 Hey, everybody, this is number 68 in the series. Oh, it says it right on the screen. I think I would know that. Hope everybody's doing OK today. We're going to wait for people to start to file in. Let's see here. I assume it's working. Let's put the chat overlay up so you guys can talk to each other as usual. Show me 15 people, then 0, then 13. OK, here we go. So anyway, just somebody give me a heads up so that I know that you can hear me. I assume it's working. I think I have this all worked out by now. OK, my glasses are no longer dark. I literally ran in from outside. My glasses had turned dark from the sun. So I might get a look like I'm wearing sunglasses anyway. So welcome, everybody. Today we're going to talk about why accepting anxiety. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it. Hey, Kathleen, what up, GBG? So working from Facebook, yep. Just a quick reminder, if you're in the Facebook group, you're only going to show up as Facebook user. That's unfortunately just the way Restream does it. So I won't see your name. Sorry about that. But if you're coming from anywhere else, I should see you. Hey, B, what up? Billy, what's going on? Today we're going to talk about why accepting anxiety or whatever word we want to use. Tolerance, floating, surrender, whatever. Why is it so damn hard to learn? And it was prompted by a thing that I posted on Instagram late last week. And I literally did get a ton. Now, this is an influencer thing. And I'm going to call out all the influencers. I got so many DMs. I will tell you if I only got four. In this case, I really did get the last count was like 17, which is a lot. So there's a lot of people wanting to know, OK, can you explain this quote? But when an influencer says, all you guys have been asking about, a lot of times, it's just a thing they want to talk about. So I promise I will never do that to you. Anyway, user works, hypercontra at Chris does too. I will not call you hypercontra at Chris. I'm sorry, I ain't doing it. So anyway, today we're going to talk about why accepting anxiety is so hard to learn. And honestly, so hard to teach from somebody like me and I think other working therapists, I'm headed that way. I'm not a therapist yet, but other psycho educators and digital creators in the mental health space will tell you that this is one of the hardest things to teach. It can be somewhat frustrating because we don't have good words for it. And we have to resort to things like metaphors and analogies and examples. And it is my contention that if Dr. Clare Weeks was working today, she would probably have revised her words like 10 times. If she had the internet and she had instant feedback like I have the benefit of having, she would have probably changed her words quite a bit because she would have found the same frustration that we do when you get a lot of feedback from people. It's pretty much like, oh, this is really hard to teach. And it's really hard for people to get their brains around. So I just definitely want to say, if you are struggling to kind of get your brain around the idea of accepting anxiety or tolerating it or surrendering to it, it's not just you. It's pretty much everybody. And we're going to go through a couple of reasons. I actually even wrote notes for today, which is pretty rare. But I actually have a couple of notes so that I make sure I hit some important points today. So we're going to talk about that. Anyway, Becky is here from Twitch. We have our Twitch representative, which is always great. What do we got? About 60 people or so in the room. This is cool. I think we usually top out around anywhere from 90 to 100. But this is pretty cool. So let's talk about this. One of the core principles in recovery, at least the way I teach it, and based on my theoretical orientation, and we can trace it all the way back to the beginning days of CBT, and we can talk about Claire Weeks, and we can go all the way back into Stoic philosophy and Buddhism and all that stuff. Acceptance, or the fact that you have to learn to stop fighting it, is one of the core concepts. It's probably in that top three for sure. It might be the top one, to be honest with you. Like the natural thing is you want to fight your anxiety, but we are solving this problem, if you want to call it a problem, by learning to not fight it and not resist it. So the universal word that gets used all the time is acceptance. I like to use the word surrender to it. Josh Fletcher likes to use willful tolerance. Like everybody has their own words. Claire Weeks did say accept and float. So like everybody has their own stuff, right? And we have to stick to that principle. Like this is one of the core principles in recovery. It's hard to do because it's really, it involves intentionally allowing yourself to be scared and intentionally allowing yourself to be vulnerable and like inviting the worst disaster in, like I have to allow that to happen. So it's all of those things. And it also goes counter to like a state of mind that in acceptance and commitment therapy and act, we would call it minding instead of this. So there's thinking and there's minding. It's minding as like an active problem-solving state. We're going to go over that. But it is one of the core principles of recovery. And it is one of the things acceptance and allowing and surrendering is one of those things that I think people struggle with the most. And one of the reasons is because it is so hard to understand and it is so hard to teach. So often people will try to do it this way without actually doing it this way, which is nobody's fault. This is just a really hard thing to grasp and really hard to do. And keep in mind as I go through this little lecture before we get it to comments and everything that one of the things that I wrote down is the best way to learn how to accept, float, surrender, tolerate