 Today on The Anxious Truth, we're going to talk about how anxiety makes us live a fear-driven life. But the process of recovery is all about moving from that fear-driven life towards the thing that we truly value. So let's get going. Hello everybody, welcome back to The Anxious Truth. This is podcast number 186, entitled Moving Toward a Value-Driven Life. If you're new here, The Anxious Truth is a podcast that discusses all things anxiety and anxiety recovery, panic, panic attacks, panic disorder, agoraphobia, OCD, social anxiety, health anxiety. If it's anxiety, we have it here so you're in the right place. Welcome. If you're a returning listener, welcome back. I'm glad to have you here. Today we're going to talk about the idea of moving away from fear. Anxiety makes us live a fear-driven life and toward a value-driven life, which is where we begin to make decisions and choices based on what we really think is important at a core level, the things that matter to us in life. We're going to talk about that today. Before we do, I just want to remind you that The Anxious Truth podcast is actually sponsored by me because this is more than just a podcast. There are three books on anxiety and anxiety recovery. There's a free recovery course. There's a ton of free information on social media. There's a whole community around this podcast. So if you'd like to check it out, go find everything at TheAnxiousTruth.com, especially those three books which have helped thousands of people and I think they will help you too. So check them out and if you're already reading the books and you dig them and you have not written me a review on Amazon, well, maybe go ahead and do that because it helps me out. And for the first time, I'm going to mention on this podcast, which is now taking up a bigger and bigger part of my life, which means I have less time to do other things. If you would like to support this podcast and the work that I do, consider making a small monthly donation, which you can do by going to TheAnxiousTruth.com. Certainly not required, but always appreciated. And for those of you who have stumbled upon that and have already done it, thank you very much. I don't know how you found it, but I appreciate you. Okay, let's get into today's topic. We're going to talk about moving from a fear-driven life, which is what anxiety will make us do toward a value-driven life. So let's talk for a second about what a value-driven life really even is. You may have heard this talked about in different self-help and mental health circles. Sometimes it's talked about in spiritual circles. The concept of living a value-driven life is all about making your choices. Sometimes those are big choices and decisions at a very large scale. Sometimes they're minute-by-minute choices. You're making your choices and your decisions based on the things that are important to you. What matters to you as a person? What matters to you ethically? What matters to you morally? What matters to you spiritually? What matters in your relationships or your career or your education or just who you are, your relation with the world? Your values are the things that come from inside you and those are the things that are important to you. Who are the person? What these reflect the person that you are or hope to be or are working toward. So living a value-driven life is really all about understanding that and get coming to grips with that. And we're not going to get too deep into it because I'm not going to teach you about how to find your values. That's a lifelong journey for all of us. But the bottom line here is that living a value-driven life is about beginning to understand what is important to you on a personal level and then moving toward that in recovery. Now, that's not necessarily the goal of recovery but that really is what recovery is. Why? Because when you are in the grips of an anxiety disorder, when you are in the grips of constant anxiety, background anxiety, panic attacks all the time, you can't leave your house, you're stuck in an OCD cycle, whatever it happens to be, health anxiety is ruling your life. So many of the decisions you make from the largest decisions in your life right down to minute-by-minute decisions are based on fear. Those decisions are based on fear. What you will do minute-to-minute, hour-by-hour during a day is 90% of the time in some cases, and it was for me. I know that that was really the case for me. It was based on trying to avoid the things that I was fearing. I did not want to feel anxiety symptoms. I did not want to hear those anxious thoughts. I did not want to experience the sensations. I did not want to trigger a panic attack. I didn't want to feel afraid. I was afraid of being afraid. So I made my decisions all the time based on avoiding that. What I was going to do in the next 10 minutes, the next 10 hours, or the next 10 days was almost entirely based on the idea of avoiding the things that I feared. I wanted to avoid and not trigger the things that I did not want to feel, think, or otherwise experience. So that is why I would say that when you are in the grips of anxiety and anxiety problems, you are predominantly living a fear-driven life. And if you're listening to this podcast, I think you can probably recognize what I'm talking about, and you may be living that sort of life right now, where the decisions you are making on a minute-to-minute-by-basis or a minute-by-minute basis, or even on a very large scale, things like where you will live, or what your job will be, or what your relationships will be, who they will be, what your relationships will be with. Sorry, I'm stumbling over my words today. But you're making these decisions in large part based on how will it make me feel anxiety-wise when I make this