Anxiety Sucks, But It Taught Me These 7 Important Things

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” ~Soren Kierkegaard

Let’s be clear:

This isn’t an article about positive thinking.

This isn’t an article about how silver linings make everything okay.

This isn’t an article about how your perspective on anxiety is all wrong.

The kids call those things “toxic positivity.”

No toxic positivity here.

This is an article about my lifelong relationship with anxiety and what I’ve learned from something that won’t go away. At times the anxiety spikes and feels almost crippling. I have a hard time appreciating the learning at those times, but it’s still there.

That is what this article is all about.

Please do not confuse me learning things from something that won’t go away with me endorsing that thing or saying it’s a good thing. I would trade everything I’ve learned from anxiety for less anxiety. I don’t even like writing about it because focusing on it this much gives me anxiety. But I want to write things that help people.

How a Bare Butt Sparked My Anxiety

Stranger Things has shown how cool the eighties were. For the most part, this is true. I miss arcades and the music. I miss the freedom I had as a kid that I don’t see kids having these days. I miss some of the fashion. I don’t miss people not knowing anything about mental health.

We used to play football every day after school at a baseball field/park in our little town. This was unsupervised tackle football with kids a lot older than me.

I remember one time a guy broke his finger. It was pointing back at him at a ninety-degree angle. He took off sprinting toward his house. One of the older kids said, “He’s running home to Mommy!” and we all went back to playing.

Oddly enough, possibly breaking my finger didn’t worry me. What did worry me was one day when a kid was running for a touchdown, and another kid dove to stop him. He only caught the top of his pants, pulling them down and exposing his bare butt. He made the touchdown anyway, but while everyone else thought it was hilarious, it scared me to death.

What if that happens to me?

I started tying my pants up with a string every day, pulling it tight enough to make my stomach hurt (remember, this was the eighties—I was wearing those neon-colored pajama-pant-looking things). I started to feel sick before we played football, before school, and before everything.

You would think it was obvious that I was dealing with anxiety, but you have to remember that in the eighties and nineties, we did not talk about mental health like we do now. We didn’t throw around terms like anxiety and depression. I was just the weird kid that threw up before he went to school.

The anxiety has gotten a little more noticeable over the past few years. It seems to have gotten worse since having COVID in 2020 and 2021. I don’t know if that’s a thing, but it feels like it is. It has forced me to deal with it mindfully and with more intention. It’s never pleasant, but I’ve learned a few things.

1. Anxiety has taught me to be present.

The crushing presence of high anxiety forces me to be exactly where I am at that moment. I’m not able to read or write. I cannot play a video game or watch a movie with any kind of enjoyment. There’s nothing I can do.

This roots me in the moment in a very intense, authentic way. That might seem bad since I’m anxious, but there’s another layer to it. When I can be completely present with the physiological sensations of anxiety, I recognize that they are energy in the body. When I’m super present, I can see how my mind is turning those sensations into the emotion we call anxiety, and that’s where my suffering comes from.

2. Anxiety has taught me about control.

I’ve been told that my hyper-independence and need to be prepared for anything is a trauma response. I was a therapist for ten years, and I still don’t know what to do with this information. I do know that anxiety gives me a crash course in what I can control and what I cannot control.

The bad news is that I can’t control any of the things that I think are creating anxiety. The good news is that I can control my response to all those things. Anxiety forces me to do this in a very intentional way.

Anxiety also puts my mind firmly on something bigger than myself. Maybe it’s that higher power we hear about in AA meetings and on award shows. It’s good for me to get outside my head and remember that I’m not in charge of anything. It’s helpful to only box within my weight class.

3. Anxiety teaches me to have good habits and boundaries.

I’m bad about allowing my habits and boundaries to slip when times are good. I start eating poorly, I stop exercising, I stay up too late, and I watch a bunch of shows and movies that beam darkness and distraction directly into my head.

I also start to allow unhealthy and even toxic people to have a more prominent role in my life. This is all under the guise of helping them because people reach out to me a lot. Over the years, I’ve learned I have to limit how close I let the most toxic people get to me, no matter how much help they need.

When I’m feeling good, I start thinking I can handle anything, and my boundaries slip. Anxiety is always a reminder that the unhealthiness in my life has consequences, and I clean house when it spikes.

4. Anxiety reminds me how important growth is.

Once I clean house, I start looking at new projects and things I can do to feel better. I start taking the next step in who I want to be. This has been difficult over the past three years because the waves of anxiety have been so intense, but I see the light at the end of the tunnel as the good habits I put in place and the new projects and things I started are beginning to come to fruition.

I chose to let my counseling license go inactive and focus on life coaching because it’s less stressful, and I’m better at it. This would not have happened without anxiety. I have changed my diet and exercise in response to blood pressure and anxiety, and these are good habits to have whether I am anxious or not.

5. Anxiety taught me to be gentle.

I’ve written and spoken a lot about my desire to be gentler with people. I’m not unkind, and I have a lot of compassion for people, but this is often expressed gruffly or too directly. It’s how I was raised, and I often feel like I am patronizing people if I walk in verbal circles when I’m trying to help them with something.

When I’m experiencing high anxiety I feel fragile, which helps me understand how other people might feel in the face of my bluntness. I started working on being gentler around 2018, and I was disappointed in my progress.

It was also around that year that anxiety began to become a fixture in my life again. As I look back now, I can recognize that I am a lot gentler with everyone around me when I’m anxious. Being a little fragile helps me treat everybody else with a little more care.

6. Anxiety taught me to slow down and ask for help.

When I started experiencing increased anxiety, it led me to make quick decisions and change things to try to deal with it. This makes sense. Evolutionarily, anxiety is meant to prompt us to action.

The problem was that these decisions rarely turned out to be my best ones and often led to other consequences I had to deal with down the line. Because of this, I’ve learned that an anxiety spike is not the time to make big decisions.

