028: Tips for Improving Anxiety & Depression - Part 2
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.
Learn more about The Working Mom Happiness Method course here!
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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 there, and welcome to part two of the episode on anxiety and depression. And if you didn't listen to part one, go back and listen to the episode right before this first, because then it'll make more sense because we're sort of jumping right back in in the middle. And a quick reminder before I do jump right back in, that I am not a licensed therapist or a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a medical professional of any kind. So I'm just going off of what has helped me and what I've learned about these two topics. And what I've also learned from all the women that I've coached through through this program. So where we're at right now is lat in the last episode, we talked about the definitions of depression and anxiety, we talked through what causes them. And we talked through tips for improving depression. And now we're going to talk about tips for improving anxiety. And then we're going to go into a little exercise where I'm going to have you pause the podcast episode and write some things down. So if you would like to do that, just make sure you're in a place where you can in order to listen. So you can write them down electronically, or you have some kind of a pen and a paper. So let's jump right back in the tips for improving anxiety. A lot of them are the same as the tips for improving depression. So moving your body, we talked about how body movement helps us to process the stress hormone, hormones cortisol and adrenaline. And how that is so important. Because we do have all of this pent up worry and stress and anxiety in our modern day life, where we're not actually out in the wild trying to survive, which is what those hormones were were built for, to actually, you know, get our bodies out of danger. And there are occasional times when we do use those right in in modern times. But for the most part, the stress and the anxiety we're feeling on a daily basis is not actually threatening our lives in any way. But our bodies still acts like it is. So getting that body movement in just start with walking will go such a long way to making you feel better and processing that. And remember, you know, we've spent our whole lives exercising for the purpose to change the way our body looks. And we're working on completely letting that go and exercising for true health. And this is such a huge component of true health, making yourself feel less anxious on a regular daily basis. And that truly does work. It's as any anything, small consistent actions done over long periods of time will change your life. So you may not notice a difference after body movement for a week, you may actually it really does help with anxiety a lot. So you may notice a difference after a week. But you may not you have to keep going and you have to trust the process. But it will genuinely change your life just moving your body more than drinking water. We talked about getting enough sleep, eating nutritious foods that make you feel good because we did talk about like those upper foods, how they can cause anxiety and then when you come off of the sugar crash or you know the insulin levels, dip or don't stay consistent that can really play with our mood, and also our energy throughout the day. So paying attention to how those foods make you feel is huge. Meditation we talked in the last episode about how 80% of our thoughts as women are negative, and most of them are lies most of them are like legit crazy thoughts that are just not true that our brain makes up to try to protect us it's that lower brain survival brain trying to protect us but actually doesn't do it in the right way. So we need to have our conscious brain who we really are come and basically tell it to shut up. No actually we need to tell it in more of a loving caring way like we would talk to you know a child version of ourselves or our child right not not actually to shut up but to put eyes have the awareness and use these tools. And meditation helps us notice those crazy thoughts when they're coming in, and have that awareness and pause and sort of talk ourselves out of it using logic, okay? knowing you're not alone with anxiety also helps. It is so incredibly common. So I encourage you, if you're really struggling with it, to talk to somebody about it, whether it's a therapist, because obviously therapy helps with this, or even just a friend. I mean, don't if you have like, you know, a really chill Yogi friend, maybe not that friend. No, they probably actually have anxiety too. But don't hold it in talk about it with somebody because there's huge benefit to us just feeling like we're not alone. I want to talk about grounding, because grounding is something a technique that I learned years ago in therapy that has really changed my life. And it's such a simple tool, it's not always easy, because you have to have the awareness in order to start using it. But actually, once you have the awareness, the tool itself is so simple, and you can do it anywhere. So let's talk about some examples of grounding. So let's use a common example of when anxiety comes up. And that is when you have to give a presentation at work, or any sort of public speaking. So let's say you're sitting