23. How to Handle Anxiety
This past year has been a wild ride. COVID has impacted us all, and many of us are feeling levels of anxiety that we’ve never experienced before. Now more than ever, we need to understand our anxiety, and through understanding it, learn new ways to show up and navigate it.
Learning how to handle anxiety is not only useful in helping you crush your goals and love your work life. It’s also essential for more basic goals - liking continuing to show up in our own lives and keep going, especially when we may want to lay down on the floor and cry instead.
Tune in this week to discover how you can handle anxiety when it shows up in your work and life. I’ll explain how the brain’s biases can keep us stuck in anxiety loops and what you can do instead so that you can keep going, crush your goals, and build a life you love, even if anxiety does show up from time to time.
If you love the podcast and want to take this work deeper, I have great news! I have space for new one-to-one coaching clients starting this month, so click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What anxiety is and how it shows up in your life.
The two types of anxiety we experience and what we can do about each one.
Why we catastrophize and spin on possible negative outcomes.
How two of the brain’s biases keep us feeling anxious.
Why anxiety can feel like a vicious cycle with no end in sight.
How to start shifting your experience of anxiety.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week, we are talking about how to handle anxiety.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. This week we’re talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, which is anxiety. And I will just give a little caveat and say I’m not talking about clinical anxiety, although that is a very real and important topic because I’m not a therapist. I’m talking about more what I’m going to call the feeling of anxiety.
So anxiety as an emotion, versus clinical anxiety, okay? Alright, great. Before we get started, I want to read y’all a fun review I got for the podcast. This review is called, “An amazingly helpful podcast.”
And the review says, “I love this podcast. Full of super practical advice for really making the most out of your work life and enjoying yourself while you do it. I was already familiar with some of the tools Kori teaches, but I’ve found her particular approach extremely helpful. I come away from every episode feeling like I have a concrete step to take to enjoy my work more and decide where I want to take my career.”
Thank you so much for this review. I’m totally delighted by it and I’m so glad that the podcast is helpful for you. And I love that you called out that you have concrete steps because that is something I’m always thinking about when I’m designing these podcasts. I always want to give y’all stuff that can help you feel better immediately. Things that you can take into your work life and your non-work life because these tools work on everything, y’all.
So that you can just create tiny shifts or even massive shifts right away. I want every podcast to be self-contained and useful and I’m so glad when they are. And if there are things that y’all want me to teach and talk about, I just want you to know you can write in and let me know.
You can send me an email at hello@korilinn.com and you can see how to spell all that in the show notes, although I hope y’all know how to spell my name by now. It’s not that hard. Although given the context of my life, apparently it is that hard because I’ve had many, many people misspell it many, many times. That’s okay though, that’s what show notes are for.
So to regroup, if you have a request for a podcast episode, just let me know. I’d love to hear from y’all and I love to teach things that you want to learn about. Okay, without further ado, let us get into the topic. Anxiety.
Okay, this past year has been a wild ride. So many things have happened that most of us had never experienced before. We had a pandemic; we’re still having it. We had a lockdown. Some of us are still having that too. We’ve had a lot of social distancing. I know we’re still having that over here at least where I am.
We’ve been wearing masks anywhere and everywhere, which was a totally new experience for almost all of us, and we haven’t been able to see our friends, we haven’t been able to see our loved ones. We’ve had a whole new layer and level of remote work for most of us.
Even people who already worked remotely, like me, I already had a remote business, but it feels really different I think when everything in your life becomes remote. And for a lot of people, they were in the office and then maybe they still are, maybe their workplace has shifted entirely to remote. I have some clients who are experiencing that.
So it’s been a really different year. On top of that, we have also had layoffs and shutdowns in many industries. And even if we’re not personally impacted by that, we’re kind of aware that that’s what’s happening in the world at large and we might even have people in our lives who’ve been impacted.
And then there are all kinds of other little things that most of us are thinking less about when we’re talking about the big anxieties of COVID, but I know that for me, one of the hardest things has been I used to go to this country dancing night every Friday at this bar in Seattle called The Cuff.
