 Hang on. All right, how about now? Can you guys hear me now? There's no voice. There should be a voice, hang on. I cannot read lips. No, there's a sound problem. Hang on a second here. I may have to stop it and restart it. Okay, now you're here. All right, for whatever reason, it's not digging my fancy gear, so that's cool. Sorry guys, sorry there was a little audio problem. Looks like we're back in business here. So the audio might not be the greatest, but that's okay, we'll do what we gotta do. Very good, so thanks for hanging in there with me. Well, I worked that out. His lack of sound is making me anxious. It was making me anxious too. I didn't know why it was not working. I got all this fancy gear here, but clearly didn't want to work. So we'll just go the old fashioned way and we'll use the built-in mic on the Mac. So sorry that the sound is gonna be so great. So we're just gonna do like I was saying, we're gonna do a little Q and A. There was a ton of questions. I'm not gonna be able to answer all of them, but I will do the best that I can. And so let's see, what else can I tell you guys? Yes, the only way out is through, says Brooke. For those of you that don't know, I'm not really here to hawk merch, but yes, I actually, if you go to the anxioustruth.com slash links, you'll see a link to like an Etsy shop, the Exitruth shop. So there's these kinds of things are in there. So there you go. Oh God, Mercury's in retrograde. Don't even get me started on that. So anyway, I appreciate that you guys are here. We have 25 folks here. Let me know where everybody's from. Some of you guys I recognize, if you're in the Facebook group, by the way, and you're watching, then I can't see your name. I only see Facebook user. That's a restring problem, sorry. So I won't know who it is. But otherwise just let me know where you guys are from. And we'll, I'll start taking some questions here. And if what I was saying in the beginning, when you guys couldn't hear me is Dean might pop in, Dean Stott from DLC might pop in, and Kim Quillen might pop in, but she's pretty busy because her book just came out. So she's got a lot to do today. And by the way, it's a great book. So let's take a couple of questions. I'm going to read the questions. So East Texas, UK, Florida, St. Louis, awesome. I dig it. Keep it going. I'm from an undisclosed location, of course. Of course she is, Stephanie. In the UK, Northeast. All right, so let's take a couple of questions that you guys submitted on my website, which is great. If you want to do that now and add to the questions, you can go to the anxioustruth.com slash ask and submit a question while I'm talking. If you want to do that, you know, this way it's a little more private. That's totally fine. Christina is on Long Island. Well, I'm on Long Island too. So there you go. Who knew? Northern Nevada, Wisconsin. Wow, okay, we've got a wide area. Let's take a couple of questions. Let's get cooking here. So I'm not going to say names. This way it's a little more private. Anxiety presents itself to me as the feeling that others are constantly judging me at work. Then talking about me behind my back. I don't know how to stop those intrusive thoughts. Okay, so first of all, that's super uncomfortable. And you know, I'm sorry that you're dealing with that because that is a tough way to go about your day, right? So the question was, how do I stop those intrusive thoughts? The answer to that would be that you don't. Like your job is not to stop thinking that because you can't, like you cannot stop thoughts, right? That's that old experiment where if I say, don't think about a purple dinosaur, you will automatically think of the purple dinosaur because you're trying not to, right? So you can't, if you're having thoughts like that, that people are talking about you and they're judging you, that your goal is not to try to stop those thoughts from happening or to try to twist them into something different, thought stopping, thought changing, that stuff just doesn't work. So really your goal is to learn to live with those thoughts and say, well, number one, there's two things. I'm having those thoughts, but it doesn't mean that they are true, right? And the second thing is, well, I guess, even if it is true, I can still handle that. So that's a really short answer to that question, but you're not trying to stop the intrusive thoughts. Even though I know that the content of the thought that people might be judging you or talking about you behind your back, that's difficult for sure, and it makes you really uncomfortable, but trying to stop yourself from thinking those things would be really, really, really hard. So you're not trying to learn to stop them, block them or turn them. Some people would give you really bad advice, like just think of happy things or turn it into a positive. What if they're talking about you behind my back? Well, what if they love me? I mean, I understand that's all really common advice and some of it seems like common sense, but we really just don't have a good way to demand to have or not have certain thoughts. It's just not the way our brains work. So your job is to just allow the thought, acknowledge it, and work on ways to move through the discomfort that it creates. And you can work on understanding like, well, those are a little bit of cognitive distortion. They may, mind reading, well, I think I know what they're thinking about me, which isn't true. So there are other things you could do there, but for the most part, you're not trying to stop the thoughts, right? So that's the first question, good question. And I'm sorry that you're going through that. The other thing that I will mention in this one particularly, which is I'm afraid that people are talking about me or judging me behind my back, there may be some other issues going on there, right? So there could be some self-esteem issues or things that you learned in your past, beliefs about yourself that fuel those things, always wanna work on all of that stuff, right? So especially if you have a good therapist that you can work with, not everything in the world is an exposure problem. So we're usually talking about things that do involve exposure and learning to move through fear and discomfort, but not everything is. So if you have some underlying issues or past issues that drive those kind of beliefs, it's always good to try to work on those as well. Next question, I prefer purple dinosaurs. Who wouldn't? I mean, come on. I think the actual, it was pink something. The actual experiment was with a pink animal of some kind, but I'll do with purple dinosaurs. Next question was, have you covered depression issues in any of your books? And the answer to that is flat out no. I've not for, if you're dealing with depression, that is not necessarily a thing that I have written about in any of the books, or I have not written about depression at all. I have lived depression. So my very first book, which is just my story, it's called An Anxiety Story, I tell the story of going through depression, but I've not written about ways to deal with depression. That is not in my wheelhouse. I don't claim to have any special qualifications on that. So you will not find depression written about in my books, except my story, where I'll talk about how I was depressed. And I'll tell you guys, somebody just asked, how do you get the book? If you want to get this book, 7% Slower, hey, look at that. And it's up here on the screen. You just go to 7%slower.com and all the active purchase links are on there. The other