EP 825- Generalized Anxiety

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Heels in the Courtroom, a podcast about successfully navigating law and life featuring the women trial attorneys at the Simon Law Firm.

Amy Collignon Gunn:

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Heels in the Courtroom. I am Amy Gunn, and today I’m joined by Erica Slater and Elizabeth McNulty. Hello ladies. Hey.

Elizabeth McNulty:

Hi.

Amy Collignon Gunn:

Our topic today is generalized anxiety. I will tell you that it is the time of year where we have the holidays coming into the year stuff just it feels like there’s going to be a lot of things on our collective plates, and I find myself just getting very tense about a lot of things I have tried in my life to recognize my generalized anxiety and to literally put a finger on it and say, okay, why am I feeling this way today and what is different and how can I fix it? Because when I have generalized anxiety, it really affects my sleep, my ability just to walk through my busy day. And I will say I am very lucky. It doesn’t happen all that often, largely because I’m so in tune with, okay, I don’t feel quite right today, and I instantly stop and make myself try to figure it out.

But this time of year, it’s hard to get past and fix on a daily basis, just so many things coming at us. And maybe what I’d like to do for our listeners is walk through our techniques for identifying it and dealing with it. So I’ll do one, Nathan, our son in Tampa a few weeks ago was evacuated actually twice within two weeks for the two hurricanes that went through Helene and Milton and Helene. The first one was not really supposed to hit Tampa and it wasn’t a direct hit, but it did cause a lot of flooding and there was an evacuation of the campus. And so Nathan ended up going to a fraternity brothers apartment, not that far away, but it was on the second floor of the apartment building and the first floor was parking. And so Kevin and I were like, okay, well I guess that’s going to be okay.

And then of course, it turns out he actually had a pretty fun time and FaceTimed me from the bay with the waves slapping against the shore without his shirt on and thinking he was making me proud. And I was like, go fast away. He laughed the whole time and then they lost power for a day or so. And so it was off school for three days. So that I think from his perspective was okay, but then two weeks later, Milton gets predicted and that one on the radar looked huge and was supposed to have a direct hit to Tampa and hadn’t happened in a hundred years. And so Kevin and I were like, we got to get this kid home, Kevin, more so than me, he’s much more of a meteorologist than I am, but even I engaged and was like, get this child home.

So he gets home, but it was a hook slide because he was on the last flight out on the Monday night and they had announced they’re closing the airport at nine o’clock the next morning and he doesn’t have a car, a freshman. So there was a lot of anxiety going on, and that’s not something I normally get to. Well, that’s just not something that happens all the time, thank goodness. And once he landed and I picked him up, even he admitted that he was a little bit anxious about getting home, but we got him home. And I was thinking about that experience and how we just sort of worked through everything. Okay, here’s the problem, identify the problem. And again, like I said earlier, why am I feeling this way today? Identify the problem, my child is in danger, get my child home, and then figuring out the flights and then having a backup plan.

And it turned out just fine. Now we fast forward into the fall and we’ve all been talking about the generalized anxiety of the election season. That started for me a couple of weeks ago, just feeling uncertain. And it’s not that, I mean, I fear this or I fear that. I don’t think I let myself really fear that because I can’t control it. And if I can’t control it, my defense mechanism is to minimize it and say, okay, well if I can’t control where our government’s going to go in the future, then I’m going to do everything I can to isolate ourselves into. So anyway, I think I try very hard to stay very in tune with myself. If I’m having these, why don’t I feel good today or right today I try to, I just stop and I say, okay, what’s going on? What is causing it? And how can I fix it? And then if I can fix it, I do it. If I can’t, I just try to let it go. Erica, how do you handle generalized anxiety?

Erica Blume Slater:

Well, in listening to your strategies, I realize that my strategies have come a long way. And I think I’ve said on this podcast before, sometimes when I just keep go, go going, and when that level of anxiety starts to creep in, no matter what the issue is, I in the past had ignored the crap out of it or bound it up and put it away and compartmentalize and said, I’ll deal with that later. And I feel like I would get to the point where I’d actually get physically sick before I’d slow down and I mean get run down with a cold or just something would put me out or I’d be at the gym just going through stuff and hurt myself. I wasn’t just trying to press through everything I could and those kinds of things would make me stop and take a beat and be like, you need to reevaluate things.

