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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

END ANXIETY

Anxiety is what happens when your habit of worrying spirals out of control. As a lifelong anxiety sufferer, I know all too well the grip you can hold on you and how scary it can feel. I also know how to beat it. Using the five second rule in combination with a strategy called reframing is the answer. The key to beating anxiety is understanding it. If you can catch it right as it kicks in and reframe it you’ll stabilize your thoughts before your mind escalates it into a full-blown panic. And over time as use the five second rule over and over, your anxiety will weaken and become what it started out as, simple worries. And as you just learned the habit of worry is easy to break. I think I was born an anxious child because as a kid my parents said I had a nervous stomach and I worried about everything. I was that kid at camp was so homesick she had to go home early. As a college student, my face would turn red as a tomato when I got called on in class. I relied on liquid courage to talk to guys at parties because without alcohol, I’d get stressed sides of my neck. The panic attack started my early 20s when I began law school. A panic attack feels like you’re about to have a heart attack and it can happen for two reasons. One, because you have something scary that you’ve got to do like give a speech or face an ex or get on an airplane. Or two for absolutely no reason at all.

Now, if you’ve ever had a panic attack, here’s the best way to describe them: it’s when your mind and body have a near miss experience that’s totally out of context. Allow me to explain using a really simple analogy. Let’s distinguish between normal panic and actual panic attacks. You see there’s gonna be tons of time in your life where you panic and it will be completely normal. Let’s say you and I are driving a car and we’re chatting on the highway and your about to change lanes. Suddenly out of no where a car races by, cuts us off, words you get out of the way of my God, but then it nearly missed us… When a near miss happens on the highway what do you feel? You feel surge of adrenaline raced through your body. Your heart raises your breast speeds up your quarters all surges, your body goes into the state of like hyper alertness to the you can take control of the car. You might get a little sweaty now as soon as your body freaks out, what happens is your mind has to find a reason as to why your body is so agitated in this example that I just gave you on the highway. Your brain realizes oh my gosh got into a car crash. That’s why your heart is racing, no wonder, and when your mind has an explanation for why your body just freaked out. Your mind isn’t going to make the anxiety worse. Your mind will allow your body to calm down because your mind knows that the danger has passed, you see the car almost hit you, it didn’t hit you. The car is now gone. There’s no reason for you to stay freaked out your life can now go back to normal now. A little more cautious. The next time you’re about to change Lane you’re not going to continue to be hyperventilating. The danger has passed. Now when you have a attack on the other hand that seem near miss experience that we just felt on the highway. It happens to you, but without any warning and for no reason at all. You could be standing in your kitchen to pour yourself a cup of coffee or about to do your 30 before 730 planning sessions just like any other morning. Then all of a sudden out of nowhere. My gosh of the surge of adrenaline and and and your heart starts to race and suddenly like your your palms are sweating and you start to breathe really having you don’t know why and unfortunately there’s no corridor, just about hit your standing in your kitchen, your braces, you breast-feeds up your cores all surges, your body goes into the state of like hyper awareness and see now what do you know when your body goes into a state of agitation. What is your mind, your mind starts searching for reason why if your mind can’t figure out why you just had a freak out you know it’s gonna do. It’s going to think you’re an actual danger. Your mind is going to go completely into protection mode on you it’s gonna make that fear worse and it’s going to make you think that danger is imminent because your brain is basically like holy cow, her heart is racing, her palms is… what the hell is going on? There must be something going on. Last time this happened, we were on the highway and it was car that would made sense, but this made no sense. You know this is why by the way as your heart’s racing and your mind is racing for an explanation so it can make sense of what’s happening to your body. This is why your mind starts to say things when you’re having a panic attack like maybe I’m having a heart attack. Maybe I don’t want to get married. Maybe it’s my job. Maybe I’m gonna get fired. Maybe I’m dying. If your mind can’t find a suitable explanation, your brain is going to make your anxiety worse so that you physically move. It wants you to leave the room.

