How to Prevent Anxious Thoughts

Hey babes, this is Dr. Kane and I am videoing you from the wonderful land of Iowa. I've been cross countrying from Arizona back to Michigan where we spend our summers. And I'm so excited to connect with you today on Facebook Live. Hopefully the technology is working. As you probably know, last week I did the live somewhere else and then it had to get uploaded and downloaded. So thank you for watching. I'm really happy you're here. And today I want to talk with you about sticky thoughts. And so I've gotten a lot of feedback from our anxiety warriors about what do I do with the fact that I'm surrounded by all of this news, all of this stuff. With the pandemic, there's so much anxiety for adults and kids alike. And so I want to talk with you about sticky thoughts and what do we do with thoughts and how do we work with them? How do we deal with the body in response to the thoughts? And so when I talk about stickiness, stickiness is how much something sticks with you when it pops up. And so for me, when I am doing a lot of self care and I'm working really hard on keeping my nervous system in bay, even though the world is chaotic around me, when I'm not doing as well, the thoughts get more sticky. So for example, a sticky thought that I was having while we were driving up here is, oh my gosh, the world has changed forever and it's not going to be back, I'm not going to be safe. And so that thought tended to get a little bit more sticky because I was in the car and we weren't doing anything. And so then I caught myself ruminating on it, it was really sticky. And so that's different than a non sticky thought. A non sticky thought may be a thought that just kind of comes, you notice it and then it goes. And our goal is to work towards thought freedom. And thought freedom is something we're talking about in our seven day anxiety freedom challenge, which is helping you be free from sticky thoughts. So the thoughts may come, but how do you make them go? And so the first thing is to know that thoughts are thoughts. Thoughts don't change reality. Thoughts don't change your identity and who you are. Thoughts are just simply your brain. And depending on how your brain is wired, your thoughts may be more sticky and anxious or they may be positive and happy, they may be more depressed. And so the first thing that we have to do is we have to separate our thoughts from our identity and we also have to separate thoughts from Reality. Sometimes we can think things that are true, but then oftentimes we think things and then we label them with judgments or filters. I have a little Cavapoo puppy here who wants to say hello. So let me grab her. And so she is here with us, and she doesn't have any problems with sticky thoughts. She just hangs out and is totally in the moment. So what do you do? You have a thought that's sticky. One of the things to do is to just label it. Okay, I'm having a thought. So when I was in the car, I was having an anxious thought. Oh, my gosh, the world has changed. It's never going to be the same. What are we going to do? I was having that anxious thought, and then I noticed it. I tagged it. I said, oh, my anxious brain is bored. It's not being distracted and it's producing anxious thoughts. And I am not. My thoughts. My thoughts do not dictate or change the future. And then I had to mindfully release the thoughts. So how can you do that? Especially if you have obsessive compulsive type thoughts or if you're incredibly anxious and you try to release, but they just keep coming back. There's an exercise that I talked about in one of our previous lives about the boats. And this is something that I borrowed from Jack Kornfield. And it's a really good mindfulness exercise that you can practice every single day. And the more that you practice it, the easier it will be to use it on command. You know, we're working on calm on command. And so to do the boats exercise, what you simply do is you just mindfully spend like five minutes and you imagine that you're sitting on the edge of a stream. Maybe you'll close your eyes and you'll notice that stream is before you. And then as you observe, boats start to drift by you. The boats represent thoughts. The boats are there. You can't ignore them, deny them, or suppress them. They're there. But what we do with them is we observe and then we release. And so when I was doing this exercise in the car, the first thing that I noticed is, okay, I'm feeling really anxious about coronavirus. I'm going to put that anxiety mentally imagine yourself propelling that anxiety onto the boat and then watch as the boat just drifts by. And so the next thing that you do is that you might notice that as these thoughts come up, that some of these boats go around and again and again and again. And so the glitter technique that we're talking about in the one week anxiety challenge is to just notice that these are thoughts. Thoughts are everywhere, just like glitter. You walk up to someone and they have a little bit of glitter on their eyes and something, suddenly you go home and you have glitter. Same thing. Your thoughts, your thoughts are everywhere. The world impacts your thoughts. The news impacts your thoughts. Facebook impacts your thoughts. Conversations with people impact your thoughts. What you're reading impacts your thoughts. So there's glitter, there's thoughts. It's all over the place. So first step is you want to mindfully put those thoughts onto the boat and to label them. Okay, this is a thought. My brain is thinking, thinking, thinking. My brain loves thinking. Put that onto the boat and then allow it to go by. If that boat keeps