Pressing Pause
Episode #88
Finding calm and joy amidst anxiety with Frances Trussell
Gabrielle Treanor
03/11/2021
Mindfulness teacher and author Frances Trussell works with people experiencing anxiety and depression to help them re-engage with the present and find more calm and joy by doing so.
In this episode we discuss:
- The biggest obstruction to feeling calm and joy when you’re anxious
- The surprising truth about how quickly you can access calm
- How toxic positivity gets in the way
- Reframing mindfulness for those who eyeroll at the mention of it
- A quick and effective action to calm anxiety
Resources:
- Get your free goodies in the free resource library here
- This conversation was first aired on my new radio show – The Calm & Joy show on Yowah Radio – on every Sunday 4-6pm UK time, find out more here
- You can connect with Frances Trussell on Instagram here and on her website here
- If you enjoy the podcast I’d love you to leave a review on iTunes so that others can find it too
- If you value what I share in the podcast, and elsewhere, you can buy me a virtual cuppa here
Pressing Pause Episode 88 Finding calm and joy amidst anxiety with Frances Trussell
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Welcome to Pressing Pause. I’m Gabrielle Treanor, a mindset and positive psychology coach and writer, exploring how we can create, find and feel more calm, ease and joy in our daily lives.
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Welcome to episode 88. Did you know that I have created a library of free resources for you, all designed to help you overcome your overwhelm and feel more calm, peace, ease and joy in your daily life? You can choose a guide to making your own mental health first aid kit, a set of guided meditations or a guide to overcoming overwhelm for introverts. Or you can download all three if you like! Go to gabrielletreanor.com/free to check out the free resource library and take your pick.
Today on the podcast my guest is mindfulness teacher and author Frances Trussell. Frances works with people experiencing anxiety and depression so I wanted to talk with her about how, even when you’re really struggling, you can still find calm and joy…
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[00:00:00] Gabrielle: Hi, Frances. Thank you so much for joining me today.
[00:00:03] Frances: Thank you. Thank you for having me on.
[00:00:06] Gabrielle: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
[00:00:09] Frances: So I’m Frances Trussell and I’ve been fortunate enough to train many, many hundreds of people in mindfulness. I’m also a therapist and an author of You Are Not Your Thoughts. And I do a lot of coaching also. So a lovely mixture of generally helping people find joy and re-engage with being present. And so my company is called Mindfully Happy, and that is my overall intention for people that I work with and also for myself, it’s a good reminder.
[00:00:47] Gabrielle: Fabulous, which makes you a perfect person for me to talk with. So I know that you help people with anxiety and depression in particular, don’t you. What kind of recurring themes do you find, come up in your work with the people that you work with that gets in the way of their calm and joy.
[00:01:08] Frances: Thinking. Overthinking is overarchingly a theme, whether it’s anxiety or depression. So with depression, we tend to be lost in thoughts about the past, a lot of the time. There tends to be lots of streams of rerunning things and regrets, and being stuck in old stories, old traumas, old versions of ourselves.
That really, when we look at that word depression, it’s a depression of pushing down and the weight of all of that heaviness of the old stuff can push us to that place. And then, again, with anxiety, a lot of the time it’s habitual worrying, rumination, overthinking, catastrophizing, usually about the future, the what ifs, what if this happens? What if that happens? That takes us into that hyper arousal state of anxiety. And the two things obviously feed into one another quite often they’re paired and it’s just these waves and waves of overthinking that takes us to that place far away from here, uh, in which, um, pain really exists for us.
[00:02:26] Gabrielle: So yeah, like you say, often anxiety, depression go together. People can experience both of them, which is a double whammy when it comes to keeping you from your calm and joy.
[00:02:37] Frances: Absolutely.
[00:02:38] Gabrielle: In that case, how do you see people who are experiencing anxiety and depression, how do you find them actually able to move towards feeding more calm and joy? Because if you’re in a really depressive state, if you’re feeling very, very, very anxious, that can feel very far away, can’t it? So how can people, I know this is a huge question but how can people start to move towards the calm and joy? How do you see people moving towards it?
