342 ~ From Constant Anxiety To Daily Ease: Tools That Actually Help

Hello Magical Human & welcome back to Madison Mindset the Podcast 🧚🏼

In this episode, I share my experience with lifelong anxiety, from early memories and teen comparison to health anxiety, and map the tools that actually helped. We move from information overload to simple, consistent practices—yoga, affirmations, and time in nature—while setting firm boundaries with tech and timelines.

If you are ready to let go of anxiety and step into joy & peace, book a FREE 30-minute coaching call with me. There is a booking link below, find a time that works, and let’s have a chat 🪬🪞

Book your FREE coaching session - https://calendly.com/hello-madisonmindset/madison-mindset-coaching-clarity-call-clone

It is safe to be calm

Love,

Madison Mindset x

Chapters

• 0:04 Welcome And Intentions
• 0:42 Free Coaching Invitation
• 2:04 Early-Life Anxiety Patterns
• 4:59 Social Media And Not-Enoughness
• 6:42 Health Anxiety Explained
• 9:14 Turning Point At Eighteen
• 9:48 Discovering Yoga And Study
• 12:17 From Information To Action
• 13:37 Affirmations And Starting The Podcast
• 15:24 Simple Daily Practices That Shift
• 17:03 Personalization In Coaching
• 18:12 Too Many Opinions And Online Noise
• 19:12 Return To Nature As Medicine
• 22:06 Tech Boundaries And The Cottage Urge
• 24:05 Reframing Comparison And Timelines
• 25:25 Ongoing Healing And Support

