 If you are struggling with chronic anxiety or working to overcome an anxiety disorder, you are going to have questions, lots of questions. So this week on the anxious truth, we're going to answer some common questions and a few not so common questions that were sent in by members of the community. So let's go. Hello everybody, welcome back to the anxious truth. This is episode number 273 of the podcast we are recording in early September, September yes of 2023 in case you are listening or watching in the future. If you are new to the anxious truth, maybe you just stumbled upon the podcast or the YouTube channel. The anxious truth is the podcast that covers all things anxiety, anxiety disorders, chronic anxiety and anxiety recovery. So if you're struggling with things like panic attacks or OCD or health anxiety or agoraphobia, then this is the place for you and I'm happy that you are here. I hope you find it helpful. Of course, if you are a returning viewer or listener, welcome back. Always glad that you're here. And by the way, I'm Drill Insulata creator and host of the anxious truth. So today on the podcast, we're going to do a good old fashioned Q&A. We haven't done one of these in a while. So yesterday I asked my Instagram audience to send in questions that I would answer on this week's podcast and there were a lot of questions. There were a lot of really great questions. Unfortunately, I cannot answer all of them because there were literally think 211 questions as of last, last tally this morning before I recorded, but I will pick out the ones that I think will be most useful to the community. And really before I get into some specific questions, we're going to talk about some very basic general principles that you can lean on because a lot of the questions I'm guessing came from people who are maybe newer to the community. And so a refresher of the basic principles will in fact answer all of those questions which seemed like individual questions, but they were really kind of the basics of accepting and going toward your fear and that sort of stuff and how this works. So we're going to do some general principles to answer a bunch of the questions in a blanket blanket kind of way. And then we'll get into some specific questions that I think you guys are going to find interesting. Of course, before we do that, I just want to remind you that the anxious truth of course is more than just this video, this podcast episode, there are 272 episodes that came before this. There are books that I've written on anxiety and anxiety recovery. There are some courses in workshops that I've put out at a reasonable cost that I think are helpful. At least people tell me that they are and all of the goodies can be found on my website at the anxious truth.com. So when you have a moment, go check it out. There's also a big red dog named copper who has decided that he needs to be on episode 273 of the podcast in case you hear him in the background, I'm going to let him chime in when he wants to. So anyway, hit the website at the anxious truth.com and take advantage of all the resources because they appear to be helpful according to the community. So you may get something out of it. Check it out. The anxious truth.com. Okay, let's get into some questions. So when I asked people to send in questions this week, I got a lot of them. And a lot of the questions are really the same question. And I know every time I do a Q&A, I went up getting around to this like most of those questions are really the same question just with different colors. So what I want to do is if you have been wondering, how do I deal with this particular symptom or sensation? What about this kind of anxiety? What do you do when it's when it's scary? How can I make myself do scary things? If you're asking that type of question and many of you did and I appreciate all the questions, by the way, I really do. But if you're asking that type of question, let's kind of go over some general principles that you can fall back on because these are the principles that get applied regardless of the specific sensation or symptom or scary thought or context. So remember that in this community and this podcast that I produce and the books that I write, we are talking about disordered states of anxiety, chronic disordered anxiety, which is essentially being defied as being afraid of being afraid. It is one of the defining characteristics of the disordered state. So if you are wondering what to do, because the thing you fear is your own body or mind, you are afraid of anxiety symptoms and scary thoughts themselves. You're anxious about being anxious or afraid of being afraid. Know that that's actually not a special situation. That is the basic core situation that I'm always addressing. So none of this is about how do I deal with anxious about my dog or I'm anxious about my partner or I'm anxious about this. You are triggered by things and we're going to get into that. But then the problem becomes the trigger is now the trigger. So I am afraid of the anxiety itself, regardless of why I'm anxious. Almost doesn't matter. I'm just anxious about being anxious and I'm afraid of being afraid. This is a common thread that runs through every episode of this podcast and every word of every book I've ever written. It's not just you. Everybody listening to this podcast alongside you is afraid of being afraid. They are anxious about being anxious. They are triggered by being triggered. So know that you are delightfully normal in a regular part of this community if that was the question that you sent in. So let's talk about how this all works. You feel things or you think things. Now, for this discussion, why