Things We Dive Into In This Episode:
Anxiety from overthinking and under-feeling and how to interrupt that pattern
Tools for getting back into your body when anxiety is at the wheel
Thinking less and feeling more by dropping into presence, sensitivity, joy, emotion, and nourishment
šResources
šEpisode Highlights
Takeaways from the Alive in October Challenge:
Night time anxiety is often a result of over thinking and under feeling.
When youāre overthinking and under-feeling, ask yourself, what am I avoiding? What emotions are beneath these thoughts?
If you're not nourishing your body adequately, you won't feel alive or have energy to live your life.
Our bodies numb out when we're starving, when we don't have enough food, and when we don't have enough water.
If you're someone who delays breakfast many hours after you wake up, consider the impact that that has on your blood sugar, the impact that that has on your connection to your fullness cues throughout the rest of your day, and the impact that that has on your general overall mood and outlook on life in the morning.
We wake up with low blood sugar. It can feel so good to make sure you have your breakfast with an hour of waking up AND include protein in that breakfast. A breakfast (or any meal for that matter) with a combination of proteins, fats, and carbs will give you the energy you need to live!
My inner child loves to tell me what to do with my day and always has a good idea for how I should spend the day.
My inner child never thinks about productivity! She's just thinking about enjoying the moment, seeing the people who are in front of her right now, and observing the beautiful world around her.
Inner child work doesn't always have to be about the deep processing and the lack of parenting that you received as a child.
It IS important to ask how was my inner child emotionally neglected and what does that you need to hear now, but don't forget that inner child work is also just about letting your inner child run the show and play and ask them what they love.
Nothing kills aliveness like your cell phone.
Nothing, nothing, nothing will kill your capacity to be present to your emotions, like your phone!
If you are someone who finds yourself automatically surfing between apps for hours, it's so important to try and catch yourself in that moment when you go to open the app and try to say ask, what was I feeling before I went to go open this app?
All of your feelings need to be felt. Nothing blocks our feelings more than just going right to the apps.
It's really important to contemplate your relationship with your phone and find what you can do to set legitimate boundaries with your screen time.
Tools for getting back into your body and out of the brain (AKA cultivating a sense of safety) in the moments when you are really struggling with acute overthinking and acute under feeling:
Reach out to your trusted people for a sense of calmness and stability and maybe a laugh, rather than for an action plan on how to move forward right now.
Really deep breathing with meditation music.
Dancing, stretching, or intuitively move your body to music. (Sometimes you need music that doesn't have lyrics because our brains love to attach to the story of lyrics.)
Get present via your senses.
Splash cold water on their face or experience some sort of temperature change
Look around the room and just name five things that they can see or notice some things that they can hear, notice some things that they can touch.
Anything that allows for a sense of presence so that you stay with what is there in the moment right now, rather than trying to escape it. When you stay in it, the emotion will passes through you.
Thanks for listening! š Stay tuned to my website for more episode updates and other exciting programs and resources.
