Hey, so this is my first try filming outside. I thought, what better place to do a video
about generalized anxiety disorder and cognitive behavioral therapy than sitting outdoors on
my porch on a beautiful sunny day. It's getting towards the end of summer and
I definitely want to enjoy these last few sunny days and I hope that you're able to
do something today that you enjoy. So let's get into the story. I'm going to start with a story of Matt and
he walked into my office about a year ago, sort of a typical looking millennial. He had a short crop beard, he had the requisite
round glasses and he exuded an air of calm. And yet when he sat down and began talking
to me, I realized how much was going on in his head. He was worried about his work. He had a job he loved, but he worked way too
many hours and he worried about his job all the time. He had gotten married in the last year and
he and his wife had been trying to have a baby for about three months and he was worried
what happens if she doesn't get pregnant? Um, he had a brother who wasn't functioning
well and he was worried about his brother and worried about his mother and the worry,
worry, worry, worry, worry. And he said to me that he had pretty much
always been a worrier and always been able to hide it and he wasn't sure he had an anxiety
disorder and he wanted to know what's the difference between an anxiety disorder and
just a lot of worry. So I'm going to talk you through that and
I'm going to give you three tools that will help you reclaim your life from worry. For those of you who don't know me, my name
is Barbara Heffernan. I'm an anxiety and trauma specialist and I've
been helping people recover from anxiety and trauma for over 15 years. And that's my dog George. He's breathing heavy in the background, so
I'm going to let you meet him. If you find my videos helpful, the most supportive
thing you can do for me is to give me a like, to subscribe to the channel and leave me a
comment below. What is the difference between worry and anxiety? The way that I look at it is that we have
these human brains that can project into the future. They can project problems in order for us
to figure out a solution. So it's actually been a very helpful brain
for our species functioning. So if we worry about something or we project
a possibility that we can prevent or we can do something to lower the risk of that, that
could be considered productive worry. So let's say I worry about my house burning
down. I could buy a fire extinguisher, I could make
sure I don't have candles burning. I could make sure that everybody knows fire
safety habits around the house. I could check my dryer lint. That's an important thing to do. So those are practical steps that you can
take to keep yourself safe. But if you take those practical steps and
then you just continue to worry and worry and worry and what if and what if and what
if it's completely nonproductive worry and what it is doing internally in your body is
setting up a cycle of adrenaline and cortisol which is very damaging to your health. Probably gives you a lot of muscle tension,
might interrupt your sleep at night, might make you irritable and generally can lead
to a pretty miserable life. So if you go to a doctor or a therapist, these
are the ways that they will diagnose whether or not you have generalized anxiety disorder. It is a condition where there is excessive
anxiety or worry, which is difficult for the person to control and it has lasted for more
than six months. The anxiety and worry occur about a number
of different types of events and activities. It's not somebody who has a particular phobia,
an agoraphobia, fear of spiders, a fear of flying. It's a broad range of worries. If you're worrying about this one thing, then
the next day you'll be worrying about that. If that could get solved, you're worrying
about something else and somebody with generalized anxiety disorder would need to have three
of these following symptoms, either feeling restlessness or keyed up or on edge, being
easily fatigued, difficulty concentrating or your mind going blank, irritability, muscle
tension and sleep disturbance. If you have three, at least three of those
six symptoms and it's been going on for more than six months and it does cause you what
we call clinically significant distress. Then you probably have generalized anxiety
disorder and the good news is that it is a treatable condition. You can get better. The main therapy technique used to treat generalized
anxiety disorder is cognitive behavioral therapy. So one of the first things I did with Matt
is I walked him through how the cognitive behavioral therapy cycle works, which I will
show you just briefly here. The cycle is basically that we have our thoughts,
we have our feelings, and we have our behaviors and they all interact. They all influence each other and with anxiety
they all spin out of control. So another thing I shared with Matt is this
Mark Twain quote or it's attributed to Mark Twain. We don't really know if it's his or not, but
the quote is "I've lived through some horrible things and some of them actually happened"
and I love this photograph that I found to go with it because it's this truck like barreling
out the side of a building, a highly unlikely event. However, people with anxiety will very often
create events that are just as unlikely as this and maybe, sure maybe possible, but highly
unlikely. The first tool is to label your thoughts as
anxiety, really label it. This is my anxiety. It helps to create some distance from the
thought. And the thing to keep in mind is that when
we have anxiety, the anxiety exists, it exists in our bodies and it will pick this problem
and then this problem and then this problem and it will worry about those three problems. And then if this problem gets solved then
it will pick this problem and then it will look for that problem. And then those two problems get solved, it
will come back to this problem. And then it will go to that problem. And there will never be a time where you don't
have a problem to worry about. But that's because your anxiety will attach
to whatever it can. So tool number one is to know that your anxiety
