Anxious Minds, Calm Solutions: 3 Tips to Tame Anxiety

In this episode of Penney for Your Thoughts, Penney is joined by mindfulness expert Dr. Sylvia Kalicinski for a 20-minute deep dive into understanding and managing anxiety. Together, they explore the surprising difference between “good anxiety” and “bad anxiety,” offering insights into why anxiety isn’t always the enemy. Dr. Sylvia shares three practical, science-backed tips to help you calm your mind and regain control when anxiety strikes. Whether you’re navigating everyday stress or deeper emotional challenges, this episode offers powerful tools to bring balance and clarity to your life. Tune in and take the first step toward a calmer you! http://www.drsylviak.com
http://www.megginsonmethod.com

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, it's Penny Meganson from the Meganson Method, and welcome to Penny for Your Thoughts, where we discuss how our thoughts and mindset affect our health and happiness. I am joined here today by Dr. Sylvia to discuss anxiety. Welcome, Dr. Sylvia. Thank you so much for having me. So tell us a little bit about yourself and your training. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

I have a PhD in family therapy, and I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist in the US. Interesting. Now I'm working in Geneva, Switzerland, and seeing clients here. So I still maintain my clientele in the US as well as Geneva. And my passion really is to help people dig into self-awareness, explore parts of themselves, better understand and contextualize symptoms of anxiety and other strong emotions that can be distressing. And I'm also writing a book called Lonely AF. It's all about loneliness, how it affects us, but really on a deeper level, it's an invitation to get to know yourself on a much deeper level. So I'm on a mission to help destigmatize mental health, especially destigmatize anxiety and loneliness, because I think it's definitely they are anxiety and loneliness are two, I would say two universal emotions that truly um affect us all.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

So anxiety, what exactly is it? What's the science behind it?

SPEAKER_01 1:31

I think in simple terms, anxiety truly is our universal way of survival. It is an emotion that we experience, but I think on a deeper level, like on a brain health level, I'm not a neuroscientist, but if I could put neuroscience into layman's terms, I would say anxiety is our natural response to a perceived or real threat. And there's a gland inside our brain called the amygdala that's designed exactly for that, to alert our body, our nervous system, when we perceive a real or imagined threat. And the amygdala speaks with our downstairs, I say downstairs brain, that's a somatic psychology word, but speaks to our primitive parts of our brain that will automatically go into a fight or flight phase. And as clinicians and researchers have developed the understanding of a trauma response, we now understand the brain doesn't just go into a fight or flight response. It can go into a freeze response and it also can go into a fawning response. Fawning is basically any attempt to avoid conflict. Some people use the word people pleasing, um, but in general, fawning could look like someone avoiding conflict, stonewalling could also look like someone becoming very nice and willing to please you in any way that they can at the sake of their own needs. And so fawning, freezing, fighting back, or running away are all automatic responses and involuntary responses to anxiety. When I say involuntary, it's not like you pause and say, hmm, in this moment, should I run away? Or maybe I should freeze. Your body involuntarily picks whatever it thinks is best for your survival. Um, anxiety, I think, in the, I would say, early age of our brain evolution, was something that we experienced in certain moments where our lives were being threatened. Um, so a little exaggerated example is saber-tooth lion coming our way, or let's say there's an you know an enemy coming in to kill us, you know, we're gonna feel that anxiety. But in modern terms, in modern times, we are experiencing anxiety daily from all the notifications on your phone, from all the WhatsApp groups on your phone, social media, you know, whatever age group you are, whether you're someone who fits into the Snapchat community or someone in Instagram or Facebook, all those likes or not getting likes could trigger something in your brain that says, the way I'm perceived by society is important to me. If I'm not being liked by society or my friends, my need to connect, my need to belong is being threatened, and you're gonna feel anxiety. Um, and then all the other natural stressors between economic stressors, traffic, food. I mean, there's so many things triggering our stress. So I do believe globally, as a global community, we're experiencing heightened levels of anxiety. Um, I know for me, the most uh recent research that I've read in terms of the United States, 63% of Americans are diagnosed with anxiety. Those are the ones diagnosed because there's a ton of people that still feel stigmatized by the word anxiety, or maybe are not diagnosed. But in general, I think anxiety is our natural way of surviving, and it's also a universal emotion that so many of us feel in modern times.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

And so there is a level of normal anxiety, you know, when you have a big presentation or you're doing a sport. So some anxiety can be good, right? Absolutely. But when does it become problematic? When is it something that you should look into getting help for or trying to find a way to manage?

