using your brain for both: when you have to do the anxiety (or your brain weather of choice!) and work in the same brain
On one of my more dramatic days, I complained to my therapist that I hated that I had to have anxiety happening in the same brain where my work was expected to go on.
"It seems like too much to process at once! How dare I have to battle my anxiety WHILE ALSO creating new knowledge!!!!!"
The reality, she gently pointed out, is that everyone has to do many things in their brain at once. Anxiety thought patterns, and the bodily responses that go along with them, run in parallel with all kinds of work, play, rest, and creation. That's just the way it works. Annoying, but true I guess.
But in my defense, it can feel overwhelming when your primary task for the day is to input a bunch of information, or draw connections between information sources, or translate your thoughts into language and your anxiety is kicked up at the same time. Other tasks (washing the dishes! tiling a back splash! walking the dog!) have a more concrete presence in the world for you to focus on and thus, you have several ways to know if you're doing it well. When you're reading, writing, or crafting an argument, you just have your thoughts. And when your thoughts are also of an anxious flavor, it can be difficult to pull the tangles apart.
And when brain weather (hyperfocus! anxiety! depression! ADHD! autism! neurodivergence of all kinds! brain fog! trauma! and all the other kinds of weather out there!) is your norm, and not just an “around the deadline” condition, it’s important to know that you aren’t making it up - the weather impacts you! If I’m having a stormy weather, I can either take an umbrella (take care of the situation!) or stand out in the rain and hope I won’t get wet. Planning works better, and is a good chance to practice self care, and the idea that you can show up and do what you can, when you can.
So, here are a few of the things I do to help that "busy brain" feeling - I can't always make the anxiety stop (although my tool belt also includes: talk therapy, medication, exercise, sleep) but I can make things a little bit more concrete, making it just a tiny bit easier to be mindful.
Make your brain weather process more visible. Sometimes, this means doing a word dump where I pull out my journal or a blank word processing document and just write out the contents of my brain. It can be a little bit overwhelming to see the contents of your anxiety thoughts spilled out onto the page, but seeing the thoughts for what they are can help bring them back down to size (they're just thoughts!) and help you combat any misinformation you might be giving yourself.
Make your work thought process a little more visible. Sometimes when my mind is spinning, I make an extra effort to make the work thinking more concrete. I make a mind map, or I start a new document where I write out what I know so far. Taking notes can definitely help keep me focused if I'm reading, or highlighting or underlining. Anything I can do to connect the abstract process I'm working on to a concrete action can help to ground me.
Have some scripts ready. I like to talk back to my anxiety, literally speaking words in my head or out loud, to counteract some of the feeling of spiraling. Here are a list of some of my standard responses to anxious thoughts while I'm writing - please know that I can repeat these MANY times an hour, but acknowledging the anxious thoughts rather than pushing past them, hoping they go away, usually is more effective for me.
Thank you for your input, brain.
We will decide if the work is quality when it is finished/on the page.
I am working at the pace that I can work.
Focus is not an objectively measured state - I will measure my work by the tasks I complete, not how easily I felt I completed them.
That is an anxious thought.
Add in a little movement. When my anxiety is high, it often can feel like I have a lot of extra energy in my limbs/torso/head, neck, and shoulders. Moving my body can help to disperse that feeling, even if it doesn't shift the anxiety itself. I love to do inversions (downward facing dog, folding in half to touch my toes, or sitting with my legs up the wall) or put on some jams and have a mini dance party. Regular exercise also helps!
Spend some time with my brain/breath. For me, this normally looks like laying flat on my floor and breathing deeply, or meditating. For you, it might look like a taking a screen break and doing 5 deep breaths, or a yoga practice. Tuning into how I feel right now, in this moment, ironically helps me anchor more into that moment, instead of swirling into the future or fixating on the past.
perfectionism: or the danger of being pretty good at most things pretty quickly
Hello, my name is Katy Peplin, and I'm a perfectionist. I've been in "recovery" for about a decade, but this is one of the biggest battles I've faced yet. It's a mental pattern that I (still) easily fall into, and that, when I really dig into it, touches the very core of what I believe about myself.
