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Your Anxiety Toolkit - Practical Skills for Anxiety, Panic & Depression
460 Stop White Knuckling Your Anxiety (Do This Instead)
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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.
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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?
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To struggle all alone.
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Big hugs and now let's get back to the show.
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So let's go back to the listener questions. They said, I feel like I know how I should be responding. I'm trying my best, but they're still so uncomfortable and it doesn't feel like progress. It's just a lot of white knuckling. So now we're starting to understand why they don't feel like they've made any progress. So now let's talk about the shift. That's what you're here for, right? To get that gold information so that you can go on and live the best life you can where fear doesn't interfere. So the shift I want you to make is allowing. What allowing means is you're creating space for feelings and thoughts and sensations without resistance. Now, what this means is you're acknowledging reality and what's happening. You're removing any internal resistance that might be physical or mental. You're working with your discomfort, not against it. Right? You're working with it. And you're letting anxiety, panic and intrusive thoughts move through you like waves of an ocean. They will rise, but they will fall. Nothing that goes up will stay up. It has to come down eventually. Right? And that's what we want to do. Now what I want to remind you is what knuckling is not giving up. It's not letting anxiety control you and it's not staying stuck and it's not weakness. A lot of people think allowing is a weakness, but that's actually not what we're talking about. There is a three pillar framework that I want you to Follow. When it comes to managing white knuckling, number one is again, acknowledge, acknowledge what's going on. I'm going to teach you how to do this here in a second, then allow and then redirect. So what we can see now is in that listener's question, the one line that I really want to zero in on is they said, I know how to respond, I'm trying my best, but they're still so uncomfortable. And the solution there is to move towards willingness. Now, in all of our courses, we always talk about skills that you're going to need to increase that ability to allow willingly to have discomfort. In your anxiety and panic. Toolkit, we have a whole module called skills that will change your life. Your OCD toolkit, we have another module very similarly, which will be showing you the mindfulness and the self compassion skills that you're going to need. But for right now, I'm going to give you a little bit of an inside view of what that looks like and it involves willingness. Now I want to give you a little bit of a story. When I was new to becoming a therapist and I just started treating ocd, I was a little baby intern, we actually used to use what's called the sudscale. The sudscale is subjective units of distress. And it's a scale where clients would come in and say, my anxieties at an 8 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10 or a 5 out of 10 or a 0 out of 10. And we used to determine that success, success of work we were doing was based on whether their anxiety was coming down. But what we've found since then with research is rating your suds scale. Looking at how much anxiety you have actually makes it worse because it puts so much attention on whether the anxiety is going up or down or, you know, sideways that it actually creates more distress. So what we did instead is we don't talk about suds anymore. Instead, I've found it's much more helpful to talk about clients with the willingness scale. How willing out of 10 are you to feel this feeling now? Often when they check in, they're like, oh goodness, a nine and eight, I don't know. And then I will say, is there a way I can get you down to maybe like a. So often clients will say, I don't know, I'm like, at a 6, maybe a 5. I'm not very willing to feel that feeling. And so then what I'm going to say is, okay, how can I get you to increase that willingness? How can I Get you from a five to a six. What would you need to do to become a seven? What would that feel like? And often they'll say, well, I don't know. I'd have to drop my shoulders or I'd have to let the feeling be there. I'd have to stop holding my breath. I'd have to let a thought come and go without judging it. That's the work of willingness. And when you can master that skill, you are going to be on your way to. So the listener who wrote this question, your main goal is to focus on the willingness. You've been putting everything together so beautifully. Now we zero in on willingness. So let me show you how we would do that using the your anxiety toolkit methods. So first we want to practice just acknowledging. Acknowledging is ultimately