 If we say that recovery is the process of building a new relationship with anxiety and fear, then there are certain skills that we can learn and practice to help us accomplish that goal. We're going to talk about that today on episode 29 of Recovery Monday. So let's get rolling. Let's see who is rolling into the chat. When you guys get here, just let me know that everything is working in that you can hear me because everything that could go technically wrong in the last 15 minutes, absolutely has. So it's a miracle that I'm even here with you guys. Bethany is here. I assume that means that everything is working. We are back for week 29. We have done this is the 29th of these. We're going to run out of them very shortly because every Monday at two o'clock Eastern time on all of my social media channels, we are teaching lessons out of this book, The Anxious Truth. This is my recovery guide. Every week we do another lesson out of this book. And this week we are talking about lesson 5.4 so that is chapter five lesson four. It's called sharpening your skills. So we're going to talk about some recovery skills that we can use that would really benefit us along the way. And again, if you do not have a copy of this book and you want to follow along, first of all, all of these videos stay on my YouTube channel in a Recovery Monday playlist. So you go back and watch the many times you want. And if you want to work along with the in the book, then you can find this book on my website at the anxious truth.com. So we don't have a lot to go over today. This is going to be very familiar for anybody who is following the podcast over in the Facebook group and whatnot. But we're going to talk about these skills anyway, because they're important. They will help us. They're not cures or shields, but they are useful tools. So let's see where everybody is from Canada is here. Cat is here. Jax is here. Belgium. Nice UK is here. What up? Let's see who else is here. Okay, we have 32 people. Florida's here. Leilani, what's up? All right, let's get into this. Here's let's get a little overview here in terms of recovery skills. And I call this chapter with assessing sharpening your skills, because these are things that we can learn to do. They may be far into you that some of them are far into me. And when we learn to do new things, we do exactly that we learn. So they they're new to us. They're far into us. We try them. And we practice them. So the overarching principle that I want you to remember in this discussion is that these are things that we do not do to stop a panic attack. These are not this is not three ways to stop a panic attack. This is not three ways to stop ruminating. This is not five ways to, you know, squash your intrusive thoughts. These are skills that we can use when we are in the middle of the discomfort that those things cause to help us move through that so we can build that new relationship. And it's important that we learn these skills, we learn it, we learn what they are, and then we practice them. Because when people look at these things as like, Oh, this is what you do when you panic, that doesn't work at all. There's a reason why and you guys have heard me use these analogies. There's a reason why professional sports teams practice. There's a reason why musicians and actors rehearse. There's a reason why the military runs drills. We do things when we don't need to to practice them so that we can do them more effectively when we do need to do them. So it's important to remember this. You don't have to become obsessive about this. They don't have to take over your entire life. But it's really a tall order to somehow think that diaphragmatic breathing is a thing that you never do. You hear me talk about once in a while, then you have a swing and panic attack and you want to sort of roll into the Facebook group and say, Can somebody teach me how to breathe when I panic? That's, that's just, that's unfair to yourself. That's an unfair ask. So these are things that we become familiar with. We learn what they are, we try them and then we practice them so that we can use them when we need to. All right. More folks rolling in. Awesome. Twitch is beautiful in Northern Nevada. Excellent. My one Twitch, Twitch viewer, faithfully every week. I appreciate that Becky. So the three skills that I want to talk about today are and you've heard me talk about these. Let's start with the skill of relaxing your body. And we use progressive muscle relaxation as a good example of how to learn how to do that. There's a bunch of different ways to do that. There are body scan meditations where you find the tension in your body and let it go. Progressive muscle relaxation is a really simple exercise and it's been around for ages. Progressive muscle relaxation is essentially a way to practice releasing the tension in your body. Because a lot of times we're not even aware of it. I know I wasn't my shoulders used to be up around my ears all the time. I had no idea I was doing that. So when you practice progressive muscle relaxation, I'm going to call it PMR. You start to get a handle on what that tension actually feels like and then conversely what it feels to let go. So you understand what it feels like to be tense in a given part of your body and then you start to understand and recognize what it feels like to let go of that tension. So PMR is a really simple idea that's called progressive because you just move from one end of your body to another. Most people start at their head and move down. And you're essentially just scrunching muscles one at a time, squinting your eyes really hard, crunching your jaw, making fists really hard and then letting go. It's essentially the act of just clenching specific muscles, holding it for a few seconds, and then releasing that and then moving down to the next set of muscles in your body that you can control. There are muscles in our bodies we cannot control so you can't flex every muscle in your body. But you're essentially flexing that muscle, feeling that tension and then releasing that tension and letting that go. Move from your head down to your feet. It's pretty simple. If you go to my website at the anxioustruth.com slash skills, I have a really simple