Anxiety: Is It Just Love Holding Its Breath?

May 11, 2021

Glennon Doyle

Hi. I’m Glennon Doyle. I’m so grateful to be here. And so very grateful that you’ve come to join me. This is the first episode of We Can Do Hard Things, which means this is the first time I’ve ever done this. So let me set the scene for you. I’m sitting here at home in Naples, Florida in my office, in front of this fancy microphone that I really hope is working. It’s early in the morning and my wife, Abby, and the three kids are still asleep. I’m in my PJ’s and I’ve got a huge mug of steaming hot coffee, which is my favorite thing. My second favorite thing, my bulldog honey is sleeping at my feet. You know, since I got sober 19 years ago, these early mornings have become my very favorite time of day because soon the world will wake up and I’ll slip right into all of my roles and I’ll forget my soul completely like I do every day. But on mornings like this just for a bit, it’s quiet enough to remember. I think my hope, my great hope for this podcast is that no matter when during the day or week you listen, that We Can Do Hard Things will become a time each week where you will remember the, you beneath all your roles.

So my kids and I have a word for how I feel right now, which is scited. Scited is how I feel when I’m making myself vulnerable. And I’m trying something new for the first time. It’s half scared, half excited. You know, that butterfly feeling. That’s how I feel this morning, talking to you for the first time, scared, but also excited because this feels like a returning this talking directly to you in this way, it feels like a homecoming for me because 19 years ago, after more than a decade of addiction, I found myself freshly sober, newly married, and dripping with children. I couldn’t find time in the day to shower, much less to get to the recovery meetings that had saved my life. And I started to seriously panic because I knew I needed those meetings. Those rooms were the first places I ever felt like I could stop acting and just breathe. I needed to hear and speak the truth. Like I needed inhale and exhale. So one day the doorbell rang and I answered it with a baby on my hip, of course, and I’m sure another one at my feet. And my sister, Amanda, was there holding a computer and she handed it to me and she said, “Sister, start writing. And when you write, use the voice you use in your meetings, while you’re here, stuck at home with the babies, just go ahead and turn the whole world into a meeting.”

So since my sister is the boss of me, that’s what I did. I started waking up at five every morning while it was still dark and silent and the kids were asleep and I’d shut myself into the closet in my bedroom and I’d start typing and I’d use the voice that I used in those recovery meetings. I’d tell my shiny happy representative self to be quiet. And I just allowed my wild, original, honest, truth self forward. I started a blog and it turned out lots of people needed to hear the truth. Like they needed air over time. As I wrote to each morning, you became my meeting, my friends, the community I’d end up doing life with

Since those early days, a whole lot has changed for me. First of all, I’ve come out of the closet. Ha. I got divorced from Craig and married my wife, Abby, and we three are raising our babies together. Those babies are now 18, 15, and 13. The oldest one is off to college this fall. I’m handling that swimmingly, as you might imagine. And those early writings have turned into three books. The last of which was Untamed, who I watched from my home this past year in awe, as Untamed became one of the biggest books of 2020 and 2021. And because of that, things have gotten bigger and wider and fancier and the bigger and the wider and the fancier it all gets, the more I miss those early days. So here we are back to the beginning, just you and me in the early morning and our coffee and the truth. Full circle. Makes me very happy.

So we’re going to get into it now, but before we do, I have to tell you my big surprise. My big surprise for you is this. You know that sister I told you about who got me started writing. Well, she and I have been doing life together since she was born three years after me. And I have finally convinced her to come out from behind the scenes to join us here on the podcast. My sister is the best thing I have to offer. So I am so excited to give you the gift of her. You will find her to be brilliant and hilarious and honest, but I am telling you, you should also watch out because to this day she keeps a revenge list on her computer made up of all the people who have ever done me wrong. Amanda thinks in spreadsheets and I think in colors, so together we have always made one pretty cool human. So each week I’ll speak to you directly just like this. And then Sister and I will talk about one hard thing we are navigating through with special guests joining us occasionally. Then we’ll have a Q & A where we get to talk to you. And then we’ll wrap up each week with a challenge for all of us before we sign off called The Next Right Thing. So for now let’s roll.

GD:

Alright, so let’s get started. Sister, are you there? How are you feeling?

Amanda Doyle:

I’d say since I’m very used to being at the back of the house, I’d say I’m not so much scited as just scared. Okay. So I think that you should bring the hard thing today because I feel like I’m already doing mine just by showing up.