you feel them or think them doesn't really matter. So let's put that aside. But when you feel things or think things, you may experience a state of distress. So the sensation you have in your body may trigger a state of distress. A thought that you have may be a thought about never getting better or scary thought about harm or something along those lines. You have a sensation or a thought or an emotion and it triggers a state of distress. You are frightened or disturbed or unsure or uncertain and you feel threatened by that feeling. So the fact that you are in a state of distress because of how you feel and what you think is the key. That's what we care about here in a big way. The state of distress is then interpreted by your brain and by you as proof that there is some threat that you must deal with. So you treat how you feel and what you think as an emergency because of the state of distress those feelings and thoughts and emotions create. So now apply this to panic attacks, anxiety symptoms, scary thoughts, intrusive thoughts, negative thoughts, fears about health, fears about not sleeping or anything else. It doesn't matter if you are distressed and treating that distress as evidence of danger or threat and acting in response of the state in response to the state of distress that the thought or sensation triggers in you, then you are square smack dab in the middle of internally generated anxiety land. We care about that because when we say things like you never get rid of anxiety because most anxiety that happens in a quote non-anxious person, you hear us use terms like that all the time, is externally generated. I'm really anxious because I have a big exam coming up at school. I'm really anxious because my wedding is tomorrow and I'm super nervous about standing up in front of everybody at my wedding. I'm really anxious because, oh my kid is going, it's the first day of school tomorrow and that's really emotional, I'm anxious about that. External events, things that are happening in our lives press on us and we may experience anxiety, externally generated anxiety. All human beings are going to go through that sometimes. But if the state of distress that you experience is itself the source of your anxiety because so many of you did ask that, I'm just afraid of the anxiety itself. What do I do? Well, you are now an internally generated anxiety land. It is part of the definition of the disordered state. Here is a absolutely key critical important concept that you can lean on. Afraid and distressed does not always equal unsafe. Like, I'm going to say that again. The fact that you are afraid or distressed by the symptoms in your body and the thoughts in your head does not automatically equal being unsafe. It's incredibly important because anxiety in its internally generated forms that we're talking about in this podcast and in my books and whatnot will trick you into gluing afraid and uncomfortable to endanger. If I am in distress, I am afraid, I am uncomfortable, it must mean I am in danger. So I have to act as if I'm in danger. I have to avoid, I have to stop this, I have to make it end, I have to get saved. But it is entirely possible. You have to at least consider that this is true. It is entirely possible for a human being to be afraid or uncomfortable while also being perfectly safe. Another thing I want to repeat. It is in fact entirely possible for a human being to be afraid or uncomfortable and also be safe at the same time. Now, if you are acting like you are under some kind of threat, but the source of that threat is coming from inside you, the way you feel or your thoughts, there's a really good chance that you are being fooled by that trickster internally generated anxiety and the principle of afraid but safe still applies, although you are going to have a really hard time accepting and believing that. Like, I know I, okay, cool, Drew, I could be afraid and safe at the same time, but it feels so strong. Like, how many of you listening are thinking right now, I hear you, but it feels. But when I get triggered, it feels so strong. It feels so real. Correct. Internally generated anxiety will demand that you treat it as if you are unsafe when in fact you are safe. Very important. So let's talk about the kind of the path that people will go through and I promise we're going to kind of finish up these general principles and we're going to talk about some specific questions. Everybody takes their first steps by usually seeing a doctor. That's super normal. Something goes wrong. You start to feel a different way. Everybody runs through a doctor and that's okay. That's not a crime. We all start that way. Some people see lots of doctors. They get everything checked out and that's okay. It's not only fine, it's almost a required starting point. Now, after the doctors, assuming that you are determined to be healthy, comes something that we call psychoeducation. This podcast is psychoeducation. Books that you read that people like me write. Claire Weeks books, those sort of things, that's psychoeducation. This is the part where you learn about the nature of an anxiety disorder and chronic anxiety and you hear that thoughts and sensations are scary. We hate them but that they're not dangerous. This is where experienced people, knowledgeable people, trained people can assure you that you are safe and won't die, go insane, or act on scary thoughts or whatever the feared outcome is. Now, after that, this is where things get dicey because you might logically hear the doctors and the mental health helpers and content creators and psychoeducators but on a logical level, you'll hear and sort of believe us but the emotional