 Hey there, I'm Drew and you are listening to or watching the anxious truth. This is the podcast where we talk about all things anxiety, anxiety disorders and anxiety recovery. So if you're struggling with things like panic attacks or agoraphobia or OCD or health anxiety, then this is the place for you. And I'm happy that you're here today on the podcast. We're going to answer a question and it's a good question. That is, do you have to be a positive person in order to get better in order to recover? We really should talk about that. So let's do that now. Hello, everybody, welcome back to the anxious truth. This is podcast episode number two, 43. We are recording in January of 2023, if you care. I am Drew Linsalata, creator and host of the anxious truth. If you are new to this podcast and just stumbled into the podcast of the YouTube channel today, welcome. I'm glad you found us. If you are a returning listener or viewer, welcome back. Always glad that you're here. So today we're going to answer the question, do I have to be a positive person to get better to recover? Do I have to think positively? Do I have to be optimistic? Do I have to have positive vibes? And should I vibrate positive energy into the universe? Well, it's a really good question. But before we get to answering it, I just want to go over a few things. I want to remind you that the anxious truth is more than just this podcast episode. If you go to my website at the anxious truth.com, you're going to find all kinds of goodies that I would urge you to take advantage of. You will find 242 other free podcast episodes that came before this one. So go check those out. You will find links to all of my free social media content. So check that out. You will find a link to the webinar that I do. It's up on the screen if you're watching on YouTube with my friend, Joanne Hartus, she is an anxiety and OCD specialist in Cleveland. And we do a webinar every month about the art, the science, the practice of learning how to tolerate distress, which can be a big part of the recovery puzzle. And you will also find links to the three books that I have written on anxiety and anxiety recovery. They are being read by tens of thousands of people around the world. I'm very proud of that because people are getting helped by these books. So go check them out. They are on my website at the anxious truth.com. Also on the website, if you're digging this work and you want to find ways to support it, are all the ways to do that. You can go to the anxious truth.com slash support. All the ways to support the work financially are there. That is never required, but always appreciated. And no matter how you support the work that I do, whether it's just watching this video, liking the video, listening to the podcast, writing a review, thank you very much. I appreciate it. You guys are so kind, so generous with your support and so generous with your enthusiasm, and that helps keep this going. So thank you very much. So today's topic. Do you have to be a positive person to recover, to get better if you're dealing with an anxiety disorder or have anxiety problems? Well, the short answer is probably can't hurt, but let's really dig into that a little bit more. The question was actually asked in my Instagram subscriber group. And if you're not, if you're not following me on Instagram, should totally do that. And if you want some extra content, a little bit more access to me, you can subscribe. That's in my Instagram bio. Go check that out. But in my Instagram subscriber group, somebody asked me a pretty fair question. They said, Hey, Drew, do you consider yourself a generally positive person? Did that give you a leg up in recovery? And you know what? I had to really think about that. And I think the honest answer is I don't think I am a terribly positive person, but I also don't think I'm a terribly negative person either. So I don't tend to camp in one place or the other. I'm not like super optimistic. I'm not super bubbly. I'm not always like vibrating positive energy into the universe, whatever that happens to be. I'm probably pretty neutral. So some days I feel bubbly. Some days I feel happy. Some days I'm excited and optimistic and raring to go. And some days are just crappy days and I'm in a bad mood and everything sucks. So I kind of think that's just life. Some days are great. Some days are not so great. Some days are both great and bad depending on the hour or even the minute, right? But what I did say was that I think the most important aspect of my own personality or my own makeup that did help me the most in my recovery is that I have always had a very high sense of self efficacy. So what is self efficacy, which is a thing I've been blessed with my whole life, I believe. Self efficacy is basically in a nutshell your belief in your ability to be capable. Self efficacy is a belief that you are capable. You can handle things. You can do things. You can meet challenges. It's a term that was coined by Al Bandura, who was actually Canadian, but did most of his work in the U.S. Probably one of the most influential and revered psychologists of the 20th century in most polls that are taken. An Al Bandura term that coined the phrase self efficacy, which is your belief in yourself. How capable do you feel? Now in this podcast, in the Community Surrounding podcast, we might want to automatically put that in touch with recovery, but he wasn't talking about anxiety recovery. He wasn't necessarily even talking about mental health issues. Self efficacy is a thing that kind of pervades your whole life. How capable do you feel in life in general? Now it's normal for us to feel