My Journey to becoming a health coach and 7 tips to deal with anxiety!

If anyone has ever experienced losing a loved one, they will understand how much anxiety grief can cause. Grief is a process; it doesn’t heal overnight and there are different aspects of dealing with the process that occur and not in any particular order. For example, the 5 stages of grief are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. However, these come in no particular order and from my own experience, you can experience every single one at the same time. I know, because I did. I suffered many years from anxiety way before my mum even got ill because I used to worry about everything, and most things now are so insignificant to me and so I know from experience that you CAN get rid of anxiety when you start to help yourself. I think to go through what I did at the age of 31, suddenly it put the things I was worrying about into perspective.

In February 2015 my world turned upside down. My mum was always the epitome of ‘health’ in my eyes. She ate well, she didn’t smoke, rarely drank, exercised a lot and yet in February 2015, she had a standard check for cholesterol which showed her neutrophils at a low level so the doctor said they needed to do a few tests. Within a few days, she was diagnosed with Leukaemia completely out of the blue. How could someone that ‘healthy’, who ate well, was physically fit, get something so deadly.

This made me think about what being healthy really means, since I watched the one person who I thought lived a healthy lifestyle get a toxic cancer so deadly it killed her within 9 months. This is what prompted me to take a journey as a health coach fundamentally but also to understand how anxiety and fight or flight can affect the body.

I remember the consultant telling my mum she had leukaemia and my brother passing out in the doctors room. It’s the kind of situation that people say ‘that will never happen to me’ and yet it does. Within 3 days she was in hospital undergoing her first round of chemotherapy. Months of chemo, infections, thinking she was going to die, then pulling back around, I spent a year of my life in and out of hospital which in itself caused me months of anxiety and stress, it was all a bit of a blur looking back but I wouldn’t have changed that time I spent with her for the world.

AML

In my mums case she had acute myeloid leukemia (AML) which basically meant her white blood cells were not producing correctly formed and mutated, and she had low neutrophils. She underwent two rounds of chemotherapy of which the consultant described it as an ice berg affect. Though the chemotherapy could initially kill some of the cells off, they come back with a vengeance. In most cases, a stem cell transplant is then needed to try to replace the cancer cells with healthy cells which then attach to your bone marrow and reproduce throughout your body, becoming your own cells. My mum had a transplant from a 22 year old male through the Anthony Nolan charity, she actually made a full recovery and was in remission for 3 months before it came back through her skin. I am still wondering to this day what caused it.

What I realise now after taking this course is that you can eat the healthiest foods, hardly drink alcohol, or smoke and yet still get a major illness such as cancer. My mum had quite a traumatic break up with my dad when I was 12 years old and suffered from extreme anxiety, she lost her hair and was always worrying about everything. When I look at it, stress and anxiety could have contributed massively to her illness, although the doctor called it ‘the cancer of bad luck’. What I now know about stress and how it affects the body, it could well have been that. Whether or not anxiety and stress killed my mum, I’ll never know but I watched her deteriorate every day suffering from it. She didn’t sleep and was on medication, sleeping tablets to help her. After she died, she left a letter to my brother and I which she had written in the hope it was never read and within it, she said how my dad had utterly destroyed her trust and it was the worst time of her life. I remember hearing her cry every night, not sleep, and lose her hair. She worried about EVERYTHING.

I think from this, my active interest in stress as a niche to help people with came about. I studied initially how stress affects the voice in my masters as a vocal coach and from that, I learnt and read a lot of articles about how stress affects the entire body. I believe now that dealing with stress can help in future illnesses. Personally, when I was going through a breakup earlier this year, it was the first time I got Covid in over two years and I’m convinced it was down to stress and feeling down mentally.

Dealing with anxiety is not easy, I suffered for many years after my mums death and had 8 years of counselling, of which I still have once a month now just mainly for someone to talk to but after the experience of dealing with OCD and anxiety about being in control, here are some things I learnt and some tips for helping deal with anxiety. I hope these help.

