When anxiety rears its ugly head again…

9th August 2020

Sometimes you can be doing all of the right things, at the right time yet those intrusive and difficult emotions still find a way into your mind and body and disrupt everything good you had going….

I haven’t felt myself for nearly a week now, I have been demotivated, snappy, on edge, impatient, seriously the list could go on, but I honestly have no idea as to the cause of it? I find this frustrating as I am the queen of analysis. (Or perhaps over analysis?!) I am normally expert level when it comes to figuring out the source of my consternation and I am always quite pleased with myself about sorting this out (at times smug!) This week I am stumped!

I haven’t been able to get present, I have avoided feeling the rising stress which of course I know doesn’t help, but I haven’t felt capable of doing it any other way.

On the face of it there appears to be no good reason for why I feel anxious and stressed, in truth it may have only been the tiniest of triggers but it has taken back its temporary residency within me and this is frustrating. I had been feeling brilliant recently, energised and calm and completely in alignment with how my life was going. It doesn’t make any sense does it? But I’m not sure mental health concerns are logical though?! That is why I wanted to write about this topic, we feel ashamed that we no longer feel good, or that we are not able to get ourselves out of the feelings that we are deeply entrenched in. That shame becomes cyclical and finds more and more evidence to prove that it is right. It is a bloody slippery slope!

My nagging sub-conscious voice, the one that tries to sabotage my good efforts has a very limited vocabulary. Essentially the one track that she plays over and over goes along the lines of ‘you… are… not… good… enough’. Do you know that track? Now there are variations of this piece, sure, sometimes she says to me ‘you did a crap job today with the kids’ or, ‘you are a rubbish wife/person/fill in the blank’ and sometimes ‘who do you think you are trying something new like this?’ She tells me to get back in the slow and narrow lane and to know my place.

Let me tell you how that played out today. I knew I felt on edge (again) when I woke up so I began my retreat from myself once more after having desperately hoped that it would all have evaporated overnight. This basically involves me being quite grumpy and finding fault with what everyone else does and judging them for it. Now I am wise to the ways of my meddling sub-conscious, so I tried my best to sit in awareness, deep breaths, sitting still and focussing on the present. It did not make the damndest difference. My mind kindly reminds me of many other times when I have felt like this and (in her view) let myself down, behaved in a way I am not happy with and I relive those moments in painful detail.

I now start to notice how I feel the stress in my body. For me, it starts as tightness in the chest, I feel panicked, my limbs tighten up and I clench my fists and my jaw. The feeling rises to my throat and I often feel sick. Now this is where I bring in my magic tool of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique). It always calms me down in the moment and means I can start to get on with my day without feeling like I am dragging myself around in a state of hypervigilance.

Now it’s time for the guilt and shame to make an appearance (meddling voice says – you are not a good mother), as I look at my two kids who are already rolling their eyes at me as they think I have totally lost it today with my nagging at them to hurry up!! Shame can lead us even further down the rabbit hole so, I decide to repair the rupture. This is a technique I learned from Phillipa Perry’s book – The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (If you have kids, read it, its bloody amazing!) Essentially, we cannot avoid ruptures forever (for me and all the other perfectionists out there who were hoping otherwise), we will fall out with our kids, partners, friends, parents etc. But we can repair the rupture that results. Say sorry and be genuine and explain why without laying blame at anyone else’s door! I said to my children that I was hot and bothered and had felt stressed and that I was sorry I had been grumpy and do you know what, it worked. They forgave and me and off we went. Hopefully my authenticity will serve them well as I want my kids to know it’s ok to feel the whole spectrum of human emotions without shaming themselves.

We were heading to a children’s birthday party today, my daughter was beyond excited, there were going to be Disney Princesses there, paddling pools and cake! It doesn’t get much better than that. Then that feeling started to rise again, its nagging at me, clutching at my throat, making me feel uncomfortable and now I am getting annoyed. One of my old negative programmes that I run in my head is that I don’t know where I fit in to social occasions. Now, if you were to ask my friends about that, many of them would call that out as bulls**t but seriously this is something I struggle with. Yes I can chat away with complete strangers for ages and no one would ever think that I had any anxiety at all, but I will then spend hours afterwards agonising over how I said things, did I gesticulate too much? Did I say something stupid? Do they like me?

As we drove, I suddenly found myself remembering particularly painful teenage memories that came flooding back in excruciating detail: social occasions where I felt so awkward and not knowing who I was and the painful analysis that followed! We pulled up at the party and as I parked my daughter said to me ‘mummy, you know when you first get to a party, you can feel quite nervous can’t you?’ She wasn’t talking about me personally but just simply talking generally about how people feel. She cut through me like a knife, at 4 years old she had hit the nail on the head. She couldn’t have said it better! She added ‘but after about 5 minutes its all ok isn’t it?’ I replied ‘yes darling, you are absolutely right.’ It brought me hurtling back into the present moment with a sense of lightness and freedom and a feeling that we were going to have a good time. Do you know what? We really did, I watched my daughter dance her socks off and had the best time and it was brilliant! True presence and a gift given to me by my amazing child!

So, this evening as I type this post I am left with a feeling of deep gratitude for what I have and how I leaned in to my discomfort today. I had no real reason to feel worried about being at a social occasion and not fitting in, but my sub-conscious had other ideas and that really is ok, because now I know where to go next with my own coach who helps me work through my old stories and negative core beliefs. This is a fundamental part of my role as your mindset coach. I have to be able to take myself to those places to be able to take you there.

So, my final parting words are this: often we will have no idea what causes us to feel anxious and stressed and that is ok. We can lean into it, breathe into it, learn from it and come out the other side, wiser and with a depth of understanding that will only serve us well in the future.

If what I have written here has resonated with you, drop me an email at hey@sarahdodsley.com and I can tell you more about the work I do as a mindset coach to help my clients step into empowerment and release the negative stories that have been holding them back.

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