 We are here for Recovery Monday, episode number 56. And today we're gonna talk about that whole, I keep getting stuck in my head. Help, I keep getting stuck in my head. I keep winding up, going down the rabbit hole of thoughts. So help, help, I need tips on that. So we're gonna talk about that today. Let us get the chat overlay up so we can see what's happening. When you guys pop in, let me know you can hear me. Let me know everything's working. Let me know where you're from. We are in the home stretch here before if you celebrate Christmas, Christmas is coming up. Those of you who celebrate Hanukkah, happy Hanukkah. I know we're in the middle of that. So yeah, I have a little bit of a lighter week this week in terms of school and I'm thrilled about that. And then next week is a week off. Yes, no assignments to do. So I'm so happy about that. Anyway, so let's wait for the usual suspects to file in and then we'll get into it. This is a pretty hot topic I think. Everybody gets stuck on this. Like help, I'm stuck in my own head. Can't get out of my own head. Hello, hello. Hey Nicole, good to see you. Dylan's here, Bethany is here. Billy is here, what up Bill? Deosa, I hope I'm saying that correct. Welcome from Indianapolis. Noel is here from Oregon. Let's see, turn the screen blanking off. Ho, ho, ho, I can always count on Jason to remind me. Actually, I have to do that. You're correct. Thank you, Jay. Oh, Carol's got a cold, that sucks. Hope you feel better soon. Hey Valerie from cold Florida. It's freezing here in New York. I don't want to hear it by cold Florida. Hello, Ohio. Anyway, we'll do the usual. I'll talk for maybe 10 or 12 minutes because I don't think I have a lot to say about this today. It's going to be pretty basic. And then, you know, if you guys have questions or comments, throw them up there. Of course, I always like to hear what you guys have to say. Always love when they're conversations, you guys are talking to each other and helping each other, right? I love that. It's one of my favorite things. Excellent, I got it right. That's a cool name, by the way. Deosa, love it. Hey, hey, hey, Canada is here. Anyway, all right, let's get into this. There's 42 of you here. So one of the more common things we hear, famous last words, right? Bethany has me now, she knows me. I say it's going to be short and then, and then I'm here an hour later. Anyway, let's talk about this whole, like we are in, I'm stuck in my own head. I'm stuck in my own head. I can't get out of my own head. Help, I need tips for getting out of my own head. And what I'm going to throw at you immediately on this topic is, why do you think that you should be able to stop thinking? Like, I say this a lot lately. One of the phrases I've taken to use it a lot lately is that we can choose to think about something, but we cannot choose to not think about something. So like, I'll repeat that because it sounds a little weird. We can choose to think about something. We cannot choose to not think about something. So you have to really define the state of like, well, I'm in my head. Well, what does that mean? It means you're thinking, right? It means your head is producing thoughts about the things that you think are very important right now. Your symptoms, your sensations, the thoughts themselves, if you're thinking about the thoughts themselves, you're building what ifs scenarios, you're catastrophizing, you're doing all those things, right? So you're thinking. And the idea that you want tips to be able to get out of your own head is often a misinterpretation or an unfair request of yourself that says, I need to stop this from happening. Like please tell me how to stop doing that. And the answer is you can't stop doing that, right? That's not a fair ask of you to think that you could just turn off the switch that creates those thoughts. Those thoughts are part of a system that means well, but has kind of gone off the rails. And at this point, it's sort of misguided. It's not really helping you. It's hurting you. We know all about this, right? The threat detection mechanism kind of gone wrong. And so it thinks it's doing its job. Like it's gonna keep trying to get your attention back to like, oh, I don't know, man. Like right now, half of my hand is really tingly. Put it to you that way. I have ulnar nerve and trapping to this hand. So half of my hand is numb and tingly right now. It happens, right? So it's distracting. I can feel it. It feels weird. And so an anxious person's brain would continually go back to, uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. What does that mean? What does that mean? That might, maybe it's not the, it's maybe it's not the, you know, the nerve and trap this time. Maybe it's a stroke this time. Maybe there's something really wrong. Maybe you're having a heart attack. Maybe you're dying. So like back in my really bad days, I would understand my brain would get caught in that loop. Uh-oh, what if, what if, what if? Okay, fair enough. It thinks it is doing me a favor, but it is not doing me a favor. It's actually, it's not helping me at all. But nonetheless, it is still thinking and it's not fair for me to demand that my brain stopped doing that. So if you feel like you get stuck in your head and feel free in the comments, if you wanna throw them out here, like these are the things I get stuck thinking about, but head, throw them in the comments and we'll talk about them. But whatever it is that you wind up getting, you find yourself, oh, I'm thinking about it again. I'm down the rabbit hole. I'm building stories. I'm answering. I'm telling stories in my head. I can't, how do I stop that? The answer is, in short, you don't stop it. Like it's going to happen. So expect that it will happen. Do not declare yourself as doing something wrong or failing. It's just not that way. So if you keep returning to specific thoughts in your head and you wind up getting stuck up there a little bit and you find a few minutes into it that you're engaging with it again, okay, it's not, damn it, it happened again. Something is wrong because it's happening again. I'm thinking again. Thinking is not a problem at all. So what we're really after here is what happens after you have those thoughts and what happens when you discover, ah, I'm in my head again. I had a couple of thoughts and I went inside and