books, The Anxious Truth and An Anxiety Story are also on my website. Just go to the links for the books and they're all on there. All the ways to get them are there. So there you go. Right now, 7% Slower is ebook and paperback on Amazon. It's ebook on Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books. We are still waiting for Audible any minute now as soon as that's released, though everybody know, but that's how you can get it. Just go to 7% Pink Elephant. Thank you, Victoria. That's exactly what it was. Appreciate it. Oklahoma is here, cool. So all right, that was that question. Next question, when to start big exposures? I am fine doing small exposures like going to the mall, staying alone for a day, excellent work. I know that was hard to get there. My company wants me to go to a whole different city across the country for three weeks. Should I consider or should I say no? Well, that's a tough call, right? If right now, I mean, look, here's the reality. The reality is you can do anything, right? There's really nothing that keeps you technically, physically keeps you from doing things. It's just a matter of the amount of discomfort and fear that you really want to experience when you do those things. So should you take the trip that your company wants you to take? Well, I mean, all I can really tell you is those are things that we usually work up to sort of incrementally. So if the best you have right now that you feel confident in is sort of local, going to the mall, the shopping center, being taken care of like your basic life stuff. If a trip across the country is not something you are even remotely close to confident in doing yet, then what I would tell you is if you did decide to take the trip, depending on how long you'd have before you have to do that, you really would want to sort of ramp up those exposures and start to work on getting closer to that goal before you did it. If you couldn't do that and it was next week or the week after and you don't have much time, you could still decide to take the trip. You would just have to go into it with the proper expectations knowing it's a huge flooding experience and it will be really challenging for you. So I think the general answer is when is it time to move up to bigger exposures is not ever, well, when I have no anxiety, it's always, well, when have I flexed and built my tolerance muscles to the point where I think I can now tolerate these more challenging things. So I don't have a definite answer. Yeah, you can ask questions here. Just hold them until I get through or else I'm going to have to scroll back. I'll try and get through as many as I can, right? There we go. Looks like Dean is coming back in. Let's see if we get him in. Fantastic. Can you hear me, sir? Welcome, buddy. Thank you. I don't know what happened there. And the first time I've been on air, so it was probably me, so apologies for that. Your internet died. Same thing that was happened to us in the recovery room. For those of you who don't know, which I can't believe you wouldn't, this is my friend Dean Stott. He's the creator and curator of DLC anxiety on Instagram and one of the recovery room crew that you guys probably see out every Friday. So Dean, we're just taking questions. I have a bunch of questions I'm going through. So we'll have you jump in on any of them and then we'll see if anybody has questions after we do this. So the next question, we're just talking about big exposure. So the answer to that part is, I can't answer it, just be aware that if you pick a very big exposure now, and maybe Dean can chime in on this, flooding, which is I know a thing that you use, right? Know that it will be really, really uncomfortable for you to go from like, okay, I'm just going to the mall to I'm going across the country for three weeks. How was, Dean, your experience was flooding. You used that. You intentionally went into the hardest things right away and stood there, right? I think because I didn't have the guidance of a therapist. So I was doing self-help CBT with good resources, but I didn't have that guidance from a therapist to maybe do it along the gradual route. I think in hindsight looking back on it, I think it was probably a little bit too much. So it was really hard and there was times where I would fail. So I don't know if it was the best thing for me at the time. I wouldn't, I don't think I'd recommend it for someone who's getting panic attacks all the time in specific locations, like I was in the mall. It did, however, I mean, I did recover from it and now I can go to the mall and shock my heart's content. But yeah, it was really, really difficult. Yeah, made it hard, didn't it? Yeah. So not impossible, usually flooding something like Dean was saying you would try and do with a therapist that's coaching you through it, but hopefully we're able to answer the question. The next one, Dean, I know you can help out with two. How can I cope with a close friends untimely death or close relatives untimely death while recovering from anxiety? Which is that thing where grief and loss is piled on top of the anxiety, which Dean, I know that that was a triggering thing for you when you lost your dad. How did you handle that? How did you cope with that? I think the way that Josh, so if people don't know who Josh is, obviously he's co-author of Untangle Your Anxiety, the book I've got out when he's part of the recovery room and a therapist. I think the way he explains the stress jug, so everything building upon everything until you get to that moment when the jug's about to overflow. Well, I think I got to that point. So my father died and I was dealing with anxiety not on a bad basis, but after the death I went back into my normal routine because I actually felt okay within myself to, I think the best way to carry on and get on with things is to carry on as usual and try and distract myself. Or it was definitely the worst case scenario and what I shouldn't have done because what happened was all that stress that built up in the jug had overflown and that created the panic disorder. So that trigger of the passing of my father, I would say was the number one creation of this panic disorder of me being a, having four panic attacks a day. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So I think the question that is not that it's impossible to deal with it, it certainly makes it more difficult, but the loss of someone close to you would make anything more difficult, right? So, is it impossible? Is there some sort of special way to deal with grief, loss and anxiety at the same time? Probably not other than to understand that you're gonna have to experience all that and to get any help that you can access that can help you through that. You did some grief counseling, right? Yeah, I was just saying, the grief counseling really helped actually. Was it wasn't really anything too much, but just having someone there to say that the process that you're going through is, Jeremy and I never knew of the different stages of grief. I wasn't aware of that, but they really are real and I really did go through them and you can go through different stages at different times. It's not a set order, so you could go through one stage before another. And yeah, just knowing the process of grief and knowing that it was a process that I would have to go through, I think helped the anxiety as well. