 Hey, it's recovery Monday, episode nine. Today we're going to talk about why attacking symptoms does not work and why we should not go about a recovery that way. So let's get this thing cooking. We've got four people already. Let's see who's showing up. Let me get the chat up here. Uh, close this guys today. We're going to talk about symptoms and why we do not attack symptoms. I'm going to put the chat overlay up. Just let me know as you come in that you're here, give me a wave. Let me know that, uh, you can hear me that everything's working. Okay. Folks are starting this file in, I will remind you that we do recovery Monday every Monday, what a surprise. And that we are literally taking lessons right out of this book, the anxious truth, which is also up on the screen there in the corner. And if you do not have this book and you want to follow along, you, you could grab it on my website at the anxious truth.com slash recovery guide. Looks good. Thank you. Emily Michelle is here. Oh, the chats are rolling in. Olivia says, hello, welcome everybody. I'll remind you that if you are in my Facebook group, VStream doesn't show me your name. So sorry about that. I don't mean to not address you by name. Welcome everybody. So let's get into this today. We are doing lesson 2.5 out of the anxious truth. And that lesson is called attacking symptoms. Do not, does not work on a, Hey, Carol, Nikki's here. So let's talk about why we never want to attack our symptoms. Like recovery is not about addressing your symptoms, making them go away or learning how to deal with individual symptoms one by one. It's never about that. There's a couple of reasons for that. But first, let me acknowledge that I understand that your anxiety symptoms are really important to you. I get that. I'm not trying to invalidate the fact that they are like super uncomfortable and they could be really scary and they can be really disruptive. I get all of that. I've had all of those symptoms or most of them, quite a few of them. So I'm not trying to tell you that, you know, the symptom is, is not, not important or not impactful. It is impactful in your life. And therefore it does make it important to a certain extent. But we need to talk about why we should not look at recovery as symptom hunting. Like we're not trying to overcome our symptoms. There's more to it than that. So we should not be like attacking symptoms. There's two main reasons for that. The first one is the obvious one, which I think is the one that you know that I'm going to tell you, which is when you put special importance on a given symptom like this week, I'm afraid of my heartbeat. Last week, it happened to be my breathing. Now it's dizzy. I have to find a way. But how do I find a way to handle that special symptom when you declare it to be a special symptom? It's something that you have to find a specific special way to work on. Then you start to get into that situation where you're reinforcing the idea that the symptom does require evasive action. So we are never trying to lend credence to the fact that we must escape, evade, stop or block those symptoms. They're not dangerous. They do not represent a threat. They just feel bad. And that's true. And again, I'm going to acknowledge that they feel bad. You are really scared. That's not fake fear. You really are scared. But the symptoms do not represent a threat. So we don't want to try to do search and destroy and hunt down the symptoms to try and get rid of them one by one, because that is essentially teaching yourself that, yes, these are threats that must be eradicated as I go. Because it's not the symptom, it's your reaction to the symptom, and it's the fact that you are afraid of the fact that that symptom makes you afraid. So you've learned to be afraid of your breathing. You've learned to be afraid of your heartbeat. You've learned to be afraid of being a little disoriented, or you might call it dizzy, all of that stuff. And really in the end, we have to understand that it's that fear, the fear of being afraid. That's the problem. It's not the symptom. And we don't want to address symptoms individually. This is why the Facebook group, we don't talk about that. We don't talk about symptoms. And I know, especially if you're new in the group, that's that really is frustrating for a lot of people because people get into the group without ever knowing about the podcast or my books or even who I am, they want to talk about their symptoms. Does anybody else get this symptom? But how can you deal with XYZ symptom? And as I say again and again and again, almost at an annoying level, no symptom is special. None of them are special. So I know that in a lot of instances, you're going to say, yeah, Rita just says I'm scared of my shaky legs. So in a lot of instances, people will say, OK, I understand like, yeah, the dizzy or the stomach or the heart, but the breathing, but how can you overcome the breathing? So there's a really good chance that if you've been symptom focused, either you are or you have been in the past, you've said that like, OK, fine, I understand all y'all symptoms over there and what you're supposed to do with those. But this symptom that I have, this is the scary one. This is the special one. So please give me special advice on how to deal with like Rita says, my shaky legs. That's not really we want to go. None of them are none of them are special. They're all the same and the approach is always the same. So this is why we do not attack