Breaking Up with Anxiety: Why It's Not All In Your Head (It's in Your Body Too):

Thank you to Modern Aquatic for the music. Track "Laurel Leaves." And to our guest Starlyn Haneman at wholesomerebelwellness.

Speaker 1 (00:00):

If you're looking for options beyond stuffing, your feelings, blowing up, acting fine, sucking it up or giving more than you get, come with me on this journey. I've got some good stuff for you.

Speaker 2 (00:17):

Okay, good

Speaker 1 (00:18):

News. According to the Mayo Clinic, it's completely normal to occasionally experience anxiety, and this makes sense, right? You're only human, so of course you're going to sometimes worry, have feelings of fear about the future or even nervousness about something fun or exciting, like getting up on a stage in front of 300 people and telling a story about your life. Okay, maybe that last one's just for me. Maybe yours is more like butterflies before a first date or nerves about pitching a project to your boss. And all of this stuff is just part of the human experience, and it doesn't have to be an awful out of control, anxiety attack. It can just come and then the feelings can go. We can even train our minds to notice these thought patterns so we can move through them with greater awareness and self-compassion. But what happens when your anxiety becomes chronic intense, or your default?

(01:09):

What happens when your anxiety starts to affect your sleep, relationships, confidence, and your health? Hi, I'm Victoria, a recovering anxious person. There's a lot of reasons for this and I'll share a little more in this episode in my conversation with anxiety coach Starlyn Haneman. But I'll give you one big spoiler alert before I knew what to call it. My main way of moving through the world looked like a case of serious hypervigilance. What does that mean exactly? For me, it meant almost always trying to do my best, even when the definition was constantly changing, which would later become a real problem because I didn't understand why I was doing it or where the motivation to be an award-winning human and a non contest with no awards was coming from when I was in school. It meant being the best student I can be. When I became a mom, it was how can I be a great mom when I started teaching in college, same when I got divorced, I wanted to be the best divorced parent possible for my kids, but that's not all.

(02:10):

My hypervigilance also meant being careful and watching out for mistakes that would mess me up later in life. And then when I would inevitably make mistakes, it would be like, oh shit, and let's write it down. Let's rehearse it. Let's memorize this experience so it can never happen again. Then it meant keeping lookouts. So the same mistake couldn't sneak up on me, and sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn't. But you know what it always was? Even when I had little awareness about what I was doing fucking work, my favorite therapist, Dr. B once told me that it was like I was moving through life on stilts while other people were out there with their feet touching the ground. The worst part was I somehow made stilt walking look like a stroll in the park. Even when it was stormy, I was a master at looking fine, even great, never knowing what I was doing was way more work than the normals.

(03:03):

So yeah, I was a ball of anxiety and eventually it wrecked my nervous system and I had to handle it, and it took years to see real progress, but eventually I did see progress, and I use these same tools today. I am hopeful that in this way you are not like me. I would not wish chronic anxiety on anyone, but it's possible you got a smidge of what I'm talking about going on, and here's why. There's a lot that happens in our developmental years that makes how we handle life later easier or harder. And turns out how you learn to experience your emotions is a big one. So if you had parents or mentors who taught you that it's okay to disappoint, to make mistakes, to try and fail, to love and lose, to feel sad, to get mad, that you will hurt others and you'll feel bad, but then you'll make it right.

(03:53):

If you had wise people who taught you to feel you're doing much better than the rest of us. But if you didn't or if your lessons were somehow interrupted or were incomplete, then now is an excellent time in your life to work on this. And the cool thing is it will benefit you immensely, but if you love other people and want to do right by them, it's going to help them too. And you know what else? When you learn to notice your feelings and work with them, your emotional suffering, which is a lot of what anxiety is going to decrease, if you're new to the Naked Librarian, I am so glad you're here. It's true. I am Victoria, the recovering, anxious, perfectionist, people pleaser, and I'm also your host and the creator of the Naked Librarian. I'm a writer, storyteller, and health nerd who is passionate about helping grown ass women navigate life with more self-compassion, energy, happiness, and wonder.

