podcast

Hi everybody and welcome to calm your caveman. I'm Dr. Adriana Jarvis Twitchell. And today in this introductory episode, we are going to talk about who am I, what's my story and what makes me qualified to be able to teach about anxiety mastery. We're going to talk about the three main things that qualify me to be able to do that.

Well first and maybe most importantly, I'm someone who's dealt with anxiety my entire life from the time that I was little, even though I didn't always recognize that I had anxiety. It was just part of who I was, it was part of the way that I saw the world, and so I didn't always realize that that was going on. But from the time that I was little, it was a big part of my experience. I had many years as a child where I suffered from anxiety related insomnia. My anxious brain at night would be worried about people breaking in, coming in through my window, even though we lived in a very safe area. I was anxious about fires breaking out in my house at night, about mysterious, magical evil powers that might harm me, about snakes under my bed. And anxiety in various forms accompanied me through my teenage years and into my adulthood. And I would say that as an adult, I felt anxious pretty much most of the time. It was difficult for me to relax and enjoy much of anything. My brain was always fixating on one problem or another. And if that problem was resolved, my brain would immediately go to the next problem, go looking for the next problem to be worried about. So I wasn't able often to enjoy any resolution or sense of enjoyment or peace. This was the case, including on vacation. Vacations were very hard for me. Other members of my family would be enjoying the beautiful place that we were in, and I just simply couldn't. My brain was anxious about this or that thing that it considered threatening. And I just didn't feel like I could relax and get into the moment and feel safe enough to enjoy life. It was a difficult and kind of torturous way to live.

So that's my first qualification that I know what it's like to have anxiety. The second and third qualifications kind of go in tandem because they happened together. The second is that I had a three year chronic illness, which forced me to become more aware of my anxiety, and learn how to manage it so that I could heal, and also so that I could manage my symptoms. And the third qualification is that I did a doctoral degree on anxiety management. As I mentioned, these things kind of happened together. I started my doctoral degree a little before I got ill, but for three of the four and a half years that I was working on my doctorate, I was extremely sick. So in early 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, I got very sick with COVID, and I am one of a subset of people who did not recover quickly from COVID. But ended up with what they call long COVID now. It was a completely new disease. And so doctors simply didn't know what to do about it. . I tried everything that I could get my hands on, both unconventional and conventional medicine, but I simply wasn't able to find a ready cure for my illness because it was a new illness. But what I was able to find was a support group, an online support group of people from all over the world who had long COVID just like me, who were experiencing similar symptoms. And we were able to share with each other. We shared what we tried. We shared what we knew. We shared what worked, we shared, what didn't work. There were people on this group from all different walks of life and from all different areas of expertise, including several psychologists and therapists. And this turned out to be important for me, because they were able to teach me the psychological side of learning to deal with a long-term illness from their own expertise in this area.
I learned from them first of all, that anxiety is not helpful for healing. When we're in anxiety, our body is in a threat state, in a defense state. And so the resources in our body are aimed toward defense, toward fight and flight, towards survival, not toward healing, and digestion and rest and repair. So they taught me how important it was to get our bodies out of an anxiety state so that we could support our body's own ability to heal. Since this was a new disease and doctors couldn't give us a cure, this was especially important. Our only hope was supporting our body's own capacity to heal itself. So I became convinced that it was really important that I learn to manage my anxiety. These therapists put me in touch with several resources and exercises that helped me to understand how to become more aware of my anxiety first of all, which is always the first step in anxiety management. As I mentioned before, I wasn't always aware that I had anxiety, especially as a child. I didn't realize that was what was going on. When I became an adult, it became more clear to me that anxiety was a big part of my experience. But I wasn't conscious of it from moment to moment. I wasn't really aware how my anxiety levels would fluctuate given circumstances and different things that would happen. I wasn't really aware of when my anxiety levels were low and where, when they were more in the middle, when they were high and what it was that contributed to changes in my anxiety levels. So these exercises really helped me to become more aware of my anxiety on a moment to moment basis. In addition, people on my group taught me about many different anxiety management strategies. Some of these included breathing protocols, exercises to stimulate the vestibular system, the balance system, cold water therapy, gratitude journals. And I found that when I did these exercises, my anxiety levels were reduced. And a very interesting consequence of this was that when my anxiety levels were lower, my symptoms, my physical symptoms from my illness were more manageable. I began to notice that when my anxiety levels were high, my symptoms were unbearable. When my anxiety levels were kept down low, my symptoms were a lot more manageable, were a lot more bearable. And so anxiety management because of my illness became a lifeline. It became a survival mechanism. It wasn't just about healing. Of course, healing was my ultimate goal, but in the meantime, I needed to be able to make it through from day to day managing these terrible, debilitating symptoms that I had, and anxiety management made that possible, made it bearable, made me able to make it through from one day to the next.