It’s like LGBTQIA+ country dancing and such a wonderful community. I think of this dancing night as my church. I’m a spiritual person but not religious. I don’t go to a church. But going to dancing and seeing my community and connecting with them, plus dancing does all these amazing things for really fun, happy neurochemicals and it was such an important part of my life.
And it has really been impactful to me to be missing that and to not have that experience. And that was only two hours a week but taking that out of my life has been a huge impact and it’s impacted all these other areas. So all of this is to say this is a time in which many, many people are feeling extreme levels of anxiety personally and professionally. Often levels of anxiety they’ve never experienced before.
We’re feeling anxiety about our own lives and we’re also feeling anxiety about our jobs, our families, our communities, and more. Not to mention very obvious anxiety of the anxiety we may feel about our health and the health of others.
So now more than ever, I think what we need is to understand our own anxiety. And again, I’m talking about the feeling of anxiety. Not clinical anxiety. We need to understand our own anxiety so we can take care of ourselves, live our lives, do our work, keep going, and maybe even move forward.
And I talk a lot about moving forward. Y’all know I’m all into goals, I’m all into crushing it and building that dream life and creating meaningful careers. But also sometimes it’s just about keeping going. It’s just about not giving up and not laying down on the floor and crying because life feels too hard.
And if you have been feeling that way, I get it because I feel that way sometimes too and I’m a coach. But the tools that I’m teaching you can really help with that. And I think that this week in particular is so useful, whether what you want is to like, crush a goal or just to keep showing up to your life and feel a little bit better than what you’ve been feeling.
So first things first, let us define the terms. What even is anxiety? Google says that anxiety is a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. This is a feeling we’re all familiar with right now.
Like I said, we’ve been in the pandemic and we’ve never seen the likes of anything most of us like this in our entire lives. We’ve come so far in the last year and survived so much more than we realized we would be facing, but there’s still so much that’s unknown.
We might not know when we’ll get the vaccine and we might not be able to do the things we used to take for granted, like my country dancing. We also don’t know what the impacts are going to be of having gone through this and they might be happening for years to come.
But what we do have is a new knowledge of what’s possible from this last year, and for many of us, that new knowledge is scary. So when I think of that Google definition, I don’t think it’s just about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.
I also think for most of us right now, it’s about what we’ve lived through, given this last year, and that has given our brain all kinds of new things that we can worry about and imagine. I think all of our brains are doing catastrophizing in a new way than they used to.
I mean, I’m sure there are some people who were catastrophizing before about a potential pandemic, but I think now that we’ve lived through that, it’s given our brains something to be really scared about. And especially since we don’t know how things are going to unfold.
So it may seem obvious given the situation that we would feel anxious. It seems like anxiety is just a natural response to everything happening in the world and we can’t help it. And I want to be very clear that anxiety is a normal response. It’s a normal human emotion that almost all of us are going to feel from time to time.
But even if it is a normal human experience, we do have control over some of it and we do have control over how we relate to the anxiety that we feel. So some anxiety is outside of our control and this kind of anxiety is the kind that might be because of brain chemistry or other factors.
For that kind of anxiety, we’re not going to be able to change it directly using the coaching tools I teach, but we can change how we relate to it and that can be really powerful because the way we relate to things creates a lot of our experience of them.
But some of our anxiety is more directly in our control. This kind of anxiety isn’t caused by something outside of us. It’s not caused by COVID, it’s not caused by lockdown, it’s not caused by the changes to how we work and live. It’s not caused by me not being able to go to my country dancing on Fridays.
Instead, this part of the anxiety, this kind of anxiety is caused by the way we’re thinking about those circumstances. So for that first kind of anxiety, the kind we can’t control directly, we can change how we relate to it, and I’ll go more into detail on that in a bit. But for the second kind, we actually need to understand that kind first and then we do have more control over it.
So what’s causing that second kind of anxiety? The second kind of anxiety that we can control more directly is caused not by the current events but by the way we think about them and especially by the way that brains, left to their own devices, tend to circle on the parts of things that aren’t working.
