 This week on The Anxious Truth, we're finally going to do a frequently asked questions episode. Actually, we're going to do two of them. This is the first one, so let's go. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to The Anxious Truth. This is podcast episode number 216, recorded in July of 2022. The Anxious Truth is the podcast that covers all things anxiety, anxiety disorders, and recovery. I am Drew Linsalata, creator and host of The Anxious Truth. I am happy that you're here. Before we get cooking on part one of our frequently asked questions episodes, I would like to remind you that The Anxious Truth is more than just this podcast episode. There are hundreds of other free episodes. There's a ton of free social media content. There's a large, engaged, vibrant social media community around this podcast and around the work that I do. There are three, currently three, self-help books that I've written about anxiety and anxiety recovery that are legitimately helping tens of thousands of people around the world right now. There's also a free morning newsletter called The Anxious Morning. All of those things can be found all the time on my website at TheAnxiousTruth.com. So go check that out. Evaluate yourself of the free resources. And I will ask you that if you are enjoying my work and you're enjoying this podcast and I'm helping you in some way, then you would like to find a way to help keep it free of advertising and sponsorships. Because frankly, I'm tired of turning down money from the anxiety bracelet people. You can find all the ways to support my work at the anxioustruth.com slash support. Never required, always appreciated. And yeah, I just appreciate you guys no matter what you do. So here we are in episode 216. Really and truly, I should have done this episode a couple of years ago. I've waited way too long to do frequently asked questions. These are the questions that get asked again and again and again. So I compiled a bunch of them myself. And then I also asked for help from some of my favorite people in the world, the admins and moderators in my Facebook group. Like what are the questions that we hear all the time in the group? That group is approaching 10,000 people. It's very busy. And so we get these questions all the time. So in the eight years that I've been doing this podcast, these are the questions that I get asked again and again and again. So the reason why I'm doing this episode and then next week, episode 217 will be part two of the frequently asked questions is so that we can put them all in one place and you could just pop on over to these two podcast episodes or the corresponding YouTube videos on my YouTube channel and just get those answers if you need them. It'll just be an easy place for us to point people. Hey, here's the top 20 questions that we get asked. Go listen to this. So let's get into it. The first question that I'm going to cover and I'm going to do these pretty quickly, I guess, because I don't want this to be a really long episode. I get asked all the time, am I, Drew, are you fully recovered or do you experience anxiety or panic attacks anymore? And the answer to that is, hell yeah, I am 100% totally completely recovered. I do not have any anxiety disorders anymore. I am completely confident in saying that, that is no lie. Now, does that mean that I never experience anxiety or panic? No, it doesn't mean that at all. One of the things that you will learn if you're just getting familiar with this work that that is not what recovery looks like. I will tell you that I can have an anxious date now and then because I can experience stress and sometimes stress is anxiety for normal healthy human beings. So yeah, sometimes I feel anxiety, but all human beings experience anxiety sometime. I'm just not afraid of it anymore. And that's the difference between anxiety and anxiety disorder. Can I have panic attacks? Sure, I might have a couple of panic attacks a year. Now, it's been a long time since I had one. The last time was probably eight months maybe ago. I tried to document the aftermath of that on my Instagram account. If you follow me over there, it's a highlight in my stories. But yeah, I could, I could have a panic attack today as good as possible. I just don't care if I do or I don't when I prefer not to because it's disruptive. But how do I know that I'm completely and utterly recovered and that I do not have an anxiety disorder anymore? That I don't care. I just do not care whether I panic or don't panic. And I don't care whether I'm anxious or not. Because anxiety is now occupies a regular normal healthy space in my life. So that's the difference between anxiety and anxiety disorders. I do not have an anxiety disorder. I'm no longer afraid of what I think and how I feel. Nor am I worried that I might be anxious or panicky tomorrow. Because even if I were to panic right after I finish recording this podcast, it will start, it will peak, it will end. The whole thing will be over in about 10 minutes. I'll feel shaky for another half hour or 45 minutes and I'll get on with my life. And that's recovery. And that is me. I am fully recovered 100%. I'm not lying. I swear to God. So the next question that I get asked is, full recovery actually possible? And well, I just kind of answered that. So yes, I am 100% fully recovered. If you paraded me in front of a hundred therapists and told and asked them to assess me in diagnosis, I am completely confident. I would bet you every physical asset I have in the world that 100% of them would find no diagnosis to be had. But it's not just me, right? So I don't want to