GD:

There you go. Okay. I’ve got you, Sister. Okay. So my hard thing that I’m bringing today is the hard thing I bring to every day, my anxiety. So you know, about my complicated relationship with anxiety, which I guess has been lifelong. So I became a food addict when I was 10 and then, alcohol addict later in life. And I got sober when I was 25. And the interesting thing about getting sober is that I thought that booze and food were my problems. I thought addiction was my problem, but through early recovery, I learned that booze and food were kind of my ineffective and dangerous solutions to my problem, which was anxiety and depression. Okay. So being anxious and depressed at the same time is a little bit like being Eeyore and Tigger at the exact same time every day, right? Like I’m kind of sad, always and very intense about it.

And you know, I have times in my life when anxiety comes in big time or depression comes in big time, but I don’t relate so much to people who feel it intensely at some points. And then it goes away completely. I feel like it’s kind of a part of me all the time. Right. That I’m kind of always at the foundation of me, I’m always kind of afraid and sad and I can have all the other emotions. And as you know, I do all day, but sad and scared are kind of where I live.

AD:

So scared is the anxiety and sad is depressed?

GD:

Yeah. Yeah. Like at least once a day, I think I am sad about everything. That’s just a sentence that makes it, I don’t know. So in the beginning of COVID, as you know, it was so interesting because Abby turned to me, I don’t know, three or four weeks in, and she said, “You are the calmest one in this house.”

AD:

And you don’t get that a lot.

GD:

I’ve never heard that in my life. Right. And so, and I was, I was feeling so steady suddenly. And, and she was freaking out about the world, about family, about work, about everything. And I was very steady, and it was so interesting. And so then I started talking to some of my other friends who deal with anxiety and depression, and they too felt very calm. And what we decided was that we had always been living on a level 10. Right. And everybody else in the world was on a level five. And finally, the rest of the world was joining us in our panic. Right. So we were kind of like, it’s like, we were Chicken Littles, you know, running around our whole lives. Like the sky is going to fall, the sky is going to fall. And then it fell. And we were all like, well, how you like us now? We told you, the sky was gonna fall.

AD:

It’s like when it’s sunny outside, and it makes me so sad because I feel this guilt of not being out there. But when it’s raining, I’m like, Thank you outsides for matching my insides. Now I don’t have to excuse myself for not going outside.

GD:

Exactly. The sun is so judgy and bossy. It shines out there, telling you, you should, if you were healthyier you’d be out enjoying me. It’s shaming. And I really did feel like always that, you know, there was a level of, okay, well, I live, I’ve learned how to live with this fear and stress. And so I can help now, like I’ve been preparing for this moment. My whole life I was made for this moment. I know how to be scared all the time and still kind of show up, you know? So there was a while where the anxiety got better and then it didn’t. So I don’t lately the anxiety has just been through the roof for me. And I don’t know if it’s related to, this is really embarrassing, but I think it might be slightly related to going back to normal.

AD:

Right.

GD:

I was out. I’ve been really taking COVID very seriously in terms of staying home. One, because I believe in science, but also because it was just a great excuse to stay home.

AD:

Because you’ve always been serious about staying home.

GD:

Yeah, yeah. That’s right. That’s right. But Abby and I had to go out and do something recently and it was just like, I forgot how to be out in the world. And I’ve always had a little bit of social anxiety, but I really felt so exposed. I was like, why look, we’re walking around now. Like people can just look at you. It just feels so ridiculously vulnerable to be out in the world. And I have always felt that a little bit. But as you know, my hard thing is that I had an actual anxiety attack last week. And I haven’t had one of those real intense ones for a very long time. But I got home. And so I think like, what I want to describe to everyone is there’s different levels of anxiety, right. There are different ways that anxiety manifests. So how would you say, I mean, you are in general a little bit more mentally typical, would you say then I have always been? How would you describe yourself compared to me in terms of?

AD:

Well, relative to you, probably. Relative to your average bear, I’m not sure. I would describe, I don’t know if I would have like a diagnosis, but I am, whatever is the exact opposite of easy breezy. Everything is intense and I’m never settled or calm, but I don’t know that I would qualify, you know, every single thing is like, Emergency. High stress. This is the most important thing that happened.