And for some of us, that goes really far, all the way into catastrophizing and spinning on all the possible negative outcomes and angles of any given situation. And in order to understand why our brains do this, we need to take a look at some of the biases that the human brain displays.
And the two that we’re going to look at today are negativity bias and confirmation bias. I just did a podcast recently on confirmation bias but I’m going to do a quick little version on it here as well so that if you haven’t heard that one, you don’t have to go back for this podcast to make sense.
So first, let’s look at negativity bias. Negativity bias is the human brain’s tendency to assign more meaning to things it sees as problems or threats to our wellbeing. In studies, it can take five pieces of positive data to have as much weight as one piece of negative data.
And the theories on why this is the way it is is that this helped keep our species alive back in the day and scanning for threats was a daily necessity. But now that we live in the day and age of endless news cycles, this bias can actually keep us stuck obsessing about the latest articles and thinking about all the things that could go wrong, instead of shifting our attention to focus on what we can do, how we want to show up, what we’re capable of, et cetera.
And then we have confirmation bias. Confirmation bias means that the brain will look for evidence that matches its current beliefs and actually repress evidence that contradicts those current beliefs. Like I said before, if you want to know more about this bias, I actually did do a podcast recently and that explains this bias more deeply.
But for now, we’ll focus on the impacts of confirmation bias as they pertain to this topic of anxiety. So confirmation bias is especially relevant right now and during this past year because people are already very afraid. We already have tons of data to support the idea that we are in danger and because of that, our brains are constantly scanning for threats and they are finding those threats.
So the negativity bias does the scanning for the threats, the confirmation bias is confirming, yes, there are threats, and if there are ways in which we’re safe, our confirmation bias might be shutting that down and not letting it come to our conscious awareness.
So this is kind of a vicious cycle, right? The more anxious we become, the more reasons our brains find to be anxious. So what do we do? What we do is we change how we relate to our anxiety. So if you remember, that’s the thing we can do about anxiety type one, but even for anxiety type two, this is where we start.
Even though some of our anxiety is created by our brains and the biases they use to understand the world, the first step isn’t to address what is creating the anxiety. Instead, the first step is to shift how we react to our own anxiety and we do that by letting the initial layer of anxiety simply be there.
Now, anxiety does not feel comfortable. So when it arises, most of us try to get the hell away from it. We often do this without even realizing we’re doing it before we’re even consciously aware of our anxiety we’re trying to push it away or get away from it.
But pushing away our anxiety or trying to avoid it does not work, and neither does trying to act our way out of it. So by trying to act our way out of it, it’s like trying to solve the anxiety by taking a bunch of actions. That shit doesn’t work.
The human brain evolved to handle physical threats, not chronic anxiety. So your brain wants to run away from danger or karate chop it in the face, but you can’t run away from anxiety and you can’t win a fight against it either. And the more running and fighting don’t work, the more anxious you feel because your brain’s like, “I can’t get away from this predator.”
But when you allow the anxiety, you are teaching your brain you’re not actually in danger. Anxiety is not actually a predator. Anxiety is a feeling that happens inside your body, not something we need to fight or run away from.
So what do we actually do with the anxiety though, right? What we do is we de-escalate the anxiety by de-stigmatizing it. What this allows us to do is deal with the initial layer of anxiety without layering any additional anxiety on top of it.
When we see anxiety as a problem to get away from, then we compound that anxiety with our thoughts and feelings about the anxiety, which means we become anxious about our anxiety. And then we’re dealing with two layers of anxiety, which quickly becomes three, which quickly become four, and then it just goes up, up, up, and we are left with unchecked anxiety with no end in sight.
Learning to allow your anxiety instead can be kind of like exposure therapy. When you can let the anxiety be there, it stops being a problem. It’s just a set of physical sensations that you’re experiencing. Maybe they’re not the most enjoyable physical sensations, I get that, but what if you can actually handle them?
