 Okay, one of the things we need to do as part of the recovery process is to learn some new skills that are recovery focused. And since it's Monday, it means it's recovery Monday, and we're going to talk about that today on episode 19. So let's roll as usual. We put the chat overlay up a little bit of a different setup today. Hopefully it's going to be working okay. I'm not streaming through my stupid VPN like I made a mistake of doing last week. Sorry about that. That was a self inflicted technical wound on my part. So good guys, just let me know that you can hear me when you pop in. That would be great. I will remind everybody that we are doing recovery Monday is essentially lessons out of this book that we teach every Monday. We've been running a week 19. Now we're going to go well into the spring because there's plenty of stuff to talk about in this book, which is called the anxious truth. So we're teaching out of this book every Monday. If you do not have a copy of this book and you would like to follow along in the book, just pop on over to the anxious truth.com and you can check it out. So there's already 30 people here. This is awesome. Excellent. I can hear you now. Yay. Yeah, a little different scenery today. So welcome guys for coming on board. Let's see where everybody is from right now. Hello from Greece. Welcome, Greece. Good to see you in the house. Greece in the house. So if you are coming, I'll remind you if you are coming. Hey, Dawn, if you're coming from the Facebook group, I can only see you as Facebook user because of the way restream does it. So sorry about that. So you may have to tell me your name when you comment. We'll go through the lesson really quickly and then we'll do some Q&A like we always do. I'm glad you guys are here. Regular crowd is coming in here. Hey, from Delaware, from England, South Florida, all over the... South Africa. Awesome. Hawaii. Damn, I'm jealous. I should be. Well, I kind of like to be in Hawaii. The Netherlands. This is great. I love to see where you guys are from. So today we're going to talk about learning some new skills, right? Because recovery is more than just like powering through. You can't recover by just sheer force of will. Even though we might think that we want to, and I know I'm guilty of that, like I'm that guy sometimes. Like I'm just going to run this over. But you can't just necessarily run this over. And while the skills that we're going to talk about today are not designed to be anxiety cures, nor are they panic shields. They're not instantaneous like this will stop panic in their tracks, none of that. But it does help to have some of these skills and techniques under your belt to learn them, get familiar with them, practice them because they will help you. The process of recovery is about learning to react to your anxiety and panic in a new way. So you can build that new relationship with it so that you can learn that you never really had to be afraid of it. You can handle all this, you can tolerate it, you can move through it. And some of the skills that we're going to talk about today help you. They help you and get through those experiences more productively, get through the anxiety spikes, get through the scary thoughts, get through the panic attacks so that you can learn those lessons that like, oh, that was really super uncomfortable. And I was terrified and I would rather not do that again. But look, I was okay, like nothing really bad happened to me. So it's good to use these things so that we can learn to move through these, these experiences just a little bit better, right, or a little bit easier. By the way, I don't think anybody is watching, but today we are streaming to Twitch for the first time. Like I actually have a Twitch account. And so we are streaming to Twitch. Do not know if anybody on Twitch can hear me or is watching, but if you are on Twitch, hey, Twitch. So what skills are we talking about here? Just just a few of them. And you hear me talk about them all the time. One of them is being able to relax your body. And so in this book, I talk about practicing something called progressive muscle relaxation. Because being able to relax your body, we talk all the time about how do you talk, one of the most popular podcast episodes I've ever done is called, how can I talk to my anxiety? And that's all about the signals that you send back down the chain to your, your overactive lizard brain. And we can send those signals behaviorally. I'm old enough to say what the hell is Twitch. I got to say I'm with you on that. Like I'm never on Twitch. But anyway, we're streaming to Twitch today. So one of the things that we do to form this new reaction in relationship to anxiety is we start to send signals back down the chain to our lizard brains, our amygdala's that say, while it is screaming, red alarm, red alert, red alert, danger, emergency, we have to send signals back down that say, nope, all green, everything is cool here. Thanks for the, trying to help out, but we're good. And one of the ways that we could do that is behaviorally. And one of the ways that we can behave toward our anxiety is to relax our bodies, right? So it's important to remember that one of the things I talk about quite often is the fact that you can become physically relaxed even when you are not calm. Now you might be hearing me self-repeated. You can, it is possible to be physically relaxed without being calm. Like those relaxed and calm are actually two different things, which I know right now, like boom, your mind just might be exploding right now when I say that, but it's true. And one of the ways that we can learn to send that, that green light that everything's okay signal back down the chain is to learn to relax our bodies. And one of the best ways to learn to relax is to practice it. So many of the things that we talk about here, we talk about, you know, kind of floating, accepting, surrendering, willfully tolerating, this is not something that you could just decide to do. If you've spent the last 10 years of your life reacting in like disaster mode to panic and anxiety and thoughts and trying to fight them and run from them and stop them from happening and save yourself, you can't just decide one day to do it different. Like you can try, but it doesn't really work that way. We suck at that. So we have to learn new ways and practice new ways. And one of the ways we could practice sending the relaxation signal behaviorally is to practice a thing called progressive muscle relaxation. There are other ways to do that. But it's one of the most popular ways and it's really easy because it's a thing that you can practice. It takes maybe two or three minutes, maybe progressive muscle relaxation, it won't go into it too much. But if you go to the anxioustruth.com slash skills, I have links on that page. If somebody wants to link that Bethany, if you're here, you're always really good at that the anxioustruth.com slash skills, you can find links to progressive muscle relaxation, belly breathing and stuff like that, right? So progressive muscle relaxation is one of those skills we can use to help us learn how to relax our bodies instead of like we're going to go into this instinctively, your first reaction. And by the way, that's super normal. Your first reaction is to tighten up and that's normal. You're not going to stop