The Happier Approach: Quieting your High Functioning Anxiety

Anyone with High Functioning Anxiety knows what I mean when I talk about the Swan Effect. It basically boils down to the feeling of being so on top of it and accomplishing everything we set our sights on… compared to the overwhelm and exhaustion that we feel under the surface that no one can see.  My guest on this series about the performative nature of high functioning anxiety is no stranger to the Swan Effect.  In part one of this podcast, Lou Blaser from the Second Breaks Podcast and I talked about the Swan Effect and what it feels like to be calm on top and yet paddling like mad, metaphorically, underneath. We also discussed when Lou realized she needed help and what therapy taught her about anxiety and depression.  On today’s episode, Lou and I continue the conversation around the performative nature of high functioning anxiety with Lou. For her, learning to recognize that tendency is a sign that her depression and anxiety have spiked and that she needs to step up her self-care. If you feel like no matter how anxious you are that you need to appear on top of it, this episode is for you. And don’t miss part one, which you can listen to here. Listen to the full episode to hear: Why sharing your anxiety is so hard and finding the right pair of ears is essential The sneaky ways we sabotage ourselves  Why therapy isn’t a fix-all and the disappointment in realizing Lou won’t be magically fixed The power of self-loyalty and changing how Lou had her own back was so important Learn more about Lou Blaser: secondbreaks.com Learn more about Nancy: Coach in Your Pocket The Happier Approach Book Live Happier Website --- Coach in Your Pocket Helping people with High Functioning Anxiety is a personal mission for me. I have a special place in my heart for this struggle because it’s both something I dealt with unknowingly for years, and because it silently affects so many people who think this is just how it is.   Working with me this way is an incredibly efficient and effective way to deal with your anxiety in the moment–without waiting for your next appointment. I have been doing this work for over 20Visit: https://NancyJaneSmith.comLearn More About Self Loyalty School: https://selfloyaltyschool.com

Well, we made it to 2021! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season. I know I’m excited to be back at the podcast after a short break.  One of the most challenging aspects of High Functioning Anxiety is the Catch-22 of the positive affirmations you receive for being so on-it and accomplishing so much versus the overwhelm and exhaustion you feel under the surface.  Does this sound familiar? This Catch-22 causes those of us with HFA to be extremely performative in how we approach our lives. The never-let-them-see-you-sweat idea permeates everything we do.  On today’s episode, I’m going to go deep into the performative nature of high functioning anxiety and talk with Lou Blaser from the Second Breaks Podcast. Lou was kind enough to agree to come on and talk about her experience with anxiety and depression.  Lou and I refer to that Catch-22 as The Swan Effect: you look beautiful and calm on the outside but underneath the surface you are paddling like crazy. I am so excited for you to hear this interview.  This is part one of this conversation with Lou. Check back next week for part two!  Listen to the full episode to hear: When Lou realized she needed help What therapy taught her about anxiety and depression  The signs for Lou when she needs to step up her self-care practices  How both our larger culture and the culture of the corporate world keep us stuck in performing. Learn more about Lou Blaser: secondbreaks.com Learn more about Nancy: Coach in Your Pocket The Happier Approach Book Live Happier Website --- Coach in Your Pocket Helping people with High Functioning Anxiety is a personal mission for me. I have a special place in my heart for this struggle because it’s both something I dealt with unknowingly for years, and because it silently affects so many people who think this is just how it is.   Working with me this way is an incredibly efficient and effective way to deal with your anxiety in the moment–without waiting for your next appointment. I have been doing this work for over 20 years and Visit: https://NancyJaneSmith.comLearn More About Self Loyalty School: https://selfloyaltyschool.com

About a month ago, I challenged myself to a month of practicing meditation.  As I shared in Part One of this series, I didn’t have a consistent meditation practice prior to this experiment. In fact, I was pretty resistant to it in the first place. (Be sure to go back and listen to this episode if you haven’t yet!) But I was inspired to give meditation another try because of all the stress and anxiety in the world right now.  As I share in the episode, I made it to 30 days of practicing meditation and mindfulness. Technically, it was two weeks of meditation and two weeks of mindfulness—and I get into why I broke it into chunks like this in the episode.  Of course, I had to invite my friend and podcast producer, Sean McMullin of Yellow House Media, back to the show to chat with me about my experience. As you heard in the first part of this series, Sean is someone who not only knows me well—but he also has a meditation practice of his own and I figured he’d be the perfect person to keep me accountable.  I learned so much from this experience and I learned even more through my conversation with Sean.  Listen to the full episode to hear: What went well and what didn’t go well in my meditation and mindfulness experiment The role my BFF and my Monger played in the experiment  Sean and I discuss the role of neuro-diversity, rules, and rigidities and how something as small as closing my eyes became a HUGE stumbling block for me in my practice What my meditation and mindfulness plans look like moving forward Learn more about Sean McMullin: Yellow House Media Learn more about Nancy: Coach in Your Pocket The Happier Approach Book Live Happier Website Resources mentioned in this episode Headspace Meditation App The Real Point of Meditating by Mike Sturm on Medium Visit: https://NancyJaneSmith.comLearn More About Self Loyalty School: https://selfloyaltyschool.com

