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Overcoming Anxiety With Rewire Your Anxious Brain
00:00:00 Hello, listener
00:12:28 Long-Term Anxiety Patterns
Rewire Your Anxious Brain: Stop Overthinking, Find Calm, and Be Present (The Path to Calm Book 12) By: Nick Trenton
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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXM6SWRH
Join us as we dive into the fourth chapter of Nick Trenton's groundbreaking book, "Rewire Your Anxious Brain." In this episode, we explore the intricate connection between long-term anxiety patterns and our environmental influences. Learn how to break free from past experiences and step into a present that is calm, confident, and worry-free. Discover practical tools and insights to tackle overthinking and find inner peace. Say goodbye to constant worrying and hello to a life of presence and tranquility! Click the link above for more info on this amazing book and start your journey towards mental freedom today! #RewireAnxietyBrain #OvercomeWorry #FindCalm
Anxiety is a prevalent issue in today's fast-paced world; whether stemming from work pressures or personal relationship challenges, it can keep us trapped in a loop of endless worries and fears. Trenton's book offers an insightful approach to tackling these issues by addressing the root causes within our beliefs, thoughts, and environmental influences.
By delving into this episode, we aim to offer listeners practical strategies for managing anxiety and discovering moments of calm amidst life's chaos. We will explore Chapter 4, "The Anxiety Timeline: Long-Term Anxiety Patterns," which provides a framework for understanding the evolution of our anxious responses over time. This knowledge can empower us to make positive changes in how we respond to stressors and ultimately create more peaceful and present lives.
Whether you're an avid reader or prefer audiobooks, 'Rewire Your Anxious Brain' is available on Amazon, iTunes, and Audible. For further resources and information about Nick Trenton's work, please visit his website at bitly-NickTrenton.
We hope this episode will inspire and guide listeners towards a calmer, more present state of being. Join us for an insightful journey as we continue to explore the path to inner peace and emotional well-being.
Today we learned about the importance of perspective when dealing with anxiety. The fight-or-flight response is a natural instinct, but it often distorts our perception of events. By stepping outside ourselves and adopting an observer's viewpoint, we can gain clarity on past memories and future worries alike. It's all about reframing and understanding how these events fit into the grand scheme of things.
We also explored the idea that anxiety stems from thoughts, which are shaped by our beliefs and life experiences. Identifying these patterns across your lifetime is key to breaking free from long-term anxiety. Don't be afraid to question the meanings you've ascribed to certain events; there may well be healthier alternatives waiting to be discovered!
So keep practicing these techniques, and don't forget that change takes time. Be patient with yourself as you embark on this journey towards a calmer mind and a more peaceful present-moment existence. Remember, it's never too late to start reconditioning your brain for tranquility and joy.
And as we sign off today, let's leave you with these wise words from author Nick Trenton: "Your anxious brain is like an overworked muscle that needs time to relax and heal. Take the steps to retrain this muscle, and soon it will be strong enough to withstand life's challenges without succumbing to anxiety."
Until next time on The Path to Calm, keep calm, stay present, and we'll catch you on the next episode!
Transcript
Hello, listeners, today is April 15th, 2025; we are here for another episode of "The Path to Calm: Stop Overthinking, Become Present, Find Peace."
Speaker:This week's podcast will explore ways to embrace the present moment and navigate through life's challenges with a calm mind.
Speaker:"Nick Trenton's 'Rewire Your Anxious Brain' is like a personal guide to taming that overthinking mind of yours!
Speaker:It's all about understanding why you worry so much and giving you the tools to break free from those negative thought patterns."
Speaker:"With techniques inspired by therapy, this book offers a simple yet powerful ABCDE method to conquer anxiety.
Speaker:You'll learn how to manage your expectations, change those limiting beliefs, and even turn your worries into a superpower!"
Speaker:"Nick's journey from farm boy to psychologist is an inspiring one, and his book reflects that unique perspective.
Speaker:It's like having a friendly chat with someone who truly understands the struggle and wants to help you live in the moment."
Speaker:"Chapter 4 dives into the world of long-term anxiety patterns and how they evolve over time.
Speaker:Get ready to explore the 'Anxiety Timeline' and understand those persistent worries!"
Speaker:Recall that the fight-or-flight response is one that necessarily narrows perception.
Speaker:When you are anxious or fearful, your attention will zoom right in on the one thing you are perceiving as a threat, and probably amplify it in the process.
Speaker:What this means is that being anxious is the opposite of being able to see the “bigger picture.” And that can be a problem.