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:04

Hello, magical human, and welcome back to Madison Mindset the podcast. I am your host, Madison. I am a yoga teacher and a mindset coach. I love all things spirituality, connecting back to Mother Nature, and returning to our natural selves, our natural healing, and all the beautiful things that are available to us in every moment. I am on my own journey of coming back to a state of balance and peace. In this episode, I am going to let you know a little bit about my journey with anxiety and what I've learned from it and what is working and what is really helping so far. Before we dive right into the episode, I want to remind you that if you are struggling with anxiety, with stress, with feeling overwhelmed, and you're not finding a lot of joy or peace in your life, I really want you to go and book a free 30-minute coaching call with me. We're going to have a little bit of a chat about what's going on for you, what's happening in your life, and I'll be guiding you through a short practice and offering any support that I may be able to offer, offering any tools, any practices, any recommendations that I could possibly support you with. If you would like to jump in and try that 30-minute coaching, you are more than welcome. There is a booking link below, find a time that works, and let's have a chat. I would love to connect with you on a more personal level. Obviously, the podcast is so much fun to talk and know that it's you're receiving it when it's the right moment. But I really want to remind you that support is here for you, and this is my life's mission to help guide as many people as possible away from anxiety and towards a state of peace and ease. So if that is you, if you want that 30-minute coaching call, jump below, book your time and your session, and I will see you there. My journey with anxiety started when I was incredibly young. I want to say, probably before I can remember, but I some of my earliest memories are filled with an anxious filter, I suppose. I remember always feeling that way. It was something that was just kind of normal for me. And there are a few things that I believe may have kicked this off, most of them very personal, so I won't be jumping into those. But basically, you know, things that happened to you as a child or around you as a child and potentially even past lives or you know, old karma from the past in some way, you know, for some reason I was dealt the card anxiety to work through. So I've always felt that little bit of anxious, you know, that tight feeling in the chest, the worrying about things, thinking what horrible thing's gonna happen next. I remember even thinking as a child, it must have been five, seven, somewhere around there. I remember thinking, you know, when I was playing or something, I would stop and go, hang on. And I'd literally think, I'm like, I was worried about something. What was I worried about? And I would literally ponder what I was worried about because I would forget, I'd forget what I was worried about, and that would give me anxiety, the fact that I forgot what I was worrying about, and what I was worrying about was obviously so important. So I would literally, it would literally ruin my day. I'd have to stop and figure out what I was so anxious about. And of course that led me to be anxious about what I was anxious about. So it was, you know, it was quite a difficult situation, and it got worse as I got into, you know, older child, teenager, dealing with, you know, bullies in school, popular kids, you know, trying to fit in, trying to, you know, do all the things that you kind of feel pressured to do. Be beautiful enough, be trendy enough, you know, be accepted, all of those things. It's a it's a really tough ride, you know? And it was something that I was so sensitive about from such a young age. It just feels normal. It feels normal to me to be worried, to be anxious. And you know, when I was doing my talk at the Mind Body Spirit event, one of the questions I received from the audience was, What do you think started your anxiety? You know, what how old were you? And that's literally what I said. I said, I have it's literally from my earliest moment I remember feeling that way, and I'm not really sure what started it. It just felt very normal. It felt like it was a part of me, and that's just kind of how it's always been. So it wasn't until I got into my teenage years and social media started becoming a big thing. This was around like 2012 or 2013, you're around that space when you started getting your phone, and social media, Instagram, Facebook, all of that started to become very quote important. You know, like what are you doing with your life? Do you have a boyfriend? What's your relationship status? Do you have a cool, you know, profile picture? All that kind of stuff. So social media definitely kicked up the anxiety, and it was all based around the idea of I'm not enough and trying to become something, feel something, have something, and I was always chasing that, whether it was through looks or a certain friend group or a certain partner, you know, through something in my body, there was always something that I had to do. You know, I got my belly button pierced, I got my ears pierced, started buying all the clothes, you know. I seriously think if I felt like I was enough when I was a teenager, I would have saved a lot of money. But of course, you get your paycheck from your very first job, which is obviously very low pay, and you just spend it on trying to be enough. Yeah, that was it was a challenging journey, and it didn't really end. I got through school got through school and moved into my first job, and I still didn't feel good within myself, but what what happened was I started to become more aware of the outside world, you know, paying more attention to what I saw on TV and social media started to become very much advertisey, if that's a word. It was, you know, people sharing big, you know, scary stories and all these things happening. I was very affected by it. I was super affected by, you know, people going through hard things and, you know, horrible things that happened, even on the news, things that people tell me about, things in my community, I started to become aware of, you know, people getting sick, people, you know, feeling really unwell mentally, people being broken up with, or people losing their child, or whatever it was, and it st really stuck with me. And that kind of started the whole health anxiety thing. When I heard that someone had a problem, I would immediately worry if I had it too. And I struggled with this because in the beginning I was like, this is so selfish, it's not about me. But, you know, I have a f quite a few clients with health anxiety as well, and they're not selfish. You know, there's no, you know, like people in my family would often be like, you know, oh, like it's not about you. But it's not, health anxiety is not a selfish thing. It's not like, oh, you just don't want what they have. It's basically just a it's literally like your brain attaches to a new potential threat that you've just learned about or just found out is common or not very common, but can happen. Your brain is so clever that if you think about it enough, you can actually start to replicate those symptoms in your own body. And then when you see them, of course, then you're like, oh, I have this thing. And I've seen this in so many people, and it's terrifying, you know, how well your brain can replicate those kind of symptoms, and then you keep thinking about it, and it obviously what you think about you attract, what your attention goes to, you're you attract. So you end up with different things, and it's I've read so many books over the time, you know, about attracting certain things into your life and being really careful about what you focus on because you