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure that it would. So good answers, good, thank you, brother. Okay, so the next question we're gonna take is, this is a question about anger. I'm about 75% recovered, but I find myself getting really angry often. How can I, this is interesting. I can now spot bullshit a mile away and have zero patients, this is what this person wrote, which made me laugh. It is feeling anger, almost rage and resentment part of recovery. By the way, I don't throw fits and scream and yell. So she's basically asking, there's two things in here that I find interesting. Number one is that the anger is really exaggerated right now, like it's feeling rage and anger part of recovery. And the second thing that I'm gonna, what I wanna talk about is, I can smell bullshit a mile away now. That I might have to, I think I might smell bullshit there. But for me, one of the things that I know while I was working in my recovery and while I was in the grips of anxiety and Dean, I don't know if this is for you too, my emotions, I felt them so much more strongly. So yes, everything was elevated, everything was elevated. I also know that I don't know if this person's situation, if there's medication involved when I came off my medication, my emotions got, they came back and they got magnified like 10 times. I was crying at toilet paper commercials like on TV. It was really crazy. So is it part of recovery? I don't know if it's part of recovery unless possibly you've changed medications that were tamping down your emotions, that can happen. But it's definitely part of, when you're in the midst of anxiety. And Dean, did you have, did you have a problem experiencing those big emotions? I was just gonna ask you when you said about tapering off the medication, did you have anxiety crack back in? Oh yeah, hell yeah, it did. Yeah, it was when I did that, the anxiety came back in and the emotions came back, everything came back in. And it came back in, I'm not trying to dump, these are like tapering horror stories, but for me, my experience was, yes, it really amplified my emotions a lot. That came back down over time, like it didn't stay that way, but that was part of, when I stopped taking the medication, that was part of it. So I don't know if this person, there's medication in the mix, that could be part of it, but feeling those strong emotions and having it really be amplified is part of, I think, anxiety for a lot of people. Well, it would make sense as well, if it was the medication, because I hear it a lot, and I'm sure you hear it with your community, is that people on medication are like, yeah, when I'm on it, it does bring the anxiety down, but it sort of levels out everything. So you're not feeling sad, you're not feeling happy. You just tend to be just floating away and not really feeling anything. So when you're coming off that medication, and like you say, you're starting to feel all these emotions again, I could understand how anger would come to the forefront. But I have also heard of people going through anxiety disorders, just the frustration of the anxiety can cause anger. Yes, absolutely. Like, being frustrated is a real thing. Oh, we might have lost Dean. Did he freeze? Possibly froze. All right, hang in there, brother. If you come back, yeah, his internet is dying. We might lose Dean. Anyway, so if he comes back, that's great. We'll just keep rocking and rolling here. The other thing that I wanted to talk about in this question is the now I can smell bullshit a mile away, as if somehow two things could be going on there. Number one, if you're just still really sensitized to the feeling of big emotions being triggered by big emotions, then calling that the ability to sniff out bullshit just might mean, well, I get angry at a lot of things that maybe you don't have to get angry at. I'm just throwing stuff against the wall. I'm not saying that's correct. Just giving you things to think about. The second thing is, if in fact you're in a situation where your emotions weren't damped down, sometimes that medication will also kind of tamp your judgment down and your perception down, right? Yeah, we lost Dean. He'll pop back in. He's having internet problems over there in Wales. So that could be what's going on. So that whole thing that somehow now in your recovery you can smell, you know, you can see nonsense, maybe, or it might be just that you're a little bit more sensitive right now to that. And so it seems like you're seeing things everywhere. Maybe that could be a bit of a distortion or if your emotions have been tamped down by, and your judgment and your perception have been tamped down by the, here he is again, by the, that could be what it is. We lost you brother. This internet issue. But yeah, we're in the process of getting it sorted. So hopefully next week we'll be back up and running. Yeah, we'll get it. So we're gonna move on to the next question. So let's take the next one real quick. We got a bunch of them. I'm never gonna get through all of these. This one, I don't wanna get into, I'm sorry, but I don't wanna get into like medication discussion and how to taper and that sort of stuff. Okay, this is a good question. I know from your podcast and previous books that seeking reassurance is not moving toward recovery. And we'll address that there is a good kind of reassurance too or assurance. My question is, are there more healthy ways to share your struggles with friends and family that doesn't keep you stuck in that loop? It's a good question. Very good question. Yeah, yeah, the thing that I wanna add first on this one is not all reassurance is bad, right? So I know that sometimes people take that idea that while reassurance is not good, okay, and generally speaking, you don't wanna base your entire coping strategy on reassurance, but you know, if you're not sure about something and especially if you're new, you're at the beginning of this journey. Well, you have a right to be educated like psychoeducation and being explained to, this is what's going on is not, that's productive assurance, that's called learning. It's when you get into a repeated loop where you get assurance and then you have to come back the next day for the same assurance again and again, that's what we wanna avoid. It also almost becomes a compulsion, doesn't it? Having to ask for the reassurance because that little bit of reassurance brings the anxiety down a little bit, but it never brings it down fully, does it? And you have to then ask for assurance again. But yeah, I completely agree with you there about the psychoeducation. If you're just asking initially and learning about it, then it's fantastic. Yeah, you gotta be, you know, it's called teaching. You're allowed to have people teach you things. You just, once you have the information or once you've got that third, you know, check up from your doctor and three doctors have cleared you medically when you continually go back again and again and again, that's a problem. So what is a healthier way to keep your friends and family or express your stuff to your friends and family? This was a big deal for me, Dean. I don't know what you did with this, but for me, I really had to make a very firm decision and I've done podcast episodes on this to stop, I stopped talking about it. Now, you know, you might say, well, that sounds really cruel. I'm not allowed to express my emotions. Well, not really, but in this situation, I had to recognize that the expressing my emotions had gone way off kilter and it turned into just constantly just speaking my fear just because it felt safer. So, you know, I would speak my fear how I was feeling because I needed to know that the people around me could save