tutorial link there. It's not mine. I just found them on YouTube. I really like it. But when you practice PMR several times a day because it only takes a minute or two to go up and down your whole body, it's a really simple thing to do. You start to get a handle on like what it feels like to feel tense and what it feels like to release that tension. Now why do we do this? We do this because this is based on the premise that our new reaction and relation to anxiety has to be based on doing the opposite of what we used to do. So when you get afraid because you are disturbed by a thought or you are in the midst of a panic attack or you're having, you know, that flare up of health anxiety and you're beside yourself because you think you have a disease that no one has diagnosed yet, you can actually respond to that by learning to relax your body. Here's an important thing about relaxing your body. Relaxation and calmness are not the same thing. So many people will think like I'm freaking out right now. How am I supposed to relax? Well, you can learn and practice the act of physical relaxation even while you are not calm. It is possible to be physically relaxed while you are not mentally calm. That is possible. And we do this because that is a signal that we can send back down to the fear center in our brains. So when your brain is freaking out and saying alert, alert, panic, panic, escape, escape, save me, save me, you can send the signal back down the chain that says no, no, everything is okay here by relaxing your body. Even when that doesn't seem like the right thing to do, even when you're kind of suck at it, you have to practice it. That's why we use that skill. That's what that skill is all about. Okay, so it's not it's it's not the the idea that you can somehow run progressive muscle relaxation and end your panic attack. It's not that at all. We're learning to talk to our anxiety since we can't talk to words, we could talk to it physically, physiologically, we could talk to it behaviorally. So when I learned to just go limp, and in the Facebook group, angle, I give angle full credit, she coined the term ragdolling, ragdolling literally means acting like a ragdoll a ragdoll has no muscles, no ability to hold itself up and is limp all the time. So we're trying to get as close to limp state as possible. And that's why we practice PMR. It's a pretty simple thing to do. You do it a few times a day, takes a couple minutes at a time, and it really does matter. I know people who get into it, and they start to find that they are doing it on a regular basis. I've had people say, I just find that I'm doing it while I wash the dishes now, I just run through and do a quick, quick scan and I release the tension in my body. I do it while I'm in the shower, I do it before bed. That's great, it becomes a really healthy habit that teaches you like, oh, I'm tensed up again, let me let go, let me let go, let me let go. So that's PMR. And that's why we practice that skill. Again, not a shield, not designed to stop your panic dead in its tracks, not designed to make your anxiety go away, just part of the way that we relate in a new way to those things. So the second skill that I like to talk about is breathing. Now, this one is so misunderstood. And let me preface this by saying that if you have breath focused anxiety, where you have a problem because you're always focused on your breath, you don't have to use this. This is not a requirement. But the reason why we use breath is because there's a couple of things. First of all, when we get into an anxious state, some people have a propensity to over breathe. So either you are a breath holder. And I used to do this, I would hold my breath and not realize like, you know, the you know, that thing where you all of a sudden realize, hey, when is the last time I took a breath? And then all of a sudden you're out of breath because you've been holding your breath. And then you have to pant to catch up because you've been holding your breath. That is a problem for a lot of people. Other people become chronic over breathers. When you get anxious and afraid, you start to pant, which is normal. These are all normal responses holding your breath or panting over breathing, very normal response. Here's the third reason why I like to practice diaphragmatic breathing, because many, many people think that breathing is a shield. They, you know, a calming breath, a cleansing breath, a grounding breath. We hear these terms all the time. And people start to get anxious. And when that when that discomfort is ramping up, they start to try to take these big cleansing breaths by and a huge exhale, a huge inhale, a giant exhale, trying to trying to ground calm cleanse whatever it is. And that can become over breathing because that giant volume volumetric exhale, the heavy sigh. So when you get anxious, if you are either a breath holder or a panter, or you are trying to do that heavy sigh to calm down, if you can hear your breath leaving that way in a big puff, then you are likely blowing off a very large volume of carbon dioxide. And then suddenly you start to get into that. I'm feeling a little lightheaded and dizzy or your fingers tingle or your nose and lips tingle. In the worst case, your hands lock right into those claw positions or your toes. So people sometimes try to use breathing as a calming tool and it backfires on them in a huge way and it makes the sensations worse. So the reason why I like to practice diaphragmatic breathing, again, I have a very boring tutorial from the University of Michigan linked on my website. You go to the anxioustruth.com slash skills. Be if you wouldn't mind doing that, maybe put a link in the comments if you're here. That'll teach you how to do it. It's really simple. The process is super simple. It is you breathe into your belly, not trying to fill your lungs completely to hear with air. You expand your diaphragm, your belly, you push your belly out, something flattering about it. It doesn't look very good. But you push your belly out and you breathe into that and then you essentially are breathing into your belly, hold for a second and then breathe out so that your chest and shoulders do not move or as much as possible. So you're