[00:03:07] Frances: Actually the surprising thing is we can very, very swiftly move to that place. That place actually doesn’t go anywhere. The place of calm, and joy, and presence, it’s here. It’s always here. It’s only us that goes to the somewhere else, the somewhere else of that past thinking that future thinking, and actually it’s this training to come back into the present because right now, away from the heaviness of those thoughts, everything is pretty much usually okay. And coming into contact with this can be really revelationary. And so we can do this in a number of ways. The first thing really is to bring down this state of hyper arousal. So when we’re in this very, very anxious place, and particularly when we’re in this place of kind of panic thinking what happens, when we’re looking at the neuro science, what happens is the prefrontal cortex, it goes, we’ve gone into fight and flight, and basically we don’t need to solve a maths equation when we’re running away from a saber tooth tiger. So the new bit of the brain, the problem solving area, it’s not prioritised. All of the energy instead is diverted into those bits that we just need for immediate survival.
And as such, we are just not thinking clearly. And anyone who has experienced these extreme states where we’re just kind of regurgitating going back over the same old, same old in that worry state know what that is like. On one level, we know that this kind of thinking is incredibly unhelpful. And yet we don’t seem to be able to break ourselves away from that.
That’s because we’re in this state of hyper arousal. So first things first, whether it’s anxiety or depression, we need to bring down that arousal. And actually we have lots of therapeutic tools now and simply just the breath in which we can very, very quickly hack the system as it were. We have the ability to press our own reset button and bring down the nervous system so that we can bring that prefrontal cortex back online.
And as we do, suddenly we, we begin to see things more clearly. The mist clears and we can start to find a way forward. So that’s the first step bringing that hyper arousal down. The second step is looking at what is going on cognitively and engaging in ways that we can break those worry or rumination cycles.
And again, we have some really fantastic tools and techniques to actually do that pretty quickly, which is so fantastic. I wish that I’d known this stuff sooner. So for me personally, I came into this work because I suffered terribly with anxiety and depression myself for many, many years and tried lots of different things.
And didn’t really find the thing for me that did it. But when I found mindfulness and discovered that I wasn’t my thoughts and it was absolutely possible to step back and to see thoughts differently and engage with them differently and change my relationship to them. That changed everything to me. And that was over a decade ago. And since that time I’ve been working with people to do the same. So I kind of want to reassure any listeners that it is absolutely possible for each and every one of us it’s accessible for all of us to, to make that change.
[00:07:00] Gabrielle: Mmm. I love the fact that you say that the calm and joy is always there. It hasn’t gone away anywhere. It’s like that idea of the sky is always there. It’s just that clouds cover it up sometimes. The rain comes down and really covers it up, but actually it’s there all the time. It’s just it gets lost between other things, it gets covered up by stuff, we drift from it.
[00:07:23] Frances: Yes. You know, the sun is always shining behind those clouds and it’s quite incredible when we can tune into that. And when we have ways of checking in with ourselves and taking a weather check, oh my goodness, like today, might internally feel like a bit of a cloudy day. Okay. I know that the sun’s still there, how can I tune into a way of lifting that or finding a break in the cloud? And of course it’s not about this toxic positivity where we’re just kind of pretending that everything’s okay all the time. In the great rich tapestry of life we’re going to experience great joys and great pains. And that is what it is to be a human being, having this fabulously rich experience of humanness and that isn’t to be turned away from. It’s just knowing that that even though we might be in the depths of pain, joy is still there in the mix.
[00:08:22] Gabrielle: Yeah, and I love the fact that you reference toxic positivity, because that could be something that can really get in the way of us actually being able to care for ourselves because, we beat ourselves up with, well, I should be fine. And, I just need to look on the bright side and, you know, well, there’s all these good things in my life I’ve no right to be feeling this way. And that just makes it all so much harder and certainly keeps us away from our calm and joy, because we’re suddenly beating ourselves up about it.
[00:08:49] Frances: Absolutely. It shouldn’t be another stick with which to be ourselves for sure.
[00:08:54] Gabrielle: Yeah. So mindfulness is one of those things which has been talked about so much over recent years. There are some people who will hear the word mindfulness and instant eye roll happens. And oh, that again. As somebody who obviously knows an awful lot about mindfulness, your training, that you, you help so many people with it, is this something that you can kind of share with us that will perhaps maybe help people understand a bit better, maybe take away some of that eye rolling skepticism that maybe people have around it.