more capable in some areas and less capable in others because we can't be masters of the universe. We can't be great at everything. So it's normal for your sense of effectiveness to be different in certain parts of your life. Some things you feel better at, some things more challenging. Totally normal like being positive some days and negative others. Totally normal. See where this is going. But in the end, your overall sense of self efficacy tells you that, Hey, in some areas, I'm really good. Some areas, I'm not so good, but I can handle not being so good. I could get through or I can understand where maybe I have to delegate something to somebody else or rely on somebody else and I'm okay. I feel capable of relying on somebody else. That's not a threat to me in certain instances. So it really speaks to your general view of yourself and how capable you are of just sort of making your way through the universe, if you will. And I do believe that it is probably more productive to look at your sense of self efficacy more than whether you are being a positive person or a negative person. Right. So the other side of the question, do I have to be a positive person to recover would be if I'm a negative person. Is that going to hurt me? Well, just like being positive, probably can't hurt you in any way. And we can talk about toxic positivity in a minute, but being negative probably isn't going to destroy your recovery, but it's probably not the ideal place to be. However, if you are generally operating from a negative view of the world and a negative view of yourself, just remember, and this is where the toxic positivity or the unrealistic positivity comes into the discussion. Even if you tend toward the negative, it does not mean that you are doomed at all. Because if we focus on self efficacy and not being positive or negative, then everybody does better that way. So just remember that if you are more of a negative person and you have a negative view of yourself, it's not fair to just think that you can just decide to change that. So choose happiness, choose positivity, vibrate positively. If your life experiences have got you in a situation where you generally have a negative view of the world, a negative view of people, a negative view of yourself, that is a thing that can certainly change over time through some work and some of which is really focused on that self-efficacy that we're going to talk about now, but you can't just decide to be positive. And if you have decided that you're just going to be a positive person all the time and you're going to only have positive vibes, that's also kind of an unfair ask. Because if you decide that you can only live in this half of the human spectrum, I can only live on the positive side. Well, that's not fair because even negative experiences and negative emotions teach us things. So to bring it back to do I have to be positive or will it hurt me to be negative? The answer is let's not worry so much about that and let's worry about learning how to feel more capable. Now that is very important in the recovery process for sure. There's no doubt about that because part of the recovery process, somebody who comes into recovery from an anxiety disorder with an already high sense of self-efficacy has a leg up. I'm not going to tell you that that's not true. I definitely had a leg up because of that part of my personality. But somebody who comes into the recovery process with a moderate to low sense of self-efficacy can actually use the process to teach themselves that they are more capable than they have believed themselves to be. See how that works? It's amazing. So when we talk about and I this is a thing that I've talked about written about and I'm probably going to write an entire book about this when I take some of the lessons that we learn in recovery and we talk about how we can apply them throughout an entire lifespan even beyond recovery. An elevated sense of self-efficacy that comes out of this recovery journey is one of those things. So I started already with a pretty high sense of self-efficacy. It only got stronger in my recovery. I've known plenty of people who came into this feeling that they were completely incapable and came at the other side feeling very differently about themselves and knowing that they are full of inner strength and power and influence and ability and choice and that they can handle life that they thought they weren't able to handle. So in the end, I would probably say that if you focus more on being open to experiences, even the difficult ones like recovery puts in front of us, even the potentially negative ones like life is going to have and you're open to have those experiences work on getting through them and take lessons out of them. Then you begin to naturally elevate your sense of self-efficacy. You begin to just naturally see yourself as more capable. If you are willing to learn those lessons and have the experiences that you need to learn those lessons. And my belief is that if your sense of self-efficacy tends to rise and improve and get a little bit more consistent and you see yourself as capable not because that means that your life will always be awesome and positive. That's not what self-efficacy is, but knowing that even on a day when it's not so great, even when I am struggling, even when I am struggling for an extended period of time, even when life throws stuff at me that I don't want it to throw at me, but I can't control, I can be okay. I might not like it at the moment, but I know that I am capable of getting through this and that everything in a way is transitory. So I can get through this challenge and