not doing none of that, none of that. Because when you do that, first of all, if you're feeling like you can't breathe and you're trying to fill your lungs up to here to prove that you can breathe, you're kind of going against the grain because your rib cage doesn't expand, but your diaphragm does. So when you expand your lungs from the bottom out, suddenly you do get the air that you think you can't get. You're getting it anyway, but it can relieve that sensation of I can't get a thank you bee, appreciate that. It can help relieve the sensation of I can't get a deep enough breath, I can't get a deep enough breath. For people who wind up in that air hunger situation, and that was me, that was me. I can still experience it now and then. When I start to feel air hunger, I immediately start to practice my diaphragmatic breathing and within minutes I have forgotten about air hunger. The biggest issue with getting anxious and starting to feel like you can't breathe is that the attempt to try to breathe makes things worse. So diaphragmatic breathing is just a way that we can eliminate breathing mistakes. So it's not magic breathing that stops a panic attack. It's not magic breathing that grounds you or cleanses you or does anything like that. It's just a way to breathe so that you don't make things worse with your breath. And that's diaphragmatic breathing. That's another thing that you can practice for just a minute or two, a few times a day. The tutorial from the University of Michigan is incredibly boring. It might put you to sleep, but I like it because it is super boring and it doesn't give you any of that like the magic of breathing thing. It's just like no this is how you breathe. So if you are a chronic chest breather you may find that that's really difficult. A lot of people don't even realize like oh I'm a chest breather. I don't even know how to expand my diaphragm. It's okay you can practice that. But you know we don't always consciously do that but when left to our own devices that is how a human being will breathe naturally. So practicing that breathing into your diaphragm hold a slow exhale where the exhale is longer than the inhale. You can I don't care what the count is. People do box breathing or just to see the thing on your screen go back and forth doesn't matter. As long as your exhale is a little longer than your inhale then you eliminate that that possible hyperventilation, the tingling, the lightheadedness, the dizziness, the numbness. So that's all that is. The breathing exercise is just a way to say oh if I'm going into breath holding, panting, or over breathing because I'm trying to calm down with my breath, oh this is my default way to breathe. I could just do this now. And it helps. It helps to not make things worse. Put it to you that way. So that's the second skill. The third skill is the one that I think is probably the toughest for most people but this is the skill of paying attention and I like to visualize it and conceptualize it in terms of meditation. Now meditation if for those of you who are somewhat new to all this material has nothing to do with spirituality. It's not has nothing to do with an altered mental state. It's not an attempt to calm down. Meditation is not designed in our context to calm you down or get you out of panic or stop a panic attack. We don't meditate to not panic. The reason why I like to use meditation is in its most basic form which is breath-centric. Again if you have breath-focused anxiety you don't have to use your breath. It's just the act of sitting for a few minutes at a time. I do like 10 minutes a day. I don't do a lot. And I just practice training my attention. For me it's my breath. I can use my breath. For other people you can use visual focus. You could put something in your hand and just focus on the sensation of an object in your hand. And we can practice that skill. Basic meditation is focus and attention training. That's all it is. That's all I care about when it comes to meditation. I'm not trying to achieve anything else other than the practice of honing my ability to put my attention somewhere and keep it there and return it to that and return it to that. Now the thing that makes meditation so difficult with some people is that oh Mia's here, hey Mia, is that when we do that thoughts will come, sensations will come. So if you are in the habit of of you know fidgeting and wiggling and pacing it's really hard. If you're anxious all the time and you're trying to escape and you're always in the state of agitation then sitting for even a minute or two quietly and allowing that agitation while you focus on your breath or a point on the wall or something in your hand can be really challenging. But a lot of people will say I just I can't do it if I can't do that because I can't turn my brain off or they think that meditation is learning to turn your brain off. It's a hundred percent not learning to turn your brain off. It's not at all. So I could do a whole series of videos just on meditation alone because of the misconceptions. I can't turn my brain off so I can't meditate. No no that's exactly why you would want to learn to meditate because you start to learn that thoughts can come and then thoughts can go. I have thoughts when I meditate. I just practice not engaging with them. Back to my breath. Back to my breath. Back to my breath. Now does this mean that if you practice meditation two three four times a day how often you can. I mean for me and if you can only do 30 seconds at a time totally cool. It doesn't matter. If you start with 10 seconds at a time that's totally cool. But if you practice it a few times a day when the chips are down. The reason why we do all this stuff is when the chips are down and you are in that state of rising agitation and distress because you're having a storm of intrusive thoughts. They're scary to you. You're panicking whatever it happens to be. You're doing your exposures. You're trying to move through the sensations and these thoughts and these and this distress. You can. Oh that's right. I relax my body. I breathe this way and I bring my focus to something. I don't mean to imply that you automatically have to focus on your breath and your nose during a panic attack. That's