Taking things a little bit different today, we're going to talk about some home-buying anxiety. So first we're gonna talk about why home buying anxiety happens. Then also some ways as to ways that you can actually help reduce some of the anxiety that you have around purchasing a home.
Now, if you're in the spot where you're, you're looking to buy a home and you're just feeling completely overwhelmed and frustrated, just know that that is perfectly normal. We're already living in a really stressful time. So trying to purchase a home on top of that can be remarkably overwhelming.
One of the main reasons why there's some anxiety in the home buying process is because you're not just purchasing a home. Most of the time, there's a lot of transition that's going on. Maybe you're changing jobs or you're relocating your family size might be changing. And when you're looking to purchase a home, it'd be the biggest financial decision that you're making.
And so when somebody's prodding around your financial life and then maybe you're selling your home or looking to get out of your lease and then trying to find another place to live, it can be really overwhelming. Not to consider the fact that when you look at purchasing a home, somebody might have an offer that beats out yours. So if you're in the spot where you're feeling anxious, that is perfectly normal.
So what we want to do when we have this anxiety is we want to be able to slow down a little bit to help ease this anxiety, because there's no point in living in a constant rush all of the time. And sometimes the way I like to think about it is when you're looking at purchasing a home, it's kind of like, you're, you're dipping your toe in the water, but you come to find out that that water is actually a surging stream and things are moving a lot quicker around you.
And when everything around you is moving so quickly and you have people saying, you need to buy now because rates are low and you need to buy now because whatever other reason. You feel trapped inside of this surging vortex around you, that's pushing you into a decision that you're maybe not ready to make right now.
So the best thing to do is to slow down and come up with a plan. So, first I want to show you one tool that you can use to help slow down a little bit. And the reason that these two tools are going to work, or these two techniques are going to work is because the way our emotions happen is we think of them so much that they're up in our minds.
Our emotions are actually physical responses, biological and chemical responses are that our bodies have to the world around us and they help keep us safe. They help us survive. But if we don't process these emotions well enough, they create this anxiety. That's going to stay in the background the entire time. Then it's not going to go away.
So what we need to do is we need to train our body to slow down physiologically so we can process these emotions. So the first way is by belly breathing and belly breathing is basically just breathing, but we're going to, we're going to change how we do it. Because most of the time we breathe at the top of our lungs. So when we breathe just the chest expands, but what we want to do is we want to inhale through our nose and imagine filling up our lungs from the bottom to the point where our belly actually extends a little bit, kind of like a Buddha, like has that big belly. So you wanna breathe in through your nose to the point where your belly extends and you're gonna hold that for a second. Then after you do that, you're going to breathe out through your mouth about twice as long as you breathe in. So do that for maybe about a minute.
What this actually does is this actually stimulate a nerve that you have called the Vagus nerve. The Vagus nerve is responsible for actually slowing down, the electrical impulses in your nervous system. So this is going to help you feel more relaxed. So basically you're telling your body, Hey, it's okay. We don't have to be in this fight or flight mode all the time, we can slow down. This is going to alleviate some of that anxiety and help you make smarter decisions moving forward.
Another technique you can use, and you can use this in accompanied with the breathing as well as a method called five four three two one.
So this is how it works. It's kind of like "I Spy" when you were a kid. So first you're going to find five things around you that you can see and you're going to name them. So for example, I'm at a park so I can see grass. I can see this gnat that wants to keep flying around my face. I can see the fall leaves on the trees. I can see the bright blue sky with no clouds, and I can see my camera right in front of me.
So five things I can see now, what I want to do is four things that I can touch. So I could touch leaves here on the grounds. I can touch the blades of grass as well. I can touch my phone sitting in front of me. Then I can finally touch this microphone here as well.
So five things, you can see four things you can touch after that three things that you can hear. So I can hear a motorcycle in the distance. I can hear crickets chirping. Then I can hear some of the people out here.
Then two things that you can smell. So right now I can smell a kind of fall decaying smell, which is kind of like a good smell, but it's kind of weird. Then I can also smell very faintly the deodorant that I have on.
Then finally, what you can do is one thing that you can taste or one feeling that you have. So if you're out in the park, maybe you don't have anything that you can taste, but maybe you have a feeling. So right now, I feel calm.
And so what this does is it helps take us out of the constant loop. That's in our mind that is just replaying thoughts and thoughts and fears and anxieties and worries over and over again.
What it does is take us directly into the present moment because we have to use all of our senses to engage with where we're at right now. So using this technique in a moment of anxiety is going to help bring you from a place where you're just in your mind and worrying to a place where you're right here, right now, engaging your body and your senses with what's going on around you.
So when you have these moments of anxiety, I want you to practice one or both of these techniques to help slow your body down a little bit. This is going to get you in a place where you can start making decisions that are going to help you move forward because anxiety is an appropriate response that our body has. It's telling us something, right? It's instructing us on what we need to do next. But if we operate out of the anxiety, if we make decisions based on the anxiety, we usually don't make a decision. But when we process things, anxiety by slowing down and feeling it and recognizing how it feels in our body we can then make good decisions from a place of calm and relaxation.
So I like to use a phrase when talking about home buying, but I think it applies to a lot of other areas as well. That is having a calm plan and a soft focus. That's the goal that you want to have. So first to calm plan often when we go into things like home buying, we know where we're at right now, and we know where we want to go. But we don't think through the steps to get there. And instead, we just assume that we'll find ourselves or we'll find the path along the way. And usually what this does is create a lot of frustration and resentment because we run into more struggles.
So having a calm plan is being able to say, I know where I'm at right now. I know where I want to go. And here are the reasonable steps for me to get there. The reason why I say calm is because sometimes it's a little too easy to create a plan that is incredibly unrealistic and incredibly demanding of your time and your energy and your emotions. So you want to create a calm plan.
So maybe instead of purchasing a home in three months, maybe a calmer plan as you purchasing a home in six months, or maybe instead of. Getting the savings created over the next six months. Maybe a calmer plan is to have that savings set up in the next eight months. So you want that plan to be calm and you also want to have a soft focus.
A soft focus is being able to say here's my plan, but if things come up I'm okay. Because I'm not. So I don't have so much tunnel vision that I'm going to get frustrated. If little things sway me off course. Because life happens things go on and they're going to shift you off the plan that you have, and that's okay. Having a soft-focus commitment from the beginning to say, this is where I want to go. But if I don't hit that exactly, then that's going to be okay because I have that calm plan that's guiding me there and how the soft focus.
So hope this helps if you're experiencing some home-buying anxiety just know it's completely normal. You're probably going to have it from the beginning until the end. And it might take a little bit to wear off, and that's okay, right?
Nobody expects you to go through something that you may have never done before, or you've only done once or twice or a few times, and to go through it like an expert to go through it without any fears or any worries.
It's completely natural to have fears, to have worries, to have anxieties and reservations about purchasing a home and getting alone and selling your house and going through the whole process. But I know that you have the strength to be able to slow down, to be able to process what's going on inside of you. That way you can make a calm decision moving forward, that's going to benefit you and your family.
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