 Today we're going to talk about the idea of learning to slow down why it's important to recovery, why it matters, and what it means for the practice of mindfulness. It's Monday, and this is Recovery Monday episode number 34. So let's see who's here. We have a technical problem today in that I do not believe I am streaming to my Facebook page, only to the group. I don't know why that is, but that seems to be the way Restream is working today. So we'll do the best we can. There's about 10 folks here. I just want to make sure you guys can hear me. So somebody just give me the thumbs up and let me know that the audio is working on the stream because I'm trying something a little bit different today. But I want to make sure that you guys are aware. Hey, what up guys? Just check it back in. Hey, everybody. Katya's here from Russia. What's going on? We hear you. Thank you, Nicole. Appreciate that. So just a reminder, today we finished going through my recovery guide, The Anxious Truth. And today we start going through lessons from this book. It was suggested that we go through this one next, 7% slower. So that's what we're going to do. It won't take us 33 weeks or 34 weeks to get through this book. But if you want to follow along with these, you can find this book on my website at theanxiestruth.com, or it even has its own URL, which is 7% slower.com. So if you want to follow along at 7% slower as we go through these lessons by all means, go grab a copy of that book. And I'm on the Facebook page. Thank you, B. I appreciate that. I don't know. Restream said it wasn't working. So I thought maybe I wasn't. So how's everybody doing today? Let's see here. Love my fresh cut, says Laura. What up, Laura? I could see you. UK is here. The usual suspects are here. Everybody's here. Emily's here. Bessie's here. Do we have our one Twitch viewer? I can't tell. I don't know. But anyway, so today we're going to talk for a little bit about the need to learn to slow down and why it is such a useful thing in recovery. And it's so useful that actually wrote a book about it. So if you haven't read 7% slower, go check that out. So I'll go through a little lecture like I usually do with this. And then we'll go through some comments, some Q&A stuff. I will spend maybe about 20, 30 minutes today. It's all I really have. But we'll go through it as quick as we can. And let's rock and roll here. So remember, I'm always addressing a specific situation here. I'm always addressing people that have panic disorder or phobia or health anxiety or OCD. We're talking about anxiety disorders here. But the beauty part about learning to go slower as part of your recovery strategy is that the act of learning to slow down helps you cultivate the act of living mindfully, which is a really kind of a useful thing in life in general. So it's worth checking out. So yes, as a matter of fact, it is a beautiful day in New York, even though we are in, I guess we're sort of in summer, it's actually cool out and it's dry, sorry, in complaining. So let's talk about when you're in this state, when you're dealing with disorder and anxiety, your anxious brain, it's always on the go. Like there's always work to do for a stressed out, frightened, oversensitized, overworked brain and fear center. It just says. So what does your brain do in all day long when you're in this state? It's scanning for threats, and then it scans for threats again, and then again, and then again, and then it fires the threat detection mechanism and kicks the threat response mechanism into overdrive again and again and again. Then it has to go back and evaluate, like how did this work out? Like am I safe now? Is there still a threat? How are we feeling? What's going on? Then it has to go back and re-evaluate again and again and again. Should we turn off the response so I have to fire it again? When you're not in threat response mode, you're thinking, you're anticipating, you're worrying, you're ruminating, you're catastrophizing. Like your brain is freaking busy, man. Like it really needs a few days off. And why does your brain do this? Why, what is the deal here? Well, to be honest with you, like we can guess at it, and we can make some educated guesses, I think evolution plays a role here, and I wrote it in the book. When we evolved tens of thousands of years ago, 100,000 years ago, and modern man begins to evolve, we were living in really dangerous times. Like hyperactive threat detection was a good idea. There were real, actual, continuous threats to survival all the time. And food threats and safety threats and attacks and territoriality. And there was all kinds of stuff that we had to pay attention to all the time to stay alive. So if you were, in fact, trying to design like a safety system into a species that will make sure that the species survives and perpetuates, you kind of want a threat detection system that's really vigilant and turns on really quickly and is really strong. So it's probably a vestige from that. I think that, you know, that threat detection response system and response is sort of built in. Evolution has rewarded us for having it. Except the problem is that now we don't live there. Like, oh, this is good. I just noticed that evolution doesn't care if you're happy, it only cares if you live, which is so cruel and cold. But it's 100% true. That's a great comment. Thank you so much for