Hard Times No More Relationship Podcast

What Is Your Anxiety Telling You? -Ep. 27

January 15, 2024 • Allesanda Tolomei-Hard • Season 1 • Episode 27

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Do you ever struggle with that uncomfortable feeling—the kind that refuses to let you take a relaxing deep breath?

This week on The Hard Times No More Relationship Podcast, we're diving into a topic that affects more than 20% of people in the U.S.: Anxiety.

Your Inner Ecosystem: Anxiety is a symptom on the surface of something much deeper. Find out why anxiety sticks around and how you can embark on the journey to lasting relief because, trust me, I’ve been there.

In this episode, I open up about my journey with anxiety, sharing personal experiences, strategies, and the importance of internal work.

We’ll also talk about…

>>> Understanding the message behind your anxiety.

>>> The secret to creating a non-anxious life.

>>> Where to focus your energy to create the right conditions for healing.


From healing emotional wounds to finding peace within, we cover it all.

Remember, you're not alone on this journey. Many have found peace and a deeper connection with themselves through these practices.


Let me know if this episode was helpful on Instagram: Mrs.Hard_TimesNoMore
Or Facebook: Mrs.Hard
Website:  Mrs-Hard.com

Don't let anxiety control you any longer. Take the first step towards a joyful life without fear. Sign up for my free 3-day coaching series—Stepping Off The Chaos Roller Coaster: 3 Simple Steps For Anxiety Relief

Speaker 1:

Hi, I'm Alessandra Tolome hard, aka Mrs Hard, and this is Hard Times no More, a podcast for people who are tired of struggling with boundaries, people pleasing and relationship problems. I have overcome some hard times. Within three years, I stopped drinking, my mom died of cancer and my house burnt down in a California wildfire, and those are just the highlights. I have a lot of reasons to be miserable, but I'm not. The truth is, life was more challenging before these events happened. If you are tired of waiting for your circumstances to change to find happiness and peace of mind, you are in the right place. Join me as I share the tools I use and love to transform challenges into assets and interview others about their relationship journeys. Together, let's learn how to have a happy life full of healthy, meaningful relationships, and say goodbye to hard times for good. Hey everyone, welcome to the hard times no more relationship podcast. I'm Alessandra Tolome hard, aka Mrs Hard, your host.

Speaker 1:

Today, I'm going to share the most important things you can do to heal your anxiety. I'm not sure if you know this, but your anxiety isn't a standalone issue. It's a symptom that has much deeper roots. Today, we'll dive into uncovering where those roots lie and how to identify the internal work needed so you can experience lasting change in a fulfilling life. But first, I'm excited to tell you about a special series that I'm offering, called Stepping Off the Chaos Ruler Coaster three simple steps for anxiety relief. Stepping Off the Chaos Ruler Coaster is a free online series, created by yours truly, full of powerful videos, stress management tools and a very special guided meditation for anxiety relief To help you transform various ways that chaos manifests in your life and ultimately help you relieve anxiety, that stress you feel, that nagging feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop, even when life is going well. Over the course of three days, I share valuable tips that you can practice. In under 10 minutes, I'll show you why these practices work and provide clear, step-by-step guidance so that you can apply it to your situation in your life. People who have gone through Stepping Off the Chaos Ruler Coaster have shared how much more grounded they feel, how less triggered they feel, and they feel like they have a plan when life shows up, because you can't control what happens to you, but with practice over time, you can control how you react to the chaos in your life, and having tools is essential. You have to have something that you have practiced, that you can lean into when you're going through life's low points, because that's going to help with anxiety management, that's going to create lasting change in your life. You can find the link to Stepping Off the Chaos Ruler Coaster three simple steps for anxiety relief in the show notes or at Mrs Hardcom.

