Ep 48 - Why Anxiety is Not the Enemy- with Teen Anxiety Coach Cynthia Coufal
January 09,2025
Today we welcome special guest Cynthia Coufal, Teen Anxiety Coach, to discuss strategies for managing anxiety related to food and eating habits.
Cynthia shares her personal journey with binge eating and provides practical tips to handle emotions productively.
We cover various techniques to process emotions like anxiety, urge control, and the importance of incremental exposure to trigger foods to build confidence and reduce fear.
Listen to learn…
What it actually means to allow emotions
Why anxiety is not a bad thing
Practical strategies for anxiety and sitting with discomfort
How to deal with anxiety around food using exposure therapy
Cynthia Coufal is a Teen Anxiety Coach. She has a podcast and YouTube channel called The Teen Anxiety Maze. Cynthia spent 31 years as a teacher and school counselor in Public Schools. She started a podcast during the pandemic to reach her students since she couldn’t see them face to face. This led to her wanting to have a broader audience than just the students in her school building. Cynthia now has clients around the US and listeners all over the world. Cynthia is YouMap®Assessment Certified. She uses the profile to help young people understand what their strengths, values, preferred skills, and interests are. This helps them find their WHY for tackling anxiety.
TRANSCRIPT:
Amber:
Hello, confident eaters. Happy Thursday. Today, we have a special guest with us, Cynthia Koffel.
And why don't you start by introducing yourself, Cynthia?
Cynthia:
Hi, I am Cynthia Koffel, and I am a teen anxiety coach. And I was in public education for 31 years. And I just decided that I wanted to keep working with teens, but doing it in my own way and the things that I wanted to do with teens. And so I started my own business.
I have a podcast and a YouTube channel and I'm just excited to be here. Thank you for having me.
Amber:
Yeah, thank you. And so whether you have a teenager yourself or you are just here because you are struggling with food, we are going to talk a lot about skills around anxiety today. So this episode is going to be useful for you either way, because I know we've all felt anxious before in our life and.
Most of us do not know what to do with those emotions that is helpful and using it in a productive way where we don't go to unhelpful actions in our life. And so as we were chatting before this, you mentioned that you yourself had struggled with binge eating throughout your life. And so do you want to talk a little bit about what your journey has been like and some things that have helped you get out of that?
Cynthia:
Sure. Well, as far back as I can remember, I was worried about my weight and dieting. I wasn't really overweight. I don't think anyone would have said I was overweight. I don't think I've been overweight, but not like in the high school times. But of course, that's when I was starting to worry about it. I tried all sorts of diets.
And in my early to mid adult time, I was trying every diet that I could find and always thinking the next diet was the answer. And I did a lot of restrictive. Eating. And then one of the diets I found, they called what it was a free day. And so I made Sunday my free day. And I know that they didn't mean this in the diet, but I made it mean I ate everything and anything on Sunday.
And that was just like, it was freedom to me because I was so restrictive with my eating all through the week. And so Sunday was like my relief for like doing all that restriction. Um, and I feel like it really did give me what I feel like was a disorder because it took me a long time to get over that once that was kind of like part of my day or will not day, but my week and when it was, that was just the way I was.
And so I didn't really want to change it. I liked the way it was, but it was not helping me weight wise or health wise. And the reason I got out of it was I started looking at my feelings and you know, why am I eating? And I talk about this a lot on my podcast too, that the reason that we do all sorts of destructive and at least unhealthy behaviors is because we're trying to avoid feeling feelings because some feelings feel uncomfortable in our bodies.
And I don't really feel like I was like an angry eater, but I was probably like a stress eater and definitely a boredom eater. But I didn't really put all that together until I started really studying how to process emotions. And once I realized. That I was using food to process. or thinking that I was processing or at least avoiding my emotions, then I started learning ways to kind of be able to process my emotions, which is something that I teach in my anxiety program because anxiety is just another one of those emotions that doesn't feel good in our bodies.
And sometimes I feel like anxiety gives us more physical symptoms than some of the other feelings that we feel. And so because there's physical symptoms involved with food can sometimes get mixed up in there. I find that a lot of my kids avoid eating because of their anxiety because they feel sick and they actually feel like they can't eat because their stomach is upset.