that first reaction. You're human. That's always going to happen. It happens to me happens to every human being walking the planet. Nobody is immune to that. Thank you, Bethany. The first reaction is always that, ooh, that bracing and tensing. That's normal. That's not a failure. After that though, we can choose to relax our bodies. And progressive muscle relaxation is a way to practice understanding the feeling of what tension feels like and what it actually feels like to release it. You're literally practicing the act of relaxing the muscles in your body. So that's one skill is the skill of learning how to relax your body even when you're not calm. Like you can be in freak out mode, but still learn to relax your body, which is totally counterintuitive, but it's really helpful. Right? So that's one of the skills. The second skill that we talk about, and we'll go through these a little bit in the Q&A. So the second skill that I talk about all the time is breathing. This one is always a little bit controversial because I also say at the same time that I'm not a fan of looking at breathing as some sort of special, like it's not a special thing. It's not a grounding tool. It's not spiritual. It's not a shield. It's not the cure for everything that ails you. But when you can learn to breathe properly, we can at least head off a lot of problems at the past. Because for many people, when they become, when they get into an anxious state, they either become breath holders, like you find that you're holding your breath and where are my breath holders at? If you guys are breath holders, like, give me a wave in the comment, a lot of people become breath holders. That was me, right, for a long time. So I would suddenly discover, like, when was the last time I took a breath? I would forget that I was holding my breath and 45 seconds later, all of a sudden it's like, oh, wait a minute, I'm not breathing. Then I have to try and catch up. So you wind up breath holding and then panting to catch up. So people instinctually are either breath holders or over breathers, where now you're doing either you are just going into the like panting because you get afraid, which is pretty normal. Or you become the, oh, I'm going to take deep breaths to ground myself and calm down. And then you wind up taking these giant like, and then you do a big heavy sigh, right? Like that's supposed to be your calming breath. But that doesn't work out because when you do the big fill your lungs with air and then a heavy whoosh, which is the normal, what people seem to normally think is a calming breath, you wind up blowing off a bunch of extra carbon dioxide. And then that leads to that unreal, like dizzy over breathing hyperventilation feeling. So the reason why I talk about learning belly breathing and practicing that, and on my website, there's a very boring tutorial from the University of Michigan, but it's supposed to be boring. It doesn't have to be anything but boring. It's very dry. Like learning belly breathing is very dry. There's nothing spiritual or special about it. Learning how to breathe into your diaphragm instead of into your chest because your lungs expand down, not out. So your chest is rigid, your diaphragm is pliable and that's meant to expand. So breathing into your belly and then making it so that your exhale is just a little bit longer than your inhale keeps you from like wandering accidentally into over breathing hyperventilation, dizzy, tingly. So if your face gets tingly in your nose, if your hands and toes get tingly, or if you've ever had your hands do this, like lock into that, like lobster claws, that's hyperventilation. Right. So if you, if you practice your belly breathing, then when you're not, and we're going to talk about this, when you're not anxious, if you could practice that, then it becomes a thing that you can fall back on. I'm going to relax my body. I'm going to make sure that I get into a better breathing rhythm as opposed to or panting or holding your breath or trying desperately to fill your lungs completely and then doing those big, heavy sides to try and calm down. All of those things tend to make things worse. So the reason why I talk about breathing is it's, it just kind of heads off some problems. It eliminates self-inflicted like wounds, like, you know, we're shooting ourselves in the foot and we don't breathe well. So why not make it as easy as we can for ourselves and start to breathe more properly. Plus it gives us something to focus on, which brings us to the third. We'll talk about this a little bit more, right? When you brings us to the third thing, which is focus and meditation. So the three skills would be relaxation, proper breathing and learning to focus and pay attention. It's more, it's more focus and attention than anything else. And the way that for me, I like to teach learning how to pay attention and put your focus somewhere aside from the panic and the symptoms and the scary thoughts is to practice focus based meditation based on your breath or based on a visual point in space or based on a touch, something maybe you're holding in your hands for three, four, five minutes at a time. Nothing special, nothing special. It's just learning that like, oh yeah, when my mind starts to wander and in basic meditation, you sit down and you try to maintain your focus somewhere. I'm going to pay attention to my breath. That's, that's what I use. And invariably a couple of minutes into it, as good as I am at this, I'm thinking about all kinds of stuff. My mind will wander and I'm not even anxious at the time. So it's hard enough when we're calm, when your brain is screaming at you that you're in danger. Oh my God, I'm going to pass out. Oh my God, what if I go insane? This is it. I'm so close to snapping. I'm going to be psychotic. I'm going to hurt myself. Like all of those thoughts are screaming at you. You will hear them, but we can actually learn that we don't have to necessarily put our attention on those thoughts. You can let them run and play. Well, you know what? I'm just going to focus on my breathing right now while you yell at me, Lizzie Brain. So that's hard enough to do when you're not anxious. When you're really anxious and afraid, it's even harder to do. So the reason why I talk about learning these skills and practicing them is if you practice them when you are not under the gun, it becomes easier to use them when you are. That's why I say this stuff all the time. You guys have heard me say this. That's why the military runs drills and professional athletes practice and scrimmage against each other and musicians rehearse and theater companies rehearse. That's why, right? So we, we should practice these things and get good at them when we're not anxious so that we can use them to help us navigate through those very anxious, tenuous, tense, scary situations. Makes a big difference. So those are the three skills that I find are the most important. For me, they were, and I think for the community at large, they tend to be the three foundational skills that like if you get good at relaxing your body, bringing your breath back into a better, more productive rhythm by belly breathing and not holding your breath or over breathing. And if you can learn that, okay, the shit is hitting the fan right now and it feels like I'm in such danger, it feels like this is