 Welcome to The Anxious Morning. Every weekday morning will take a few minutes to go over some important lessons that you can use in your anxiety recovery journey. Away from the endless noisy scroll of social media, The Anxious Morning brings you support, education, inspiration, encouragement, and empowerment. For more, visit us at TheAnxiousMorning.com. Every month I will ask one of my friends or collaborators to write a guest entry for The Anxious Morning. This month our guest writer is my friend and respected anxiety OCD therapist Kimberly Quinlan. I love what Kim has brought for us today. I hope you will too. I'm often asked what is the one skill you have learned that help you the most in your recovery and the answer is actually quite simple. It's actually a simple question and the question is can I make space for this discomfort. I remember going to my therapist many years ago when I was in the early stages of treatment. I told my therapist a story of a recent event and how much fear I was experiencing about it happening again and she sat with her hand rubbing the side of the leather couch and gently she asked I'm wondering instead of us reviewing this event and addressing the probability of this event ever happening again could we first just make space for the discomfort you feel. Doesn't she know that that requires me to feel my feelings? Does she not know how much I would prefer to solve this problem instead of leaning into the discomfort that I feel? Together we sat for maybe 15 to 20 seconds as she continued to run her hand back and forth over the leather of her chair and we together practiced just allowing space for all the feelings I felt. Fear of the future. Annoyance of the activity that she was asking me to do. The sadness that I felt when I felt this way. The frustration in my mind and the fact that it was messing with me yet again. It was hard to make space for these feelings but I quickly in that moment understood what she was trying to achieve with me. There was much benefit to making space for what I was feeling instead of solving it in that moment. I wanted to take this time with you thank you so much Drew for this opportunity to consider just making space for your discomfort. Creating space for this discomfort can feel painful and I know it can feel irresponsible in the moment. Fear can convince us that we are doing the quote-unquote smart thing by calculating the probability of our fears coming true or what would happen and how to solve it. Uncertainty can feel so urgent and propel us towards safety behaviors that keep us stuck in a painful loop of anxiety and they keep our minds stuck. Now that I am a therapist and an educator I often ask my clients and my listeners the very same question. Is there a chance that you could make space for this experience? Now when I'm with my clients we giggle together when I tell them that I remember being asked this exact same question and we acknowledge that no human enjoys making space for discomfort. However when we do a cost benefit analysis we quickly learn that allowing discomfort has way better outcomes than pushing discomfort away or wrestling with its validity. Sure when you put in the time to solve one fear you will feel some semblance of relief but what will you do next time the fear comes by with a new super duper important and urgent concern? That's right you will have to solve it all over again and in that process you will keep believing that you cannot tolerate or handle the discomfort of just allowing this fear to come and go as it pleases. So here we go. Let's practice together. Can you allow whatever you're experiencing just to be here? Just how it is right now. Can you make space for this experience to be messy? Can you drop your shoulders and loosen your jawbone and be kinder with the struggles you are having right now? Can you make space for this experience without assigning any meaning to what it means about you or your future? Remember this discomfort will not hurt you instead it will rise and fall with time if you allow it. Kimberly Quinlan LMFT is dedicated to providing outstanding therapy and counseling for those with OCD and related disorders, eating disorders and body focused repetitive disorders. She is also passionate about advocating for those with mental health disorders. Kimberly is dedicated to ongoing advocacy and education within the community for OCD, eating disorders and BFRBs. Find Kimberly online at CBTSchool.com. And if you're listening on iTunes or Spotify or someplace where you can leave us a rating or review, take a moment and rate the podcast and maybe write a small review. It really helps us out. Or just tell a friend about us. Thanks a lot.