I started answering them and I'm in a whole dialogue in my head, right? So what happens when you discover that you're doing that? That's what we care about. That's the most important part. Once you discover that you've done it again, what's your reaction, right? So when you notice that you're stuck in your head, air quotes, what do you do from there? Now you have power and now you have choice. Well, I can stay in my head or I can continue to try to solve this problem by thinking and ruminating and going through all the what if thoughts and trying to find some sort of answer in my head. I can choose to do that if I want, but that's probably gonna make me feel bad and I'm getting more and more worked up while I do it or I can continue to let my brain produce those thoughts and I can move my attention elsewhere. That's okay. That's a win right there. If you realize it and you make the decision, I'm gonna move my attention elsewhere. I will drink my coffee or I will live stream to the 60 people in the room while my brain is saying, oh, your hand is numb, okay? So my brain will continually try to get me back inside because it thinks it's helping me and I'm supposed to pay attention to those scary thoughts, right? Like your brain will say, no, no, of course you're supposed to pay attention to this. This is important shit. So it'll keep dragging you back in there, but when you discover you've been dragged in, you drag yourself back out again. So it's not a failure because you've wound up in your own head, especially when this is new to you and you're sort of in the beginning of things, anxious people spend most of the day in their own heads and the recovery process is a process of slowly changing that over time. Like it's not a thing that you can just decide, oh, okay, I watched Drew's video four days ago, so now I shouldn't be in my head anymore. It would be great if it worked that way, but it doesn't work that way. It's gonna take time, it's gonna take repetition, it's gonna take practice. And in the end, what you're learning is that when my brain decides that something is really important and that I should think about it, when I catch that and I sort of move away from that while it's still sending the alarms, I discover that like, oh, either the thought got quiet or I forgot about it for a couple of minutes. I get pulled back in, but suddenly I get caught up in whatever and I stopped being afraid for a couple of minutes and I get dragged back in. Okay, fair enough, but over time, those experiences that like, oh, I was okay, even when I didn't pay attention to the thought is what changes your relationship to the thought. And until you can get to that place where you're just working that process again and again and again, and accepting that the outcome is that nothing bad happens to you. You've got to accept that outcome. Then over time, your relationship with that process changes and the process itself then starts to change slowly. So that's kind of the way this works. It's not like, when you say help, I keep getting stuck in my own head, be careful of demanding that somehow you should be able to stop thinking about things. You cannot demand to stop thinking about things. It simply does not work that way. I've done whole podcast episodes on this. You've all heard of like the famous, was it Purple Dragon or Pink Elephant experiments? You know, don't think of a, if I tell you don't think of a pink elephant, you will automatically think of a pink elephant. There is actually a checking mechanism up there that says, okay, I'm not gonna think this. But then there's a checking mechanism that rolls back and says, am I thinking about it yet? Did it work? Am I thinking about it? And the minute that checking mechanism rolls in, you're thinking about the thing. So it's virtually, it is impossible for us to say, I'm not gonna think that, not gonna think that. So if you can't stop your brain from thinking, what you can do is to learn a different way to relate to your thinking habits. And you can look at this two different ways like, and there are really two things happening on them at the same time, they're not mutually exclusive, they're probably complimentary really. You can look at it as changing a new relation to the thoughts themselves, the actual thoughts, I'm going crazy, my blood pressure's too high, my fingers are tingling. The thoughts themselves you perform new relationships with, but you're also changing your relationship with your thinking habits. So anxious people tend to get in the habit. Generally all anxious people tend to build thinking habits that are designed to think a lot, to try to seek safety, protection, comfort and certainty. Other people, even non-anxious people, will describe themselves sometimes as over thinkers, and especially like our GAD contingent here in the community probably came into this already with a propensity to think that thinking and worrying and ruminating is a go-to behavior to solve problems and seek certainty, and that goes off the rails. So over time as you practice this, instead of declaring failure, damn it, I'm in my head again and now I'm all worked up. Okay, fine, you're in your head again, you're all worked up right now, now what do you, now what can I do with this, right? So part of the answer to the question today, help, how do we get out of my own head, is essentially to recognize I'm gonna wind up in my own head, it's okay, it's not a failure. And if I wind up in my own head and now I'm uncomfortable because of that, I can't keep calling that a nightmare and demanding tips or techniques or tricks to make it stop. I have to recognize what's happening, I'm engaging in thinking, my brain is thinking to try and keep me safe, it's not helping me. And so now what can I do with it? So step number one of getting in your own head is recognize that your brain will think, step number two is you're gonna have to understand that you can't demand that it will not think. And step number three to me might even be step one, maybe, might be the most important step is, I have to stop declaring the discomfort of my thoughts as a horrible disaster that I must be able to stop. So much of what we talk about in this community, whether we're talking about thinking, sensation, symptoms, it doesn't matter what it is, whether it's panic disorder, agoraphobia, health