[00:09:25] Frances: Yeah, I hear you. And you, you know what, when I first went into the field of mindfulness, particularly here in the UK, it wasn’t so widely known, wasn’t so prevalent. And in the years subsequent, I lose count of the amount of times I would have even said the word mindfulness. I’m actually just about to, uh, in a fun way I hope, I’m playing with delivering my next course, which is a refresher course about reengaging with this spark of, of presence, I’m playing with dropping the word mindfulness altogether. So I’m challenging myself to, to share a whole course where we don’t even use the word mindfulness. Because again, it can become when something is so the zeitgeist, it just can become something that actually loses its meaning, loses its potency and power. But for me, I’ve always described mindfulness as having your mind full of what you’re doing, when you’re doing it. Rather than filled with the rest of the bull that is normally going on in there.
And so actually this kind of lightness of touch can be incredibly helpful. Really even the word mind, it can, can alter kind of how we’re viewing and translating the way that we’re, that we’re working with mindfulness practices. Really what we want to be doing is transcending the mind and entering this state of fullness.
And so really if we just dropped the mind a bit and we call it fullness, then that might be more helpful for people. So actually, when we, when we, when we think about fullness and think about the times that we would have experienced fullness, perhaps what comes to mind is some of those golden moments in life. Those moments where suddenly, we didn’t have our mind full of loads of the crap. We, we were actually not thinking we were just fully, fully present to our experience. For me, I had a, I had a moment where, when I got married and I walked out onto the aisle there’s that bit where everybody kind of turns around to look and suddenly I felt this incredible whoosh of being entirely present, entirely there.
And so, so engaged and not a thought in my head. And so for me, that is a standout golden moment. And. Subsequently, that’s kind of, that is the very heart of, of a mindful moment of being really, really engaged, really present, really there, not in the world of somewhere else. But the important thing is to have these golden moments, we don’t need to be getting married. We don’t need to be flinging ourselves out of an airplane or doing anything particularly extreme. We can just choose to, we can just train ourselves to, and really that is where mindfulness or presence training comes in because we’re training ourselves to be more and more tuned in to what’s real, what’s here, what’s happening now. As opposed to getting lost and jumping on those trains of thought and whizzing off into the past and the future. We’re getting off the trains of thought and we’re coming back to the place that life lives and the place where the juicy good golden stuff happens.
[00:12:59] Gabrielle: I’m just thinking, because you mentioned, coming back to the breath earlier, and I’m just wondering in the limited time we have, if there is one or two little exercises that you could share or just hints that you can give to help people to recognise those golden moments, be in that golden moment when it’s happening in a very ordinary day, in an ordinary moment of the day. If there’s anything that you can, you can share with us.
[00:13:23] Frances: Slowing down, simply slowing down. We can do pretty much everything and anything mindfully if we really engage with it. I had the pleasure recently of being on a retreat with my Zen master. I’ve studied with a Zen master for quite a long time now, probably nine years or something. And I’m sitting opposite him, we work in, in some, some time of silence and sitting opposite him just noticing the way that he took sips of water was just, it, it might sound a little silly, like the most simplest of things, but watching the way that he was just present and engaged with a single sip. And in a single moment. And just as you suggest in a single breath, we can come back into presence. We can come into kind of intimate contact with what is here right now.
And so with the breath and why we always talk about the breath and people again, might be eye rolling. Oh, God, back to the breath. With the breath we have this fantastic thing that is always happening, whether we’re paying attention to it or not, it is here, it is happening this breath, and we can’t breathe in the past. We can’t breathe in the future. We can only breathe in this moment. And this particular breath is totally unique. There will never be this particular breath again and an awareness of that. And, uh, and allowing yourself to just in a single moment, come into contact with the preciousness and the life that is flowing through that breath, because it is how we can, how we can tune into this exchange of life that is always going on. So, so simple and yet, so incredible. So whoever is listening right now and I’m going to do it right now too just really slowing down for split second, resting the eyes down and noticing the sensation of this particular breath, and then allowing yourself to bask in this particular breath.
