How To Turn Off Anxiety & the Stress Response with Ashley James

How To Turn Off Anxiety & the Stress Response with Ashley James

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Hey everybody, welcome back to the EnergyMD Podcast, where we help you resolve your Long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome naturally so that you can get back to living your best life. I'm really excited today because we're going to be talking with Ashley James about anxiety. And before you click away, you may think that you don't have anxiety, but pay attention to the way that she defines it, because it's very possible that you do.

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Most people who have medical diagnoses and are going through medical issues have some degree of anxiety. She has a really great technique that she uses to resolve it quickly. We're going to get into some practical stuff around that. So let's learn a little bit about Ashley. Ashley James is a holistic health coach, podcaster, rapid anxiety cessation expert, and passionate whole food plant-based home chef who has been helping clients transform their lives since 2005.

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She is a master practitioner and trainer of neuro-linguistic programming. She combines powerful mind-body tools with deeply researched holistic protocols to create lasting change. After reversing her own type 2 diabetes, PCOS, infertility, chronic infections, and debilitating adrenal fatigue, Ashley founded the Learn True Health with Ashley James podcast in 2016 to share what truly works. Her mission is to show you that you do not have to suffer,

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and that your body can heal when you remove what harms it and give it what it needs. Ashley, thanks so much for joining me today. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. You mentioned before we jumped on that you had your own story of chronic fatigue. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. I was really sick as a kid, just sickly,

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until my mom took me to a naturopathic physician when I was six years old. He looked at my eyes, my ears, and my throat, and took my blood and said, you're allergic to milk, yeast, wheat, and sugar. Stay away from them. I remember coming home and my mom threw everything out of the cupboards, and we ate more of what you would now call a paleo or O blood type diet, where it was whole foods. There was meat, eggs, and limited grains.

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Lots of vegetables, both raw and cooked. Overnight, my health completely did a 180 in the positive direction. All my sore throats went away, all that fatigue went away. I was an energetic kid for the first time, just feeling good. Then when I was 13, I rebelled against all of it, as we often do.

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I snuck a bunch of Halloween candy and just started eating cafeteria food at school. All the junky kind that I knew wasn't good for me, but all my friends got to have it, and it gave lots of good dopamine hits to eat all that fried food and sugar and everything I wasn't allowed to have. And I proceeded to give myself infection after infection. That was the first time in my life I was on antibiotics, when I was 13. For about six months, I was just sick

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from all the food I was consuming. Then I gave myself type 2 diabetes. Later on in my 20s, I developed chronic infections that I was on constant antibiotics for. I was still rebelling with my diet. It just took me a really long time to realize my mom was right, which is a hard pill to swallow. But now that I'm 46 and a mom, I realize how much my mom was right.

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I spent most of my 20s really sick and developed chronic adrenal fatigue that was confirmed with blood work and a 24-hour saliva test where my cortisol was shown to be almost non-existent. My doctor was a functional doctor. She said, how are you even standing? And that was really affirming for me, because everyone was kind of like, you're just lazy. Just go to the gym. And I'd say, if I go to the gym, I can't move for a week.

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I couldn't process human language in the morning. I was completely drained. I finally found this, and it was really a godsend. This functional doctor back in 2008 had also overcome chronic adrenal fatigue because she was in the Olympics twice. She gave me some good guidance. Then my husband and I were watching, and this is going to date me, but back when Netflix first started streaming.

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Instead of having Netflix send you DVDs, you could watch it online. They had some really interesting food documentaries like Food Inc. and Forks Over Knives. In one of these documentaries, the original CEO of Whole Foods gave a speech and said, shop the perimeter of the grocery store and eat organic. We thought, there's a new Whole Foods that opened up down the street. We could try that.

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So we shopped the perimeter of the grocery store and gave up all processed food. I was still doing dairy at the time, although I knew from my childhood that my body didn't agree with dairy. I gave up all the sugar and the flour and the processed food, and we ate organic. Within one week, all my chronic infections went away. I still felt like crap. I still had chronic adrenal fatigue and type 2 diabetes. And I also

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had PCOS and I was infertile. I didn't have a cycle. I was told I'd never have kids by an endocrinologist after a battery of tests. Here I am in my late 20s making this one food choice and having one of my health problems go away. I thought, if I can make a food change and one problem drops off within a week, what else can I change? So I began just

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deeply seeking. I think at one point I had kind of given up on seeking, right? Because every doctor just had drugs and not answers. So I began seeking more and more. That's how I found my mentor, who's a naturopathic physician who showed me what I could do with minerals, supplemental minerals, and herbs, and Chinese medicine and nutrition. I was able to reverse all of those conditions.