But if they learn to manage. their anxiety, they're learning to manage those physical symptoms, uh, better. Right.
Amber:
I actually have a vivid memory of when I asked one of my very first life coaches who I worked with, I said, well, what if we get so anxious that like, I just feel nauseous and I feel like I'm going to throw up.
And she said, well, you're probably not processing that emotion because, and I thought, well, I am, I'm sitting with it. But can you talk a bit more when someone says like, Oh, you just need to sit with the emotion and process it and then it will all handle itself. Like, what do we even mean when we're saying that?
Cynthia:
Well, I know that's hard because we assume that if we try to fight it or resist it or ignore it, that it'll go away. I mean, it almost makes sense in our brain, but it doesn't really work like that. And so when I'm talking about processing, one of the very first things, and I think this is the most helpful thing that kids can learn at the beginning, is that anxiety is not our enemy.
Anxiety is not the double, you know, like I think so many of my kids are like, they're making anxiety a monster. And then of course if a monster came to our house, we're going to be like, Oh, don't come in and we're going to slam the door and we're going to try to get away from them. But I said, look at anxiety as your friend, or if you can't look at it as your friend, look at it like a younger version of yourself.
Like if a toddler is afraid, you don't. You tell the toddler, Oh, don't be afraid of that. That's stupid. What's wrong with you? Get out of here. You try to explain to them why they're feeling scared about something. And so you just need to look at your anxiety as this maybe younger part of yourself. Like, Oh, anxiety.
I see you're here today. What are you needing from me today? What can I do? And when you feel those sensations and you're thinking calmer. nicer thoughts about it. Like, Oh, anxiety. Of course you're here today because we're not going to be surprised by anxiety because anxiety is part of our, of every human.
Then nothing's gone wrong when we have anxiety and just. Breathing into it. I teach my, um, clients breathing in and imagining that the breath is going to wherever they feel. So like if they're feeling sick, the breath is going to their stomach. And then I said, just imagine that your breath is calming or healing your stomach.
Or imagine that your breath is calming or healing your head. Like if you're getting a headache or maybe you're getting tense in your shoulders. Wherever it is, you just breathe into that. And you just give. the anxiety space to move around. You almost think about it as an entity, a person, another character.
It's moving around and giving it space. And then if you allow it and you're not resisting it and fighting it and getting mad at it, You're just talking calmly to it. Then it's like if you talk calmly to a person, they calm down and they go away. That feeling will flow out of your body. It's like a tunnel.
I teach my clients that all emotions are a tunnel. They have a beginning, they have a middle, and they have an end. It's like a storm, you know. You can see the lightning in the horizon and you know that maybe a storm is coming or the dark clouds are coming and you know that it's happening and then it gets, you know, Really intense in the middle and then it goes away and that is what we're going to process that part while it's going to get Somewhat intense, but if we start processing it at the beginning, it's not going to become that big storm.
It's just going to kind of be sort of rumbly and then it's going to move on. I love that.
Amber:
And I think I want everyone to hear that there's a beginning, middle and end. Yes. End. Because, you know, whether it's just an emotion of boredom. Stress, anxiety, or an urge to eat, I, urges are this feeling of overdesire, right?
And a lot of people think that if I gain an urge for food, I just have to eat because it's so uncomfortable. And I'm like, how long have you actually sat with an urge before? And people are like, well, Maybe a minute.
Cynthia: Yeah.
Amber:
And it's like you have to give your urges, your emotions a chance to move through you.
And there always is an end to them. No one has ever come to me. And I'm sure you saying I felt anxiety every single day, 24, seven for the past 10 years. Right. Right. I felt a little anxious during this moment and then it went away and then it came back and then it went away. And same thing with food. Oh, I was feeling this desire for food.
And then I started doing laundry and it went away. And then I went to work and it went away. And then I came back, but like seeing how this experience does have an end can make it so much easier to sit with because we know that it's temporary then.
Cynthia:
Yes. Yeah. I think so too. And I was thinking about this with grief.