You know if you’ve ever seen anybody that you care about have a panic attack, stop and think about what they were like. They started breathing really heavy, their heart starts fluttering, they start to freak out, they dart around, they have scattered thoughts, they don’t know how to calm themselves down. They don’t know why they feel so freaked out they have a “deer in the headlights” look. Then suddenly they’ll say, I just have to get out here, I just have to get out here. That’s their brain, their brain can explain what’s happening so their brain wants to protect them. It’s actually making it worse so that they will move out of the room. It’s a vicious cycle and it’s something I was trapped in for years.

Now, for a long time, I understood neither the difference between normal panic and actual panic attacks, nor did I understand the role that my mind was playing in escalating the anxiety. I went to therapists. I tried all kinds of cognitive techniques to try to stop myself from panicking. It got so bad the panic attacks that I actually became afraid of having panic attacks, and that fear of course, just made me have more panic attacks. Finally, what happened for me is, I went and got professional help. I got myself on Zoloft with the help of a psychiatrist and it was a miracle for me, truly. It literally was like taking, you know, the volume on the stereo and turning it to zero. I felt like myself again and here’s the, I took for two decades, and as far as I’m concerned, zero stigma on mental health. I look at mental health issues, like diabetes. When you have diabetes your body had, cannot process insulin or doesn’t make enough of it. When you have mental health issues, you also have a chemical imbalance. Therapy plus drugs can be absolutely amazing and you should explore it. So here’s the thing though I was a kind person where I just thought I’ll just take Zoloft for the rest of my life. And then what happened is we had kids, and all three of our kids started to struggle with their own form of anxieties. And it was beyond mere worrying. The anxiety was impacting their lives, they stopped doing sleepovers. They would sleep on the floor of our bedroom. They were worried about everything. Oakley named his panic “Oliver”. Anytime he started getting a panic attack, Oliver’s here. And our daughter Sawyer, she would call it her, “What-if Loop”. She would get stuck in this… What if this happens and what if that happens. She said you know it’s like there is this “What-if Loop” mom. Once he started thinking about all the what if’s. I get stuck thinking about what all the what if’s and if I can’t get out of it because there are always what-ifs. Sounds like a Shell Silverstein’s poem, doesn’t it?

You know, I knew how scary it was to suffer from it and it was heartbreaking to see our kids struggling and afraid. It was really eye-opening and frustrating trying to help them deal with their anxiety because nothing worked. We would go to specialists after specialist after specialist. We tried all kinds of techniques and games. We set up prizes for them to face their fears. And honestly, it just seem to keep getting worse. So I came off Zoloft to face my own anxiety head on, because I wanted to better understand it and figure out how to beat it so I could help our kids figure out how to beat theirs. Here’s what I learned. First of all, telling somebody to try to calm down, it does not work. It actually makes it worse.

I’ve spent countless hours with therapist who have told me and the kids just change the channel, think about something else. That works if you’re worried. It works if you’re worried. But as a strategy for full-blown anxiety, it doesn’t work. See when you’re worried about something, your thoughts have drifted but your heart isn’t racing yet. So your thoughts drift 54321, awaken your prefrontal cortex, your mind is now ready to receive a new thought, insert a new thought. That’s how you control worry. That’s a change your attitude. That’s how you create a new mindset, very straightforward.

When you’re having anxiety, what happens is you are worried, and now your body is starting to get agitated. Your heart is racing, your palms are sweating because of what you’re thinking. And when you are in a state of physical agitation, it’s impossible to get somebody to calm down. And in fact, it’s like asking somebody to go from 60 miles an hour to 0 miles an hour. It’s a lot like trying to make a freight train stop by throwing a boulder in front of it, it’s gonna jump the tracks. There is actually a study in the Journal of behavior research and therapy that showed when you try to make somebody calm down and you tell them, just stop thinking about the thing that’s worrying you, guess what happens, they end up getting more upset. When you try to tell yourself to calm down, you make the anxiety worse because you’re fighting against it. When you understand how panic works, what it is the role your brain has in making it worse, you can beat it by working with it.

