Episode 170
3 Million Stressed Out Federal Employees - EP. 170
In this episode of Ditch the Suits, host Travis Maus sits down with Dr. Paul Gould, PhD, LICSW, a licensed clinical social worker and expert in anxiety and trauma, to unpack the mounting stress experienced by federal employees amid sudden funding cuts and workforce changes.
With nearly 35% of all U.S. jobs tied in some way to federal funding, these shifts are rippling across the economy—impacting individuals, families, and financial futures. Travis and Dr. Gould dive into the differences between stress, anxiety, and trauma, and explore the real emotional toll these changes are taking on people. They discuss why common reactions like “toughen up” may be more harmful than helpful, and how political polarization and media overload are intensifying people's sense of fear and uncertainty.
Most importantly, Dr. Gould offers practical, thoughtful advice on how to recognize and manage anxiety, maintain emotional well-being, and support others through challenging transitions. Whether you're directly affected or simply trying to make sense of the current climate, this episode delivers insights that are both grounding and empowering.
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About Your Host:
Travis Maus has been in financial services for over fifteen years. He is a Senior Wealth Manager and Chief Executive Officer at S.E.E.D. Planning Group. Travis also hosts the Unleashing Leadership Podcast, where he dissects some of his favorite books on leadership and how you can apply it to your business or life.
Transcript
Foreign.
Speaker B:Welcome to Ditch the Suits podcast, where we share insights nobody in the financial services industry wants you to know about.
Speaker B:We're here to help you get the most from your money in life.
Speaker B:So buckle up and welcome to Ditch the Suits.
Speaker C:All right, so there are 3 million or so federal workers or federal employees, and it seems like most of them are stressed out, according to USAFacts.org some website.
Speaker C:I haven't vetted the website, but this is their studies that they've put together.
Speaker C:About 3 million people make the federal government the nation's 15th largest workforce.
Speaker C:So not necessarily employer, but kind of workforce, think industry.
Speaker C:And this number is varied.
Speaker C:And I found this very interesting.
Speaker C: In: Speaker C:So there's been a fluctuation of federal workers kind of throughout history.
Speaker C:It's pretty common for a shrinkage of the federal workforce and an expansion.
Speaker C:If you search how many jobs are at least partially paid for by the federal government, Google will actually spit back at you.
Speaker C:This is one of those things where AI gets in the way, and it doesn't actually let you, like, look yourself, but Google will spit back.
Speaker C:Well, we have a study that found that 35% of all jobs are funded in some way by the government, which includes state and local governments and private contractors.
Speaker C:And this is kind of where this is really affecting people, because it doesn't necessarily matter if you're just a federal worker, you could be affected by federal funding cuts.
Speaker C:And kind of how that is kind of matriculating on through the economy is an interesting thing.
Speaker C:So I think there's a good chance that if 35% of all jobs in the United States are somehow affected by federal funding, that pretty much every single one of our clients and anybody listening to this podcast knows at least one person or maybe even has a family member that's going to be impacted by changes that are triggered by the Trump administration.
Speaker C:And one of the things I want to make sure that we don't do is I don't want to turn this into any kind of a political, like, who's right and who's wrong.
Speaker C:That's not our job on this podcast.
Speaker C:But what I do want to do is, aside from whether it's valid or fair or if there's a real need for change, I want to recognize the fact that change is a real thing and.
Speaker C:And it impacts real people.
Speaker C:And today's episode is focused on understanding what these folks and their families, because most people don't go through this alone, they're stressed, they're anxious, they're feeling a lot of pressure.
Speaker C:And so it's impacting their families.
Speaker C:What these folks are going through and what we can actually do to help them.
Speaker C:And I think that how this ties into finance is this is your career, this is your job field, this is your financial future.
Speaker C:Should you retire, should you stay working?
Speaker C:Is your identity being challenged because you're thinking, this is who I am, but I'm losing this job or something like that.
Speaker C:So our guest to help us unpack all this today is Paul Gould, Ph.D.
Speaker C:l I CSW.
Speaker C:So we'll have to ask him what that means.
Speaker C:Also the owner of Kindred Spirits Counseling and Wellness.
Speaker C:And before we get to anything, we're going to do our little intro.
Speaker C:For anybody who doesn't know, this is Ditch the Suits.
Speaker C:I'm Travis Moss, CEO of Seed Planning Group.
Speaker C:Seed Planning Group is a fee only wealth management firm.
Speaker C:And this show is all about how we share our experience and collective professional knowledge so that we can help our listeners and our clients get more out of their money in life.
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Speaker B:So visit patreon.com search ditch the suits or head to our show Notes where we got links to our channel.
Speaker C:So without further ado, Paul, it's great to have you with us today.
Speaker C:Thank you, Travis.
Speaker A:Glad to be here.
Speaker C:All right, so right off the bat, before we even get to like who you actually are, I gotta, I gotta understand, what is this credential?