that. Just caught it out of the corner of my eye. But the issue here is that in modern times, in 2022 and the 21st century, we don't live in the same sort of environment, right? So unfortunately, you know, evolution takes a long time to happen. Like, our brains are kind of similar to the way they used to be way back then, even though the world we live in right now is vastly different from the world that evolved this particular system. Okay, well, we're changing, but certainly not fast enough. So in the end, what we wind up here is when you get into this state, now you have that threat detection system that's been kicked into overdrive, and it's always on, and it's always looking, and you're always worried for your safety, it cannot find threats. So it will find threats into almost in almost anything. It will find social threats, family system threats, financial threats, career threats, like self image threats, relationship threats, health threats, like, when it can't find the same threats it was designed to detect, it will just find threats everywhere. So for those of you that are in that state where you feel like you're just constantly on a state of high alert, you're always thinking, you're always worrying, you're always ruminating, you're always on the edge of panic, you're feeling anxiety all day long. Well, yeah, your threat detection system is just finding anything it can find and sounding the alarm all the damn time. So it doesn't really, you know, work out that well. It would be great if we could just say to our brains like, hey, dude, it's 2022, this isn't 35,000 years ago, you can chill, we're okay. I mean, you could say that, and you've probably been trying to say that for a very, very long time using a lot of different words and images and songs and lyrics and memes and inspirational quotes. And it's just not listening. Yeah, it's like, don't talk to me. It's not even saying don't talk to me, it doesn't even hear you. It's not wired to receive that message. So the only thing that we can feed it to start to teach it differently and turn it back down so that your threat detection system goes back into its normal state or a healthy state is we have to feed it signals and experiences. That's all it knows. It only knows behaviors, it knows signals, it knows experiences. It does not know, I'm, you know, I'm going to launch into my usual litany here, it doesn't know essential oils, it doesn't know tapping, it doesn't know any of those things, it doesn't know grounding, it just knows experiences and behaviors and signals, all right. So we want to slow it, we want to turn that down and teach our brains that lesson that like, no, no, we're safe, we don't have to live like this all the time, which would be great. And that's kind of what the process of recovery does. But what we have to do is send it different signals. Now, to get into the slowing down thing, one of the main hallmarks of the threat response, threat detection response is speed. Most people, not everybody, but most people, and that's who I wrote this book for, most people, and I learned this in my own life. I wrote the book, honestly, to me. So when I wrote 7% slower, I could have been writing this book for like 2007 and 2008 drew. So one of the hallmarks of the threat detection response is speed. We automatically speed up your brain wants you to get to safety immediately. And part of the way you get to safety is to speed up, go fast, go fast. There was, again, probably evolutionary and survival benefits in that. If you have to run, you have to, you know, turn and run and turn tail, then fast is good. If you're going to turn around and fight fast is also good. Like being in that in that hyper state is probably a good thing if there's really a threat to deal with. But right now, being in a hyper state doesn't actually help us anymore. But nonetheless, it's still there. So the vast majority of us will, when they start, we start to feel anxious, we will begin to speed up, we talk faster, we, we, we're already thinking at the speed of light, we go, we think even faster, we try to process faster, we move faster, everything about us becomes faster. So there you go. I just saw that now Marnie says, you know, everything I do, I do fast. Now, you know, we can address, and as we go through the book, we'll address this, like some people feel like going fast is part of their identity. And it's sort of a badge of honor to them. And as we get to the end of the book, I did acknowledge that. But in this situation, we're talking about speed as it relates to that, the anxiety and panic response, that threat detection response thing. So if you're walking through the supermarket, you are now running through the supermarket because you got to get out of there as quick as possible. If you're driving, you're trying to get out of the driving situation as quickly as you can. If you're in a social situation, you're feeling anxious, you're going to panic, you're looking for an escape, try and get out of there as quick as you possibly can. So everything starts to go fast, fast, fast, fast. Part of the signal that your brain says, sends is like, oh, danger, threat, whatever it happens to be, it's the panic itself is a threat, the anxiety is a threat, the perceived of the pain in my arm, which you then feel is arm cancer, that's a threat, whatever it happens to be. Now, part of that