Transcript
Caitie: In September of this year, I found myself having some of the worst nighttime anxiety I've ever had in my life. I would try to go to bed at night and I would find myself starting to run down the list of things I felt were out of my control. The things I was feeling anxious about when it came to my business and my finances and my friendships and my family and also the world at large. And this nighttime anxiety was, not only generally annoying because I was not getting a lot of sleep, it was also really, really devastating because I was feeling like a lot of things were actually okay in my life. And in so many ways, I had reached a really beautiful place.Ā
I have been living in Lisbon for over a year now and living in Lisbon has been an amazing chapter of my life. I've been looking for a home like Lisbon for a while. Since early this year, I've been in a really wonderful relationship that is one of the, one of the best relationships I've ever had in my life. I feel very aligned in my work. And so this nighttime anxiety was like a bit perplexing if I kind of zoomed out and looked at my life, right? Of course, like we're all impacted by world events and what have you, but I was like, why am I feeling like I can't stop thinking every time I try to go to sleep? Why does it feel like a dark storm cloud enters my bedroom whenever I put my head on a pillow? And I realized that I'm overthinking, so I must be under feeling. If I've learned anything from years of being a counselor, and being in my own counseling, it's that every time I'm overthinking, I'm under feeling. So this little flare up of nighttime anxiety I was having in late September was certainly related to avoiding feeling something.Ā
And so I decided at the end of September that I would need to use the month of October to start feeling my life a little bit more in hopes that I would think about my life a little bit less. And I created an official challenge for myself, but I shared it with you. I called it the Alive in October Challenge. And I basically made a list of things that I know help me feel life a little bit more. And that means feeling not only the good stuff, definitely the good stuff, but also the more sticky and challenging emotions. And I shared this list with you. I posted it on my Instagram and 30 of you actually committed to joining me for this Alive in October Challenge. And now that I'm 10 days into November, I just want to reflect on some of the things that I learned by doing this self induced challenge and by having you join me in it.Ā
And I think that this is really good timing to be reflecting on this because 10 days into November, 2024, we have recently received the results of the election in the United States and they are scary. They are kind of devastating. They are confusing and they're causing a lot of emotions and it's feeling tempting to run away from that right now. It's feeling tempting to go back into dissociation. It's feeling tempting to stop feeling life so much for a second and go back into just thinking about things because feeling means feeling all of the uncertainty and grief that comes with a time like this.Ā
But I want to use this episode to remind you that first of all, it's so important to feel your life all the way if you are struggling with overthinking. And second, even when times are challenging like this, the world needs you, the world needs all of us to be feeling our lives and feeling our feelings all the way because feeling is where creativity comes from. Feeling is where compassion and kindness and sensitivity comes from. And this world needs us all to be alive. So, you know, I think we need to continue the Alive in October Challenge into November, so I'm excited to be reflecting on it today. Let's get into it.Ā
Welcome back to another episode of Whole, Full, & Alive, the podcast helping you feed yourself, feel yourself and be yourself. I'm Caitie Corradino. I'm your host. I am giving you this raw, unedited 25 minute episode, but if this happens to be the first episode that you're tuning into, I do usually have little intro music and production at the beginning. I just lately have been doing more unedited from the heart kind of episodes because that's just where I'm at in life right now. And at the beginning of next year, I think I will be adding my little theme song and things like that back in. But for now I'm keeping it real. I'm keeping it short. I'm keeping it from the heart. And if we're just meeting each other in this way, I just want to tell you that I am a registered dietitian, nutritionist, an eating disorder recovery counselor, body image counselor, meditation and yoga instructor, breathwork facilitator, and Reiki healer based in Lisbon, originally from New York City, New Jersey. Done lots of traveling in my life. I feel like that's going to come up at some point in this episode. So that's the brief intro to me.Ā
And another thing about me is that, yeah, I was really feeling like I lost my own plot at the end of September of this year. As someone who teaches how to, teaches who teaches people how to feel their feelings and how to nourish their bodies and how to feel alive, I was not feeling quite so alive. I was stuck in an overthinking place. And so, like I said, this Alive in October Challenge was, something I created for myself, but invited you to join me in. And you can download the list still on my website. You can go back and listen to the episode I recorded a couple of weeks ago where I go through the list in detail of all of the things that I did specifically to try to feel my feels and increase my sense of aliveness throughout the month of October. But for today, I just want to reflect on some things I learned while I was doing these things, some things that I hope resonate with you and some things that I feel are particularly pertinent right now in a very, very sticky, challenging time for the world. So let's get into it.Ā
