 Behoove us to sort of arrange our lives so we can fit it in there and get it all done the way we need to. So we're going to talk about today on Recovery Monday. This is week 27. Come on in. Here we go. You know, the usual deal here, we're going to put the chat window up so you guys can talk to each other. And just let me know that everything's working. Let me know where you're from. Let me know what's going on today. Just a quick reminder that we are teaching lessons out of this book every Monday, The Anxious Truth. This is by Recovery Guide, which you can find at the anxious truth dot com if you don't have a copy of it. If you want to read along today, we are ready in chapter five. And this is lesson two in chapter five, which is called Arrange Your Life Accordingly, we're going to go through just a couple of different, couple of different lessons out of this book today, that really revolve around the idea that when you want to get this recovery work done, sometimes you have to so last week we talked about prioritizing committing today we're going to talk about sort of a few practical tips to arrange your life so that you can actually get this work done, can fit it in, can do the things you have to do. It's kind of important, right? Otherwise, if you don't do it that way, you can run up against some obstacles and why make things any harder than they already have to be. So if we do some of this stuff, we can actually make it a little bit easier even from a practical level. So let's take a look. Hey, Julie, what's going on? Anna is here. What up, Anna? Bethany is here. I see Cat Francis is here. Where's everybody from today? Denmark in the house. What up, Ann Marie? Good to see you. So I guess let's get rolling on it. This is a relatively short chapter. And then we'll go to the usual Q&A coppers wanting to chime in clearly. So I'm just kind of go through this lesson a little bit and do a little bit of reading, believe it or not. So one of the the way I started this lesson was talking about the idea. And I use the phrase no breaks, no days off, which I know I have said to you guys before, I'm a little bit reluctant, or I'm a little bit, I have a little bit of regret that I actually use those terms. But the point here with no breaks, no days off is that we have to be consistent. So we really need to be consistent in our recovery work. That's important. It helps us get the job done if we are consistent. And especially if we can do the work when we don't feel like doing the work, that's when it's most effective. So if you're not going to be consistent, you're just sort of kind of doing it when you think you're having a good day or when you're feeling good or when you're feeling motivated, things get really frustrated that way. So we need to be consistent in our work, we need to be consistent in our approach. And we need to be able to do the work even on the days when we really don't want to because we're not feeling so great. It helps us to sort of have our life arranged accordingly to support our recovery work. It helps us to do that. When you're under the gun and you're not feeling so good, you really don't want to do your exposures that day. It's harder if you're making up the day as you go along all the time. So if you have a plan, if you know what you're going to do that day, and you have your life sort of arranged to accommodate that stuff, it does make it a little bit easier practically to go out and do this work on a consistent basis when you have to write. So that's really important. You don't want to shortchange yourself and be kind of scattershot. And just like I said, kind of fit it in when you think or only when life makes you do things that's not necessarily recovery and that's not necessarily exposure. I like to call that interrupted avoidance. And it doesn't really help you. So let's talk about sort of getting your life in order a little bit and arranging things to support this sort of work. Now just a caveat, I don't mean that you can plan every activity down to the minute. You can't do that. That's really not likely. It's not possible. That's an unrealistic goal. And you don't have to do that. You don't have to plan every minute of every day and know everything in advance. That would be really extreme. And I'm not saying that's anybody. But it does help to at least acknowledge, Well, I have work to do. And if I'm going to do it, I have to do it consistently. I have to commit to this work. And I have to sort of arrange things to give myself the best chance of actually doing the work. So the first thing that I talked about in lesson five dot two in the book is what I call the morning effect. So let's talk about the morning effect. You guys have heard me talk about this before I know the morning effect is what I call call it when you get the benefit of actually going into your challenges, your exposures, doing the hard things, sort of first thing in the morning, if you can. Now, sometimes you may be dealing with things that don't necessarily relate to the clock at all. So it's not that might not necessarily be a factor for you. But as opposed to starting the day, sort of ruminating over what the day is going to be wondering, dreading, like, Oh, I'm starting with anxiety, I wake up afraid. It really helps if you can do the hardest work. So if you have exposures to do if you have ERP homework to do, if you're going to set some intentions for the day in terms of right today, I'm not going to Google my symptoms today. I'm not going to talk about how I'm afraid that I might have XYZ disease. If you can tackle those things in the morning, I find that it actually helps people have a better day. So there's a reason why the newsletter and morning podcast that I do called is called the anxious morning. And there's a reason