There are two strategies that work really well together. One is the five second rule. Use it first because that’s going to assert control over your mind. It’s gonna interrupt the default setting of anxiety and it’s gonna cue your prefrontal cortex to pay attention and then what we’re going to do is we’re gonna teach you how to reframe the anxiety as excitement, as excitement. I’m gonna say that again because I don’t want your brain to escalate what you’re feeling. I want your brain to be like, oh that makes sense. And that’ll then allow your body to calm down. Here’s how you’re going to do it. Excitement and anxiety, feel the exact same in your body, okay? I’m gonna explain this to you.

So I first used this strategy of reframing anxiety as excitement when I started in public speaking. I get a lot of questions about public speaking and specifically how do you get over your fears and nerves about public speaking? And my answer always surprises people. My answer is this: I have never gotten over my fears and my nerves. I just use them to my advantage. Now here’s what may surprise you about that answer. I speak for a living, as in a lot. In 2016, I was not only one of the most book speakers in the world, I was the most book female speaker in America. A hundred and three keynotes in one year. Biggest audience over 20000 people, absolutely amazing. Do I get nervous? Absolutely I do, every single time.

But here’s the trick, and this is what I’m going to teach you to do. I don’t call it nerves. I call it excitement, and that is a game changer and the reason why it works with anxiety is because physiologically, anxiety, excitement, exact same thing. Nervousness, excitement, exact same thing. Fear and excitement are the same thing to your body. The only difference between excitement and anxiety is what your mind calls the sensation. It’s like the near miss example. Remember when you were on the highway, and a car almost hits you, and your heart starts to race and you freak out for a second, and then the car passes and the danger is gone and you’re like, oh, okay the danger has passed. Deep breath, we’re okay. But if that same physical sensation happens in your kitchen, it’s exactly the same. There’s no danger. The only difference is your mind doesn’t have a logical reason to explainthis, your mind makes it worse. We’re gonna use that same principle with anxiety.

If your brain has a good explanation for why your body is freaking out, it won’t make it worse. This is the key to being in anxiety. This is it, right here. Understanding that if you can give your mind a reason why you’re upset, why your body is freaking out, you can beat it. So the first time I ever gave a legitimate speech like no joke, the first time I walked onto a stage and gave an actual speech was when I gave that Ted-X talk in San Francisco in 2011. I remember standing backstage listening to one person with a PhD after one person with a PhD give their talks and you know what I was thinking to myself for seven hours straight, this is the dumbest thing I have ever gotten myself into. I am about to go out there and tell these people that I am a local radio host who dreams of being as big as Rush Limbaugh, I’m nowhere near doing that. I am going to make a complete and utter ass of myself.

You know what was happening for me backstage? My palms were sweaty. My heart was racing. I was convinced I was gonna be the stupidest person with the dumbest speech that I was gonna look like a total moron after all these people, that I was gonna have a bright red face, that I was gonna get laughed off that stage. My face was hot. My armpits were dripping like Niagara Falls. You know what my body was doing? It was prepping for action. I was getting ready to do something and I kept telling myself, oh my God I’m nervous, oh my gosh, this is gonna be terrible. I labeled all these sensations that I was feeling, the sweaty pits, the clammy palms, that beating heart, as a warning sign. That this was gonna go horrible. I said I was nervous.

You want to know something wild? So six years later, six years later, hundreds, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of speeches later. Do you know I still feel the exact same thing in my body? When I’m backstage, the exact same thing. My palms sweat, my heart races, my face gets hot, my armpits start to drip. Physiologically, I am in a state of arousal. My body is preparing to go out on stage and here’s the difference though. I just call it excitement. It’s the exact same freaking feeling I felt six years ago. I just called it nerves. I channel it in a positive direction. If I were to go backstage and say, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, I’m nervous, nervous, nervous, nervous, nervous, I’ll tell you what, I would get more nervous. What your brain calls what your body’s doing is the secret.

Now, the more speeches that I give, the more comfortable and confident I become about what I’m saying. But even as I’ve gain confidence in my abilities, I’ve noticed that the feelings in my body, they don’t disappear. That’s when it dawned me that maybe this is just my body’s way to get ready to do something cool. And so, I started telling myself that I was getting excited instead of calling it nervousness and everything changed. My body still gets agitated but I don’t freak out, ever. Now look, I never knew that my little trick of re-labeling it something else from nervousness to excitement has some serious science behind it. It’s called anxiety reappraisal. Reframing your anxiety as excitement works. Not just for me, it has worked in study after study after study. Harvard business school professor Allison Wood Brooks just conducted this massive study where she would tell people before they are about to do something that made them nervous to reframe it and say it out loud, I’m excited, I’m excited. I know it sounds really stupid. I actually stand backstage and go, I’m excited, I’m excited, I’m excited and it works. I get really excited and I don’t freak out.