(04:44):

In today's episode, you're going to meet Starlin Hannaman, an integrative wellness coach who focuses specifically on living with and overcoming your anxiety monster because like me, she believes you deserve so much more. Starlin who runs wholesome Rebel Wellness has her own remarkable story of going toe to toe with anxiety and rebuilding her life from the inside out. I know you'll be inspired by her story, our conversation, and the tools you can glean from noticing your anxious thoughts and how they're participating in the way that you show up in the world. So if you're looking for options beyond stuffing, your feelings, blowing up, acting fine, sucking it up or giving more than you get, come with me on this journey. I've got some good stuff for you.

Speaker 3 (05:40):

So I'm so glad you can be here today, and we're actually recording on Valentine's Day, and people will listen to this later, and we're going to talk today about anxiety and healthier ways to really manage that. I find it interesting that love today is the day of love and love can be part of that little formula and how we experience our own feelings and emotions. So it's probably one of the pieces of the puzzle.

Speaker 4 (06:15):

Yes, very much is.

Speaker 3 (06:19):

Well, I know you have such a unique background, and I'd just love to start by having you share a little bit about yourself and how did you get to this place where you're helping other people and especially women with anxiety?

Speaker 4 (06:35):

Well, thank you for having me first of all, and yeah, I have mean it's a long, crazy wild ride. But about five years ago I was struggling with anxiety, which I originally didn't even realize was anxiety. I don't like to be weak, and my viewpoint was that if I had anxiety, that was a weakness. So I kept pushing it off. I was using my own coping mechanisms to deal with stress, anxiety, overwhelm, all the things that come along with being a parent and female in our society, I feel. And I was drinking to deal with that, and it helped to kind of numb the feelings and dull the edges and not have things feel quite so hard. Eventually that led to panic attacks because I was ignoring it, and those feelings just build up inside of your body until they have to escape somewhere. So panic attacks started happening.

(07:46):

I finally broke down and went to the doctor and they prescribed me medication, which I feel most people can relate to if they have anxiety. I started taking it. I did not like how I felt on it. It just didn't feel like me. Things just felt a little bit off and I knew that there were things I could be doing. I just hadn't wanted to try them. Some of those things involved, like you said, love self-love. I was in a place more of self-loathing, I believe, and I sort of went on a journey of trying to figure out what would work for me because I am a 100% di iyer. I like to figure things out on my own. I like to fix things, and I figured this could be something that I could do myself, but it took getting to that rock bottom and realizing I had to make a change, and I went on a personal journey of figuring out what worked and what didn't. And now I'm on the other side of that and it's amazing.

Speaker 3 (08:58):

Wow. I love what you said about self-love versus self-loathing because I feel like for those of us who've experienced anxiety, we sometimes don't even realize how our thoughts are participating in how we're feeling. And you talked a little bit about this feeling of not wanting to feel weak, and that really resonates with me. I feel like a lot of my life and a positive part of my identity that I associated with was feeling strong and capable and overcoming, and it is almost like the resisting of a feeling of weakness or dependence. And we were chatting earlier before the call about how much our family backgrounds play into that, and I can certainly almost draw a straight line to experiences of why I really decided to form an identity specifically around strong, capable, and independent. And those are wonderful qualities to be, and many of us, they're really tied to resilience and many of us need to cultivate those, but it's also this almost like this limited supply. We don't know that. We don't know that we have a limited supply of it. And so when it's like you're starting, the threads starting to run out, it just exacerbates that fear of, oh no, what's going to happen? So you had your personal experience and it sounds like you started finding practices, things that worked, things that didn't work, and then you decided, okay, I've learned these things for myself. Maybe I want to teach this to other people. So did you go back to school? What was that like?

Speaker 4 (11:01):

Yeah, so decided that I had gone to school previously for food science and human nutrition because I love food and I do see it as such a great tool to heal. I do think it can be medicine, but I did not want to be a registered dietician. I didn't want to tell people what to eat. And so I kind of backed away from that. And so after my journey, I decided I really want to make an impact. I really want to help people, but I don't think it's just food. I think there's just so many lifestyle changes that we can make so many different ways we can impact our mental and physical health just by making small changes in our life. So I went back to school, I went to the Institute for Integrative Nutrition to a health coach, and that really took more of a holistic approach of all the different ways that we can make changes in our lives that aren't just food and exercise, so to speak.

