More Than Anxiety

Ep 104 - Brain Science And Self-Care: A Path to Anxiety Relief

• Megan Devito • Episode 104

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Beyond Thoughts: Taking a Somatic (Body Based) Approach

This one's for all of my ambitious women out there working their butt's off to achieve their goals who are struggling to think straight due to stress and anxiety.  In this episode of the More Than Anxiety podcast, I share my personal journey with anxiety and offer practical strategies that I use myself and with my clients to overcome it. 

You'll learn how to:

  • Interpret physical symptoms of anxiety: Understand your body's signals and learn to respond effectively and in new ways that move you toward your goals.
  • Understand what's going on in your brain: Learn the science behind anxiety and its impact on your thoughts and behaviors.
  • Mind-body connection for healing: Discover how tuning into your body's sensations will help you calm and manage anxiety, boost your overall well-being and change the direction of your life.

Join me as I share personal stories, scientific insights, and practical tools to help you conquer anxiety, achieve your goals, and change your life.

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You know you're overwhelmed, burned out, sick to death of work but also trying to do everyting for everyone at home. TAKE THIS QUIZ to find out why you're so overwhelmed and what to do about it.

Megan Devito:

Welcome to the More Than Anxiety Podcast. I'm Megan Deito and I help ambitious women break out of the anxiety cycle that keeps them frustrated and stuck. Get ready for a lighthearted approach that will change what you think, how you feel and what you believe about yourself. This podcast is full of simple steps, a lot of truth, talk and inspiration to take action. So you walk away feeling confident, calm and inspiration to take action. So you walk away feeling confident, calm and ready to live. Let's get to it. Hey there, welcome to episode 104 of the More Than Anxiety podcast.

Megan Devito:

I am celebrating my two-year podcast anniversary today, showing up every week for two years. I wasn't sure that was ever going to happen, but this is really fun. It feels like a big deal and a big milestone, so thank you for joining me today. I am so excited to be able to kind of look back over the last 103 podcasts that I've written and just to see what you guys like and what you keep coming back for maybe what you want more of. And one of the things that I noticed was that it's still that very first episode that people get drawn to. Maybe they're starting at the beginning and maybe it's because what's in that episode. What I did was I looked back at that episode to see what I had said and to review the transcript, and I noticed that a lot of the things that I said in there were absolutely rock solid the same for me. But I also noted that there were some ways that I had grown, some things that changed in how I help my clients and what I do myself, and I thought I'm going to reboot that episode. So this is back to basics anxiety 101, but better. So if you are a woman who is trying to solve all of their anxious thoughts by thinking when you notice that you feel anxious, but then you get wrapped up in the thinking part instead of recognizing that feeling in your body as a message to slow down, this episode is for you.

Megan Devito:

I want to tell you my anxiety recovery story. I want to tell you how you can start putting into practice some things that will help you calm down and be able to think clearly so you can achieve your goal. If this is the first time you've ever caught this podcast, you can always go back and listen to episode one, and if you're like, no, I'm good, I'll stick with this one, that's great too. Either way, I'm so thankful that you're here, that you're listening, and I hope that you will share this episode with anybody else who you know, who feels really anxious, who's trying to do really big things in their life but they're just stuck because it's a rotten place to be.

Megan Devito:

And I lived there for a long time, a really, really long time. My anxiety started back when I was eight years old. I was in the third grade and I remember sitting in my classroom and my teacher handed me a stack of papers that she had graded and it said "always sick on it, and I remember thinking I was really mean of her, but I also knew it was true, because I didn't feel good. I had an upset stomach, I worried all the time, I missed my parents. I just had a lot of thoughts about not feeling like being away from my parents I guess more than anything. I wanted to be at home with them. I wasn't crazy about school; I was a good student but I didn't feel good and I remember sneaking down to this little tiny room in our school and staying in there to go to sleep because my tummy was upset and just wanting to go home. Because really that was kind of the main goal was to get the heck out of there.

