Understanding Anxiety, Panic and Trauma with Brian Sachetta | Ep 17

Liz Albanis continues her conversation with Brian Sachetta. 'Little T' versus 'big T' trauma. They discuss the embodied experience of anxiety. Tools that have supported his healing. Brian shares  practical strategies to help listeners move through panic attacks. Reduce stress, and manage anxiety and depression. From understanding the "proverbial tiger" that triggers our nervous system. To how eye movement and physical exercise can shift our mental state. This episode offers grounded, science-informed tools for self-regulation and resilience.

Topics Covered:

• The physiological experience of panic attacks
• Difference between fear, anxiety, and panic
• How movement helps regulate the nervous system during anxiety
• Introduction to EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing)
• The mind-body connection: how stored tension can manifest 
• Mindfulness and grounding practices (including the 5-4-3-2-1 method)
• The benefits of cold exposure for managing depression
• Shifting perspective: choosing hope over despair in anxious moments

 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17993252/

Brian Sachetta is an author, blogger, and mental health advocate from Boston, Massachusetts. After grappling with anxiety and depression throughout his young adulthood, Brian became determined to find better ways to navigate such challenges. He turned to therapy, immersed himself in mental health literature. Experimented with a wide array of tactics for managing his well-being. Over time, these efforts led to significant breakthroughs on his mental health journey. Inspired by his progress, he began sharing his story to empower others facing similar struggles. Brian’s mission is to alleviate psychological suffering and guide individuals toward taking control of their mental health. He brings that mission to life through his popular book series, "Get Out of Your Head." Many podcast appearances & blog posts.: 

Connect: https://getoutofyourhead.com/about/

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The content shared in these conversations is intended for informational and educational purposes only, and it is not suitable for listeners under the age of 18. Please use discretion and consult a qualified professional before making changes to your health or wellness routines.

If you’re interested in being a guest or know someone who might be head to my website: https://www.lizalbaniswellness.com.au/podcast/yoga-for-trauma

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Chapters

• 0:00 Trailer
• 1:39 About Brian Sachetta
• 2:48 Mind Body Connection
• 3:10 Anxiety Defined
• 3:50 Panic Attacks Defined
• 7:02 Managing Panic Attacks, Cortisol and Adrenaline
• 9:46 Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR)
• 12:50 Meeting the Anxious Mood
• 13:54 Trauma and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
• 15:22 Stres and the Mind Body Connection
• 22:15 Other Treatments for Anxiety
• 27:37 Traums, Triggers and The 5,4,3,2 Method
• 31:42 Depression
• 33:15 Performance Anxiety and Getting Out of Your Head
• 36:37 Mental Health Books and How To Connect With Brian

Transcript

[00:00:00] Even though there's no tiger in front of you, your brain for some reason is having the response to say There is a proverbial tiger in front of me right now. I'll close my eyes and I'll move them back and forth underneath my eyelids.

Welcome to the Inner Fire of Yoga. A podcast about transformation, resilience, and the power of yoga beyond the mat. I'm Liz Albanis, senior yoga teacher and yoga therapist in training. This podcast was born in 2024 after I survived my second fire. Fire has been a recurring theme in my life, not just in the literal sense, but as a metaphor.

It has asked me to burn away what no longer serves me. To transform and to rise stronger each time. This podcast [00:01:00] is about that fire, the one that challenges us, but also fuels us to grow. The views and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host Liz Albanis.

The content shared in these conversations is intended for informational and educational purposes only, and it is not suitable for listeners under the age of 18. Please use discretion and consult a qualified professional before making changes to your health or wellness routines. Here is the second part of that conversation I had in the last episode with Brian.

Brian is an author, blogger, and mental health at. Advocate from Boston, Massachusetts in the USA. After grappling with anxiety and depression through his young, throughout his young adulthood, Brian became determined to find better ways to navigate such challenges. As a result, [00:02:00] he turned to therapy, immersed himself in mental health literature, and experimented with a wider way of tactics for managing his wellbeing.

Over time, these efforts led to significant breakthroughs on his mental health journey. Inspired by his progress, he began sharing his story to empower others facing similar struggles. Today, Brian's mission is to alleviate psychological suffering and guide individuals towards taking control of their mental.