Speaker 1:

So, getting back to the topic of today, what is anxiety? In case you don't know, I'm sure if you're listening, you've probably experienced this in one way or another through your life. But just to get on the same page, anxiety is a feeling of fear and dread or uneasiness, and if you've ever struggled with anxiety, you know that sometimes the feelings you have make sense because you feel like you're under a lot of pressure and things aren't going well. But sometimes we experience anxiety when quote unquote nothing is wrong, meaning that we have a good relationship with our partner, when our parent isn't asking too much of us, or we feel financially secure, or that we should feel financially secure, and we still have that nagging feeling and I feel like times like that can be very discouraging because we can't point to. Oh, it makes sense why I'm feeling this way, because some of us walk around with anxiety all the time. I mean, I don't know about you, but I've had panic attacks in the grocery store when I felt like nothing was going wrong. So why does anxiety happen?

Speaker 1:

Anxiety happens when our mind is stuck in the future, when we are worried about what will happen if we get sick, either a cold or a severe illness, if we are concerned we don't have enough work next month to pay our bills, if our partner is traveling and we're worried that they're going to get into an accident, or if we feel like we have too many things on our plate and we've overcommitted and we foresee that we're not going to really be able to sleep for the next week. That can cause a lot of stress and anxiety. So basically, we feel anxiety when we feel lack, when we feel like we don't have enough money, love, time, energy, et cetera. Anxiety also happens when our nervous system is stuck in the past because of a traumatic event. When hard things happen, we subconsciously create a lot of coping mechanisms because our subconscious, our conscious, our ego, our mind whatever you wanna call it wants to try to ensure that that bad thing never happens again. But unfortunately sometimes we get stuck in that heightened state of alertness and our body never really decompresses or feels safe because we're still subconsciously, mentally stuck in that trauma part of us is, and that creates anxiety, and I totally understand this state.

Speaker 1:

You may know, my house burnt down in a wildfire in 2017. After that incident, I would feel triggered by wind, hot weather the combination of wind and hot weather nearby fires. I live in California and so nearby fires have been common some years, and in 2020, my husband was working as a firefighter. It was his first year as a firefighter with Cal Fire and there was a dry lightning storm. So this was three years after my house had burnt down and where I was living, I could see the smoke from one of the lightning strikes and it was probably about seven miles away as the crow flies. I packed up my house probably within three hours of seeing that smoke from that lightning strike, and obviously that was a reaction to my past experience where I had a ton of anxiety and I felt like I just needed to flee the situation to feel safe. Now the fire ended up being really big and the area where I lived ended up being evacuated, but I had evacuated a couple of days before the actual evacuation.

Speaker 1:

Notice and talk about anxiety. I was full of anxiety, but since then, every year, every summer, has gotten better and better in regards to my anxiety around wildfires, and the reason why I've had success in healing from that experience, in letting go of overwhelming feelings of anticipating that something wrong was gonna happen, was because I didn't just ignore the feelings. I took action and I actively worked on them and I have very specific practices that I use to manage my anxiety and I share some of those tools in stepping off the chaos roller coaster and in my experience, it's very important to not wait for your anxiety to passively get better. Yes, time does heal wounds to a certain point. If we're just sitting around going about our day, not looking at our stuff, it takes a lot longer for those wounds to heal, whether it's anxiety or grief or whatever other experience has happened in your life. But on the bright side, when you take the steps towards healing, when you take initiative, you not only reduce the effects of anxiety, you create a more trusting relationship with yourself and that affects your relationships and that creates more stability, security and fulfillment in your life.

Speaker 1:

Like I talked about in the last podcast episode, I feel like when we have discomfort that comes up, or if we have a goal or something we wanna change in our life, I feel like it's the universe dangling the carrot, enticing us to take a step forward, to take action towards achieving that goal or healing that anxiety, or whatever it is that we're being drawn to. And when we say yes to that healing, to changing our lives in a big way or a small way, we say yes to so much potential, so much more than what we think we are saying yes to. For example, my journey of healing has taken me from a place of believing that life will always be hard, that I am doomed to have challenging relationships. I felt like I would never have a job I enjoyed. I felt stuck, I felt like I would never have enough money, I would always struggle and, on a deeper level, I felt like I wasn't worthy of the life I really wanted, that it just wasn't in the cards for me. But I got to a place of so much discomfort that I decided to change my life, to say yes to something different, and what started out as, honestly, a big step transformed so many aspects of my life in such a positive way.

