 Monday, which means it is Recovery Monday. This is episode 16. Today we are going to talk about the need to stop avoiding and to start going toward what you fear, which sucks, but it's the way we got to do it. So let's get cooking. Let's see how people are rolling in. That's my standard like a little intro that I had to do so that people on my Instagram story will understand what we're talking about before it cuts me off. So as you guys pop in, I'm going to put the chat overlay up on the screen so you can see each other. I have a little bit of Internet prop. Hopefully this is working all right. There's nothing I can do. The cable company's working on it, but let's do the best we can. So as you guys pop in, just say hello. Let me know everything's working. I'm not using the regular microphone today. So audio quality might be a little worse, but that's okay. I will remind you that if you are coming from the Facebook group, I will not be able to see your name. I'll only see Facebook user, but that's okay. I kind of know who you guys are anyway. So if you're watching on YouTube or Facebook or in the Facebook group or Twitter, hey, Twitter. I know you can't comment. I don't think you can comment on Twitter, but welcome. So it's Recovery Monday, which means we are going to do a recovery lesson out of this book, The Anxious Truth. We do one every Monday and we're about halfway through the book. So we have another few months of these to go. We're going to go all the way through the spring doing these every Monday. We're essentially teaching lessons right out of this book every week. And today we are doing lesson 3.4, which is called Stop Avoiding, Going Into Fear. So if you don't have the book, you go to my website, TheAnxiousTruth.com. The book is right there if you want to follow along with me. So let's talk about this. This is a raw deal. This sucks that we have to go toward what we fear because what you really want to do is run away from it. And look, totally get it. Nobody is blaming anybody for that. Human beings are not wired to go toward discomfort and fear. We want to be comfortable. We want to be content. We don't want to fear unvulnerability uncertainty. We're just not wired that way. I mean, there are some outliers that run toward that stuff. But for the most part, it's not really our thing. So doing this stuff is so counterintuitive and really goes against what you really want. We don't go toward comfort. We go actually toward fear. So I'll go through the lesson a little bit by little bit. And one of the things that we care about here is how we learn, right? So the reason why I'm telling you to go toward the things that you fear. And for example, that would be if you are agoraphobic, pretty typical in the audience, right? The way that you stop being agoraphobic is to start working on getting out and getting out of the house and going to those places that you think you can go to because you might panic if you do. If you have panic disorder and you are living your entire life to try to not ever panic, then the way you deal with that is to allow the panic and just sort of let it happen. That's the way you kind of have to do that. Let me move this out of the way because I see it's cringing on the picture. So this is what I mean by going towards the things that we fear. We go toward the anxiety, toward the panic, toward the situations that trigger those things. Why do we do that? Why do we do that? Because we have to learn. Like, this is a learning process. The recovery process is a process of learning. We have to learn that even when our brains are telling us that we are threatened for some reason, that is actually not true. These are false alarms. And so we have to learn that the alarms feel really real and powerful and scary but that they are false alarms. And the only way that we can really learn that, I could tell you that a thousand times and probably every month I do, if you had it up between this and the podcast and all my social media stuff, I probably do tell you a thousand times every month. But we can't really, we do learn by being told. That is one way that human beings learn. We sit in lectures and we are told things. We watch YouTube videos. We learn things. We can read. You can read my book or whatever book you want. And you can learn that way. Another way that we learn is by watching other people model things for us. So you can watch people do things and you can learn that way. So those are really effective ways to learn also. So you can be told. You can read like passive assimilation. You can watch people model behavior and sort of learn from that. But the best way that human beings learn, the best way to really do learn, especially when the learning involves behavioral changes is to actually engage in those behavioral changes. That's the way to learn it. So I can tell you that you have to change your reaction in relation to anxiety all day long. I could write 70,000 words about it. I could write new podcasts about it, new videos about it. You can watch other people do exposures. If they do their video, their exposures, you can hear people talk about it. But until you do it yourself, you actually don't have the experience that you need to actually learn that lesson. So this is why we have to do it that way. This is why we have to go toward the things that we fear. And why avoiding doesn't really help us. So when we avoid and when we've been through this in an earlier lesson, if you go back in the book or you go back to earlier lessons and Recovery Monday, because they're all on my YouTube, you'll see we said avoidance doesn't work and there's a reason for that. It