GD:

Yeah. And it feels like yours is related. The way that I see it, the way I see your anxiety and for people who are a little bit more neurotypical is that your anxiety seems to be appropriately matched to the life situation you’re in. You have a very, very, high stress life, schedule, day. You’re in it with two young kids. You run our business. You have a very, very intense life. And so when your anxiety gets high, I can see, Oh, that’s matched to her circumstances to what’s being required of her. Would you say that?

AD:

I would say that. But I would also say that some of it, I feel like is just the way we were made. Like, I think I’m always going to find a way to make something. to project manage my life into a whirlwind. If people are like, why didn’t I become a gardener? I would be the most miserable overachieving, stressed out gardener in the history of gardeners. So I just think some of it is just like personality type too, but it’s of my own doing to myself. I don’t feel like there’s this external force on me that is shifting me outside of my actual ambitions and goals and projects that are self-imposed.

GD:

Okay. Okay. Got it. So you think yours is personality driven? I get that. I feel like what I’m trying to explain about the anxiety that I feel is tied to mental health with people or mental illness, is that it feels very existential. My anxiety has nothing to do with what’s being required of me. I know stress, I know stress. I mean, I have to do a lot of things. I have to like, you know, I have a big job. I know stress. Anxiety is completely different anxiety. So I will sometimes be sitting at a restaurant. Okay. And looking at all of the people, just eating their dinner and using their forks and talking to their people and looking so calm. And every once in while I just want to stand up and be like, are you all aware that one day, perhaps not too soon, we are all going to die. And so is everyone that we love. All of them for sure. 100%. And you are ordering onion soup. Like what? It blows my mind.

AD:

That’s why you’re so fun at parties.

GD:

I know. I know. Okay. Yes. But what I’m saying is I remember being little and being in therapy and being diagnosed with anxiety and thinking, okay, maybe I am anxious, or maybe you just aren’t paying attention to what’s happening in the human experience. Right.

AD:

What’s not to be anxious about? Everything.

GD:

Point to it. Point to something that’s not to be anxious about. Right. It just feels as if non anxiety is the suppression or the compartmentalization of the actual human experience to me. Right. Isn’t it?

AD:

That’s correct. I mean, think about all the things throughout the day. Yes. Everyone you love is going to die. Yes. You’re getting in a little like tin vehicle that’s like a 300 pound tank that and careening down the road. Just really hoping that any of these other people don’t smash into you, like it does require the suspension of logic to get through all of that. It’s true.

GD:

Yes. Yes, it does. Yes, it does. And every once in a while, I am unable to compartmentalize. I am unable to pretend that what’s happening in my life and, in everyone’s lives and in the world is not happening or is not inevitable. And those are the moments where I freak out. Okay. So to me it feels like, okay, it’s mental illness, it’s anxiety. But, I have this part of me that is a little bit belligerent and wants to insist. I don’t know. I just feel like it’s moments where I’m actually seeing the matrix, you know, like we all have to walk around and pretend that the matrix is not real. And every once in a while it just pops up. So I’ll briefly tell you what happened. I came home from something, well, it must’ve been the bus stop or soccer practice.

AD:

Cause that’s the two places you go.

GD:

That’s where I go. I’m trying to think if there’s anywhere else I go. There is not. Craig’s. So I got home and I saw a note on the counter and it said it was from chase my 18 year old son. And it said, Went for a bike ride, be home soon. This is a normal occurrence. Okay. But something about that note, the moment, the world, I don’t know, my mental state, I just knew, Sister, I had an actual knowing. I saw it on the counter and I had an actual knowing that something horrible had happened, that he, a car had hit him. That just the visions that I have are so horrible. They’re like embarrassingly horrible. And every part of me just wanted to jump in the car and go driving all around and find him. But Tish and Amma, my 15-year-old, and oh my god …

AD:

13

GD:

13. Okay. Whatever. Their ages change every freaking year. And it’s impossible. They were sitting at the kitchen table, right. And Abby sitting on the couch and I’m at the counter. And so my anxiety just completely took over my body. I could barely breathe. I just went cold. I explain it like, it feels like a paralysis, like a mental, emotional, physical paralysis. And then this war starts when I have an anxiety attack. This war starts. It’s this internal war of my anxious voice, which is saying, This is it. This is your intuition. Go. He’s in trouble. Go. And then there’s this other voice that is saying, Don’t let the anxiety win. Right. Don’t show your girls that you’re supposed to freak out constantly that you’re supposed to live in fear by going and getting in that car.