the way we learn and we practice is to use our breath or a point on the wall or picture or an object. But the point is that once you learn how to put your attention somewhere you can put that into motion and sometimes you'll panic sitting quietly and focusing on your breath sometimes if that's the context. Sometimes you'll panic while you're making dinner and you'll use that attention training and focus skill to put your attention back onto the cooking again and again and again or back onto the email that you're typing or back onto the conversation that you're having. That's it. And it's not failure if your attention wanders because the anxiety and the fear will want all your attention. If it wanders back to that that's okay. Just bring it back to your breath. Bring it back to the email. Bring it back to the conversation. That's okay. The wind is in bringing your attention back to where you want it. It's not a defeat because anxiety will drag your attention to it. It's going to happen. So that's what we practice. Those are the three things that we practice. Those are the skills that we practice. In the book I talked about making time to practice those things maybe in the morning, in the afternoon again, in the evening they become a little bit self-care rituals if you will. We don't want it to become compulsive behaviors. So oh my god I'm only okay if I meditate. We don't want that. But these are just skills like learning how to play these guitars or learning how to ice skate or learning how to speak a foreign language. You try something new. You begin to practice it. You make mistakes. You're terrible at it. You do it more and more. You get better and better at it and then it becomes second nature. Nobody walks into a music star picks up a guitar the first time and is qualified to go on stage and play with a band. Nobody. So you have to be really nice to yourself. If these things are new to you then take some time to practice them. The practice itself is helping you. In this situation the process of practicing those things can be a benefit to you. So those three skills are to me foundational skills when it comes to recovery because they teach us the ability to react in a new way when we have to and that's what recovery is all about. So again not shields, not cures, not this is what I use to extinguish panic or anxiety. This is what I use to help me relate to panic and anxiety and discomfort and distress in a new way. That's what these skills are all about and that's why I think it's important to learn them and sharpen them. The lesson is called sharpening your skills because you have to practice them. Again if you never do these things and then you expect that when you panic you should be able to somehow meditate and breathe your way out of it. You're going to be so disappointed and so frustrated and then you will declare that either you're extra broken or that it doesn't work for you and that's just not fair to you. So let's go through some of the let's go through some of the comments here. I'll take as many as I can. Let me close this. Let's go, let's see. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and need these. Listen to number seven at least 10 times. Okay, let's see. Check me, let's put Bethany up on the screen. Bethany always has good comments here. It took me a while to realize I really needed to practice these skills. It really helped once I started doing them regularly. Thank you, B. So many people miss that. A lot of people really miss that. And I understand it's like anything else. We get a little bit lazy. Like I don't want to practice my guitar. Like I just want to play the guitar. I don't want to practice this. I'm going to do my homework. But we get a little lazy, but when we practice them, then those things become available to us when we need to. If we don't practice them, then it's really hard to expect them to be useful. It really, it's really very difficult. Hey, Patty. Hey, Ruby. Let's see here. Mohammed. I'll put this up. I'll answer it. Is there a link between childhood trauma and anxiety? Or is the different anxiety? This is a hard question to answer because I don't know your individual thing. Is there a link? Sure. I think most people probably agree there may be a link. What we care about here in this context, in this community, in these videos, in my book, the podcast, is not the trauma. We care about the part where you have disconnected your trauma and the anxiety disorder has fueled itself now. So in other words, in that situation, I am now afraid of being afraid. So if somebody is experiencing, say, flashbacks of a traumatic experience or abusive experience, and now I'm afraid to go to this particular restaurant because I was attacked there, nobody would question that. We understand that. But now, if you just become afraid of being afraid, maybe that there was some trauma that may have triggered that, but now it has taken on a life of its own, and that means you have to work on all of the things, including the trauma resolution. So that's important. So it's not one or the other, but when the anxiety disorder takes on a self-healing life of its own, now you have two problems. I don't mean to say you're worse off, but now you have things to work on on multiple levels. Short answer. I can't diagnose you or treat trauma here, of course. So let's see here. Oh, this is good. Hey, Donna, by the way, I seriously caused mouth and throat pain with tense muscles there. Didn't know. Crazy, right? I had huge amounts of jaw pain. I was having headaches. I was having problems on the side of my neck. I had no idea just how I was tensed up all the time. I was just wound up like a spring all the time. Now, look, if I'm having a stressful day or maybe anxious, I still might get a little tensed up. That's just normal. Nobody, we cannot learn. This skill is not going to teach you to just like float through like some sort of like angelic being all day long. It's not going to happen, but it is amazing when you start to do this work, how you realize, oh, my God, I was a breath holder. I was a tenser. My abs were always super tight. It was always like I was about to take a body shot from my tice. And I don't know what that was all about, but it helped