reinforces the disorder. It reinforces the mistaken belief that you have to run when you get anxious or try to stop from happening. So we have to learn by doing. We really need to do. And the doing is the going toward the fear in this situation. So what we're essentially doing when we do that is that we are leveraging the same learning mechanism that got you into this mess. We're just sort of putting it in reverse, if you will, like a shift on a car and we're using it to back you out. So that's what I did. I used the exact same ability that my brain has to learn things and adapt that got me into the situation because it learned the wrong lesson. And I used it to back out of that by teaching it the right lesson. The bad news is you learn the wrong lesson almost instantly. We become phobic of things almost instantaneously. So anybody who's ever been say bitten by a dog or say contractive food poisoning knows like you get food poisoning, you will start to avoid the last thing that you remember eating, whether that was the thing that caused it or not. If you get bitten by a dog, you might have been a dog lover your whole life. You could instantly develop, you know, a phobia of dogs instantly once you get bitten. So we can learn to be afraid really quickly. We don't get to learn to be unafraid or at least to tear down that fear and that fear reaction. We don't learn it that quickly. It has to be repetitive. And I would say it's because nature wasn't dumb enough to let us really try again. Like watch things I'm talking about, which I am not. So nature wasn't dumb enough to give us the ability to quickly turn off that threat detection and response mechanism. That would be bad design. So it's easy to turn on. It's really hard to turn off. So we need to go toward and have these non avoidant, you know, experiences repeatedly in order to make that this work, right? So this is how we learned that lesson. And what we're essentially doing is we're breaking that connection. So right now you think that if I start to get a racing heart or short of breath or my stomach starts to rumble, I get nauseous, whatever your intrusive thought is your scary thought, whatever it is that that bothers you from a physical and a thought basis. Whenever I get that, oh no, I have to find a way to stop it. I need a way to manage it. I have to find a way to keep it from happening. I have to heal. I have to calm my nervous system. Well, not really. The issue here is that you have to learn that, oh, I'm allowed to think those things, even though they're really uncomfortable. Or hey, I'm allowed to, you know, feel these particular anxious sensations. And it's okay. Video keeps freezing. Yeah. Sorry, guys, I'm having internet problems today. So I'll just do the best that I can. Hopefully the audio is still working. I'm sure the video is freezing, but we're working on it. Best we can. It's problem outside in the neighborhood. It's not here. So we go into these situations and we try to be non-avoidant by going toward them so that we can learn that while we do the things that we fear, yet nothing bad actually happens. Other than being afraid and uncomfortable and unsure and feeling vulnerable, nothing bad actually happens because you've glued that fear to those feelings. All right. So we go toward the fear in order to learn that if I move through it, instead of avoiding or running from it, that everything turns out okay in the end. But we have to be careful that when we say go toward the fear, we have to really accurately define what okay means. Like being afraid and uncomfortable is still okay. And if you're not willing to accept that, then that's going to be a problem. Like just being afraid is not dangerous by itself. So this is the reason why we go into these things and we don't avoid it. We go toward the things that we fear. So avoidance, I'm back here. It's going to come in and out. And I'm really sorry. I was thinking about canceling it today, but I said, yeah, let's give it a shot. We'll see how we do. So anyway, by next week, hopefully this will be really this new fiber optics game and all kinds of stuff. So anyway, so let's talk about avoidance and why we have to stop avoiding and what avoidance looks like. Like a lot of people would think that avoidance would just mean refusing to do a thing. Like nope, I will refuse to do a thing. Okay. Or I'm really supposed to go and pick up my kids at school when I'm going to kind of ask my neighbor to do it instead. Sure, that's avoidance too. But there's a lot of little hidden aspects to avoidance too. There's the covert, very obvious or overt, very obvious avoidances that you can't. Yeah. Okay. Well, the audio is working. So we got that. So there's that part of it. And then there's also a lot of hidden avoidances. So things that you do to try to make things a little bit more comfortable. Anytime that you do a thing or engage in an activity that you're a little bit afraid to engage in, and you essentially put conditions on that. One good example is for people with a panic disorder who become agoraphobic in many instances, the showering becomes an issue. I'm afraid to get in the shower. I will shower, I can shower, but only if my partner is home, only if it's a certain time of day, only if blah, blah, blah. Okay. So that is something to consider at this point. Avoidances can be really sneaky. If you engineer a lot of conditions on top of the things that you're doing in your day-to-day life, then those could be avoidances as well. I can only do this if there's a condition. I will only do this if I can only get through this if I will only consider this, this particular task or situation