AD:

But that’s what love looks like. It’s running out and doing that every time. Right. Right.

GD:

Okay. I can’t believe you said, That’s what love looks like. Because the next thing that happens while I’m sitting there holding onto the counter, trying to like figure out which of these voices to listen to. Right. Abby walks over, bless her. She knows me so well. She walks over. She knows exactly what’s happening. She holds my arms and says, He is fine. My first thought Sister is, First of all, you are reckless. You are reckless and irresponsible. And second of all, You just don’t love him as much as I do. Okay. Now none of those things are true. I’m just telling you what my inner anxious voice said to me. Okay. So I just think that’s fascinating because basically what I must believe at a real level is that anxiety is love because her not being anxious makes me think you don’t love him as much as I do. If you loved him as much as I do, you’d be losing your shit right now because our 18-year-old is on a bike ride. Right.

AD:

Because didn’t you read that note? It’s obvious.

GD:

So anyway, I sat there, I just, you know, smiled at her and let her walk away and I just held onto the counter and just breathed deeply. I just couldn’t make a decision either way. And I just breathed as deeply as I possibly could. And thank God, like one minute later, two minutes later, Chase walks through. Oh. And by the way, I have no idea how long this was. It could have been two minutes. It could have been 30 minutes. Okay. Chase walks through the door and I just hug him as if he’s returned from war. Okay.

AD:

Right. Lazarus.

GD:

And then it’s over, it’s over absolutely. Back to normal.

AD:

Your whole body returns? The ice paralysis has gone? Okay.

GD:

Yeah, yeah. And then I’m back to normal. So, you know, and then the three days afterwards, usually when I go into a real anxiety attack like that, not just my normal level of Tigger, hypervigilance, general concern about life, but like that kind of thing, then I spend the next few days just spinning about it because it scares me so much that I feel like I have to figure out why it happened and fix it. And then I just remember actually I don’t have to fix anything. What I’m choosing to understand about those moments are that those moments they do have to do with clinical anxiety. I am doing the things I’m supposed to do. I’m on my medicine. I do all of my things. And yet there will be times when the matrix becomes visible to me. Right. When I look at a note from one of my children, or when I have a moment where I remember that, Oh my God, the truth is that I love this person as much as I love this person, that life is as fragile and precarious as we think it is. That we actually could lose each other. And will eventually that every time we take any sort of risk, show our heart, leave the house, love someone, try something new, we could fail and we could lose. And that we do it any way. We still let our children go for bike rides. Right. We still allow life to happen, even though it’s terrifying and scary and things could go wrong. Right. Anxiety in those moments, it’s not a problem that I need to fix. It’s sometimes just an acknowledgement of what love and life and risk are. And that sometimes that is so breathtakingly brutiful, as we would say, beautiful and brutal, that you just have to hold on to the freaking counter and breathe.

AD:

And so it isn’t necessarily a conflict between your intuition and your knowing that guides you in all these other beautiful ways. It’s just a deeper, more core life truth knowing that shows up in these moments where you’re like, I really do love him as much as I’m terrified that I do, and I really will lose him eventually, either me or him. And so this is precious and scary.

GD:

Yes, this fear is the price of love sometimes. Right? And it makes me think of when I was younger, and I thought that that ache, that anxiety, that I, that fear, that awareness, that I felt was so painful that I had to get out of it. That’s what addiction was. It was every time I felt so afraid or I felt deeply, I just felt like I got to get out of here. I’ve gotta get out of this pain. I’ve got to get out of this fear and I would do it with booze or food or a million different things. And it just reminds me of that thing we said in Untamed so much, that was like, This is so painful. This is so deep. This is so beautiful. This is so real. So stay. Right? It’s that kind of love while it’s so terrifying when you’re paying attention is the whole point. When I look at it a certain way, that moment in the kitchen was everything beautiful, right. About my life. And I think the decision to not run and get into the car with Chase, to find him. I think that that is the progress of being a 45-year-old woman. I think it’s that a few years ago, I would have gotten in the car anyway, but it’s finally knowing I can’t control shit. And what I want my girls to see is a woman who loves so deeply and still knows that she can’t control anything. And so she’s just going to stay and breathe in these moments.

