 Everybody struggles in recovery. Everybody. We know it's not linear. So the best thing we could do about that is to expect to struggle and plan accordingly. So it's Monday, which means recovery Monday. This is episode 30. Let's get started. For those of you who do not know, we've done this now 29 other weeks. And by the way, welcome back because we were not here this week. Every Monday we do a lesson out of this book, The Anxious Truth. This is my recovery guide, covers everything you need to know, or most of what you need to know at least, getting past things like panic disorder and agoraphobia. If you'd like to copy that book to follow along with these, check it out at TheAnxiousTruth.com. All of these recovery Monday episodes, by the way, because we only have a few left, are all saved on my YouTube channel in a playlist. So if you ever want to go back and watch them again, they're all right there. So avail yourself of the resource. They will stay there forever. All right, let's put the chat up. Let's see what everybody's doing. Just let me know that everything is working. I'm pretty sure that it is. What up B? Katia's here. Kat is here. We got two cats here at the same time. So last week we missed a week. Sorry about that. School stuff took precedence. I was just kind of buried last week. This week is a little bit lighter, assignment-wise. So that's good news. I am now, this is week seven of the first 10-week term, and my master's program is going really well. I'm excited about it. It's pretty cool. So yeah, so here we are. Let's wait for the rest of the crew to show up. Hey, Nikki, what up? Sorry, I have to look down here for the comments. I'm not being rude. I just want to read your comments. I will put the chat overlay up so you guys could see what each other is saying. Is that even grammatically correct? And then let's get into this. So expecting to struggle. We all hear this, the saying all the time that recovery is not linear. They're right. There are ups and downs. Generally speaking, recovery sort of looks like the stock market, if you will. If you look at the stock market over a long period of time, it looks like a straight line, right? It just keeps going up and up and up over time. Within each one of those kind of small periods, though, if you look within a year, you'll see ups and downs. If you look within a month, you'll see even more ups and downs. If you look within a day, even more, and from hour to hour, the stock market is up and down and up and down. It's very jagged. In fact, it almost would look like a straight line on any given day, or even a downward slant on any given day. But if you pull back and look at a longer term, you see that the curve is always up. So that's recovery. It's just not linear. And some days it looks bumpier than others. The curve is jagged. Some days you have a little bit of a downward slope. It happens. So we hear this all the time. But I hear people just sort of pay lip service to it, like, hey, recovery is not linear. But let me tell you why I'm back to square one anyway. Let me repeat the phrase that recovery is not linear. Then let me dump all over it by telling you why my recovery has been ruined by this experience that I had. So it's sort of not fair. You really have to take into account the idea that recovery is not linear. And if we want to be brutally honest about this and get down to brass tax, except my Twitter stock, sorry, Ilana's ruining it for you. But if you want to get down to brass tax, recovery is not linear is really just code for you're going to struggle. Like you're going to struggle in the recovery process. That happens. We have struggles. Some days are better than others. I had plenty of struggle days. So what does that struggle sort of look like? The struggle looks like days when maybe things don't go as well as you want them to. Maybe you had your experiencing more anxiety than you would hope to, which is kind of every day because none of us wants to experience that kind of anxiety, right? So maybe it's a little bit more severe than you thought. Maybe you set out to do an exposure challenge and it didn't go quite as well as you wanted to. Maybe you're having a rough week. Maybe things are just kind of going awry in your life. And that life stress is sort of triggering a little bit of an increased response anxiety response. There's a bunch of different ways that you can struggle. Sometimes we struggle emotionally because we think, well, I'm never going to get better. We get impatient. We get frustrated with ourselves. If you're struggling with self-esteem issues or you're the type of person who tends to judge yourself very harshly or negatively or you beat yourself up when things don't go the way they want. Or maybe you have some pressure from the outside. People who are maybe putting some pressure on yourself or on you to get better, faster or you're ruining things for them or whatever it is. There's so many reasons why we might struggle kind of practically with progress. And there are times that we will struggle emotionally in how we feel. We're disappointed. We're discouraged. We're angry. We're resentful. There's a bunch of different things that are going to happen. So we have to expect that this is going to be the case. So it's not enough just to sort of do the old cliche, recovery is not linear. We really have to get down to brass tacks and say, well, that means I'm going to struggle some days. Some days I'm not going to feel so great. Some days it's going to be harder than other days. What do I do? So I think the first thing that you have to recognize is, number one, this is going to happen. That's part of the process too. And there are lessons in the struggle. So the very first thing that I would tell you about struggling is you have to really be careful that you don't define everything based on how you feel. So