of context. If certain conditions are made, that's avoidant too. If you go into those contexts, but you bring all kinds of safety crutches with you. Yes, I can go and pick my kids up from school, but I have to make sure I have a cold bottle of water and I have my mints and I have my essential oil to sniff. Those are avoidant things also. A lot of times it starts to mix together. We call avoidances or safety behaviors or safety devices, but anything that you are using to try to minimize the impact of the anxiety. I can't let it happen if I get too anxious or too panicky or too afraid. I can't handle it. Anything that you do to try to minimize that, we would put in that avoidance thing. We have to start to not only go toward the things that we don't like to go toward, but we have to start doing those things and engaging in a different way where we drop some of those conditions and we start to drop some of those safety behaviors and those crutches and those devices are safe people. In the end, the ultimate lesson that we're trying to learn here, and this is very simplified, but it's what we can do in a 15-minute video out of Monday, is over time you're having repeated experiences that teach you that no matter what I do, if I go toward the thing instead of running from it or refusing to do it, I get through it. Then not only that, but if I go toward the thing and I don't put conditions on it, I'll shower even when my husband isn't home or I'll shower even my wife or my partner isn't home. I still get through it. I might be afraid, but I'll still get through it. Guys, there's nothing I can do about the fact that it's freezing on Facebook. We're having upstream problems with the internet, but it seems to be working just fine on YouTube, but I'm not sure what to say. As you go through these experiences, not only is it learning that, oh, I can have these experiences and turn that okay, but I can have these experiences, stop trying to minimize them, stop trying to make them gentler, easier, stop trying to soften the blow or have somebody with me who can rescue me. I'm still okay. I was still okay. I was still okay. I was still okay. That's why we do this, and today's topic is going toward and not avoiding. We have to actually go toward the things we fear. We have to stop avoiding. You got to really sit down and be honest with yourself and say, okay, what is it that I am avoiding in life that I really don't want to? Now look, there are things that every human being avoids, so I need to acknowledge this. Not every bit of avoiding life is maladaptive or indicative of some way. Everybody avoids stuff. We all have stuff that we don't like, that we don't want to do, that makes us feel bad, that maybe we think we're not so good at, we're afraid to fail, and everybody has substances somewhere. That's okay. You have to really look at what am I avoiding in my life that I don't want to be avoiding. What am I avoiding that's having a negative impact on my life? I'm missing out on my family life. I'm missing out on activities. I had a job. I'm not happy at school. What is impacting my life for the conditions and avoidances here that I feel like I'm not really living the way I want to live? That's what we care about and cover. So sit down and the first thing you have to do is say, well, what is it that I'm avoiding and how am I avoiding? What are my little safety behaviors? What are my conditions that I put on these processes? Who do I have to have with me? That sort of stuff. And you have to look at that stuff, and then you start to just attack it sequentially. And as we go through these Recovery Monday lessons, the book actually goes through the process of like, next we're going to start to talk about recognizing reactions and changing those reactions before, during, and after exposures and making a plan and making that plan fit in your life. But the first thing you have to do is get your brain around the fact that, well, I got to stop avoiding things, and I have to start identifying what I am avoiding and how I am avoiding that so that I can start to move forward in my recovery. So that's basically the gist of it today. If you've been trying to find a way to go around this thing or somehow, you know, back away from it and make it better, there's a reason why it hasn't really been working and that's why that's why. And this, again, I will always, always, always acknowledge that this sucks. This is not a good deal. But as I say all the time, it's a raw deal, but it is, it's the deal we got. So we're gonna have to make the best of it. All right. So I will try and take, let's take some comments and questions here. I know that the internet connection, especially if you guys on Facebook, isn't optimal today. I will do it can the audio seems to be working. So at least you can hear me. That's something hello, everybody. Thanks everybody for just saying hello and popping in. I appreciate people from all over the world. We got Wales in the house. Let's see. From my perspective and experience, I'm by no means an OCD expert or qualified to treat OCD or anything like that. This is the internet. I can't diagnose OCD. But generally speaking, it's the compulsive part of it. When things become to the point where you feel compulsed to repeat certain whether they're mental or physical behaviors to alleviate the discomfort that comes with those thoughts, then you start to, you know, kind of veer into OCD territory. That that's sort of, you know, the way that that kind of works. That's a very broad brush. It's super nuanced and you really need a qualified clinician to tell you if you have OCD or GAD. But generally