Rooted Mama Podcast
Episode 20: Anxiety Rewire
Hello friends, welcome to another episode of the Rooted Mama podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about anxiety, its causes, what to do about it, and how to uproot the whole system so you can stop it and its tracks for good.
Now let’s get into the episode. I did an episode on anxiety when I first started the Rooted Mind podcast back with my first friend Jess in like 2018, 2019. And at the time, I think I had a decent understanding of anxiety and what it looks like. But I think the more clients I’ve worked with, the more I’ve grown in my knowledge and appreciation of just how much of a struggle anxiety can be for some people.
How We Interact with Anxiety [00:00:50]
And I think that’s what’s interesting is because not all brain patterns are going to struggle with anxiety the same. Some, it’s actually going to be more of a front. It’s not going to be a front and center issue that they’re going to have to deal with on a regular basis.
Whereas for other people, it will just be a kind of a hit or miss issue that may pop up occasionally, but won’t be a pervasive issue over the course of their life. And I think that’s what makes anxiety such a tricky subject to handle is because to some degree, anxiety is a necessary part of life. If you think about it, there’s not really a practical use for depression. There’s not really like an upside to it. But anxiety is different.
Faced in the woods by a bear, anxiety will literally save your life. If you have a test, a small amount of anxiety will actually help you focus and get through the material faster than if you didn’t have anxiety. So you can’t black and white say like all anxiety is good or all anxiety is bad. It’s a little more nuanced than that. And I think the problem happens when anxiety gets out of control or it becomes all consuming or a just all encompassing part of your life.
The Types of Anxiety [00:01:59]
I think it’s also important to clarify that there are many different types of anxiety with a variety of causes as well.
There’s panic anxiety.
There’s different types of phobias.
There’s OCD,
general social anxiety.
And then in terms of causes, you also have things like
PTSD,
intrusive thoughts,
ADHD,
mania,
depression, things of that nature.
There can also be underlying physical causes of anxiety. There can be. Inflammation in the body that can cause anxiety.
If your blood sugar is low, that can cause anxiety.
If you have an autoimmune disease, that can cause anxiety.
If you’re burnt out and tired and dealing with adrenal fatigue, that can cause anxiety.
If you have hormonal issues
or gut imbalance or dysfunction with your body, that can cause anxiety as well.
What is your Body Telling You? [00:02:52]
And so I think it’s important that we shift our mindset away from this place of oh, anxiety is bad, to what is anxiety telling us? Because the body tries to communicate with us in whatever means it has available to it. And so if you struggle with anxiety on a regular basis, instead of vilifying it, maybe take a minute and think, hmm, could this be my body’s way of telling me that something’s wrong and there’s something that I need to work on or catch or do differently?
And I think that’s important because often we want to cover up the symptom and mask it. And so if you don’t actually get to the root of the problem, the body will just come up with a different way to communicate with you. And it’s not going to fix, it’s not going to actually fix the problem. And so instead of running from our symptoms, I think we need to look at it from the perspective of what is this symptom telling me about my body? What is it trying to communicate? Because the body wants to heal and the body wants to get better. But if it feels like it can’t, it will rely on whatever tools it has to try to communicate it. It’s frustration with you.
Pressing through Persistent Problems [00:04:02]
And so the more in tune with our bodies we become, the easier it is to actually get to the root cause of the problem. This can be tricky though, because once the body selects a tool, sometimes it can be very challenging to get the body to use a different tool. And so if you struggle with anxiety and you deal with the root cause, there has to be a level of patience and persistence to help teach the body to operate differently.
Because we can’t separate our physical biology from our brain patterns. They’re very much so interlinked and interconnected. The chemicals in our body are actually primed to become addicted to the inputs they receive. And so if you grow up receiving certain inputs, your emotions and your physical body operate in tandem to establish that as the status quo. And so then even when those inputs stop, the body’s still going to operate in that manner because it wants things to stay the same.
So, you know, I think it’s important to understand that. So I want us to go through the causes of anxiety as well as the types of anxiety. So you can understand how these pieces are working together. And maybe you can help identify, okay, this is probably what I’m struggling with. And this is potentially the cause that’s coming from it as well. Obviously, there’s a wide variety of physical causes of anxiety. And I don’t want to downplay those necessarily. But I want us to focus on, from a mental health perspective, the mindset, the causes of anxiety, or the mental health struggles that can lead to anxiety.