Speaker C:That's after your name.
Speaker A:Oh.
Speaker A:So every state, you know, professional licensing is done at the state level in each state.
Speaker A:So where you'll see like people with md do you know different credentials?
Speaker A:So in Massachusetts, which is one of the states I'm licensed, and it is the licensed independent clinical social worker.
Speaker A:So that's the highest tier of credentialing in social work profession.
Speaker A:In New York state, I also have a credential that is simply lcsw.
Speaker A:It's the equivalent, but each state gets to use its own letters.
Speaker C:Okay.
Speaker C:And then you've got a PhD there.
Speaker C:Yep.
Speaker C:And your PhD is in what?
Speaker A:It's in human Development and Clinical Social work.
Speaker C:Okay.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:So needless to say, this is your profession, your Area of expertise.
Speaker A:Yep.
Speaker A:Love this.
Speaker A:I've been at this about 30 years now, so absolutely love what I do.
Speaker C:You're aging both of us because we.
Speaker A:Yeah, unfortunately.
Speaker C:Yeah, we didn't talk about that.
Speaker C:We cut that out.
Speaker A:That's right.
Speaker A:That's a whole other episode.
Speaker C:But we, we had been talking.
Speaker C:We have a lot of clients that are stressed out.
Speaker C:We've had people call in and they're stressed out about, hey, I'm a federal worker, I'm afraid of losing my job, or maybe I want to make some changes before funding changes where it's going and I just want out.
Speaker C:We've also had people who have family members who are calling.
Speaker C:They're very upset because they're concerned about my family member is losing their job or losing the funding behind their program or they're concerned about it.
Speaker C:Maybe nothing's happened yet, but they're concerned it's going to happen.
Speaker C:And that's being conflated with kind of the political extremism that we have with.
Speaker C:I don't care because I'm on the right or the right is ruining my life because I'm on the left.
Speaker C:And it's really at a really unhealthy level and I think it's causing a lot of trauma.
Speaker C:And one of the things I'm trying to figure out is how do we actually help people from a standpoint of we've got to get the temperature down and the first place that we can work on is ourselves and how we're kind of feeling the world around us.
Speaker C:So you and I had had some fascinating conversations, so I wanted to have you come and kind of share some of the stuff that you do on a day to day basis.
Speaker C:So I guess that kind of tees off kind of who are you and what do you do?
Speaker A:You know, Now I'm a full time therapist, so I do mental health therapy.
Speaker A:Full.
Speaker A:I work with people in Massachusetts and I work with people in New York and soon I'm adding Florida because I'm relocating personally.
Speaker A:And so I do generally individual counseling and people come to me for a wide variety of reasons.
Speaker A:But one of the key conditions or symptoms that people reach out to me for and that I, that I market myself around is anxiety.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:So I do a lot of work around trauma, anxiety, depression, and you know, with, with clients.
Speaker A:I spend some time early on debunking a lot of the pop psychology, pop culture definitions that float around out there, around, around trauma because we've really overused that word and watered down what, what trauma actually Is right.
Speaker A:You know, pop psychology, it's throws around a lot of these clinical terms and all of a sudden, like, everyone has a, has a condition.
Speaker A:And so I spent a lot of time with people, educating them about, like, you know, what's actually happening for you.
Speaker A:And you know, as you said earlier, we're in a, in a state very quickly here in the last hundred days.
Speaker A:Today, I think, is actually the 100th, 100th day of the, of the current administration.
Speaker A:And we, we've seen some very fast changes in people's employment or concerns about employment that are working for the federal government and even some that are.
Speaker A:They may not be employees of the federal government, but they have federal funding.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker A:And, you know, we've really seen that this very quick change and that's produced a lot of stress and anxiety.
Speaker A:And when I talk with people, one of the things I try to do is differentiate stress from anxiety.
Speaker A:And because we respond to those two things differently.
Speaker A:And I think this is a little bit of a conversation you and I had previously around, you know, I talked to people about stress is.
Speaker A:Stress is tangible.
Speaker A:We can point our finger and say, oh, this is what's causing the stress.
Speaker A:It's, there's containment around it.
Speaker A:It's everything from like, oh, I have this upcoming test, or I have this big project at work, or we know changes are coming.
Speaker A:Yeah, maybe people are getting married or divorced or they're having a child or whatever it is.
Speaker A:You know, they can lay their finger on it.
Speaker A:It's finite.
Speaker A:We know where it begins and it ends.
Speaker A:Some of them are time limited, some are not.
Speaker A:And so we can look and say, like, this is a stressor and let's talk about how to respond to that, to that stress and manage that.
Speaker A:Anxiety is something that creeps in and builds on top of stressors.
Speaker A:And this is where we get into, like, you hear the word trigger everywhere.
Speaker A:What is what has triggered someone?