anxiety, again, it doesn't matter. So much of this ultimately boils down to, I cannot tolerate the state of discomfort. I cannot tolerate the state of distress. So much so that Joanna Hardison, I do this do the distress tolerance webinar every month. It's such an important thing that I'm getting more and more into it and we're teaching it more and more now because so much of recovery is really about the process of addressing your intolerance of any state of distress. So if you get stuck in your head and you discover that you're there and now you're worked up because you've been overthinking, okay, oh yeah, that's right. This is gonna happen because my brain thinks it's helping me. This is not a disaster. I feel bad, but I'm allowed to feel bad. What else can I do to work through this now? And then here's the bad part. This is the part that frustrates everybody and that I hate to have to say. Then you have to rinse and repeat. So it's a rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. That sucks. That's the part that sucks because it can get super frustrating. It can get a lot can happen there. You start to feel like this isn't working. When is it gonna work? All of those things. So I kind of get that and I get the frustration. I really get the frustration but be patient with yourself and be nice to yourself. Do the fact that you beat yourself up because I'm an overthinking, I can't stop. What is it about me? Nothing about you. You're just normal. Like your brain is normal. It's an overdrive trying to keep you safe. It doesn't have to keep you safe right now. It doesn't know that. We're teaching it. It's cool. Like it's all right. It's just cool. I can do this, right? So it's really important, man. It's really important. So like I said, I told you, I didn't have a whole lot to say about this. It's actually a relatively simple topic just that so many people, I'll call it, answer really quick. Rinse and repeat is if you have to refocus your attention again and again and again, do that. Like do that. It's okay. You can't say, okay, well, today I'm gonna make sure that I'm externally focused and today I'm gonna stay focused on the external world and I'm gonna be mindful. And then at one o'clock in the afternoon you discover you've spent the last hour like digging deep into your thoughts. You're stuck in your head and you've worked yourself up into a lather. Rinse and repeat is, oh, I have to go back again and focus outward again as opposed to up it happened, it's over, disaster. My tips and tricks and techniques didn't work. Rinse and repeat is every day, again and again and again, you're gonna have to refocus and put your attention where you want it to be when you discover that it's been dragged back into your own head again. That's what I mean when I say rinse and repeat. And that's why I say it's exhausting, it's tiring, it's frustrating. Like, and so many people when you get into that situation, like we'll start to say, I wish I, I don't know what's wrong with me that I keep going back, I keep getting stuck in my head and nothing is wrong with you. You're just working on breaking a really long standing habit that was born out of the idea that you have to stay safe. So be nice to yourself. All right, so hopefully that helps, let's pop, cool. So let's pop into the comments here and see what we got. Does this typically take time? Like months, it takes however long it takes. So I do understand that you want a timeframe. Is this a week? It will take two weeks, will it take three weeks, take six months? I don't know. Don't actually don't know that. So it'll take as long as it takes. I will tell you that it's not, doesn't take a week, doesn't take three days. It's not gonna be, probably not gonna be two weeks. This is a very long standing habit that you're trying to break. And I say this all the time, it's really easy to trigger the threat detection mechanism. We need it to be that way, evolutionary speaking, but it's really hard to turn it off, which is okay. You would want it to be that way. If it was really easy to turn off, then we probably wouldn't all be here with some other species would be here except us. So be careful, man. Be careful with that. Okay, so let's go through some comments and see what everybody has to say. Let's see here. What if you get better from your video? What if I got better from your videos, but then I heard you talk about trauma and the thought I'm not worthy in my recovery and boy that triggered my brain and now I can't stop paying attention to this thought. Okay, I'll put this up on the screen. It's a fairly tall comment. Hello, Lou. So first of all, the first thing I wanna say is, what if you got better from my videos? You didn't get better from my videos. You changed something, right? So I'm gonna take it down because it's just a big comment. You made some sort of change. My videos may have pointed you in a direction, but you didn't get better from my videos. So I'm gonna really point that out and hand the credit right back to you. You got better because you watched my videos and you started doing things differently. You started changing things. And that started to change the way you were feeling and the way you were thinking and things went in a different direction. So think about what you did differently, what you changed to get better from my videos, right? In this situation, you heard a thing. You heard something. Okay, maybe you feel like you're not worthy in your recovery. And now your brain has decided, I need to latch onto this thought and I need to think it again and again and again. I need to solve it. I need to figure out if he's talking about me. What would you do to change the way you react to that thought? So this isn't like a new thing, like, oh, well, now this is a new problem. It's really kind of the same problem. My brain got triggered by that thought. You'd have to really look at it and say, okay, well, do I feel that way? It's possible. Do I feel that way about myself that I'm unworthy? Do I have some negative self-image issues? Okay, well, that's okay. Half the people walking the planet do. I can maybe start to work on those. I can't seem to find those negative self-image things. So therefore, right now, that's just the thought. And now what can I do? And then I'll just, I guess I'll just have to go about my day while my brain is