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Absolutely. I think when you look at good anxiety versus bad anxiety, it is similar to looking at the concept of stress. You know, stress is looked at in two categories: eustress, the positive stress, getting married, graduating, you know, from high school or college, buying a new home, having a baby, winning the lottery, all of these, you know, are forms of eustress. And then you have distress, which is the negative stress, which could be losing your job, losing your home, losing a baby, you know, having a miscarriage, not having enough food, um, living in a violent neighborhood where your basic needs are at risk, losing your home to a fire, like we've seen, you know, in the Los Angeles area. So that's distress. The problem with distress and long-term stress, it wreaks havoc on your nervous system. And the same thing with anxiety. If you're a person living with high functional anxiety, or let's say, when I say high functional anxiety, that's somebody who just on a day-to-day basis feels more anxious than others, and they've just learned how to either mask it or cope with it. Um other forms I think of anxiety are people who have experienced PTSD or CPTSD. And the difference between PTSD and CPTSD is CPTSD stands for complex post-traumatic stress disorder. These are people who've experienced long-term stress, ongoing stress for years, and there was no clear ending. And people who experience that long-term stress really also experienced an impact in their nervous system, their brain functioning, et cetera. So the negative stress and the negative anxiety, I think can lead to a lot of disorders that are not really seen. Let's say, for example, digestive disorders, um, autoimmune disorders. Um, it could lead to, you know, certain phobias, um, you know, fear of socializing, a fear of leaving your house. Um, it could lead to, you know, fear of eating eating certain foods. I think just long-term stress and long-term anxiety can lead to debilitating behaviors that in essence are designed to avoid the anxiety. And here's for me, I think, I guess the paradox of anxiety, especially working as a clinician in hospital settings and also in private practice. Most people want to avoid feeling anxious. And we are all clever at doing it. One thing I also learned is that the body is extremely good at hiding um illness, right? And so humans are also good at hiding anxiety. Yet the paradox is all the behaviors that we create for ourselves that we think, oh, this is gonna help me feel less anxious because I'm gonna avoid that trigger or that event or that setting that's gonna make me more anxious. The avoidance of it is actually what increases it, which compounds it and then leads to more negative effects of anxiety. So let's say if you're afraid of leaving your home and that develops into agoraphobia, and then you're not leaving, well, your brain is not receiving that stimulation it needs in the limbic system. You're not receiving that um human-to-human contact. Your anxiety increases, and then it just becomes a vicious cycle.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Okay, so what are three tips that you could give our listeners that could really help them in that situation when they start to feel the anxiety so that they can manage it, either before it happens as a way of knowing this might be a situation where I might have anxiety, so it's something that they can do so it prevents it, or what do they do when they're in it? Okay.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