all that stuff is to just try doing it. There is inherent in all of this a leap of faith that requires trust in the people who came before you. I 100% understand and I try to honor this every day. If you are following my words or anybody who sounds like me, we have to all understand that you are choosing to trust us like I trust a doctor weeks when I read her books. If you have a therapist, you're trusting your therapist. If you're watching people who came before you on the recovery journey in the online community at large or in the Facebook group or whatever, you're trusting them to not steer you wrong. So you're trusting us to send you into direction where you must do really hard things, but you're trusting that we're not telling you to do actually dangerous things even though you feel that they are dangerous. But baked into this whole thing is we could talk about words and books and videos and explanations and metaphors and analogies and examples, but in the end you only truly learn how to do this when you add, you mix together that leap of faith, willingness to take the leap of faith and courage. That is the only way that you ultimately actually understand acceptance. So anybody who's watching who's maybe further down the road would probably corroborate that, at least a variation of that. And I say this all the time, one of the paradoxes of all of these things is that you just don't get it until you do it. You're never ready to do it until after you do it. It's ass backwards, but that's what we got. So let me put the quote up on the screen so that you guys can see what I am talking about because if you missed it, this is what I put up. So let me hide the caption because clearly I'm hiding the quote. So this is the quote that I put up. This is from a book on acceptance therapy that was literally written by the guy that sort of invented it, Stephen Hayes and a couple of it, Kelly Wilson and Kirk Stroll. So a couple of his frequent collaborators who were part of the sort of the Titans of Act, ACT acceptance and commitment therapy. A lot of people ask me about this book because I do a bunch of, I put up a bunch of quotes about this book on social media. I would not expect you to buy this book and I would not even necessarily suggest it. It's really a textbook. And believe me, the sections on relational frame theory, I've reread seven and eight times and I still look at the whole thing. So this might not be a great book for an end user, but I quote this book a lot. So this quote is when acceptance is linked to this kind of problem solving mode of mind. Remember I talked about the difference between thinking and minding? It is not acceptance at all. That might be one reason why acceptance appears to require metaphors, exercises and shaping to be learned rather than instructions simply to be given, which is huge that last bit of the quote there rather than instructions to be given is pretty much huge. So let's get rid of that. I will put the caption back up again and let's get into that. So in the quote, they're talking about the state of like a problem solving state of mind. That's the thing that we would call minding. I'm minding now, which is I'm actively, you can't stop thinking, we don't have to control that, but we do get to control where we go into problem solving mode. And sort of the default state, well, before we get to that, let me give you the first point. So I'm gonna get to that in a second, but let me back up. One of the reasons why acceptance is just so difficult to learn and on the other side, difficult to teach is because it is literally based on doing the exact opposite of what every instinct in your body wants you to do. So if you have kicked around online and tried to find all different ways to manage, regulate your anxiety and prevent it and avoid triggers and do all those things, you know that they're the preponderance of advice when dealing with anxiety problems like panic disorder or gorophobia would be to try to teach you how to get away from it or how to manage it and do things like manipulate your vagus nerve to try to keep it from happening and get away from it. It's all based on the idea that the state of being anxious is a problem that you'd have to pathologize and either cure or somehow fix. And one of the basic premises in acceptance and commitment therapy and act is that not all human states should be pathologized. We don't have to fix every state that we have that we don't like just cause it's negative or just cause it might be a state that we don't like to be and doesn't necessarily we have to fix it. So we wind up in a situation where it scares you so damn much it will convince you that you're in danger and the idea of acceptance is exactly the opposite of what you may have been told in other places and exactly the opposite of what your own instincts are screaming at you to do which is save me get away from this stop it. I have to stop this. This is going to drive me crazy. It's gonna kill me. It's gonna give me a heart attack. I'm never gonna sleep again. I'm gonna have a psychotic break. Those things get so loud that the idea that you have to just accept all that and possibly enroll the dice to let those terrible outcomes happen is very, very, very difficult for any human being because it goes completely against common sense and sort of survival and preservation instinct if you will, right? So that's the first reason. And as a teacher, it's really hard to teach acceptance because to be completely honest with you people ask me all the time, like how come you only have say 10,000 people on your YouTube channel? How come you don't have an audience of millions? Well, because this is a really hard product to sell. This is like trying to sell ice in the winter. It is not easy to sell the idea that you have to drop all that resistance and just let these horrible feelings