screaming that I have some trauma that I don't know about or self-image issues that I don't know about. See how that works? Like if I do know, oh, man, I got triggered because, ah, man, I feel that you're right. I got some work to do. Okay, that's cool. That's all right, you can do it. But if you feel like, well, maybe I have that work to do, but I don't know it, and now I have to ruminate on that, now you can change the way you react to that thought, just the way you change the other stuff when you say you got better from the videos. I hope that helps. Sometimes it's about taking the principles and applying them in all these different contexts, right? You know, your brain can throw thoughts that you like you're dying, and oh, we haven't had one of these guys for a while. Kind of want to leave him just to see what he does, but oh well. We'll block him. You private dating chat. Hags. Anyway, I'll block him here too. Hang on here. There you go. So sorry, guys. This means we're popular, I guess. There's 60 of us in the room and they felt like they needed to barge in. So good deal. Okay, so hopefully that helped, but you didn't get better from my videos. You did stuff. Like give yourself the credit, Lou. You did stuff. Let's see, Valerie says it's the doubt that creeps back in. Okay. It's the doubt that creeps back in, says Valerie. I think the other day Josh Fletcher talked about that, that the key one of the things that runs common thread is doubt, right? It's totally doubt. Doubt about am I judging this right? Am I doing this right? So it's the doubt that creeps back in. Okay, but what you're gonna have to do, your job here with the doubt is I'm going to have to do my best to live the life that I wanna live as close as I can approximate it today while I'm full of doubt. So be careful that when the doubt comes in, you decide, now I have to fix the doubt. I've doubt so I have to fix it. No, you don't. You don't have to fix it at all. In fact, most of the time in these contexts, you cannot fix it because the doubt is often driven by distortions or black and white things. There's a bunch of cognitive distortions there. There's catastrophizing in there. Often the doubt is not anything you'll ever be able to address anyway with more thinking. So you have to be careful. When you feel that, oh, I have doubt again. Okay, well, I'll have to do my day while I'm full of this doubt. Does that make sense? Let's see here. Oh, my house in New York City. Welcome, I hope you're enjoying it here. Chest pain and palpitations are what freaks me out. It puts me back into my home. So I understand that that is scary 100%. Certainly I can relate to that in a big way but one of the basic principles we operate on here is that if you choose to run back to your house every time you feel those unpleasant sensations and you have been told by your doctor, doctors probably plural for most people in the room, they've checked it again and again, that you're healthy and there's nothing wrong with you. Every time you run back and make that choice to do that, you stick yourself deeper into that hole a little bit. So I know that's not what you wanna hear about this but that is one of the basic principles here and everything I ever talk about is recognizing that that's part of the problem and recognizing that what we're talking about here is doing the really scary job of not going back home. I know you want to, I know it's really difficult. If you could just choose to do that, you really chose to do it but that's a basic principle here that says, okay, you can continue to do that if you want. You have a right to live your life anyway you want but every time you run back home and it makes you feel better for an hour then you're just setting yourself up for the next time you'll run back home again and again and again and again. So let's see. Cambridge UK, hello, hello. Okay, I'll throw this on the screen here. I get stuck thinking I'm gonna go crazy, lose control or forget who I am. Okay, all super common thoughts. Number one, most feared outcome is death or some sort of physical incapacitation. Second most feared outcome is loss of control and this is part of that. Loss of control is generally is most often expressed as I'm going to lose control of my sanity. I'm going to have a psychotic break. I will go crazy. I will forget who I am. Sometimes loss of control is I will make a scene but just because you think that your job will be to go ahead and think that while you go about your day. I guess I'm gonna have to pick up the kids from school while I go crazy. Which I know if you're new and you're like, what is this guy talking about? That's horrible, that's cruel, he's not supporting but that is the actual job in front of you Heather. So I know that you're gonna say that that thought is very important because the content of the thought feels so important but it's still just a thought. So you can't justify, well I'll go back into my head and try to fix this, right? I feel like I'm gonna go crazy so I better stay in my head and make sure I'm not crazy. But it's completely pointless. You're not saving yourself from those fate. No amount of thinking and ruminating and focusing on it is saving you from it. If it was gonna happen, it would happen. You can't stop it from happening by thinking or holding on. And if it's never gonna happen, then you're actually doing nothing. I use the holding up the moon analogy. I keep telling you that I have to keep my hands up in the air and you say, why your hands up in the air? Well, because I have to hold up the moon. You would say to me, you could stop doing that. And I would say, well, I can't do that, the moon will fall. And you would say, well, true, the moon isn't gonna fall. You can actually put your hands down. So I'm telling you like you can stop trying to hold up the moon, i.e. keep yourself sane. It's important. It's hard though. It's hard. Let's see here. I'm stuck thinking about Christmas Eve. Having to drive 30 minutes and stay overnight in a hotel. Seven, I can't focus on anything. How to stop dreading exposures. Well, first of all, welcome to the stream. There's a new name. I'm stuck thinking about Christmas Eve. How to stop dreading exposures. Here's the bad news, dude. Like dreading exposures is not a something you can just decide. You can't decide to stop dreading them. So how do I