Overcoming Anxiety: Why Divorce Might Be the Key to Finding Relief

Today, we’re talking about overcoming anxiety. And rather than give you a diagnostic definition of anxiety, I’ll give you a practical overview of anxiety.

What is Anxiety?

Anxiety is a heightened sense in your body and your mind when you perceive a threat in your environment, and I want to emphasize the word.

So often, we women are perceiving a threat when it’s not there, but we’ve rehearsed it so many times that it’s created a brain map.

We women have so many repetitive anxious thoughts that we’re cueing our nervous system to perceive threats, which then activates it. We have repetitive thoughts or body sensations that are indicative that you might be unsafe.

The things that commonly trigger anxiety in this season of life after divorce are feelings of insecurity or uncertainty about whether or not you’re making the right decision.

What Triggers Anxiety?

Often, having to make decisions in a post-divorce situation triggers a perceived threat. You ask, “What if I make the wrong choice?” And so your heart races a little. Maybe your mind starts to spin.

Other common triggers have to do with money, your health, or your kid’s health. All of a sudden, your heart skips a beat, or your stomach drops.

Signs of Anxiety

What do I mean when I say anxiety is being triggered? Let’s go through a list of symptoms that can be included under the umbrella of anxiety.

Imagine this: You look down at your phone screen’s notifications and your attorney and your ex have both reached out to you.

• Is there tingling?
• Is there tightness? Is there clamminess?
• Do your armpits start sweating?
• Does your face get flushed or hot?
• Is there any heat?
• Does your heart and mind start racing?
• What happens to your breathing?
• Do you fidget?
• Do you notice worry?
• Are you having repetitive thoughts about what could go wrong?
• Do you sometimes talk faster?
• Do you have a hard time sitting still?
• Do you have a hard time making decisions?
• Do you ask a lot of people to validate your decisions?
• Do you rewrite text messages a lot?
• Are you overly self-conscious?

When you’re having a conversation with someone, and you’re looking and talking to them, you’re also analyzing what they’re thinking about, what you’re saying, or how you look, all at the same time.

Your inner dialogue may sound like this:

• Am I okay?
• Do they think I’m okay?
• Are they judging me?
• Did I say the right thing?
• Did I say the wrong thing?

Let me ask you a few more questions:

• Do you need help with thinking straight?
• Are you preoccupied with your health or symptoms?
• Do you have a difficult time sleeping?
• Do you try to read people’s minds?
• Do you repetitively check your phone?

I want you to take a deep breath and notice how your body feels right now. Do a body scan. Check your breathing. How does your stomach feel?

Nervous System Activation

The experience of anxiety is a precursor to more significant nervous system activation.

So, when you feel anxious, I want you to know that your nervous system is in a heightened place. There’s more vigilance. It’s more activated. It’s not in a calm state, but we women are not in a full-blown panic attack, and we’re not at the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn stage yet.

We’re talking about a middle stage, like a yellow traffic light, where a lot of people tend to hang out. Most humans spend a lot of time in this place of chronic, repetitive anxiety.

Many people would qualify for a diagnosis of anxiety, and that’s not normal. There are a lot of people out there who don’t realize how much of their time they spend in an anxious state.

When your nervous system is chronically in this anxious state, you’re just a hair’s breadth away at any given moment from shifting into more of an extreme nervous system spot where you’re in a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode. That’s when we women know there is a trauma response brewing.

I want you to kind of visualize this spectrum of intensity, where anxiety is in the beginning, and then we have this heightened state where we move towards panic.

If you’re chronically anxious heading towards fight, flight, or fawn, then eventually a step beyond that is exhaustion that can take over, and then shutdown.

Shutdown is when your nervous system goes into a collapsed state, and you can’t think, feel, or are unable to function in a meaningful way.

This is a spectrum of nervous system activation that begins with becoming aware of how often and how chronically you experience anxiety.

When you think about that list of things that I gave you, these common triggers when you’re going through a divorce, and these symptoms that are associated with anxiety, what do you do when you experience those things?

• Do you feel like you know what to do?
• Do you know what tool to reach for?
• Do you have a toolkit of things that you grab for? And how often would you say you implement those tools?

