← Your Anxiety Toolkit - Practical Skills for Anxiety, Panic & Depression
Your Anxiety Toolkit - Practical Skills for Anxiety, Panic & Depression
Bonus Episode: What to Say When Your Brain Freezes in Conversation: Social Anxiety Rescue Script
00:12:35
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- [00:02]
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So you're at an event and you're just about to talk to somebody and then out of nowhere your whole body freezes. You've completely lost what you're about to say and your whole body feels like it's completely shut down. You cannot bring yourself to make the next step. What do you do? Now? By the end of this episode, you are going to know exactly what to say when your brain freezes. And I'm going to help you understand why it's happening. And I'll give you social anxiety scripts to help you in any circumstance when you have felt like you've completely gone into freeze mode and you want to resume back into that conversation. Hello, my name is Kimberly Quillen. I am an anxiety specialist and I am on a mission here at your anxiety toolkit to help 10 million people manage their anxiety with evidence based skills. It is terrifying out there on the Internet to see some of the strategies I am seeing people give advice on. And so this is what I do for a living. It's my biggest mission to help as many people as I can suffer less from anxiety. So many people are suffering from anxiety and I'm here to hopefully help you along the way as well. Now, first we have to understand something really important. When you freeze. It doesn't mean anything's wrong with you. It is a normal human response to anxiety. We go into something called the fight flight and freeze response. And the freeze response is exactly that freeze moment you have when you're in social settings. Now what we want to do here is your job is to immediately normalize this response. You could say, of course my brain froze. This is what anxious brains do when they're under pressure. We just want to completely normalize what's going on and remind ourselves it doesn't mean the whole evening is awash. We can resume back into that conversation. Now, there is one key thing I want you to remember, which is do not leave. Once you've gone into freeze mode. It is normal to go want to go into flight mode, which is where you run away. But we want to practice not leaving. Instead we're going to inhale and exhale and we're going to move into the next step. Now I want you to first recognize that we have to drop this I must perform well rule where often anxious folks tend to be very perfectionistic. And so instead I want you to give really gentle permission that you don't have to be impressive, you just have to stay present. The only thing we're here for is to connect, not to be Perfect and look like everything's perfect and shiny on the outside. Now, what we can do then is, is we can use a few simple rescue scripts. These are things that you're going to use to get you back into that conversation, back connected. Now, often people go into like, well, what am I going to say? How am I going to say it? Now I've really got to perform perfectly. We've already dispelled that myth. What we want to do instead is just say, as something as simple as, I just totally lost my train of thought, what you say, it can literally be as simple as that. Nobody is expecting you to be perfect. Nobody needs for you to be perfect. And we're all human beings, we're all doing the best we can. Another thing you could say is, my brain went blank for a second and then resume back into it. Even if you don't know what to say, you might even say, hey, I just need a second. My brain went blank for a second. Okay, that's all right to say. You could say, wait, I really want to hear more about that. Please tell me again. That's totally fine to say. Or my personal favourite is I'm a little anxious, which means I lose my train of thought sometimes. Does this ever happen to you? I try to connect with them over the fact that I'm anxious. I've actually had other people do this to me, which is why it's become my favorite response. I cannot tell you how many times I've sat on an airplane and the person, the complete stranger next to me, looks at me in the eye and tells me directly I'm anxious. Please understand that I'm going to be a little all over the place. Like, they just put it out there. And what that does is it completely dissolves any tension and then we're just on the same playing field and they might even connect. Like, do you have anxiety on airplanes? That way it's all out in the open, we know what's happening. And again, most people can completely understand having anxiety in social situations. Another thing you might say is, I had something to say, but it just disappeared. Please tell me more about what you're saying. Okay, so here are some things you could practise saying if they feel good to you. Now, what's going to be key here is that you have to be kind. You can't say mean things to yourself, beat yourself up, say, oh, I'm such an idiot. We don't want to say that in front of other people. It's okay if you do, but it's actually bringing more attention to the negative stuff that you don't want them to see instead of bringing them through to connect with you, to bring them into like, hey, this is truly my vulnerable self. This is hard for me. Or maybe you're like, oh, I just did a normal human thing, which is I made a mistake and I lost my train of thought. Foreign.