Speaker 3 (12:09):

I think that it's holistic is one of my, I think my favorite words. I love how it applies to so many things that I value, and I think a holistic view of health is so important. And even though in some of the circles that I am in, it's almost now mainstream, that everyone's sort of looking at their health holistically. It really is not always been introduced to people even at our age. And so I love that this is important work that you get to do. I also think it's really cool how you look at pieces in order to help with the whole, and I happen to know that you are also a Harley Davidson mechanic, which I just feel like I need to bow to you or something like that. That is your sign behind you says badass, and that's the most badass woman thing I could think of. So okay, there's got to be a story in here about how you became a motorcycle mechanic, but I'm also curious if that mind of, you said you're a DI wire that mind of figuring something out, so something goes or runs. Is there a relationship there between that work and what you do now?

Speaker 4 (13:33):

I hadn't completely thought of it that way, but I think you might be right. I became a mechanic probably because I really did love doing things that weren't mainstream and I dunno, shock value, but I did love working on my car with my dad and I grew up with parents that rode motorcycles and I started racing motocross. And one day I found an advertisement and a motorcycle magazine about going to motorcycle mechanic school, and my dad was like, great. He was totally on board to have a motorcycle mechanic in the family. And there may have been a little bit of like, oh, I can, I don't know, gain some extra love from my dad or appreciation. There's that feeling of that child to parent relationship where you're like, oh, look at me. My dad will love me even more if I do this. Not that he didn't already love me, but that was probably part of my view.

(14:36):

So I went on to be a mechanic, and I think that may have been what really triggered a lot of my anxiety originally and learning how to pack things in because I was in a who it was 100% masculine environment. I couldn't have any feminine there really. It wasn't really safe because I had to go to work and I had to be the best. I couldn't make a mistake because if I made a mistake, it was because I was a woman. It wasn't because I was human. So I had to be the very best every single day, no doubt about it. And at that point, I was almost able to be equal, but I could never be up here. There was always a doubt. And so there's a lot to process in that I still am working on where I had to prove myself and I was never worthy.

(15:36):

So that can really start to weigh on someone. And I became so unhappy in that job that I would just wake up every day and cry and then I'd get off work and I would drink to deal with the stress of it. And that just sort of over time, but it pushed me into that identity where I didn't feel it was safe to be feminine or show that feminine energy, and I always had to be capable and I always had to be able to do the things. So I never allowed myself to make mistakes or to be soft. So ideas like meditation or gratitude, they always felt so fluffy to me. I was like, I was a doer, a pusher, and those things felt like, how could they help me until I tried them? And then I was like, whoa.

Speaker 3 (16:25):

Yeah, I think your story is so relatable, which is so surprising given that most women are not motorcycle mechanics. But I think your experience is such an extreme way. I know there's other careers like stem and medicine that sometimes women talk about this in sports, but I really relate to this story in a different way. I was very young when I started teaching in college, and I always looked younger than I was and I'm small. I'm five three, so I am not an intimidating presence. I'm blonde. I had a lot of things on the outside, young, blonde, small that didn't look like college professor. And the first couple of semesters that I taught, I was so uptight about doing it all right, and it was my own hangups in that environment. I could have been softer, but I was worried about not being perceived as an authority. I was worried about being perceived as not smart because of what my appearance and what I looked like, and I put so much pressure on myself that was unnecessary. And in fact, I still remember when I had my second son and I had been teaching my first semester at the University of Portland, I was finishing up, I had a really sweet group of freshmen, and I think on the last day I mentioned I was going to go home and see my kids and they were like, what? You have children?