Health. He brings that mission to his life. Through his popular book series, Get Out of Your Head, as well as his many podcast appearances and blog posts. You just describe what a panic attack felt like in your physical body, because I know you're gonna touch on this, how there's the linkage there with the mind body [00:03:00] connection.

Yeah, for sure. What I would basically say is, we've talked a little bit about nervousness and anxiety. Let's quickly put a formal definition on anxiety or a lay person's term on anxiety. So, I usually say that it's future oriented fear in this from the standpoint of we all know what it, what it's like to be afraid to feel fear, right?

Yeah. If you are in a haunted house and you're worried that somebody is gonna pop out and scare you, that feeling that you feel in your body is fear. Yeah. Anxiety is that feeling, but abstracted out over a period of time where the threat, the perceived threat in your mind is not present in front of you today.

So, it's more the fear of being in a haunted house or a proverbial haunted house a day from now, a week from now, a month from now. Right. To give a definition of panic or a, a panic attack. It's essentially that feeling of anxiety dialed up to 10. Yeah. So, it's 10. Exactly, and so in the [00:04:00] body and it different, it, it manifests differently for different people, but the most common symptoms or feelings are, uh, a racing heart, like a really racing heart.

It from the standpoint of. Uh, it's not like I'm sprinting down the hallway or you know, down the street right now, and yet my heart is racing as fast as it can possibly go. So that is not only indicative of a panic attack, but it also feeds the experience, you know, where you're sitting there and saying, I already feel terrible.

Now my heart is racing outta my chest. And it, you know, by all accounts, I don't think that it should be. That makes you question the experience and say, what is happening to me? Am I dying? You know, a lot of people, the first time they have a panic attack. Yeah. That's a heart attack or something. Exactly.

Yep. So people are like, I, I think I'm gonna have a heart attack and die. And, uh, it's, it's very harrowing. It that's, I'm not trying to add any, anything to that. Just say it's very scary. Other symptoms include completely racing thoughts. Like you just, you know, you're completely losing control. You have no idea what's gonna [00:05:00] happen.

You feel as though, uh, you're, you're gonna maybe take some action that like, completely does not align with who you are as a person. Like, you're gonna lose control of your body. You're gonna lose control of your values and your morals. You know, similar things to anxiety, but also like, like profuse sweating, uh, inability to focus complete tunnel vision.

It really is like, so all of those things, but then like above all, it's, it's really a sense of like a complete loss of control and a an overwhelming pending sense of doom, you know, of everything's broken, I'm broken, everything's going to be broken. Oh my goodness, I am completely freaked out. Right? So if you think of the word panic, right?

When we think about it, it's sort of like, throw your hands up and lose your mind kind of thing. And that's what really does happen when you're having a panic attack, right? It's, if you've ever seen somebody have one, it's a little disturbing, right? Because you may just be sitting there, uh, at work, at home, on the couch, [00:06:00] whatever, and something is going on inside.

You know, let's say where whoever is sitting next to us is having a panic attack, something's going on inside their mind and body that we can't see it exactly. Yet. We can tell by from what they are doing and what they are saying, that they are not in their normal state of mind. It's sad and also just like scary to see that right where they've just tipped over into complete, utter fear and despair, uh, or at the very least dread, if you will.

So it's a scary thing to go through. I think a lot of people report those, you know, those feelings of doom and dread and fear and all that. When it comes to, I guess, one, uh, two things that come to mind. One is with panic, right? Is uh, it's that, it's that loss of control. It's that feeling that you're losing control.

And often what you kind of need to do right is like so much adrenaline and so much cortisol is coursing through your bloodstream at the time that you have a panic attack. It's very hard to actually [00:07:00]be able to have the wherewithal to do this in the middle of a panic attack, but one of the best things that you can do is get up and move your body.

The reason why is you have all that adrenaline, you have all that cortisol. Your mind is, for lack of a better term, is going a little bit crazy. The sympathetic nervous system, the acute stress response in the body is designed to get you away from danger and threat exactly from a tiger. So even though there's no tiger in front of you, your brain for some reason is having the response to say, there is a proverbial tiger in front of me right now.

So even though it doesn't make total sense, you kind of have to align with that logic and say, okay, let's pretend as though this really scary situation in my mind is a tiger. If my brain is pumping me and my body is pumping me with adrenaline and cortisol, which are, you know, the stress hormone, and then, uh, I, I want to say adrenaline is another hormone.