that I try to have it in your inbox every morning when you wake up as sort of a setup for the day. It's something to help you maybe think about it and get you motivated for the day. There's a reason for that. And that is what I like to call and I wrote about the morning effect. So when you go and do the hard things first thing in the morning, and it doesn't matter how little those things are, if they are difficult, they count. When you do them first thing in the morning, it's a good way to arrange your day for recovery. So if you start the day, you know, sort of hiding into the covers and dreading, getting up and just white knuckling your way through because you're super anxious and hoping that you might feel better later so that maybe you could do some recovery work or some exposures. That's putting yourself sort of behind the April, right? Sort of putting yourself behind the April. It's way better to get up in the morning and say, Okay, I'm going to tackle my first challenges right now if you can, if at all possible. I do understand that it's not always possible. I mean, you also have practical considerations in your life. But in my example, I will tell you that I would get up in the morning, put my feet on the floor, run through my very basic morning routine of brushing and hair brushing and all that stuff, and then immediately get out the door and do my driving exposures, the very first thing that day. And even though those are really difficult, and I might come back after that. I might come back after them be really tired or worn out and a little bit shaky because I would panic during my exposures. It still set me up for a much better day because accomplishing something in the morning, even when it didn't feel so good to do that was a huge, huge advantage to me, huge, because I would wake up really anxious and just sort of dread the rest of the day when I woke up anxious and afraid and actually went toward that and met some challenges, even on some days when they were tiny, it mattered so much. It made such a big difference. So I'm a huge fan of trying to arrange your day so that you could take advantage of this, you know, the morning effect. I don't know if I invented that or not, but that's what I call it in the book. So basically what I said was it keeps your exposure and practice from becoming a dreaded task shrouded in anticipatory anxiety. So if you know that you have ERP work to do that day, then waking up in the morning and dreading when you're going to do it later is not helping you. So doing it first takes away the anticipation. It takes it away from being a dreaded task. You wake up, you do it. You don't think about it all day. Second thing, it sets a tone for the rest of the day. Accomplishing something to start the day is way better than dreading the rest of the day. And it adds structure. It's like having, so what I wrote is having a purpose when you open your eyes matters. And it really does, especially if you struggle in the morning. And it's way better to kind of use the morning effectively than to just sort of lie there and ruminate about cortisol cycles and why you're so anxious in the morning and when will this end? And I hope I feel better this afternoon. Kind of go toward it. Okay. So what I said is given the morning effect, the first thing you want to do is arrange to give yourself an hour or so immediately upon opening your eyes to work on what you have to do, if possible, if you can do that. If you can arrange your life to do that. I believe that it is really beneficial. So there's that. And then what I also said in the book is if you can move from your morning exposures directly into some of the basic practice of basic meditation or belly breathing or progressive muscle relaxation, like when you have skills to practice, do that after your exposure. Boom, you set yourself up for a better rest of the day, right? So that is what I call the morning effect and trying to arrange your life to support your recovery by carving out time in the morning, if at all possible, to do your exposure work, to do your recovery work. Of course, we all know that life is going to throw other things at you, right? So not everything is planned, you know, recovery is life, life is recovery, they start to mix in. But when you do have planned exposures to do planned work to do things that you want to work on skills that you want to practice, try to practice them in the morning. That's a good way to sort of start to arrange your day to give yourself the best chance of success and to make things, again, practically easier for you. Not easier. It doesn't make the exposures themselves easy in any way, shape or form. They're still as difficult as they always are, but it makes things easier from a practical standpoint. That's what I'm talking about here. I don't want anybody to just because you do an exposure in the morning doesn't necessarily make it any easier than if you did it at night. That's important. So the other thing that I did here is I talked about sort of sprinkling it in. And in this situation, this is when you think you may have time throughout the day, really have to sit and look at your day and say, okay, it might have some time in the afternoon. I might have a little time in the early evening. I do have time right around lunch where I could do a little more work. I could do another exposure. I could do more of my ERP work. I could do a little basic meditation or relaxation practice, sprinkle it in, like plan to do that, make that an active part of your day when you know that you have time to do that. It is not a bad thing to throw little things and throughout the day, like make it part of your routine. That's part of arranging your life to give yourself a more practical chance to succeed with recovery. Again, not