If I have to make a decision about something, I slow down and try to be very intentional about it. I’ve also learned I need to talk it out with somebody else, something I’ve never been inclined to do. Asking for help is a good thing.

7. Anxiety helps me speed up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is the opposite of what I just said.

Let me clarify.

One of the most important quotes I’ve ever read came from the folk singer Joan Baez: “Action is the antidote to anxiety.” (Years later, I learned she might have said despair instead of anxiety, but I heard it the first way).

Some tasks bring anxiety that I do not want to deal with. These usually involve phone calls or emails to bureaucratic organizations or errands that I find unpleasant and anxiety-inducing (avoiding these also makes sense—our evolutionary legacy cannot understand why we would do something that may feel dangerous).

Over the years, I’ve learned that anxiety diminishes if I take the steps I need to take to address these tasks. The cool thing is that this has translated over to many of my day-to-day tasks.

By acting in the face of anxiety, I’ve gotten pretty good about doing things when they need to be done. I mow the lawn when it needs to be mowed, take out the trash when it needs to be taken out, put the laundry up when it needs to be put up, and get the oil changed in my truck when it needs to be changed.

Once we start addressing tasks immediately, it becomes a habit. Anxiety helped me do this.

Anxiety Still Sucks

So there you go. Seven things anxiety has taught me. I’m grateful for these lessons, but they don’t make anxiety any less difficult in the moment.

Anxiety is meant to suck. It’s meant to make things difficult and uncomfortable for us until we do something to address the problem. The problem, unfortunately, is often unaddressable these days.

We worry about things like losing our job, not having enough money, divorce, and the general state of the world. Anxiety did not develop to address any of these things, so sometimes being comfortable with discomfort is the best we can offer ourselves.

Maybe that’s the last thing anxiety is teaching me.

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About James Scott Henson

James is a writer who wants to help people overcome challenges and make important changes in their lives. He has worked for over twenty years as a social worker, meditation teacher, and licensed professional counselor. Having found his home in life coaching, he helps others achieve their goals and create the life they want. As a writer, James shares helpful posts on Substack, writing thousands of words each month to inspire, challenge, and motivate his subscribers.

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Why I Let My Kids See My Sadness Now (After Hiding It for Years)

“I will not teach or love or show you anything perfectly, but I will let you see me, and I will always hold sacred the gift of seeing you—truly, deeply, seeing you.” ~Brené Brown

The first time my kids saw me truly cry was Christmas of 2021. My oldest was sixteen, and my youngest was twelve.

They had just opened their presents. It should have been a warm, joyful morning. Instead, I turned away toward the foyer near the entry of the house, my back to them, as tears threatened to spill over. My mom—whose emotional chaos had disrupted a large part of my life—was in a psychiatric hospital again. Her mental health had unraveled once more, and the grief of it all, the repetition, the helplessness, finally caught up with me.

I had spent years trying to keep my pain out of sight. I thought I could hide it again. But this time, I couldn’t.

Both of my children asked, “Are you okay?”

I whispered, “I’m fine,” even as the tears streamed down.

Then something unexpected happened. They both came toward me and wrapped me in a hug. No fear. No confusion. Just love. Pure and steady.

That moment began to unravel something in me. What met me was tenderness. My children were not overwhelmed by my sadness. They simply responded to it. In that moment, something old began to crack: the belief that my pain was dangerous to the people I loved most.

I had spent so long trying not to become like my mom. I always felt responsible for her feelings and well-being, and I never wanted my own children to feel burdened the way I had. But in trying so hard not to repeat the past, I held my emotional interior very guarded when I was sad.

I thought I was protecting them.

What I didn’t understand then was that my children did not need protection from my humanity. They needed some connection to it.

In late 2023, my younger child made an observation that showed me my hiding wasn’t really working.

“You’re the sad one,” he said, “and Dad is the mad one.”

The truth stung, but I knew he wasn’t being cruel. He was simply saying what he saw.

And he wasn’t wrong.

After that Christmas, I had gone back to holding everything in and trying not to let too much of my sadness show. But even without tears, my son had still been seeing my sadness for years—through what was happening with my mom, through losses I had carried quietly, through burdens I thought I was keeping to myself.

Of course he sensed it. Maybe it was in my demeanor or my energy, in the heaviness on my face, in the way I sometimes stared off blankly, or in the moments when he had to call my name several times before I came back. He often asked, “Are you okay, Mommy?” He knew something was there.

That was the moment I realized there was no point in hiding my inner world if my children could already feel it without words.

Kids are incredibly intuitive. Even when they don’t have the language, they can feel what is happening. They pick up on tension, sadness, distance, and strain long before anyone explains it. When we pretend everything is fine, they still feel that something is off.

What I began to understand is that without context, they were left to make meaning out of what they felt. They could assume my sadness had something to do with them, or that it was something they needed to fix.

But when I began giving them enough truth—without trauma dumping, without making them carry what was mine—they were better able not to personalize what they were sensing. They could understand that I had feelings, that those feelings were real and human, and that those feelings were not their fault.

I also began to see something else more clearly: my children had always seen me as strong, independent, and capable, the one who managed things and handled what needed to be handled. Because I did not let them see what I perceived as weak, I never really gave them the chance to know this too: I have feelings. My feelings matter too. Not just theirs.

As I began sharing more of my interior world in age-appropriate ways, my children became more thoughtful and considerate. Not because they were responsible for me, but because they could understand me more fully.

What hit me hardest was realizing that the very thing I had felt as a child—being unseen—was something I was repeating with my own kids without even knowing it. Not in the same form, but in a similar emotional pattern.

How could they really see me if I never let them know anything about what was happening inside me? How could we have true connection if I only let them relate to my strength, competence, and composure while hiding the deeper parts of my inner world?