part of your brain and the lower part of your brain that is tasked with keeping you alive will not believe it. You may continue to dig and search and research and question and re-question and try to figure out what is wrong with your body and mind. You may repeatedly ask for assurance again and again in an urgent kind of way every time you feel afraid or triggered. Why? Because you feel distress internally generated. There's no external threat. It's coming from inside you and therefore that must mean that something is really wrong, right? You see where this goes off the rails? So you get checked out, perfectly fine, almost required first step. You start to hear people like me talk about this stuff and logically you hear us but when you are triggered that fear-based emotional reasoning kicks in and because I feel so afraid, because I am in such a state of distress, I'm going to throw all of that away and insist that something must be wrong and I'm going to act as if something is wrong and I need to be saved. So that's where you get stuck now in the cycle of I know what I have to do but it takes so much willpower. I know what I have to do but it's so scary. What do you do when you progress to a certain point in your recovery and then you hit a wall and you're afraid to go further? These are some of the questions that were sent in this week. This, this is it. That emotional reasoning is still hanging around and unfortunately it takes us to the next general principle here which is, I hate this part, the leap of faith. The leap of faith fueled by courage. So at some point you reach the point where there's no more checking and asking and researching and talking about what you think might be wrong or how to manage it or how to deal with your symptoms or how to overcome. If the discomfort itself is the threat, I am afraid because I am afraid, I am anxious because I am anxious, then it is internally generated and internally generated anxiety is the trickster. This is where we run up against the universal principle of taking a leap of faith because progressing toward getting better, overcoming, handling, managing, whatever word you wanna use, almost always includes those leaps of faith. Even when we do not believe that we are safe, when all the evidence around us shows us that we are safe. So reality is saying, you're safe, you've always been safe. You've always been okay. But internally we do not believe that because distress must equal danger, right? Emotional reasoning. Then it's time to test that assertion by taking the leap of faith. It's that leap which does require courage and bravery. This is the part that I wish I didn't have to talk about but that's the part that teaches it that the danger wasn't real and that even when we are sure that it was too much for us to handle and we would be overwhelmed, we're not. We're uncomfortable, we're afraid, we feel vulnerable, we're uncertain, we feel like we can't handle it but then we do. It's the leap of faith. At some point you hit that wall where it's like now I have to take a leap and I have to let reality teach me a lesson as opposed to following my state of distress all the time. That's where we learn and that's where we start to be able to correct that emotional reasoning through behavioral change. Now the part that everybody hates, maybe even more than the leap of faith is, now apply this to the question you sent in about your specific challenge. Scary thoughts about scary things, that too. We take a leap of faith. Thoughts about not sleeping and then something will go wrong because you don't sleep. Yep, that too. Feeling like you can't breathe while by the way you're actually breathing just fine. That too. Nauseous feelings, feelings of like dizziness or I might fall down. Yeah, that too. Heart anxiety, that too. The general principles that we rely on in recovery get applied across the board. Now that's a big ask because you may say, yeah, but what about heart anxiety? That has to be different, right? Because it's so important, my heart is so important. No, same. We go back to the beginning of the process here that I described, which is you got checked out. You've been checked out. You're okay, your body is physically okay. Yeah, we take a leap of faith. We apply this in all the principles. Now, in all the context, are there nuances? This is the big disclaimer here and you have to take this with you out of this podcast episode. Are there nuances? Are there specifics based on each individual and your exact circumstance? Of course there are, of course there are. So we use these principles, but then we fine tune them, right? And you get specific instructions from your counselor or your therapist. But since we can't address your exact specifics and your specific fear and your specific circumstance in a podcast, we fall back on the basic principles and you start your journey there. So the answer to most of the questions that were sent in this week is in this last 10 minutes that I just rambled in. Like this is the process that everybody goes through when you are dealing with internally generated anxiety where you are afraid of being afraid, you are distressed because you are distressed and you then interpret that distress as meaning that you must do something about that, something must be wrong, I must escape, I must avoid. And this is the process everybody goes through. Apply it across all of the different contexts that you guys sent in. So I would almost urge you to pause this if you sent in a question like that or you're thinking, well, what am I supposed to do with just the fear of the fear? I'm just anxious about being anxious. Rewind, listen again, pause, think about it