Speaker A:And this is where we really start to talk about, like, what is a trigger and what is anxiety?
Speaker A:And anxiety is usually a magnification or some sort of distortion in and around what I like to call little nuggets of truth.
Speaker A:So as people share their narrative, what is happening to them?
Speaker A:You know, I always kind of listen for that little nugget of truth, like, yeah, this is, this is the stressor, or this is what's really going on, or this has happened to you, but it's being magnified, distorted, or we're getting into.
Speaker A:And because those magnifications or distortions can include what ifs you know, know, what if this happens?
Speaker A:What if this happens?
Speaker A:And I think that's part of what we're probably discuss as part of today is how do we respond to those what ifs, how do we manage that when we find ourselves getting into.
Speaker A:You were talking about people calling, worried about losing their job or a family member who might lose their job.
Speaker A:And how do we really start to manage that?
Speaker A:You know, how do we take care of ourselves?
Speaker A:How do we support our friends, family members that are legitimately going through the unknown?
Speaker C:You mentioned trauma in the beginning and kind of this idea, what I took from that is this idea that people can.
Speaker C:People are maybe using the vernacular too loosely and they're.
Speaker C:Which I think is part of this.
Speaker C:I think it's very easy to kind of self diagnose and feed your own stress or anxiety by saying, you know, I'm in pain or I'm in trauma because of this triggering event or something like that.
Speaker C:You want to, you want to.
Speaker C:I mean, I'm probably doing a disservice.
Speaker C:So do you want to talk a little bit more?
Speaker C:What you mean about how we're using the word trauma?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:You know, trauma itself is, you know, there are some criteria around it and we really look at trauma as an experience where our well being, our safety suddenly became out of, out of our own control.
Speaker C:Okay.
Speaker A:This is why we range from people with domestic violence histories, child abuse, other forms of sexual abuse, people in car accidents, you know, airplane accidents.
Speaker A:Those are all situations that, that they experienced very genuine threat to their well being.
Speaker A:Very well, you know, very likely their, their life.
Speaker A:And it was beyond their control, you know, and they didn't have the means to protect themselves, remove themselves.
Speaker A:You know, in the case of accidents, you know, those things happen.
Speaker A:We have that surreal feeling, somebody hit.
Speaker C:You, you're crossing the street and somebody runs a red light.
Speaker C:And.
Speaker A:Absolutely right.
Speaker C:That is something where you can't, you have no control over the fact that that happened.
Speaker C:Your right safety was taken away from you.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker C:Didn't matter what you did.
Speaker C:You could have gone to the left or the right, but it happened so fast.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker C:No choice, no control, no control.
Speaker A:So when we look at, you know, trauma from that lens, we're looking at times that the body goes.
Speaker A:The body and the brain go through a series of automatic responses and the brain can lay down a series of experiential memories that can be triggered by different situations.
Speaker A:Seeing a crosswalk, hearing a car, maybe the color of that car, a tire screech, Any of those can become triggers years Ago, I was walking with a friend, a colleague, and we were out on just a walk and a car backfired just somewhere down the street.
Speaker A:And he dropped into this, this safety position, got down.
Speaker A:And it was in that instant that I remembered he was a Vietnam vet.
Speaker A:And this was an automatic response, you know, that probably saved his life at various times or was intended to save his life to drop at the sound of that.
Speaker A:And, you know, it's a.
Speaker A:Just a quick example of, you know, the impact and the automatic nature of trauma.
Speaker A:You know, that, that, that was a very legitimate trigger for him, that sound.
Speaker A:Bam.
Speaker A:His body responded before he probably even, you know, could have said, like, oh, that was a car backfiring or, oh, that has, that sounds like a shot.
Speaker C:So trauma literally changes brain structure.
Speaker C:Your, your instinctual, your reactions to things like, like there's a, there's a material change to how you react to the environment around you due to trauma that in an uncontrollable way.
Speaker A:In an uncontrollable way.
Speaker A:So it's an automatic response.
Speaker A:It's a program safety response.
Speaker A:You know, it keeps us alive.
Speaker A:We'll be talking about anxiety today.
Speaker A:And you know, we, you hear people talk about the fight flight freeze response and anxiety, and I always tell people, like, that's a survival mechanism.
Speaker A:It keeps us safe.
Speaker A:You know, if I'm walking across the street and I look out the corner of my eye and there's something there, my body is going to ideally react.
Speaker A:I'm going to move very quickly and cortisol and adrenaline is going to pump through my body instantly.
Speaker A:And because my body is ready to move, because maybe there's a car coming, there's an owl coming at me, I don't know what it is, but my brain registered a threat or a potential threat to my safety.
Speaker C:Okay?
Speaker A:And that keeps us alive.
Speaker A:Anxiety is when that mechanism becomes distorted.
