This week on the Anxiety Slayer Podcast, we're discussing some of the habits and things we do that make anxiety worse and what you can do instead. Hey Ananga, it's good to be with you again this week.

This is such a potent list of items that all of us do to make anxiety worse. I'm so grateful that we also have a long list of what you can do instead.

Yeah, it's an easy list to make, isn't it, really?

Mm-hmm.

Anxiety can sneak up on us and we can find ourselves just wanting to avoid.

That's the first thing on our list.

Avoidance, we can get caught up in scrolling.

We can go to our phone and think,

oh, just check in on a certain person and then before we know it,

time has passed and we've scrolled through so many things to distract ourselves and just

try and take ourselves away from that awful experience of anxiety, but not a healthy choice, not a choice that serves us well and the anxiety is right there waiting for us as soon as our attention is freed up.

Yeah I found myself in the past kind of looping doing the social media loop, moving from one platform to the next,

to the next, and then coming back around again,

and then being like,

what are you doing?

Yeah. And how much time

have I just let slip away

when I could have been perhaps doing something more creative, something more supportive, something that would not put me in that space of being in distraction or suppressing my feelings, but doing something better.

It's so easy as well now. Right by our hand, we've got this thing that will divert us. I don't know how many times we

pick them up a day. People have looked into it. It's a lot. It's just too easy to go down that rabbit hole. I read a book last summer called Stolen Focus and the guy shared that you took himself off to a remote area and just put his phone aside and kind of came back to himself and was

spending time reading sitting by the ocean but he was sharing the journey with that and how

habituated we are to being caught up with social media and the other

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