a little bit, digest this because you are not beyond hope, you're not specially broken, you're not unique, you're not worse, you're the same as everybody else in this community and that's a good thing. So let's move on to some of the more specific questions that we got from the community. So the first question I wanna get to is a pretty interesting question because I think it's practical, it has practical considerations beyond just recovery. And that is after the crisis, air quotes has passed, do you still need therapy? Do you still have to work on yourself? Well, there's really no correct answer to that. The answer is maybe or maybe not. So recovery from like an anxiety disorder might mean that you don't feel like you need professional help anymore and that's fine or you might feel that there are maybe other issues in your life that you wanna work on with a professional, right? And that's totally okay, that's an individual choice. Maybe there are other issues in your life you wanna work on, but on your own or maybe just with the support of your family and friends. That's totally cool too, like all the options here are valid. Remember that human beings are kinda designed to change and learn and grow and change course throughout our lives. We're always changing and learning and evolving. So you can spend an entire lifetime working on yourself in some way and that's perfectly okay. If you don't feel the need to do that, guess what? That's also okay. So there's no set answer to this. That's a good question though. You can do what's right for you and that may change from month to month or year to year, it's all good. So the next question is what's the difference between OCD and GAD or like panic disorder and health anxiety? It's basically what's the difference between these two different types of anxiety? And the answer to that, especially the more we know and the more we research and the more data we compile in a practical sense, there's often very little operational difference between one form of chronic or disorder and anxiety and another. In fact, in most instances, if you have a counselor or a therapist or a psychiatrist and they are trying to reach, say, an official diagnosis for you, they have to take into account what's called differential factors, which like, well, be careful about diagnosing this because it might also, it might be this. Those differential considerations for all of these different anxiety types we talk about in this community almost always include a bunch of the other types. So if you look at, say, diagnostic criteria for panic disorder, you're gonna see the other types in there as differential considerations. In the end, there really are no clear cut boundaries between any of these different issues. So the answer to the difference between OCD and GAD is it almost doesn't matter because the approach in the end is the same. So don't get too caught up in like, well, I have GAD, so therefore it must be this or I have OCD, so therefore it must be this. As we go forward, you see that the way we approach almost all of these things really looks the same regardless of what the presenting condition is. So hopefully that helps. Here's the big one. How can you be sure that what you're feeling is just anxiety? And this is a tough one. The answer to that is you can't. Like the difficult answer is that there's never 100% certainty of anything ever in life, but a non-anxious, air quotes, non-anxious person understands this and we sort of live with that small degree of risk because there's always a tiny sliver of risk every minute of our lives. An anxious person, somebody who's in the grips of chronic or disorder and anxiety will not tolerate even a very tiny chance that something might really be wrong. A really anxious person, like in our community, will confuse possible with probable, right? I might know that it's possible that I'm gonna have a heart attack in the next five minutes, but I also understand that it's not probable whereas as soon as the anxious person knows that it's possible, then their assessment of probability, I call it life math, goes way out of kilter and they start to act as if possible means it's about to happen. That's kind of important. Recovery in this situation is the process of returning to being sure enough, which is one of the greatest things that I had Sally Winston on the podcast and Marty Sief and Sally Winston said, we're sure enough in most instances. And that rings true, the process of recovery gets us back to the point where we can be sure enough and we can base our choices and our actions based on what reality is showing us rather than acting entirely driven by what we think and feel. So can you be 100% sure? The answer is no, you never can. But recover people learn to be sure enough and that's good. So the next question is a really common question also, when am I allowed to rest? Is it okay to rest? Is rest avoidance? This is a big source of confusion in the anxiety disorder community and people who are dealing with the recovery process. I get it because it is super confusing. There's no cut or dry answer sometimes. People worry that they shouldn't rest because they think if they're resting in there, that's avoidance. And we vilify the word avoidance. Now it's true that avoidance in our context is what drives the disordered state. That is 100% true, but then we get latched onto that and we say, oh, if I'm not doing my exposure, if I'm not actively recovering during every waking moment, I must be avoiding it and I'm gonna make myself worse and that is a gross distortion. That's not true. You are allowed to rest. When you get tired, you rest. Rest is not avoidance. Rest is