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Having chronic adrenal fatigue finally leave my body was amazing. It was like the light bulb was finally coming back on. Of course, it happened over a period of time, but it was fast enough to notice a difference. That's when I changed careers. I thought, I have to get this information out there to people. That's why I started my podcast, so I could interview experts in the field who share information

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you're not going to get from your regular medical doctor or from mainstream medicine that is funded by big pharma. I've been doing my podcast for 10 years now, and I've been doing holistic health coaching for over 13 years. The anxiety piece is something I'm very passionate about, because I've been doing that for 20 years now, helping people

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rewire the brain so they no longer have anxiety. And I'm going to teach a technique on the show today that turns off anxiety in the moment. That's the first of seven main tools that I teach, and it's the most powerful experience, because some people don't even realize that anxiety is in the background for them. It is there. It is the air they breathe. It is so ubiquitous with their life that they can't separate themselves from the anxiety.

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And when I teach you this technique and you turn it off, all of a sudden it's silent and calm and peaceful. And you realize that anxiety was there the whole time. So for some people it's like that. For others, they know they have anxiety and they know it's a problem and they are trying all the things they say to do, like meditating, praying, keeping gratitude journals, and cutting out coffee, right?

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And these are all good ideas. It's not that they're bad. It's just that they don't get to the root cause of turning it off and rewiring the brain to no longer create it as a problem in the first place, which is what I do. Brilliant. So let's start off with a definition. How does somebody know that they have anxiety? Anxiety is not an emotion like any other emotion. All other emotions you can feel in the past as well as in a future made-up memory.

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When I say a future memory, we can all agree that the future hasn't happened yet. But we can imagine what's happening next Sunday, or imagine what's happening next Christmas. We can make up memories, right? And then you can feel emotions about a fictitious made-up event in the future. So I could think of something really happy that's going to happen. Even if I know it's fake, like winning the lottery,

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I could live it in my mind and actually start to feel in my body the feelings of happiness. We can just agree that there are emotions we can feel about the future, even though it obviously hasn't happened yet. And there are emotions we can feel about the past. I could think of an unresolved negative memory where there's sadness. I could think about it and start to feel sadness in my body.

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That's a memory of the past, right? We can activate emotions and feel them in the body about past events. We can also do that with positive emotions. You can think of something really amazing that happened in the past, like a really happy memory. When you start to go down inside your body and look through your own eyes, seeing what you saw and hearing what you heard in that really happy memory,

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you can start to feel it light up in your neurology. You can start to feel that warmth in your chest. You start to smile. Maybe your cheeks get a little rosy as you relive that positive memory. So emotions can be felt about the past and the future. But anxiety cannot be of the past. When an event is complete, we can't recreate that anxiety because it's complete. I'll give you an example. I can remember being anxious

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during my driver's test. You remember your driver's test? Oh, yeah. Did you have anxiety that day? Yeah. I mean, I'm sure I had some. OK, some people are so cocky and confident, but I was a teenager. So I was not confident that I would 100% pass. Some people are confident that they're going to pass. And what makes it worse is I'm Canadian. That's not what makes it worse.

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What makes it worse is that as a Canadian, I moved here in my 20s and then I had to redo the written and driver's test, which I think is ridiculous. I had to redo it all in my late 20s. I had been driving for a very long time, and I was so cocky about the written test that I got a few answers wrong because there are differences between Canada and the States. So when I went to do the driving test, which also requires different things, like in Washington State you have to

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back up around a corner. I felt more anxiety about my second driving test as a late-20-something than I did as a 15-year-old, because you can forgive a 15-year-old for not passing their driving test. But if you've been driving for over 10 years and then you fail it,

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that would be super embarrassing. So I remember having more anxiety about my second test to get my American driver's license. When I look back on that moment now I can say, oh yeah, I was so anxious, but look at me. I'm laughing. I don't feel anxious now. I just feel the emotions of the success. I passed with flying colors, by the way. Anxiety is not an emotion we feel about the past.

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All other negative emotions can be, because we can have unresolved negative emotions. Anxiety is very different. It's its own category. That is because it is the signal from our brain to tell us that we're in the stress response. Stress is not an emotion. This sounds really simple, but it's very profound. I've had a lot of clients where I give them homework that is neurologically science-based homework to help lower stress levels.

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They don't do it. They don't do the homework. They'll do all the other homework I give them, but then they say, well, I don't feel stress. Why do I have to do this homework? And I say, thank you for acknowledging that stress is not an emotion. Unless you are incredibly aware of your body, like, are you aware of how many beats per minute your heart is doing, are you aware of your heart rate variability, can you feel how many breaths you're taking, can you feel

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whether you're in your prefrontal cortex or living back in your amygdala, no, we don't. Unless you're super aware of your state, you don't know how stressed you are. And that is a blessing and a curse, right? We want the stress response, but we want it in short bursts at specific times. Unfortunately, with all the triggers now in our modern life, it's being falsely triggered almost constantly,

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especially if we have medical issues. I remember from chronic adrenal fatigue, there would be times when I had these adrenal dumps and I'd be lying in bed in my 20s gasping for air. If you've ever had that experience of oxygen hunger where you just couldn't breathe enough, your heart was pounding, you felt like you were falling, and you felt like you were dying,