me to go through these exercises and practice these things. It made me very self-aware, which was a good thing. It was a good thing. I started to understand where my tension was and what I was doing with my breath. It wasn't helping. Moscow is here. What up Moscow? Let's see. Don't be surprised if I'm okay. This is good. Throw it up on the screen. Don't be surprised if a muscle that you clenched is sore when you release it. It's a good thing. This is good because for some people who are super focused, I'm sorry I can't see your name because of StreamYard, but not StreamYard, Restream, but this is actually really common too. All of a sudden when you begin to release some of this tension you may find a soreness or pain or discomfort that you hadn't even noticed before or now you start to perceive your body differently. Now all of a sudden I feel the muscles in my neck. I feel the muscles in my abs. I feel my quads. I'll tell you what's an interesting one. You can clench your glutes, right? Your butt muscles. You can you can clench those. You don't normally know you're doing that. Some people do, but they don't even realize it. And then when you start to work on PMR, suddenly you become aware of your butt muscles really seriously. Like can we get a break here? But it can happen. And then you can start to fixate on those things. So if you feel additional sensations because of that, that's okay. This is normal. Your body is designed to feel these sensations. You know what another interesting was on the interesting thing. I didn't have this, but a lot of people have talked to me about it, which blew me away. Is that claws, like eagle talons, some people grind, grab their toes into the ground all the time. And they start to have problems with their feet and their toes. I had no idea that was a thing, but so many people have talked about that, that they weren't aware that they were doing that. Interesting, right? Cotches here. What's up? Finally made alive. Good old claw hands. The first time I, yes, there you go. First time ever, I'll tell you a very quick story. Where are we? 2023 minutes. First time I ever experienced that, I was having a big old panic attack. I was up at the University of Buffalo where all this started for me and I was driving through the campus with my then girlfriend and I was starting to panic. And I had seen, this is a good, this is actually a good story. I had seen, I say chiatrist at the University Health Services because I was having panic attacks and he taught me how to breathe, take a deep breath, blow it out. He taught me how to do that. He taught me how to hyperventilate. So the next time I experienced the panic attack, I still remember this guy's name. I could see his face in front of me. He was a much older gentleman and I think he was generally trying to help, but he had no idea. He taught me how to hyperventilate. So the next time I was panicking, I started to breathe the way he taught me. And within minutes, I was getting very dizzy and my lips started tingling. My nose got numb. My fingers and toes got numb. And then my hands and toes involuntarily, I can't remember the name of the, that's actually called a thing as a name for that. But that's because of the imbalance in your blood gases. And I was terrified. It never happened before. He literally taught me how to do that. So, thanks doc. And I ran into like the, you know, whatever, the health services, the infirmary, whatever you would call it. And as soon as the nurse there saw me, she was so nice. She showed my hands like this and she's like, handed me a paper bag immediately. And I breathed into the paper bag and within a minute, my hands loosened up and everything was better. So yeah, the claw. There you go. It's not so good. All right. So what else do we have here? So let's let's throw Hey, Hiram, what up? So you will not get better if you don't control your breathing when in high anxiety. No, that's not what I said. What I'm saying is it can be helpful to practice proper breathing because if you have crappy breathing habits because you are an over breather, you pant or you hold your breath, that's not making it easier on you. So we do this to just get better at moving through that. I did not say that you can't get better if you don't do it. I just said that this would be helpful if you do work on these things. Sometimes they're not going to be applicable, but oftentimes they are. Let's see here. Babies, this is so good. This is so good, Kat. That's a great comment. Babies are experts in perfect breathing because babies don't think about their breathing like people who are not anxious don't think about their breathing and they breathe just fine. And if you have walked around all day long convinced that you cannot breathe and you're having air hunger and I can't breathe and I can't breathe and I'm not getting enough breath, but surprisingly for somebody who can never breathe nothing bad ever happens and you never die, that is such a clue that I always say nature was not stupid enough to let us screw up our breathing. We can. If I wanted to, I could literally hyperventilate in front of you and pass out right now if I wanted to. Probably within a minute I could make myself pass out. I don't want to do that because it would be silly, but even when you do screw it up and pant and hyperventilate and pass out, once you pass out you're not in control of that process anymore and your body goes back to breathing normally and then you wake up. So even in that situation nature was not stupid enough to let us control our own breathing to detrimental effect. Which is, I'm not going to get off on a tangent, there's a whole sub-segment of this sort of industry or whatever you want to call it that has focused on somehow the idea that human beings have learned to breathe incorrectly and we have to return to ancient ways of breathing. I'm not sure that doesn't jive at all with the function of your autonomic nervous system, but okay. Everybody has to sell something, I guess. Oh, this is good. GBG says, took me a while to get PMR right. A lot of people, like it feels really foreign and it's clunky and it's not natural and it doesn't feel right. So took a while to get it right, but the other day fell asleep