happen to you to learn from them. And you've seen me in debates with people who will disagree with me and other people who do what I do wind up in those same debates and that's fine. Healthy debate is okay, but it's hard to learn because it's exactly the opposite of common sense and it's hard to teach because it's exactly the opposite of common sense. And many, many people will encounter content like mine or books like mine or podcasts like mine and immediately lash out at me and say, you are lying, you've never had a panic attack, you don't know how it feels. This cannot be right. F you, I'm out of here. Like you should not be allowed to say this. So I get that every day. So the second thing goes back to the quote, right? Which is the quote talked about being in a problem-solving state of mind. That is that thing where we decide that if it is something that makes me uncomfortable or scared or frightened or I feel vulnerable or uncertain, I have to fix that. I need to fix it. I have to fix this. I must manipulate it. I must fix it. I must solve the problem. And really and truly, when you are in a total state of surrender, acceptance, tolerance, floating, whatever word you like resonates with you, you are abandoning that default response, which is to go into fixing and minding mode to try to solve the problem. Now, this is a tough one because I think it's really nuanced. And a lot of people who even will say, okay, I get it now, you'll get it intellectually, but it really takes a lot of repetition. And sometimes it takes your therapist pointing out like, I appreciate your commitment, but look what you're still doing. Look what, look at the resistance you're still showing. Look at this that you're still doing. We often will intellectually say, okay, cool, I'm gonna totally surrender, but we are still almost involuntarily for a little while till we start to get some feedback and we start to get some experience under our belts. We are still going into it with like, okay, cool, I'll totally accept it, but you're still trying to solve it. And that's also what makes it really hard because not only are you abandoning sort of the drive for self-preservation and safety and comfort, but you're also going against that default response of the mind to try to fix adverse problems. This is why the internet is completely loaded with happiness hacks and gratitude and like the idea that you can totally engineer your emotions to only live a life of positive vibration and abundance. And like from the act world and the act world, that's complete bullshit. Like that is terrible advice, but we are in many ways conditioned and that drive for comfort and self-preservation sort of leans us toward trying to fix all these problems. We are literally saying, but you have to really and truly stop trying to solve it. So by show of hands, if you want to, and I'll come back and get the questions by the way. So don't sweat it, I will come back and do questions and comments, but by show of hands, how many of you have said like, okay, cool, I'm gonna accept, I'm gonna float, I'm gonna surrender, but you still know that you're hoping that when you surrender it's a way to fix it and make it go away. It's not a problem if you are doing that, if you're still doing that now or if you've done it in the past, everybody goes through that, everybody goes through that. Yeah, like I know, I get it, I have to accept, I'm gonna float, Dr. Week said it, Drew said it, Josh says it, Kim says it, Jenna says it, but you're still hoping, oh, if I do it this way, that means it'll go away faster, it means it'll stop. So see everybody's jumping in with like, yeah, like me, me, me, it's an almost universal experience, guys. So don't judge yourself negatively, don't get down on yourself because I went through that too, we all did. It is really, really hard to abandon that frame of mind. And I think for me, when I started by saying, keep in mind as we go through this discussion that part of acceptance only comes to experience, it really took letting go again and again and a little more and a little more and a little more and then finally at some point it starts to dawn on you, like, oh, she really meant, Dr. Week's really meant, let my hands shake uncontrollably, she really meant, let my legs go totally to jelly, Drew really did mean, like go ahead and have a heart attack and die. That is so hard to ultimately accept and you can't do that until you roll those dice and you start to feel like, oh, that they really, really meant that. So I'm sure a lot of you guys listen to me or people like me are read books like I write and you get it, but there's still a part of your brain that says he or she, they can't possibly mean that I allow a thought about harming my children. They can't possibly mean that, right? But we do and it's really hard. That's why it's so hard to teach because like people will push back all the time. Yeah, but what about? Well, and when I push back on your pushback, it's because yes, you really do have to abandon the idea that you can mentally protect yourself or do some sort of mental navigation and gyrations to change the state you're experiencing. So that's the second reason why it's really hard to understand and learn acceptance and really hard to teach. But here is, here is the prop to me, the number one reason why that last part where you do leap and you do fully surrender and you do begin to experience what full acceptance and surrender feels like is that there are no steps for that. So the quote, when Stephen Hayes wrote the book and Strohsel and those guys and Kelly Wilson wrote that book, actually though that quote was from a different research paper by the way, that was from a guy named McMullen. Then anyway, so when that quote was written, they're literally talking about the fact that we run out of words to give you, we run out of steps. There