 This week on The Anxious Truth, we're going to look at the concept of active recovery because there's no immune response that fixes an anxiety disorder while you just wait and hope to get better. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to The Anxious Truth. This is podcast episode number 265, recorded in July of 2023, in case you're listening from the future. I am Drew Linselotta, creator and host of The Anxious Truth. This is the podcast that covers all things anxiety, anxiety disorders and anxiety recovery. If this is your first time here and you just stumbled upon the podcast or the YouTube channel, I hope you find the content helpful or useful in some way. And of course, if you're a returning listener, welcome back. I'm always glad you're here. This week, we're going to do something a little bit different. We're going to revisit an episode of the podcast from way back in April of 2015. It was different back then. It had a different name. Back then, the podcast was called That Anxiety Guy, which is a name that I always really hated. So we're going to look at a foundational concept in recovery, and that is that recovery from an anxiety disorder is an active process. You can't just sit passively and wait and rest and hope that something will change. It requires action on your part. There's behavioral change as part of the recovery process. So this week, we're going to take a look at clips from the original episode 11 of the podcast from way back in 2015. I'm going to play a couple of the highlights and I'm going to pop back in here in 2023 to expand upon some things, clarify some things, and to add some details that maybe I missed back then. Before we get into that, just a quick reminder that The Anxious Truth is more than just this podcast episode or this YouTube video. There's 264 other podcast episodes and many more YouTube videos. There's a ton of free social media content. There are workshops and courses about anxiety and anxiety recovery. And there are three books that I've published up to this point, An Anxiety and Anxiety Recovery. All of those things can be found on my website at TheAnxiousTruth.com. Go check it out and avail yourself of all the resources if you can. So let's get into this. We're going to look at the idea of recovery as an active process because there's no immune response to an anxiety disorder. You've got to do things. Let's hear what 2015 Drew had to say about this topic and I'll pop in from time to time to expand and clarify. Let's do it. And this means that recovery from things like anxiety, panic, and agoraphobia is an active process. It requires action and activity on your part. Nothing will improve if you just sit and wait passively for something to happen. You know, when I changed the name of the podcast a few years ago to The Anxious Truth, one of the reasons why I picked that suggestion is because the podcast was kind of known for a very straightforward approach. I kind of don't mince my words. I don't now, but I was even more aggressive about it back then as you can hear just in that short little clip. Some of the things that I hear on the internet when people review those early episodes of the podcast are that they're really helpful, but warning, he's very, very direct. And you can hear that in this little clip. And it remains true today. I might say it a little bit more gently today and maybe with a little bit more compassion, but you will not get better if you just sit and hope to get better. Let's move on. Now, when we get sick, let's say you get a cold or a sore throat, we all get sick from time to time. We generally follow a procedure. We retreat, we rest, and we recover. You have a fever, your nose is running, you're coughing, you're obviously sick, you retreat, you take time off from work, you take time off from school, we tend to cancel things like social engagements, we skip family functions, we cancel our business meetings and that sort of thing. And everybody understands why because we're sick. And the next thing we do is we rest. We put on our comfy clothes, we get a box of tissues and some orange juice and some aspirin and we lay in bed and watch bad TV shows or we sit on the sofa and we rest. That's part of the process. In a couple of days, we begin to feel better. And after another day or two, we feel right back to normal and we get back to the business of living. 2023 drew back again with a comment. The reason why retreat, rest, recover works so well when we get physically ill, like maybe with a stomach bug or the flu or something like that is because we have a thing that happens automatically inside us without us trying and it's called an immune response. Our immune system takes care of us. We retreat and we rest so that our immune system could do its work. It wipes out the thing that's making us sick. And lo and behold, we get better. But here's the rub. There is no immune response to an anxiety disorder. I talked about it back then. So let's listen. There's no such mechanism when it comes to anxiety disorders. In fact, if you're going to retreat and rest, that generally means avoiding and that can actually make it harder to recover by making the disorder even worse. Okay, I need to clarify something. Back in 2015, as you can see, I said that if you try to use the retreat and rest method to deal with your anxiety disorder, you can accidentally make things worse. I probably shouldn't have used the word worse because while avoidance and escape behaviors and safety behaviors certainly don't make things better, they don't actually increase the intensity of your anxiety. They don't actually make the disorder worse. They just more deeply ingrain those avoidant and escape based habits. So all you're really doing if you do it that way is you're continuing to reinforce your brain's mistaken