027: Tips for Improving Anxiety & Depression - Part 1

In episodes 27 & 28 we'll be talking all about anxiety and depression because when I interviewed multiple working moms before creating The Working Mom Happiness Method, almost all of them had struggled with anxiety or depression at one point.

We'll cover the definitions of anxiety and depression, why it's so important for your health to take them seriously, and some great tips on how to help.

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• Access the episode transcript here

  Hi, my name is Katy Blommer and my passion is helping women learn how to put themselves first, I learned all the tools for success on my own 12 year journey that has led me to finally figuring out how to live my best life. My journey included overcoming body image issues, and yo yo dieting, climbing the corporate ladder to a multiple six figure career, navigating mom guilt through a 60 hour workweek turning around marriage issues, and much more. Now, I'm truly living my best life. And I've pretty much become obsessed with teaching others my tried and true methods for creating balance, maintaining healthy habits, improving your relationship, career development, and how to stop tying your value and worth, to the way you look and how you serve others. I'm so passionate about helping others learn this, that I created the working mom happiness method to help you get there too. So if you're ready to learn how to live your best life, pull up a chair or put on your walking shoes and get ready to dive in. This is the working mom happiness method podcast. Hi,

  and welcome to the episode that's all about anxiety and depression two super important topics. But before I jump in, I just want to acknowledge that I took a break from the podcast for most of the summer, actually. So I took more than a couple of months off. And I want to talk about it because I was essentially practicing what I preach, which I'm really excited about. I mean, I was a little bit sad to take off time on the podcast because I really love it. And I'm excited to get going again, what happened is the kids got out of school for the summer. And my company offers this amazing summer FLEX program where you basically get four extra days off. So you can use them in four full days, or you can use them in eight half days. And I ended up taking the eight half days to take my boys to their golf league every week, which was awesome, loved it loved having that time with them. So excited I did it. However, taking those basically three to four hours off each time, took that out of my work schedule. And in addition to that, we've been doing a lot of fun things on the weekend, like going camping or going on different trips, lots going on over the summer. And so really with all that I have going on in my life. So I have my job at American Express, and then I have my business. And then I have just all of the things that go along with families spending time with them taking care of myself, all of the other things with the house, it basically wasn't possible to do at all, when you took away that half day each week. And then the time that I spent on the weekends working on that. And so I went back to my values way back to you know, Module One where we put our values in priority order. And right now at this time in my life, I have, of course myself on the top of my values, because that's a requirement for the program, as you're already aware if you started it from the beginning. And if you haven't started from the beginning, definitely go back to the first episodes where we start from the beginning. My values currently are myself, my family, and then my career, which is my job at my corporate job at AmEx and my business, this business that I love. And so because I had family and myself above the work stuff, I really took a hard look at what can I take a step back from to create that extra space to spend more time with my family over the summer, and I made the difficult decision to take some time off from the podcast, but it was absolutely the right decision. I had an amazing summer stuck to my boundaries continued just living my best life, which isn't easy, right? It comes with sticking to those boundaries and making those hard choices and there was a little bit of fear as well in stopping the podcasts like are the people who are listening, going to stop listening or they're gonna forget about it right you have a lot of sort of just fear rabbit holes that your brain goes down when you do that. So here I am, though how to an amazing summer the kids are now back in school. They've been back in for a couple of weeks. So I'm excited to get back into the podcasting routine. There's actually like a lot that goes on with the podcast. It's not just simply sitting down to record it. That is obviously one piece but there's a lot more that goes on. So it is fairly time consuming, but I absolutely love sharing this information. Like I said, my whole goal with this is to you know, set in the cheesiest way to change the world that that really is my goal but to share this with as many women working moms people humans as possible because I know so many of us struggle with these things. So with that said, let's jump into a topic that I've included anxiety and depression because I've mentioned this before, but before I started this program, the working mom happiness method, I went out and interviewed multiple working moms and mental health with all of the exhaustion An overwhelm that comes with being a working mom because of what our society teaches us as women, right that we've talked about in previous episodes, we struggle with mental health and anxiety and depression was super common with the women who I interviewed. But also now the women who I've coached nearly every single one struggle with this or have in the past, or struggle with it in some form, either anxiety or depression, or both in some manner or fashion. And so that's why it was really important for me to include this here. And I will also disclaim, I am not a therapist. I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I'm not a medical professional, I am simply sharing what I've learned on this topic to help in my own journey with anxiety, anxiety and depression over the years, and what has helped others who I've spoken with or read or learn