Overcoming Anxiety
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Hey there and welcome back to the Ground Up Show. I'm Matt D'Avella and today we're talking about anxiety. If you saw the video I uploaded to YouTube this week, you know that I've been dealing with some pretty severe anxiety. Someone who has inspired me a lot and written extensively about her experience with anxiety joins me for this episode. It's my friend Caroline Zuck. This is really a candid conversation between the two of us sharing our experiences and

and talking about what's worked for each of us. If you think that you might have anxiety or you're experiencing some of the symptoms we talk about, it's important that you speak with your doctor as soon as you can. Thanks for listening, and I hope this one helps.

Caroline, thanks for joining me today. So we've got a bit of a heavy topic to cover and we're going to be talking about anxiety. Yes. Yeah. So I think we're going to talk a little bit about our own personal experiences, some things that we've gone through, the things that we've learned. But I wanted to start by just kind of defining it in a way because I think there's two different types of anxiety. There's

the everyday i don't want to say normal person but just like your everyday anxiety that you get when you when you're nervous about something when you've got the jitters when you feel a little bit uneasy and then there's what's called generalized anxiety disorder severe anxiety there are a couple different forms of it um but what is the main difference between the two and

how bad does it get when it comes to generalized anxiety? Yeah. And again, not to, I don't want to respond here as though I'm like the, you know, anxiety expert of any kind. Let's just like get that disclaimer out there. But I have had many, many experiences with it and over the years, and especially, you know, we've just talked about the fact that I'm sort of

thankfully at the tail end of probably, well, definitely the worst period of anxiety I've ever had. And so I'm even now experiencing like a new depth to that spectrum that you were describing. But so I'll just share my personal experience throughout this and hopefully people out there can relate. But to answer your question, yeah, for me, the big difference between when it crosses over into just

normal kind of everyday stress or anxious thought or something like that is when it really starts to present as physical symptoms. And that to me was like the scariest part of when I first started experiencing anxiety. And this was back in 2014. Like I did the word anxiety I don't think had ever even kind of escaped my lips until 2014. And that was when I started experiencing these very physical symptoms related to it.

So I think that's one piece of it. And then when it starts to really spiral into a place where it's inhibiting your daily life, like it's not a fleeting thought. It's not sort of a, oh man, I feel like my brain's really full when I go to bed at night. It's like, oh,

Oh, I wake up in the morning and all I can think about is how weird I feel and how not myself I feel and how scared I'm feeling from all these sensations. So that's what it is for me. It's sort of like if it's inhibiting my daily life and then also if it's presenting as physical symptoms, that's when I feel like it's getting to a place where it's more generalized anxiety.

I think I've had mild anxiety for most of my life. And I think like most people do like anxiety is just a natural part of life. It's part of the fight or flight response. There have been times when it's gotten really bad and it's related to social anxiety, like dating where I just didn't go on a date for five years because it just built up to be this thing where in the beginning I was a little bit nervous and anxious. It was felt like a normal, typical anxiety. But then I was like,

But then I had never been exposed to going on a date for years. And then that just built and built and built to the point where I'm like the day before the date, I'm like shaking in the shower. Like, how am I even going to get through this? And yeah,

But the remedy was pretty simple. It was just exposure. It was just going on more and more dates. And I get mild anxiety when I go on airplanes, like 10 to 15 minutes of just until the point we reach cruising altitude, I'm just like a wreck. My palms are sweaty. Same. Yeah, every single noise, every single sound the plane makes, I'm like, that's it. That beep, it's going down. Same. I realized the other day that

if if i don't die in a plane crash all of this worry is going to be a complete waste of time i'm like what am i doing here even if i do what's the point but that's the point of anxiety is that you you don't have control over it you can't just tell yourself to stop worrying and oftentimes that makes it even worse

It's this confusing idea of like what came first. Is it the anxious feelings or is it something that changed in your environment and trying to figure out like there's a lot of problem solving that goes into it in the very beginning. And it has for me. It was two weeks ago when I started to feel very similar symptoms to what you've said that you experience. You start to get dizzy. I start to feel uncomfortable. I started to feel like the entire room is spinning. And then I'm like something changed.