sitting in my truck in a target parking lot. I know a lot of people that after a while, if I'm not careful, I could fall asleep during meditation. Like I don't want to fall asleep during meditation. We try not to fall asleep. We're trying to train our attention, but I am amazed at the number of people who will say that after they start to get better at these things, all of a sudden they discover like I was really having an anxious day, but then next thing you know, I fell asleep for 15 minutes. So that happens. That's a good sign. That's a good sign. Hey, Mae, these techniques are so good, important to form good relaxation. Can I tell you something? I'm going to throw this up on the screen too because in my experience, post-anxiety, post-recovery, I use these all the time. I'd be lying if I say I use PMR that much. I don't. I don't really use PMR very much at all, but I meditate 10 minutes a day and diaphragmatic breathing is always a good go-to for me. When I am, you're kind of going like the hammers of hell and things are rocking and rolling and I'm multitasking and I'm okay with that, but when I start to feel that my stress level is rising, that's almost a go-to right away. It's just a good check-in that says, oh, that's right. I do this thing and I can relax my body and I can breathe and I can maybe do a quick two minutes of meditation and just bring things back down again so I can be more effective throughout the day. So to me, these things have lasted well beyond recovery, well worth the time to invest in this. Let's see here. Ooh, have we got another baby reference? I'm not sure that I can endorse this, but I get it. I've read that holding a baby's belly or an animal's belly can help you to learn how to breathe the diaphragm. Probably if you watch a baby breathe, that's 100% true and that I think about that and this is really good. A baby always breathes. Baby's tummy is always go up and down. You almost never see a baby is not filling their chest with air. So breathing into our diaphragm is really how we were designed to breathe when we need to. So practicing that is a good thing. Oh, this is, I forgot to mention this. Thank you. I tried one of your insight timer meditations earlier today. Or I can put this on the screen. I can put this on the screen. No, because then I have to edit captions. I'm not going to do that right now. If you go to, I'm at insight timer, if you go to insight timer.com slash the anxious truth, I have, they're all free. So you don't have to buy insight timer. You don't have to subscribe. It's all free. I've done guided meditation recordings there on breath focus. I did one about worry and worrying. I did a visual focus one and I did a sensory focus one where you hold something in your hands. They're just totally free. Go get them. So if you want to go to insight timer and look for me there, that's great. If you go to, Oh, thanks, B. Thank you. So Bethany in the comments, just put my link up on insight timer. Totally free. Don't, you don't have to subscribe to insight timer to access that stuff. So it's free. Mia is here. Let's see. What up? I use the word. Okay. This is a thing. Some people, I use the word calm on a meditate. There's no wrong way to do this. So some people think that meditation is based on chanting. There is types of meditation that are based on mantras and chanting. I'm never talking about those, but some people do use words and on the exhale, calm, relax, or whatever you could do. I don't care. You could use whatever word you want. Sunglasses, egg, the word itself doesn't really matter. Some people count breaths. Counting breaths is actually a mindfulness technique where if you, this is an interesting experiment. If you're at the point where you could do this, if breath-centric anxiety is an issue, then you don't have to do this. But an interesting experiment is if you have a meditation practice, sit for your practice and see how many breaths you can count. Amazingly, many human beings have a very hard time counting to 10 breaths because our brains are always so active and we're just thought-producing machines all the time that the average human brain cannot even manage to count past seven or eight breaths. Seven or eight breaths consistently is a pretty good before some other thought rolls in there and then takes over. So believe me, I've been meditating for years and years and years and there are still plenty of times. Today was a good example. This morning, I set my 10-minute timer and today, honestly, by seven minutes, I just had so many things that I wanted to do that I ended the session. Now, some meditation teachers would say never bail in a session. Maybe that might be true. I made a mistake, but I just had so much going on in my brain, but I wanted to be engaged with those thoughts and I wanted to get to my work. So I ended the session. We're thought-producing machines. We can't avoid that. That's normal. Let's see. Object meditation is good, very good. So whatever, object, visual, you don't have to use your breath. I know that's a problem for some people. You don't have to use your breath. It's okay. Oh, this is good. So let me put this up here. Honestly, I love meditation, but I'm sort of afraid to do it. So many people, that's the tough skill. The meditation skill is the most challenging one to learn because they are afraid to do it. That's very, very, very common. It's incredibly common to be afraid to do it. It's incredibly common to be afraid to meditate. We used to have an admin in the Facebook group that made a video once and she said, when I do these things, then I am just left with the symptoms, which was such a pure expression of why it's so scary. If I drop everything and I just sit quietly and focus on my breath or on whatever piece of jewelry that I like in my hand, I'm only left with me and my scary thoughts and my sensations and my symptoms and my fear. So that is a very difficult thing to do. That's why it's okay to do 30 seconds, 60 seconds at a time, take a break, come back and do another 30 seconds. It's okay. You're learning that it's okay to sit here and allow thoughts and sensations to come. It's okay. But admittedly, the time to practice your meditation is probably not when you are on a