from. So that's really all this is, obviously, if you are struggling with anxiety, or depression, or both, seek medical help with somebody who is qualified in that field. This is me just sharing what I learned. So just wanted to start with that. So let's go ahead and jump in. We're going to start with the definitions of anxiety and depression. We're going to talk about what causes them, we're going to talk about tips for improving depression and tips for improving anxiety. And I am going to split this up into two episodes, because I like to keep these short and sweet since we're busy. So I'm going to go for to around 20 minute episodes. So we'll cover in this one definitions, what causes them tips for improving depression. And then in the next episode, we're going to do tips for improving anxiety and a little exercise. So in the next episode, you're going to want to have like a pen and a paper or something electronic to take some notes with. But in this one, you can just listen. Because we won't get there within the time frame, I want to keep it in and couple of things before we jump into the definitions. Number one, and most kind of say this throughout. But if you're struggling with anxiety and or depression, I want you to know that you're not alone and that it's super common. And in our society, it's actually become quite normal, which is a bummer. Because these things are hard and they don't feel good. But it really is. And so I really want to have a message throughout that there is nothing wrong with you, you're not doing anything wrong, well, maybe you have habits that are contributing to it. That's what we're going to learn about right throughout. So maybe there are things some things that you can change if you're struggling with either of these things. But I do want to let you know that there is not absolutely like nothing wrong with you. And that once women start to open up about this women, not just women, men to anyone humans start to open up about this, you really realize how common it is and how you certainly aren't not alone. So just wanted to start with that message. And then the reason I covered these two topics together is because they are very intertwined. Now it doesn't mean that if you have depression, you have anxiety, or vice versa. But it is very common to have those two things together. And a lot the causes a lot of the causes are the same. And a lot of the ways to improve them are the same. So that's why I cover them together. So let's go ahead and get jump right in. And we'll talk about the definitions. So the definition, just one sort of standard definition that I found for depression is it's a mental health disorder characterized by persistently depressed mood, or loss of interest in activities, causing significant impairment in daily life. So I want to talk about that for just a minute. Especially that last part causing significant impairment in daily life. I want to call this out because a lot of us have this vision of depression that is staying in bed all day like not being able to function. And that is true that there is depression that is that severe, and maybe you've experienced it, where you actually cannot function, you're to that level of depression, that's a real thing. I think what is more common, though, is like a functioning depression, where we can hide it really well. And that can be on a whole spectrum with varying levels, it could be clinically diagnosed or or not. But there are many, many people out in the world who are depressed and who are functioning and who most people would have no idea that they actually are depressed. And I think that one of the things that we do, because society has taught us as women to place our value and worth on serving those all of those around us is that we try to talk ourselves out of it. We try to say, oh, no, my life on paper looks great. I should appreciate it. I'm not depressed, I shouldn't be depressed, right? We put this sort of pressure on ourselves when I think that a lot of people are or maybe not to the level of clinically depressed but having some sort of bout of depression going on. And so I just think it's important to take that really, really seriously. And we're going to talk about sort of some things that can help that as we go through that. The other thing I want to mention about depression is that is typically rooted in the past, and anxiety is more typically rooted in the future. Sure and trying to control the future where depression is more of like a historical past space. And we'll talk about that more, we talk a little bit more about what causes it. But I think it's helpful to think of the separation between the two that way. So the definition of anxiety is intense, excessive and persistent worry and fear about everyday situations, fast heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating, and feeling tired may occur. So, I think that what's really important to call out about that is, first of all, sometimes we don't even like realize that we're having anxiety. So we have stress, we have situations that we feel stressed about. But this whole fast heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating and feeling tired piece of it, that can really quickly lead to like adrenal fatigue. So because it creates the core, the the fight, flight or flight, that was a tongue twister, fight, flight, or freeze switch survival situation waiting within us when we have anxiety, because the truth is, whether you are running from the saber toothed Tiger, or just sitting at your desk and stressed about a presentation, your body doesn't know the difference, right? And we've talked about this in previous episodes, your body still reacts with the stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline, because your body thinks it's got to fight for its life for you to give this presentation that you're anxious or nervous about at work. And the reason this, we need to pay attention to this, and we really need to like, Stop, have awareness about our anxiety and stop ignoring it is because this can be really bad for our health, this fight flight or freeze and the cortisol and the adrenaline building, building up in our body. Without us closing the cycle. I'm going to talk a little bit more about closing the cycle in just a minute. But really, what I mean from a high level is that