is, okay, alert says the brain, okay, we got to get to safety, we have to fix this says the brain and part of fixing part of getting to safety is everything speeds up, everything starts to speed up. So I said a couple of minutes ago that the only way that we can really teach our brains that it's wrong, and you know, your brain is wrong, it doesn't need to always be scanning, it doesn't have to be vigilant, you do not have to worry and ruminate to be safe. You don't have to solve problems before there are even problems to be safe. You don't have to knock your anxiety symptoms down or stop them to be safe. You don't have to avoid panic to be safe. The only way we could teach it those lessons is to send it new signals and give it new behavioral experiences. And one of the best signals that you can send your brain that says, I know that you think we're in mortal danger here, but everything is cool. One of the best signals you could send is to slow down. So one of the reasons why I wrote 7% slower was to bring this to light, like it's really a valuable tool. Your brain is telling you to do everything you can to eliminate the threat and get back to a safe state or, you know, that base state where you're calm and you're safe and everything is okay and you're not threatened anymore. And part of that will be to speed up. And one of the best ways that you can send a signal back down to your lizard brain, your amygdala, to say, no, we're cool. It's okay is when it's saying speed up, you slow down. So you're acting in opposition to what your brain wants you to do. This is not an easy thing to do. And that's why I wrote a whole book about it full of little tips on how you can learn to practice slowing, going slower. But the part of one, one of the reasons why we want to learn to slow down and consider at least consider this as a task as part of your recovery strategy is going slow is a signal that you can send back down to your brain that it will understand. So if if I'm having a particularly anxious day or my stress level is really high, and this does apply even to just life stress, you could tell a stressed person because they are going faster, you could tell an anxious person because they look like they were shot out of a cannon, right. So everybody in my life knew when I was having a really anxious day or if I was on that edge of panic because I was in just hyperdrive all the time and they could tell. So one of the things that we could do is to begin to recognize that, oh, crap, I'm really I'm speeding up here. I have to start to slow down because when I'm having a particularly anxious day, when I catch that, which I'm really good at doing now because recovered, when I catch that one of the things that I can do is to really just slow everything down, just slowing things down for a minute or two changes a lot. It changes a lot. Everything changes almost instantly for me. I can get back to like, okay, I can focus. I can start doing my stuff again. You know, I'm not feeling that agitated say that's me because this is many, many years into recovery and practice and it's now a life skill, but it helps not because slowing down is going to immediately turn off your panic. It's not going to stop everything. It's not going to fix your engoraphobia tomorrow. It won't satisfy your health anxiety concerns in this moment. It is just one of the signals that we can send back down the chain to our lizard brains that say, I know you're in freakout mode, but we don't have to be and let me show you by slowing everything down. I'm not going to run around like a chicken with his head cut off just because you tell me to because lizard brain, you are always wrong on an epic level and I haven't it anymore. All right. So like I said, short little sessions in this version of recovery Monday, 7% slower doesn't have big giant lessons in it, but that is essentially chapter one. It's loud down the block today. That's essentially chapter one in this book. It explains or at least attempts to explain why it is we speed up this way, why your brain is so anxious and overworked. What can we do? We have to send it signals and one of the best signals we can send it is to learn to slow down. So that's chapter one of this book. Let's take a look at some of the comments here and I'll take some questions as best that I can. Probably not as much as what we usually are used to on recovery Monday because these chapters I said they're a little lighter. 7% slower is a little bit of a lighter book anyway, to be honest with you. It's a little more humorous. It's not as deep. It's not like a textbook like the anxious truth is. So it's a little lighter. So good. Okay. Let's see here. Hey, Lisa's here. What up, Lisa? I'm going to put this up on the screen just because I love this comment so damn much. Hans, thank you so much. Evolution doesn't care if you're happy. It only cares if you survive. That bears putting on the screen so it's here for posterity. I think another related quote is that your brain was not designed to keep you happy. Your brain was designed to keep you alive. So that is a really I think to me a very impactful quote for those of us in this community because so many people demand like I but I can't feel sadness. I have to feel happy all the time. I need joy. I need whatever and like but your brain wasn't designed to be happy. It was designed to be alive. So it's