Here are some of the ways that perfectionism pops up for me:
Extremely high standards for my own work
Tendency to "redo" the work of others to make it fit my standard (assuming that it's the best, of course)
Mismatch between the level of frustration I feel about a task and the actual level of challenge/difficulty I'm facing (for example, feeling mega frustrated when a small thing doesn't work the way I think it should)
Mistrust in my own evaluation of my work - constantly seeking outside opinions and validation, consciously or otherwise
Fear about letting others see my work before it's ready
Missing deadlines because the work isn't ready to be seen
Constantly shifting definition of what "done" is
Hitting one goal and immediately setting another, even higher goal without pausing to feel good about meeting the first one
Abandoning activities if I'm not instantly competent/proficient
Taking activities that were expressly intended to be hobbies and turning them competitive/measurable (focusing on stats for exercise, extremely critical about things I make for fun, from dinner to doodling)
Inability to take compliments gracefully because it feels uncomfortable to get praise for something I'm not satisfied with
Needing to obsessively plan out and make milestones/goals/targets for big projects and being immediately and deeply discouraged if I'm forced to be flexible with those internal deadlines
(and probably a lot more!)
When I list them out like that, it's easy for me to see that perfectionism is more than just "wanting to do well" - it's a coping mechanism that is designed to protect me against the uncertainty and possible pain of not doing well. Brené Brown describes perfectionism like this:
In the research there’s a significant difference between perfectionism and healthy striving or striving for excellence. Perfectionism is the belief that if we do things perfectly and look perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame. Perfectionism is a twenty-ton shield that we lug around, thinking it will protect us, when in fact it’s the thing that’s really preventing us from being seen.
Perfectionism is also very different than self-improvement. Perfectionism is, at its core, about trying to earn approval. Most perfectionists grew up being praised for achievement and performance (grades, manners, rule following, people pleasing, appearance, sports). Somewhere along the way, they adopted this dangerous and debilitating belief system: “I am what I accomplish and how well I accomplish it. Please. Perform. Perfect.” Healthy striving is self- focused: How can I improve? Perfectionism is other-focused: What will they think? Perfectionism is a hustle.
Last, perfectionism is not the key to success. In fact, research shows that perfectionism hampers achievement. Perfectionism is correlated with depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis or missed opportunities. The fear of failing, making mistakes, not meeting people’s expectations, and being criticized keeps us outside of the arena where healthy competition and striving unfolds.
So much of this resonates with me, and with what I see every day with my clients. This is not a well-balanced desire to do well - this is an unconscious (or sometimes conscious) belief that we ARE the work, and therefore the work must be evaluated well by others because that means WE are good in the eyes of others.
As an experiment: imagine that you were working on a big project - a dissertation chapter, a journal article, a book, a website. You work on it for months under the impression that you will eventually share it for feedback with an advisor, editor, supervisor, or boss. Then at the very last minute, that person says "no need for me to look at it,” and asks you to move onto the next task. How would that make you feel?
Would you still celebrate a job well done? Would you be able to look at your work and know how to feel about it without the feedback? Would you feel completion, accomplishment, pride?
This isn’t, of course, to suggest that all feedback is evil and that we should just do what we want without ever asking for anyone to evaluate it. That’s not how this works. But, I find that that exercise helps people see that in the absence of validation from others, many of us don’t have robust mechanisms, or any mechanism at all, to consider, appreciate, and evaluate our own efforts.
If you’re in grad school, or if you’re an academic, or if you have a PhD, it’s more than probable that some things came easily to you. Maybe you were pulled out in elementary school and given books from the next reading level, and it felt good to be special. Maybe you were valedictorian. Maybe good grades got you ice cream at the end of the year. Maybe you could write papers the night before (or morning of) as an undergraduate and they still got glowing comments from your TA. That’s not all we are, obviously, but if we come to associate parts of our identity with academic or intellectual achievement, grad school is a natural next step.
It is also a perfectly designed system to turn that perfectionism and expose all it’s toxicity. For me, something broke down when I made the jump between 15 page papers and 50 page chapters. I simply couldn’t organize my thoughts clearly enough - my writing wandered and I couldn’t fix it. My perfectionism SCREAMED at me all through my dissertation process - don’t let people see this! They’ll think less of you! They’ll take your acceptance away! You’ll never get a job! Everyone else figured out how to do this! Why haven’t you??