so urgent, but I can put my attention on this camera while I talk to all of you lovely people or that I can put my attention on the book that I'm reading or I can put my attention on the conversation that I'm having with my friend or whatever it is. I don't have to put all my attention on the anxiety, on the symptoms, on the thoughts, on the fear, no matter how strong they are. So I will always acknowledge that that attention and focus skill is challenging because the thoughts and the sensations and the fear is so strong that it will feel very real, right? And so it will seem like, but I don't understand how am I supposed to not pay attention to that? Everything is based on the premise here that even though it feels really real and very strong and urgent and like you must take urgent action to protect yourself, that's actually incorrect. And when we learn to say, okay, brain, you can keep telling me that I'm about to have a psychotic break, I'm going to keep reading my book or I'm going to keep drinking my coffee or I'm going to keep talking to my friend or I keep answering my email or whatever, I'm going to keep practicing the scales on my guitar while you tell me that I'm about to go crazy, those experiences teach us over time that it's wrong again. It was wrong again, it was wrong again, it was wrong again. So those three skills help us, they help us send those signals back down the chain to our lizard brain so that it understands like, I keep, you know, hey, thanks, I know you're trying to keep me safe, but you keep signing false alarms. So I have to now teach you lizard brain, I'm a Deluffier center, anxious brain, I have to teach you that you're wrong. Thank you, but I'm going to have to show you now that you're wrong, you keep being wrong. And I can't keep living based on the fact that you're wrong. You give me a bump steer all the time. All right, so somebody mentioned, those are the three skills, those are three skills I talk about and which lesson is this in the book? This is lesson 3.7. Some of the stuff that I want to point out though, in the chapter, let's see, I do say remaining physically relaxed and mentally calm, well, anxiety and panic rage around you will help it and sooner, but it will not make it all end immediately. I literally wrote that it's very important that you don't look at these skills and these tools as instant panic attack cures. Like if I panic, if I do this, it goes away. This is how I stop a panic attack. I will say this a hundred times every day if I have to, I am never teaching anybody how to stop panic attack. If anything, what I'm trying to teach you is how to let it end sooner than it otherwise would naturally. So if you don't add, it's already there, it's already there when adrenaline is in your bloodstream and the panic has already happened, you cannot stop it dead in its tracks, but you can let it peek and then come back down naturally, which is generally shorter duration than if you went into, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, snap a rubber band, call my friend, blah, blah, blah, do all this stuff, you're prolonging it and prolonging it that way. So I'm never teaching you how to use these skills to stop panic attacks, to prevent them or otherwise like turn them off at all. I'm teaching you how to navigate through them so that you can learn that you do not have to always be afraid of the next one or the next wave of anxiety or the next pang of health concerns or any of those things, right? So I wrote that for sure. You have to be careful, a lot of people will look at some of these skills and immediately try it once or twice and like, that doesn't work for me, that doesn't work, nope, that just doesn't work. And I understand, I can be respectful of that if you feel like they don't work for you and this isn't the way I get that, you were entitled to make that choice, but many people will have that reaction. It didn't work, I was still really afraid, I tried it, I did my breathing, I've been at it for three days, I did my breathing and I'm still afraid. Yeah, that's okay, that's what's gonna happen. It's not meant to stop you from being afraid. All right, so that is lesson 3.7 in the anxious truth. Again, you can find this book on my website at theanxustreat.com. So let's go through some of the questions. This is good, I'm digging this. And I have a big red dog literally sleeping like four feet from me, he is not making a peep, I thought for sure he was gonna want to chime in here. So I'm gonna go through some of the comments here and I will try to answer as many questions as I can, we got some extra time, which is nice, we'll go for about a half hour today, I suppose. Look at all these different places you guys are from today, I'm digging it. I am digging it. I don't see anybody commenting from Twitch, by the way. I'm very hurt, clearly I'm too old for Twitch. I'm never gonna have an audience on Twitch, but I'm all right with that. Let's see here. Okay, let's put Sam's thing up here, Sam's always good for a comment or two, so let's pop that up. I recently got off some meds that I won't be mentioned, however, I'm glad I practiced my recovery skills, it's been a huge help in managing the anxiety, trying to come back. Not today, Satan. Very good, a little Saturday Night Live Church Lady reference there. I will tell you that when I went through my anti-depressant withdrawal, and by the way, I've done three podcasts on my medication experience and why I don't talk about it a lot. So if you go to my website, TheAnxiousStreet.com, and search for anti-depressant, you will see the three episode series that I did on that. And I wrote all about it in my first book, An Anxiety Story, which is also on my website. And you can get for free and listen to free. So when I was going through that, some of these skills, which I had really yet to fully buy into, to be honest with you, I had to start buying into them. And they did help me. They helped me navigate through some of that stuff, because when you're going through those that med withdrawal, the tape, or whatever, some stuff happens that you just can't help it, like only time fixes it. And some of those skills, I started to learn and adopt and use, and they really helped me. They really helped me. They didn't stop it from happening. I wish I could tell you they did. I still felt like shit, but they did help me navigate through some really rough days during that. So let's see here. Breath holding. Yes, I see. All right, here we go. Let's put this up here. Somebody from the Facebook group. Again, I'm sorry, I can't see your name. Many therapists and doctors say that belly breathing changes chemistry to release com chemicals. Okay, I won't argue with that. There's certainly some evidence for that a little bit. Functional MRI, by the way, is really cool stuff. Like a lot of really good studies happened because we have functional MRIs right now. And that's true, but I hate when we talk about that, like breathing to release the com chemicals. Like, what's the best way for me to describe this? There are people watching right now. So there's 82 people right now, some of which are taking medication of some kind, who are still having a problem, right? So the com chemicals in your brain are great. You know, there are, those are real things. We do have comic chemicals. That's true. Like nature