get back to more neutral times, more positive times, and I'll probably have negative ones again, but I'm capable of handling all of those things. So concentrate more on how you view yourself. You can't just decide to feel more capable, but you can work on feeling more capable by practicing being more capable and that often involves to bring it sort of back to the positive or negative outlook thing. A positive person might be a little bit more willing to say, okay, this is going to be a learning experience. I'll take it where somebody who has a little bit more of a negative outlook on on the world or themselves might struggle with that. Are you crazy? I have to do hard things in order to get better. So you have to do you do have to be careful about the negativity loop where well, there's a way out of the negative mindset, but it involves doing hard things, except the negative mindset might tell you that you shouldn't do hard things. So the positive person may have a leg up in going toward the experiences that raise self raise self efficacy, but even the negative person, if they are aware of that negativity loop can say, okay, I don't believe that I should do this. I don't think it's going to work. I don't think I have a snowball chance of hell of getting this done and making it happen for me. But you know what? I've tried everything else. It isn't really working. So what do I have to lose? I'll try it anyway. So if you're a more negative person, maybe you don't have that sort of positive bent. You may have to work on that to break that negativity cycle a little bit. But again, you're breaking the negativity cycle and using your positive bent. If you're that person to really work more on the self efficacy situation, which is going to be more useful in your recovery, more applicable outside of recovery and probably tends to skew your outlook a little bit more toward the positive over time naturally. Anyway, but I cannot say enough that raising your sense of self efficacy is not a magic wand that fixes your anxiety or makes it go to go away. It just helps you feel more capable. It helps you have the experiences that recovery demands we have difficult things like exposures and ERP work and going towards scary things and learning to tolerate the stress and move through it instead of try to fix everything. A positive higher sense of self efficacy is more important in those situations than just being a positive person because just thinking positively doesn't mean that you feel capable. It probably feel that means that you feel more capable, but I would break those two things apart. There's a lot of super positive bubbly, happy, vibrating people out there that still think that they are completely incapable. Sometimes that manifests as I have to be super bubbly and positive and vibrate positive energy. I have to make sure that there's never anything negative because they have decided that negativity as no bueno. They can't handle it. So you can be a very positive person at first surface value, but also have a low sense of self efficacy. And I know that I am weaving in and out of these issues, but they are somewhat tied together and it's an interesting conversation. It's not full of specific tips and tricks and techniques, but I do think it's something that's worth thinking about. So to sort of wrap it up, do you have to be a positive person in order to get better? The answer is no, you don't necessarily have to be a positive person. All you just have to be a person as that. So are you positive? Are you negative? Do you have a high sense of self efficacy? Do you have a low sense of self efficacy? Can you think of maybe why those things are part of your personality? Because this is where past experiences matter. This is where maybe we learn things that teach us to be positive or teach us to be negative or teach us that we're super capable or teach us that we're not. So we factor those things in, but then we can adjust accordingly and to wrap it all up in my words that I evidently use all the time that I didn't know I was using and there you go. So you don't have to be a positive person to recover. You probably have to feel like you are a capable person to recover and it will definitely give you a leg up. If you're willing to work on that sense of capability or self efficacy. So there you go. That is episode 243 of the Anxious Truth in the books. You know it's over because the music that is afterglow by my friend, Ben Drake, who wrote that song inspired at least in part by this podcast several years ago. You hear it at the end of most of these podcast episodes, most of the beginning of every one of these podcast episodes, but you can find more about Ben Drake and that music at ben drake music dot com on his website. And if you are listening to this podcast on Apple podcast or Spotify or some platform that lets you rate or review the podcast, please leave a five star rating or take a second and write a quick review because it helps other people find the podcast. More people get help and that's why I do this thing anyway. If you're watching on YouTube, be sure to like this video subscribe to my YouTube channel, hit the notification bell so you know when I upload, which is generally at least every Wednesday. We do live streams on Monday and there's some random stuff beyond that too. And that's it. I hope you have found this helpful. I will be back again next week with another podcast episode. I do not know what we're going to be talking about, but I will be here and I will leave you as always with words that I completely ripped off from the Mandalorian, which I know is all news. But remember, this is the way.