if you are continually in that process where it's like, Oh, I had a good day. So I'm doing great. Oh, I had no anxiety. So I'm doing great. Oh, I had anxiety fail over square one. I'm a failure. This isn't working. I'm on the struggle bus. If you are in the habit of always judging your progress and assessing how you're doing based on how you feel, then you are much more likely to be susceptible to the Oh, I'm struggling thing. So we say all the time and I wrote it in this book and I talk about it all the time. It's in the podcast episodes. We only care what we do, not how we feel, which I know sounds ridiculous in like sort of self-help and spirituality and personal development circles. Like I'm telling you to not care how you feel, you will care how you feel, but you can't judge based on how you feel. If you think you're only doing okay, if you have no anxiety or you don't panic, then the minute you do experience that those things, you're going to declare struggle and you're going to declare that that struggle is a five alarm fire that's burning down your house. And that doesn't have to be that way. So we have to expect to struggle. We care about having those negative feelings because those negative feelings of anxiety and panic and all of those things, uncertainty and the things that come with it, that distress, the recovery lessons are in that we need that. Now, we're not talking about that today, but part of the idea of being prepared for the struggle is the acceptance that that is true. Like if you are unwilling to accept that there are lessons in that struggle, in that discomfort, then you're going to have a hard time maintaining forward progress. Like we need to move through anxiety. We need to move through fear. We need to move through panic. We need to do scary and difficult things. We have to do those things. We're doing them to get better. We're not doing them to not feel it. We're doing it to feel it so that we can get better at feeling it. That's the recovery process. So if you're going to glue yourself to how you feel all the time and decide that your entire progress and your assessment of how well you're doing and success or failure is based only on how you feel, then struggle is going to be almost continuous thing for you. And you will overemphasize that struggle when it happens. So we have to be mindful of that. But when we do get into a situation where, hey, even people who are like fully, you know, look, I'm the guy that wrote the damn book, like I wrote the book, but even the guy that wrote the book had days where I struggled because I would get angry. I would get impatient. I'm not the most patient person. I would get frustrated. I would get sometimes resentful of myself and the situation. I would get sometimes a little bit, I would feel a little bit of grief sometimes, or what's the word I'm looking for? Regret for the time that I had lost. Those are things that I would feel on a fairly regular basis because I'm a human being. So even the guy that wrote the book about how to do recovery would experience struggle, just that I understood that I was going to feel those things. And I wasn't in the trap of like, oh, well, now that I feel sad today about my anxiety, that I'm off the rail and it's all over. I never felt that. So you have to expect that you're going to have those days. And what can we do when that happens? Well, first of all, we never deny our feelings, right? So we never deny that. And anybody that talks about this stuff and tries to help in this area would tell you, you're doing a difficult thing. You're doing brave things. You're doing, you're trying to find courage. You're challenging yourself. This is not an easy task. So the one thing that kills me that people do say to me all the time is, well, easier said than done. Well, I never said it was easy. I never ever say it was easy. Like we're doing difficult things. And when we do difficult things and things that are new to us and challenge us, then we are going to stumble. We are going to struggle. We are going to have a hard time. We're going to have to work on it and practice it and repeat things. So accept that that is true and accept that when human beings do things like that, we also have emotional reactions. You're going to feel frustrated. You're going to feel angry. You're going to feel resentful. You're going to feel all of those things. So in the end, the first thing that you have to do in terms of struggle is to say, well, this is going to happen. And I have to acknowledge that I'm going to have these emotions. I can't decide not to have them. They're pretty normal. And I'm going to have to say, well, I'll take a little bit of time and say, okay, I'm going to have to feel these emotions right now. So I had times when I would come back from my exposure work in the morning and I would just be pissed off and like, okay, well, I was angry or I was sad or you know, I'd have a bunch of different emotions. I mean, like, well, I'm going to have to spend some time and just feel this emotion now. So the first thing is when the struggle hits, we don't want to struggle against the struggle. Like, oh, I can't struggle. I can't. It's too much if I struggle. Like, okay, I'm going to have a little bit of a struggle for today. That's okay. So it's important to understand you're going to have to take time to acknowledge that like we never want to suppress that. Like, oh, I'm not allowed to feel sad. I'm not allowed to feel angry. I'm not allowed to feel. You're always allowed to feel. So part of what recovery teaches us is that all of our states are acceptable and okay, all of them, like calm, happy, anxious, uncertain, vulnerable, excited, angry, like all states are okay. We're learning that all of our normal human states are okay. They're not too much. We can handle them. So that's why I say there's lessons