  when your body needs to be in fight, flight, or freeze, when we truly need to use our adrenaline and our cortisol, it is actually for survival. So it is our survival brain thinking it's being chased by the saber toothed Tiger, and the adrenaline and the cortisol builds up in our body and we run we run to get away from it. And the run is what sort of like for lack of scientific term burns off those chemicals in our body, when they don't get burned off, which is more like giving the presentation because actually sitting there and giving the presentation even though it ends, you didn't actually burn off those chemicals by either flight which is sprinting away or fighting, which is obviously very physical or with Freeze. It's like when you go into shock your body shakes. And that actually burns off those those chemicals and those hormones, the cortisol and the adrenaline as well. And this buildup that happens in our modern day society where we were feeling and having those chemicals, but not burning them off, really leads to some serious health problems. It manifests physically within our body. So things like cancer, joint pain, back pain, headaches, exhaustion, chronic fatigue type stuff, right? All those things. And so that's why we really need to take these things seriously. And if you are struggling with any kind of like depression or anxiety, just really working on some of this stuff. I think it can make a huge difference in our lives when we struggle with these things. Okay. So let's talk about things that cause depression and anxiety. Stress just talked about that. Worry, let's talk about worry, because worry and stress can be different. If you are a worrier, you are worrying about everyday things like sending your kids off to school or you know, your commute to work or like like the world has become a pretty scary place, which is so sad and awful, that we have to be like, scared to send our children to school. And that's a whole nother topic for a whole different day. That's not part of this program. But I'm also very passionate about but it just is like so unfortunate that we even have to worry about this stuff. But but we do and a lot of us are chronic worriers and the situation of the world hasn't helped that. And what happens with worry is that it builds and a lot of people have anxiety that they feel like comes out of nowhere, like an anxiety attack or maybe even to the level of a panic attack, that they can't identify why they're having it. Sometimes it's obvious, but sometimes it's not like why is this anxiety coming on? I'm just driving down the road or doing something random and I have an anxiety attack when I'm not even feeling particularly stressed or anxious. And I think that we can build up a lot of like worry and, and stress over time, that can sort of manifest and come out anytime. And that's why they can be random. And so we're going to talk actually not in this episode about anxiety and depression, but in the next one, I put them in this order on purpose about surrender and control, that some things that can really help with that sort of chronic worrying, but we're also going to talk in this topic, but in the next episode, the part two of this topic, we're going to talk about an exercise that can also help with this, with when you start to feel your anxiety come up, but also with how to help with some of these worries, okay? So stress and worry can cause both depression and anxiety. So we have to take them very seriously. And stress is why stress management is so important, why it's one of the five non negotiables that we work on in this program. The next thing that can cause both depression, anxiety is food. Let me give you an example of this. But we've talked a lot about when we talked about intuitive eating, we talked about paying super close attention to the food you're eating, not from a diet perspective or to lose weight. But to see how it actually makes you feel, what does it do to your moods does it bring you down. So let me give you an example. There are types of foods that are more for lack of a better term, like uppers like energy foods, like sugar, complex carbohydrates, caffeine, energy drinks, things that really are associated with like quick energy, right? These are more upper type type foods. And if you're eating these frequently, regularly, you're gonna be way more likely to have anxiety, they just cause some of the symptoms that can trigger it. And so that's really, really important to pay close attention and know like if you're if you're a person who has anxiety all the time, like you know, you have anxiety, and you're you're drinking caffeine all day long. That is not a good combination. Like even cutting your caffeine down could obviously and quickly help with your anxiety. So you can play with things like that. But it can be a lot more subtle than that. One of the things that I've learned about myself is there are certain foods that if I like if I actually happen to love Arby's