By 2026, something had begun to change, but not quickly and not by accident. It came after years of therapy, reflection, and slowly learning how often I still suppressed what I felt—pushing it down, swallowing hard, going into my bedroom to hide it, trying to regain composure before anyone saw. Little by little, I stopped doing that as much. I cried more freely. I let more be seen.

My youngest son, who is autistic and deeply bonded to me, at first didn’t know what to do when I began letting my tears show more often. A few months ago, while I was crying, he said, “I want to make you feel better, but I don’t know how.”

I told him, “You don’t have to fix anything. Just let me be me, and I’ll let you be you. That’s the best gift we can give each other.”

After that, I sensed his awkwardness begin to soften into acceptance.

A little later, as we were landing in Houston after a trip to Canada, tears started falling again. I didn’t want to come back. That place no longer feels like home to me. Without saying a word, my son wrapped his arms around me and held me while I cried.

After a few minutes, I exhaled and said, “Thank you. I feel better now.”

But it was the moment in the car that stayed with me most.

About a month later, I was crying again while we were driving. A song came on the radio that reminded me of someone I missed, and the sadness rose up fast. He was sitting next to me, and I said, “I’m okay, honey. The song just reminds me of someone and makes me sad. I just need to get it out, and then I’ll be okay.”

Even then, I still felt self-conscious. Some part of me still worried he might be judging me.

Instead, he said something that completely stunned me.

“I wish I could cry like that,” he said. “You’re strong.”

I laughed a little and said, “I get it, honey. We’ll get you crying again eventually.”

I meant it tenderly, but I also realized in that moment that he had learned some of the same lessons so many boys learn early—that tears get pushed down, that feelings get stuck, that crying becomes something to resist. And I knew he had learned some of that from what both his dad and I had modeled. It would take time to unlearn.

That moment stayed with me because it showed me how differently he was seeing my tears than I had always seen them myself.

For so much of my life, I had equated crying with weakness. I thought being strong meant holding everything in, staying composed, pushing through, and keeping the hard parts hidden. But through my son’s eyes, I saw something different. He did not see my tears as failure. He saw courage in them.

That moment opened up another conversation between us. He told me he could not cry anymore. He said it always felt stuck in his throat. He could feel it, but it would not come out. He told me the last time he had really cried was when he was thirteen.

I thought then about how much energy so many of us spend trying not to feel what is already there.

For years, I thought being a good parent meant being unshakable. I thought strength meant keeping my children from seeing my grief, my overwhelm, my tenderness, and my breaking points.

Now I think children need honesty more than performance. They need to know that hard feelings can be felt without becoming dangerous, that sadness can move through a room without becoming their responsibility, and that love does not disappear when life gets hard.

I used to think my tears would make my children feel less safe.

What I know now is that when those tears are held with honesty and care, they can teach something powerful: that being fully human is not weakness, and connection often deepens the moment we stop pretending we have nothing to feel.

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About Allison Briggs

Allison Jeanette Briggs is a therapist, writer, and speaker specializing in helping women heal from codependency, childhood trauma, and emotional neglect. She blends psychological insight with spiritual depth to guide clients and readers toward self-trust, boundaries, and authentic connection. Allison is the author of the upcoming memoir On Being Real: Healing the Codependent Heart of a Woman and shares reflections on healing, resilience, and inner freedom at on-being-real.com.

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All the Important Things a Scale Can’t Measure

“She remembered who she was, and the game changed.” ~Lalah Delia

The scale. Those dreaded words and those dreaded numbers. It can strike fear in the heart of any generally happy human. We look at guidelines and BMI charts and always think, “It should be lower.”

Have you ever been having a perfectly good day and suddenly think, “Maybe I should weigh myself?” And just like that, your day is ruined.

How do we let a $20 bathroom scale dictate how we feel about ourselves?

I remember stepping on the scale and seeing numbers that somehow determined how I valued myself. What a ridiculous way to measure our worth. Yet so many of us do it. Somewhere along the way we start believing that if we weigh less, we somehow are more.

I grew up in the 1990s, and I remember being told that I should weigh 120 pounds. Thank you, Seventeen Magazine and the fashion industry. Granted, I’m not tall. But that number became something I chased for years. I weighed myself religiously every day. I didn’t care if I had energy or if I felt good. What mattered was the number on the scale. If I could just reach that elusive number, all would be right with the world.

All around me, the message was the same: do more, eat less, weigh less. If I could just reach that number, somehow, I would become the most worthy version of myself.

People would complement the weight loss, not realizing that I was often starving and exhausted. I felt terrible, but the number on the scale was good. It never made sense.

Around that time, I had taken up running after the loss of my grandmother. The endorphins gave me a positive way to deal with grief. Running helped me process the pain. But then, as good things often do, it became something negative.

I also realized something else—it made me smaller.

For whatever reason, that made me feel better about myself. So for many years, I learned that if I ran enough and ate little enough, I could stay small. I remember being told in my early twenties that my body fat was too low. At the time, I wore that like a badge of honor. Looking back now, it seems a little ridiculous.

Life, of course, has a way of changing things. After four pregnancies, the number on the scale became harder to control. Each time my weight crept up, I would return to running to try to bring the number back down. After each pregnancy it became harder.

Even when I added strength training, it wasn’t about building strength. It was about burning more calories. Everything revolved around pleasing the number on the scale. If I had to do jumping jacks in between every exercise to burn more calories, I did it. I never considered if I was getting stronger. To be honest, it didn’t matter.

Then something unexpected happened.

After a fall from my horse injured my ankle—and my pride—I wasn’t able to run the way I used to. Instead, I started strength training from a different place. I wasn’t training to burn calories. I was training to be strong. If I couldn’t run, I still needed to be able to move well.

I wanted to lift things. Move things. Feel capable in my body.