symptoms. That's reason number one, why we don't attack symptoms because it reinforces the mistaken belief that they are threats that need to be specially addressed. And I will say Amanda says there are some that are harder to accept than others. That's exactly true. It's 100% true. Some are more difficult. And I did a post on Instagram. Oh, months ago, I don't even know when it was. A little bit tongue in cheek. And it was like one of those carousel posts. And I was like, OK, the verdict is in. We've had our best scientists like researching this. And now we know the scariest, the hardest anxiety symptom is. And the last slide is the one you're afraid of today. And that's truth. So the hardest symptom to overcome is the one you care about most today. And unfortunately, if you've been at this for a while, you will probably relate to the idea that that special scariest symptom is a moving target. So the other reason why we don't play whack-a-mole is with symptoms. I was talking about whack-a-mole, you know, the game, the arcade game where you're hitting the little mechanical moles with the hammer and they keep popping up. So we don't play whack-a-mole with those symptoms because invariably, and we've seen this time and time and time again, that you if you solve one one symptom, you will wind up two weeks later saying, Oh, I was doing great. Like I calmed my heartbeat down. It's great. But now I have stomach symptoms. How do you deal with that? So when you sort of like knock down one and try and engineer your way around one, another one most times will pop up and the one that you are most scared of today will be different than the one that you're most scared of two weeks from now or two months from now, or then the one you were most scared of two months ago. So when you confront that reality that like, Oh, yeah, that's right. I used to be really scared of my shaky legs. And now it's heart focused. What does that tell you? So it's another reason why we don't play whack-a-mole. It's a very frustrating, no win, low yield game. Can you find ways? And this usually means that you're trying to find physical ways to address this. Can you find ways to slower your heartbeat? You're not sure you can. You could take a beta blocker or you can take all kinds of herbs and supplements or you can refuse to get off the sofa because if you get off the sofa, your heart rate will go up. You could do a lot of stuff that will try to address individual symptoms and you can engineer your way around them, but it becomes a game of whack-a-mole. It's frustrating and you're reinforcing that mistaken belief. Here is the second reason that I wrote about in the book in Lesson 2.5 in the book was when you are symptom focused, not only are you reinforcing the mistaken belief that these are threats that you must deal with, then you are also really practicing your scanning and inward focusing skills, which is exactly the opposite skills that we are trying to develop in recovery. So if you're going to take a symptom-based approach to recovery, that means that your job on any given day in your head is, okay, I have this symptom, let's say it's nausea. I'm just going to pick one out of that. Nausea, I hate it. I'm terrified of it. I'm terrified of being nauseous. The stomach, the stomach. And you wake up that morning and decide, okay, well, my job today is to handle or deal with my nausea. So let me chew on some ginger root. And then 10 minutes later, like, okay, how does my stomach now? How is it now? Is that working? Let me go do some meditation. Did that help? How's my stomach now? Let me do some yoga. How did that work? Is my stomach better now? So when you try to take a symptom-solving approach to this, you are literally getting to be an expert at scanning your own body and evaluating how is it now? How is it now? How is it now? How is it now? Because you're trying to solve the symptom and you're looking for that solution to be working. So the second reason why we should never be symptom-focused is that not only are you rewarding your amygdala for being wrong about the threat, but you're teaching it to get really good at scanning. And we're actually trying to teach it to stop scanning. So this is one of those things that most people overlook. Symptom-focused recovery actually makes you really good at fueling the disorder. You get really good at being a checker and a scanner and an evaluator of what's going on in your body. And that will keep you stuck. It's one of the reasons why when you think you have one problem, one symptom sort of beat or solved, another one pops up because you have taught yourself to be an expert at constantly evaluating the state of your body. So maybe your heartbeat has calmed down or you're not getting that air hunger so much anymore. But since you are constantly scanning for it, you'll feel everything. Every new twitch, every new pain, every new tickle, every new tweak, every new pain, every new everything. You will 100% have taught yourself to find it and focus on it and feel it intently. So let me give you a bit of my own experience and we'll go into the comments here. When I was in the thick of things, I was riddled with twitches and pains and literally muscle twitches all over the place. My eye would twitch, my cheek would twitch. I would get twitches in my fingers. I would get twitches in my quads and my calves. I would get them all the damn time as an example of one of those symptoms. I was so keenly focused on everything my body