My first strategy is to name it. This is a concept borrowed from narrative psychology by a clinician named Michael White, he was from Australia. And him and other clinicians developed this technique. If you can name the feeling, right, or name the problem, you give it a name, you separate it from your identity, you separate it from who you are. So, for example, a cognitive-based therapy application would be this is anxiety, or the thought that I feel anxious just went through my head. So when you thought label or label a thought, or you name the emotion, it creates a separation. And in terms of narrative psychology, it's called externalizing the problem. So a very, I would say, kind of uh non-traditional um way of working with anxiety would be give it a different name. We use anxiety all the time. I'm so anxious, I feel so anxious. I'm, oh my gosh, I have anxiety or I have high anxiety. We have used the word so much. So give it another word. Like one of my cases that I was working with at Nova Southeastern University was with um a 14-year-old. She had a lot of anxiety, her mother had a lot of anxiety, and I felt that the family system wore anxiety like a badge. Like, we all have anxiety. My mother had anxiety, my grandmother had anxiety. I said, What if we give it a different name? Let's call it waggaboo. And they looked at me like I was the strangest clinician on earth. And I said, I know it sounds weird. But instead of saying, I have anxiety, what if you give it a name and you say I have wagaboo? The connotation is different. Your brain associates a different meaning to it, and it doesn't have that same cortisol flush. Because when you say, Oh my gosh, I'm feeling so anxious, your body knows what that word means. And I think you actually release more cortisol. So if you say, Oh, wagaboo's here, and people, well, I don't think the strategy is to be used openly with others, but quietly in your head. So by giving anxiety different names, whether it's wagaboo or I don't know, um, I don't know, cauliflower, whatever, just some funny weird name that doesn't have an emotional attachment to it, it starts to separate it. So once you name it, you are practicing awareness, right? The Hawthorne effect. The Hawthorne effect is when our behavior is being observed, the very behavior starts to change. So use it towards your anxiety. When you start to name it, this is anxiety, and then you observe it. Okay, in this moment, anxiety is here or wagaboo is here, and in this moment, I don't want to leave the house. You're observing the behavior. So when you start to create that observing effect, the very nature of the behavior will change. Second tip I would use is called my body technique, B-O-D-Y. It stands for four words. Breathe. So if you're listening, go ahead and take a deep inhale through your nose. We can do it together. Penny, inhale through your nose. Exhale like a haw sound. You can do that two more times, inhale through your nose. And now look around the room, and with the letter O, you're gonna observe three colors, three sounds, and three objects, and name them out loud as you observe them.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Red, green, black. Candle, table, chair. Birds chirping, a dog barking, and the buzzing of the computer. I'm imagining. Okay, the buzzing of the computer. Taking uh a clock. And some birds chirping in the distance.

SPEAKER_01 12:40

And then I'll take a slower inhale through your nose.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

And a slower exhale to your mouth.

SPEAKER_01 12:48

Now scan your body and what's the difference between when you imagine the sounds versus actually waiting to hear the sounds and name them.

SPEAKER_00 12:57

I think it gets you focused more internally because you really have to quiet your mind to listen to the subtle things around you. It's kind of mindfulness, isn't it? Yeah. So it tunes you in. I I could see how this could be really useful even for a student who's having test anxieties. So you just stop what you're doing, name what you're feeling, look around the room and name those colors, name the sounds, uh, the objects, and and then you know, it kind of refocuses you and you're able to then start again. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:28

And what would you say is the difference between how you feel in your body compared to when we first started the podcast?

SPEAKER_00 13:35

I would say I feel more grounded. Okay. Yeah, that's probably the main word that I would give it. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 13:43