are creating your reality. It's not a healthy thing. And I really do encourage you, if you are suffering with health anxiety, do something about it. Because what you focus on, you attract. And this was not good news for me in the beginning. I was like, great, that's all I've been focusing on. But it's never too late to shift your focus, to shift your attention. So for me, health anxiety really kicked up, and that went on and on, getting, you know, I call it better and better because obviously what you what you practice, what you focus on, you get better at doing, and I was getting very, very good at being anxious. So it got worse and worse, and eventually, I don't know what part of me decided that this wasn't healthy, but I was only 18, and I realized that this couldn't be what life was about. I didn't want to live that way. I didn't want to be worried all the time and thinking about all the bad things that were gonna happen. I didn't want that. And I was so determined to stop it, but I didn't want to do medication or anything like that. That just didn't feel right for me. I wanted to find a way, you know, if I had gotten myself into this with my mind, I wanted to get myself out. So I started studying, and the first thing I found was yoga. You know, it's if you look up ways to calm down or to calm anxiety or stress, yoga is definitely one of the things that pops up, without a doubt. And, you know, yoga has a lot of beautiful teachings for us on stress and the body and how to calm the body down, how to quieten the mind. So I did yoga on and off for a little while, trying to find something that worked, meditating on and off, and it did help, but I wasn't very consistent, so I think that was a big part of why it took a little bit longer than maybe it should have. But I became obsessed with devouring books and information, you know, podcasts, certain writers, you know, researchers that have studied the mind, studied anxiety, studied stress. You start to get really excited about what you're learning, and yeah, there's so much, and there's so many powerful authors and things that I had read that had really helped me with anxiety and helped me understand. So I'll be recommending a few of those books in the description of this episode, so feel free to jump down and have a look. You may have read some of them, maybe not, but if you do struggle with anxiety on any level, I highly recommend that you go and do your research, do, you know, read about stuff, learn. But this quickly led me to my next problem, which was I was an information hoarder, and I would never actually do anything with the information. You learn things, your next step is to do it. You know, the best way to learn is through doing and getting your own experience. So you've got to monitor how much you're leaning on information. While it does make you feel better for a little bit, you've got to understand that coming back to your own responsibility and understanding that you need to do the work is a big point in this. So you have to actually take the reins in your life and decide to show up, decide to give it a try. So I started doing the meditation, I started doing affirmations, which is around the same time I started recording affirmations for myself, and then I ended up putting it on the podcast, which is how this podcast started, because I wanted everyone to have access to the affirmations I was doing, and I found it much easier when they were recorded, and I just wasn't happy with the affirmations that were available online. I wanted something specific. So I started making my own, and that's how this podcast really took off was the affirmation work and the meditations. So if you haven't checked those out yet, just literally put in the search bar of this podcast affirmations, and there are an abundance of episodes with specific affirmations. There are ones for health as well, but you'll pretty much find affirmations for every topic. So that I found was really powerful, and some of the biggest shifts for me were the simplest, you know, like smiling, like finding a reason to laugh every day, finding the beauty in the world, practicing true gratitude, choosing to be enough in every moment, even if it doesn't feel easy, you know, even if things are feeling hard or you feel like you just can't find your feet. You know, practicing self-love was powerful as well. You know, mirror work, choosing to fall back in love with myself because that's how it first started, right? When I was a teenager, it was, you know, not enough. I'm not enough. I'm not enough. And I had affirmed that so much that it was impacting my ability to move on from those thoughts. So I started doing mirror work and I started hugging myself and staring at myself in the mirror and spending time with myself, taking myself on dates. And all of it made such a difference. And that's when yoga started to really kick off. I became a yoga teacher, and I was practicing meditation all the time, doing my mirror work, and making sure I'm setting my day up for love and for joy and for peace. And it really started to make the difference from there, you know, and it was a variety of different practices and visualizations and all kinds of things that really helped. And when I work with people one-on-one, depending on what I hear, depending on what you're struggling with, will be, you know, I'll then decide what do I need to say? What do I need to, you know, give you that will help you. So yeah, it's it's tricky. It's a tricky one to navigate, but in the beginning, it was really hard for me because it's like, where do you go? Where do you start? There's so many different opinions and views, and honestly, that there are too many opinions out there. There really are in this world. You know, that caused a lot of my anxiety. It was literally just the opinions in that too much, especially on social media, it became part of the stress. So, yeah, look, there's a lot in this world that is that is a challenge, that is difficult, and can definitely make things harder, you know. As a as a society, as human beings, we have complicated things so much to the point that the way to heal it is to go back to simple. You know, and there was obviously a time where I don't know if everyone thought everything was too simple or, you know, everyone wants to start gaining things in life. I'm not sure what it was exactly, but we just kind of lost the contentment with how things were. You know, we weren't happy with how things were, simplicity of living alongside nature, alongside each other, showing love, showing compassion. And we just decided we're gonna, you know, make things so much harder. And I think the intention at the time was to make things more simple, but it definitely went the other way. It definitely flipped to, you know, it's too hard. Everything's too difficult, and no one can find who they are, what they want, what they want out of life, what dreams they have. People find it very hard to feel content with what they have because everyone's got so many different ideas and so many different things, and it has made things really difficult. And I definitely felt that, you know, and I don't even know how teenagers would do it today, you know. I'm 27 now. I don't know how teenagers are doing it now. I mean, even kids, you know, they unless they're very lucky and, you know, they've been banned from certain technology or certain, you know, whatever it is, which I think is rare these days, because we all just think it's so normal, it must be so difficult to find who we are. And you can look in this world and you see so many issues with that. Like no one knows who they are, no one knows what they want, you know, no one even knows is even comfortable in their own body. You know, it's it's a very difficult time, and it's a big one for awakening. You know, we're all waking up and becoming aware of reality. If I can give you one