Speaker C:Okay, now this is helpful because I think that there's a category of people who are untrained, which is most of us, who, when we have somebody who's facing some of the issues that we're going to talk about, the response is, well, toughen up, buttercup.
Speaker C:You know, like, hey, you know, just, yeah, you don't like it, but you guys lost, so this is how it is.
Speaker C:Or, hey, everybody's like this, so we need to be like, you know, do something different.
Speaker C:Or the responses that we tend to have when we're trying to help somebody normally, especially when we're untrained, I think are not.
Speaker C:A lot of times they're not helpful.
Speaker C:They kind of provoke the wrong kind of escalation of whatever the issue is.
Speaker C:So just understanding that trauma, anxiety, stress are three different things I think is helping us to kind of frame up the fact that, you know, there's people dealing with things, but what category of things are they dealing with?
Speaker C:So we've got a good idea now what trauma is.
Speaker C:Can you tell us a little bit more how you would separate so stress and anxiety?
Speaker C:Anxiety, you said again was more.
Speaker C:So the distortion of what is happening around us and then stress.
Speaker C:Can we put a nice little box around stress?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:Help explain that.
Speaker A:I like to say that stress is tangible.
Speaker A:We can name it, we know where it's coming from, person, place, thing.
Speaker A:And you know, it has containment around it, meaning like there's a start and a finish.
Speaker A:Maybe it's time wise, you know, it can also include things like chronic health conditions and so forth.
Speaker A:But again, we can name it and say like, you know, know this is, you know, this is related to my cancer diagnosis or this is related to my bursitis or whatever it is that they're, they're experiencing.
Speaker A:They can say I'm pain, I'm uncomfortable.
Speaker A:We can put a finger on it and identify it.
Speaker C:Okay.
Speaker A:Anxiety, a lot of times we, you know, we may not be so quick to identify the source of it, you know, okay.
Speaker A:And people know that they're having feelings and you know, maybe they're becoming reactive.
Speaker A:And I think to your point, around, like, you know, people are very well intentioned and they're trying to engage someone in a conversation or maybe respond to something they're saying and not realizing that there's a, maybe a latent trigger or something that's not obvious or you know, in social media, tv, movies, trauma, anxiety, even depression are dramatized because it makes it interesting.
Speaker A:And you know, we're, we're trying to sell a show and we're trying to tell a story and engage viewers and a lot of times it's actually very subtle or it's not the obvious, it's not the obvious symptom that maybe we, we saw in, in a show.
Speaker A:I'm going to date us again.
Speaker A:If you go back to remember LA Law and there was a, I'm thinking.
Speaker C:About that just because that, that wouldn't have been the type of show that I would have watched.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker C:I, you know, I didn't see any kind of show like that until there was a time period there where I didn't have any cable at all.
Speaker C:And then one day and the first thing I saw was 24 with Kiefer Sutherland.
Speaker C:My mind was blown that that was TV at that point.
Speaker C:I went straight from, like, original Superman movies to.
Speaker C:To 24.
Speaker A:To 24.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:And everything in between I missed.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker C: s to somewhere in the: Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:So that's wild.
Speaker A:I did not know that about you.
Speaker A:LA Law was, you know, one of those law dramas, and they had a character one season who had Tourette's syndrome.
Speaker C:Okay.
Speaker A:But the way they portrayed it was he kept swearing, and that was his nervous tick, was he would just say these really offensive swear words.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And so.
Speaker A:But what happened in.
Speaker A:In, you know, pop culture was that's what people thought Tourette's syndrome was.
Speaker A:They're like, oh.
Speaker A:And people would walk around, they're like, oh, I want Tourette Syndrome.
Speaker A:I want to say what I was thinking.
Speaker A:And, you know, it was a dramatization of what a tick can look like.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:But that's how pop culture will oftentimes misinterpret a lot of the things that we're talking about here.
Speaker C:Gotcha.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Or why they misinterpret them.
Speaker C:So in the case of federal workers, and I got a feel for them, I mean, they're under a lot of pressure, and there's a lot of people, you know, who I would say are probably apolitical or there can be, you know, just because it's well known that a large percentage of government workers vote Democrat ticket.
Speaker C:And there's a kind of a political battle going on with that.
Speaker C:But at the same time, there's a lot of people that aren't that involved politically that just happen to work for the federal government or be funded somehow by the federal government or even on the other side of the aisle that are getting impacted.
Speaker C:And one of the things I see is.
Speaker C:Aha.
Speaker C:I see it.
Speaker C:He's hurting you, too.
Speaker C:Or there's this kind.
Speaker C:There's this incredible stress about the boogeyman coming and getting you, and that's manifesting into almost this.
Speaker C:Well, it's just a really extreme scenario with people across all spectrums.
Speaker C:And so how do.
Speaker C:How does trauma, stress, anxiety, you know, now that we kind of understand what these things are, how do those relate to what people are going through that are federal workers right now or somehow impacted by funding or the potential funding cuts or real funding cuts and kind of what they're going through?
