POWerful Moment: 005 - Arielle Lorre on Daily Tools to Manage Anxiety + Find Peace

Thank you guys for joining me for another powerful moment from one of my favorite episodes. This is a highlight clip to enhance your week. I hope you enjoy with the anxiety. What would you say are your main tools that you use now to handle it? Meditation is number one. I know you meditate too.

Well, okay, no, I don't, not like you. You do transcendental meditation, right? Yeah. I've taken one class back in the day and I really want to learn more about it. Like, what would you say is different about TM to other meditations? So for me, I had tried different meditations over the apps and different platforms and stuff, guided meditations, and I still think there's a time and place for those and I do use those occasionally now.

But I always just kind of felt like I was listening to something. And then I would be done. And I was like, OK, well, that was nice and relaxing, but it wasn't doing anything for me. And when I started this back in 2018, I started noticing that a lot of people kind of in my orbit who were people that I looked up to who just had this thing about them.

that you just can't really put your finger on. They were all doing TM and I was like, okay, I'm going to try it. My husband started doing it. My parents started doing it. So I was like, I guess that's my sign. And the way that you learn TM is you go and you do a four day class. It's only like an hour or two a day.

And I noticed in that first day, even, that it just brought my nervous system down. And I felt so anchored. That's the only way that I can describe it. And I felt energized after, but in a calm way. I felt like my sleep was better when I started doing it consistently. It was just so crazy effective for me from the beginning.

And yeah, I've heard the analogy. So if you think about the ocean and you think of like a small boat on the surface of the ocean, it's going to rock with every single tiny little wave and current and all of that. And what I learned in TM is that that kind of meditation is kind of like going down to the floor of the ocean.

Where there's still a current, you know, you still might move a little bit, but you're not so like at the mercy of what's happening up there. And it's not so turbulent. And that was like really what I felt. So I'm a little bit of like an evangelist about it. I try not to.

I'm influenced right now honestly yeah it's amazing if you can do it and it does cost money it goes to their nonprofit foundation but you can also like scholarship and if you really can't afford it for anybody listening like they do like an honor system they're like if you can pay ten dollars you know we'll take it.

That's amazing. Yeah. So you do that twice a day. Twice a day for 20 minutes in silence. They give you a mantra and I was so intimidated. I was like 20 minutes in silence, like in my head. Are you fucking kidding me? Sorry.

I mean, it was really scary. And you just think of the mantra and you're going to lose the mantra occasionally. And then you just think of it again and bring it back. And the whole thing about TM is that it's effortless. You're not trying to clear your mind. Our brains have thoughts rattling around in them 24-7. And the thing about meditation, and this is not exclusive just to TM, is that you notice that and you can detach from the thoughts.

And that was like a huge benefit that I got from that because I tend to take thoughts as fact. And when I could just kind of observe that, I was like, oh, this is just craziness in my head. It doesn't mean anything. It's kind of like observing the thought rather than being the thought. Yes.

I think Jay Shetty said, if you say that you don't have time for meditation, you need it more than anyone else. And I think that's so true. I'm so inspired by that. I really want to try that. What other tools have you used? Because I know you've mentioned, OK, can you explain stoicism to me?

Yes, I was, well, I don't know. I think I can, but it has a lot of similarities to like a lot of the principles and recovery. And it is kind of accepting life on life's terms. It's not placing judgment on anything. Like, you know, we tend to be so reactive and assign, you know, good or bad to anything happening. Like, oh, this is terrible. And stoicism is just like, no, this is just what it is. It's like acceptance, like radical acceptance. So I don't know if that's a good definition. I love that.

Yeah, something that I'm striving for. Your story is so inspirational and so refreshing also in the wellness space. I don't think I've come across someone like you before. Do you feel like your audience has become kind of like a sober community? Do you get a lot of questions about it? About sobriety? Mm hmm.

Occasionally, yes, I do have some people that I'm really close with who reached out to me initially on Instagram trying to get sober. And I was able to help them with that. And now they've been in my life for years, and that's really amazing. I noticed a lot over the pandemic that I got a lot of messages. I think people were really reevaluating their relationship with alcohol because

when we started working from home and all of that, you know, it's like wine every day at five o'clock and I think people after a few weeks of that or months or whatever started feeling like maybe this is not the most healthy thing. So I did notice a correlation with that. I always say like my DMs are always open for anybody who's curious, you know, how to get sober or questions if they think they might have a problem.

I'm always happy to help in that way. But yeah, I mean, my community is really amazing. They're just really supportive. I just want to feel good. That's like, I want to be healthy and I want to feel good. I spent so many years feeling like absolute shit and treating my body like shit.

So now the biggest motivation for me is just feeling my best and I do notice that when I make that the priority in my body responds really positively. I can relate to that as well because although my life was better when I was on the fitness journey, it was still a form of self-torture. And I know that sounds kind of dramatic, but it was. It was like, let me work myself into the ground because that felt

similar to destroying my life through whatever I was doing before. It was kind of like self harm, but in a healthy way, if that makes sense. Sounds a little weird, but no, I totally get that. And I think there's also an element of control, right? Like I can control this. And when I was doing like macros and BBG and everything that I was doing at that time, like it

gave me a sense of control, and I realized like, oh, I can do this many macros and not feel hungry, so I'm going to reduce them even more. And I got down to really low calories. I see pictures of myself now, and I was super lean and skinny, and I remember at the time

I didn't see that in the mirror. I saw, oh, I need to lose weight in this area, tone up that area. It was never enough. And ironically, I just had to let go of control. My body told me I've had enough. And I had to stop. My hormones were out of whack. My gut health was out of whack. I had no energy whatsoever to do anything because it was all going into these workouts and the tracking my food and all of these obsessive things.

And I hit that wall and I had to just stop and slow down. And slowing down turned out to be the kind of solution that I have been looking for a whole time. I feel like when you've lived in chaos for so long, finding that control is so helpful. But there comes a point where you need to let that go too. That's why I feel like the fitness world is such an evolving journey. You never really have it fully figured out because you learn new things or you figure out something that works better for you as you evolve.

Thanks for listening to this powerful moment. If you want to hear the full episode, click the link in the show notes. Love you guys, bye.