I'm gonna share five things that I learned about how to feel your life all the way, so that you don't miss your life and so that you can maintain your sense of empathy and compassion and creativity and so that you can stop overthinking things. Truly, when we are feeling more, we're thinking less and that just kind of happens naturally, truly. When you do practices that help you drop into your emotions and drop into your body and drop into the present moment, you naturally start thinking less. And it's funny because so many people who struggle with overthinking will be like, well, how do I drop into my body and how do I stop overthinking? And how do I know when I'm not overthinking? And it's like, you know you're not overthinking when you stop asking how every five minutes. And when you do these practices that help you drop into presence and sensation and emotion, like the how and the why and all of those questions, they don't come up as much because life turns into a one moment at a time, one step at a time kind of deal.Ā
So yeah. I am happy to say that on November 10th, about a month and change after I realized I was having a flare up of nighttime anxiety, I'm no longer stuck in that flare up of nighttime anxiety. And it's not because I'm super fucking happy all the time. It's because I feel my life every single day all the way. That is the first thing I wanna share about my Alive in October experiment is that the first thing I needed to do to let go of my nighttime anxiety is realize what I was avoiding feeling. And boy, I was avoiding feeling something in my life and it came in like, I don't know, a wrecking ball within the first week of this Alive in October Challenge. So just to give you an idea of some of the things on this list, they're like conscious emotional release practices, journaling, sitting with songs and works of art that help you tap into emotions, and having phone calls of people who help you talk through things, and engaging with your inner child. After my first week of doing these things, I realized that I was avoiding some serious grief about some changes that have happened in my family recently. And I was also avoiding the, don't even know how to say it briefly, but there is a generational sort of guilt that's been passed down in my family from both my parents to me, suffice it to say. And it makes us feel like we don't deserve the things that we have.
Both my parents were raised super freaking Catholic and they were also both raised in environments where they were made to feel just like generally guilty and like bad people. And I was also raised in that kind of environment. And so I realized this might not be where you thought I was gonna go, but I realized within a week of my Alive in October challenge that I was still like fighting that generational guilt and fighting that feeling that I didn't deserve good things and kind of fighting that feeling that I didn't deserve rest. And I really needed to process and grieve that. Like there was like a, there's like a big like brick sized like, like a power like grief in my body that I needed to let just kind of like come up and through me because it was preventing me from enjoying a lot of things in my life that have been really beautiful this year. I was still kind of sitting with some sort of feeling that I didn't deserve it and that I still needed to be punished for like doing things when I was like that thing that I did when I was like 11, 12, 13 years old. And that came up and through for me right away.Ā
And I think the message that I want to share with you with that is like, if you're in a state of running down the list of things that you're stressed about when you're trying to go to sleep at night, you gotta ask yourself, what am I avoiding feeling? And I realized for me, I was avoiding feeling really kind of sad about some things that are happening in my immediate family right now. And I was avoiding feeling some grief and some just like really messy emotions associated with the idea that I didn't deserve the life I have right now. And boy, that's a really deep thing to say within 14 minutes and 20 seconds of this episode, but I really encourage you to consider that deeper thing that you think has nothing to do with your nighttime anxiety, right? Like I wasn't sitting up at night thinking about being raised Catholic and you know, my dad's generational guilt that was passed down to me and like, my parents' divorce and all of these things. I was sitting up late at night thinking about my finances and thinking about a conversation I had with a client earlier and thinking about a conversation I had with a colleague earlier. But I was using all of those little things as like distractions from the much deeper and more difficult grief. I'm so grateful that I used the practices on this list in addition to some support from friends and my partner and a therapist. And also an amazing sound healer here in Lisbon to just let some of those emotions move through my body. So yeah, what are you avoiding? That is the first thing I think is really important. And can you find support spaces, places to move through some of those feelings. And if you need any help with finding resources to move through the things you've been avoiding, do not hesitate to send me a DM on Instagram. Do not hesitate to email me. I'm here to help you, find the resources that could support you through that kind of thing. Cool.
