Meet the Squirrel Wrangler™ - From 20 Years of Anxiety to Empowering Freedom

Hi, I’m Stacy Braiuca — known as the Squirrel Wrangler™ — and I made a short video sharing my journey from twenty years of living with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) to finding true remission and building a system that helps other women reclaim their peace of mind. In this article I’ll expand on that story, explain what I mean by “inner squirrels,” outline the Squirrel Wrangling Method (my four-pillar framework), and show how evidence-based techniques like Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), Mental Emotional Release® (MER®), and hypnosis can shift you from surviving in a constant loop of worry to sleeping through the night and making confident decisions.

Table of Contents

• 🔎 The Private Circus at 2 AM: What I See and Who I Help
• 🧭 What Are Inner Squirrels — and Why They’re So Exhausting
• 🛠️ The Squirrel Wrangling Method: A Four-Pillar Framework
• 🧠 From Symptoms to Source: Reprogramming with MER®, NLP, and Hypnosis
• 🌟 A Breakthrough Moment: November 17, 2022
• 🌙 Real Results: Sleep, Decisions, and Quiet Confidence
• 💼 Why This Method Resonates With Accomplished, Multi-Passionate Women
• 🧾 My Training and Why You Can Trust This Roadmap
• 🗺️ A Practical Roadmap: What Working Together Looks Like
• 🌱 What Peace of Mind Actually Feels Like
• 📣 What This Isn’t — Clearing Up Misconceptions
• 🧰 Tools I Use (Explained)
• 🔁 How the Four-Pillar Rotation Works in Everyday Life
• ✨ Stories That Prove the Point
• 📅 If You’re Tired of the Squirrel Wheel, Here’s a Simple Next Step
• ❓ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) 🧾
• 📬 Final Thoughts and Invitation

🔎 The Private Circus at 2 AM: What I See and Who I Help

If you’ve ever stared at the ceiling at 2:17 AM while your mind performs a relentless highlight reel of potential disasters, you are not alone. For two decades I lived and worked inside that paradox: by day, I was a clinical therapist helping clients navigate anxiety. By night, I was an anxious professional, second-guessing myself, replaying past conversations, and imagining worst-case scenarios.

Those racing thoughts are what I call “inner squirrels” — quick, scattered, repetitive mental habits that steal your energy, fragment your focus, and keep you in a state of chronic stress. Inner squirrels are not a moral failing or a character flaw. They’re conditioned patterns of thinking and feeling that got wired into you by experiences, fears, and survival strategies that once helped you cope but now hold you back.

I primarily work with accomplished women in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who, on the outside, appear to have it all together. They give advice, hold responsibilities, and perform well at work and in relationships. Inside, though, there’s a constant hum of worry: “Am I good enough? Am I doing enough? What if I messed up my kid’s future?” Sound familiar?

🧭 What Are Inner Squirrels — and Why They’re So Exhausting

Imagine your mind like a duck on a pond. On top, you look calm, collected, and capable. Underneath, though, your feet are paddling furiously. That paddling is the inner squirrel chatter — the small, repetitive thought loops that demand your attention, drain your energy, and keep you stuck in survival mode. Over time, that constant low-grade fight-or-flight state can lead to insomnia, decision paralysis, relationship strain, and a diminishing sense of self-trust.

“Those are your inner squirrels and they are exhausting you.”

Inner squirrels tend to show up as:

• Racing thoughts that jump from worry to worry.
• Replay of past mistakes or cringe moments.
• Future-driven catastrophizing — the endless “what if” scenarios.
• Perfectionism, over-checking, and people-pleasing to seek external validation.
• Difficulty sleeping and chronic second-guessing.

They’re exhausting because they waste cognitive energy on rehearsed threats rather than letting you use your mental bandwidth to create, connect, and enjoy life.

🛠️ The Squirrel Wrangling Method: A Four-Pillar Framework

When I talk about wrangling inner squirrels, I’m not promising a temporary band-aid. I’m offering a step-by-step method that begins with system-building and moves to deep reprogramming. My approach is built around a four-pillar framework that creates a stable, sustainable foundation for emotional regulation and focused living.