speaking, when you begin to react to thoughts in a compulsive way, I have to have my rituals that are used to respond to my thoughts, to make them go away or to decrease my discomfort. Then then you start to stray into that OCD territory, right? Hopefully that helps. So let's see here. Okay, let's pop through. Oh, this is a good one. So Christina, this is good. Thank you for that. I'll put it up on the screen for you. You can still see the video. Evidently, it's working on our channel on YouTube. I will only go out of town if I know where the nearest hospital is. I did that, been there. I would actually look at the route. I was traveling if I had to travel long distances and really look at where the hospitals were along the route. I did that too. Or I will drive 30 minutes away, but I'll send GPS to avoid highways. Did the same thing, drove around the New York metro area without using highways for a while. If you live around here, you know how difficult that is. Anybody who lives on the New York City area would tell you, go into Queens by a jerk or turnpike, because it's not really a good way to live. But I get that. But that's a really good example of avoidant behavior, right? I will only go if I know where the hospitals are. I can go places, but not on the highways. So your targets there would be, I'm going to not look for where the hospitals are, and I'm going to start to drive little by little on the highways. That's a really good, really good. This is a good question too. I'll put it up, because a lot of people ask this, and I know this is confusing sometimes and could be a little bit, you know, a morphous. It's a little bit hard to put your brain around sometimes. And there aren't always set answers. What's avoidant today might not be avoidant tomorrow. So this is not black and white. I can't give you specific black and whites on this. But how do you know if you're avoidant or you really just don't want to do something? That's super fair question. And sometimes it's really not easy to answer. So in the beginning of recovery, you really have a hard time answering that, because you tend to want to avoid everything that might trigger you. So I think in the beginning, I usually tell people like, look, you're going to have to sort of default to yes as much as you can, even though it might not be things that you necessarily want to do on a personal level, based on your values and what's important to you. But if you're not really sure in the beginning, it's sort of, and you achieve more of a recovered state, and you're less in the grips of that distorted relationship with fear and anxiety, you can start to make different decisions. Like, no, I just, I just don't want to do that. And look, everybody changes. Like I have stuff that I used to like to do when I was, say, 20 years old that I don't like to do anymore. So it's okay. Sometimes we don't know. And sometimes the answer would be, you just have to try a few things here and there. And if you discover like, I just don't like this, or I don't, I don't fit in with this group of people anymore. That's not my kind of music anymore, whatever it is. That's okay. People change over time. It's okay. But it's a hard, it's not an easy question to answer you. Sometimes you just have to experiment and try a little bit. So it's okay. Let's pop in here. Ellen says, I'm wondering if the difference is between thought stopping, avoidance and refocusing. Okay, so this is like really common. And people seem to get really caught up in this. In a way this almost becomes, especially people who are really caught up in the thinking process, they become obsessed with their own thinking process. This is a really common question. What is the difference between thought stopping, avoidance and refocusing? Am I thinking correctly? Is what you're asking me, am I thinking correctly? Is my thinking right here? Am I thinking correctly? So I would always give you one, intent is the biggest single determiner in my opinion, in my opinion. What is your intent? If your intent is to try to stop thoughts from happening, you want to stop them, that's never going to work. And we know it's never going to work. There's a lot of research on that that says that doesn't work. If you're trying to not hear it, I'll just turn up the radio really loud so I can't hear it. I want to make it go away. But this is very nuanced. That could be maybe a little bit avoidant, but it isn't always 100% black or white. Is it avoidance or is it refocusing? Well, it could be a little bit of both. And that could be changing from minute to minute, depending on what's going on. It's okay. It's the thing that you have to get better at doing. And it's just really intent. What am I doing right now? Am I trying to make it go away? Or am I trying to have an experience that actually includes the scary or anxious thought in the experience that I'm having? So that might be one way to look at it. I'm going to invite this thought to come along with me when I have this alternative experience of making my lunch. That's my usual thing that I usually use as an example. But I'm going to invite it to come along with me, then you kind of know that, well, I'm not really trying to avoid it or stop it. Come along with me and I will think this really scary thought while I take shower. I will think this really scary thought while I pet my dog or while I do my emails. That's okay. Come on with me. That's not a bad way to think of it. But again, not always black and white. Not always black and white. Intent and invited along are two good ways to sort of ensure that you're not going to be disappointed because you're really trying to