there, and you're either physically in the room, or maybe it's a virtual environment. So you're in front of your computer, you're in front of the camera, and you know what's about to happen, you're nervous, you don't know what questions people are going to ask, you want to sound like you know what you're talking about, right? All the normal things that we've all experienced your armpits, maybe getting a little sweaty, your heart's racing, right? When you notice that anxiety coming up, or maybe even you do it before it comes up, because you know what's going to happen because you've been here before you can. Number one, you can fill feel your butt on the chair, feel your butt on the seat, feel the weight of your body on the chair. So this is like when we say grounding, literally feel yourself on the ground chair is connected to the floor floor is connected to the earth, right grounding to the earth, feel the weight of your body, if you're standing, feel the weight on your feet, just feel it, just feel the weight of your body on the ground. What that does is it snaps you back into the present moment. Because you're there, you're there, you're literally grounded, you're literally connected in some way to the ground. Okay. So that's one thing you can do in that moment. The other thing you can do, and this is from Mel Robbins, I love Mel Robbins effect, the exercise we're going to do in just a minute as I learned it from her, as well. But her five second rule count backwards from 554321. That's going to snap your brain out of its spiral and it's going to bring you back to the present moment. And that's a really simple silent grounding technique that you can do you really quick. gymnasts use this. Divers, I don't when I say divers, I don't mean like scuba diving, I mean like off the diving board, like Olympic divers how to do crazy flips and tricks. And it's actually like, quite dangerous, right? They use it to learn new dives. It's just it's a psychology strategy that I know Mel Robbins didn't even make up. She just wrote a book about it. So very effective. Okay. And then the other one that I love is naming the things in the room. So wherever you are, whatever's going on in your head, you can stop and pause and name the things in the room and it brings you snaps you back to the present moment. And it snaps your brain out of the stress spiral. So remember these things and next time you're stressed or anxious, you really try it. It sounds kind of cheesy, but it actually works. And when you get good at it, it works really, really well. It really helps. So that's a great one. I also love this is I don't know, I don't think this is specifically grounding. But the power poses Amy Cuddy's YouTube video, I think I put that somewhere else in, I want to say in one of the episodes, but I can't remember. But you can just Google the Power Poses TED talk, and you'll find it doing some power poses before you're going in can really help to.
Okay, telling yourself you're safe is a great tip for anxiety. Because remember, when you're getting anxious, it's your body's protection, even because you're most likely you're not in a situation where about you're about to die, but your brain is actually telling your body it's going to die. And then it gives off those adrenaline and cortisol hormones, right, that causes the heart racing and the sweat and all of the things because basically your body's ready to perform at peak physical performance. That's what those hormones do. But actually, you're not doing anything physical, right? You're just sitting there getting ready to give a presentation or whatever it is the thing that you're stressed about are remember sometimes anxiety. We don't we don't know the trigger isn't conscious. And that's because of like could be past trauma could be pent up worry, stress, that sort of thing. Sometimes we do know sometimes we don't but either way this technique works really well. So remember how we've talked about how your subconscious mind it's like, really complex and really amazing and it actually runs our life. 95% of our lives are run off of our subconscious and 5% is run off of our conscious. And this is why we can like drive ourselves to work without really noticing we did it right? That's all subconscious programming. However, we've also talked about how your subconscious mind is kind of dumb, meaning it believes whatever you tell it. So those lies that spin in our brains all the time, those thoughts, those negative thoughts, they're all lies and crazy. Our subconscious believes them. This is why words matter so much, right? Because our subconscious man believes those words that come out of our mind. So, or, and out of our mouths really like speaking them out loud, is even more powerful. So what we can do in this moment where we feel the anxiety is just say, you're safe, we're safe, we're okay, we're sitting in a bedroom in front of a computer, or we're sitting in an office, or we're sitting in an office building, we are safe, we're not going to die. In this moment, we're safe. If this group of people doesn't like us, or they judge us, we're not going to die. This is not back in cave person days where we relied on the tribe for survival, we're in modern times, you're not going to die, you're going to be okay. Even if these people don't like your presentation, or they don't like you, you're going to be safe. And it is amazing how you can have awareness when this comes up and tell