Welcome back to the Anxiety Slayer Podcast. I'm Shan Vanderleak here today with

Stephanie Weichert. Stephanie is a certified yoga therapist, a loving mentor, dynamic

teacher, author, and captivating speaker. She teaches individuals and organizations to use challenges as catalysts for growth with the time-tested wisdom of yoga.

Welcome to Anxiety Slayer, Stephanie.

Thanks for having me, Shan. I'm really happy to be here today. I'm happy to have you here as well and

oh I just love talking about yoga and how helpful it can be so this is a great conversation. I'd like to begin by you kind of sharing the story of your decade-long battle with stress that

manifested itself as it does for so many as overwhelm and anxiety, worry and

exhaustion.

Thanks for asking.

So it was really throughout my 20s.

It started in my late teens and It was really throughout my 20s.

Started in my late teens, and I just started feeling anxious all the time

about everything. developed a lot of unhealthy coping mechanisms

but the one that's notable because it's

helped me shift was that I pulled on my eyelashes and eyebrows. I now know that it's a body focused repetitive behavior and a common one that many people are familiar with is nail biting.

But this, and this is a similar sort of thing

that can develop and I just pulled on them

and over the course of my late teens into my late 20s,

there were periods of time

when I just hoping

hoping with coping with just coping with the basics of life at that point.

I was about 27 when I had no eyebrows or eyelashes at all and I had bought a house and was working on renovating it myself. Talk about overwhelm. And I had this

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