31: How to Release Fear & Live an Anxiety-Free Life with Jackie Bowker

Help. I feel anxious. What do I do of the 15,000 people that we surveyed over the last eight months, six out of 10 of us are experiencing feelings of fear of worry of overwhelm. And this is a real problem. I am here as a health practitioner to tell you that I can completely relate to.

There was a time when I was a corporate marketing executive, I was giving a [00:02:00] really big presentation to a major airline to win a big piece of business. I remember being paralyzed with fear as I was talking, I literally ran out of words. This had never happened to me before I was horrified. We have a tendency to be embarrassed by these things that are going wrong.

What I know now was that I was having a panic attack. And instead of checking in and wondering if everything is okay with me and speaking to colleagues or friends in a safe space about what to do for next time, I didn’t have you ever had a situation where your body hasn’t done, what you wanted it to do?

You haven’t been able to perform under conditions of such pressure of such stress. I wish I knew then what I know now about what was actually going on in my body. I want to talk about this because it is such a serious issue in today’s world. A world of anxiety, of fear, of [00:03:00] overwhelm, where everything like this is so prevalent in our society.

We live in so much pressure and chronic busyness. We run from one task to the next. Psychological safety. I love that. We’re starting to talk about this in businesses. It’s a common topic on board discussions. What we need is for people to be empowered with knowledge, be empowered with simple actions that we can take to improve our health, which improves our performance.

There is a direct link unequivocal evidence that improving health outcomes. Improves your impact improves your productivity, reduces your brain fog, reduces absenteeism. And really, for me, it’s so important to know this because improving your health, which means reducing feelings of fear, anxiety overwhelm is going to IM.

Prove your accelerate, your impact, and you are better able to share your gifts with the world. And if you’re working for a company, [00:04:00] that means that that has a direct impact on the bottom line today. I want to talk about some ways that we could look at the situation. For example, the situation that I was in, where I was paralyzed with fear, perhaps you relate to that with a different perspective.

I want to give you a couple of tips that might be useful if you are in a situation where you are paralyzed with fear, or if you’re experiencing shortness of breath or worry or consumed with being overwhelmed. One of the tools in my toolkit is a really simple posture. It’s important to talk about this because something that happens to your brain in a situation where you experience fear or overwhelm is that the two hemispheres are left and the right hemisphere become misaligned and click out of place.

When that happens, you are unable to think rationally about a situation, and that might be at work in a relationship at home or online. These. When we can’t think rationally, our decision making is impaired. This ends up [00:05:00] creating a downward spiral with stress layered on more stress. I had that all the time when I was working in business.

A great, easy, quick way to realign the he, your brain is to sit in. What’s called the whole brain posture. You can do this anywhere. Cross one ankle over the other, cross one wrist over the other, sit or stand in a safe place, take a deep breath through the nose. And I like this breath to come right from the base of your feet, all the way to the crown of your head.

And concentrate deeply on the situation. This is such a great exercise to do before a big presentation or an important conversation. You have to say with somebody, if you sit in this space for a few minutes, concentrating deeply on the situation, the stress will dissipate to a place of peace. What is happening?

Physiologically is quite magical. The two hemispheres of your brain are realigning in perspective to that situation. So you will literally think about it differently. The [00:06:00] benefits are so impressive, especially if you bring this into your life as a practice. The better you’ll become the more familiar it will be to your system because we have what’s called muscle memory.

So as soon as you go into this position, your body will remember that this is instruction. Oh, when she goes into this position, it means we think about peace instead of stress regarding the situation. This is such an effective tool to have in your toolkit. I absolutely love my get better system. I love teaching it to people because it is such a simple framework and easy to remember, cuz everybody wants to get better.

GE stands for gut health. It’s so relevant to feelings of anxiety, fear overwhelm. The first place I look when I’m working with a client that presents with these feelings is their gut. What is going on in your gut is directly related to what is going on in your brain because the gut in the brain were the same organ.

It’s [00:07:00] just one grew up. And one grew down. That is such a beautiful concept for you to remember when you are thinking about the brain and the gut being so connected. There is overwhelming evidence of imbalance in the microbiome and the impairment of the intestinal lining something called leaky gut being correlated to anxiety and feelings of overwhelm, depression, et cetera.

One of the things I have done in moving through my healing journey is to completely rebuild, heal and seal my gut lining, wipe the microbes that aren’t supposed to be in my gut out of my system. And as a result, Everything gets better, including my mood, my ability to remain resilient to a situation. The second letter in the get system is.

Eat real food what’s on the end of your fork really does matter. This means removing inflammatory foods. We know that inflammation creates nine out of 10 diseases in our society today. These diseases are preventable. [00:08:00] The top five, I like to talk about are sugar. Gluten dairy, soy and peanuts. They are all highly inflammatory to the human body.

And then on top of that, we have to work out. What does your body respond to? What does your body love? What is supportive and makes you have high impact, massive impact and abundance. And what are the foods that are holding you back? Knowledge is power. You are in control of the situation. So it’s important for you to understand and tune in to what foods support you and what foods.

Holding you back. This is a process over time. You don’t have to do everything at once, but removing those top five inflammatory foods is gonna make a huge difference overall to your health, which is going to impact your performance at work at home online. You are the investigator here a really good way to identify foods that you might be reacting to is the process of elimination.