something that all human beings need. The problem in our context is that an anxious person will want to avoid, I understand, totally fine. I get it, it's part of the process. You will want to avoid because you are afraid in experiencing that state of distress so you wanna avoid whatever it is that triggers that on you. And sometimes the anxious person will say I need to rest when what they're really saying is I'm afraid and I'm gonna retreat but I'm gonna call it rest because I don't wanna say I'm retreating. That's okay. That's gonna happen sometimes. So I think the biggest issue here is being willing to do it wrong sometimes. Sometimes you're not gonna know whether you're tired or avoiding and you're gonna make the best choice you can make and sometimes you only know in retrospect and that's okay. Because if you look back the next day and say, you know what? I think I was hiding. I wasn't really that tired. Or you might say things like, well maybe I didn't have to take a two hour train ride exposure but I probably could have taken a walk around the block. I should have done that. Okay, cool. So then just adjust next time and you learn something from that experience. So you're not gonna really know and it's okay to get it wrong. As you get more experience and you have more of these experience and you allow yourself to learn from those experiences, you will regain the ability to know when you're actually tired versus when you're just afraid and wanting to hide. Totally fine. Don't worry about it. If you make a mistake and you hide one day and call it rest because now you're not sure. It is no harm, no foul. Learn from it, adjust. You'll change over time. Totally fine. Don't stress over this. What is the next one here? The next question was, we're gonna do three or four more. How does mindfulness fit into recovery? Now mindfulness and meditation are often held up as like these amazing like mindfulness as a cure, meditation fixes everything. No, not true. You hear me talk about meditation practice, focus practice and mindfulness all the damn time. When I wrote 7% slower, I essentially wrote a mindfulness book on the down low. Like 7% slower is a funny little book about slowing down but it's actually a mindfulness manual, believe it or not, in disguise. But in our context, it's best to conceptualize mindfulness because the act of just paying attention with intention and without judgment. So I'm going to intentionally put my attention somewhere of my choosing and I'm gonna do that without judging it. I'm not gonna judge how I feel when I do it and I'm not gonna judge my ability to pay attention. That's it, that's mindfulness. It doesn't change your state. It's not designed to calm you down. It's not designed to be a shield against anxiety. None of those things. Mindfulness in the context of recovery just means that when that internally generated anxiety that we talked about in the me in the episode, when it raises its head and it starts to look like a threat to you and it demands that you pay attention to it. I must be the most important thing in the room, says your internally generated anxiety. Mindfulness is the practice of saying, I'm gonna pay attention to the peanut butter sandwich that I'm making right now. While I'm uncomfortable and while you are screaming at me lizard brain that I need to pay attention to my heartbeat, I'm gonna do the best I can to pay attention to my sandwich or the song that's on the radio or the podcast or the conversation with my friend or the marble that I'm holding in my hand that I can feel or whatever, it doesn't matter. I'm going to pay attention to this instead with the intent of bringing those feelings along with me and I'm going to be nice to myself while I do it. And I'm not gonna make judgments based on how I feel when I do it or judge whether I'm doing it right or wrong. I'm just gonna practice that's mindfulness in recovery. I will add that I think mindfulness is essentially meditation in motion. So when we sit to practice meditation if that's a thing you're doing, I'm a fan. I talk about it all the time. I admit I'm a meditation fanboy but when we practice basic meditation we're only practicing focus. We're practicing paying attention and then mindfulness in my world this is the way I like to conceptualize it is mindfulness is just meditation in motion. So if you start with sitting quietly and stationary and practice your focus, your meditation skills for a couple of minutes here and there then consider getting up and taking that state with you. There you go, mindful state. So no great mystery, just pay attention. Okay, next question. Are positive affirmations okay? Okay, and the answer to that is sure. Now listen, I've done two podcast episodes. One was literally called why positive self-talk is bullshit. I mean, that's an aggressive title I admit. That's an episode I did years ago. It's actually very popular. But, and then I did another one called revisiting positive self-talk. Is positive self-talk truly like bullshit? Like I said in that podcast episode and never to be engaged in, no. I did the second episode to clarify that. Positive affirmations are fine. If you are drawn to that sort of thing and they help give you firm or ground to stand on then by all means use them. I would not take your positive affirmations from you. However, I think this is important. Positive affirmations by themselves are not a recovery strategy. And I don't like when people try to use them to talk themselves out of the anxious state. So that becomes tricky because that becomes I'm only okay if I can repeat my positive affirmation mantras. And if they don't work properly, then we have a problem and