As if navigating the holidays wasn’t already hard enough, 2020 has turned our holiday traditions on their head.  In my family, we’re making some tough decisions about the holidays, and emotions are running high. We’ve already canceled our traditional Thanksgiving trip to Chicago to visit my aunt, uncle, and cousins—and it looks like we’ll need to reimagine our Christmas as well, which has been pretty much the same my whole life.  Making decisions this year has been hard. I’m sure you feel it, too. Do we have a holiday celebration with family? Do we travel? Do we stay home and have a virtual get together? Do we need to change how we do things at all? It’s tough and the decision fatigue is real.  In a quest to make the holiday decision-making process as easy as possible (or at least a little bit easier), I wanted to talk with Decision Engineer and Coach, Michelle Florendo.  Michelle specializes in helping people untangle messy decisions in life and work. After studying decision engineering at Stanford University, she spent the past 15 years helping hundreds of professionals use the principles of decision engineering to make decisions with less stress and more clarity.  Listen to the full episode to hear: How we make decisions  How decision fatigue is a thing more than ever this year and how to deal with it to make life a little easier Tips on dealing with all the emotions that come up around COVID and the holidays  Ways to navigate the constantly changing information we’re getting around COVID Why it’s important to honor the feelings that keep coming up and treating them as data  Learn more about Michelle Florendo Michelleflorenda.com Connect with Michelle on LinkedIn Follow Michelle on Instagram Learn more about Nancy Jane Smith: Live Happier Through The Holidays Coach in Your Pocket The Happier Approach Book Live Happier Website Instagram: @nancyjane_livehappier Visit: https://NancyJaneSmith.comLearn More About Self Loyalty School: https://selfloyaltyschool.com

For many of us with High Functioning Anxiety, we have a hard time noticing when we are anxious. Our anxiety is usually swimming around in our heads WELL before we consciously notice it.  For me, I can say I’m fine, I’m not feeling anxious then poof—I explode at my husband for leaving something out of place and realize how high my anxiety is and I didn’t even realize it. In a similar vein, my clients tell me their HFA shows up when they can’t sleep at night because of their racing thoughts. The truth is: we all have default patterns we fall into. Many of us have “go-to” behaviors to express our anxiety that we either inherited genetically or that we learned from a young age: behaviors we engage in and beliefs that we get stuck on. Some of these patterns might be overeating, overthinking, people-pleasing, insomnia, over-analyzing, or assuming you are wrong. HFA is sneaky—and it shows up in the most strange and uncomfortable ways. To illustrate, I decided to record the times when my anxiety was exceptionally high this past weekend. My goal was to share what was happening—and how I felt about it—so you could get a behind the scenes look at how HFA plays out in your life and what to do about it. Listen to the full episode to hear: The 6 situations that triggered my high functioning anxiety and my response to them Healthier ways to approach your HFA—and why practicing A.S.K. to quiet your Monger is important (listen to this episode to learn all about the 3 steps of A.S.K.) What a wrestling match between your Monger and BFF can look like How many of my default patterns tie back to messages I swallowed as a kid Links: Coach in Your Pocket The Happier Approach Book Live Happier Website Instagram: @nancyjane_livehappier -- The Happier Approach Book I’ve been working with women like you living with hidden anxiety every day for over 20 years as a coach and counselor. I wrote The Happier Approach to give you a framework for dealing with your anxiety and start living happier. The Happier Approach will help you understand the voices in your head and what to do with them. It’s not another woo-woo self-help book that asks you to think positively and live your best life. It’s a practicaVisit: https://NancyJaneSmith.comLearn More About Self Loyalty School: https://selfloyaltyschool.com