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that's an adrenal dump. Now I can look back and know what it was, but at the time it was a very scary experience. Anytime I would start to feel anything like being out of breath or my heart pounding or any kind of physiological shift, I would start to have negative thinking about it. Oh no. And I'd start to have a story around it. Oh no, this is happening. Am I dying? Am I having a heart attack? What's going on? I'm scared. I don't know what's going on. Is it getting worse? Oh no, it's getting worse. And I would have this thinking

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that my body would listen to. This is part of the whole anxiety model. The moment you have a sensation in your body and you start to label it negatively, like, is that a heart attack? Oh no, what if this means I have to go to the hospital? Does this mean this? Does this mean that? Then your body takes that, it becomes a biofeedback loop. Your body listens to your thoughts and ramps up the stress response, which then ramps up more of those

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physiological sensations, right? Anxiety goes through the roof at this point. We can actually create our own panic attack based on our cyclical thinking, which judges the sensations we have. When it comes to medical anxiety, catching ourselves in that moment when we're starting to have sensations and observing the self-talk we're having about them, and shifting our focus toward what we want

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instead of what we don't want, will stop that cycle. It will stop that cyclical thinking that then creates a panic attack and actually creates a very high state of physiological stress, which is all rooted in our thinking. There is a mind-body connection because our body is always listening to our mind and our thoughts, and our body cannot tell the difference between what's imagined and what's real. You and I can go

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and watch a really scary movie. My husband's a great example. Just the other day we were watching something a little scary, like Stranger Things or something. A monster jumps out. I thought it was very predictable. I knew the monster was going to jump out. But my husband, he's six foot seven, literally levitates off the couch.

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It's comical, because anytime I watch a zombie movie I'm laughing. I think it's hilarious. But he, if he's looking at his phone or reading a book and in the corner of his eye a zombie jumps out from the TV, he jumps off the couch like he got electrocuted. He knows he's safe. You know you're safe when you're watching a scary movie. We know we're safe. We're in our house. Our doors are locked. But if you and I and my husband got hooked up to machines

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and we monitored our heart rate and our blood pressure and saw the dilation of our eyes and did a galvanic skin response and all the machines that could test our stress levels and emotions, we would see that our bodies are going through a stress event as if we were really fighting zombies. But we know logically it's not real. And that's the problem. Even our thoughts,

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even if you think, what if, oh no, I'm having these weird heart things. What if it's cancer? What if it's this? Our body doesn't know that those thoughts are just thoughts. The body thinks it's actually real. Even just listening to these negative thoughts, the body goes into stress response in order to survive, right? This is survival. They call it fight, flight, or freeze, running away from the bear. But our body is listening to these thoughts and our focus.

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That's why anxiety is actually a gift. Once you know how to turn it off, it becomes a gift because it is the red light on your internal dashboard to let you know you've entered the stress response. Now, for some people, they're like, I've had anxiety for 25 years. And I say, congratulations. You have not exited the stress response. At least now we know where you've been living. You do not have anxiety when you're out of the stress response. When you always have anxiety,

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your body is in some state of fight or flight. You have activated the amygdala. You have activated all of the physiological shifts that take place. And this is a spectrum. On one end, we have a 10 out of 10, which is a panic attack. On the other end, there's zero, which means we're good. We're on a beach in Hawaii sipping coconut juice out of a coconut with a lime. And then a one might be like,

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I'm worried the grocery store isn't going to have one of the ingredients I need for dinner. And it progressively goes up from there. When people come to me to learn this technique, most people are living between a six and an eight, which is pretty stressed out. The amount of anxiety you're having in the moment is going to be related to how deep into the stress response you are.

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The only thing I'm thinking of is an example from my own life. I actually have a vocal performance coming up. One of my hobbies is singing, and I have a performance where I'm singing a solo in front of a whole bunch of people next week. The last time I did this, I forgot the words to the song. I was singing a solo in front of all these people and I was just kind of making it up.

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The words, you know, it was more like, da ba da ba da ba. Still sounded good. Fortunately, the director kind of shouted some lines at me and that got me back on track. But I have anxiety thinking about it. My technique has been to try to not care, to not give a damn. And that is so good that you brought that up, because that's one of the things people try to do. It doesn't work, though, does it?

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I mean, it stops you from spiraling, because you stop focusing on it. So at least you stop focusing on bad things that could happen in your future, like imagining yourself doing it again poorly. But it doesn't make it go to zero. It doesn't turn it off. I'm glad you shared that with me, because other people can relate to that. I'm really glad

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that you have something to be anxious about because then I can teach this technique. I'd say 99% of the time when I get on someone else's podcast and teach this technique, people have something they're anxious about. The other day I had a guy who didn't, but he does somatic work, and I said, okay, thanks for already processing all your stuff. I can still teach it, but it's way more fun when the host has something they're anxious about. Okay, let me just talk a little bit about the stress response, because

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everyone pretty much knows fight or flight. So this was so fascinating when I learned this in college, in physiology, neurology, pathology, all the ologies. It was super interesting to learn about capillaries. And I'm going to say it like a Canadian, but there's capillaries and there's capillaries. OK, they're the same thing. Just take the one you like and keep it. OK. These are like the roots of a tree.

