24: Managing Headline Anxiety

Welcome to the Women's Success Coach Podcast. A podcast created to inspire growth and to help you learn, achieve, and evolve in your life ongoing regardless of your age. I'm your host, certified coach, and licensed therapist Karen Vincent, and I'm here to guide you and provide you with concrete tips and strategies you can implement in your life. I'm also here to inspire you, challenge you, and cheer you on so that you can create the life of your dreams and beyond. Thank you for tuning into the women's success coach podcast. I'm recording the shorty podcast episode about headline anxiety as a result of witnessing a recent spike in fear, uncertainty, stress, anger, anxiety, and a whole host of challenging emotions related to hard things happening in the world. It is my hope that you can take one of the strategies I share and start to implement it right away to start to get some relief. Then, you can add in as many other strategies based on what you think will be most helpful for you. And, if you find the suggestions I'm offering you helpful, please share this episode with anyone else you know who may be struggling during these uncertain and scary times. Hey there, my friend. As you heard in the introduction, I'm recording the shorty podcast episode to offer you some suggestions for dealing with headline anxiety. As you know, there's a lot going on in the world that's shocking, scary, sad, and well, just plain overwhelming. And while I'm certainly not an expert in what's happening in the world, why it's happening or what will happen next, I am an expert in helping people manage their stress and anxiety. so I thought I would offer you some strategies you can start to implement right away if you're like so many of us experiencing a whirlwind of challenging emotions. When anxiety and stress increase, our nervous systems get revved up, and when this happens, for many people, breathing becomes shallow. Instead of taking deep breaths from the abdomen, we take shallow breaths from our upper chest or throat area. And when this happens, it can further rev up our nervous system, which then revs up our thinking patterns, which creates more anxiety and stress. It can essentially become a vicious loop. So, the first strategy for managing headline anxiety is to intentionally take slow, deep breaths that will help you slow down your nervous system and allow you to take those full, deep breaths. So right now, if you're in a place where you're able to breathe with me, I invite you to take five breaths with me. I'm going to count them for you as we go, and the count will go like this. It will be a deep breath in for a count of five, hold the breath for a count of seven, slowly exhale for a count of eight, And we'll repeat that five times. And if you can't do the activity right now, you can listen as I go through it and come back to it later when you're able to focus on this breathing technique undistracted. So if you're able, sit or stand comfortably and slowly breathe in for a count of one, two, three, four, five, hold. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, exhale 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, inhale 2, 3, 4, 5, hold 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, exhale 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Inhale, 2, 3, 4, 5. Hold, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Exhale, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Inhale, 2, 3, 4, 5. Hold, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, exhale 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, inhale 2, 3, 4, 5. Hold 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, exhale 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Do you feel calmer? I hope so. This is a strategy you can use anywhere at any time and you can do as many rounds as you want or need. When you slow down your nervous system and take control of your breathing, you're better able to manage your anxiety. So this is always a good place to start if you notice your anxiety heightened. Next, I want you to do an assessment of what you're consuming throughout your days and weeks. Are you watching a lot of news and hearing the same information over and over? Are you on social media, doom scrolling and reading posts and comments that are full of hate, conflicting information, and that promote further uncertainty and fear? Are you spending a lot of time talking to others about what's happening in the world? And if you're doing any or all of these things, you are 100 percent normal, my friend. Your brain, just like my brain, does not like uncertainty. And right now, there's a lot of uncertainty about the state of the world, about safety in general, and about what will happen next. And when uncertainty is present, it's natural to try to get answers so that you can be prepared for what will happen next. However, the reality is that there's a lot going on, and we don't know what's going to happen, and exposing yourself to the same stories or debates over and over doesn't bring about any further certainty. Instead, it only creates additional anxiety, anger, sadness and fear. Now, I want to be clear that I'm not suggesting that you cut off all news and social media. But what I am suggesting is that there's a difference between being informed and being oversaturated with challenging news, especially when things are outside of your control. Overexposure to negative things can significantly impact your overall emotional well being and not only create anxiety, but it can also increase depressive symptoms and trauma symptoms. It can lower your ability to cope with challenging situations and it can also cause you to miss out on some positive things that may be happening in your life at the same time, you're also witnessing or directly dealing with very negative things. What I have seen help with headline anxiety is to set some boundaries for yourself by limiting your exposure to news and media. And some ways to do this are:#1: Turn off notifications. Stop reacting to your phone every time you see a notification pop up. This creates uncertainty, anxiety, and stress.