say that, well, because I'm recovered, then that means everybody can recover. I just have seen too many people, hundreds, thousands of people over the years that I've been privileged to interact with you guys who have also reached a state of complete and full recovery and will tell you the same thing that I just told you. Sometimes they get anxious. They might panic now and then. They might have intrusive thoughts now and then they might experience anxiety sensations now and then, but they are 100% fully recovered from their anxiety disorder. So yes, I promise I would not spend the time that I do on this if I did not fully believe and see evidence every day in a large population of people that full recovery is in fact possible. It is. It's possible. I see them every day. If you are in my Facebook group, you see them every day too. You just might not notice that or you might be skewed and thinking, well, this person had a panic attack. I have been told I'll use my impersonal experience. I've been told by people online that because I had a panic attack eight months ago that I'm lying and I'm not recovered. What's the point if you still can have a panic attack and they're missing the whole thing and they can have that opinion if they want. That's okay. We won't see eye to eye, but sometimes the fact that you're so desperate to never panic again, you're so desperate to feel better, you'll discount what recovery actually looks like right now. I get that. That's okay. You're getting there. As you work it down the road, as you get better at the process, you'll start to understand what it really means and you'll see, oh yeah, people really do recover and I could be one of them. I promise. Full recovery is not only possible, I see it every day. Just about every therapist that you can find in the world that specializes in treating anxiety disorders will tell you that, oh, sure, yeah, it's fully possible. Some people with OCD will say, well, you can never cure OCD, but you can live without it crippling you and controlling your life. That sometimes gets debated because just like with anxiety, you may have thoughts, you may have intrusive thoughts now and then they may pop up, especially when you're stressed, but even then, even people that say, well, there's no cure for that, will tell you, but you don't have to be crippled by it anymore and that's recovery. So that's question number two. Question number three, excuse me, this is a bit of a loaded question and you guys know that it's something that I don't spend a whole lot of time talking about, but I have to address it because it comes up all the time every day. And question number three is, can I recover without medication? So I will, if you are really interested, I did three part series in this podcast about a year and a half ago, I don't remember which episodes those are. If you just go to the anxioustruth.com and use the search tool and search for anti-depressant or SSRI, you'll see those three episodes. I told the whole story. Can I recover without medication? Yeah, yeah. Now, let me preface this by saying that if you believe that you are better off in medication and you think that you should just take that for the rest of your life, I am still going to 100% support you as one human being to another. I completely respect your ability to make a decision that you think is best for you 100%. So I'm going to say that it is possible to recover without medication, but please do not tell me that I'm med shaming everybody or anybody. You may choose to take medication and that's a perfectly valid choice. What I'm saying right now doesn't make, that doesn't make what I'm saying untrue and it doesn't mean that I'm invalidating your path, but I get asked, is it possible to recover without medication? And the truth of that is, is that I have, besides me, again, hundreds and thousands of people that I've seen do it. So what am I supposed to say? The answer is yes. Yes, it's there. The evidence is right there. I'm evidence as are these hundreds and thousands of people that I see all the time. Again, if you were in my Facebook group, you know people that have recovered without medication. You know, people who were on medication, did the work of tapering off. Sometimes it was pretty fast. Sometimes it was a struggle. But yeah, you could, people do recover without medication. So if you are taking meds now and you're hoping one day to not, I get you because that was me. That used to be me. Yes, you can come off it. Sometimes it's difficult. That's for sure. But is it possible to come off your medication and fully recover? It is possible. So the answer to that question, can I recover without medication is I did and many, many people do, but your circumstance is yours and you get to make the decision that you think is right for you and everybody should respect that. All right. So that's all I'm going to say about medication. Please don't at me and tell me that I'm med shaming anybody. I'm not. Excuse me. If you want to take medication and you think it's best for you, go for it. Don't let anybody knock you down for that, including me. So the fourth question is not really a question. It's more of a statement. And this is a thing that people will kind of not throw at me. They're not being mean. I understand. And that is this statement. You know, that's easier said than done, Drew. And I, and I understand it totally is, it completely is. This is all easier said than done. But I will point out that I never talk about it being easy. In fact, I talk about how hard it is all the time every single day. I will validate that this is very difficult. The