stop dreading them is about doing them while you dread them. And that is a raw deal. But the only way to stop dreading them is to do them even though you dread them. So many people try to go the opposite way. Like tell me how to not be so afraid so I could do the things. No, you actually have to do the things while you're afraid first. So the answer to that is you have to do the things that you dread, but remember why you're doing them, right? So if you're not familiar with my podcast or the videos here on YouTube or you haven't read my books, you're gonna wanna do that because there's a method to the madness here. It's not just just do it and push through the fear. It's not that at all. You have to remember why you're doing that. What lesson are you trying to learn? Hope that helps. Hello, Kentucky, let's see here. Ooh, this is good. Always count on GBG for something good here. I've noticed here in my recovery that all of my thoughts, good or bad, went from rock concert to elevator music levels. That is such a good analogy. I know that I've used the analogy of turning down the radio. In recovery, think of your anxiety levels. That would be your symptoms, your thoughts, all those things, not as a switch on off, but as a knob that has volume. And what Jason is saying here at Grease Bell Garage is that what we're doing is we're turning the volume down. Most of the time, the volume winds up at zero. Sometimes they turn back up again, but that's okay. So be careful that you're not trying to flip an off switch. There is no off switch. We turn the volume down. Excellent comment, dude. Love it. We've all categorized these thoughts as bad. Okay, let's see here. My blood pressure gets high when I'm freaking out. I think it's dangerous, which makes me feel full to leave. Okay, I get it. Sorry, I'm gonna scroll while you guys watch me scroll. This is good too. I would deliberately think about winning the lottery. My brain didn't see that as important enough even though it was as likely as the bad thoughts. This is a funny comment for sure. And I've used the idea when people say what it feels like and I would always be really glib. And I'd say, well, right now it really feels like there's a giant pile of cash under my desk. It just feels so much like there's a pile of cash under my desk. I'm gonna give away all the money I have because I know it feels so real that there's a pile of cash. You'd be like, no, no, no, don't do that, right? So this is a really good. It's a funny comment, but it illustrates something. Number one, the irrationality of the thoughts. Number two, that you can't replace a thought with another thought. So I don't know if Jason was trying to illustrate that or not with that comment, but be careful about thinking, oh, he's saying that I can engage with the world or distract myself or I can replace the negative thought with a positive thought. You cannot do that. So thought replacement is just another form of thought suppression and that doesn't work. So you can't just say, well, I'm thinking really dark thoughts today. So let me go to happy thoughts because then it winds up being this frantic escalation of like happy thoughts, happy thoughts. It's not working. It's not working. I keep thinking the negative thoughts, you can't do it. So tough one. Okay, this is good. Well, okay, I'll throw this up here. So Luddington says, trying to get my brain to think differently seems impossible, but here's the thing. You're not actually trying to force your brain to think differently. You're gonna act differently toward the thoughts. So we lead with behavior. Instead of trying to bend your thoughts and change it and do all those things, no, go ahead and let those thoughts be there. You're changing your behavior toward the thoughts. That comes first and the change in the thinking and the thinking patterns trails behind. Do not try to change your thoughts or your thinking. Change the way you act toward your thinking and the way you react to that thinking and then it starts to change over time. Otherwise it is almost impossible. You're right, it is almost impossible. Let's go through a little bit more. I can always count on some people to come through here. No one is worried about being plagued with happy thoughts forever. That's 100% true. We all know and accept that happiness is a transient feeling and we don't mind having happy thoughts. Interesting, excellent point by Bethany. Like nobody runs into the Facebook group or here onto the stream and say, please tell me how to deal with being happy. But why is sad any different than happy? I mean, we understand it's different. Of course, of course it's different. Naturally it's different. We like happy, we don't like sad, but the mechanism of emotions that come and peak and fall and come again and change and are transient are the same. So the happy and dangerous or happy and dark are the same mechanism, but we refuse to allow, I cannot be any sort of state of distress. I must fix it immediately. Like so much of this comes right back down to if I feel a thing or I feel bad, I have to find a way to fix it now. Nobody tries to fix their happiness. They let it be there. So like this is a big part of like even acceptance of commitment therapy is that, hey, you don't get to demand to not ever feel bad. So let's see. I mean, I'm an SSR, I'm thinking always my board's enemy about this. Thinking has always fell on me. I get anxious about thinking and thoughts. Okay, but that's okay. I get anxious about thinking and thoughts. Let me make a clear statement here that relates to I keep getting stuck in my head. If you wanna say, well, I get stuck in my head about this topic, they're all the same. All the topics are the same. I don't care if you get stuck in your head about DPDR, depersonalization. I don't care if you get stuck in your head about getting going crazy. I don't care if you get stuck in your head about your blood pressure. I don't care if you get stuck in your head thinking about a thing that happened six years ago. It doesn't matter. In the end, the content or your particular worry is kind of irrelevant. I'm not saying you're irrelevant, but you have to stop looking at it as, because I would bet by show of hands if you wanna do this in the comment section, how many people have listened to me talk and thinking, yeah, but yeah, but my thoughts. Like