Episode Overview

What if the future you're worrying about never happens, but the stress you're feeling is already affecting your life today?

After breast cancer, it's easy to let our minds race ahead. The next scan. A new symptom. A difficult conversation. All the things we can't predict or control.

In this episode, I'm sharing how worry affects our bodies, our sleep, and our ability to enjoy the life we're living right now.

We'll talk about the difference between worry that leads to useful action and worry that keeps us stuck in fear.

I'm also sharing three simple practices to help you recognize anxious thoughts, take action when you can, and reconnect with the future you want to create.

Because uncertainty doesn't mean you have to spend today preparing for everything that could go wrong.

You deserve to experience peace, love, and joy right now.

Resources Mentioned:

Download for iPhone: 

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kajabi/id1485646310

Download for Android: 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kajabi.kajabiapp&hl=en_US

Work with Laura:
https://www.thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/health 

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Read the full transcript:

Laura Lummer 0:00
You're listening to Better Than Before Breast Cancer with the Breast Cancer Recovery Coach. I'm your host Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills, on the insides, and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis. If you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started. Hey, friends! Welcome to episode 487 of Better Than Before Breast Cancer. I'm your host Laura Lummer, and today we're going to talk about worry. You know, worrying is on my mind because I'm recording this episode on voting day here in California, and I have heard so many people who are worried about the future. And trust me, this episode has no political slant at all. I don't do politics here. Today just reminded me of how much of our lives we can spend in the future that hasn't happened yet. You know, when we worry, we're telling ourselves a story about something that's coming that hasn't happened. I'm going to give you a great example. My very sweet, wonderful husband. He watches a lot of YouTube videos. He reads every post-apocalyptic book I think that is available on Amazon, and he worries about a big disaster coming. So he's out buying generators and food, and now we've got a couple closets filled with months worth of supplies, and as he's preparing, and I'm out enjoying the sunshine and reading a good book, not about anything post-apocalyptic or hanging out with my friends. But the the funny thing is, we're living in the same house. We're facing the same unknown future, but we have two very different days, depending on what we're thinking is going to happen in that future. And I am completely supportive of what he does with food and supplies and bug out bags or whatever, because that's what makes him feel safe. And I want him to be able to feel safe, so you may not have a closet full of generators and canned food and dinty more bee stew, but maybe you have a closet in your mind, some version of that closet. Maybe you have a scan coming up, and you've already played out how that appointment is going to go. You're worried about what you're going to be told. Maybe you have a new ache, and by 2o'clock in the morning, you've decided what that means. Maybe you've even consulted, talked to ChatGPT, and you're freaking out. Maybe you're worried about your kids and what they're doing and where they're going or how their lives are going to end up. Maybe you're worried about your marriage, or the way the world is headed. And the thing is that whatever it is you're casting a story into the future about, your body is listening to that story. So even though nothing has happened yet, your body is responding to the story you're telling it today, and the physical response that story is generating inside of you. Let me tell you something about a little bit of research. There were some researchers who pulled 60 studies on worry and rumination in healthy people, and what they found was links to higher blood pressure, heart rate, and cortisol, so the disaster may never come, but the stress response is happening now, just because you're thinking about it, and over time that matters. There was more research. Some researchers at Carnegie Mellon found that chronic psychological stress was associated with the body losing some of its ability to regulate inflammation. So worry can also get in the way of your sleep. Oh my gosh, how many times I have allowed worry to get in the way of my sleep over the course of my lifetime? How many times I work with clients who don't sleep, and when we dig into it, it's because they're worried, and their minds are going so fast and so far into the future. And then you know that feeling because you're exhausted and you want to sleep so bad, but your mind is so busy running through everything that could go wrong. So more research. Winsome researchers followed 178 adults for two weeks, they found that mental arousal before bed helped explain the link between stress and poorer sleep. And so, think about mental arousal.