But under that noise was the reality: I wasn’t immediately good at writing dissertation chapters, and I hadn’t had much experience with having to work to get better at something in the “school realm.” I wasn’t used to "SEE ME” comments. I was completely unhinged when faced with the idea that I wasn’t good at school, because such a huge part of how I saw myself was “a person who is good at school.”
So I did what I’ve always done: worked as hard as I could to be good so that I wouldn’t have to feel “not good” at something. I went to the writing center, I got involved in writing groups, I worked with editors, I had friends read my work, I turned into the most ruthless self-editor. And unsurprisingly, this did not go well. I became so anxious at the very idea of writing that I would sit down at my desk to do it and feel nauseous.
Looking back, I know that it didn’t feel good to work at writing, even when I was getting better, because I wasn’t interested in the process of being a better writer. I was working that hard to avoid bad feedback, and so my sense of myself hinged on what others thought of me. It would have felt more empowering, I’m sure, to be working hard to be a better communicator, to improve my writing so more people could access my ideas, but instead, I was working hard so other people would think I was good. And even when the feedback came, because I had no inner foundation to see my own value, I was utterly dependent on what other people thought of my work. Negative feedback was crushing. Positive feedback was regarded with suspicion. I never felt good about it.
The first step in the perfectionism recovery journey is being aware of it. I read two books that changed how I think about perfectionism: When Perfect Isn’t Good Enough: Strategies for Coping with Perfectionism, and I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't): Making the Journey from "What Will People Think?" to "I Am Enough". I got into therapy to deal with my anxiety, only to find out that my perfectionism was kerosene thrown on the fire of my brain chemistry. And then I did the most radical thing of all:
I tried to be bad at things on purpose. I told my students in class when I didn’t know (and promised to look it up and report back.) I opened up and told people when I was struggling with something. I tried to get better about accepting help. I did things just for fun, like knitting, and brush lettering, and gardening. I put things up on my walls that I made, so that I would look at both their mistakes, and my hard work, at the same time. I focused explicitly on my processes for work, rather than the results. I focused less on the time it took me to do things, or any other metrics I was using to measure my work, and focused more on how I felt WHILE working. I made messes. I learned that screwing up wasn’t the end of the world.
And now, a few miles down the road, I can work with clients around their perfectionism. In Thrive PhD, we talk a lot about feeling good about what you’re doing, while you’re doing it. Turning in your dissertation proposal is a MASSIVE deal, even before you get the feedback on it! Showing up to work regularly is a HUGE accomplishment, even if the work wasn’t perfect or you were in your pajamas. We track our days so that we can see that “good days” and “bad days” productivity wise tend to balance out if we show up regularly. We remind each other that trying again is the key to everything. We try to improve for our own sense of pride, because it feels good to try your hardest and do your best, not because we want our advisors to swoop in and shower us with praise. We practice the skill of viewing feedback as suggestions for improving for THE WORK, not suggestions for improving OURSELVES. We cheer when people do things for fun.
It isn’t easy. But it feels better than carrying around that armor all the time. Sometimes you don’t know how heavy you feel until the weight is gone.
building brain trust
we adopted a new cat (which brings the total up to four) (it’s a lot of cats) recently and while also being an excellent change of energy as i enter into my sixth month of pretty strict shelter-in-place protocol, i’m learning a lot. i am learning about cat-cat interactions, seasonal shifts in animal life, but most relevant here, i’m learning a lot about central nervous system soothing.
not what you thought i’d say?
yeah, that wasn’t the lesson i thought i’d be learning either. but let me start at the beginning.
we all have scripts that play in our head about how we get out of an emotional/physical state that we’d rather not be in. and for many of us, that script looks something like this:
i’m really behind
i feel badly about that
i need to not feel badly
better work really hard (exercise a lot) (eat better) (start a whole new life of routines and structure)
or they could look like:
i’m really anxious / sad / frustrated / upset / distracted
this feels uncomfortable
better work really hard to distract / solve / run away from / avoid that
but many, many of us assume that work will make us feel better. or that being caught up will make us feel better. or that if we can just stick to a routine, the feelings will resolve and we’ll be accomplished and that will make it easier overall.