Breaking Down the Mental Health Side of Anxiety [00:05:30]
So I want to go through these categories and break them down with you. Let’s start with intrusive thoughts.
Intrusive Thoughts
Intrusive thoughts are where your brain or you or something else inserts a thought at random. Often this is at a time when you are maybe at peace or actually enjoying yourself. And that thought can be a minor. It can be a thought or an extreme thought. I’m going to give you some examples. Say you’re walking down the street and you have an intrusive thought. A minor intrusive thought could be, hmm, remember last week where your mom sighed at you before she hung up the phone? That could be a minor intrusive thought.
It’s not necessarily automatically a big deal, but your brain’s trying to make it a big deal and get you to stew on it and think about it. Now, you can also have intrusive thoughts that are a lot more gruesome and a lot more extreme than that. Like, say you’re taking the same walk and then your brain goes, huh, well, what happened if someone broke into your house and murdered your children? And like, it takes it to this extreme level where it’s completely ridiculous, but the goal is still the same.
The intrusive thought is meant to disrupt your peace and take you from a place of joy to a place of anxiety because your brain wants to stay in that anxious state. So that can be a cause of anxiety, intrusive thoughts.
ADHD can also be another cause of anxiety. And this is something that I don’t think a lot of clients necessarily think about necessarily. I think they easily compartmentalize them into two separate issues. But in my experience, they are very much so intertwined and build on one another.
If you struggle with focusing and staying in the present, it’s very easy for you to slip into anxiety because the harder it is to focus and be in the moment, the more anxious you’re going to feel. And the more anxious you feel. The harder it is to stay in the present moment and stay focused. And so there’s kind of this enmeshment that happens between anxiety and ADHD.
And often I would say at least 50% of the time clients I work with who we treat their ADHD and their anxiety gets better and goes away. Now, that doesn’t happen with everyone. Sometimes we have to treat the anxiety as its own issue and have to address it. But for a significant portion of my clients, when we treat their ADHD, their anxiety becomes manageable and they can deal with it. And deal with it well and be successful with it.
Now let’s talk about PTSD. PTSD anxiety is a little different because the body in PTSD becomes very agitated and very irritable. And so the anxiety looks a little different in the sense of like there’s a lot of physical tension going on. There’s a lot of hyper awareness and hyper arousal. And there’s a lot of feeling on edge, always looking over your shoulder, feeling like. Someone’s out to get you and hurt you.
So it’s kind of this anticipatory anxiety where you’re like something bad is going to happen. I know it’s going to happen. I have to be prepared for it. And so it’s very hard for the body to calm itself and regulate itself because it’s always operating from kind of that threat state. And so PTSD can cause more of an agitated anxiety, whereas depression can go hand in hand with anxiety. But it looks a little different.
And for some of my clients, teasing out and understanding the nuance of one leading to the other is really helpful because some of my clients struggle with depression and start to feel bad about themselves and criticize themselves and talk down to themselves. And then they feel anxious, whereas other clients feel anxious because maybe they’re not performing or succeeding or living up to whatever expectations they have of themselves or others have of them.
And then when they fail and they don’t feel like they’re meeting that goal, then they feel depressed. So sometimes depression can be the actual cause of anxiety. Sometimes it’s just a cousin that they go hand in hand and work together to make you feel terrible.
Now, this one, I would say, isn’t as common, but definitely still happens. Mania can be a cause of anxiety as well. Some clients, when they’re manic, actually feel better and feel good about themselves, whereas a lot of clients find that they feel very out of control, very impulsive, feel on edge. And so the anxiety is very like, hmm. I almost feel too good.
What’s going to happen next? And so the anxiety presents is very like, I can do anything. I can do whatever I want. There’s no consequences to this. And that can lead to obviously a lot of consequences if you if you look through that lens and operate through that lens. So those are some different causes of anxiety.
Like I said, don’t discount the physical causes of anxiety, because I think for a lot of people, those are a bigger factor than what we make them out to be. But for this episode, I just wanted to focus on kind of the mental health aspects of anxiety.
Like I said, there’s different types of anxiety as well. And depending on your brain pattern, that will kind of dictate which type of anxiety your brain’s more inclined to use to protect itself. Because again, anxiety is your brain’s way of trying to solve a problem. Often this problem doesn’t exist yet, but it’s your brain’s way of trying to keep you safe and protect you. And so the type of anxiety you fall into. Is very much so dictated by your hormones, your body, the input you were given as a child, as well as just your brain pattern and how you cope and see the world.