how many people are having that thought? Okay, I hear what he's saying, but how would I deal with this exact thought? Because this is special and he didn't talk about that. So thinking about thinking is still just thinking. Like, okay, I guess I'll have to do the best I can to engage with the world around me while I'm thinking about my thinking. So it doesn't, in the end, it doesn't matter. Remember, this is the best we can do in a YouTube stream. This isn't guilty. This isn't therapy. I'm looking at the hashtag guilty. This isn't therapy. It isn't a group therapy thing. So there's nuance here that can always best be addressed in person with a qualified professional helping you. So I'm giving you very broad statements here that will apply to a lot of different people, but then applying that broad stroke to you is on you at that point, and maybe if you have some in-person help. So just remember that. When I say you're not special, and I hear people seeing people say you're not special. Yeah, these are big, broad, blanket statements and people are sometimes like, well, that's not right. You can't say that. Well, on the internet, I can say that because it's the internet and there's 65 of you in the room and only one of me. So just remember that there's always application into your personal situation here. But yeah, a lot of people get stuck there. Like, oh, but this, I hear him, but no, no, he hasn't talked about this thought. My thought is special. So it needs, I can't possibly do what he's talking about. Let's see here. I'll throw this up real quick. Why do we have derealization that's the hardest for me? Derealization is the hardest for you. I show of hands in the comments for our friend Yosie here. Tell me another thing that's hardest for you. I guarantee they will be breathing. They will be dizzy. They will be feeling like they're going crazy. They will be heart racing. Everybody has their own symptom that they think is the hardest one. It doesn't matter why you get it. It just matters what you do when you do. Again, broad brush principle to go on here. So trying to dig into, I must explain why this happens. And I have to keep calling it the hardest and most dangerous thing. You have to start to back away from that a little bit. I hope that helps. Hey, Saranis here. Hello, Saranis. Good to see you. I don't know what's wrong with me. Keep going back in my head. Yet another thought. Yes, correct. And that's the cue to focus back outward. That's exactly right. When you catch it and you will at some point, right? When you catch it, you can go back and say, oh, okay, it's time to do the thing again. So thanks, B. Podcast links from Bethany. Follow those. You're very welcome. No problem. Let's keep going. Valerie takes practice. Oh, something about thinking about your thoughts in the third person. It's a perfectly valid way to do that. Yeah, if you talk about them in the third person, you're becoming like a disinterested observer in your own thoughts. Totally fine to do that. You can totally do that. Okay, this is a good one. I'll throw this up here real quick. And then I'm gonna address, wait, let me do this one first. I'm suggestible when I hear anything bad. I assume that could and is happening to me. And then I thought I saw you do this. So let's talk about this. I feel not being suggestible as living my life dangerously. Like I need to go through life completely unaware of my feelings and surroundings. No. So you see the cognitive distortion, black and white thinking, I either have to analyze everything or nothing. That's not true. Like a non-anxious brain sometimes, sometimes analyzes things and sometimes doesn't. Okay, so be careful about the idea that, oh, it has to be one or the other. I either must be on guard against everything or nothing, but that's not what actually happens. So as you go back into a little bit of a normal relationship with anxiety, that isn't what happens. You don't lose, you don't stop caring about everything in the world. You just stop caring about everything in the world. Hopefully that helps. And thank you. See, that's why Bethany's here. That's exact. This podcast episode, Luddington, if you look, living recklessly, I literally did a podcast episode that talks about how you have to start to live recklessly. Not really, but you think it's reckless. If I don't stay on guard, I heard about something bad that happened, so now I have to think about it happening to me. Because if I don't, that's really important and what will happen? It's really reckless to abandon that, right? Or feels reckless and we're practicing doing that. Practicing living recklessly. So somebody said, here, let's go back to this one. I'm sorry. Sorry, I can't see your name. That's the restream thing. Where are we? 33 minutes. Okay, I can do another five or 10 minutes. It's checking you with my feelings each time I awake in the morning, the same as being stuck in my head. So I can't know your specific situation, of course. But one of the things that I have talked about is the idea that checking in with yourself is a kind of a bad idea. Like, I know that it's common self-help or mental health or wellness advice. Check in with yourself. Check in with yourself. What do I need right now? Anxious people are often in the unbreakable, dysfunctional, like overdrive habit of constantly checking in with themselves. So I have, in many instances, gone head to head with some very kind therapists and very kind clinicians who don't necessarily treat anxiety disorders who have heard me say, why are you telling people to stop checking in? Because they can't stop checking in. They're constantly checking in. So I would suggest in, again, broad stroke here, you gotta apply it to your own situation. What is the habit of checking in with your feelings actually doing for you? When we are in a non-anxious state and we have a more normal, healthy relationship with anxiety and their own emotions, yeah, checking in is a good idea. It can help us decide what we need to do that day. How am I feeling? What's going on? What do I need to do? What do I need to do for myself today? Cool. When you're in an anxious state and in a maladaptive relationship, you're like in a toxic relationship to your own thoughts and your own emotions and your own body, checking in with it is a bad idea. Hopefully that helps. So you have