So, when you're having a panic attack, even [00:08:00] though it's, it's very difficult and it's. It seems counterintuitive. It's not something that comes to mind always in these situations. One of the most helpful strategies is to get up and to move your body. And the reason behind this, or how I want us to think about this, right, is the acute stress response in the body, the sympathetic nervous system, the part of our bodies that puts us into that heightened state was designed millions of years ago to help us evade threats such as standing in front of a dangerous tiger, right?

So when you're having that panic attack, for some reason, your body and your brain are making the determination to say There is a proverbial tiger in the situation in which I find myself. So, what will happen then is your brain, your body are essentially flooding you with adrenaline and cortisol, which, you know, cortisol is the stress hormone and those hormones are designed to get you moving away from that tiger, right, to either fight with the tiger or to flee from it.

And so even [00:09:00] though there is no real-life tiger in front of you, when you're having that panic attack, those signs, those signals in your body are, are. Blaring out and going off and saying, Hey, for lack of a better term, we want you to run away from this threat. So, when you get up and you move your body, you essentially appease your brain by saying, I'm doing that thing that you designed me to do, or that these hormones were designed to make me do right.

And so once we get walking, once we get moving, and that kind of, you know. Almost forces us to, uh, to catch our breath a little bit more. We start making use of the adrenaline. We start making use of the cortisol, and we eventually send a calming message back to our brains that says like, Hey, I've got this.

I moved away from the danger. I moved away from the threat. Thank you for the alarms, but you can turn them off now. Here's one thing that I think could be kind of helpful, right, is the idea of EMDR, which is a form of therapy called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, [00:10:00] and it's actually along the same wavelength of what I'm talking here.

It's meant to be a form of therapy that helps guide you through traumatic or difficult experiences or memories. And so, what will happen is if you're working with a therapist, they will essentially ask you to think about these difficult experiences from your past or these traumatic experiences from your past.

And normally, right? As you think about those things, your nervous system goes haywire, and you think to yourself, this is too scary, this is too dangerous. I can't think about this. I can't consider this. Now, when you do EMDR, essentially what'll happen is the therapist will say, as you think about these scary and harrowing experiences or memories.

I want you to move your eyes lateral back and forth. Yeah. And so, what happens is, you know, I don't know the exact science behind it. No, neither do you. But when you move your eyes back and forth, you're doing that same thing of sending a calming message back to your brain, back to your amygdala, the fear center of the brain and saying, I appreciate the warning [00:11:00] signals and all that, but this is okay right now.

You can calm down, you can turn off the alarms. And so. When you're moving your body or when you're moving your eyes, and you know, funny enough, right? If you're going for a walk or you're going for a run, just by being outside, being on a path in nature or being on the sidewalk, you have to look around, right?

You have to observe what's going on around you. Maybe there's people, maybe there's animals, maybe there's branches on the ground, that kind of thing. So you're forced to move your eyes. So whether you're moving your body, uh, explicitly or you are just moving your eyes back and forth as you sit down. Both of those things will send that calming message back to your brain and say, Hey, sympathetic nervous system, I appreciate the warning signals, but I have this right now.

And so a lot of people will report, you know, if they've had difficult experiences in their own past, if they have traumatic experiences, and then they go and do EMDR with a therapist, and the therapist is guiding them through these experiences, they can do the [00:12:00] eye movement while they think about those traumatic experiences, those scary memories.

Memories that they previously were unable to touch, right? Yeah. But if they're sending that calming message back to the brain, while they then think about these previously untouchable experiences, the brain doesn't react in that same alarming kind of way. And they're able to work through some of these traumas over time and eventually get to the point of saying.

I can work through them, I can reprocess them, hence the, the name of the therapy, uh, and eventually get it such that these traumas, these experiences don't have as negative of an effect in my life or a hold on me. It's an amazing way to treat trauma and even depression and anxiety. I've gone through it myself for complex trauma and it's been life changing, so I appreciate your explanation.

You explained it well. But I also appreciate the fact that you talked about movement, because it's amazing. So many people [00:13:00] will see someone, they may not be having a panic attack, but they're extremely stressed, you know, may maybe close to it, and they'll say to them, just breathe. Or just calm down. If it were that easy, they'd calm down.

Some will people say, oh, just go lie down and go to a restorative yoga class and relax. If you've got that much pent up tension, you're that anxious. You gotta get rid of that tension first and meet your mood. And I'm so grateful I learned this on one of my trainings with actually a yoga training center in the United States Life Force Yoga.