What if you don’t have to fight the anxiety? What if you don’t have to suppress it? You just allow it to be there without allowing it to take over. When you expect anxiety to show up and it does, nothing has gone wrong. You don’t need to be anxious about the anxiety. You can just see it as your brain trying to keep you alive in the ways it evolved to, even if those ways don’t make the most sense and aren’t the most useful in our current world.
Okay, now here’s the question I always get. People are always like, okay, but how do I actually do this? Learning to allow your anxiety looks like changing the story you’re telling about what’s going on.
So we go from a story like, “This is really bad, I don’t know what I’ll do, I can’t handle this,” to something like, “Okay, I’m feeling some anxiety in my body, that’s okay, I’m learning how to feel anxiety in my body, I’m learning how to just be here with these physical sensations, it’s okay if I’m uncomfortable, I’m learning a new skill.”
It’s kind of like learning to ride a bike, I might fall down, I might scrape my knees. I mean, you’re not going to literally scrape your knees with anxiety, but you might feel some mental and emotional knee scrapes happening. But you will get the hang of it, and just by changing the narrative and even associating it with something you’ve learned to do before, like ride a bike, if you’ve learned to ride a bike, you’re de-escalating it and de-stigmatizing it for yourself.
And when you shift how you’re talking to yourself about the anxiety, you will probably also feel immediate relief in your body, even if some of the anxiety remains. This is because reassuring ourselves that it’s okay to have some anxiety calms us down.
We’re no longer fighting with reality, which helps us complete the stress cycle and calm our nervous system down. Once you have calmed down your nervous system by letting it know that the anxiety isn’t a predator who’s trying to eat you, then you can move on to what to do next.
As I stated before, the brain has a negativity bias. Left to its own devices, our brain will keep going back to what’s not working. Instead, you need to bring your attention back to what is working. I know, we talk about this all the time on the podcast and I’m talking about it again because it’s an extremely useful tool and I want you to actually use it.
So when the brain is stuck in negativity bias, it’s easy for it to seem like nothing is working and everything is terrible, but that’s almost never the case. Asking your brain what is working will actually help you see the world more realistically.
Remember the studies I was talking about where it takes five pieces of positive data to balance one piece of negative data? Focusing on what’s working is not about being optimistic. It’s about balancing the natural negativity bias with real data.
And as always, get as specific and detailed as you can. Really push yourself to come up with some compelling data about what is working. Once you start working on this list, you’re going to begin to feel better. And from the place of seeing what is working, you can always go back to things that aren’t working and figure out ways to solve them, handle them, deal with them, move through them.
We have our best ideas and do our best work when we come from this place that some things are working, and we know what they are. When we try to take action from the anxiety, we just create results that feel the same way and we burn ourselves out in the process.
When we come up with actions, we can take from a place that some things are working and we can handle it and we can do this and it’s worth trying, we come up with stuff that actually works better and it’s easier to do that work. But you have to do this on purpose.
Because on its own, the brain tends to loop on the negative and get stuck in a vicious cycle that seems like it’s just reality. Okay, I also have one more thing for y’all to consider and that’s this; even if you feel incredibly stressed, that does not have to be harmful to you.
They have done studies about how your body handles stress and it really does come down to guess what? How you think about it. If you think stress is bad for you, it is. But if you think that stress isn’t bad for you, it’s not. For more on that, check out Kelly McGonigal’s TED Talk, How to Make Stress Your Friend.
It’s a great watch and it’s really helpful for me when I do feel stressed to be like, okay, this is part of having a human body, it’s okay, it doesn’t have to be harmful to me. And then that alone will relax me a lot.
So let’s review. The key to cultivating calm during times of extreme anxiety and uncertainty is feeling your anxiety but not letting it run the show. It’s like a toddler we’re taking to the grocery store. We bring the toddler with us even if they’re screaming but we never ever let the toddler drive the car.
Here’s what we do use to drive the car. The positive emotion we generate by spending time intentionally noticing and appreciating what is working. Like I’ve said before, this isn’t about positive thinking. It’s not about bright siding, it’s not about telling yourself you should be grateful because let’s be honest, nothing makes us feel less grateful than telling ourselves we should be grateful.
