Why You Feel Anxious—Even When Nothing Is Wrong

From the moment we all wake up to the moment that we fall asleep, our minds are buzzing all day long and constantly moving with activity. And a massive portion of that is mental chatter and stories that we tell ourselves. It's us talking to ourselves, it's us creating stories in our heads, and you know, it's stories about who we are, what we think other people think of us, how we fit into the world, good things about us, bad things about us, if we're good or bad, if the world is good or bad, if your boss is good or bad, what they think of you, what you think of them. And there's these entire stories and story lands that are basically being built in our minds all day long. And if you're unaware of it, hopefully with this episode you can start becoming more aware of it. Because these stories aren't just like little thoughts that just happen in your head. They shape all of the feelings that you feel. Every thought that you have creates a feeling of some sort inside of your body. You have a thought that's an electrical signal from one place to another inside of your brain. Your body creates these things that basically send, the easiest way to think about it, sends a message from your brain to your body and tells you, hey, this is how you should feel. Your body creates hormones and then your body talks back to your brain and says, hey, yes, we are feeling this way. So you have an anxious thought or you have a thought about, what if this person doesn't like me? And you have that thought, your body's going to then click on the hormones of stress, anxiety, and then those stress and anxiety hormones are going to trigger your brain to think, yes, we are feeling anxious right now. We should continue this. And the feedback loop continues to keep on happening. And so what happens is every thought that you have creates some sort of feeling. And so if you're unaware of your feelings, your thoughts, you need to become aware of them. Because then you feel a certain way and that's going to dictate the actions that you will or will not take. When you don't feel good, it's really hard to take action. It's really hard to create the life that you want when you feel anxious, when you feel stressed, when you feel sad, when you feel mad, when you feel angry. So eventually if that goes on long enough, they're going to create our entire reality over time. And so if you want a better life, if you want more peace, if you want more joy, more happiness, if you want to take action to create the life that you want, you need to become very aware of the stories that are happening inside of your head. And so our brain makes sense of the entire world, where we fit, how it works, how everyone else around us fits through stories. That's how our brain makes sense is through stories. And these stories come from many different places. They come from your past experiences. They can come from dreams that you might have had that you thought were reality when you were a kid. They come from societal pressures and societal messages, what we see in advertisements, who we follow on Instagram, the shows that we watch, the music that we listen to. And a lot of times they create these things called cognitive distortions. And a cognitive distortion is an irrational thought pattern that leads to negative thinking. And we're going to dive into those a little bit later into the episode, but I'll give you a couple of examples just in case this isn't fully hitting with you, right? Let's say that you need to give a speech and you have anxiety when it comes to public speaking. It's not the public speaking. It absolutely has nothing to do with the public speaking because the public speaking is just you, a human, standing up in front of other humans at its simplest form. Sounds are coming out of your face. That's its simplest form, right? The thing that causes you anxiety is not the public speaking. The thing that causes you anxiety is the internal story. Oh, I'm always so awkward. I'm so awkward when I stand in front of people. Everyone in the crowd is going to think that I'm foolish. Or what if I mess up and I look like an idiot? There's that girl that I like and she's going to see me look like an idiot and then she's not going to want to be with me and then I'm going to be alone forever, right? And the story just continues to keep going on. Or I have this presentation. I need to give it work. My boss is going to be there. What if I do the presentation and my boss realizes that I'm incompetent and then he starts to notice other places where I'm incompetent and then he fires me, right? So the story, it doesn't just start and end at the event most of the time. Usually what happens is we think of the event like the public speaking and then we think and we basically play it out in our head and create an entire story around what could happen next and it usually doesn't happen near as bad as we think it's going to. But that thought causes an anxious feeling or stress about what it is that we need to do in the future and then what it does is that story affects how you feel and you act during that public speaking, which likely reinforces your anxiety, which likely makes you more awkward when you're in front of people. So let me give you just a bunch of different examples of how this can happen in your life. You know, let's say that you're sending a text message to somebody and you're waiting for their reply and you see the three dots pop up after texting a friend and then they disappear and you're like, oh my God, what happened? You ever done this before? You're like, did I? Maybe they misunderstood my text message. I hope they're not upset with me. Maybe they must. Oh my gosh. And then what do we do? We scroll back through our text messages and we see what you could have said. Oh, could you, could you have said something? Oh my gosh, this thing could have been read incorrectly. I hope they didn't misunderstand what I was, what I was saying. The reality is the three dots were there, the three dots disappeared, but we went off into story land and thought, oh my gosh, they could have taken this wrong. They could have taken this wrong. I hope they didn't take this wrong. And then, you know, I hope they don't, I hope they text me back. I hope I didn't offend them in some sort of