recovery plan that I'm always talking about. And I'm not the only one I didn't invent this. Remember, I did not invent any of this. I just seem to be good at relaying it to people and explaining it. Go me, I guess. But I didn't invent this. But nobody who's in the business of treating anxiety disorders, of being an advocate, whatever it is, and talks about the things that I talk about and believes in this approach, nobody will tell you that it's easy. So if anybody comes at you and tells you that, you know, they have a fast way for you to cure your panic disorder or your agoraphobia or your OCD or your health anxiety run, because there really aren't really easy ways to do this. This is hard. The plan and the concept is simple. But the execution is hard. It is hard. And I've done a podcast episode about that. Now, if you go to the anxioustruth.com slash 216 in the show notes of this episode on my website, I will link the episodes that I'm referencing here. I did an episode dedicated to that. Like, why is recovery so hard? Well, there's a bunch of reasons why it's hard. First and foremost is you have to be brave. You have to face your fear. It's counterintuitive. It's the opposite of what you want to do. You're running toward discomfort. Nobody wants to do that. So when you tell me that's easier said than done, my answer to you is correct. That is correct. I never promised you easy. I never talk about easy. I talk about it being hard all the time. This is easier said than done. It's a simple plan. It's really hard to execute for a variety of reasons. Right? So that's not question for its statement for how's that? So number five in the hit parade here and I frequently ask questions in this episode is how can I be sure that this really is just anxiety? This is definitely a top five question. I hear it all the time, but how can I be sure that it's just anxiety? So let me put this into context. If you are a typical sufferer of things like panic attacks or agoraphobia, health, anxiety, whatever it happens to be, if you're typical and you kind of follow the patterns that most of us follow that I followed that many, many people follow, you have been checked out again and again. And again, maybe you've been to the ER or the A&E like you guys call it in the UK. Maybe you've been to the emergency room and the hospital again and again and again. Maybe you've been to 16 general practitioners and a bunch of specialists and you keep asking for different tests and you always need to, well, what about this? Let's do about this symptom. You know, I mean, I bet you check that out. So the context that I'm talking about right here is that you have gone through all of that and you have been told by a team possibly of medical professionals that there is nothing wrong with you right now. This is anxiety. So that's the question that I'm answering, right? So it's okay to get yourself checked out. Everybody does it. When new things come up in your body, it's okay to check that out. There's no crime in that. There's nothing wrong with that. But once you have been checked out and given that medical clearance, how can I be sure that it's really just anxiety? The doctor keeps telling me that. Everybody keeps telling me that. Drew, how can I be sure? The answer to that question, this is a sucky one. And I did an episode on this too, so I'll link that in the show notes of this one. The answer is you can't ever be sure. That's true. You cannot ever be 100% certain, but you don't need to be, right? So people who are not suffering in the grips of, of disordered anxiety and the irrational fear that comes with that and the distortions and magnifications understand that they are not living in certainty either. They are just willing to be certain enough. And I did a podcast episode with Sally Winston where she talked about that. Her and Marty Seif wrote a book called Needing to Know for Sure, which is a great, great book that I highly recommend. And she talked about being sure enough, like air quotes, normal people. And I know you can't see me because there's no video in this episode, but so-called normal people are sure enough. People with disordered anxiety can never be sure enough. But the reality of this is, is part of the recovery process is that you are learning how to be sure enough. And in the episode that I did entitled how can I be sure this is really anxiety, I went into a thing that I call life math and I talked about this and the distortions and magnifications that, that really overblow the risk in your mind right now. But as you go down the road and you become more and more recovered and a little bit closer to back to so-called normal, that life math goes back to a normal state. The risk is no longer overblown and you learn to be sure enough again. And trust me, that is a state that is perfectly okay. That's the normal human state. How can I be sure that if I have a pain in my chest after a stressful day that it's not a heart attack? I can't be 100% sure. I can't, but I don't have to immediately assume that it is a heart attack and go into immediate emergency mode. So that's the answer to that question. How can I be sure you can't ever be 100% sure of almost anything in life, but you can learn to be sure enough and you can learn when anxiety goes back to a healthy position in your life to navigate that uncertainty more productively and more effectively so that you know, yeah, it's time to call for help. It's time to go see a doctor. You'll know. Believe me, I know now. Back then I had no idea. I thought it was always time to see a doctor and I'm sure you do too right now. And it