Season 2 Episode 7: Spiraling Up
In this episode, we explore the idea of spiraling, through anxiety, in our bodies, and throughout our lives.
This episode traces a familiar circle, pun intended! Nancy explores the idea of "spiraling" through a personal story about living the same lessons about anxiety over and over again. Then, she talks to movement educator and expert on the mind-body connection, Jenn Pilotti, about ways to combat anxiety by using your brain to tune into bodily sensations. Jenn shares some movement exercises, tips, and tricks for calming the nervous system through movement. At the end of the episode, Nancy puts what she learned from Jenn to the test, by taking a walk through a labyrinth.
Listen to the full episode to find out:
How to look at the so-called "anxiety spiral" in a new light.
How to use movement to calm anxiety.
Tips and tricks for tapping into the sensations of the body.
Resources and advice from Jenn Pilotti.
Resources mentioned:
Go to jennpilotti.com to sign up for Jenn's workshops or buy her book.
+ Read the Transcript
Intro
Music
Nancy VO: Hey guys, it's me, Nancy Jane Smith. Welcome back to the happier approach, the show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle and achieve at the price of our inner peace and relationships.
Let me tell you, and this might sound familiar, I've had some moments in my life where I think to myself, why am I here? Again, the belief that I can conquer my anxiety is still strong in me. Even after lots of time spent working through those feelings, I still find myself saying, If only I was smart enough, strong enough, or something enough, I would be able to conquer it. Sometimes it feels like I just keep spiraling through the same lessons over and over again. But in reality, I know that something enough's are impossible.
At the core of my philosophy on high functioning anxiety is to acknowledge your feelings, get into your body, and see a bigger picture. All while being kind to yourself. Learning to live with anxiety and not let it run the show is the true goal. But for me, the belief that I'm broken that I'm just living through the same lessons over and over like our rusty windup toy, is a tough one to let go of. In today's episode, we're going to search out an antidote to that spiraling feeling and rethink what it might mean to spiral towards something, rather than into a black hole of anxious feelings. So let's hop on that merry go round.
I'm looking at myself in the mirror, getting ready to go to a small gathering for the first time since COVID. Started, and I say to myself, I don't want to go to this party. I am so socially awkward, and even more so since COVID. What if I say something wrong? Or I do the wrong thing. It was the day after Fourth of July, and I was getting ready for a backyard barbecue with friends. I was tired from the family celebration to the fourth, and was feeling anxious about gathering with people making small talk and navigating being social after a year of limited social engagement. My monger started in Good grief. You are so anti social. What is wrong with you? Why can't you look forward to social events like other people? I knew she was wrong. I was excited to see our friends. And I was anxious. The being anxious part was not okay. I kept telling myself stop being anxious. What is wrong with you? My biggest fan the voice of self loyalty reminded me that it is okay. It is okay to be anxious. But it doesn't have to drive my actions.
But my monger wouldn't give up. Come on, get over it. What do you have to be anxious about? This is ridiculous. This is just a gathering of friends. You will be fine. Get over yourself. For most of the afternoon, my monger and my biggest fan went back and forth. Finally, my biggest fan said you weren't going to conquer this anxiety. And that is okay. Let's try being hyper present. bring yourself back to your body over and over throughout the event. As I got out of the car outside of my friend's house, I paused stretched my hands above my head and thought just be present. You will be okay. You are valuable, lovable, worthy period throughout the barbecue by monger chimed in constantly keeping a running commentary about what I was doing wrong. And what I should do next, like some demented sports announcer.
But each time I heard her say, you should be more social or you should be mixing more move around. I took a breath. I felt my feet on the ground and reminded myself that whatever I was feeling was fine. I could have anxiety and stay present. That process happened on repeat. Anxiety would kick in and I would take a breath and feel my feet on the ground. And it worked. I was more present and had more fun than I normally do.
Later that night decompressing after the events of the evening, I told my husband I'm onto something. This worked. I don't need to conquer my anxiety. I just need to live with it. But as I crawled into bed my mom chimed in. Why is it so hard for you to remember that the key is living with your anxiety. Why do you always feel like you have to conquer it? When are you going to get this message and accept it Then Luckily, I heard my biggest fan, oh, no sweet pea. This is the lesson you aren't broken. And you don't need to be conquering all that is wrong with you. It's hard. This is a lesson that is wired into your brain, and one that will take a lifetime to heal. And you're spiraling up, you keep getting it at another level. When I think about life lessons as spiraling up, rather than spiraling down into darkness, it gives a new perspective. While we do repeat lessons, we don't unlearn all we have implemented before we repeat the lesson one step up with a new perspective, new challenges and new information that we didn't have the last time the lesson came into our lives.