And if you zoom in your attention around the nostrils, noticing how air is slightly cooler as it enters the nostrils and slightly warmer as it leaves again. And as simple as that, here we are. No story, If there was any judgment that’s okay. But notice it and drop it. And here we are just us. Just being alive and noticing how it feels to be alive. And allowing ourselves to bask in this feeling of aliveness, because one day our breath will be our most precious thing. And one day we will take one last breath, whether we’re aware of it or not. And just knowing that. And tuning into the preciousness of that can be so life affirming.
[00:16:51] Gabrielle: Mm, I love that. And I love the fact that what’s so gorgeous about tuning into our breath is that you don’t have to be doing anything special. You don’t have to be anywhere special. You can be in the car with the kids, screaming at each other in the back, and you can just tune into your breath for a moment.
You can be stood in a supermarket queue and you’re thinking I’ve got so many things to do and the person in front me is being really annoying, and you can still come back to your breath wherever you are. It’s always there, like you say, and it’s something that is so precious that we really take for granted because we just do it until we have a cough, we’re ill, something that then brings our attention to it. But just being able to come back to it whenever we want and we can have that moment, it’s really quite special.
[00:17:36] Frances: It’s incredibly special and precious, and yet we don’t notice it. And all of life actually is so incredibly precious and special. The sip of water, the taste of food, life is in the little stuff and yet, because we’re so used to the little stuff, we simply don’t pay attention. And that is the very heart of let’s drop the mindfulness, but it’s the very heart of fullness.
If we want to live a full life, we do so simply by paying attention to those tiny little moments and those glimmers of aliveness and the breath. It reminds us, we can often fall into this trap. And particularly when we’re in those states of anxiety and depression, we can feel like life is this thing that is happening to us or at us. It can be like, oh, fighting against the tide of the barrage of crap, which is flowing towards us or being on high alert, waiting for the next terrible thing to happen. And yet, as we really tune into that preciousness of the breath, we begin to recognize that actually life is this thing that is flowing through us rather than happening to us, just as the breath is flowing through us rather than happening to us.
And the more that we cultivate coming into contact with this, the more that we see it’s possible to begin to shape our lives, responsively to that flow of life that wants to run through. Actually life, I feel, wants to be lived, wants to be engaged with it, wants to be enjoyed and we can bask in it more and more as we tap into this flow of life, rather than this battling against the tide.
[00:19:34] Gabrielle: So much good stuff there to digest. I have one question left for you, and that is what are you going to do today to give yourself a moment of calm and joy?
[00:19:46] Frances: I am going to sip my water and breathe my breaths. And for me, my daily practice, I’ve already practiced today but I always want to fit in another practice. My daily practice is, it’s a joy, it’s a ritual. I remember when I first started a meditation practice and it felt kind of clunky and difficult and full of effort and like, oh God, have I done it yet.
And, and overthinking and. But actually, more and more as, as the years go by and not always, because sometimes there is a challenge still, too. It’s this thing of really having some time to come back into contact with the stuff that’s already here and tap into that wellspring of joy and presence that is in not just me, but in every single one of us and it’s our birthright.
[00:20:47] Gabrielle: Fabulous. So how can listeners find and connect with you, Frances?
[00:20:52] Frances: If you search mindfullyhappy.com uh, anything on mindfully happy, and you will find me, @_mindfullyhappy_ with little underscores either side is me on Instagram. Favouritism is real, I love my subscribers. And uh, if anyone wants to come and pop their email into the website, they get lots of lovely freebies and meditations and discounts on retreats and courses and all that good stuff.
So if they would like to come into contact with me there, or drop me a message, I am always open to hearing from people and where they are on their journey.
[00:21:29] Gabrielle: Wonderful. Thank you so much for talking with me today, Frances.
[00:21:32] Frances: Brilliant. Thank you so much.
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I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Frances, there was so much good stuff she shared. If you enjoy listening to Pressing Pause I’d really, really love it if you would leave a quick review on iTunes and share this podcast with anyone you think might find it useful too.
For the show notes and links mentioned in this episode 88 go to gabrielletreanor.com/podcast. And you can also find lots more to help you feel more calm and joy in your daily life at gabrielletreanor.com. Don’t forget there’s the free resource library I mentioned at the start of this episode at gabrielletreanor.com/free.
Thanks again for listening, until next time, lovely people.
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