Welcome to IVF this- episode 51 Anxiety and control

Hello, hello, hello my beautiful friends

I’m so excited to be talking to you all today and on such an important topic. 

There are fewer things that come up AS often as anxiety and control. I’ve mentioned this before but anxiety and control are often inextricably linked. 

I think this also comes up a lot as we come into this holiday season. There are lots of opportunities for us to have anxiety-producing thoughts. Particularly around family get togethers, some cycles and transfers are delayed until after the New Year, so that can be challenging. And for most of us, where there is anxiety, there is often a need to control. 

So that is what we’re going to talk about today. 

Now before I start, I want to remind you all that anxiety is like any other emotion (sadness, happiness, whatever) it’s all part of the human experience. Anxiety has kept us safe in so many ways, it’s really one of the amin reasons we have survived as a species, so we don’t need to go crapping all over it. It’s just that it doesn’t particularly feel all that great so we tend to try to resist it, avoid it, or we react to it- all three of those things are pretty normal responses. This is how most people manage- now you cant see me but I am using air quotes for “manage” because resisting, avoiding, and reacting are not managing our emotions. It is delaying them and numbing them.

All that to say, I don’t ever want to give the impression that we need to villainize anxiety. It’s not the bad guy of the story- ever. It just is. The more we learn about anxiety and how to allow for and process feelings, you get to change your experience of it, and that’s really the goal. 

We don’t want it to have the death grip on us, and that’s why we want to change our experience of it. 

Now, regardless of each of your situations, we all have some anxiety. Cycles, family, friends, appointments, medication, hell the Pandemic is still going on and on. We still have a LOT of opportunities to feel anxious. We have all felt it, most of us are probably actively feeling it. 

But this is not the first time. Nor, will it be the last time you will ever experience anxiety. 

I think a lot of us walk around, I know I sure have, with this belief that once I get passed this thing- whatever that thing may be- then I will get to feel better. I won’t have the weight of this thing any longer, so I’ll get to feel better. 

I see this a lot with my clients talking about once they get pregnant. Then they won’t have to feel so anxious because they will have finally gotten where they wanted to be. But that’s not true. Not even a little bit. Our anxiety just shifts. It morphs into something new based on the change of circumstances- this is just how our brains work. So, when this happens to you, you’re not doing anything wrong. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s a question of learning why your brain does this- this helps us to normalize the experience- and then we can get to work helping yourself to manage your mind. 

It's funny, when I was really thinking about this and how I wanted to explain it, I was going for a walk and I noticed that the leaves are starting to change color- well, as much as the leaves change color in central Texas. I lived in VA for one year and let’s just say they know how to put on a show with the leaves changing. 

Anyway, I was walking and I was thinking about WHY we hold so tight to control and why it’s so closely tied to anxiety. There are two things we try to control, people and outcomes- so I’ll be talking about both. I’ll talk about it within the context of IVF but also in the broader context of just living your life. I mean, everyday, outside of infertility and IVF, there are tons of things we try to control- so I think taking a wide-angle lens to this topic is really important. 

While walking I started to think about that cliché, the only thing permanent is impermanence. The world keeps turning and life comes and goes as it always does. I think seeing ourselves as part of that cycle of nature - you guys may be able to hear the wind chimes here at this farmhouse. Seeing ourselves as part of that cycle of nature, to me is so grounding. The earth turns, species come and go. The earth has no investment in us particularly. 

We are always part of a cycle of life that is birthed and that dies. Always. And the trees turn over, the seasons turn, the animals come and go, the humans come and go. So remembering that I am part of that, for me, it takes me out of this focus, this sort of primitive brain animal-based focus on just myself and my own survival, which is so anxiety producing, and helps me reconnect to what is the truth of life, which is that it is beautiful because it is impermanent. 

It is precious to us because it is a limited resource. So today I want to teach you about one of the main ways that I think we block ourselves from being at peace with that impermanence, even though that impermanence is the true state of any life. 

And that is when we try to control what is beyond our control. That is the best way to fuck up our peace in any given moment. And one of the paradoxes I see in how we kind of think incorrectly about the world is that we think that we don’t have control over our own thoughts and feelings. 

We think outside circumstances control those- because that’s what we have been taught. That’s what most people believe. That’s what we are modeled growing up. And so, so as a result, we run around trying to control things outside of us. Other people and external things, which are what we actually can’t control. So why do we do that? It’s so counterproductive, it doesn’t work, it’s exactly backwards. Why is it so seductive to us to try to do that? 

Why do we get so sucked into that? And I think there’s a couple of reasons. The first is because we think we know what should happen. We think we know how life should be. We think we know how other people should act. And we think that if life would just be the way we want it to be and other people would just act the way we want them to act, then we would feel okay. 