Change isn't one and done, it is on going, we might come back to the lesson. And it might feel like we are relearning the same lesson. But really, we are experiencing it at a new level with new insight, a new situation a new challenge. And then when we have that mastered, we will spiral up to another place. But I have found that there are techniques I can use to break the pattern of that downward spiral like I did at the barbecue, my favorite one get into your body.
Jenn: So we all have a body that tells us stuff, right? Like it tells you when it doesn't feel good. It tells you when you're hungry. It tells you and maybe you're a little bit tired, or when you have a little bit of tension. And then we have this brain that takes this information and decides what that means. So if we can start to get more in tune with the signals, when maybe they're not quite so loud. And we can start to play with what would happen to how can they change the signal a little bit? What happens if I change my position or I change the way I'm holding myself or I change the way I'm breathing all these things? How does that change my experience of what my brain is telling or what my body is telling me. So that's really, to me the mind body connection.
Nancy VO: This is Jenn Pilotti. She's a movement educator who writes books, leads workshops, and works one on one with clients of all ages to support their physical and mental well being.
Jenn Technically, I'm a personal trainer, I'm using air quotes here, my youngest client right now is 10. he happens to have ADD, my oldest client right now is 86. And she happens to have anxiety. Not that these are defining factors in any way, shape, or form. But I cared deeply about that integration between the mind and the body. And I care about how movement can support someone's mental well being as well as help create more embodiment,
Nancy VO: even though she's using air quotes, now, Jenn started out her career in the vein of a more traditional personal trainer,
Jenn: I was working with clients one on one as in a personal training gym setting at a country club. And I would watch people move and I would listen to what they would tell me about what they were experiencing their aches and their pains. And I also hear about their lives. And I'd be like, something is missing. There is something missing. I don't know what it is. But I feel like I'm not able to help these individuals as well as I as I felt like I should be able to like I wasn't sure what I was missing, but something was missing.
When I went back to graduate school I fell in love with neuromuscular education and motor control and and I started really starting to dive more deeply into why do things like felden craze really help some people? Why does strength training and CrossFit really help some people like what are these common denominators that I can extrapolate? And how can I make this accessible for the person that's in front of me and choose the tool that's, that's most right for the person that's in front of me based on what they have going on. I just I really got into the brain stuff and how it intersected with the body.
Nancy VO: A lot of Jenn's work involves retraining people to actually listen to the messages their bodies are sending them. And that can help with everything from anxiety to back pain.
Jenn: The way the nervous system works is that afferent branch that's getting all of that sensory information from your joints from the mechanical receptors in the skin from you know the ambient temperature outside all of that information, we tend to just ignore it.
Nancy VO: we dismiss the real and accurate information our bodies are sensing and pay more attention to the not so helpful messages we cook up in our heads. Like focusing on why do I hurt so much What's wrong with me? Instead of paying attention to the physical sensations our body is feeling
Jenn: I always think of like a picture, right? The way a lot of us look at things, it's very black and white. But when we start really paying attention to the information that we're getting, and we start, you know, playing with it, it becomes the color starts to fill in a little bit. You know, I'm trying to make the picture as bright as possible.
Nancy: Yeah, so that black and white thinking is very common. You know, one of the steps in how I work with in my system for working with clients is to slow down and get into your body. And I encourage people to do because I realized for me, like, I'll forget I have a body. Like, every time I do it, I'm like, Oh, yeah, look at that. There's this little thing down here.
Jenn: Yes, that's so informative. It has so much to tell you. Yes. That's one of the things that I try to share with people and clients often tell me they're like, this is so simple, but so like empowering. And that's that's the goal, right like to create autonomy to create self agency to create the ability to experience in a full way.
Nancy: So can you give an example of how it's been empowering, like how that has shown up.
Jenn: So an easy way is helping people feel their feats, and how it grounds how they ground them, and how that can change breathing patterns, neck pain, what they're experiencing in the here and now and anxiety, the feet, actually, there's a huge connection. And the research actually shows this between ends, anxiety and balance. So for instance, right now, if you're seated in a chair, if you start to press your feet into the floor, and you think about pressing your feet into the floor in such a way that you feel the middle of your heel. And then you start to see if you can reach the outside of the foot really long. So it's making, it's like you're making the outside edge of the footings, long as you can. And then while you're doing that, imagine that you're putting weight evenly across the balls of your feet. And you press those parts of your foot down quite a lot on both feet, and you start pressing so much that like you're about to stand up, but you're not going to actually stand up, you're just gonna get that sense, just hang up there, and then relax. And like for you, for instance, I watched you were holding a bit of tension through your jaw. As soon as I took you into your feet, the tension through your jaw, decreased, right? So
Nancy: that is crazy. I didn't even know I had tension in my jaw. Like I had no clue.
