What Your 80-Year-Old Self Wants You to Know About Fear: A Therapist in Charleston SC on Anxiety, Courage, and Living Your Values
If you’re searching for a therapist in Charleston SC, chances are anxiety has been whispering… or shouting… in your ear lately.
Maybe your mind is running worst-case scenarios.
Maybe fear is keeping you from taking a risk.
Maybe you’re tired of feeling like anxiety is in the driver’s seat of your life.
If that’s you, I want you to know something first:
There is nothing wrong with you.
What Your 80-Year-Old Self Wants You to Know About Fear | Dr. Stephanie Best
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Below is the unedited transcript from the original video.
Hi, I'm Dr. Stephanie Best. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist and I used to be anxiety girl. Able to jump to the worst conclusion at a single bound.
For those of you who know me, that was a large part of my history because as far as I can tell, I popped out of the womb anxious. But in my journey as a licensed clinical psychologist and as a member of Club Human over the last 50 years, I have learned a thing or two about how to operate effectively even with anxiety around and when your mind is trying to torture you with all of those catastrophic future scenarios that it can imagine.
Now what I love to do in my practice is inspire high achieving women with anxiety to live courageously and build lives that they love using mindbody wellness. And many of you have asked to hear from me more often.
So here we go. We are going to do the YouTube thing. And my hope is to post a video roughly every week. We'll see how that goes. Where I am teaching you a tip or a skill to help you manage your own anxiety, but I'll be applying it through the lens of my own life just to show you that we all experience anxiety sometimes. And I firmly believe there is nothing wrong with you. You are not broken. You are a wonderful human being who really just needs maybe some skills to help you learn how to navigate situations where your anxiety shows up and tries to yank you around and gets to have too much impact and influence over you and maybe takes you away from the things that you love and the people that you love.
So, this week's tip is ask your 80-year-old self, what the heck do I mean by that? So, I actually needed to apply that in in starting this channel and in making this video. I have been thinking about doing this for a lot longer than I want to admit to y'all. And what has gotten in the way? Well, sure, it's easy to say… so busy hosting people, lots of things to do on my to-do list, right? We're all busy these days. Really if I dug down I knew that what was keeping me from starting this and was beginning to serve as a real obstacle was fear.
Fear is something that we're all very familiar with, right? And when we struggle with anxiety, fear can keep us from taking the steps that really are aligned with our values. Okay? So how do we find out what our values are? This is where ‘Ask Your 80-year-old Self’ comes in. So, if I could bring my 80-year-old self back to sit here with me and maybe have a cup of tea in a time machine, bring her back from the future and have a chat with her to say, "Well, what do you think about, you know, making these videos off the cuff and not having them all perfect and prepared and not having a social media team to make them look all beautiful and, you know, are you sure that you should, that that's the right thing to do?"
And you know what she would say to me? She would say, "Do it." Because she knows what's in my heart, my why. She knows the why, and she's got to focus on the stuff that's more important. So, my 80-year-old self says, "I want to help people. I want to help people however I can. I want to use my own life experience. I want to use my 20 plus years of working with women with anxiety to help others liberate themselves from their fear." Because the women that I know in my life and the women that I've worked with have incredible hearts and incredible minds and if they could be liberated from their fears, I think they would have an incredible impact on the world. And that doesn't necessarily mean making big huge sweeping changes. It just really means in your community with the people that you love, however you want to use it, you get to shine your light more brightly when fear isn't in the driver's seat.
So, I asked my 80-year-old self, why would I make this video? Even though my head is saying, "What if you mess up? What if you don't do it right? What if people don't like it? What if they go, ‘Oh gosh, that's cringey. She really… what is she doing?’" You know, all of that stuff, right? Why make space for this discomfort and do this anyway? Because it's important to me to turn my pain into purpose. The things that I went through in the past, the times where I I did let fear drive the bus. I learned from those and I want to help you learn as well. So, this is my way of starting to try to, you know, show you how I walk the walk every day, not just talk the talk.
And asking your 80-year-old self will help you put into a clear lens what really matters most to you. And for me, it's not… I'm not going to get to the end of my life, I'm not going to get to 80 years old and say, "Yeah, I didn't really take many risks to sort of spread my message or teach other people the things that I learned. I played it really safe, but everybody was really happy with me in the end, so I'm good with that." No, I'm not going to say that when I get to the end of things. I'm going to want to say, "Yeah, sometimes it was uncomfortable and sometimes it was scary and I didn't know if I would be received well or people would approve of what I was doing, but that's not what this is about.” This is about helping you, maybe the person who's watching this right now. This is about helping you. This is about showing you that you can have uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, body sensations, anxiety, or otherwise, and they can be trying to prevent you from taking that next step in your life. that you know is important. But if you bring your 80-year-old self back from the future and say, "Hey, am I really focused on the things that are going to matter to me most when it's all said and done?" And I think you'll get a clearer answer from her.