yourself that how much it really does calm, you're calm yourself down and calm your brain, your brain down. And it almost helps you to realize like, it really is still silly, how worked up, I'm getting right. It's not not silly, in that you're stupid. It's really normal. Society has taught us biology has taught us our DNA has taught us that this is how we survive. So you're not you're not silly, you're not dumb, it happens to all of us. But how silly it actually is and how it's more of our primitive brain and how our brain hasn't evolved to modern times yet. And then you can almost kind of be like, yeah, like, why am I stressing so much about what this group of people thinks of this presentation, like, okay, then maybe, maybe it's like, well, because I want a promotion, or I want this or that we're going to talk about that and surrender and control, we're going to go into that, right, because that is not healthy, you are jeopardizing your health, literally, your physical health. By stressing that much about what the people at work, think about you. So we're going to talk about that. And it doesn't even have to be at work could be people in your family, people anywhere in your life. But telling yourself you're safe is a great tool and technique for calming some of those
harmful chemicals. They're harmful when you're not actually doing physical activity, right. And just like the remember, we talked about those upper foods, how they can cause anxiety, those upper foods can be hugely valuable. If you're going to do something super physical, if you're going on a big long hike, you're going to run a race, you know, that's why they say like carb loading, right, like that energy can actually be beneficial. But the reality is, a lot of times when we're eating that we're not going to do anything physical. Now remember, intuitive eating no diet culture, I'm not saying that if you're going to eat a cookie, you have to go sprint. That's not what we're saying. Don't take it that way. It just means, hey, eating a cookie for you might result in some anxiety. So like, be mindful of that. Be ready for that and plan for it. In for you. It may not it may be like me with where it's Arby's right, just paying attention knowing that is a game changer. Okay, so therapy, obviously, is another great tool. Just like with depression, we talked about that. Medication is a great tool that can help anxiety. And, you know, one of the things that's interesting in our society is that we don't know all the things that I just said. And so we start with medication. And I'm not I think medication is fabulous, I'm not putting any sort of negative connotation to medication. I'm just saying that, like, if you haven't ever tried any of the things that I said, and you are experiencing anxiety, you might want to start with these things. Because sometimes doing these things consistently work just as well as medication. And sometimes they don't, sometimes they don't, but it's kind of cool to maybe even go in that order and try them and see how that goes. Because you know, the medication can be expensive. Or if you don't, if you don't have insurance, or the medication can be hard to come off of, you know, there are some downsides, certainly, but also it can be really fabulous and great and life changing. So something to think about and then also just the whole, like words matter. And I think this applies to both depression and anxiety. Be careful with your words. So if you are commonly saying I'm depressed, especially if you're saying about like, it's just like a figure of speech, like if your favorite sports team loses, and you're like, I'm so depressed, right? Be careful with that. Because you'll remember your subconscious is kind of dumb in that way. Like it will hear your words and it will believe it just like how we said with food morality like, oh, I ate three doughnuts this weekend. I am so bad. Your subconscious starts to believe you're a bad person because of what you ate, which is absolutely not true. Well, your subconscious can start to believe you're a depressed person because you're using that language, commonly for things that aren't really depression. Now maybe you actually are a depressed person. Okay? And if you actually are, there are times to share that, especially with a therapist or a doctor or somebody, family or friends support person, like, definitely you can tell them you're depressed. I'm not saying don't say the word. I'm just saying. If you're constantly saying I'm depressed, like, I used to constantly say, I don't even like to say it right now, because I'm so careful with my words, I used to constantly say, I am a people pleaser. I'm a people pleaser. And I've switched that to I'm a recovering people pleaser. Because it's true to me, I still do have some people pleasing tendencies that I'm working hard on to correct. But I've come such a long way that I say I'm a recovering people pleaser, because I choose my words so carefully, because the words matter and what we say our subconscious believes, and then it creates our actions accordingly. So watch your words with anxiety and depression. If you are an anxious person, try not to say it so often try to change that story for yourself. And even that can help not saying it's magic, but it can start to help and change that subconscious programming. Okay. All right, let's go into our exercise now. All right, what we're gonna do is, you're going to do two different little quick writing sessions here. And if you can't write, I still think just thinking through it would be hugely beneficial. So still participate in the exercise, even if you can't write and just think, think through your lists. Okay, because the first part of the exercise is that I want you to create a list of things that you commonly worry about. case, we talked about worried before. I want you to think about what are the predictable things you worry about on a regular basis. So let's just get your juices flowing and think of some examples. So it might be that you worry about
