 On this episode of the anxious truth, we're going to talk about why making up recovery as you go along is a bad idea. So let's get rolling. Hello everybody, welcome back to the anxious truth. This is podcast episode number 194 entitled making up recovery as you go along is a bad idea. This episode is recorded on February 1st of 2022. If you are new to the podcast, I am Drulan Solada creator and host of the anxious truth. This is the podcast where we talk about all things anxiety and anxiety recovery. So if you're dealing with problems like panic attacks or panic disorder or gorophobia, this is the place for you. I'm happy that you're here. And of course, if you are a returning listener or viewer, then of course, I'm happy that you're still here. Thank you for spending time with me as always. This week, we're going to talk about the idea that making up your recovery sort of as you go along and not really having a plan or some structure is a bad idea. I'm going to give you three primary reasons why it's a bad idea to do that and why you should have a plan and why you should have some structure. And trust me, you're talking to a guy right now that hates a plan and hate structure. I resisted on an almost path, almost pathological level, but in my recovery, I had to come to grips with the fact that I needed a plan and I needed some structure. It helped me so much when I finally did that. Now, before we get into it, I want to remind you of a couple of things. The anxious truth is more than just this podcast episode. So if you're new and you just sort of stumbled upon because you search for anxiety podcast and you found me, there's way more than this. If you go to the anxious truth.com, you will find the three books that I have written on anxiety and anxiety recovery. You will find all of my social media stuff. You will find links to get me on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and all that good stuff. So take advantage of all that. There's a ton of free information that I put out over the years. There are three great books. If you've been reading them and you liked them, maybe write a review on Amazon. And if you are not already subscribed to the anxious morning, which is my weekday morning anxiety recovery email newsletter, which is also a little mini podcast, go ahead and do that. You can go to the anxious morning.com and subscribe to that completely free. Everybody that is subscribed is loving it. It is probably the best work I've ever created in this space. I'm really proud of it. And I would urge you to take advantage of that for sure. The anxious morning. Okay, let's that out of the way. The housekeeping out of the way. Let's move on to today's topic. And that is why making up your recovery as you go along and not having a plan is a bad idea. Now, let me first acknowledge that putting a plan in place to do scary things repeatedly and intentionally and difficult things is not terribly easy. So if I'm you hear me telling you, you need to like really start to schedule doing really scary things. So for instance, if you are agoraphobic, you have to put a plan in place to actually schedule and be ready and know that on Wednesday at two o'clock, you're going to take a walk around the block, even though that terrifies you. Right. So let me acknowledge that what I am saying here, of course, is going to sound maybe a little off the wall to you, but stick with me because I'm going to tell you why it matters. First of all, recovery is about doing scary and difficult things that is so much of what kind of moves us forward. We don't want to do them, but we do. So the reason why having a plan becomes really important and injections injecting some structure into this. And let me just say that it doesn't have to be completely and utterly rigid. You don't have to schedule every minute of every day. And not every minute of every day has to be about recovery. That's a really common mistake that people make, especially in the beginning when they get excited about the stuff and they just, I'm going to recover. I'm going to do it right. I'm going to do all the things and listening to the podcast, reading my books, whatever. Life also happens. So we can't schedule every minute of your recovery, nor should we. Right. So not every minute of your day, even if you have a plan and a schedule in place has to be about recovery, you cannot recover during every waking moment that's not realistic. So just be careful as we go through this episode, be mindful of that and be careful about flowing into the traps trap where you think that every waking moment has to be about recovery, or that you have to actively be doing recovery things. If you are conscious and awake, that's not realistic. That would be very unkind to yourself because it's not doable and it doesn't have to be that way. So that being said, when we know that we have to consistently intentionally, incrementally do these scary and difficult things, we have to do our exposures, we have to do our ERP homework if you're working with an OCD therapist. We have to face the things that we've been avoiding. We have to get rid of all of our safety avoidance behaviors and crutches. We know we have to do this to get better. And it is the natural propensity of an anxious person, and I speak from experience here, to want to evaluate how you feel all the time. So you are probably stuck in a loop, most likely if you're listening to this or watching on YouTube, you are most likely stuck in a loop where you are constantly evaluating, scanning and evaluating how you're feeling and what you're thinking. So how you're feeling in any given moment is the single most important thing in the universe, most of the time for an anxious person, generally speaking. And this means that we will fall into the trap of deciding whether or not we are ready to do difficult things. Am I ready to do my exposures? How do I feel today? Do I feel like I can today? So if you do not have a plan in place and you wake up every morning and first evaluate sort of how you feel, how am I feeling today? Am I anxious today? Is it a good day? Is it a bad day? Is it going to be a bad day? Is it