This is still the gold standard of food sensitivity [00:09:00] testing today. The technology hasn’t really advanced as far as we would like it to. So taking up those top five is gonna make a huge difference on top of that, you can always dig deeper. There are lots of food sensitivity tests that you can do as well, depending on where you are at in your journey and your appetite for testing.

The impact of removing inflammatory foods is that you have less inflammation in your body as a whole and less inflammation in your brain. Having an inflamed brain is a really big deal. When I talked about sugar earlier, one of the things that alcohol does in the body. Is passed straight through the blood brain barrier.

And that’s the reason that we can feel so tipsy even after just a sip of alcohol, alcohol essentially is sugar. So we have to be really careful when we are thinking about alcohol and our performance. The third letter in the get system is the T thoughts, your thoughts create your reality, what you think really matters.

So I’m [00:10:00] always talking about focusing on your transformation on the journey to your transformation instead of sitting in the pain. Instead of sitting in the symptoms that you don’t want. We want you to focus on what you do want. Instead, this is a beautiful concept to think about, not an easy one with a lot of support groups.

I know there are well-meaning support groups on Facebook, for example, of people that are in the same situation that have identified. Same condition that are going through things together. Often what happens though, is that creates a lot of momentum and energy around that situational condition of what you don’t want.

This is why labels can be so dangerous because once we get attached to the label, we can say something like we have this disease and we have this condition, we embody it and it creates so much momentum and resistance. It creates resistance. To moving from the place where you are with, of what you don’t want to a place where you want to get to.[00:11:00] 

I personally can really relate to this cuz there was a time where I was very unwell. I was diagnosed with gland fever and that’s sometimes called mono or EVV in different parts of the world. My situation was also tied to a chronic fatigue for years. I really identified with this. I was relieved and happy to find that I had a diagnosis.

Finally, I feel, I felt like I belonged finally, there was a reason and there was a label I could give to why I was feeling so crappy. We have a tendency to be validated by our label or our diagnosis as a society. Have you ever been diagnosed with a conditional, given a label and felt some sense of relief because finally it made so much sense.

Finally, you felt like you belonged and you were safe. This was a huge turning point in my health journey. When I realized I was a victim to my label, this was a huge shift in the perception of what was going on for me. And I moved from being in pain island [00:12:00] to going to pleasure island. I had to view the situation differently and focus on the momentum around the journey from getting where I was to, where I wanted to go.

When I did this, everything shifted for me. This is not a conventional mainstream way of thinking. It feels really vulnerable for me to speak about this topic and to say what I really think, because for years, I have suppressed this voice in fear of being judged in fear I’ve been considered too. Woo, woo.

Too spiritual in fear of hurting people’s feelings or being discredited, because I’ve worked so hard to get to where I am today as a functional medicine practitioner, as a mind gut, a nutrition expert. What I’ve realized is that I am failing you if I don’t share this information, because for me personally, this was the thing that changed everything.

I rebuilt my gut. I changed my diet to an anti-inflammatory diet. I lost my inflammation. I fixed up my sleep. I fixed up my hydration. I balanced my movement. I moved from self-loathing to [00:13:00] self-loving. But the biggest shift was how I perceived a situation, how I perceived myself from a place of compassion and love, and that allowed me to perceive the world in the same way.

I consider this to be the secret. The power is in your thoughts and how you can use your thoughts to change your reality and perceive a situation differently. You can use your thoughts to create your own reality. How can you use your thoughts to change your reality around fear and anxiety worry. It would be really nice to use some sort of mantra you can ask.

The universe to help you dissolve all fear, anxiety, worry, and powerlessness. You can ask to release the, these feelings of helplessness, of hopelessness, of betrayal and trauma. You can ask where the growth opportunity is, where the gift is in every challenging situation. And. Focus on the best possible outcome.

And you can repeat this [00:14:00] relentlessly and observe the changes to your mind, to your emotions, to your energy, by dissolving the negative thoughts, the negative words and feelings, the negative memories, the negatives, images of fear, anxiety, worry, and powerlessness. I’m excited by the thought of these changes and how they could help to accelerate your massive impact and how it can help you share your gifts with the world.

By doing this deep exploration, by the things that might be holding you back. I’m excited for you to use my system, the get better system by looking at things a bit differently by observing a symptom of anxiety, worry, fear, and bringing it back to, okay, what are the big systems in the body? I’m gonna look at my gut.

Health. I’m gonna look at what I’m eating and am I eating inflammatory foods? I’m gonna look at my thoughts and my feelings and emotions, and I’m going to, eh, continue to explore and dig deep about what [00:15:00] might be going on for me and how I can enjoy the journey. To the destination of feeling really, really good and better and better and better.

I’m so excited for you to try some of these tools out. I will see you next week. Bye bye. If you made it to the end of this episode, celebrate yourself because it means you are truly dedicated to feeling better in your health, in your career, in your relationships. And I am so proud of you, and if you want more.

Feel better now show tuning every Monday for new episodes and join our community on Instagram at Jackie Bauer for all the behind the scenes action and more. Hey, why don’t you sign up for a chance to have your question answered at feel better. institute.com/. Sign up that feel better. institute.com/sign up.

But most of all, please keep reaching to feel better because the world needs you to [00:16:00] feel good. So you can share that very special gift that only you have. So with that said, see you soon. Here’s to feeling better now. Bye bye. Feel better with Jackie B.