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Hey everybody. Welcome to the podcast again. Thanks for joining me once again today. We've talked before several times about how there isn't one strategy that's the best for anxiety or for regulating negative emotion in general. The best strategy is really having a great big toolbox so that you can have all kinds of different strategies to match them with different situations, because the world is always changing, our situations are always changing, and so we need different tools for different situations. But we've talked about a lot of different tools on this podcast so far, we've gone over cold water as a tool for anxiety, breathing protocols, meditation, third person self-talk, being out in nature. We've talked about exercise as an anxiety management strategy, gratitude, doing a body scan. Anxiety acceptance or accepting how you're feeling, being curious about your anxiety. We've talked about using panoramic vision to regulate your anxiety, arranging your living space, using music for anxiety management. We've talked about thinking that you have one year left to live and how this, how this helps you to manage anxiety. So there's so many different tools we've talked about so far. How do you go about choosing the right tool for your situation right now? That's one problem with having the huge toolbox is how do you know which tool you're supposed to use when? Well, I'm gonna teach you a rule of thumb to remember that can help you to categorize the tools that you should use depending on your situation. And this procedure has two steps. The first step is that you need to rate the level of your anxiety. How intense is your sense of threat? Measure your anxiety. And the second is to choose a tool that matches that level of anxiety. So if your anxiety's really intense, you're gonna choose a tool that matches that intensity. You might think that this means that if I've got big anxiety, that means I need a big tool. If my anxiety isn't intense, I need a really intense tool to deal with this anxiety. That's not actually how it works. I'm gonna teach you the tools that actually work with those moments of intense anxiety.

So we've talked before about how we have different stress responses, we have the challenge response, and we have the threat response, and they act really differently in our body. A challenge response is when your brain decides, Hey, I've got the resources for these demands, and it helps you to feel excited and it helps you to feel like approaching the problem and it gives you increased cardiac efficiency and it increases blood flow to your brain and your extremities, and it helps you to produce hormones that are related to thriving and growth. And it facilitates your performance. It makes you perform better. And then there's the threat response, which is where we feel anxiety. And this is where our brain decides that the, the demands in this situation are too much for my resources. And what happens in our bodies is that we feel like running away from the stressor and hiding from the stressor. It decreases our cardiac efficiency. It concentrates blood in the core areas of our body. So it takes blood away from our brain and puts it in our core. And that means hampered cognitive performance. That makes us perform less well when we're talking about thinking related tasks, because we can't think very well when we're in that high anxiety state. So it's not, I've got big anxiety. I need a big tool. It's, I've got big anxiety and I need a tool where I don't have to think at all in order to use it. So you, you've got big anxiety, you need an easy tool. You've got low anxiety, then you can use one of these harder tools that uses more thinking power.

