 Hey there, I'm Drew and you're listening to or watching The Anxious Truth, the podcast that covers all things anxiety, anxiety disorders and anxiety recovery. On this podcast our approach to the subject means we talk about facing fears, going toward triggers and learning to accept, float through, surrender to and willfully tolerate anxiety in order to get better. But sometimes people will say that accepting, floating, surrendering, tolerating and exposure doesn't work for them. Let's get into that right now on episode 248. Hello everybody, welcome back. I am Drew Linsalata, creator and host of The Anxious Truth and if this is your first time listening or watching, welcome. I'm glad you found us and I hope you find it helpful. If you're a returning listener or viewer, well then welcome back. Pull up a chair, grab a beverage and let's chat. This week we're going to talk all about the connection between difficult and effective. In life something can be effective for us in solving a problem or creating a needed change or supporting some desired outcome in some way. But in life things can be difficult for us. They can even be scary at times because, well, life is sort of like that. And here's the core message for today, effective is not negated by difficult or scary. Now before we get into that, just a quick reminder that The Anxious Truth is more than just this podcast episode. There are 247 free podcast episodes that came before this one. There's a ton of free social media content, three books that I've written on anxiety and anxiety recovery, workshops, classes and other resources on my website at TheAnxiousTruth.com. Take a moment and surf on over there to check it all out and take advantage of what's there. And if you are enjoying my work and find that it is helping you in some way, all the ways to support what I do can be found at TheAnxiousTruth.com. Regardless of how you choose to support this work, maybe making a purchase or just liking a YouTube video or leaving a nice review for the podcast, I appreciate it. Thank you very, very much for being here and for your support. So when someone says that this approach to recovery doesn't work for them, we have to dig a little bit deeper into that statement to see where it comes from. Now let me clearly and loudly acknowledge here that everyone gets to choose their own path to recovery. I don't get to dictate how you do this nor is it my place to convince you to do it this way. I don't even want to do that. If you feel that this is the wrong path for you, I totally respect that. And whatever your reasons are, I would still wish you well on whatever recovery path you choose to travel as one human being to another. But today I want to try to unmask some of the fear-driven distortions that many struggle with when they want to do it this way, but wind up feeling discouraged or defeated because this is in fact difficult and scary work. So take it as a bit of education and a bit of cheerleading may be rolled into one today. So most often I hear a few statements. These are, I tried it and it made me worse. And I also hear, it's very scary and I also hear, but it's so hard. And let's break all of that down. The first one is I tried that and it made me worse. So when you stop hiding and shielding and soothing and you go toward what you fear, you will feel more like more is to be expected. So let's say you wrap yourself in bubble wrap every day. You will feel very little of anything as you go through life. If you take away the bubble wrap or the protective layer, you're going to feel wind, you're going to feel rain, you're going to feel bumping into walls, you're going to feel it when you accidentally kick the leg of the table, you're going to feel it when your cat sort of accidentally scratches you when you're playing. You wouldn't question that because you know that you took away the protection, you took away the shield, the buffer, you unwrapped the bubble wrap and went into life without a shield. Well, the same thing holds true with taking steps toward your panic and anxiety and your triggers and intentionally triggering yourself for a reason without trying to save yourself or run away or put a shield or a buffer between you and those things, those scary things. You feel it more. There's really no news there. Be careful about saying that feeling it more means that you got worse. You are essentially in the same situation that you've always been in, but you've taken off the bubble wrap and decided to intentionally trigger that fear and that anxiety and that panic for a reason to learn lessons that will help you get better. But if you're going to intentionally trigger yourself, then you will feel things and since there's no shield anymore and you've stopped running, you will feel them more intensely. But they are the same things that were always there. You just feel them more because you took away the buffer between you and them. So that's actually not news and it's to be expected. Just be careful about saying that feeling it more means that it made you worse. You just decided to actually feel things that you've been really trying hard to not feel. That doesn't mean that you got worse. Now you may feel that if I feel it more intently, well, that is worse for me because I don't like that. I get that. That's valid. That's 100% true and I wouldn't argue with that. But just because you don't like it doesn't mean it made you worse. It just means that it feels worse for sure. So we can acknowledge that, but that's a really important distinction I think. When people say it made me worse, what they're saying is, huh, I don't hide from it anymore so now I feel it and I don't like feeling it. But that doesn't mean you've gone backwards. It actually means you're going forward within the context of this theoretical orientation. So let's look at that second argument or the second statement. It's not necessarily an argument. People aren't trying to argue. I don't mean to say that, but people will say, but this is really