Speaker 1:

So what does saying yes to making changes look like it's trying something new. This can look like going to therapy, working with a wellness coach, it can be joining a support group or developing a spiritual practice. Trying something new is so important because it's about seeking something different, seeking what can work for you. What is drawing you to it? Just pay attention to what you're attracted to. Is there a person in your life that has a life that you want? And what are they doing? I love the saying if you want what they have, you got to do what they do, and sometimes it's as simple as just asking a person who's made changes that you trust that you have heard has gone through similar trials to you, asking them what they did, what helped them.

Speaker 1:

And it's not just about trying something new once and deciding if it worked for you or not. It's about creating a plan and staying committed to your path of healing, because no one no one I know heals instantly by just trying something once. It's the repetition, it's the practicing it over and over again, it's the bringing that practice into your life and developing tools and developing new habits that is going to change how you feel internally, and I have seen so many people who feel stuck and hopeless because of their life situation. I've seen them feel this way because of drug or alcohol abuse, because of dysfunctional relationships, because of grief, great loss of a loved one. I've seen them feel this way because of past hardships and I've seen them turn it all around.

Speaker 1:

One key element that all of these people have in common who make big changes is that they are fed up with their current situation. They are uncomfortable. Discomfort is a great motivator. I love how some people talk about how they grow at the rate of pain. For a long time I grew at the rate of pain, which meant unless I had that discomfort, unless I had that feeling like I was fed up, I wasn't going to make a change. Now, years later, after doing a lot of spiritual work and seeing the results of the effort that I've put in, I don't have to wait until I'm in pain anymore. I can pick up on some more subtle cues of like, hey, maybe this isn't working out as well as it could be. Or hey, maybe this is highlighting something old, an old coping mechanism that isn't serving you anymore. I talk about with friends how, like I get more of a whisper from the universe instead of a slap upside the head. But I used to only change when I had a slap upside my head, and so I'm grateful for that progress. But, needless to say, discomfort is a great motivator. Another thing I see that people do who make big changes. They have willingness and an open mind an open mind to practice something they've never practiced before. I also see them have courage, because if nothing changes, nothing changes, and so if you want to experience something different in your life, you have to do something different.

Speaker 1:

Another key element of healing is that you have to be willing to ask for help. Now, I know a lot of the people who are listening to this podcast are most likely very independent. You may even be more comfortable being the one who helps everyone else rather than receiving help. Maybe you don't want to be a burden, or you don't want to be needy or appear weak, and sometimes, if we've lived in that role for a long time, we lose sight of what we need or what we even like, because for a long time, we've made other people's needs more important than our own. But when we ask for help from others, there's so much opportunity to feel more connected to those around us, to feel more supported, to feel more love, and that helps us heal as well and we don't lose our independence when we ask for help and in the long run, we become more capable of helping more people because we're able to receive and we see the value of that give and take, and so we end up with more energy and in turn, we're able to help more people and from a much healthier place, because we understand the laws of give and take. We don't just have to be like the giving tree and participate in the never-ending giving, which really sets us up for depletion, and sometimes that's a coping mechanism or a survival mechanism that we learned as a child.

Speaker 1:

For a long time I believed if people needed me, it gave me purpose and it granted me some sort of worthiness to take up space in the world, and I was terrified of who would I be if no one needed me. This fueled very dysfunctional and codependent relationships because I needed to be needed by others and I'm sharing this because so many of us feel this way, and when we hear someone else talk about it, it can put words to the experiences we have internally, and today I don't feel like this anymore. I'm married to a firefighter, like I said, which means he has gone for multiple days at a time. My past self pre-2017, it could never have handled that. I was too insecure and too anxious. If I had been married to him at that time and he had to go away for two weeks to be on a fire, I would be constantly worried about him and I would feel really lonely and I wouldn't know how to be by myself and I would probably find some other way to be needed by someone else instead of you know now, when he's gone for multiple days at a time. Honestly, I enjoy being by myself and I don't mind spending time alone and saying yes to working on my anxiety and different issues that came up.

