I just noticed the sensation that I'm feeling in my chest. And I realized something. I realized that my thoughts were going on in the background. And in those background thoughts, you know how you can have forward thoughts through the active ones that you're thinking, but then at the same time, you can have passive thoughts kind of running around in the back of your mind? Those thoughts were thinking really scary, negative things about my jaw. It's thinking, oh, my gosh, what if we have jaw cancer? What if we have to get orthodontics? Like, all these anxious thoughts. And so then I'm like, why am I having these anxious thoughts? What's that all about? So I notice it. I pause, and I realize that I'm having jaw saunas that I wasn't paying any attention to consciously, but it's because I was clenching my teeth all day yesterday. So now I know I've been clenching my teeth. Oh, yeah, of course your jaw's a little bit sore, but there were all these thoughts happening in the background, and it caused chest anxiety. So. So all that being said, next step is to regulate. Now that we know what's going on, do you resonate with.
