How to Prevent Passing Anxiety on to Your Kids

[00:00:00] This right here is the most underestimated and under recognized piece when it comes to preventing passing your anxiety or other undesirable traits onto your kids. Maybe you think that you do a really good job of like hiding your anxiety from your kids, you're not.

[00:00:21] Because children, they can't know what they can't see. If you are ready to burn bright instead of burning out, to lead without losing yourself and to enjoy the life you have worked so hard to create, then keep listening.

[00:00:36] I'm your host, America's leader on rewiring perfectionism, CLG, and this is Perfectionism Rewired, the podcast. Welcome to Perfectionism Rewired. Today we are talking about how to prevent passing anxiety onto your kids. This episode is going to give you signs you're programming your kids for anxiety, why therapy

[00:01:02] or whatever else you have tried hasn't been working and what actually works for busy, perfectionistic high achievers who want a physiology of excellence. You have a physiology of excellence. You are resilient, you are able to be present.

[00:01:18] You don't have to control everything around you anymore because you can be disappointed. You can fail in public. You can tell someone no that you normally would totally people please. You can not prepare for something and still feel very confident going into it.

[00:01:36] That's what a physiology of excellence is. And it's not something where you fake it till you make it. It's something that you are able to program within yourself on the inside using the inner technology that is known as fascia.

[00:01:51] I'm going to give you a quick primer on fascia just for this episode. There is a link in the show notes to an episode that gives you an introduction on what fascia is, where it lives in your body and why it matters. So cue it up to listen.

[00:02:09] Add it to listen to next. So fascia is the foundation of who you are. It used to be something that scientists discarded as like, oh, it's just something that's there. And now they're looking at it and they're realizing, oh, this is everything.

[00:02:25] As babies in the womb, we actually start out as fascia and all of our organs and systems develop from there. Why we care about fascia in regards to passing your anxiety is that fascia facilitates all communications between every single part inside of us. Fascia is our internet.

[00:02:50] It's the Wi-Fi of our insides and communication in the fascia is 15 times faster than in the nervous system. And your brain is part of your nervous system. So like nervous system, it communicates via message in a bottle where fascia is fiber top of the line Wi-Fi.

[00:03:09] Another really cool thing about fascia, especially if you're a parent, is that it gives us the ability to move quickly and efficiently in a way that muscles alone cannot achieve. When you hear those news stories about superhuman strength, like a mother that

[00:03:24] was able to lift her car to save her children underneath, that is brought to you by fascia. The more healthy our fascia is, the more we are able to feel and the more that we are

[00:03:36] able to truly be embodied and present both as a perfectionist and as a parent. What skin is to touch, fascia is to feeling. I'm not just talking about feeling like if your stomach is nauseous, but like emotions and feeling. Fascia impacts our emotional intelligence and our emotional resilience.

[00:03:58] Now, how this looks for you, ways that you are unintentionally programming your kids for anxiety. An example is let's say that you just got out of an interaction with a real jerk face. It was a meeting at work. Homeboy was condescending, belittling and a total misogynist.

[00:04:20] And you fought the urge in this meeting to throw your laptop at his face. Most of the time when a situation like that is over, when the stressor leaves us or we leave the stressor, we go on living our life.

[00:04:37] Like in this scenario, I'm guessing that you're probably racing into your next meeting and you probably don't even have time to pee. Here's how this directly impacts passing anxiety to your kids. During these times of stress, like the meeting with the jerk face, your fascia

[00:04:56] stores a holographic image of your physiology. It's like taking a Polaroid of how your shoulders are positioned, your clenched jaw, how shallow your breathing is. Maybe you're getting tight in your chest. It is a holographic image of you complete with all of the fury, the guilt,

[00:05:19] the resentment and the worry that you are feeling. Why is this? Because fascia is recording every experience you have from the moment that we are in the womb till we breathe our last breath. Whatever you push down, hold in or sweep under the rug, it goes into your

[00:05:40] emotional storage unit, which is fascia. When this happens, it creates obstructions in your inner net. Your fascia actually shrinks. It becomes hard and inflexible. You get dead zones in your internal Wi-Fi. Like the Wi-Fi signal can't reach there. Parts of you actually go offline.

[00:06:08] The communication network powering your entire person becomes compromised. It would be as though you are not receiving text messages. Some of your messages are going through, some of them aren't. The messages that you do receive are distorted.

[00:06:25] It's missing the second half of sentences or there's just some words. It's like a phone call that keeps cutting out. What this looks like for your body is your system internally is not working as efficiently because your communication network has become compromised. You are not accurately reading situations.

[00:06:47] For example, a fast heartbeat of excitement. Your brain is probably registering as fear and panic. Ordinary wonderful things like delight, arousal, surprise is instead activating, oh my goodness, what is this? Why is this person text messaging me? It's why a lot of times your reactions to situations,

[00:07:10] the littlest thing will set you off. You will have a level 13 reaction to a level 0.5 situation. A way that perfectionists tend to get around this is that we just try to control everything. We're like, well, if I'm in control of everything,

[00:07:24] then I can make sure that I avoid feeling a certain way. We try and make everything perfect. But the downside of that is if you're not moving and metabolizing those emotions, like the rage that you felt during that meeting with the jerk face, if you're not metabolizing that,

[00:07:42] you'll literally carry that with you for the rest of your life. Here's what that actually looks like in your day to day. Here is how you can know if you are carrying this with you currently. You are stuck in this over anxious, scattered, everything feels urgent.

