If you find yourself dealing with anxious thoughts, unexplainable or uncontrollable sadness, moodiness, and frustration because of it, this blog post is for you.
First let me say I AM A STRATEGY COACH NOT A MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONAL
More and more of my clients have expressed how anxious they’ve become over the last couple years. I’m not a betting woman but I’m willing to bet it’s connected to the world being thrown into a pandemic and our inability to control things around us.
Stress is real. There is not a person on this earth that has not experienced some type of stress in their life. And just as many, that have stressors they are unaware of. Women often minimize their stress while men ignore it all together, which is not good for our mental health. But can we dig into the need women have of minimizing stress.
Most women wear multiple hats at the same time. We’ve become desensitized to our body’s gentle signs of stress and need more aggressive signs. The gentle nudges could look like slight tightness in our shoulder or neck, a dull headache that don’t go away quickly
, isolating ourselves from family and friends, not doing the things that normally would make us happy or excited, fatigue, constantly declining social invitations, working long hours to stay busy, inability to concentrate, avoiding phone calls, disruption in our normal routines, clutter, etc. The extremes could look like severe headaches or migraines, body pains, heart palpitations, mood swings, panic attacks, depression, uncontrollable crying, high blood pressure and the list goes on. Even though we experience the extreme, we keep going because that’s what we have conditioned ourselves to do.
Our conditioning has become the backbone that pushes us to perform day to day activities without interruption despite the extreme anxieties our body is screaming at us. The stress of the next performance or activity is pushed away with an overwhelming desire to perform and do well.
Women have this superpower of making it all seem easy, while suffering on the inside. Many of us have been going 1,000 miles a minute for so long, that when the world shut down and forced us to slow down, it disrupted our ability to cope.
As the days continued the anxieties became more apparent and frustration of not being able to shake the anxious feelings made us even more anxious. It’s a vicious cycle. But if I can be honest, much of our anxiety comes from our inability to control what’s happening. We want it stop on demand. We want it to go away by willing it to go away. And when it doesn’t, we panic. We are so accustomed to sweeping our feelings under the rug that not being able to frustrates us.
Well, that frustration only fuels it more. The way to deal with anxiety and depressive thoughts are to face them with professional help. They are NOT going anywhere until you do. Minimizing what your body is experiencing is not helping. Once you are at the height of an attack, it’s a wave you must ride. The key is to prevent it from getting to that point and I will share some tips I’ve learned to cope.
But first what do you do when you are in that attack.
- Reach out to a professional. Your friends are NOT equipped to handle a panic attack. They may have the best intentions but if they are not trained professionals, they are best holding your hand while you speak to someone that is.
- Be Gentle. Don’t beat yourself up because of what you are experiencing. Every woman in this society, experiences some level of stress every day. If there are other factors added to it like being a woman of color, a survivor or victim of domestic abuse, sexual assault or trauma, a mother, a wife, a caregiver, an employee, the level of stress is heightened. So be gentle. Remind yourself baby steps are still steps.
- Take deep breaths. You may think this does not help but it does. Take a deep breath through your nose for 5 seconds, hold it for 5 seconds and slowly blow it out of your mouth. The sensation of focusing on your breath and the distraction of doing so in 5 second increments could be enough to calm your heart rate down and release the extreme anxiety.
Let’s avoid them if possible.
There are tools all over the internet that help with dealing with anxiety and depression. But the best way is to identify the triggers that cause your anxiety and how your body reacts to them. Once you have identified what triggers you and your body’s reaction, you can possibly avoid an attack.
One of the major tips I will offer for dealing with triggers and reactions is having a toolbox of things before you need them. My toolbox includes a playlist of songs that make me happy, a coloring box, list of friends that make me laugh, podcast or videos that make me laugh, workout videos, a list of places I want to visit and of course, my therapist’s phone number.
Another tip that helped me was the power of saying NO. Saying No when I wanted to say no was a game changer for me. Doing things I didn’t want to do was a major stressor for me. But when I mastered saying NO, things became a lot less stressful. Please note this as well, NO does not need an explanation. It is a sentence all by itself.
You are not in this alone and you don’t have to fight it alone. There are many support groups that specialize in anxiety and depression. But should you just need a space that allows you to lay down the cape for a moment, where there is no judgement and lots of head nodding as we listen, we offer you a personal invitation to our peer support group, Release, Relate and Breathe.
Stay safe. Stay encourage. And know together we can normalize talking about the things that bother us.
Until Next Time,