then my anxiety escalates because it's not working now. What's wrong? I don't understand. I'm telling myself that I'm strong. I'm telling myself that I'm great and I don't feel that way. So I don't believe that we recover or that I don't even believe that we really successfully navigate through those peaks of distress by talking to ourselves. We recover by learning to behave in different ways. The words that we say to ourselves, positive affirmations if you will, can be a way to inform and support those behavioral changes but by themselves they should not be anxiety shields like instantly stop a panic attack in its tracks by doing positive affirmations. They should support our behavioral change but by themselves will fall short if we rely on them only to protect us from anxiety or to fix the problem. So that's where I think positive affirmations and positive self-talking, that sort of stuff fits in. If you like that sort of thing, go for it. Like the things that resonate with us are strengths in the recovery process and we can use those strengths. We just have to know where to slot them in. So that's the thought on positive affirmations. My opinion anyway. Next question, we'll do three more. How do I accept dot, dot, dot, put in your scary thought, feeling, sensation idea here? My answer to this is acceptance, forget the word acceptance because people get confused by this and if you go to the show notes of this episode or just go to my website, I literally, Kim Quinlan and I did an entire two hour workshop on acceptance because it is so confusing to people and I understand why. Think about acceptance as non-resistance. If you wanna learn how to accept the thing that you hate or a thought that bothers you, how am I supposed to accept the thought that I'm never gonna get better? Well, let's acknowledge that you hate that thought, that you really want to get better, that you do not want that to be true and you wish you weren't thinking that. All okay, all okay. None of that has anything to do with acceptance because acceptance is literally just non-resistance. So you don't have to like that thought. You don't have to like those sensations. You don't have to like those emotions but the object of the game in acceptance is to drop the resistance to them because the opposite of that is I can't accept this because I don't wanna feel this and how can I accept something that I hate so much so I will fight it and it's the fighting that causes the problem. So if you're struggling with the idea that how am I supposed to possibly accept the possibility that I'll never get better? That's just a thought. It's just a thought that you might not get better. There's probably, it's laden with emotions and it's driven by experiences. I get it, not trying to invalidate the experience but how am I supposed to accept that thought? That's a terrible thought, sure is. That's a terrible idea that I'll never get better, sure is but we do not have to fight it. We don't have to engage with it. I'm thinking again. I'm thinking about a worst case scenario. What else can I do while I think of this worst case scenario? While I'm worried about never getting better, what can I do to move myself toward getting better? Drop the resistance to the things you dislike and fear and therein lies acceptance. Now, that sounds scary and difficult, drop the resistance and it's true but in the end, acceptance as non-resistance is a simpler concept than trying to find a way to think differently or feel differently about what we think and feel. So it's a simpler concept but it is hard to put into practice. Why? Because it involves that dropping resistance is a leap of faith and then we're back to that whole courage thing. So that's acceptance, non-resistance. Check out that workshop if you wanna check it out. It's on my website. I'll put it in the show notes for this episode too. I'll put all the links in the show notes. Second to last question. What are the most effective self-regulation methods when anxious? And this is where my message sometimes gets really hard to hear and some people hit the eject button and if you do that, it's okay, you can't have my feelings. I always start answering this question by first challenging the narrative that says that your anxious sensations and thoughts must be actively regulated or turned down before you can be okay. I'm gonna challenge that narrative because that question is when I get really upset and triggered and I'm experiencing an internal state of distress, please tell me how to make it stop. And when we insist that we need methods to instantly make it stop or quickly make it stop, we're basically saying is I can't ever allow these to be triggered. And if I do have these internal states of distress, if I have these internal experiences that I fear, it's not acceptable. I have to find a way to get rid of them right away. And that completely flies in the face of one of the core concepts of recovery, which is you can handle that state of distress. You can move through it and out the other side. So the first thing that I would say is let's challenge the narrative that the object of the game is to find ways to instantly turn down your inner experiences. You could try that, but in many instances, if you've been trying that for a very long time, you may already know that that frantic attempt to self-regulate the physiology of anxiety often backfires and keeps the fires burning, especially when you're having a particularly hard day and you're not very resilient or flexible and so you feel it more and then you decide this isn't working. My coping and regulation skill isn't working today and then you spiral even more. Oh no, oh no, it's