seems super scary to not see that doctor, but you'll get there. So let's move on to question six. Where are we? 15 minutes. How can I be brave and face the anxiety without running? Look, this is at the core of everything that I talk about, right? This is about going toward the anxiety or allowing it without resistance. I use the term surrender. Josh Fletcher talks about willful tolerance. Claire, we talked about acceptance and floating. So we are allowing this scary stuff, the scary sensations, the disturbing thoughts, the OMG thoughts, the catastrophic thoughts. We're allowing all of that and we're facing it and allowing it to reach its peak so that it comes back down naturally and we can learn how I can navigate through this. I don't have to run from it, but that requires courage because and I'm going to do a podcast episode on this shortly. I'm going to dedicate an episode to the fact that you will be afraid. Yeah. Yeah, you're going to be afraid. You're going to be uncomfortable. You're going to be vulnerable and unsure and uncertain. And those are really tough things to just deal with to just sit in and allow and people will ask me all the time, but how can I be brave and do that? And the answer to that is I can't tell you how to be brave. And a lot of times it done and I've done episodes on this to bravery. I've written my morning newsletter the anxious morning. I did a whole series on bravery. How can I be brave and face anxiety without running? There's no lessons on how to be brave. Just gain an understanding that brave doesn't mean you're not afraid. Brave means that you are in fact afraid, but you're you're doing the thing that you have to do anyway. So that my best tip for how to be brave is to first start with an understanding that brave means that you're afraid and you take a leap of faith that you can you'll be okay even if you're afraid. That's what bravery is. So a lot of people are convinced that like, well, I'm not brave because I'm still really afraid. Yeah, you're going to be afraid. Bravery doesn't mean not being afraid. It means being afraid and doing it anyway. And before I move on from this question, I need to clarify that this is not I mean, yeah, there's that old I don't even know where it comes from. Maybe it was a book, self-help book, feel the fear and do it anyway. Okay, yeah, kind of like that's a gross oversimplification do it anyway. Okay, a little bit of an oversimplification simplification. Just do it, you know, like the Nike slogan, do not ever let anybody tell you that my message or the message of anybody that sounds like me is just do it. That that frosts me that that grinds my gears in a big way. Recovery is not just do it. Nobody is telling you to suck it up. No one's telling you to just do it. This isn't a bad ass hardcore character proof of character or strength thing. This is hard. Being brave is hard. And it's nuanced and you'll be braver on Tuesday than you are on Wednesday. And then maybe you'll be brave again on Sunday. You don't know it waxes and wanes. So just allow all that like do the best you can. Sometimes bravery is very imperfect. Most of the time it's imperfect. That's okay. But none of this just boils down to silly stuff like just do it. Hate that. Don't like that. It's very invalidating. Okay, so the next question. This is a big one. And this is also a sensitive topic. Don't don't I need to find the root cause of my panic attacks to get better? Sometimes the word healing, don't I have to heal to stop my panic attacks? Well, here's the deal. When you are now afraid of the panic itself, and I've talked about this, I've talked about this in some of my earliest episodes, anxiety is physical anxiety disorders are cognitive. I've explained how these things come to be in the evolution of what an anxiety disorder looks like. But the crux of the matter here, don't I need to find the root cause? Don't I have to heal my pain or my suffering in order to stop my panic attacks? The answer maybe. But if you are now primarily concerned with the fact that you are anxious, then then you have a different problem. So you may just have that problem in my life. That's the only problem I've ever found. For whatever reason, I started to have panic attacks. I don't know why I may never know why. But guess what? I got fully recovered without ever finding out why. And I may never know one day I may know I don't know. But once I was only afraid of the next attack, once I became afraid of my own heartbeat, my own thoughts, my own emotions, my own lungs, my own legs. Once I became afraid of the state of being anxious itself, then if there was some sort of root cause or pain trigger, it didn't matter anymore. So the litmus test here is, what am I afraid of? Right. So if you walk out of your house and you experience panic because you have been assaulted and you feel unsafe because of the memories of that assault, then yeah, then that's a root cause thing for sure. I would never ever invalidate that. It's true. But if you started that way and are now just afraid that, well, if I walk out of the house and then I don't like how I feel, that has become the primary fear. Well, now you have two problems. You have to work on the disordered anxiety part, and then maybe there's some healing, some trauma work to do. Yeah, that could be more than one thing can be true at one time. So when I say that you do not need to find the root cause of your panic attacks or your anxiety to get better, I'm talking about a situation where you have learned to be afraid of your own body and thoughts. Right. So in that situation, the root cause kind of doesn't