Happiness Hacks

For many of us with High Functioning Anxiety, we have a hard time noticing when we are anxious. Our anxiety is usually swimming around in our heads WELL before we consciously notice it.  For me, I can say I’m fine, I’m not feeling anxious then poof—I explode at my husband for leaving something out of place and realize how high my anxiety is and I didn’t even realize it. In a similar vein, my clients tell me their HFA shows up when they can’t sleep at night because of their racing thoughts. The truth is: we all have default patterns we fall into. Many of us have “go-to” behaviors to express our anxiety that we either inherited genetically or that we learned from a young age: behaviors we engage in and beliefs that we get stuck on. Some of these patterns might be overeating, overthinking, people-pleasing, insomnia, over-analyzing, or assuming you are wrong. HFA is sneaky—and it shows up in the most strange and uncomfortable ways. To illustrate, I decided to record the times when my anxiety was exceptionally hig