You need to meet that anxious mood first before you can start to calm down and feel more zen. And I guess a lot of people who suffer from anxiety do find it frustrating when someone just says to them, sometimes in a patronizing way, just calm down or just breathe. It's hard to take a breath when you're having a panic attack.

So you've experienced EMDR yourself? [00:14:00] Yes. I've done a few sessions. I guess the thing is, I wouldn't say that I like, I definitely don't have complex trauma. I don't think I've been through anything. Capital T traumatic little. I'd say little T. Yeah. So some of it is me knowing that, you know, uh, there's not all that much that's way repressed in there that I need to dig out and do the EMDR with or for, but what I will say is like, I essentially take EMDR, the core concepts from it, and then map it back over to anxiety in general.

So, when I'm feeling anxious. One of the things that I will do, right? Like I, I just talked about moving the body, moving the eyes, that kind of thing. Those are two of my go-to tactics. So, if I can't get outside, go for a walk, for example, let's say like I'm at the office and I'm in a meeting. As long as I'm not the one who's presenting, then maybe what I'll do is I'll close my eyes and I'll move them back and forth underneath my eyelids, really.

And I find that that gives me a nice [00:15:00] little release from the anxiety sometimes. Yeah. That's amazing. I've got a little app on my phone, but yeah, just even with your eyes closed. That's great. They used to think it was only used for trauma, but they're using it for more and more things nowadays. It's just, if it's used for complex trauma, it's not a couple of sessions, it's many sessions and there's different protocols.

It's great. You've experienced it. What is your understanding of the mind body connection with. How we physically store things from your experience in studies? Yeah, I, I mean, my understanding is kind of more anecdotal from the standpoint of I can feel the stress in my own body and I can sense when I'm getting stressed out and how that leads to anxiety.

I'm not a stress researcher, I'm not a scientist in that regard, but I can definitely speak to my own experiences. One thing that I want to talk about, I think it [00:16:00] dovetails nicely with some of the things we've talked about already, is so I actually have had, and you know, I've worked with a few different doctors, they kind of basically said, don't worry about this thing.

It's, it's not much. But the pattern that I've noticed is when I get really stressed out, I actually get nerve pain in my extremities. It's not fun to experience. I get like shooting zaps in, into my feet, uh, and into the side of my head. Wow. And it's, it's definitely harrowing. When I first encountered it, I was like, oh, I must be dying.

This is horrendous. You know? And what I think I have noticed or sort of figured out over the years is, to me, it feels like when stress gets stored in my body, I essentially become inflamed. My nerves don't know how to deal with it. And so it's almost like this energy that is, I don't know if being released is the right word, but basically my nerves become inflamed and then they create these, uh, painful sensations in my own body.

And so what I have learned to do, or what I have figured out to [00:17:00] do just as a result of reading the energy in my own body and reading, you know, my own emotions and whatnot over the last few years, so. What I've figured out to do, or I've learned to do over time is to understand a co, like so understand one thing and then put this into practice, and the understanding is that.

When you are living a very stressful lifestyle, when you are stressed out all the time when you're super busy, and also it's okay to be busy as long as you are doing things of meaning and purpose and whatnot. But if you are perpetually overtaxed, if you are perpetually stressed, uh, you're eventually gonna feel that in your own body.

Right? And the physical sensations that we most. Commonly associate with a stressful life and that kind of thing would be, you know, first would be like, uh, high blood pressure. Somebody who's stressed out all the time, they're gonna get a higher reading, uh, on, you know, their blood pressure reading. If you experience enough stress, you can go into these states, uh, states of dissociation or derealization where.

You sort of [00:18:00] like, it's not a literal leaving of your own body, but it's basically your brain tuning out and saying, this is too stressful. I don't know what to do here. I'm going to do that. Tuning out and the derealization, like, I experienced a lot of that in the last few years just because of how much stress that I was putting myself through or I was encountering, and my brain would constantly get to this point of saying, you know, hey, there's too much stress here and so what my experience of it would be.

I'd be living my life and things just wouldn't quite feel real. It's very unsettling. It's a documented thing, but it's just very scary to go through. And so enough of those experiences of the nerve pain, the dissociation, the derealization hit me for me to be able to say, Hey, there is a pattern here. That pattern is that when enough stress builds up in my body, these weird symptoms start coming about.