in the struggle, right? So okay, today I'm struggling. So what can I do about that? And in the book I did not do one of the more popular podcast episodes I ever did was expect to struggle and the bad day playbook. Now I did not write the bad day playbook in this book. That is something that I sort of came up with afterwards. So but I'll include it here because they kind of go hand in hand. So when you find yourself on the struggle bus, what can you do? You can acknowledge that. You can speak that out loud. If you have a support system, people who will hear you, listen to you, empathize with you, like I'm really struggling today. I've had a hard time the last week in my exposures. It's really getting me down. It's okay to say that. It's totally okay to say that. If you have a good support system, my Facebook group is awesome for that. You guys are in the group, you know this. People will show up and it's okay. We'll cheer for you. It's okay. Everybody feels this way. You're not alone. That's important. If you have close friends and family, whoever might be able to talk to and voice those feelings, too, that's okay to do that. Maybe you want to write them down or journal or video yourself or something. That's okay. All okay. Express what you have to express. Get it out. Understand that it's a normal part of it. But then we have to sort of draw the line. So we sort of have to draw the line and say, okay, I don't have to squash my struggle. I don't have to squash my feelings or my emotions or my reactions. But I don't have to turn them into a part-time job or a full-time job either. That's really important. So I think one of the most important parts of the struggle for me was I would almost sort of mentally put a time limit on it. Okay, I'm going to just lick my wounds this morning and that's fine. This is the way it's going to have to be. I'm going to have to just sit in the dark and be pissed off at the world and angry at myself and all of those things. But then at two o'clock this afternoon, I'm going to go out and drive again. I'm going to go out and do something harder. I'm going to go take a walk. I'm going to take the dog for a walk. I'm going to do something. So I think one of the important things about struggle is to expect that it's going to come, like I said, and then when it comes, validate that experience and those emotions. And I knew this was going to happen and here I am. But we cannot decide to set up camp in struggle and say, I'm struggling. It's all over. I can't do this. There's no way. I can't do this. There's no way I'm never going to get better. It's part of the struggle. Those are normal things to pop into your head. But then once you've expressed that, now you have to have sort of a plan in place. And that's the bad day playbook that I talk about and say, okay, well now what can I do next? I did a podcast episode. And by the way, they're all on my website. So if you go to TheAnxiousTruth.com and just search for bad day playbook, you will find that podcast episode. I believe that it's an excerpt from the book and then I expounded upon it. Also, there's a podcast episode that's really popular. That's called What Do We Do When We Fail? So if you have an exposure that you think you failed at, what do we do? Well, we do it again right away. So you express your failure, you feel all those emotions, then I'm going to do it again. So the main thing that you have to do with struggle is to understand that when it comes, I have to let it come, I have to move through it, but then I have to move beyond it. I have to keep going. So yeah, you don't be, I'm glad that you like that. Yes, you don't have to set up camp in struggle and decide, well, since I'm struggling today, that means I am always going to struggle. This means I will always feel this way. One of the things that kind of traps us into these problems, into things like panic disorder, health anxiety, OCD, blah, blah, the things we talk about here are the idea that my state is permanent or might be permanent or it will last way longer than I wanted to. When in reality, everything in life, including how you feel, your emotional state, your anxiety, your panic, even happiness, they're all transient things. So struggle will tell you, like that said, I'm stuck and I'm never getting out of this quick sand. But the reality is that every single thing in the universe is transient. Everything is transient. Like we change physically, we change mentally, we change emotionally, our moods go up and down. This is normal. So I'm struggling at 9am. It doesn't mean I'm going to be struggling at 9am three weeks from now. Unless I pitch a tent here in Struggleville and I stay here and I do nothing but repeat. I'm struggling. I feel, I feel, I feel. At some point, your plan has to be, okay, I'm going to have to get up and move forward, even though I am in Struggle mode right now. I'm going to have to do something small. So to me, and I'll take some comments in a second, I'll just wrap up really quickly with sort of the Bad Day Playbook and go listen to that podcast episode if you haven't. The Bad Day Playbook usually says, okay, now go back. Now go back and circle back and do something easy. Go back and do an exposure you've already mastered. Go back and start from the very beginning. It doesn't matter if you're six months into recovery. It doesn't matter. When you're having struggle days, it's perfectly okay to say, well, let me just circle back and repeat some of the things that I know I've sort of already mastered. They help you build confidence. They help you get back on your feet. They help you get back in touch with the competency that you have built over time. There's so many good ways to do that. Now ask your support system to cheer for you. Like guys, help me get off my butt here so I don't stay stuck in this rut. That is what you can do