me from it, right? So I had to decide, well, I'm gonna have to err all the way on the other side and I'm gonna have to just stop talking about this and just be silent. For me, I found that it was way better to just be much more objective and factual. Like, hey, I really, and after the fact, I was really struggling today, but I still did my stuff and I did it and I'm okay. Like today was a really hard day and you could share that, right? Like I had a really hard day today but I got through it and you know, I'm just gonna try again tomorrow. That's a better way than continually telling your friends and family that your heart is beating quickly or you're having a hard time breathing or that you're afraid or that sort of stuff. Dean, how did you deal with that with your people close to you? Yeah, I'll be completely honest with you. I probably fell into the trap of telling people when my levels of anxiety had heightened. So I'd be out with my friends or with family and I'd say, hey, listen, I'm feeling anxious now. At the time it actually helped me because it was almost like I was getting the thoughts from in my head out to the person there but I don't know by what you say in their dream if that was continuing the loop of anxiety because I'm always having to tell them that I'm feeling anxious to reduce the anxiety. So that's a really good point what you said. Yeah, for me, it definitely was continuing the loop because I was continually thinking every time I spoke my fear out loud or I told somebody and I started getting really sneaky about it. Like I knew I shouldn't be saying it so I would just sort of get really sneaky about like I would make fun of it. Like, oh, this anxiety is so stupid. Like why does my brain keep telling me this? Yeah, I was sort of, I was like covert reassurance seeking like, but I knew what I was doing. I thought I was being slick but everybody around me knew I wasn't being slick. So I get it. And the true is, is what do you do when the person isn't there? So you get anxious so often used to telling the people around you but you're on your own, do you know what happens then? Yeah, it was a thing. It's interesting because somebody just commented someone from my Facebook group, I don't like talking about it at all. So some people go the other way, like they just, they do not, I'm not gonna tell you about it. I don't wanna talk about it because it makes it more real or it just fits into my face. So, but if you circle back and start telling the people in your life that yes, it was challenging but I did it, I'm okay, I'm doing it. And instead of asking them to just hold your fear, ask them to support you while you hold the fear. Probably a better way to interact with them. So let's move on to another one. Let's see. Okay, we'll take this one. How, we were about half hour in. Don't know if I'm in the right place. I am fine with all the physical feelings of anxiety and do not avoid anything. But then something comes over me and I feel trapped in the feeling of not being able to get away from anxiety. So I hear a little bit two different things there. Yeah, I know, definitely conflicting things. First out of the question, great, isn't it? To being able to accept the symptoms of anxiety. But in the second part says that they're still on the journey to recovery, isn't it? From what I'm hearing, I don't know if you agree, Joe. Yeah, I do. So I'm hearing a conflict there that says, I don't avoid, well, that's fine. I don't avoid everything, which is great. So you're feeling like it's not limiting your life. And did they say that they're not afraid of it? Like I'm fine with all the physical feelings. But when they come up, then you feel like you can't escape from it. So I'm hearing, that's like, that's the conflict there. So if you were really fine with it, which is, I understand you're not, like it wouldn't expect you to be. It takes a long time to get fine with it. But the feeling that you still need to escape. So in other words, what I'm hearing is I'm totally okay in the pool. I'm a great swimmer, but as soon as I get wet, I freak out because I gotta find a way to not be wet. So that's, you know, tells me that you're not really a good swimmer. You're still afraid to be in the pool. Yeah, anxiety recovery is not about when am I not gonna feel anxious again. It's about not bothering if you do feel anxious again. It's about not having that effect on you. Or not needing to escape. So I would say regardless of what it is, whether they're, you know, okay, that's great. You don't have specific places. The supermarket isn't a trigger. But whenever you do get triggered, you feel you have to escape from it. That just tells me you have to continue to work on those tolerance and the willful tolerance and navigation and moving into it as opposed to trying to go away from it. So the feeling that you still think you should have to get away from it tells me regardless of the triggers, you still have to work on that. When you do get triggered and it happens, you have to work on changing the way you react to it then. So whether there's a specific place or context or it just might happen randomly based on stress or whatever it is, the rules are kind of the same. Would you agree with that, Dean? Yeah, I would and people, and it's a good question as well. So people often say so. For example, if we just took an example of someone who gets anxious on a plane, if someone's continually to go in on a plane and still getting anxious, but not seeking reassurance and just dealing with them anxiety symptoms, but the anxiety symptoms are still coming through. Does that mean anxiety recovery or is anxiety recovery that they need to get on the plane and not feel anxiety? I often get that question a lot. Yeah, I mean, I could tell you my definition. I don't think there's really no specific definition we probably all 100% agree on, but my experience wasn't the experience of most of the people that I deal with is recovery happens when you really get to the point where you don't care if it happens. And when you don't care, that's when it kind of stops happening. So it's really hard because you never want to accuse somebody of like, well, you're lying, you still care. Well, you may feel like you really don't care, yet when it pops up, then you care. So, you know, it's a tough one, but I think it's really when you don't care and when you truly do not care. I don't care if I'm 35,000 feet the air between New York and Los Angeles. If I panic, I panic. It is much less likely that I'm gonna panic in a plane from here to there. And what that behavior that you take on that in a narrative that you're telling yourself reduces the anxiety that I think that's the most important thing. That is what brings the anxiety down. And you start to have less anxiety on them trips because of that way of thinking. Yeah, definitely. When you get to that point, it's, you know, that really when it sort of starts to fall off and it doesn't happen anymore. So that was really a question. This is another good one, right? Exposure versus white knuckling. Like for those people who don't understand, we use white knuckling all the time. That's like when you're, I used to use it for driving. You know, you're so scared of driving that you're holding the steering wheel so hard that your knuckles turn white or you're just like gritting your teeth and pushing, powering through it. That's white knuckling. Had anxiety for 15 years, always go to the store yet still anxious. Enough forced exposures. I think it would be gone. This is a good