was doing that it was like putting them all under a microscope and a magnifying glass. I felt everything that was going on in my body all the time because it was almost my full-time job to be aware of what was going on in my body all the time. I got really good at it. And guess what? It was shooting me in the foot every damn day. These days, I might get a muscle twitch here and there. I notice it sort of, sort of like sometimes they happen a few times before they even come into the forefront for me. It's like, oh, yeah, my calf is twitching today. But it's been twitching for an hour and this is the first time I've actually acknowledged it, for instance. See the difference? My habit of scanning my own body has gone away. I don't need to constantly scan my body. So that is reason number two why we should not be attacking our symptoms here because you will make body scanning a full-time job and that is the opposite of where you want to be. It literally is what got you into this predicament where you are scared of all these symptoms and always on guard for them. Right. So those are the two reasons. That's why we do not want to be focused, symptom focused. We want to be process focused and we want to understand that the real problem here is learning to move through the fear. Whatever triggers it, it doesn't matter what triggers it. The fear is still the fear of being afraid. What does this represent? If I can't figure it out or find a threat in my heart or my breath or my muscle twitches or my tummy or my thoughts, then it's a threat and I'm afraid of that. So we have to learn that we move through that fear no matter what the trigger is. No matter what the trigger is. So it doesn't matter what your symptom is. The answer is always the same, always the same. And I know that sounds really harsh because a lot of people want to say, no, no, no, this is my main symptom. It needs to be special. It's not. You might also argue that, well, what if that symptom is real? I will tell you that when you are in this heightened, sensitized, ultra scanning state, you don't know what's real and what isn't. So you just assume that everything you think about your body is real. Whereas when that that state comes down, trust me, you know the difference between actually a problem and worrying that there might be a problem. So when you are riddled and by by anxiety and fear based on, well, I feel a thing. What might that mean? What might that be? What might be happening? That's very different from when you start to bring your amygdala back in line and anxiety comes back into a normal place in your life. And you don't think about that anymore. What might this mean? You just know what's going on right now. Oh, I literally cannot stand up. Something is clearly wrong. Not, oh my goodness, my legs feel shaky. What if I can't stand up? See the difference? See the difference? So this is one of those things also that people will say like, no, but but this symptom, what if it's real? Well, you're going to have to let it be real in the end and learn to live and move through that discomfort. In a way, we're calling it out. You have lied to me 10,000 times, lizard brain. And so I'm going to call it out this time. Go ahead. I will let this stroke be true. I will let this heart attack be true. And then it isn't. And then it isn't again and again and again and again. And yes, that requires a lot of bravery and courage, especially in the beginning, but that's where the lessons are. Right. So that's the focus. It doesn't matter what the trigger symptom is. All right. So so there you go. All right. Let me look at some of the comments here. I will put some up on the screen. You guys have been busy. I see. Let's see. I missed everybody that says hello. I say hello right back to you. Make sense. I have to all the symptoms are that just that symptoms. Yes. Remember that when your body produces those those sensations, those reactions to fear, your body is doing exactly what it's designed to do. One of the earlier lessons we did on Recovery Monday, one of the earlier lessons in the book in the anxious truth is you are working as designed like your body is supposed to produce physical responses to what it's to a perceived threat. It's supposed to do that. You just interpret it as well, there is no threat that I can see so that the response itself becomes the threat just just because you think it's a threat doesn't mean it is. But I do understand that feels really, really scary. I get that and it is scary. So let's see here. Emily says it's not like an let's put some of these up on the screen. I'll try and get through them as quick as I can. We're a little ahead of schedule. This is good. It's not like an illness. We could take Tylenol to make a fever go down, but we can't do that with anxiety. Yes, that's true. Like you do not when you're when you have a cold, you're right. You might address your symptoms just to make yourself more comfortable. But in the end, there's an immune response when we get a cold, when we get the flu or whatever you get a sinus infection, your body takes care of that. Are you taking antibiotic or whatever it is? And then it goes away. It doesn't work that way with anxiety. So we can't treat the symptoms and think that it will make it go away. That's not how this works. So I like your Tylenol allergy. That's really good. Let's see here. This is super common, too. Let's acknowledge this. It's what I said early on when my anxiety to sort of first started, I