Episode 30: Anxiety

Well, hey, everybody, welcome to the 30th episode of Don’t lose your balance. My name is Mallory Durrick. I cannot believe this is the 30th episode, I also got some very nice news, I don’t really look at the metrics on how the podcast is doing. And I got an email yesterday, I put everything through Buzzsprout, which is this podcast platform that sort of makes things a little bit easier for uploading and connecting the directories. And they sent me a notification that I got 1000 downloads for this podcast, which is remarkable to me that anybody’s actually even listening. And I’m thrilled, I’m thrilled that people are listening. And I’m thrilled that I feel better after I record episodes. And I’m thrilled that I’m putting it out into the universe to see where it will go. And I want to say thank you to everyone. I am also excited that we close out the gratitude room today. And I looked at the number and it was 230 out of 365 consecutive days. So there again, is that number 30. And I was thrilled because I feel like gratitude, which I’ve talked about before on this podcast is something that we should all pull from in moments of anxiety and when we’re feeling not okay, sometimes if we can ground ourselves and come back to this element of gratitude, there’s something wonderful that can happen for us. But I do recognize the challenges that involves so I’m not Suzy cream cheese about at all, I recognize how difficult it can be because it’s a daily practice. Okay, that said, I want to talk about anxiety, not because of anything other than it was on my topics of conversations that I wanted to have on this podcast. And I wasn’t sure what I wanted to talk about today. But I think it’s an important one. Because for the last, I guess it’s been two years since the pandemic started. And since, for me, you know, with quarantine, when I was home alone, I was doing all the things that I was doing. something remarkable happened for me, which was I stopped feeling anxious. I have spent decades of my life full of anxiety. And I want to draw from my past experiences with anxiety. And when I felt anxious, what were some of the things that I did, that I believed would help me with my anxiety. Well, if I was super, really anxious, I went to doctors, and I would go to therapy, and I would get on all kinds of medication that was supposed to help with anxiety. And even though they would say things like don’t drink alcohol, I would still feel like that glass of wine at the end of the day was a way to calm myself and bring myself down from these anxious moments. In retrospect, I feel like not only did that medication, cause more anxiety in many cases. But so did the alcohol. It didn’t occur to me that not only was I mixing drugs and alcohol, and not so terribly in excess in the early days, but even one or two glasses of wine would be a temporary fix to whatever I may have been feeling only to have it rears its ugly head again, and far worse than it originally was.

04:45

What I’m what I’m trying to say was that I looked at some of these mechanisms of coping as a way to deal with whatever anxious feelings that I had. It could have been a simple, and I don’t want to say it’s simple, but my anxiety could have been. It is kind of simple, I guess a little bit about how I was performing as a wife how I was performing as a mother, I remember feeling super anxious about what people thought of me. And whether they were talking about me behind my back and, and saying negative things about me. I remember feeling anxious about my job. And whether my clients were happy with the performance, whether I was doing a good job, and I am the kind of person that goes overboard to do a good job, even to this day. I want to reflect on this time in my life, because the anxiety that I had felt sort of followed me along for many, many years. And for whatever reason, I didn’t want to talk about it, I lived with it, I found what I considered coping skills and exercise was a big part of helping me cope. And clearly when I was an instructor, Lady of America, and then LA Fitness, exercise was a big savior, I would be obligated to teach at the gym. And that forced me to get up and move. I wish I was still doing that. But I can say that, it probably helped more often than it did not, and that I am really grateful for, but it it wasn’t enough. Because when the anxiety went over the edge of I can’t, I can’t work this out, meaning I can’t exercise this away. That’s when I ended up in doctors offices, and they’re so quick to just prescribe a medication. You know, and it’s funny some medications like the benzo diazepam, or whatever they are like Valium, and Ativan, they did not call me they actually made me more anxious. I will say that the vikan in probably calm me. But of course, the withdrawal Vicodin would cause more anxiety worrying about whether I was going to have enough even remember feeling, you know, anxious about a snowstorm that might be coming and did I have wine in the house