when Struggle hits. So when I say this title of this episode is Expect to Struggle and I don't know why I have my name up there instead of this. This is what should be up there, whatever. But in the end, the title of the episode is Expecting and Planning for Struggle. You have to remember that this is planning for Struggle is, yeah, it's going to come. And then what will I do when I struggle? Feel it, validate it, move through it, get the emotional support you need, bend people's ear, they'll listen to you. It's okay. Yes, I know you're feeling really shitty today. I give you a hug if I could. Come and sit with me and I'll just listen to you, whatever. This is the kind of support we all deserve. And then it's on you. Like, okay, guys, now help me get up and start moving forward again. And what can I do? I can circle back around and start from the beginning and do some stuff that I know I can do. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how small it is. That's not backwards. That's not failure. That's not anything. That's what we do. We get up, we brush ourselves off, and we just keep going the best we can. And starting with some things that we know we can do that we've already mastered is a good way to get back up on our feet. So that's what I would suggest as a general rule of thumb in terms of what is your plan for when you struggle, right? What is your plan? One more quick thing, and that would be struggle based on external circumstances. I'm sick. Someone in my family is sick. We're moving. My car is in the garage, so my car is in the shop, so I can't drive today. I'm between jobs. We're having financial problems. That happens. And sometimes we don't get to control that. So when we are struggling because of those external factors that are sort of imposing logistical or like just reality on us, logistical problems that are based on reality on us, the best we can do is to say, okay, well, what is the best I can do right now? What is the best I can do right now? I can't help it that I'm sick right now. I can't help it that I broke my leg. I can't help it that, you know, I'm two weeks between jobs. I can't help those things. So recovery is the process of learning that we are always capable. I said it before, all of our states are permissible. All of our states are handleable. And life is handleable too. So when you're struggling based on external circumstances, sometimes the best you could do is say, well, forget recovery for a second here. Let me see how I can handle and move through these circumstances as best I can, which is very different than just waving the wife leg and saying, oh, that's it, you know, I can't, my recovery is torched now because this happened, because I got sick, or because there was an injury, or because my boyfriend broke up with me, or whatever it happens to be. Okay, that's a terrible situation. We're going to have to work through it the best we can. That's part of recovery too, learning and exercising your competency and learning your strengths. That's all part of it. So I just want to throw that out there. So let me scroll into the chat a little bit here and look at some comments and scroll up a little bit. And I'm sorry that here, I can do this, I can put them over here. So it's not so bad. Let's see. I'm going to scroll through. I'm struggling so bad. I'm sorry, I can't see your name. If you're in the, if you're in the Facebook group, you guys know this by now from silly things, a haircut too short and pain in my shoulders. I am every one of those things. I would almost bet that I know who that is without knowing the name. Again, this comes back to I'll put it up on the screen. This comes back to I can't handle anything, the belief that I can't handle it. I can't handle if my shoulders are sore. I can't handle it if I get a haircut that I don't like, but you always do. You have always, always, always handled it. If you're in this video watching and commenting right now, you have literally handled everything that life has ever thrown at you ever. So I just have to keep repeating that sometimes. But well, I feel, I feel bad because of this haircut. Okay. But you've also always handled that too. So at some point there's the realization that like I'm handling all of this. I don't like how I feel, but I can handle my feelings. If you, if you wave the white flag every time you have feelings, you get stuck in this loop that just continually runs again and again and again. Okay. Let's throw this up on the screen again. I'm sorry that I can't see your name, but I was doing good that I hit a curve in the anxiety road. I really am trying to see this opportunity. It is tough. Again, we always want to acknowledge that it's good that you're trying to see that opportunity to learn. It's not the default. Human beings hate challenge. We hate failure. We hate discomfort. We hate fear. We hate all of those things. That's okay. That's the way we're wired. Not a single, I don't think there's one of us walking the planet that's like, yeah, I can't wait to struggle. Nope, nobody. There are certain instances where I think there's a lot of, I don't want to use the word toxic because it's way overused. But in a lot of the self-development and personal development space, you'll see that like get comfortable being uncomfortable and, you know, build your character. Like, yeah, okay, whatever. But in the end, we don't like these things. So it's not the default to say like, yeah, I'm struggling. Man, now I'm going to learn. First, we hate it. And first, we want to stop it. And first, we want to be moan it. And that's okay. Then we move forward. And then we say, okay, where are my opportunities? So it's okay if it's hard to see that. It's totally hard. I get that. This is important. This will impact how you view the struggle. So when I say when you're in struggle day, go back and