Megan Devito:

But it didn't stop there. It actually got worse and my anxiety got worse and worse and worse. I remember having my first panic attack, or my first really long anxiety attack, when I was in what would be called middle school now I guess; we called it junior high back then, and exactly where I was sitting in the school library looking at this magazine with Ryan White on the front of it. If you don't know who Ryan White is, then you are definitely not my age and probably not from Indiana. So Ryan White was this kid who got the AIDS virus from a blood transfusion. He was a hemophiliac, he passed away, he lived in my state and it scared the bejezus out of me.

Megan Devito:

And then it just continued to morph and it turned into really disordered health and, I would say, generalized anxiety that lasted until I was 40 years old. I missed out on things like my college experience, enjoying high school, my wedding, raising my kids, vacations, all kinds of things that anxiety kind of stole from me over the years because I had no idea what to do. I knew that I was terrified that I was going to get some horrible disease and then, with all of these existential thoughts that would come into my head about volcanoes. You know, the giant volcano underneath what is it? Yellowstone or Yosemite, one of the two? The giant volcano that I try not to think about because you can get real existential, really really quick, those kinds of things. So if that sounds familiar, or if your anxiety is based on things like what people think about you or how you are afraid that you would never get anything right, making the wrong decision, being trapped, all of those things, it all comes back to the same concept and that's really what I want to talk about with you today.

Megan Devito:

In this process of me feeling anxious for so long, at one point in my life I decided that I was going to start walking after dinner. I was raising four kids kids, and this was almost 10 years ago now about nine years and my kids were home. It took a lot of energy. I was teaching part-time, I was doing all of these things, but I needed a walk in the evening just to chill out and get out of my head. So I would take a walk and at one point I was walking because I wanted to eat more cookies, and you can tell me all about eating and food and walking for other benefits, and that's fine, but that was really my reason and it all worked out. So I will still do that.

Megan Devito:

I still walk a lot, but walking changed something for me. One it gave me a chance to get out of my house to calm down, and there was something about being outside and really being in this place where I'm like, oh, my mind can wander, but it didn't wander to the scary places. And in hindsight I know why. In that moment in time, I didn't know why. I just knew that I got to walk, I ate more cookies and I got a break, which was amazing. So I kept walking. I started out walking for maybe 10 or 15 minutes, and I ended up walking for two or three miles, and I still, sometimes, will go out and take a two or three mile walk.

Megan Devito:

One day, though, I turned on an audio book. A lot of times I would just listen to playlists. I had it on my phone. Occasionally I would listen to a podcast or something like that, but I purchased the book You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero, and I'm listening to her narrate the book as I walk.

Megan Devito:

She says "worry is wishing for what you don't want, and I was like that's garbage, because who would do that? This book if you've never read this book? It has absolutely nothing to do with anxiety. It's about manifestation, which I also didn't know anything about at that point. All of it was a little crazy. But she said that I'm like who would do that? Oh my God, who does this woman think she is? That you can just choose your thoughts. Okay, I'm not dumb by any means, like I'm pretty smart, and obviously there were parts of me that knew I didn't believe everything that I thought, or that I didn't believe everything that anyone told me. But the idea that I could choose my thoughts or that I didn't have to buy into them was sort of mind boggling in that moment, because I realized that I could do that. It seemed really impossible because when you are anxious, your thoughts can feel very important, very true and very out of your control. I listened to this. I started thinking more about that concept of worrying and wishing for what I didn't want, almost like I was going to; I'm sure the point of the book was that I was going to manifest something that I was worrying for, and maybe that was true, but in that moment it was just this one thought change. That flipped everything for me.

Megan Devito:

A lot of times I'll work with people and they'll say this is going to take forever. I don't know if I can do it: maybe. But in all actuality, anxiety change happens in a moment. It's the one thing you learn, the one thing you change, the one thing you do, so that several weeks or several months down the road you look back and you're like, I don't know, but I've felt really good lately. I haven't been anxious, hardly at all. I just something changed and that's really how it happened for me.