(18:14):

It wasn't my age or what I looked like. They were just truly flabbergasted that I had never talked about them before, that I never mentioned them. And I was working so hard on that exterior persona of like, I just want you to see me as your teacher and we talk about the things that you read and write, and it's comedic to me today that I thought that was great. But I think what we're getting at is that when we create these divisions within ourselves, even when it feels necessary, that's not helping how we're processing stress. And so that was one of the other questions I had for you is I think that, and we haven't really defined anxiety. I remember when anxiety became part of my conversation and repertoire with my therapist, but I think a word that a lot of people associate is stress and that feeling of stress and overwhelm. And so where does anxiety fit and is it part of a spectrum? Are they sisters? Are they the same thing?

Speaker 1 (19:32):

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Speaker 4 (20:39):

I would say that they're closer to sisters. They're siblings of sorts, but stress is more of that pressure and we can put physical stress on us. It can be a mental stress workload, or we can do the physical where it's working out or sauna, cold plunge. Those are all physical stressors, and sometimes those stressors can be good for us, but anxiety is more of a feeling and energy within us that sometimes we don't even know where it comes from. It's just all of a sudden in there and it's causing that overwhelmed feeling where you're like, I can't breathe, or My stomach hurts, and you're like, what's happening? Whereas stress, you kind of know where stress comes from. Sometimes anxiety, you can be like, oh, that's a trigger for me. I know what that is. But a lot of times you don't even know what brings it on because my belief is we've gotten so good at ignoring ourselves and what our intuition is telling us that we don't even know what's triggering us or we're just like, go away. I don't want to deal with that round now. I don't have time for it. And it becomes an energy within us that refuses to be ignored anymore.

Speaker 3 (22:01):

Oh, that's such a helpful explanation. So almost the semi-conscious or subconscious nature of something kind of gnawing at us and saying, I don't have time for this, or something that I used to do before I started realizing it was a problem. I think I knew it was a problem, but it was, oh, I can't cry now I have on makeup, and then I'll go into this meeting and everyone will see that I've been crying and I don't want that, so I'm not going to feel this now and I'm going to deal with that later. And I ended up with a very unique experience where I went through several years of actually not being able to cry, and it was almost like somewhere along the way I shoved it away so much that I got stuck. I was in working with my therapist specifically at that point, wanting to cry, desperate to cry because my body was kind of jacked with anxiety.

(23:20):

This was around the time my sister passed away about 15 years ago, and her death was very sudden. She died from a drug overdose, and she had been in recovery, she had had a lot of off and on again, periods of time of sobriety, but at the time she was in a pretty good place. And so it was very shocking. And something like that isn't just her death, it's also all the family memories and all the relationships. And so I started experiencing, I had equilibrium, which took me time to even understand because when I went to her memorial, it was in Georgia and it was summer and the ceiling fans were on. So I thought it was some kind of weird thing with looking up at a ceiling fan and this is what your mind will do. It took me a long time to go, oh my gosh, I am dizzy and I feel like I'm going to fall down.

(24:28):

So I had these weird symptoms. I had the heart racing, just the constant chattering and talking, and I've written about this before, and my joke was that my anxiety was on 24 7 except when it went out for smoke breaks. So I was mainly, some people were having anxiety attacks. I was like an anxiety being who occasionally got little breaks, which I didn't know how to control. And so yeah, it was just a storm. And I hope for people who are listening, that doesn't ever happen to you because it's so hard. And it really took me, I mean this sounds dismal, but it took me years to, not 10 years, but it took me a couple of years, took me not just the years, but things that I needed to stop doing, relationships that needed to end, things like that, that had to happen in order for me to make that space and get well.

(25:36):

So I hope that that's not your experience, anyone who's listening, but I think that maybe you can hear it as a cautionary tale. I think yours is also in that cautionary tale, that there were things that were happening, little red flags, little bad habits that had helped us habits, let's take the bad out of it, habits that had helped us survive in life, that had stopped being helped, they were now hurting. So in your experience working with people, what are some of those little anxiety flags, that little habits that we might be doing that we can begin to notice?