And then something strange started happening. People began telling me I looked like I had lost weight.

But when I stepped on the scale, the number hadn’t gone down. In fact, it had gone up.

I remember thinking, “That’s odd… my scale says this, but my old jeans fit again.”

Slowly, it dawned on me.

Maybe the scale wasn’t telling the whole story.

For years I believed the scale told the truth about my health. What I eventually realized is that it was only telling me how much gravity was pulling on my body that morning. It couldn’t measure strength. It couldn’t measure muscle. It couldn’t measure how capable my body had become.

As a nurse practitioner, I do still weigh patients in my clinical practice. Weight trends can matter in certain situations, and sometimes it helps guide medical decisions. It can impact your health, and my job is to make you healthier.

But that number was never meant to determine whether someone should have a good day.

It doesn’t measure resilience.

It doesn’t measure energy.

It doesn’t measure confidence or strength.

What frustrates me most is realizing that the same narrative I grew up with is still alive and well. I see it in my adolescent patients. I see it in the media my children are exposed to.

Boys are often encouraged to become stronger and more capable. A higher number on the scale is even to be celebrated if it means they are building muscle.

Girls often hear a different message. Smaller is better. I work daily to change that narrative. I want my daughters and all girls to know that stronger is better.

I try to remind them of something I wish I had understood earlier: our bodies are meant to be strong, healthy, and capable. Strength is something we build, not something we shrink ourselves into.

I remember when that little bathroom scale could determine what kind of day I was going to have. The number could jump up five pounds overnight from hormones or water retention, even if I had done everything “right” the day before.

Now I see it differently.

If I’m going to focus on a number, I’d rather focus on the amount of weight I can lift.

The number on my deadlift. The number on my squat. The number on my bench press.

Those numbers tell a much more meaningful story. They represent effort, consistency, and progress that actually reflect the work being done.

And maybe the day we stop letting the scale decide our worth is the day we finally start appreciating what our bodies are truly capable of. I think it’s time.

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About Shannon McDonald

Shannon McDonald is a Nurse Practitioner and holistic nutrition coach who helps midlife women restore energy and build strength through her "Strong + Steady" methodology. With over 20 years of nursing experience, she guides women to work with their bodies through protein optimization and progressive strength training rather than restrictive dieting. Shannon integrates clinical expertise with faith-based wellness principles from her Nebraska homestead, where she trades scrubs for muck boots between working and client sessions. Visit her at navigatingtowellness.com.

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From People-Pleasing to Self-Trust: How to Come Back to Yourself

“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” ~Carl Jung

Where did I want to go out to eat?

The question was straightforward, and the answer should have been easy. But as my mind flipped through the options, my thoughts weren’t focused on what I wanted. Instead, I was preoccupied with making the right choice, the one least likely to cause tension.

Yes, my partner had asked where I wanted to go. But over time, I learned that answering honestly often came with consequences. My choice might be questioned, dismissed, or turned into a debate. If I tried to stand my ground, I spent the rest of the evening on edge—hyper-aware of the service, the food, the noise, and even the temperature—waiting for something to go wrong.

More often than not, I avoided deciding altogether. Ironically, my indecision led to being told I was boring or had no opinion at all.

I hadn’t always been this way. Up to my early twenties, I was known as feisty and opinionated. I knew what I wanted and went after it with quiet determination. In fact, it was this confidence and strength that initially drew my partner to me when we met during freshman orientation in college and, not long into our marriage, became a source of tension.

Over time, frequent arguments, distorted facts, and the constant questioning of my judgment chipped away at my confidence. I became anxious and second-guessed myself constantly.

Keeping the peace in our household became my primary focus, and I went to great lengths to ensure that my partner’s needs were met.

With my awareness focused outward, I slowly lost touch with my inner guidance. My survival instincts kicked into high gear, and I became the quintessential people-pleaser.

This way of being spilled into my professional life. I believed everyone was smarter, more capable, and better skilled than I was. Whether setting a strategy or executing a project, I overthought every action, wavered on each decision, and deferred to the person with the most authority.

In my personal life, my relationships became one-sided. Convinced I was rigid, quiet, and generally uninteresting, I slipped into the role of the easy, low-maintenance friend. I believed that if I expressed disagreement or had strong preferences, the relationship would fall apart.

Eventually, I extracted myself from my partner and moved back to my hometown. It was through reuniting with old friends that I clearly saw the person I had become. Having known me before my descent into survival mode, they were surprised by what they saw—my hesitation, my lack of opinions, the way I seemed to shrink from simple preferences.

Through their eyes, I remembered the person I used to be. And I recognized how far I had drifted from myself. Though painful, that realization gave me hope. If I had learned to constantly ask myself, “What will keep the peace?” perhaps I could learn to ask myself a different question instead: “What feels true for me right now?”

If you are feeling a dawning realization that the person you are now feels smaller than the person you once were, know this is not because you’re weak. It is because somewhere along the way, you learned that shrinking felt safer than standing firm. And if you are wondering what life could be like if you began to notice your preferences and voiced your opinion, read on.

Rebuilding Self-Trust

Use your body as a barometer. 

Asking yourself, “What feels true for me right now?” is a powerful question. However, I found myself so out of touch with my wants, needs, and desires that the answer often dissolved into a whirlpool of options and consequences.

In an effort to move beyond my confused mind, I turned my attention to my body. A tightness in my chest often meant I was about to agree to something that didn’t feel right. A wave of nausea signaled an emotional response that wasn’t aligned with my true feelings.

By practicing tuning into your body, you can begin to pause long enough to notice these physical signals. And they will become a quiet guide, helping you interrupt the automatic urge to override yourself.

Start with low-stakes decisions. 

With time and practice, I began using the physical sensations as guides to what I wanted. I was surprised to discover that I still had desires, needs, and opinions. They hadn’t disappeared—they had simply been buried.