thing that made a big difference for me in my life, which, you know, I mentioned many, and there are many more, but I don't want to overwhelm you, I want to give you something that you can use right now, and that is nature. Spending more time out in nature and realizing that you are part of it, and observing, noticing what nature does, and letting yourself be a part of nature, letting yourself be a part of it, that makes the world of difference. Because nature's the only thing in this world that's real. You know, all the buildings, all the money, on the all the online stuff none of it's real in the ways that matter. You know, it is a part of our life, but we could just turn the switch off and turn off all the 5G towers, turn off all the Wi-Fi, turn everything off and choose not to use it. Which means it's not real in the deepest meaning of the word real. It's just something we're using right now. And when you look at it and when it was created, I'm sure, you know, everyone's like, oh, this is gonna make things easier, this is gonna make us more intelligent, this is gonna give us more opportunities. And of course it does. I mean, I'm doing this podcast to you with the internet, obviously. But I'm recording it without internet. You know, I started doing some video episodes, and I found that, you know, which I well I still do some because I know people love it, but I don't like staring at a screen all the time. And here I am, as I said, I'm out in the forest recording a podcast episode. That feels so much more real to me and so much more valuable than anything done perfectly in front of a screen. This helped me with anxiety immensely. When I found out that every tree is different, every animal is valuable, you know, even the things you may be scared of, or things that seem hard you are capable of handling. When you notice that aging is normal, loss is normal, you know, different weather is normal. When you really start to tune back into nature, there is nothing you're missing. You know, this morning I was feeling pretty overwhelmed. I got myself lost in a scroll pattern. You know, when you start scrolling, don't recommend that ever, ever, ever, ever. You know, I know a girl who comes to yoga, she's really cool. I don't know if she listens to this, but if she is, if you are listening, I think you're awesome. She got rid of her iPhone and got a flip phone. It has no internet on it. And I just said to her, I'm itching to pull that thread because I just know how much better my life will be when I don't have the ability to open my phone and scroll. It would make such a difference. And I really want to do that. You know, I've pondered, you know, do I have a work phone? You know, how can I make that work with the job that I'm in? It's difficult. You know, the urge, I always see memes like this too. It's probably because I'm feeling it, but I always see memes as well as like the urge to run away, live in a small cottage in the middle of the woods where no one knows you are except just the people you love, the only people you really care about, and you're just gardening and painting and chilling out. The urge to do that is insane. I can't tell you how much I would love to do that. But then again, you look at this world and you think it's just impossible. Because you've got to have things on your phone, you've got to, you know, scan QR codes and all this nonsense and update your friends on Facebook and ultimately who cares? You know, the people who really love you and who want to be in your life, they are in your life, and there'll be more people to come, but why do we have to update 200 strangers pretty much on Facebook? It just doesn't make any sense. So when you start to look at nature and you get familiar with what's normal, what's real, suddenly the things that don't matter fall away. They have no strength at all. Who cares what your body looks like? You know, if you're feeling emotions, totally normal. You know, if there's a storm, come back to peace. You know, let yourself let go of things, let yourself come back into love to step into peace and joy and genuine connection with people. You know, I don't think the internet is doing us any favours. I don't think the way we're living is doing us any favours. And you can see that through all the new problems we've developed. We've solved, we've solved some problems that aren't really problems, it's just simple simply we just want more. We're just impatient, we want more from certain things. We've solved problems in a sense, yes, but we've created far more. And it's at this point it's like choose your hard. Choose your hard. And I really think if we went back to simplicity and we didn't have to look at so many, probably thousands, if not more, faces on Instagram and on TikTok and all these things, if we can just be in terms of anxiety, this makes a world of difference. It really does. Anxiety is like a fire. And if you keep stoking it with thoughts that align with it, you know, if you keep throwing it, you know, oh, this Instagram influencer is making a billion dollars a month, or this, you know, this person is in Europe having a holiday, or this person is, you know, just on this, and look what I've done. I haven't done anything like that, and this person's getting married, and this person's having a baby. And when you start to get into that loop, it doesn't help you with your life. It fuels anxiety, it makes it worse. Or it sparks it, it triggers it. You know, what you're creating in your life is entirely personal. And remembering you're co-creating with life, just because you don't have a baby right now doesn't mean that you're not going to have one. It's a different timeline. And it's good to be inspired by other people and let other people inspire you as to what you want to do in your life. But we go way beyond that. We don't get inspired, we get we fall into FOMO. We want more. So this is an important topic, and one I want you to focus on, especially if you are someone who deals with anxiety. I have not healed my anxiety by any level. I would never say that I've healed it. I still have my moments. I've had a pretty strong go at it, you know, through my life. I've had a lot of anxiety, but I am learning and I'm healing so much. And considering where I was, it's a different life. It really is. And I literally just want to hold everyone's hand who has felt the way I've felt and help you take a few steps forward because it changes everything. So if you feel like you need a hand to hold, if the world online researching and all the books and everything available is too much and that's overwhelming you, there's too many opinions, too many ways, too many this, too many that, come and chat. Book a free 30-minute coaching session, and we can go from there because it really helps to have someone in your corner and to guide you, especially in a world where there's so much noise and so much happening. So book your session with me. I hope this episode inspired you or at least gave you some reassurance that things are okay and that you are enough and that anxiety is it is a normal feeling. It is on a rise. There is way too much of it, and we just have to find a way to manage that anxiety and making sure that we don't get so overwhelmed with anxiety that it destroys us, you know, that it becomes something that stops us from doing the things we love, from getting off our phones, from turning the TV off and going out and experiencing real life. Thank you so much for being here, Magical Human. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please leave a rating or a review on the platform that you listen to this podcast through. It really helps me reach new people. Please share it on your Instagram stories and tag me at Madison underscore mindset so I can send you so much love and lots of love hearts for sharing and for listening. I wish you a wonderful rest of your day. Love