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Some of us find ourselves overwhelmed by anxiety and fear. When this gets extreme it can look like being afraid to be alone and or also afraid of leaving the house. This is how I felt before I got sober. I was terrified of leaving the house at times. And also I was afraid of being alone.
I had a conversation recently with someone who is in this place now, afraid to be alone and afraid to leave the house. So I'm hoping that making this video for you that if this is you too, that you feel less "alone" in this while also knowing that it is possible to move beyond this.
Wishing you much peace and freedom.
Xo
Sobriety Bestie
P.S. Here's the Progressive Muscle Relaxation guided experience: https://youtu.be/jEPtVEPwZ5c?si=w7A2MWxCCSB6uB6A
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Back then, I felt like I had fallen into a whole of anxiety. And I knew that the only way out of what felt like a whole a fear, a whole of anxiety, was to climb out slowly, we have to climb out of anxiety hell. The first thing to do for a super anxious person is distract yourself. Now distraction is not the long term plan. It's the short term thing. It's the first thing. It's the easiest thing, right? So if you're thinking about something, go do something to change your mind. Whatever you can do. Hello courageous bestie. I'm Kirsten Johnson and welcome to the sobriety bestie podcast where we adventure together through emotional sobriety, unapologetically expressing yourself and building a purpose driven business because the world needs your wisdom. Each step you take opens up infinite possibilities because your transformation's not just for you. It's a beacon of light for those you're called to serve. So get on comfy. Repeat your mantra. This is courage and take that next alliance step into creating the business and life of your dreams. I'll be your guide. And I am so glad you're here today. We are going to be talking about fear of being alone, a lot of us fear being alone. If you fear being alone, you are literally not alone in that. I mean, you are alone at the time that you are alone, right? But you're not alone in that fear of having that fear. It is very, very common. I had that for a long time when I was getting sober, like before I was sober and an early sobriety. And a lot of my clients and students have had that as well. It is very common. So if that's something that you're going through, nothing is broken in your head. Nothing is wrong with you. This is just what anxiety can look like in some of us. It is normal for an anxious person to have thoughts like that to be afraid to be alone. It's also totally true in my experience and in my belief that there is freedom available for you. There's freedom available for all of us. I can't guarantee. I can't know how much freedom is available for you, but there is absolutely freedom available for you. So if you are afraid of being alone, it doesn't have to be forever. You can get free from your fear of being alone. And we're going to talk about that today in the show. So I had like all the anxiety disorders basically before I got sober in 2009. I was on benzos. I was on Klonopin by my psychiatrist for anxiety disorders. I was afraid to leave the house. I was afraid to be alone. I was afraid to drive in the freeway. I was afraid of public speaking. I felt like I was afraid of everything. There were times where literally I would freeze and be unable to walk outside my front door to cross the streets, to get groceries from the convenience store across the street, literally across the street from me in San Francisco. And so after being somebody who was completely dominated by fear and phobias for a very, very long time, and being somebody who no longer is, who has gotten through to the other side, I want to tell you some of the things that really worked for me and what I would suggest if you have a fear of being alone or if you know somebody who is afraid to be alone, maybe you have a loved one who has confided in you. By the way, that's super courageous if they have. It's really hard to say that even asking for help is really hard, especially when you're afraid to leave the house, when you're afraid of being alone, when you're afraid of all the things, it's hard to ask for help, at least it was for me. It's like not, I felt like I would get so much anxiety and this is why I was afraid to be alone because the anxiety would get so bad and I wouldn't even know how to get help. Like I'd be in the midst of this like anxiety attack and then I'd be wondering how do people when they freak out like this even get help, like am I supposed to walk into a hospital right now? Like no joke, that was like literally what would happen and so I'd be sometimes terrorized to be home alone or to be alone. And so what do you do? Actually that feels really good. Let's take a couple of breaths together. If you're into it, close your eyes. If you fall comfortable, I'm going to close mine. Let's take a deep inhale through the nose and now let's exhale through the mouth. Let it all go. Let an inhale through the nose. Exhale through the nose. Let's do one more inhale through the nose. And exhale through the mouth. Open your eyes if you're ready. Okay, so that just kind of spontaneously came from me. I noticed I was getting a little excitable as I was chatting with you because I know there's freedom available for you and I really want to help you see that and help you know that and then also help you get there, right? This is really important. And so I also know that when I'm excitable, whether it's because I'm chatting with you here on the podcast or when I was back in my anxiety disorders and afraid to leave the house, I know that the three breaths is really helpful. I didn't know this back then. And you probably already know that breaths are calm us down. And the quick science behind this is when we're activated, when we're anxious, when we're in the fear of being alone, we're in the sympathetic nervous system, fight, flight, the stress response. We're having adrenaline cortisol and 30 other friends, stress chemical friends are dumped into our system and pumping through our body like a frickin rave, right? And that's the stress chemicals that are raving in our system when we feel afraid to be alone or whatever we're being afraid of, right? And so that's the stress response. And what happens when we're in the stress response is we want to turn on the parasympathetic nervous system. And you know it as rest and digest is when we feel more calm and a great way to do that. My favorite way to do that still all these, you