That’s not very healthy as I have learned. And I think that my kids are three and five, my daughter’s almost six in two, three weeks. And I think in having them, it becomes very clear that that won’t work. So I’ll give a little bit of the young parent perspective, which Amy, you’ve given one perspective, the old parent perspective. Well, a more mature parent perspective. We’re much further apart in kid ages than we are in actual age. I waited quite some time, but I recognize kids do great things for your anxiety and terrible things for your anxiety. The great thing is they help you prioritize and understand that there’s a floor for everything you can never get to. Well, I hope people don’t get too, you do have this responsibility. It is not about you first and foremost. It’s now completely about these little humans who depend on you for everything. But at the same time, they also cause a lot of anxiety. And for me, I’ve always felt like a person who can, is capable, can take control of situations, can find solutions for every problem that I see, and that type of type a control freak mentality, it really goes to shit when you have young kids.

And getting used to that and learning how to adapt in that environment has been difficult but rewarding I think. So when Amy, like you said, when I take a step back and understand that things are, that my anxiety level is heightened or trying to identify what’s going on, I really feel that it’s really understanding if you’re at a simmer or a boil or where you are. And when I have something going on in the background, whether it’s preparing for something at work that I am anticipating or nervous about whether I’m going to be ready or whatever it is, my baseline is a little higher or I feel more to a boiling point, and that’s when things like getting out of the house with my kids is really triggering because you really can’t control a three-year-old who rather put on her unicorn shoes that don’t fit yet instead of her pink sneakers because one pair to go on her feet.

But my sweet little hazel has a perfect age appropriate knack for finding everything else that she wants to do when I need her to get with the program. But in figuring out how to deal with those situations and kind of getting to that kind of frantic like we got to go or I’m running out of time, it’s been so important for me to both mentally and physically just take a beat and whether, so physically, literally taking a deep breath. I feel like all preschool age and young kids in school settings are taught that really well these days about taking a breath or taking a beat and I can’t expect my kids to do it if I don’t model it for them, which has been a really relieving thing to understand. I can take a breath and walk away and that’s not dismissing the situation or whatever.

That’s actually modeling what I want them to do in anxious situations. So that’s the physical part. The mental part is monitoring why are you getting to this point or why are you just running down my anxiety in that moment? So I understand most of my anxiety to be created by some sort of fear, and it sounds kind of superficial, but even getting out the door with two little kids who don’t, it is just a situation you can’t control. I do a real quick assessment and I’m like, why am I rushing them right now? And I take it all the way down. The fear is we’re not going to get to school on time. If they don’t get to school on time, I have to go through these extra steps to take them through the office and get a slip or whatever, and they’re tardy, whatever. If they’re not to school on time, why am I concerned about that? Oh, well, actually I think that school is going to think that I’m parent who can’t get my kids to school on time. So just breaking it down and isn’t that a relatable thing? Why am I rushing my kids out of the door because I’m worried that someone’s going to think I’m a bad

Amy Collignon Gunn:

Parent

Erica Blume Slater:

On the other

Amy Collignon Gunn:

Side side? Very powerful. That is very powerful.

Erica Blume Slater:

So running that down and just taking it even to the silly outer bounds of why am I so, why is this so triggering right now? It’s kind of comforting. I’m like, oh, I think school’s going to think I’m a bad parent if I can’t get my kids to school on time. Maybe a real concern, but is that the worst that could happen? Right. Okay, we’re all right here and that helps me take a beat. That’s the mental part of taking a beat. And that’s usually when I take a knee and talk to my three-year-old and say, girl, we are on the same team. What do you need right now to help you get this done? Sometimes she responds, well, sometimes she doesn’t and we move on to the next strategy. But those are the two things I do in the moment to help with that kind of pressure cooker of parenting personally or professionally.

When I’m in anxiety situations that don’t involve my kids, again, that feeling of pressure and I’m running out of time, that’s a reoccurring thing for me. So the mental aspect, it’s almost a mantra I use. I’ll step back and just tell myself, you have enough time, you have enough time, you have enough time. And that is from the perspective that reminds me. Say I’m prepping for a deposition and I thought I had three hours got pulled into something else, and now I’m left with an hour to prep for a deposition the next day my mind would spin and be like, I’m not going to be prepared. Run down that fear. It’s that I’m not going to be prepared. I’m not going to ask the right questions and it’s going to affect my case. Fair enough. But then I come back and say, you have enough time that reminds me that I’ve done this before.