earthquakes, right that I'm saying that because that's actually something that I've had worries about over the years of earthquakes. And that was because of a traumatic moment in my past where I when I was in second grade, there was the big San Francisco earthquake. And so we had to practice earthquake drills, and it was traumatic for me. Or you worry about school shootings, sending your kids to school, or you worry about, you know, big thing, there are lists of big scary things you worry about not You're not making your if you're married, making your marriage work getting a divorce, maybe you're having marriage issues you worry about. And then like there's a whole spectrum, like maybe maybe on kind of the more lighter side of the spectrum, like you worry that it's raining and you're gonna ruin your shoes, are you worried that your kids aren't eating healthy enough, or you know, that's maybe more kind of in the middle of the section, you worry about your house being clean, when people are coming over, you worry about, you know, like, just think about common things that like on a daily basis, or on a monthly basis you worry about and things that stress you out presentations at work deadlines at work, like there's probably a whole work section, there's probably a whole health section, there's probably what people think of me, you know, that those sort of things. And I just want you to start by writing down common worries, things that make you anxious, that sort of thing. So that's the first part. So you're gonna go ahead and pause the podcast right now. And just take a few minutes and write those down and then come back. Okay, go ahead and pause right now.
Okay, welcome back. Now you have this list. And maybe you just thought about it. But I think writing it down is even more powerful than just thinking about it. But thinking about it helps. But now you have this list of things that you commonly worry about. Hopefully, this doesn't make you more worried that's not the point of this activity. So maybe you have a couple of maybe you have a lot, right, we were all in a different spectrum of what we worry about. Now, part two is where the rubber really hits the road, because this is how we're going to start to work on this and chip away at these worries because they can lead to both anxiety and depression, right? Or they can make anxiety and depression worse. Oh, by the way, I do want to give full credit this exercise I think I mentioned this is totally from Mel Robbins, this is what she she suffered from debilitating anxiety for like 20 years. She shares this in her book and in her talks, and was on medication for like 20 years. And this is that that's one of the main tools. She has a couple but this is one of the main tools that really helped her to kind of wean off of that medication and changed her life from an anxiety perspective. So I think it's really cool. And I've helped I've used it to and it's really helped me but just didn't want to like try to take credit for this. I got this from her. So that's why I'm sharing it with you because it's so great. So we're going to come up with a list of what she calls anchor thoughts to help with these worries. And what happens is that you have the feeling come up like like you kind of know when these things are going to come up. So let's say it's like you're afraid to send your kids to school, so you probably have a morning routine. You know where they get ready You know, and then you at some point say goodbye to them, or maybe you say goodbye to them when you leave for work, whatever it is. And maybe that's when the anxiety comes up about, like, you know, if it's a school shooting, or you're just whatever you're afraid they're gonna get bullied, what whatever worry you have about sending them to school. So what she teaches is when you first start to get the feeling ground yourself, and she uses her five second rule 54321. And then you're going to say, the anchor thought, and we're gonna get, I'm going to tell you what that is in just a second, but feel the initial feeling ground yourself, because the way she explains it is the grounding piece helps the the adrenaline from like reaching your brain, which it's, it's so it's harder to spiral, I'm sorry, it's harder to stop spiraling once that like adrenaline and cortisol, with the anxiety have like fully, this is these are not scientific terms, she gets into the science of it, but like have fully gone out up into your brain. So the grounding kind of helps stop that process. And then you say, the anchor thought and so what the anchor thought is, is your so So studies have shown that the way that anxiety physically manifests itself within our bodies, so like heart racing, sweaty, butterfly feeling, you we all get it a little differently. But you know, the feeling of anxiety when I'm talking about that is exactly the same as when we feel