DailyOM: Tell us about your experience with anxiety. What are some of the most common causes of it?
Ashley James: My experience with anxiety started as a child. I had constant anxiety — in school, around my parents, on the playground. I did not know it at the time, but my childhood was painted with the tension, fear, and stress that all stems from uncontrolled anxiety. Twenty years ago, I began to study neurolinguistic programming (NLP) — a mixture of behavioral psychology and cognitive therapy — in a desperate attempt to gain the personal growth I needed to free myself from the cage of anxiety. It was then that I learned why my childhood was so difficult. I then became a practitioner and trainer in NLP, time line therapy, hypnosis, as well as life and holistic health coaching, all in the pursuit of learning how to help people end their anxiety, just as I had learned how to end my own.
The cause for anxiety is simple, but the problem feels overwhelmingly complex. The solution will elude us until we learn what turns anxiety on in the brain and how to turn it off. Anxiety is not an emotion, like anger, sadness, fear, hurt, or guilt. Anxiety cannot be felt about past events. All emotions can be felt about past, future, and current events, with the exception of anxiety. That is because it is not an emotion! It is how we have come to understand the stress response. The stress response can be triggered by foods and beverages that do not agree with our nervous system. It can be triggered by real-life stresses, such as loss of a job and fear of illness.
But the most common trigger — which in this course I teach how to quickly turn off — is the stress that comes from our own thinking. When we focus on what we do not want to have happen, we trigger the stress response, and from there, we have a cascade of hormones that send us into fight or flight. Anxiety ranges along a spectrum from minor worry to full panic attacks. We can even have generalized anxiety, where we are in constant worry or a stressed state, and we do not know what is causing it. With these different kinds of anxiety, the cure is the same. We turn off the brain's stress response, get the brain to tell the body we are safe, then the body stops the cascade of stress hormones and reactions, and we come out of fight-or-flight mode. The next step is learning how to rewire your brain so that your thoughts stop triggering your stress response.
DailyOM: Are some anxiety and stress necessary, and even good for you to have? How do we know when anxiety has taken over our lives and become toxic?
AJ: We know it is toxic long after we have been living in an unhealthy state for months or even years. Our nervous system has two modes: rest and digest or fight-or-flight. At first, we don't even notice we are in fight-or-flight. It becomes part of our mode of operation. We use the nervous energy we get from the stress hormones to keep us going at a great cost. When we are in stress mode, we are out of healing mode. The opposite of feeling anxiety is being in a state of healing and rest. If we are in anxiety for a prolonged period of time, our body shuts down and suppresses healing. It puts energy toward running away from the threats and not toward fighting cancer, digesting and absorbing nutrition optionally, and keeping a robust immune system. It is only after many months of living in stress mode that we start to see and feel the physical and toxic effects it has had on our body.
You ask if some anxiety is necessary. Anxiety is not the bad guy we have made it out to be. It is actually a good thing! It is the red warning light on our internal dashboard saying, 'WARNING! WARNING! Something is wrong! We are under threat!' Without the sensation of anxiety, we would live in stress mode until we just dropped dead from exhaustion. Anxiety warns us that we have been living in fight-or-flight for too long.
We need the fight-or-flight response to help us survive. To get out of a burning building, steer a car away from an accident, save a child from being hit by a car. In those moments, we want our body to go into superhuman mode. Shunt blood away from our digestion and logic centers of our brain to bring more blood to our limbs. We lose the ability to control critical thinking and complex problem solving so that our brain allows us to go into reaction mode. We are making quick decisions powerfully so we can survive in the moment. But in these moments, we are so focused on the task at hand that we have little time to feel anxiety, let alone suffer from it. We are present in the moment, fighting or fleeing. This rush of adrenaline in these moments only lasts a few minutes. Once the threat is over, we can go back to rest and digest mode. The problem is, we don't. We have created a way of thinking that continually triggers the stress mode, much like living in a war-torn country would do.
Our body is always listening to our thoughts and perceiving threats we think about as actual threats that are happening right now. When we change how we think, when we change our focus, we can stop telling our body to trigger the stress response. It is the prolonged stress response that triggers anxiety.
DailyOM: Walk us through your course. Tell us about the homework and tools you teach.
AJ: I am thrilled to offer this course. It is an accumulation of what would amount to working one-on-one with me for three months. By the end of the course you will have all the tools you need to no longer suffer from anxiety, worry, procrastination, and stress. In my course, on day one you will learn how to turn off anxiety in the moment. If you only ever completed day one and then did the homework often, you would have great success. The rest of the course teaches you and gives you exercises and homework for rewiring your brain so that the brain stops triggering your stress mode when it should not! You will learn many wonderful NLP and time line therapy techniques, but even better than that, you will experience them and the transformation that follows! You will experience your body shifting back into healing mode — and you will feel it!
You will experience anxiety-free days and nights, sleep better, feel at peace in your body, and have more energy and mental clarity. You will nourish your body and learn what foods and supplements best optimize your health. You will experience the end of procrastination. You will transmute anxiety into excitement. Joy will fill your life! Many health issues including chronic pain, infertility, acne, and acid reflux all stem from the same triggers that cause anxiety, so when we resolve this, which you will in my course, you will also notice positive health changes as well!
DailyOM: What is one of your favorite anti-anxiety tips that someone could implement in their lives today?
AJ: Specific breathing techniques can help a lot in the moment to lower stress. Slow, deep breathing can help when you do it in a specific way that increases heart rate variability. Start by lying down. Breathe in and place your hand on your belly. Feel your belly rise. Now place your hands along the sides of your rib cage. Feel your belly rise with your next breath, and then feel your ribs expand. Release your breath. Place your hand on your collar bones. With your next breath, feel your belly fill, your ribs expand, and then your collarbones rise. This is called a three-point breath. It means you are taking in a full breath.
Now for the important part that makes this into a stress-relieving exercise. You will slowly do a three-point breath while counting to five. Do not hold your breath at the top. Exhale immediately but even slower than when you inhaled. Count out to seven. At the end of the exhale, pause. Then start over again. Breathe in fully for a count of five. Exhale immediately and slowly for a count of seven. Pause. Continue to do this for five minutes. This breath specifically allows for the heart to rest, the body to oxygenate, and the stress response to be turned off. Your thinking at any time can turn it back on, so be sure to focus on what you want to happen, not on what you do not want to happen. | | |
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