because you can be recovering 24 seven, it's really important to keep this tempered. You cannot be recovering 24 seven. And I know in the beginning, especially if you get really enthusiastic about some of this stuff, people get into the trap where they think that everything they do, everything they do, somehow has to be related to recovery. Or if I if I do that, is that recovery? If I don't do it is not, it's you can't do that. But when you intentionally sprinkle things in throughout the day, when you know you have time, again, it gives you a little bit of a leg up. There's no reason to not do that. It really isn't. It's in fact, a lot of the time some of the skills practice, we talk about practicing breathing, practicing basic meditation, practicing how to relax your body. It literally takes minutes at a time. There's five and 10 minutes worth of practice here and there throughout your day can really go a long way. Again, not because it makes you feel better. These are not shields. This is not because it calms you down. This is not because it'll keep you from panicking. These are the skills we use to help build that new relationship with anxiety, not to stop it dead in its tracks, right? So it's sort of sprinkling it in as a thing. But that leads to the other thing that I put here, which is kind of the end of the lesson. It's a short lesson, which is to monitor your downtime. Now, this is a little bit of a touchy topic and it was for me on a personal level and I will tell you why, because it really requires you to be kind of honest with yourself about what your downtime looks like. For me, I discovered like, oh, I spend a lot of time in downtime that I would have maybe called rest or me time or mental health time. It was avoidance time. It was time wasting time. It was hiding time. That was me. I had to really come to that conclusion and say, well, when I'm calling downtime or like rest time or break time is really me just backing away from this problem. So when I really came to that conclusion, it said, I'm going to have to own this a little bit. I was able to say, well, I can carve out some time now. Instead of doing some of those things, I can do things that are a little bit more productive. I'm not saying that that you are avoiding all day long. I don't know. This is this has to be particular in your situation. But when I say monitor your downtime, everybody, including non anxious people will tell tell us all day long. Oh, I don't have time. I don't have time. I was so busy. I don't have time. But how much of how much time do we spend scrolling through social media? How much time do you spend on Instagram? How much time do you spend on Facebook? How much time do you spend watching YouTube videos? How much time do you spend watching Netflix? So there is time in almost everybody's day. And that's sort of life coachy guru nonsense. I don't mean to get to go down that path, but monitoring your downtime means well, let's just be honest and see how much time do we have to devote to our recovery? And you may find that you have a little bit more than you think, because the standard I'm so busy that we all use anxiety or not everybody uses is oftentimes like, well, I really do have time if I want to get the time. So again, this is not like a, you know, hustle culture entrepreneur like you can do it kind of thing is not none of that at all. But when I say monitor your downtime, I just mean sometimes you really have to be honest and say, well, I do spend a fair amount of my day doing things that I could otherwise be using for recovery, even if that's just two minutes of progressive muscle relaxation or two minutes of diaphragmatic breathing, or just a couple of minutes to take a little micro break and practice your attention focus and your meditation, or like, oh, I actually do have 15 minutes after lunch where I can go out and take another walk or do another drive or do another ERP session or whatever it happens to be. So this is all goes into that idea that you have to not only like have a plan and then commit to that plan and prioritize that plan, but start to really sort of arrange your life the best you can to be able to actually execute that plan, it matters, right, it matters. Now there are it's not just you in the world, there are external factors to your jobs or school, family, friends, other things. And then I think next week we're going to talk about that getting your family and friends involved. And let me just take a quick look to confirm that because I think that is next week. Let's see monitor your downtime. Oh, the other thing about downtime, yes, what next week will be get your family and friends together, which is about addressing the external parts of your life that have to sort of fit into this. But the last thing I'll say about monitoring your downtime and then we'll go into some Q&A is what I discovered was when I got up in the morning and did my exposures first thing in the morning and I met my challenges right away. And then I was honest about how much time I really did have and I used that time productively for my recovery. By the time the nighttime hit, and I was tired. I was tired. And nobody has to earn sleep or rest. That's I'm not saying anybody ever has to earn rest human beings get to rest by default. We need it. But at the end of the night, I was mentally in such a better place because I even if I didn't accomplish a lot, I did accomplish a lot. I don't know if that makes any sense to you. But it was way better to get to the end of the day and just be actually tired and have been productive that day in some way or at least point it in the right direction and be tired at the end of the day, then to be anxiously tired at the end of the day because it was another day full of sort of avoidance and hit