Laura Lummer 4:54
Worry is is one sort of mental arousal, but also television. I work with a lot of women who have a TV in their bedroom, and they're like, "Well, my husband likes to watch TV in the room," and then they fall asleep with the noise going on, and the brain is still engaged, watching social media videos, whatever it is. Right? Mental stimulation can be different than just sitting there worrying for yourself. So it's an important thing to think about. Worry also can impact your appetite. Now, some of us eat more when we're under stress. Others eat less, or we eat things we normally wouldn't eat because we're looking for that dopamine hit. Right? We're standing in the pantry looking for something sweet because sugar gives us a little hit of a reward, and we're feeling stressed out, and we might not even be consciously aware of it. And it all makes sense; it really does, because everything, everything we do, comes down to how we want to feel, and every human being wants to feel safe. You know, when we're worrying about what's coming, do we feel safe? Absolutely not. So we look for anything that might help us feel better, even if it's just for a few minutes. Now, to be fair, worry can sometimes do us a favor, right? If worry gets you to call your doctor about a symptom or book an appointment that you've been putting off, then it did its job. It worked in a positive way, but the question I ask is: Does this worry have a next step? Right? Is there something I can do about this? If I feel a weird pain, or I'm having trouble breathing, or something's going on in my body, there's a next step. I can call the doctor. If I'm telling myself that I'm worried about where my adult child is at 11 o'clock at night. There's no next step because I have no power over this adult, even though it's my child. Right? If I'm worried about some apocalyptic event, there's no next step. I have no power over it. So, if what you're worried about has a next step, take it. But if there is no next step for you, or if you've already taken the next step, right? If you already noticed something in your body, called and made the doctor appointment, you can stop the story now, right? It's no longer protecting you. You took the next step, so now all it is doing is taking up your day, taking up your mind, and causing a lot of suffering for you. So it also helps to know how often stories in our mind turn out to be wrong. This is really interesting. Researchers at Penn State, looked at 29 college students with generalized anxiety, and they had them write down the worries and track what happened. And over 30 days of watching, 91% of these worries did not happen. And now these were a small sampling of young people tracking near-term worries, so I'm not applying that number to a cancer diagnosis or scan. I just wanted to share it because it shows how convincing a worry can feel, even when it's wrong. So, what's actually happening in the body when a thought turns into a feeling? This is where I love the work of Dr. Candice Pert. When she was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins in the early 1970s, she helped prove the opiate receptor exists, and that's the place on the cell where opiates lock in and do their work. In her book Molecules of Emotion, she writes about how these messenger molecules and their receptors are found throughout the body, including in our immune system, and that led her to the idea of body mind. And I love that because your feelings are not just in your head; they're in your body. And in Dr. Pert's view, the messengers tied to emotion are moving through your whole body, and your cells have places to receive them. Dr. Bruce Lipton he gives us another picture in the biology of belief. He's a cell biologist, and he describes putting genetically identical stem cells into three dishes with slightly different environments. This is so cool. In one dish, those stem cells became a muscle. In the other, a bone, and in the third, they became fat.

Laura Lummer 9:29
The cells all started out the same, but their environment shaped what they became. So he calls the fluid in those dishes the laboratory version of blood, and he believes that the way we perceive our world changes the chemistry of the environment our cells live in. Now, Dr. Lipton goes further than many scientists do, and his claims about beliefs directly changing how our genes work are highly debated in the medical field. So, I'm not telling you that. That your thought is rewriting your genes, or that a belief can cure cancer, because I can't say things like that. But what I do take from his work is this question: What environment are my thoughts creating from my body today, right now? And you know that makes me think about something that my own belief, right, makes me think about my own belief. And this next part is not science; it's my lens. And you can take what's useful to you, and you can leave the rest. So there's no doubt in my mind that everything is energy. At a cellular level, we are energy. Our nervous system is moving energy. Everything around us is energy. We know this. And when I was reading the book Infinite Quest by John Edwards, something stuck with me, and he talked about worry, and he said that when we are in worry, we are sending out negative energy to that thing or to that person, right? So the way I see this, thoughts are energy. Energy is moving all around us all the time, and when we're in worry, whether it's about our health or a relationship or someone we love or how the world is going, I think we're sending that energy into the future version of whatever we're thinking about. So let's talk about a little side note here, so we're all on the same page. If you worried a lot in your life, and then you got a diagnosis or a recurrence or a scan that didn't go the way that you hoped it would, your worry did not do that, right? Researchers in the UK followed about 106,000 women, and they did not find consistent evidence linking stress or hard life events to breast cancer risk. And that study was about developing breast cancer; it wasn't about recurrence. But my message is the same: I've had two diagnoses of breast cancer, and I know how easily we can turn this kind of a conversation into blame. And this is not about blame. It's about what you get to choose today, right? It's about what you choose today so that you can feel as good as you want to feel. So, a lot of the work that I do is helping women visualize the future version of themselves and their lives. And if we keep drawing on memories and experiences from the past, we keep recreating the past. If our past has a lot of fear in it, we keep bringing that fear forward, and then we add more fear by sending it ahead into the future with worry. So we have to ask ourselves, how will I ever get the life I want, or live in the world I want to believe in, if I keep sending fear into that vision, into that future, into this body, the truth is that today is the only thing any of us has, as far as we know. So, if our mind is in the future, we also miss the peace and the love and the joy that are available to us right now. Now, in my metabolic health training, we talk about oxytocin and how laughter and connection and community, prayer and meditation all support that feel-good chemical, oxytocin, in our brain, in our body. So when I'm at the beach with my friends, or my latte, or my dog, I'm not ignoring the future. I'm giving my body what it needs today: peace, love, and joy of living in the present moment. That peace and that love and that joy of being in the present moment and really appreciating it and sending gratitude out for it, those are things that we can do, even if we're living in uncertainty. So, what do you do now? Maybe thinking, well, I worry all the time. How am I supposed to stop? Let me give you a couple of exercises that you can try.