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The tiniest roots are capillaries, and they're so small that only a single cell goes through at a time, right? So it's like a tube where one cell at a time goes through. Very small, and it's super interesting. They branch down from big arteries, which then branch down to arterioles, getting smaller and smaller and smaller until they're so small that they're able to feed nutrients to cell groups, right?

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Then they collect the toxins and the CO2. I always get CO and CO2 mixed up. Anyway, it gives oxygen and collects carbon dioxide.

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And then they rejoin to become veins. In these areas of the body, we have 37.2 trillion cells. You can imagine how many capillaries we have. Wild, right? Here's a really cool part. There are tiny sphincters. A sphincter is a group of muscles, think of your anus, right, a group of muscles like this around the capillaries, and they can shunt blood. Now think of how many capillaries we have with 37.2 trillion cells.

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They can shunt blood away from certain areas. Shunting doesn't mean completely cutting off, although it can, like in Raynaud's disease where someone loses circulation in their hand. But for most of us, it means lessening the amount of flow. So the body has this incredible dam system, the most complex dam system in the world. It can shunt blood away from specific areas toward other areas that need more blood flow. So if you're running away from a bear, you have fight or flight. What

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don't you need for immediate survival? Now this is where I get nerdy. I'm a Star Trek fan. Even if you've never seen Star Trek in your life, it doesn't matter. Imagine there's a starship and they're fighting the Borg and Captain Picard says, divert all energy from non-essential floors. Let's say there's the cafeteria. We don't need energy in the cafeteria right now. Divert all the energy to the shields and to the phasers.

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This is the stress response. The body says, we don't need, and now what we're calling non-essential is actually all of our processes for long-term health and healing, for fighting cancer, for staying young, for having energy, for having fertility, for having healthy hormone levels. All the things you want in your life get shut off in order to divert energy to run away from the bear. And this is why it's really hard to sleep at night

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when you have high stress. And again, stress is not an emotion, so you don't know if you're in it. You see the signs of it, like seeing the smoke, not the fire, right? That's why I love anxiety, because anxiety is giving you clarity. It's letting you know your body is diverting all your energy from non-essential systems, meaning all the systems that are part of your long-term health and healing. That was one of the things happening

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in my body, because I had anxiety my entire childhood. I was riddled with anxiety. I also had infertility. When I corrected my anxiety, things started to heal, right? Because I got out of the stress response. This is why it's all connected. Anxiety is beneficial in that it can show us that we're in a state we don't want to be in. It's not good for our health. I'm going to teach you how to reverse it and correct it. Just knowing that is powerful.

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Once you feel anxiety, get excited. You can say, yes, my body is in stress response and I can do something about it, because you're going to learn a technique I'm about to teach you. So in the stress response, diverting all of the non-essentials looks like this. It means taking away most of your prefrontal cortex, which is here. This is where you live most of the time. It's where you make decisions, where you think logically, critically, where you can remain calm and weigh

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options. That's where you want to make important decisions in your life. Your amygdala is like, they call it the reptilian brain. It's you snapping or yelling at your partner or your kids, or going and buying a pack of cigarettes even though you swore you quit smoking, or getting some alcohol even though you swore you wouldn't. It's impulse. No impulse control. Dopamine seeking. We're prone

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to anger, defensive, and not making decisions that are good for long-term health and healing. That's the amygdala. But it's better in survival mode, because if you are in a burning building on the third floor and you have your logic centers active, you might try to strategize how to get out of the building and stall. Whereas if you're living in your amygdala, you're just going to jump and hope you land in a bush. Maybe you break a leg, but you live, right?

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So it's actually good to not have impulse control when we are in fight or flight, because we just have to react. But the problem is you're in fight or flight at the wrong times, when you don't need it, right? So we want to get your prefrontal cortex back, which means we have to get you out of the stress response. Another thing that happens, which you might recognize, is ulcers, right? The body shunts blood away from your

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core, away from digestion. We don't need to digest when we're running away from a bear. You might actually eliminate. You might have had that experience when you're super stressed out and you throw up, get diarrhea, or get constipation because digestion just stops. It just shuts down. If you do eat something, you're not hungry at all, but if you eat something, you feel a rock in your stomach, a knot in your stomach. It just sits there. That's because your digestion has slowed down.

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It's at like 10% power, because you are in stress mode and your body doesn't need that energy going toward digestion. I think something like 60% of our energy is taken up by digestion. That's why the body can heal so much more when you're fasting, because it doesn't have to pour all that energy into digestion. So where is that blood going? It's going to your limbs so you can fight or run.