Instead, it’s about balancing your brain’s natural tendencies, even when it “feels really true” that things are terrible. It’s about reminding yourself what you’re capable of and who you want to be, no matter what the situation is, rather than letting fear and anxiety and negativity bias dictate what you do and how you show up.
And if you love what I teach and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I’ve got good news for you.
I’ve got space for a few new one-on-one coaching clients starting this month, so let’s hop on a call. I’ll give you some coaching right away to help you get going and if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the Work With Me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience, and yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we’ve had great success doing that.
There’s even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. Alright y’all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. This week we’re talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, which is anxiety. And I will just give a little caveat and say I’m not talking about clinical anxiety, although that is a very real and important topic because I’m not a therapist. I’m talking about more what I’m going to call the feeling of anxiety.
So anxiety as an emotion, versus clinical anxiety, okay? Alright, great. Before we get started, I want to read y’all a fun review I got for the podcast. This review is called, “An amazingly helpful podcast.”
And the review says, “I love this podcast. Full of super practical advice for really making the most out of your work life and enjoying yourself while you do it. I was already familiar with some of the tools Kori teaches, but I’ve found her particular approach extremely helpful. I come away from every episode feeling like I have a concrete step to take to enjoy my work more and decide where I want to take my career.”
Thank you so much for this review. I’m totally delighted by it and I’m so glad that the podcast is helpful for you. And I love that you called out that you have concrete steps because that is something I’m always thinking about when I’m designing these podcasts. I always want to give y’all stuff that can help you feel better immediately. Things that you can take into your work life and your non-work life because these tools work on everything, y’all.
So that you can just create tiny shifts or even massive shifts right away. I want every podcast to be self-contained and useful and I’m so glad when they are. And if there are things that y’all want me to teach and talk about, I just want you to know you can write in and let me know.
You can send me an email at hello@korilinn.com and you can see how to spell all that in the show notes, although I hope y’all know how to spell my name by now. It’s not that hard. Although given the context of my life, apparently it is that hard because I’ve had many, many people misspell it many, many times. That’s okay though, that’s what show notes are for.
So to regroup, if you have a request for a podcast episode, just let me know. I’d love to hear from y’all and I love to teach things that you want to learn about. Okay, without further ado, let us get into the topic. Anxiety.
Okay, this past year has been a wild ride. So many things have happened that most of us had never experienced before. We had a pandemic; we’re still having it. We had a lockdown. Some of us are still having that too. We’ve had a lot of social distancing. I know we’re still having that over here at least where I am.
We’ve been wearing masks anywhere and everywhere, which was a totally new experience for almost all of us, and we haven’t been able to see our friends, we haven’t been able to see our loved ones. We’ve had a whole new layer and level of remote work for most of us.
Even people who already worked remotely, like me, I already had a remote business, but it feels really different I think when everything in your life becomes remote. And for a lot of people, they were in the office and then maybe they still are, maybe their workplace has shifted entirely to remote. I have some clients who are experiencing that.
So it’s been a really different year. On top of that, we have also had layoffs and shutdowns in many industries. And even if we’re not personally impacted by that, we’re kind of aware that that’s what’s happening in the world at large and we might even have people in our lives who’ve been impacted.
And then there are all kinds of other little things that most of us are thinking less about when we’re talking about the big anxieties of COVID, but I know that for me, one of the hardest things has been I used to go to this country dancing night every Friday at this bar in Seattle called The Cuff.
It’s like LGBTQIA+ country dancing and such a wonderful community. I think of this dancing night as my church. I’m a spiritual person but not religious. I don’t go to a church. But going to dancing and seeing my community and connecting with them, plus dancing does all these amazing things for really fun, happy neurochemicals and it was such an important part of my life.
And it has really been impactful to me to be missing that and to not have that experience. And that was only two hours a week but taking that out of my life has been a huge impact and it’s impacted all these other areas. So all of this is to say this is a time in which many, many people are feeling extreme levels of anxiety personally and professionally. Often levels of anxiety they’ve never experienced before.