stop the thoughts, which we know is almost impossible to do really hard. So let's see here. Okay. This is a good question. I will put it up on the screen. It's a really common question also. I feel like I'd be happy having safety behaviors. I get you. I totally get you on this. Because if you, for instance, if you're agoraphobic and you are completely homebound or even worse, like confined to a room in your house primarily, then somebody who goes to the supermarket and has to bring a bottle of water with them, luxury man, right? Like that seems like a win in a big way. And it is, it is. So you don't, you absolutely can start out with them and gradually drop. There's nothing wrong with that at all. Right? So when we do this, and you know, even you'll see what I wrote in the book is, it's all gradual. It's all gradual. You're always going to be uncomfortable. So we're always doing things that are pretty much going to be uncomfortable. So you have to accept that going in. Right? But in the end, you have to start to slowly peel away that avoidance in that safety behavior. Because what is super scary for you now, while you're holding your safety device, bottle of water, just an example, it'll stop being so scary with the bottle of water, even though right now it's really super scary even with your safety device. But when it starts to become less scary with that safety device, you could say, all right, to peel the safety device away. And then it will start to feel scary again. So it is totally okay to start to drop them bit by bit. There's nothing wrong with that at all. In fact, I would really, you know, kind of that if you are finding that you are completely stuck, safety crutches could get you moving. Right? They're not always 100% evil. There's no, there isn't always an absolutes on these. Right? So if you have to start with those crutches, then use them and then you can start to peel them away as you go. That's perfectly acceptable. It's not the wrong of that. So let's see here. Just found your podcast today. Welcome, new listener. Happy to have you here. Hopefully you will find it helpful. How do you go to a dental phobia? There's not much you could do like because you can't practice going to the dentist. But that there's a little different animal here. So dental phobia meaning while I do everything else, okay, but I just can't go to the dentist. I like that's a simple phobia of going to the dentist. That's one thing. You can, there are things that you could try. You could go and drive to the dentist's office. You could sit in the dentist's waiting room. If you get really like anxious just going there. If you get really anxious just sitting in the waiting room, even though you're not going to see the dentist, you could practice doing those things. You could watch videos, you could listen to the sounds of a dental visit. There are ways to start to desensitize yourself to those things, but ultimately are going to have to go to that dental visit. I understand you feel like it's special because you can't go to the dentist every day, but you can take some steps to start to practice some of those things and expose yourself to the sights and sounds and simulate the experience of going to the dentist. So you can totally do those things. But I will also say that the dental phobia, unless it exists all by itself, anything that you can do to help you build a better, better, more productive relationship with anxiety in general will help the dental phobia. So right now you may think, well, I call it dental phobia because it's the hardest thing that I could possibly do. But if you get better at doing all the other things and you're not so afraid of panic anymore or you're not so afraid of feeling anxious anymore, then feeling anxious when you go to the dentist just becomes an unpleasant part of going to the dentist like it is for most people. So you can do some dental things, but you can also work on your anxiety problem in general to try to improve the whole situation. Hopefully that helps. Okay, this is pretty good. So this is, I've convinced myself that running toward the fear is like muscle memory for the amygdala. It sucks, but man, this will work. It is, exposures in a way are like going to the gym for your brain. They're going, but I'm not sure I would say it's exposed. It's like going to the gym for your amygdala. It's more like going to the gym for your tolerance muscles and your uncertainty muscles and your catastrophizing muscles and basically your navigation muscles. Like so if you are refusing to engage in any situation where you might feel uncomfortable, then your ability to navigate discomfort begins to decay over time and that's how these disorders progress. But if you practice being uncomfortable productively instead of refusing to ever be uncomfortable, then you begin to reinvigorate those muscles if you will. I mean, we're using an analogy here, but that's exactly what it does. Over time, you begin to understand like, oh, that's right. I can do this. I can do this. I practice doing it again and again and again. I am capable of moving through discomfort like all human beings are. That's part and parcel of what this is. And yeah, dude, it's hard. Don't get me wrong. Let's see here. Get back into exercise. Has stripped it away from me. Okay, that's really common too. People begin to, it's one of the most common avoidances. You're welcome, Carol. No problem. I'll put this up on the screen because this is actually really common avoidance for people, especially people that deal with panic attacks. Avoiding exercise and forget just intentionally exercising working out, but avoiding anything