Rewiring the Anxious Brain Part 2: 10 Skills to Beat Anxiety: Anxiety Skills #22

In my last video, I explained how to rewire the anxious brain by understanding the anxiety cycle. In this video I'm gonna talk about 10 skills you can develop to help you face your fears and beat them. So here's the amazing thing about your brain.

It's made to rewire itself all the time. This is called neuroplasticity. Scientists used to think that after childhood, our brain was pretty much locked in place.

But now that we have better imaging technology, we can literally see how the brain changes depending on how we use it. So, in this video I'm gonna talk about 10 extra skills that you can develop on your own or with a therapist, to build up your ability to take control of your anxiety. And if you'd like to learn more in depth information about how to treat your anxiety, I've got a course on Udemy that I'm working on, it's called rewiring the anxious brain so you can also check out that link in the description.

So, 10 tools to face your fears. Number one, choose something that matters more. Remember why you wanna do hard things.

Maybe it's so you can spend time with the people you care about, maybe it's so you can work towards your dreams and goals without letting fear control you. Write down why you want to beat anxiety, or even more importantly, why you're willing to experience anxiety. If allowing yourself to feel it opens up all the good things in your life.

Nietzsche said, "he who has a why can endure any how". Number two, practice willingness. Anxiety is uncomfortable but not dangerous, it's not fun but it's not bad either.

We can practice a non-judgmental attitude. This is basically changing your rules. Where before, you subconsciously said, I can't handle feeling that way.

You now say, it's ok to feel anxious sometimes. I don't like it but it won't injure me, it's worth it for me to live the life I want to have some anxiety come with it. So, this includes physical acceptance.

Learning to notice and allow your physical sensations to be there, and to just breath into them to make space for them. So there are some skills we can practice that help us increase our ability to sit with our anxiety, while we face our fears. And you can actively learn and practice these two skills through meditation and mindfulness.

So, mindfulness helps you sit with your experience your thoughts emotions and sensations without needing to escape or avoid them, it's a training program for distress tolerance. So just download a good meditation app like Headspace or Stop, Breath and Think and do it for ten minutes a day. The more you do it, the easier it gets.

There's also a bunch of exercises from acceptance and commitment therapy that are really helpful with this. So you could get the book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life, and it would guide you through a bunch of these activities, and I'm gonna be including more videos on willingness on my YouTube channel in the future so check those out. Now in addition to willingness which is this active acceptance of what you're experiencing in the present moment you can also practice grounding activities and self-regulation activities.

So these are bottom up techniques to calm and sooth your body and that's gonna send messages to your brain that you're safe and it'll create this cycle where your anxiety starts to decrease. So step three, build emotional muscles. When you make facing your fears a normal part of your life it suddenly gets easier and easier.

Our brain is like a big muscle. The more you practice something the smoother and thicker those neuropathways get. That wiring that says I can do hard things gets stronger, and just like muscles when you start working out a twenty pound weight might seem really heavy at first but then as you get stronger the easier and easier it gets to lift.

So, have faith it won't always be this hard. Number four, let go of perfectionism. Letting go of the need to do everything perfectly to be ok.

Instead replace this with a growth mindset which says I'm gonna keep trying and learning and that involves messing up sometimes. Let go of comparision as your source of self worth and instead make your goals about growth. This means that you may need to let go of looking perfect all the time or never messing up.

So one active practice that can help with this is sharing around the dinner table every night a mistake that you made. Or if that's not an option for you, writing it down or sharing it on social media and talking about how mistakes are a good way to learn and grow. Number five, let go of the belief I can't handle it.

This belief is linked to perfectionism this idea that I need to be able to do something without looking like I'm having a hard time, or everything should be easy and comfortable or else it's bad and replace that thinking with this is uncomfortable I don't like this but I can do hard things. This is a skill that can be developed gradually through practice by doing hard things. Number six, change how you perceive situations this is one step that's really hard without a therapist or a wise friend.

So this is intervening at the thought level so with my dog example from the last video when you think this dog could kill me you notice that thought and then you replace it with something like most dogs are safe that dog looks nice my brother says that dogs are safe. Changing how we think can sometimes work in the moment of anxiety but usually this works best as a big picture preventative approach and is less functional in the moment of fear if you really want to work on this by yourself do some research on cognitive distortions. I've made a couple videos on this like catastrophizing mental filtering and black-and-white thinking.

So you could check out those videos if you wanna learn more. Number seven, do one small step every day. This is where having a detailed written down exposure hierarchy is super helpful.

Write down your fears and break them into teeny tiny little steps. Start with small fears and when you have success sitting with them, you can gradually move on to bigger and bigger ones. Baby steps oh boy baby steps baby steps baby steps through the office baby steps out the door it works it works.

Set a challenge for yourself to do one thing every day that scares you and write down your goals and write down your accomplishments. You could do this in a journal or in a book like this one. This is essentially brain exercise and your emotional muscles will get stronger and stronger.

Skill number eight, stay with your fears until you calm down or for a set amount of time. Never set the rule that I'll stay with this unless I get too anxious. This is asking your brain to make you anxious, you need to set an amount of time to sit with your fear to allow yourself to be uncomfortable but for a cause and then when you're going to do the activity write down your anxiety as a number on a scale from zero to ten.

Stay with the activity. Actively allowing yourself to be present and let yourself feel the emotions that will pass through you. The better you do at accepting and being present with these emotions, the more likely the anxiety will decrease.

In general the recommendation is to stay with an activity until your anxiety goes down by half so if you started at a six stay in the dog park until you're at a three. However, if you're practicing willingness, allowing yourself to feel what you're feeling you can also set an amount of time to stay like thirty minutes and then give yourself credit for doing hard things. We can't force our anxiety to change right away and trying to do so often back fires.

But the one thing that always increases anxiety is saying if I get to anxious I'll leave. Number nine, get support not to avoid but to help you face your fears. This may look like taking a friend with you to the dog park or working with a therapist to face your fears in session.

It could be asking someone to hold you accountable or to hold your hand. Getting support can help you build up the ability to do things on your own. Number ten, be compassionate with yourself.

Give yourself credit for every hard thing you do. Write them down tell someone about your wins even if they're small or easy for other people. Practice patience and gentleness with yourself sometimes we think we can berate ourselves into change like if we punish ourselves or talk hatefully towards ourselves that will motivate us to change, but anxiety isn't about lack of caring it's about being paralyzed by caring too much punishment including self punishment will never work as a lasting form of self motivation so give yourself a little love and you'll find a surprising amount of strength and energy in that compassion.

If this is really hard for you it's something that you can practice and develop as a skill. I'll include a link in the description to an activity that can help you practice self compassion. You probably noticed that I never promised that all of your anxiety will go away.

It won't and it shouldn't. We have a normal level of clean anxiety so that means anxiety that is healthy and helpful and a beneficial part of our life. This anxiety is functional helping us stay safe and motivated to do things like study for tests, and be safe around cliffs but, this process will help you get rid of the dirty anxiety or the anxiety that we create through our own actions and distorted thinking.

As you face your fears and you embrace your discomfort and learn to choose something that's more important to you, you'll find that anxiety no longer controls you. Not only will you have control over your life and your world will open up but a huge amount of that anxiety will go away. You can rewire your own brain by interrupting the anxiety cycle, and gradually facing your fears.

Courage is not the absence of fear it is the ability to act in the presence of fear. And if you'd like to learn more in depth information about how to treat your anxiety, I've got a course on Udemy that I'm working on. It's called Rewiring the Anxious Brain.

So, you can also check out that link in the description.