was smart enough to give us those and we benefit from them. But at the height of your, of the fear and the panic and those anxious thoughts and sensations, the com chemicals in your brain are like bullets off a Superman. They just are. And somebody's got to say that. And I guess that somebody is going to be me. So when we talk about like, Oh, if you breathe properly, it releases the com chemicals, it gives you the wrong impression that somehow you could turn on the com switch and ha, like everything's cool. No, it doesn't work that way. I have yet to meet a human being that has turned on the com switch in the middle of like rolling panic attack that goes up and down and up and down for hours and hours and hours. It doesn't happen. Like, so we have to be really careful about that. Oh, the com chemicals. This is how I release my com chemicals, because there are people who are literally adding chemicals. And I used to be one of them. I was on an anti-depressant. There are people taking benzos and anti-depressants, they're adding extra chemicals and still having panic attacks and still struggling every day. So that whole idea of like the com chemicals, turn on the com in your brain, it's not it's not wrong, but it's not terribly practical for most of the community that that we're addressing here in this room today. So that needed to be said. Meg, you're very welcome. I'm glad that I'm able to help you. Let's see here. Here we go. Bo's mom. How you doing, Bo's mom? Good to see you here. I will suddenly take a deep breath and say, oh, no, I'm not breathing. And there I go. Often with the breathing and the reason why I'm so big on the breathing practice, again, not because it's special or cure, but a lot of people get into this habit, especially if you have breath focused anxiety, that could be a thing. Now, people who have breath focused anxiety, we don't necessarily recommend that you should sit and focus on your breathing because sometimes that makes it worse. I get that. But learning the basics of as soon as I have the thought, oh, it feels like I can't breathe. If you know, well, I can breathe into my belly. First of all, when you decide that you feel like you can't breathe, I would bet you a large sum of money, big handful of gold coins right now, that when the thought pops into your head, I can't breathe or I can't get a deep enough breath. The first thing you do is try to fill your lungs right up to here. Like when air hunger kicks in and you think you're suffocating, you will try to fill your lungs up to the top. But that doesn't work. Like you can't expand your lungs up to the top. And then it gets worse because you feel like, oh, I'm not getting enough. That's not enough. It's not enough. It's still, I can't fill them up. This is, I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I'm tight. If you learn to push your belly out because you've practiced it. Oh, this is what I do. I push my belly out and I breathe that way and I do a nice slow exhale. You can quickly adjust that. Like, oh, that's right. I'm thinking that I can't breathe. It's still unpleasant and you still have the sensation, but it's a really good way to counter. Oh my god, I can't breathe. And then, like you're trying to fill your lungs all the way up to here. I used to have that problem too, but now when I get that sensation, I immediately push my belly out and it's not pretty. Nobody wants to be seen that way, but you can breathe out into your belly and then nice, slow exhale. And suddenly you realize, oh, check that out. Like, yeah, my heart's racing and everything, but I am actually breathing. Like if I can exhale, like in a very slow way, I'm not panting. Look, I'm actually breathing. So that's one of the reasons why I'm so big on the breathing exercise because it can actually be a really good response to like, oh my god, I can't breathe. Oh my god, I can't breathe. The feeling that you can't breathe, the exhale longer than the inhale a little bit and the breathing into the belly. It's a really big deal. Okay, so let's see here about the muscle relaxation thing. Let's put that up on the screen real quick. About the muscle relaxation thing, is it possible to feel your body vibrate like an electric toothbrush? Sure. I will tell you that I can relate to that sensation. There were times I said something in the Facebook review the other day, somebody was a little worried that she sometimes will go to her like her rescue meds and feels like she's a failure. And I told the story about how I would get 90 Xanax in a bottle from my doctor and a year later I'd have 89 of them left because I'm just a stubborn mofo. It doesn't make me better or worse. I'm just stupid that way. And the times that I did ever take it was when it was, I was just exhausted and I couldn't fall asleep and I would feel like my whole body was vibrating on the inside. I completely and utterly get that. And there were times when I would take a little tiny crumble of Xanax. Like I'm not a little guy, I'm a big guy. I would take this little tiny crumble of the smallest possible Xanax to just get a little relief from that. But I had to learn that like, okay, it really feels like I'm vibrating right now, but I could still keep going and not base all of my decisions on the fact that it feels like I'm vibrating. And it felt like I was vibrating on the inside, which was really weird. And I have not had that sensation since I read it. It is what it is. I had to learn that like, oh, that's okay. I can feel like I'm vibrating on the inside and still wind up being okay. And it turns out I was okay. So there you go. Let's see. No, no, no, no, these are navigation skills. Let me put this up on the screen. Hello, Nell family. The Nells are here. Are these all of the skills you used every day? They are and they were and still are. I meditate every single day. Some days I miss. I'm not perfect. I'm on a pretty good streak right now. So I do 10 at least 10 minutes every day, generally speaking, silent meditation timed. Sometimes I'll use music or something if I'm really bored. I mix it up, but I meditate every day. I don't have to practice progressive muscle relaxation so much anymore because I'm really good at just relaxing when I need to. And but meditation and focus, like, yeah, I practice that all the time. And when I am practicing that, and I'll even do that in little breaks throughout the day, like yesterday was a little bit of a stressful day for me for various reasons. And there were times when I was I was able to say like, oh, I can let me just take a little just a minute here, take a minute and close my eyes and just like come back to my breath and just relax my potty and slow down. And it helped didn't stop the stress of the day, but made it certainly better easier for me to navigate here. So yes, I continue to use those school those tools every single day. My biggest fear. So I'll put this up here. My biggest fear is being alone. How do I get used to that? I get anxious, but also depressed and upset, which heightens me as well. So fear being alone is really common for people who develop panic disorder, especially when you become agoraphobic. And I don't, Jackie, I don't know your specific situation. So I can't say, of course, in a video. But most commonly, that is just another expression of the idea that you have to be saved when you get anxious. So