So this was my second qualification, this illness that kind of put a gun to my head and said, you need to learn how to manage your anxiety right now in order to be able to get through today and, and in order to be able to heal from your illness for which there is no other apparent cure. The illness in tandem with my doctoral research was an amazing pairing. My doctoral degree, as I said, I started just before I got ill and I originally was researching a different topic. But my illness got me extremely focused on anxiety management. And so I wanted to continue this type of research for my doctorate. My area is music performance and so I decided to focus on anxiety management strategies for music performance anxiety, but it was really as a means to an end, to be able to learn more and perfect better my own anxiety management for my life on a general scale, not just as it pertains to music performance. So where my illness gave me the urgency and the motivation to understand my anxiety and learn how to manage it, my research gave me the how, it taught me how this has done. I discovered many different theories that help to explain anxiety generation and anxiety regulation. One of the theories that helped me initially, one that I studied toward the beginning was called the polyvagal theory. And what I found most helpful about this theory was its classification of connection versus protection states. That when we are in a connection state, we want to connect to our environment and our circumstances. When we're in a protection state, we want to protect ourselves from our environment and our circumstances. And anxiety of course, fits into this latter category. So this theory helped me become more aware of my state changes from moment to moment and to be able to notice those micro moments when I felt connected, and the majority of the time, when I felt like I needed to protect myself from everything that was going on. So that awareness was very key in my initial development of understanding anxiety management. But the most important theory that I came across in my research that really revolutionized my own ability to manage my anxiety is one that is called the appraisal theory of emotion. This theory has been around since the 1960s and has been talked about and written about and discussed and tested and experimented on since then. And today it is one of the most widely used theories in emotion science, and one of the best empirically tested. And I personally found it extremely useful for my own anxiety management. You know, it's been said, there's a famous quote that says that "all models are wrong, but some are useful." And this means that all theories and models in a sense are wrong because they don't reflect completely the complexity of reality. Reality can't totally be reflected in a simple theory or model. Models and theories are simplified versions of reality, but they can be useful because they can help us to understand some aspect of life and reality enough to be able to experiment on it, to make hypotheses, to make predictions and to act, and to create and to build and to experiment using these models. And the appraisal theory is very useful, as has been shown through research, but also for me personally, on a personal scale. It was especially useful because it helped me to understand not just what happens when anxiety is generated, but how that happens, why that happens and also what you can do about it. Different models that are based on the appraisal theory that have to do with emotion regulation, or in other words, being able to modify your emotions, help conceptualize the emotion generation process and help understand how you can interfere in that process, to be able to change emotions when they're not serving you. So it explains not just the what, but the how and the why and the what to do about it. These models also helped me to begin to understand why sometimes certain anxiety management strategies worked really well and sometimes they didn't.