#2: Schedule set times when you watch or read the news. Get that information you need to be informed, but don't allow yourself to watch and listen to the same things over and over. Try to stick to 10 to 15 minutes or less.#3: Have no phone zones. This may mean that phones are never allowed when you're eating or no phones are allowed in the bedroom or some other room of your house.#4: Have no phone times. Have times of the day when you take a break from your phone. If this is hard for you, use a site blocker, move apps off your home screen, or even delete certain apps from your phone so that it takes more effort to get to them, which will allow you to pause and consider if you really want to be using them.#5: Mute, pause, or unfollow social media channels or individuals who seem to be triggering challenging emotions for you.#6: Balance out what you're consuming online. Be sure that there's some positive things you're consuming, even during challenging times. As you know, social media will feed you more of what you spend time looking at, so do what you can to control the algorithm so that it offers you a balance of things instead of only things that are challenging to consume.#7: Seek support from others and give support to others, but don't get stuck in only talking about horrific things happening in the news. Set boundaries as is needed. Whether you need to let someone know that you want to be able to talk about things other than the news or you need to let someone know that certain topics are not allowed due to differences of opinions, set those boundaries and protect what you're letting in. 8: Practice self care. Be sure that you're nurturing yourself when you're experiencing negative emotions like anger, fear, anxiety, sadness, and uncertainty. Trying to escape with food, alcohol, or screens may pause the negative emotions, but it won't make them go away. Instead, do the things that nurture your mind, your body, and your relationships.#9: Control your thinking. If you notice that you have ruminating thoughts or racing thoughts that focus on worst case scenarios, be intentional about noticing them and managing them. To do this, Set a timer and take 5 minutes or so each day and write down what you're thinking that's causing the negative feelings. Use pen and paper and a notebook if possible, and when the timer goes off, finish writing any remaining thoughts and then close the notebook. When you do this, you're telling your brain that you know what you wrote down was important and that you have it on paper to go back to, so that you don't need to think about it over and over and over throughout the day and night. An added step to this, if you want, once you get those thoughts out of your head, you can read them back and look at them from a different perspective. You can ask yourself questions like,"Are my thoughts 100 percent true?" Or,"Is there another way to think about this?" Or,"Is my thinking about this helping me or anybody else?" In challenging these unhelpful thinking patterns, You may be able to get them to stop completely.#10: Control what you can control. Ask yourself, is there anything that you can do to help that feels meaningful, and if so, consider doing it. If not, try to let go of, or at least limit your time thinking about things that are outside of your control. And finally,#11: Do what you can to keep your routines and life in general in order. When lots of things are out of your control, don't allow yourself to lose control of the things you actually can control. Take care of yourself, keep your surroundings clean and in order, and connect with people who make you feel good. So as I say in all my episodes, I don't want you to just listen. I want you to take some action so that you feel better. I also want you to share this episode with anyone you know who may benefit from one or more of the strategies that I shared. All of the suggestions and strategies I provided are in the show notes, so you can go back and reference them and as a quick review, consider what would help you. Do you need to turn off notifications? Do you need to limit when you check the news and social media by setting a timer, making apps harder to access, having no phone zones, or by limiting the overall time you allow yourself to check news and social media each day? Do you need to mute or unfollow certain accounts or individuals? Do you need to intentionally make sure you're consuming positive information? Do you need to set boundaries with others about how much you'll talk about things happening in the world? Or do you need to refrain from talking about certain topics completely? Do you need to seek out more positive support? Do you need to practice better self care and do the things that nurture you? Do you need to dump your thoughts out of your head through journaling? And finally, do you need to spend more time focusing on the things you can control versus the things that are outside of your control? I hope you do what you can to help yourself feel better during these challenging and uncertain times. And if you want daily support to help you manage your mind and your anxiety or other challenging emotions, go ahead and follow me on Instagram. You can search by the hashtag KarenVincentSolutions or Best Boss Lady Life. Until next time, take care and be well. That's a wrap. You should be proud of yourself for investing time in you, which is so critical for success and for overall life fulfillment. I look forward to having you join me for my next episode. And in the meantime, go click that subscribe button so you'll know when it's released, and you can also follow me on Instagram at Best Boss Lady Life that's at Best Boss Lady Life on Instagram. Also, remember that whatever it is that you're working on, you've got this and I'm here cheering you on.