being alone becomes really challenging because what if I panic or what if I get really anxious while I am alone? What will happen? Who will save me? Nobody will be here to talk me out of it to calm me down to soothe me to stop it and, you know, pull us up. So that's really what that is. How do we get past that? Generally speaking, I would say I got past that by just working on all of it. I did have to practice being home alone. That was true. But I also all the other practice that you're getting out, anything I did that made me better at moving through anxiety and panic helped. So it's not a special fear if you're if you are afraid to be alone because you think you need to be saved or somehow somebody has to intervene for you. If you get too panicky or too anxious, you can work on that any place that you can learn that, oh, I don't actually don't need that help. I'm okay. I'm always okay. Well, that helps. You won't be afraid to be alone anymore. Let's see here. Philip says, How do you stop relying on your safety objects like gum and water bottles? Really common question. I always had strong mints, cold water. Well, so that was mainly my thing. Those are my two big things. We're mints and cold water. Honestly, a lot of people sometimes you start that way. It's okay. Like, if you're having a hard time just getting out to do it, do your exposures at all, and you need to bring your mints and your water to start, that's totally fine. It's not a problem. But you can start to eliminate those things one thing at a time. And when you ask how do I stop using them, what you're really asking me is, but if I leave my mints and my water at home, I'll be scared. And the answer is correct, you will. So if you have to start with your mints in your water, that's totally fine. There's no crime in that. If that gets the ball rolling for you, then by all means do it. But yes, at some point, you'll have to decide, well, today, I'm going to leave the mints at home. I'll take the water. And then the next day, maybe I'll take the mints and leave the water at home. And then I'm going to one day, I'm going to just eliminate the mints all together. And another thing I'm going to eliminate that way. So you do it that way. You basically do it that way. There's nothing. Let me just, I just see somebody answer that there's nothing wrong with carrying water. I like to have water in the car. If I'm out all day and I'm driving around, I don't buy the water in the car. Yes, just know that you should be drinking because you're thirsty and you should just drink. We should all be drinking water all every day, right? That's just a healthy thing to do. That is true. Good morning, Australia. What up? So, yeah, that's, that's okay. There's nothing wrong with being hydrated. Sometimes we just have to catch ourselves when we know that we're taking the water just in case we panic. And then we want to say that we're staying hydrated. And by the way, that becomes, you know, I'm gonna stay out of that argument. I'm gonna stay out of that argument. I was going to talk about hydration for a second. Stay hydrated. You're supposed to, but just be honest with yourself. You know when you're taking the water in case you panic, you know when you're doing it. I had to be honest with myself too. And you just a little bit at a time, leave it home, leave it home, leave it home, leave it home. And then one day you decide, you'll walk out the door and discover like, oh, I forgot to take anything. And then like, oh yeah, I didn't even think about that. It'll happen. That's the way that works. So let's see here. This is a common question. Where are we? 20 minutes? Oh God, the purse full of emergency supplies. One day maybe we'll do a thing. We're like, and this is for anybody who's carrying a purse. That's always a fun game. What's in my purse is a really enlightening game. And I know people who have done that as they go further down recovery and literally like, I had this, I carried this, I carried this, I carried this, like people who will carry a purse or a bag on a carat male or female if you got something with you and that bag is loaded up with like rescue and safety devices. That's a thing. One day maybe we'll do a little game where everybody has to like take a picture of all your safety devices. We should do that. Maybe we'll do that in the next couple of days. When the anxious sensations come and I'm still moving on with my day, am I ignoring it? Okay, it's a common question. I'm going to talk more about that very soon. I might do another podcast episode on this. Am I ignoring it? You couldn't ignore it if I paid you to ignore it. And this is reality, right? So I would always say it's not ignoring. It's non-reactive acknowledgement. Try to think of it that way. You still feel it. You still feel it. It's still there. You're clearly still scared. You hear the thoughts. You feel the sensations, right? But you keep going anyway. So people always say like, is that am I ignoring it? Is that wrong? If I paid you, you couldn't ignore it. Get ahead. Try to ignore it. I dare you. Like, you can't. So intent is the thing that we care about. Like, I'm going to go about my day so that I can learn, that I can feel these things and still be okay. That's the intent that you want. The intent we don't want is I got to get away from this. So I better turn up the radio and sing along or count backwards by threes from 100 because that's what I've learned I have to do if I panic. That's not the intent that you want. So as long as your intent is like, I can move through this. I'm going to move through this. It's okay. What you're doing is okay. And it's really nuanced and it takes a while to get the swing of that and really kind of get the handle on that. But that's okay. You couldn't ignore this stuff if you wanted to. So I think people get worried about that. But I dare you. Go ahead, ignore your anxiety. Try it. You can't. We just can't do it. Let's see here. No, no, no. I'm going to scroll down, scroll down. We're about three quarters of the way to the end here. Okay. This is a good, this Colleen, this is good. And by the way, I'm sorry I'm having a migraine. I understand you're having a hard time with that today. Funny how you have health anxiety, but when I have a migraine or real health issue, I don't concentrate on it because that's a real, this is a really, really good point, right? So even somebody, and Colleen, I know how you struggle with this stuff, especially hard stuff. When we have a real problem, often we can focus on the real problem that's actually happening and take action on it and take your migraine meds or go lay down or whatever it is you have to do to treat your migraines and handle those. And since it's an actual thing that you can actually work on, you don't have to work on imaginary things. That's a big, big, big deal. And we see it often too where people in the community will say things like, oh, this weekend, my son was playing lacrosse and oh my god, he broke his arm. We had to go to the hospital and we were there for three hours. And oddly, I didn't feel anxious at all. Yeah, because you're actually focusing outside of yourself on a real problem. Or even if it's a problem in you like a migraine, you're focusing on a real, actual problem instead of all of the disasters that your brain is telling you might happen. You can't