super important to remember that. Great quote. Great comment. Okay. So let's say let's pop this up real quick here. Sorry I can't see your name. Facebook user just means you're in the Facebook group and Restream doesn't show me your name but let's see here. Issue what's slowing down is when I need to do something quickly I really struggle. Okay. That's actually a really good point. So when we're in an anxious state or a panic state that frantic state we do struggle to complete tasks sometimes. And this is a vicious cycle. We naturally speed up most of the time. Again not everybody but most of us will go and start to speed up but yet we get worse at execution. So we're trying to go faster but the faster we go our reasoning skills are generally impaired a little bit in that anxiety state anyway. So we try to go faster as a result and our execution of any given task tends to get a little worse. Not horrible. You don't lose the ability to drive. You don't lose the ability to talk walk any like that. But we do get a little fumbling little fiddly like a little less refined for sure. So we speed up automatically and speeding up actually makes that even worse. So that's a little bit difficult. Now in this situation if you get in the habit of trying to slow things down all the time which is great habit then maybe you start to struggle when you do have to do something quickly. That could be because when you do start to act quickly it starts to agitate you. Could that be it? I don't know. But that's actually pretty common. If you are trying to slow everything down when you are forced to get a move on sometimes that could be very agitated because many people in our community really try very desperately. Let me hide the comment. We'll get on to the next one. Many people in our community try desperately to live all day long every day like even slow, calm. I can't have agitation. I can't go fast. I can't be upset. Can't feel emotions. So that could be what that is. That could be what that is. Good comment. Oh, this is good. Cesar, our minds turn inward and we become our own threat. I've written about this before and not just me. Many, many people have talked about this before. In the end when my brain can't find a threat which it was desperate to do, I became the threat like my own body, my own mind, my own emotions, everything became the threat because there's nothing around me that was warranting that response that was causing me to sweat and be dizzy and jelly legs and all that stuff. So I became the threat. That's what, you know, disordered anxiety is. It's like internally focused anxiety as opposed to externally focused, which is the part that keeps us alive and we want in our life. So excellent. Thank you or appreciate it. Hey, from Detroit. What up, Jay? My hamster wheel is always smoking, says Jason. This is really good. It's true. A lot of people will visualize it that way. Like the hamster wheel of your brain just always, most people will visualize that with like overthinking and things of that nature. You know, your brain is just always churning, churning, churning, churning, churning, churning. I get that. It is the hamster wheel. Slowing down. And when we learn to slow down and we'll do that over the next few weeks as we go through this book and talk about this stuff, it's a way to jump off the hamster wheel. I think I even made a hamster wheel analogy when I wrote seven percent slower. It's in there somewhere. But if you're stuck on the hamster wheel of anxiety, learning to slow down is a way to step off or at least slow the wheel down. It doesn't stop the wheel, but it is what it is. Let's see here. I'm going to scroll through and see what I can take here. I wish I could do exposures every day, but I'm not able to. My anxiety issues with driving and in that moment, it feels like I'm going crazy. Other things can do when I can't do driving exposures. Feel like I'm stuck. Oh, this is a huge type of peer over the top of the comment here. Again, I'm sorry, I can't see your name. What other things can I do when I can't do driving exposures? I don't know if you're saying that you can't do driving exposures because you feel like you're going crazy. So therefore, driving is off limits. Or if there's some practical thing that keeps you from doing your driving exposures. And the answer to that question is you actually can do them. Feeling like you're going crazy is not going crazy. Being worried that you're going to a crazy has nothing to do with actually going crazy. So this is the principle that we operate on all the time. You have to go ahead and let do the thing anyway. And let that worst case scenario come true. If you're afraid that you're going to snap and have some sort of psychotic break because you're so anxious, in a nutshell, very simplified version, your job is to go and drive anyway and go ahead and have your psychotic break. Because then you learn that you didn't. And then you didn't again and again and again and again and again. And sooner or later you unmask that fear as, oh, it's real fear, but there was no basis behind it. So I don't know if you're saying that you can't drive for practical reasons, maybe car problems or transportation, whatever schedule, or if you're saying I can't do driving exposures because I'm too scared when I do it. That's not a reason to not do an exposure. The whole point of doing the