Unpacking Anxiety with Ruth McNulty
You know at Her Bags Were Packed that we love to talk about travel and helping women in their quest for solo travel. But we also have a second purpose: helping women unpack emotional baggage. To fulfill this dual purpose, we provide resources on travel and solo travel, as well as mental health, self care, and personal development. We have a series of interviews, Unpacking Solo Travel, in which we talk to women about their solo travel experiences. Now we are introducing a new “Unpacking” series: Unpacking Mental Health.
Each month I will speak with mental health professionals (or other individuals with a special interest in the field) on a different topic related to mental health, self care or personal development. I will start with a live video chat/Q&A and follow up here with a blog post. (If you want to be alerted to live streaming events let me know here).
In this first post of the series, I sit down with Ruth McNulty to unpack anxiety.
Ruth is one of my great travel buddies and has been a part of Her Bags Were Packed since the beginning. We actually just celebrated five years of friendship! She is originally from Scotland but is now based in New Zealand. She works in the mental health field when she’s not traveling. You can read all about her solo travel adventures in our Unpacking Solo Travel interview!
Disclaimer - The following interview does not contain professional medical advice and does not take the place of therapy or speaking to a doctor. It is, however, an opportunity to start a conversation around topics that maybe we don't normally have, in order to help us become more comfortable with talking about them.
Ruth, tell us a little bit about your background and what you do.
I have been a psychiatric nurse for 15 years, in several different areas, currently in youth mental health. I spent about 10 years working in crisis mental health, responding to emergencies and crisis situations. I have also spent many years working in addiction services, where I saw a lot of anxiety and compulsion issues.
I also used to be terrified and anxious about everything, and now I’m really not. Hopefully some of that personal experience can be useful here - how I kind of changed from being terrified to being a bit of an adrenaline junkie.
I am more than happy to give friendly advice, and have a chat, but for our readers I will say that I am not speaking as a nurse right now. I am not your nurse, and I do not know all of your circumstances. If you are taking medications, no matter what we say, don't just go and stop them. I'm happy to try and point you in the right direction and talk about my experiences as a nurse, but all mental health should be taken seriously. It’s important to have a trained professional, but sometimes you just need a friendly chat - that’s why we’re here.
That being said, let’s jump straight into it. Can you start by talking a little about what anxiety is and, if there is one, explaining the purpose of it?
Anxiety is completely normal. It is natural, and it's actually something that we need. Anxiety is the body's way of telling you that something's not right. It's an early warning sign, that shot of adrenaline that tells you fight, flight, freeze -- whatever it is you need to do. This is completely and utterly normal, and it is something that we all need to survive. Anxiety is something that everybody experiences.
We never want to get rid of anxiety completely. Sometimes society tells you that you need to be one hundred percent happy, one hundred percent of the time; and if you're not, then you're failing. But that is absolute rubbish. Even when everything is fine and great, you will find something to worry about because you're human.
So anxiety is normal. And for the vast majority of us, it's within the normal limits and it's fine. There are times when life will be more anxiety-provoking. Sometimes in life you'll be more anxious, but it's how you manage the anxiety and how you manage yourself and conduct yourself in that setting that’s important.
I think sometimes it’s hard to tell when we need to talk to someone about our anxiety. When do you think people should seek professional help?
Some of us can get caught in these cycles of becoming anxious and worrying and stressing about everything. That’s when we need to take a moment to think about the choices we have to make, and how we can take back control of the situation. Don't worry about worrying. Focus on what you need to do to get out of that cycle.
But for some people, it will be absolutely crippling. And that is when a medical intervention, such as therapy or medication, is needed to allow you to identify the root causes of what's going on.
It's important to acknowledge that your anxiety is helpful, and it's there to serve you. It has a purpose. But when it gets out of control and it becomes debilitating, you should seek additional help.
That’s so helpful to keep in mind — anxiety is normal and it’s serving a purpose. What would be a good way to help yourself get out of the anxiety spiral?
I’ll use an example from my life this week. I’m currently sitting on a beanbag in my living room that is half packed because I was supposed to move into a new house this weekend. But, a few days ago, the sale fell through. I no longer have a house to buy or to move into, and it took me five hours to get a hold of my landlord. So for five hours, I didn't know whether he had rented this house that I’m currently in or not. I didn’t know if I had a place to stay. I’ve already sold my furniture. It’s stressful.
There are things in life that just happen that you have no control over that are quite anxiety-provoking. Thankfully, I was able to reach my landlord eventually, and I could take a breath and tell myself that my place has not already been rented out. I do have a place to stay. I won’t be out on the streets this weekend.