going to be a good day? You will make decisions in that moment as to whether or not you should do your exposures, whether you should do your homework, whether you should meet the challenges and go toward the fear. You will make those decisions based on the premise, based only on how you feel. Do I feel ready? Do I feel strong enough? Am I too afraid? Do I feel too weak? My legs are too shaky. I'm too nauseous. I feel dizzy today. I'm having all these scary thoughts today. You will put those in front of recovery on the priority scale, then you will almost by default fall into the trap of deciding to not do the things that will lead toward recovery because you won't feel like you can do them. I don't feel good today, so I shouldn't do these things today. That's a mistake. Recovery happens most when we do the difficult things, we do the exposures, we meet our challenges, we go toward fear consistently and incrementally, even when we don't feel like we can. Because the recovery process is at its heart all about learning that we always can even when we thought we couldn't. We were always safe even when we thought we weren't. So it is so important for you to be able to say, well, today I'm going to take my walk, I'm going to do my exposures, I'm doing my homework, I'm going to the dentist, I'm going shopping today, whatever it is, it doesn't matter how I feel. That is not going to enter into my decision making process, right? So it's really important to understand that. That is really an important thing to understand. And when you make a plan and have a plan in place, like, oh, no, this is what I am going to do. Apologies for the notification sounds. But I have my plan in place. This is what I am going to do today. Doesn't matter how I feel. I'm just going to do that. So it takes away that propensity to evaluate how you feel first before making your decisions. The second point is related to that. And that is in anxious and fearful moments, all human beings, not just people without anxiety problems, all human beings tend to be bad decision makers. So when the chips are down, when we are under the gun, we are in anxious, fearful, stressful situations, we make our decisions based almost always on just escaping that distress, right? So we are feeling distressed in that moment and under the gun and uncomfortable and afraid and all of those things. And so the decisions we make in those moments tend to be based almost entirely on how can I feel better right now? I mean, I want immediate relief. I want how I feel to change right now. And the bad news is that when we do recovery things, we are kind of working in opposition to that. Recovery things are not about what will make me feel better now. They never are. They're not about feeling better now. They're about getting better later on the long term. So if you're going to wait until you are in an anxious state to decide what to do today, what should I do today? What exposure should I do today? What challenge should I meet today? How can I go forward today? If you have no plan and you have not already decided what today is going to look like, then if you wait in those moments, you will not want to make those decisions. You will make decisions based on short term relief as opposed to long term recovery. So that's reason number two, why making it up as you go along, you know, waiting to see how you feel today and then deciding like, you know, what should I do today to for my recovery? While you're anxious, you're not going to make good recovery focus decisions. That's reason number two, why just waiting and making it up as you go along is a bad idea. And reason number three is one that most people don't realize. But again, this is probably this might be the most important one because we know, and we've talked about this before, that the lessons of recovery happen after the challenges, right? So you do your exposures, you meet your challenges, you do the scary things. The lessons really happen after the reaction after. What was that experience? Well, that was really unpleasant, but I was okay. I was really afraid, but nothing happened. I kept thinking I was going to pass out, but I didn't pass out. I kept thinking I was right on the edge of a psychotic break. But once again, I did not have a psychotic break. So that's the most important lesson. Reality shows us that the things that we feared the most don't happen. And those are the lessons that we have to take. Those are the recovery lessons and they happen after the fact. If you do not have a plan in place and you are just making it up as you go along, you're doing sort of hit and run exposures. If you're feeling particularly brave on Tuesday and a little bit more motivated, you might do a thing, but then you don't do another thing for another six days or another three days. Then you sort of do another random one and you call that exposure. That is going to lead you to into the other common trap, which is you will fail to take those lessons and you will begin to only evaluate your success and failure and your progress based on how you feel. Again, the anxious person is primarily concerned with how they feel all the time. And if you don't have a plan, you will default to that. Like, I don't know, am I making any progress? And everybody has those days where it feels like it's not working. It's going too slow. You're frustrated. You really want to get better right now. Everybody has that. That's normal. That's normal to feel that way. I wouldn't take that away from anybody. I used to feel that way too. I was impatient. I would get angry. I would get frustrated. Very normal. All human beings are going to experience that. That's okay. But without a plan, you have nothing to evaluate your progress by objectively. You will subjectively evaluate based on emotions and based on how you feel. I'm just feeling so scared today, so this must not be working. This isn't helping. It's not doing anything. Well, you didn't have a plan, so you were kind of making it up as you went along, which means you didn't really do the work consistently because you decided every morning whether or not you were ready or not so you weren't