AD:

That’s fascinating because as, as you’re talking, I know you’ve had so much anxiety recently around Chase, around this time period. And it’s just reminding me of when you were in the mental hospital in high school, and you were getting ready to leave and you were so scared to leave. And then as you’re talking, it’s occurring to me, that Chase is getting ready to leave for college, that we’re getting ready to transition out of COVID. Is it like you’re creating, in the mental, there were clear rules. This is how you talk to each other. Here’s the words you use. Here’s your schedule, all of those things. And then you’re going back to high school, which was, this had a whole nother set of rules that never really made sense to you.

GD:

No. Lord of the Flies.

AD:

And then COVID is the same way. It’s simple, right? It’s terrible. But it’s simple. Stay in your house, wear your mask. It’s very clear what should happen. Chase, you know, the rules of like how to parent him. You don’t know the wild rules about parenting when he’s off at college and how you’re going to love him through that.

GD:

It’s freaking so true. Okay. This is crazy. This is wild. I can’t say crazy. Cause I’m talking about mental illness. Tighten up, Glennon. Okay. I’m telling you that yesterday, I was thinking about how maybe once a week, I fantasize, it’s just like a slice. Okay. It’s not like for real, it’s just like a little bit about being in a mental hospital again, about just tapping the F out of everything that’s hard about trying to adult and trying to be human and trying to mother and parent and sister and work, and like go into this place where there’s this structure and all the freedom that is so terrifying is taken away. And it’s just a simplifying of everything. I think that you’re exactly right. And I think that’s why when anxiety comes in, there’s a million things that I do to control again. Structure like lists and food and bringing back like, yes, it’s the anxiety of walking out the door of the mental hospital when I was a senior in high school and being like, but what now? But in there you told me what to do what now?

AD:

And really at the bottom of it, when you’re describing this knowing, this hitting the kind of bottom of looking at Chase and seeing that and realizing that you love him so much, and life is so precarious. At the end of the day, that really is a rule of life. That is a rule of life that you find utterly intolerable to abide by. That we love these people this much, and it’s so precarious that somebody could leave that any number of totally intolerable things could happen. But at the end of the day, that’s the game. That’s what’s happening.

GD:

That is the core of my sobriety, I think, this commitment to accept, surrender to, show up for life on life’s intolerable terms. That’s it. I’ll just stay, keep showing up, under these ridiculous circumstances where we are loving and risking and will lose. Okay, well, on that note, we’re going to take a break and then we’re going to come back and answer some hard questions.

GD:

Okay, everybody. Welcome to the part of the show I’m most excited about, because this is when we get to hear from you. This segment is called Hard Questions. We will be taking all of your questions, Sister, what’s the phone number?

AD:

It is (747) 200-5307.

GD:

Bring all of your questions. I will not have answers, but I will have things that I say in response.  I cannot wait to hear from you. Let’s hear these questions.

AD:

(747) 200-5307.

GD:

Today we are taking questions about anxiety.

AD:

Our first question Glennon is from Kirsten.

Kirsten (caller):

Hi Glennon, and my name is Kiersten. My boyfriend has anxiety and I don’t understand it. And I don’t understand how to help him. How do I support him through this, and these episodes or challenges that he is facing? Thanks so much.

AD:

Hmm. That’s hard.

GD:

Sweet Kirsten. I often think that the only thing harder than living with mental illness is loving someone who’s living with mental illness. I really do over the years of listening to people who try to make sense of things in the people they loves lives that can’t be made sense of, and that can’t be fixed. I do think that that’s a really, really tough card to pull. I would imagine that that Kiersten is a bit of a warrior there. I mean, I can just tell you this one wild time I’m thinking about, and Abby’s just like sitting here in the room with me, so this is going to be funny, but I actually had a bit of an anxiety a few years ago and I was laying in bed and I just started like breathing and hard. And it was so embarrassing for me because it was the first time that Abby had witnessed the weirdness of that. You know, it wasn’t just me like talking through it. It was like actual and physical, right? Yeah. And this is as a total aside, but I was having visions of being back in the mental hospital and this like worst case scenario that I go to every once in a while, where I’m just left somewhere, because everyone’s just decided that I’m too much to deal with. It’s just too exhausting, that it’s just too much, that ultimately what will happen. It’s strange. But anyway, I started breathing heavy and kind of rocking. And Abby held onto me tight and afterwards I talked to her about it and said, I was so embarrassed. And she just said, Oh, this is part of the beauty of you. This is part of the magic. I will take all of this with the rest of it. And she said something about how the deep feeling of everything is not something that she loves me in spite of, but she loves me because of, so I don’t know. I mean, that’s a high level of love. And, but I do know that there is so much beauty and there are so many gifts inside of people who have this fire inside of them. And that there is part of it that brings something to the table, as opposed to like it always being something that you have to deal with or figure out, or manage that there are things that we bring to the table that are gifts in terms of the way we see the world in terms of the way we stop the world and say, No, no, no. Look at that the way we feel things that other people are not willing to feel and see things that other people are not willing to see and hear things that other people are not willing to hear. And so there is a way of looking at it that I think Abby has that I love, which is not just like how the freak do I freaking deal with this, which I’m sure sometimes she feels, but like, what gifts does this bring to me and my life that I would not have if it weren’t for these mental differences that my wife has.

