Being Present When Your Inner World Is Loud: What Anxiety Actually Is, Why You Can't Think Your Way Out of It, and What to Do Instead

And I had this moment this year where I was sitting in my backyard, the sun is shining down, we've got a picnic blanket down.

He's running around the yard in his diaper.

He's got his helmet on.

He's hitting baseballs.

I'm sitting there reading a book.

My husband is, like, piddling around the backyard doing some yard work.

And I just was overcome with so much joy for that moment.

I just felt extreme peace, extreme joy, and I was just looking at him almost as if I'm watching a movie, and I felt like I was having this out-of-body experience of watching my life unfold before my eyes.

And it was the most simple moment, and yet I was so enamored with it.

And then instantly I felt fear because any time we feel immense joy, vulnerability sits next to that.

And I was overcome with fear, and my inner world started to feel panicked, and my mind was racing.

I was having some intrusive thoughts.

I was feeling a little bit of, like, tension in my chest.

It always, for me, is like, starts in my head, goes to my chest, then it goes into a pit in my stomach, and it's this feeling of like something is wrong or something-

Is this happening in this exact moment?

Like-

Yes

... joy, highest p- peak of life.

Yeah, so-

Mm-hmm

... something that I like to joke about myself is I call myself Death Barbie, which is like [laughs] if you've seen the Barbie movie, she's dancing and she's having the time of her life, and then she turns to her friends and she's like, "Do you guys ever think about death?"

[laughs]

And they're like, "What?" [laughs] And I feel like Death Barbie sometimes because I can be having, like, immense joy, and then I can, in an instant, switch over to having fear.

And it's a bodily reaction.

It's a nervous system reaction that I lose control of, and my mind, like, cannot unthink the way I'm feeling.