Episode # 123- Unlearning Anxiety

Anxiety is a symptom that goes hand in hand with chronic pain and disease. In this episode I talk about what anxiety is, how it affects the body, why it's so common, and how to unlearn it!

I give an example from my own life, and some techniques you can use to teach your brain to produce anxiety less and less.

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Transcript-Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, Episode 123, Unlearning Anxiety. In this podcast, we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life. Become unstoppable body and mind. Hello, my loves. I really wanted to talk about anxiety today because it is a very common symptom for people who have chronic pain or disease. In fact, it's kind of like the chicken or the egg, which came first. Many people who have a tendency towards more anxious thoughts, they're more likely to develop this neuroplastic chronic pain. Alan Gordon said in his book The Way Out that the fear of his symptoms becoming chronic is actually what caused his symptoms to become chronic. And once you have pain or symptoms that don't go away quickly, it's common to develop a health anxiety about symptoms in your body. So I think of anxiety as just another version of one of the neuroplastic symptoms your brain can produce. So first, just a definition of anxiety. It's intense, excessive and persistent worry, and fear about everyday situations. So anxiety could be normal if you have a stressful situation, like public speaking, but it becomes a problem when anxiety feelings become excessive or interfere with your daily life. You might identify with some of these symptoms of productivity anxiety. This is what I really associated with before. So feeling like you're not doing enough, feeling guilty or ashamed when you take breaks or rest, feeling like you're always behind and you can never catch up, obsessively planning, checking emails, messages or to-do lists, feeling irritable or easily frustrated if things don't go according to plan, or feeling so overwhelmed that you procrastinate and avoid tasks. And you could feel on the edge, irritated, and like your mind is always racing. This can affect your sleep, and you could even have night anxiety where you can't stop worrying about the next day. You have intrusive thoughts that come up at night and a racing mind. You replay the day and keep thinking about what happened. You're tossing and turning in bed, and you're worried about not getting enough sleep, which causes you to get less sleep. And even though you're feeling physically exhausted, you can't sleep. With anxiety, you could have memory issues and trouble focusing. You notice that you worry a lot and overthink. You have a lack of patience and need constant reassurance, and you could even have panic attacks. Anxiety is this activated state of the nervous system. So it's like fight or flight. It's more in the flight. Like you're running from a tiger. You're running to try to constantly find problems and fix them and solve them so that you'll feel safe. And this can be depleting to y