Uh, I had a, yesterday. And she said the exact same thing about grief is that, you know, grief comes and goes, it comes in waves. And when you're in the midst of it at the beginning, it feels like it's never going to end, but there are ways to process and manage grief too. And I think grief is probably another time I haven't experienced.
I mean, my father passed away, but he was older and was sick. And so it was like the sudden young person death that always seems like so tragic. But I'm guessing that grief is another reason why people maybe get disordered eating or binge eat because that feeling of grief is so painful and so uncomfortable that they're looking for a release with food.
Amber:
Right. And I think it's the way we label it. That's important too, right? It's painful. It's uncomfortable. It hurts. I don't want it to be here, which is the opposite of like making friends with it. If we're making friends with it, we want something to be there. We're okay with it being there. We honor that it's there.
And I think even just sometimes shifting our language around emotion is important of, I don't want to be bored. I hate being stressed. I can't be stressed. It's like, well, you know, sometimes we are stressed and that's how life is. Because I'm pink. A big problem with our society as a whole is we're always striving to be 100 percent happy.
There's millions of books out there about how to be happier, you know, how to achieve happiness, how to achieve everything you want. And I think we all need to realize that that point is never coming. We're going to escape the human experience and be happy all the time. I'm wondering, is that something you see with your clients as well, where they're Trying to avoid any and all anxiety or feelings like that.
Cynthia:
Well, and I think that because we've sort of villainized anxiety, especially right now, that's like a big thing that everyone's talking about. We've made it such a bad thing that kids feel like if I'm anxious, something's wrong with me. I shouldn't have this feeling. And I even had during a consult, I had a girl cry and say, because I said something about managing her anxiety.
And she said, I don't want to manage it. I want it to go away. And I said, I, yeah, I said, I get it. But we have to think about what anxiety is. I mean, we have anxiety for a reason. It's there to help us to stop and think about things. Sometimes we need to have a pause and think, Oh, is this the right direction to go?
Should I be doing this? Is this the right person to be around? Is this a dangerous situation? You know, like we need that to keep us alive for whatever reason. And there's many reasons why our alarm system gets. Messed up, but sometimes if we've allowed ourselves to avoid a bunch of stuff that feels uncomfortable, we have like too much sensitivity to the uncomfortableness to the point where we can't walk out the door or we can't get out of our bed or we can't go to school or we can't get a driver's license.
And those are the things that anxiety is robbing from us. If we're allowing it to keep us in our house and our bed. Never, you know, going out and having an expansive life because we're too afraid of what's going to happen. And so in my program, part of the processing is first we need to figure out what are the mindsets that are going on in our mind that cause all that anxiety and most of the time, the anxiety that every person in the world has.
It's the kind that started with our thoughts. You know, if we think anxious things, that creates anxious feelings inside of our body. Now there are other kinds of anxiety that not everyone has. And a lot of times those are created from traumas or abuse. And there's things that our brain remembers that we don't consciously remember that can cause us to just be anxious out of the blue.
And we don't really know what is causing it, but for the most part, the thoughts are still part of that. Your amygdala is being fired, and you don't understand why it's being. started your thoughts about that anxiety and that feeling fuel that anxious sensations more. So we work a lot on the thoughts and reframing thoughts and how to look at things in a lot of different ways.
Some of the problem solving that I teach my clients, we look at all sorts of different options and why are these options good and bad. And, you know, what's the best option to take and then what necessary feelings will we need to feel in order to do that action. And sometimes we find, Oh, I'm going to have to be frustrated to do that.
I'm going to have to be scared to do that. I'm going to have to be annoyed to do that. And that's okay to feel those. Lesser feelings like annoyance, frustration, because they feel a little bit better than anxiety feels. And so we talk about how we can kind of switch around. And also that if you imagine how you feel when you're excited about something, like I always think about when I was a young person, Christmas was super exciting to me.
Like I could not wait. for Christmas day so I could see what presents I was getting and Oh, like a vacation or something where you're like looking forward and you get like this feeling like a fluttery butterfly type of feeling. That's the exact same feeling as you have when you're anxious. We just don't think about it as anxiety because.