to be really careful about the whole check in with yourself. I don't think that's good advice for people who are dealing with anxiety disorders. Again, broad brush. So let's see. Let's keep going. No, no, no, no. I feel like I'm stuck and then when I think about making progress, it scares me. Okay. Well, this is scary. This is certainly scary. Bethany is the link fairy. Bethany is the link fairy. I feel like I'm stuck and when I think about making progress, it scares me. Okay. Well, Jose, it's all right, dude. Like everybody gets scared by this. I will tell you, it's not really shameless plug, but I'm just gonna use it to illustrate. This book right here, if you don't have this book, it's on my website. Go to theanxiestreat.com. When I wrote this book, the first two chapters to this book are very touchy feeling and they're all about how this is what happened. It's not your fault. You're not broken. You can get better. I really go into a lot of detail to describe symptoms and sensations and thoughts and the things you've tried to get better and what doesn't work. And everybody that gets this book says, oh my God, I'm crying as I read this. He's talking directly to me. That was my goal. Then they get to chapter three, which is the part where I say, so here is the actual solution. This is the nature of the solution. And then they stop reading. Many people stop reading. So Jose, it's not just you. I bet that there are a lot of, there are probably people in this room, 69 people. How many people have the anxious truth and stopped reading it because it was scary or triggering to hear that you have to do hard things. It's okay to be scared, dude. I get it, we all start that way. So the idea that to get better, I have to actually go into this fear is super scary. Don't beat yourself up for being scared about it. It's okay to be scared. I promise. Let's keep going down. Thought is just a thought. That's what's happening every day. Gives me bad headache, but it will pass. Sure. I'm realizing how subtle thoughts can be. They absolutely can be super subtle. Let's see here. You're welcome, man, no problem. Doesn't work. I'm sorry, I'm just going through comments here. This is good. This is good. This is, Teresa, thank you so much for this. I'm getting so much better by just living again and saying whatever to the anxiety symptoms, which would also be whatever to the thoughts, whatever to this. Like that's kind of the way this works. It's hard. It feels reckless. It feels wrong. It will instantly make you feel more anxious. So if you are really trying to make yourself feel better, what Teresa's talking about right here, it seems like I'm out because every time I give in and just say whatever to my anxiety or whatever to a really scary thought, I feel worse. It feels more dangerous. Yeah, like that's the way this starts. But that's a great comment. Thank you, Teresa. It's just hard to do what she's talking about. There's a lot of practice that goes into this. So let's see here. Let's keep going. Another couple of minutes. Serana has another good one here. Too many therapists have not understood this and it does a great disservice to sufferers. Well, I can address that a little bit. So it is true that I, and it's funny because the people that all kind of fall into the same category that I do, people who sound like me, I'm very fortunate to be friends with many of them now and many members of the therapy community have accepted me as one of their own, even though I'm officially not yet. So I'm eternally grateful for that and I respect them for that. And in the conversations you guys don't see behind the scenes, I can't tell you the number of times that that sort of stuff comes up. Like, oh my God, I was just in a training and I cannot believe that they spent 25 minutes on thought replacement. Okay, now that might be a valid tool outside of the realm of OCD or other anxiety disorders, but inside the realm of thought replacement is not a good tool. So it's not that the therapist is trying to hurt. The therapist probably just is going based on what they think is right and what they believe in, the type of therapy they believe in and probably doesn't have personal experience with the problem that you have. Doesn't mean that they're a bad therapist, it just means that they're misapplying, they're not understanding that like, oh, this is an anxiety disorder, this requires an opposite approach. So I get that, it's difficult. Thanks for trying to answer that, I appreciate it. I always appreciate when you come around. I'm almost at the bottom here, I think we're good. Is my suggestibility, I think I already answered that, I believe feeling like I'm gonna die. Yeah, okay, so these are the most scary things, right? Okay, thank you, I appreciate you guys putting them up there. So everybody can see the link fairy is here. I know I'm looking at like six miles away, my screen is really big. So to look at the comments, I have to look far away from you guys. Let's see here. All right, let's throw this up on the screen. Hello Penelope, Marina. My dad's been sick and had a surgery. Well, I hope your dad is feeling better soon. The guilt I feel is debilitating, I've been working on recovery so much yet, I'm still not there. I get this, I get this. This is a real thing, right? So when anxiety will make us feel guilty, I used to have those feelings too. I think the best we could do here is kind of support each other when that happens, like it sucks. It will make you feel guilty. You'll feel like, oh, I'm failing as a daughter, I get it. You do the best you can and I think the best advice I have is guilt is a real feeling. You're gonna have to move through it as best you can. You can't fix the guilt right away. But you can also try to tap into it as motivation to a certain extent. So knowing that I've spoken to Penelope Cruisify multiple times, I feel comfortable in saying, we've talked about that thing where like, oh, I only do exposures when I sort of have to, or I feel good. This is a good, you can tap into guilt sometimes to say, oh, I know I have to change that. So I'm gonna go out and do something for myself today. So if you're feeling guilty about your dad and you're worried about your dad, which I get. And again, we hope he feels better, but use the guilt to say, I can sit here and wallow in the guilt and I can beat