that might make your heart go faster or you make you sweat or make you breathe hard. Like that's a very, very common occurrence for anybody that deals with panic disorder and has a problem with panic attacks. And that means not just exercise, but getting up from the sofa too quickly, getting out of bed too quickly, bringing the groceries in from the car, going for a walk around the block, being intimate with your partner. That's really common too. So if you have panic problems, sometimes it will display as that. I cannot allow my heart to go fast under any circumstance. So it can impact a lot, a lot. Okay, so there you go. Let's see here. What would you say when trying to find a good therapist for Gad? Okay, I'll put this up. This is a tough one because finding a therapist sometimes is a chore. Like, and that happens, Bonnie. So it's pretty common, right? It's pretty common. You just have to interview them. You're going to have to talk to therapists. And sometimes it's trial and error. I wish I could tell you that. Nope, you just look for this, this, this and this. I'm going to show you there like credentials and you're good to go. Even the person who is, you know, specializing in Gad or specialized in anxiety, sort of well trained, all the credentials, all the continuing education still might not be a good fit for you because in the end it's where people, right? So finding a therapist can be tough. So check the credentials, check the specialty, interview the person on the phone, talk to them. And sometimes you go through a few sessions and discover I'm just not clicking with this person because remember that, you know, in a relationship with a therapist, there's trust issues. There's, there's confidence. You have to have confidence in that therapist. You have to be able to trust that person. So there's a lot of that that goes on, right? I wish I had a good, you know, like quick answer for you, but sometimes it's trial and error. And especially when you are in more rural areas, I understand, let me acknowledge that sometimes it can be really hard to find good mental health care in more rural areas. So that's 100% true. If you live in a bigger city, you're going to have a larger selection. If you live in a more rural area, you're going to have more difficult selection. And I'll, I'll like preach for a little bit. Like I don't understand why we haven't addressed that. I understand that each individual, I can always speak for the United States, right? I can only speak for the US here. I understand that each individual state gets to make its own rules and that's okay. We can respect states' rights. I don't have a problem with that. But in this day and age, with the internet, I don't understand why we take somebody who lives, say, in Arkansas or Tennessee or Montana, more rural, less populated areas and force them to only work with a therapist in Montana where nobody lives or Wyoming. These are sparsely populated states in a way that's just not fair. So we really got to, we got to work on that. There's got to be a better way than that. I'm not trying to take away the right of a state to govern itself, but I also, in the same vein, think like state boundaries in the US in terms of therapy, this day and age with tele-therapy really does a lot of people, keeps a lot of people stuck and it sucks. So I just want to at least, if you're having a hard time finding a therapist and you're in a rural area, I see you. And it's, it's a problem. Avoidance with GAD, it's so confusing. So a lot of times if you have a GAD, it depends on what that is, a complicated subject, right? But a lot of times the avoidances are as crazy as it sounds, you're not choosing to not do things. You have to choose to not do things instead of do things in many instances. So what is it? You know, GAD, are you a problem solver? Are you a perfectionist? Are you a people pleaser? Are you a planner and overthinker? Are you the person that must always find the problem and solve it? Are you the person who takes care of everything? Are you the person that makes sure they have all their ducks in their own, tries to control everything? A lot of times those are some of the underlying traits that will create GAD. So in a way, dealing with GAD a lot of times is not doing, especially when that person develops this all day simmering anxiety, and then that becomes a problem and it's an unsolvable problem. So a lot of times avoidance with GAD would be your avoidance is I'm trying to always solve this problem. I need to know, I need to know, I need to solve, I need to know why, I need to explain it. And as crazy as it sounds for people on the other side of this, a lot of times it's they refuse to do things. The GAD person will double down a lot of times on how hard they're working to solve the anxiety. So there's that. And then the other thing that tends to happen sometimes, I see Bethany just said it too, is sometimes GAD people will do that also where it's like, well, I'm anxious all the time. So therefore I'm going to avoid anything that will increase that level. So Bethany just brought up Thanksgiving, that's a really good comment because that would be the second half of that. If you feel like I'm already starting at an anxious level, it's too much, I can't handle this because I can't solve this, but I better not really do anything. So you have to be careful about that. Even though you're anxious all day long, which I know is completely unpleasant, you're still capable of going through your life while you deal with some of that underlying stuff. So let's see here. This is good too. So we got a couple more minutes I'll do. Apologies for