are no steps to being brave. There are no steps to letting go. There are no steps to taking a leap of faith. I talked about this over and over and over. You did a podcast episode, I don't even know when. I've lost track of them all at this point. Cult is the anxious truth and anxiety recovery program. So if you can go to my website, the anxioustruth.com and search all the podcast episodes. I went into detail on that one, whereas at some point we literally run out of steps to give you. And that's difficult because when you're trying to get it and you want to let go but you're just too afraid to let go, you will almost instantly come back to me or whoever, your therapist, your group, whoever. And say, but how? But then I get really scared, so how do I do that? And none of us ever has, we run out of steps. At that moment where you choose to be courageous, where you choose to roll the dice, where you choose to take a chance, where you choose to take that leap of faith, there are no steps. I can't give you steps. I can no longer give you instructions for that. So this is why we wind up resorting to all kinds of crazy metaphors and analogies and people say all the time, like how do you keep coming up with these? Well, because there's like a zillion people in the community here and everybody thinks a little different, feels a little different, has different experiences. And so I might use one metaphor on Tuesday that hits for 15 people and a completely different metaphor on Thursday that hits for 35 completely different people because everybody does things a little bit differently and they're, you know, everybody's thinking and conceptualizing things a different way. So there are literally like, I probably use the word literally a lot here but in the therapeutic community, like a couple of months ago, I had one of my therapist friends on a Saturday morning, send me a link to a PDF. It's like the latest version because we just keep adding to it of like the big book of act metaphors. There are so many of them. And any therapist that's involved in like that type of intervention and act type intervention, that's based on acceptance on surrender, on floating, on tolerating, on inhibitory learning, which is like you don't try to save yourself and you wind up okay, even when you don't feel okay. Anybody who's doing that sort of stuff, we all run for those metaphors and those analogies and those examples. And because we're just trying so hard to find words for things that there are no words for. So if anybody in the comment section right now thinks that they have a way to give somebody steps to be brave. If I told you, I have to go, when I'm done with this video, I'm gonna go and go on like a 30 meter diving platform. I'm not a diver by the way. And I'm gonna jump into a pool from that third and I'm terrified to do that. You could give me a bunch of steps that say, okay, go to the pool, go to the locker room, change, go to the platform, climb one rung, the other rung. And then when you get to the point where I am on the platform and looking over the edge, the last step is jump. And when I say, but how do I jump? You will have no more words for me. You will have no more instructions for me. Like just jump, I can't tell you anything else. Close your eyes and jump. That's not an instruction. That's a suggestion, but you'll run out of words for me. So I would urge you, if you're struggling with the idea of surrender and acceptance and tolerance, think about trying to teach a friend or a family member or me or anybody. Go ahead and try to think how you would teach me or somebody how to jump off a giant, high diving platform if they're scared to do it. You know that at some point, you would have to say to me, I don't have any more words, dude, I wish I did, but I'm out of words. So that's where people like me sit. And that's why, in the quote that I put up on the screen, I'll put it up again in a second if you guys want to see it again, but that's why acceptance requires experience and doing and actual practical application to learn how to do over time. Because your surrender, your allowing, your floating, your acceptance in the beginning looks very different than it does in the middle of your recovery and toward the end of recovery. Like what I do now looks very different than what I did those first few times, I allowed myself to make a right on route 347 and panic on a six lane highway, right? So that's kind of what I wanted to talk about. And I'm gonna keep coming back to the idea that acceptance, surrender, tolerance, is a thing that you only know how to do after you take a chance, roll the dice, take a risk, give up, allow the horrible thing to happen and then learn that like, okay, this is how we do this. This is what it feels like. It feels terrifying, but even though I didn't save myself, nothing bad happened to me and that's the lesson that acceptance and surrender and tolerance teaches us. And then over time, when we add a bunch of those experiences together and we put them in different contexts and different places because we want a wide range of experiences in which we are afraid and we surrender, then we start to learn like, oh man, I'm super capable of handling this thing that for so many years or months, I've declared off limits, no way, no how, no way, no how. And I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that that applies to everything that you fear in this disordered state that we're talking about. I'm never talking about learning how to not be afraid of truly dangerous things. Never, never, never. I cannot say that disclaimer enough. There is in no way am I saying like, hey, go do truly dangerous things and just learn not to be afraid of them. Like fear serves a purpose. We want fear, it keeps us alive. This is just fear that feels every bit is real but it's completely misguided. That is always so, so, so important to remember in the context that we're all dealing with here, right? So that is, you guys want me to put the quote again? I don't care if it'll help or not, but let me know, I'll put them up there. So let's go through the comments here and I'll see everybody is doing. What are we doing? 