not working. It's much better to learn the lesson that my body probably will regulate itself if I learn how, consider that it can and learn how and practice the art of getting out of its way and letting it play itself out. That sounds super risky. It sounds reckless. It sounds dangerous. It sounds impossible. You might be thinking, I'm out. I've elicited this guy ever again. Just consider and take comfort in knowing that everyone that ever got better, doing it the way that I'm talking about, once had the exact same view. That's impossible. That's too scary. I can't do it. And as it turns out, we, because I was one of them, were wrong. So take some comfort in that. And finally, before we wrap it up, people ask, well, what about this kind of anxiety? And that is essentially like, what about when I'm anxious at work? What about if I have anxiety over this? What about when there's anxiety with no known trigger? What about that? And what happens here is that anxious people will often listen to the principles of recovery and get all the information, read the books, listen to the podcast, watch the videos. But we tend, and I know, because I did it too. I'll say we, because I was you at one point. We still carve out exceptions for the kind of anxiety, air quotes, that we fear and dislike the most. So I hear you and I hear you talking to all those people that have driving anxiety or panic attacks true. But what about when you're at work? Like I hear you talk about OCD and ERP for OCD, but what about thoughts about? So an anxious person will get the concepts, but will take the thing that causes them the most internal feeling of distress and carve out an exception. Yeah, but for me, I think this, or I have this kind of anxiety, I get triggered and I don't know what the triggers are. So therefore I'm going to mostly discount those principles and I need to know what to do in my situation. The tough thing about this is that you kind of need to at least consider that if you are afraid of how you feel and what you think, the internal experience of distress and discomfort and uncertainty and fear is itself the problem, which is in the majority of cases of people who listen to this podcast. Then the situation around that trigger, I'm anxious at work, I'm anxious while driving, I'm anxious if alone, I'm anxious because, and there's no obvious trigger. I have thoughts about this. It is largely irrelevant. The content that I am producing in this podcast, in my books, in my social media, is all based on allowing, accepting, navigating, tolerating, willful tolerance. You hear Josh Fletcher talk about it and we do disorder and he says it all the time. Even in the context that you suspect might be different or special. So even when you hear these concepts and say, okay cool, what about anxiety at work or what about this type of anxiety? Know that the answer is the concept applies even there. It's an allowance dropping the resistance, learning that you can navigate through that uncertainty, that fear, that distress, learning that your body will regulate itself if you give it the chance. These are the lessons and those principles to learn those lessons apply in all of these different contexts. Again, quick disclaimer and clarification. Each individual person will have their own little nuances and subtleties but it's a podcast, it's social media so I can't address them because there's a lot of you and I don't know your individual nuances and subtleties so I can keep returning you back to these general principles and then now you have to try and apply them in your case but don't look at that as will I make an exception for my case and I need special instruction. You might need more detailed instruction. You might need a little more hand holding or tweaking or coaching but that's where in person help or like one-on-one or small group help really comes into play. So consider that. I guess that's it. We've been going out for quite a while. This is a longer episode than I wanted to do. I know I spent a whole lot of time in the beginning on like a rehash of some basic principles but I think it was needed to kind of cover most of the questions that were asked this week and I do appreciate all of the questions. They sparked, they made me sit and think about like how would I explain this to a new person again and I've been at this for a long time so sometimes it's good to go through that exercise and I thank you for helping me do that and for letting me do that and then for those of you who sent them more specific questions the ones I was able to answer I'm sorry I can't answer everybody's questions I would if I could. They were great questions and I appreciate them. So that's it. We are good to go. That is episode 273 of the Anxious Truth in the books. I will end this podcast as I always do by asking a favor. If you are watching on YouTube subscribe to the video subscribe to my channel, like the video leave a comment, I answer all my comments or read them all for sure. If you're listening to the podcast on Apple or Spotify some platform that lets you rate or review the podcast leave a five star rating if you like it and if you really dig it maybe write a quick review because it helps other people find the podcast. That's it. Thanks for hanging out for 40 minutes or whatever this has been today. I appreciate it. I'll be back next week with another episode of the Anxious Truth. I don't know what I'm gonna talk about but I will be here and every Friday remember we released a new episode of Disordered that's a podcast I knew with Josh Fletcher so we'll check that out at disorder.fm. Thanks for coming by I hope you find it helpful and I will see you next time.