But in those moments I had to make a conscious decision of how I would choose to respond to the situation. I had to figure out what I could take control of then and there. The biggest hurdle was finding somewhere to stay if I needed to, so I called my friend who offered me a place to sleep. That’s the first thing I could check off the list.
I can't do anything about the fact that I’ve lost the house. I’ve just got to let that go. It serves me no purpose to hold on to it. I am allowed to grieve, but I can’t keep holding on to it because if I do that, I’m making a conscious choice to not move forward. Doing that is going to make things worse and will make me more upset and more stressed. And at the time, I was at work and needed to remain professional and be able to work through it in order to serve my patients properly.
So a lot of it is breaking these situations down into two categories: what you can control and what you have no control over, and then how you can differentiate between them to make the right decisions. And it takes a long time to learn that, but it is completely possible to do, and that's part of what something like coaching or therapy can teach you to do. It is a journey and a process that you must learn like everything else. Certain skills can be learned. They're not necessarily easy in that moment, and they can feel a bit overwhelming themselves at the time. But once you practice, you start putting them into place in different situations in your life. It becomes second nature, and becomes what you do and who you are.
For me personally, I really want control. I like being in control. I'm totally fine to not control the things that I can't control. But if there is even a chance that I can, then I control it. I'm going to keep trying. And I will not stop until I finally can come to terms with the fact that I can't control it. I slowly recognize what I can't do, and I recognize the things that don't have to be done and I let them go. But it's always been on my terms.
I think everybody can relate to that. And I think another key thing is that you know that about yourself and you have spent that time working on yourself -- that you know that this is a thing for you and that control is important. So it's something that you can then be mindful about and catch yourself when you start to get into that headspace.
Until you can work that out and recognize that about yourself, you will start to fall into that headspace when you become stressed out. And sometimes you don’t see it unless somebody holds that mirror up to you. And then once you can see that, then you can start unpacking it and putting things in place and start to build those skills around what it is for you that stresses you. Because what stresses you is different than to me and is different to the next person. We don't fit neatly into boxes when it comes to our mental health.
I think we often get anxious and stressed out because we see someone else doing something that we’re not doing. We think to ourselves, “I need to be doing that. I need to be meditating like that person. I need to be keeping a journal or doing yoga like this person.” No, you just need to do what you do, and you need to work out who you are, what you need and what works for you.
Are you able to talk a little bit about what causes anxiety for people and what our response to that is?
Like I said, anxiety is an early warning sign, a chemical in your body that sets off that fight or flight kind of response. It’s a little flashing indicator light that says something's not right here. I need to do something about this situation.
For some people, that switch can be left on almost permanently. And so their body is being constantly flooded with these adrenaline hormones that make them feel that anxiety and certain feelings. The physical response is different for everybody, and sometimes certain chemicals are medically necessary to be able to turn that switch off or to dampen it down a little bit.
And sometimes it’s a combination of needed interventions. Sometimes we need to balance the chemicals in our brain with medicine so that we can dampen things down enough to breathe and think. It can reduce the fight or flight response, so we’re no longer frozen between the two, and we can begin to do the work of learning the skills to be able to slow down and process on our own.
Anxiety is something that is very very treatable. Not just medically treatable, but through skills that help you to move forward. Once you've got those skills, you've got them for life and you can apply them to all sorts of different situations.
That's really helpful. I think it would be good to talk about some of these coping strategies and skill sets that are good techniques to use.
I recently listened to a podcast that mentioned the importance of breathing deeply and calmly to trick your body into thinking that the danger is over. I've been trying to do that on a regular basis to slow down and remind myself that I am not in a fight or flight situation; that there is no real danger. The last thing we want to do is stay in fight or flight because that can potentially cause physical damage to your body.
What are some other strategies that you would suggest?
Different strategies work for different people. To go back to my example of this week, the first thing I did after finishing work that day was drive straight to the beach. I left my shoes in the car, and I just went for a long walk on the beach and stood in the freezing water and just took some breaths and looked around, acknowledging the space around me, because I know that the beach is my happy place. I know that for me personally, it helps to get out into nature.
I knew that at that point there was very little that I could do about any of the stuff that was going on. But if I got to the beach and took a walk in the sand, I would feel better. I know me, and I know that gets me to the point where I can just stop and breathe, so I can begin the mindfulness strategies and then process everything that’s going on. I know that if I start trying to process the stuff while I'm stressed, I’m gonna make rubbish decisions.
A lot of it is so individual, but it’s about finding what you can do to slow your heart rate and get some oxygen.
Some people love having bare feet in the grass, even if it's raining and it's cold and it's wet. Just that grounding feeling of nature, of feeling the mud between your toes, can calm you down. I love having a long hot bath and soaking for an hour. For some, it’s having a cup of tea, and just the process of watching the water in the kettle boil can be soothing. Or just taking a moment to smell your coffee in the morning, taking the time to really taste your breakfast every day.