I use the skills and tools I have and just get started. And time and time again, every time I feel that way, preparing for a deposition or hearing on the other side of it, you can prepare as much as you want, but it’s usually going to go a different way anyway. So anytime that you spend preparing or thinking about it, if you can stay clearheaded and not just have the anxiety shadow talking, pestering you with, you’re running out of time, you are not prepared because you didn’t have the three hours you thought you would. That has really helped me slow down and start from a more confident spot in doing whatever tasks needs to be done instead of starting with this idea of I’m just going to be anxious all the way through this hour, which is not productive. So those are some of the tools that I use to help get through that kind of stuff.

Amy Collignon Gunn:

So Erica, that reminds me of a couple little things that I do. I’ll stop and take a deep breath and I count to three over and over. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. And maybe that doesn’t sound very soothing, but to me, Connor’s birthday is one, two, three. It’s January 2nd, 2003. And so ever since he is, he’s been born, I think I was doing that before, just a 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. But ever since he’s been born, it’s added an extra layer of comfort. It’s also kind of how I put myself to sleep at night. I sleep really well luckily, but I will, if I can’t sleep, I’ll just start doing 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. And it’s a little technique that I use also, you mentioned working through the worst thing that can happen. I play the worst scenario game all the time

With myself, with Kevin, with people at work, someone in and says, this happened. I’m like, okay, what’s the worst thing that could happen? Is the case going to get dismissed? Are we going to get sued? And most people, most of the time people look at me like, no. I’m like, okay, let’s start there. And John saw me, taught me that actually I told him something one time and he was like, did the case get dismissed today? And I was like, no. He was like, okay. I don’t know if he was just teaching me something or really just having that anxiety himself, but whatever it was, I’ve taken that with me. So I will do the worst case scenario game. And then ultimately, Erica, what you said is trust yourself at the end when you don’t have the time you thought you had. Just take a breath and say, I’ve done this before. And this is particularly for trials and for depos and hard things that we’re doing. I’ve done this before. I know what I’m doing. Let’s go. So Elizabeth, what do you have, babe?

Elizabeth McNulty:

Yeah, so this is something I feel like I’ve been dealing with probably a really long time. I can sort of pinpoint the exact moment I identified that I was dealing with some anxiety. I was in the fourth grade,

Erica Blume Slater:

This is big.

Elizabeth McNulty:

I know. I think it’s probably just a side effect of being a high achiever. And in the time period, the early two thousands, but it was shortly after I had thrown up at school for the first time, which is really gross. I’m sorry that you have to listen to that. And I’ve always been, as a kid, I was really good at identifying when that was going to happen, but I actually had pneumonia and so it was the beginning of being really sick, so I didn’t need to be at school. But anyway, the next time I got a stomach ache, which I do think was from anxiety, it gave me anxiety because I thought that that was going to happen. So I’m nine or 10 years old, and so I just have anxiety. And so that’s when it initially started. So obviously I needed to learn how to deal with this.

I was obviously a really competitive student, needed to do well, and that doesn’t come without side effects. And for me, that was a little pit in my stomach and I dealt with that by just taking a really deep breath because at the bottom of that breath was a moment of relief where you didn’t have that little stomach ache. And I’ve been doing that for a very long time. But I think because of that I’ve become for probably a pretty long time, really good at compartmentalizing. So I put all my worries in little boxes and I open them up when it’s time and when it’s not time, I put them back up and I don’t think about it. So I really only think about work generally during work hours. If you catch me on the weekend and you want to talk about work, I don’t want to.

So if you text me about something work related, I might not respond to you because I don’t talk about it then and it’s not in my brain in that moment. And I might think it’s a little rude of you to text me about that because it wasn’t in my brain at all. And I think that that’s kind of unique for what we do because a lot of people, at least for people without kids and a family, I know both of you are also probably really good at not focusing on those things. But I think a lot of the danger of our profession is you get so sucked into it because it’s kind of addictive. It becomes all consuming. That’s all you think about. It’s

Erica Blume Slater:

Never over having cases, that type of work. Anyone who has work that involves revolving cases or anything like that, you don’t put it up, put

Elizabeth McNulty:

It away. We’re done. Yeah. So it takes a lot of self-discipline, I think, to be able to set it on a shelf and let it go for a little bit. And that’s just how I deal with it, and it enables me to care about other things in my life and take care of other people that are important to me. And ultimately it’s how I deal with my anxiety. If I was thinking about those things all the time, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else because this job is hard and I wouldn’t be able to function because it can be really stressful. So compartmentalizing is something that does take a sort of skill, but you just have to focus your mind on other things and not think about those things and ultimately have the discipline in place to not check your email or talk to other people about work, distract them with other things, ask them about other things.