AD:

I love it. Good luck, Kiersten.

GD:

And Abby.

AD:

Yeah, and Abby. Forever and ever. Amen. Okay. This second question is from Samantha.

Samantha (caller):

Hi G. This is Samantha. I’ve not been clinically diagnosed for anxiety, but I have many things that suggest I could be. I was diagnosed with OCD in my teens and found that meds were helpful then, but with pressure from my holistic mom, I stopped seeing my therapist and quit my meds cold turkey. And I have not sought professional help since living with untreated OCD for 20 years and experiencing symptoms of anxiety have been an uphill battle for me. I’m curious about seeking treatment and using meds again, but it’s hard because my family is always talking to me about their concerns that the world is so overmedicated. What has your experience been like with meds and how do you respond when folks share their concerns about you being on them?

GD:

Oh, Samantha, uh, okay. Well first my experience with meds, I have been on meds for a very long time. I love my meds. Like I love my children. Okay. When I walk into the grocery store and I see the pharmacy sign, it feels like light from heaven. To me, it’s like the whole, the music of my life begins. My favorite song is Jesus loves me this I know for he gave me Lexapro. I feel strongly Samantha, how I feel is strongly. I feel that medicine for me, like it does for many people who struggle with all different kinds of illness has balanced the chemicals in my brain to get me to an even playing field with everybody else. Mentally. I feel that my medicine has not helped me escape the human experience. It has allowed me to have the full human experience and I’m grateful for it every day, every single day. I can imagine that it must be very hard to be someone who’s trying to be brave enough to get the help they need and to have this, well, it sounds to me like judgment. I know it’s being couched as concern for me every time I hear a sweeping generalization, like the world is over-medicated, it doesn’t sound like concern. It sounds like judgment. It kind of feels to me like when a woman shows her body, is bold enough to just live in her body and her body doesn’t match the cultural expectations of what a body should look like. And somebody expresses concern, right? They say something like, Oh, I’m just worried about her health. I’m just concerned about the obesity epidemic, right. It doesn’t really feel like concern. It feels like judgment. We have a saying in our family that that goes like, you know what mind your own body. And so I think we could extend that to brains, right? Mind your own mind. What I know is that what is helpful to me is when people speak of their personal experience. So, how that would sound Samantha is I would say, medicine has helped me. I would never go as far as to extend that to, so the world must be completely under medicated. Right? Do you hear that difference? So I can hear someone who says to me, medicine did not help me. I cannot hear someone that says to me, the world is over-medicated. I think we have to be very careful to speak about our personal experiences and not over-generalize because those overgeneralizations they release the stigma into the air that keeps people maybe like you from getting the help they need and deserve. So my experience in my own life and inside the mental health world is that I see a whole lot of people who need help, who don’t get it, right? Who do need medication, but don’t get it. First, because of the incredible privilege, that’s required to have the money and time to get medication. But also because of the stigma, right, that’s released inside of families and cultures often couched in concern like, but the world is so over-medicated. So Samantha, what I would say to you is that none of these people who judge who we are or what we need can be with us in the dark. Right. I often think of these kinds of ideas and people as two-legged men who are calling prostheses a crutch, right. Just because they don’t need it to have the full human experience does not mean that I don’t. So, I think the angst inside of you is your knowing, maybe trying to get you to understand that your family doesn’t know best for you and maybe you do. So find a professional. And if you need that help, get the help you need.