i don’t know about you though, but when i am buzzing with anxiety, or really, really dragging myself through a pit of emotional quicksand, i don’t necessarily do my best work. it’s a lot harder to focus, it’s a challenge to stay on track, i get distracted easily, i’m more likely to make mistakes. and the more i keep trying to push through that, the harder it gets, which of course just increases my worry that i’ll never be able to work, which makes the anxiety worse.
it’s sort of like if you have a cat (or dog, or any animal really) and they’re nervous, or scared, or angry. you wouldn’t yell at a cat, who has no relationship with you, to get over here right now and snuggle in my arms! you wouldn’t tell a dog that was afraid of the stairs to just jump down them right now and stop being afraid of stairs forever! chances are that if you force the animal to do what you want it to do without calming it down or reassuring it first, it’s going to hurt itself, or hurt you, or just not trust that you have its best intentions at heart.
animals need to be able to trust you - the deeper that relationship, the more they relax. the more they relax, the more you adjust to where they are - rather than demand that they meet you where you are - the smoother the interaction goes.
brains can be like that too. if your brain sends you the important signal that it’s anxious, and then you invalidate that, or ask it to set that aside, or just demand that work commence immediately, then you’re trying to work through the haze of emotional/physical reaction, and you learn to not trust yourself, either.
so, imagine your brain as a beloved animal or plant or being that needs your care. and the next time that it’s in an emotional state that you find overwhelming, think about taking care of it:
do you need a basic life supply - like water, or rest, or food?
can you reset - take a walk around the block, have some water, look at a new wall?
do you need to do something to take your physical sensations into account? - deep breathing, breathing exercises, moving your body in a way that releases tension?
can you acknowledge how you’re feeling and remind yourself that it’s okay?
another way to think about this is: how can you get to a place where you feel supported, and then start to work?
trust is hard - it takes time to build. but if you can consciously start to cultivate trust with yourself, it reduces some of the fear. if you force yourself to your desk, no matter what, then every time you feel something sticky or tough, you not only have the weight of that emotion to deal with, but the knowledge that you won’t have any time to process or deal with it. it creates a cycle where the feeling is tied to the absence of work, where you assume that you’ll be unfocused, won’t finish things, and will fall behind just because you feel something, which only increases the anxiety, which in turn increases the chance that you WILL have trouble getting to work.
so experiment a little bit - picture bedelia, if you need to. we’ve gone from initial trepidation to full, deep chested, alien chirp purrs in just a few weeks. she trusts that i won’t rush her before she’s ready, and i get lots of head butts. win win.
Meditation as first aid - a #MindfulPhD post
The first time a therapist explained mindfulness to me, I'm pretty sure I laughed out loud, and not in the most kind way. Why, why on earth, would I want to sit still and listen to my thoughts? Even now, there are many moods and times of day where that sounds like absolute torture to me. Because of that, and my naturally stubborn disposition, I do not have a regular meditation practice (although I do have a fairly regular yoga practice, which is similar but not the same!)
But I do have a whole arsenal of meditation, mindfulness, and breathwork techniques that I have used to live with my anxiety. I basically use meditation as "first aid" - I pull it out when I need it, I feel safer knowing that the techniques are easy to do, and easy to reach for. I am hoping to build meditation into more of an every day, or "preventative health" model, but for now, this is what I'm working with.
So if the idea of "sitting quietly to get to know your mind" terrifies you, read on for how I do it in a way that makes me feel safe, supported, and lessens my anxiety.
I have never "cleared my mind." I don't even often sit completely still while meditating.
I for years used the "Headspace" app for my meditation, and I found many of the videos to be extremely helpful in challenging some of my worries and fears about meditation. The concept I return to again and again is that meditation is less about me "clearing" my mind or getting to a state of complete emptiness, and more of accepting my mind and what hangs out in there. Meditation and mindfulness are ways to get in touch with what I am thinking, what words I'm using to describe myself, or my work, or others, and how I feel - in my mind, in my emotions, in my body.