We’re feeling anxiety about our own lives and we’re also feeling anxiety about our jobs, our families, our communities, and more. Not to mention very obvious anxiety of the anxiety we may feel about our health and the health of others.
So now more than ever, I think what we need is to understand our own anxiety. And again, I’m talking about the feeling of anxiety. Not clinical anxiety. We need to understand our own anxiety so we can take care of ourselves, live our lives, do our work, keep going, and maybe even move forward.
And I talk a lot about moving forward. Y’all know I’m all into goals, I’m all into crushing it and building that dream life and creating meaningful careers. But also sometimes it’s just about keeping going. It’s just about not giving up and not laying down on the floor and crying because life feels too hard.
And if you have been feeling that way, I get it because I feel that way sometimes too and I’m a coach. But the tools that I’m teaching you can really help with that. And I think that this week in particular is so useful, whether what you want is to like, crush a goal or just to keep showing up to your life and feel a little bit better than what you’ve been feeling.
So first things first, let us define the terms. What even is anxiety? Google says that anxiety is a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. This is a feeling we’re all familiar with right now.
Like I said, we’ve been in the pandemic and we’ve never seen the likes of anything most of us like this in our entire lives. We’ve come so far in the last year and survived so much more than we realized we would be facing, but there’s still so much that’s unknown.
We might not know when we’ll get the vaccine and we might not be able to do the things we used to take for granted, like my country dancing. We also don’t know what the impacts are going to be of having gone through this and they might be happening for years to come.
But what we do have is a new knowledge of what’s possible from this last year, and for many of us, that new knowledge is scary. So when I think of that Google definition, I don’t think it’s just about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.
I also think for most of us right now, it’s about what we’ve lived through, given this last year, and that has given our brain all kinds of new things that we can worry about and imagine. I think all of our brains are doing catastrophizing in a new way than they used to.
I mean, I’m sure there are some people who were catastrophizing before about a potential pandemic, but I think now that we’ve lived through that, it’s given our brains something to be really scared about. And especially since we don’t know how things are going to unfold.
So it may seem obvious given the situation that we would feel anxious. It seems like anxiety is just a natural response to everything happening in the world and we can’t help it. And I want to be very clear that anxiety is a normal response. It’s a normal human emotion that almost all of us are going to feel from time to time.
But even if it is a normal human experience, we do have control over some of it and we do have control over how we relate to the anxiety that we feel. So some anxiety is outside of our control and this kind of anxiety is the kind that might be because of brain chemistry or other factors.
For that kind of anxiety, we’re not going to be able to change it directly using the coaching tools I teach, but we can change how we relate to it and that can be really powerful because the way we relate to things creates a lot of our experience of them.
But some of our anxiety is more directly in our control. This kind of anxiety isn’t caused by something outside of us. It’s not caused by COVID, it’s not caused by lockdown, it’s not caused by the changes to how we work and live. It’s not caused by me not being able to go to my country dancing on Fridays.
Instead, this part of the anxiety, this kind of anxiety is caused by the way we’re thinking about those circumstances. So for that first kind of anxiety, the kind we can’t control directly, we can change how we relate to it, and I’ll go more into detail on that in a bit. But for the second kind, we actually need to understand that kind first and then we do have more control over it.
So what’s causing that second kind of anxiety? The second kind of anxiety that we can control more directly is caused not by the current events but by the way we think about them and especially by the way that brains, left to their own devices, tend to circle on the parts of things that aren’t working.
And for some of us, that goes really far, all the way into catastrophizing and spinning on all the possible negative outcomes and angles of any given situation. And in order to understand why our brains do this, we need to take a look at some of the biases that the human brain displays.
And the two that we’re going to look at today are negativity bias and confirmation bias. I just did a podcast recently on confirmation bias but I’m going to do a quick little version on it here as well so that if you haven’t heard that one, you don’t have to go back for this podcast to make sense.
So first, let’s look at negativity bias. Negativity bias is the human brain’s tendency to assign more meaning to things it sees as problems or threats to our wellbeing. In studies, it can take five pieces of positive data to have as much weight as one piece of negative data.