Megan Devito:

So that idea that it has to take a really long time is one not always true. Yes, I would. I would venture to say that anxiety recovery is a progress and it's something that we, you know, it happens in a moment, but we just continue to get better and better. And we will have days, we will have times where we feel really anxious and we learn to say, oh well, yeah, I know this feeling and I move through it. If that doesn't sound possible to you, keep listening, because I'm going to tell you something in just a minute that's going to rock your world and it's basic biology. This was another thing. So, yes, hearing worry was wishing for what I didn't want was a big moment for me. Maybe that's crazy, but that's what it was for me.

Megan Devito:

The other thing that I started to learn because, as I felt better and I started thinking about what I wanted to do next in my life, which had never really felt like an option for me before. I knew I wanted to move out of my teaching job, just out of the classroom I wanted to change. I was done. I didn't want to be there anymore. It wasn't my passion. I was just preparing for whatever happened next. It wasn't something where I was like I'm leaving next week, but I needed something else that I was interested in.

Megan Devito:

So in this book she started talking about working with a coach and I'm like, yeah, I could do that. I could totally do that. I can teach anybody anything. Remember, I'm listening to this as someone who I feel like I lived in a tent in the woods, like maybe I was just really sheltered, maybe it's because I live in a small town in Indiana, but whatever it was, I'm like coaching. I was coaching swim at that time and I'm like coaching, so like swim and what I do as a swim coach. All right, I'm a teacher, I'm a swim coach. I could totally do this.

Megan Devito:

So I learned what a coach was. I signed up, I got certified with my health coaching certification and I became a health coach. And those coaching certifications that I took to become a health coach first and later to become a life coach because I'm certified as both, I learned what the heck was happening inside my body. Now, I went to college. I graduated, I have a degree, I got good grades in high school, and I really I'm good at like body sciences and things like that. Part of that is because I've researched the crap out of a lot of really scary diseases and what's happening in your body with those diseases because of health anxiety. The other part is is that it just sticks with me.

Megan Devito:

So I think something that can really benefit you, that can help you get to a point where you're like, oh wait, anxiety, I understand what's happening, Really, that can change a lot in the fact that when you're anxious, you're just looking for some sort of proof and the thing that life doesn't offer us very often is actual proof or statistics or hard facts. So if you are one of those people that wants to know what is absolutely the next step. You're going to be frustrated and anxious because there may not be an absolute, perfect next step. If you are looking for anything perfect, you're going to be frustrated and anxious. If you're looking for a 100% guarantee that you're never going to have this, this or this happen. If you're looking for a 100% guarantee that you're never going to have this, this or this happen, none of us can give that to you, but science can.

Megan Devito:

So let's dip into brain science for a minute and let's talk about the different parts of your brain, how they all come together to cause you to think and to feel anxiously, and what you can do about that to start to recover. So let's talk about the different parts of your brain first. The first part I want to talk about is the newest to develop. It's the part that does the thinking. It's the part that helps you rationalize. It's your frontal lobe. It's also the last part of your brain development in terms of your life.

Megan Devito:

Guys, sometimes you're 28 before this thing kicks in and we know this can take a while because we see I mean sometimes young adult men or, you know, guys in fraternities. I like to pick on guys in fraternities, I don't know why just because we've all got stories or we've at least heard stories of things that they do, that we're like honestly, what were y'all thinking? Things like tying sleds to the back of pickup trucks and whipping people through fields Maybe that's an Indiana thing too Things like just ridiculous things like jumping off balconies onto bounce houses, whatever. Their brains aren't fully functioning yet and alcohol, it all goes together. But that frontal lobe is the thinking part of your brain. It's also the last to develop. So if you're trying to rationalize things, that is the part of your brain that does it. This is what happens when we feel anxious and we start trying to think our way out of it. The thing is that part of your brain it's right up here in the front that part of your brain isn't turned on when you are anxious. So the more you think, the worse you're going to feel, because you're not actually thinking with the part of your brain that you need to think with.