decision. So I know that I need to go out and buy a birthday card for my sister. I'm using an example here. But if I do that, I might trigger all those sensations and thoughts that I hate. What if I have a panic attack while I'm walking to the car job? Or what if I have a panic attack while I'm driving there? What if I have a panic attack or something happens to me while I'm in it? As an example, so you're running through your decisions based on, well, I would like to do this, but if I do that, this might happen and I can't let that happen, so therefore I'm not going to do that. So those are fear-based decisions. But in that example, which is only one example, we could probably give thousands of them, but we just don't have time for that. But in that example, it is your sister's birthday and you want to get her a birthday card. People still do birthday cards. I haven't done cards in years. But it is your sister's birthday and you want to acknowledge it in some way by getting her a gift or a birthday card or a cake or you want to go and get the ingredients to make her birthday cake or cupcakes, whatever it happens to be. Your value in that case, your values, the things that are important to you would be your sister because you love your sister. You value your relationship with her. Maybe you value your family and your family ties. You want to acknowledge her because you do care about her. It's her birthday and you want to make a big deal over it. Those are your values and your values would tell you to go and get a birthday card or buy her a gift or take her to dinner or bake a cake or do something to at least acknowledge that event, her birthday, because at a value level, who you are, the things that matter to you, that is important. On the flip side, your anxiety is telling you, no, do not go get a birthday card. Do not go to the grocery store and buy ingredients to make a cake. Do not arrange a birthday party. Do not go to a restaurant with her. Do not go to a family gathering with her. You understand, this is an example, but I'm sure you can relate it to the things in your life. Your values tell you to do one thing. Your anxiety tells you to do another. It is quite annoying. It is quite restricting and it stinks because I lived a fear-driven life for a very long time and you may be too. So let's talk about this march from the fear-driven life to the value-driven life. When you set out on the recovery path, you don't actually set out to do that. And most people don't even realize that that is one of the defining characteristics of recovery, is leaving behind the fear and living in your values. Many people don't even realize that. I didn't realize that, even in this thing that I do where I spend so much time talking to microphones and cameras and talking to people and interacting with the community, I only realize that recovery was really related to living a value-driven life, maybe in the last 18 months, maybe. So it's a hidden thing, but it really is a central theme of recovery. Why? Because when we start to do the things that we know we need to do to get better, facing the fear, going toward it, doing your exposures, practicing that non-reaction, disengaging yourself from those things, when we start to do the hard work of recovery, and it is hard and it is scary, I will always, always acknowledge that. When you listen to this podcast, when you want to say, easier said than done, correct, it is. But when we do those things, when we go toward the things we fear, when we begin to eliminate our avoidances, when we begin to eliminate our reassurance-seeking, when we begin to eliminate our safety behaviors, and we start to truly learn how to experience that fear without reacting to it and without saving ourselves. And then we learn through those experiences that the fear has been real but baseless in the end. We learn to not be afraid of our anxiety, right? You've heard me through 186 podcast episodes, three books and like a zillion social media posts, all based on the process that I just described for the last 60 seconds. So when we go through this process and we learn that we do not have to be afraid of being afraid, we do not have to be afraid of our bodily sensations and our thoughts. We don't have to be afraid of those things. Then we stop making our decisions based on that fear because that fear doesn't matter so much, right? So as you go through this and you begin to discover, well, it didn't kill me again. Or I did not engage in my compulsion that my mind was telling me to do and no negative consequence existed anyway. When you learn that you did not have to Google the symptom and it still turned out okay. When you learn that yes, you can get out of the house and take a walk around the block or bring your dog to the park and nothing bad happens even if you feel anxious. When we do these things and we learn that that fear is baseless and we don't really have to fear those things, then the fear begins to lose its grip. And when the fear begins to lose its grip, people ask all the time, what does it feel like? What does it look like to be recovered? Well, what it looks like to be recovered and what it feels like to be recovered is that you begin to make your decisions based on the things that you truly want to do, like in your heart, in your soul, whatever, inside you. I want to acknowledge my sister's birthday. I love my sister. I care. It's her birthday. It's a family event. These are the things that are important to me. I want to do these things. I want to go to the birthday party. I want to go out to dinner. I want to make a cake. I want to buy a gift, whatever. Or I love music. I love the music of my life. All I want to do is go to this concert. My favorite band is playing in the stadium near my house. I want to