Ā I'm going to keep it light for number two because that was a lot. Not that it was too much. I'll never say too much. You are not too much. I am not too much. No one is too much, but that was definitely a lot. So let's do a little pallet cleanser. The second thing I learned from the alive in October challenge, it's quite a superficial thing, but something that I really want to remind you. So I had a section on this list related to fueling your body appropriately and making sure that you get enough energy in the form of food and water, because if you're not nourishing your body adequately, how the heck are you gonna feel alive? How the heck are you gonna have energy to live your life? Our body literally numbs out when we're starving. Our body numbs out when we don't have enough food, when we don't have enough water. So obviously as a dietician, I'm usually pretty locked and loaded when it comes to eating, like intentionally, but by really making sure I put all my meals on a plate and balanced them all and got really present at all of my meal times. I realized that sometimes I delay breakfast and that absolutely never feels good. It absolutely never ever ever feels good for me to delay breakfast longer than like two hours after I wake up. I can feel that impact on me throughout the rest of the day.
And so I invite you to consider if you're someone who delays breakfast like many hours after you wake up, consider the impact that that has on your blood sugar. Consider the impact that that has on your connection to your fullness cues throughout the rest of your day. And consider the impact that that has on your general overall mood and outlook on life in the morning. We wake up with low blood sugar. That's just a fact. And it can feel so good to make sure you have your breakfast with an hour of waking up. Sometimes I would like get up and I just would be like journaling in bed for a little bit. And then like, my laptop's nearby. Let me open that up and start working. And then I've gone through like a million emails and I haven't like had breakfast yet. And I noticed like whenever that did happen, it felt like shit.
And while we're talking about food, another thing I noticed to you is just truly how important it is to include protein in that breakfast. I didn't neglect to include protein in any of my own breakfasts, but it's just something that's been coming up with my clients a lot. a lot of people don't realize that if you just have a carb breakfast or a carbon fat breakfast, you don't feel the same, you know, boost of energy going throughout your day, especially if you're an active person. So PSA, eat breakfast and include protein in it. And if you need any support with that, that's another thing I'm happy to help you with if you want to reach out to me.
The third thing I learned is that my inner child loves to tell me what to do with my day. My inner child always has a good idea for how I should spend the day. And throughout the month of October, I decided that I was gonna take every, I was gonna aim to take every Saturday or as much of every Saturday as I could to myself and just let it be like Caitie day. And what I decided to do for pretty much every Saturday for the month of October, I'm really grateful I had the privilege of doing this was just like, do what my inner child wanted to do. And if you're rolling your eyes, hang with me for a second, because honestly, if someone told me to let my inner child run the show, like two, three years ago, I also would have rolled my eyes. But I totally get what it means now. I totally get what it means now. My inner child loves to put stickers on things for absolutely no reason. My inner child loves to wear glitter on my eyelids for literally no reason. My inner child loves to listen to the Spice Girls and dance around in my kitchen. My inner child loves chicken tendies. I found some gluten-free chicken tendies. I have celiac disease, so I've been deprived of chicken tendies for a while, but I found a gluten-free brand that I really, really like, and I was making those on Saturdays. My inner child loves to just only do one or two things throughout the day because simple things become so much more satisfying than when we don't try to pack our day by being the most productive we can possibly be.Ā
My inner child never thinks about productivity. She's just thinking about enjoying the moment and seeing the people who are in front of her right now. My inner child isn't strategizing for my business model in the next two years from now. My inner child is just like noticing that that bird is really pretty. And that girl who just walked by is wearing really cool shoes and these chicken tendies taste so good. I want to go take a bath and my inner child noticing the different shapes that the shadows make on the wall. And yeah, that's, that's something I really encourage you to do is like, you know, inner child work doesn't always have to be about the deep processing and the lack of parenting that you received as a child. Like that stuff's important. It is important to ask how was my inner child emotionally neglected and what does that you need to hear now. But don't forget that inner child work is also just about letting your inner child run the show and play and ask them what they love.Ā
Two more things that I learned from my Alive in October Challenge. The next one is that nothing kills aliveness like your cell phone. Nothing, nothing, nothing will kill your capacity to be present to your emotions, like your phone. And if you are someone who finds yourself like just truly automatically like surfing between two apps for like an hour and don't we all end up there at some point, it's so important to try and ask yourself, try and catch yourself in that moment when you go to open the app and try to say like, what was I feeling before I went to go open this app?