Megan Devito:

You also have an emotional part of your brain and this is called your limbic system, and I don't wanna go like super duper deep, but I do want you to understand why this is important. The limbic system has these other parts in it. It has the hippocampus. The hippocampus is responsible for this is all really important when we talk about anxiety, because if you have a memory that causes you to feel an emotion and you react to it because you feel anxious if it's a bad emotion or a negative emotion or an anxious emotion, you're going to keep repeating the same habits. The hippocampus is also responsible for taking memories and I like to think of it as putting them in a file cabinet, as like this is in the past. We can shut that file cabinet drawer but if you're in a place where you're avoiding that emotion or you're traumatized and this is where we start seeing trauma come into play and that memory stays active inside of your body so that you're always feeling it, you're having those really physical reactions to it. It's not assimilating that drawer, it's not making its way to the file cabinet. So you just keep going into the memory and the emotion and taking the same actions. So we can really look at the hippocampus as part of the limbic system that fires up when you're anxious.

Megan Devito:

You also have things like the thalamus. This takes in all of the stimulus that you have around you through your senses, everything except for your nose and I don't know why the nose isn't included, because I'm not a doctor or a scientist, but I know that it's not. So anything you see, hear, taste, feel or just have like a sensation or an emotion too, it takes in all of those things and it works to process all of those different stimulus. So you have emotions about them, or so that you have reactions to them. For example, if you touch something and it's hot, you pull away. That's a pretty good reaction to have. We're thankful for that reaction, so that we don't put our hand on the stove and then try to decide what to do when it's burning us. We just pull it away. That's a good anxious reaction to have. And then, of course, there is the hypothalamus and this manages your body temperature. So if you notice that you get really hot or really cold when you're anxious, it makes you hungry and thirsty. It's about your mood, it's about your sex drive, it's about your blood pressure, it's about your sleep, all of those things that can really get out of whack when you're feeling anxious. It's all part of that emotional brain. So what happens?

Megan Devito:

And I'm going to explain this in terms of the movie the Croods, and I think this is the simplest explanation. If you've never seen this movie, watch it. It's like pre-Inside Out. I always relate it to what's happening inside of your brain. Yes, Inside Out does a great job of explaining your emotions. This does a great job to me of explaining what's happening in your brain. So we have the dad in the movie the Croods and I want you to picture this dad. Okay, if you haven't seen the movie, just picture a caveman and picture him living inside of your brain and this part of your brain called the amygdala. Now I want you to pretend like he is the fastest guy alive, like super fast, because that part of your brain is really, really fast.

Megan Devito:

It's the first to react and it's always, always, always, always on the lookout for anything it perceives as dangerous, not because it's really dangerous, but because it thinks it's dangerous. This part of your brain is the oldest part of your brain. Some people will call it the lizard brain or the reptile brain. I just happen to call it the caveman brain. You can call it critter brain, it doesn't matter, it's all the same thing. That part of your brain's job is to react, react, react, and it reacts from the perspective of a caveman. It has no idea that saber-toothed tigers aren't running around trying to eat you and kill you. Do I touch the fire? Do I stand in the fire? No, it doesn't know that. It just reacts, reacts, reacts and it's always on the lookout.

Megan Devito:

And when it sees something that is dangerous, the caveman in your head does everything it can to keep you safe. And the first thing it does is flood your body. It talks to the hippocampus and the thalamus and the hypothalamus and all of your different other like hormone secreting parts of your body and says fill this person with tons of cortisol, tons of adrenaline, all of these things, so they can get the heck out of here or fight or freeze or do whatever they have to survive. And so it's those hormones inside your body that do things like raise your blood pressure or make your body really hot, because it floods your body with a lot of blood. It pushes it all out into your arms and legs so that you can run really fast. It shuts off your digestion, so suddenly you have no appetite and you're about maybe to run to the bathroom because you've got diarrhea. If it goes on long enough, you have no appetite and you're about maybe to run to the bathroom because you've got diarrhea. You have if it goes on long enough. You have no sex drive. You're in a terrible mood.