  In fact, I have like inside jokes about how much I with my friends about how much money I can drop it in Arby's, which is just anyway, it's funny, but I don't I don't go there very often, actually. But when I do I like love it. One of the things that I've noticed since I went away from diet culture and shifted over to true health and, you know, paying attention to how foods really actually make me feel is that every time I eat Arby's, I get anxiety, like to the point where like, I can't fall asleep, like my thoughts are racing. It's it feels random, but now I know that it's based on the food. And so if you're having those random anxiety attacks, and you're like, What the hell, why is this going on with me I had a regular day, it might be because of a meal you ate, okay. And then when we come off of those upper upper sort of foods, there's a drop, right? Like there's the crash in the sugar levels, you know, the insulin doesn't stay regulated, and that can really affect our mood too, and trigger us into more of a down mood. So food really matters. Other things that cause depression and anxiety, our nature and nurture. So we know these things are genetic. And then we know from a nurturer perspective that, you know, if our parents were worriers, were more likely to be worriers. If our parents had depression were more likely to have depression if we were sort of just surrounded by it from a nurture perspective. So maybe you've never thought about that. And maybe if you're wondering why, what's wrong with me, right? There's nothing wrong with you. These things just happen from a combination of nature and nurture, and experiences that happened to us abuse, that one is probably pretty obvious that maybe to some people, it's not if you've been abused in any way, there are things that could trigger your anxiety that you don't even like aren't even aware of you might not even remember. So that's a really important one to think about a potential cause traumatic events, and traumatic events run on a spectrum to like, really obvious traumatic events. If you have, I think there are some studies that have shown that if you have a significant loved one passed away in your childhood years, while you're while your brain is still forming, the DAC can lean more towards depression as an adult. So that's kind of like over on the extreme end of the spectrum or like abuse, things like that. And then even on sort of like the other end of the spectrum, small traumatic events like maybe you had a horrible experience when you were a kid at the dentist like you were really afraid for whatever reason, or maybe the the dentist wasn't comforting or you had to have like a really tough feeling as a kid. You might not even remember that experience like you might not have a conscious memory of it but your your body could be reacting to it as an adult because our bodies remember. So lots of reasons you could be having unsafe, unexplained bouts of anxiety and Depression, okay, so that's important. So we're not beating ourselves up about these things. And then depression can cause anxiety and anxiety can cause depression as well. Like I said, they're very intertwined and connected not always, but a lot of the times they are. Okay, so let's move over and talk about tips for improving depression. These ones are specific to depression. After this, I'll wrap up this episode. But in the next episode, part two of this, we'll talk about tips for improving anxiety. And then we'll do that exercise that I told you about. And a lot of these are going to be the same between the depression and the anxiety. First and foremost, one of the most important things you can do for either depression or anxiety is move your body. Okay? So we were doing this as part of this program. That's great news, right, we're getting to consistent body movement, what I actually love about this, I love a lot of things about it. I love that number one, it's, you know, moving, your body is free, it's a free resource, you don't have to pay for it, you, you know, literally can walk out your front door and start walking because that walking is shown to be one of the most effective ways to help with depression and anxiety. And we talked about that body movement, how it's so important to help process those fight flight or freeze cortisol and adrenaline hormones. And so I love that about it. I also love that it's yet another reason to break away from diet culture. Another reason to not use exercise or body movement for weight loss, there are so many benefits health benefits to moving your body that have nothing to do with weight loss. So you can drastically improve your depression and or your anxiety through body movement without losing any weight. Okay, so it's just another great example and great benefit. So if you're struggling with, you know, I don't like motivation, I like creating an underlying drive in your life to do healthy habits. Think about this as something else you can add on to it. If you struggle with depression and or anxiety, it's another reason to get consistent on that because it's going to make these things feel better, and it's going to make your life better. And then the other top few things are really our five non negotiables. So we talked about stress management, drinking water, a lot of times just right drinking enough water gets our body running better and more correctly. Again, same with eating nutritious foods that make you feel good, because we talked about how foods can really impact that. But it's there is a very much a biological component to depression and anxiety. And so getting that water and getting that nutrition and will definitely make a difference and getting enough sleep. And then there's getting into a routine, as well, as studies have shown that routine can really help people who tend to be depressed or anxious. And we work are working on that in this program. Right? We're working on our morning routine. And then as we get further in, we will be working on creating a schedule as well to fit in basically a schedule for our best like it's called the best life master schedule. So we'll be working on that as well, which is great. Creating goals. So one of the things especially with depression is it's you know, rooted in the past, we can get stuck in the past stuck mulling over the past. And it also just feels permanent. That is one of the hardest things about depression is is this feeling of hopelessness, this feeling that oh, we'll never change that will never feel better. And so studies have shown that if you can create a couple of goals for yourself, now I'm not I don't want to just throw that out there like this is super easy, right? If you are depressed, this is not going to be simple. But if you can push yourself to create a couple of goals, you know, something rooted in the future, that you can slowly chip away at right these baby step goals that we work on in this program. It's amazing for so many reasons for not being stuck, you know, in the past, for having something to look forward to for creating like dopamine, dopamine and serotonin like those feel good chemicals that can help with depression in your brain. And when we created our best life master plan back in modules one, two and three with your goals on it. That's part of why reading them every day makes you feel good because it's exciting to have goals and to read those goals. And remember, success is not in taking the success is basically in writing them down. It's in coming up with the goal writing them down and then the action you need to take is reading them every day. That's the success if you do that, and you continue to do it consistently over long periods of time. I promise you'll start to reach those goals. Okay. So we're not putting a ton of pressure on ourselves to all of a sudden get our all our goals done. We're just saying let's define some let's write them down and let's start reading them every morning.