coming back again and again, it's super sticky. And so what we have to do is we have to interrupt the brain's sticky anxious pattern. And so that's where we get to the cognitive skill or the gold skill, which is actually working on changing your brain. And the first thing that you have to do is distract. So the brain, especially an obsessive compulsive pattern brain, it's going to go down a neural pathway where the thoughts get really sticky, intrusive, repetitive, and we literally have to just change the situation. And so that might mean getting up, it might mean turning the channel, it might mean going to the bathroom. So I was in the car and I'm noticing this pattern is happening. I'm bored, I'm stuck in the car. We're going through Nebraska. My brain is producing these anxious thoughts. So I start to label them. I'm like, okay, my brain is thinking, it's having anxious thoughts. Let's imagine putting that thought in the boat. Watch the boat go away, but the boat keeps coming back, right? So it was more of a sticky thought. And so the gold method is total distraction. And so because I was stuck in a car, we had to get creative. You're going to have the most success with distractions if they distract the physical nervous system. Your brain stem, your brain stem is really responsive to touch and smell and sight. All of the sensations, temperature. And so a strategy that I used was to shift in my seat and turn on some music. I closed my computer, laptop and I totally distracted. So if you can't, if you're at work or if you're with family and you can't go anywhere, you can change something about the scenery. That can make a huge difference in reducing the stickiness. So number one, if you're having anxious thoughts, like we're all inundated with the news right now is label the thoughts. Okay, I'm having thoughts. They don't change anything. We don't know what's going to happen. All we have is the moment. Everybody has opinions about what's going to happen with COVID And all we know is where we are right now. And the second thing is, once we've labeled the thoughts to put the thoughts away, put them on your boat, watch the boat go by. And then the third thing is to remove the sticky factors completely distract the nervous system. So I want to also talk quickly about. I had a question on my comments about, well, what do you do with kids? Kids are really anxious. Kids don't know what to do. They don't really understand everything that's happening with coronavirus. And the cool thing is that you can do this same exercise with them. And in fact, teaching them how to do this while they're young is going to be profoundly helpful when they're adults. And so tell the kids, remember, your thoughts are thoughts. Just like if you look at a rock, no matter what you think about that rock, no matter how you analyze it, it doesn't change the fact that it's a rock. So label it for what it is. I am not my thoughts. My thoughts do not change reality. My thoughts do not know the future. They are only guesses. They are feelings from an anxious brain. So you'll teach them to label it. You can teach them to mindfully put those thoughts on a boat. And then if the thoughts are really extra sticky, teach the child the art of distraction. So maybe they'll go and they'll get a drink of ice water, or maybe they'll go into another room or they'll play with another toy or. Or they'll turn on some music or turn off the music. Kids respond really well oftentimes to nature sounds. So downloading an app onto your phone which will play the sounds of the waves or the birds, something like that would be helpful for kids. And so we've been talking today about the sticky thoughts that can happen and what do you do about them? And if you like this, and if this is helpful for you or relevant for you and what you're going on in your life. Right now, I have a totally free Facebook anxiety one week challenge. My heart is to help people with anxiety, especially with what's going on in this country, is to spread some positivity. And so this is totally free. There's no pressure, and Shiva and I are loving it. So join us on this one. Week challenge. You can find it by going to the private Facebook group. Again, it's totally free. No pressure. It's just me loving on you. There's a one week challenge on there. You're going to get a 30 page book. It's beautiful. It's made by my brilliant designer, Haley, and there's literally 30 pages of content. And I send you a video every day. Just make sure you give us a good email address where we can get that all to you. And then in the group, we're there to support each other. There's this research study that came out that said that people had 85% greater levels of success when they did things as a group as opposed to individually, which is amazing. So it shows that group work works. We all need community. We need each other. And so I created this group free of charge, just for you to get in there, get support, be real love on each other. And so I would love to know what your thoughts are about. Sticky thoughts. Have you dealt with sticky thoughts? What's the most beneficial thing that you got out of this Facebook Live today? And I would also love to know if you have any other questions that I can answer. I'll be in the group. We're checking it out often and I would love to have you become a part of our family. And Again, this is Dr. Nicole. To learn more about the anxiety one week challenge, you just go to the link. I'll provide it in the notes here. And I will see you soon. I'm doing these lives on Wednesdays and Fridays. It's the same time, same place. And so I will see you soon, my loves. Take care.