Speaker 4 (26:29):

So one of those things is any time that you all of a sudden want to avoid something that can kind of be a trigger where it's like you should notice that where you're trying to avoid feeling a certain way. So you grab your phone to just start scrolling or you want to drink or smoke or it could be working. Some people use work as an avoidance because it takes their mind off of whatever it is that they're doing. Shopping, online shopping is a big one where people just want to get that hit that makes them feel good in the moment, and then all of a sudden they have a million Amazon packages and they're like, I don't even know why I ordered those, but it was their form of where I would drink, they would shop, and it's just to get us to feel good and to not be in that anxious feeling.

(27:28):

So when you're doing those things as an avoidance technique, I would personally recommend that if you start to do that and notice it, stop and take a breath and just try and sit with it and see if you can actually realize where it's coming from, because there's the times that you don't know. But if you sit with it long enough, you'll usually figure it out. You will start to cue in to be like, oh, that thing happened. I didn't like it, but I don't want to admit that I didn't like that, or I don't want to have to address that. I don't want to have to talk to my husband about that, or I don't want to have to talk to my boss about that. And so we kind of internalize that, and it might show up hours, days later, but it's a feeling your brain's been processing it and it suddenly starts to come out. So I think that the big ones are just those avoidance techniques and when you start to see that you're using them not for just like, oh, social media, I want to see what so-and-so's up to, but you're using it just as, I just need to escape right now. That is a flag that should be looked at.

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Speaker 3 (29:31):

And that's so good. Just that little practice of noticing when, or I wonder too about sometimes we were like, something's bothering me. I don't even know what it is. And we can sit with that and go, oh, it was that comment my friend made. I didn't like that. That really bothered me or hurt my feelings. And you, we have choices, but not if we don't admit that something really hurt us or bothered us sometimes it's like, oh, well that hurt my feelings because it reminded me of when I was in third grade and Adam said that I don't need to talk to her about it. Now I understand why I'm upset. But other times it's like she's kind of got a pattern going of saying these kinds of things and she's got no idea how it's landing for me and take a lot of courage, and maybe it's time to have a courageous conversation.

(30:37):

So I think that one of the things that I've had to learn is to actually not think too hard because that was a problem. When I first started therapy, I always wanted my therapist to give me homework and books, and he was like, Nope, you don't get any. And I was like, why? I feel like we talked about stuff and I just want to learn more about it. He's like, yeah, you've learned enough. You're full of learning. Why don't you? Yeah, I remember the day where he was like, okay, great. Yeah, I've got a homework assignment for you. I'm like, perfect. Okay. What is it? I'm ready. He's like, your homework is to love yourself. And I'm like, what does that even mean? Love myself? And I really had no idea what he meant. Thankfully, this was years ago, many years of loving myself since, but I really was like, well, first, that's stupid. That was my main thought. Well, that's dumb. This is the dumbest homework I've ever even heard of. And what even is that? And who's to say that I don't? So I've had to learn that sometimes we are talking about sitting with it and usually we can figure it out, but is it always our thinking brain that we're using to do that? What else is happening?

Speaker 4 (32:05):

I definitely don't think that you can definitely get into an overthinking pattern, which obviously can trigger more anxiety. But I like what you said about the self-love, learn to love yourself, which I believe could be what triggered a lot of this anxiety to begin with. We weren't true to ourselves. We built up those walls, we stuffed ourselves into those boxes. We made those rules of I need to be capable. I need to show them that I am this type of person. And we didn't allow ourselves to be fully expressed. And so that process of self-love is allowing all of you to be out there in the world. So that is a huge part of becoming who you were meant to be, right? Which allows, I think that anxiety to dissipate because you are loving yourself, you're accepting yourself exactly as you are, and you're not trying to cut off part of you like, oh, there, I'm just going to cut off my arm.

(33:09):

I don't need that. But subconsciously, obviously. So yeah, finding ways to love yourself to sit with yourself, not overthink things, but feel things, get those feelings. You don't have to think about it with your brain necessarily, but when someone says something to you that you don't like, you usually can feel it in your body, but we also maybe don't love ourselves enough or we think, oh, I'm overreacting. How many times have you told yourself I'm overreacting? Maybe you're hearing a parent's voice in your head where they told you quit overreacting. We haven't been allowed to feel, we come from a generation where feeling wasn't always approved of it wasn't something that we were supposed to do. It was just get on with life, push through it, buck up, move on. And so we're having to retrain ourselves things that hopefully our children are learning at a much younger age than we did, because I think that we were done a huge disservice, obviously not being allowed to feel in the way that children are now.