repeat some old things that you've sort of done already. This is a good reason why it reconnects you to the progress you've already made. And if you never give yourself credit for the moving forward, and you're moving forward all the time, if you never acknowledge that, and you never give yourself credit for that, and you're always returning to but I feel, but I feel, but I feel, again, struggle is more likely to pop up. I think I could make the argument that there's no such thing as struggle not popping up. We all experience varying states. But I will tell you that by the time I got halfway through and toward the advanced stages of my recovery, I would almost guarantee you that I had days that many of you would say were struggle, struggle, struggle. And to me, they stopped feeling like struggle. And part of it, it was staying in touch with like, wow, look what I've done now, look what I've done now, look what I've done now. So that can make a difference. If you refuse to give yourself credit for your progress, you're more likely to to find those chat to call challenges struggle. That helps. Just kind of scroll through here. Okay, well, I'll throw this up. I'm not learning lesson I have symptoms and freak out still. So after so long, I think because you're hoping that you won't freak out, like the freak out is the lesson, right? The freak out is the lesson. It's important to say that. I think some people get stuck in the that mistake that says, oh, if I freak out, then that is failure. I'm not doing it right. No, no, no, the lesson is in the freak out. I freaked out 1000 times. Nothing bad has happened to me. Let me go freak out again. So sometimes that's just a shooting at the wrong target sometimes. But sometimes it is like, well, you are kind of shooting at the right target. But there is a refusal at an emotional level. Nope, I refuse to feel this way. I'm not going to allow it. And that's tough. So if you're in a situation where you are going to refuse on an emotional level to allow those feelings, they can never happen. Never, never, never. But yet I will go and do exposures to make them happen again and again, well, you're putting yourself in a bit of a torture chamber. That's not fair. So you almost have to decide, am I willing to feel these things or am I not this important? I think you don't talk about that enough. And I'm going to talk about it a lot more. If we are not willing to feel the things, then just doing the work is almost putting you in a continuous like torture chamber. Well, I'll do it, but I'm not really willing to do it, but I'll do it anyway, because Drew says to do it or the group says to do it or this book says to do it, you have to be willing. And look, that willingness will waver from time to time. That's not rock solid to get that. But if you're completely unwilling, like I should never feel this ever, ever, ever, then doing this work is going to wind up being very frustrating. So we do have to talk about that. This is, there are mechanics here, but the mechanics are predicated on, I'll go through it really quickly. You're new to this game. I don't mean to call it a game, I'm trivializing it, but you're new to this situation. I've tried everything. You come from the essential oils camp and all the things and gut health and nothing is working and you stumbled upon this crazy dude from New York talking about stuff, writing books and making videos. And so the first phase is I have to understand what this is. Oh, I'm not broken. Oh, I'm not sick. Oh, this is the actual nature of this problem. And then from there you have to understand, well, okay, well, then what's the nature of the solution? Oh, this is the nature of the solution. Oh, oh, I have to do this. That is super critical. That part, oh, I have to do this. If your answer is, uh-uh, then it's really, really hard to say, well, I'm going to keep moving forward and just do the mechanics of exposure and exposure and exposure if you are really unwilling to feel those things. You have to really get to that. So, well, again, we will talk about that more, uh, for sure. Uh, so let me scroll up here. Did I get that again? What did I get? Um, okay, those mom will pop it up here. This is the same with physical stuff, right? Yes. I'm a broken record, but the dizziness throws my off kilter and I have days in a row when I can't just seem to work through it. So yeah, it's the same. And again, at some point that's that refusal. Well, okay, I'm dizzy. So all bets are off. I'm dizzy again. I can't, I can't do it. I'm dizzy. Okay. Well, I'm dizzy, but I can still walk even while I feel dizzy. I can still work even while my brain is telling me that, nope, there's, there's, nope, this can't do it, but I'm going to do it even though I think I can't do it. So there's subtlety in there, for sure. Uh, there's, there's subtle subtlety. Okay, let's throw this up here. I beat myself up over still not coping correctly with the physical symptoms. This, and I made a post on this, I think on Instagram last week, none of this information should ever be used. Oh, and I didn't actually say it. That was Kimberly Quinlan. Uh, Kim said it in her last podcast episode, but she said none of this information is meant to be a weapon to be used against yourself. Like, okay, now these people are pointing out what I'm supposed to do. And I just suck because I can't do it. No, you're learning something new. This is completely counterintuitive, completely counterintuitive. None of this makes any sort of common sense sense to anybody. And that's why about a zillion people, you know, will look at me and say, you're crazy. You obviously never experience the anxiety or panic. Oh, what do you mean? I'm supposed to intentionally be afraid. No way. Like none of this makes sense. So beating yourself for not doing it correctly is really common, but certainly not