Book Review: 'Maybe You Should Talk to Someone'

Good Monday Morning! Today, I thought we should kick off with a book review. Some of you may know that I co-lead a therapist book club, and I LOVE reading. Anything really. For fluff, I read suspense, mystery, or romance novels. For work, I read books written by therapists. In the therapy room, I assign books sometimes as 'homework' for my clients. Bibliotherapy is highly effective and highly under-utilized by therapists and clients alike. Here's a link to a study about bibliotherapy if you're interested in its efficacy in improving mental health symptoms, specifically anxiety or depression. Since I want my blog to be a useful place for clients and people who otherwise may not be able to afford therapy, I thought I would give you a few book reviews to help jumpstart your 'To Be Read' list.

'Maybe You Should Talk to Someone' by Lori Gottlieb holds a special place in my heart. It's a memoir of Lori's experience with an existential crisis in her thirties and forties, and how she navigates attending therapy for herself while holding space for her clients. It is, hands down, the best book I have read about psychotherapy in a long time. It's funny, it's real, it's warm. Her stories and her clients' stories shine through each page as a beacon of hope for all of us.

To give you some context, I would like to set the stage of where my life was when I read this book. In the year prior to me picking up this book, my first daughter had died of a congenital birth defect and was stillborn. I was navigating fertility issues, recurrent miscarriages, and the heaviness of grief in my marriage, which was still very young and untested. I'm not certain how I came across Lori's book, but from the moment I opened it up, I felt like she was speaking to me.

Lori tackles everything in this book: grief, trauma, broken relationships, love, sex, cancer, death. You name it, and somehow she has managed to share a client's story that resonates with that particular theme. She shows all of us her vulnerability in going to therapy for the *first time* as a therapist herself. Wendell, her therapist, is witty, warm and unpredictable. He helps her find herself again, and wrestle with her fears of dying.

My favorite quote in the whole book is this: "People tend to dream without doing, death remaining theoretical. We think we make bucket lists to ward off regret, but really they help us to ward off death. After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them. Cutting the list down, however, makes a tiny dent in our denial systems, forcing us to acknowledge a sobering truth: Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when it will happen. In fact, as each second passes, we're all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive."

When people ask me to recommend books about therapy, this is often my first pick. You will laugh, you will cry, and at the end, you will be grateful for the time you spent with this book open on your lap. You can purchase it here. Let me know what you think about the book in the comments below or send me an email. I'd love to discuss it further with you!

Anxiety Busters: Welcome your Thoughts

Hello, hello! I can't wait to hear from you about your sunshine and sweat challenge is going. It's helped me this week to refocus on spending more time outside with intentional movement. I hope it's helped you reset or reduce your anxiety symptoms as well.

We're on to our final anxiety buster tip: Welcome your Thoughts. I'll explain what I mean by that

in just a moment.

Let's set the scene for you first: You woke up this morning and you felt your anxiety already lingering from poor sleep the night before. Your mind drifts to prepping for the day ahead, and instantly you are filled with dread. You think to yourself, "Why can't I get it together like everyone else? What is WRONG with me?" Then you feel bad for thinking those thoughts and you attempt to push them down. Your brain then rebels even further and introduces an image of you crashing your car on the freeway while driving to work. "Whoa! Don't think about that, don't dwell on that. Quit thinking about that," you mumble

to yourself as you attempt to get ready for the day. The anxious thoughts increase, and you feel worse and worse as the day goes on. In fact, the more you try to push down these anxious and unhelpful thoughts, the more intense and intrusive they get.

Whew. That's a scene that I know feels familiar to many of us. It's like I was in your brain for a second, wasn't it? I know what the anxious brain sounds like, because I have one as well. Mine is very creative when it comes to worst case scenarios.

Let's break down what is going wrong in the picture we painted above. Anxiety typically works like this: activating event+ thought= consequences (namely the behavioral or emotional responses we ultimately exhibit). In this particular case, we saw the activating event, which was getting ready for work after a poor night's sleep + the negative thoughts about self and the intrusive images of crashing your car while driving to work = increased anxiety response all day long.