After a while I started to feel like I was up on a hilltop and I could look down on my emotions from afar and see what was happening, understand what was happening, and understand what could be done about it when it wasn't helping me, when it wasn't serving me. My research was not just about models and theories. But also about how to apply them, how to implement the application process. It was a case where I researched, learned, and then applied that research to myself, was able to embody that research. My dissertation discussed theories and models, important theories and models, which help us to understand emotion generation the how and the why and the what to do about it. I also compiled a large toolbox of anxiety management strategies from the scientific literature. And three, I discussed how you can implement those strategies on a personal basis and how the theories and models help us understand how that implementation happens, how it works and what it looks like.

Now, having these two circumstances happening in tandem, my illness with my research, gave me a turbocharged laboratory to experiment in because I would learn about a new concept or a new strategy, and I would immediately have need to put it into practice, apply it, experiment on it. And my body would act like a megaphone to my inner anxiety states. Because, as I explained before, when my anxiety was high, my symptoms were worse. When my anxiety was lower, my symptoms were more manageable. And so I could immediately tell, I had immediate feedback about whether or not I was implementing and applying the research effectively on a personal basis. And so I was able to experiment and perfect this process of personal implementation, of personal application of these theories and strategies.

This whole process ended up causing a revolution in my brain. That sounds dramatic, but it's true. My personality changed. Whereas before I had been a person who was high in what psychologists called trait anxiety, or in other words, someone for whom anxiety was a stable trait of my personality, a very constant companion. Because of this process, I transformed from a person with trait anxiety to a person who didn't have trait anxiety anymore. It's not that anxiety didn't ever happen in my life, but it was occasional. It was just an occasional state when appropriate, and it was passing and it was temporary. So I was no longer a person bullied by anxiety. Instead, I was, as I explained, that person up on the hilltop that could understand what was going on, and felt like I could manage and direct my emotions, and cultivate the emotions that were helping me, and down-regulate the emotions that were not helping me. I began to be able to enjoy my life in an entirely new way to be someone who could actually relax and enjoy life, and that's who I am now. I have a great sense of peace a lot of the time. When I do experience intense negative emotions, I know how to understand them, I know how to process them, and when they aren't serving me, I know how to help them evolve into something that is helpful, a different emotion that is helpful, more helpful toward my goals.
In addition to applying this research on a personal scale, I have been able to teach and coach others. On a variety of anxiety-related issues and see improvement in their anxiety levels as well. And so that is why I wanted to start this podcast. I wanted to share this journey with you and share my expertise gained through this three-fold process of knowing what it's like to be an anxious person, knowing how to become aware of my anxiety, and knowing the research on anxiety management and mastery so deeply that I was able to apply it and teach it and embody it. I feel like my life and experiences have given me a gift, the gift of being able to become aware of my anxiety and learn how to manage it, even to master it such that I have had a transformation in my personality. And that's what I would like to share with other anxiety suffers. I'd like to help other anxiety suffers, to be able to transform their brains, to go from someone who is high in trait, anxiety, to someone who is no longer described in this way. I'd like to explain these theories and models to you, to teach you my large toolbox of strategies and teach you how to implement these strategies, teach you how the theories and models help us know how and when to implement the tools that are out there.

These episodes will be short. There'll be 30 minutes or less, but they'll happen every week. We'll work on a bite sized concept each time so that you can just build a little at a time, so that you don't get overwhelmed, but so that you can really incorporate and digest and absorb the information and the understanding, uh, of how to manage and master your own anxiety. So I invite you to come on this journey with me of learning my research and how to apply it. And hopefully revolutionize your relationship with your own anxiety and with your own life. And actually it's not just about anxiety management that we're going to be talking and learning. It's really about emotion regulation in general. So that you can look at your life, look at your goals and understand how to regulate your emotions in a way that will serve you best, in a way that will get you closer to what's most important to you. So that you can begin to feel like you're a person who is in charge of your life, who's in control of your life, rather than at the mercy of things that you can't control, including your anxious brain. So that's it for today's episode. Join me next time where we'll start to get into the basic concepts of appraisal theory. Until then have a good week.