Speaker:Using timelines is a way to gain that broader perspective again and reacquaint yourself with the bigger picture that anxiety can sometimes cause you to lose sight of.
Speaker:Here’s a question that may seem strange to you: How do you know that what you’re experiencing is actually anxiety?
Speaker:The truth is that what many of us interpret as anxiety is actually a complicated cocktail of so-called “meta-emotions” that completely overwhelm us and make it difficult to identify with any clarity.
Speaker:When you are trapped in an anxiety spiral, all you know is that it feels bad and you want it to stop.
Speaker:But you lose any sense of what is happening and why, and you may also lose all sense of proportion.
Speaker:Timelining can be an antidote for this.
Speaker:It will help you break down the big, confusing mess that anxiety can be into smaller, more manageable pieces.
Speaker:It will help you put those pieces into a logical order and link them up with a narrative that helps you contextualize what’s actually happening.
Speaker:Now, timeline exercises usually cannot be done right when you’re experiencing a peak of anxiety or worry.
Speaker:No matter how strong your willpower, things are simply moving too fast for you to make sense of them.
Speaker:Ever feel like your head is rushing a million miles an hour?
Speaker:That’s not a time to embark on a timeline exercise!
Speaker:Instead, do this exercise as a kind of “anxiety post-mortem” when you’re feeling a little calmer.
Speaker:Looking from the outside, you are able to see the event with more neutral eyes and move through the memory almost as though you have a pause, rewind, and fast forward button and you’re watching it as a film.
Pause:stop for a moment and remember a particular episode, really focusing on what happened and what you felt and thought.
Pause:Knowing your anxiety symptoms and triggers can help you identify future anxiety episodes.
Pause:These sensations then stop serving as triggers but instead become little alerts that bring you to awareness and give you the opportunity to run a different program.
Rewind:this helps you see what may have contributed to your anxiety in the situation.
Rewind:Were you “going down rabbit holes” online?
Rewind:Drinking too much coffee?
Rewind:Dwelling again on that embarrassing memory from five years ago?
Fast forward:zoom ahead to the outcome of the situation and look at your responses to your anxiety.
Fast forward:Did you get anxious because you were anxious?
Fast forward:Did you berate yourself, apologize, feel shame?
Fast forward:Look at this consequence clearly and see it now, without judgment.
Fast forward:Do the timeline exercise with a pen and paper, or else using a word processor.
Fast forward:Take your time and reconstruct the event as best as you can, almost like you’re a forensic detective piecing together a crime.
Fast forward:Put things in chronological order and look for connects and cause-and-effect relationships.
Fast forward:Look for cues and triggers, look for rewards and reinforcers, look for automatic thoughts and feelings.
Fast forward:Be curious about how the difficult episode came to a close.
Fast forward:What helped?
Fast forward:What didn’t?
Fast forward:What you are trying to do is figure out how you have interpreted the event and the meanings you have ascribed to certain points in the timeline.
Fast forward:What begins as a stressful, confusing muddle can start to look like a clearer picture.
Fast forward:You can construct timelines to dissect particularly intense moments, like a panic attack, or you could take a long view and use a timeline to explore a whole year, or more.
Fast forward:In the context of therapy, timeline exercises can help bring to light pivotal but often-overlooked personal experience.
Fast forward:Sometimes, you need to see everything all together on one page to have that lightbulb moment.
Fast forward:As usual, this works best if you replace judgment and assumption with compassion and genuine curiosity.
Fast forward:Don’t let your “soundtrack” or inner critic jump in too quickly to tell you the same old story.
Fast forward:Instead, look at it as though for the first time.
Fast forward:Look for patterns.
Fast forward:Look for something beneath the surface.
Fast forward:Let’s see how we can apply the above to an example.
Fast forward:Lydia is making a big presentation at work, and as D-day approaches, she starts to notice she is feeling pretty anxious.
Fast forward:On the day, she feels unsure of herself, bungles some of the delivery, and receives a few critical remarks from her boss.
Fast forward:Now she is home after work and trying to process what happened.
Fast forward:She sits down to explore.
Pause:Let’s look at the details.
Pause:At the time she was sweating and felt her heart pounding, she had a weird tight feeling in her stomach, and there was a lot of tension in her neck and shoulders.
Pause:She took some deep breaths and soldiered on with the presentation, but still felt anxious.
Rewind:Lydia thinks carefully about what may have triggered her anxiety, and realizes that she only got anxious after learning that there would be someone from another branch sitting in on the presentation.