needed. What, what did you do incorrectly? Like you didn't do anything incorrectly. Running is maybe we might say counterproductive. I ran out of my exposure. I ran from the anxiety, but the lesson you can even take at the end is, okay, well, I ran, but again, nothing bad happened to me. So you can even learn something in the running instead of deciding, well, I blew it again. I can't do it. Right. Right. That's not required. Try to, to, to realize that, that it's not required. That's not a helpful thing. Sometimes, and I'm a little bit of rantier now, but sometimes we use that self-deprecation as a way to sue their, sue their discomfort a little bit. Consider that. Like I wrote about that in the morning newsletter. If you're not subscribed to the anxious morning, go to the anxious morning.com and subscribe to that. It's free. But I wrote about that. Sometimes when we fail, or we think that we're struggling, for some people, a little bit of a insidious little habit is to use self-deprecating responses to soothe that discomfort. I don't like that feeling. That hurts. So I will just say, yeah, I suck. I can't get it. And in a way that soothes things a little bit. You get a little bit of temporary relief when you like, I'm the worst. I can't do it. I don't get it because you also, then, if you're talking, speaking that out loud, you'll also get a little bit of counter back, right, from people. No, you're really, you're okay. You don't suck. So in a way, we should be aware of that. Sometimes that self-deprecating response is a little bit of a self-soothing mechanism. But it's self-defeating, even though it might be self-soothing for a few minutes. Okay. Let's scroll. Nat is here. Nath. Natalie. I don't know if you say that. Did I say that? I don't know. I know you're French, so I don't want to blow it. I'm sorry, late. First of all, let me point something out. You don't have to apologize for being late to a live stream, right? You never, nobody has to ever apologize to me. Like, Nat, you don't have to apologize for being late to a video. The video will be here forever. You can go back and watch any time you want. I pushed myself for going for a walk, even though I fell kind of weak, but I went. That's great. It's really good, but I wanted to throw that up there because of the apology. What's that all about? And I'm going to also, while I have your attention for a second, that thing we're like, well, here I am at the dentist and I'm really afraid to go to the dentist, but here I am for the third time, actually getting my procedures done, but I'm going to say that I'm not brave. Like, boom, my head almost exploded. If you're doing it, then you are literally displaying bravery. And that's a lesson for everybody watching. I'm not brave. I literally have people say that in the middle of exposures, I'm not brave, but you're doing the exposure. By definition, you are exhibiting courage right then and there. Like, that's a thing. Okay, let's scroll down. How am I doing? Oh, man, I'm not even halfway through. I've been missing my old non-anxious self lately. Okay, that's fair. This is a really common thing. You know, I talked about all those emotions that sometimes come up when we hit the struggle path, right? Or when the struggle bus missing my old non-anxious self. I used to get that one a lot. A lot. I used to spend a lot of time pining away to get the old me back. When will the old me come back? When is he going to come back? When is that guy going to come back? That was pretty common. I spent a lot of time doing that. One of the things that I did learn to do is I know I got to stop doing that. Like just wishing for him to come back isn't going to bring him back. I got to do something. And as it turns out, like he did come back, but he came back in a better version, which happens to all of you guys. You'll see. I always put it. I'm going to always put this up. Always. So my Twitch audience. I think I have three followers on Twitch now, by the way. Three. I want you guys celebration. You're going to be caking and refreshments afterwards for my third Twitch follower. Let's see here. Okay. This is interesting. I look at all pictures of me and miss that person so bad. And I wish I could warn her. So I think this is a double-edged sword. Like we, that might be a good way to work through some of those emotions, right? So when you're having the emotion of, boy, I really miss old me. I'm sad over who I am now. I'm sad over this situation. I have regret. I have grief over the situation. That might be a really good way to express it. Right? We're not, you know, I think most people would say, Oh no, he's going to tell her not to do that. But that's okay. Maybe you take some time to do that. But then how can we make sure that we don't turn that into a weapon? So maybe, maybe we can do like, I wish I could warn her. Maybe an interesting exercise to do would be like, write a letter to old you. Hey, this is what's coming. And guess what? These are some of the things that, that you might be tempted to do that you maybe shouldn't do because when you write a letter to your old self, sometimes you're writing to yourself also. So that can also be a useful thing. You get to express your emotions, and it might actually help you find a new perspective and like, Oh yeah, I see what I did. I did this. I did this. I could change this. I could do that. I could change that. So I like that you're doing that, Jen. It's good. Let your emotions out. They have to be out there. Okay, let's keep going here. On the tough struggle there is let's see. In my book said something like we need bad days more. I'm putting it up on the screen. So Katya brings up, I guess I did write that. I don't have the time to remember what I wrote. It says something like we need bad days more than we need good days. That is 100% true. The bad days is actually