question. Is it really all just mindset to go from white knuckling to an actual, which I would say productive exposure or sort of interpret the question. And if you guys want to answer this too in the comments, like let us hear what you're thinking about these in the comments, that's fine. So she's basically asking, is it really just a mindset shift to go from just powering through and then running back home to an actual productive exposure experience? What are you thinking? Yeah, I think it is about just putting yourself into that. I often, I remember having the conversation with Josh about, and we were speaking about water bottles. So people having a water bottle with them to be able to go through it. And I want to know your take on it as well, Drew. If someone's at the start of recovery and they're avoiding situations and to be able to put themselves in that situation at the start of recovery, they need a water bottle. Do you think that's a good or bad thing in your opinion? If it may start to expose themselves to the situation that's bringing on the anxiety? I think it's a, I mean, I write incessantly and I use the word incremental all the time. So I don't think it's a bad thing in the beginning. I know for me, first I had to get out the door and if I was getting at the door with water bottle to start, well, then so be it. So I was able to start putting myself intentionally into those situations. And then I knew I had to start leaving the safety things behind the water. For me, it was water and mints. Like one of the biggest things was not having the phone with me. This is back, it was a while ago when I was doing the work, it was over 10 years ago. So, or a flip phone in the first case, but not having the phone, not having my Xanax with me, which I never took, but I always had it with me. So in the beginning, if you're gonna do that and use those things, I get it. If that's what gets you into the flow of the exposure and the work, then more power to you. You just have to know that part of your plan is I'm gonna have to start to leave those things behind as I go along, right? Because you get the credit in the end, yeah. Yeah, that's why every Josh always says who gets the credit, which is really, really good. I think the question, is it really just a mindset? I don't know. Like, I don't think exposure is a mindset. I mean, the mindset can set you up for it. The exposure is really a change in behavior. So when you go into those scary situations that trigger your anxiety, the change is really how you behave. So white knuckling is true. The reason why you can say white knuckling and everybody sort of knows what that is, is because that's an actual behavior, right? So, like I talk about it in 7% slower, like you speed up, you start to rush, you tense, you're pounding your feet, you're stumbling over things, like you're trying to get out of the situation as quick as you can, that's behavior. So you can have a mindset that says, I'm not gonna do that anymore, but only the change in behavior actually turns it into a productive experience, which is when my lizard brain is telling me that I should tense up and clench my teeth and tense every muscle and run and go fast and try and escape, I'm going to do exactly the opposite behaviorally. That's the difference. That's the difference between white knuckling and what becomes a productive experience, because then you did nothing to save yourself, none of the tensing, escaping, running, fighting, bracing, keeping it at bay, and you still wind up okay. And then, like Josh just found out saying, you get all the credit. So it's not mindset, it's a change in behavior, but maybe the mindset leads to that. And it's worth saying as well, when you start to change that behavior, when you're doing it, it feels so wrong, doesn't it? It feels completely opposite to what your body is telling you that you should be doing. And that's okay, it's fine to feel like that, because like everything, it takes practice. It's not going to happen straight away. That change of behavior is not going to reduce the anxiety straight away. And a lot of people get frustrated because a lot of people want results straight away. And anxiety recovery isn't a straight away thing. Well, I've heard of someone coming over it like that anyway. Yeah, it's pretty rare. It doesn't happen that way. So Nicky in the comments was just saying like, the white knuckle feeling comes and goes through its exposure, which is right. Like it's even at the micro level. So if we look at the recovery at the macro level, it will sort of look like a line up, but if you zoom in, you'll start to see the ups and the downs and the bad days. And even each exposure has the same thing. Like at a micro level from minute to minute, you might be handling it or tolerating it a little bit better, the next minute maybe not. But in the end, it's the overall outcome that we care about. So yeah, that is kind of what happens. And it changes over time. You get better at it as you go. So if you're not so good at it now, totally fine. It's okay. You'll get there. Keep practicing. Let's see here. Let's go to take another couple. I can do about another 10 minutes or so and then we'll see what's in the comments here. I'm inspired from, thank you so much. Yeah, yeah, very good. Everybody's participating, helping each other out. I dig it. This one, okay. I have a question about GAD, generalized anxiety disorder. I have 24 seven physical symptoms and my brain keeps shitting all over me. Very funny. I should do this. I should go there, go, go, go all the time. And it's about people, situations, activities that I don't like to do. People I don't even like. Is the shitting a GAD thing? And should I stop listening to it and do the exact opposite? It's really stressful. That's a great question, right? Yeah, what do you got? I'll let you start. Okay. So again, all of this stuff comes from, having the benefit of this crowdsourcing, right? So it's such a nice big community of everybody that's so engaged and active and sharing. What you start to see is these patterns. Yes, the should, shitting all over yourself, which is cracking me up. I don't think I've ever heard that before. Yeah, it's totally driving that, I would think. Like a lot of people with GAD will do the old, like I don't know where it's coming from. I don't have panic attacks, but I'm anxious all day long and I don't know what it is. But then they start to realize when you start to question them like, well, are you an over thinker? Are you an over planner? Or you see yourself as an overachiever? Do you, are you a perfectionist? Are you a people pleaser? Are you a fixer? Are you a warrior? W-O-R, not W-A-R. And a lot of times it'll be like, oh yes, I'm that, that, that and that. And so yes, if you feel somehow rather that you are failing yourself or you're doing something wrong by not going and hanging out with people you don't like, but you think somehow you should to achieve something or prove something, then why would that not be anxiety provoking, right? Now if you don't do it, you feel like you're failing, you're doing something wrong, you're not getting it right. So yeah, in my opinion, I'm not diagnosing anybody with GAT, I'm not qualified to do that, but I would think why would that not make you anxious? Right? And it's not something that you doubt would have drove. I can't say that I really dealt that much with that. I mean, for me, I had to recognize that, yes, my personality type was probably fueling some anxiety for sure. So I am definitely more patient now. I'm