matter anymore. It still might be there. And one day you may do that work. Maybe you'll do that work simultaneously as you're doing the anxiety to start a recovery work. Could be people do that, but to stand on your feet again and no longer be afraid of your own heartbeat, which is the thing I use all the time. No, you don't need to find a root cause. Because whatever that root cause is, did not make you afraid of your own heartbeat. It may have been the trigger that caused your heart to beat faster in those first waves of anxiety, those first panic attacks, but now you're afraid of your heart itself. So the root cause is on the back burner now. Sorry, it is. And the beauty of some of this process is many, many people in our community come to this process and figuratively metaphorically, they're on fire, they're burning. They're burning. I can't get out of my own bed. I can't leave my bedroom. I cannot even walk to the other side of the house without panicking. I have to sit in the dark all day. I'm super sensitized. I can do nothing. I just panic, panic, panic all day long. I'm anxious, anxious, anxious, the thoughts, the thoughts, the thoughts. And they stop digging for root causes. They start doing this kind of work and they put the fire out. And then they discover like, okay, I'm back to a state where now maybe I could do some of that root cause work. I see that every single day. And for those people, they have very difficult, but sometimes very rewarding journeys and experiences. But digging for a root cause, because everybody just assumes that panic is caused by some sort of unhealed pain is really could be a very damaging narrative in the anxiety disorder community. So no, you don't need that. And I will tell you right now, if you've been working with anybody, whether they just be supportive friends, family members, or a therapist that has been digging for your root cause for two years and you still can't find it and you still can't leave your house, you got to rethink that relationship. I'll say it. It's okay. I can say that. So that is the answer to the root cause question. I've talked about this all of the things I'm talking about today. I've written about that were in my books during other episodes of the podcast or in the morning newsletter and they're in my social media content. They're all there. So let's move on to the next question. Another sort of hot topic that I catch a lot of heat about why don't I talk about things like nutrition or diet or supplements? I get asked that I don't understand drew it's a mind body thing. Everybody loves mind body loves mind body. Listen, I have no problem with mind body. I'm cool with that. I don't believe that the fact that there's a connection between your mind and your body is news. Like we kind of know this already. It's not news. It's not profound. It doesn't necessarily inform the recovery process because just like my answer to the last question, if you are afraid of your own heartbeat or you have thoughts that you can't necessarily unhitch from and they are dragging you up and down the street every day, even though you know they shouldn't and you know they're not true, but you get dragged around anyway. If you're afraid of your own breath, if you're terrified to be alone because what if something happens and nobody's here to save me because I might panic and my anxiety might be dangerous this time, then there is nothing in your gut biome that's going to make a pill of beans a difference about that. Now this is not to say that I don't believe in taking good care of your body. We should all take good care of our bodies. There's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. Again, these are not mutually exclusive things. I don't talk about diet or nutrition or supplements because everybody should take care of their bodies. But in this paradigm that I have embraced in my life that many, many of us in this cognitive behavioral approach to anxiety disorders have embraced, that doesn't enter into it really. You know, look, don't let yourself get run down. Don't be unhealthy. Take good care of yourself as best you can. But I'm going to tell you right now, I have run across hundreds and hundreds of people that have fully recovered on a steady diet of sugar processed food and cigarettes. They still got better. They probably have terrible gut biomes, I'm guessing. I'm no expert on that. But the reason why I don't talk about those things is because even though you feel anxiety physically, an anxiety disorder is not a physical problem. Is it possible that, I don't know, something in your leaky gut syndrome or something caused your initial panic attack? Yeah, maybe. But now you're afraid of the attack itself. So this is why the community is full of people who spent just gobs and gobs of money and all kinds of supplements and herbs and special diets and programs who still are having a problem. They may have incredibly well balanced gut biomes. And I know I keep going back to that. You know, they're treating that air quotes second brain as best as you as we know to treat it feeding it the most, you know, whole organic foods and supplementing properly, but still can't get better. There's a reason for that. There's a reason for that. So that's why I don't talk about nutrition or diet or supplements because to me, it's a red herring in recovery. It's a thing that everybody should take good care of. Take please take good care of your physical health, please. Like I would, you know, advise everybody to do that. But chasing diet supplements, herbs in recovery is a red herring. It leads us down paths. We don't need to go