We've talked about this before in an episode about a year ago, but I wanted to explain it in some different types of details so that you can understand better how to use it in your personal life. So I have a list of strategies that I know are really easy for me to do, even when I can't think at all. And here's about five of them. I know that even if I can't think I can go on a walk, I don't have to have my brain working very well for me to go out and walk. This is a great anxiety management strategy. Going out in nature. I don't have to think. It helps with my anxiety. Going out in the sunlight. Talking to myself in the third person is pretty easy. I just start calling myself by name and talking to myself as you. And using cold water. I don't have to think a lot using music. These are some different ones that are really easy to access, that don't require concentration and focus, and my brain can be totally blown apart by anxiety, but I can still use these tools. But that's only five. And there are gonna be some situations where I can't use some of these tools. For example, if I'm in the green room and I'm about to go out on stage and I'm feeling a lot of performance anxiety, I can't use the strategy of going out on a walk 'cause I've gotta go on stage. I can't go out in nature and get some sunlight. That's not available for me. I can't go take a cold shower 'cause it's time for me to go out on stage. I need different strategies for those moments when I can't access some of these five. So how am I gonna make this list of really easy strategies, bigger? Well, you can make strategies, even strategies that are hard, that are high thinking, high brain power strategies, you can make them easy, you can make them automatic if you practice them. So I have a list of strategies, for example, that used to be hard for me, that used to require thinking and a lot of concentration, but I practiced them so much that they don't require that for me anymore. And so I can do them even in those moments when I feel a lot of anxiety. And that's great because when I'm in the green room and I can't go out on a walk, I can do some of these. So these are some of the ones that I have practiced that used to be hard for me that aren't anymore. And I'll put links in the show notes to all of these different strategies. We have episodes that were dedicated to each one of them, and then you can listen to them more if you're, if you're curious about how to execute these. But one of those that I have practiced a lot, so much that it's become easy and I can do it even when I feel really upset, is doing balance postures like yoga postures where you're standing on one foot. And we talked in the exercise episode about how exercises that activate your balance system are really great for anxiety. You know, at first it was kind of hard for me to do them, but now I've done them enough that I can do them without really thinking. So that's something I can do in the Green room, for example, if I'm feeling a lot of performance anxiety and I can't go out on a walk. Gratitude is another strategy that used to be really hard for me. I had an, a whole episode on this. When I first started it, it was really unnatural. It was really hard for me to look at, look for things that were good In my environment. I was so used to picking out the problems in my life. It was hard for me to figure out how to notice things to be grateful for. But I've practiced it now over a period of about five years, and so for me it's not that hard anymore. I'm a lot more aware, just kind of instinctively, of things to be grateful for in my environment. So it's become a strategy that I can engage in, even if I'm really upset, because it doesn't take a lot of concentration for me anymore. Doing the body scan where I go through each part of my body and I think about, oh, how do my toes feel? How do my ankles feel? How do my knees feel? This was hard for me at first. I didn't used to be aware of how different parts of my body felt. It was really hard for me to zone in on my feet, for example, and figure out how they felt. It used to be something that took a lot of concentration. Not anymore. That strategy we talked about a few episodes ago where you, just accept your anxiety. You notice that you're feeling some kind of intense negative emotion, but you just say, I'm feeling anxious, and that's okay. Being able to accept your negative emotion. This is something that was used to be really hard for me, but I've practiced it and I can do this now even when I'm really upset. I can say to myself, it's all right for me to feel this way. Even different breathing protocols. These were hard for me to do at first, but I've practiced them enough that I can do them even when I've got high anxiety. That panoramic vision, it was hard for me to do at first. I didn't understand how to execute it, how to be able to be aware of my whole peripheral vision at once. But since I've practiced it enough, I can do it even in the green room if I'm feeling really upset. So these different strategies, although they used to be hard for me, they've become easy. And so now they have made it onto my list of easy strategies, and then I have more things to choose from. When I don't have the option of going out on a walk, I can do a body scan, I can do a breathing exercise, different things that are available to me in more different types of situations.

So this is something you can do. First of all, you can make a list of those strategies that you have that are easy for you, that you already can do without thinking. And everybody has some of these. We usually use some of these intuitively. And I'll just say, as a a side note, I did not mention things like video games and social media and chemical manipulations like drugs and alcohol in this list of Easys. A lot of times these are easy, they are things that you can do even when you're really upset. But as we've talked about in past episodes, these types of things, especially when they're linked to addictions, they end up increasing our anxiety in the long run. So you wanna choose things to put on your easy list that are not gonna make your anxiety worse. But anyway, make a list of easy, healthy strategies for you that you can access even when you're really upset, and then start making that list a little bit bigger so that more of these strategies are available to you in different situations where you might not be able to do all of them and practice some of these strategies that we've talked about. Maybe pick one per week and say, well, this week I'm gonna focus on panoramic vision. I'm gonna practice it several times until I start to be able to do it without thinking so much. Or I'm gonna work on balance postures, or I'm gonna work on mindfulness meditation where I'm able to observe how I feel. Incidentally, mindfulness meditation is another one of those that used to be really hard for me, but since I have done it enough, where I start noticing how I feel, I, I go into that mode where I can think of myself as the sky and the emotion that I'm having as the cloud passing through and just observe this emotion that is temporary, observe its aspects, what it looks like, what it feels like. I've done this enough so that when I, even when I'm really upset, I still am able to kind of observe how upset I am with this little bit of a distance and use mindfulness even though this used to be something that made me have to think hard. It made me have to really focus. But now it's easy for me and I can do it even when I don't have brain power.