It's almost like it's not an autoimmune thing, but it's, it's along that wavelength, you know? And so [00:19:00] for me, uh, how I have made sense of it all is to say that, and obviously like along the lines of stress and dissociation and derealization and whatnot is a lot of anxiety comes with that as well. Not just from the stress itself, but then also the thoughts of, am I losing my mind?

Is something going wrong here? Like, what is wrong with me? It kind of talked about the pattern of me figuring out that there was too much stress in my life in general. I would see these patterns play out of, okay, during really stressful periods. I'm getting more nerve pain, I'm getting more dissociation.

I'm getting. More derealization. And so a lot of the healing that I did over the last few years was to say, okay, if I see this pattern, if I notice it, then what I need to do is I need to de-stress my life because I don't want to keep running up against more nerve pain, more dissociation. More derealization and the piece, like kind of the cherry on top or how I want to tie things all together here is to say, you know, we talked about the sympathetic nervous system, the acute stress response in the body, [00:20:00] and essentially, right, is like when you go into that heightened state where your nervous system is revved up that state.

Is very similar to anxiety from in the kind kind of common thread there is that the symptoms that we associate with a heightened sympathetic nervous system and anxiety are very similar. For example, when you are afraid or when you have that sympathetic response, your heart is racing, your palms start sweating, you get that tunnel vision, you know?

And so essentially was kind of came to this point of saying, if I want to experience less anxiety, if I want to experience less derealization, if I want to experience less. Dissociation. Then what I need to do is I need to control my stress levels, because what's really happening here is I'm constantly putting my nervous system into that heightened state, and the symptoms arise from that heightened state.

So, if I can go back and say. Hey, get myself into less stress in the first place, then I'm gonna have fewer of those symptoms. And so stress reduction looks different for [00:21:00] everybody. But what it's looked like for me is to really be honest about myself and where I'm putting my time, look at my calendar and say, you know, where can I cut back on certain things?

What things are causing me a lot of stress in my own life? If I am showing up to a job every day, that's very stressful. How can I change that? Can I talk to my manager? Can I reduce my workload if there are too many demands on my time? And those things cause me stress. How do I delegate some of those demands?

How do I just let go of some of those demands in general? And so, yeah, to kind of cap it off, it's all to basically say that the more stress that you put onto your body, the more you're going to get that acute stress response and some of those symptoms that we don't like. A lot of those symptoms are closely related to anxiety, and if we get enough of that acute stress response, we're gonna tip over into anxiety as well.

So, if we kind of go from the foundation up, or think of it as like building blocks, right? The less stress we put into the system in the first [00:22:00] place, the fewer of those effects we're going to get. So, I think it's really powerful and really important to do that work and ask yourself, you know, where's this stress coming from and how can I mitigate some of it?

Yeah. And that's what we do with holistic way of thinking. Looking at the cause, not the symptoms, where's it coming from? The root cause. And what other tools have you used on your journey? Your body-based tools? Yeah, no doubt. You know, we obviously, uh. One of your focuses is yoga. Uh, I do enjoy yoga, but the funny thing is that I will go to a yoga class and as I guess as a guy, right, I watch, uh, the females who are much more flexible than I am and I'm jealous where I'm like, when I'm doing warrior one or whatever you want to call it, my legs are shaking, whereas I see them, the women in the class, and they look a lot more serene than I do, so.

Even though yoga is not quite my thing, I do, I like the idea of it. [00:23:00] And honestly, I mean, child's pose, corpse pose, like those are great, right? And obviously just getting a good workout, uh, can be great for the mind, but my body just isn't quite as aligned with doing some of the poses. So I actually, in terms of, you know, body related stuff.

Actually, like my favourite thing is just getting a good workout in. A lot of the times it's getting a good run in, but weightlifting is good as well. And a good amount of people who experience anxiety. And this also kind of ties back to what we talked about earlier, is you know, if you experience anxiety on a regular basis, on a frequent basis, then you probably are more.

Predisposed to anxiety and cortisol than the average person. So, you might have more of that floating around in your bloodstream on any given day or any given, uh, situation, right? Yeah. And so, a lot of people who experience anxiety, they will say that they love doing cardio. And if you think about everything that we've talked about thus far, right?