Rewind:She writes down all the thoughts she had at that moment.
Rewind:“An outsider will instantly see how stupid my ideas are.” She also writes down all the emotions she recalls feeling: exposed, vulnerable, foolish, small, unconfident.
Rewind:She also noticed that there was a secondary reaction—i.e., she felt stupid about feeling stupid!
Rewind:There were other triggers too.
Rewind:She recalls staying up late the night before and skipping breakfast that morning, instead opting for more coffee than she usually had to pep her up.
Rewind:She is beginning to see some cause and effect.
Fast forward:After receiving some feedback from her boss, she recalls going into a mini meltdown and immediately getting defensive.
Fast forward:On the drive home, she noticed herself ruminating over his words, seemingly making them worse and worse each time until she felt sick with anxiety.
Fast forward:After calming down, though, she can see that she actually missed all the good points—the positive feedback and the fact that she completed her presentation despite feeling anxious.
Fast forward:Once all this has been written, Lydia takes a piece of paper and literally draws a timeline from left to write.
Fast forward:She plots all the events, starting from the previous night, and ends a few hours after the presentation.
Fast forward:She draws a line to show where her anxiety rose and fell.
Fast forward:Simply doing this calms her down and gives her a sense of perspective, but the real work comes when she starts to ask questions:
Fast forward:79 00:09:30,640 --> 00:09:37,400 • How might she respond to these triggers differently in the future, knowing what she knows now?
Fast forward:• What helped reduce anxiety in the moment, and what made it worse?
Fast forward:• What was the main trigger?
Fast forward:• Can she see any factors that were staining and maintaining the anxiety?
Fast forward:• What did she think and feel, and can she put a more positive spin on it now that she’s calmer?
Fast forward:• If she could go back to certain points in the timeline now, what would she tell herself?
Fast forward:Lydia might then decide to close her eyes and visualize the entire scenario again, but this time change it.
Fast forward:She might picture different choices she might make, and different ways she might respond to triggers.
Fast forward:She might rehearse an alternative ending to the story and add in a breathing exercise or affirmation to help soothe her nerves.
Fast forward:When the exercise is completely finished, Lydia realizes something: Her boss had a point.
Fast forward:Once she can dial down her anxiety, she can see his feedback more clearly and realize that he was actually helping her and that his notes could be extremely useful going forward.
Fast forward:But this is not something she could have processed if she had left her anxious experiences in a knot and decided not to unravel them further.
Fast forward:To follow the process Lydia did, try the following:
Fast forward:93 00:11:01,080 --> 00:11:02,680 1.
Fast forward:First just describe the event in as neutral terms as possible.
Fast forward:Note your feelings, your thoughts, your bodily sensations, and your actions.
Fast forward:Describe what was happening around you.
Fast forward:2.
Fast forward:Look to what happened immediately before and be curious about triggers and contributing factors (remember that a trigger can be purely internal, such as a memory).
Fast forward:3.
Fast forward:What happened after the main anxiety event?
Fast forward:Note what you did, your emotions, and how effective your coping strategies were.
Fast forward:What meaning did you ascribe to certain events or sensations?
Fast forward:4.
Fast forward:Continue to explore the event, perhaps even replaying it while rehearsing a different ending.
Fast forward:What have you learned?
Fast forward:If the above seems long-winded, rest assured that this kind of unraveling doesn’t need to take a long time.
Fast forward:But it does need a moment of conscious reflection, a little honesty, and a lot of compassion.
Fast forward:Don’t assume that your first interpretation of any stressful event is the most accurate one.
Fast forward:You may find that this technique almost always makes events seem a lot less catastrophic than they seemed at first!
Fast forward:Long-Term Anxiety Patterns
Fast forward:112 00:12:30,560 --> 00:12:36,720 The timeline tool is not just useful for dissecting bad days at the office.
Fast forward:It can help you gain an even broader sense of bigger overarching patterns—for example, why you tend to gravitate toward jobs that aren’t right for you, why you usually quit after three or four years, and why the same story seems to be playing out every time this pattern repeats.
Fast forward:Try the following exercise when you have twenty minutes to spare:
Fast forward:116 00:12:59,200 --> 00:13:10,760 Take an A4 piece of paper, landscape orientation, and a pen, and draw a long line from left to right to represent your entire life (so far).
Fast forward:The very leftmost part is your birth, and the right is present day.
Fast forward:Divide the line up evenly so that every year or decade is shown in its correct proportion to the rest of the line.
Fast forward:This line represents chronological time.