  All right, service. I know I treat service very carefully here because a lot of us think that we should in air quotes, we should be doing service and volunteering and there are a lot of of benefits. When we do that when we do service and do volunteering, one of which is it does help with those feel good chemicals in our brains. And so it is a great thing for helping with depression. Where I want to just be careful, though, is right, I always like to say we have to be servicing ourselves first. So we have to be taking care of ourselves first. However, if you are really struggling with depression, one of the things that studies have shown can help to sort of snap you out of it a little bit or start that process is to do something nice for somebody else, even smiling at somebody else can help create those chemicals that are lacking, you know, those feel good chemicals that are lacking when we're in a depressive state. So you could think about doing some kind of service helping somebody else in some way to help get out of that. Okay, challenging negative thoughts. And using logic around those, we've talked actually a lot about that right? noticing them awareness on the negative thought is the first, you know, one common negative thought that depressed people can have is, nobody cares, nobody loves me, I'm a burden, I'm not adding any value, you know, thoughts like that, those are big thoughts, this will never change, I will always be this way. Those are really, really big thoughts. And meditation helps hugely with this. Because when we get into regular meditation routine, even if it's just a couple of minutes a day on a consistent basis, we get really good at noticing our thoughts. And remember 80% of women's thoughts are negative, and almost all of them are untrue, untrue stories that we're making up in our heads about ourselves, or others, or whatever, you know, negative type thoughts that we're making up. And So meditation is a great tool to noticing all these, like actually legit crazy thoughts that happen in our head that are negative and untrue. And so this is a game changer for depression. Because if you can start to practice that, and get a little bit better at noticing when your brain is telling you these big thoughts that are so damp making it so down and negative, you can start to get a little bit better at not believing those or having these little tools to stop and have awareness and maybe redirect it into something a little bit more positive. Again, I'm not saying that's easy. But just starting with the meditation is the pathway there. Okay. And just a guided meditation we talked, I know we talked about this, we had a whole section on it in the morning routine, so I don't need to go back into it. But really, really, this is another super important reason to do it. Trying something new can help with depression can just cause hopeful feelings, the dopamine and the serotonin in the brain that will help knowing you're not alone is kind of huge.

  Being in an in a depressive state, you know, can be linked to not wanting to talk to anyone sort of hiding from the world. If you can at all, just talk to somebody else and share how you're feeling, you can start to realize that you're you're not alone, and that can go a long way. And then of course, therapy. Therapy is amazing. for so many reasons. I actually personally believe that everyone should have therapy. Now I know that's a privilege statement, I realized in this country, not everyone can afford therapy, not everyone has insurance that covers therapy, I wish that we could just give therapy to everyone, I think it would really help the world tremendously and solve so many of those scary societal problems that are going on, in addition to other things, but therapy is amazing. So if you are struggling, and you have access Jupiter, especially like a lot of corporations, now these days, give away like a certain amount of therapy sessions for free as a benefit, I know where I work does. So please leverage that and use that. I know for some people, it can be scary. Some people don't believe in therapy, but I promise you, it will help with these things. And you'll be working with a trained professional, who knows how to guide you how to guide you to a path to healing these things. So definitely therapy. And then of course, medication. And therapy can also help or your doctor can also help to figure out you know what medication might help you with, with depression. So I think that is a great resource and something to look into. But it all starts with not talking yourself out of it. Like if you think you might be depressed. And if it resonated with you when I said hey, it might not look like laying in bed all day and not not functioning it might look like you're functioning but you know that something's wrong and something's off. So trying any all some of these things I think would be amazing. And if you want to talk further about any of these things, or you know any of my experience with using them absolutely please reach out and if you know somebody who's struggling with this, please send them this episode. So I'm going to wrap us up for now and then in the next episode, we'll finish up these two topics with a couple of more things. Okay. But thanks for listening. Like I said, I am so excited to be back in action on the podcast right now. We are in Module Four, Module One was values Module Two was goals. Three was boundaries. If you haven't done those and created your free best life master plan, please go back and listen from the beginning. Because this is meant to be done in order. We are in the middle of module four, Module Four has 14 topics and we're this we're just starting the second half. So really excited to get into the second half of it. A lot of great things we're going to cover including surrender and control, career development, we're gonna talk about budget and money mindset, and some other things too. And then we're going to create a starting create your schedule, which I'm really excited about. Alright, so thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you in the next episode. Thanks so much for listening to the working mom happiness method. If you liked what you heard, please be sure to subscribe and leave a review and share it with others who might benefit from listening for show notes or to enroll in the working mom happiness method coaching courses, visit www dot women's best life university.com

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