Shame is a HUGE part of High Functioning Anxiety. Practicing self-loyalty is a key to healing that shame and therefore quieting our High Functioning Anxiety.

Throughout my life, one of my go-to strategies for dealing with my anxiety is through people-pleasing. My Monger tells me, that if everyone around me was happy, I will feel less anxiety.

I spent much of my life thinking I needed to be fixed, healed, or changed. I knew I was broken, and I thought the answer was something outside of me.

Because the People-Pleasing Hustle is so much deeper than just stress less. You are not a failure because the usual tips haven't worked. People Pleasing Hustle is a seductive foe.

I spent much of my life trying to fit my square peg into a round hole. I remember asking myself, why do I deny who I am so that they can accept me?

So many of us are people pleasers. We live our lives doing what we think others want or need from us. As a recovering people pleaser, getting clear on if I was giving from a pure place or giving because I thought I SHOULD.

Rationally you know it is ok to say no. However, you find yourself agreeing to do stuff you don't want to do more often than not. I mean, after all, we as women are supposed to do it all.

We all have THOSE people in our lives. The ones we dread to see, the ones who know exactly how to trigger our shame responses and make our lives miserable.

One of the leading causes of anxiety is when we stop listening to our inner voice and instead start listening to what we SHOULD be doing. Schedule Pleasing is a very common way of doing that.

Many of us experience anxiety in our lives because we are constantly trying to fit our square selves into a round hole. Any time we are trying to become something we aren't, it will cause anxiety.

As with most motivational sayings in life, "Stop Living Your Life for Everyone Else" is easy to say. But what does it mean? What does it look like to run your life?

Crossed or over-stepped boundaries show up all the time. We tend to think setting boundaries is all about just saying no. And while saying no is important, boundary setting can become much more nuanced.

We have so many obligations, so many 'shoulds,' it is hard to recognize when we can say no. If you are filling your time with obligations and shoulds, it is time to do an inventory of how you are spending your time.

The ability to be empathetic is a gift. It allows you to understand where someone is coming from and offer support and encouragement. Where highly empathetic people run into trouble is when they turn empathy into responsibility.

We all want to be agreeable, helpful, and pleasant. But too often, our acceptance builds into resentment, and we end up paying the price in anxiety, anger, and exhaustion.

Setting boundaries is challenging and confusing. We are taught to have curiosity about other people and be compassionate about what they are dealing with, so how can we then set a boundary that feels so cold and mean.

When we set new boundaries, have different reactions, or change a pattern, we are changing the rules of the system. This rule changing requires adjustments for those around us.

Somewhere we learned that our needs aren't as important as other people's. We learned that our role is to predict, mind-read, and generally guess what the other person needs or might need so that we can fill it for them.

One of the ideas of relationships I particularly like is the analogy of throwing the ball. Ideally, a relationship is a two-way street where both people are giving and receiving 100%. Both parties are engaged and wanting to participate in the relationship. Think of a relationship as a game of catch.