And the theories on why this is the way it is is that this helped keep our species alive back in the day and scanning for threats was a daily necessity. But now that we live in the day and age of endless news cycles, this bias can actually keep us stuck obsessing about the latest articles and thinking about all the things that could go wrong, instead of shifting our attention to focus on what we can do, how we want to show up, what we’re capable of, et cetera.
And then we have confirmation bias. Confirmation bias means that the brain will look for evidence that matches its current beliefs and actually repress evidence that contradicts those current beliefs. Like I said before, if you want to know more about this bias, I actually did do a podcast recently and that explains this bias more deeply.
But for now, we’ll focus on the impacts of confirmation bias as they pertain to this topic of anxiety. So confirmation bias is especially relevant right now and during this past year because people are already very afraid. We already have tons of data to support the idea that we are in danger and because of that, our brains are constantly scanning for threats and they are finding those threats.
So the negativity bias does the scanning for the threats, the confirmation bias is confirming, yes, there are threats, and if there are ways in which we’re safe, our confirmation bias might be shutting that down and not letting it come to our conscious awareness.
So this is kind of a vicious cycle, right? The more anxious we become, the more reasons our brains find to be anxious. So what do we do? What we do is we change how we relate to our anxiety. So if you remember, that’s the thing we can do about anxiety type one, but even for anxiety type two, this is where we start.
Even though some of our anxiety is created by our brains and the biases they use to understand the world, the first step isn’t to address what is creating the anxiety. Instead, the first step is to shift how we react to our own anxiety and we do that by letting the initial layer of anxiety simply be there.
Now, anxiety does not feel comfortable. So when it arises, most of us try to get the hell away from it. We often do this without even realizing we’re doing it before we’re even consciously aware of our anxiety we’re trying to push it away or get away from it.
But pushing away our anxiety or trying to avoid it does not work, and neither does trying to act our way out of it. So by trying to act our way out of it, it’s like trying to solve the anxiety by taking a bunch of actions. That shit doesn’t work.
The human brain evolved to handle physical threats, not chronic anxiety. So your brain wants to run away from danger or karate chop it in the face, but you can’t run away from anxiety and you can’t win a fight against it either. And the more running and fighting don’t work, the more anxious you feel because your brain’s like, “I can’t get away from this predator.”
But when you allow the anxiety, you are teaching your brain you’re not actually in danger. Anxiety is not actually a predator. Anxiety is a feeling that happens inside your body, not something we need to fight or run away from.
So what do we actually do with the anxiety though, right? What we do is we de-escalate the anxiety by de-stigmatizing it. What this allows us to do is deal with the initial layer of anxiety without layering any additional anxiety on top of it.
When we see anxiety as a problem to get away from, then we compound that anxiety with our thoughts and feelings about the anxiety, which means we become anxious about our anxiety. And then we’re dealing with two layers of anxiety, which quickly becomes three, which quickly become four, and then it just goes up, up, up, and we are left with unchecked anxiety with no end in sight.
Learning to allow your anxiety instead can be kind of like exposure therapy. When you can let the anxiety be there, it stops being a problem. It’s just a set of physical sensations that you’re experiencing. Maybe they’re not the most enjoyable physical sensations, I get that, but what if you can actually handle them?
What if you don’t have to fight the anxiety? What if you don’t have to suppress it? You just allow it to be there without allowing it to take over. When you expect anxiety to show up and it does, nothing has gone wrong. You don’t need to be anxious about the anxiety. You can just see it as your brain trying to keep you alive in the ways it evolved to, even if those ways don’t make the most sense and aren’t the most useful in our current world.
Okay, now here’s the question I always get. People are always like, okay, but how do I actually do this? Learning to allow your anxiety looks like changing the story you’re telling about what’s going on.
So we go from a story like, “This is really bad, I don’t know what I’ll do, I can’t handle this,” to something like, “Okay, I’m feeling some anxiety in my body, that’s okay, I’m learning how to feel anxiety in my body, I’m learning how to just be here with these physical sensations, it’s okay if I’m uncomfortable, I’m learning a new skill.”
