The Welcome back to the Anxiety Slayer Podcast. I'm Shan Vanderleak here with my wonderful friend and co-host in Angasivere.

We come together weekly from Kent and Leilinaw

and share a powerful collection of techniques to reduce anxiety. This month we're celebrating

surpassing a milestone 8 million downloads and we couldn't do it without you.

So thank you so very much for listening in.

The feeling of waiting for something bad to happen often comes when the anxious mind

pulls us outside of the present moment.

Today we're going to be discussing why this happens and share self-care practices that you can move into your daily routine to help you settle your mind.

Yeah, so we're responding to a question we received, how to stay in gratitude when you're always

waiting for something bad to happen.

And that's a really good question and we have some ideas around that because it's not the first time we've received it and you are not alone in being in that place waiting for the other shoe to drop or waiting for something bad to happen. The good news is there are things that you can practice,

that you can start to do that will make that dissipate and let's begin by talking about past trauma and

stress or anxiety and how that plays into this. Yeah, you use the saying shan Shannon waiting for the other shoe to drop,

that sense of just waiting for the next thing.

And often that comes from anxiety in our past or trauma in our past, we might be experiencing the effects of a traumatic event from the past that came in on a happy day, broke through onto a happy day, And so we enter into a hyper-vigilance state where we don't

trust happier times because we just fear that it's going to happen again. So the anxious mind sets up this looking and waiting always waiting for the next bad

thing to happen not able to trust a good day because we're waiting for that bad thing to happen.

It doesn't always work this way, but it can do.

That we're bringing some trauma or stress or anxiety from behind us,

from back in time and kind of throwing it over our shoulder ahead of time and looking out for it.

And this is when the memory of those moments steal away our peace and happiness?

Yeah, sometimes I think of it almost like a trust issue where we feel we can't trust

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