and run. And you know, I think you guys will understand what I'm saying. It was way better to not be anxiously tired at the end of the day. I was legitimately tired now might be feeling anxiety. But I also knew that I was productive that day. And I did something for myself, even if it wasn't terribly measurable that day. Right. So that's what I mean by arranging your life. That's that's just a particular lesson in the book. So let's roll through and see if we get some comments and questions here. Where are we 15 minutes? What's up everybody that I did not get Oh, we're we got a bunch of people are Canada, England, Puerto Rico, another Denmark, what's going on Jason's here long a fellow Long Islander here Christine, Oregon. Hey, Sarah what up? Let's get into this year. Let's put Bethany's comments up. You'll end up. Yes. This is really good. If you don't take advantage of the morning, this look at Bethany saying right here, how many of you start your day and basically scan? First thing I do is evaluate how I feel. If you start the day by evaluating how you feel, how am I feeling today? Am I anxious today? Am I thinking a lot today? Am I having my thoughts today? Is my health anxiety kicked up today? And then you decide the day based on that, you're really short changing yourself. So if you have some structure in there and say, well, in the mornings, I do my exposure work, even when you wake up and say, well, I'm not feeling so great. Many, many mornings, I woke up and I would wake up and immediately I hated that moment where you actually do wake up. You know the thing where you're sleeping and like I was barely sleeping as it was and then I would wake up and there'd be like a switch would click like awake. Like there was that moment where you might be able to fall back to sleep and then there was that switch that was like, nope, you're awake now. I hated that moment because seconds after that moment, I would start to feel I would start to feel the I would start to feel the the anxiety I would start to feel the symptoms, the thoughts would start to creep in. But instead of just laying there and drowning in that, I was like, well, OK, well, it's I'm up. So this is when I do this stuff and I would just do it and it made a huge difference. Someone in the Facebook group posted about that I think yesterday or maybe this morning how getting up in the morning and running that routine had actually helped over the course of time. Suddenly, this person said that, hey, they was up and making breakfast and discovered what's going on here, making breakfast and I'm not anxious. Yeah, yeah, like that matters a lot. So waking up in the morning to scan is a bad idea. Let's see here. Thanks, Bethany, for putting up the the link to subscribe to the anxious morning. That's free, by the way, it doesn't cost anything comes out every week day morning. So let's see here. What does Danny have to say? Pop it up on the screen here. I noticed that I've been running for my planned exposures. Totally makes sense to do it first thing in the morning. Yes. And again, it takes away that anticipation. So if I wake up in the morning and it's nine o'clock and whatever and I know that I'm going to have to do some driving exposure today, I'll just use driving because it was my example. And I don't do that until one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock. And all I know is I don't want to do it and I'm afraid and I'm afraid and anticipation, anticipatory anxiety. There were times before I really kind of got serious about this when suddenly it was seven, eight o'clock at night and then it was too late, too late, like I was like I was 14 and had a curfew. So it became way too easy to put it off, put it off, put it off, marinate and drown in anticipation and then not do it that day. And then by 10 o'clock that night, I would be just annoyed and pissed off and discouraged because, you know, it felt like failure. I felt like I was failing. A lot of that change when I got more consistent, including arranging things so that it could be more consistent. So there you go. Hey, Nikki, what up? Let's see here. Let's put this on the screen. I think it's possible to recover using a plan that only involves response prevention without planned exposure. So loving your life as if recovered and eliminating avoiding mental. Well, I mean, I guess technically it's possible if you can, if you can eliminate the response, like all exposure is exposure and response prevention. All of it. I mean, the reason why we do the exposure is to elicit the things we don't like and then respond differently or not respond to them. So all exposure is ERP in the end. Could you recover just by doing that? Technically, sure you could. I mean, practically, you'd have to really decide, does that work? I mean, is that really work? So how often does life present you with those triggers? If it's all the time, then maybe you don't have to plan exposures. So yes, it's possible, but that's, that's a hard one to answer really like on the internet, because I don't know your particular circumstance, but technically, if you can eliminate those old responses and build a healthier response or lack of response, then you win. So technically, the answer to that would be yes. But what I would caution against is, oh, I'm going to do that way. I'll just love my life as if I'm recovered because I don't like to do my exposures. I'm afraid to do them. So let me, since I don't like to do them and they make me more anxious, let's see if there's a way if I can do it, if I can do this without doing the exposures. Be careful about that. I'm not saying that's what you're asking, but just be careful about trying to rationalize why you shouldn't do exposures. That's super common. Super common. All right, so let's see here. I