07:27

once I eliminated some of these toxic things from my body. And I managed to recognize that there are a lot of things I can control with my anxiety, I figured out how to cope better, getting rid of them, getting rid of the wine, getting rid of any of the drugs over the course of many, many years. I started to just feel better in the last two. When many people were elevating, amplifying from the pandemic, there are levels of anxiety, mine started to come down. How in the world did that happen. And I can only say, clearly my body was clean and cleanse from any toxic chemicals. And I just got into the creativity. And that made a big difference. I started to develop this routine in my life. I get up in the morning I put myself together, I make my coffee, I go to my desk, and and the day the same way that I always ended the day I might have a small salad for dinner, or very rarely am I cooking anymore. And then I go to bed and rinse and repeat. And I found that each day turned into another day and you wake up on Monday and you go to bed and it’s Friday and you hopefully enjoy your weekend. And then it’s another Monday and again I said rinse and repeat and before you know it, this sort of routine of what you can expect. You wake up and you say I don’t feel anxious anymore. What am I doing differently, that my anxiety has gone away? Well, I’m not, you know, spending too much money I’m saving. I use the time in quarantine to improve my skill sets. So I’m not I’m no longer lacking the confidence in my work. I’m pretty confident that I’m very confident that what I do and what I put out when I put together a website or I’m designing something I know I’m delivering and I’m delivering something awesome. And I’m getting rewarded for that. And I go into gratitude every morning and start my day with people who may be ending their day in Japan and England. I feel like the expectation of what others have of me is I don’t know if it’s better But it’s different. And because I’ve eliminated people who I don’t allow to have an expectation of me, I only have an expectation of me. And I’m really happy about that. I feel like when I communicate with other people, I am a much better listener than I ever was. And I thank the app clubhouse for that, and the people on clubhouse, because when two people are talking, you can hear no one. And I learned how to be a much better listener, how to pause and think about what I want to say, before I say it. I hope that my children, when I get to see them, get to see the benefits of all of this, because they have their own lives. And I recognize that and I’m not, you know, waiting around for anything, I hope that when I have time to go out to the West Coast and see either one of them, or they come here, they’ll see a different kind of mother and I, I don’t have to do the things that I had to do for them when I was a young mother, obviously, because they’re adults. But I’d like to have a different kind of a relationship with them without this history. And this pass of, oh, god, my mom was really, you know, fucked up. But I don’t know if they’ll ever have that I know that I can have that. I know that anxiety can come into our lives for no apparent reason. You know, there are situational anxiety, you’re stuck in traffic, and you feel really anxious about being late for an appointment. Or you’re having a fight or an argument with somebody and you feel really anxious about that. But one of the things I can say is, those things are temporary. And when I’ve, I’ve seen people online, talk about what you can do to help mitigate some of your anger, anxiety levels,

12:05

I can honestly say that, when you focus on your body’s reaction, like your breathing, and where you go mentally, you can change that narrative in your head, you can say to yourself, I’m not going to, I’m not going to allow myself to feel this way. And even though you may be dealing where I might end up dealing with the absolute worst thing I could possibly think of, I have better coping skills. It’s not about a pill. It’s not about a glass of wine. It’s not about the things that traditionally were the Go twos for me that I would say, well let me go do this. Because I’ve eliminated it, I can’t fall back. And I won’t fall back on having this feeling of anxiety, and then going to, you know, a bar and having a glass of wine. And I have to say it doesn’t help. I know we think it helps temporarily. But ultimately, it really doesn’t help or it doesn’t help me, I shouldn’t speak for anybody else, but myself clearly. But I would wonder about also food that we put into our system. I’m actually an extraordinarily healthy eater. I have nothing but fruits and vegetables in my refrigerator. I don’t buy refined sugar or processed foods. And I eat, you know, salmon and all kinds of healthy things. So I know that what I am ingesting and consuming is not causing me to have these big spikes of insulin and, and sugar rushes. And then people will say, Well, you drink coffee. Well, my liver doctor said to drink coffee. And you know buddy is going to die from having two cups of coffee a day with almond milk. And I know that sounds silly, but it’s the truth. I would like to also say that things that we can reach for from a creative perspective, consumers can be super helpful to helping us with our anxiety levels. And I am not going to speak from a place of never having anxiety. Of course I have anxiety. I just got better at dealing with the moments of anxiety and knowing that there it that it’s all temporary and not reaching for certain things that isn’t going to help. It might be a temporary fix for a few moments or an hour or two. But ultimately, it’s going to come back. I remember feeling so anxious as a young mom and worried all the time about everything that I was doing wrong and you know it didn’t, it didn’t really help me do anything? Right? It made me do even more things that were wrong. I, I can’t imagine that there’s anybody who goes through life that doesn’t feel anxious. Like I look at my mom and I wonder I never really saw her anxious. How did she manage to do that? I know she’s listening right now. And I will have to ask her that again. I’m sure I’ve asked her that in the past, because she’s had to deal with lots of things that were awful me being sick, and even a husband who died when she had two little girls who are seven and 10. Can you imagine the anxiety that she felt? Oh, I certainly can’t. But the coping skills of of just allowing yourself to feel it, and then breathing through it. And then sometimes you have to be angry about it as well. I don’t know. But I do know that no one probably gets on skates gets through it unscathed. Do you know what I mean? Wish that it didn’t have to be so hard all the time. I wish that everybody could experience the sort of piece that has come over me in the last two years. And I feel like, I’m lucky. I feel like I set myself up for all of the right things, good patterns, and good behaviors were rewarded, not because I manifested it. But because I made choices, to live a better, healthier, cleaner life. One that was far more productive than not. Even when I was just sitting here with no work. I didn’t do nothing. I didn’t. It’s not like I sat and watch television all day, I got better at my job.

