I saw a great meme yesterday that read, “My body runs on caffeine, sarcasm, and anxiety.” I laughed to myself because that was me… until about 5 years ago.
During my corporate life,I began every morning with a Grande Latte from Starbucks. That was my “breakfast of champions.” After lunch, my energy usually dipped around 3 pm, so I needed a Coca-Cola to get me through the rest of the long afternoon of meetings. My body didn’t know how to wake up or stay awake without caffeine.
Dripping sarcasm and self-deprecating humor were how I deflected my frustration with the bureaucracy and insanity of the television business.
As for my anxiety, I just assumed it was normal. I told myself that it was the “rocket fuel” that kept me sharp and on my toes.
I came to believe that these were the daily habits that ran my engine and defined me as the multi-tasking, high-performance human that I was. I thought I was killing it.
The only clues to the contrary were my shallow breathing, chronic headaches, stiff necks, and insomnia. But I figured this was the price to pay for “having it all:” Career, home, family, kids, and pets.
It wasn’t until I left the television business, that I realized it wasn’t the television business that was creating my chronic symptoms of anxiety.
My Type A, driven, competitive, fear of failure, keep-going-until-you-drop personality was who I was. And it was going to keep following me unless I did something to change my daily habits.
My first step in getting off the anxiety rollercoaster was to stop drinking coffee for breakfast. Look there is nothing wrong with a morning “Cup of Joe.” It’s a great ritual. The smell is heavenly. The warm cup in your hand is soothing. The initial buzz is so good to wake you up from your morning stupor.
But if you lean towards anxiety, caffeine is not your friend.
It’s kind of like throwing gasoline on the fire.
Switching to decaf, herbal tea or hot lemon water was a great first step to turning down the volume on my anxiety loop.
Similarly, I became aware that my sarcasm was really a deflection of expressing my feelings. This was especially true when it came to negative self-talk. I always thought it was disarming to be self-deprecating, but I learned that it was counterproductive to my well-being.
The thoughts and words we say about ourselves create who we are. Unless you are a standup comedian and that’s your shtick, talking negatively about yourself is not serving you.
Learning to think and speak kindly about yourself is a shortcut to becoming the person you want to be.
But the real game-changer in anxiety reduction was learning to meditate. If you think that I came to meditation with open arms, you would be wrong. I had all of the garden-variety excuses of why I couldn’t meditate:
-People like me can’t learn to meditate.
-I have too many thoughts.
-My mind races when I close my eyes.
-I am too busy.
-It’s a waste of time to do “nothing.”
If this sounds like you, then you are the perfect candidate for meditation.
Meditation is a daily practice. It’s not about being good or bad at it. It’s just about doing it. Here are some of the benefits I get from daily meditation:
More centered.
Greater sense of calm.
More energy (not the frenetic kind).
More creative.
Promotes healing.
Creates greater clarity.
Meditation does not have to be hard. It can be done in 5-minute increments. I have a podcast series to teach people how to meditate, which you can listen to here. I, also, have 10-minute meditations on my YouTube channel.
These are just a few tools that I use to create a greater sense of calm in my life.
If you would like to learn more, then let’s talk about working together. You can schedule a consult call here.
Anxiety sucks and you don’t have to pretend that it is your rocket fuel. There is another path… I promise.