I think I'm allergic to my apartment. I think my apartment is killing me. And I honestly that feeling hasn't gone away. And I like my my mind refuses to tune it out because I'm like, there's always that 5% what if? Yeah. Like what if it is carbon monoxide? Yeah, making me feel this way. And like yesterday, I ran out and got carbon monoxide detectors. Yeah. And it's still something you deal with because like you're looking for certainty when you have none. 100% so many things of what you just said. I

I think are really crucial, like to my experience as well. First of all, I also have really bad flight anxiety, but for me, it manifests so much like the fear of like the, what if I die in a plane crash? Like that's definitely part of it. But for me,

I have this like fear of the discomfort that comes with the physical sensations and the lack of control that I have. And so it's a very like vulnerable feeling to sit on an airplane and know that I'm – I have this like this very sensitive –

the sensitivity to motion. So when we're ascending, I feel this change in my body and I can't control that. And so that lack of control manifests as just like extreme discomfort and it only feeds the anxiety. And so that's been a really interesting thing in the past six months as I've dealt with this like extreme season of anxiety is like,

Is really unpacking that feeling and that lack of control. Because I did exactly what you were just describing. Where when you can't control it, you do everything you can to control what you can. And so those what if thoughts can really, really run away with you. And that was an interesting thing that I haven't totally experienced in the past with this podcast.

period of anxiety because what happened was I had this kind of episode in January. And normally, if I have like an anxious event or I feel like I'm going to pass out or something like that and it scares me, if I take a step back from work, if I kind of chill for a while, eventually it dissipates and I can kind of go about my normal life again. Well, two weeks later, three weeks later, four weeks later, it's not going away. And that's when the what if sets in because I'm like,

oh, I for sure have a brain tumor, right? Like, oh, I for sure I'm going to. And then this layer of a term that I didn't even know about, which is health anxiety, then gets put on top of it, of the general anxiety where, and it only feeds itself where I think I'm going to die or I think I'm going to, you know, I lay in bed at night and I have this pressure on my head and I'm like, well, I'm for sure going to have a stroke in the middle of the night. I was telling a friend yesterday,

I had this like stitch pain in my side like a couple weeks ago. And I, of course, went immediately to Google and determined that I had an enlarged spleen and that I was going to die from a ruptured spleen. And I'm like in the shower shaking because I'm so –

terrorized by the idea of suddenly just dying, like dropping dead. And I know now a couple weeks removed from that mental state that I was, I know how crazy that sounds. Like I know that it sounds insane, but when you're living in that place,

Like you said, it's this chicken and the egg thing where a feeling happens, a thought happens, and then these like grooves of thoughts start happening where you're just reinforcing the thought and all you can think about is the control of it. Because you think, and I learned this throughout all of this, is that I associated worry with safety. Like I think that if I'm going to, if I worry about something, then that means that it's somehow going to save me from some terrible outcome, right?

But what I had to eventually come to is, A, I don't want to live in that place of terror. So I have to do something to interrupt those thought patterns when I recognize them. And then B, I don't think the worry is actually going to save me. I think if I'm on the airplane and the noise happens and we're going down, we're going down. My worry about that, my anticipation of that event is not going to make that any less scary or any less awful if it happens. And so I finally just got to this place where I was like,

Okay, am I just going to live in utter terror and fear every day? Or am I going to just like try to challenge when those thoughts happen with some sort of courage to be like, you know what? If I can't control the outcome, I'd rather live in just utter delusion and just say –

Okay, why don't I focus on the what if that's on the positive side of this? Instead of what if my spleen ruptures and I die, what if it doesn't? What if I come out of this six months the healthiest and happiest I've ever been in my entire life? Like isn't that equally as possible because I can't control it either way? You know what I mean? So that's where I take it.

how do we create the control? Like, are we creating control then through letting go of control in a way? Like, is that the only way we're able to actually gain our sanity back? Because you try to logically work your way out of it and say like, I know I'm safe. I know I'm safe. I know I'm okay. I know everything's fine. I have a lot to be grateful for. My apartment's not killing me. And you like, you try to talk your way out of it or overthink your way out of it.