was desperate to rid myself of the symptoms. I I feel that in my bones. I I'm sorry, I can't see your name, but 100% feel that. And I understand that. And sadly, that drives many, many people for a very long time, especially when social media is kind of rife with feeding you solutions for each individual symptom. Oh, you got it. You got to take tumor clearly. Clearly, this is a ginger problem. Clearly, this is a fish oil problem. Clearly, this is a vitamin D problem. Clearly, like so that gets really difficult, right? When Jason has it going, this is good. And so here's the reason I assume it's the same person. I don't know. Now I couldn't care less about the symptoms. I feel that in my bones, too. 100% there. I can still have anxiety symptoms. I'm a human being. So if I have an anxious day or a stressful day, I will feel that stress in my body. I just don't interpret it as anything more than that. This is a stress response. I don't like it. I don't like it, but I do not read into it and build an entire horror story screen play around it, right? So let's scroll down. Let's scroll down here. My biggest symptom is fear. Well, that's everybody's biggest symptom, my friend. So I'll put this up on the screen, right? So in the end, it's not the symptoms. I said that earlier on in the video here. It is the fear. This these disorders are defined by the fear of fear. So that's not uncommon. Yes, you have to learn to get better at being afraid. Any ideas would be we're learning to get better at being afraid. This I know that sounds crazy, but people will say, I know there are many therapists and clinicians that will say that as well. I think Josh Fletcher has said this in some of our lives that we've done together, recovery room and such. He'll always say, I don't need you to not be anxious. I need you to get better at being anxious. You are already anxious. You're already afraid. I need you to get better at that. That's that's there's power in those words. That's true. Let's see here. OK, so let's see what Laura says here. A holistic doctor. I'm not going to eye roll because I love Laura. But a holistic doctor wants somebody to dance through those symptoms. What are your thoughts on that? OK, honestly, I'm kind of with your holistic doctor. What your doctor was telling you there is it trains your brain to react different. Remember that the solution here or the way out is always in the reaction. When we get to chapter three in this book, this the anxious truth, this book that I'm holding here that I'm teaching out of. We get to chapter three. It's all about reactions. Recovery is about recognizing your reactions to anxiety and fear and panic and everything that comes with it and then working to change them over time and learn that you can change your reactions and still be OK. So when your holistic doctor told you to change the way you react to your symptoms by maybe visualizing yourself dancing or literally dancing through them. OK, the only thing I would say about that is you wouldn't want to develop a ritual around literally dancing or very specific. OK, when when I feel my breath, I have to do my my visualization. Yes, those are tools that we use. We just never want to ritualize those responses, right? We don't want to replace one maladaptive response with another one. But otherwise, I agree with your doc. Very good. Very good. Let's see here. On and on and on and on. Haven't been able to push myself to start exposure. Well, Allison is a tough one. I'll put it up on the screen really quickly and talk about the last part of this. I become paralyzed with the fear. So I haven't been able to push myself through them to start exposure, been in therapy every week for over a year. Well, it depends on what the therapy is. I don't know. I don't know what your therapy is. If it's just talk therapy, that's really not going to help you start your exposures. But always remember this like any time you experience that fear, that trigger is an exposure. That is an opportunity right there. So even if it's small, even if your response to that, I know a lot of times in the beginning, we think, well, my response has to be to not care. Like Drew teaches me to not care and not react. Well, sure. But that's a skill we develop and we get better at over time. So Allison, when you get triggered the next time by a bodily sensation and you fear that you feel that fear, which is very real, your goal might be, you know what, instead of running to call my mom or snapping a rubber band or whatever you do to save yourself, I'm going to do a 60 seconds of simply sitting with it and being terrified just for 60 seconds. That's a perfectly valid start to the exposure. You're in it. You have no choice. It's there. The opportunity for exposure is there in that moment. So use it and you can even set that goal really small. Your exposure doesn't mean that suddenly it looks like your reaction looks like mine does now. It's certainly not going to. You're going to look like I looked 15 years ago. And that's OK. That's where you start. All right. So understand that starting the exposure would be a very tiny step of surrendering and giving into that fear and just allowing it to be there, even for just a minute or two to start, that's OK. That's a start that will teach you I didn't do anything and nothing bad happened. So let's see. Having as a there some days I can blow off a symptom and others are tougher. So let's put Amanda's comment up because it matters. And I'm going to scroll