The Four Pillars I work with are:

1. Body — physical regulation, sleep, breathwork, nutrition, and somatic techniques that downregulate anxiety physiology.
2. Mind — cognitive restructuring, NLP techniques, and habit redesign to change thought patterns and beliefs.
3. Relationships — communication, boundary work, and repair strategies to reduce interpersonal anxiety and reliance on external validation.
4. Spirit — meaning, values, and connection to something larger than the frantic inner narrative; often the anchor that sustains long-term change.

Rather than trying to “fix” a scattered brain by forcing more willpower, I teach my clients to create a systemic rotation across these four pillars. That rotation prevents burnout, honors multi-passionate brains, and organizes interests without shaming them. In short: we transform scattered shame into strategic celebration.

Part of this system includes practical tools — for example, I use the Ellie productivity app with many clients to help them structure time, manage projects, and reduce decision friction. But apps alone aren’t enough. The fieldwork — the real change — comes from addressing the emotional and programming roots of anxiety with therapeutic interventions.

🧠 From Symptoms to Source: Reprogramming with MER®, NLP, and Hypnosis

Here’s the key distinction that changed everything for me and my clients: too many anxiety treatments only manage symptoms. They teach coping strategies — breathing techniques, thought-stopping, and safety behaviors — which help in the short term but don’t necessarily change the origin story that created the anxious loops.

To eliminate the root drivers of anxiety, I combine several powerful modalities:

• Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) — a suite of cognitive and behavioral techniques for changing internal representation systems, habits, and emotional responses.
• Mental Emotional Release® (MER®) — a guided process for identifying and releasing core memories and emotional associations that drive current triggers.
• Hypnosis — targeted trance work to accelerate re-patterning of beliefs and embed new, resourceful states.

These aren’t vague “positive thinking” tricks. They are structured interventions that help you map where anxious beliefs came from and safely install new, calming neural patterns. In practice, that means we don’t just teach you to tolerate anxiety better — we find the scenes, words, or beliefs that replay in your mind and dissolve their emotional charge.

🌟 A Breakthrough Moment: November 17, 2022

On November 17th, 2022, my life changed. After a two-week intensive Master Practitioner training, I experienced firsthand how combined NLP and MER techniques can move someone from chronic, unmanaged anxiety into a place of sustained remission. For me, this wasn’t just a mild improvement — it felt like my anxiety literally walked out of the room.

That day, my mind went quiet for the first time in decades. I slept through the night. I woke up with a sense of clarity and trust in my own judgment that I hadn’t felt in years. The techniques not only helped me personally — they put my dad into remission as well. When a method transforms both my internal experience and the lives of people I love, I knew I had to integrate it into my practice.

That’s why the Squirrel Wrangling Method blends the four-pillar systems work with targeted MER® and NLP interventions. We use the structure to stabilize daily life, and the reprogramming techniques to remove the automatic triggers that fuel night-long worry sessions and constant second-guessing.

🌙 Real Results: Sleep, Decisions, and Quiet Confidence

What do the outcomes look like when clients move through this process? Here are some repeated, tangible results I’ve witnessed:

• Sleeping through the night without waking to spiraling “what ifs.”
• Making decisions without asking multiple people for permission or reassurance.
• Reduced compulsive behaviors — fewer obsessive phone checks, less email perfectionism.
• Consistent ability to shift attention from worry loops to present-moment tasks.
• An internal sense of calm that persists even when life gets messy.

“I slept through the night for the first time in months.”

Those two sentences are everything. They aren’t dramatic transformations posted for likes. They’re quiet, human victories — the kind that allow someone to breathe again, parent from presence instead of panic, and make career moves without self-sabotage whispering in their ear.

💼 Why This Method Resonates With Accomplished, Multi-Passionate Women

There’s a reason this work resonates particularly well with accomplished women over 30: often they are multi-passionate, high-achieving, and carrying internalized expectations to be perfect, productive, and nurturing all at once. That combination sets the stage for chronic over-activation of the worry circuitry.