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:I think legitimately, a lot of what we're really seeing is stress and anxiety.
Speaker C:Okay.
Speaker A:And where, you know, the unknown and the reason A lot of this is unknown.
Speaker A:And talking to federal workers and you know, kind of tracking what's, what's appearing in various media venues and is a lot of the stress is coming from the suddenness and that a lot of this has been out of process.
Speaker A:And you know, we know government likes its rules, it likes its processes.
Speaker C:That's.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker A:You know, so much of its function is to provide that.
Speaker A:And you know, of course, you know, when we're talking about employment, you know, in government, we're also talking.
Speaker A:A lot of, a number of positions are unionized, obviously not all of them.
Speaker A:There's, I think the federal workforce, there's something like 30, 36% of people who are exempt employees, so they're not represented in unions.
Speaker A:But, you know, there's process and a lot of what's happened in the last hundred days has really been out of the normal process.
Speaker C:Gotcha.
Speaker A:And you know, an email coming, you know, from a outside source saying, you know, there are changes coming, you should consider resigning.
Speaker A:This is the date you need to resign from or make a change.
Speaker A:And even some of the language that we've seen reported in the media, where they've gotten hold of some of those emails is the language is also somewhat inflammatory.
Speaker A:And you know, talking about like, you know, you should move on to something more productive, you know, right.
Speaker C:You're making an accusation now and.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker C:Self worth and there's all kinds of issues that you're bringing up there.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:You know, so there's, there's some, some emotional poking there.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:Okay.
Speaker A:And you know, folks that I've spoken with that are in those positions, they haven't so much personalized it necessarily.
Speaker A:Like, that's not what I'm hearing them talk about, but they're talking about the process and not even the suddenness, but just the, like, this is not the process to talk about retirement or, you know, talk about leading.
Speaker A:You know, this.
Speaker A:And they are going to the hierarchy.
Speaker A:They're going to like the HR representatives and so forth.
Speaker A:And, and what they're hearing across the board is like, we don't have answers.
Speaker A:They're like, we don't know.
Speaker A:Like, okay, is this an early retirement incentive?
Speaker A:This is how much time you have.
Speaker A: f the federal workforce as of: Speaker A:And I think that that number was somewhere around 37 to 40% of the federal workforce is age 55 and older.
Speaker A:So, you know, these are people who are starting to think about Retirement.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker A:You know, or should be thinking about retirement.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker A:And I think that that's also part of what's going on here is I'm hearing from people that are saying, like, I have a year left or I have three years left, or, you know, this is, this is what I was working toward and there's just a lot of uncertainty.
Speaker A:And this is.
Speaker A:So we're taking the stress of what's happening, you know, that there are, you know, emails coming out, you know, that there are, you know, discussion of incentives or, you know, okay, you can, you know, decide, decide to work from home to this date and then you'll leave in September.
Speaker A:So there are stressors, there are tangible things going on.
Speaker A:But now people are getting into that space of like, well, what does this mean for me?
Speaker A:And they're getting into some of the what ifs and the unknowns, and I think that's where we're seeing that intersection between stress and anxiety.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:And I.
Speaker C:That question was important to me because I.
Speaker C:My first reaction to this is this is very common to normal economic cycles in the private sector.
Speaker C:So it's very normal to be working at a tech company and come in next Monday and they just say, yeah, we're pulling back, the numbers aren't where they're supposed to be, or we're going in a different direction and they chop the jobs just like that.
Speaker C:And it's a very normal happenstance.
Speaker C:But what you're saying is two things.
Speaker C:I think.
Speaker C:Number one is it's not normal in that, if you wanted to call it an industry in that industry to have those, you know, aggressive job cuts coming out of the blue.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker C:Number one.
Speaker C:Number two, normally when you do that with a company, HR is there with a packet and says, you know, we put this together for you and the attorneys have already gone over it at all and everything.
Speaker C:And you know what you're signing and you know what you're getting, you know where you're going and you know, if you can get a job back there next, next, next year, if they're hiring again.
Speaker C:In this case, what you're saying is, is it doesn't appear that it seems like people are dealing with it.
Speaker C:It's coming out of the blue.
Speaker C:So you could say, okay, well, that's not, you know, that's a new thing for them to deal with.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker C:Whether it's fair or not, that's a different discussion.
Speaker C:But then also they're not being given enough answers to understand.
Speaker C:And because of the personalization of it, it's probably Amplifying the reaction.
Speaker C:Because the typical reaction I think you would get from that is, I've been disrespected.
Speaker C:You know, I, maybe I am working really hard and trying and I just happen to be in a group of people that maybe the department's not functioning correctly.
Speaker C:But maybe that's not me, maybe that's management, maybe it's somebody else.