fight might happen. I cannot solve. I might have a heart attack. I can't solve. I might have a psychotic break. I can't solve. I might pass out or go crazy. But I can take action to sort of solve like a migraine or a broken arm or if I cut my finger, I can do something about that. So that's why that happens. It's amazing and it's real proof why the fear is real and the feeling is real, the danger is not because when you get distracted away from it, suddenly it goes away because you're working on something real that you got to work on. Let's see here. Yeah, this is super common. Let me put this up here. And I don't do much meds talk and we're not going up, but I always like to acknowledge and validate this. There are a ton of people in this room right now, 79 people as of right now, according to Restream. Of the 79 people, I'm going to say that at least 30% of you are taking medication of some kind, but yet you are still here in this room talking to some dude from New York that tried to how to try and make your anxiety problem better. So it's incredibly common. Like you did some a lot of people wind up taking meds, but yet they're still having this problem. The meds aren't necessarily solving the problem, right? So that's really common. If I, you know, just to validate that, it doesn't mean you're specially broken. You're just one of about a zillion people in that exact situation. And just to follow that up really quickly, because I know Amanda, you are frantic to hear some of this stuff depending on who you ask about that, you will get a different answer. So if you go to a medical doctor and a psychiatrist is a medical doctor, a very common strategy is we need to up your dose or we need to add a second medication or switch you or tape or cross taper you to another medication or we're going to add this medication to counteract the side effects of that medication. That is what they do. It does not necessarily mean that you are specially broken or will never recover. It just means that if you bring, you know, a problem to a plumber, he will try to fix it with a piece of pipe. That's all that means. I'm not picking on the doctors. Just be aware that that is very, very, very common. It's not a reflection on you. It's reflection on the practice. And that's, that's the tools that they have. It's okay, they're trying to help you. They are trying to help. So you can't interpret that as like, Oh my God, oh my God, I'll never recover because this person wants me to take a different matter up my meds. It doesn't mean that at all. But those, the decision to do that or not has got to be between you and them. It cannot be between you and me. It cannot be between you and this video room. It cannot be between you and the Facebook group. It can't be, it's got to be between you and the medical professional. I will never advise you on that, never, nor, nor will the group, nor will any of them. I'm not going to allow that. It's really important. So let's see here. Okay, this is cool. Thank you, Stacy. Stacy, by the way, let me go shout out here. Like to Stacy, I know how hard you have worked in this stuff. And you guys should give Stacy a big old high five because you I know you have come a tremendous long way from where you are. And I appreciate the hard work that you did. Breathing will always correct itself. That is 100% true. Nature was not stupid enough to let us make a mess of breathing. In the end, it will always get the job done whether we want it to or not. We do not have a choice. So you could try to hold your breath if you want. And you could try to screw it up and you could try to make a mess of your breathing, which anxiety will have you do. But in the end, nature's going to get the job done. It wasn't dumb enough to give us control of that. Nor was it dumb enough to give us control over our hearts. It was not dumb enough to give us control over our neurotransmitter levels or endocrine levels or any of those things. We think we can manage a whole lot of what goes on in here and we just cannot. We can have some influence. I'm not saying that you can. If you're just going to eat Twinkies all day long every day of your life, you're going to feel that. Not if you guys know what Twinkies are if you're not in the U.S. But in the end, our bodies are tremendous machines that are pretty good at taking care of themselves when we let them do that. So there you go. All right, almost to the end here and then we're going to kill it. Let's see. Okay, I'm going to bring this up here. This is something that comes up quite a lot. I'll answer the vertical question in a second. When do I do nothing and when do I push through with depression and anxiety? This is a really common question. I'm going to have to start to bring some more people on to collaborate with that are more well versed than I am in this. I have experienced clinical depression three times in my life so I can give you my experience and I can give you what I have been told by very smart qualified people. That is that depression is never a float through. We don't float. We don't willfully tolerate depression. There's a level of acceptance because we can't try and deny that we have it. We can't decide, well, I'll just think different. I'll just think positive to get out of it. Depression is always a doing thing. Depression is a different animal. I did an Instagram Live probably a year ago with Allegra Castins, especially she's obsessively ever after. We talked about that. We talked about depression and she talked a lot about behavioral activation, which I can vouch from my own personal experience is really important. When your depression is telling you to stay in bed or sit on the sofa because you are helpless and worthless and there's no point, that is the most important time to get up and brush your teeth and comb your hair and put on some clothing and go walk down the block even when it feels like there is no point and you can't. So depression and anxiety, the way they do come together sometimes and there are certainly overlaps. We have to be very careful. I would never advise anybody. We don't just float and accept through depression and just somehow wait for it to get better. We take action and almost anything you do is crazy. It sounds like a lot of research that says almost anything you do to help yourself, almost anything as long as you do it, turns out to be beneficial in the case of depression. It's crazy as that sounds. Any steps that you take to help yourself can prove to be beneficial, just sitting and passively trying to float through depression, not so helpful. Hopefully that helps. So let's see here. We're almost at the end. You guys are going to keep me going here. All right, we'll do a couple more minutes. Do you consider, Amy asks, say Amy, do you consider listening to music on exposure walks to be a bad thing? No. If you like music, then listen to music. In many ways, again, intent really matters. If I have to listen to them, I would say this. If you feel like there is no way I could take a walk unless I have music in my ears, well, then you're going to have to take a couple of walks silently. They could be short walks so you don't get bored out of your mind. But if you just enjoy the music on the walk, then by all means enjoy the walk. And I say this all the time, recovery is life and life is recovery. We want them to start