22 minutes, that wasn't bad. This is a big topic. I literally had to write notes, like notes are rare, but so this was a big topic and I appreciate you guys hanging in there with me. I think it's an important topic. I really is, is one of the hardest parts of recovery. Sure, Penelope Cruzify, always one of my favorite screen names there. I will put that graphic back up again. I need a producer. I need somebody like in the truck, like with the levers and stuff, like in a football game. So this is the quote, we'll leave it up for a second while I read through the comments. Again, the book is called acceptance commitment therapy. It's like the third edition of it. Don't buy this book. You can buy, I can't tell you not to buy the book but I would not recommend that you buy this book because it is a textbook through and through. It is slow reading. It is meant for therapists and practitioners. It's not meant for end users. So I'm going to look through the chat for a second while I hide behind this quote. Get a stream deck. Becky knows what a stream deck is. That's cool. On my gadget guy, I would like a stream deck 100%. Stream, this is, I use restream and restream just let me start to use multiple cameras too. So one day I really want to have a reason to show you something that's on my desk, like top down. Maybe we'll do like something with a book just because I want to use the gadget. Anyway, let's hide the graphic. I feel silly hiding that. That doesn't make any sense to me. So let's go into the chat and see what we got here. I see Sonya is here. Hello Sonya. And by the way Sonya, you are very generous. Just to say thank you very much. It is difficult to wrap. I'm going to put some stuff on the comments. You guys are killing in the comments. I do not know what this background is. I think it's coffee beans. I think, I hope it is. Anyway, it's difficult to wrap your head around when the concept is so damn foreign. That's what I said. It is super opposite of what everybody wants to do. And it's why people like me do not have giant audiences because we're selling ice in the winter that nobody wants to buy. But you are right. So correct. Thank you Becky for pointing that out. I know this is a big one. So Kathleen, thank you for mentioning this. Particularly bad flight the other day. My husband said I just need to be better at being okay with my own death. This, so there are certain things, and I'm glad you put this up there. This is the ultimate acceptance right here, right? This is the ultimate acceptance is like you need to be better. And by the way, that's a great quote from your husband for sure, give him a big fist bump for me on that one. But that's the ultimate one that everybody say, how am I supposed to accept death? Well, in every one of these instances, I would say, well, what choice do you have? You literally have no choice. There is a difference between accepting death and treating it as if it's happening right now. That's the difference. So somebody I saw a comment go by before like, but acceptance of death is just so hard. Well, in the end, you have to understand the difference between like, well, I accept that someday I'm gonna die. Maybe today is it, I don't know. I mean, I hope I see you guys two Mondays, but I don't know that. So I can accept that that is a harsh reality of every human life that has ever been and never will be. I mean, unless Ray Kurzweil is right, and we're gonna download ourselves into machines, I don't know. But you have to understand that what you are stuck on in terms of accepting death is trying to, you're treating it as if it's happening right now or might happen sometime in the next five minutes or an hour when you have no idea, when none of us has any idea when that's coming for us. So you get stuck in the whole like, cool, good job. Dual fist bump. So we get stuck in that cycle where we begin to treat death like it's an immediate thing right now. And that's different. So I don't wanna die, but I've accepted the fact that someday I will and I don't know what day that is, but I don't have to always treat it like it's happening right this minute because it's not happening right this minute. And I have no idea if it's gonna happen in five minutes. And in the end, in very rare instances, could I even stop it anyway? So that is the reality. So just understand that you're feeling like, well, if I accept death, it means it's gonna happen. Well, it's gonna happen anyway. So not accepting it is absolutely to be super cliched. Like it's useless because then you're just ruining the life that you have before it does happen. So it's really hard to do that, but I get that. I question my health, as we guys watch me scroll through the comments is always so exciting, accepting is so hard to continue to question my health and how everyone is wrong. I'm really sick. That's always how I get stuck, yeah. So again, the first thing that I told you that makes this so hard is it's the opposite of what you wanna do. And for people, I hate everything you said, but I accept it, touche. But for people with health anxiety, you are literally accepting, you're the opposite. For you, I have to remain vigilant about my health all the time and I must treat it as if every doctor and everybody I've ever seen is wrong. I can't take the risk because what if they were wrong? I gotta make sure, I have to make sure. So for you, acceptance is, I'm not sure. It's possible that 62 doctors have been wrong. It is possible. The odds are not zero, they're 0.0001% that 62 doctors are wrong. But if you listen