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Hi everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Today I want to talk to you about something, a strategy that you can use when you feel like you have some really intense physical symptoms of anxiety going on that are interfering with your goals. So for example, this might be when you wake up in the middle of the night and you feel anxious for no reason and your heart is beating fast . Um, another example might be when you have performance anxiety, when you have to go out and speak in front of people or perform in some capacity and you feel like your physical symptoms of rapid breath or rapid, heart beat or sweating or shakiness are going to interfere with your performance. I wanna just teach you about something that can be helpful in these situations. Just wanna remind you about something that we've said several times. We've talked about how there is no one best strategy for anxiety, that the best strategies are the huge toolbox. It's having this big toolbox of strategies that you can use, you can sort through and find the right one for your situation, because every situation's gonna be different. But there are sometimes situations that come up where you just can't calm those physical symptoms of anxiety down and you're trying all these different tools in your toolbox like breathing and like trying to get distance from your emotion, and it just doesn't work to calm it down.

So this is one tool that I wanna teach you today, which I call anxiety acceptance, which can really help you in those moments of kind of panic crisis as far as the physical symptoms go. So I'm gonna give you two different examples from my life. One from the middle of the night anxiety and one from performance anxiety. And the middle of the night anxiety is a recent example. I've used this strategy when I couldn't sleep many times. But I'm gonna tell you about this most recent time because it's most vivid in my memory, and so I'll be able to give you more detail and can maybe help you a little bit more when something similar happens to you. And as I said, the second example is gonna be with the ways that I've used it for performance anxiety, situations where my physical symptoms are getting in the way of my performance.

Okay, so somewhat recently, pretty recently actually, I, right before I went to bed, I heard some news about some different things that were going on in the US and different things that were happening in the world that really upset me. And I went to bed feeling anxious about what these events would mean for the future. And I was able to kind of doze for a while because I was pretty tired. But after a little while, I woke up just super hyper alert and I was feeling kind of a panic, a mild panic attack, just really anxious. So what this looked like for me was that I felt like my heart was beating really fast. My, my breathing was kind of fast. My limbs were just kind of rigid and felt like they're tingly, like they had spiders crawling in them. My stomach felt like it was tied up into knots and it just would not relax. So it actually made it kind of hard for me to breathe because my lungs, when I would breathe, they would push down on my, on my entrails and, and my entrails were all rigid. And so, you know, it, it was just kind of impossible to sleep. And at the same time I was feeling kind of terrified about this news that I had heard.

So I started trying the different tools in my toolbox that usually work for me in situations where I wake up at night. And I've had an episode where I talked about some of these, which I'll link to in the show notes. Things like talking to myself in the third person and calling myself by name. "Adriana, you're feeling this." And trying to get some kind of distance from my emotion, writing about it to myself in the third person. Trying to get sort of a removed perspective in time. Thinking about myself 20 years from now, looking back on this. Trying different breathing protocols. Nothing. Nothing was helping the physical, just tension in my body to calm down. All those tools that usually worked were not working in this case. So that's when I went to this other tool, which is important to have in your toolbox as well, anxiety acceptance. So I can illustrate what this tool means by telling you a little bit more about things that I was taught when I was pregnant with my first child and I was doing some natural childbirth classes. And in these classes they were trying to teach us about pain management, obviously, because we needed to learn how to manage the pains of labor. And I, one of the things that they told me was that it's really important to not resist the pain, that when you resist it and tense up against it, it not only makes your body less efficient in doing what it needs to do to to birth that baby, but it also makes the the pain more intense and it exhausts you more. And so they taught me how I would need to, when I felt the pains of labor, I needed to, learn to breathe into the pain and accept it. I needed to learn to relax into the pain and trust it and be willing to feel it, to trust that it was actually not going to hurt me to feel this pain. So this goes beyond what we've talked about before in a couple of episodes where we talked about distress tolerance. This is, this is kind of one level above that. We're not just tolerating the distress or tolerating the pain, but we are accepting it. We are relaxing into it, we're trusting it, and we are willing to feel this.