But getting re-acquainted with myself was one thing. Using my voice to express what I discovered was another. Speaking up didn’t feel natural. It didn’t feel safe.

So I started slowly. I identified the people in my life who would be least likely to push back or dismiss my preferences. I also made sure I didn’t overwhelm my budding decision-making ability by burdening it with anything too heavy.

I chose a friend I’d known for twenty-five years as a starting point. Reaching out with a dinner invitation, I included the phrase “I’m really in the mood for Italian.” As my truth rolled off my tongue, I had to resist adding the caveat “but whatever you prefer.“

During dinner I paid close attention to my body and the impulses that surfaced, including the urge to ensure that the evening went smoothly, as if the efficiency of the service, the quality of the food, and even my friend’s experience rested on my shoulders.

As you begin this process, you may notice how strong your habitual hypervigilance can be. The weight of trying not to make the “wrong” decision can feel paralyzing, and the impulse to pull back may be almost overwhelming. But with each small, honest choice, that intensity begins to soften. What once felt dangerous starts to feel possible.

Practice disappointing others without abandoning yourself.

As I expanded into my rediscovered self-awareness, inevitably conflict arose and cooperation was required. I was pleased to discover that I could compromise what I wanted to allow someone else’s needs to be met without losing myself. In fact, the act of cooperation felt light and giving, which created a stark contrast to the heavy feeling that accompanied decisions that went against my best interests.

But even with a cooperative mindset, there were times when asserting my needs disappointed others.

I had attended a close friend’s destination wedding. The weekend was full of fun and laughter, and I enjoyed myself immensely. However, by the time Sunday evening rolled around, I was socially exhausted.

The plan was to go to dinner, but the idea of sitting in a noisy restaurant and holding conversations was mentally and emotionally taxing for me. I shared my truth with my friend, who immediately supported my request not to go to dinner.

In an emboldened state, I communicated my needs to the group that had gathered, preparing to leave. Most greeted the news with neutral emotion, but one person did not like my position and attempted to bully me into changing my mind. I did my best to express myself, but she remained on the attack, fixed in a place of personal offense.

This moment was difficult but presented an opportunity for me to dive further into self-knowing and trust. In that moment, I realized something important: someone else’s disappointment does not mean I have done something wrong. The discomfort I felt wasn’t a sign that I should abandon myself. It was simply the unfamiliar sensation of choosing myself.

Rebuilding self-trust isn’t about bold declarations or grand reinventions. It’s about quiet check-ins, small pauses, deliberate decisions, and allowing yourself to move through others’ disappointments and remaining in your place of truth. Self-trust is rebuilt in ordinary moments and seemingly inconsequential decisions.

If you feel out of touch with your wants and desires, know that this part of you is not gone. It is waiting for you to tune back in. Each time you do, you return a little closer to yourself. And that is how you move from responding from a place of fear to a place of self-trust.

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About Lynn Crocker

Lynn Crocker is passionate about helping people shift their inner dialogue and take charge of their thoughts to create a more purposeful, joyful, and fulfilling life—one thought at a time. If you’d like support carrying this mindset forward or guidance in cultivating steadier, more empowering inner dialogue, she invites you to schedule a free discovery call to see if mindset coaching is right for you. Learn more at lynncrockercoaching.com.

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Phone Down, Eyes Up: How to Really See the People We Love

“The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Judy was three the first time I missed it. She had spent a solid ten minutes stacking every couch cushion on our living room floor in Vancouver, building what she clearly considered an Olympic-grade landing pad. She climbed up on the couch, stretched her arms out wide, and gave me that look. You know the one. The look kids give you right before they do something that makes your heart jump into your throat.

“Baba, watch!” she yelled.

My phone was in my hand. It was always in my hand. I was reading a Slack message or an email or maybe nothing at all, just the reflex of pulling down to refresh. I have no memory of what it was. Zero. Whatever it was dissolved completely about four minutes after I read it, because that’s what 90% of notifications actually are: things that feel urgent and then vanish.

“One sec, habibti,” I told her. My thumb kept scrolling.

She jumped. I heard cushions scatter across the hardwood floor. When I looked up, she was already gone, walking toward her room with a stuffed elephant dragging behind her by one ear.

I went right back to my phone.

That moment didn’t register as anything at the time. Kids jump off furniture, parents check their phones, nobody files it under “things I’ll regret.” But that was the beginning of a pattern I wouldn’t recognize for years, because the pattern was made of absence, and absences are nearly impossible to see while they’re forming.

Over the next two years, the requests kept coming. “Baba, look at this.” “Baba, come see.” “Baba, watch me.” Each one a little quieter than the last. Each one met by a version of me that was technically in the room but had his mind parked somewhere inside a 6.1-inch screen.

I ran engineering teams for a living. My entire professional identity was built around responsiveness, around keeping fourteen threads going simultaneously, around never letting a message sit unread for more than a few minutes. I was genuinely proud of how fast I could context switch. I thought it was a superpower. I carried that mentality through our front door every evening and never once questioned whether it belonged there.

What I didn’t know, what took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out, was that Judy had been keeping score.

There was this Saturday. She was about five. She’d set herself up at the kitchen table with markers and a big sheet of paper, and she was drawing while narrating the entire scene to me in that wild way kids narrate things. The purple dog lived on a rainbow, and his best friend was a cloud named Martin, and they were both invited to a birthday party on the moon, but the purple dog was nervous because he’d never been to space.

I was saying “wow” and “oh cool” and “then what happened” at what I thought were convincing intervals. My phone was under the table. I was reading a thread about a deployment that had gone sideways.

She stopped talking.

I didn’t register the silence immediately. Fifteen seconds went by, maybe twenty, before I noticed and looked up. She was watching me. Her face was completely neutral. Not upset, not hurt in any obvious way. Just watching me the way you watch someone when you’ve confirmed something you already suspected.

