To move past anxiety, watch this video (7.5 min at 2x) after reading the post below (1-2 min).
🏃♂️🐕 I went running once and got bitten by a dog.
It was shortly after my first daughter was born, and my mind went off to the races about how I was going to get rabies and leave her fatherless.
(Research shows becoming a parent often grows the size of the amygdala, which acts as our brain's fire alarm 🧠👶)
I couldn’t shake the anxiety (thanks, amygdala), so I decided to have a conversation with it.
Fortunately, my brother was in town, and I told him what was up and asked him to give voice to the anxiety while I dialogued with it.
✨ And something magical happened. Right when we started the conversation, I already felt completely calm.
I got to be the calm, centered Self, listening to and empathizing with the anxious part of me. And as that part was heard, understood, and appreciated for its protective intent--held in the presence of a calm adult--it calmed down.
🔍 Note—my brother didn’t try to calm my anxiety. Rather, I put some space between the anxiety and me, and got to embody (and remember) the calm that was already inside me and outside it.
My brother’s presence was super helpful, but we can do this same exercise on our own.
I'm not alone in experiencing this.
📊 Ethan Kross’s research of 585 participants showed that when they recalled an anger- or anxiety-related experience and on their own used tools, like dialoguing with it in the 2nd person, doing so reliably increased their sense of space from the challenging emotion.
Self-Distance measured on scales ranging from 1 (predominantly immersed participant) to 7 (predominantly distanced observer)
You ever feel anxious, overwhelmed, etc., and want practical tools to re-center?
Having this kind of dialog, where we externalize the dominant emotion, can be really helpful--but we can also do it ourselves as an Inner Dialogue.
Here's an example of me modeling how to do this using the Two Chairs "Inner Dialog" method, which we will explore and practice in a work context in the Applied Mindfulness session of ManagerGPT
The video shows how I move through and past a paralyzing anxiety about perfecting a new offering before launching it. This fear was getting in my way of making any progress until I used this method.
I demo doing it myself, then doing it with Claude where Claude takes the voice of my anxiety--and wow was it revealing!
Watch this video (7.5 min at 2x).