where you name what you're feeling without judgment. The not judging is so important. So you're going to notice the sensation, right? You're going to name it. So it might be, this is anxiety. Or you might say, I notice my chest is tight, or I notice I'm holding my breath, or I'm noticing how I'm clenching my jaw, right? And then we're going to practice non judgment. We're going to say, okay, this tension is anxiety. This is not danger. I'm going to let it be there. Or I'm not good or bad for feeling that it's totally neutral. And then we may practice externalizing it, which is that I'm having anxious thoughts. Not I am anxious. Or you might go, I am observing the urgency to tense up my body. Or I'm observing the thought that something bad might happen. Or I'm noticing that I'm having intrusive thoughts about A, B and C. Or I'm observing the rise of panic. Then what we want to do is we want to move, move into that allow component. Now, what does that mean? It means you create space for that sensation or experience to exist. Because the truth is, I promise you, it will not kill you, it will not hurt you. Having an allowing anxiety is a wonderful opportunity for you to practice being uncomfortable on purpose. Willingly. You want to say, I can feel this and still be okay. You want to say, let the wave pass through us, right? Let the wave rise and fall on its own. I actually have to do nothing about it. Often I remember in my worst panic attacks being like, all right, Kimberly, you're along for the ride. Just let go and pretend it's like a roller coaster and it will rise and fall on its own. It's just a matter of time. There's no fixing, there's no forcing. And we're going to soften that physical resistance. Soften. The last piece here is to redirect. Now, redirect means gentle action versus force. So what? Redirecting is slowly, gently shifting into a value based behavior, a value aligned behavior or action, and compassionate movement, not mean, jarring, judgmental movement. We want to redirect because sometimes clients, I have found when they're not white knuckling, they just sit there and stare like they become like a deer in headlights. They're going to the fright mode, right? Instead of we still want to move through it, we want to keep moving in our action, we want to move towards values, but we don't want to move while we clench because that's exhausting. All right, again, in your anxiety and panic toolkit and in any of the courses at CBT school, this is where we make a plan. We identify what are the behaviors that you value. We get very clear. We might even schedule them. And we're going to think, okay, while we practice not waking knuckling, what could we be doing? It might be a bunch of things, right? And I'm going to talk to you about some homework. All right, so do you have your notepads? Because I am assigning you homework. I'm going to give you three practical techniques. Actually, I think I put in a fourth one there. So let's just wait and see. Sometimes I forget I get a little excited. So the first thing I want you to do is make a goal to make just 1% improvements with white knuckling. So nothing crazy. We just want to soften a little bit at a time and slowly but gradually do that work. So we're going for 1% improvements. And what I want you to practice for homework is what we call the white knuckling check in or body scan. So what you're going to do is whenever you notice that you're white knuckling, you're going to pause and you're going to do a scan. Where am I clenching? Is it my jaws? Is it my shoulders? Is it my hands? Is it my stomach? You're going to notice any clenching or bracing and then you're going to breathe and soften that part and you're going to repeat that because the chances are within a couple seconds you're back up clenching again. That's fine. Again, we're here just to learn. And then you will notice it again, acknowledge it, allow it, and redirect. Now, another really helpful tool. And I've talked about this before on your anxiety toolkit is to relax your hands. When I was delivering my daughter, one of the midwives told me that she said, my God, you're completely white knuckling this. And I was like, no, I think I'm doing pretty good. And she's like, look at your hands. And I looked down and they were completely clenched. In fact, I had had kind of pushed my nails into my palm to the point where it made indents. I didn't even notice. And she said, turn your palms up ways towards the roof and just let them flop. She says it's almost impossible to tense any part of your body if your hands are completely relaxed. Go ahead and try it. You will be shocked. It is very hard to white knuckle if your hands are relaxed. So it's a really great one to use when you're really, really struggling with white knuckle. Now, our next activity or homework I'm going to give you, if you would like, is to breathe and do some breath work that actually works. Now, this is not like doing some crazy breath practice. I actually don't really think that's super helpful. But what I do want you to do is I want you to practice not doing any force breath and focus