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Practice. I have six amazing therapists in Calabasas, California. However, we do not take insurance. Now if you are looking for insurance covered OCD or BFRB treatment, I want to let you know about nocd. NOCD provides face to face live video sessions with specialized licensed OCD therapists. Now their therapists use exposure and response prevention. We know this is the gold standard for ocd. So you can be absolutely confirmed that you're in the right place there. And they have a clinically proven app that helps you stay connected to your therapist and others who have OCD between sessions so you'll always feel supported. Now the cool thing is NOCD is a available in all 50 US states and even internationally and they accept most insurance plans, making it affordable and accessible. We love that. Now if you think you might have OCD or you're struggling to manage your symptoms, you can book a free call. Just click the link in the show notes@nocd.com I am honored to partner with NOCD. I want to remind you that recovery is possible. Please do not forget that. Now big hugs and let's get back to the show.
- [06:58]
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The second thing I want you to focus here is you can make jokes. It's okay to make little giggly jokes about the fact that you forgot. I will often make a little joke like, oh my gosh, what happened? I totally lost my train of thought. That happens when I'm anxious. Ha ha ha. Like you're allowed to laugh. You don't have to treat yourself like you just ruined a TED Talk. You are allowed to giggle, but what you're not allowed to do is self deprecate. You are not allowed to put yourself down in front of other people. I mean, ultimately you are allowed, but I don't want you to. I don't want you to say, oh, I'm such an idiot. I always make a fool of myself or oh, wow, I can't believe I screwed up again. That's not what we're going for again. We want to connect with them and not just put yourself down because then they feel the need that they have to make you feel better, which really makes the dynamic go a little bit skewed. Your job if you can, and I really encourage this is to practice these scripts on your own so that you've rehearsed them. Because yeah, it's going to happen. And that way you don't have to rely on self deprecation to get yourself through or running away. Now there are self compassion skills that you can practice, especially afterwards. And this is critical. I don't want you to analyze or ruminate about what they thought about you going into freeze mode. Because once you do that, you're just ruminating. You're just trying to solve what they think and you'll never actually get that information. It's only going to cause you more suffering. And again, we're in the business of reducing your suffering, not making it worse. Now what you want to be able to say once you leave the event was, oh my goodness, that was hard. But I stayed. That's the key. I stayed and I tried to recover and that's what matters. You might also say I showed up even when my brain froze. And what you hopefully will learn is that there was no big catastrophe. Nobody died because you froze, nobody ran away and like shunned you for the rest of your life. You're probably learning here that the world has space for you to make mistakes, which mightn't be a message you got as a child very often, but hopefully I'm here to give it to you. So when you're ready and if you want to dive more into how to manage the post, review the post analysis. The rumination that you have after these events about what you said and all the things, head on over to cbtschool.com we have a course called the Rumination Reset and it is a specific course for this specific circumstance. It's for folks who ruminate about things that have happened in the past or they're ruminating about things that may or may not happen in the future. What we know about rumination is it's an attempt to get control over something you have completely no control over and completely no ability to get certainty over. And I'm going to strongly encourage you to check that out. It's not an expensive course. Hopefully it gives you the exact step by step skills that you need so that you can also be working at reducing that rumination. Now, before we finish, please don't forget you are allowed to be imperfect in conversations and still be completely deeply worthy of connection. Those two things can exist at the same time. Please don't leave. Please just stay and practice the reps of recovering from when you go into that freeze mode, I want you to gently diffuse yourself from that freeze and move into connecting. You will get better at this with time. And lastly, please be as gentle as you can. This is a practice. It takes practice. Many, many reps. I would say expect to suck at this for the first five times at least. And that's okay. That is a normal human response. We anxious folks, our expectations on ourself is so high, we expect perfection at the first time. Like, come on, give yourself some grace. Give yourself some time to get good at this. Okay? All right. Now, as always, thank you so much for being here. I know how valuable your time is. I am on a mission to help as many people as I can. So if there's anyone that you can think of that might benefit from this, please do share it with them. It will help me with my mission to just generally reduce the suffering on this planet. And it means so much to me that you do that. If you're here listening on YouTube, I want you to stay because we're going to then lead you to the next video, which is how to stay calm at work when your anxiety is off the charts. If you're listening here on the podcast, please do know that I do all of these episodes in a presentation format over on YouTube at your anxiety toolkit. And if you would be interested in that, I would love to see you there as well. Thank you again. And as always, it is a beautiful day to do hard things. Please note that this podcast or any other resources from CBTSchool.com should not replace professional mental health care.
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If you feel you would benefit, please
- [12:20]
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reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day and thank you for supporting cbt. School school dot com.