This is a YouTube video titled "183: 5 Things to Stop Anxiety and Worry" created on April 10, 2020. It features a monologue by a speaker named Sam who shares personal insights and expert advice on managing anxiety and stress during the pandemic. The content focuses on practical habits such as feeling emotions, staying informed without obsessing, controlling what can be controlled, avoiding comparison, and maintaining human connection through technology. The video is a solo talk rather than a conversation.
Welcome to Fit for your Mind Friday, where I share an insight from me to you. After spending a lot of time interviewing recently on how to manage anxiety and stress during this time of this pandemic going on in our world that's become so many of our new realities, there's a few common practices that I'm seeing with people. People that are not just experts in managing that, but people that I know that truly are leaders. People that are showing up very strong. There is a theme on habits and practices that they are doing to be able to put themselves in a clear, calm, focused state where they're not in reaction mode, where they're not feeling anxious, they're not living through worry. And I wanted to share those here today. And I also want to share that I myself am a guinea pig to these. These things. I've said many times that I am not an expert in overcoming anxiety and worry, but I am certainly an expert in feeling those things. And I've really committed to learning how to practice this. Now, I personally had a little bit of a jumpstart before the pandemic because of my arm injury. Many of you know, some of you do not that I had torn my bicep pretty significantly. Gosh, now, it's been about eight weeks since my tear, but I had tore my bicep when I was in Costa Rica. I returned and I learned it was a turn torn bicep ended up in emergency surgery, not something I was expecting. And have been in a cast at the time of this recording. Right now, I've been in the cast five weeks. I have five more to go. And this is on my right arm, my right hand. So I was in this position of, oh, my gosh, I'm feeling anxious, I'm worried. Before, everything was happening with coronavirus, and then we added that to it, and it was a recipe for me to really be feeling a lot of that. So today, what I wanted to share with you is see five things, five things that I'm really practicing myself that is working for me. And there are five commonalities that all the experts I've been interviewing, people that I've been connecting with that are really in a good space right now. These are the things that they are doing, and I hope that they will support you. Okay. Number one. Number one is literally feel and process your emotions. You see so many times when something comes up that feels sad or stressful or anxious or hard, we've learned that we're not supposed to feel those things. So we go and we try to Mute them. We, you know, either avoid feeling them or we zone out or we try to cover them up with wine or a Xanax or whatever it is. And what I'm learning from experts is the best thing to do is literally to process your feelings, to feel them. Because when you can feel the feels and let them run through you, you are able to move that energy through you and get it out of you. So some examples, an interview I recently did that I'll be airing next week with nq, he shared that he allows himself every night to watch what's going on in the world and have a good cry, like literally feel those feelings. He views this that people are not just statistics, they're actual people. And he feels it and he lets himself cry. I've interviewed some people that they move their energy through dance or through singing or from literally shaking it off. But the key is to let yourself feel those feelings, not numb them, ignore them, try to stuff them down. Because then they start manifesting in other areas of your body and in other ways. And they also definitely do not help our immune system. So feel the fuels. I'm not personally someone who's a crier, but I'll tell you, I've been letting myself do it by going on really meaningful walks where I'm not listening to something else while I'm walking, I'm just thinking through and processing. Not in a worry state, but in a, in a true feeling state of what's going on in the world. So that's number one, feel the feels. Number two, this was a big one. A huge commonality was stay informed. Know what's going on in the world, but do not obsess. Do not obsess about the news and about your news feed and monitor exactly what you're letting in. I, for example, I had felt myself very anxious one week. It was at an all time high. When I checked the settings on my phone and looked back through it where I had been using my phone, I had seen that one day I had spent six hours, six hours scrolling Facebook, like, what the heck, no wonder I was feeling that way. So put some controls in place for you. For me, what I did is I personally limited the social media on my phone. I put a block where at an hour mark, I can't see it anymore during the day. And that's helped a lot. So a commonality I've seen is stay informed. Have your plan on where you're going to get your resources and your, your information and your knowledge about what's going on. In the world, but do not let it interfere with your day where you're mindlessly scrolling or just popping on the news or looking up things on Google, because that doesn't help anything. So control what information you are bringing. And that's a big one. The next thing, this was a big one is whether you do this through a list. And if you listen to my episode with Nell Rose, you heard this. You. If you listen to my episode with Rhonda Britton, you heard her share this. But make a list. Really look at what are the things that right now, in this time, can you actually control and what are the things that you can't control? Those things that you control. What are those? And focus more on those. So, for example, on my personal list, things I can control, what I'm eating, what I'm doing with my body, what I'm letting in, conversations with people, going for a walk, being present with my dog. I control what I'm doing with my own body, my own environment, my house right now. Those are things I can control. What can't I control? Everything going on in the world, really. So when you make that list and you really take a look at it and you stay in your zone of what can I control? That will shift things. You see, the majority of the time that we're anxious or worrying, it's about actually all of the times that we're anxious or worrying, it's always about stuff we have no control over. And that solves nothing. Staying in your head, worrying and being anxious about things that we can't control is. It is a waste of energy. It's a waste of space. It gets us nowhere. So really take the time to make a list of what can I control? What can I control? And do everything in your power to stay in a place of what you actually can control. Okay, the next thing, do not compare. There's no award for being the best quarantine mom. There's no award for being the best entrepreneur during this time. There's no award for getting your house the most organized right now. So. So stop comparing. That is all stuff that makes us feel less than it makes us feel anxious. Stop comparing. How you're processing and handling your time is your own personal business. Everybody's got a different life, a different schedule, different priorities. However you choose to spend your time is just perfect for you. I'm just going to encourage that you do it on things that you can actually control and that it's not in a place of worry. But stop the comparison. There is no award for the person that spent spent their best time with quarantine. I've been personally triggered by some of the memes going around saying things like if you don't learn a new skill, this means that you're, you know, lazy. Not true. Not true at all. Everybody's got different priorities. So however you choose to spend your time now, choose to spend it. But I will encourage you to keep in mind that one of the biggest complaints that we've always all had is lack of time. And now you've got the time. So really take the space to think, what can I control? And what's the best use of my time right now? And then the final thing, and this is so critical. Just because you cannot get out in the world, many places you can still connect with others. Human connection is really critical. So those that are navigating through this successfully and well, they are really using things like FaceTime and Zoom and that app, House Party or Skype to really be able to see face to face connection with others using technology. So we're staying in the game. I've seen many people do birthday parties over Zoom or girl, you know, happy hour over Zoom. There's so many creative things you can do with with video conferencing right now, but stay connected anyways, I hope those things serve you on this Friday. And as always, if you loved this episode, please share it and pass it on. Sam.