can't take all the comments. So let's see here. Love it. Laura's here. Hey, Laura, good to see you. When I do my exposures in the morning, it gives me this extra strength and power like, yes, it's like a little bit of a superhero thing. So I appreciate that share because I believe that to be true in a lot of instances. You just always had to remember that, again, I said it before, I'm going to say it again. It doesn't mean that getting up in the morning and doing exposures in the morning makes them easier. They're as difficult as they would always be. And maybe you don't have the weight of hours of anticipatory anxiety over you. So that might make it a little easier. But for the most part, they are going to be as difficult as they always were. Just because I was driving at 7 30 in the morning doesn't mean I didn't panic while I was driving. I did. But the important thing is not to say, oh, see, I started my day and I was I panicked in the car or whatever is going on. Like I got really anxious. And so forget it. It was a failure this morning. No, you did it. It's always you did it. So all of this almost everything we talk about every weekend recovery Monday is all about taking that lesson. I say it all the time. Take the lesson, right? The story you tell yourself after. So the morning effect will be pointless. If all you do is say, well, I was afraid I did it wrong. That's it. Doesn't this doesn't work. This isn't working. I'm a failure. I can't get it. It's not going to help you at all. No, no, I did it. I did it. I felt really anxious. I was really afraid I was really uncomfortable. But nothing bad happened to me. And I tolerated it. I moved through it. I did it so important because that's the point of the exposure to begin with. It didn't do all my safety stuff. I didn't do my compulsions and everything was OK anyway. So it's always, always, always important. Laura, totally a win. It feels like a win because it is a win. Let's see. Hey, Dawn in the UK, what up? OK, this is this is good. Let me put this up. Downtime is an exposure for me. This is a very often underrepresented topic in the community, right? Very, very much because some people we always talk about exposure as doing things, right? We always talk about that. Like you got to drive, you do your walk, you go to the mall, whatever you go to the school pickup. But for some people, that is how they run from their anxiety. So you might be one of those people that has decided I'm anxious all the time. So as long as I keep moving, moving, moving, moving and running away from it, I always have always music or sound or TV. I'm always doing activity. I clean this. I do this. I cannot sit still. I'm running from it all day long. Then yeah, downtime could be your exposure. So it's OK to plan that. If you're one of those people, instead of jumping out of bed in the morning and immediately going into like grease lightning mode so that you can run from your anxiety all day, well, then the morning would be the time that you plan that quiet time. Like, oh, I'm going to have to actually sit and practice meditation or I'm going to have to just sit quietly and try to read a book with no music on. I have to I have to be alone with my anxiety a little bit. If that is your exposure. And this is a great comment. Thank you so much for bringing it up. I'm sorry, I can't see your name. But yeah, super important, super important. I love it. Twitch is here again and on vacation, not just not just on Twitch, but on vacation. I hope you're enjoying your vacation. Very good. Very cool. Oh, no, no, no. Oh, this is good. This is one of those things that we didn't talk about that today, but one of the things that I talk about reasonably often and those of you who have dealt with me know default to yes. Over time in recovery, we begin to default to yes. If our default is no, because I can't do that. I have anxiety so I can't do that. I get I might panic if I do that so I can't do that. I won't do that. You default to no. Over time, you begin to default to yes. So this is a huge comment right here. I started saying no as little as possible. Now, don't get me wrong. Sometimes we have to say no for practical reasons or, I don't know, like it's just something that you don't like to do. It doesn't align with who you are. But we talk about recovery as a steady march away from fear driven decisions toward value driven decisions and defaulting to yes more than no, let's those values start to come out. Like, yes, I want to go to the barbecue because I miss my friends and I enjoy those gatherings. So I will say yes to that, even though I know it is going to be a challenge. So switching from no to yes is really important now for some people. And again, case by case, you have to know yourself a little bit. You might say yes to everything so you're always on the go on the go on the go. Sometimes you could sometimes saying no is is the anxiety exposure for you. Because in the end, you know, it may be one of the situations where you feel like you always have to say yes because your anxiety happens if you think you'll let people down, like you have to please everybody all the time. So sometimes saying no is your exposure. It depends case by case. Whatever, whatever elicits the threat response is what we're after. That's what we go after. All right. Let me throw this up here to Nikki. So Nikki's working hard. But let's see, I feel like I have to do something for recovery every day or it bugs me and actually tends to make me feel a bit more anxious to not do anything. So this is really good. That's motivation and using it. Okay, so we like to be motivated. We like to tap into motivation and use it. We just have to be really careful that we aren't in that situation where if you for whatever reason, a day, you're