Speaker 1:

Working on having healthy relationships has taken me to a place beyond my wildest dreams where I have security in my relationships. I love my job. I feel internal peace and ease. I don't wait for the other shoe to drop anymore. Gotta be honest. It took a while to get there, but I can tell you every morning I wake up without waiting for the other shoe to drop, without having anxiety when everything is going well because at any moment it's gonna turn around, or I better enjoy these moments because they're not gonna last. I know that life will continue to happen and hard things most likely will happen again in life, because that's just life, but it's not destroying the good times and the peace and the happiness that I have. And I swear it was probably like 15 or 20 years.

Speaker 1:

I lived on the opposite side of that spectrum where I was just always on guard because I had so many experiences that I believed proved the opposite and I didn't know how to work on them. I didn't know how to access tools to help me manage my insides. I was always waiting for everything to fall into place externally, believing that was gonna be my solution. You know, like once I had the great relationship, once I had the good job, once I had the security in my life, then I would feel great. And that is not the case. That is not how it works, which is good news, because there are so many things you can do to shift and change your internal world, your internal experience of life, and that is what creates the security, the fulfillment, the peace of mind. And then the external things seem to just show up and follow those internal changes, and so you actually have a lot more control when you work on the internal things as opposed to focusing on trying to get the external things to be right, the right conditions for you to finally feel okay.

Speaker 1:

For example, let's say you have some issues around food. You've tried a million different diets and you can never get the results you wanted. Maybe it's even backfired and whatever you were working on whether it was like your weight or your blood work or whatever it was backfired and even got worse. And you keep going from diet to diet, nutritionist to nutritionist and you aren't getting the results you want. Do you think that one more diet is really gonna be the answer? You have proven to yourself that it is not your problem, isn't that you're not smart enough, that you have weak willpower or that you've done something wrong?

Speaker 1:

Sometimes, when people experience this, they blame themselves, they feel like they are weak or that they have done something wrong and they feel like if only I stuck with it longer, if I was more perfect, if I was more restrictive or whatever, then I would have success. But in my experience, it isn't the willpower or their intelligence that's the issue. The food or the diet is a coping mechanism. It is the external part of the problem, not the internal part, and in this example, the person most likely emotionally eats or is trying to control their stress through what they eat. Like maybe if somebody has parents who've had a chronic illness, or maybe they have a chronic illness or they have something going on with them. They feel like if I eat this certain way, then I can control my physiology and my body, and some people have success with that. But other people it becomes a black hole of not getting the success they want because they're trying to manage their stress by managing their food and ultimately causing more stress.

Speaker 1:

And that stress piece is the internal work, the emotional, internal cue and signal of like hey, this is what you really should be working on. But it can be so easy to be like no, that's not it. Everyone has stress. I just need to focus on the external. That's really what's gonna make the change. And unless they deal with that part of them, that emotional part of them, they're never gonna have success. And unless they try something new, they're going to continue to be stuck. So they have to become fed up or tired of being stuck in the same cycle.

Speaker 1:

They have to have possibly a little aha moment when they realize that they've tried everything external and now all that's left is the internal, or maybe they meet someone who has gone through a similar thing to them and now this person doesn't struggle with food in the same way anymore and they ask him how did you do it? And they said well, I did a lot of emotional work. They have to be uncomfortable because the discomfort Leads them to try something different. It leads them to have willingness to be open-minded. It can lead them to ask for help to try something different. Sometimes they have what's called the gift of desperation. It's when we're so desperate we'll try anything, and and that is where sometimes we find a solution, because we have no other choice but to be open-minded and try something new. Now, through the experience of saying yes to try and something completely different Not a new diet, but coaching, meditation, constructive journaling, something along those lines they not only heal their relationship with food, but they also heal their anxiety. They learn how to manage their stress better. They have the experience where their blood work actually improves because they're not under as much stress and they underestimated how much their stress was affecting their physiology. And over time, life becomes more manageable and even fulfilling.