through if you I'm sorry I can't get to all of them. I would love to because these are also good. The more you pay attention to what the worse it gets. But I like the what Amanda saying here. Some days it's easier to blow them off or disregard them. Right. Some days it's not. And the same thing holds true with thoughts, scary thoughts and intrusive thoughts and sticky thoughts. Some days we're really good at being resilient and like shrugging it off like I'm thinking again or all my muscles are twitching again or all I'm feeling a little disoriented today. Whatever. Some days if we're under the gun, we're under a lot of stress, we're feeling emotional. There's a ton of different reasons we're fatigued. We we things get a little bit stickier and our resiliency and our skills are a little bit lower on those days. That's OK. That's part of being human. You do the best you can on every given day and you do your best to learn the lessons as best you can every given day. So Amanda, thank you for bringing that up because some days are easier than others. That's just life. Some days are easier than others in life in general. Right. So let's see. I like that I love when you guys are talking to each other. That's one of my favorite things. How can I deal with my digestive issue? Is it normal to my? Yes, digestive issues with anxiety are incredibly normal. And I say this over and over and over. It's some of the top physical manifestations of stress and fear and stress are gastrointestinal. We have phrases and slang phrases. If somebody said to me, oh, my God, I was so scared. I thought I was going to I was going to wet myself or I was so scared. I thought I was going to ask myself. I was going to soil myself. You would understand why they say that we all acknowledge that like, oh, my God, I was I was scared shitless is a very common slang in English, at least in Western English, I was scared shitless. Why do you think we say that that isn't just for fun that actually has a basis in reality? So yes, they're incredibly common gastrointestinal problems. You just have to move through those just like anything else. It's the calling it a disaster. It's uncomfortable. It's disruptive. But we got to move past. This is a disaster that I must never allow it to happen. And I must figure it out. All right. So let's see here. Body scanning is my worst enemy, says Ashley. Body scanning is everybody's worst enemy. We need to get out of the body scanning business. And sometimes this is advice that sounds counterintuitive to what you're going to find in the sort of the wellness community at large. You'll get a lot of people using that generic check in with yourself, check in with yourself. So I want to address that for a second. Check in with yourself. I understand the reasoning behind that. If something's on your mind, check in with yourself. What do you need right now? I did a podcast episode. They did two of them. One was called stop, let's stop listening to your gut, like don't stop following your gut because we're in the grips of these disorders. Our gut is epically wrong and we should not be listening to it. Intuition is nonsense when you're in the grips of disordered anxiety and your gut is lying to you all the time. So that gut feeling, that gut instinct, don't follow that. And I think the other one that I talked about was stop checking in with yourself. So the phrase check in with yourself often invites us to look. Let me see. Let me check in with myself. How am I feeling? No, our problem was that we're body scanning all the time and we're evaluating how we feel all the time. So that advice does not apply to people in our situation. Later on it will again. You can use that as a tool. Right now it doesn't. All right. This is good. Emily puts this up. I became compulsive around my symptoms, constant checking and doing my safety rituals to make them go away. And that is the danger of being symptom focused. All right. Oh, let's let's put. What do we got here? Who's up now? You can change your focus around your body so many times literally in seconds. You can. You can do that. So you do have a choice. But Nick, Nicky, thank you for the comment. The choice is rooted in courage in the beginning. Like I can choose to decide this is horrible. I must save myself or I can choose to say, you know what? I chin up, I chest out. I'm going to fake it a little bit and I'm going to allow this to be here. And I'm just going to move through the best that I can. That is a choice. And acknowledging that you have power in that not ultimate power. You can't make it perfect. You can't just decide to make it perfect and instantly better. But we always have agency in this process. It's super important. Michelle just likes knowing that she's not the only one. Not at all, man. This sadly, this community around these videos and the podcast and my books very large, the extended community, mental community, the anxiety community, millions and millions of people. You're so not alone. I wish it wasn't that large. I wish it wasn't that large, but it is. So I'm going to scroll down kind of quickly here so I can get to the end about 25 minutes in. Let's see here. Seems that there are some symptoms that always linger longer. I won't put this up on the screen because it'll take the whole screen. This scares me because the main symptom is the one that people struggle with for years. OK. The symptom that I am most likely to on a stress day or an anxious day, the thing that I'm most