when we do the learning. So Katya, thank you so much for putting that out there. Thank you so much. That is so important. It's the reason why I tell people to not wait till you feel good. I got to wait till I feel good to do my exposures. I got to wait till I feel good to do the hard things. No, the most important days to act are the days when you feel the worst. Those are the days when we learn. Because if you feel good, what did you learn? I felt good today. Excellent. But if I feel bad, well, I can't do anything. So see, if you feel bad and you got out and you accomplish some things anyway, no matter how small they are, the lesson is, oh, feeling bad turned out to not be a disaster. It wasn't debilitating, even though I've been saying for years that it is. That's really important, really important. I see that people like the letter writing thing. That could be a thing. Again, but you have to be careful that you don't turn it into like an exercise in beating yourself up. You did this wrong. You did this wrong. You can maybe take an objective look at what has happened. What did I do? Oh, I see what I did. I started to become afraid of driving. Oh, I started to learn that if I stay home by myself, I might panic and that's not safe. Like write a letter to your past self to warn them of the pitfalls that are coming. But be objective. Do not turn it into and I suck and I did this wrong and I blew it and I did this wrong and I did that wrong. That's not okay. Don't do that. But sometimes the letter writing really maybe frames things in a different situation. The more we can eject, here's the deal with that. Where are we? 33 minutes. So irrational fear, which drives all of this stuff, right? Real fear. I'm not saying it's fake. It's real fear, but it's irrational. There's no basis underneath it, right? It's false fear. Real but false. That is always, it's irrational in nature, right? It's a disorder. It's a magnifier. It's a catastrophizer. It's all of those things. So we, oh, and it will subjectify everything. So your irrational fear will drive you to evaluate everything, everything, every event, every context, every person, every word said to you, every twinge in your body, every thought you have, you will attach subjective interpretations to those through that fear lens. So anytime we can inject objectivity into that, that irrational fear process, we do ourselves a favor. So if you guys are going to do the letter writing thing, try to write a very objective letter like you're writing a report for school. Here's, here's my report on my panic disorder. That's a very objective way to go. You wouldn't hand in a, you know, it wouldn't hand a paper to your teacher that says, I suck. I'm the worst and I made every mistake into the book. You would just describe what happened. It's almost, you know what? Write this book back to me. Like write this book back to old, to old you. So you're actually handing them the manual before it happens. That's a great way to learn. Okay. Let's keep going here. Have an accidental angry emoji from Sarah. That's okay. I'm gonna throw this up real quick. Do I believe childhood trauma and anxiety is a myth or having bad childhood does not matter. No, trauma is certainly not a myth. Trauma is not a myth. Like bad childhoods are definitely not a myth. Like I would never, ever in a million years say that, oh no, no, no, none of that stuff is real. It's 100% real. It's a tough, touchy subject. Now, I would, I would take a listen to, if you guys listen to the panic pod, which is Joshua Fletcher's podcast, he did a great episode on this with Sheru Traula. She is also a therapist in the UK. And I love her too. It a very candid discussion about trauma and how it fits into the anxiety recovery process. I never would say that it is a myth or that your bad childhood doesn't matter. It does matter. Those things 100% matter. What we care about is if you are reacting to things because of what has happened to you in the past, well, that's one thing. But if you are reacting in a new way to life because you are just afraid of how you feel now, then we went from having one problem to two problems, but both problems matter. So the thing that we always talk about is I use the fire analogy. If your trauma or your bad childhood is the match that lit this anxiety fire, if you blow out this match, that fire is still burning. And we have to put out the fire and blow out the match so we don't light it again. So it does matter. It does matter. We just have a little bit of a problem in the community where we're a little bit over generalizing the trauma thing. Anyway, if you want to listen to Josh's podcast, it's called The Panic Pod. It's the last episode he did with Sarut. And it was really, really good. Thank you. Very good. But no, it's not a myth. I would never say that. So we're almost done here, I think. Here we go. Jessica learns this is a big one. Learning that everything is temporary has been a game changer for me. This is one of the basic tenets of you know, Buddhism, everything is temporary. Everything is temporary. One of my favorite movies in the whole world is a movie called Moonstruck. I shouldn't, I'm not supposed to love that movie because it's not really like a guy movie. But I do love that movie because growing up in an Italian American family, it's incredibly authentic. So it makes me smile every time I watch it. And one of the chairs father, Cosmo Castorini, at one point, he's exasperated. He says, everything is temporary. And that is the best line in probably the whole movie. I didn't know it then, but I know it now because Cosmo was right. Everything is temporary. And when we, when we learn to live in that, I don't want to get too far into it, but that state of, that state of temporariness, groundlessness, when we embrace that and we like, okay, we're okay, we can surf, we can