The self-help industry is FULL of concepts that are meant to inspire you into a better version of yourself—go big or go home, love yourself, rewrite your past—but what happens when they’re overused and lose all their meaning? How can they then motivate you to live happier and more fulfilled?   And what about self-compassion?  I remember reading Tara Brach’s book, Radical Acceptance, where she tells a story about a woman’s mother who was dying. On her deathbed, the mother opened her eyes and said, “You know, all my life I thought something was wrong with me. What a waste.”  I can still remember where I was when I read that line. At that time self-compassion was NOT a part of my life. In fact, it was the exact opposite: I believed something was wrong with me and I was constantly looking for the fix. Kind of the opposite of self-love and self-compassion. The bright side is that one line prompted my quest to figure out what self-compassion was and how it looked for me. It was a cautionary tale—and I swore I would figure out a way to be kinder to myself. In today’s episode, I’m bringing you a conversation with my childhood minister, Gary Ritts. We started our conversation with self-compassion and went down a number of avenues beyond it into grace, empathy, Brene Brown, sympathy, loving relationships, and kindness.  This is one of my favorite episodes I have ever recorded and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Listen to the full episode to hear: How self-compassion is radical self-care and what self-compassion can look like  Ways that self-compassion can look for different people—and how to find ways to recharge yourself so you feel more complete and fulfilled Why compassion and self-compassion are a choice that requires practice by learning and doing   How grace is something that is given to us—and why we can choose to accept it, even if we don’t think we are worthy Learn more about Nancy: Coach in Your Pocket The Happier Approach Book Live Happier Website --- The Happier Approach Book I’ve been working with women like you living with hidden anxiety every day for over 20 years as a coach and counselor. I wrote The Happier Approach to give you a framework for dealing with your anxVisit: https://NancyJaneSmith.comLearn More About Self Loyalty School: https://selfloyaltyschool.com

For those of us with high functioning anxiety, the voice of our inner Monger is loud.  It’s the voice that tells us we’ll never succeed.  It’s the voice that tells us we’re an imposter and we’re mere moments away from being found out.  It’s an internal voice of belittling and nastiness. It consistently makes us feel like we aren’t enough.  For those of us with exceptionally loud Mongers, we can’t WAIT for the day that our Monger disappears. And while we’d like to silence that inner critic once and for all, what happens if you feel like you’d never get anything done without your Monger? What do you do then? That’s exactly what my dear friend Jamie told me… and it sparked an epiphany. I needed to get to the root of why my own Monger was so belittling, shaming and mean—and why I believed that I needed that voice. In this episode, Jamie and I are chatting about her anxiety and how her Monger shows up in her life and ways your Monger might show up in your life, too. To learn more about the Monger, listen to Episode 110: The Voices In Your Head—The Monger and click here to read more about the Monger on my website.  Listen to the full episode to hear: How Jamie brings her own sense of humor to the many rules and rigidities we have in dealing with our anxiety The different ways that our Monger can show up: mean and relentless or critical and pushy and ways our Monger can shame us and keep us stuck in all areas of our lives How Jamie realized that her Monger would never fully go away but instead she could make her part of the team Learn more about Nancy: Coach in Your Pocket The Happier Approach Book Live Happier Website --- The Happier Approach Book I’ve been working with women like you living with hidden anxiety every day for over 20 years as a coach and counselor. I wrote The Happier Approach to give you a framework for dealing with your anxiety and start living happier. The Happier Approach will help you understand the voices in your head and what to do with them. It’s not another woo-woo self-Visit: https://NancyJaneSmith.comLearn More About Self Loyalty School: https://selfloyaltyschool.com

What is happy?  This is a loaded question—but it’s something I want to explore in this episode because happiness is the #1 thing my clients say they want. But how do we get to happiness? What is the path there? Lately, I’ve been on a quest to go deeper. To ask questions. To get clear.  In episode 153, I explored how asking and studying into a question helps you to really get to the heart of the issue.  What does happiness look like?  What does happiness feel like?  How will we know when we’ve reached happiness?  For this episode, I decided to ask some of the people in my life—my mom, my second mom, my nephews, and my friend Andrew, who is a philosophy professor at Otterbein University—what they think about happiness and you’ll hear their ideas throughout the show.  As you’re listening to this episode, I challenge you to ask yourself: what is happy for you?   Listen to the full episode to hear: How happiness is fleeting and is a feeling we have, just like sadness and anger. It isn’t a state of constant being How to give ourselves grace and relieve ourselves of the pressure that we should be happy all the time—and if we aren’t happy, there must be something wrong with us Examples of what makes people happy from reading in peace, creating something, and spending time with family Learn more about Nancy: Coach in Your Pocket The Happier Approach Book Live Happier Website --- Coach In Your Pocket  Helping people with High Functioning Anxiety is a personal mission for me. I have a special place in my heart for this struggle because it’s both something I dealt with unknowingly for years, and because it silently affects so many people who think this is just how it is.  Working with me this way is an incredibly efficient and effective way to deal with your anxiety in the moment--without waiting for your next appointment. I have been doing this work for over 20 years and Coach in Your Pocket Visit: https://NancyJaneSmith.comLearn More About Self Loyalty School: https://selfloyaltyschool.com

