Welcome back to Anxiety Slayer. I'm Shan Vanderleak here with my wonderful friend and

co-host Ananga Civier and this month we're going to be speaking about how anxiety can often make our lives small and what you can do about it.

And this week in particular, we're going to be speaking about how to stop fear of the future from shrinking the present moment.

Hello Ananga. Hey Shen. It's good to be with you again for this conversation and really zeroing in on how anxiety can make us feel so much

smaller than we really are. Yeah, it's such a constricting experience isn't it anxiety. It's almost like it takes all our air

all our energy all our vision it just floods in and takes everything and to make our life feel very small, very fixated on the things

that are worrying us and really caught in that anxiety loop.

And anticipating the worst is exhausting.

And you and I have both been through that in our own experiences and watching people in our family do that. This anticipatory fear, this

waiting for the other shoe to drop, robs us of the present moment like nothing else.

It's very difficult because that kind of anxiety really gets an energy to it, a push to it,

or it's quite hard to deal with it and again it floods in and takes over and it's like we

start going over and over the worries in our mind and living out the scenario of our fears and it feels kind of like a pre-trauma or pre-griving

is that we're anticipating something we dread, we're worried something might happen

and every time we do that our body and our

nervous system have to go through it as if it's happening now which is why it's

so awfully exhausting.

And our sweet bodies deserve so much more than that.

And thank goodness,

there are all kinds of coping skills and ways to move through this

Because in the moment when we when we don't have any coping skills or we feel like we don't have any We're just swimming and worry. And what we dread, even though it's not actually happening,

we can't get to that place of being practical, we can't get to that place of being practical we can't get to that place of

...