Tools I Use to Combat My Anxiety
"Get lost, Gretchen."
If you’re anything like me, anxiety is something you cope with every single day in different ways and getting here, able to cope, has been a non-linear journey.
Anxiety can look so different for different people. For me, it looks like disassociation or freezing or a combination of both. Disassociation can look like doing a whole lot of nothing while doing a whole lot or it can look like being in a room without really being in the room. I described this to my therapist as feeling like I’m floating and vibrating above my body. Freezing looks like just what it sounds like. It looks like feeling overwhelmed and doing absolutely nothing. It looks like feeling anxious about a social event and staring at the pile of discarded clothes on my bed unable to choose an outfit that I’ll feel best in for 35 minutes and then running late. It can look like feeling scared about an audition and lying in bed doom scrolling until I’m rushing to get a self-tape done. Sound familiar?
Here are the things that helped me the most.
Naming my anxiety.
This is a trick that my friend Margaret taught me this last winter and it’s really helped me build the habit of awareness which, for me, is a lot of the battle as someone who struggles with subconscious disassociation. Give your anxiety a human name to call out in the moment. Mine’s name is Gretchen and she’s a real bitch. This technique helps me to cognitively detach my anxiety from myself because we are not our feelings and our feelings aren’t facts. I am feeling anxious, I am not anxious. Call out your anxiety and give them a name.
Humor.
If you were to rent a room in my brain, you’d find it to sometimes be a pretty mean place (but getting nicer!) How do you defeat a bully? You laugh at them. Something that my therapist recommended to me to help me deflate my negative self-talk is to use sarcasm at my own negative thoughts, often by just repeating it back to myself.
“You’ll never book that job because they’ll never pick you, over someone with Broadway credits.”
“Oh I’ll never book that job because I don’t have Broadway credits? Oh okay! Oh, I’m a rando who’s been auditioning for ten years? Oh weird! Thank you, got it! Heard thanks!”
“Wowee thank you so much for your very *aggressive* honesty (David)!! What a *safe space* we have cultivated here.” (For some reason a lot of my humor while using this technique specifically is in Alexis Rose-speak so re-read that again and you’ll probably hear it better.)
“Oh I’ll never book that job? Oh my god thank god for Amazon that crystal ball was truly such a steal!”
Morning Pages.
This is straight out of The Artist’s Way but I love this practice. It’s three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing designed to unlock creativity by ridding your brain of negative thoughts and mental clutter (hello, Gretchen). I don’t do this every day, but I find it to be really effective when my brain gets loud.
Move my body.
Moving my body almost every day each week really helps me keep my anxiety at a manageable distance because it literally makes your brain more sensitive to joy. It also helps your ability to focus, retain information, and reason. Literally drop and give me three pushups or just go for a walk and you’ll release some level of serotonin or dopamine into your brain (not to mention the other ways it benefits your body).
How are the anxious girlies coping today? Let me know what’s worked for you in your own healing journey below. I’d love to swap resources. Let’s enter 2025 more centered together.
As always, thank you for being here.
xx,
KDC.