And that's often, I think in the moment when you're feeling those things the worst, it's not helpful. But is there a part where it does? Because you're kind of also talking about this idea where like there are some realizations that you can have when it comes to anxiety where there is logic that I think maybe comes into play and there is a way to maybe look at anxiety or these feelings in a different way that actually help. Yeah, I mean, believe me, I totally know that feeling of like,

You can like see logic and you know what it is in those moments. But you feel like it's on the other side of a pane of glass. Like you can't reach it. You know what I mean? And so I definitely can relate to that frustration of people will tell you these things. And people will say be grateful and have gratitude and whatever. But when you're experiencing such physical – and like I said, I was in a place of like utter and complete terror. It's very hard to access that. But –

It's like you have to pick your poison. Like you have to decide which discomfort you're willing to accept. And it was either the discomfort of being in that place of terror and knowing that I was making the grooves deeper by like,

allowing myself to repeat those patterns in my brain or it was this discomfort of going, okay, I'm going to try to at least say those affirmations or say those logical statements. And even if I don't truly believe them in this moment and even though they're not making my symptoms go away –

I think that's a better choice in this moment to hopefully get myself out of the well, you know? And like, I do think there was this place in my journey the past six months where I didn't realize it, but I was digging my whole, like, I just always use the well metaphor. I was like digging the well deeper. And when I was able to recognize some of my negative thought patterns and turn them into more reassuring thought patterns, um,

At least it didn't get me out of the well, but at least it helped me from digging it deeper. Do you know...

Why anxiety and depression are often talked about in the same sentence? Because at least in my experience, depression was not something that entered the picture. I wonder if it's maybe like a long-term exposure to anxiety that sets in. But when we're talking about depression, you often think it's people who do not want to live. And anxiety is this fear of dying. So how do the two come together? That's a really...

Great question because that was my experience as well before this particular season of life. I remember I had never experienced depression in my entire life. And I remember even my best friend in the entire world, you know, I have this history of anxiety. She has this history of depression. And I remember we chat all the time. And I remember just one time we were like, what's depression like for you? And she would describe it. And then she'd be like, well, what's anxiety like for you? And we sort of had this like

mind swap of like what is this experience because both things were so foreign to each of us um however this is the first time in my life where the depression definitely came on top of the anxiety and we can get into later of my theories on whether that's biology based I mean all of it is sort of a mixture of like mind body spirit in my opinion and I'd love to also get into that but um

You know, I think you're absolutely right. Part of that depression set in because every day was such a struggle for me that when I started to hit that point, I would say about three months in where you just you can't even you don't even know your life anymore. You don't even recognize yourself in the mirror anymore anymore.

you know, and suddenly all these things are stripped away from you, like being able to contribute to a job or work. And this like sense of despair really sets in where you're like, am I going to, is this going to be my reality for the rest of my life? And I think that is a very depression inducing despair. I think that on top of potentially some chemical things that were going on in my brain, like low serotonin was like really,

really taking me to this place where I couldn't even get out of this well that I was in. So I think it's a combination of those two things for me. But, for example, back in 2014 when I had this – my first, like, really big anxiety episode, depression didn't even enter into it. It was more just –

How do I desensitize myself and really get to the root of what that issue was at the time, which for me looked like going to therapy. It looked like making some big shifts in my business. It looked like really the first time that I had even looked at my own behavior patterns and thought patterns and things like that.

So depression never even entered into that scenario for me. I will say that I have gotten just more emotional. And I don't know what it... I think it's just because everything's tuned up a bit. But I think I've cried three or four times in the past two weeks when I haven't, I don't think, in the past couple years. And it's from watching YouTube videos.

I listened to this 10-minute meditation on anxiety because I was just really in the thick of it. And I was like, I just, I'll try anything. I, you know, listened to this YouTube meditation for 10 minutes and it was so corny. I can't even tell you the music. Everything about it was corny as hell. And then they weren't even trying to be emotional. I just like eight minutes in, it had nothing to do with the thing. And I was just like, so I was grateful for what I had. And also kind of almost like a big...

Yeah.

And I think that's where true vulnerability comes when you're like, hey, I'm not feeling great. I'm not uncertain right now. I'm feeling pretty uncertain right now. Oh my God. Yeah. And everything to me with anxiety and mental health is this very naturally vulnerable feeling because it's like,

A, it's a very isolating experience. And for me, part of the hardest part is that nobody can climb inside your head and know what you're feeling, what you're experiencing, the struggle that you're going through every day, how hard a situation is for you, and all of these things. And so that's kind of isolating. And even me, who's very comfortable crying, very comfortable with her emotions, I mean, I'll find myself in a crying fit where I get to that level where I'm like –