I use the app Opal now to try to keep myself off of Instagram and to try to like bar myself from opening it too quickly because I noticed that almost 100% of the time when I'm going to open Instagram after 10 p.m. what I was feeling before was like fatigue and I'd numbed it by opening Instagram and I woke my brain back up. Or what I was feeling before was like maybe loneliness and I numbed it by opening Instagram. What I was feeling before was anxiety about my business and I numbed it by opening Instagram. All of your feelings need to be felt. And I feel like nothing blocks our feelings, like just going right to the apps. And so it really is important to contemplate your relationship with your phone and find what you can do to set legitimate boundaries with your screen time and I have to tell you the days when I had to be on my phone the longest are days when like I'm seeing a bunch of clients in a row or days when I need to post something on social media. And those days, I always kind of feel the most numb, but that's when I try to bring in like extra backup to like get myself to feel more in my body at the end of the day. So if I just have to be seeing a bunch of clients in a row and I really want to post something on social media and I want to do something that's gonna require a little bit more phone time that day, I will do like a conscious emotional release practice that night, which I explained in the episode about Alive in October. I'm in a long distance relationship right now, so I often have to FaceTime my partner at the end of the night, but I'll tell him I do not want to FaceTime that night, I just want to like talk on the phone so that I could go sit outside and like look at the moon like while we talk on the phone because I need to do what I can to be as present in my body as possible. I encourage you to think about that as well. I really do think that nothing sabotaged all the things on this list like screen time. And if you're avoiding contemplating your relationship with screen time right now, that's something really worth thinking about.
So the last thing I'll talk about to, so the last thing I learned from this Alive in October Challenge kind of speaks to what you can do in the moments when you are really struggling with that acute overthinking, that more acute under feeling, what are the ways that you can get back into your body and get out of your brain, especially if you're struggling with nighttime anxiety like I was. I think this is especially relevant. So, throughout the month, I certainly did feel like waves of getting stuck in my head and needed to pull myself back into my body, back into the present. And what I found really helpful to remember in those moments is that what I need is a sense of calm, leveling, safety, and not a sense of like reward and dopamine. When I have these episodes of overthinking return, I remember or try to remember that what my body is actually searching for is a sense of safety. And what will help me feel better long-term is by trying to activate a sense of safety in my body rather than trying to activate a sense of satisfaction.
And that's why we go to our phones very often, right? Because we're just looking for a sense of satisfaction, a sense of like a dopamine hit. Or that's also why we can ask other people for reassurance all the time, because we're just looking for reassurance that like we're okay and we're awesome and we're a rock star and everything's good. That's also why it can feel good to like go watch like an exciting TV show or like do something like that. But if you can try first to activate a sense of safety in your body, I believe you'll experience better long-term results. So that doesn't mean that you can't involve other people. In this process, one of my go-to tools for getting out of overthinking is to reach out to one of my trusted people but not for a sense of reassurance about the thing I'm overthinking about, just for a sense of calmness and stability and maybe a laugh and maybe a sense of just like, I'm safe. For example, I called my partner one night when I was overthinking my business and my finances and he started diving into like, well, here's what we can do. Here's the contingency plan. Here's how you're gonna do this, this, and this with your business. And it was so activating. It made me feel so much worse. And I realized what I needed from him, which is thankfully what I was able to communicate, was just like a, hey, everything's all good. Like, I've got you. Let's just talk about something funny that happened last week. Let's just get back to a sense of grounded, centeredness in safety. And then once you're there and you're at your work desk tomorrow, then we can think about the contingency plan in the next five years of your business. We don't need to do that right now though. So when you reach out to your people, can you reach out to them in a way that's like searching for that leveling calm, that like sense of warm vanilla pudding in your belly. That's what my fave Liz Gilbert says. Like that sense of like, okay, like warmth and calmness rather than like a here's the plan for how we're gonna solve the thing you're anxious about.Ā
