I caught up with Danielle LaPorte the other day. I wanted to ask her a bit about anxiety. She gets it. She writes about it.
I’ve followed her White Hot Truths for a while. And her career in the self-help-of-the-brutal-variety realm. (Note: Danielle tours Australia next month, with special guest Clare Bowditch. Details, and a ticket giveaway, below). A while back she dropped one of her “truth bombs”:
Interrupt anxiety with gratitude
I like this. I’ve dug around on the topic of late. Alex Korb writes in The Grateful Brain, ‘Gratitude can have such a powerful impact on your life because it engages your brain in a virtuous cycle. Your brain only has so much power to focus its attention. It cannot easily focus on both positive and negative stimuli.’ Literally, you can’t be grateful and anxious at the same time. You can, thus, derail your anxiety by being grateful. Chuck a bomb under it!
On top of this, research shows gratitude stimulates the hypothalamus, a part of the brain that regulates anxiety.
Korb adds that the brain loves to fall for the confirmation bias – it looks for things that prove what it already believes to be true. ‘So once you start seeing things to be grateful for, your brain starts looking for more things to be grateful for.’
And thusly interrupting anxiety even more.
I asked Danielle a little more about her anxious thinking.
Me: Why do we get anxious?
DLP: Because every time anxiety shows up, it’s our psyche’s way of saying, “Knock knock, I’ve got something to show you about yourself that you really should see.”
Me: How do you cope with it?