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Welcome to episode 172 of The Non-anxious Leader Podcast. I 'm Jack Shitama and I am still abroad with my wife and family celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary. So this is a rebroadcast again from about two years ago, but I still think it applies. This was first broadcast at the very beginning of the pandemic, but we are still facing as much disruption and uncertainty as ever. And if you are in my denomination, the United Methodist Church may be even more uncertainty.

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So without further Ado.Here is a rebroadcast of episode 67, episode 172, Six Ways to Manage Anxiety.

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College President Sandy Sugar once said, People aren't afraid of change. They are afraid of loss. I believe this is profound because all change is loss. When we experience change, it is the loss of the old as we contend with something new. I had a monthly coaching meeting with somebody that I meet with in the first week of every month. This was the first week of April, and when I looked at my calendar, I thought to myself, did we miss a month? It seems like it had been forever since we had met. Now in April, we started meeting via Zoom. When I looked back at my calendar, we had indeed met in person the first week of March. Things had changed so entirely in just one month time that it seemed like another world. It seemed like another time, and I had felt like we had not seen each other in forever. That's the kind of change we are all experiencing in this coveted 19 pandemic. The loss of our old way of living in just a matter of a couple of months is massive change. It's massive loss. And of course we know with loss comes grief.

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David Kessler co wrote with Elizabeth Kubler Ross, the book on grief and grieving, Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss. His new book adds another stage to the process. It's entitled Finding Meaning the 6th Stage of Grief. I want to take you through the five stages of grief that Kessler applies to this crisis. I'll link to an article in the show notes an interview with him from the Harvard Business Review, and the article is entitled that Discomfort You Are Feeling is Grief. Now, as you may know, the five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance. And this is how Kessler applies those five stages to this covered 19 pandemic. The first is denial. So early on we were saying this won't affect us. This is in other countries. It's not going to be a problem for us. Then there is anger you can't make me stay home. Somebody should have done something sooner. How come this is affecting our lives so drastically? The third is bargaining. If I shelter in place for two weeks, it will all be fine, right? I just need to do this for a little bit of time and everything will go back to normal.

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The fourth is sadness. People are dying. People are losing jobs. Our country is in a huge crisis. We are dying for leadership. What are we going to do? And finally, acceptance. Well, I can do something. I can wash my hands. I can shelter in place. I can donate to a cause. I can work on keeping our Ministry going. I can do the things I can to contribute to mitigating the spread of this virus and to trying to get our country, our economy, back on track in the safest way possible. Kessler says that it is in acceptance that we find power, because in the acceptance we are able to then focus on what we can't do and not on what we are unable to do. One of the things he mentions about this is the great uncertainty of this crisis causes what is called anticipatory grief. He defines this as thinking about the future and imagining the worst. So because of the uncertainty, because we don't know when this is going to end, how we're going to get through it, what it's going to look like on the other side. We just imagine the worst case scenarios.

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Our mind runs off and makes us anxious, and he does. He calls this anticipatory grief anxiety. I think of Seth Godin, who famously said anxiety is experiencing failure in advance. And that's what happens even in the best of circumstances. We can think about an uncertain future, and we can feel anxious about it because we imagine the worst. But in times of uncertainty like this, it's much more likely that we are going to have this anticipatory grief. We are going to experience anxiety, and it is actually a physical thing. When we experience this kind of anxiety, it physically affects us. We have the visceral feelings of failure in advance of failure, even though it has not yet happened. So the question is how then if we are feeling anxious, if we are having this anticipatory grief, how do we manage that anxiety? I'm going to focus on six things that you can do to manage your anxiety. And they kind of go from the most immediate, the most granular outs to the broader and more long term things that you can do to make it less likely that you will get anxious as you think about the uncertainty of this crisis or of life in general.

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So the first thing you can do is calm down, and that is literally calm down. Just try to get your body to not feel those visceral feelings of failure in advance. There are three things you can do to calm down the first is to breathe deeply, breathe into your diaphragm, deep belly breath, hold your breath and then exhale long and drawn out. And if you do that for even a couple of minutes, it's been shown to actually calm your body down. See, what happens is when you get anxious, it activates your fight or flight system, which is controlled by your sympathetic nervous system. These are your automatic responses. What breathing does is breathing activates your parasympathetic system, your rest and digest system. And this counteracts the adrenaline and this counteracts the feelings of anxiety that you have. So it physically does enable you to calm down. The second thing you can do to calm down is to move. There is a connection between the areas of the brain that control motor functions and the adrenal glands that control your stress response. So getting up, moving around, walking, doing arm circles, just creating some movement of your body will actually help to physically calm you down.

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And then finally you can get outside in as little as five minutes with nature, your brain will actually start to relax. And in 15 minutes or more, you will see a reduction of cortisol levels. And you will see the beginning of the restoration of cognitive function. The good news is, even if you can't get outside, just looking outside can have similar effects. So go to a window and look outside. And if you can't do that, look at a picture of nature, especially greenery that's been proven to reduce stress. So that leads to the second thing. Once you've calmed down, then what you want to do is act small. This is a variation on a concept from The One Thing, The Surprisingly Simple Truth behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papazan. Their concept is think big, act small. And the idea is that you can have big dreams, big goals. But if you focus too much on them, you can get overwhelmed. So even with big goals, breaking things down to the next step, the next action that will move things forward will help you to do what you need to do and to gain momentum.