more measured. I did learn to incorporate like the slower stuff, the 7% slower stuff, it is part of my life now. The way I used to live was go, go, go, go, go, go, go. I still do, I just do it in a much less frantic way and I do it with no expectation. Does that make sense? Yeah, no. And you hear a lot of people who have general anxiety disorder that they can actually put themselves in that situation. I hear it described as like a simmer. Do you know, like, I don't know, like low cooker that's always on. So you're not reaching that level of the fight or flight panic attack where you have to, where you have your body response, but it's always there in the background. You hear a lot of people dealing with God have a lot of muscle tensions and headaches and those physical symptoms of keeping the anxiety in the upper body. I hear that a lot. Yeah, and it's, you know, there's always a lot of those drivers in just their personality. I'm not saying their personality flaws or they're not, you know, it's not your fault. You don't do anything wrong, but it's always interesting to hear somebody say like, well, do you default to thinking as your primary coping strategy with the world? Do you generally engage with the world up here instead of here? And a lot of times the answer is yes, I do. So if you're constantly thinking, thinking as a means to solve problems, find problems and then solve them and you can't because thinking doesn't solve every problem. That's another loop that starts to fuel that. And then the physical anxiety follows. We react physically to women that way. So yes, the should, you're shooting all over yourself and I would, my opinion would be, yes, it's absolutely driving it. So what do you do? You have to start to learn to change that. You can't just decide not to do it. I mean, you know, we hear folks like him and Josh talk all the time about, you know, you change your behavior. So it's not just, I'm just gonna stop thinking about that. It's no, no, instead of doing that and worrying about that and punishing myself because I feel like I should be hanging out with people I don't like. Instead, I will make a plan to go hang out with people that I do like. Like I will replace thinking and ruminating and judging myself with actual engagement with the world that's productive. That's a short answer, but that's kind of how you do it, right? Try and get to a couple more, let's see. We'll have to save some for the next time. We'll do these kind of regularly. Let's see. This is interesting. It's not really, I mean, I'll throw it out there. Okay, so it's kind of filled the white knuckling thing, but here's the interesting part. This person's from Germany. I just started reading your book, The Anxious Truth, which is the big recovery book. In Germany, when you can't express your fears to any psychiatrist because a lack of efficiency in German language, your book is a blessing. So I don't know if that means this person is in Germany but is not a native German speaker or there's something in the language. Yeah, sounds like they're talking about the German vocabulary, doesn't it? Yeah, almost like there's no good way to express that. So I find that interesting, but her question, I guess, is during exposure without white knuckling, what should I tell my anxious mind? So what did you do when you popped yourself in the middle of that shopping center and said, I'm not leaving? What was that inner dialogue like? Yeah, well, fuck it. It was busy, that's definitely the best way to explain it. It was loud and it was busy, but you have to succumb to the fact that you're gonna feel anxious and your body is gonna be telling you to do everything that your behavior has to not do to be able to get through it. So it was about fighting against the urge of leaving the shopping center and knowing that the anxiety symptoms are coming. And this is where the psychoeducation was really important because when you start to learn and know the process of anxiety, the process of panic, there's nothing, there's no surprises and you can, when you have this education behind you, to me, it felt a little less scarier. So psychoeducation was probably one of the main sources of helping me to overcome a panic disorder. And then, yeah, the nitty gritty doing the hard work was putting myself in these situations, knowing that I was gonna feel anxious, knowing that I was possibly gonna have a panic attack, but also knowing that every time I'd had a panic attack in the past, that it was okay, Julie, it was uncomfortable, it felt horrible, but I was still here to live to tell the story. I didn't have to go to the hospital. Luckily, I know that some people do go to the hospital for checks on it, but panic attacks can never, they can never harm you. Yeah, so I mean, that really, for me, this end is, I'm so with you on this, knowing ahead of time, there's even a comment here I'll put up on the screen real quick. There's a lot of stuff on the screen right now. It helps a lot when you understand what will happen during the exposures. Like it does help a lot, that's huge. So understanding, going into the exposure, like, oh no, this is going to be really hard. Like it's going to be difficult. I am supposed to feel anxious. Like all of those things are really important. And I think that influences that chatter or that self-talk or whatever you wanna say it is, that dialogue in your head. Like, well, I plan to do this. I'm supposed to panic. I'm supposed to be anxious. And my job is to move through it. So I don't think you have, the first thing I would say you have to tell your anxious mind is expectations. Like, okay, mind, we're about to go and do a really hard thing and we're supposed to be anxious doing it. So when you start there, then when the anxiety does come up, instead of trying to talk it away, it's just anxiety, it's just anxiety. No, no, I already know it's just anxiety because I'm doing this intentionally to feel it. So that makes a huge difference. And to me, I really had to stop the old like, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. It's okay because I had to stop doing that. I had to stop doing that. I had to really work hard. And this is where the skills I talk about all the time, focus and breathing and relaxing my body. It wasn't about what I was telling my anxious mind, it became about what I was showing my anxious mind. So by relaxing my body, even though it wasn't calm, I could be relaxed by slowing my breathing, by putting my attention somewhere, not like count fly blue things, see three things I could smell. Not that, but I'm going to engage with the world even while I feel this way. It was way better than trying to tell my mind anyway. Even subtle things like the openness of your body language, just changing your posture and the situation. Yeah, like for me, I really try to adopt like a chest out, shoulders back, chin up thing. Not because that's a panic shield and it instantly makes it go away, but it does make a difference. One of the podcast episodes I did, I don't know what number it is, but it's called How To Talk To Your Anxiety. If you go to my website and search for that one, that is one of the ones that people love the most because it's all about that. It's not about what you tell your mind, it's about what you show it. Because guess what? Your mind ain't listening to this too shall pass. It doesn't hear that, it doesn't know. So there's that. All right, let's take, we'll take two more. Dean, you got time for a couple more? I got for that. Awesome, all right. Let's do, let's see