scary and that is correct. Oftentimes it is. If you're going towards the things that you fear and you're allowing yourself to trigger your fear, that is scary work and they'll say, well, but it's all it's this is so hard. Like it's a simple. It seems so simple, Drew, but it's really so hard and yes, that is 100% true. I probably say the phrase, this is hard more than I say any other phrase. If you go back and analyze every word I've ever said in this podcast, I have a feeling that that would be true because it is hard and it is scary. I've done the work. I know what it is. I get how difficult it is. It is a simple plan. It's just very hard to execute because it is scary because it does require courage and that makes it difficult, but I don't want to minimize the effort it takes to recover. And I've just tried to take a minute to acknowledge it again and again and again. It takes a lot of effort and it is hard and scary work, but let's use a very oversimplified gym analogy here. If you decide you want to be stronger and you go to the gym to start lifting weights, that will be difficult. That is hard work. You're working against gravity. You don't have the strength you want yet. You struggle. You wind up uncomfortable, out of breath, gasping for air. Maybe you're even sore for a few days afterwards or in some actual pain. You look at, do you look at all of this and stop going? Does it mean that lifting weights doesn't work? Or does it mean that you see yourself as incapable of tolerating and handling that discomfort and that challenge? If you keep lifting weights, unless there's something physiologically wrong with your body, you will in fact get stronger, but it will be a struggle to do that. So when people go to the gym to try to get stronger and they decide to stop going to the gym, it is rare that you'll hear them say it didn't work. Well, I kept lifting more and more weight, but if you kept lifting more and more weight, you were in fact getting stronger. They will say, you know what, I couldn't bring myself to do it every day. It was really hard. I went up sore all the time. Totally fine. I get that. That's fair. But people will rarely give up on a difficult thing and say, well, it just didn't work. They'll just acknowledge it was really hard. And you know what? That's not a priority in my life right now. Cool. No problem. But this will be difficult work. There's no doubt about that. But difficult doesn't mean it's not working. And again, I don't want to use an oversimplified gym analogy to minimize the work of anxiety recovery. Remember, I went through it too. I understand how intently scary and therefore difficult this is. But we have to be super careful about saying, well, it's scary, so it means it doesn't work. Or it's difficult because it doesn't work. Like, that's really hard. So this is important because when you throw your hands up and you declare that this method, air quotes, doesn't work, you are adding yet another thing to the list of things that didn't work simply because they didn't make you feel better right away or permanently or consistently, which is unfortunately not how this works. You are doubling down on the idea that the only way you could be OK is if you eliminate the struggle, eliminate the challenge and eliminate the discomfort. And that is so unfair to you because it's almost an impossible ask. I can only get better, and I will only define getting better, is if I am calm all the time, I never struggle. I never feel things I don't want to feel. I need to make it all go away. If that's the only way that you think you can get better, and again, back to the very first thing I said here, you have a right to choose that path. I think that it just ultimately leads to feeling frustrated and sometimes feeling hopeless, which is heartbreaking to see because that is a very big ask. As much as it is a big ask to try to make yourself do things that are intentionally triggering, scary, difficult, hard, make you feel things that you wish you didn't feel as hard as that is and as big of an ask that that is of yourself, I believe that it is an even bigger ask. It is a bigger demand and an almost more impossible demand to say, I will never feel these things again. And then I'll say I'm better because that just isn't realistic. It's not realistic. People get triggered. Life is difficult. Life is stressful. For many people that try to do it that way, when they wind up in a rough patch in life, in general, suddenly they often find that their anxiety problems have flared up again. And then they think, oh, I'm not really better. This is horrible. I'm back to square one because they got triggered and that wasn't part of the plan for them. Their plan was make it go away forever or else fail. So sometimes I just want to unmask some of that distortion and the unrealistic thinking and maybe aiming at the wrong target. So just because something is scary or difficult doesn't mean it isn't effective. Like I said, today we're going to tie together the concepts of effective, difficult, and scary. Because as often is the case in life, more than one thing can be true at a time. Something can be effective while also being difficult and scary. And sometimes it's the difficulty and the scariness that actually makes it so effective and that applies in this case here. And again, I'm not here to convince you to do it this way, but I'm just going to sort of give you information that maybe you can make good decisions on. And if you have been beating yourself up or declaring yourself hopeless or a failure because being scared or challenged somehow is equated to the fact that this won't work for you, you can let yourself off the hook. That's not being very fair to yourself. That's not a realistic conclusion to reach and you're really kind of selling yourself short. So why do I say that scary and difficult in this situation do not equal ineffective? It doesn't mean it doesn't work because we have so much real life data that shows that this is an effective way to do