Speaker 3 (34:31):

Yeah, I can hear my grandmother say, which sounds crazy now, or if you cried, stop that, or I'll give you something to cry about. But my grandmother would say, children are to be seen and not heard. And that was her big response to what she called back talking. And so when we spent time with my grandmother and all of our other cousins, of course there would be conflicts, and there was no responsible adult to help us navigate that because we were not supposed to have problems, I guess, or we were supposed to. It would've been nice to have been equipped. And I don't blame my grandmother, she wasn't empowered with any of these tools, and she was just repeating things that she heard. But I think a little bit about something I've been trying to do with my sons, because I think that I have three sons.

(35:27):

So my experience as a woman, I have my own issues with how the world perceives me and how I show up. And then I think about my sons who are also giving a lot of mixed messages about what it means to be a young man. And sometimes it's share your feelings, but then other times there's still a lot of coded messaging around strength and the perception of that, and that's changing, but it's not maybe where it will be. And so one of the things that I'm helping them with is something that I've been helping myself with, which is just putting language to the feeling. And so I've had fun conversations with my 15-year-old where I, I'll say, well, how did that make you feel? And he'll say, fine. And I say, well, what else? And he'll say, well, ask me questions. And I said, well, do you maybe feel disappointed?

(36:29):

Yeah, a little actually, I was surprised. I was surprised when that happened. And we end up kind of building this bigger emotional lexicon, and in an attempt to kind of pass the generational baton, it's like, okay, I didn't get this training, but I'm getting it now. I'm learning it now. Let's see how much I can impart so that maybe you have more range. I like to think of it as emotional range. And to me that's kind of almost like the flip side of anxiety. We have our very anxious state and then we have potential emotional range that we can develop. And turns out I'm a highly sensitive emotional person, so no wonder stuffing all my feelings wasn't working so good. So what are some of the practices that you feel like are just a good place to start when it comes to managing anxiety or managing these conflicting feelings? If somebody's not ready to call it anxiety, the capital A.

Speaker 4 (37:46):

If you're having those feelings, I would recommend to start to notice your avoidance techniques. So whether that's drinking, eating, scrolling, notice when those things are happening, try to sit with yourself, learn to be comfortable in the uncomfortable because those feelings are uncomfortable. Those we've been avoiding them for a reason. They are uncomfortable, but they won't kill us. And I think that that was a big turning point for me when I realized that my feelings were just feelings. My thoughts were just in my head and none of them were going to kill me. I just had to be okay with sitting there, and I just never wanted to sit with them because it sucked. But I finally started meditating and I started with three minutes of guided meditation because at least there was another voice and it was telling me what to do. And I was like, okay, I can do this.

(38:42):

And I worked my way up. 10 minutes is usually about all I have time for in my life, but it's perfect because it's 10 minutes of just sitting thoughts come in and out. I might be uncomfortable, I might hate it, but I do it and I'm like, oh, and I didn't die. I started a gratitude practice where I was journaling every night because when we are anxious, we kind of get this tunnel vision where we're only thinking about the bad, the negative. We don't see the beauty of life, we don't see the positives, and we are just looking at everything that is going wrong and how nothing is right, and we get in that spiral. So when we start to focus on just those good things, they can be anything. It can be I have a roof over my head, I have a warm shower in the morning.