know, 15 years later is three slow mindful breaths. I always feel calmer after I take the breaths. Let's take another breath. Now, if you're afraid to be alone, maybe three breaths isn't going to cut it. Let's just be honest here. There is no point in BSing yourself when you have a really bad anxiety. I was just telling a client this this week, earlier this week, we don't BS ourselves when we're trying to get through this stuff, positive thinking, sure, but like if we're really going through it, if we are in what I call anxiety, hell, let's not lie to ourselves, right? I'm not going to tell you three breaths is always going to make you feel better. I'm telling you that three breaths is going to what it does biologically, like I know when I turn a switch on on my light, the light on the wall, my light goes on, right? I know that to flip the switch up, light goes on, flip the switch down, light goes off. That's how our nervous system works. When we're stressed out, when we take those breaths, it's the switch to calm us down. Now it might be more like a, like a light on a dimmer, like it might not calm us down all the way, but that's how it works, that's literally how it works. But sometimes our anxiety is so crippling. Like for me, my anxiety was through the roof. So what happens if the breaths aren't cutting it and that's why I think for somebody who is super anxious and I know that when I was afraid to leave the house, I was in a super anxious season of my life, like super, super overwhelming anxiety, like on a scale of one to 10, I was at like a million. And so if that's where you're at and you're afraid to leave the house, distraction is our best friend. Distraction is an anxious person's best friend when they're first learning the skills to get the fuck out of anxiety help. Like back then I, back then I felt like I had fallen into a hole of anxiety. And I knew that the only way out of what felt like a hole, a fear, a hole of anxiety was to climb out slowly, we have to climb out of anxiety hell. The first thing to do for a super anxious person is distract yourself. Now distraction is not the long term plan. It's the short term thing. It's the first thing. It's the easiest thing, right? So if you're thinking about something, go do something to change your mind, whatever you can do. Like when I would be super anxious in the car when I was trying to get over my freeway phobia, if the radio was on, I'd turn it off. If my window was down, I'd roll it up. If my sunglasses on, I would move them up. I would start moving things around a little bit in my car, literally to distract myself in not, not in ways that we're going to disrupt my driving, but I would distract myself in order to get myself out of what was becoming an anxious, um, thought spiral. Cause when we have the anxious thoughts, we have the anxious feelings and then we noticed we're having more anxious feelings, we're feeling anxious. So we have more anxious thoughts. So when we're thinking more anxious thoughts, then we have more anxious feelings and then we're on, we're on what I call the downward anxiety spiral. We want to get the off of the downward anxiety spiral. And so a great way to do this in the beginning, especially is distraction. If you have a lot of anxiety, go reach for distraction. It's the first thing to reach for. So this might be turning the TV on this might be calling somebody. This might be doing something physical, like going for a run around the neighborhood around the block. It might be doing jumping jacks. It might be anything to distract yourself from thinking the thoughts that you are feeling because the thoughts that you are feeling are cascading the stress chemicals into your body. Remember it's adrenaline and cortisol and 30 other stress chemical friends are flooded into your blood. It is a flood in your blood of this little pumping base rave that we call anxiety that we don't want. So if you want to get out of the anxiety party, you want to shut down the anxiety rate, you got to change the channel on your thinking. Changing the channel on your thinking by distracting your thoughts will change how you feel internally. It's super basic. It's not always easy, but it is the easiest thing to reach for. It's the like so-called low hanging fruit. And so distraction is an anxious person's best friend in the beginning. Now long term, there are better ways to overcome anxiety for like long term relief and long term free. I look at anxiety disorders as like a season, not as a permanent thing. I don't look at anxiety disorders as something that lasts forever. Now that's my belief. I'm not a doctor. I'm not your doctor. But the way that I've seen it in myself and in my students and clients and I've been teaching people this for, let's see, I got sober almost 15 years ago. The last time I had an anxiety attack was 2012. And right after that, I started teaching people how to not have overwhelming anxiety. So I've been teaching people for well over a decade, how to not be anxious. And I've seen a lot of breakthroughs, a lot of miracles, a lot of people who thought they would be anxious forever and might have even been told by medical professionals that they would be anxious forever, I've seen them get free. So it's really opened my mind to the possibility that freedom is available for all of us. I don't know how free you're going to get. But I know that there's freedom available for all of us because we're literally working with what I consider like an electrical system, our nervous system. It sends electrical impulses throughout our body. And so it's because it's electricity and part of our thoughts and our feelings are playing into what frequency, what what voltage is zapping through us right at this anxiety rave we've been talking about so weird. And so we need to shift that. So number one distraction. Number two, if you are super anxious, if you are afraid to be alone, if you are having the debilitating or crippling anxiety, you're waking up with a pounding heart, you're waking up an anxiety attack, like I was always waking up an anxiety attacks, then doing something regularly to get the frick out of dodge, get out of the anxiety hell is mandatory. It's like, if you want to be strong physically, you have to lift weights or go to the gym or do some physical exercise, we know that if I want strong biceps, I got to lift something with my arms weights or something, a car, right something, I live something because it's that resistance and that pushing through that builds the muscle. So if I want to be physically fit, I got to physically move my body, exert it, push through resistance in order to build