moving, Nikki and I have a move coming up and everything. So whatever something is going on in your life, you're moving, you have to take care of your kids. There's a medical thing. There's a family function, whatever it is. And you can't do your planned exposure that day or just didn't have time, but you lived your life. That's okay. So we have to be really careful that we don't fall into the trap of if I don't do recovery every day, I'm going to ruin it. I'm going to ruin it. You can't ruin it. It's okay. You almost can't ruin it unless you just stop doing it or revert to just random things when you feel like it. So that's really good. Use your motivation. Tap into that. Let it feed you and your consistency. But when things come up that prevent you from maybe doing the work, it's not a disaster. Get back to what the next day. It's okay. We have to be careful about that trap. Let me pop this up here real quick. Francis asks, what is ERP work? ERP stands for exposure and response prevention, which really is most the letters ERP are mostly used in the OCD community. But ERP is really what we're all doing exposure, meaning go toward the thing that trigger your anxiety and your fear or your discomfort and response prevention, which is do that without resorting to the safety behaviors, the escape behaviors, the compulsions that are designed to get you out of the danger or what you think is the danger. So that's ERP. Pretty much everything we talk about is ERP. Hopefully it helps. Suggestions for good morning routine. Okay, well, it depends on your particular challenges, of course, but one of the morning routines I talk about all the time because every human being has to go through them. And this addresses not just panic disorder or garfobia, but it can really address the idea that I am incapable when I am uncomfortable, right? It doesn't the morning routine can really address that overall perception that like, I'm incapable, I'm failing at life, because I'm afraid and uncomfortable and unsure. So to me, a really great morning routine is you get up, you get dressed, you brush your teeth, you comb your hair, you wash your face, you put on your shoes or your slippers or whatever, you walk into the kitchen, you get a glass of water or make coffee or tea, you make yourself some breakfast, you take care of yourself. Believe it or not, feeding yourself, dressing yourself and taking care of basic personal hygiene is a really great morning routine, because you got to do it anyway. And believe me, I made a tremendous amount of progress by learning how to brush my teeth slowly and mindfully while I was in a full blown panic. Before I got really good at driving exposures, I had to get really good at going into driving exposure. So I spent a lot of time in panic brushing my teeth in the morning or combing my hair in the morning while I was panicking. That made a difference. Get up in the morning and just just take care of yourself. And if that takes you 20 minutes or a half hour to do slowly, mindfully, as relaxed as you can, allowing everything to just be there while you do it. That's a good morning routine. Not a bad morning routine. Lauren asks, if I try exposure and fail, first thing, panic during it, or nerd buzzer, panic during exposure is not fail. There's your first mistake. The panic is the point of the exposure. So when you look at that and say, well, I panic during my exposure, so I failed and I ran away from the exposure. No, the panic is the point of the exposure. If the exposure makes you panic, your job is to panic. So you're in your panic, your job is to get better at panicking. So that's the first thing. That's the very first thing that is not failure. So the answer to this question is, first of all, you're defining that wrong. If you're trying to do your exposures without panicking and you think successes or I managed to do it without panic, you're missing the point. And then your recovery starts to be really fragile because if you try to do it that way and you just teach yourself how to do little things without panicking, then the day comes that you do panic. It feels like it's all shattered into a million pieces and square one. So the first thing I would say is be careful of how you define failure. So I would define maybe not failure, but maybe less than optimal results. I don't like the word failure. We either win or relearn, which is cliche, but it's true. If you run from an exposure because you panic, my advice would be get yourself together and do it again. You can just sit there and think about it all day long, but go back to it as soon as possible. I actually did a podcast episode on that. It's even a video. You go to my website, the anxious truth dot com and use the search tool and put in when we fail. There's an episode called what do we do when we fail? And it talks about that go right back out it as soon as you can, because you're sitting and thinking about what happened. Yeah, you can say, oh, I should have done this differently. Go ahead, then go do it differently. It's it's important. Go back and do it differently, learn the lesson and then apply the lesson, right? Really important. Let's see. Not easy, but it feels like a win. Put this up real quick here. I fear depression and I feel my anxiety looks for an attempt to convince myself I have something other than anxiety. Okay, mental health anxiety. That's actually really super common. There's 65 people here. I bet 25 of them 25 of the folks in the room right now would tell you that they also feared some sort of mental health problem, like being afraid that you were depressed or going to be depressed or being afraid that you were bipolar without knowing it or being afraid that you were going to have a psychotic break. It's incredibly common, but the same rules