AD:

Our last question is from Sarah.

Sarah (caller):

Hey, G. My name’s Sarah. I’m so lost in myself when I’m having anxiety. I feel detached from everyone and everything. Have you ever found anything that helps make those tougher days better? Thanks.

GD:

What is her name? Sarah?

AD:

Sarah.

GD:

I love your description. Detached. That’s so good. That feels right to me. I always describe anxiety as like a shaky hovering. I don’t know. It’s that Tigger-ness, right? Like the Tigger-ness of always being too high or too low, like for me that the anxiety feels high and the depression feels too low, but both make it absolutely impossible to access the right level of life, which is like in the middle, which is right here right now, which is in the moment. Right? So if all of these spiritual teachers are right and joy in life is in the moment, then anxiety and depression rob that of us because it’s like fricking positional. It’s like, Oh no, no, I’m not down there. I’m up here. Right. Where I’m like, Oh, I’m not up there with you. I’m too low in depression. It’s interesting. Detached feels right to me. A couple things that I want to say about that. I used to believe that at some point I was going to figure this out. I think this is an idea that we get planted in us when we’re young, that I have found to be completely untrue, which is that we will work really hard and grow and grow and grow. And then someday we will be grown up. And then magically change. Right? So I’m 45. I have finally realized that that is not going to, I keep waking up being the exact same freaking person. Like it’s just no matter what I do, no matter who I’m really in relationship with, no matter where I move, no matter what my job is, I still, wherever I go there I am. Right. Same, same, same. New year, same me. Over and over again. Right. So one of the things that helps is to know that I’m not two weeks away from fixing my anxiety, that this is something that I’m going to live with for the rest of my life. Okay. Now that is not to say that medicine and therapy and spiritual practices and all of those things have not helped because they do. They allow me to deal healthfully with this thing that I have. Okay. But I’m also going to have it forever so I can stop holding my breath about that. And at the breath is an interesting thing. So a lot of this has to do, anxiety, has to do with our nervous system. Okay. So it helps me to think of this in terms of spiritual stuff, but also science, right? Like my nervous system is extra nervous. It’s like, which is what it’s for.

AD:

You have a very nervous system.

GD:

I have a very nervous system. So what I have found things that help me are things that actually are proven to calm the nervous system. So I do a lot of breathing exercises. I have this one that I learned a long time ago. I think it’s called like the box method or something, but it’s like, you breathe in for five seconds and then you hold it. And it’s like, I’m envisioning going across a box. And then the holding is going down and then the exhale is going across again. And then the holding is going up. Breathe in for four, hold, breathe out for four hold. That is something I’ve returned to over and over again that actually helps me in a detached, freaking out anxious moment. For me, anxiety is all about not being present in my body. It is that detached thing. It is that shaky hovering. So whatever I can do to get back to the moment to get back to reality. So I have an exercise that someone taught me a long time ago. Think of something you can you feel. Grab something. What can you feel? Feel it, feel your feet on the ground. What can you see? Take in something that you can see. What can you hear? Right. Activating the senses brings me back into the moment and into my body and out of the spinning of my head, which helps every time. Not sometimes. That helps me every single time.

AD:

That’s interesting.

GD:

Yeah. And then, one of the things that helps me is this idea of whenever I’m in anxiety, I’m not in the moment I’m freaking out usually about something that might happen. And so there’s this thing I say to myself as, okay, I’m in What If. I’m in What If, but What Is? What Is right now? What Is right now? So 100% of the time, if I focus, if I get out of What If, and I focus on What is right now? Okay. I’m in my house. My kids are at school. I’m okay. I’m in my body. I have food. What Is is always okay. I am always okay in What Is, right. So a reminder, whenever I’m in What If to go back to What Is, grounding myself in my senses, returning to my breath, those are the things that helped me moment by moment.

AD:

That one even as someone who doesn’t have clinical anxiety, you taught me that one, and that helps so much because in the moments when I’m spinning with like worry and concern about my kids, it’s very rarely, if ever, what is happening in that moment. It’s what I’m projecting that moment means for their life, you know, next month, in five years, when they’re adults, and then I’m losing it because I’m thinking, Oh my God, are they going to be okay? But really they’re very much are okay in this moment. It’s what I’m assuming. It means about not being okay in the future.

