Welcome to Untangle. I'm Patricia Carpice. Today we're diving into a topic that's close to home for so many of us, navigating our emotions. It's one of the most common struggles we face. And every time we explore it on this show, the response is overwhelming.

My guest today is Dr. Alyssa Giroud, a clinical psychologist, researcher, and author of the book Emotionally Savvy Parenting. Her work focuses on helping us build practical evidence-based

strategies for navigating the storm of emotions that life inevitably brings.

And as you might guess, anxiety is one of our most challenging emotions.

What I love about Alyssa's approach is that she doesn't treat anxiety as something to get rid of

or any difficult emotion for that matter.

Instead, she helps us understand it, accept it, work with it, and even grow through it.

We talk about the myths of coping, how we often make things worse without meaning to, and

why the strategies we instinctively reach for might not be serving us.

We also learn how to become more emotionally agile and the powerful practice of doing the opposite

of what your anxiety might be urging you to do.

If you've ever felt overwhelmed by strong emotions and wanted to respond with more clarity,

courage, and compassion, you'll find this to be an interesting conversation. As always,

we're Untangle, the podcast from Muse, the brain sensing headband that helps to transform your brain.

Use promo code Untangle15 at choosemuse.com for your discount. Now here's Alyssa.

Alyssa, it's great to have you on Untangle today. Thank you for being with us. Oh, thanks so much for

having me. I love this topic and our audience loves it too. Anytime we ever talk about anxiety, we seem to get an enormous

number of comments and lots of feedback. So excited always to get different perspectives.

So I want to start with why you think so much about anxiety, why you write about it.

Where did all that come from for you personally?

Anxiety is something that we all experience at times. It's this universal emotion. And what I find

so fascinating about anxiety is that the thing that most of us typically try to do to cope with

...