exposure is to intentionally be scared. That's important. A lot of people miss that. So I hope that helps. I don't know. Let me pop that out here. Okay, so let's see here. This is really good. One of the things that I think is so interesting. Reacting has to be really fast. If you want to survive a bear attack, if you think you're too late. And I forget who the hell it was. Maybe it was Josh Fletcher. He was picking on his British football club that he likes. I can't remember the name of the club. Newcastle, Newcastle United. And he said, the threat response is like a defender for Newcastle. It's really fast, but not that smart. And that made me laugh so hard because any sports fan can probably apply that to some of their own teams that they've suffered with over time. But it's 100% true. It's meant to be super fast, super brutal, and super decisive. It's not meant to be nuanced. It's not meant to be reasonable. It's not meant to understand any sort of special techniques. It's just designed to be really fast, really strong, really aggressive, and very effective. That's what we're dealing with here. That's why we can't feel our way out of it. We can't talk our way out of it. We can't logic our way out of it. It was never built to understand any of those things. If you look at your brain the way it's built, this is the lower part of the brain where structures tend to be a little bit smaller. And then what separates us from the rest of the planet is this big giant frontal brain that we have where all the reasoning stuff happens. Just literally more horsepower in the top part of your brain because it's a bigger engine. Your lizard brain is a smaller part of the brain, and it just doesn't have the capacity to engage in that sort of stuff. So we have to send it the signals that it does understand, which would include slowing down. This is good. GBG here always has good comments. The Burger King drive-thru will slow you down. It probably will. For so many people, going through a line, by the way, is a really good way to practice a cue if you're in the UK. Going through drive-thrus and things like that is a great way to practice slowing down because you don't have a choice. Now for some of you, the idea that you might have to sit and wait in a line or cue for five minutes sounds impossible right now. But if you practice again and again and again, it forces you to slow down. You cannot run out of that cue or that line. Okay, let's see here. Okay, this is a little different animal. So Carol puts this up here. What if you freeze? I actually, in this book, I mentioned the freeze response. Some people do have the freeze response, and speeding up is not their problem. So I will always acknowledge that, even acknowledge it in the book. If you're a freezer where you're not going to speed up, you tend to want to sort of go into paralysis mode. I don't mean exact literal paralysis, but when you don't want to move because you're afraid, you don't have the speeding up problem. So it's a little different animal. Just to acknowledge that, not everybody has the speeding up response. Some have the freeze, air quotes, freeze response. Okay. Let me put this up at the screen. Lauren, this is a good comment. Thank you for bringing this up. I progressed to having normal days. I slowed down. I've been more mindful. We're going to talk about mindfulness as we go through the book in these new episodes of Recovery Monday. Because really, this is, believe it or not, this is not a recovery manual. This is actually a mindfulness manual in disguise, which I only discovered as I was about halfway through writing it. Slowing down is a gateway to living mindfully. You cannot be mindful if you're working on slowing down. So thank you, Lauren, for bringing that up. But my sleep is being disrupted, and now I'm slow because I'm tired. That can happen. That can happen. There's a lot of reasons that way we would be naturally slow. I'm tired today. I'm actually a little slow today. So it is what it is. Let's see. Oh, Bessie says, your brain isn't always the smartest person in the room. That's a great comment. And that is 100% true. The top part of your brain is the smartest part of you, is the smartest person in your room. Lower party of your brain, not so much. You don't want to trust that to run the show all the time. Oh, Katie's here. Katie just got back from a big trip through Europe. So everybody gave a big fist bump to Katie here because it was a huge, huge, huge deal. And Katie Kathleen, as she's coming up here, I think we first bumped into each other, I don't know, not even a year ago, probably on Instagram Live when me and Josh were doing together. And I cannot believe how far you come. So Katie, tremendous. And thank you for sharing that. I'm glad that it helped. Slowing down really is a thing, guys. Trust me on this. And you might think, no, like a no. There's no way I can slow down. I have to go faster. I have no choice. Not true. Almost everybody that does this 100% would say that they started with the insistence that I can't do exposures. I can't go toward my fear. I can't stop ruminating. And I can't go slower. But you can. I know you can. This is a practice thing. We learn how to do this. Let's see. Adrenaline sends one. I have to go against our chemical response. Okay, a laurel brings up another good point. I'll throw this up here. You guys are on fire