Jenn: Because this is what I do for a living and I can see your face, I can see I could see I'm like, oh, and as soon as I cued the feet.
Nancy: That's crazy.
Jenn: So that's an example. And you probably felt a little different, right? When you pressed your feet.
Nancy: Yeah, yeah. Well, cuz then cuz I was all I was more noticing, like, Oh, I could feel it in my butt and my hips, you know, like all these other muscles engaged.
Jenn: Exactly. So what that does, which is really cool, is it creates body awareness, which is really powerful for your brain. It gives your brain information about where your limbs are located in space, which creates a sense of safety. Something as simple as that, like being able to feel the feet being able to feel there's three arches in your foot, that will change a person's entire nervous system, you'll see them drop from this pretty sympathetic state to more of a balanced state between the parasympathetic and the sympathetic. So basically, between your you know, between your chillout state and your fight or flight state,
Nancy: so is it that I can help my anxiety by building better balance. And if I'm feeling anxious, I can start feeling my feet, and that it's like it's helping long term and short term.
Jenn: What's really cool is there's a correlation between building strength and a decrease in anxiety symptoms. So as you were saying with the short term, right, like getting someone to feel their feet, that's a very short term fix. And that's great, because it works really well. It's like, Okay, cool. I have something that routes me right now. brings me back from my brain into my body and into this place, like what am I standing on? What am I experiencing. But then as you build strength, which is a long term thing, you're going to feel even more grounded through your feet, because strength does that which is awesome. And it also gives you a sense of resilience, physically, which carries over into how you feel emotionally.
Like if you stop worrying so much about like, what's going on physically, and worry about again, how's this making me feel, then the movement choices they make can be much more intuitive. They start to trust themselves so much more. I had one client Tell me Just recently, she said the biggest gift you've given me she's worked with me for a long time. She has chronic low back pain is you've taught me that. It's okay if I change my position if I don't feel good. And I tried to do the exercise a different way. And she said, and 96% of the time, I can find a way to do it where it doesn't hurt. And so I can keep moving, which is amazing. But I don't have to necessarily do it this one rigid, right by.
Nancy: So what would you say is the most important fundamental thing to understand about mind body awareness?
Jenn: I would say that it's being able to feel your body and where it's located in space. And that's all the parts of itself. Now, the easiest way to think of this is whatever's connected to something, if you can figure out how to feel that thing that is connected to something, and by something, I mean, something external. So like sitting in a chair, for instance, you've got your feet connected to the floor, but you also have your pelvis connected to the chair.
So these are the things that you'd be like, oh, cool, can I feel my pelvis? And you're rocking a little bit, which is great. Can I feel my pelvis connected to the chair? Can I feel my feet connected to the ground? And what's amazing about that is even just starting to play with these simple ideas of, can I feel when my hand is connected to my phone? How does that feel? And maybe you'll start to realize maybe I don't like how that feels. But again, this gives us information about what we need, you start to play with again. What do I What do I feel? And what is that telling me. And this can help with so many things, it's just so cool. It's very, very, very, very cool.
Nancy: That sense of play, and really grounding yourself in the moment, by paying attention to what's going on inside and outside of your body is super important in Jenn's work, it can really help to snap you out of that feeling that you're circling the drain with your anxious thoughts,
Jenn: maybe your things going for walk right, say okay, I'm going to try and carve out 10 minutes to try and walk a little bit differently. And that could mean a lot of things you could try to play with taking slightly bigger steps, picking a slightly smaller steps, paying attention to how your foot lands on the ground. You know, just give yourself permission to start to notice. And if something feels kind of funky, give yourself permission to be like, Okay, well what happens if I play with this a different way? You know, what happens if I play with letting my arm swing a little more? How does that feel? What happens if I feel with letting my breastbone rotate a little more? How does that feel? You know, just give yourself permission to tune into different aspects of your body. Maybe once you've never even thought about give yourself permission to be a little little, you know, curious with it.
Nancy: It can be easy to get stuck in that cycle of circling your thoughts in a way that doesn't feel very good. But like Jenn is quick to remind me circling and rotating is actually a normal and fundamental way that our bodies move through space, and exist in the world.