and it becomes frustrating because I'm guessing that for every 100 people listening to my words right now, there are at least 35 of you that have a closet or a box or a big plastic container full of at least 300 US dollars worth of vitamin supplements, herbs, special diets, magnesium powder that you all were just hoping were going to be the answer. And I'm sorry that they weren't. But that's why I don't talk about this because it's somewhat irrelevant in recovery. But please, please be healthy. Please take as good of care of your body as you can. Okay, so question number nine, and then we're going to do this one and then one more and we'll wrap it up. Why don't I, no, no, I'm sorry. Question number nine is why do I need a recovery plan? So if you read my book, the anxious truth, which is my recovery guide, you'll I talk about having a plan all the time. Like, why do I need to plan? So I know this is confusing for a lot of people, especially we'll talk about this in a question next week in episode 217, like, but I don't have panic attacks. I don't know what my exposures are. So what would my plan be? I understand that's confusing. But why do I say that we should have a recovery plan? Look, you cannot plan every second of your recovery. So some people here plan and they think that they can literally plan every hour of every day specifically to optimize the recovery. No, you can't. This is you can't become a robot. But the reason why I say we need a plan is that if we do not have a plan to follow that informs the actions that we will take, we will too easily fall into only acting based on how we feel. We'll only challenge ourselves on the good days when we're feeling better. That's bad that we don't learn anything when we're feeling better. We will make our decisions based on our emotions, our symptoms, our thoughts. We make a plan so that we can put some objectivity into that. I woke up this morning and I'm anxious as hell, but my plan says that I go and do my exposures in the morning. So I will go do that. So a plan injects some much needed two things much needed objectivity into the process, because odds are if you're still kind of lost right now and don't know what to do, you are making all of your decisions based on subjective judgments. How do I feel? What does this mean? What do I think about this? What might be wrong? Oh my God, what could this be? That's all subjective. We need objectivity and a plan gives us objectivity. And when we are in an anxious state and we are frantic and beside ourselves, we are terrible decision makers. So a plan gets us out of the business of making decisions on the fly, right? So American football teams and I've talked about this all the time create playbooks. They know who they're playing on Sunday, they get ready and they know what the first 15 plays are that they're going to run. That's just scripted, done. They have playbooks to tell us in this situation we run this play, in this situation we run this play. Yeah, there's some creativity there of course, but they don't wait to make it up on the fly in the heat of a game. And this is the same reason why I talk about having a recovery plan. It's so, to me, it's very important because otherwise you will be governed by your fear, your irrational fear, distortions, magnifications, how you feel, your symptoms, that will suffer to drag you around. And then you wind up in that situation where it's like, I'm doing my exposures. Oh, well, when was the last time you do the driving exposure? Well, I was out on Friday and today is, you know, Wednesday. But that's not exposure, that's interrupted avoidance. There's a difference and not to get into the details, but having a plan helps us stay clear of that trap. So that's why I say we need a recovery plan for objectivity and to get yourself out of the decision making game, minute by minute, when you're suffering and when you're not feeling good, make the decisions ahead of time and then execute those decisions no matter how you feel. A plan does that for us. So question number 10, which will be the last one for this week. This is always one of my favorite ones. And you guys have heard me say this before. This question is any tips for dot dot dot fill in your symptom, fill in your scary thing. Any tips for nausea, any tips for dizziness, any tips for depersonalization, any tips for a metaphobia, any tips for, you know, I can probably go for another 15 minutes and name all the specific things, any tips for the that breathing feeling, any tips for that my nose getting tingly, any tips for feeling like, you know, having a panic attack at night, like, no, no, I don't have any tips for those things. I never have tips for those things. The reason why I don't have tips for that those things is that they're all the same fear, right? So anybody who has ever gone down the road of trying to address each individual fear, like today, I'm afraid of my heart. This is a big one. Any tips for cardiophobia, but how do I overcome a fear of my heart? And at the very same time, there are three people asking me how they overcome heart fear. There are four other people telling me that depersonalization is the worst possible thing. And how do they overcome that? And then there's three other people behind them that are talking about that short of breath air hunger feeling. And that's the worst for them. And they want to know how to overcome that. But the answer is the same all the time. In the Claire Weeks world, and that's really what launched this holding for me, Dr. Weeks talked about accepting and floating, letting time pass. It's the answer for all of them. Even