16:54

I learned how to be more productive. I learned about structure, I learned that I can count on myself. In that part of anger, that anxiety that I used to feel like oh my God, I need to I need a partner, man to take care of me, it’s gone. 100% gone. You know, and I feel like the people that I have in my life are just marvelous. They care about themselves, they care about me, they care about others, and they show up and showing up is a big part of it. I don’t have to show up based on somebody else’s expectations of what they want of me, I can show up based on the expectation of what I want for myself. And I love not feeling anxious all the time. I love that I was able to get through it and get over it. And I hope that for everybody, you know, I, I want everybody to have the opportunity to feel what I feel. Yesterday, I had a meeting with somebody who had found me through my hashtags on Instagram for this podcast. And we had a very nice conversation and one of the most interesting things about the conversation, and she has a podcast as well. And she invited me to be a guest on our podcast, which I’m actually looking forward to doing. And one of the things that was amazing that I took away from that conversation with her was the similarities of what we both had gone through. Now. She’s younger than me. And she’s still, you know, obviously, she’s not obviously, but she’s still got young children. But I felt exactly the way she felt I we spoke from the same sort of thread, cloth, we spoke from the same feeling of whatever we had been going through at the time in our lives that we went through it. And I have to be honest, I really believe that at the time that I was going through it, I was the only one going through it. Everybody else around me look like they just had their shit together. And I must have pretended so well that I look like I had my shit together. And I did not have my shit together. I was far from happy, healthy, or even remotely together. But I can’t imagine what other people thought of me. Or how they looked at me. Because I looked at them well, they’re working mothers, they’re stay at home mothers, they they’re not complaining, they’re not having any problems that I could see. And yet the beauty of living today with these podcasts and with even with social media we get to see, even though we know when we look at social media, we’re looking through a filter, we’re still able to get a glimpse into people who are willing to share their anxiety with others, not for attention, but for the sense of camaraderie so that we can all come together and say I feel that too. What are you doing to help yourself? How are you getting through it. And you know, I didn’t have any of that back then if you had anxiety went to a doctor, you got a pill when you dealt with it, deal with it. That’s this thing I keep hearing all all the time, just go deal with it, fix it. But it’s not as easy as that.

20:21

There’s this fantastic person I follow. She’s a therapist in Philadelphia here. And she got a bad review on her book. And she got on Instagram. And she talked about how her body just went into this like mode of anxiety and upset. And yet, she shared this on Instagram about how she was feeling and she pulled herself out of it. She recognized where her mind when she recognized her breathing, she, she did all the things that even a psychiatrist would tell us to do, but makes it so hard to do when you’re in it. And I want to say when you’re actually in it, allow yourself to feel all of those things. But recognize that is probably temporary, it is temporary. And that whatever you’re going through is going to pass and it does. I hope this helps somebody because I know for a fact it’s helping me. I may feel anxiety again, many times in my lifetime, I am much more prepared to have better coping skills and know what only will make it worse, which is throwing a pill down my throat are poured like putting a glass of wine into my mouth, you know, and I am not doing it. I’m just not going to do it. And I want to share with anybody who might be listening to this and thinking, well, that wine I don’t want to let go of that wine, that wine makes me feel great. And yeah, I get it. And I was watching something on Elizabeth Vargas from ABC News, who who’s an alcoholic and she had the same feelings about her anxiety, it was so through the roof. But somewhere along the line, she felt like the wine made her feel better. And maybe it did temporarily. But ultimately, when she crossed over to the point of just a casual drinker, to somebody who couldn’t even speak, she knew that she had gone to the point of no return and that it didn’t really help her anxiety, it amplified her anxiety. It was a temporary fix. That only made things worse later because it just piled on more problems after that. Well that’s what I like to share. I hope if you’re feeling anxious, you can take a deep breath and get a little bit more grounded and do it all through the day and hopefully you’ll pass through it quicker than you would normally. Okay well if you found value in this or any other episode of Don’t lose your balance you can share it download it you can follow me on Instagram I have two handles one is don’t lose your balance. MSD That’s Mary Sam David and then Mallory underscored direct I also have a website. Don’t lose your balance calm and I hope that you don’t lose your balance along your life journey. And I’ll see you next time. Thanks everyone.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Hi, I am Mallory Durrick. I am a creative. A Marketing Strategist and Web Designer with a small and modest boutique Marketing Agency living in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I am the creator and narrator of this podcast, Don’t Lose Your Balance. This is a culmination of decades of self-help books, countless doctors, numerous hospitals, including rehabs. Once a wife, now divorced, a mother, a grandmother and an addict in recovery. These are things that I am and have experienced.

I’m sharing it all. Baring it all. Hoping to help others; not lose their balance.