likely to experience is derealization. Still, that is that it will be the first sign for me. I will become a little bit derealized, right? So. But does it matter to me? No, it doesn't. That's again, that thing that says, yeah, but it's staying around too long. But what has it done other than make you afraid? Right? What has it done other than make you afraid and uncomfortable? So for me, I had to take that derealized feeling, which was really hard for me to deal with. It's the hardest one for me to surrender to and accept that derealized, depersonalized feeling and say, well, I'm just going to keep going even though I feel this way. And so that has completely changed my reaction to that completely changed. Now when I feel it, it's like, oh, OK, clearly this is a stressful day or I'm anxious over something. But I'm just going to keep going. I'm just going to keep going through it. And that's how I know that this has no impact on me other than making me uncomfortable. So regardless of how long that symptom may hang around for you, you can still learn that you can move through it. And then I don't get derealized very often at all. It's rare now. It used to be a lot because I would think of it that way, too. This one is the one that's too hard for me, but it wasn't turned out not to be. Let's see here. Tony had COVID. Tony, I'm happy you're feeling better. I hope you're feeling better. That gets touchy, right? Like it's that's in that situation where now something real is happening to us and we can't we can't differentiate the difference between what's actually happening right now and what I'm afraid might happen down the road, especially if you really are ill and then things get harder and harder to deal with. So I hope you're feeling better, Tony. Really do. Let's see here. Health anxiety. I'm going to scroll through these a little bit. Bethany, thank you for replying to that. I see you. We need to deal. OK, let's see here. This is funny. We need to deal with the symptoms in a communist way. No classes, no hierarchy. They are all the same and they are all anxiety. I love this. I am completely stealing this. Like our new way to result, to react to symptoms is like the communist. There's no class system here. That's excellent. And it is dead on accurate and is a really good analogy. No symptom is any more important than any other. I know, hard for people to hear. Let's see. You need to practice driving on the highway, blah, blah, blah, says, Misty, 45 minutes, not really feasible for me. You can, well, driving on the highway, I'll quickly answer that. I'm not really talking about that today. What else are you afraid of? Like, Misty, if you have, I understand that the highway is 45 minutes away, so that's hard practically to practice that. I get that. My advice in situations like that is what else makes you afraid? And if you have other things in your life that also trigger anxiety or panic that make you afraid, do those. Because in the end, it's always about just learning to be afraid better. It's not really about the driving on the highway. So if you have other things that trigger you, you can work on those. Okay, let's see here. Skipped heartbeats used to get them all the time. Used to get them all the time. Still get them. If I'm really sleep deprived, I'll get those. But they used to send me into a multiple day tizzy. I would have one skipped heartbeat, one PVC, and it would be all over for me for days. Now I have them all in the gym, and again, I don't care. So let's see here. Is it true that your body starts to give you aches? Right, Nancy, after you've been, okay, is it true that the body starts giving, I'll put this on the screen. Sean, you're not gonna like my answer. Is it true that the body starts giving you aches and sinus issues just right down, Nancy, the immune response after you've been stressed for a while? Maybe. There's some research out there that's been really interesting that says you are far more likely to experience actual health concerns when you are afraid of having health concerns over your stress. So the stress appears to be far less impactful directly than your fear of it being impactful. Does that make sense? It's very meta, but that is some interesting research right there. But sitting and wringing your hands because I'm super stressed. So this means I'm gonna, and if I feel things that that means it's an indicator of some problem because of the stress. So that stresses me out even more. That's a cycle that will perpetuate itself. It's really hard for you to get out of, but you have to just let it be. Right now I'm stressed. I can move through that, right? I'm gonna scroll down as quick as I can here. This always comes up, Michelle. Do we navigate depression the same way? Depression is not an accepting and surrendering thing in any way. I don't wanna ever give people the idea that you float through or just surrender to and passively accept depression. Depression is different to a certain extent. It's similar, but there's always a challenge with depression. We challenge depression. We get moving. We try to stay as active as we can. We try to accomplish little things. We behaviorally activate. It's a whole thing. On my Instagram, if you go through my Instagram, I did a live with Allegra Castins, I don't know, five, six months ago, where we talked about that. And she was, she talked about that. She's a therapist in New York City. She talked about treating depression and how it differs from the anxiety