Whoa, I zoom the lens out and I can like see myself crying. I'm like, oh shit. Like this is very, very uncomfortable for myself to even see, you know. But I think it's really good. Like I said,

With all of this stuff, I do think it's important to at least be curious about where the root cause of it all comes from. And I think it's a weird Venn diagram of like mind, body, spirit, like, you know, biology and chemicals and then like your thoughts and the way that you've been raised to play those same tapes over again and then like your emotions and your spirit and what it needs and all this stuff. And it all gets kind of mixed up together. And I wonder for you, like,

Have you thought about or any curiosity around is it maybe the move and change and big change happening? Because maybe it's not the apartment itself. Maybe it's like the metaphor of the new apartment. Yeah. And I think about that too. It's like, I mean, how deep is this problem really? And is it something that may come back? And we can talk about some of the things that have helped us

in a minute. But for me, when I... All right. So it was... It's definitely mostly related, I think, to work and change and just too much happening at once. But I had...

two weeks of travel through Spain and Italy. And it was amazing. And I planned on doing a little bit of work while I was there, but I ended up not doing anything at all and just enjoying my time and being as gluttonous as you can in Italy. And we checked out our wedding venue and it was amazing. And it was great to just have some time off, but like it was both socially fulfilling as well as just like emotionally and just being with Nat and having some time to actually relax. And then we come back and

Our stuff was already all packed up because we were moving two days later. And so, right, you're... I think I just...

Took off more than I could chew. I bit off way more than I could chew where we have this move two days later All of our stuff's packed up We move into the new apartment and then the moment we move into the apartment and we start opening up boxes My head starts to spin a little bit and I start to feel a little bit light-headed. I open up all the windows Okay, I feel a little bit better. I'm getting some fresh air But that never left from the moment I got in the apartment throughout the entire day and

I told Nat, I was like, I mean, this was talk about like embarrassment and shame. I just felt super silly. I felt so stupid. I was like, I don't know what it is, but I think the apartments, it's having an effect on me. I think there may be some chemicals or something used in here that's not vibing right. And

She's like, Matt, we've stayed at like thousands of places, I mean, or hundreds of places all over the world. And we've had multiple apartments. And, you know, you've stayed at so many different places that you probably would have noticed something before. It's probably just a little bit of uncertainty and anxiety. And that did start to like make me feel better. And this is when I started to realize a bit that this is,

perhaps in my head and that there is actually nothing else that's threatening me but i think it was and then i i hadn't i didn't get back to work for another like half a week or a week just setting everything up and then the anxiety starts to build as well and then once i finally started to get into a routine once i started editing and doing my work i started going to the gym it was there but it faded and it faded lower and lower as i started to build this routine

But I do think it's like, all right, there's an element of change. There's an element of the pressure I put on myself to be

a solo business owner, the only person running this thing. And without me, it falls apart. I put the pressure on myself. I do it to myself. And it's something that I'm starting to work through right now about just how do I move forward? How do I make sure I have the support I need to help me? But also, how am I better to adapt to change in the future? Yeah, I relate to that a ton. And it's so frustrating, too, because you're like,

You want to believe that because it comes on so suddenly sometimes too, you want to believe that like if you can just sniff out the right cause of it and it'll be like ding, ding, ding and the clouds will part. And like the truth is I think that it's a slow investigation that you have to then also desensitize yourself to those sensations over time.

And then also recognize that it's not going to be some like miracle breakthrough that you have where you –

Are going to suddenly like make it go away all of a sudden. But I think all the things that you just mentioned about like recognizing. Okay when am I feeling it the most? What could be at play here? Like for me back in 2014 when all of this hit. It was within the first three months of starting my business. And so I didn't and it sounds stupid. But like I didn't put two and two together. And it was the first time I was doing design work, client work,

And I have a huge history of like,

Putting a lot of responsibility on myself. Taking on responsibility. Things that I didn't even realize until, again, many more years of therapy and understanding where that comes from and why do I do that and all these things. But just at the time, I knew this is making me feel a certain way. And actually for me, that looked like changing my business. Like actually changing my business model because it wasn't healthy for me. And I didn't feel confident that I could un-

wind those layers of anxiety

excuse me, as it relates to client work and be okay for my mental health. So I actually, that was one of the big reasons I shifted to digital products was because I wasn't, I was no longer responsible to and going above and beyond and trying to make my money based on the expectations, delivering on the expectations of somebody else's vision. And so I could just create a thing. And then if people bought it, great. And it put more control back in my hands and

Yeah, and that's, sorry, that's why I say that it's, it's hard to say, and I don't want to say that you have no control over it. Like when you're in the moment of these feelings, it feels like there's, you don't have control. And you probably don't apart from just, you know, accepting it, right, and not trying to fight it. But there is an element of control there.