the hell out of myself or I can go and do something better, do something that helps me move forward so that I might not have to feel this way down the road. That can be a hugely helpful way to address guilt. Do something. You're not gonna get to him today probably, but do something that you otherwise wouldn't have done today can be helpful. Any words of wisdom going into this busy holiday week? And then we're at the bottom. I love it. Words of wisdom in the busy holiday week. Yeah, I think probably the thing I would tell anybody about the holidays, whatever it is you're going to experience you're gonna experience. So people get really worked up this time of year, this week, regardless of whichever holidays you might be observing, it doesn't matter because it's social, there's demands on you. Oh my God, there are people coming over my house or I have to go to church or I have to go to people's houses or whatever. Like it's you always, always are operating from the assumption that it's gonna be too much. This might be too much for me. Redefine too much. Tell me why you think it's too much or ask yourself what does too much mean? Too much might mean that I will feel bad. I will be afraid. I will have sensations in my body. I will think things. And I am drawing a line in the sand that says I must never feel that. I'm incapable of feeling that. So I need to find a way to pray and hope that it doesn't happen. And I have to pray and hope that it goes away fast. But that's not true. So even if you panicked all the way through Christmas last year, you actually could do that again this year and you were okay last year also, it was just really uncomfortable. So I think my best words of wisdom going into the holiday week is be careful about why you're afraid of going into the holiday week. It's gonna be too much. What's too much? Too much is I can't handle negative feelings. You always handle them. Just don't like that you have them. So it's really important to start to put your brain around that to a certain extent. All right, guys, I think we are done here. Let's see here. Okay, one more here. And then a pop of rock, Ben, what's up brother? Good to see you, dude. It has been a long time. Hope you're doing good out there. Let me get this one up real quick before I end it. And then we're gonna end the stream. I have no support around me. I feel so alone. This is a difficult thing. Brooke, for sure, like this is hard to do alone. There's no dad. How do I build the courage to do this on my own? Whether through young children, I feel so bad that I cannot be good mother. Okay, so I get this. First of all, the experience that you're having is a shared experience. Many, many people in this room, especially the moms and even the dads, because this attacks like I'm a terrible, I used to feel like I was being a really bad dad. So it's really common to feel like you're being a bad mother. You're not being a bad mother. You're struggling. Everybody struggles. Like your kids are gonna struggle one day. Every human being struggles, it's okay to have struggles in life. It is hard to do this on your own. But here's the thing that I need to tell you more than anything else. How do I get the courage to do it? You do it and then you feel courageous. So I know that sounds like not the answer you want. And I know that you keep wanting to like, well, let me tell you what I'm afraid of today. But in the end, the principles here are, if I keep going back to, but it feels like this is so scary, I can't do this, then you'll have a much higher probability of staying stuck where you are. And how do I feel courageous is, well, I don't feel courageous. What you're saying is I feel scared. So don't say I'm not courageous. You feel scared, which you should feel scared. It is scary things. We're talking about doing really scary things to face the things you fear, right? So it's not that I don't feel courageous. It's that I feel scared. Courage is I will do it while I'm scared, okay? And then the feeling that you are courageous only comes after you do it while you're scared, which is another shitty deal, but it's a deal that we have. And that's again, a very broad brush. I know you're kind of new to this Brooke, but be careful about always returning to, but let me tell you what I had to tell you my fear. It feels so terrible. I can't do it. I can't do it. You've probably been doing that for a long time. We had to start to step away from that and say, oh, okay, well, I feel really scared, but it's okay. I can learn to get better at being scared. And that's how I start to change things. But the change doesn't happen like today. I'm having a hard day today. Give me tips about what to do right now. It's never about right now. This is a long-term change. So I hope that helps answer your question, but it is hard to do these things alone, but you're in a community here that understands how you feel, I promise. All right, guys, I think I am out here. Let's see, did I miss anything? Have you started the patent paperwork? I say this all the time. Soran, I saw your comment, by the way. I know you're not holding against them. That's okay. Have you started the patent work for Brain 2.0 yet? I talk about Brain 2.0 all the damn time. There's so many stupid flaws in this. Like, brains are amazing. You're welcome, Brock. Brains are amazing, but brains are also stupid. And I keep thinking at some point, like, okay, somebody has to improve this. Maybe evolution will do that. We do need Brain 2.0, but for now we have Brain 1.5 beta and it's the best we're gonna get, so we're gonna have to work with it. All right, guys, I am out. I don't know if I'm gonna stream next week, to be honest with you, I'm off from school, so I may just declare a social media moratorium. I don't know, I'll let you guys know. If you celebrate Christmas, then Merry Christmas. If you're celebrating Hanukkah right now, whatever holiday you celebrate this week, I hope it works out well for you. Thanks for coming by. Like, I live with you guys hanging out every Monday. It's a fun day for me for sure to do this. Thank you for the questions. Thank you for, like, you know, helping each other out. Thank you, Bethany, for being the Link Fairy today. So helpful. Ah, so good. Anyway, all right, guys, I am out. I will see you maybe next week, if not the week after. Enjoy your holiday.