That’s the face I think about. That neutral, knowing face. Five years old and she had already done the math.

Children are paying attention even when, and especially when, you think they aren’t. They don’t need you to announce that your phone is more interesting than they are. They pick it up from the half-second pause before you respond. From the direction your eyes keep drifting. From the way you say “tell me more” while your thumb is still moving.

Sarah, my wife, was the one who made me see it.

Months later, Judy in bed, both of us sitting at the kitchen counter with our laptops open. Sarah said, “She doesn’t ask you to watch anymore.”

Four seconds of silence.

“Have you noticed that?”

I had not.

I sat with that for a while after she said it. I tried to trace it back. When was the last time Judy had grabbed my shirt and said, “Baba, watch”? I could not find the moment. It hadn’t ended. It had evaporated. The way a sound fades out and at some point it’s just gone and you can’t say exactly when it crossed the line from barely there to not there at all.

What I understood, sitting at that counter with my laptop still open and glowing in front of me, was that Judy hadn’t stopped wanting me to watch. She had stopped thinking I would.

That is a different thing entirely, and it is the worst thing I have ever felt.

I did not sleep well that night. I stared at the ceiling and ran through a kind of inventory that I did not enjoy. How many times per day did I pick up my phone? I started counting the next morning and lost track before lunch. I reached for it while the toothbrush was still in my mouth. While the kettle was heating. While walking from the car to the front door, a distance of maybe forty feet, because apparently forty feet of not looking at a screen was too many.

At red lights. During meals. In bed next to Sarah while she told me about her day. That one hit especially hard when I actually forced myself to see it.

I wasn’t hooked on any particular app. It was the checking itself. The constant pull toward somewhere else, someone else’s conversation, someone else’s emergency, someone else’s opinion about something I would forget within the hour.

My phone had turned into a door I walked through a hundred times a day, and every single time I walked through it, I left the person in front of me standing in an empty room.

What changed was not willpower. What changed first was that I let myself feel how much I had already lost.

I thought about all those mornings with Judy eating Cheerios at the counter and telling me about a dream she had and me staring at my phone. All those evenings on the couch where I was physically next to my daughter and mentally sorting through my email. Years of that. Actual years. You cannot retrieve those mornings. They happened once, and I was elsewhere for most of them, and that is permanent.

That’s the part about distraction that nobody warns you about clearly enough. It doesn’t just consume your time. It takes moments that existed once and will never exist again, and you don’t even realize they’ve been taken until much later, when the only thing left is the knowledge that they happened and you weren’t there for them.

Sarah and I had a series of long conversations about what we actually wanted our home to feel like. Not about screen time. We had tried screen time rules before. We’d downloaded tracking apps, set daily limits, made agreements that fell apart within a week because the structure was always about restriction, and restriction gets exhausting. This time we talked about what we were making room for. That was a different question and it led to different answers.

We started with small moves. Phones went into the kitchen drawer during dinner. Then during the hour before bedtime. Then for the first hour on Saturday mornings. We didn’t tell Judy we were cutting back on screens. We told her we were trying to be more here.

She noticed within days. Obviously.

Two weeks in, maybe three, she walked into the living room carrying a book. I was on the couch, no phone, just sitting there, which I realize makes me sound like some kind of relic from 2004, but that’s what it felt like, genuinely disorienting to just sit. She climbed up next to me,  dropped the book in my lap, and started reading out loud.

She didn’t ask if I was paying attention. She could see that I was.

That was the start. Not of a program or a system, but of something more like a set of family habits that we built together. We started taking morning walks and leaving our phones at home. At dinner we’d go around the table: “What was the best part of your day?” We put a list up on the fridge, one column for each of us, with whatever habits we were each working on. Judy held us to ours as much as we held her to hers.

And somewhere in there the question I was asking myself shifted. It went from “How do I spend less time on my phone?” to “What do I want to be present for?” Those questions sound similar, but they are not. The first one is about avoiding something. The second one is about choosing something. The second one actually worked.

Judy is twelve now. She is sharp and funny, and she has started learning to code, which makes me proud and also slightly terrified about what she’ll be able to do in five years. She doesn’t say “Baba, watch” the way she used to.

But she does something I like better.

She sits down next to me and shows me whatever she’s working on. A drawing. A program that won’t run because of a missing bracket. A video she thinks is the funniest thing ever created. And when she looks over to see my reaction, I’m looking back at her.

Not every time. I want to be honest about that. I have not transformed into some perfectly present person. My hand still goes to my pocket. I still feel the pull when I’m bored or stressed or standing in a line with nothing to do.

But I notice it now. I notice it and I choose. Sometimes I choose wrong. But the noticing is the thing. That’s what changed.

If you recognize any of this, if you are reading this with a tight feeling in your chest, I want to say one thing to you. You are not too late. I know it feels that way. I know the guilt is heavy because I carried it for years and it is heavy.

But the people we love give us more chances than we probably deserve. Kids especially. They will let you back in if you show up.

You do not have to rearrange your entire life before bed tonight. You just have to put your phone down the next time someone you love is talking to you, and look at them. Really look. Let whatever is buzzing in your pocket stay unread for sixty seconds.

Sixty seconds. Start there.

The moments you’re scared you already missed? New ones are forming right now. They’re in the next room, in the next conversation, in the next time someone you love glances over at you hoping you’ll already be looking back.

Be looking back.

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About Sabry Ali

Sabry Ali is a dad and husband in Vancouver, Canada. After years in engineering leadership at Life360, Reddit, Microsoft, and Amazon, nearly missing his daughter's childhood inspired him and his wife, Sarah, to co-found Habi (https://habi.app), a habit tracker and screen time app for families. He writes about presence, digital habits, and building meaningful routines at habi.app/insights (https://habi.app/insights/).

