Overcoming Anxiety Through Self Awareness

Welcome back to the second Improvement Room Blog, where we only talk real talk! No crap, no perfectionism, no smoke and mirrors, just real, raw life and how you can improve and even change the shitty parts that no longer serve you!

Let’s start with repeating patterns. Do you ever kinda feel like you’re always stuck repeating the same behaviour patterns? Unable to break free to make meaningful changes in your life? Or maybe, just like I did for 30 years, you continue to find yourself making the same mistakes, struggling with the same repetitive issues and feeling like you will never achieve anything in life?

It’s frustrating, it feels like heading into a boxing ring knowing you’ll get beat up, but you still step inside because you don’t know any other way forward.

I know how it feels. It’s demoralising to think that you can’t change your own life, that you’re powerless over what is happening around you.

But after studying, researching and reading everything I can get my hands on, you know what I realised? Self-awareness is just like playing a video game...the aim is to get to know your character.

What is your character thinking? How are they behaving? And what are they feeling? Once you master that, then you can move through the levels with enough awareness to succeed and win the game!

By learning to identify what triggers emotions, and how beliefs and values shape your life experiences, you can start to break those patterns down, peel back the layers and slowly start changing who you are in this moment and start moving towards who you want to be.

Let’s use weight loss as an example. You are trying to lose weight, but you keep sabotaging your progress by indulging in junk food and skipping your workouts. This was me, I learned that I was always looking for a dopamine hit!

Without that self-awareness, I used to beat myself up and felt like I couldn’t change. But when I figured out I was using food for my ADHD brain to access dopamine, I was able to create strategies.

If weight loss is your goal and you’re happy to eat well, but you can’t be assed doing any exercise, you have to dig into the feelings, the what’s and the why’s.

Why don’t you want to exercise? What feelings do you have when you think about exercise? When you break it down, there is a limiting belief there

Anxiety is another great example. I think a large majority of the population has experienced some level of anxiety at some point. You may find yourself constantly worrying, you might feel embarrassed, and I would go as far as saying you might feel ashamed or like there is something fundamentally wrong with you.

Anxiety is a real bitch, and I see it in children as young as 4!

We are our own worst critics.

Then we start to listen to everyone else's opinion of us, which significantly affects our mental health.

But self-awareness can help us recognise the humanity and imperfection in ourselves and others, and you can start to recognise anxiety for what it is…

Last week one of our podcast listeners wrote in with her question about her negative self-thoughts, and we discussed it on the show. You can watch it on YOUTUBE HERE or listen on your favourite Podcast app..

Here’s a little example of the questions being answered on the show…

Question One:

No matter how hard I try, I start a new routine like trying to keep the house tidy, and within a few weeks, it’s back to a terrible mess. I don’t know how to change it?

Developing habits can take a little while. It’s easy to develop a habit like eating chocolate because we place value on the pleasure we receive from eating chocolate. My suggestion for you is instead of thinking, “I have to tidy the house” focus on the end result, why do you want a tidy house? What feeling does that give you? This will help you look at tidying your house from a different perspective, it will allow you to place value on the experience of a tidy home rather than the experience of cleaning. It’s all about building habits.

Send in your questions and have them answered on the "Self Improvement Room Podcast" Fill in the form below and CLICK HERE to listen to the PODCAST to hear your answers.

Join me in the Self-Improvement Room next week, same place, same time. Until then … live your best day every day!