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So now understanding what it is to be in stress mode, yeah, you're going to have a bit of a pounding heart. Maybe sweaty palms. Maybe tunnel vision. These are all things associated with a panic attack. But fighters, if you have ever been in fighting, that's also fighting mode, right? That's their go mode. So for some people it's a positive thing. For others, it's a negative. It also has to do with your focus, what you say to yourself, your self-talk

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around the physiological experience of the stress response. Again, anxiety is good because it lets us know we're in the stress response. Now I want to teach you how to turn off anxiety. There are two things. One is turning it off in the moment. And then I have six other tools I teach that are incredibly impactful because we get ahead of the curve by rewiring the brain so it doesn't create anxiety in the first place. And then you just have less and less anxiety.

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And then anxiety becomes this 0.5 out of 10 experience to warn you. It just comes on and you're like, oh, I feel a little off. That's my body telling me I'm in stress mode. OK, I know what to do. So it doesn't become this overwhelming thing that completely shuts down your brain and your focus. You keep your mental clarity. You keep your focus. You keep your physiology calm. These tools are incredibly powerful. I'm going to teach you the first one today.

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If you want to learn more, I'm launching a course. This is the second course I've launched. I've spent the last eight months working on it, pouring everything I've done with my clients for the last 20 years into this course. Listeners can just go to learntruehealth.com for all the information. That's my website and my podcast, learntruehealth.com. They can check out the course if they'd like to. But just this one technique alone

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is enough to turn off anxiety in the moment, and you could keep doing it and get great results. It doesn't necessarily keep it away, because that's not the purpose of the technique. But with the rest of the tools, you can also keep it away. Before we teach the technique, do you have any questions? I don't. I'm excited to learn it. Awesome. I'm excited for you to learn it too. And I love that you're a singer. My son is also in a choir.

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He just wrapped up this weekend. I was the food lady. I fed 34 kids, and they did a tour, going around to different senior homes and singing to them. It was really cool. I love that you do that. Awesome. OK, Evan. I want everyone to follow along. If you're driving, you can listen, but

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for your first time doing this technique, I'd really like you to be able to close your eyes. So pull over, or come back to this later. You can listen, but don't do the technique while you're driving if it's your first time. So, Evan, when you think about your singing event, and everyone, I want you to think about something you have anxiety about. For the purpose of learning this technique, pick an event. It doesn't have to be the biggest thing in the world. It could be like, I have a

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dental appointment in three weeks, or you could pick something you have a little bit of anxiety about. Even though I say that, most people make it the biggest thing anyway, but it's okay. Just pick anything you have anxiety about. Pick a specific event just in order to learn the technique. Some people have generalized anxiety, and I'll teach in a moment how to work with that too, how to turn that off as well. But Evan, you have this specific event. Good. So I want everyone to think of a specific event that when they think about it coming up,

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they feel some anxiety. They feel something in their body. So Evan, when you think about this singing event coming up, how much anxiety do you have in your body right now on a scale of 1 to 10, one being minimal, 10 being the most? A four. OK, great. Everyone, do the same thing. Ask yourself how much anxiety you have. Just gauge it on a scale of 1 to 10. A four is great. Any number is fine. It just gives us a

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starting point. So Evan, what I'd like you to do, and what I'd like everyone to do, is close your eyes. I want you to imagine that your life is like a timeline. You have your past in one direction, you have your future in another. And I want you to float above this timeline. I'd like you to float 15 minutes after the successful completion of the event you have anxiety around. And I want you to stay floating, looking down on yourself in this event.

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15 minutes after the successful completion of the event you had anxiety around. And I want you to ask yourself, where's my anxiety? Is it there or is it gone now?

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It's like a two. Great. I want you to stay there. Everyone who still has anxiety, stay there. Now for some people, it was a one and done. Their anxiety is down to zero. They're 15 minutes after the successful completion. It is now completed. They see it. They see that it was a success. What are you doing 15 minutes after something? It's very mundane. Maybe you're driving home. Maybe you're

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celebrating. Maybe you're having a cookie. It's just very mundane, but it's 15 minutes after the successful completion. For those who have no anxiety, come back to now, open your eyes. You're done. You can just keep listening. But some people still have anxiety, and this is because sometimes anxiety is layered. There are layered reasons. So Evan, you're floating 15 minutes after the successful completion and you're now at a 2. I want you to hold that and be aware of it and ask it,

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what am I anxious about now?

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So I think I'm still not fully in that moment. I'm still kind of thinking about where I am now and still anticipating the event. Oh, so this is good, because sometimes when I say go 15 minutes past the successful completion, people just go into the negative future and they don't see success. What I'd like you to do is remember this is a process of active visualization. You are making this up.

