 Welcome to The Anxious Morning. Every weekday morning we'll take a few minutes to go over some important lessons that you can use in your anxiety recovery journey. Away from the endless noisy scroll of social media, The Anxious Morning brings you support, education, inspiration, encouragement, and empowerment. For more, visit us at TheAnxiousMorning.com. When we brace against our anxiety and fear, when we run from it or try to escape, avoid, and stop it, what are we really doing? Are we guarding ourselves against fear? Or are we already afraid and just desperately trying to hang on? Our escape and avoidance strategy is likely based on the idea that we can guard against anxiety and fear. If we guard against them, we can keep them from catching us. If we remain vigilant and on alert, we can at least run away from them if they do manage to slip past our defenses, right? We relate to anxiety and fear the way we do probably because we are hoping that we can keep them at arm's length. But are we really accomplishing that? I would suggest that we are not. We are hoping to keep the invaders outside the city walls, but we are failing at this task. We guard, we brace, we scan, we evaluate, yet we are afraid even as we do these things. We are anxious. We are experiencing all the scary sensations and thoughts that come with it. They are here. The walls are breached. Our guarding strategy is misguided and ineffective. We are not effectively protecting ourselves against the damn thing. We remain vulnerable to the full force and effect of our anxiety and their fear at all times. They are not at arm's length. They are here and they will be heard from. Falling and protecting never really works because anxiety and fear arrive anyway. It's a whole lot of effort with very little consistent payoff. So where does this leave us? It leaves us with the fact that anxiety and fear are here anyway, so we must just hang on to avoid falling into the abyss that they bring with them. We hang on because we are afraid that if we really let go, the worst will happen. Death, incapacitation, insanity, complete loss of control. These are terrifying outcomes for us, so we tighten our grip, we hang on, and we hope that the storm will pass. We think we are protecting, but we are really just hanging on. Why does this matter? I think it matters because when we acknowledge that all of our guarding and managing is fruitless, we can start to move in a new direction towards solutions that will bear fruit. Hanging on is not battling, fighting, or guarding, it's just hanging on. This might sound a bit depressing at face value, but really giving up the illusion of the fight can lead us to actually give up the fight, and this is critical in a war that we can only win when we put down our swords. There is tremendous power in abandoning the fight. There is great potential to be realized when we accept that we are only hanging on and that true recovery is found in letting go. Let's keep going with this tomorrow when we look at the power of letting go and how to practice it. Hey, if you're enjoying the podcast and you'd like to get a copy of it delivered every morning into your email inbox, including a full text transcription, head on over to theanxiousmorning.email and sign up for the newsletter. And if you're listening on iTunes or Spotify or some place where you can leave us a rating or a review, take a moment and rate the podcast and maybe write a small review. It really helps us out. Or just tell a friend about us. Thanks a lot.