the quality today. I know the video hasn't been great, but sometimes I think we never know what triggers us. You have to run toward the fear anyway. That is true. One of the things that we don't have to do to get better at this is to somehow know all the triggers. We don't have to know all the triggers. We have to know that we are triggered. And then what do I do that? Because a lot of times people get stuck on like, oh, if I don't know the triggers, I have to know the triggers and then manage the triggers. Not so much. Not so much. And I know that seems completely counterintuitive. Because a zillion people are going to tell you, well, you've got to find your triggers and then avoid them. No, not true. Because when we do that in the context that all of us are in in this room right now, when we decide, well, I have to find my triggers and avoid them, what we basically start to do is avoid more and more and more things. Because we discover that, well, I'm avoiding everything. My tolerance muscles that to go back to the analogy earlier are decaying. So I have no tolerance for any sort of distress because I just want to avoid anything that triggers it. Then more things become triggers because your tolerance just I have to be like this all the time, or it's not okay. So avoiding triggers usually leads to more triggers. It's kind of rough. I'll do a couple more. I know it's always tough to get through all of these. Can you overdo exposures? No, I don't believe you can overdo exposures. That being said, this is not a situation where you decide, well, I've been stuck in my house for the last six months. So I am going to go and drive 600 miles away today and stay there for a week. That's not a productive exposure at all. So be incremental. You can totally start small. There's nothing wrong with that. But I would advise you to start small and just keep incrementing all the time. But I don't think there's such a thing as overdue exposures. When you're saying, well, it can cause stress and stress causes anxiety. No, you got to be careful with that. That's true. But in situations like we're in, again, the people in this room right now in this particular context, we have to be extra careful about taking that interpretation and nailing it to the wall, and like overdoing the interpretation. Well, I can't do anything that makes me feel stressed because that will be anxiety. Yeah, you are capable of being stressed. I wouldn't tell everybody to live their life stressed to the max 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So you got to find a happy balance there. But be careful about declaring that I don't want to do anything that causes stress. Life causes stress. Exposure is teaching us to strengthen that tolerance and navigation muscle. So be careful about declaring that was too much because now I'm stressed and therefore I'm anxious and then I can't be anxious. So I don't want to be stressed. You got to be really careful about that. All right, so let's see here. This COVID thing with avoidance to avoid family from living together. All right, this is probably the last one I'll take because we're going to run out of time here. I have something else I got to do after this, but I'll throw it up on the screen. So COVID avoidance. And I'm not dismissing you and I'm really sorry. So I'm not trying to dismiss the question. Like everybody, I'm a human being and I'm just tired of COVID-19 at this point. We all are. We're just worn out. So I'm sorry that when I see the COVID thing, roll my eyes a little bit, I'm just tired of it. It's not anybody's fault. I'm just like, can this be over already? I know we all want that. Not to talk about health, but this COVID thing with avoidance can at least talk about it. Do we avoid family and friends altogether? All right, this is different. I'm not going to say that that is necessarily avoidance. Avoidance happens on a spectrum, right? So every human being has things that we avoid. And if there was something genuinely dangerous, if there was a pack of like rabid hyenas living in your backyard, I would probably advise you to not go in your backyard. That wouldn't be necessarily avoidance. That's just making smart life choices, right? So not everything is maladaptive avoidance. So in a situation where there's still a pandemic going on and yes, there's a variant that's spreading quite quickly, you may choose to make health decisions you think are best for you and avoid certain things. That's okay. Like you are allowed to do that. You just have to be mindful of the point where you take, I want to take precautions against what the actual threat level is. And I will declare this an un-tolerable threat at all because COVID even exists. And therefore what I really want to do is shut myself in my basement and duct tape the door closed until I know for sure it's over. That's not good avoidance because that's not realistic. You can't really do that. So, I mean, you can. You can choose to do that if you really want to, but understand where like being prudent and making good decisions based on the reality of the situation is always okay, especially with COVID-19. It's always okay. I wouldn't tell you if you didn't want to go to your sister's house, for example, I wouldn't say that's avoidant. You can choose not to do that. Just be careful that you are trying to engage in activities that bring your risk to zero because there's no such thing. There's just no such thing. So you have to just watch to see where that goes off the deep end because it can. It can tilt off the deep end and then things get really nasty. And then you're living highly avoidant lifestyle in response to