I think this is something that all of us kind of intellectually tell ourselves we “don’t know” what’s going to happen- but that’s very different from being convinced that we know what “should” happen. That kind of sits abck there is the back of our brains like, yea, I get it I don’t REALLY know, I’m not REALLY in charge but this should absolutely be the way this goes down. And we will always dream and imagine those things going in our favor. Based on our own preferences and biases and kind of in this vacuum of perfection. 

We’re always just trying to have a feeling and 99.9% of the time we want that to be a positive or a comfortable feeling. So let’s even zoom out from IVF and infertility, If you read a news article about people not behaving the way you think they should behave about the pandemic, vaccines,  or anything else, of course your brain has a lot of logical reasons and even principled reasons about this, but on an emotional level, all that’s happening is that when you see them doing that, you have a thought that makes you feel anxious or afraid or sad or whatever it is. 

And then you think, “Well, if they would just stop doing that, I wouldn’t have to have this thought.” Or, “well if this had just happened this way, then I wouldn’t have this thought or this feeling.” Of course that’s true because if they could be doing it and you didn’t know or you could’ve gotten the thing and your didn’t know it yet, you wouldn’t have any thoughts about it. Or let’s say that you were going to get that positive pregnancy test but you didn’t know yet.

You are creating your own negative emotion with your thought about whatever other people are doing and then you just want to get rid of that emotion and so you think, if those people would just stop, then I could feel better. 

But the opposite is true because when you want life to be something it isn’t, when you want other people to be and act differently than they are, when you want the world to be different than it is, you are creating so much suffering for yourself. You are resisting reality. You are resisting what is. 

Byron Katie says – When you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time, which I love. Now, of course, I am not talking about not having a vision of a world that you want to create, that you want to take action or change to create. 

I’m not talking about not wanting to show up yourself in a certain way to try to make changes in the world. But when you are emotionally resisting that the world is not already the way you want it, it’s almost like we feel entitled to the world being the way we think is best, which is so wild. 

Because you can’t get people to agree on anything about how the world should be. From the most macro to the most micro. We can’t agree on what the global political system should look like and y’all can’t agree on how I should run my business based on the emails I get. We can’t agree on what to have for lunch, we can’t agree on what we should do with the world. 

Humans do not agree on this stuff. And so when we think we’re entitled for the world to just already be the way we want it to be and we resist the reality that it’s not, and I’m talking about the global health conditions or the way your boss is in the office, at any level. When you’re emotionally resisting reality, you’re believing that you know better how things should be. 

And that causes so much suffering because you don’t. There are millions of humans on earth with millions of ideas about how things should be. And we’re never going to get the ultimate checklist that tells us who is right. And the problem with thinking you know how things should be is that it’s so painful then when the world won’t cooperate. 

And unfortunately, normally, the world will not cooperate. It usually will not be the way you want it to be. And so believing that it has to be for you to feel okay is why you feel so crazy. Giving the outside world the power over your feelings is going to make you obsessed with how the world should be different. 

The truth is it’s your own thoughts that are causing your feelings, and in fact, it’s your resistance to how the world is that is causing the suffering. That’s the paradox. If you stop believing the world should be different, then you don’t need to change it to feel better. You’ll feel better already. You’ve changed the premise of the thought. 

This is also true when it comes to trying to control how other people think or feel or act. I think we’re often so convinced of the righteousness of our own beliefs and we genuinely believe that we’re looking out for other people’s best interest. And we believe that their lives would be better if they just did what we told them to do. 

I think we believe that bullshit, that we know. And that’s at any scale. We can be mad at everyone we see in the news and on the street who we don’t think is doing things right during a pandemic, or we can be mad at our partner or coworkers for how they handle conflict, we can be mad at friends or family that might have made some off-handed (albeit inappropriate) comment. 

There’s no situation of other people’s actions too large or too small for us to get emotionally invested in and think that we know better about. But whenever we believe we know how things should be or how people should act, we are setting ourselves up for so much suffering because again, they almost never comply because they have different thoughts than we do. I know, it’s very rude, but it’s true. Just like there’s no situation too big or too small that we won’t be emotionally invested in and think we know how it should turn out. We’re still setting ourselves up for that let-down, that anger, sadness, or whatever the emotion. 

Now, I’m not saying that if a cycle fails, or a transfer fails, you’re not allowed to have feelings about it- not at all. Grief is a natural byproduct. But it’s when you tell yourself that it “shouldn’t have happened this way” or “this or that should have happened” THAT’S where we get into trouble. 

Think about when you have a thought about a situation that you think is the right thought. You have a situation in your life or in the world and you have a belief about it and you are convinced of your own rightness in that belief. How receptive are you when other people try to change your mind or tell you what to do? You’re not too receptive probably, and that goes both ways. 