Instead of telling these women to choose one thing and stop being “scattered,” I help them reorganize so their passions fuel their life instead of fracture it. The four-pillar rotation allows a creative brain to thrive without shame. We build empowering structures — routines, rhythms, and mental anchors — that support multiple interests while dismantling the shame surrounding them.

The result: people stop feeling like they’re broken by their multi-passionate nature and start celebrating their clarity and creative genius.

🧾 My Training and Why You Can Trust This Roadmap

My professional path includes 20+ years as a clinical therapist working with anxiety. I hold degrees in social work and public health (BSW, MSW, MPH) and clinical licenses (LCSW, LSCSW, LICSW). I’m also a Master Practitioner of NLP, MER®, and Hypnosis certified by the Association of Integrative Psychology.

But credentials alone aren’t the point — the point is that I’ve experienced the problem firsthand and found a solution that worked. I lived with GAD for years while helping others manage theirs. That lived experience, combined with rigorous training and results with clients and family members, is what gives me confidence in this work.

🗺️ A Practical Roadmap: What Working Together Looks Like

If you’re wondering what a coaching or therapeutic arc looks like when you work with me, here’s a simplified roadmap:

1. Assessment — Identify your top anxiety patterns, how they show up in daily life, and which pillar needs immediate stabilization.
2. Foundation-building — Establish body, mind, relationship, and spirit routines that reduce baseline arousal and create safety.
3. Targeted intervention — Use MER®, NLP, and hypnosis to locate and release the core memories and beliefs fueling your anxious loops.
4. Integration — Install new habits, anchor resourceful states, and practice regulated decision-making patterns.
5. Launch — Apply the Ellie productivity tools and our rotation strategy to support your creativity, goals, and life design without relapse into the squirrel wheel.

This is a collaborative journey. I’m your navigator — not someone who magically fixes everything for you. The real power comes when we combine clinical skill, targeted technique, and your lived experience to redesign a life that feels restful yet vibrant.

🌱 What Peace of Mind Actually Feels Like

Peace of mind is not an absence of emotion. It’s the ability to feel anxious, disappointed, or uncertain without being hijacked by those feelings. Peace of mind looks like:

• Waking and feeling rested instead of drained.
• Making a choice and moving forward rather than replaying and re-checking forever.
• Being able to parent, lead, or create from presence rather than from fear.
• Laughing at your own small mistakes instead of catastrophizing them.

When clients tell me their mind is no longer their enemy — that they can actually trust themselves — that’s the mark of deep change. Those small victories compound into a life that’s more joyful, creative, and collaborative.

📣 What This Isn’t — Clearing Up Misconceptions

Let me be clear about a few common misconceptions:

• This work is not quick-fix positivity. It’s not about affirmations plastered over unprocessed wounds. It’s about targeted therapeutic change.
• This method is not shame-based. We don’t pathologize creative, passionate brains. We celebrate them and provide tools to manage their natural intensity.
• This isn’t about becoming emotionless. The goal is emotional freedom — to feel deeply without being controlled by the feeling.

🧰 Tools I Use (Explained)

Here’s a brief primer on the major tools I combine:

NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming)

NLP provides methods to quickly change internal maps — the way your brain represents experiences. We use it to alter how you recall memories, dissolve negative associations, and install resourceful states for decision-making and calm.

MER® (Mental Emotional Release)

MER® helps identify emotional memories attached to current triggers. It’s a safe, guided process that frees the emotional charge from those memories so they stop driving automatic anxious responses.

Hypnosis

Hypnosis is a powerful accelerant for embedding new beliefs, calming the nervous system, and rehearsing new responses in a state of focused attention.

Ellie App

Tech is not a cure-all, but smart tools like Ellie help reduce friction in life. By organizing time and projects and reducing decision fatigue, the app supports the systems we build in the four-pillar rotation.