GD:

Spinning. It’s all the spinning. So all of those are to say that whenever I can get out of my mind and out of the future tripping and all of that, and back into the moment right now, whatever it takes to get me back into my body back, back into the moment right now, I am always okay. And that will always be true forever, which is comforting. Great questions.

AD:

Great job, Kirsten, Sarah, Samantha. Thank you so much for all the questions. And don’t forget to send your hard questions about anything at all. 747-200-5307.

GD:

Welcome to The Next Right Thing. So the reason we created this segment is this. During my 45 years on earth, I have learned that tragically, there is no five-year plan. Every time someone asks me my long term plans, I just laugh. In fact, I’ve always hated the AA one day at a time mantra because in case no one has noticed, days are very, very long. All I can handle is deciding the next right thing, one thing at a time. Whenever I’m uncertain, which is always, all I can do is go inside, feel around for my intuition and do the next thing it nudges me toward. I can’t see the whole path, but I’ve learned that if I just do the next right thing, one thing at a time, life becomes like a yellow brick road. And one brick at a time, I can find my way home. So this segment we’ll figure out a Next Right Thing that we can all try before we meet up again next week. Okay. So my dear friend, Allison, who was helping produce this podcast right now, recently told me about this cool thing that she and her friends started during COVID every Friday afternoon. She and her friends would meet on a path and they would take a long walk together. And each friend would bring the hardest thing she was facing that week, whether it was in her life or marriage or friendships or work or world, whatever. And they’d talk about it as they walked and nobody had any answers, just time, just honesty, just solidarity. And Allison said that as a result of these walks, this little group of friends had become tighter than ever. And she had started to feel less alone than ever. And she suspected that this was because they had been friends for so long, but they’d never gotten so real with each other before. They’d never brought to each other, the real heavy stuff that as friends, they were meant to help each other carry. And COVID kind of forced them to share this hard, which turned out to be exactly what their friend group had always needed. And that is my dream for this podcast, that it will be like a weekly Hard Things walk that you and Sister and I, and your closest people will take together, dropping all the fake and sharing and helping each other carry the hard. So that for the rest of the week, we can all walk a little lighter and less alone. So here you go, are you ready for your Next Right Thing? Okay. Your Next Right Thing is to build your pod squad. Okay. You know how people have book clubs? We are going to have pod squads. Okay. I want you to think of a few people that you might like to deepen your relationships with, that you might like to get real with. And I want you to send them a link to this podcast. Just ask if they want to be in your pod squad. If you think that term is cheesy, like Sister does then just ask them if they want to follow and listen with you. See if listening together opens up conversations and helps you begin to build deeper relationships based on the messy truth, not surface stuff. So just text them this episode and say, I want to start listening with me and also listen up. If you are someone who doesn’t have a person or people to invite into this journey, do not worry, Sister and I didn’t either. That’s why we started this podcast. Sister and I will be your pod squad, okay? To close us out, I have an amazing gift to give you. This is actually a gift from my daughter, Tish, who many of you might remember from Untamed is a deeply feeling person and a musician. And she wrote a song for us. She wrote it after reading Untamed and after learning that her mom was going to start this podcast. And the song is called We Can Do Hard Things. She wrote it all by herself, in her bedroom, both the lyrics and the music. She sent it to our dear friend, Brandi, Carlile, and Brandi loved it so much that she decided to sing back up and produce it as a gift to Tish. And to you for this podcast. This song has already become a personal anthem for me. And it’s helped me through many hard days. And I hope it will become our family’s pod squad anthem, too. I give you Tish Milton and Brandi Carlile.

Tish (singing):

I walked through fire I came out the other side
I chased desire I made sure I got what’s mine
And I continued to believe that I’m the one for me
And because I’m mine I walked the line

Cause we’re adventurers and heartbreak’s our map
A final destination, we lack
And we’ve stopped asking directions to places they’ve never been
And to be loved, we need to be known
We’ll finally find our way back home
And through the joy and pain that our lives bring
We can do hard things

I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new start
I’m not the problem, sometimes things fall apart
And I continued to believe, the best people are free
And it took some time, but I’m finally fine 

Cause we’re adventurers and heartbreaks our map
We might get lost but we’re okay with that
We’ve stopped asking directions
To places they’ve never been

And to be loved we need to be known
Well finally find our way back home and
Through the joy and pain that our lives bring
We can do hard things