If adrenaline and cortisol are basically the chemical messengers that are [00:24:00] telling you to move your body and get rid of stress. Going for a run. Doing cardio is essentially our way of burning off those hormones. And so when I go for a run, oftentimes like I'll be stressed out for the day, I'll be anxious for the day, I go for a run and like a few minutes in, everything kind of aligns.

It's almost as if I've gotten that nice burn off of adrenaline and cortisol and I can see things. A lot more clearly. Everything just kind of snaps into view and I can make sense of things a lot more easily. So that is my go-to thing, I guess. Obviously you can't go for five runs every day, but I do think that you could go for a good enough run or a long enough run, and the positive benefits stick with you for at least a few hours.

For me, I, I feel better with regular exercise and that's common not just for anxiety, but for people like me with a DHD, I just don't feel like my normal self and my yoga practice helps as well. I dunno what I'd do if I didn't have that, [00:25:00] especially when I've been injured and can't have gone to the gym or whatever, as long as I don't overdo it.

What about mindfulness or breath work or anything like that? Have you incorporated that for your mental health? I mean, mindfulness is a big one, right? When I think about mindfulness, I think about the idea that we only really can focus on one thing at a time, right? And in today's world, we want to multitask.

We want to jump from one topic to the next. But if you really think about, uh, you know, a a prime example that, that I think about and that people give is, uh, if you are eating a meal. And somebody tells you, you can only focus on this meal, no cell phone, no tv, no computer. You're actually going to enjoy the meal better because your focus is on the meal, right?

Yeah. When you instead are eating at the same time that you're watching a TV show, I don't get me wrong, like it's a great experience or can be a fun experience. [00:26:00] You are sort of dividing your attention between the TV show and the food and trying to get pleasure from each of them. You're not going to be able to extract the full benefit from either one of them because your attention is divided.

So thinking about mindfulness in terms of our own mental health, right? It's essentially saying. How can you use the direction of, uh, your focus or your attention? How can you place it on certain things that benefit your mental health, that alleviate some of your anxiety, that sort of thing. One tool that a lot of people talk about these days that I find helpful, you know, they'll talk about grounding methods in general, which is essentially how to, how do you bring that attention back to the present moment?

How do you be mindful of what's happening around you right now? Another reason that you know, or maybe this might be the first reason, but an important reason for the mindfulness practice when it comes to mental health and especially as it comes to anxiety, is when you are anxious, kind of by definition, mentally you are [00:27:00] off somewhere in the future, spinning the wheels over some fear that has yet to come to pass.

Right? We're thinking of that happen. Exactly. We're thinking of that proverbial tiger that we might encounter a week from now. When you really get your focus, your mind and your attention back on the exact present moment, what we often find is that there is nothing in this exact moment to be afraid of.

Yes, there are things to be anxious of, but there's not usually that tiger that is right in front of you. So coming back to that present moment and coming to that conclusion again and again and saying, yes, maybe there's something on the horizon that scares me, but there's nothing in this exact moment that is causing me fear.

That's an important realization to make. And so the popular tool that I was gonna throw out there is this thing called the 5 4 3 2 1 method. It's a flavour of mindfulness or a mindfulness practice. So when people talk about this, right, the, the number five, uh, connects [00:28:00] to the fact that we have five senses.

And so when you're running those visualization exercises in your mind, or the loops of fear in your mind, and you want to come back to the present moment, what you want to do is you wanna re reconnect to your senses because it's something that's always with you and relatively easy and accessible. So you say, what are five things in my immediate presence that I can see right now?

What are four things in my immediate presence that I can touch right now? What are three things in my immediate presence that I can Oh, what, uh, here, right now? Here, yeah. Here. Yep. What are two things in my immediate presence that I can smell right now? And what is one thing that I can taste right now?

And so it's, it's something of an exercise that you walk yourself through to distract you from those fears that are circling in your mind. And the idea is, again, you're trying to come back to the present moment and the reconnection. Two, the senses forces you to do that. So, once you've gone through that exercise, you'll often [00:29:00] find that you are re more reconnected to the present moment.

You're not thinking about that proverbial tiger a a week from now, and you feel a little bit better. So on the mindfulness front, when it comes to anxiety, the idea is we're human. We have what's known as the monkey mind. We get distracted by all sorts of things. The idea is not to beat yourself up when you get distracted, and when you think about the scary thing off in the future, it's just to come back to center and say, okay, I got distracted.