Speaker C:And here you are going to put a mark on my resume that I was, you know, I mean, unproductive or ineffective.
Speaker C:And I'm being terminated in these things.
Speaker C:So.
Speaker C:And that's the hard part because it is real people.
Speaker C:These are, these are, and I always say this going the other way too.
Speaker C:Be careful when you broad brush paint people and say all those people on that side of the aisle are bad because these are your brothers and your sisters and your neighbors, your aunts and your uncles, your children, your friends, kids, you know, whatever.
Speaker C:There's a lot of them.
Speaker C:You know, if we're talking 35% of the potential jobs out there, you're talking a lot of people who are going through this to some extent, right?
Speaker C:The question is, is how are they dealing with it and are there healthy ways to deal with it or are there unhealthy ways to deal with it?
Speaker C:And, you know, kind of how do we get through that?
Speaker C:Because I gotta imagine, and I had talked to you ahead of time and I was using the term stress for this, but I think it's more than stress.
Speaker C:There's got to be impacts from prolonged anxiety.
Speaker C:And we already know there's impacts from stress.
Speaker C:Everybody knows that if you're at a high level of stress, higher potential for heart disease and all kinds of other things, right?
Speaker C:So like, there's no question that the stress has an impact on your body and mind, but what's the long term impacts of uncontrolled anxiety on the body and mind?
Speaker A:You know, anxiety is a really interesting condition because it can do a lot of different things in the body.
Speaker A:We have seen examples from, you know, it can compromise immune health, it can compromise, people start to have gastrointestinal issues, issues we generally associate like irritable bowel syndrome with anxiety.
Speaker A:We see disruptions to sleep, to eating patterns, we see changes in overall health condition and, you know, in my role.
Speaker A:And a lot of people may not realize this, like when they come to a, to a mental health therapist and say, like, oh, you know, this is what's going on.
Speaker A:We actually, before we can give an diagnosis, before we can give any mental health diagnosis, we're actually supposed to Rule out medical conditions.
Speaker A:And that's okay.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:It's really supposed to be a criteria of a mental health diagnosis is that I send people back to see their.
Speaker A:Usually their pcp, and I'm like, you know, these are just something that I want you to rule out.
Speaker A:You know, have the.
Speaker A:Have the blood work talking about this.
Speaker A:Yeah, let's make sure that we're not dealing with a medical condition, you know, before we come back to.
Speaker A:A lot of people get very frustrated sometimes with their physicians unfairly, because maybe they've been seeing their physician about some heart palpitations or headaches or, you know, something.
Speaker A:They know something's not functioning right.
Speaker A:And the providers have run the gambit of.
Speaker A:Of tests, and everything has come back in the normal range.
Speaker A:And then the provider, sometimes they incorrectly say, oh, yeah, this is really in your head, which can be really offensive to a patient.
Speaker A:But if they come back and say it's anxiety, some people will say, like, okay, I've heard this before.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And that's when they come back to us.
Speaker A:And I spend not a lot of time, but I certainly have conversations with primary care providers and some specialists where we do coordinate services, and they're ruling out something.
Speaker A:I'm ruling in, you know, mental health.
Speaker A:And, you know, I say that because anxiety has such a wide impact, there's actually been really extreme.
Speaker A:Let me be clear.
Speaker A:This is a very extreme example, but where people have lost their vision as a.
Speaker A:In response to.
Speaker A:Oh, wow, right.
Speaker A:You know, so it can really have a very significant, detrimental physical impact on us.
Speaker A:Now, short of that, I say to clients, sometimes when they're living with chronic anxiety and we're trying to manage it better, and I talk with people about three goals.
Speaker A:Reducing the frequency of the symptoms, reducing the intensity of the symptoms, and reducing the duration of them.
Speaker A:And we can use specific strategies to target any of those.
Speaker A:Those three goals.
Speaker A:And so when we're looking at that and we're dealing with.
Speaker A:With chronic anxiety, you know, there's the empathy piece that you're hinting at, like, you know, really sitting and hearing.
Speaker A:Hearing them.
Speaker A:And, you know, sometimes they just need to genuinely hear, like, yeah, this is hard, and it is harder for you.
Speaker A:And I'm like, people who live with chronic anxiety, you know, sometimes they feel like they've been through the paper shredder to get to a decision or to get through an event, and they do look around and they see other people.
Speaker A:And, you know, we're focusing on federal workers today.
Speaker A:Federal workers, you know, are responding in different ways.
Speaker A:What I think is really interesting and says something, says something about them is they're all still showing up to work.
Speaker A:You know, we're not hearing reports of mass call outs and so forth, that they're showing up and they're still, still doing their jobs.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker C:One of the things that, that you just made me think of because we, the, the goal of this was to try to help people going through this change.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:You know, people say normal, new normal.
Speaker C:What's normal?