🔁 How the Four-Pillar Rotation Works in Everyday Life

Let’s translate conceptual systems into concrete actions:

• Body day: Focus on sleep hygiene, movement, and breathwork.
• Mind day: Cognitive restructuring, journaling prompts, and micro-NLP exercises.
• Relationship day: Practice boundary-setting scripts and honest communication exercises.
• Spirit day: Values clarification, gratitude practices, and an exploration of meaning.

The rotation doesn’t have to be rigid or prescriptive. The key is to consciously give attention to each pillar on a routine basis so that no single part of you becomes depleted or neglected.

✨ Stories That Prove the Point

I cherish the small messages clients send: a late-night text that says, “I made a decision today without asking three people what they thought first,” or a short note that reads, “I slept through the night for the first time in months.” Those sentences are the currency of change.

“I made a decision today without asking three people what they thought first.”

It’s not about dramatic fireworks. It’s about quiet, sustained shifts in the nervous system and in how someone relates to their own mind.

📅 If You’re Tired of the Squirrel Wheel, Here’s a Simple Next Step

If you’re exhausted from pretending you have it all together while your mind races, you don’t have to keep suffering in silence. The first practical step is to set an intention to be curious rather than punitive with your own mind. Curiosity opens the door to change. Judgment keeps you stuck.

From there, a complimentary consultation is a low-pressure way to see whether my approach fits your needs. We’ll look at which pillars are most destabilized, identify a small number of targets for MER®/NLP work, and create a short roadmap you can start using immediately.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) 🧾

Q: What exactly is “remission” when you talk about anxiety?

A: Remission means that the symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder are no longer interfering with day-to-day functioning. It doesn’t mean you’ll never feel anxious again — anxiety is a normal emotion — but it does mean your nervous system no longer lives in a perpetual state of high alert that undermines sleep, relationships, and decision-making.

Q: How long does it take to see results?

A: Results vary. Many clients report immediate shifts in intensity after a few MER® or NLP sessions. Deeper rewiring and habitual changes typically occur over weeks to months depending on the severity and duration of the anxiety, engagement with homework, and consistency of the four-pillar rotation.

Q: Are these techniques safe?

A: Yes. NLP, MER®, and hypnosis are practiced widely and can be used safely by trained clinicians. I combine these methods with clinical oversight and integration strategies to ensure you process memories in a contained, resourceful way.

Q: Do I need to stop medication or other therapies?

A: Absolutely not without consulting your prescribing clinician. My work can complement medication and other therapies. We coordinate care and make transitions intentionally and safely when appropriate.

Q: Is this only for women?

A: While much of my work focuses on women in their 30s–50s because of specific societal pressures that make anxiety more likely in that demographic, the Squirrel Wrangling Method helps anyone who struggles with racing thoughts, shame around being multi-passionate, or chronic worry.

Q: What does a typical session look like?

A: Sessions combine assessment, stabilization exercises from the pillar most in need, and a targeted therapeutic intervention (NLP, MER®, or hypnosis). You’ll leave with concrete practices to anchor shifts in nervous system regulation.

📬 Final Thoughts and Invitation

If you’ve spent years telling yourself, “I should just be able to handle this,” or “Everyone else seems fine — why not me?” please stop. You didn’t design your nervous system to be a hamster wheel. It developed patterns based on what kept you alive or functional at specific times. Those patterns can be rewritten.

I’ve been in the dark place of 2 AM anxiety. I’ve walked clients out of it. I’ve watched my own father step into remission as a result of this work. You don’t need another band-aid strategy. You need a proven roadmap, anchored in practical systems and therapeutic reprogramming, that meets your complexity with compassion and skill.

If you’re ready, I’ll walk alongside you as a navigator — helping you wrangle the inner squirrels, rebuild trust in your own judgment, and rediscover the peace and joy that’s been waiting for you all along.

Ready to explore next steps? Book a complimentary consultation at https://stacybraiuca.com/consult and let’s see how the Squirrel Wrangling Method can help you sleep as well as you perform.

This article was created from the video Meet the Squirrel Wrangler™ - From 20 Years of Anxiety to Empowering Freedom with the help of AI.