to mesh together and we want your recovery to look like life. And if you like music and you like to listen to music, then by all means, if those are exposure walks and you enjoy music, then enjoy the music. Go for it. But if you feel like you can't walk without music, then you're going to have to practice walking silently, at least a little bit. Let's see here. I'll put this up real quick because I know that it's not this particular question. It's very common. I tried meditation, but I felt things. I've tried meditation, but I thought things. I can't do it because I found then I have those scary thoughts and I'm not telling you to power through it. You can choose not to do that. It's an individual thing and I wouldn't pick on you for choosing to not meditate. But the point of meditation is that those things will come up. So the meditation itself sometimes is an exposure and that's why I always tell people if you're new to it and you don't know how to do it and you've never tried it and you think I can't possibly do it because I can't be alone with my thoughts, it's perfectly okay to start with 30 seconds at a time. It's totally fine. Meditation will teach you that those things will come up and then you just have to continue to move through those 30 seconds, that's 60 seconds, 90 seconds, two minutes, 10 minutes as you get better at it, even when you feel those things. So meditation is about teaching you that like, oh, I can be non-reactive in that state. All right. Thank you, babe. Appreciate your help here. We're scheming to get you to talk for an hour. I could actually probably go for an hour today. I don't have anything after this, which is good. I just have work to do. Let's see. My purse used to be so heavy with emergency supplies. Yeah, we totally should do that one day. Everybody empty their bags and see what's in there. Let's see here. Scroll down a little bit more, a little bit more. Oh my God, I'm a pharmacy. I see you guys that resonated with you, that what's in your purse, what's in your bag, they clearly resonated with you guys. Let's see. Let's put this one up. 40 minutes. All right. Keep going. I have come a long way with my journey and improved so much. Good job, Don. But some days I still have the background anxiety that lurks around. Well, that improves as I go along with my recovery work. I mean, I think it will, for sure. That's part of it, but it's still there, but it's still there, but it's still there. That was a natural progression for me, and I could tell you that many people will echo that. The panic starts to go away. Those super high anxiety spikes in the panic begins to become less and fewer and further between, between attacks and heavy anxiety periods, but the background anxiety still stays. That's pretty common. I had that too. It wasn't just one day I stopped panicking and everything was great. I was always anxious because I was still anticipating, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like, I haven't panicked in five days, but clearly it's going to happen sooner or later. So that happens. Pretty common. You just got to keep going, but remember specifically for you, remember some of those habits that I know that you have been having to work on. So, Don, I'll talk to you just for a second, but for you guys watching, you'll understand this too. In Don's case, and Don, I know you shared this on the Facebook group, so I don't think this is talking at a turn like Don has been given exercises to do to work on her anxiety, like ERP type stuff. Like I'm not supposed to follow the cleaning lady around or I'm not supposed to prepare like specific things. Those things are making you anxious. So when you stop doing those things, then you will be anxious. You might not be panicking like you used to, but when you don't tidy up after the clean lady or you don't clean before the cleaning lady comes or the cleaning person comes, then that's going to make you anxious because that's wrong, right? I'm supposed to do that. If you remain silent instead of automatically correcting a thing that you hear that you think is wrong that you must correct, that will make you anxious. So a lot of times that's why the bank running anxiety is still there, but you're working on it. It's really okay. It's all good. It's all good. All right. You got to kind of scroll down to the bottom here a little bit now. I'm going to, I am getting a little ahead of a little bit of this now. Let's see. Oh God. Bethany burned her hand on her flat iron. Glamour is hard, man. Glamour is like, I can just put a hat on. Don't even shave. I got a good life. I don't have a flat iron. Let's see here. As a pleasantly plump guy, Sandy killed me. Yoga was not really on top of my list, but I found it helps with the tension. People love yoga. It's a good relaxation tool. Tai Chi, like Tai Chi is another thing that some people really love. And Tai Chi is just beautiful. Like if you ever watched somebody who does Tai Chi, I'm not arguing of Tai Chi as a martial art or not. I have no knowledge there, but as a bonafide or legit martial art, but Tai Chi is very beautiful and fluid in its motions. Some people love yoga. Some people do progressive muscle relaxation. There's a lot of cool ways to do it. If you like yoga, go for it, dude. We ain't judging. It's all good. I'm sure you look just fine when you're doing your yoga, but hopefully you're not wearing yoga pants because no dude should be wearing yoga pants. That's right. I said it. Let's see here. Let's go to the bottom. I think we're good here. I think we're good. I think we got them almost all done. Thank you so much for your books. You're very welcome. You're very welcome. You're welcome. Just do. Okay. This is good too. Just do what not. Now, this is good advice, by the way. Do what non-depressed or non-anxious you would do. That is kind of the way it works. And especially with anxiety, it's easier. And I look, it's hard with anxiety. I can't be wrong. With depression, it's really hard because of that absolutely the lack of motivation, the lack of like anxiety will try to keep you from doing what non-anxious you would do, right? But you want to do the anxious stuff out of fear. Whereas in depression, you are literally just robbed of the motivation, like nothing. What's the point? What's the point of doing that stuff? So you're right. The rules are the same. And that's why I say when you say do what non-depressed you would do. Yes, you've got to activate. You've got to activate. You can't just sit there and ruminate on the depression. It's really good. Very good. We're going to have what's in my purse anxiety version. This is like, let's make a deal. Love it. Let's see here. How can we join the group? I see Bethany just put a link to the Facebook group. Thanks, B. Appreciate it. How does one transition from being able to go into stores to grocery shopping or any store to being able to work? I'm now able to drive 50 miles and go into any building. William, that's awesome, dude. That is no joke. 50 miles and go in anywhere. That's a pretty big deal. So I would tell you that that issue is a time issue. So when you're talking about the problem that you're clearly working on, it's distance and time. But I'm going to go all Einstein on you and tell you that time and distance are really the same thing. Like technically, they really are from a physics