So even if you could know you were right, even if we could get you a certified letter from the universe, it would still just create unnecessary suffering to believe that you’re right and other people should agree with you because we all have human autonomy and we all get to have our own thoughts and feelings and actions. Aunt Greta gets to say and do whatever she says and does, even if she says the most ridiculous, inappropriate, ill-timed, whatever comments because those are subjective. TO her they might be her “truth” or a joe that she thinks is funny, or something completely appropriate. 

You are not the reference point for how people should act or communicate. 

Most of us, we want autonomy for ourselves but we don’t want other people to have it. But then that’s how all of us feel. It doesn’t work that way. We all get it or none of us have it, and the truth is we all have it. So the faster you can stop believing that you know for sure what other people should think or feel or do, the less stressed out you will get about not being able to control them. 

And it’s so important to remember that you want to control them because of how you think you’ll feel. I know you probably have a lot of high-minded sounding reasons that your brain tells you. It’s for their own good, it’s for the good of the family, it’s for public safety, whatever your thought is. 

But whatever we want, it’s because of how we want to think and feel. So we want our partner to handle his work problem the way we think will solve it, so that he will stop being stressed about it so we can stop worrying about him being stressed. Or she or they, however that person identifies. 

Or we want everyone to participate in social distancing exactly the way we do, at the exact level of accommodation we’ve decided to make between safety and risk in our brains because then we think we will feel safer and more in control of our health or the health of our loved ones. 

We want our kid to stop acting out at school or at home. A lot of them are at home now, right? So we won’t have to worry about their future or think we’re a bad parent. Whenever you are trying to control someone or something outside yourself, it’s always because of how you think you would get to feel if the world or the person just cooperated to create the circumstances you want. 

And that’s so important to know. Whatever your cover reason, whatever your brain tells you about why it’s very true, sincere, and factually better way for people to be the way you want, it’s always because of how you think you’d get to think or feel in this moment if the circumstance was the way you want, or the person acted the way you want. 

It doesn’t matter if your brain says no, it’s really about the future. It’s always in this moment, because of how you think you would feel if you could have a different thought. But the good news is that you can have a different thought by choosing a different thought on purpose. 

And the paradox is that the more you try to control people or situations around you, the more out of control you will feel. I’m sure you all have 

noticed this. If you tell yourself the truth, nothing feels more out of control than trying to control something or someone that you can’t control. 

The harder you grip, the more it squirms away, the worse you feel. It feels desperate and scary and terrible. I do not recommend it. I recommend focusing all that energy and brain power on what you can control, which is your own mind. The best news I can give you is that you are wrong about what needs to happen for you to feel better. 

Other people do not have to change what they’re doing. The external circumstance, no matter what it is, does not have to change. And I’m not saying feel better as in feel happy all the time. That’s not the point of life. But to stop feeling this out of control experience that you have when you’re trying to control things you can’t control. 

What has to change is your thoughts. We want to control things and people so we can feel safe. But safety is an emotion created by your thoughts. It’s not created by what other people or the world do or don’t do. You can imagine someone who becomes paranoid about their safety and their life gets smaller and smaller by increasing degrees. 

They don’t ever get to the point where they feel safe, by just taking more and more actions to try to be safer. Instead, what happens is they train their brain to always look for danger, and then they just keep finding smaller and smaller threats to be terrified by. 

I am going into this in detail on an upcoming episode on fear and safety. So you can’t control your actions or other people as a way to feel safe or free or happy or peaceful. But you can achieve those feelings by relinquishing the idea that you can or should be able to control anything outside of yourself. 

You can certainly take actions that you can predict might make certain outcomes more or less likely, as far as you can see, but you still can’t control all of that, and your perspective is limited anyway. So much is unforeseen or turns out differently than we wanted, or ends up being exactly what needed to happen. 

So what if instead of trying to control other people and things around you, so that you could feel whatever you want to feel, you looked for how you could feel that by releasing the attempt to control. And I call it attempt to control on purpose. It’s not about releasing control because you don’t have control and you never did. 

It’s releasing the erroneous belief that you have control. When you accept that you can’t control other people or the world around you, you will feel so much freer. And then you can ask yourself a much more useful and important question, which is how do I want to show up? 

Knowing that I can’t control other people or the world, who do I want to be in the world and in my relationship to those other people? What kind of thoughts do I want to think? What kind of feelings do I want to create? What kind of actions do I want to take? What kind of results do I want to create for myself? 

Those are things you can control. And focusing on who you want to be and how you want to show up in a world full of people and things you cannot control is the most empowering thing you can do. So that’s what I encourage you to think about the next time you find yourself trying to control the world or other people or being mad that you can’t. 

How can you flip that mirror to see yourself more clearly and choose who you want to be on purpose? Today and every day.

And that is what I have for you today, my beautiful friends. 

I’ll talk to you next time. Have a wonderful week!