today. I don't have much to do at all. You guys are just throwing at these great comments. All I have to do is read them. Adrenaline sends blood slash energy to our muscles to help us escape. We have to go against our chemical response to slow down. It's not easy, but not impossible. I couldn't have said that any better. You are 100% disobeying all the physiology of your body. But that brings up a really good point. And I've talked about this before. Going slow and slowing down is a choice that you can make because you also, this goes hand in hand with the fact that you can relax. Your body can be relaxed even though your mind is not. That is possible. So part of learning to go slower and the stuff we're going to talk about here is making that acknowledgement that you actually can be relaxed when not calm. Calm and relaxed are two different things. Right? So I think calm is a mental state, relaxed is a physical state. You can go slow even though your body and the chemistry in your body is at a heightened state. The problem with that is that you feel that chemistry even more. So when you start to feel the chemistry of anxiety and fear that adrenaline and cortisol kicks in and your body is amped up, if you run, you are kind of masking that a little bit. You're buffering it a little bit. You're running from that a little bit. When you slow down, even when your heart is pumping like crazy and you're breathing hard and you're feeling hot and cold and getting jelly legs and all those things, you feel that chemistry more and it's hard. But that experience of feeling the chemistry and then seeing that, well, I slowed down, I did the opposite of it and I turned out okay is hugely impactful in recovery. So good point, Aurora. Thank you so much. The difference between calm and relaxed matters and you can slow down even though your body doesn't want to. You have some agency here that's really important. I think somebody answered this already. I'll throw it up on the screen. If the head is going forward and I slow my body down, well, that'll help slow down my brain. Indirectly, I think it will. Going slower physically is a signal that says everything's cool here. Everything's cool here. Everything's cool here. And it gives you the opportunity to start to navigate through those thoughts a little bit, which would be let them come. I'm just going to slow down and move through these next 10 minutes as slowly as mindfully as I can while my mind manufactures 72,000 different thoughts about all the catastrophes that are in front of me that don't really exist. And that's okay. You learn to start to tolerate those, that state and navigate through it and ultimately that does slow your brain down. So I would say it's a precursor that that helps. This is pretty funny. Note that some of the... I'll put this on the screen. This is Lisa. Lisa's one of the admins in the Facebook group. Thank you, Lisa. Note that some of the coolest modern survivor peeps move like slow cat-like dancers. James Bond or Ocean's Eleven, they're not running around like nervous chickens. Solid point right there. That is a solid point. Okay, this is good. Emily, this is a really good question. I'll throw this on the screen. How do you slow down at a fast-paced job? Excellent, excellent question. Your job may require you to not be a sloth, right? So if you're a nursing or you're a first responder or you do things that are time-sensitive in nature, then you might work at a fast-paced job. But you can actually be mindful of every task you do in that fast-paced job. So if you're a nurse, for instance, and I've never been a nurse, so forgive me for stepping in anybody's toes here, but if you have to go from patient to patient to patient because you are a nurse, and it is a fast-paced job, no doubt about that. As you do each task that you have to do, I have to put a blood pressure cuff on this patient right now. I can be fully engaged with the act of putting on that cuff, and then I can be fully engaged in every, listen to me, pump. They're probably automatic now, right? Maybe my doctor has an automatic one now, and he's old. But every pump of the blood pressure thing, I can be mindful of. I can be mindful as I fill this syringe. I can be mindful as I give this injection. So you can do your job quickly, but be mindful of every single task and fully engage with every single task you do while you do that job. I live this way almost every day. People would look at me and think like, I'm this crazy multitasker. Yeah, maybe, but all I'm really doing is shifting very intent focus from one task to another, sometimes in rapid succession, but when I'm on that task, I'm 100% in that task. That's how you do that. That's how you do it. So you can still do your job fast. You don't have to do it frantically. So understand the difference between moving quickly and moving frantically. It's two different things. You do not have to be frantic. You can be fast, but you don't have to be frantic. And the key there is being mindful of each task that you do and fully engage with it. Let's see here. Slowing down isn't feeding. This is true too. Hans, you're on fire today. Thank you so much. Slowing down isn't feeding the second fear anymore. If you want to use the Claire Weeks analogy, first fear, second fear, first fear is automatic. It's built into all of us. You are never, ever, ever going to get rid