Fast forward:Next, you are going to draw two more lines: One that represents your overall state of mind, and the other tracks your most significant life events.
Fast forward:For the first line, try to think back over each year of your life and, using the y-axis (the vertical left edge of the paper), mark how you felt on, say, a ten-point scale.
Fast forward:You could show your mood as neutral (zero), perfect and blissful (ten points above neutral), or the worst you’ve ever felt (ten points below).
Fast forward:While you’re drawing this up-and-down line, you can simultaneously draw in the other line that shows the main events happening at the time.
Fast forward:A main event can be a big thing like the birth of a child, the loss of a job, emigrating, winning the lottery, or getting married, but you get to decide what is significant—if there is a single poignant memory that you feel was pivotal in your life, include it, even though it may seem small to others.
Fast forward:Let’s say Lydia does this exercise in addition to the shorter timeline exercise above.
Fast forward:She marks on her graph all the big events: every new job, every relationship start to end, all the big house moves, health disasters, and life-changing holidays.
Fast forward:You can see where this is going: When Lydia looks at everything on one page, she may start to see patterns that were kind of hidden before.
Fast forward:She might notice that, almost like clockwork, her anxiety tends to skyrocket in the few months after starting a new job.
Fast forward:She may notice that her worst years were always those in which she moved houses, and that she tended to be happier when she was in a relationship than when she was single.
Fast forward:Some insights might be truly surprising—for example, she thought that changing jobs or being fired was the worst thing that could happen, but when she actually looks at the timeline, these periods in her life were in fact marked by a feeling of relief.
Fast forward:The most stressful moments are, she realizes, the times when she begins a new job.
Fast forward:Doing this exercise for the longer term has many benefits.
Fast forward:It gives you the bigger picture and lets you challenge certain assumptions that many not be correct.
Fast forward:Remember that anxiety is just a story we’re telling ourselves, and it may be accurate or it may not be.
Fast forward:This is true for the bigger overarching stories we let anxiety tell us.
Fast forward:For example, we may have a story that goes, “Because I’m not as smart as other people, I find things more difficult, and that’s why I’ve never really progressed in my career.” But then you construct the timeline, and you see a different story.
Fast forward:You have progressed in your career.
Fast forward:Maybe it’s time to throw the old story out!
Fast forward:Naturally, this exercise is limited by the accuracy of your own memory—of course, you could just project your own distortions and biases onto it.
Fast forward:But it works best if you can be as honest as possible.
Fast forward:If you have someone you trust, ask them to look over your graph; you may be surprised at what they agree and disagree with.
Fast forward:As you complete it, ask the following questions to get a richer sense of the way anxiety has played a role in your life:
Fast forward:144 00:16:49,120 --> 00:16:54,600 Overall, what has proceeded your most anxious periods in life?
Fast forward:Overall, what allowed you to overcome those periods?
Fast forward:What made things better?
Fast forward:Is there any main theme that seems to recur across your timeline?
Fast forward:What big idea is connecting all the separate events?
Fast forward:How do you look at past events now, and how does this compare to what you felt about them as they happened?
Fast forward:If you struggle with anxiety, can you pinpoint the moment when it started?
Fast forward:What else was happening then?
Fast forward:Is there an overarching story that you’ve been telling about your anxiety, which links all these events together?
Fast forward:"Hey there, podcast listeners!
Fast forward:We hope you found this episode insightful and that it provides some helpful tools for managing anxiety.
Fast forward:In today's chat, we dived into the world of anxiety management and explored some unique techniques to help us stay calm and present.
Fast forward:You see, our fight-or-flight response can sometimes make us feel like we're missing out on the bigger picture.
Fast forward:But by stepping back and looking at events from a neutral perspective, almost like an observer, we can gain clarity and understand how all these memories fit together.
Fast forward:It's like rewinding and fast-forwarding through a movie to get the full story.
Fast forward:Additionally, taking time to question our interpretations of events and seeking healthier alternatives can lead us down a path of long-term anxiety relief.
Fast forward:This process allows us to identify patterns and make positive changes for a brighter future.
Fast forward:So, don't forget to grab a copy of "Rewire Your Anxious Brain" by Nick Trenton if you want to delve deeper into these topics and take control of your mental health journey.
Fast forward:Remember, the power to calm our anxious minds lies within us all.
Fast forward:Let's keep moving forward with curiosity and self-care.
Fast forward:Until next time, stay curious, stay present, and always believe in yourself!
Fast forward:Catch ya later!"