consistent. Then when you were kind of feeling like, okay, I know I need to do stuff, you were making decisions not based on a predetermined plan, but based on how you felt and trying to get immediate relief. And then when you did those things quite a scattershot once in a while when you felt like it, you have no way to evaluate other than, well, I felt really scared. I'm still scared. You know, I went to the supermarket three times in the last two weeks, but I'm still really scared. This isn't working. This exposure doesn't work for me. Very, very common mistake to make. Very common mistake to make. You forget that like, oh, wait a minute, I only have to evaluate my success and my failure, my progress based on what I do, not on how I feel. And the way to take away that subjectivity and the evaluation of your progress and your success and failure is to have a plan. My plan for Wednesday was to get up and run my morning routine, take a walk around the block and then go shopping with my mom. For instance, that was my plan. What's my success or failure? Did I do that plan? Yes, I did those things. Did I die? No. Did I go crazy? No. Did bad things happen to me? No. Done. Evaluation, you know, conclusion? Success. I did it. I did it. That's success. So you can judge that as a successful outing. But if you didn't have a plan, all you would know is, well, I don't know, I went out and I was really scared. And I didn't like it. And they almost panicked. And I panicked in the parking lot and I thought I was going to die. But no, the plan would say, what were you supposed to do today? I was supposed to go shopping with my mom. Did you do that? Yes, when then you win, right? So that's the third reason why we really care about having a plan and some structure. So I'm going to wrap it up. I'm not going to belabor this too much longer. But if you are in the habit of making this up as you go along, you are really kind of stepping into three traps that everybody steps into and making a plan and knowing at least a couple of days ahead of time. This is what I know I need to do. This is what I'm going to do on this day, this day, this day and this day, no matter how I feel. And then I don't have to make a decision when I'm anxious. The plan already tells me what to do. It's letting me off the hook. It's actually a very kind thing to do for yourself. Oh, I can make a decision without having to make it when I'm afraid. It was already made when I planned my schedule for the next three or four days. And then the evaluation afterwards, the plan said to do this, said the plan doesn't say anything about how you feel. I did that. And oh, when success, I executed the plan and it will help you get motivated to the next plan. So I would urge you to every few days at least make that plan a few days ahead of time at a minimum the night before for the next day at a minimum. In fact, when you can find the places where maybe you're a little bit or the times where maybe you're a little less anxious and a little more clear headed. That's a good time to make your plan. Alright, so okay tomorrow I'm going to get up. I'm going to run my morning routine. I'm going to take the kids to school. I'm going to finish reading that book. I'm going to take two walks around the block and I'm going to call a friend and catch up with them. That's my plan. Know that before you wake up so it doesn't matter how you feel when you wake up. You just do it because the plan says to do it. You don't have to make decisions about what to do with your day when you wake up anxious. The plan tells you what to do. It lets you off the hook, much kinder to yourself. And then after you do the things you can compare it against the objectives of the plan, which again will tell you, oh yes, I did those things and nothing bad happened to me. That's why we should not make it up as we go along. A plan might seem rigid. It might seem like this is crazy. How am I supposed to schedule mental health? It's a amorphous thing. You're not trying to schedule a mental health. You're just trying to schedule your activities because your activities, your behaviors, the changes in behaviors, that's where recovery lies. So consider this. Start to put a plan together. Understand that you should plan a day in advance, a few days in advance, a week in advance. You don't have to plan a year in advance, a month in advance, two weeks in advance. That's probably not right. But you can plan tomorrow tonight. So if you've never done this before, maybe start tonight. Sit down and decide when I wake up tomorrow, this is what I'm going to do tomorrow, no matter how I feel. And then when tomorrow ends, go back and circle around and say, what was my plan? Did I do those things? I did. And you'll see that it starts to make a difference. Again, this may take you some time to get into the swing of it did for me because I hated doing it. But once I did do it, it really started to make a difference. So stop making up your recovery as you go along. That is loaded with traps and pitfalls and start planning and adding a little bit more structure. It will matter. That's it. That is Episode 194. You can tell it's over because the music. So I am going to leave you guys with Afterglow by my friend Ben Drake. You can find Ben in his music at bendrakemusic.com. Check him out. Tell him I said hello. Awesome dude. Great song. Means a lot to both of us. And what else can I tell you? If you're watching this podcast on YouTube, hit the like button. Subscribe to the channel so you know when I've got new episodes and new videos coming out. If you're listening to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify or someplace where you can rate and review, leave a five star rating. Take a few minutes and write a review. It helps other people find the podcast. That's why I do this to help as many people as I can. So thank you again for taking your time and hanging out with me for these 15 minutes or so. Hopefully this has been helpful. We will be back again next week with another topic. I don't know what we're going to talk about, but we will be here. So thanks again for coming by and remember, this is the way.