So make that, make that list of easy strategies. Practice one new strategy a week so that you can make your easy list bigger. But this procedure really depends, first of all, on you being able to measure your anxiety level. And this can be a little bit tricky. I don't know if you've ever had that experience where you went to the doctor or the hospital because you had some kind of a problem and they ask you to rate your pain level. When I've been asked to do this, there've been times when I've just felt at a loss. I, I just feel horrible. You want me to give my pain a number? They tell, they tell you to rate it on a level between one and 10, 10 being the most intense pain imaginable, and one being just slightly uncomfortable. And I remember thinking, I, how in the world can I give a number to my pain? I, I feel terrible. I just feel bad. Can you just go with that? But the reason why they want you to try and think about a number and comparing it to other times that you've been in pain and try and decide if it's better or worse than other times is so that they can know how to treat it. And this is the same for our emotional regulation. You will know how to treat your anxiety better when you can give it a number, when you can decide if it's really intense. If it's up at the top and it's a 10, then you're gonna need to use an easy strategy that doesn't use any brain space. If it's somewhere in the middle, just kind of medium intensity, then you can use kind of a a medium hard strategy. It doesn't have to be one of the easiest ones, maybe one that requires a little bit of thinking. And if your anxiety levels are pretty low then you can go for one of these strategies that does require you to focus a little bit and concentrate. And of course, if you're not in anxiety at all, then that's a great time to be able to practice all of these new strategies. That can be really hard when you've got any level of anxiety and threat response going on, limiting that blood flow to your brain. So you need to get good at rating your anxiety at being aware of how anxious you feel and comparing it to other times you feel anxious. Well, if you wanna get good at regulating your anxiety first you get, you need to get good at noticing how you feel in general. And this isn't such an easy automatic thing for everybody. Some people have a lot of trouble with this, but we've talked before about how there's an app that can make this a lot easier. It's called How We . It's Free and it makes it easier because when you get on that app, it notifies you several times a day. It'll, it'll give you a little ding and it'll tell you to check in on how you feel. You go to the app and it will give you several different choices of different words just to describe how you are feeling. And once you choose one of those initial choices, it'll give you some more words so that you can really get more specific with how you're feeling without having to generate the the words on your own. And this can be easier for some people when they're starting out. But in any case, this is the first step, is getting aware of how you feel, getting aware of your anxiety level, being able to observe your emotion enough to notice how intense it is.

So just to review, how do you decide what strategy you should use in this situation? Well, it depends on how intense your anxiety is. So the two step process is to be able to rate your anxiety and then choose a strategy that fits with that level of your anxiety. And remember, big anxiety doesn't equal big strategy. Big anxiety equals easy strategy. Make a list of your easy strategies, and then practice new strategies that are not easy for you yet. The more you practice them, the more accessible they will be in a wider variety of situations, and pretty soon you'll have more options for those moments when you feel really bad. So the key is to practice when you don't feel anxious, so that you can get good at those strategies before the moment when it really is crucial for you to use them. But just remember that rule of thumb that if you are very anxious, you need a low thinking power tool. Make that list of low thinking power tools and expand it as much as you can so that in those moments when you need it, you have choices that will work in your situation.
So there's a little rule of thumb to help you to know how to choose the right strategy for your situation. Stay tuned now for our painless gratitude practice. This is an easy way for you to practice gratitude, and it really does make a difference because you are being more aware of kindness every time you listen to one of these, and that helps your brain to be more aware of kindness in general. But even better than just listening to this, this story is to send in your own. That'll have an even bigger impact on your personal experience and on your own awareness. So I'd encourage you to do that. You can send it to me by email or on Instagram by audio or written form. Listen to the information after this kindness narrative to hear how to do it. Thanks for joining me today and see you next week.

Okay, so for today's gratitude audio, I would like to talk a little bit about a girl that I just, uh, recently started dating. Ever since I met her, she has shown, that she's really willing to show affection and show love and do little tiny things almost every day. Little surprises, that really, you know, they're, they're small things, but when you do several of these over time, they kind of add up. There have been several days where I've, I've gone to, to visit her. She lives kind of far away, so I stay at her family's house and there's several days where, you know, she comes back from work during lunchtime and then I was at the gym, so I wasn't there. And I get back and there's, you know, some chocolate bars ,waiting for me on the table with a nice note that she wrote for me . She also, you know, will just kind of randomly post pictures on Instagram with me and her that are very , very nice and reassure me and help me feel really important to her, which, you know, is, is also another small thing, but I've been in relationships where people haven't done that. And it's just that, just that demonstration that you actually care about the person that you're with and that you're not afraid to you know, post some pictures and show the world that you're with that person. The first time that I came to visit her, I got really sick and, um, yeah, she took care of me when I was sick. She made food for me. She made tea for me. Basically I was kind of bedridden for a day or two, and she was just really, really nice . . She rented a car as a surprise the first time I was here as well for us to go on a, it was a a little day trip. We went to a a beach that was like two hours away and had a really fun time listening to music in the car going out there. She's always looking for little things that she can do to show her affection and she uses her creativity to think of things. And when you really look at it, these are small things, but it's kind of in the small things and the details and the way that you treat people. When you do that for somebody, even though it's something small, it shows that you thought about them and that you, that you're important to them and they want to make you feel loved. I think that it's something that I, have done in the past, but I I would also like to improve on, to be able to show people that I care for, that they're important on a daily basis, not just with words, but with, you know, little things that I can do for them throughout the day. It's nice to think of these little things because we have opportunities every day where we can make other people's days better, with a smile or with some kind words. That can go a long ways.