When my anxiety kicks up, the last thing I want to do is sit down and meditate. But doing so usually helps.
My anxiety happens on a curve. Eustress is the 'good' kind of nerves - the buzz before a big test that helps you perform better, or the extra hit of adrenaline before the big game. I then follow a pretty steady climb from stress, to anxiety, to high anxiety, to a panic attack. Meditation is not a helpful tool (for me, could be different for you) for anything above a 6 or 7 on the anxiety scale (with 10 being a full panic attack.) But for lower levels, it successful can help me refocus and usually prevent me from moving up the anxiety ladder.
When I'm above the "good stress" and before I hit the panic levels, meditation is very effective in re-centering me and usually can stop a full blown attack from happening.
Here's what I mean when I say "meditate": a combination of observing my thoughts and focusing on my breathing.
Andy Puddicombe is the face behind the Headspace app, and I find his explanation of how meditation works when you're anxious to be particularly accurate to my experience.
So, here's what I do, step by step:
If I can, I move locations. Getting up, shaking my body out a bit, and resettling in a new space (even sitting on the floor of my office) signals to me that we are doing something different.
I sit in a comfortable position. There is no rule that you have to be sitting cross legged. I sometimes sit in a chair, other times on the floor on a blanket, or with my back resting against the wall. Laying down can work too, especially if the anxiety is very high, but if I'm more relaxed, laying down on the floor can lead to a nap.
I put on a mindful breathing meditation. I used to pay for the Headspace app subscription, which was great but expensive. I also have used Stop. Breathe, & Think, and sometimes I just go onto Youtube and search for "Mindful breathing" and click until I find someone whose voice doesn't annoy me. There are also usually mindful breathing tracks on Spotify or Google Music, if you're with your phone. I like having someone lead me through the meditation, because then I know how long it will be before I start, and I am less worried about "doing it right."
I go through the meditation, which often prompts me to pay attention to my breath, or literally say "inhale" to myself when I inhale, and "exhale" when I exhale. Sometimes I'm prompted to count my breaths. Other times I might be told to focus on how my body feels in the space- the pants against my leg, the sounds I can hear. The important part to remember is that I'm not trying to "stop thinking," or "clearing the mind." I'm just trying to focus on one specific thing.
When it finishes, I give myself a minute to "come back" to the real world, and make a quick note (mental, or in my bullet journal) how I feel. I often do not feel 100%, or even 60% better. So I keep checking in throughout the day -how do I feel an hour later? Before bed? Collecting this data proved to me that eventually, meditating when I start to feel anxious will calm me down, even if it isn't a "miracle cure." 40 or 50% less anxious at the end of a work session is still a huge accomplishment.
More than reducing or eliminating it, meditation has helped me to "get to know" my anxiety.
I am learning much more clearly about my anxiety since I've started to approach it with a curiosity, and knowing more about it helps me short-circuit it before it gets out of control. Before I started working with mindfulness, it was not uncommon for me to get a panic attack "out of nowhere" or "out of the blue." It would feel like I would be fine all day and then one little thing would happen and boom, I'm in the midst of a panic attack, or severe anxiety episode. But, being more aware of my anxiety has shown me that my anxiety experience is usually less like getting into a 140 degree sauna and instantly feeling uncomfortable and unsafe, and more like being in that sauna as the temperature slowly climbs, but doing my best to ignore the growing discomfort.
I am getting better at realizing that if I've opened 15 tabs in a 25 minute pom, I am probably starting to feel a little anxious. Same goes for feeling my neck tense up, or making overly detailed to-do lists. These are all little signs that the anxiety is creeping up, signs that I wasn't aware of until I started to pay more attention to my body and my mind. I can intervene earlier because I know what the warning signs are, and this helps me keep the anxiety at a lower level.
This did not happen overnight. It has been almost a decade since I was first diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and I still have bad days. But meditation has helped me to make those bad anxiety days less frequent, and less severe when they do happen. And I didn't have to turn into a super chill person to do it - I just had to do a little bit of practicing when it came to observing, and not controlling, my mind.