(39:33):

I have kids that are loud and obnoxious and they make a mess, but they love me and I love that it doesn't all have to be the most amazing things. You don't have to have a million dollars to be grateful for. It can be teeny tiny things. The broccoli I had at dinner tonight was amazing. It can be those things, but just to draw your focus just for a minute where you can start to pick those out and getting time outside, moving your body outside. Nature. Mother Nature is so wonderful. She has so many things to offer us. The expansion of being outside. A lot of us are in front of our computers a lot. We get that tunnel view kind of with anxiety when we go out and we see the big wide world can kind of expand us and not to mention all the benefits of the light for helping us with circadian rhythms plus the vitamin D, and then just moving your body out there. You don't have to go out there and exercise or go for a run per se, just go out and walk and move. That movement will help you move any of those anxious feelings through your body and hopefully out. Those are the easiest, simplest, they will cost you nothing techniques to just start to be aware and start to get out of that state.

Speaker 3 (40:51):

And I feel like everything you described, there's almost an immediate reward for right? It's almost never happened that you go outside and go for even a leisurely walk and come back in and go, well, that was a waste of time. Almost like never happens. And the gratitudes, which I so believe in those might be a little harder to see the change over time, but I encountered some great terminology around gratitudes that I've been hanging onto. One psychologist talked about them, as he said, a lot of times we're very focused on what he calls the headwinds of our lives, which are all the things that are coming at us, but we don't often have the same insight around the tailwinds. And those are the things in our lives that are making it easier, better, rewarding. And yeah, sometimes it is the roof over your head, but sometimes it's your dog and you're just like, oh, I'm so glad, so grateful for my dog or these fuzzy socks.

(42:05):

My feet are cold. And it's amazing. It's almost impossible not to find something to be grateful for. And I've been writing gratitudes mostly in the morning when I journal, but I also recently started doing this at night and I was noticing I wasn't getting as great of a night's sleep as I need and want. And I just had this intuition to, well, it wasn't even to write gratitudes. It was like, I think I need a journal before I go to bed and see if I can get some of these thoughts out. And then I was like, and now I'm going to write just intuitively and now I'm going to write some things. I'm thankful for it. I slept so great, and I am going to keep practicing this to see if it's a continuation, but I am going to keep doing it because I feel like one of the things about midlife is it's getting a little more harder to sleep.

(43:02):

And if there's some things that I can do just on a very simple way, like journaling and reminding myself of what I'm grateful for before I sleep, then why not do it? I love how you said they're all free and they don't really cost anything. I mean, in a way they do. There is a cost, which is that we have to prioritize ourselves. We have to believe that we matter and that we have an urgency to us just like our small children did when they were growing up, that it's a need that needs to be addressed now and not my favorite game kick the can just going to kick the old can down the road. I'll deal with that later. Later comes around and you're like, oh God, that is the worst. Why do I do this? So well, I have just been so delighted with our conversation and if people want to find you, where should they look?

Speaker 4 (44:12):

I am really active on Instagram at Hanman, and they can also find me at my [email protected]. I do have a freebie. It's an anxiety SOS toolkit, and it gives you a couple tools if you are dealing with anxiety in that moment. And then it gives you a couple tools to help you with changing your anxiety feelings over time. So it's more of a long-term practice. So I've got both of those inside that toolkit and it's totally free, and you can find that on my website or on Instagram. It's in my bio.

Speaker 3 (44:48):

I love that you have that. That's so useful too, just to be able to spend some time with your individual experiences, because I know we've been talking about our own, but also just broadly. Well, thank you so much for joining me today and I'd love to have you back another time. I feel like we have more that we can talk about.

Speaker 4 (45:14):

Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. This was great.

Speaker 1 (45:18):

I hope you enjoyed this production of The Naked News. Everything created here is for educational and entertainment purposes and should not take the place of talking with a medical or mental health professional. I am a big believer in therapy, and sometimes you really need a guide to walk with you through all those feelings and experiences you've been avoiding. If you've been thinking about finding a great therapist, let me be the first to say, go for it. And if you want more wellness news delivered to your inbox, and always be the first to know about a new episode of the podcast, head over to naked librarian.com and become a subscriber. In addition to the Naked Librarian Podcast, I also publish recess, a monthly wellness newsletter with curated health hacks, recipes, books and music recommendations, fun and more, and you get all of it for free when you become a Naked Librarian subscriber. Thank you for tuning in today. I made this for you and cheers to living your very best life.

Speaker 2 (48:00):

I will take you. Tell me anything you.