Jenn: The way we move is through rotations. Even like the knee, which we think of as a hinge joint, if you really look at how the movement of walking takes place, it's a series of rotations. So spiraling is huge in just movement. And then if you look at how do you get someone to move efficiently into move? Well, well, the easiest way to do that is to move in a rotational way. So you create little rotations, maybe and sometimes bigger rotations.
There was this crazy study I read a few years ago, where they tried to figure out the best way to train the muscles on the outside of the butt, your glute medius. For those of you that pay attention to that type of thing. It was a very small study, but they actually found that walking around in a circle activated that muscle more than any of the little gym exercises. Because our body is designed to be able to move in a lot of different directions in spiral. spiraling is how we move, walking in circles as a way to train our muscles and our brains?
Nancy VO: Hmm. Now that’s an interesting idea.
Nancy Tape: Okay, so I am on my way to the labyrinth. It's early in the morning on a hot day in Ohio and I'm driving to a labyrinth outside of a local church to put some of Jen's advice to the test. In case you're not familiar, a labyrinth is like a big hedge maze with passages that circle around each other until they arrive at the center. I'm going to circle through the labyrinth try to really get into my body and see what happens. So the labyrinth is at a church near our home. It's a couple miles from our house called St. Alban's and it's actually my husband's childhood church where he went to his family was a member so they have a labyrinth out front and I'm gonna walk and see. See what happens. See what magic happens. You know always hoping for a little miracle with this stuff. Okay, there it is. Turn around. Okay.
The front says as you enter, walk in love at the center, be still and know that I am God and when you return, Go in peace. Okay, so I'm going to get in my body and feel my feet. It's been a stressful week. So I'm a little hopeful that this will change my mindset is a soupy day in Ohio super humid and wet but here we go. Okay.
Deep breaths
it's interesting how much I keep asking myself if I'm doing it right. That is a plague of my existence. doing it right. And it's a path you can't do it wrong.
The rhythm of it keeps you present.
Okay, I'm coming to the end.
In the center
it is been rainy here a lot and there's blue sky trying to come through. As you enter walk in love Ephesians 5:2 at the center. Be still and know that I am God. Psalm 46:10. And when you return Go in peace. So I'm back in the car. I wanted to record thoughts
doing that made me cry.
As much as I that's why I got silent.
Nancy Tape: I think the rhythm of following the path and not having to pay attention anything but the path and my body. Just kind of let your mind go. It was it was meditative. I guess that's the word. And I noticed feeling is coming up and typical for me. I was like, No, no, no, no, no. But I just let the tears come. And I could feel in my body just my legs and back there was a just a different presence than just walking and noticing. I know that meditation is hard for me. Just sitting that's why these walking meditations are nice because you're moving. And your body's thinking about that. But it's still I noticed myself like speeding up when the tears came and trying to get out of it. And am I almost done is this almost over. It's a very pretty small labyrinth. And I didn't move super slow through it just because that's who I am. So filled in my feet, reminding myself to keep coming back to that and keep coming back to my breath. That was hard. To do to keep coming back to my breath because I kept getting teary, but I feel more relaxed, I feel more present, I feel more centered after doing that, which is,which is awesome. It's a good way to start the day. Anyway, those are my thoughts from walking the labyrinth.
Nancy VO: My monger loves to think in black and white and be very Doomsday about the fact that I'm relearning a lesson. But like I figured out in the labyrinth, moving in circles can actually be healing. It can unlock deep feelings and give us new ways of looking at our problems. Just as a child who's learning to walk falls, so do we as adults, we lose our balance, we run into a new obstacle. But that doesn't mean we forgot all we knew before. Yes, this idea of living with anxiety rather than conquering it is an old insight. But it's one I keep practicing. I keep fine tuning and tapping into new ways to approach the constant curveballs and spirals that life throws at me. And each time I do, I learned something new.
That's it for this week. Our next episode is our last episode of the season. Can you believe it? We've come a long way on our journey to self loyalty and we're gonna wrap things up by talking to an old friend of the show, and an expert in self compassion, my friend, Reverend Gary Ritz. That's next time on the happier approach.
The happier approach is produced by Nicki Stein and me Nancy Jane Smith. Music provided by pod five and epidemic sound.
For more episodes to get in touch or to order a copy of my book, happier approach. You can visit live dash happier.com and if you like the show, leave us a review on iTunes. It actually helps us out a lot.
Special thanks to Jenn Pilotti for speaking with us for this episode. You can find more information about Jenn sign up for her workshops in order her book, body mind movement and evidence based approach to mindful movement at Gen Pilates calm. That's Jenn with two ends P-I-L-O-T-T-I. The happier approach Are we back with another episode in two weeks Take care, until then.