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Because imagining a bad future is just as fictitious as imagining a good future. So what I'd like you to do is imagine 15 minutes after the successful completion of your singing solo. So it's the end of the performance, and I'm kind of milling around with the people who I sang with, and the audience members are coming up and everybody's telling me that I did an amazing job. And

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where is your anxiety now on a scale of zero to 10?

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It's definitely better. Maybe it's a one. It's okay that there's still some left. I want you to take that one. Ask yourself, what am I anxious about now?

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So I'm in that moment and people are congratulating me and...

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Yeah, I'm actually thinking about something else. What's that? What is that one about? Well, I'm thinking about how this is going to be the last time I'm singing with this group because I'm moving to Europe in four months. And I don't know if that's anxiety or whether it's some sadness, a little bit of grief. You can have more than one emotion in a future memory, right?

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You identified that there was a one. So maybe you identified some discomfort. But is it a one? I want you to get really clear. Is there any anxiety left in this future memory? No. But it's really good to acknowledge that there are other emotions there that you're free to work on and process. So come back to now. Evan, you can open your eyes when you're ready. And any listener who's at zero,

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come back to now. For those who still have anxiety, here's what we're going to do. Float above the event and look down on it. Remember, we're 15 minutes after the successful completion. You don't need to know how it was successful for this to work. You just need to see 15 minutes after the successful completion and gauge how much anxiety you have. If there's any left, even if it's a 0.5, I want you to stay there. Hold that anxiety

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and ask it, what am I anxious about now?

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When you identify what you're anxious about now, go into the future, 15 minutes after the successful completion of that. For some people, it's two, three, four times because sometimes there are layers. I'll give an example. A woman who had overcome breast cancer was at her first five-year scan and she was anxious about it. So we had her go 15 minutes past the successful completion of that,

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and see that it was great. And then she still had some anxiety. The question revealed that the anxiety was because she was worried about the next scan, and the next, and the next. It's totally individual. I have to ask how many scans she needs to have to be convinced it's gone. And for her, it might be 25 years. So she went 15 minutes after the

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25-year anniversary of her successful scans. And then I said, where's your anxiety? She said, oh, it's at zero. OK, great. Come back to now. It's individual in terms of your convincer. I interviewed an author who was publishing a second book. He had more anxiety about the second book than the first. So I had him go 15 minutes past the successful completion of the launch, because that's what he was anxious about. And his anxiety went down, but was still present. From a six to a four kind of thing.

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And I said, what are you anxious about now? And he said, all the reviews. He didn't realize that what he was really worried about wasn't the launch. He thought that's what he was worried about, but it was really how it would be received. Do you see that layer? You can't even see the layer until you get past the first one. So then we went 15 minutes past the successful completion of all the reviews, which could be a thousand years from now on Amazon. His book could outlive him.

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And his anxiety went to zero. Then he had this profound realization that he had this imaginary mob of people who didn't like him in his mind, chasing him his whole life. And that was very profound. So if you still have anxiety, find the layer. I had a woman who had to do weekly presentations for her job and she hated public speaking. She had to do them for

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basically the next 20 years. I said, okay, go imagine every single one of them being successful. She was always successful at it. She just had anxiety around it. We can train her nervous system to not have anxiety around it, but for the purpose of turning it off, the reason we're doing this technique is to turn off the stress response so we get the benefits. You want your critical thinking back. You want

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your digestion back. You want your energy production. You want your longevity-producing enzymes turned back on. And then we can do the wonderful work, the neuroscience work to support the brain with neuroplasticity to change how it behaves so that we don't create anxiety around future situations in the first place. But first we have to get out of it. What she had to do was imagine her retirement

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and see her entire career as successful, 15 minutes past the successful completion of retirement. And then her anxiety went to zero. Lastly, I'll teach for generalized anxiety. Some people say, I don't know what I'm anxious about. I just know I'm anxious. I can't pinpoint it. So I'd like you, and Evan, you can do it too. I'd like everyone to close your eyes. Float 15 minutes past the very

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long and successful completion of your life. Whatever that looks like to you. For me, I'm in heaven, surrounded by God's love. Whatever it looks like to you, maybe you die peacefully, happily, surrounded by generations of your family who are all happy that you're passing on. You live to be 125 with no ailments whatsoever. And you were able to fulfill all the purposes you were meant to. You fulfilled everything, right? Your life was amazing.

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And now you're 15 minutes after the successful completion of your life. For most people, that is the most peaceful and amazing experience and completely turns off anxiety. In 20 years I've only met one person it didn't work for. That's because they were struggling with their belief and said they were maybe atheist or agnostic and were struggling with what afterlife looks like for them. So they couldn't imagine it. That was the only

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one person out of thousands I've worked with who didn't have a visualization of what a successful afterlife would look like. So that turns off anxiety. Why does imagining 15 minutes past the successful completion of your life turn off anxiety? Because your body is constantly wanting to protect itself. It wants to go into the stress response when you need it. So it's always listening to our thoughts and to what we're seeing,

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and listening to the movie we're creating in our mind. It's like your unconscious mind has its hand on the light switch. Do I need to turn on the stress response now? How about now? The moment you start to imagine something negative or stressful, the body jumps into that because it wants to protect you.