thing. So hopefully that helps. All right, scrolling down, scrolling down, scrolling down. I say I'm scared shitless all the time. There we go. John is in Germany and he's actually saying, like in other languages too, we have phrases that allude to the physical responses to stress, whether they be gastrointestinal or my heart was a flutter or the room was suddenly spinning. Like I heard the news and the room started spinning. If somebody said that to you, they would, you would not question them. You would understand why they say that, right? So there you go. All right, almost at the end, do we have it here? This is like medical student syndrome. Reading about other people's symptoms makes you start thinking, do I have it too? Very common. We can be critical consumers of the information we decide to ingest. So immersing yourself in people's anxiety symptoms online might not be the best idea if you're in a very suggestible, less resilient state and those can become sticky for you. You don't need to read about other people's symptoms. On the flip side, that can also be a bit of an exposure because if seeing someone else's symptoms raises your anxiety level, okay, I read about somebody's symptoms. I'm not having those symptoms. It's making me uncomfortable. I'm gonna go have some lunch while I'm uncomfortable. So double-edged sword there, right? Okay, let's see here. No, no, no, no, no. Oh, this is a big deal. I'm gonna throw it up on the screen. Maybe the last one I do. I carry a backpack with me everywhere that my friends call my hypochondriac bag. I don't know how to get away from you. Okay, Brandy, this is a good, I'm glad you put that up there and thank you for sharing that. That's very common. Now I'm trying, I'm not gonna be like sexist here, but women tend to carry purses and men do not, whatever. I have heard from hundreds, if not a thousand women, that will laugh at the number of things that they keep in their purse. The safety behaviors, the escape things, the remedies that you guys will carry around in your purses. And look, don't get me wrong, I don't carry a purse, but the console of my car had mints like ancient Xanax that had been frozen and cooked and thought so many times it was probably useless. But the way do you deal with that is you're gonna have to start leaving those things home, which will make you super uncomfortable and afraid and feel vulnerable, that's okay. Just keep moving through that, that's okay. Just because you feel like you are vulnerable and unsafe doesn't mean that you are. You have to learn from experience that when you start to leave things out of your hypochondriac bag, which is a funny name, start leaving things out one by one. Let yourself be uncomfortable and afraid by that. But you will figure out like I don't need this. And if I did need it, I don't need it because none of what's in that bag is saving me from anything. So it's not that I'm never gonna need it. The lesson you must learn through reality is that none of what's in that bag is saving you anyway because you don't need to be saved. So if every time I burped, I ran to my kitchen and guzzled some apple cider vinegar, or I guess that's a big thing now, apple cider vinegar secures everything. And I didn't die, I would learn, well, when I burp, I have to use apple cider vinegar so I don't die. But if I didn't use apple cider vinegar, I wouldn't die either because burping isn't dangerous. Simplified analogy, but it matters, right? So scrolling down, scrolling down, scrolling down. Let's see here. Hey, Jenny, all right, I think we're good. I know, right? I'm just scrolling just to see at the end. Yeah, I'm gonna kind of chime in on this. Like the continual return to the same symptom again and again and again isn't helpful. So asking to be told again and again and again about your gastrointestinal issues is actually not helpful. And from where I sit, I won't answer those after a while. A good therapist would compassionately decline to answer those, continually going back to but what if, but what if, but what if, reassure me again and again and again that it's okay. I won't respond to those after a while. So we're gonna ultimately cut that off. Like, yes, I know what to do, but I'm scared, so just tell me again that it's okay to have stomach problems. I'm gonna, so it's not, that question has come up over and over and over, by the way. So this is not a compassion thing. This is a recognition of, it is a stuck question right now. All right, so I think we're done. I'm at the bottom here, good to go. Oh, this is good. So clean my pantry and toss a bunch of things that I ingested for the symptom of that. Goodbye, collagen powder. So long collagen powder. All right, guys, we've gone longer than I want to do today. Almost 35 minutes. Thank you all for coming by. Remember, we are teaching it of this book. If you want to go along with this book, you can get it on my website at theanxiastreat.com. It's right there on the homepage. Just follow the links. We do this every Monday. So I'll be back again next Monday to do the next lesson in the book. We're live streamed like we always do. This will stay in the Facebook group on my Facebook page on my YouTube and I will post it on Instagram. If you're watching and on any of those places, like and subscribe and do all the stuff or whatever. And thank you guys for being so supportive of each other. That's my favorite part of these things. I really do. All right, so see you guys next week. Have a good one.