exists, if you have anxiety. So we're going to have to treat the anxiety. We can't focus on the problem you're worried
about. If you go to a therapist and you're like,
okay, this week I'm worried because my wife didn't get pregnant. And then next week I come in and I'm worried
about this project that I'm doing at work. And then the next week I come in and I'm worried
about the dynamic at my parent's home. Well, you'll never get to the root cause. A therapist could talk to you about those
issues and help you brainstorm them and help you figure out what you can and can't do,
but you'll never get to the root cause, which is that you have anxiety. So we need to treat the anxiety, we need to
take care of it. And thinking of it as a separate thing almost
can really be very helpful. And that's going to lead me to tool number
two, which might sound a little odd, but tool number two is to create a cartoon character
that represents your anxiety that you can like put on your shoulder. And then when you have an anxious thought,
you can put that thought into the character's mouth. And here I have this picture of this a, this
is actually some street art. He looks pretty anxious, right? He also looks pretty self-destructive and
pretty negative so he could easily represent somebody's anxiety. So if you look at that character on the screen
with some compassion, what does he really want? Like what does that character want? That character probably wants to be happy. Your anxiety wants to keep you safe, your
anxiety thinks it's doing you a favor. And it can be very, very convincing. I have many clients in my office and once
we sort of piece through the issue that they're struggling with and they realize like, wow,
this really is just my anxiety. But I was fully convinced that it was something
I had to do something about and there is nothing for me to do about it. So your anxiety can be incredibly convincing
and it is trying at every moment to convince you to pay attention to it, to convince you
that you need it to exist. But the thing to do with your anxiety is not
to like reject it and be angry at it and then blame yourself and have all sorts of negative
thoughts about it. It's more to like take care of it. So once you have that cartoon character on
your shoulder, you can treat that cartoon character with a little bit of a sense of
humor and a little bit of compassion, which leads us to tool number three and tool number
three is to do something you love regularly. Do something you love that has no other purpose
other than you enjoy it. It makes you feel calm. It makes you feel peaceful. It makes you connect to your soul. Now, Matt, my client Matt, he loved to be
outdoors. He loved to hike and when he came to see me,
he been hiking in six months. He was just rushing from one thing to another
and taking on all sorts of things that really weren't his responsibility. And trying to take care of people he actually
couldn't take care of and worrying about things that didn't need to be worried about and he
hadn't taken any time to nurture himself by being outside in nature, which is so, so important. It is so important to physiologically calm
ourselves. Diaphragmatic breathing is super important
and there's a lot of videos on youtube that you can find to demonstrate it. And I also have a little free mini course
that you can sign up for. The link is below, I call it the "aah mini-series"
and it teaches diaphragmatic breathing, it teaches a safe place exercise and it teaches
some mindful grounding techniques. And all three of those things are things you
can do to help yourself physiologically relax. Because if we go back to that CBT cycle, one
of the main ways to feel better is to engage in behaviors that help you physiologically
calm down. And by doing that you can calm down your thoughts,
you can end up feeling better and the cycle will go in the opposite direction in a positive
direction instead of spiraling into a negative direction. So Matt made awesome progress with therapy. First by acknowledging that, yes, he had an
anxiety disorder, second by beginning to separate from it, to identify it as a separate entity,
create this cartoon character, put the anxious words in that character's mouth and then engage
in activities to physiologically relax. And of course on top of that we did all sorts
of CBT. We went through unhelpful thinking styles. I've done a video on that that you can access
or there I'm not quite sure where, where it will show up. And we really did talk through the specific
things he was worried about. For example, he and his wife had been trying
to get pregnant for three months and he was very worried that they weren't going to be
able to get pregnant. And yet statistically it takes about nine
months on average to get pregnant. So to have tried for three months and not
be pregnant, there was zero reason to worry. There was no family history that would cause
the worry. And yet Matt was projecting and projecting
into the future all the different possible scenarios of what might need to happen and
just sort of bringing that in and realizing like, okay, I really don't even have to think
about that yet because everything is okay now, really helped him. So recovering from generalized anxiety disorder
takes practice. It takes a consistent effort to really become
aware of your thoughts and piece through them. Are they productive worry? Is it unproductive worry? Probably it's unproductive. Is there anything you can do about it now? Is there anything you can do about it today
and if not, attempting to let go of the thoughts, which I know is way easier said than done,
but that's why I come back to the physiologically relaxing activities. Whether that might be skiing for you or hiking
or running or meditating or just simply the diaphragmatic deep breathing or sitting on
a porch on a beautiful day like this. If you find my videos helpful, the most supportive
thing you can do for me is to give me a like, to subscribe to the channel and leave me a
comment below that helps you to promote my videos so more people can find them and people
can watch them. And of course you can share this with a friend
till the next time