Speaker 1:

Our Internal world is like an ecosystem. When we focus on healing one part, other parts heal as well, and in ways we may not have even known were possible, because our internal ecosystem is Attached to that loud part and we don't need to worry about working on the entire ecosystem. We can just start with that loud part, that one part, and that will help everything else flow and receive healing as well. And when you learn tools and habits that help you work on one aspect of yourself, when that part Quietes down and other parts emerge that need focus, love and attention, you now have ways to deal with it, because usually tools you can apply to multiple things or multiple emotions or multiple areas. You're stuck and your internal world is like an onion. So Be be aware that when you pull away one layer, another layer will present itself.

Speaker 1:

But, like I said, when we work on this emotional healing, when we work on this internal work, we have a more fulfilling life, because we feel more security, we feel more stability, we feel more comfortable in our own skin and we have less worry, and so our life changes. Our ability to look at new things becomes greater, because maybe those things were too hard to look at in the past. But if we're open to the process, amazing things can happen, and when we heal our struggles. It positively affects our relationships, our families, Our friendships, and the side effects of all of this is a more fulfilling life. Like I said before, sometimes we think we need the right job, the right relationship, more money, more love, and then we will finally be able to thrive. But it's not true. And if we receive these things and we don't do the internal work, it can feel even worse, it can feel confusing, because we have everything externally but we still feel uncomfortable, we feel avoid and we feel a lack of satisfaction. And if you find yourself in this place, you are being called to do the internal work. So what's your next step?

Speaker 1:

If you struggle with anxiety, you've gotta check out Stepping Off the Chaos Roller Coaster. These practices are foundational to your healing. They will set you up to feel more peace throughout your day and they'll help quiet that relentless stream of thoughts bombarding you with stress and worry, because it's really hard to feel calm when your mind just won't quit. And these are the very strategies I use with my clients. So you gotta sneak peek into what it's like to work together, one-on-one. And bonus there's a free anxiety relief meditation included and it's only five minutes.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes it's really hard to sit quietly in meditation, especially when we struggle with anxiety, because our mind can be moving at a million miles a minute and we feel like we need a pen and a little notepad next to us to write down all the to-dos that come up during the time when we're trying to be quote-unquote clearing our mind. But meditation can be used in many different ways. Currently, I use meditation as a place to practice the tools I use for stress management throughout the day. That way, if something happens, if life happens, my mind will go right to those tools that I have practiced. This way, I'm less likely to fall in old behavior patterns and get caught up in my emotions. Think of this guided meditation as a gentle gym for you to work out calming tools that you can practice when you get overwhelmed through the day, because we all know we can't control what happens to us in life. But with practice over time, we can control how we react and respond to the challenges that come up. And, like I said, the best part is this meditation is only five minutes, so you can download it, you can bring it with you wherever you go, you can listen to it in the morning, you can listen to it after lunch. You can listen to it after your boss triggers you, after your husband frustrates you, whenever you need it, because repetition is how you will grow nervous system muscles so you can be spiritually and mentally fit. One of my friends talks about having a spiritual six pack and that's from doing a lot of internal work, and I love that idea, like not a six pack of beer but a six pack of belly muscles. Spiritual six pack that's what we're all looking for, right?

Speaker 1:

You can find the link for stepping off the chaos roller coaster on my website at Mrs-hardcom, or in the show notes. I'll put a link there for you All right. Thank you so much for your trust and support. I am so grateful to be on this journey with you. I'm here to support you. If you have any questions, you can find me on Instagram or Facebook. You can find me on my website. On Instagram, I'm at Mrs that's MRShard H-A-R-D underscore times no more. On Facebook, you can look me up. I'm Mrs Hard and I'll put those links in the show notes, along with my website, mrs-hardcom. I wish you a stress less day and an amazing future beyond your wildest dreams, because it definitely is possible for you. All right, until next time, take care.