[00:08:00] And a lot of times clients will tell me they feel like a raw nerve. You're thinking, what am I saying next? Are they looking at me weird? It is this very active buzzing state where you're like,

[00:08:12] I'm doing this and then I'm doing this and then I have another cup of coffee and then I got to do this and then I got to do this and there's not enough time. There is not enough time in the day

[00:08:20] and I got to get to the kids' school, I got to take the baby to the doctor. I should really sit down and do that five minute thing. I really need to pee but no, I don't have time for that because we're late for swim lessons.

[00:08:30] And it's just this frenetic moving, moving, moving, moving machine. There's not a lot of presence there and you can feel like you're always on the brink. You're like, I'm on the edge. And then what happens is that even when you do stop moving,

[00:08:46] so let's say you're back from swim lessons, you cook dinner, you put all the dishes away and you're watching TV at night, you're not even really watching it. Like you're there but you're not there and you can't seem to stop scrolling on your phone.

[00:09:01] Like you're not shopping for anything in particular. You're not really communicating with anyone. You're just scrolling. Maybe you're also drinking wine but you're not savoring it. You're just wanting to dull what you're feeling inside. And these patterns in your physiology, your kids pick up on.

[00:09:20] Maybe you think that you do a really good job of like hiding your anxiety from your kids. You're not because children, they can't know what they can't see. What they see are your actions and your physiology. And it's also why you have probably inherited some stress patterns

[00:09:44] from your own conditioning, your own upbringing. This is where epigenetics comes into play. And that's actually why Diana, a perfectionism optimized client, came to me. She noticed that her four kids were really anxious and that they were taking on her mannerisms and thinking patterns.

[00:10:03] The ones she did not want to pass on like a family heirloom. And in Diana's words, she said that therapy made me aware but it's not fixing the problem. I'm still just as anxious which has been my constant issue because it's like, oh, I'm really, really aware

[00:10:20] and this awareness is fixing nothing. I live up here in my head. There's never enough time. There's never enough energy. It's not enough. I need more. I got to do more. I go, go, go, go, go until I crash.

[00:10:34] Maybe you feel like Diana where you are very, very aware but you notice that there is a lack of results that you're seeing and it is not for lack of trying. If you notice this in yourself, if you're like, holy moly, CLG, you're reading me like a menu.

[00:10:50] This is not a defect of you. This is not admitting defeat. This is just admitting that you have these patterns in your physiology and your kids are picking up on it. Little kids are parrots. They copy us and that includes our physiology.

[00:11:06] If you're sitting in traffic and you're squeezing your arms and you're like, oh, I'm so frustrated, you're grinding your jaw and you're clenching your pelvic floor. If you don't metabolize that stress, if you don't flush it out, then that stressy pattern gets on a loop.

[00:11:21] You get in that pattern every time you experience traffic. That's what leads to your children unconsciously picking up that pattern because fascial networks, they talk to each other. They calibrate to each other and you as the adult, your children's calibrate to yours.

[00:11:39] And in fact, there have been scientific studies that show that this happens even in utero. There is a change in fascia from babies that were born to pregnant women with an ice storm where they experienced major stress. There is a change in the way that babies develop

[00:11:58] when your fascia is very tight and constricted when the baby is in the womb. Now that we know, okay, I get it. I can tell whether or not I'm carrying this around with me. I have some dead zones in my internet and oh my goodness.

[00:12:12] Now it makes total sense. I really want to work on this. Now you're probably wondering how. How, CLG? How you prevent passing on your anxiety, ruminating, overthinking, people pleasing, et cetera to your kids is you learn how to effectively metabolize your stress in the moment.

[00:12:32] It's not like, okay, we need to go spend 20 minutes in an infrared sauna. You have a daily hygiene practice that gives you tools that are usable within your daily life that allows perfectionists like Diana to keep going with their life. It allows parents that are perfectionist

[00:12:52] and have a lot of interests and are involved in their community to keep moving through their life without feeling like you have to shut everything down and to go through this big emotional experience. You don't have to eat, pray, love this.

[00:13:04] What is so cool about fascia is that when you start to get those emotions that have been stuck inside your body for so long, the flow of your body is actually restored. It's why you look younger because the energy is flowing again.

[00:13:21] Those aspects of yourself that were offline are now online. When you do this work, you are going to be shocked at how much lighter you feel and how much energy you free up for the things that you care most about.

[00:13:36] I have a patented framework for you to do this called Epic Skills so that you no longer have to internalize all of these emotions. You gain tools to metabolize your emotions in a super efficient, healthy way. I created this because I know what it feels like

[00:13:51] to talk something to death but not feel like you're getting anywhere or you are still fighting against yourself and that your inner critic, it just won't shut up. And perfectionism optimized ends that cycle permanently so that you are able to prevent passing on your anxiety to your kids.

[00:14:11] I mean, who doesn't want that? If that's you, go to CourtneyLoveGavin.com slash optimize. In the next episode, we are going to get into feeling clenchy, specifically the pelvic floors connection to perfectionism. And by the way, every human has a pelvic floor. Listen up.

[00:14:30] Taking charge of your perfectionism is so much easier than you have been led to believe. Whether you want to stop playing out worst case scenarios in your head or be joyfully present ambitious again, you don't need more rigid rules, guesswork or hard work in perfectionism recovery.

[00:14:49] You need a framework that helps you understand and most importantly, rewire your perfectionistic habits from the inside out. It starts inside of perfectionism optimized. Besides the obvious mental health and wellness benefits, rewiring your perfectionism is the fastest way to figure out what's really underneath your perfectionistic patterns.

[00:15:12] This radically different proven proprietary approach helps you succeed by dropping the contempt and judgment that blocks change. Discover how to trust yourself, take control of your world and feel truly empowered to own your perfectionism instead of being owned by it. Head on over to CourtneyLoveGavin.com

[00:15:36] and start your transformation today.