way. Reality is three dots were there, three dots disappeared, but we went off down into story land. You know, for me, I've had this happen before and this was something I worked on for years is I'll text somebody and it's, it's always, always used to pop up when it was, uh, other men that I would look up to. I'd text them and then they wouldn't text back for a while. Right. And I was like, I wonder if they don't. And it was this whole feeling of like, I'm not good enough. Well, maybe that, you know, it's maybe I think I'm stupid. Maybe I didn't say something, say something correctly. Maybe it's not important to get back to me. Right. And I think if I'm going to try to find the root of it, I think it came from, you know, my relationship with my father, wanting somebody that I look up to, to think highly of me. And if they don't text back, then I'm like, Oh my God, did, did I say something wrong with something wrong? Because ultimately the reality is they just haven't text back yet. They're probably busy. Right. Or another example is reality is your boss sends you an email and says, Hey, you know, Sarah, can we meet up, uh, and have a meeting this afternoon? And so your boss asks you for a meeting unexpectedly. And your first thought is I must be in trouble or worse. I'm getting fired. You ever had this happen before? The reality is your boss asks you for a meeting, but you went off in a story land. And now you're thinking there's something wrong with you. Maybe I'm in trouble. Maybe I'm getting fired. If I get fired, what am I going to do? I had to, am I going to pay the bills? I only have X amount of dollars in savings. You're in story land. You're not even in reality anymore. Another example would be like, maybe you text a friend and, you know, you send them a long message of something that's going on. And then they text you back something really short. And you're like, Oh, they're annoyed with me. I wonder if I said something wrong. You know, another thing that I've, I've done before. And I've noticed within myself is you go to like a social gathering, go to party. And after you leave, you kind of ruminate over something that you said. And you're like, Oh my gosh, I hope that they, I hope they didn't take that wrong. I shouldn't have said that. They might think that I'm strange. I can see how they could take that the wrong way. You know, I said a couple of years ago, I had an interview with someone who I really admire. And after it, I started thinking about something that I said. And I thought to myself, Oh my God, that could have been taken the wrong way. I wonder if they think that that was a bad thing. And I remember for like days, I was beating myself up. And I was like, damn, did I, did I say it that way? Did I say it incorrectly? Could it, could that have been taken incorrectly? I'm in story land. I'm not in reality anymore. Right. Interview was over. Everything was done. I'm in story land. I'm in story land for the entire weekend. Then I come back on Monday and I watched the footage and it wasn't even as bad as I thought it was. And I was like, Oh, that's what I was worrying about. But for like three or four days, I was just ruminating on it. Like, Oh my God, they must think that I'm stupid. They must, they could have taken that the wrong way. I hope that they don't think that that, that I said that right. So we all have these stories. You know, you might see another example, be like, you see someone else's success on Instagram and think, Oh, they must have cheated or manipulated others to get there. Maybe they slept their way to the top, right? Like there's so many stories that we create in all of those stories. All of those thoughts have feelings that come with them. And so the thing that you really have to understand is that something happened and then you left reality and you went off into story land. And this happens all day long. And these can really sway our emotions. And if our emotions are swayed and we feel good, great. It's easier to take action to create the life we want. If we don't feel good, it makes it harder to actually take the action that we need to. And you can really start to beat yourself up for it. I know a lot of people reach out to me. They beat themselves up just over the story inside of their own head. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to teach you different techniques that are based in cognitive behavioral therapy and other forms of therapy to help you identify what your negative thoughts are, your negative stories that are going on. Actually look at them and see if you can poke holes in them to kind of assess the accuracy of them and then how to actually take those thoughts and replace them with more realistic and positive ones. And it's really going to help you alter the emotional and behavioral responses that are associated with the thoughts that you have and the stories that you have as well. And so the first thing I'm going to teach you about is something called cognitive restructuring. So this involves identifying specific negative thoughts that you have and challenging their validity. So if you think, I'm awkward, I am a terrible communicator, I'm bad at public speaking, people think I'm ugly, whatever it might be. It involves you finding those specific negative thoughts. So first off, you have to become aware of yourself and then testing the validity of them by actually asking yourself questions. I recommend don't just do it in your own head. I recommend speaking it out loud. And even better than speaking out loud is speaking out loud while you're writing it down. And then what you do is you test the validity of them and then you replace them with more balanced thoughts. So like an example would be something like, I always mess up. You might notice that you're like, oh, you screwed something up. You think to yourself, I always mess up. I always mess up. I had a friend of a friend over at the house a couple weeks ago and within like three or four hours, she said, I'm stupid or some variation of that like seven times. And I was like, I don't think I've ever heard. I didn't say anything to her about it, but I was like, I don't think I've ever heard somebody say, I'm stupid so much. And so, you know, instead of saying something like, I always mess up, say, sometimes I make mistakes, but I'm learning from