That we all have over our lives. And there's a lot of different things that we can do that can help to either relieve or help us overcome it in the long run. A hundred percent. And I'm so glad that you brought up the idea of rituals and routines because that was the first thing that came to my mind whenever you were talking about unpacking the boxes. And I was wondering if part of the kind of floaty uncertainty feeling is all of your

your rituals and all of your routines are now upended. And so it's no surprise to me that once you started putting some of those back in place, like you felt it come down a little bit. And my suspicion is that with more of those and with more time with those, it will come down even more. But I do think that what you said about digging into all

What is this pressure you put on yourself and the responsibility? Like those are questions that I had to ask myself too and that I have to continue to work on. And it's taken me a long time to be able to get to this place where a lot of that stuff isn't the anxiety-inducing thing anymore. I'm not saying I'm perfect at it. I think the earlier that you can actually become aware of those triggers for you, like the better off you're going to be for years to come, you know? So and I know this is so cheesy, but I'm going to say it anyway.

And anybody who's out there right now who's in the thick of anxiety, feel free to just plug your ears right now because this is the last thing that I wanted to hear when I was in the middle of it. But you will come to this place where you go, oh, I'm actually grateful for this in my life because it showed me these things. Like it showed me these childhood traumas that I needed to heal or it showed me these bad patterns that I have or in my case,

I have come to believe with this specific anxiety right now, part of it is this underlying biology and actual nutritional deficiency that could have affected me really badly in the future had I not tackled it now.

And so I'm now coming to this place of like, oh, well, these past six months and actually basically a year because I had shingles at the end of last year before any of this anxiety hit. So it's been the worst year of my life in terms of health and mental health.

But I would I would so much rather go through that really bad year now to learn all these things that are going to give me a happy and healthy life for the next however many years that I'm on this earth. You know, my experience has been pretty limited, but I agree that as I am, I now feel to be towards the tail end of it and experiencing it less and less each day.

that I was grateful looking back on it because now I have a lot more compassion for those who suffer the same thing or worse. It's very hard. It's so crazy that the timing worked out as it did, that you were just going through this and writing about it. Because I remember being at the gym. Well, I could say before when you started writing about your experience with anxiety, and I was texting with Jason and just...

Just so upset and worried about you, but then also not being able to have a great place to root it because I had never experienced something like the symptoms that you're explaining. And lo and behold, a couple months later, I start to go through the same thing. And I do remember being at the gym, my head spinning, not feeling completely like...

Some kind of chemical substance is taking over my body. Like I like, this is not something coming from within. And then just reading some of your Instagram posts that you made and just starting to feel more reassured just because you had been through this same thing before. And it's like,

It does, I think, getting through stuff like that, one, it helps you have more compassion, but it also, I think, shows you that if you can get through this, you've been through it before, the next time you're going to be better able to handle something similar. It's true. Because you've tried everything. You've done all the things that is recommended by doctors from exercise to meditation. Oh, my God. I tried everything. Yeah.

Why don't you talk about some of those experiments, some of the things that did work, didn't work? Yeah. And just to your point there before I forget, it sounds really drastic and maybe even like morbid. But I do feel like when you're wound up in this place where you go to bed at night thinking I where you're so convinced that something terrible is going to happen to you, like I'm going to die in my sleep. Really? I can't even tell you how many times in the past six months I've gone to bed with that feeling. Yeah.

And you wake up the next day and you go, wow, I can't believe I survived that day the way that I felt. I mean, in January, I was clawing by hour by hour, minute by minute, really. And when I look back, I'm like, well, shoot. Like in those moments, I had no idea how I was going to make it to the next minute, but I did it and I didn't die. And it sounds crazy, but when you do go through that, you have this kind of newfound boldness, I think, and courage about going like, well, shoot, none of that took me out.