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What My Body Taught Me: 13 Surgeries, One Coma, Countless Powerful Lessons

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” ~Khalil Gibran

I was born with spina bifida. When I was ten years old, doctors told me I might not walk again after a surgery that would change my life.

I don’t remember every word they said, but I remember the feeling, the air shifting in the room, the adults speaking carefully, the quiet that followed.

Paralysis was a possibility.

By that point, my body already knew hospital ceilings well. I had been through multiple surgeries before I fully understood what surgery meant. By adulthood, that number would grow to thirteen.

I was born with VACTERL syndrome. I had a surgery to remove a kidney and another to correct my bladder. I also underwent open heart surgery and multiple surgeries on my bowels, including receiving a colostomy bag and having it repaired.

But at ten years old, I only knew one thing: my body felt uncertain.

Four days later, I stood up. I was in the hospital. Alone in a cold room. I couldn’t feel anything but pain. I pressed the pain button and sat up. I manually swung my legs to the side of the bed and pushed off the bed with my arms.

Not because I felt strong. Not because I wasn’t afraid. But because something inside me refused to accept that prediction as final.

My legs trembled. My balance wavered. But I stood. I didn’t feel anything, and the next thing I knew, I hit the floor. This happened three days in a row.

On the third day, the nurse walked in on me as I stood, and she said, “I’m calling physical therapy. You are going to walk again.” As she picked me up off the floor, I stared at a wheelchair that was no longer a dark place.

And that was the beginning of my relationship with resilience.

Basketball became more than a sport. It became my conversation with my body. Every dribble felt like proof. Every sprint felt like defiance. The court didn’t care about medical charts; it only responded to effort.

Through repetition and discipline, I built strength where fear had lived. I went on to play in high school and later in college, not because my body was untouched by struggle, but because it adapted.

Then life tested me again.

As a young adult, after twelve surgeries, scar tissue led to another. Due to complications and losing six pints of blood, I fell into a coma.

When I woke up, walking was no longer automatic. Muscles that once responded quickly felt distant. I had to relearn balance and rebuild my strength.

Again.

There’s something humbling about teaching your body how to move twice in one lifetime.

It strips away ego and teaches patience.

I had moments of frustration. Moments of anger. Moments when I wished I’d had an easier path. I compared myself to people whose medical history didn’t follow them into every room.

But something shifted in me during recovery.

I gave up. I was tired. I was over the hospital rooms and medications. A friend encouraged me to eat healthier, and I discovered herbalism, along with holistic modalities, yoga, rebounding, and chiropractic care.

I stopped asking, “Why is my body like this?” And I started asking, “What is my body teaching me?”

It taught me that strength is not loud. It’s consistent.

It’s showing up to physical therapy when progress is slow.

It’s repeating small movements until they feel natural again.

It’s trusting your body even when it feels unfamiliar.

It taught me that healing is rarely dramatic. It’s repetitive. It’s quiet. It’s a thousand small decisions to keep trying.

Thirteen surgeries could have become my identity.

Instead, they became my training.

I learned that the body is not fragile simply because it has scars. Scars are evidence of repair. They are proof that something was damaged and healed.

My body has been opened, stitched, sedated, and measured more times than I can count. It has been judged and doubted.

And yet, it continues to move.

I no longer resent its limitations. I respect its endurance.

It has survived stillness.

It has survived unconsciousness.

It has survived uncertainty.

And it keeps choosing life.

I used to believe resilience meant pushing through pain at all costs. Now I understand it means listening. It means working with your body instead of fighting against it.

My body has taught me discipline. It has taught me faith. It has taught me that rebuilding is possible, even when you have to start over.

Twice.

If you are in a season where your body feels like a burden instead of a blessing, I hope you give it patience. I hope you look at your scars, physical or invisible, and see evidence of survival, not weakness.

Sometimes the miracle is not avoiding hardship.

Sometimes the miracle is adapting.

And sometimes, the quietest strength is simply standing again.

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About Jewel Jones

Jewel Jones is an herbalist, educator, and founder of Alkaline Academy, dedicated to helping others heal through plant-based nutrition and holistic practices. Drawing from personal experience overcoming serious health challenges, she teaches individuals how to reconnect with their bodies and reclaim their wellness naturally. Her work blends traditional herbal wisdom, spiritual insight, and practical lifestyle changes to empower communities, especially those underserved, to take their health into their own hands.

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What’s Really Happening When Your Thoughts Spiral at Night

“The anxiety is not the enemy. It is the messenger. The mistake is killing the messenger instead of reading the letter.” ~Unknown

It’s 3 a.m. I’m lying in the dark, planning my own funeral.

Not because anything is wrong. My family is safe. There is no emergency. But my brain has decided, with complete confidence, that the headache I had this afternoon is something fatal. I am already thinking about who will come. Who will cry. Who will move on faster than I’d like.

An hour earlier, the same brain decided my career was ending. I have a presentation tomorrow—and in my mind, I was already standing there, forgetting every word, watching my boss slowly shake his head. Before that, a friend hadn’t replied to a message I sent at noon. By 2 a.m., the friendship was over. She hated me. Everyone hated me. I had done something unforgivable that I couldn’t even remember doing.

This is what night does. It takes small things and turns them into certainties. It takes a headache and makes it a tumor. It takes silence and makes it rejection. It manufactures catastrophe from almost nothing, with extraordinary creativity and zero mercy.

For years, I thought something was wrong with me.

I was wrong about that.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about 3 a.m. anxiety: your brain is not malfunctioning. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do. And once I understood that—really understood it—everything changed.