them, right? So it's about identifying the one that you don't want and replacing it with a more, first off, valid one, but also a more positive one. Because anytime that she uses the words like always, I always mess up or never, I never do that. I never get this right. I'm always so stupid. Those are what are called universal quantifiers. And those are just basically linguistic generalizations that really hold you back from seeing any other possibility that you could experience. And so when you look at almost and never, that's basically you putting yourself inside of like a mental prison. In your mind, there is no other option. There is no way out if you are just always or never. Because if you think about it, always and never, almost never happen. It's very rare that something isn't absolute. And so you can start to test the validity of that. Am I always this way? Am I always? Do I always mess up? No, not always. Then the other thing that you can do is you can actually start to test the beliefs that are underlying the narratives. And so if you believe, if I speak up, everyone's going to laugh at me, then you want to test that. If I speak up, everyone's going to laugh at me. You got to go, **** it, I got to go. And you've got to be able to just get yourself to go, I'm going to speak up and speak up. And you need to see that when you spoke up, nobody laughed at you, which then proves your story wrong in the moment. And what you're doing is you're looking for cracks in the story so that you can start to break through those stories. Another thing that you could do is something that's called is to integrate creative storytelling. And so creative storytelling is a way of telling a story that's going on in your head, but differently. And so there's a couple ways you could do it. The first one is third person writing. And so what you do, obviously these take effort to change. Like this isn't just something that you just like, oh, I'm just going to change. These all take effort. And I understand that. And so I hope that you actually put the effort into this. As you actually take a pen and paper and you write about the experience that you went through from a third person point of view to basically get distance from that. So there's not as much emotion around it. So if instead of saying something like, I went to a party and I felt nervous, you would Sarah went to a party and she felt nervous. Or I'm always so awkward. Sarah sometimes feels awkward, but she's been taking lessons and is improving quickly. And you start actually changing them around. And so here's three examples of when Sarah was not awkward and she was really proud of how she communicated. And so what you do is you write and then create a story and look at your stories and create a new story, but from a third person point of view. So you can distance yourself and not feel as much feelings around it. And then you can start to poke the holes, right? That's how you poke holes in it. And so really, when you start to change your story, it's going to start to change your life. The process of changing your story is not, and this is important to think about, it's not about suppressing negative thoughts. It's about transforming them into narratives that empower you and actually start to support you to who you want to become. There's basically four steps to it. The first thing that you need to understand is you need to develop awareness around it. The first step to anything that you want to change is you need to become aware of it outside of the moment. And then when it pops up, you need to become aware of it in the moment, right? So you can keep a journal to track all of these daily events of the stories you tell yourself, the things that you do, the stuff that you feel, the thoughts going through your head. So the first thing is the awareness of it. The second thing is to evaluate it. So what you do is you take a step back from those stories and then you ask yourself, are they based in fact or are they distorted perceptions? In 99.99999% of the time, they are not based in fact. They are distorted perceptions. And then what you do is you challenge those narratives and the stories that you've built with evidence that you actually have. Am I always awkward? I'm not always awkward. I'm actually really comfortable in front of my friends. So that's a bunch of ****, right? So you challenge yourself. You test the validity of those thoughts and those stories. So you evaluate them. Then you start to reconstruct them more than anything else. You start to rewrite your story. And what you do is you focus on what you're doing well and how you want to be and how you're improving. So if somebody says, I'm not good at meeting new people, that's not really a great way that I want to be. You can say something like, I can improve my social skills with practice. I am improving my social skills. I am getting better at my social skills. And then the last piece of it is you just have to practice repetition. You have to put yourself out of your comfort zone. You have to change the narratives, and then you have to put yourself out of your comfort zone to realize that what you thought was going to happen did not happen. So therefore, the story in your head was false. It holds no weight. You got to get rid of it if it's false. And so ultimately, when you look at your stories, if your stories, a brain left to its own devices will almost always go negative. It's a protection mechanism that your brain has. And so if you want to actually start changing the way that you think and the way that you feel, you need to be very intentional to do that because the stories you tell yourself are shaping every aspect of your life. It's influencing how you feel, how you think, how you act, how you interact with the world, people around you. And when you start to change those stories through cognitive behavioral therapy and other forms of therapy that I share with you, the storytelling, the third person, all of that, you can really start to shift the narratives. And it doesn't happen right away, but if you do it over and over and over and you keep testing the validity of your thoughts, you'll realize those thoughts start to change because your brain starts to understand that isn't true and your brain doesn't want to hold on to something that is a complete lie.