standpoint, but you care about time. So like, okay, cool. I can go 50 miles away from home and I can go in, say to a supermarket and do some shopping. But I know that that shopping will be over in a half hour or 45 minutes, and then I can go back home. If I drive 50 miles away from home, I know that on mile 51, I turn around and can go back toward home. Whereas if you go to work, you don't have that. You don't have that luxury, right? It's going to be the old like, well, now I have to stay for my entire five-hour shift or eight-hour shift or whatever it is, right? So that's what that is. So I would suggest if you can, one way to work on it, if you want to work on it with exposures, would be to practice staying out for longer and longer and longer times. You'll get bored doing that because you're artificially creating a reason to be out of the house for eight hours. So it's not always terribly practical. But that would be one way to try that if you want, like just try to get you out there, get out there for, you know, five, six, seven hours in a day and see what happens. Let's see what happens. You know, it's going to be fine even if you panic, you're going to be fine. But sometimes you get to the point where it's just like, hey, you know what? I got all the tools. I've been making my progress. My next step will be to start going back to work. Or some people will say, maybe you can go back part-time, have limited shifts, that sort of stuff. But you're working on time. Time is your, you think time is the enemy. Like as long as I know that there's an exit where I can start getting back home, I'm good. But really, that's not true. You're good no matter what you do. So hopefully that helps me. All right, peeps. So I think we're good to go. Let's see. Last question. I'm sorry to see that I'm having a goryphobia. What is the first thing that will help to stop to just accept the heart racing? So what I'm going to probably, I don't know if you are listening to the podcast or if you have this book, The Anxious Truth, but the first thing you do is really learn the principles here. So there's not a first thing to help accept. There's really no like, hey, here's a step that you can take to accept. Acceptance is a, it's not necessarily a thing as it is a decision that you make. Like acceptance says, what I would tell you is it means, okay, I have to accept that my heart is racing. This is a normal and natural fear reaction. It's part of my anxiety and panic. When I react to it by hiding and retreating and staying in and trying to save myself, I develop a goryphobia because then my avoidance runs rampant. I did a podcast on this about what a goryphobia is and how it develops out of panic and panic disorder. But your acceptance really, your first step is to say, okay, then my job now is to going to be to stop doing the things that I am currently doing to respond to that heart racing. So right now, if you are, some people learn to like, oh, I drink a big glass of water, right? I drink a big glass of water to get, oh, you're right, I'll ask the question one more time. So I don't have to scroll up if you could and I'll chill and I'll wait for you to do that. I'll try and find it. But some people, whatever you're doing to do the, to address your racing heart, you have to stop doing those things one by one bit by bit. That would be, that's the path you want to go on. So that's pretty much what I'm talking about. Let's see here. I will scroll, I'll try and, Olivia, I'm going to try and find your question. Let's see. I know you asked one and you're right. I said I was going to answer it and I promised, well, let me find it. Ah, here we go. Do you still get vertigo? I found it so good. Do I still get vertigo? Yes, I can get vertigo a couple times a year. Like legit real room spinning cannot stand up, eye shaking, nystagmus vertigo. I get that. And it sucks. It is 100% no fun. It sucks. And yeah, I get it. I get it a couple times a year. I think the last time I had real bout of vertigo was, I don't know, maybe four or five months ago. I'm not even remember when it was. It is 100% no fun. It is legit debilitating because in, so we'll talk about this for just a second before I end it in real vertigo. Like a lot of people in the room here will say that one of your anxiety symptoms is that you get dizzy. Yeah, no, you don't. Like when you have vertigo and the room is legitimately tilting and spinning on you, because your ears and your eyes and your core muscles are not on the same page, your eyes and your core are saying you're stationary, but your ears are saying, oh, we're on the move. And your brain gets super confused and does not know how to interpret that. And so the room is spinning and tilting and your eyes are shaking. Your eyes literally are shaking. That's called nystagmus. And that is one way that vertigo is diagnosed. So you can't, you can't focus. Now I'm trying to focus because it feels like the room is tilting and spinning. So I'm trying to get a focus point, but I can't because if I look in a mirror, I could see that my eyes are literally involuntarily shaking. That is dizzy. So inside dizzy, not spinning. Some people might argue living in my town, you don't have vertigo, but generally speaking, you are legitimately impaired spatially and in terms of being able to stand up and stand upright and walk when you have vertigo. Feeling like you are dizzy is not the same as that. Really? Sorry. And I watch things. I'm talking to it. I don't know why. So yes, I get that every few months. I might get it two or three times a year. I have medication for it. I never take it because again, I'm stubborn. That doesn't make me better or worse than anybody else. It makes me stupid in many instances, but I do get it. It's okay. It sucks, but I don't get afraid of it now. It's debilitating, but I'm not afraid of it. That's it, guys. 50 minutes, you almost got me. One day we'll do an hour, but 50 minutes, 80 of you hung around. Like, thank you so much. Hopefully, this has been technically better than the last few. I'm kind of digging the new scenery. Maybe I'll do more of this from this other room because I'm tired of sitting in that office all the time. So that's it. All right, so we will be back again next week. Just a reminder, we are talking about lessons out of this book. If you do not have the book, you can find it on my website. That's the AnchorTruth.com. We'll be back again next week. What is next week's thing? Because we still have, we're about halfway through the book at this point. Lesson 3.8 next week, sneak preview will be, I want to say it might be about practicing skills. I can't be sure. Lesson 3.8 is learning new skills. You would think that I would know. I wrote this, but I don't even know. Okay, here we go. Lesson 3.8 next Monday, same time will be about persistence and patience. Two very big ingredients in the recovery process. So come back again, same time next week. This will stay on my YouTube, which you subscribe to if you like to watch on YouTube. It will stay in the Facebook group. It will stay on my Facebook page. It's on my Twitter, anybody who's watching on Twitter. And if there's one person, one lone person watching on Twitch, hello, Twitch, like it'll stay there too, I guess. All right guys, I'm out. I'll see you next week. Thanks for coming by and hanging out and see you later.