These are the tools that can help conquer anxiety:

• Vagal breathing
• Homeopathy
• EFT tapping
• Immersive journaling
• Essential oils
• Butterfly tapping

When we women don’t address these things, and they’re happening habitually, all day, every day, we can now see why the nervous system eventually heads into a fight, flight, freeze, or even worse, collapse mode, and why it can feel so hard to recover from divorce.

Confusing Grief and Anxiety

There are times that you may confuse grief and anxiety. Do you know how many times a client tells me about how sad they feel about missing their ex? When they give me all the reasons they’re missing their ex, they tell me stories about times when they had to do hard things or when they were uncertain about a situation.

What they are experiencing is anxiety about having to go to new places, do new things, and figure out stuff that they don’t have the answers to yet.

Feeling uncertain about post-divorce life has nothing to do with who your ex was. It’s not grieving a specific person.

It’s anxiety about not having the support that you needed in the moment to solve a problem you had.

Anxiety and Mental Health

Next time you feel anxious, I want you to pay attention to it.

• How often do you experience anxiety?
• What is the intensity of the symptoms?
• Do you have a hard time sleeping?
• Do you get tightness in your chest?
• Do you have a pit in your stomach?
• How much of your quality of life does that steal?
• Is it now normal for you?

We learned so much about mental health during COVID-19, and so many platforms like TikTok and Instagram have helped us learn so much.

But then what also happened is we accidentally got conditioned to think that it’s normal to have this much anxiety, and it’s not. It’s common. It’s incredibly common, but it’s not normal.

We were designed to be peaceful creatures, who can love and be loved, and when we’re feeling dysregulated, distressed, or anxious, we take some care and get back to a sense of safety and security in our bodies.

But today, we’re throttling further and further into these places of heightened distress, and it’s being normalized.

Chronic Anxiety

If you notice how your body and mind have subtly started to accept that that’s just a part of life, because chronic anxiety is not just a part of life.

What is Chronic Anxiety

We’ve been making a collective choice not to take good care of ourselves and to not have honest conversations about what needs to happen next to heal or recover.

It’s a cultural issue about doing more, spending more, buying more, going more, having more, more, more, more.

How do we pivot to less so we can get back into that green zone of a sense of well-being? We can only pile on so much more before the system is overloaded.

Who are some of your favorite mental health people that you listen to on Instagram or TikTok or in your favorite podcasts? Notice, are they saying anxiety is normal, or are they telling you that it’s common?

I want you to start discerning the content you’re downloading because the more we women talk about and reaffirm that this is normal, the further we’re getting from actually resolving it.

I believe very strongly that this divorce is helping you finally address the anxiety you have been carrying around for a very long time.

I know you experienced anxiety before you got married because you wouldn’t have picked the partner you picked.  If you attracted this partner from a calm state, from a sense of that green place, a sense of well-being, you wouldn’t have picked this partner where it all went to shit.

I know that there’s anxiety that predates this marriage, but I want you to notice how far back it went.

• Do you feel like this is a genetic issue that you inherited?
• Do you feel like it came about as a result of lifestyle in your younger years?
• Do you feel like it came about as a result of childhood experiences in school, adolescence, and high school?
• Did your childhood lack supervision or structure?
• Did your parents struggle with anxiety?

Tools to Overcome Anxiety

Now that you have a better understanding of the signs of anxiety, I want you to have a sense of when you can see anxiety starting to become more predominant in your life after divorce because when it starts to gain traction and momentum, it tells us a little bit about which tools for overcoming anxiety need to be used.

For instance, if you were somebody who was born with a genetic predisposition to anxiety, we know that we have to go to homeopathy as a tool because homeopathy can address things that are genetically or energetically inherited.

If you can see that anxiety just existed in your family culture; it was a childhood experience or something that came on in high school, then we know that EMDR is a great choice.

Tools for anxiety:

• Vagal breathing
• Homeopathy
• EFT tapping
• Immersive journaling
• Essential oils
• Butterfly tapping

There are so many tools out there to help you. You can overcome anxiety. This is not normal and doesn’t have to be part of your life. I love you. You’ve got this.