You can find things in the mundane parts of life to help you slow down. Standing in the shower and feeling the hot water on your skin, noticing the smell of your soap and how your skin feels afterwards, feeling the suds from the shampoo as you massage it into your head.
It's slowing all of these little day to day things down. Noticing and being mindful about those is a great way to practice those skills so that when you're in stressful situations, you are able to bring your heart rate back down and return to a more relaxed state that you can walk through fixing the problem and coming up with solutions.
All of these are skills that take time to learn, but they're worth practicing.
That’s really good. Sometimes I worry about confusing anxiety with intuition. They are similar feelings of “something is not right.” So for me, I have to think, is this something that I can take action on, and if so then maybe that’s intuition, or is this a spiraling feeling, which if so, is maybe anxiety? I'm curious if you have thoughts on anxiety and fear versus intuition and instinct.
Realizing that it’s something you can do something about is often a key to resolving the issue. But I think that is again, one of those skills to learn. You are not born with it, and it's okay if you don't know it yet. It’s easy to beat ourselves up over not knowing those skills, but unless someone teaches them to you, how are you supposed to know them?
Sometimes we learn through situations. What I find really useful is that once an issue is resolved, we can pull it apart afterwards and examine how we handled it, what went well, what worked, what we were thinking about, what we were feeling, etc. Finding what our positive responses were and what our negative responses were, so that we can know how to respond next time.
And that will help you to learn the difference in your own life between gut feelings and anxiety, so that you can begin to trust your instincts and manage your anxiety. Look back once you’ve solved problems and take note of what you felt, how you responded, and why you responded that way.
The more you do that, the more insight you will have about it because that’s not something that anyone else can discover for you. How you respond to something is based on a whole heap of stuff from your past, your body chemistry, your outlook on the world. People can help you unpack all of that, but it’s something that you need to discover. Then you can work out how you would respond to things differently. Again, it takes practice, but eventually it starts to become automatic.
It's also really key to find somebody you feel comfortable with to explore all of this. Make sure that it’s somebody positive who can help you focus. If you're not exploring this with the right person, it can become that spiral of you both pulling each other down into a negative headspace. Find someone who will be able to walk with you and talk you through those moments. It doesn’t need to be a doctor or a coach, just someone who you look at and think, “I wish I could remain calm like that person,” someone you can learn from who doesn’t mind sharing their process with you.
I really like that idea of finding someone in your life that you can observe and learn from. And it's important to remember that anxiety is normal, and it does serve a purpose. Can you share with us why anxiety can also work in our favor?
Exactly -- anxiety is not a bad thing. Out of control anxiety is a bad thing. But normal anxiety is that warning sign that tells you to stop and examine the situation. It’s a good thing, because it’s meant to keep you out of danger - a survival instinct.
If it starts to take over, intervention may be necessary. Therapy, medication, coaching, all of these can help you learn the skills to take back control of your anxiety.
As I said before, it’s something we have to learn. We don’t just know it. Most of our parents didn’t teach it to us growing up. We don’t learn it in school. It’s not taught through the media, so don’t feel bad if it’s not something you instinctively know how to do because it’s not an instinct, it’s a learned skill. If you want to know how to cook a three course meal, you’re going to look at a recipe book. If you want to drive a car, you first need a driving instructor. If you want to learn French, you download an app or you take a class.
It’s the same thing with learning the skills needed to manage your anxiety. One of the best things that you can do is to ask for help and let somebody else coach you and teach you and show you those skills.
Learning the skills takes time, but it’s totally doable. I turned my life around: starting as someone who was terrified of heights, a bit socially awkward, and scared to meet people to someone who is now an adrenaline junkie who loves to travel on her own. I’ve turned my fear into excitement.
It’s 100% doable if you take it day by day and practice. Be open about it, and don’t be ashamed. It’s okay to not be okay at times, but it’s not okay to do nothing about it. If you don’t do anything about it, the situation will never change. Do the hard work and find a support network that will hold you accountable to the changes you want to make.
That was so well said, thank you!
As Ruth said, it's important to find someone to talk to about these things. If you are someone who's looking for help to unpack all of this, if you need someone to talk to, we do have coaching services on the website. On top of all of her other qualifications, Ruth is also a certified life coach. This is not professional medical advice or counseling services, but she is a great resource for learning the skills necessary to conquer your anxiety. If you are interested in working with her, please send us a message to get connected.
If you have questions on future topics you want us to discuss, please feel free to send your suggestions.
Do you have more questions on anxiety management for Ruth? Let us know in the comments below!