Like, I can't believe none of that took me out. And so I'm trying to kind of harness that energy of feeling, can I turn this into feeling like more courageous in my life in a way? And like I said, when you're in the thick of it, you don't feel that way. But there is hope, you know, there is light at the end of the tunnel. And I am starting to feel a little bit of that.

back to your question, I, yeah, I tried everything. I mean, first of all, I've been going to therapy for years. So we're, you know, and that's like deep emotional trauma work. I work with a therapist who does EMDR therapy and it's about literally unearthing traumas, not just childhood, but like any type of very emotionally disturbing like trauma from your past and trying to kind of desensitize to it and reintegrate it with your

kind of fuller, more rational brain. And that's helpful in certain ways. Well, I'll just go through like the things that I do think really helped. So I think any type of exercise or yoga or moving your body, that helped me. For me, that looked like taking walks every day and listening to a podcast. And for a while, it was really hard because I was so dizzy that I would feel terrified. I would feel like I was going to just pass out on my walk. But I sort of forced myself to

still do it and just go around. I would do like a little mile walk and just moving my body. That was usually enough to at the end of my walk, I would feel in a much better emotional state. And then it's also like a sense of accomplishment. Plus you get a little bit of vitamin D. It's great.

Or sometimes doing yoga or something like that. Meditating, actually, I really resisted that in the beginning, but it became kind of like a refuge for me. So I used the Calm app and that allowed me to feel like I could rest my brain for a second. Because when you're in the thick of it and when you're in the type of anxiety, at least for me, where it was going for months, you're fighting such a battle every day and you're so mentally fatigued.

that just kind of going to this place in my mind where I could just kind of – and I would do a lot of crazy things in my meditations. Like if I had weird sensations in my head, for example, one of my symptoms was like a really bad head pressure. And it was so alarming because it felt like my head was going to explode. But this is going to sound really stupid, but like during my meditation, I would imagine like –

This is so stupid, but I'm going to say it anyway. I would try to turn my body sensations into something positive. So instead of my brain's going to explode, I would picture like people painting rainbows on the inside of my brain or like, you know, people in there like doing drum circles or like just like something more uplifting and just that visualization.

visualization helped me when I would feel really dizzy like I like the whole room was spinning that was really unsettling to me and I would just instead think of like oh what if I was floating in like a Mediterranean Sea right now you know it would feel similar but it would be a positive experience I'm just wanted to share that because it was really helpful for me if somebody's particularly sensitive to body sensations and

dancing that sounds stupid but that really can change your emotional state and and music I did that I did that as well yeah yeah as corny as it is but like I was like just a couple mornings I like before

My anxiety actually wouldn't set in until somewhere in the day, like whether it was in the morning, like it usually wasn't in bed. Although I wake up being like, oh, is this going to happen again today? But then it was like playing music and just start like dancing around the kitchen. And I'm like, whoa, I got some control. Also some moves as well. Definitely moves. It did feel like it just completely changed my state. Yeah, completely. Anything I did discover that anything like that, that could change my state completely.

dancing and the walks were the biggest two for me on that was really important, especially when you find yourself getting to that place of like hopelessness. And this day is just like all the others. And this I'm never going to feel normal again. Like I would just have to interrupt it with something that would hopefully elevate, elevate my vibration. That's the spirit, the spirit part of mind, body, spirit. Exactly. I'm trying to think of what I would do as cheesy as it is. I would do like affirmations.

And I actually found – you can Google them on YouTube or whatever, like affirmations for anxiety or health anxiety, specifically for the health anxiety. So it would say things like I am safe, I am in control of yada, yada, yada. And there's something about – I haven't done a lot of research on like neuro-linguistic programming yet.

But there's something about an affirmation statement that does change your confidence and your sense of control and your sense of positive outlook. Well, I want to say, too, that we – I mean, we're both being a little self-deprecating about, like, something's corny or not because –

I mean, we I think we pride ourselves in not being corny or cheesy. But at the same if it if it works, it's not corny at all. Totally. And like a lot of these things totally work. And like, I think that what happens when they get into pop culture and then you see maybe kind of knockoff versions on Instagram and maybe like fake self-help people or people that are just maybe talking about things that they don't truly believe in themselves. That's where it kind of crosses the line. But like shit. I mean, when you get to these points, you're in your life and