And what she found is not only, not only does the strategy of going 54321, I’m excited, not only does it work to not have you freak out, guess what? You perform better. In study after study after study, kids that would say, I’m excited before walking into a math test, guess what? They did better than the kids who didn’t. People that said, I’m excited before they walked into an interview or a negotiation for a raise, did better than the people that didn’t. People that stood at a track meet and before they ran said, I’m excited, I’m excited. People did the karaoke, I’m excited, I’m excited, did better than the people who don’t. The question is why? The reason is simple.

Anxiety is a state of arousal. It is so much easier to convince your brain that all those arousal feelings aren’t natural and there’re just excitement then trying to calm yourself down. Reframing your nervousness into enthusiasm works not just in research at Harvard. Susie use this right after she learned the five second rule. Here’s what she wrote to me: my husband and I are planning to get out of our comfort spot in a big way. He is going to retire soon and we are looking into moving across the country to the East Coast. Every time I get “that feeling” in my stomach, you know the one fear of change, I remember the five second rule and saying, I’m excited. I make a list of stuff I have to do, I check them off one by one. It’s taking us a little closer to our dream. Thank you for the inspiration. She’s using it to stop that “feeling” in her stomach from growing into something that stops her.

Here’s the catch, when you tell yourself I’m excited, it doesn’t lower the feelings in your body. Your heart rate’s not gonna disappear. Your palms are still going to be a little sweaty. You might feel parched in your throat. Whatever the feelings that you used to call nervousness, they’re going to stay there. But what happens is really important. They don’t get bigger, they don’t escalate. When you say I’m excited, I’m excited, you stay in control. And your brain stops worrying about it which gives your body a chance to start to calm itself down. So the next time that you feel yourself getting worried, or you feel nervousness or panic starting to set in while you’re making a cup of coffee or you’re experiencing a little bit of stage fright, or pregame jitters or you’re worried about a big exam or a job interview, I want you to try this. Use the five second rule and this new research to beat it to the punch. As soon as you feel the physical sensations start to take up, you get that feeling in your stomach, you feel your heart start to race, you start hissing a little bit, that’s the moment. I want you to take control 54321. You’re gonna seize the moment. Then I want you to start telling yourself I’m so excited. I’m so excited to play this game. I’m so excited to make this cup of coffee. I’m so excited to be on this plane. I’m so excited to take this test.

That’s exactly what Greg did when he reframed his feelings in order to beat anxiety. I have reframed this hesitation as an opportunity to get going on my work in those five seconds even though I don’t feel like it. I have allowed this not feeling like it to become a full-blown anxiety disorder. And I truly think that this technique has helped me find a way to get unstuck. So thank you for helping me reframe these feelings of never feeling like it from, to normal rather than neurotic. See the physical impact of 54321, which is the first action, and then saying your excited, your excited is critical. Because it’s you exerting your self. It’s awakening your prefrontal cortex and it allows you to start focusing on the positive explanation. Look when you first start using the strategy, you might have to repeat it 27 times in one hour. The first time our 11-year-old used it to beat his anxiety about sleepovers, he said I’m excited to sleep over at Queen’s house, over and over and over again. During a Six Mile drive, from our house to Queen’s. Bless his little heart, over and over. I’m excited to sleep over at Queen’s house. How you feeling… my stomach, my stomach is grumbling, so I must be excited because I’m going to Queen’s house to sleep over. So when we finally get to Queen’s house, we pull into the driveway, I put the car in park and I turned and I’d say, how you doing? And he looked at me and he said my heart is still racing and my stomach feels funny but I’m actually excited to sleep over. That was six months ago. His anxiety about sleepovers gone. Now he’s actually excited and that’s the power of this tool. It truly works.