Transcript
A (0:02)
Welcome to youo Anxiety Toolkit. I'm your host, Kimberly Quinlan. This podcast is fueled by three main goals. The first goal is to provide you with some extra tools to help you manage your anxiety. Second goal, to inspire you. Anxiety doesn't get to decide how you live your life. And number three, and I leave the best for last, is to provide you with one be big fat virtual hug. Because experiencing anxiety ain't easy. If that sounds good to you, let's.
B (0:33)
Go stop white knuckling your anxiety and do this instead. Right now, if you are gripping the steering wheel, if you're clenching your jaw, or maybe you're just holding your breath, you are white knuckling your anxiety. And I need to tell you something. It is making everything worse. Now, we have a lot of research and I have a lot of clinical experience and evidence that show that white knuckling only fails. But I have some good news. We now know what to do instead. So today I want to share with you the hidden features, physical and mental signs that you are white knuckling through your anxiety, your panic, and your intrusive thoughts. I also want to show you why it feels like it's the only way that you can manage your anxiety. I want to talk about exactly what is not working. And I want to teach you exactly what to do instead, instead of white knuckling so that you aren't exhausted and completely defeated. Now I'm going to give you three practical exercises and very specific homework to help help you navigate anxiety, intrusive thoughts, and panic so that you can stop reinforcing that cycle and feel more confident and capable holding anxiety whenever it arises. So welcome. This is your anxiety toolkit. This is a podcast where I teach you everything I know about anxiety so that you can go and live your biggest, most beautiful life. My name is Kimberly Quindlen. I am an anxiety specialist and I am on a mission to help humans all over the earth suffer less with anxiety. My goal and my mission is if you're suffering less, you're living more. And that's what I want out of all of the work that I do now. Of course, as always, in every single thing we do at CBT school, including all of our online courses and all of the podcast episodes, we always talk about self compassion first. Always. We want to start with kindness. And every single time, as we proceed into these harder conversations, we proceed into doing hard things. We want to be kind and compassionate always first. That's going to be our first agenda. That is the biggest work that we are here doing. Over here in CBT school, we also want to remember to take small baby steps. The bigger the step, the more likely you are to give up, the more likely you are to lose yourself in those massive steps. They just feel so big. I'm a huge fan of baby steps steps, small baby steps, reasonable step that you can take over time, which lead to medium sized step, which lead to very, very big steps. Now let's talk first is so what is white knuckling? White knuckling is the act of trying to reduce pain or force control using tension and or resistance. Now, often there are three types of white knuckling. Number one, physical bracing against anxiety and intrusive thoughts and panic. There's mental suppression of thoughts and feelings and there's this powering true mentality that we will talk about as well. So let's talk about the physical signs that you might be white knuckling. And you're probably gonna laugh because you're probably doing some of these right as we speak. Number one is jaw clenching. Are you clenching your jaw together really tight? Are you shallow breathing or are you holding your breath? Sometimes I'll be in session with a client and I'll start to see that they're holding their breath and they keep holding their breath and they keep holding their breath. And I'll have to say, take a breath, take a second breathe out. Because naturally we are going to hold our breath when we're trying to resist or reduce anxiety. The next one is stomach tension. Maybe you're holding your tummy really tight or you're clenching your butt cheeks really tight. This is also very common. We also have shoulder tension. This is a huge one right now. Do a check in and I want you to drop your shoulders. You're probably holding them very, very tight. The last one is fist cleansing clenching. This is actually another really common one. Some people also furrow their brow, squeeze their brow or their forehead very tight. There are so many different ways we might do this. Clenching your quad muscles and your calf muscles as well. It's ultimately anything that you're clenching. Now we want to now move over to the mental signs that you're white knuckling. This might include forcing positive thoughts. It might include suppressing any quote unquote negative thoughts. It might be this constant self monitoring that you're doing of yourself and others and around you. It might be this sort of mentality of just don't think about it, trying not to think about it, suppressing thoughts. This is very common in ocd. Another one is trying to solve Things like going around and around and quite urgently and frantically trying to make a solution or come up with an answer. And the last one is hypervigilance. Now, many cases you can't control these behavior is. But in many cases you can. It's something that you're voluntarily doing. And hypervigilance is a big one. You're constantly looking around, when's the next scary thing? How can I prevent it? How can I make sure nothing bad's going to happen? That is another symptom of white knuckling. Now, I have a listener question here. And this whole episode was inspired by a listener who had written in and they had said, kimberly, do you have any episodes on feeling stuck with panic attacks? They said, I feel like I know how I should be responding to them and I am trying my best, but they still feel so uncomfortable. So it really doesn't feel like I'm making, quote, unquote, progress. It's just a lot of white knuckling, if that makes sense. And it made total sense. And this is, I think, what a lot of people here on the podcast might be feeling, which is why I wanted to highlight it, is you have the skills, you know what to do, you're trying your best, but it's still just so uncomfortable. And because of that, you don't feel like you're actually making progress. Or maybe you're not making progress. You're not getting any benefit from the skills that you're using. And so let's talk about how to do this. Now, first, we want to look at one big problem, which is why does it feel right to white knuckle? Why do we do it so instinctively? Why do we do it so automatically? Well, white knuckling is a natural survival response. If you had a car coming towards you, you would naturally brace yourself, you would naturally clench up. That is a normal response to having danger. But the problem here is your brain sees anxiety as danger. It thinks that just because you had a thought about something that is going wrong, that that must mean it is going wrong or it is an imminent threat. And again, that's why it feels so automatic and so out of your control in the beginning. Now, the other thing to remember here is we kind of have this faulty belief that if we have control, we'll be able to keep ourselves safe, that if we can just everything, well, then nothing bad will happen. But that's actually a false belief that we have. We also see