Speaker C:Normal is whatever happens consistently going forward, not what used to be.
Speaker C:So it's like, you know, number one, you've got to be comfortable that the world is always going to be changing and it doesn't care if you're ready for change or not.
Speaker C:But the other thing that this made me realize too, while you were talking about that I can I, off the top of my head can name a number of people that I know clients and people that we've worked with over the years.
Speaker C:They have uncontrollable anxiety over the investments and the way the politics are intertwined with investments anymore, which is a game from the media.
Speaker C:It's not real, but it's, you know, it's a way to get eyeballs and get people.
Speaker C:You vote with your pocketbook.
Speaker C:So I'm going to tie every issue to your pocketbook.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker C:Type of thing.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker C:And, and being able to set.
Speaker C:I always say you need to separate from the, the emotion and the social issues from the financials.
Speaker C:But there's an awful lot of people who probably need to hear this conversation because they're reacting to the news the same way that a federal employee or somebody who's got federal funding for their job maybe is anxious about, you know, what policy Trump is rolling out next week or somebody in his cabinets rolling out because they're reading the news and saying, oh, we're headed for the Great Depression or, you know, the next great recession because of things that, you know, unfortunately when they get it wrong in the news, you never hear about it.
Speaker C:They don't come back and go, yeah, we got that wrong.
Speaker C:And we caused people to quit their jobs and commit suicide and do like, you know, and have divorces because they were panicking and, you know, do these, all these crazy activities.
Speaker C:But, you know, we were kind of making it up because we were just guesstimating what might happen because, you know, we, we, we kind of failed to explain how terrorists really actually work, you know, or something like that.
Speaker C:You know what I mean?
Speaker C:It's just kind of like I think people really, really need to hear this, who are reacting to, like, who are aggressive to me, aggressively reacting when they read something or they just, they just know.
Speaker C:They know scary, scary things are going to happen.
Speaker C:You and I were joking a little bit before this.
Speaker C:It's like, you know, I always show people kind of their projections and, you know, if you'd run a Monte Carlo scenario, which is just a stress test on sequence of return, you're going to get the percentage that's in the really bad output.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:This is the 20% where your life can't happen the way you want it to happen.
Speaker C:But if you're controlling your variables and you're really realistic as to how you're modeling, you can say, well, what you have to understand about that bottom 20% is we're all in that together.
Speaker C:If you're doing what you're doing and the results are that bad, chances are it's that bad for everybody.
Speaker C:So that new normal is kind of reset.
Speaker C:You know, it's kind of like we're.
Speaker C:And that means you can't do anything about it that's out of your control.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker C:And so we can sit here and we can worry about doomsday happening.
Speaker C:And by the way, they've been saying doomsday was going to happen as long as you and your parents and your grandparents can think about it.
Speaker C:Right?
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker C:And it hasn't happened yet.
Speaker C:We can, we can sit here and we can dwell on it and panic about it, or we can realize if doomsday does happen, like if they, you know, if an asteroid hits the Earth, I guess we're done worrying about global warming and we don't need to be right.
Speaker A:Variable change.
Speaker C:Whether or not it was going to happen or not it happened, it's done.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:It's done.
Speaker C:And, you know, if you're on the wrong side of the bat, who cares?
Speaker C:It's done.
Speaker C:It doesn't matter if you were right or wrong.
Speaker C:It's done.
Speaker C:So real quick, before we wrap up this episode and then we're going to bring you back for our next episode, are there things that we can do to address the anxiety?
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker A:And I'm actually going to use what we were just saying saying to segue a little bit.
Speaker A:One of the first things that, you know, like, when we're talking about variables and we're talking about the, the media and some of the influence, it doesn't matter, you know, which media we're, we're talking about, you know, media has changed so much in, in certainly our lifetime.
Speaker A:And, you know, as you were talking about the retractions, I was reminded like I was a paper boy.
Speaker A:And so I used to get up every day and deliver the paper, you know, through the neighborhood.
Speaker A:And those retractions were in the lower left hand corner.
Speaker A:Yeah, that were printed like, you know, but that was an era that, you know, you got the newspaper, you got your information from that and there was, you know, like the morning news, the new news, 6pm news and 11 o' clock news.
Speaker A:So we had very clear periods of time and mechanisms that we were exposed to that when we went to a 24 hour news cycle and then we went to, you know, the sensationalization of some of the stories.
Speaker A:And we've seen a lot of change in the way that the media, you know, we've shifted in some of these media platforms from objective and neutral to, you know, inflammatory and getting people to watch.
Speaker A:And they're meant to evoke emotion.
Speaker A:So you know, what that does, and the research has been really clear about this for at least 15 years, probably longer than that now is we want to moderate the amount of, you know, news exposure that we take.
Speaker A:Meaning we want to, I'm, you know, we want to set aside time to look at current events, what's happening in the world, because people are always like, you know, well, I have to know what's going on.