to the podcast episode I did on health anxiety, just go to my website and search for health anxiety. You will see that I frame that as a uncertainty intolerance disorder. It has nothing to do with your health. It has to do with, I can't accept anything more than 100% certainty. So maybe that helps. Mustard rain, I always love the name. Williness is a precursor to acceptance. That is true. That is 100% true. If you are not willing to surrender, you won't surrender. But that's okay, because sometimes it takes a long time for people to get to being fully willing. You might be intellectually willing but not emotionally willing, which sounds all like woo-woo. But I think there's truth in that. And I believe that some of that involves consequence. Like if I don't have enough consequence then I'm not gonna be willing. Like if I am backed into a corner and I have nowhere else to go with this, I am out of options. This is my only choice. I become a whole lot more willing to roll the dice and like take the leap of faith. So sometimes acceptance only comes when you reach that level of willingness that Mustard Rain just talked about. And sometimes you only reach that level of willingness when you have exhausted every other option. Some people think their options are exhausted earlier. Some will hang on like hot death to every possible other option that there might be before doing it this way. And that's okay, I would not blame you if you're doing it that way. You think you're protecting yourself, I get that. So another one of those show of hands, like how many people is in 100 of you in the room right now? How many people are you listening right now but are also keeping one eye on other things? And I'm not saying that I'm better than the other things or whatever. How many people are listening to me right now, listening to my podcast, reading the books that I write and also hoping that celery juice is gonna fix it. I don't know, I always pick on the celery juice because that's okay. Everybody kind of does that, waving, sure, I get it. And again, so Mustard Rain, who brought up the willingness thing only when you have exhausted all the options and you see like that's not helping me, then you get that sense of willingness that leads to acceptance. So I appreciate this. This is thank you for the feedback. And that was a great comment by the way. Trying to help my daughter through anxiety and panic a lot. Thank you for being a good mom. That's hard and it's hard. We don't wanna watch our kids struggle. So I get it, hang in there. Cheer for her, don't comfort her and don't wrap her in bubble wrap, cheer for her. So let's see, had to take the, okay. Always gotta put a comment from Bethany up. I had to take that leap too. I told myself, what do I have to lose? I won't be any worse off. And that is exactly the thing, the consequence, right? So at some point it's like, this can't get any worse. And one of those, I always, I know I'm always sending you guys on Wild Goose Chases to old podcast episodes, but one of the more popular ones I ever did was that one where I said, I think it was called the thing that nobody wants to hear. And I literally had to reach the point where it's like, you are gonna have to effing kill me because I'm not living like this anymore. Like it took me getting to that point before I was willing to like go all in. Like that's it, I was all in. I mean, I was already down the road, but that was a moment where it's like, that's it. I knew all the things, but I wasn't really totally putting into practice until I hit the point where it's like, nope, no more. So, Julie, you don't have to apologize for being busy at work. It's okay. It's okay if you're watching the replay. It's all right, can't do anything wrong in one of these. And there's no reward until you do it. That's another huge one. I don't know what's up with Restream where like the caption is only half the screen. I don't know what's up with that. Yes, it will. These stay on a replay. If you subscribe to my YouTube channel, there is a playlist called Recovery Monday. All of the old live streams are in there. You can come back and watch them anytime you want. So GBG is right. There is no reward until you do it. So that's another thing that sometimes just reading about this stuff. Now, I talked about this in the Facebook group last night. Any of you who have commented on my posts last night, I promise I'm gonna go back in and answer you guys. I promise as soon as I get a chance today. But I talked about that. Sometimes just thinking about it, watching videos like this, commenting, asking questions. Let me go read another podcast. And there's never a reward for that. The reward only comes in recovery from the actions, which is a shitty deal, but it's the deal we have. Let's see here. It's okay. I think we need to recognize that some people do need extra help because the pain from the anxiety has pushed them to the point of, I'm sure that this continues. I'm sorry, Jen. I know that it cuts you off, right? I'll see. Yes, that's true. Everybody is in different situations. People who are dealing with chronic health conditions or chronic pain. Yes, those things make it harder. There are things that add wrinkles. There are things that make it more challenging. I always want to acknowledge those things, but I also really feel so strongly that I also have to push back a little bit and say, that can become a trap. We have to acknowledge, like, well, I have more obstacles here that I have to work on. No problem. We can cheer for you. We can acknowledge that. We can validate that. But at some point, we run the risk of getting into like, but I have these extra special things, so therefore I must be so slow and so careful and never ever ever push myself that I never actually get better. So that is a hard line, like it's a tightrope act in a little ways. So I