that society rewards this idea of toughing things out, clenching through it, powering through it, moving through it at a fast rate and not slowing down at all. And we also, I know this is true for me, we also get some short term relief when we white knuckle, right? We night knuckle it and then we get through the hard thing and we go, oh, okay, okay, that worked, that worked. You know, the fact that I controlled this thing is what was the reason that nothing bad happened. But P S that's a lie. The next thing you to remember here is we want to be kind to ourselves and recognize that we all get triggered sometimes. And I don't want you to beat yourself up for having this very normal white knuckling response, right? I'm not here to tell you you're doing it wrong and you're bad for doing it wrong and you should be doing it better. We actually want to just acknowledge as we do with self compassion, like it makes complete sense that we knuckle it, right? Because our brain and our DNA has set us up to engage in white knuckling or the fight and flight response when we perceive danger. And I really place emphasis on that word, perceive danger. So what we want to really think about though is when we engage in this white knuckling behavior, we tend to get exhausted. The more we white knuckle, the more we clench, the more we grasp, the more we try and control, the more completely exhausted we feel. And that is because there is a vicious cycle that feeds us around and around when it comes to white knuckling. Now we have what we call the white knuckling exhaustion cycle. Let's talk about it. Number one, it starts with just good old fashioned anxiety or intrusive thoughts or panic attacks. So you have the onset of good old fashioned anxiety and intrusive thoughts and panic attacks. And our natural response is to white knuckle it. Now what happens here is when we white knuckle it, it does give us this temporary suppression of what's going on. It does give us a false sense of security and control. And like we are, you know, we could solve this one, we could get through this one. But what happens is if you right now clenched every muscle and I want you to do it, hopefully if you're driving, don't do this, but otherwise clench your fist, clench your nose, clench your jaw, clench your tummy, clench your shoulders, like you're really, really white knuckling, you're going to start to feel fatigued, your muscles are going to start to feel achy or knotted or uncomfortable or exhausted. That's what happens when we engage in white knuckling and what that does is it creates a cycle where now you feel less capable with coping because you're fatigued. You're using up all your energy sources on clenching instead of moving through to the next activity. And when that happens, we tend to have even more anxiety. You guys know, when we don't get enough sleep or when we're exhausted, we tend to cope less and we tend to reinforce that something is wrong. The thing to remember here too is if you have an intrusive thought, let's say you have OCD or you have an intrusive thought about a health anxiety or social anxiety or even ptsd. If you have an intrusive thought and you respond to it as if it is a fact, your body and your brain is going to continue to believe that all thoughts are facts and you're feeding that cycle as well. And P.S. we're going to talk about that here in a little bit. So there is a real cost to you engaging in this white knuckling. There is emotional exhaustion. There is physical attention and pain. There's a lack of confidence and a lack of mastery over your anxiety. There is decreased performance. I know for me, anytime I'm giving a presentation, if I'm tensing, I'm using my energy towards tensing instead of using my energy towards performing well. There's also a ton of less joy. There's a complete reduction in your ability to be present and joyful in the moment. So white knuckling, while it may feel effective, we know that it's not. We know that there are a lot of consequences to this behavior. And so when it all comes down to it, there's a very common saying that we use in therapy, which is what you resist, persists, what you try to push away or suppress or control will usually bubble up in some way. And the harder you fight anxiety, the stronger it gets. Now, this is sort of like a tug of war. Imagine you're in a tug of war with anxiety. You're pulling, then it's pulling. So you tighten your grip a little bit more and you tense up your. Your face. You're starting to feel exhausted. The thing is, anxiety can go all day. It doesn't care. It doesn't. It's not going to give up. It's going to keep going and going and going and you're going to start to get more and more exhausted. Now, we have a lot of science that shows that resistance actually triggers the threat response even more. It's like an on and an off switch. So the more you resist, the more you're turning on that threat response in your brain. So white knuckling actually sends the danger signal to your brain even more. Right. So it's even feeding that cycle even more than we originally thought. We also have research to show that your body can't tell the difference between a real threat and internal resistance. So if you're tensing, we could even maybe do an exercise where if you're resisting and clenching, monitoring your anxiety, you might actually find that you have more anxiety just by tensing and resisting and clenching and, and fighting and trying to control. Now we also know that by clenching and resisting triggers, we actually continually activate the sympathetic nervous system. That's the part of the nervous system that gets ramped up and speeds up. The parasympathetic nervous system is the part of your nervous system that slows us down. So we don't want to activate the sympathetic nervous system all day if we can avoid it. Because again, that's a lot of energy that gets consumed by activating that type of system and having it go while you're trying to enjoy your day. We also know that there is something called a rebound effect. Now what we want to think about here is just like a regular trampoline. If you jump heavily onto a trampoline, boom. You're going to pop up really fast, right? And that's the same with resistance. The more you pull something down, the more it's going to, to boing. Go up as high as we can go. A really great example of this is if you had a beach ball, or you were in a pool holding a beach ball and you pushed it down under the water. The further you push it down, the more it's going to boing. Pop up out of the water and go high. And that's the same with anxiety. Now I know you're kind of getting the point here, right? I can imagine. But what we're really trying to get at here is you cannot hold this stuff down forever. It will eventually pop up. And that's often what happens with panic. The more you try and resist it, the stronger the panic attack. And for the listener who wrote in that question, that probably explains a lot of why they don't feel like they're having progress. Because they clenching around the panic, they're tightening around the panic, making the panic worse. Now we have even more research to show that experiential avoidance, which is ultimately the experience of avoiding, is linked to worse outcomes. And we know now that acceptance based approaches show better results. And I'm going to teach you exactly how to do this right here and right now. Okay?