of the first fear because we don't ever want to. We need that. But second fear is the part where I feel afraid, normal first fear. Now, oh my God, I feel afraid. Second fear, that's the problem. That's a disorder part. And slowing down helps take the fuel away from that second fear fire. So excellent. Very good. Probably stupid question, but can you give examples of slowing down? Actually, we're going to go through that. The book is all about slowing down, like examples of what it means, how you get practice at specific tasks that you can use to slow down. I will be frankly honest with you and say, isn't it amazing that you could find yourself in a position where you have to ask what slow means? I'm not picking on you in any way, Emily. It's a good question, it's a fair question, and we're going to go through all of that. And they are in the book. I'm not trying to sell a book, but they are in the book. Maybe I'm trying to sell a book. It's a great book. You'll get it. But it is amazing that anxious people can literally be in a position where they have to ask what slow means. Think about that for a second. It's not a reflection on us personally. It doesn't mean you're doing something wrong or you're less than. It just means look at the nature of this disorder, how ridiculous and irrational it is. Can you please tell me what slow is? Can you give me examples of slow? The fact that we have to add, we, not just you, I'm not going to pick on you. The fact that we as a group would ask that question is so telling. So telling. Let's see here. Hey, Laurie. Newby here. Great information. Welcome, Laurie. Glad you're here. Thanks for coming by. We're here every Monday. I practice slowing down a lot. Where are we? 31 minutes, 236. Sorry, I could do a few more minutes. I practice slowing down a lot. You have to catch yourself in the moment. This is a good comment from whoever you are. You have to catch yourself in the morning. This is why we practice. We practice. We practice. 7% slower is full of things you can practice, practice doing this. I literally go through like this is how you can practice learning slow down. But it's not the natural state when we're afraid or we're anxious. So you do have to be able to catch it, catch it, catch it. Hey, we got at least one Twitch person. What up, Chris? Thank you. Too funny, man. Bessie is demanding euphoria. Very good. Let's see here. I'm going to scroll as best I can because I only have a few more minutes, so I'll try and get as many as I can here. Yes. Let's put this up on the screen. So in driving, as an example driving, thoughts start to lean toward panic and speed. The best thing is to slow down and ignore symptoms. Correct. Would it be by deep breaths or literally slowing down? Well, I always hate deep breaths. We should have a new law that says the word deep should never come before the word breath ever again because deep breath, I literally want to take out like a chainsaw and cut those two words apart and build a wall like so they can never meet again because the word deep breath in the anxiety community does far more harm than good. So no, your breaths don't have to be deep. They just don't have to be, you don't have to pant. They can be slower, but they do not have to be deep. Like, and I know that's not necessarily the question you're asking, but I'm going to take the opportunity to point that out anyway. The idea that somehow deep breathing is a thing, it's not a thing. Just breathe. It doesn't have to be deep. There's no magic in filling your lungs completely to the top. There's no, nothing that doesn't serve a purpose. It's usually to make you a little more hyper aware of your breathing. Right. So yes, your object of the game there is when you're driving as an example, but in any exposure and panic starts to hit. For me, I would be tapping the wheel. I would be fidgeting at my seat. That's speeding up. Right. And in chapter two, I talk about, of this book, I talk about learning to recognize your speed habits and that fidgeting thing is a good indicator that you're getting into speed mode. Well, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to stop tugging at my ear. I'm going to stop poking at my chest. I'm going to stop touching my face. I'm just going to keep my hands relaxed on the wheel. That's a way to slow down and not ignore the symptoms because you can't ignore them. You're going to feel them. Just let them be there. And your reaction to them is to take, just go slack, relax, be mindful of what you're doing, pay attention to your driving and let them do what they're going to do. Okay. This is, well, we'll talk about that in the end. The whole I take pleasure in getting things done. That's a thing, but we'll talk about that weeks from down the road. That's near the end of the book to be honest with you. Let's see here. I'm going to scroll down to the bottom I think because I'm running out of time now. Just slowing down physically also help. Yeah, we talked about that already. Slowing down physically will ultimately teach your brain that it's okay to not problem solve and catastrophize all the time. Yes. Let's see here. Rushing days because kids of life. Okay. Well, this is a similar thing. I'll put this up on the screen. Laura asked, this is similar to how can you slow down when you're doing a fast-paced job? I would suggest that what you're describing is a