Another one of my go-to tools for activating a sense of safety in the body is really deep breathing. And sometimes I have to put on meditation music on Spotify to get myself to do it. And I recommend using that as a resource if you need to do it too. Sometimes you can't like sit in a silent room and like just start breathing. You need to like put on maybe some sound waves or some healing frequencies on Spotify and put them into your headphones to just like really get yourself there and activate some box breathing or things like that. These are all tools and resources I'm happy to teach you if you ever want to reach out to me about it, but different types of breathing and I recommend pairing it with sound.Ā
And another thing, that can take us out of overthinking is utilizing music in a different way and dancing to it or stretching or intuitively moving your body to music. Sometimes you need music that doesn't have lyrics because our brains love to attach to the story of lyrics.Ā
The last tool for interrupting overthinking is to get present via your senses. So some people like to splash cold water on their face or experience some sort of temperature change to kind of bring them into their senses. Some people like to look around the room and just name five things that they can see or notice some things that they can hear, notice some things that they can touch. And the reason why getting in touch with your senses is important is because it grounds you in the truth of where you are in that moment. The truth of where you are in that moment is that you're not five years down the line and that thing that you're afraid of happening like isn't happening right now. Whatever hasn't happened hasn't happened yet. And when you connect to your senses, you also are not falling away into the past and over analysis. You get more in touch with the truth of what's available to you now. And this can also really like open your creative mind a little bit as well and help you get into that childlike mind that starts kind of seeing more of like the playfulness in the moment. And you can also get in touch with your emotions and channel those emotions into movement, channel those emotions into a journal, channel those emotions into a drawing. But the key is using your senses to access a sense of presence so that you stay with what is there in the moment right now, rather than trying to escape it because when you stay in it, the emotion kind of passes through you. It crests like a wave, it crashes and it goes back out and it's done rather than getting trapped in your body.Ā
When an emotion is unfelt, it gets trapped in your body and it can manifest physically, it can manifest in aches and pains, days, weeks, months later. It might also turn into thoughts. That's why we end up overthinking when we're under feeling is like trapped emotions in the body sort of like crystallize and harden and manifest into thought after thought after thought as the emotions trying to make its way out of your body. It kind of comes up in the form of thoughts. And if we can stay present in these moments when we're feeling anxious and uncomfortable, it allows whatever emotion that needs to be felt to come through, fully and completely. And if you stay in touch with your senses, you can kind of carry yourself through that more emotional moment.Ā
I hope some of this is resonating with you. And if I can share anything to sign off, it's that this world does need you to be in touch with your emotions. This world does need you to have energy. This world does need you to be sensitive and creative. And you are so deserving of feeling fully alive. When we can drop out of overthinking and drop into feeling and sensing and experiencing our life, that's when all of the greatest experiences of life kind of pass through our bodies. That's when all of the things that make life worth living can make their way to us. And you deserve that. You really, really, really deserve that. And making your way there can be perhaps more simple than you think. There are tools and resources and communities and me that are all available to you to help you start feeling more alive. And I hope you will give it a try. That's what I learned through my Alive in October Challenge.Ā
If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a five-star rating on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts or just share this episode with somebody or share something you learned from that episode with somebody. That is the genuine impact that I hope to have through sharing these words. And yeah, I'll be, I think I'll be back on the podcast microphone quite honestly, more so like Jan 1st of 2025. I think I am going to take a page out of my own book and focus on one thing at a time. I'm launching a Substack later this week called Deep Breaths and Dance Breaks and kind of want to tend to the garden of my Substack through the end of the year and I can come back to the podcast at the beginning of the year in a more intentional and present way. So that's the plan. I hope you'll join me over on Substack until the end of the year and maybe go back and listen to some of older episodes of the show. I will chat with you again in January.
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