belief that you have to run and avoid and never face your anxiety. So I probably shouldn't have used the word worse. Doesn't make it worse. It probably just adds an obstacle to the recovery process because old habits die hard. They become normalized. So if you do try to just sort of retreat and rest and just cross your fingers and hope that you'll recover, that avoidance becomes normalized in your life and it becomes a little bit more difficult for you to break that habit. So I just wanted to pop in and say that because that's probably what I should have said back then. Too many people actually spend months or even years trapped in a life that they hate while they just wait for things to get better. In this next segment, I'm talking about what happens when somebody shows up to like a Facebook group or an internet support forum for anxiety disorders, when they've basically just been sitting with their fingers crossed hoping to get better and they're sort of losing hope and they want to know, can I actually get better? The standard response because people try to be nice to each other is to say, yes, you'll get better. Yes, it can get better. But there's a catch there because telling somebody, yes, you can get better is only half the story. So let's listen. In reality, telling somebody that it's going to get better without telling them what they have to do to make it better is actually doing them a bit of a disservice. So when we say things like, it's okay, it will get better without qualifying that advice and saying what needs to be done in order for that to happen because it will get better. There's no doubt that it can get better. It absolutely can get better, but it doesn't get better just because we say it will. This is another sort of brutally straightforward statement that I made eight years ago, but I'm going to stand behind it today because it is vitally important that a message like this not get cut off halfway. The message of hope is amazing and we need to give that to each other. That's one of the real benefits of community support based on the internet and on social media platforms, but we can't do it if we only going to tell half the story. And I think it becomes really difficult because especially in the eight years, since this podcast episode was recorded, when I have much more experience and have talked to thousands more people and have seen more of the mechanics of how community and internet based support works, sometimes we want to give the hope, but we also want to give gentle comfort and we want to give the gentle story that's a little bit easier to hear that might garner a few more clicks or eyeballs. But my assertion then and my assertion now is that you can't tell somebody that they're going to be okay and also tell them that they don't have to do anything or it's okay to just sit there and wait to be okay. And sadly, I still think a pretty big segment of the online mental health community is kind of doing that. All right, let's listen to more. You have to believe that you are absolutely not a helpless victim of some incurable mental illness. You're not, you are not a helpless victim. So you're going to have to agree with me on that right now to get started. Okay, here what I'm doing is I'm starting to build a foundation that we can stand on, from which we can take that action. This is where we can begin to engage with the active process of recovery. However, I need to correct myself. So hey, 2015 drew, why did you tell people that they have to believe something? Because I know now for sure, and I probably knew it back then, you're not going to believe a thing just because I tell you to believe a thing. So when you hear me say, you're going to have to believe that you're not a helpless victim. Boy, was I off base on that one. What I would tell you today is you're going to have to at least consider the possibility that you are not a helpless victim. And even if you still see yourself that way, and even if you still believe that you are powerless in the face of anxiety, you're going to have to take action anyway. That is a more refined way to put that that is the way I would tell you today. And that's why I'm here sort of revising this episode and changing my words. All right, let's move on. Everything you need to improve your situation is inside you right this very minute. It's in there. And there are steps you can take and steps you need to take to get better. And you could do it. And those steps should be taken right now. Right. So you're not a helpless victim. You have all the tools you need baked into you from the factory. And there are things you could do starting right now this very minute listening to this podcast that will help you begin to get better. And if I can impress upon you one thing in this episode, it will be this stop waiting. Ouch. Okay, let's let's clarify this one too. And in listening to that, boy, that's what about 35 seconds of audio that I wish I could erase from the universe and redo. I'm not going to erase it, but I'm going to kind of modify it here a little bit. Hopefully people will hear this. What I'm saying here is accurate. That is true. I'm trying to impress upon you the fact that you do have everything you need inside of you to get this job done. I believe that in my heart or I would not be doing this eight years later and writing books and changing my entire life to become a licensed therapist and that sort of thing. So that assertion I will stand by. However, what I probably should have said and I will tell you now is it's not that you need to recover today because I think this could be misinterpreted as, oh boy, he's really over simplifying that. You know, it sounds very cliche. You are all you need. You are the solution. Yeah, that's an empowering statement that I would still make today. But