Speaker A:And you can, but you want to do it at a time that like you feel your strongest during the day.
Speaker A:You have a lot of mental clarity.
Speaker A:People do what we call doom scrolling.
Speaker A:Just when we get on that magic, that little magic box that we all have and just start going and it starts feeding us stuff that promotes anxiety, it evokes strong emotion.
Speaker A:And you know, so if you're doing that at 9, 10, 11 o' clock, 2 o' clock in the morning, you're feeding that anxiety.
Speaker A:So those are some things controlling that media exposure.
Speaker A:And not just to news media, but to TikTok and Reddit and all the different things that are out there that feed us stuff very quickly and that are designed to evoke emotion.
Speaker A:We want to have better control about when do I expose myself to that?
Speaker A:We want to think about on a very general level around anxiety.
Speaker A:You know, one, learning to recognize it.
Speaker A:You know, am I someone that I have a low level of anxiety?
Speaker A:Do I experience moderate?
Speaker A:Has anxiety been a partner throughout my life for a variety of reasons and you know, do I find myself very reactive?
Speaker A:And in those cases I say like, that's when you want to seek out some professional assistance and somebody that can teach you skills.
Speaker A:There's A lot.
Speaker A:There's a lot of skills that we can use.
Speaker A:There's different approaches to anxiety management.
Speaker A:Exercise, you know, just daily moving our body, Our bodies are designed to move.
Speaker A:We're not supposed to be sedentary, you know, making sure that we have daily movement, a sufficient amount of cardiovascular or.
Speaker A:Yeah, cardiovascular exercise or cardio.
Speaker A:Yeah, cardiovascular exercise.
Speaker A:I'm saying that, right, that we're getting enough, you know, exercise and that can just be walking, you know, it doesn't have to be to the gym.
Speaker A:You don't have to swim, you know, Olympic pool laps.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker A:You know, paying attention to our nutrition and, you know, giving our body the energy that it needs.
Speaker A:Doing that, doing that properly.
Speaker C:There's, there's, I've seen a study before that says, you know, one of the problems that people have with diets is, you know, in the morning, you wake up, you're fresh, you're strong, and you go to work and, and you fight all the battles.
Speaker C:You fight at work, right?
Speaker C:And then you come home and you take care of the kids and you fight all the battles of taking care of the kids.
Speaker C:And then, you know, it's 8 o' clock and you hit the couch and you're like, you know, if, if you have something sweet in the house, like ice cream or something like that, it's just like, I need something from me.
Speaker C:And so either you're rewarding yourself or you walk by the counter and there's a cupcake on the counter and it's like, you know, your guard is down.
Speaker C:So if normally, if normally you would be telling yourself, you don't need this, you're strong, you can do this.
Speaker C:By the end of the day, you're worn out and, and, and the energy to tell yourself you don't need that as kind of gone.
Speaker C:And so if you take the news and you put the news in the place of the cupcake or the news in the place of the ice cream, it's like if, if you're doom scrolling before you go to bed, when you're least able to fight, you know, the, the narratives and kind of think about it critically.
Speaker C:And then, you know, I mentioned, I, you know, I woke up one day and I started watching 24.
Speaker C:So I'm watching 24, I'm watching Criminal Minds, watching all this like, serial killer, end of the world type of stuff, listening to Hard Rock on the way home from work and, you know, all that kind of stuff, what you put in your brain starts to come out in your, the way that you kind of see life I noticed, I don't think it was depression, but I noticed a, I had a much darker mood most of the time because I'm watching those shows.
Speaker C:I'm like, yeah, there's people that really do that.
Speaker C:Yeah, this kind of sickness is real.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker C:And, and you just start going, I'm sad for humanity.
Speaker C:Why is humanity like this?
Speaker C:Then you start thinking about why is all the entertainment out there seem to be about the end of the world and people being tortured and horrible things happening to people Instead of like whatever happened under the Tuscan sun or something like that.
Speaker C:You give me, give me something that happens positive at the end.
Speaker A:Yes, yes.
Speaker A:You know, I don't think you know this about me.
Speaker A:My undergrad is know a lot about.
Speaker C:You, but I may not know this.
Speaker C:I'll tell you if I know or not.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:You know, my undergrad is in journalism.
Speaker C:I did not know that about you.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yep.
Speaker A:And you know, again, it was, it was, you know, the 80s into the 90s and you know, again, there were formulas back then and if you remember the old newscasts, you know, the newscast always finished on what was called a color story, something that was bright and uplifting.
Speaker A:You know, that was when you saw things from the zoo or from, you know, elementary schools.
Speaker A:It was always positive and it was meant to finish on this uplift.
Speaker A:And we've lost that again in the 24 hour news cycle.
Speaker A:And now that, you know, whatever search engines you know are feeding, feeding our news feed, they don't do that.
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