always try and give both sides of that. But that's hard because in a social media context like this, when I don't know you, I can't say specifically how hard you should push yourself and not, but I just see too many people that get stuck with like, well, I'm specially broken because I have these other things so I should never push myself and then they wind up stuck. So we gotta be careful about that. Let's see here. She's such a little fighter. That's great. Okay, I get it. For those of you who I'll put this up on the screen, if anybody is dealing with kids in anxiety, again, if you go to my website, just search for kids or search for Dr. Jackie. Her name is J-A-C-Q-U-E Bogdanov. She did an episode with me. She's a therapist that specialized in treating kids and adolescents. And we talked about that. The rules are generally the same, by the way. Most people would be amazed. I was amazed. I was like, it's gotta be different, right? She was like, no, it's definitely not different. We just have to take into account the developmental level of a particular person. So a 10-year-old doesn't have the ability to conceptualize the way a 40-year-old does. So we have to be mindful of that, but the rules are pretty much the same. Anybody who's working on helping their kids with this, my hat is off to you. So let's see here. Oh, we got another church person. I think the hardest part is when you get better at accepting then it all falls apart. Okay, let's pop this out here. And then it all falls apart again. So I will always challenge this. This is the setback thing. It all fell apart. It all went out the window. This is where you hear me say things. I can, some people hate this because it sounds accusatory to them. I'm not accusing you. I'm not blaming you, but I'm pointing out your power. It all falls apart is I was scared enough in those moments that I reverted back to my old ways. I couldn't roll the dice because the fear got, I defined it as too much, too much of a risk, and I went back and chose to do my old things. And then I got stuck in that cycle. So that is what all falls apart actually is. And it's so important to put your brain around that, not because there's blame there. Like, oh, you did it wrong. Of course you did it wrong. It's not because you did it wrong. It's just that you're really scared and you went back to the old way. You weren't willing to jump across that next fear line, if you will, like the line that fears draws in the sand. You hit one and you ran away. That's okay. Recognizing that is like, oh, so I don't have to just sit here with my fingers crossed and my toes crossed and I hope that somehow I move forward again. I can actually just start doing what I was doing that was making me better. So that's, you have power there. You have power there. Recognize it. Let's keep going. Okay, see the rest of Jen's comment here. Jen, those are terrible experiences you went through. I'm very sorry that you had to lift through those experiences. I'm never gonna comment on I needed help in pharmaceuticals, totally fine. Personal call, nothing wrong with that whatsoever. We need to be careful about, okay, see that's you actually answered the question already. We have to be careful about how far we push ourselves. We just have to be careful about assuming that you can never ever push yourself. Listen, this is an unpopular thing, but even people who have lived through horrible traumas and horrible experiences, ultimately, if they wind up moving past those things and to a recovered state, not that we can ever erase the past, but when they get past those things, anybody will wind up telling you that, yes, at some point I had to push myself into places that I did not think I should possibly go. So you just have to be really careful. I don't wanna belay with the point because I don't wanna sound like I'm arguing with you. I respect your experiences and I'm very sorry that you had to live through that. So let's see here. No, Billy says, so just do it even if you have to white-knuckle through it. No, I will tell you that if you are white-knuckling through, that's not helping you at all. So white-knuckling is what we call it when it comes from gripping the steering wheel so hard that your hands change color, right? And actually, I was told the other day that that's probably not a very culturally sensitive term to use and I probably shouldn't use it anymore. But yes, that means you are just gritting and I'm fighting through it because when you white-knuckle your way through things and that's where you wind up with like, I'm doing all the things, but I'm not getting any better. If you are, again, let's do another show of hands while there's so many of you still here, how many people are doing the things? I do the things, I'm doing my exposures that you don't avoid, but you are gritting your teeth, hanging on like hot death, pushing through as quick as possible. And when you get out of the challenge, it's like, ooh, thank God I made it. Hope I get to take six days now in the house before I do that again. Very common, yeah, white-knuckling is not a thing that helps you because the lesson that you learned from just gritting your teeth and pushing through it is that was horrible, I should have never done that. I barely made it, oh, I made it, I survived, I don't know how you lose the lesson that says, even if I let go, I still did it, right? So that's why you'll always hear me say to people, like, stop saying you made it, you did it, and you were always gonna make it. So that's sort of the white-knuckling thing. And again, white-knuckling is a thing that indicates I'm not accepting and I don't have that full willingness. I wanna do it, but I wanna do it, which is better than not doing it, don't get me wrong, as opposed to saying, no way I'm gonna live my entire life on the sofa, you've decided to try and challenge it, which