And so I started to do this with my, with my own emotions, with my own anxiety, and with my physical sensations that were being triggered by this whole emotional response that I was having. So I started to say to myself, I am terrified, and that is okay. My stomach is tied in knots, and that is okay. And I would just really think about what that feeling felt in my stomach and just try and relax into it in that same way that I was taught to relax into the pain during the pain of labor. I'm just going to accept that my stomach is tied in knots. I'm going to be willing to feel that my stomach is tied in knots. My arms feel tingly, like they're crawling with ants, and that's okay. I'm going to accept that. I'm gonna relax into that. I can't make these feelings and these physical bodily symptoms go away and it's okay for me to feel them right now. I said to myself, I'm going to trust that I can handle feeling this fully, and that I'll make it through this. And so the interesting thing was that as I relaxed into this pain and really accepted this fear, this unpleasant sensation of fear and anxiety and all of the tension that it was giving me in my body, that as I relaxed into them, they started, the edge started to come off of them. And I actually started to feel less intensely anxious, and I was able to go to sleep actually. After being awake for hours, I was able to calm down and go to sleep and sleep for the rest of the night.

So it seems kind of counterintuitive, you know, why would actually, accepting the fact that I feel anxiety and all of the physical sensations that come with that, why would that make my anxiety diminish? Well, it might be related in some ways to chronic pain . As I said before, I was comparing it to labor pains and how I was taught to deal with that pain. But I've also read a book called The Way Out, which is about dealing with chronic pain by a particular author who has treated a lot of people with chronic pain. One of the things that he really brings out is that when we feel pain and we feel afraid of the pain or worried about the pain or distressed that we are feeling pain, then it creates a feedback loop. And our brains label that pain as dangerous, and in labeling the pain as dangerous, our brains will create more pain, which then creates more of a signal that is alarming us, which then creates more pain and it just gets worse and worse. And the same type of thing can happen with anxiety, where the physical sensations feel alarming. It feels like I shouldn't be feeling this. You feel alarmed that you are feeling alarmed and that your body is showing those signs of being alarmed and that fear of those symptoms then creates more physical alarming sensations. It just heightens, turns up the volume on everything. so when You can trust instead that you can handle it, then it just turns off, turns off that feedback loop, and so you don't add anything to the basic anxiety that you're feeling. You're not making it worse. You're not making it last longer or making it more intense than it needs to be. We talked several times about how anxiety comes from your brain telling a story about the situation where it feels like your resources are here and your demands are way up here, and your resources just don't meet the demands of the situation. And so then you end up feeling anxiety. But when you stop resisting and being afraid and distressed and upset by the physical symptoms, which are part of the demands in your situation, then you don't magnify in them and they, and they start to reduce in, scariness for you. And so the demands start to come down. And you start to feel less intense anxiety.

