Hi! It's Lynn, your adulting coach.
This morning my 27-year-old shared that they hadn't slept well last night. They were tired. Now this was after working until about 1 or two the day before, and not having the easiest day, but they had the opportunity to recover all afternoon and that evening and then all night. I believe that they were still in alarm from the anxiety of trying to manage the work that they do. And I am determined to help her figure out how to decondition those alarms, those chronic alarms, so that the healing can happen. So they can handle the hurt from those alarms and move forward and recover and be resilient.
What I'm going to teach today is How We Do It. It's directly informed by Dr Russell Kennedy who wrote the book Anxiety Rx and at least a dozen of other teachers that I've studied. This idea is really well researched and I believe that it works because it has worked for me as well as for my kids. So here it is.
Anxiety has two parts. It has the alarm that happens in our body that's first. Where we go, "uh oh." That intake of breath, that whoosh that happens when we feel the impact. Then our brain kicks into action shortly after trying to figure out is this a real threat to our existence or, "What's really going on here. That's its job. Its job is to make meaning from whatever has occurred.
What can happen, though, is that those anxious thoughts can go from the brain to the body, and we feel that anxiety over and over and over again. Those thoughts are usually 3 Ws: Warnings, What ifs and Worst case scenarios. It's our brain again trying to make sure that we're going to survive.
It's done a really good job. We're at the top of the food chain. Yet in our modern society, most of our challenges, most of our threats, are as a result of our thoughts. They psychological threats. We're not you know physically threatened all the time. Although we may have been in the past.
What we want to do this.
1 | We want to find and feel that alarm in our body. In my case it's really right there, in my solar plexus. It's almost always right there.
I've talked to people recently, members the Art of Adulting where the tension they feel is in their neck. Others feel it in their digestive system, in their belly. Most of the time it's in this midline area somewhere where we just our tension just tends to go.
When we have that tension we pay attention.
2 | Instead of feeding it, we want to feel that alarm. We want to separate our brain from our body and just spend some time in our body. Say, "Hold on a minute thoughts. I'm going to feel. I'm going to feel this. I'm going to allow. I'm going to notice that it feels like a ball, a blue ball of lightning that is sending Sparks out into my body. It's very uncomfortable. I don't like it. But I can handle it. If we allow that to happen it can it will fade. If we feel it long enough it will fade after about 60 to 90 seconds.
Try it. You won't believe it. What the thing is that we have been resisting, that feeling, that we don't want to feel, will go away if we allow it to be there for about a minute to a minute and a half.
The next thing that we want to do is to stay separate we want to say okay I've got my body doing this thing but I'm going to notice what my thoughts are. I'm going to write some of those down or record them in some way. What are the thoughts? I'm worried about so much. Let's just get them scribed somewhere so that we can look at them. Separate them. We are not our thoughts. we are we have much more to us than just that ticker tape parade of thoughts going across our head. so let's just separate them out and get a little bit of space so we can look at them.
3 | The the next step is to focus compassion on our inner child. Well, that's a leap. So let me explain where that comes from.
A = Abuse. Often, in our childhood, we had alarms occur that we just didn't know how to handle. There was abuse it could be physical. It could be sexual. Something happened that just we could not handle it at that time. We just didn't have the skills.
L = Loss. Or we had a loss that we suffered could be a family member, a beloved pet, or a blanket, an item that was really important to us.
A = Abandonment. We could have been abandoned by our teachers. Maybe we were being bullied and no one was there to notice or to you know really take control of that situation. At that time, at that age, we could not solve.
R = Rejection. We've been rejected enough. We've been 'othered.' Imagine the times that our our autistic graduates were othered in school. It was probably you know on the regular.
M = Mature too early. We've been asked to mature too early to handle those types of situations. When they are being othered, they don't have the skills yet, we didn't have the skills yet as children to really understand what was happening and know what how to manage that.
A = Shamed. They're ashamed because they are different. They've known they're different for a while because they're just not going along with the the middle of the bell shaped curve. They're different and thank goodness they are who they are. We don't want to change them but they feel the shame for that.
These alarms come at our kids on the regular. So it's not hard for them to imagine a time in their earlier days when that younger child couldn't manage what was happening. We want to give it compassion. This is how we heal.
We imagine ourselves at that age. We figure out, we just can picture it, we can figure out what our thoughts were at that time, what what we were feeling at that time. The shame. You can just feel the blush come through your face of the shame of not doing it right or not being good enough.
Of course, at that time, we couldn't reject the school system. We didn't have the power to do that. Even if it was happening in our home, we couldn't reject our home.
So we turn it inward and we reject ourselves. That manifests itself today as JABS: judgment, abandonment, blame and shame of ourselves.
It's really interesting to notice that the source of that inner critic is probably childhood experiences that we didn't have the tools and skills to handle and felt like we weren't good enough.
Good to know! Imagine our children our graduates have this happening inside of their heads on the regular as well.
We don't want to get MAD. We don't want to take medications to numb, or go out and find addictions to escape like drinking or alcohol or screens or whatever it is, porn. We don't want to just distract ourselves that's where the screens come in that's where a lot of us distract ourselves. Food is another distraction.
We don't want to get mad. What we really want to do is learn from them. We need to stop rejecting ALARMS. This is a stretch. Stop rejecting and start loving those alarms for what they tell about us and the patterns that we have had since children that are just not working for us now.
Our patterns are not creating the life that we love. They are not moving us forward to take those right actions that are going to give us what we want in the long run.
We want to start thinking, "Oh, I have a choice. I can either win or learn. This is not a right or wrong choice anymore. It's a winning or a learn choice. This is how I'm going to take my life forward. I'm going to either win or I'm going to learn what's going on for me."
So these are the three steps.
1 | Find and feel our alarm
2 | Separate the alarm in our bodies from our thoughts up here.
3 | Focus on being compassionate for our younger child our younger self who came up with this these Solutions, doing the very best they could. They became patterns that may not be serving us today and that's um how we decondition those alarms.
These ideas are inspired by Dr Russell Kennedy who wrote the book Anxiety RX. It's just a wonderful explanation of what's going on. I learn from 12 other teachers that teach these concepts. But he packaged it in a way that I'm sharing with you today that I find very clear and easy to figure out how how we're going to apply this to our life.
He also has a online course MBRx, Mind Body prescription. that's only 100 bucks. Inside there are two wonderful meditations, one he calls a Yoga Nidra. He's borrowed this practice from the Eastern wisdom that will help us decondition our nervous system and enable us to rest and recover from the alarms in our body. So that we can heal ourselves from them happening. I just encourage you to um explore his resources and hopefully come into the Art of Adulting with your graduates so that we can really bring some of these lessons right to you at the right time so that you can solve the problems and outsmart the struggles together. Bye for now