And I think it’s something you said. My dad has always said it control the controllables. I make fun of him by saying, control the uncontrollable. But I think it’s true. You can just focus on the things that you can control because instead of focusing on all the things that you can’t control, and those are the things that lead to the anxiety, like the election, being stressed about it, obviously very normal, but there’s so many factors outside of the things that you can control. Liz is in my office talking about how stressed she was about it a few weeks ago, and I was like, yeah, I guess it is a point of privilege to not be super stressed about it, but I was just like, I’ll be stressed about it once we find out more of the results and then we figure out how it’s going to go.

I’m going to do my part in it and then kind of figure out go from there. But that’s just sort of how I deal with things, figure out the problem, find a solution, then kind of move on. But one thing, as I’ve talked about, I’ve had my parents have moved closer. I’m in a long distance relationship, so my boyfriend spends large chunks of time here. And before those people came closer to me physically, I spent a lot of time alone. And I’m someone who obviously doesn’t like to talk about work a lot, but in my subconscious, obviously there’s a lot of things going on in the back end, so the stress bubbles up, and so sometimes you’re forced to talk about those things when there’s other people around. It’s something that I’ve had to recalibrate in the past couple of months. I think it’s important to identify that if you’re someone who like me maybe doesn’t like to talk about it, you have to at least tell the people around you that you’re maybe projecting onto that you’re stressed about something.

Give ’em the high points and then you can say you don’t want to talk about it. Sometimes it does help to talk about it though, but when you’re ready to talk about it. But I also think slowing down a little bit, not everyone, I think we all probably move at a really fast pace just through life. That’s how I am too. Having some people around you that force you to slow down, I think that actually does help with I think anxiety and moving fast, like go kind of hand in hand. So surrounding yourself with a couple people who force you to slow down a little bit. Actually I found as frustrating as those people are a little bit, I think it helps kind of. And then asking for help when you need it I think is something that can be a little counterintuitive, but does help in those moments when if you’re really feeling super anxious, there’s probably a lot going on in those moments and you probably could use a little extra help. So don’t be afraid to ask for

Erica Blume Slater:

It. I think that something else that I have, I feel like I’ve convinced my anxiety to think in a different way. Sometimes. I heard a phrase once and it was, if you worry, you suffer twice.

And that really stuck with me the first time I heard it. And that’s another thing that I remind myself. If I find myself really spending too much time worrying or having anxious thoughts about something, it’s usually things that I don’t yet have an answer to or have to ask myself, what evidence do you have of that? Which is a good way to cross-examine yourself as a lawyer. It’s a great way to handle a lot of your anxiety because I’m a pretty rational person. I can put rational thoughts in my head, but sometimes your emotional side takes over and those worries if they are irrational. Asking yourself, what evidence do you have of that is a good way to identify. If you’re having irrational worries about something like, I’m going to screw up this depo tomorrow. What evidence do you have of that? Not much. You had an hour to prepare, that’s okay.

You’ve done it before. You don’t know what this witness is going to say anyway. So you’ll have to use your lawyer skills in the moment like you have every other time. But that has been a good way for me to identify when, if there’s a time period leading up to even the election, we won’t have an answer. By the time you hear this podcast, we will. But that’s one of those ideas of, for me, worry makes you suffer twice. I can worry about it all the way leading up to it, but until I know what situation I’m actually worrying about or whether that was time well spent, I won’t know until there’s an answer. Evidence. Same goes for a trial result, whether you’re going to get an admission out of a certain witness and being able to suspend that hamster wheel of worrying about it has been helpful too. And controlling my anxious thoughts.

Amy Collignon Gunn:

I think we’re going in this profession and many of our listeners professions as well, or just life, we all have moments of anxiety and we’ve called this generalized anxiety. When I say generalized anxiety, I just mean stuff that happens to us every day that we have to deal with and not serious anxiety. And I think it’s important to check in with yourself, with your practitioner, or with your family to find out whether you fall into the generalized anxiety camp or a more serious situation so you can get professional help if you need it. I think we’ve talked about this a lot on our podcast. This is my therapy. I’ve learned some techniques today to take care of my generalized anxiety, and I thank you all for that and I hope our listeners have taken that to heart as well. But certainly if your anxiety goes beyond just a generalized, then we do hope that you are able to reach out to people who can help you with that, because we want everyone to be happy and healthy as we get toward the end of the year and into the D holiday season. So thank you all for listening to another episode of Heels in the Courtroom. We drop episodes every other Wednesday. You can leave thoughts and topics and comments at comments at heels in the Courtroom law. And thank you for listening.

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