Megan Devito:

All of these feelings you have in your body, like your heart starting to beat really, really fast, are from adrenaline and cortisol and it's just a reaction inside of your brain, that something that your amygdala thought was dangerous, and this could be something as sensitive as a shift in the way the light is outside your window or a smell that you've had in the past. Like you know, smells trigger memories. Have you ever noticed that, like you can smell something and you time travel back? That caveman time travels all the time but it always thinks it's in prehistoric days. It just reacts, reacts, reacts to some things that it doesn't even need to react to. But the point I want that I think is really important for you to understand in all of this brain science stuff is that it makes your body feel a certain kind of way.

Megan Devito:

This is one of the questions I always ask women when I'm coaching them is, I want you to tell me how your body feels, and sometimes they say something like bad. Yeah, it does feel really bad, but let's get more specific. Where does it feel bad? What does bad feel like? If you were going to close your eyes and imagine, could you actually describe how it looks to me? Could you describe how it feels? Does it feel tight? Does it feel loose? Does it feel hot? Does it feel cold? Does it feel spiky? Does it feel stretchy? Does it feel wispy like smoke? Does it flow like water? Everybody has a different description and it doesn't really matter as long as you know yourself, because the key here and something that I don't think I realized when I recorded episode one was how important the body was when we're worrying about things, and here's why this is important.

Megan Devito:

If you can recognize how your body feels, you can choose to not believe your thoughts, instead of going to let me stand back and think about something different that I would like to think. That's absolutely part of what I do when I'm coaching people, but the first step is calm your body down, because if I was to take somebody who's really anxious and say, well, let's be rational for a second Never works, does it Just calm down? And that's not really. That's certainly not what Jen Sincero was writing about in her book, and it wasn't exactly what I was doing. It was just that first step of recognizing that I didn't have to believe what I think, but it took it to a new level in myself and then, with my coaching clients, to say, oh, wait a second. Those feelings, that anxiousness, that's when I start choosing to not believe my thoughts. So that's really important in understanding that we have concrete proof in the way that our body feels that we are anxious.

Megan Devito:

We feel anxious. Anxiety is an emotion and it causes a feeling inside of your body and so when you know why you feel what you feel, then you know why your thinking goes off the rails. It's not because you need to invest more time in those thoughts, it's because you need to notice them and say, oh yeah, well, that one came because I feel anxious. So what we want to do is we want to have the option to be able to retrain your brain on how it thinks, because thoughts are habits. We think the same things over and over and over again, and you might notice that when you're anxious, I don't know. I always just think that people are looking at me. I always think they think I'm stupid. I always think I'm messing everything up. I just have to think myself into the ground and overthink everything to make sure that I don't embarrass myself.

Megan Devito:

Embarrassment is a survival technique A long long time ago. If you're afraid of being embarrassed, if you're afraid of failing, imagine a caveman kicking you out of the cave and saying, while you're on your own, now go eat some nuts and berries and enjoy the winter you die. You want to stay in connection. So this is why we do things like people please, because we want to stay in the group, and there's certainly a time and a place to stay in a group and to find your people. But if you're just doing it at your own detriment and never, ever moving forward, that's when we need to talk about when is it okay to say yes to other people and when is it okay to say yes to yourself. These are all concepts that I've coached people on recently and they all go back to the same concept of how do you feel when you want to do that, or when you say yes or when you say no.

Megan Devito:

And then we could always dive into trauma. As a coach, I am trauma-informed, but I'm not a therapist. So if I'm dealing with somebody who has really big trauma where you can just tell that it's really active in their body all the time that maybe they haven't been able to work whatever happened to them out of their nervous system. That's when coaching and therapy can really come together and help you use your body and examine your thoughts and integrate old memories, and that's just like for a whole other episode. Actually, I've done episodes on that. You can check out episode 103 with Cheryl Arutt, and she talks a lot about how EMDR can do that.