though I know that the thing that you want special tips for right now feels much scarier than the other things. And because it scares you more, you think it's worthy of a special approach to try to specifically address that fear. But especially if you knew it this game, look around at the people who are further down the road from you. And almost with that question, they will tell you that when I get over one fear, another one often takes its place. So this is why that I did a podcast episode about following the principles of recovery and not just instructions. I'll link that one in the show notes anxious truth.com slash 216 for the show notes of this episode. I talked about that then learn the principles and apply the principles of allowing accepting floating willful tolerance surrender all of navigation. Right. He did a video with Lauren Rosen not too long ago. We talked about the thing the tools that we use in recovery are not tools of eradication. They're tools of navigation. So I know in my own personal journey, as soon as I learned to navigate air hunger, I was able to use those navigation skills when I would have PVCs and skipped heartbeats. I was able to use those navigation skills when I experienced derealization or dissociative state. So I could just forklift the same navigation skills across multiple fears and then it all became so obvious and anybody who's down the road and closer to recovery will tell you like, yeah, I thought they were all special and it turns out they weren't. So that's why the answer to any tips for and then you insert your scary thing there is always the answer is always the same. And I say it again and again and again. I know I start to sound, you know, dismissive or flippant. And if you're in my Facebook group, you see me post this at least once a month. Special reminder, no symptom is special. None. No symptom is special. I know you think that your symptom is, but it is not. It is not because like I said, if your particular thing is that you're afraid of your heart and you want to throw down like, no, this is the scariest one. I'll bring somebody in the room here that's terrified of their own breath and then they will fight you. Like they will throw hands with you because they will insist that theirs is worse. And the people that have air hunger will insist that theirs is worse. And the people that are DPD are people, they will insist that theirs were then they'll be a big brawl because everybody is 100% convinced. No, but this one is this is special. How could you not have a tip for this? I can't tell you the number of times that I've had somebody say, I would pay to have a rapid heartbeat. Like I'm so afraid of my breathing that I would pay to be afraid of my heart. I have had people say that I wish I was dizzy. I wish I was dizzy. I'm so afraid of my heart. I wish I was dizzy. That must be a walk in the park. That's easy. See what happens. So that's why the answer to any tips for is it's all the same tip. You're going to have to work through navigating through the thing that you are afraid of to learn that I don't have to be afraid of it. It's super disturbing and uncomfortable and all of those things, but not worthy of an emergency response. And when you learn it for one fear, you forklift those skills to other fears, and it becomes portable across multiple fears. And then when I say all your fears are one fear becomes painfully apparent like holy cow, he was right. So if I can get through the air hunger, I can get through the dizzy, I can get through the tingly toes, I can get through this and get like all of the things. Okay, they're nothing new. It's just like, Oh, thanks, I need to throw another one at me. No problem. I know what to do with this without needing specific instructions for, Oh, I need special breathing instructions. Now I need special dpdr instructions. Now I need special nausea instructions. You don't you need principles, learn the principles, apply them across multiple symptoms and fears, and you're good to go. So no, I don't have any tips for and that is part one of our frequently asked questions. We did 10 questions today. I'm going to do 10 more questions next week and podcast episode 217. So come back for that bookmark it. If you're on YouTube and you're listening to the to it on YouTube, like favorite the video, like when you want to ask these questions again, come back here, like listen to these again. And that's it. So I'll be back again next week. You know the episode is over because music, that's after glow. It's a beginning and end of every podcast episode. So he's written by my friend, Ben Drake. It is sort of inspired by this podcast and is a special song for both Ben and I. And I appreciate that he lets me use it. You can find Ben and his music at Ben Drake music.com. So go check him out. And if you are listening to this podcast on Spotify or Apple podcast or any platform that lets you rate and review, leave a five star rating or whatever the top one is, and then take two seconds and maybe write a quick review because it helps other people find the podcast. If you're consuming this content on YouTube, then like the video, subscribe to my channel, hit the notification bell so you know when I publish more, leave a comment, I dig all that. And yeah, I think that's it. That's part one of our frequently asked questions. I hope it's been helpful. I will be back next week. I do know what I'm going to be talking about. We'll do another 10 questions to wrap this up. I will see you next time. Thank you for your attention. And I will leave you as I always do with a reminder that this is the way