panic. That's probably not going to be terribly effective. You kind of want to do that when you're in the calmer points of the day. Your practice. That is practice. So I do understand if you're in a very agitated state, it could be difficult to practice meditation at that point. Let me throw this up on the screen for Colleen. You always make so much sense and then when I panic, I totally forget it. So I'm going to go directly at this and really kind of shine a light on the silliness of that. And Colleen, I'm not calling you silly because I used to say the same thing. Everybody says the same thing. The silliness of this idea that I forget, everything goes out the window and I forget. So when you panic, Colleen or anybody, me, everybody listening, and you feel like I can't do these things that you talk about, Drew. I forget them. They all go out the window. But what you can do is tap your foot and you can wiggle your leg and you can pace and you can try and take deep breaths and you could call your husband or your spouse or your partner or your friend or you could snap rubber bands or you could drink water or have sugary snacks or pop a mint or sniff lavender oil. You can remember to do all of those things. So I had to confront that. I had to confront that in my recovery. I had a huge lint of crazy little tics and body things and all kinds of stuff that I would do when I would get anxious. I was shaking my leg, my foot, my tugging on my ears. Like, wow, I can remember to do all those things but I can't remember to relax my body. I had to really call that out. So I'm not saying that you can instantly decide to relax and breathe. That takes time. But next time anybody listening to me wants to say but when they get afraid it goes out the window. I want you to really think about the automatic things, the things, the all the things that you can remember to do that are fear based that put you in the wrong direction. I know I need to do this. I need to count the blue things. I need to call my sister. I need to, you can remember to do all those but you can't remember to not do those. So in a way when you confront it that way you discover that like doing what I'm talking about is doing a whole lot less than you're probably doing now. Again, does it make it like a switch turns and you could do it differently but just consider that. Frame that in that. Like I'm actually advocating doing far less than you're probably doing now in response to being afraid. Lavender oil. It is vile, man. It's and it's you know what for as long as I do this thing it's going to be a joke and you guys I'm happy to have the jokes but oh I can't I can't take the lavender oil thing. Okay, this is pretty big deal. Just being told that you can separate from thoughts is huge. This morning if you guys are not subscribed to my morning newsletter the anxious morning you should do that just go to the anxious morning.com this morning's topic was when emotions are the feared disaster people who fear their emotions which comes from being fused with our emotions which is the same thing as being fused with your thoughts. If I think a thing if I think a thing then it is a thing because it comes from me and I always want to you know and Becky I'm glad you point that out because a lot of people are blown away by the idea that wait a minute I don't have to listen to my thoughts how could that be or I don't have to listen to my you know my my emotions how could that be but it's true it's a revelation for so many people and it's important because we become fused with those things and we think that because I feel it or because I think it then it must be true and it is important but the funny thing about that is if I had a thought and I told you it was in my head right now and it's completely ridiculous you would so easily dismiss my thought but we can't dismiss our own until we start to learn oh no I could put some space I could put space between me and my thought me and my thoughts okay so let's see here ah and then that thank you for saying this I've definitely been going at meditation all wrong then I really thought we were supposed to achieve enlightenment or something that's a very common thing and I appreciate you making a little joke about it because so many people suffer from that for a long time I used to think like meditation and I would crinkle my nose at that and it just wasn't my thing I'm not really a new agey kind of guy but when I broke it down and said oh wait this is just a skill I'm just learning how to do a thing if you discover that there is some spirituality in your meditation practice in the end then that's awesome like there's nothing wrong with that but that's not why we're approaching it and no we're not trying to achieve some sort of alignment enlightenment awakening none of those things have anything to do with recovery from an anxiety disorder don't tell the meditation people I said that though because they hate it when I say that that's not really true most meditation teachers that I know are excellent excellent excellent excellent as a matter of fact on Monday nights I think she's still doing it my friend Susan Varo does meditations on Facebook every night I'll try to post a link if I can find it I know she does them every night every Monday night but she's really good too she understands this in fact I think she's still in the Facebook so we'll see okay what else we'll do a couple more before we wrap it up here I feel this I practice drums over and over and I still suck at it this why do you think you never see me play these guitars man that's all right you do if you have a phone you drums and it's okay uh no no no no ah okay this is this is big I thought these skills were only useful when I was anxious not really to help to use calm my nerves yeah and a lot I said in the beginning a lot of people look at these as rescue things like these are rescue things like a like a pill would be like meditation breathing and relaxation is not rescue at all it's it could just be a thing these are just skills that you can use all the time no matter what can you use them during periods of anxiety and panic and distress sure but don't look at them as rest as rescue things let's see scroll down to the bottom here I got to