go to that. Well, anxiety will tell you, no, you're not going to that. You can't do that. It will be too overwhelming. It will be too loud. Too many people. You might panic. You can't handle it. It will be too much. Anxiety will tell you to not go to that concert. Whereas your values, your heart is saying, but I love this music so much. It resonates with me. It matters to me. I get joy from it or whatever. It's my favorite band. I want to go to this concert. What does recovery look like? Well, I think from a practical standpoint, you might know, well, it means I don't stay home anymore. I actually go do things. But what is the going and doing things? Or I don't wind up stuck in my head all day long. I don't run from my thoughts all day long. I don't try to put out the fire in my brain all day long. And it starts to put out itself. You know, okay, well, what does that look like? Well, we know what it looks like practically. There's obsessions much anymore. You're not gripped by the health concerns anymore. They might come back now and then, but generally speaking, they're not ruling your life. So that means you're free to do what? You're free to do what you want to do. That is the value-driven life. So in the end, we're all sort of headed that way. And this can be a long and tedious process. We know it doesn't happen overnight, but we are on a slow and steady march away from a fear-driven life and toward a value-driven life. And we know it doesn't happen overnight. We all wind up, even if we don't know that. So what are the implications here? Well, one of the implications is that a lot of people, when they go down the recovery path, and I was one of them, when that fear starts to lose its grip, you kind of wind up in no man's land. You really do sometimes, and it's like, well, what do I do now? And people in the community will ask all the time, why am I anxious about not being anxious? Like, I'm not anxious right now, and that's making me anxious. Like, I quit my job. I stopped going to school. I haven't been socializing. Like, I've lived a life based on doing nothing but trying to not be anxious for so long. Now that I'm not afraid anymore or I'm beginning to be less afraid, I don't know what to do. That is incredibly common. And this is where if we look at it in the context of going toward a value-driven life, you start to think like, well, what are my values? You might not know at that point. You might have forgotten some of that. You may have lost touch with that. That's okay. So part of moving toward a value-driven life in recovery is really the understanding that like, oh, I'm going to start to rediscover some of these things. And you know, it's very possible that this can create a bit of a crisis for some of us. Like, well, wait a minute. I used to really like to go to theme parks and go on roller coasters and thrill rides. And I don't really want to do that anymore. Or if I'm just done with that, could be both. At first, you may be avoiding based on anxiety, but as you go further down the road, you may discover, well, I just don't feel like doing that anymore. That's not important to me anymore. That doesn't bring me the same kind of joy that it used to. That's okay. That's okay. Because our values, I mean, personal opinion, I think a lot of our very core values stay intact for very long periods of time in our life. But some of the other values that we have, the things that we think are important, as we gain new experiences, we get a little older. Things change in our lives. Our values can shift and change. That's okay. And as you're going down the road to recovery, when you discover like, well, I'm less driven by fear right now, but I just don't really know what to do now that I don't have to, I'm not sitting around being afraid all the time. I don't know what to do. This is that thing where you're moving toward your values and you may have to take some time to rediscover what those values really are. You may be thinking things. Try the things you used to like to do. Maybe you still do. Maybe you don't. That's okay. You'll have to start trying new things. This is how we start to emerge from that fear grip and start to find what we value again. Some of the things that you value will emerge and have room again and you'll be rock solid clear on those things. I will go to my kids' concerts at school. We will go on family vacations. I will go back to work and start contributing again. You're set. You start to act based on those values. But if you're not really sure, you may have to begin trying different things to start to rediscover what your values are and what matters to you and what you enjoy and what brings you satisfaction or fulfillment or happiness, whatever it happens to be. That's the idea of moving from a fear driven life to a value driven life in recovery which is a thing that happens even if you're not trying to make it happen. You need to be able to understand the principles of what that actually looks like in motion, in the process of recovery as you're going down the path. What do those moments look like where you start to discover that you start making choices based on what you value as opposed to what you fear? Now, I would think that even if you're at the very beginning of the recovery journey, you know the choices that you want to make. If you didn't understand the difference between what you want to do So I think you can agree that you might already know the kind of choices you want to make, but you just can't right now. So I understand, I used to be there too. But as you start to move down the road of recovery, you're essentially choosing to start to do those things that you refuse to do. And you start to move when you're making choices to like, I'm gonna go do my exposure today, or I'm