here. This one I will, I don't know if this person is watching and here I will, I'm just going to quickly address it. This is about bradycardia, which is a medical issue, very low heart rate and not having the high heart rate response. Like I can't answer that one. That's really one that you're going to have to work on with your physicians and your medical team. I, no one's like you to without the increase heart rate. Yeah, yeah. So there's a person who really is almost having a paradoxical and they don't have that their heart rate stays down in the 40s, they get cold and they're, you know, that's different. That's more of a medical thing. So as much as I'd like to help out, I have to defer to your medical team on that one. I just wanted to at least know I saw the question. Let's see. Is it normal that when you start to feel good and do a heart exposure, you'll feel like you're being back to square one because it made you so anxious. We hear this all the time, right? It is normal, but you're not back at square one. That's what I tell everyone. Like you just mentioned before, recovery isn't linear, but when you do have these setbacks or you do do an exposure that's a little bit too far for where you are on the recovery journey, it's fine to have these setbacks because you're not in the same situation you was at the start of your anxiety. You've now got the psychoeducation. You've now got the body language tools. You've now got this in a dialogue so you know how to speak to you. So you're more equipped with going ahead and you have the experience that you've already done it before. Yes, that's true. So in the end, I can't even answer that. You're not at square one. And I think it's always the expectations matter so much. That indicates, well, I've been doing great because I'm not anxious. And then if I get anxious, it means all that that said it's done. But that's not right because you never judge your progress as not being anxious or not. The progress is how do I handle it when I do get anxious? Like you do a hard exposure and you get really anxious. That's what the hard exposure is supposed to do. So it goes back to the previous question. Sometimes that's a misalignment of expectations where you're really doing exposure but what you're hoping to do is find ways to do those things without feeling anxious. And if you manage that, you think it's a win but you're supposed that the exposure is not the grocery store or the shopping center or the highway or the party, the exposure is the anxiety itself. So that's important. Cover every one Josh mentions about his clients and the therapy room when they come and say, hey, I've had a week and I've had no anxiety and he's almost telling them off saying, well, that's no good. You're supposed to feel down as I see. Right, right, exactly. Somebody just asked, cause I know this comes up a lot. Why do you not, hey, I'll put it up on the screen. Restream has all kinds of cool stuff. Like we do all kinds of really neat stuff on the screen. I don't even see it, but it's cool, right? Why do I not recommend the counting, naming colors stuff? I'll tell you why. Like this comes from my own personal experience and being able to talk to just a whole lot of people. I said something in a recovery room not too long ago and I used to use the term conditional okayness. And I knew that I could not shoot for conditional okayness, meaning I never wanted to get to I'm okay as long as I can ground myself, get to some special magical state called grounded. I really had, and I know this sounds really harsh and you might not like it and you can disagree with me and do what's right for you. But I always would say like grounding was not a required thing. Now, if you're dealing with somebody who's got really serious emotional dysregulation problems and they're in that frantic state, which is beyond just the anxiety we're talking about. Yes, the grounding techniques are really helpful for those kind of people because they begin to lose touch a little bit with the ability to regulate through an emotion. So it's used a lot there. But during a panic attack absent that problem, thinking that well, I have to somehow get to a grounded state to be okay is something I didn't want that's conditioned. I just knew that if I did nothing and allowed it to run its course and didn't try to do all that stuff, it would still end. That was far more durable for me because when you have that experience over and over without having to count things and put my toes in the dirt and somehow magically ground, you become, your recovery is deeper, wider, more durable. That's my answer. Hopefully it makes sense to you guys. I don't know Dean, if you have an opinion on that one way or the other, Yeah, especially the ground engineer. So find five specific colors, you can say. And like, I don't know, I was working around the supermarket and they were sold out with the yellow bananas and I couldn't find anything that would be yellow. That had increased my anxiety. Grounding as a whole, and I think if you want to incorporate it into, I don't know, a daily activity of something like that, then I don't have anything against that. Yeah, would it have helped me in the middle of a panic attack in the supermarket? Probably not. I think that's a really good point. I couldn't, they had no bananas and it would, it derailed me completely. I know I have somebody close to me in my life that had a panic attack at work, not too long ago in the last year or two. And the person she was working with is actually a counselor, like has experience in mental health and did that. Okay, look at the window, see if you could find five blue things, like see if you can smell and it just amped her panic up because she couldn't think. She couldn't think of, I can't find blue things right now. I just feel like I'm gonna die. So sometimes that's a bad thing because if you have expectations that special grounding techniques during anxiety will bring it down and they don't, because sometimes they won't, that could be even more distressing. But again, you're trying to create conditional okayness which is something that in my opinion, isn't lasting. You get, I don't want to have, I don't want to have any conditions in my ability to tolerate anxiety. So there's that. We'll do one more and then we'll probably wrap it up because we're getting close to the 55 minute mark. So happy to have found this great resource, you're welcome. My question is about sleep. This is so many sleep questions, right? There are many nights I have crazy scary nonstop dreams, I feel the energy and let it be. How do you sleep? When nights like this occur, do we relax into them? I'm exhausted the next day but tell myself it's anxious energy releasing thoughts. I don't know, you ever have sleep issues? I'm a terrible sleep resource, because I don't sleep. So. Really is a machine, he doesn't sleep. Five hour difference between me and Dean is irrelevant. No, it means nothing. I know that when I wake up in the morning and I want to speak to Drew, I know he's there to answer me. Yeah, I think I did have sleep issues. One thing that helped me was a lot of people say, how do I get to sleep? How do I get to sleep? Well, and try and do, I don't know, breathe in exercises or try and do things while they're in the bed. What I did was if I was feeling anxious, then I knew that I wasn't going to get to sleep. So I just get up and I'd do something that I knew would naturally make me tired. So I don't know, I'd start to read something and I feel my eyes starting to go and then just try