that muscle. The same is true for an anxious mind and anxious mind just needs some training. I don't mean just needs because I know it's overwhelming. I know it can be overwhelming. It is a lot, but if it's likely if you are afraid to be alone, it's likely if you're being dominated by anxiety and fear that there's some skills that you can learn, there's some stuff that you can do that's going to help you move home emotionally so you don't experience as much anxiety. One of the things that is super great, it's similar to like lifting a weight. If you want to get your biceps strong, if you want to get your anxiety calm, there's something called progressive muscle relaxation. Now maybe you've heard about this. So I'm not telling like some mind boggling new invention over here. It's the basic stuff that works. The question is, are you working it? Because it's not what we know, it's what we do. It's not that I know what calms anxiety is going to keep my anxiety calm, it's not informational. It's not like just knowing it. It's what I do. It's what I practice. It's how I down regulate or calm my nervous system on a regular basis that will give me the results. Just like I go to the gym to get physically strong, I need to go to my anxiety gym or some sort of calming my nervous system gym, if you will. And here's the deal with progressive muscle relaxation. We calm slowly from the head to the toes or the toes to the head. We tense each muscle one at a time and then we release it and then we tense the next one and we release it. And by the time we've gone through all of it, we tend to feel a lot more relaxed. Now I'm not saying that if you're feeling like you're afraid of being alone, in the moment that's going to make you not be afraid to be alone. What I'm saying is if you practice something like this every day, you are changing the way you experience life. You are re-regulating your nervous system. You're setting your life on a different trajectory so that you're no longer in the anxiety hole or anxiety hell, that you're moving towards a different kind of life where you actually have a calmer nervous system, which means calmer thoughts and calmer feelings. We could still be very excitable, obviously I'm very excitable, I'm sure you've noticed. I don't have the racing anxiety thoughts anymore. I know how to jump out of them. I know how to not have an anxiety attack. It's been over decades since I've had an anxiety attack. And so this is something that's very basic, but that can be done. The example I'm giving you, there's so many examples, but I want to keep it really simple for you. Progressive muscle relaxation. I have a guided experience that you can do. I'll put a link in the show notes, it's a guided, progressive muscle relaxation video. My encouragement, my invitation is that you do this daily. Do it before bed, do it when you wake up, whenever you want to do it. The more you work these muscles of calming, like we can call them calming anxiety muscles. The more you work, you're calming anxiety muscles. I'm literally just making this up on the fly, but it's a really good way to think about it because your perspective is going to affect your actions, it's going to affect how you think about things and what actions you take or which actions you don't take. So if you think about it as anxiety calming muscle and you want to get that one ripped, which I would if I was afraid to leave the house and I was afraid of being alone and I was afraid of my anxiety and afraid of fear and all the fear, all the things, right? Then it's about using deliberate things to calm your nervous system down, like progressive muscle relaxation. What I want most for you is I want for you to know that it's possible to get free. It's a possible to break through. It's a possible to have a completely different experience of life, transformations possible. Our mind is so freaking powerful and the more that you do these calming practices, they are building up like in my online courses that I have. The way that I talk about it and teach it to my students is I call them calm coins. Each practice that you do like progressive muscle relaxation is a calm coin and you are investing in your freedom every time you practice a calm coin. The coins add up to an investment in your freedom. So if you are a student, one of my courses, that's what you would be hearing, but you're hearing it here too because I really want you to be free. I want you to know that freedom is possible and I want to give you a way out of the anxiety help. The way out today is progressive muscle relaxation. And did you notice there was actually a second way out too that we already did, which was a three breath. That was like the bonus. I didn't know it was going to come in here, but it did. So there's a lot of ways to freedom and you just have to do one at a time, the next one, one. The more that you can do these daily, the more that you're going to see that change in your life, just like the more frequently you go to the gym or do physical activity and exert yourself that way, the more likely the, the more that you're going to get strong physically. All right, thank you so much for being a part of the sobriety messy podcast today. I really, really, really hope that your freedom comes as soon as possible and that you break through this and that you were able to live that expansive life that you were dreaming of, that you no longer are being held down by any sort of feelings of shame and adequacy, grief, guilt, anything. We get so many negative emotions. I had so many negative emotions when I was afraid of being alone and I really hope that you break through all of them and that you get to do all the dreams on your heart and that's possible for you. And as basic and as annoying as it might sound, I really believe that by calming your nervous system, that's the path to freedom. Like maybe you don't want to do it. I didn't necessarily want to do it. I didn't want to learn how to meditate, but I wanted to be free. And your freedom is worth it. That's what's on the line here, your freedom. That's why I'm making this podcast for you today. I haven't been afraid to leave the house in 15 years. I'm making this because I know your freedom's on the line and there's a lot of beautiful things for you ahead of you breaking through this fear and I want you to break free and you're worth it and we need you. There's a lot inside of you that can be expressed in the world on the other side of this. And so I hope you enjoy the progressive muscle relaxation guided experience. I'll link it in the show notes, take care. Wishing you so much peace and freedom today.
