the cure for a worrisome mind? perhaps.

Here’s something I’ve come to terms with in the past couple of years: I’m a semi-anxious person.

When you first meet me, this is not obvious. I don’t bite my nails or fidget, and I don’t come across stressed or hyper. In fact, most people tell me I seem pretty zen and that I have a calming energy about me. Go figure!

But under the surface, there are loads of feelings and itty-bitty worries that poke and prod at me on the regular. I’ve worked really hard to live with them, to feel them, to be present to them, and to not react to them. And while I’m much more chill than I used to be, worry still weasels it’s way in and takes me down the uncomfortable rabbit hole of “what if” scenarios.

What if a client hates what I write?
What if my fiancé falls out of love with me?
What if people don’t like who I really am?
What if I never become more successful than this?

If I’m in the flow of taking good care of myself—meditating, exercising, nourishing my body, etc.—I can usually shrug this stuff off by bringing my attention to what’s really true in the present moment.

Like…

99% of my clients have been deeply happy with my work.
My fiancé adores me and shows me how much he loves me every day.
I have amazing friends and family who love and support me completely.
I never imagined I’d be as successful as I am now. So there!

However, when I’ve slacked on self-care, countering “what ifs” with the truth is much more challenging. I tend to dwell in the worry, or even worse it pops up over and over again.

Can you relate?

These threads of “what ifs” are major distractions. They prevent us from being fully present and showing up the way we want to for the people we love, in our work, and in our lives. And while shifting our attention to more positive thoughts and truths is effective sometimes; it’s not really addressing the root issue: our relationship with worry.

As fate would have it, I stumbled upon a book (via Instagram, obvi) that addresses this head on. It’s called The Worry Trick: How Your Brain Tricks You Into Expecting the Worst & What You Can Do About It, and if you’re someone who struggles with anxiety, you have to pick it up ASAP.

Written by psychologist and anxiety expert, it teaches us how to not only disengage from worrisome thoughts, but to also retrain our brains so that those thoughts no longer trigger anxiety.

What I love most about this book is the author’s explanation of why we have anxious thoughts and anxious reactions to begin with. It’s all rooted in our amygdala, the part of our brain the handles fight or flight responses.

Turns out that the amygdala learns by association. He says, “It’s only when your amygdala detects what it takes as a sign of danger that it activates your sympathetic nervous system, enabling fight or flight responses, and then it will make memories.”

Basically anytime a thought has triggered an anxious feeling, it’s tracked by that part of our brains forever. Crazy, right?

And the only what to retrain the amygdala is to disrupt it the moment we feel the anxiety creep up. Doing this over and over again, facing our most uncomfortable thoughts head on without distraction or efforts to push them away, eventually makes them less and less bothersome.

While I’m just beginning this process, I do feel like taking a new approach to my most anxious moments is shifting things for me. It’s going to require some serious committment and practice on my part to get real results, so I’ll report back in a month or so with more thorough findings!

In the meantime, I’d love to hear if anxiety or excess worry impacts your life. And if so, what do you do the manage it?

Please share in the comments below!