It’s kind of like learning to ride a bike, I might fall down, I might scrape my knees. I mean, you’re not going to literally scrape your knees with anxiety, but you might feel some mental and emotional knee scrapes happening. But you will get the hang of it, and just by changing the narrative and even associating it with something you’ve learned to do before, like ride a bike, if you’ve learned to ride a bike, you’re de-escalating it and de-stigmatizing it for yourself.
And when you shift how you’re talking to yourself about the anxiety, you will probably also feel immediate relief in your body, even if some of the anxiety remains. This is because reassuring ourselves that it’s okay to have some anxiety calms us down.
We’re no longer fighting with reality, which helps us complete the stress cycle and calm our nervous system down. Once you have calmed down your nervous system by letting it know that the anxiety isn’t a predator who’s trying to eat you, then you can move on to what to do next.
As I stated before, the brain has a negativity bias. Left to its own devices, our brain will keep going back to what’s not working. Instead, you need to bring your attention back to what is working. I know, we talk about this all the time on the podcast and I’m talking about it again because it’s an extremely useful tool and I want you to actually use it.
So when the brain is stuck in negativity bias, it’s easy for it to seem like nothing is working and everything is terrible, but that’s almost never the case. Asking your brain what is working will actually help you see the world more realistically.
Remember the studies I was talking about where it takes five pieces of positive data to balance one piece of negative data? Focusing on what’s working is not about being optimistic. It’s about balancing the natural negativity bias with real data.
And as always, get as specific and detailed as you can. Really push yourself to come up with some compelling data about what is working. Once you start working on this list, you’re going to begin to feel better. And from the place of seeing what is working, you can always go back to things that aren’t working and figure out ways to solve them, handle them, deal with them, move through them.
We have our best ideas and do our best work when we come from this place that some things are working, and we know what they are. When we try to take action from the anxiety, we just create results that feel the same way and we burn ourselves out in the process.
When we come up with actions, we can take from a place that some things are working and we can handle it and we can do this and it’s worth trying, we come up with stuff that actually works better and it’s easier to do that work. But you have to do this on purpose.
Because on its own, the brain tends to loop on the negative and get stuck in a vicious cycle that seems like it’s just reality. Okay, I also have one more thing for y’all to consider and that’s this; even if you feel incredibly stressed, that does not have to be harmful to you.
They have done studies about how your body handles stress and it really does come down to guess what? How you think about it. If you think stress is bad for you, it is. But if you think that stress isn’t bad for you, it’s not. For more on that, check out Kelly McGonigal’s TED Talk, How to Make Stress Your Friend.
It’s a great watch and it’s really helpful for me when I do feel stressed to be like, okay, this is part of having a human body, it’s okay, it doesn’t have to be harmful to me. And then that alone will relax me a lot.
So let’s review. The key to cultivating calm during times of extreme anxiety and uncertainty is feeling your anxiety but not letting it run the show. It’s like a toddler we’re taking to the grocery store. We bring the toddler with us even if they’re screaming but we never ever let the toddler drive the car.
Here’s what we do use to drive the car. The positive emotion we generate by spending time intentionally noticing and appreciating what is working. Like I’ve said before, this isn’t about positive thinking. It’s not about bright siding, it’s not about telling yourself you should be grateful because let’s be honest, nothing makes us feel less grateful than telling ourselves we should be grateful.
Instead, it’s about balancing your brain’s natural tendencies, even when it “feels really true” that things are terrible. It’s about reminding yourself what you’re capable of and who you want to be, no matter what the situation is, rather than letting fear and anxiety and negativity bias dictate what you do and how you show up.
And if you love what I teach and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I’ve got good news for you.
I’ve got space for a few new one-on-one coaching clients starting this month, so let’s hop on a call. I’ll give you some coaching right away to help you get going and if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the Work With Me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience, and yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we’ve had great success doing that.
There’s even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. Alright y’all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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