Let me come back to the present moment. Let me run through another one of those 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 exercises. Let me bring in some other form of mindfulness that can recenter me and get me away from those feelings of anxiety. Yeah, I've heard of that method because it's also a method used by therapists if, with someone with PTSD, if they get triggered to bring them, to ground them back to this moment, and it can be quite a powerful method.

Yeah. So that's a great one to share. [00:30:00] So Brian, any other insights, takeaways you'd like to share? With the audience before I ask how people can connect with you and about your books. Obviously I could talk for days about this stuff. I'm passionate about it, which is great. We didn't talk too much about depression, so let me just give something real quick there.

Yeah, no, that is great. Cool. So, obviously depression is a longer term disorder. Uh, we talked about it at the beginning of the show. It's sadly, or unfortunately not one of those things that you're just gonna flip a switch and be like, Hey, I'm not depressed anymore. Three minutes later. Right. But at the same time, like depression, just with all things in life of make, you know, we talked earlier about making those gradual changes and eventually, uh, getting to the point of doing that work of, of getting to that place that we want to go to over time.

So depression can't, even though it's. A long-term kind of thing. What you're trying to do is stack up little wins [00:31:00] day after day after day, rebuild some of your hope, rebuild some of your agency, take back a little bit, uh, of control over your mood, right, and feel as though, uh, you can experience positive things yet again.

Uh, one tactic that I just wanna leave folks with, I will say it's a, you know, a little bold is there's some science out there showing that. When you submerge yourself in cold water, so this could be a cold plunge, this could be a cold bath. Oh yeah, yeah. This could be a cold shower. You actually have cold receptors on your skin, and when those receptors get activated, they send an antidepressant like effect up to the brain.

Now again, this is not to say that you get in a cold shower and all of a sudden you're not depressed anymore, but it is to say that. You know, taking that cold shower, doing that cold plunge day after day, that can get you a nice little positive hit that allows you to start building that momentum towards regaining that sense of hope and agency and positive affect or [00:32:00] good mood.

And so my challenge to folks, if they were looking for something to help with their depression, maybe this week, to try when you're in the shower, if you're taking a hot shower, maybe try to end the shower with. 10, 10 seconds, excuse me, of cold and just see if that has a positive change, uh, or effect on your mood.

Uh, and take it from there. See if, you know, maybe that would be something that you'd like to integrate into your repertoire. Not saying that everybody has to do it, but definitely something that I try to do on a regular basis and I find as though it helps my mood. So, uh, try it out and see what happens.

Explain it well about with the receptors. It's something I haven't tried. Well, no, I, I lie. I have tried it a couple of times and then put it in the too hard basket sort of thing because I'm a heat lover because of my constitution, but something might be easier to try as it warms up here in Australia.

Would you be able to share a [00:33:00] scientific article on that for me to put in the show notes? I do, there is a study that I can email you. Yeah. Oh yeah. I'd love to put that in the show notes. Sure, that'd be great. So any other quick key takeaways or just how to, uh, let's see. Keen, I don't mind. Yeah, let's do one more quick one just 'cause I'd like to leave folks with things to chew on.

So let's go back to anxiety for a minute. Yeah, and let's give the distinction of so when you're feeling anxious, right? Of course. Like you can be anxious where you're going to some event or there's something looming over you that feels really scary. That's kind of what the definition of anxiety is, but it almost feels as though nothing.

Positive can come out of that occurrence, right? So for example, you're giving that public speech and you say to yourself, I'm so afraid of this. Why am I even going to give this public speech? It feels as though I'm gonna get up on stage and faint. I'm [00:34:00] gonna pee my pants, I'm gonna forget my lines. It's just gonna go horrendously.

A distinction I wanna make is if things could only go horrendously, it wouldn't be ex, it wouldn't be anxiety that you were experiencing. It would be something more akin to despair. That feeling of, oh, everything is hopeless and broken and nothing can and doom, right? There might be a lot of negativity in it, but there is, with anxiety, there's usually always some sliver of hope that something can go well.

The challenge is that our brains distract us from that. So when we're giving that public speech. And our brains go into protection mode. They distract us from the fact that we could give a good speech, we could get a standing ovation. We could just survive, we could connect, you know, we could give our speech and connect with somebody in the crowd.