I don’t have a meditation practice of my own.  In fact, I’m pretty resistant to it. I have a lot of rules around meditation and I’m pretty rigid in how I think about it.  But, with all the stress in the world recently and my own anxiety, I thought it might be helpful to revisit meditation.  Meditation, after all, puts our anxiety front and center. It encourages us to make space for it so that we can soften our feelings of anxiousness and stress. Maybe it could help?  That’s why I decided that doing an experiment would be a lighthearted and fun way to reintroduce meditation back into my life. Plus, it would be a space for play and exploration rather than rules.  In this episode, I sit down with my friend Sean McMullin of Yellow House Media, who is the producer of this podcast, to talk about experimenting with meditation and mindfulness.  Sean’s been practicing meditation for nine months at the time of recording and is light years ahead of me—and he also understands my blocks and resistance to meditation. Listen to the full episode to hear: The moment when Nancy realized that she needed to start adding meditation into her morning routine Sean’s experience with daily meditation plus how long his meditations were when he first started and how long they are today Nancy and Sean explore the reasons behind why people meditate, why they don’t, and common expectations (like meditation is going to make everything easier in life) How people with high functioning anxiety might struggle with establishing a daily meditation habit and what to do about it Learn more about Sean McMullin: Yellow House Media Learn more about Nancy: Coach in Your Pocket The Happier Approach Book Live Happier Website Resources mentioned in this episode Headspace Meditation App The Real Point of Meditating by Mike Sturm on Medium The Science of Mindfulness |Visit: https://NancyJaneSmith.comLearn More About Self Loyalty School: https://selfloyaltyschool.com

How often are you apologizing, regardless if you hurt someone or if the situation truly necessitated an “I’m sorry”?  People-pleasing includes a lot of apologizing, and it doesn’t always express what we really mean which, sometimes, isn’t so much I’m sorry as it is I’m so thankful.  I used to say I’m so sorry all the time. I’d apologize for everything—even when it’s not really what I meant. Here’s an example from my own life. When I published my book, The Happier Approach, some of my friends and family hosted book parties in their homes.  One of my dear friends from high school, Renee Mattson who spoke on the podcast about how to avoid passing your anxiety onto your kids (here’s part one and part two), hosted one of these events. She invited me to her house a little early so we could have lunch together.  When I arrived, Renee realized she’d forgotten to think about lunch. As she was running around the kitchen, prepping leftovers, I started to feel bad. She went into all this trouble—hosting an event for me—and now she’s serving me lunch!  My Monger was having a field day with this. As the words “I’m so sorry you had to make me lunch” came out of my mouth, I caught myself and simply said: “Thank you so much for making lunch. I know it wasn’t easy and I really appreciate it.” Renee’s face lit up and she said, “you are so welcome, I’m so glad you came early. I know it’s just leftovers but it gives us a chance to talk and catch up.”  In that moment, I realized that by saying thank you—which is what I truly meant—it allowed me to appreciate Renee, allowed her to feel appreciated, and empowered both of us. Had I apologized instead and said my 3 favorite words, “I am sorry”, then she would have apologized for throwing together leftovers and all the things that we people pleasers apologize for and we would have both left the conversation feeling disempowered.  Today on the show, my guest Amy E. Smith and I are talking about people-pleasing and how saying I’m sorry all the time is just one of the ways that people-pleasing shows up in our lives and how it disempowers us and keeps us disconnected from the people in our lives.  Amy is a certified confidence coach, masterful speaker, and personal empowerment expert. Founder of TheJoyJunkie.com, Amy uses her roles as coach, writer, podcaster, and speaker to move individuals to a place of radical personal empowerment and self-love.  Listen to the full episodeVisit: https://NancyJaneSmith.comLearn More About Self Loyalty School: https://selfloyaltyschool.com