COVID-19 that isn't warranted. Caution is warranted. Prudence is warranted. Planning is warranted. Staying abreast of things is warranted. Being completely and 100% avoidant because you act as if the virus is literally waiting to shoot you in the face when you walk out the door. That's not warranted. So we have to be careful about where you fall in that spectrum, right? I think that's a bit it. I really have a whole lot of time to finish the rest of these. Let's see here. I'll just throw this up on real-kill. We'll do one more and then I'm going to get going. My avoidance is going back to the place I had anxiety and panic in the first place or even going in those groups. Yeah, sure. That's actually really common, Kelly. So that's really pretty normal. That is essentially the same mechanism that says if you get bit by a dog, even if you love dogs, you won't go back. You don't want to have a dog. You'll run from a dog. The minute you get bit, you'll run from a dog and not want to go back to see that dog. That's pretty much what that is. Human beings hate, hate, hate to repeat negative experiences that we hate it. We just don't want to do it. So we have a negative experience. You don't want to repeat that. So if you have a panic attack in a certain place, supermarket, for instance, this is exactly how a gorephobia develops. I had a panic attack in the supermarket, so I don't go to the supermarket. I had a panic attack driving on the highway, so I don't go to the highway. I didn't drive on the highway. I had a panic attack at school, so I don't go to school anymore. That's exactly how it develops. So it's super normal, just recognizing that this is kind of part of the process and you have to start going back toward those things again, Kelly. So all I can tell you is that it's really normal. Why does the process take so long? It's a bad deal, isn't it? But it does. It does. And like I said earlier, nature, it would be bad design. If we were able to just talk ourselves out of being afraid of things, we probably wouldn't be here. Some other animal would be ruling the earth right now. So it sucks. But that's the way it goes, right? I think that's about it. It's as far as I can get here. Let's see here. Yeah, I can't answer them all. Unfortunately, I'll be here for the next half hour. Okay, we'll do one more quick one right here. This one. I don't know if this is in the Facebook group because I can't see your name. Sorry. But when I hyperventilate during panic, is it important to focus on belly breathing? You don't have to hyperventilate. So what I would say, I think I'm quite advanced. I'm really dislike hard, I assume you mean dislike hard work and my problem is now just dizziness. Oh, okay, I understand. So I think if I'm reading the comment correctly, you feel like you're pretty advanced in your recovery, which is great. It's really good news. And so right now, you're only like focused on that dizzy feeling. So hyperventilation is, I don't think there's anything avoidant about that. I just want to mention it because you don't have to. And somebody pointed out recently that I use this phrase a lot, but you are not required, which I do. And I was writing this weekend, I'm like, damn, I write this all the time. You're not required to hyperventilate. You can actually learn how to not hyperventilate. There are people who have like chronic over breathing syndrome where they walk around almost hyperventilating all day long. And yes, you can actually learn to not do that. So belly breathing, the diaphragmatic breathing is a really great way to learn how to not hyperventilate by breathing differently when you find yourself going into the panting. So hyperventilation would be either your panting, right? And that you quickly get lightheaded that way, or breath holding also because you'll hold your breath and then you discover your body won't want to do it anymore. And then you have a quick like to catch up with that. So if you work on those breathing exercises, not only when you are in a panic, but when you are calm and you practice it multiple times a day, because it only takes a minute or two every time, you can actually learn to be better at breathing, believe it or not, and avoid the hyperventilation and all the symptoms that come along with it. So that wasn't really a bad avoidance, but anyway. All right, guys, we've been around for 40 minutes on a shitty internet day. And thank you for putting up with the crappy video. I probably looked terrible on video today. But thanks for hanging out. Anyway, I will remind you, I'll put this up on the screen here. This is what we do every Monday, at least for the next. We got another few months to do before we finish this book. We're teaching recovery lessons out of this book every Monday at two o'clock Eastern time. So check it out if you're watching on YouTube, like and subscribe to the channel. Of course, just set a reminder that we're going to do this every Monday, pop in any time we do questions. And what else can I tell you, if you're not subscribed to the morning emails, everybody, if you're in the Facebook group, you hear people talking about this, just go to the anxious morning.com. If you're not subscribed to those, and you just pop your email address in and you will get those. They come out every weekday morning. Everybody seems to really like them. It's an email in your inbox with a recovery lesson and a little podcast that goes with it. So feel free to subscribe to that. That's 100% free. And what else? That's it. I'll see you guys next week. I don't remember what the topic is, but we'll be here. Thanks as always for your support. See you later.