You're listening to Take Out Therapy with your host, Rebecca Hunter. If you're into personal growth and fascinated by the human condition like I am, stick with me. In the next few minutes, I'll break down a common personal growth topic and give you some straightforward ideas for change.
I'm a private practice therapist and online mental health educator, so I see a lot of popular topics both in and out of the therapy office that we all struggle with. I'm here to help with that. This podcast is not a substitute for therapy, but rather the musings of a therapist and an opportunity for information and a little bit of help.
Okay, let's get to work. Hello friend. Thanks for spending some time with me today in your quest for personal growth.
Today we're going to be taking a spin around the reality of anxiety. What do I mean? Well, I want to talk about some of the areas of life that having anxiety impacts and how. Because here's the deal.
So many people live with anxiety, but I don't think we really grasp the full impact of that. It's not easy. We know that.
It's not easy on the people who have anxiety. It feels awful. I'll vouch for you there.
But it's also not easy to live with someone who has anxiety. So I just want to talk about the impact of anxiety on a personal level, but also like let's think about it on a bigger level, right? Because if anxiety is an epidemic and it negatively impacts all these different areas of our life, then we got to solve this problem, my friend, or we're going to have bigger problems ahead. You see what I'm saying there? So let's dig into the reality of living with anxiety.
What are the areas of life that are affected by anxiety? And of course, in my short and sweet podcast, I will never be able to cover all the areas of life that are impacted by anxiety. But I'm going to kind of take a bigger view. Let's start out with like health and wellness, shall we? When people have anxiety, basically what happens to them is that their nervous system spends a lot of time out of whack.
Well, friend, that's not good for us. And it's not good for us in a myriad of ways. And so the things that we hear about like in the therapy office in terms of how people's health and wellness is affected by anxiety is basically like, I have headaches all the time.
My stomach feels terrible. A lot of kind of intestinal, like IBS and other digestive type things get kind of jacked up by anxiety. If we just talk about wellness in general, people that have anxiety don't tend to be people that spend a ton of time on a wellness plan.
I'll just give you a little clue right there. So what we find is that people end up at the doctor a lot because they have anxiety, which is why doctors are prescribing anxiety medications like never before. And you know what? I'm just going to say it.
I'll just, I'll just say it out loud. That is not the first course of action when you're dealing with anxiety. So I encourage people to look for a different way to deal with anxiety first before resorting to medication because there's a lot we can do actually, and not everybody benefits from going right to that prescription.
So yeah, health and wellness is a big area that I hear so much about. I mean, even on a very surface level, anxious people are exhausted because when we're anxious all the time, it's a big emotional burden and it's also a really big physical burden on us. So yes, our health and wellness really suffers.
You know, one of the other areas of life that's really affected by anxiety, and I think that my life was impacted this way for sure, when I had anxiety is parenting. You know, the problem with anxiety is that it puts us in this heightened state of awareness all the time. And if you're anything like me, the way you respond to a heightened state of awareness when it comes to little kids is not pretty, right? So I hear a lot from parents that they feel like they're not quite parenting to the level that they feel like they can be because they're short tempered and they're really impatient.
They're kind of snappish, right? Or they're just a nervous, worried wreck. You know, I just, I totally remember that. And my kids are 16 months apart.
They're grown now, but I just remember being so nervous all the time, like, get down from there, don't touch that, move away from there. You know, because of my own anxiety, I tended to be more of a nervous Nelly mom. Yeah, so it's kind of important to understand that anxiety impacts our ability to parent the way we want to parent.
You know, it really impacts our ability to be present. And that not only affects parenting, but also it affects our partnerships, our relationships and our level of intimacy, right? So if we just talk about what kind of those closer relationships, I don't mean necessarily only like sexual intimacy, but rather just emotional intimacy and being really close emotionally to people as well, right? It affects our ability to do that because when we're, you know, dealing with an elevated nervous system and we're feeling really emotionally dysregulated, it's kind of hard to be like a good partner, right? Maybe we're kind of naggy or we don't speak up about things like we should. You know, we're worried, maybe we go over and over and over things in our minds.
We tend to overthink our relationships. You know, there's a lot of communication issues that happen between anxious people and their partners. A lot of times, like when people come in to do some couples work, one person might be anxious and their communication skills aren't helpful to closeness in their relationship.