apply. So, you know, you think you're protecting yourself by scanning for depression or scanning for other mental health issues. The object of the game here is to say, well, what if I get depressed? The answer is, I don't know, maybe I'll have to deal with that if it happens. That's that's always the answer. I know it's just a very short answer to a very big question, but the same principles apply. Let's see. Okay, Bill puts this up as a good question. Why when I get angry like you're bleeping there? I do my exposures like a monster, but when I'm not, I'm so afraid. Okay, well, this is actually really common. So when you're really angry, the anger sort of squashes down the fear washes away the fear. But the problem is not that you are afraid. The exposure is designed to make you afraid. So being angry through the exposure, okay, that might help you just power through it. But really in the end, you want the non angry exposure. If I if you're going to put me on a spot on this and say, well, where does anger fit in? Anger is a good way to get motivated to start doing the exposure instead of sitting on the sofa all the time. But if you get afraid during the exposure, that's the point. Like I had, like I said to Lauren before, the panic during the exposure is the point of the exposure. Being afraid during the exposure is the reason why you do it. We don't do it to not be afraid. We, it wouldn't be called exposure if we weren't afraid to it. It would just be life. So don't worry about that. Like, okay, if you're angry, that's fine. But you know, you're the most valuable exposure is when you're not angry. But if you're saying, well, I'm not angry, so I'm afraid. Therefore, I can't do it or I failed. That's incorrect. Like, no, you do it even when you are afraid. That's the most valuable exposure. Hope that helps. Again, these are really short answers to sometimes complicated questions. You know, this is not I can't tell you your recovery completely on these silly videos. That's not right. So if you have other help, if you have a therapist, always consult that person. Right? You always have to remember that. I can't answer every nuance of every question. Oh, that's the reason why I'll just answer that really quickly. Restream does not know there's a URL you could go to restream.com slash Facebook or something and say, well, let Facebook show let restream show the name, but whatever. That's why I can't see your name. It's okay, though. Let's see. How long did it take me to know we'll do another couple of minutes? How long did it take me to realize that I was avoiding exposure? Um, I'm being honest, I probably always knew that I just, you know, I would just rationalize it and then I really I knew I was doing it. You know what? That is the answer. I'll be totally honest with you guys. I always knew I was doing it. I knew that was not a mystery to me, but it was actually confronting that and admitting it and putting it out in the open and saying, well, I'm not gonna do that anymore. That was that was the big turning point. So I kind of knew I was always doing that. So hopefully that helps. I'm wondering how we get the morning post in the UK. We're six. OK, so I'll throw that up. The morning post goes out at 3am US east coast time in the US. So it is either midnight on the west coast of the US or it is 8am in the UK. So I intentionally picked 3am my time in New York to sort of make it morning or late at night for everybody else. If you are down under and you are an Aussie or a Kiwi, I'm sorry you're getting in in the afternoon. I just couldn't do anything about that. Substack doesn't know time zones. That's that's what I use. Uh, let's see here. I'm in Ireland at a very good. Oh, good. You guys are answering the questions. OK. For things like existential anxiety, you could you could move in on a I'll throw this up real quickly. Sure, existential anxiety. In my case, I had a huge amount of existential anxiety. In the end, my fixation on on ideas like existence or the afterlife or life into death or annihilation and that sort of stuff, the very nature of existence. I still have those questions now, but now I have them the way normal people have them and actually even enjoy them now. When everything was a trigger for me, then those questions became unbearable. They were absolutely unbearable. So I know that, sure, you could do that in a way. You could use that. You know, you said, hey, you know, what about watching the next Jared's next thing was this like watching a science program about the arches universe? You could use that. But what helped for me for sure is, believe it or not, dry panicking while I drove learning to get out of the house working on my agoraphobia actually helped in a big way resolve my anxiety over death and my existential anxiety. It just did because I just wasn't in that sensitized state where everything was unhandleable anymore. In that situation where you're just always on a hair trigger, unanswerable questions. These are the questions that have plagued mankind since we became sentient in the end. And we have a whole department of people working on that. They're called philosophers for thousands of years. And they haven't solved those questions and they haven't answered those questions. So these are unanswerable questions and they're the biggest questions that we have as human beings. So when you are just under the gun and you are overly sensitized to everything and afraid of your own thoughts and just overwhelmed by it, trying to answer the most unanswerable questions we have is a big ask. So it helped me a lot to actually work on everything else. And I did not have to do death anxiety exposure in the end. That was me. Don't know what that helps. Let's see here. I can't take them all and we're pretty much running out