So panic anxiety. This one is kind of interesting because some of my clients who struggle with panic anxiety, it’s kind of like Pandora’s box where one time they had a panic attack and then their brain decided, oh, you know what? That is the tool I’m going to use for every problem in the foreseeable future. And they struggle with panic attacks constantly.
Other clients, they may have a panic attack and then it not be an issue again. It really just depends on how your brain’s trying to solve that problem in that scenario.
Phobias are interesting because I would say this is the most common type of anxiety, but it’s one that is easily managed because a lot of people have phobias of the dark, close and close spaces, spiders, snakes, things like that. And those things aren’t necessarily deal breakers. It’s fairly easy to avoid. A lot of those phobias as a part of your daily life.
Now, if the phobia is allowed to take over and become all encompassing, that’s where it becomes a significant problem. That’s where you can develop things like agoraphobia, where you don’t want to leave your house and you become paralyzed with fear about whatever that situation is.
OCD is a unique type of anxiety because that one is definitely tied to a strong need to control as a safety response. And that one is very, very important. And that’s very much so prevalent in certain brain patterns where if you have the proper inputs, the odds of you developing OCD actually go up very significantly.
General anxiety is kind of just an all encompassing term. How I typically define this with my clients, I ask them, do you tend to worry about anything and everything? Where the anxiety isn’t focused on a specific trigger, it’s just kind of all encompassing.
Day to day, you worry excessively about people, circumstances, situations, kind of anything and everything. And this one, I think, is definitely also tied to your brain pattern because it’s your brain’s way of processing how do I deal with these things.
It’s also very common for people to have anxiety as their protective emotion. And so when you’re struggling, that’s going to be your body’s kind of go to primary response to any given situation. Finally, there’s social anxiety. And I think this one is very much so tied to a relationship. And I think that’s a very common projection brain pattern because these individuals will be very much so hyper aware and very concerned about what other people think of them. And so they’ll be more prone to develop that as a coping mechanism.
How to Rewire Your Anxiety [00:13:40]
So regardless of what type of anxiety you struggle with, it is possible to rewire these patterns. And you can do things differently. But it’s not going to happen accidentally. Because again, this is often the primary way your brain is coping with life. And so you can’t take away your primary coping skill and not give yourself something else to fall back on.
So we have to learn the new skills first and then remove the old patterns as well. So typically when I work with clients, I recommend working on thought patterns first. And so when you work with me, we really focus on identifying exactly where the anxiety starts and how it manifests. And then once we map the whole cycle of what your brain is doing, then we can provide strategic inputs to help you rewire it.
And this is not therapy. Because I use a data-driven approach that helps me analyze exactly what’s going on without getting sucked into your story. Because again, your brain doesn’t want things to change. Your brain wants things to stay the same. And so if we go in with an attack through the front door, so to speak, the brain is going to lock it down and be like, Get out. I don’t want you in here. We’re not doing things differently.
So you have to be very strategic about this if you actually want things to change and change permanently. So once we’ve… Mapped your whole cycle and we’ve done your 30-day rewire, then if you’re still struggling with anxiety, then I take a practical approach where I look at potential physical causes of anxiety as well as spiritual causes of anxiety as well. And we can look at those and determine, okay, where does healing need to take place in this scenario?
I think for moms, postpartum anxiety is a huge issue because it puts so much tax on your system of coping that if you don’t have extra support and skills to help you through it, it’s really easy to go into a place of crisis where you’re like, I’m overwhelmed. I don’t know what to do. And your body kind of goes into that state of constant anxiety.
So I think for new moms in particular, it’s really important that we help support you and help rewire these patterns early because this can really set you up for success in motherhood long term.
If you are ready to rewire these anxiety patterns for good, I’d love you to send me an email at info@shelbyleppin.com.
We’ll set up a free call and I’d love to go through this with you and help you see what we can work on and if this would be a good fit for you.
Thanks for listening, friends. As always, if you could leave us a review on iTunes or Spotify, that will help our podcast reach more people.
I can’t wait to talk with you next time and I hope you have a wonderful day. Bye.
Link to discovery call: https://calendly.com/shelbyleppin/30min