We're excited and our thoughts are excited about what's going to happen. So when kids are anxious about school, say, instead of saying, I'm anxious about going to school, say, I'm excited about going to school because it feels the same. So just change the words. And once you start saying the other words, like I'm excited to do this, it makes it feel better.
And I know it sounds crazy because you're just changing a word, but it makes your brain shift to some different kinds of thoughts that feel better about doing that action.
Amber:
I think sometimes too, holding space for both of those feelings, being like, I might be a little anxious right now, but I also could be a little excited, like seeing how like an inch of that could be true.
Like maybe there is some excitement in here. And then as you start to focus more on that excitement, watching it grow and saying, Oh yeah, actually. This is something I'm excited for, like maybe there is a little anxiety underneath it, but there's also a lot of excitement for it, and I love that tip to just, when you start to change your thoughts around it, it will start to change how you perceive it.
One thing that I was curious about is, You know, sometimes we have anxiety because of a bad experience that's happened before. Someone's scared of driving, maybe some of their family members got in a car crash. Or, for a lot of my clients, they might have a lot of anxiety around certain foods because they've binged on them before.
Or they have anxiety around feeling hunger because it's They once died at it. So if you have a past experience where something bad did happen, how do we get rid of the anxiety around that? Then
Cynthia:
I think it takes small steps sometimes, like I'm not a therapist, but I still call it this exposure therapy.
You have to be exposed in small doses to that thing that causes so much anxiety and maybe you don't just Jump right into driving if someone's had a bad car accident, or maybe you've been in an accident That was really scary and then you don't want to get back in the car again I totally get that because I've experienced similar things to that But if the thing that you want to do is too much, what can you do around that, that still pushes your comfort zone?
Because you need to push yourself into uncomfortableness, but not into panic. You know, there's a line between like, I need to be uncomfortable to go forward. You know, if I'm like totally out of control, that's not going to help me either. And so just finding what is the small steps into that. And thinking about what feelings am I going to have to feel?
What are necessary feelings in this situation? And so maybe if it's not driving right away, maybe just riding in a car and maybe just, you know, like trying to find like, what's the next closest step to what it is without actually doing it. When I worked in the school system, if I had a student that was just terrified to come in the building at all.
We would try, we'll come in the building and you'll just come right to my office for the first hour and we'll figure out what to do there. And then, you know, we'll do that for a day or two and then you're going to come in the building and we're going to go to your first class. But maybe, you know, I go and sit with you in the class or, you know, or sometimes that would cause more anxiety for some people, just dependent on the student.
But we would find, like, what are the steps? And then we would just follow through with that plan. So in no way, and I would tell them ahead of time, the end result is you do the whole day. by yourself. But how can we get there where you can feel comfortable here? Okay, you're feeling better. Now let's push that comfort a little bit.
Let's push it. Let's push it. I'm even trying it with my grandson who is just two, but he got scared when we were in the nature center one time because this bird was like, He squawked super loud a whole bunch of times and it scared me too, but then I was like, Oh, that's funny. That bird is loud. And I think he was scared.
Like what is the bird going to do to us? And so I just talked to him through like, Oh, that bird is really loud and he needs to be loud because where he lives, he has to have a loud voice so that other birds can find him. And for a while, Oliver didn't want to go to that nature center anymore. And so I took him one day and I said, we're going to go inside.
And But we're just going to go to the side room where the bird isn't. We're just going to play in there, and then we'll just see what happens. And if you like it, we'll move on to the next thing. And so we went in, we played in the side room. Some other kids came in. He got interested in what the other kids were doing.
So he went where they were, which is where the bird is. And he forgot. That the bird was there at first. And then when he realized he just stopped and he was like looking over at the bird, I was like, it's totally fine. We're safe. The bird isn't doing anything. And if the bird is loud, that's okay. Grandma's here.
It's going to be fine. And so we just went through that and he ended up staying and having a good time. And so you have to push yourself a little bit through stuff you don't want to do, but just not into the panic zone.
Amber:
Yeah. Does that make sense? That is the most perfect example. And definitely what I would recommend too.