of time. So let's see here. I'll throw this up here because this is going to cover anybody that has any like, Hey, I have this particular fear or this particular symptom. How to be cardiophobia. Cardiophobia. This is just heart centered anxiety, whether I don't care what's your your anxiety centered on your heart, your breath, dizziness, psychotic break, going insane, whatever it happens to be. It doesn't matter. They are all the same in the end. So the way that you beat cardiophobia is to go toward the activities that make your heart beat and make you feel your heart. I know you don't want to hear that. But this is all about understanding that like, Oh, look, my heart beats really fast when I exercise and that's fine. I don't die. Every time my heart beats fast, I don't die. I don't die. Nothing that I have been doing has saved me from heart problems. Nothing. So the first thing is a realization that there is literally nothing that you have ever done that has saved you from a heart problem. Nothing ever you've never saved yourself sitting on the sofa, not exercising, trying to keep your heart rate low. None of that is saving you at all, not even for a second. Super important. And you can apply this to whatever your anxiety fear is today. So when you understand that that's true, then you have to say, well, I'm going to start doing the things that I that I don't want to do. I'm afraid to do because I have to learn that even when I do them and I get afraid and I'm sure that my heart's going to explode or stop beating, it never does. The only way to unmask that fear is to prove it through experience again and again and again to be untrue. That's the only way experience. It needs to be experienced. So and this holds true for everything. I'm afraid I'm going to go have a psychotic break. I'm afraid I'm going to lose control permanently. OK, go ahead and let that happen. Stop trying to let it happen. And then it doesn't. That's always the way. It's always it's the theme that underlies all of the stuff we talk about. Hopefully that helps, even though I know you don't want to hear that. And yes, it means you have to be brave, right? Got to throw that in there. All right, let's see here. Oh, OK, there you go. Good job, Bell. So sometimes you need that light bulb moment. You always thought that it was not to have them. No, it's totally not to have them. There's 400 pages in this book about exactly what you're trying to do. This book teaches you how to have the exposures. All these videos teach you how to have the fears, how to have the sensations like everything I ever write is about actually intentionally having them and moving through them. So a lot of people make that mistake that they think the idea is like, oh, well, my exposure is that I have to be able to go and do things without panicking. No, no, no, you have to go and do them while panicking. That's the difference. All right, I think we're kind of out of time here, guys. I'm going to hit about the 40 minute mark, which is about all I got here. So I think we're good. Let's see. We'll throw one more up here. What up, Kendra? So my sentence is pretty common. My symptoms always fluctuate and you're coming to an end. And it's like it's like trying everything it can to scare me. It's like a grand finale. It's really good. I like your like the grand finale. It's like the end of a fireworks display when like whatever they got left on the barge. I mean, they plan it, of course, but just all goes up in the sky all at once, boom, boom, boom, boom, everything. A little bit and anxiety is a little bit like that. This is why you never find me talking about how to deal with this symptom, how to deal with that symptom. I never am specifically trying to teach anybody how to get over the fear of breathing or specifically. But how do I get over DPR? I know everybody wants to talk about their specific symptom, but this is exactly why we never do that. The principles remain the same across all the symptoms. And I can tell you in my own recovery, when I just decided, well, I'm just going to be anxious all the time intentionally, it stopped mattering. My symptoms stopped mattering like, OK, well, today I have this crazy twitch in my jaw that I that I've never had before. I treat it like I used like at my heart. I treat it like my short of breath feeling. I treat it like my dizzy feeling. OK. So the same principles apply no matter what it is that came up. That's why I'm such a stickler for we don't talk about symptoms. We don't try to solve symptoms. We never give advice about how to overcome dot, dot, dot, put your symptom there. The principles will set you free, not not learning how to solve each individual symptom. All right, guys, we are good to go. 41 minutes is about the limit that I can do on a Monday afternoon. Got to get back to work. So we'll be back again. We have a few more of these to do. I think we got about four or five more to do next week. We're going to talk about the role of your family and friends and getting them involved. So that'll be less than five to three in this book, which again, if you don't have it's on my website at the anxious truth dot com. This will stay as always. It stays on Facebook. It stays in the Facebook group. It stays on my YouTube. And I will post it on Instagram shortly, usually within a half hour or so. So if you're not subscribed on YouTube, do that and all that stuff. And yeah, go check out the anxious morning. You just go to the anxious morning dot com. And there's a link there to subscribe. And if it'll take you over to the sub stack, all the episodes are there. There's now 65 of them. Comes out every weekday morning. I love it. This is the best content I've produced, to be true. So go get it. And I'll see you guys next week. Same bat time, same bat.