Now I'm gonna tell you about how I've used this principle in situations of performance anxiety. So as you all know, I'm a pianist. Of course all of us mu musicians have to deal with some form of performance anxiety, and it usually creates some kind of physical symptoms, which can be really distressing because those physical symptoms can actually interfere with your ability to perform well. So for, for me, for example, if I'm feeling a lot of performance anxiety, I end up getting really sweaty palms, which is terrible because when my hands are sweaty, I'm gonna slip off the keys. I'm not gonna have the control that I need. My attention gets really fragmented and jittery. I'm not able to think about large shapes or the entire piece or this big chunk of memory that I'm supposed to produce. I get this kind of jumpy feeling in my arms, which makes me feel like it's a lot harder to control the muscular movements to play the music. And times when I have felt these symptoms and I have felt alarmed about them and worried about my sweaty palms, and worried about my jittery attention and worry about worried about my jumpy arms just makes it worse. My hands sweat more, my arms get more jumpy. I have even harder time focusing. It's that feedback loop again, of being afraid of things that are manifesting in your situation, and that amplifying your anxiety, which then amplifies your physical symptoms and just makes everything worse. So what I've learned to do, admittedly, through trial and error over a lot of years, is just to expect and accept the fact that, especially if I'm gonna play a piece for the first time, perform a piece that I have never performed before, I expect that I'm going to have these symptoms. I already know ahead of time that my hands are gonna be sweaty, my attention is gonna be jittery, my arms are gonna feel kind of uncontrollable. And I just know that that's normal. I know it, and I, I expect it and I accept it. And so when I go out on stage in the moment and have these symptoms, I just, I just know that they're there, it's okay. I accept them. I observe them. I say to myself, my hands are sweaty. This isn't gonna be a great performance, but that's okay. I'm not gonna be able to be super free, but that's okay. My attention feels jittery. I'm not gonna be able to focus and do anything really amazing artistically here. I'm just gonna, I'm just going to make it through this piece. That's all I'm gonna be able to do, and that's okay.
And also another thing that I've found through experience is that that first time that I play a new piece of repertoire that I've never played before, I have these symptoms the most intensely, and then the second time that I perform it, I will have the symptoms, but they will not be as intense. And then the third time, I may have a little bit of those symptoms, but they will be way less intense. And each time I perform it, the physical symptoms get less and less disturbing because they actually fade and fade. And this happens because of something we've described many times before, how when you become more familiar with a stressor, that it starts to feel less alarming and it starts to feel less demanding just because you, you know what to expect. And so, I already know, I already know that this is how it goes. I know that the first time I play it I'm not gonna feel that great. I'm gonna have a lot of physical symptoms and that as time goes on, I'm not gonna have those physical symptoms so much, and so I actually am able to see that first time when I have to perform and I have all of these debilitating symptoms, I start to see it as constructive. This is something that I have to wade through. This is something that is unavoidable, but that if I just get through it, it'll help my next performances to feel way better, that this is something that is actually beneficial for me in the long run. It's kind of going back to that idea of childbirth. I was taught to relax into the pain and see it as constructive, that this pain was getting the baby born. This was necessary, unavoidable, constructive pain. And I start to be able to view these early performances in this manner where I have these unpleasant physical symptoms in the beginning, I start to see them as, as part of this progression from less familiar to, more familiar, that makes it possible for me later to have better performances with fewer physical symptoms. And so actually part of this, being able to expect that it will follow this progression helps me to plan because I already know that I will have these debilitating symptoms in the beginning. And so when I know that I have a really big stressful performance coming up, that's gonna have a big audience, that's gonna be high pressure for some reason, I schedule lots of different practice performances prior to this so that I can already get through these physical symptoms. So I'll have an initial, I may, I, I'll schedule, for example, my first performance to be in my house where I invite a bunch of friends. It's kind of a low key performance. And then I schedule several other smaller concerts in the community with smaller audiences, and I, and I do it over and over again, Maybe five times, performing the same repertoire. And then by the time I get to the high stress situation, my body doesn't react so severely to the stress because the repertoire and the situation, the act of playing these notes in front of people is now more familiar. And so I don't have as big of a physical reaction. But if they do come up for me , I know that the best approach is simply to accept them. It's okay that I feel this way. It's okay that I feel shaky. I'm just gonna observe it's okay that this is gonna harm my performance a little bit. It's all right.

So that's what I call anxiety acceptance. It can be a really a real lifesaver in those moments when you've just tried everything else and it's just not working. Sometimes you just have to relax into the anxiety. Sometimes you just have to stop resisting it and not just tolerate it, but accept it and be willing to feel it and know that it will pass. But be willing to feel it as intense as it as it is for as long as it needs to be. You just say to yourself, I'm gonna feel anxiety right now, and that's okay.

So I encourage you to practice this in small ways before you have these crisis panic moments. Because when you're already in the panic, if you've never done this before, it's gonna be a lot harder to do it for the first time. But if you can practice just in moments when you feel some kind of painful physical sensation, just practice accepting it. Just practice feeling it fully, practice relaxing into it and trusting it. Say to yourself, I'm having a pain in my lower back and that's okay. When you are feeling an emotional experience, which is unpleasant, whether it's sadness or anger, or anxiety, or fear, to just say to yourself, I'm feeling sad and that's okay. I'm gonna accept this. I'm gonna, I'm gonna feel fully, everything that I feel right now, I'm gonna trust it. I'm gonna relax into it because it's okay. If you can practice it in these small moments, then when that crisis comes and you feel the real intense panic symptoms, it will be easier for you in that moment to do what you've practiced over and over. Everything that you practiced becomes easier. We've talked about this a lot as well. So practice it as much as you can in low stakes situations with any kind of emotional or physical pain, and then you'll be able to take this tool outta your toolbox when it's the only one that will work for your situation .

Of course, if you are having super intense panic symptoms, you might need some professional help. You might need some medical help to calm you down. Sometimes it's really too much for us to do it on our own. But the more you practice it, the more you'll be able to do this for yourself. So that's what I have for you today. Now we have our kindness narrative. Don't go away because it's good for you. It's your gratitude vitamin. It helps you out. It's painless. Just listen to it. And also think about sharing yours 'cause that will really help us and it will help you.

This particular kindness narrative was shared with me by a friend. And before we started recording this, he was telling me the kindness narrative is about his grandfather, and he was telling me about how kind his grandfather was to people in his community, but this particular story that we recorded is about his grandfather's kindness to animals, so enjoy.