excited. They're exactly there, you can't distinguish them in scientific studies, people have not been able to, like, distinguish the difference between those physical symptoms. And so you can actually trick your subconscious. When it's feeling nervous and anxious into thinking it's actually feeling excited. Now, that might sound ridiculous, right? Probably does. But this really works. And it's really true, no matter how cheesy it sounds, and it's one of those things where when you get good at it, and you start practicing, practicing it, it can really make a difference. And it can really help. So an example of an anchor thought could be. So instead of I am feeling scared and anxious to send my kids to school, you say, I am so excited that my kids are getting educated and learning to be independent at school. It needs to be true to you it needs to be something you're you actually are excited about it so that maybe you don't have like excitement over that maybe like, you think that's good, but you're not particularly excited about it, maybe you're just excited that you get a break from your kids during the day. Like, because I know for me, even though I work, the summer can be hard because like my kids needs need things. They're not in school. So it's a little bit more stressful sometimes, in the summer to be working, especially kind of right now post pandemic, when we're still doing a lot of working from home and like you're home in their home and you're trying to work. So maybe your excitement is just like, hallelujah, they're off to school, I'm so excited to not have to worry about what they're going to need today while I'm at work, right. So that's an anchor thought that's what you're going to redirect it to. So let's do another one just to kind of like make sure you understand it. So let's say that you are giving, you have to give a big presentation at work to the example we use before and you're getting the sweaty feeling you're starting to feel it come up you stop 54321 anchor thought and your anchor thought instead of being Oh, I'm so stressed out that I'm going to say the wrong thing or that I'm not going to answer a question or that I'm gonna mess up your anchor thought is, I am really excited that I have this opportunity to show what I've been working on to the senior leaders that my company can maybe it's not, if that's exciting to you, if that's exciting to you, maybe what's exciting to you, it's just getting it over with, I am so excited to get this out of the way, right, like so you have to find what kind of resonates to you that you're actually excited about. But then you flip it and you create that as an anchor thought, okay, so this exercise, the next part is going to be that you are going to take your list of worries and you're going to create an anchor thought for each one of them. So you're going to spin it into I am excited because or I am excited for some form of excitement you can link to the thing that you are stressed or anxious about. Okay. So go ahead and pause the video now and do that.
Okay, welcome back. So now you have this awesome list of your common worries and anger thoughts. And your homework essentially, is to practice this. So I want you to try it. And obviously the first step like we've talked about, it's not obvious I should I hate that. It's not obvious. Hey, by the way, if you're a leader at work, don't say obviously I tried to catch myself because a lot of stuff isn't obvious, and we don't want to make anybody feel bad. Sorry, that was a squirrel moment. Anyway, now you have this great list of these worries, these anchor thoughts that I think will really help if you can start practice them and the first step is awareness. Okay, just being aware because you have to have the awareness feel what's going on in your body to stop it ground yourself and then say the anchor thought okay, so I'm really excited. If you want any help ideas with anchor thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out to me. You can follow me on Instagram, there's a link to my Instagram in the show notes. We'd love I love talking about all of this stuff so certainly don't hesitate. And if you know anyone who's been struggling with any of these things, please forward them the episode, let your friends no co workers know about the podcast because that's the whole goal here is to just reach as many women moms humans as possible because I think so many of us struggle with this stuff. So just a quick recap of what we covered on this topic. You are not alone so many people struggle with these things. There's nothing wrong with you. All the things we're working on in this program that you've learned so far and that will you continue will continue to learn will help with depression and anxiety. And body movement is huge body movement is where to start. If for some reason you're you're not capable of moving your body at this time, water, food, paying attention to it sleep, those things will make a huge impact as well. It's so important to set goals. When we're feeling depressed, they can help us with the hopelessness they can help with the dopamine and the serotonin. You can work on breaking the anxiety cycle with all the things we just talked about using your anchor thoughts. So that is the homework. Practice this have awareness and use the anchor thought and see how it goes for you. Okay, thank you so much for listening as always, 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