What can we do to break up the formula above and reduce our anxiety response? We 'welcome the thought.' The mistake many of us make with anxious thoughts is we attempt to push them down, much like you would push a beach ball beneath the water and hope it doesn't pop back up again. We all know what happens in that case. The ball not only pops up above the waves again, but it also pops up even higher than before. It's similar with anxious thoughts. When we attempt to shame them into going away or push them down, they come back either in the form of more thoughts or increased physical symptoms related to your anxiety. Welcoming the thought would look like: When our brain introduces the image of the car crash, like in the scenario earlier, we would say internally, "oh hey there anxiety, I hear you. You're trying to protect me. Thank you for showing up today. I think I've got this." Then we take a deep breath, and we repeat it every time a thought or image like that appears. We 'welcome' the thoughts by thanking our anxiety for showing up as a protective part.

Your anxious part loves to project worst case scenarios as a way to “prepare” you for, and thus potentially prevent future loss. The problem is some things in life— no amount of worrying could prevent them or the emotional fallout afterwards. Ask any mom who’s had a child die. Or a widower. Or a young man diagnosed with terminal cancer. They all know now. Anxiety did nothing to prevent tragedy. All worrying does is steal time and joy from the present. Joy is the most difficult and fragile human emotion because we are constantly scanning for danger, thus diminishing our happiness. We think to ourselves, “There is no way this indescribable joy will last. Something will come along and take it, so I won’t stay present for it. Because losing this would be too painful and I wouldn’t survive.”

The secret is, most of the things we worry about don't actually happen, and worrying about them didn't prevent bad things from happening anyways. All we can do is thank our anxious part for being here, because it's obvious it cares about our wellbeing. When we listen to our anxious thoughts, often they become quieter. And when they are quieter, we can find space to use other coping to help us manage in times of difficulty.

Let me know what you think in the comments below! Welcoming the thought takes practice. Don't give up after two or three times. Your anxious thoughts may not quiet the first few times, because you've been ignoring or shaming them for so long. I believe in you.

Take care of your circle and yourself,

Anxiety Busters: Sunshine & Sweat

Good Morning! How was your last week? Did you utilize the "two truths" tip to help shift your thinking to a more compassionate and gentle approach? Let me know in the comments below how that tip worked for you.

Our third anxiety buster tip involves two things: sunshine and sweat. Anxiety is typically physiological and emotional, meaning lots of people know they are feeling anxious when their body tells them so. Our bodies, when anxious, will exhibit any number of physical sensations: racing heartbeat, rapid breaths, stomach pains, diarrhea, excess sweat or mouth dryness. These are all due to your sympathetic nervous system activating. Here's an interesting article on the purpose and function of your sympathetic nervous system. It basically activates all the parts of your body needed in order for you to fight or evade a potential threat (a.k.a. the fight or flight response). The trouble with the anxious brain is that it perceives 'everything is a threat,' so the sympathetic nervous system is sent into overdrive. So, how do we combat this seemingly automatic response system within our bodies?

We utilize exercise (sweat) and nature (sunshine) to turn on our parasympathetic nervous system, which acts as the 'rest and digest' system. This is only part of the solution to reducing anxiety, but it is a HUGE part. I believe the reason we feel so exhausted, depleted, worried and tense is because modern life demands that our sympathetic nervous system be on all. the. time. Think about it: our news cycle is 24/7 (see here about using a news diet to manage your anxiety), we work jobs that are menial and have little physical reward, and we are surrounded by so much information that the brain cannot process it all. Yes, we are evolved creatures with big brains that can handle a lot. However, we are not computers and we do need resets from time to time. Thus, the practice of adding in exercise (cardiovascular and weight-bearing if possible) and time in nature to combat the ever constant hum of anxiety in our minds and bodily systems.

You can start small. Sitting outside for 15 minutes per day with your face in the sunshine can give you the equivalent of a daily dose of Vitamin D, as well as boosting your serotonin levels naturally. Exercise also boosts endorphins, which are the feel good chemicals in your brain, thus the 'sweat' part of this anxiety busters equation. If you're feeling wild, you can combine your sunshine and sweat challenges into one 15 minute walk outside daily. Try this everyday for 3 weeks and let me know how it works for you! It helps some people to rate their anxiety on a 1-10 scale, with 10 being really high, both before and then directly after their sunshine/sweat time.

See you next week with our final anxiety buster tip! I can't wait to connect and hear about how this anxiety busters series has been helpful for you. As always, you can reach me at info@giftofgritcounseling.com, if you are interested in connecting about possible therapy treatment with me.

Take care of yourself and those within your circle,