Ep 126 – Questions to Reflect on Anxiety

Breaking the cycle of going down the anxiety spiral

Do you keep going down the anxiety spiral at the drop of the hat? Any person or unwanted situation can push you over the edge, where you go down questioning everything you think or know.

Hello and welcome back to the deep dive series on the Being Meraklis podcast. I am Shwetha Sivaraman, your self-awareness coach, here to help you ask the right questions.

We all experience anxiety from time to time. But when anxiety starts to take control of us and our lives, that’s when we start to get into trouble. We need to be aware of our anxiety and keep it in check to ensure it doesn’t call the shots in our life.

Most of us who experience anxiety have a natural bias towards thinking about worst-case scenarios. We can use some CBT techniques here and objectively explore

What’s the worst that could happen? What’s the best that could happen? What’s most realistic or likely?
This can help us get in touch with reality and move out of our heads to truly see what’s possible.

When you feel a little bit more at ease and are more stable, here 4 steps that work for me to break the cycle of going down an anxiety spiral

1. What do your thoughts centre around when you’re anxious? Start becoming aware of what you’re thinking during this spiral. If you can go a level deeper to assess how that makes you feel

2. What are the triggers that bring you down? Traceback as to what was the origin of the thought or feeling – how did you get here? Was it certain people or situations? Can you restrict your interaction with those triggers till you’re resilient to them?

3. Challenge those thoughts and feelings- are all your thoughts that come up when anxious true? Do you know an equally true counter?

4. Catch and replace – Create a mechanism to catch these thoughts and replace them with reaffirming thoughts. You can do this via sticky notes in your room or workspace or hourly mobile reminders- whatever works for you. You will fail many times in the beginning- it is but natural. Our decades of conditioning of being anxious won’t go away that quickly. But over time it will become easier. The replaced thought will surface automatically without exerting so much pressure.

Deep dive into these aspects the next time you find yourself going down that anxiety spiral and find answers within!
If you’d like more 1:1 support with me as your Coach, book a 30 min catch-up call using my calendar link and let’s explore if self-awareness coaching can help you release this anxiety spiral and feel more at ease as you navigate your daily life and responsibilities.

Until we meet again, this is Shwetha signing off hoping you have a phenomenal week ahead.