7 tips for dealing with anxiety

1. Start saying no. We live in a world where people are constantly expecting next day delivery and things ‘right now’. I used to agree to things In the past and afterwards regret it and get anxious about letting people down when I inevitably cancelled. Now I just say no in advance so I don’t even put myself in that situation. Also, the more you say yes, I realised the more people expect from you or come to you because they know you will say yes and then my life became so overloaded being the ‘yes person’ and pleasing others whilst all the time, I wasn’t pleasing myself. Don’t become that person!

2. Get rid of toxic people from your life. One of the signals of my anxiety personally is usually from the company I’ve kept around me. People who trigger you, don’t know you, constantly judge or are just draining to be around, need to go. Since I cut out these people from my life, I am so much more at peace. Now if I recognise someone is triggering me, I remove myself from the situation.

3. Social media detox. Social media can be a great tool for business but it can also be a terrible place for mindless scrolling and wasting time. Comparison to others, checking ex-boyfriend/girlfriends pages, it all creates a breeding ground for anxiety. Remember a life where we break up and you never see or speak to them again? – me either! Taking breaks from social media will mean you don’t get addicted and gain some perspective on staying in the present moment. It will also allow you to contemplate whether the content you are sharing feels authentic to what you are trying to portray.

4. Write a daily Journal. Journaling is a great way to get thoughts out. If you are prone to rumination or simply have too much on your mind, writing it down or writing lists will help. I do this every day before I go to sleep so I can reflect on the day and write down anything I need to do the following day or even if I have anxious thoughts, I find writing them down gets them out of my head and onto paper. Creating lists stop you from getting overwhelmed and forgetting important things. I use a whiteboard personally for day-to-day events or things I need to remember but you can use a notepad. I also have a diary that is written in ‘hourly’ sections so I can really breakdown my day hour by hour and see what I’m achieving.

5. Meditate. Meditation brings you back to the present moment. Focussing on nothing but your breath reminds you where you are and turns the mind off from overthinking. It’s okay to let thoughts come and go whilst doing it but I feel that when I’m overwhelmed, this is one of the biggest things that helps me. It takes a while to master so be patient. It’s a proven fact that breathing in for a shorter time than you exhale can slow down the circulatory rhythm and therefore lower anxiety. Learning to diaphragm breathe through my singing training means I automatically had the basis of the breath used for meditation. I find this is an easy and quick way to take 5. I will usually do this before bed, I use the calm app and its only 7 minutes a day, that is because that is when I usually overthink the most or I can’t sleep. It will not only calm the nervous system but it will aid in better sleep. You can also do it during the middle of a stressful day or whenever it suits your lifestyle.

6. 5,4,3,2,1. A technique I learnt when I was wellness coaching was to ‘take 5’ in situations of high alert or in fight or flight. Whenever I’ve been triggered, I have tried to do this although it is hard, its ideal for moments of just getting you back to the present moment and remembering that life is happening right now.

You look around and view 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell and one thing you can taste. It’s about engaging the senses but also, taking that time out to really think if it is worth responding or reacting and bringing yourself back to your surroundings.

7. Finally, reduce caffeine intake. Cortisol levels are highest In the morning and the first thing we do every day is reach for the tea or coffee (I’m guilty of this) but actually it’s the worst time of day to have caffeine as it will increase cortisol levels even further. I limit myself to 4 cups of a tea a day, if you drink a lot of caffeine, now might be the time to start thinking about reducing it.

Reactivity in itself can cause a lot of anxiety, mainly what I have learnt from this is I don’t like who I become or the aftermath of a trigger when I do react. If we can have some useful tips to help us all throughout the day, it would ease anxiety before it starts.

Anxiety affects the body in the nervous, digestive, cardiovascular and urinary systems. It creates more of a negative affect than people realise. It can also contribute to long lasting chronic diseases which has an even more devastating effect on people’s lives. If this can help just one person, then I know it will make me happy that I could have helped someones future health. Start thinking today what you can do to help your anxiety, is there anything on this list you can start to implement?

For more information, please feel free to contact me via my website on www.mindandfitnessnm.co.uk