and go back to sleep again. So yeah, take myself out of the situation of being in the bed, trying to get to sleep. Because if you're trying to get to sleep and you're anxious, it's not gonna happen. Yeah, that makes sense. And that comes down to, for me, often it was, and when I was sleeping even less than I do now, but that wasn't by choice. Now I just have a natural sleep pattern that I do sleep far less than most people. But back in those days, it was hard for me to go to sleep. I would finally close my eyes at one o'clock in the morning, I was wearing sleep masks and all the silly things in my ears by neural beats like anything because then I would just startle awake two hours later, two and a half hours later. And it was so hard because for me, it was a fear of like, now I'm going to be exhausted and sleep deprived, which means I'm gonna feel bad and I'm afraid to feel bad. So I think- A lot of people worry, and I'm sure you've heard it as well, but a lot of people worry like, oh, I've only had two or three hours. So that means that tomorrow I'm gonna be more anxious. And that's a trap that a lot of people fall into. I don't know, well, I don't, I haven't seen any evidence behind that, that's true. Well, I mean, I think, you know, if you're sleep deprived and you're really exhausted, clearly your body's gonna feel differently. You know, your dragon, I mean, I think in the end it's, your heart rate is probably a little higher that day, your blood pressure is gonna fluctuate a little bit. It's true, but that doesn't mean you have to be afraid of it. And I will relay a little anecdote that really helped me. One day when I was out and I was doing my recovery work, which for me was a lot of driving. And I drove around, there's right around the corner, I could drive there in a minute, minute and a half. It's a little dairy shop, right? So I parked in the parking lot and my exposure that day was to drive there and sit in the parking lot for 10 minutes. And I sat in the parking lot and a woman pulled up next to me. It was fairly early, about 7, 30, 8 o'clock in the morning. And she got out of the car and she looked like hell. Like, I'm sorry, whoever you are, lady next to me at the parking lot. But she was clearly exhausted. She was dragging ass that morning. And it really showed me, she had a coffee cup in her hand, like typical. She was probably going to work. And it really showed me like half the people around me, especially in the U.S., we are chronically sleep deprived here, probably didn't sleep well. We're undersleeping, we're exhausted, we're stressed. She just wasn't afraid of it. That was a huge moment for me. I'm like, that woman is exhausted. And she's just getting out of her car and walking across this parking lot, like it's nothing. I'm exhausted and I'm like hiding in this car, like I can't get out of it. What's wrong? It was a big, big, big deal for me. I have interest. Did you avoid things like caffeine when you're in the midst of it? I have an interesting history with caffeine. So I actually, when I was an undergraduate, I was in a school of architecture. I have a degree in architecture, believe it or not. So when you are in the school of architecture, you often do not sleep, like it is grueling. So we would stay up all night studio finishing projects and we would take caffeine tablets, no-dos, like you guys have no-dos in the UK. Or like, you know, it was the precursor to Red Bull, but like jolt cola. Oh, it's disgusting, it's awful. So it's just all so much sugar and syrupy, but jolt cola, no-dos, and like we would drink coffee to stay awake, it started to really upset my stomach. Like I would get really nauseous by four o'clock in the morning, plus not sleeping, probably had something to do with that. And so I kind of stayed away from caffeine even before I was anxious. But yes, when I started having anxiety problems, it was like, oh no, I will, I cannot drink cola, I can't drink coffee, no chocolate, nothing with any caffeine in it. And as it turns out, I'm still not a big caffeine guy and I'm not a caffeinated coffee drinker anyway, but that turned out to be a bit of a mistake because I used to think like, oh no, if I remember once I had an ice cream sandwich, we have a place called Carvel here in the Eastern US and they make these flying saucers, it's just an ice cream sandwich, but the top and bottom of it, the cookie part is super cocoa-y, very chocolatey, a lot of caffeine. And I had one, I was in the office and I was super anxious, I was working on my recovery, I was really struggling and I had half of one and my heart started racing from the caffeine in it and I was like, I was done for like a day and a half. They were still working on it. And I had to learn like, oh yeah, that's all right, like caffeine makes your heart beat. So there's that. Anyway, I think we're done, we're about in an hour, that's as far as I can really probably take you today, Dean, I'm super happy that you came by. Like what are you doing going on? How can people find you? They all know how to find you, but say it anyway. Yeah, DLC Anxiety over on Instagram. You can also see the website, so www.dlcenxiety.com and the resource hubs there. You can see stuff about Drew on there, which is fantastic. And we do the recovery room every Friday around this time when the internet is not playing up, which should be next week, which is fantastic. I should be doing it from Spain next week, which will be real. It's gonna be great. I'm fully expecting you to speak Spanish. I'm gonna make this so you don't. Also dance and I did say. Very good. All right, guys, thanks for coming by. I appreciate it. I'm gonna do it because it's my video. Like if you don't have this book, you really should check it out. Like, out of it now. Now everybody that's reading it is raving about it and they're finding it super useful. And I'll get, I'll let you guys in on a small secret. It's not set yet. Like Dean doesn't even know this either, but before this I was on the phone with some folks who are gonna help me create book clubs around the anxious truth and around 7% slower. So it'll be actual virtual book clubs where you can join 10, 15 people and go through like a four week thing or seven plus over, be short, be like a one week thing where you can actually talk about the book and there'll be some extra content and video and all that. So I think I'm gonna do that. It's gonna be pretty cool. So there you go. You guys heard it first. How's Denena? Will you be in the grade? Yes, I probably, well, we're working out to particulars right now and it takes about 90 days to make this stuff. So it wouldn't be until like probably after the holidays. But yeah, so, but get the book because everybody that's reading it is really digging it. It's inexpensive. Just go to 7%slow.com all the links are there. Audible is coming, I promise. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. Soon as it's out, everybody know. I don't know. Thanks for coming by. And thank you, Dre. Looking forward to the Audible. And yeah, well, just the people's reviews already on it how they're saying they're using it as part of their recovery as well and you see it about with them. So yeah, congratulations, Dre, on another masterpiece. That's what I've got to say. Thanks man, appreciate it. All right guys, thanks for coming by. I will post this. It's gonna stay in the Facebook group on my Facebook page and YouTube. And I'll upload it to IGTV if you wanna watch it on Instagram too. So there you go. Take it easy. Have a good day. Have a good weekend.