Megan Devito:

That was just the episode right before this. It's such a good one, but really being able to use your body as a guide is so, so important. Knowing what is going on inside of your brain gives you the proof that anxiety is looking for. It helps you create that pause that you need to, so that you can question your beliefs and make different choices. That's how recovery starts and how it grows and how it gets faster and easier every time you do it.

Megan Devito:

And what this means is that you have an opportunity to get clear really, really clear on what you want to do, instead of continuing to react in ways that are keeping you feeling anxious, keeping you feeling stuck, not being able to be successful or enjoy your life at all. And what I didn't know until I learned all of this is how much I could trust my body and how much I couldn't trust my thoughts, even and especially when I felt anxious. So that anxious feeling, even though it's horrible and awful and it was for me the thoughts were still worse. For you that might be the opposite, but no matter which one is worse the thoughts or the feelings, it doesn't matter. You can still use your body to help you feel better. So you have the power right now to calm yourself down, to learn how to trust yourself, to choose new thoughts that make you feel confident and excited, instead of continuing to feel terrified and trapped. Nobody wants to feel that way any longer, right? Because when you start feeling confident, you start behaving differently. You smile at strangers who you might have shied away from in the past, so you start making new connections and even new friends.

Megan Devito:

If you've been feeling lonely, if you've been feeling like isolated, and maybe you think that you don't have any idea how to connect with people, that's just a thought. You can choose differently. You start to ask for what you want and go after it, even when it feels scary, because you recognize that anxiety is really normal when you're trying something new. Again the caveman's telling you don't do that, we don't know how it's going to turn out. It's looking for certainty. But you recognize that. So if you notice the anxiety pops up out of the blue, like you're just sitting on the couch watching TV, having a snack and suddenly you're anxious, you can say oh wait, I know what's going on here. I can calm myself down and then you can get back to being present with your family or with your friends. So you start having more fun because the feeling doesn't matter so much and all of a sudden you're a little more successful and life is lived differently. That's crazy.

Megan Devito:

When you look back and you're like I don't know what happened, but something changed. And I know that the feelings are big and I know this might seem like something that you're stuck with, like from one former anxiety junkie to someone who's in that place right now, I promise you that you can change. You really can. You can do the things that are going to blow your mind six months from now, but you can't keep doing the same thing, thinking the same thing and reacting the same way, believing the same lives, and get there. So you might be thinking that you're going to give this a shot, and I totally think you should, and I hope that you do. I hope that you'll put everything that you've learned in this episode into practice, but wouldn't it be a lot easier if you had someone to walk you through it and to help you find those sneaky thoughts that are keeping you stuck? I can help you create new habits so that you learn how to stop that feeling of anxiety in your body, how to slow down and how to think clearly. And we're going to look at the thoughts that are feeding your anxiety and making it grow and making it get worse, and then challenge them with the truth so you can start to believe new things about how smart and capable and important you are. And then you'll find more evidence to believe those things because you're going to take one step at a time towards the goal that you set.

Megan Devito:

Coaching is always forward-focused and very goal-oriented, so you can learn more what it's like to work with me as your coach by going to my website it's just megandavidocom. You can also find me on Instagram or Facebook at @Coach Megan Devito. I am Megan Devito on LinkedIn and my DMs are always open. Just message me and say hey, I really want to know how to do this. I really want to know what it's like to work with you. I work one-on-one with all of my clients, so you get me all to yourself. We dig into what you want, just you and me, once a week, every week, for six months.

Megan Devito:

All right, I hope this was helpful. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thanks for sticking with me for two years. I hope that you'll stick with me for two more and I'm really looking forward to talking with you guys. So reach out, don't be shy, and I will be back again next week. Take care. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the More Than Anxiety podcast. Before you go, be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find this resource as well. And, of course, if you're ready to feel calm, to stop overthinking and have a lot more fun, you can go to the show notes, click the link and talk to me about coaching. I'll talk to you soon.