on just the exhale and taking natural, easy breaths. That's it. That's all I want you to do. Just take natural breaths. Because again, it's really hard to white knuckle when you're just doing, doing easy, simple breath. Now, what you may do as well, and I have actually found this to be very beneficial. We do this in my house all the time. My husband, my two children is if we're feeling a little bit tense or things are tense between us, we will do a sigh breath, which is a hi. Right? It's not like it's not a growl. It's. And it's just letting that out breath all the way. Again, we're not here to control the breath. We're just practicing not holding it. All right, the next exercise you can practice is called the and statement. Now, often when we're white knuckling, we are thinking, I can't relax because anxiety's here. I can't do both. I have to completely clench my body or I have to completely control or I have to completely solve this. I have to completely ruminate until I make this better again. What I want to introduce you to you is a dialectical term where you're going to practice the word. And so I'm going to feel angry, anxious, and I can soften my body. This is uncomfortable, and I can stay present. I'm scared, and I'm going to soften my body and take action. This is the beautiful part of holding space for discomfort and softness. You can learn to do both those things at the same time. The last activity, I did tell you that I had one bonus that I had forgotten about. That is movement over force. Now, again, when we practice not white knuckling, we do tend to go into freeze mode. And so what I'm going to encourage you, if you do really notice a lot of tension, is just to walk. Take a. I remember I used to share with you guys when I was really struggling with anxiety and OCD and ptsd, I used to take what was called an OCD walk. When I knew I was clenching, when I knew I was doing compulsions, when I knew I was ruminating, I go, okay, I need to get out. And I would slowly just heel, toe, toe, next foot, heel, toe. Notice the trees, notice the lemons, notice the birds, and just ground myself by acting very slow. My neighbors probably thought I was, I don't know, crazy, but I didn't care. I just wanted to be mindful and I did not want to do any more mental compulsions. You might also practise gentle stretching. Maybe you dance gently. You just swing your arms around, stretch. The main thing here I want you to do is slow, slow down. Right Is so easy when you're white knuckling, to rush and move and be erratic and jarring, and it's just too much. It's not good for you. It's not good for the people around you. It's not good for your anxiety. I just want you to slow down. Now, what we want to look at here, let's do a review. There are key differences between white knuckling and allowing. Number one, white knuckling is fighting the feeling. Allowing is feeling the feeling. White knuckling is tensing up. Allowing is softening. White knuckling is forcing control. Allowing is releasing control. White knuckling is exhausting. Allowing is sustainable. White knuckling increases anxiety, allowing decreases anxiety. So there are things I want you to remember here. It will feel weird at first. In fact, it might even feel scary and dangerous. But that's okay. Your brain will resist it. It wants to get control, but it might feel like not fighting means you're doing nothing about it, but you're actually strengthening your ability to allow and to let go and to. To bring your attention to the things that you love. You may notice that you need to tolerate that feeling of being irresponsible or losing control. But I want you to practice trusting this process anyway. Okay, so let's do a recap. We learned that white knuckling makes anxiety and panic and OCD and intrusive thoughts worse. We know that the cycle of white knuckling leaves you feeling more exhausted and defeated. We learned that it's not your fault, it's just a natural response response. We learn a three pillar framework to stop reinforcing that cycle. And we learn four core exercises you can use to practice. Now. Again, our goal is to make 1% improvements. So if there's one thing you take away, it's that from today. Okay? So I want to thank you so much. I hope that this has been helpful. Once again. Head over to cbtschool.com we have courses on OCD, anxiety, panic, we have courses on depression, we have courses on time management, we have courses on BDD and we're constant adding to our library. So head on over to cbtschool.com it has been my pleasure being here with you. I hope this was incredibly helpful because I know how important and valuable your time is. Have a wonderful day and as always, it is a beautiful day to do hard things.
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Please note that this podcast or any other resources from CBTSchool.com should not replace.
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Professional mental health care care.
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If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day and thank you for supporting CBTSchool. Com.