gonna do my ERP homework that my therapist gave me. You are making a choice based on your values to tell you the truth. And at first, you have to force that choice. At first, that is not what you wanna do. That's not the natural choice. So you gotta force it to a certain extent. You're making it almost artificially and unnaturally because it doesn't feel organic in any way. It feels wrong and it's scary and it's dangerous. But as you start to do the work more and more and more, suddenly you discover that you start more easily making the opposite choice. When anxiety tells you to do X, you do Y because X is based on fear. Y is based on what you really want. And at first, what you really want is no, no, I gotta go toward the fear. You're just doing automatic opposite of the fear. But over time, you begin to start to make choices, your values begin to bubble back up again. I'll give you, here's a good example. And I think I can share this because I've talked to this person enough to get permission for this. But I was dealing with a person who was confronted with the fact that one of her children wanted, was looking for a hamster, a pet hamster. And that would have meant that she was on her own, had to go to the pet store to get this hamster before this particular date. It was a specific event, right? And she had not done that before. She had not gone that far by herself. There was panic disorder and agoraphobia there. And at some point, as she got into the work, she discovered like, you know what? If we're gonna get this hamster, then I'm gonna have to do it. And then she got in the car and she did it. And it was certainly a challenge, but that was a perfect example of how that decision became a value-driven decision. She wanted to do that. She wanted to do what she wanted to do for her daughter in that situation. That was important to her as a parent. And instead of choosing, no, I'm gonna skip that. I'm gonna wait till somebody can come with me. I'll have somebody else do it. She kinda knew it really needs to be done. I'm gonna have to be the one to do it right now. So I'm going. And she accepted the challenge and she went. That was one of the earliest for this person. Moves from fear-based choices to value-based choices. She made a value-based choice in that moment without even realizing that that's what she was doing. It felt practical to her. I don't have a choice I have to go. But two or three months prior, she would have said, well, I have no choice, but I can't go anyway. So there's gonna be no hamster or somebody else is gonna have to run and get it at the last minute. So see the way that worked out? That is what starts to happen. She did not even know she was making a value-based choice, but she was. And in your recovery journey, you may start to look at that story and say, oh yeah, I see parallels in my story too. So as time goes on, it becomes a little bit more natural, organic, and automatic for you to start to make, not choices that are only based on doing the opposite of anxiety, but making choices that kinda bubble up from inside you because you know that that is right for you. This is what I really want. So that's what it looks like down the road as you start to make value-based choices versus fear-based choices. It's a small process. It's a slow process. It comes in little increments as you go. You don't sometimes realize the change until it happens, but that's what it will start to look like, more and more and more. You stop avoiding and making no value-based choices, then you move toward, well, my value-based choice is really to get better. So I will just automatically do the opposite of what anxiety tells me to do. Those are my first new choices. And then over time, these little choices that actually organically come up and say, no, no, I just wanna do that. They start to become more and more and more frequent. And the fear-based choices or the simple early recovery opposite action choices become less and less and less. And next thing you know, you turn around and you're just doing the things that you want to do because they're important to you, even though they may still be challenging to a certain respect. So when I wrote in my book, The Anxious Truth, that recovery is life and life is recovery, and sooner or later they begin to merge, that's what I'm talking about. When the value-driven life becomes the primary way that you live, now life has become recovery. Whereas in the beginning, recovery is life. So there you go. That's my 20 minutes on the march from a fear-driven life gripped by anxiety to a value-driven life at the tail end and the far end of the recovery process. I hope that has been useful to you. And we're gonna wrap it up here. So as usual, I'm gonna play you out with Afterglow. Here it is by my friend, Ben Drake, who is always gracious enough to let me use this song. You can find Ben in his music online at bendrakemusic.com. And if you are listening to this podcast on iTunes or some platform that lets you rate and review, leave a five-star rating, write a little review. It helps me out. If you're watching on YouTube, subscribe to the channel, like the video, share it with people who might benefit. I appreciate you guys. I appreciate the attention you give me and the support you have always shown me through 106 podcast episodes. I would not be doing it without you and I thank you for all of that. Okay, guys, that is episode 186 in the bag. If you have questions or comments, you know where to find me all over social media, let's hear it. I will see you again next week with another topic. Don't know what it's gonna be, but I'll be here nonetheless. Thanks for listening and remember, this is the way. It's in these feelings that you never show. It's all around you, you can breathe it in.