So that's exactly what I designed it for was to create a sense of groundedness and it's an absolute application of mindfulness. From a brain science perspective, when you're anxious, your amygdala is already triggered, right? So you usually have a breakdown in your ability to use any kind of skills or tools. So practicing body is really important to practice it when you're not really anxious, practicing it when you you feel that you're kind of like at a state of you know equilibrium. The more you practice when you're not stressed out or anxious, the better or the easier it will be to access this, access it when you are anxious. And what happens is that when the amygdala is activated, we're in that involuntary response. We're either frozen, reacting, we're wanting to either fawn or run away. When you're using the body skill, you're getting the executive functioning of the brain back on. You're opening that prefrontal cortex and you're saying, okay, wait, stop. Let me notice three colors: blue, white, green, three objects: couch, pillow, sweater. And then the sound, listening to the sound really drops you into that task orientation of your brain. And that actually helps regulate the emotional part of your brain. So when you're focusing on the sound, so I'm gonna do it right now, I hear like a white noise, like that kind of static of the silence in the room, a car outside, and me moving in the chair. And my body naturally just wants to take a deeper breath. So the body skill is a wonderful way to use pre-anxiety and during anxiety. But again, it won't work if you just wait to use it when you're super anxious. The more you practice it, the more that you're able to practice what is fundamental in mindfulness, which is attentional control. Most of us experience anxiety because our attention is focused on something that we are applying the meaning to that provokes anxiety. So, for example, if I am a student and I think I'm gonna fail my math test, the fear of failure and applying the meaning, if I fail the exam, my parents will be disappointed. If I fail the exam, my GPA will go down. If I fail the exam, I won't go to the college I want to go to. So all of those applications of the meaning to the event increases my anxiety because it impacts my value system. And so that leads me to my third tip. Know your values. Most of us don't really think about what our values are or what's important to us. So I'd ask you to write down or just think about it right now. What are three things that are most important to you in your life right now? Like for me, for example, one of the most important things for me is to experience more of a peace of mind because I have such an incredible imagination and I'm usually a person that does think thoughts that fall into the category of catastrophic thinking. You know, I can exaggerate things quickly in my mind and think of all the worst-case scenarios, which then leads me to living under a, I would say, high core of soul-driven brain and body. So when I can bring my attention to something in the present, three colors, three sounds, three objects, I'm creating a brain hack, helping my brain reorient itself to what's happening in the now. And I'm getting out of all those narratives, I'm getting all out of all the storytelling that I tell myself when I'm in that cycle of anxiety. And so, how does this tie back to values? If you can go back to your values, so for example, peace of mind. Okay, so I could say it makes sense that I would feel anxious right now because peace of mind is important to me. Like last night, for example, my husband was flying to Poland. I felt so much anxiety, right? And it makes sense that I would feel anxious because his safety is important to me. And so I'm feeling anxious because I'm like, well, he hasn't flown in a while. And I, you know, my anxious thoughts lead to these catastrophic thoughts. So what helped me last night is I named it in my head. My my son was eating dinner. He's like, Mom, are you okay? Because he he's very perceptive. And I said, Yeah, I'm fine. He goes, You look tired, which I think what he really was trying to say is you look worried, which I absolutely was. It was the first time I felt this worried about him flying. And so quietly in my head, I'm like, this is anxiety. This is catastrophic thinking. Because of course I was thinking of the plane blowing up, like, of course, like worst case scenario. I thought of his funeral, I thought of all these horrible things. I mean, that's just what catastrophic thinking can do. And I said, okay, this is anxiety, this is catastrophic thinking. And as my son was eating, I looked at three colors, three sounds, three objects, and I brought myself back. And then I to kind of alleviate myself from that sense of shame or that helplessness, like, why can't I just get rid of this anxiety? You bring in the mindfulness and you shift your attention from the worst-case scenario to your value and you humanize the experience. It makes sense that I would feel anxious because my husband's safety is important to me. It makes sense that I would feel anxious because our family unit is important to me. It makes sense that I would feel anxious because I don't have any other family here in Switzerland. And so then it kind of reduces that additional anxiety that comes with the helplessness. And so three steps I'll recap first is name it, give it a name, simply say this is anxiety, or give it a funny name, like this is waggaboo. Um, number two, um, use the body skill. Get straight into the um four steps, breathe, take three deep inhales and exhales, observe three colors, three sounds, three objects, name them. And as you're naming them out loud, the language is helping you reduce anxiety. And then third, tell yourself it makes sense. Makes sense that I would feel this way because, and then name your value, because going to a good college is important to me, because um safety is important to me, because peace of mind is important to me, because health, etc., whatever it is. And yeah, those are my three tips.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

That is so great. That's so helpful. I can understand how the last tip really gives you the permission to feel what you're feeling. So instead of avoiding it and running away from it or feeling more anxiety about having the anxiety, you're actually explaining it and understanding it for yourself. Um, so it makes it almost okay to feel that. And maybe um it can over time allow you to sort of know when it's going to happen and um and be able to use that step too, where you name the colors and the objects and all of that because you understand, okay, this is why I'm feeling this, and I understand why. Okay, here we go. Waggaboo's happening. Yeah, I'm not scared. And I love uh using sort of comedy in these moments. Humor, I think, really works for me. Maybe it doesn't work for everybody, but I would just give it a name like Mary or Bob or something. It's like, okay, Bob's here. Okay, welcome, Bob. I know what this is gonna be like. Okay, I'm gonna get myself out of this and um, you know, kind of bring it on, Bob. Yeah. And so I love that. I love these three tips. I hope um all of you listening can try this out. And um, I think it's great to use it when you don't really need it in the beginning, just to really get into this daily practice where it's just easy. And then when you actually start to feel like you need it, you already know what to do and you kind of go into it like it's a habit rather than just waiting until that moment and then going, oh, I I just couldn't think about anything. I was feeling so anxious. Um, do it when you don't need it, when you're bored, when you're sitting in traffic, that sort of thing. Just get into a habit of it. And um, and then you'll be able to use it when you need it. Um, I think that was great. And thank you so much, Dr. Sylvia. And thank you, listeners. And don't forget to follow me at Meganson Method on Instagram and Facebook, and feel free to leave a review.