Think about where we come from. For most of human history, darkness was genuinely dangerous. Predators moved at night. Enemies came in the dark. The people who relaxed after sunset, who trusted the quiet, who let their guard down—they didn’t survive long enough to become our ancestors. The ones who made it were the ones who stayed alert. Who scanned for threats. Who imagined the worst and prepared for it.

Those people had children. Those children had children. Eventually, one of them was me, lying in a safe room in a city, with locks on the doors and no predators within a thousand miles—and a brain still running the same ancient software, searching for danger because danger is its entire purpose.

The lions are gone. The brain doesn’t know that.

So it finds new lions. An unanswered message. A headache. A presentation. It takes whatever is available and turns it into a threat worth staying awake for. Not because it wants to torture you. Because it loves you, in the only way it knows how—which is to protect you from every possible thing that could go wrong.

This was the first thing I had to learn: the anxiety at 3 a.m. is not an attack. It is, in its broken, ancient, unhelpful way, an act of care.

The second thing I had to learn was harder.

A real disaster and an imaginary one feel completely identical at 3 a.m.

Heart racing. Hands cold. Stomach tight. All of it—every physical symptom—caused by thoughts. Just thoughts. Pictures inside the mind that exist nowhere else. And yet the body responds as if the threat is standing in the room.

If you vividly imagine biting into a lemon right now, your mouth produces saliva. The body cannot distinguish between what is real and what is intensely imagined. This is not a flaw. It is the feature—the brain preparing the body for what the mind believes is coming.

And so, at 3 a.m., I was spending real adrenaline, real cortisol, real physiological resources on events that would never happen. By morning, I was exhausted before the day began. Not from what had occurred, but from what I had imagined.

The things I feared almost never arrived. And the real difficulties—the ones that did come, the ones that actually changed my life—almost never came from the direction I was watching. I prepared for the wrong disasters. The real ones arrived quietly, from places I had never thought to guard.

I tried many things to make it stop. Breathing exercises. Counting. Meditation apps with calm voices telling me to relax. Sometimes they worked. Mostly they didn’t. Because I was approaching the anxiety as an enemy to defeat, and you cannot defeat something by fighting harder against it. The resistance itself becomes exhausting.

What finally helped was something much simpler, and much stranger. I stopped trying to stop it.

Not in defeat. Not in resignation. But in recognition. The thoughts would come—they always came—and instead of arguing with them, instead of trying to replace them with better thoughts, I started just watching them. Letting them run. Treating them the way you might treat a very worried friend who is convinced something terrible is about to happen: with patience, without agreement.

The thought would say: this headache is something fatal.

And instead of fighting it, I would think, “Yes, I hear you. That’s a frightening thought. Let’s see if it’s still true in the morning.”

The thought would say, “Your friend hates you.”

And I would think, “That’s possible. We’ll find out. Right now, there is nothing to do about it.”

This created something I can only describe as a small gap—a sliver of space between me and the story my brain was telling. I was no longer inside the disaster movie. I was watching it from somewhere just slightly outside. The disasters still played. But they lost some of their authority over me.

There is one more thing. A small truth that I try to remember in the dark. Right now, this exact moment, nothing is wrong.

Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not the abstract futures my brain is so convinced are ruined. Right now. This moment. There is a dark room. A quiet house. A body that is warm and safe. And that is, actually, all that is real.

The future is imagination. The past is memory. Only now is real. And now—almost always, if you look at it directly and honestly—is fine.

This doesn’t empty the mind. Nothing empties the mind. But it creates that gap again. Enough room to breathe. Enough distance to wait.

Because morning always comes. This is the one thing you can trust completely about 3 a.m. It always, without exception, ends.

The tumor becomes a headache. The ruined friendship becomes a friend who was busy. The career collapse becomes just another Wednesday. And you look back at what felt so certain in the dark, and you understand—not with shame, but with something closer to compassion—that your brain was trying. Working hard. Doing its ancient job in a world that no longer needs it done that way.

It doesn’t know the lions are gone.

It just knows it loves you.

The next time you are awake at 3 a.m., convinced of some disaster that feels absolutely real and absolutely certain, try not to fight it. Try, just for a moment, to watch it instead. Notice what the brain is doing. Notice that you are still here, in a body that is safe, in a room that is quiet.

Thank the worried part of you, even briefly, for trying so hard.

Then wait for morning.

It is already on its way.

And you—anxious, exhausted, wide awake at 3 a.m.—you are not broken.

You are just human. Doing the most human thing there is.

Waiting for the light.

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About Selim Hayder

Selim Hayder writes essays on memory, grief, identity, and the unspoken parts of being human — anxiety, silence, time, loss, and what it means to exist in the gap between who we are and who we show the world. No advice. No answers. Just honest writing that explores what it feels like to be alive. Read more at haydervoice.com.

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5 Quotes for Hard Times (and a Free Ebook)

Sometimes everything feels like too much, and it’s hard to use all the valuable lessons you’ve learned when life requires you to use them all at once. It’s also easy to feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of what you’re facing and alone with all your struggles.

I’ve felt this way on and off for the past year and a half, as I’ve been dealing with significant stressors in nearly every area of my life. Since I know many of you are in a similar place, I’m offering my Guide to Overcoming Hard Times for free, along with 18 other digital gifts, to both new and existing email subscribers.

Whatever you’re going through right now, I hope these quotes from the eBook resonate with you, and that the free resources offer some comfort, perspective, and relief. You can sign up and access everything here.

Get all 19 free gifts by joining the Tiny Buddha list here.

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About Lori Deschene

Lori Deschene is the founder of Tiny Buddha. She started the site after struggling with depression, bulimia, c-PTSD, and toxic shame so she could recycle her former pain into something useful and inspire others to do the same. You can find her books, including Tiny Buddha’s Gratitude Journal and Tiny Buddha’s Worry Journal, here and learn more about her eCourse, Recreate Your Life Story, if you’re ready to transform your life and become the person you want to be.

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