You're willing and ready to try everything and you should. And don't let something being corny or cheesy hold you back. Totally. I also tried something called neurofeedback, which is it's like biofeedback where you're

measure kind of your brainwaves and they basically have programs to train your brainwaves to sit in a kind of a better place. My situation, I was just, I was in too heightened sensitivity of a state for that to be really effective. Like we could never get very far with it. So I did that for about eight weeks and it did help me desensitize to a degree, but it just

didn't go much further than that. But there was, I will say that if you are in a place where you just feel like, oh, this is going for a really long time and you get to that place where your days start to revolve around

your anxiety and you just feel like one bleeds into the next and all of those things what I found was really helpful is all of these things that I'm listing to you I took out a sheet of paper I wrote basically a grid and I said okay every day I'm gonna try to and I wrote like 15 things like

take my vitamins, drink eight glasses of water, do my morning meditation. I did all the things. My full-time job was mental health. Go for a walk, do my dancing, do an evening meditation. I had also a nighttime routine that was so crucial for me because if you're losing sleep and you're in an anxious state, it's only going to feed and make it worse. And a lot of people I think have insomnia. And I was getting to a place where as soon as the sun would go down, my anxiety would go through the roof because I would be so afraid of

That my evening that I wasn't going to be able to sleep and that would be torture for the entire night. So anyway, my little grid, I'd be like, do my tea, do my evening affirmation, whatever. And every day my job was just to check off those boxes.

and to I didn't use my little colorful markers and so that became my job and it gave me this like sense of purpose and sense of control to the point we were talking about earlier where okay well at least I can say I'm doing these things and I did find that to be helpful yeah I agree I think that it was mainly for me like the routine the exercise although I

To your point as well with the exercise, sometimes if you're feeling like lightheaded from a workout, it can get too far and then it can actually create the symptoms that you're trying to avoid. And that's actually what I experienced with cannabis since it's legal here in California. I tried like a very mild cannabis and CBD blend that actually it created the symptoms that I was trying to avoid, like the dizziness, the uncertainty, the overwhelm. If it works for you, great. I mean, people obviously have said that it helps quite a bit.

but in my particular case, it didn't work out. I did try just some straight up CBD and that seemed to help, but like,

And like whether it was placebo or not, like I'm totally happy to overdose on placebo during these moments. Yeah, same. Actually, I totally forgot about that. With the insomnia of the first like couple of months when it was so bad, I did find a CBD capsule. So not the drops, but a capsule that was incredibly helpful for sleeping through the night. So I would take like 20 milligrams at night.

But I didn't really like it during the day because of the reasons that you described. If somebody's struggling with anxiety right now, it's very easy to feel like you're weak. What would you say to somebody who feels like they're in that position? They're kind of at a low right now and they're trying to work their way out of it.

First of all, I would say that nobody knows the struggle that you go through on a daily basis. And there's, to me, nothing stronger than somebody who is fighting for every minute to –

get back to a place where they're in a good state of mind. Like there's nothing more resilient and strong about somebody who's fighting to do that. So I would say that I've been there and I've felt that sense of weakness, but to remind yourself that,

If you feel at your absolute lowest and you're still on this earth and you're still kind of fighting to move through this life every hour, every minute if you have to, you're incredibly strong. And to also just hold on to hope that this reality that you're living right now is not going to be your reality forever. I wrote a couple of weeks ago when I was really at a low point, I wrote I think in my art journal something along the lines of like,

I will just keep fighting through this until I find myself again on the other side. And I just had to come back to that almost on a daily basis to say, I will try anything. I will get up and I will commit to whatever the solution of the moment is for me. And I just won't stop until I find myself again on the other side. So if you're in that same position right now, I know it's really hard to hear, but just trust me.

Your reality is not going to be like this forever. Caroline, thanks so much for doing this. And thanks so much for your openness over the past couple of months. It's definitely helped me to come out and talk about this myself. Absolutely. And thank you for your openness. Just like you said, I think the more people that can share their experience and their unique symptoms and their unique circumstances that, you know, have led to this place. I mean, if there's one thing that I've learned in going through this, how many people have come out of the woodwork and just survived.

slid into my DMs or my email or anything to wish me support and to say that they've gone through something similar. It's really a struggle for a lot of us. I think being a human is incredibly difficult and complex and hard. And the more that we can all share our experiences, the more we can help each other get through it. Thanks again for doing this. Of course.

That does it for this week's episode of the Ground Up Show. Thank you so much for listening. I hope this one helped you out, added a little bit of value to your day. If you're going through something right now, just know that you're not alone. Thanks, guys.