Taming Self-Anxiety, with Kara Loewentheil

(sparkly music) ♪ At Space Studio. ♪ (sparkly music) Hello, hello, this is Karl Lowenthal your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Tuesday. This week is all about how to live with less insecurity and more confidence. Today, I'm going to talk about how confidence issues can show up as anxiety, and I'll share a simple way to keep those anxious thoughts from spiraling out of control. (gentle music) In my work particularly, I look a lot at how women are taught to think and how that contributes to ever present anxiety and security about most areas of their lives. Fundamentally, if you are taught that your value comes from what other people think about you, whatever gender you are, if that's a lesson that you picked up along the way, you're going to be pretty anxious most of the time because you don't have an inherent and stable sense of self-worth. The way that you can resolve and change your anxiety is to get super curious about the anxiety itself. (gentle music) I think there are two types of people. One type of person is very aware that they have negative emotion and they are constantly trying to get away from it. And so, if that's you, if you're sort of very aware when you are sad, or anxious, or afraid, then the practice is allowing that emotion, so you can even practice thinking to yourself, it's safe to feel this. This emotion is just a sensation in my body. And then you can start to ask yourself, "Why am I feeling this?" It's really a deceptively simple question. When you ask yourself, "Why am I feeling this?" And your brain says, "Because if you don't get a text back that means you're not good enough and no one will ever love you." You think that that's just true that your brain is just delivering truth to you. When you understand that your brain has all sorts of nonsense thoughts, you can see that as an optional thought. So when you feel anxious and you ask yourself, "Why am I feeling anxious?" And your brain says, "Because if you don't get a text back nobody will love you and you'll die alone." You could get that distance that we talked about in yesterday's episode where you could say, "Oh, that's a sentence in my mind, I am making up this idea that whether or not I get a text back means whether or not I die alone." And I can choose to try to practice thinking something else. Now, if you are the other group of person, then you're actually not aware of how you feel at all. And so, there's a kind of an additional step for you. Everything I just said still works but before you can even get to that point, you have to practice tuning into your body to actually become aware of your emotions in the first place. I...