So it totally wiggles its way into the cracks of our relationships, which is such a bummer, right? And not only like our romantic relationships, but also like our friendships, right? Because when you have anxiety, you can't do all the stuff that everybody else does, right? You kind of have to say no a lot because it's exhausting and because it just puts a lot of limitations on your life, right? And so you'll notice that anxiety impacts all these different areas, right? Even maybe sometimes people's jobs, again, I'm not going to be able to touch on every single thing that anxiety touches because it does, it like worms its way into the cracks and the crevices of our lives. But it's definitely impacts people's jobs, right? It's really hard to feel like you're doing a good job or feel like you're getting what you need from your job when you're in a constant state of emotional churn, my friend. So it's not necessarily that you're messing up or that you're not good enough or all the things, right? That come up and through with anxiety.
It's really that you have anxiety and that might be getting in your way in terms of figuring out like how your job's going, whether you like it or not, whether it's healthy or good for you, right? So like on this deeper level, I'm going to go, I'm going to tell you kind of that anxiety affects a very big area of your life and that is your relationship with yourself. Anxiety is a drag to be around, right? And you're stuck with you. And I felt this way when I was anxious too.
It kind of puts us in this position of being stuck with somebody who we don't thoroughly enjoy and so we start to kind of get down on ourselves. We start to be really hard on ourselves about the fact that we're anxious in the first place, right? It eats away at our confidence in our life and our ability to just be like, the answer is yes all the time, right? It makes us have to think hard about what we want to do with our lives, what we are capable of and that does eat away at our relationship with ourself. It's very frustrating to have anxiety.
It's a little bit victimizing, frankly. And I guess my question for people is always like, what's your internal dialogue about that? Like how do you talk to yourself about the fact that you have anxiety, that some days are really, really hard for you, right? So it's, you know, not to sort of say, and so there it is, but rather to say like, just a look at that friend and understand that when you have anxiety, it's not as simple as like I have anxiety and that's that. No, you're actually have something going on in your life that is pervasive, that is eating away at your structure of your life, your relationship with yourself, your relationship with your kids, your relationship with other people, your health and wellness.
I could go on, but I won't, you know? And it puts us in this position of living a life in which we're not really able to like live our values. I promise you, I never wanted to be an impatient, snappish mother, but when I had anxiety, I absolutely was, right? And when I recovered from anxiety, I had to course correct there with my kids, right? To teach them about the new culture of our house. Because here's the deal, you guys, if you're able and most people are, when you're able to heal from anxiety, you take back your power in your life and then you get to decide, you get to decide what kind of job, what kind of career, what kind of relationships, what kind of parent you're going to be and how you're going to behave in your relationship with yourself, how you're going to treat yourself every single day.
When we heal, we take back our power. That's why I'm trying to help you guys, because I believe that we can all heal from anxiety. And I also believe that the process of healing from anxiety is like the ultimate empowerment.
So I wish that for you. I hope it feels really validating to hear about kind of what is the reality of living with anxiety. If you're somebody with anxiety, hopefully you did some head nodding today.
And stay tuned for next week, because next week I'm going to dig into recovery from anxiety. How do we heal from anxiety? I talk about this a lot. It's very different than coping with anxiety.
I'll give you that much. I'm going to talk to you about how it's different than coping with anxiety and why it's completely possible to heal from anxiety. It is a step by step.
It's important that you kind of like work with your brain in the process. And I'll talk to you about that. And it is indeed a step by step process that you have to sort of know what step you're on, which I think stymies a lot of people.
So tune in next week and we'll keep the conversation going. And in the meantime, my friend, take a little break here and there. Get some time to yourself and take really, really good care of you.
Hey there, if you're someone who experiences anxiety on a regular basis, and you're kind of in that funny in-between of like, should I go to therapy? Should I take the medication? Like it's time to get to work on the anxiety. What should I do? And you're finding kind of a stuckness there. Let me present you with another option.
As a therapist, what I know is not everybody needs therapy to heal anxiety. That's why I've developed some online classes to help you kind of dig into the deeper roots of why you have anxiety and help you to start a very comprehensive brain-based and research-backed way to heal from anxiety. If you're interested in learning more, just check out my website.
The link is in the show notes, but here's the deal. Anxiety is a solvable problem. So move towards solution, whatever that looks like for you.
If you like the podcast, it really helps this project if you subscribe, send it along to a couple of friends and keep listening. We need more mental health education people. That's what I'm doing here.
I have a lot of unpaid content that I put out like this podcast, but I also have two paid programs. One for people who want to stop overthinking everything to death. And I also have an in-depth program for anxiety recovery.
So if you want to dig into some work with me, get in touch. You can find me at rebeccahuntermsw.com. That's an MSW because I have a master's in social work. A lot of people ask about that.
And yes, I am a therapist, but this show is not meant as therapy, but rather education. Thanks for listening.