So, here is my initial attempt at showing this. I'm making this video, very little prep, honestly, and I hope that you have found it useful. If you have certain tips or things that you are struggling with that you would like to hear about from week to week, don't hesitate to let me know. Go ahead and if you see this on social media, drop a comment or back channel me in a private message. If you received this in an email, please respond to the message and let me know how I can be most helpful. And of course, if you feel like this is what you want to do, go ahead and like this video and subscribe to my YouTube channel. So that you can be notified when I put out new videos. Alright, thanks for being here while I put my values and my 80-year-old self in the driver's seat and kicked fear to the back of the bus. What is it that you want to do this week? If you could do the same, if you could put your heartfelt values, the things you're going to care the most about at 80 years old, first this week, and let that make the choice for you about what you want to do versus fear… What might you do? Be brave, be courageous, be kind, and I look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks for listening and watching.
As a psychologist in Charleston SC, I work with high-achieving women every day who look “fine” on the outside but feel hijacked by anxiety on the inside. And I know this terrain personally. For much of my life, I was what I jokingly call “Anxiety Girl.” I could leap to the worst conclusion in a single bound.
What changed wasn’t that anxiety disappeared.
What changed is that I learned how to operate effectively even when anxiety is present.
Today I want to share one simple but powerful tool I use in my own life and in Charleston anxiety therapy with my clients:
Ask Your 80-Year-Old Self
When fear is loud, your mind will generate a hundred reasons not to act.
What if you mess up?
What if people judge you?
What if it’s cringey?
What if you fail?
Sound familiar?
This exact fear almost stopped me from starting my YouTube channel. I had every practical excuse in the book. I was busy. I had a full schedule. I didn’t have a production team. The videos wouldn’t be perfect.
But if I’m honest? It was fear.
And this is where the question comes in:
If my 80-year-old self were sitting across from me having tea… what would she say?
She wouldn’t care about perfect lighting.
She wouldn’t care about polished edits.
She wouldn’t care whether everyone approved.
She would say: Do it.
Because she knows my why.
What This Has to Do With Anxiety Therapy in Charleston
As a therapist in Charleston SC specializing in anxiety, I teach women how to stop letting fear dictate their lives.
Fear is not the enemy.
Avoidance is the trap.
In Charleston anxiety therapy sessions, we don’t try to eliminate uncomfortable thoughts or feelings. Instead, we ask:
What matters most to you?
What kind of woman do you want to be?
When you are 80, what will you wish you had done?
When anxiety says, “Play it safe,” your future self may be saying, “Be brave.”
When anxiety says, “Don’t risk it,” your values may be saying, “Shine.”
Why This Question Is So Powerful
Your 80-year-old self has clarity.
She knows:
Approval doesn’t matter as much as impact.
Comfort doesn’t matter as much as meaning.
Playing small won’t be what makes you proud.
When you bring that perspective into the present moment, something shifts.
You can still feel anxious.
You can still feel uncertain.
You can still have uncomfortable body sensations.
But you no longer let fear drive the bus.
That’s the heart of the work I do as a psychologist in Charleston SC. We build the skills to:
Notice fear without obeying it.
Clarify your values.
Take aligned action anyway.
Turn pain into purpose.
Because when fear isn’t in the driver’s seat, you get to shine more brightly.
Not in some grand, dramatic way.
But in your home.
In your work.
In your community.
With the people you love.
A Question for You This Week
If you could put your heartfelt values in the driver’s seat — and move fear to the back of the bus — what would you do differently this week?
What would your 80-year-old self encourage you to do?
Have the conversation?
Start the project?
Set the boundary?
Take the risk?
You don’t have to eliminate anxiety to move forward.
You just need clarity about what matters most.
Ready for Support?
If you’re looking for a therapist in Charleston SC — or anywhere in one of the 40+ states where I’m authorized to practice via PSYPACT — I would love to connect with you. I understand anxiety from both personal and professional experience.
If you’re ready for therapy, you can reach out here:
👉 Contact me: https://www.drstephaniebest.com/contact
If you’re not quite ready for therapy but want practical tools for managing anxiety, I created a free guided mindfulness meditation for you:
👉 Download it here: https://www.drstephaniebest.com/freemindfulnessmeditation
And if you’d like weekly-ish encouragement and practical anxiety skills delivered in video form, subscribe to my YouTube channel:
👉 https://www.youtube.com/@courageouslivingdoc
You don’t have to let fear run your life.
Be brave.
Be courageous.
Be kind to yourself.
And let your 80-year-old self lead the way.