this. No data says it's easy. None of the data, none of the clinical data, none of the research data says it's easy. None of what comes out of research or actual clinical practice says, oh, here's a simple, gentle way to do this. None of that, unfortunately. In fact, there's quite a lot in the literature that talks about issues of, say, non-compliance, which sounds terrible, but that just means somebody bails on therapy because it's so difficult. So the research and the literature, professional literature in this area, even acknowledges that. Sometimes we have a hard time with clients staying in therapy because this is such a challenging therapy. But when they do, the outcomes tend to be pretty damn good and as this sort of method, again, air quotes method, evolves over time and we get away from some more of the old school CBT and into more of the more recent third wave or beyond modalities where we're concerned a little bit more with process and acceptance and things of mindfulness. The outcomes become even more better, listen to me, horrible. Yes, I'm a professional podcaster saying more better. The outcomes become even better over a larger population over time. Recovery is a little more durable, a little more lasting, the relapse rate is going down. So things are getting better and better as we go, but it is difficult and scary work. Be careful of selling yourself short because you are being challenged or that you are afraid. In this context, you did not get worse, you just feel it more because you have chosen to feel it more. I cannot stress this enough as I sort of wrap up this episode because I'm gonna try and keep it at around 15 minutes or so. If you accept the challenge to feel it more, then you feel it more, you're being incredibly unfair to yourself if you draw the conclusion I'm worse. So that would be like me jumping and I use swimming analogies all the time. You know, I'm not even terribly great swimmer, I can swim but I'm not great. So why do I talk about swimming all the time? I think it applies. If I decide to go to the pool, for instance, and I wanna become a better swimmer and I wanna practice, if I decide, let me go practice, I jump in the water and I find myself underwater, if I jump out of the pool and say, oh my God, I wound up under the water, this doesn't work, you would say, you just jumped in the pool. You literally decided to challenge yourself to become a better swimmer. Well, as much as, again, that might be oversimplifying and I'm not trying to wipe away the impact of the fear on you, but the same principle is underneath all of that fear. If you choose to trigger yourself, you will feel that doesn't make you worse, it makes you challenged and it makes you afraid. Neither of those things is failure and neither of those things is doing it wrong and neither of those things is a crime and recovery. So if you choose to do this in a little bit of a different way, which you certainly can choose to do, there's nothing wrong with that at all, if you choose to do this in a different way and go down a different path, 100% behind you, I wish you well. But if you wanna do it this way and you wanted to clear that it didn't work simply because you are afraid or feeling challenged in some way, then hopefully the last 15 minutes of me babbling has helped you maybe get a little bit more objective about that, take a little bit of a clearer look at it and maybe let yourself off the hook and understand that like, hey, I better be nice to myself because I'm doing a really hard thing. And let me tell you, the last thing I wanna tell you today before we sign off is if you are choosing to do it this way, even if you're stumbling in those first few steps, you have chosen to turn and face toward your fear that is incredibly brave. It is an incredibly good thing to do for yourself. It is incredibly strong and you have my respect, my admiration and my support for doing it. So don't forget that you're choosing to do hard things. Give yourself some leeway, allow the challenge, allow the fear, do your best to navigate, remember why you're doing it and don't wave the white flag when things get really rough. You'll be tempted to, we all are tempted to, but you don't have to do that because you are capable. I promise you really are. So that is episode 248 of The Anxious Truth in the books. I hope you have found it educational and informative. Maybe gives you a little bit of an objective view of things when it's hard to find objectivity. And hopefully I did a little cheerleading for you at the same time, which as I mentioned was sort of my goal in this episode. Speaking of the episode, you know it's over because we're hearing music and that is as always after glow by my friend, Ben Drake, who wrote that song inspired at least in part by this podcast several years ago and who lets me use the song in every podcast episode. Thank you, Ben, I appreciate it. If you'd like to find more about Ben and his music, you can visit bendrakemusic.com and tell them I said, hello, if you do that. If you are listening to this podcast on Apple podcasts or Spotify or some platform that lets you rate or review the podcast, leave a five star rating if you dig it and maybe take a second and write a quick review because it helps more people find the podcast, more people get some help and that's why I do this to begin with. If you're watching on YouTube, like the video, leave a comment twice a week at least. They circle back in and answer YouTube comments and subscribe to the channel, hit the notification bell so you know when I upload more stuff. That is it. Hopefully you have enjoyed this episode. Hopefully it has given some value to you. Hopefully you are feeling a little bit more encouraged today or at least it can be a little nicer to yourself for the rest of the day. I will be back next week with another episode. I do not know what I'm gonna be talking about but I will be here and remember as always, this is the way. It's been fast. No looking back or sweating on the...