I would modify it by saying you have what you need to start the process today to take your first small step to understand that this is going to be a long road that's built on a lot of tiny little steps taken one after the other. It's not like you can just decide to stand up and say I am no longer a victim and get better. So I really didn't mean to oversimplify that back then. And my clarification now eight years later in 2023 is that you you're going to have to at least consider the possibility that you're not a powerless victim. You're going to have to at least consider the possibility that this has to be an active process where you do difficult things and you have all the power and everything that you need inside of you to begin to start to take those first baby steps because it's perfectly okay to start with baby steps. Everybody does. I should have acknowledged that. All right, let's move on. Waiting for time to fix you is not going to work. Like I said, there's no automatic background process going on that will somehow get you your life back if you just wait long enough. That statement is as true in 2023 as it was when I said it in 2015. So I will stand by that pretty much as I said it. Here's the deal though. I wish I didn't have to say that. I really do. But if I didn't say that, I would be missing half of the story. I would be maybe offering some soothing or maybe some comfort or maybe some stroking of fear and sort of cliche based. Oh, it's going to be okay. But I wouldn't be giving you accurate information. I wouldn't be giving you complete information and I wouldn't be giving you anything that's actionable that you could use. So as much as I hate having to say these things, I didn't like saying it back down. I don't like saying it now. It's really important for me to put it out there. And I know it sounds a little brutal and it sounded even more brutal than but if you've been in a situation where you have been pinned down by your anxiety, by an anxiety disorder for any extended period of time and you aren't really sure what to do about it and you've just been sitting and hoping that something will get better as you scroll through social media or read a book or learn about anxiety without doing something to make it better. Know that you're not doing it wrong. You're not committing a crime. Nobody would blame you. I do not blame you for doing it that way because I would think that most people will at least try it that way in the beginning. I get that. But at some point you'll have to say, well, this doesn't mean that I'm never going to get better. It just means that I haven't been taking the actions that I need to take. And those actions are difficult and they're scary and they're not what I want to do. But maybe I am capable of doing them. Maybe I could start to try it a little bit at a time. Maybe I could take those first baby steps. Maybe I can at least consider that this is an active process and I can't just sit and hope to get better. So I'm going to sort of wrap this recap up here. There's more in episode 11. You can go back and listen to that. This is episode 11 of the podcast from, you know, back in 2015. You can listen to the whole thing if you haven't heard it. But I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to expand on this next week on the anxious truth. So next Wednesday, when I release the next episode, I'm going to talk about the idea that what you have to engage in that active process, you have to do the things, right? You can't just be passive. You have to be active in your recovery, especially on the days when you least want to be active. Because that is the next thing that I talked about in episode 11. I sort of touched on it. But next week on this podcast, I will go into greater detail as to why the most valuable recovery action and the most valuable exposures, the most valuable challenges that you can meet come on the days when you feel the worst and you feel least capable and least motivated to take that action and meet those challenges. So this has been a little experiment. I'm curious to hear what you guys have to say about this. If you're listening on YouTube, by all means, leave a comment. Let me know what you think about this little revisiting of an old podcast episode, maybe massaging it, maybe updating it with additional knowledge, additional experience, additional clarification, additional instruction. I kind of like this idea. I might do more of that if you guys think it's helpful. And I guess that's about it. That's episode 265 slash episode 11 in the books. And yeah, thanks for coming by. I'm going to ask a favor if you're on the YouTube channel listening that way, then maybe subscribe to the channel, like the video, leave a comment or a question. Definitely tell me if you like this format. And if you're listening on Apple podcasts or Spotify or some platform that lets you rate or review a podcast, leave a five star rating if you like the podcast and maybe take a second to write a quick review because it helps other people find it, then more people get help. And that's why I started doing this way back in 2014. And I guess that's it. I will be back next week. We do actually know what we're going to talk about next week. And then we're going to talk about why it's most important to act in the days when you really don't want to. And remember, no matter what you're doing today in the recovery process, if the best you could do is to take a tiny little step toward recovery, do that. Do the best you can be nice to yourself while you do it. And remember, every time you take one of those little steps, try and take a lesson from it, see what you can learn from it, and they all count. They will all add up. Thanks for hanging out. Thanks for indulging my little experiment and I'll see you guys next week.