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So your focus, your thoughts, and even how you word things matter. If I say I don't want to slip and fall, I'm imagining slipping and falling, and my body goes into stress response. I see ice in front of me. But if I say I want to walk safely to my car and I imagine myself getting there safely, I don't trigger the stress response. It seems like the same thing, doesn't it? I want to walk safely to my car. I don't want to slip. Those two statements seem like the same thing, but they're not.

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One has a focus that has me imagining hurting myself, possibly ending up in the ER with something broken. I've just triggered the stress response in my body just by imagining that. And we do that a thousand times an hour with our thoughts, over and over again with our focus and our thinking. So part of the techniques I teach is how to rewire the language we use

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externally, but also internally, our internal dialogue and our focus, so we don't trigger the stress response. We're just trying to stay out of the stress response. As long as we stay out of it, we are in the good mode. We're in the health and healing mode. You can do things to increase health and healing mode. There are wonderful breathing techniques proven to increase heart rate variability. There are all kinds of great things you can do to strengthen the nervous system and help you be even deeper in

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a rest-and-relaxation and healing mode, which is great. Anything you can do to lower stress and manage it is great. But if you're battling a thousand negative thoughts an hour versus five minutes of meditation and breathing, I'm sorry, but one negative thought puts you in stress response. Good luck with those five minutes of breathing. And most people don't even do that. Most people don't dedicate five minutes to

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increasing their relaxation. You know what I mean? So most people are in a state of anxiety and don't realize it. In fight or flight and don't realize it. Deteriorating the body by being in that state chronically and don't realize it. But I bet the people who are listening do realize it, because most people who are interested in learning how to decrease anxiety or turn it off know that they're experiencing it. So here's the breakdown of the technique.

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This is your homework. The next time you have anxiety, which could be in five minutes, five hours, or five days, whenever you wake up to the realization that you're having anxiety, I want you to get excited because it is a break state for your neurological program. Your neurological program is used to doing a certain pattern. We're going to break

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the pattern by immediately getting excited. This is going to start to change your neurology. So this is what it looks like. Oh yes, I'm in anxiety. Awesome. I get to practice the tool Ashley taught me. Just that. And you can fake it till you make it. Just smile, even though you don't feel like being excited. Go, oh, awesome, I'm in anxiety. I get to practice the tool. Literally say that to yourself. Say it inside your head if you want, like if you're on the subway and you don't want people to hear you. But just get excited.

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And then practice the tool. The tool looks like this. Identify what you're anxious about. If you don't know what you're anxious about, go 15 minutes after the successful completion of your life. But most people know what they're anxious about. So identify it. How much anxiety are you currently having on a scale of 1 to 10? Go 15 minutes past the successful completion.

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It has to be successful. Imagine what you're doing. Float above your body. See yourself. What are you doing 15 minutes after the successful completion? If you have a really hard time feeling the feelings, you can go into your body and look through your own eyes. That's fine too. If it's at zero, you're done. More than 50% of people, it's a one and done. They go 15 minutes past the successful completion.

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It turns off the anxiety and that's it. They come back to now and they're done. It would be good to then start to think about what thoughts you were having, what self-talk you were having, that triggered that anxiety. You will probably identify that you were thinking about something in your future not working out. Just remember, imagining something good happening in your future is just as made up as imagining something bad, but imagining

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something bad turns the stress response on, which then makes it more likely that the bad thing will happen because you're not in a resourceful state to make the good thing happen. So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? If you, Evan, are in a state of stress, you are more likely to forget the words to a song than if you're totally locked in. You've sung this song a hundred times. You know it. But if

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you're in your amygdala, you're not in the flow with the music. You're in your head, worried about forgetting the words. Being outside of the stress response, being in relaxation mode, being totally in the music,

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you're in your prefrontal cortex. You know all the words. Everything is great. And there's a flip side of the coin. This is anxiety. Imagining a bad future. The other side of the coin is excitement. Imagining a good future. We all the time imagine bad because we think we need to imagine bad things happening in our future in order to somehow

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figure out strategies for overcoming them. But here's the thing: we don't prepare when we lament. We don't actually solve problems by imagining bad things happening. What solves it is imagining yourself having solved the problem and then looking back to see how you did it.

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If there's an earthquake, see your family survived and is thriving. Then look back and ask, what did I need to do to thrive and survive an earthquake? Well, we have to have water, an emergency plan, medical supplies, food supplies, a family plan. So that creates no anxiety. But what do most people do? Imagine

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the worst case scenarios and relive them over and over again. Think about what if the other shoe drops. Live in the tragedy, the future made-up tragedy. What if we lose a loved one? What if we don't have medicine for little Tommy? Just imagining the trauma and not seeing a way forward. And most people think they need to think of bad things happening in their future in order to survive them.