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So if writing a novel is your goal, then focus on writing 250 words, then do it again, then do it again. That's think big, act small. In this case, what I'm suggesting is don't even worry about thinking big, just act small. Just bring it down to what is the next thing that I can do to deal with this situation. So for example, as I think about how we are going to reopen our camp and retreat Ministry that I serve, it can get overwhelming to think about when that's going to happen and how it's going to happen and what we're going to have to do. So I'm thinking small. I'm just saying, okay, what are the things that we might have to do? Just start keeping a list of things that we might have to do to make this work. For example, we may not be able to allow double occupancy in our hotel rooms and our retreat center. We might have to change the way we serve food. We will have to consider starting later in the summer and having fewer weeks. We'll have to consider having less staff. These are all different scenarios, and if I got bogged down in any one of these things, it would be overwhelming.

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But what I can do is I can think small. I can just record each one of these thoughts and set it aside as something to be explored, something that will help me to get the big picture together, something that will help us to figure out what we need to do when we can do it. Because right now everything is uncertain. And until things reveal themselves, we don't know exactly what we can do. But we can think small, we can prepare, and we can try to figure out little details one at a time as we get closer to the date that we can reopen. This leads to the third thing that we can do to manage anxiety, and it's kind of similar to the second, and that is to focus on effort, not results. Don't worry about outcomes, because right now it's hard to even tell what the outcomes are going to be, but instead just focus on trying to get things accomplished that can help us to better prepare. I like to say that this is having a Zen like detachment from the outcome, that when we focus on efforts, not results, we do what we can and we don't worry about it.

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I'm a runner, and one of my favorite workouts is my weekly tempo run. It starts with a warm up and then a period of fairly intense running followed by a cool down. In my most recent tempo run, something wasn't quite right. My legs were aching. I could tell my pace wasn't as fast because I was timing myself, but I just focused on getting 1ft in front of the other. Just keep on going, keep on going, keep putting the effort in. And in the end, it wasn't really a very successful outcome. My pace was way off what it normally was, but that was okay. I just wanted to focus on the effort and not the results. And that leads to the fourth thing that we can do to manage anxiety, and that is show self compassion. Give yourself a break. There's always too much to do, and if things go undone, don't be hard on yourself. At least you're doing something. You focused on the effort and not the results. In my case, with the tempo run, my pace wasn't nearly what I'm used to doing, but that was okay. I finished. I gave myself a break and said, at least I did it.

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So when we're thinking about anxiety in this crisis, you may have felt like you're not as productive as you normally are. Maybe you have kids at home that you're having to help get their school work done. Maybe you have several people in your house, sheltering in place, and all trying to work at the same time. It is not anything like we've ever experienced. So give yourself a break. Show yourself some compassion. Just keep on putting in the effort. Keep on trying to be effective, and don't beat yourself up about it. The fifth thing you can do to manage anxiety is to reach out to get outside yourself. So maybe you just need a break. You're just plowing away trying to get stuff done in the midst of all kinds of change and new situations. And stopping and reaching out to somebody else can give you some perspective. We know that thinking about others helps us to get outside of ourselves. We know that when we show concern for others, we are less concerned about ourselves. So when you're feeling anxious, you can make a phone call, you can write a note, you can make a donation, you can order a meal for somebody, you can send an email.

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But get outside yourself and think about another person and if possible, even connect with them. There's nothing like hearing the voice of somebody you care about. There's nothing like thinking about somebody as you're writing a note to them. These are ways that you can bring your anxiety level down and get some perspective. Perspective is really helpful because sometimes it will feel like the crisis is your entire world and it is our entire world in many ways, but in many ways it's not. We still have people that we love, we still have work that we can do. We still have ways that we can connect with God. And so in all of these things, it simply helps us to have some perspective on what is going on and not get engulfed by our anxiety. And finally, something that is helpful, whether we're feeling anxiety or not, is to express gratitude. This is proven to improve well being. And a simple exercise is to just write down three things each day for which you are grateful. If you do that every day in the long term, you will actually feel better, you'll feel less anxious, and you will get outside of yourself.

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You will have perspective that helps you to manage the anxiety that comes from dealing with this unprecedented situation. I want to say, finally, that these things are ways that you can manage anxiety, but they are meant to follow some basic things that you can do to help you cope with life in general, whether there's a crisis or not. So first of all, taking care of yourself spiritually, having a prayer life, meditating journaling, connecting with God, reading scripture. Those are all ways that you have a foundation which will make you less anxious in general and less reactive in general. And then the second thing, of course, is to take care of yourself physically, to eat well, to exercise, to get enough sleep. Those things will also help you cope with whatever you have to face in life. So take care of yourself, have ways to manage that anxiety. Do what you can, but also give yourself a break. This is a difficult time and this is a time that we should be connected with other people, that we want to make sure that we don't go through this alone in whatever way we can. We will get through this and the best way we can do that is to do it together.

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That's it for episode 172. Like I said, two years into this pandemic, we are still struggling. There is still uncertainty, there is still a lot of anxiety. Thanks again for being a non-anxious leader. You can connect with me at thenonanxiousleader.com and you can get the transcript at thenonanxiousleader.com/172. I'll be back next week with an all new episode. Until then, thanks and goodbye.