So the tip that I want to give, and in my first book I talk about 10 little tactics that you can use when you're feeling anxious to feel less anxious. They're called the 10 steps to getting out [00:35:00] of your Head. The third one is. To evaluate the potential outcomes of the scary situation in front of you and recall the one that you want, right?

Because when your brain goes into that protection mode, it bombards you with all the negative possible outcomes and makes you feel like only those negative possible outcomes are possible. In reality there is at least one positive outcome or neutral outcome, and maybe that's the outcome that is positive for us.

So when we are feeling anxious, what we need to do often, and this is just one tactic out of many, is take a step back, recall, or I guess evaluate all of those possible outcomes, right? So, if it's the giving of the speech, you say, yes, I could pee my pants on stage. Yes. Uh, I could forget my lines, I could faint, I could make myself look, I could get booed, I could get tomatoes thrown at me.

All of that. But I could also give a good speech and I could have my message resonate with [00:36:00]somebody in the audience. I want you to think about that positive outcome for a minute and just see how it makes you feel. I'm not saying you have to stew on it. I'm not saying you have to think of it forever, but as you are sitting in your anxiety and feeling really miserable, remember that your brain.

Again, it's designed to protect you. Uh, and even though it doesn't feel at that moment like it's protecting you, it feels as though it's just leading you into negativity. There still exists some positive outcome there that you can remind yourself of, and sometimes that can serve as a positive mood booster.

So, when you're feeling that anxiety, take that step back, recall that outcome that you might want, and just see how it makes you feel. Sometimes it boost you up a little bit, gives you that little pep in your step to keep going. That's a great take, final takeaway. And so your books obviously are full of little tips like that?

That's correct. Yeah. I mean, uh, both books are called Get Out of Your Head, volume One and Volume Two. First One's on Anxiety, [00:37:00] second one's on Depression. Yeah, they're a combination of my own stories that I've, you know, lived through some of the ones that we've talked about here. Uh, integrating research from the.

Various, uh, studies that have been run in the psychology space over the years, trying to essentially tie together my own experiences with, uh, what has been known to work or shown to work. Uh, and then just turn it into a, a package that is engaging, relatable, and also filled with some of these tactics that, that folks can try on for size, uh, and potentially integrate into their own life.

And I'm sure you've had some people come back to you and tell you how it's improved their life. Yep. And that is, uh, that is one of the, that is the most rewarding part of all of this, right? Is going back to what we talked about at the very beginning, is just, I've been there before. I know what it feels like.

I've talked to a lot of people who have been through this kind of stuff before. My heart kind of breaks when I talk to people and they tell me what they've [00:38:00] been through, the difficulties, the challenges on the mental health front. And when I get those messages from folks who say, Hey, I'm starting to make progress.

This specific thing is helping me, uh, there's kind of no better feeling than that. So yeah. Giving back and helping others. Yeah. 'cause you're passionate about it. 'cause you know what it's like you are working full time. In an office role, but are you doing public speaking other than your books and being on podcasts?

Is there any other way people can connect with you, like on socials or anything else you offer? So to connect with me, I would either go to my website, which is get out of your head.com. I'm sure we'll have it in the show notes. Yeah. And then on Instagram, the handle is get out of your head. Both of those, you know, URLs if you want, call them that do not have any dashes or underscores.

So just the one word, if you will. But folks are listening and they wanna shoot me a DM on Instagram. I invite them to do that. In the spirit of most of this conversation, I would just say that, [00:39:00] uh, folks who are listening and struggling, like my heart goes out to you. If I can help in any, any way. Please let me know.

Uh, and I do want to just send a message of solidarity and also some hope of, uh, you know, things saying that things can get better. They usually do. It just takes some time. So stick with it. Stay patient, keep looking for the solutions. They're out there. We just gotta keep digging for 'em. Thanks for sharing all of your experience and knowledge to help others.

I hope we can help people who've listened to this episode and thank you for coming on the podcast today. Brian. Thanks, Liz. I, I hope the same. Thank you for joining me on podcast. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired and informed and empowered to take meaningful steps towards your wellbeing.

If there's a topic you'd like me to cover, or if you'd like to share your story, I'd love to hear from you. Just fill in the form on the podcast page of my website. [00:40:00] Your voice is an important part of this journey. I want this podcast to reflect the conversations that matter most to my listeners. If today's episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who might benefit from these conversations.

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