I teach my clients the trigger food process, which is where instead of just saying like a lot of intuitive eating people, but I kind of have the mindset of like, just bring it all in the house to give yourself permission. And it's like, well, if you've been done these foods a lot, like you're terrified of them, they create a lot of anxiety.
So it's like, let's start with just one food and see if we can like conquer that. And yeah. Same thing the first time they forget that like ice cream is in their house. They're like, Oh my gosh, so cool. And then they realize we're doing it. I'm safe. Like I can't have ice cream in the house and you start to build this confidence in yourself that, okay, maybe this is okay.
And it's really important to show your brain too, that I am safe. Like look, brain, we survived. Yeah. We didn't binge look brain. We sat with hunger for 10 minutes and we didn't pass out. Like we're okay. So it's like pushing yourself for. the right amount of discomfort, like, okay, willing to feel this amount of discomfort.
That's like comfortable discomfort, almost like I want to feel this discomfort. And then really celebrating ourself for doing that little step because then we're one step closer to conquering where we want to go.
Cynthia:
Well, I think, and I remind my Um, clients have this all the time and, and it helps me when I remind myself that there is not a successful person in this world that can't push through discomfort because they can't be successful if they can't push through discomfort because everything that's worthwhile requires some level of discomfort.
You know, when I think about Olympic athletes that we just saw in the last couple of months, you know, there were times when they didn't want to practice, they didn't want to go to the thing. It was painful when they were practicing and they did it anyway because. The end result was what they wanted. And so we have to be able to be uncomfortable sometimes to do stuff that we want to do.
Amber:
Absolutely. So good. So before we wrap up, is there any last minute advice you have for someone struggling or any last minute thoughts or tips you want to leave the listeners with?
Cynthia:
Okay. Well, I really think if you spend time like, you know, breathing and thinking about where you are presently, like even if you're usually are anxious and panic has to do with either thinking about things in the future or thinking about things that happened in the past that create all that chaos.
If you're in the present and you're thinking about, I'm sitting in this chair. I'm safe. I'm healthy or whatever it is that makes you feel better. If you try to bring yourself down into the present, you know, that's going to stop some of that chaos from really spinning around and getting too out of control where you then get sick and have all these other physical symptoms.
And just like thinking about what are all the reasons why I might feel this way. You know, it's not that something's gone wrong or what is this trying to tell me? Why am I maybe feeling anxious and thinking about anxiety as a friend or as a younger version of yourself that you are just taking along with you and you're caring for them?
And I even have some clients that when they're at school, they say, well, it's okay. Anxiety, you can hide out under the desk. I got the sandals. I'm going to set here. room. You can just stay under there and hide until it's time to go home. And that's what you maybe would tell a toddler. You can hide under there, but I'm right here and I'm going to do school and make it happen.
And so I just want parents and teens and whoever is listening that these anxiety is a problem. Very treatable. I think it's one of the most treatable mental health disorders of all of them because it has so much to do with the control that we have over how we're thinking about things, how we're framing situations.
And once you can get that figured out and you're able to process those uncomfortable feelings and allowing them to be there as you go through your day. You're already being successful doing successful things.
Amber:
Mm hmm. I love that. Well, this is so good, Cynthia. So much goodness in this episode. So tell the people if they're interested in working with you for either their anxiety as a teen or as a parent who's dealing with a teen with anxiety, where can they find you?
Cynthia:
Well, you can find me at Cynthia Koffel Coaching because I'm on Instagram and Facebook and my YouTube channel is at Cynthia Koffel Coaching. My podcast is the Teen Anxiety Maze and you can find that on any of the platforms. And I have a free parent guide on my website that you can sign up for and it talks to you about like what's normal with anxiety with teens and then when maybe you need to get some help.
And also it talks about how to build your relationship with your teen that gets a little bit rocky in the teenage years. So it helps. There's like some tips on how to build your relationship, but also conversation starters. How can you bring up the conversation of anxiety with your teen so you can start to assess with them?
Is this a problem or is this just normal teen stuff?
Amber: Perfect. I'll have all of those in the show notes so you can go find them and thanks so much for you coming on today. Thank you so much. I enjoyed it.