kind of kind of have to wrap it up here attention being released I'm sorry story time oh this is good let's put this up thank you jolly it's a good comment first time I noticed I was totally relaxed in years it was so far and that it freaked me out that is a very common story too so some people will discover that if you are working on your progressive muscle relaxation or your meditation or your breathing and you do start to find yourself being relaxed sometimes the realization that like oh I'm relaxed can be a little jarring so thank you for putting that up that's actually super common believe it or not don't be don't be worried if that happens to you it's pretty common oh this is okay let's throw this up here some meditation people will say oh no no no you know you have to be able to meditate in silence now I don't subscribe I don't I don't subscribe to that notion to be honest with you if you like music in the background and that helps you I have no problem with that play whatever you want so if if music meditations are better there's nothing wrong with that at all if you like music I wanted to put that up there because there's no really wrong way to do that now some people will say and I might be one of them that guided meditation so you can listen to me on insight timer and that's good to get started or mix it up use them now and then some people like guided meditations but it is most valuable if you can learn to sit in silence for a few minutes here and there so I would urge you as you go through a meditation practice to start to incorporate silent meditation in there it doesn't have to be all the time because it should also be something that you enjoy and if you enjoy the guided imagery of different meditations and that's fine if you enjoy whatever listen to my silly voice go ahead if you like music go ahead but work toward being able to do some silent meditation practice because when you can sit silently for two, three, four, five, ten minutes you really get to kind of another level in that ability to focus your attention but there's no no problem with music if you like it go for it man there's no right or wrong here no no no I like insight timer too because just this comment the reason why I picked insight timer is if you are in on insight timer and you have that app open it is because you are meditating like I like it because it's very purpose driven they have some really cool social tools and stuff this is not by the way an ad for insight timer you don't have to pay for insight timer pizza I don't need to meditate I don't have to chant about pizza to want pizza I just always want pizza this is good too getting to the end here I'll put up on the screen Sharon's a really good comment I finally realized I can't control the skipped heartbeats or the feeling that I can't take a dip but I can relax and let the body do what's meant to do boom huge fist bump that's a great great great comment you correct you know the idea so much of this is we are trying to control a lot of people approach recovery at first like I have to control I have to stop this symptom I have to stop that symptom I have to stop this feeling I have to stop this thought and it really so rarely works and it becomes so frustrating and then it feels like you're even more out of control so I go no what I can control is the way I react to that not easy but I can control that I can change that I can modify that over time and it does make a difference over time so Carol I love it great comment thank you pizza can also work as an object meditation I love how pizza is being worked into meditation practice you're right I can look at the pizza on the counter as I meditate and then like imagine eating it I guess or whatever it could be a decent medication also all right I'm I'm good that let's see here all right I think we're at the end of the game here scroll down to the bottom oh you guys keep going all right I think we're going to end it here at 42 minutes it's about as far as I could go my oh this is good let me throw this up though this is really good my family would come in on me meditate and apologize I had to tell them that I needed to learn the skill no matter what was going on around me I love that I actually love that because I can tell you from my own personal experience I have intentionally chosen sometimes to do a little meditation practice in the mall or at Starbucks I don't drive to the mall to meditate but I have had times where it's like I I have five or 10 minutes or maybe I'm waiting for my daughter or something I will sit and do that because if you can do that in the mall if I can do that while I'm sitting you know wherever or waiting at the drive-through at the bank or something along those lines then you could do it anyway so that's a great comment too love it all right guys so I don't know how many more of these we have left there's not too many we're almost at the end of the book I think next let's see what next week is it's always Monday at 2 p.m eastern time lesson 5.5 this is a big one this is the expect to struggle lesson there are certain parts of this book that are quoted again and again by people that chapter is definitely one of them so we have that one next Monday then we have how to judge your progress and then we have not always recovery and that's it so we only have about three more of these so Monday at 2 o'clock eastern we'll be back here again YouTube Facebook page Facebook group Twitch Twitter I don't know if anybody's watching on Twitter under the good video we're watching on Twitter and that's it if you want to copy the book this is it you can get it at theanxiastreat.com all of my stuff is there including the morning newsletter go check it out you can keep commenting here I will do my best to answer and thanks for coming by and making it fun today guys I appreciate it see you next week we're out hit the button and awkwardly wait well I'm hitting the end stream button but maybe it's going to end maybe it's not it doesn't want to end all right so let's do the keyboard this way restream as decided that this stream is never going to end so let's see what happens if I just leave the stream what if I just do this what if I just do that okay now I can download the recordings