fast-paced job. Like sometimes there are like those crazy kid days when you're a mom or any parent, mom or dad, you can be mindful of each of the tasks that you are doing with the kids. So you can have to do a lot of stuff with the kids and family stuff to get through the day, but you don't have to do it frantically. You can do it quickly without being frantic. So I clearly, I think this is the thing I have to talk a little bit more about the difference between speed and frenetic, freneticness. There you go. It's a thing. You learn to be mindful of each task that you do. It really makes a difference. This is a big one too here, Shannon. Thank you for this comment. I feel like I tried to run through a task as fast as I can trying to avoid feeling panic. Speed is a response to panic. Speed can also be an avoidance technique. You're 100% right. Thank you, Shannon. I appreciate you bringing that up. Sometimes we will speed up to try to get away from our own bodily sensations, which can't be done. You can't run away from your own body. Or when we are in a situation that we think is going to make us panic, we will try to run out of that situation as quickly as we can so that we can't possibly let that panic happen. Two more. Let's see here. Andre, this I'm digging. When you were suffering, were you as interested in anxiety as you are now? Oh, I was way more interested than I am now, because I think one of the things that keeps me in the cycle is I cannot seem to lose interest in anxiety. This is excellent, dude. Thank you so much for this comment, and I will tell you this. When I was suffering or in a bad place, I was way more interested in anxiety than I am now. And you would think, how is this even possible? Like you write about it, you podcast, you write books, you're a grad student. Yeah, like I'm neck deep in anxiety all the time, but in a different way. I was super interested in my anxiety. So what you're saying, Andre, is that you are not, you can't lose interest in anxiety. You can't lose interest in how you feel. So I was super interested in anxiety, my anxiety. All I cared about was what it was doing, how it made me feel, when it was going to come next, how long was it going to last, how strong is it today? So I was 100% engaged with anxiety all day long, every day during every waking moment, all I cared about was anxiety. Now, you could say that I spend a lot of my time talking about anxiety now, but it's very different. Like, I don't care about my anxiety, or I care about the topic of anxiety. Sometimes you get caught up in the topic of anxiety because you care about your anxiety, and you're trying to find some sort of magic bullet that will wipe away your anxiety, and it doesn't exist. So it's a really good point. Yes, it's very common. It's incredibly common to get really stuck in that, like, how do I feel, how do I feel, anxiety, anxiety, anxiety, anxiety, and you're just going to have to start to learn the lesson of like, I can do my life while I'm anxious and let life start to kind of bleed back into this. That's an excellent comment. I'd really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Let's see here. Ah, okay, this will be the, we're going to close it with this one. There's a great comment by Katya. During anxiety and panic attacks, I used to speed up and get annoyed with my family and friends for being slow in those moments to learn not to hurry up, but to slow down myself. So how interesting is that? You wanted them to come along for your frantic panic ride, but in the end you had to learn, oh wait, they don't get on the ride because there's nothing to be panicked about. Like I can, let me just follow them. That's so good. I appreciate that. I'm going to wrap up the comments with that because I'm just running out of time. I can't do all of them. Anyway, so that's the deal. So great comment to end it. Thank you very much. Let's kill the chat overlay, I guess. We'll go back to the typical caption here. I can't even find it. It doesn't matter. There you go. So this is it. Anyway, so thank you guys for coming by. We're going to do this every Monday until we're done with 7% slower. So I don't know. I think there's like 10 or 12 chapters in this book. So we have at least 10 or so weeks. In a couple of weeks, we're going to skip one because I'll be out of town for a week, so I won't be able to do it in a few weeks. But we'll be here every Monday. We'll go through 7% slower. If you want to get a copy of the book, you can find it at 7% slower.com or on my website at theanxiestruth.com. This video will stay on YouTube. There's a playlist on my YouTube channel called Recovery Monday. So if you're not subscribed to the YouTube channel, you should probably do that. I'm going to pop over there later on and answer some comments so you feel free to comment. It will also stay in the Facebook group, although that's a swirling quagmire of chaos. You won't be able to find it there after a couple of days, and it stays on my Facebook page. I'm going to post them to Instagram, but I'm probably going to stop doing that because Instagram hates long-form video. They don't want to know anything about it. If it ain't a 30-second reel, Instagram doesn't care. So thanks, guys, for coming by. I will see you again next week, same time, same place. We'll do chapter 2 of 7% slower, and if there's any questions or comments, come at us.