Laura Lummer 14:02
So this week, maybe you make yourself a worry appointment. This has actually been tested by research, and it has a small but very real effect on how often and how long people worry. So you pick a time and a place each day, and you give yourself anything from five to 30 minutes, and when a worry shows up at 10 in the morning, you tell it, "I'll talk to you at 5pm" That's your little window of time. Then you come back to what's in front of you, right? You put that worry aside for a minute, and then when you're 5o'clock, whatever that window of time you've set aside for yourself when it comes, then you sit down and you write down your worries, and you ask, "Does this have a next step?" If it does, you take the next step. If it doesn't, then you look at the reality of it, and you make a choice to sit it down, not give it any more energy. Here's a second one. Write down what you're afraid will happen, put it aside, and check back in a week or in a month. And what actually happened? Did the things you were worried about actually happen? If the hard thing did happen, how did you get through it? How did you support yourself? When you do this, you're collecting your own evidence, and you're seeing how capable you are, and how true or untrue these thoughts of worry are. All right. Third and last one: spend five minutes with your future self, that person that you are becoming in six months from now, three weeks from now, next week, next year, however, whatever length of time you're comfortable with, but you decide, and then you sit down with her and you ask yourself, "What does she do in the morning?" That future version of me, who's she laughing with, how does she feel in her own body? Because you're deciding this, and then you get to ask that future version of yourself. What's one thing I can do today to move towards you? Right, my husband. He might keep filling closets, and that's okay, because it makes him feel safe. The future version of himself is a man who's prepared to take care of his family in the event of something horrible happening. Right, I'll be at the beach because whatever is coming, the future version of myself is a woman who lives in the present moment, who looks everywhere for joy and laughter, and feeds herself these nourishing, happy thoughts in order to heal her body. So, ask yourself what story you want to tell yourself about your future, about tomorrow, and maybe sometimes we can only get as far as the next hour. What do I want to tell myself about the next hour, so I don't send worry into that next hour, right? And what would it feel like to come back to this moment right now, and then take a breath and choose how you want to feel. So these are some great exercises for you. And I know things feel so heavy right now. And I know that if we allow ourselves to get out there on social media, I'll give you an example. I saw all kinds of really scary things on social media, and this was like a week or so ago. And my youngest son was heading to Paris for he he's taking a trip with his girlfriend, and one of the stops was Paris. But I had seen a lot of violence in Paris, and so I was worried. And I called him and I said, "You know, are you sure about this?" And he's like, "Mom, trust me, everything you see on social media is propaganda. I said, "Okay, okay," and then I stopped and I was like, "What am I doing? Why am I sending worry towards this kid when I want him to have an amazing time?" Right? And then I just pictured him, and I just pictured him with this glowing white light around him. I pictured him with the biggest smile on his face. I pictured him walking through Paris like a picture of the Eiffel Tower, and I just pictured him and his girlfriend standing there in awe of this beautiful Eiffel Tower.

Laura Lummer 18:07
And when I practiced that visualization, not only did I feel better, not only did I release fear and worry, but I didn't send any worry into the future for my boy. Right? I sent a beautiful, protected, exciting, wonderful moment that he would have on this vacation, and he did have an amazing time, and he did not see any sort of violence anywhere, which was lovely, right? So we need to think about what our thoughts of the future, right? Imagination, because the future hasn't happened. So any story you're telling yourself about what's coming is just that it is a story. It is a fictional creation, and you get to decide if it's making you feel safe, if it's making you feel happy, if it's making you feel joyous, if it's giving you something you're looking forward to and you're taking steps towards, or is it stressing you out? Is it affecting your appetite, your sleep, your relationships, and your wellness? All right, you get to choose. That's the beautiful thing. You've always got the power to choose your thought. It's a practice. Those three steps that I gave you. It's a practice. We have to do it. We have to do it consistently to rewire the brain. But if we decide to do that, if we decide I don't want to live in a world of hatred and violence and separation, then the first thing I have to do is say, "What role do I play? And are the thoughts I'm having now, are the actions I'm taking now? Are the things that I do now and the people I engage with now are all of those leading to the type of world I want to live in, which is a harmonious world where people are kind to each other, where people do wonderful things for each other, where they show up, where we have community and neighborhoods where people. Care about each other, right? The actions I take today are going to move me towards whatever that future is, and so I have to decide what those actions are going to be. All right, I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. So come and join my Living Well After Breast Cancer free community. You can find it on my website or click the link below wherever you're listening to or watching this podcast, and come and talk to me about your thoughts on this podcast. Does it make sense to you? Do you have more questions? Did you try the exercises and you want to know about it, or share your successes with me because I would love to hear about it. All right, my friends. I'll talk to you again next week. And until then, please be good to yourself and expect others to be good to you as well. Take care.