surf through this groundlessness, which is the thing I talked about with Lauren Rosen, if you've watched some of those videos, Lauren and I recording a podcast episode today, maybe we'll talk about that. It's a, it's a big deal. It's a big deal. It is a game changer when you can embrace that. So good job. I can't answer all of them because I'm running out of time here. This is good. Carol's working hard, by the way, the weather can't control the weather, right? Sometimes can't get out because it's raining or snowing or it's icy, whatever. Exercise at home. Sometimes that's what we have to do, right? We sometimes external circumstances press upon us. We do the best we can to adapt, adapt, improvise, overcome. That's what the Marines say, I believe. Oh, this is good. GBG went to a Counting Crows concert on a struggle day and went up having a blast anyway. I'm always amazed. I would go see the Counting Crows, by the way. It's a good show. I'm always amazed at the number of times that you hear people in the community relay their stories. Sometimes the story is just like, hey, you know what? This wasn't easy. I struggled from the beginning to the end, but I did it. Yes, I did it. Many times the story is, well, it started really bad, but oh my God, I had such a good time at the end. Now, we never go into this challenges like demanding that we have this amazing, joyful time, but we have to consider the possibility that we may. We may have a joyful time when we do those things. We may get out of our own heads, engage with the world, and have a great time. It's possible. If we're unwilling to accept the possibility that that might happen, then it's a little bit defeatist. Or we might struggle the whole time and feel crappy the whole time, but nonetheless, the lesson is there and you still accomplish the thing. So good job, GBG. I think we're at the end here. Everything is temporary. It always comes to an end. This is true. We're having concert talk. Love it. Sarah Drew from Wales. Let's see here. I can't put that on the screen. It's too huge. Why can I feel so good doing something hard and then struggle? Okay. So the question that Sarah asked is why can I have a good time doing something hard and then struggle when something is easy? The answer is don't know. Like if we knew the answer to that, that's like the million dollar question, you know, I would probably be able to just like, okay, everybody, here's the secret, and then you would never need to watch me again. We don't know. The bottom line is like it doesn't matter, you know, okay, well, I'm struggling today. I didn't expect to, but I'm finding this to be more challenging than I thought. Okay, it is what it is. Move forward. So we don't, sometimes we don't know. Sometimes we don't know. I'm going to take a couple more because I'm just at a time here at 39 minutes. I try and do about 40 minutes tops. Oh, this is good. For the first time forever, I switched the feeling to the doing. The doing is where the recovery happens, not in the feeling. The feeling follows the doing. So this is really good. Show my brain that the danger was not real. The part of our brain that is governing this fear, that irrational field, does not know. It does not know words. It does not know memes. It does not know inspiring lyrics. It doesn't know soothing mantras. It doesn't know any of those things. It only knows experiences. So the doing is the important thing. A podcast episode coming out soon, I think, about CBT called is this CBT. I think it's a podcast episode or it's a morning newsletter. I can't remember. We're talking about that, like old school CBT was about trying to change your thoughts. Like, oh, let me challenge my thoughts and replace them. But really, in the way we're in right now, we know better than that. And it's like, no, no, no, the thoughts and the feelings really follow the behavior. So if you want to feel different, act different. Really important. Really important. I've got to scroll to the bottom, guys. I'm sorry. Let's see here. I think that's it. This is a great comment. We won't tell. Your secret is safe. Your secret is safe with me, at least. I can't vouch for everybody else. I might throw you into the bus, but I'll keep it cool, man. I got your back, brother. Beaches. It's good. I've never seen beaches. Maybe I'll have to watch beaches. We'll watch beaches together. We'll just like cry and no one will know. We'll just hide. So there you go. Anyway, guys, that is it. I'm out of time. I can't go much longer than this. We only have, I think, three of these left. I will be back next Monday. We'll do it again. Same time, same place. YouTube, Facebook, the Facebook group. And then at the end, I post them on Instagram and they will just stay here on my YouTube channel, on Facebook and the Facebook group and my Instagram, even though nobody watches them on Instagram. Anytime you want, come back and get them. Again, if you need to copy this book, you can find it at theanxiestruth.com. Find it at theanxiestruth.com. All of my books are there. And the Anxious Morning, which is the morning newsletter, which is free. You can subscribe to that if you didn't do it already. And all the things. So I'll see you again next week. Oh, Movie Club says Kat Katya. Yes, I would love to do Movie Club. I will let you guys in on a little secret. This is a super long shot, but I'm trying to reach out to the people that own the rights to What About Bob? We all love What About Bob. If I can get them to okay it for me to stream it once, because they won't let me do any more than that, for educational purposes, we're going to do a live stream of What About Bob, but I have to get permission first and that ain't easy. So I'm working on it. All right, guys, I will see you next week. Thanks for coming by. Thanks for all the questions in the comments and we're out of here.