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But they're actually putting themselves in an unresourceful state and then not thinking of how to survive or how to overcome it. That's why I say if you're in anxiety when thinking about your future, you're not preparing, you're lamenting. You have to see yourself having been successful and then look back to now and ask, what did I do to get there? So with this technique, we go 15 minutes after the successful completion.

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It turns it off because we're telling our body we're safe now. Then we can come back to now. We're safe. We're out of the stress response. Now we can do stuff. Now we can prepare. So Evan, you're practicing your singing every day. You know what to do. You know how to remember the words. Seeing yourself be successful

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in your future keeps you in the resourceful state, which lines you up and makes you more likely to be successful. Does that make sense? Yeah. And what's the purpose of looking down? How does that help? So in neuro-linguistic programming, there are different viewpoints. When you see yourself, it is a level of dissociation.

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And like you noticed when you were in that future event, there was more going on, right? More emotions. Did you look through your own eyes when you felt more? Yeah. See, you got more associated. When we look through our own eyes, we feel feelings bigger. What I do is something called the fast phobia model, where we take people with intense phobias and within 45 minutes, they no longer have the phobia. We completely clear it out of their nervous system.

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We do a lot of dissociation like this. When I say dissociation, I mean their visualization in their mind is seeing themselves. So it becomes third person. Like you're the fly on the wall. You see yourself. And so with timeline therapy, which is a technique created by Tad James, of no relation, although I was mentored by him. Unfortunately he passed away a few years ago at a very old age. I

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worked with him for about five years and was on staff with him. He created Timeline Therapy, which is phenomenal work. And I am also a master practitioner and trainer of it. Timeline Therapy is the process by which we can resolve negative emotions from our past. We can resolve anger, sadness, fear, hurt, guilt, PTSD. It's amazing with veterans.

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Really successful with veterans, and with limiting decisions and negative beliefs. We can completely resolve those, and then anxiety. Part of that is the dissociative visualization, which allows you to still feel the anxiety without getting so deep into the future memory that it becomes intense. Does that make sense? Yeah. And we also use different positioning. It actually creates

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a neurological shift by seeing yourself down in the timeline and seeing yourself depending on the angle. So it can get really interesting. Yeah. It's rapid change work. It's quantum-level change work when you can take someone who has been suffering from PTSD or a phobia and in one session have that problem gone. That's amazing. So for people who've heard this

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and want to go deeper with you, where's the best place to send them? Yeah. LearnTrueHealth.com is my website, and they can get on my newsletter. They can reach out to me if they have questions at support at LearnTrueHealth.com. And very soon, probably by the time this gets published, there's going to be a link to sign up for my course, which is called Anxiety Freedom. What I did differently with my second course is the first time I

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taught this in an online format, I was just a talking head on video where people would take the tools and learn. That was good. It was successful. But what I wanted was an experience for people to learn from case studies. So I took a bunch of clients who agreed to be recorded and share. Every week I teach one or two tools.

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They learn them, practice them, and come back the next week and share how it impacted their life. Then they learn two more tools. What's cool about the new course, Anxiety Freedom, is you get to learn the tool, because I do this talking head segment where I teach the tool, and then you can watch as many of the case studies with real people as you want.

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Repeating it over and over again with different people. It's like coming at it from different angles because everyone's different. It's always taught a little bit differently depending on their specific situation. You're going to get it so much deeper by going through and seeing other people learn it and how it impacts their lives. Yeah. So it was a lot of fun to create this program. The beta testers have really liked it. Nice. And we do have the link to that. It's anxietyfreedomtechnique.com.

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Yeah, and for all my information, they can go to learntruehealth.com. OK. I just went to learntruehealth.com and nothing popped up. Is it L-E-A-R-N, T-R-U-E, H-E-A-L-T-H dot com? OK. For some reason it didn't work for me, but we can work that out afterwards.

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This has been really wonderful. I appreciate you coming on and sharing this technique with us. And for those of you who, like myself, are really fascinated by this work, definitely check out Ashley's work. I highly recommend it. And if this was helpful for you, please give it a like and subscribe and we'll see you in the next episode. If you have chronic fatigue, whether it's from Long COVID or chronic fatigue syndrome, go ahead and click the link below

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to watch my latest masterclass where I go deep into our four-step process that has helped thousands of people resolve their symptoms naturally. After you watch that video, if you're interested in seeing if we're a good fit to work together, you can get on a free call with me. All right, thanks so much. I'll see you over there.

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I hope you learned something on today's podcast. If you did, please share it with your friends and family and leave us a five-star review on iTunes. It's really helpful for getting this information out to more people who desperately need it. Sharing all the experts I know and love and the powerful tips I have is one of my absolute favorite things to do. Thanks for being part of my community. Just a reminder, this podcast is for educational purposes only

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and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. It is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. Thanks for listening and have an amazing day.