is amazing, awesome, brave, and like certainly commendable fist bump for that, but we haven't reached the full level of like, oh, I'm gonna let whatever happens happens. So the thing I posted yesterday, was it yesterday on Instagram? I don't know, over the weekend, recovery is going from what if to even if, and so white-knuckling gets in the way of learning the lesson, even if I feel a thing, I'm okay. Hopefully that helps. Oh, this is good, sorry, I can't see your name. When I was surrendering, I didn't wanna feel things, but that is not surrendering. So yes, most people, I made a video on the Facebook group years ago, you're never gonna find it. I can't even find my own videos there. It's one of the reasons why I kind of hate the platform so much, but one of the things that it was an old admin, a lovely woman who's not in the group anymore, she at one point was beside herself and said, but if I do that, if I accept, if I do the Claire Week stuff, then I'm just left with these symptoms, these sensations and these feelings. And I made a video saying, yeah, that's exactly correct. Because remember that accepting and tolerating and surrendering is not a way to make it go away. It's a way to intentionally put yourself in contact with those internal experiences that you do not wanna have. So the object of surrender is to fully feel the things. So I love this comment because many people will find, well, I'm doing it now, and now it's worse. No, no, you're just choosing to feel it instead of shield yourself from it or gloss over it or use sandpaper to take off the rough edges. When you fully surrender and accept, you literally are like right up against the sandpaper, the nasty sliding across the pavement of exposures. You get scraped up, it feels like shit, it hurts. You bleed a little bit, I'm using metaphors here. And most people are like, oh, then that must be wrong. That can't be right, right? If I'm doing a thing, it's not making me feel better, it's making me feel worse. It's making you feel more. And it brings us back to the second point of why acceptance is so hard because you think you have to solve the problem instead of allowing it and stop seeing it and stop saying it is a problem. So, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, this is a good question. How do I not wish that it goes away? Everybody will wish that it goes away. Everybody does. You can't stop wishing that. So see why this is so hard? This is so hard to tease sometimes and I get why it's for you guys sometimes it's so hard to learn and grasp. Nobody is saying people will often misinterpret acceptance and surrender and all that stuff as you have to just not care. No, you're gonna care. You are 100% gonna F in care. Like if I have a panic attack today, which I always will say could happen, don't know, maybe I will later, who knows? I don't want to. Like I care if I have a panic attack, I just don't care as much as I used to. So it's not that you just turn off some switch and decide I'm not gonna care, I'm gonna stop hoping. You just learn through repeated experiences that you don't have to care so much. You don't have to protect yourself so much and you don't have to hope so hard. Like, and then over time that sort of changes. So that relationship with I hope it goes away starts to change. Like, I really hope it, oh my God, I hope it goes away. Turns into like, yeah, this sucks. I really wish it would go away. Turns into like, I don't need it to go away. I still want it to go away, but I don't really need it to. I'll be okay, cause I know I'm gonna be fine in an hour. See the difference? Like it changes over time. You don't just flick a switch. There's no switch that says you just, you stop hoping that it goes away. It doesn't happen though. You can't do it that way. So, let's keep going. Thanks for the inspiration. You're very welcome. I was going out of town, tried so hard to accept, but felt like I had to turn around even though I was already there. It's always a felt like, right? So pop this up on the screen real quick. Again, sorry, I don't see your name. I was going out of town, I tried so hard, but it felt like I had to turn around. Felt like is, felt like is death in this game, right? So I always say things like we should, we have to eliminate feels like or felt like from our vocabulary if we can. It felt like, it felt like I had to turn around or else, I don't know what. When you finally come to see your anxiety symptoms, is that a true game changer? Yeah, let's see here. Yes, Shane, good question. When you finally come to see your symptoms as irrelevant, is that true change? Sure is. Whether anxiety is there or not, you'll continue to pursue your life based on your values. Values is huge in ACT. Like if you know anything about ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a lot of it is based on like, I'm gonna move away from making choices based on fear to making choices based on what I value in life. So yes, things change. Like over time I start to learn that I don't have to care so much about how I feel and that gives me more room. So when all you care about all the time and you treat it as so important is how you feel, what your body's doing, what your thoughts are doing, what might happen in five minutes, you literally have no room to do anything but try to hang on like hot death. When you stop, when you stop seeing that, oh, I have to care so much about this and I have to fix it and prevent it and get away from it, you suddenly have room to move it. You get wiggle room and like, that's where your values can start to come in and things start to change. You make decisions all differently. Great, great, great question. Great, great, great question. Yeah, this is a good one too. So thank you for this comment. You realize after you surrender that you weren't going to, you know, you are solely sure it was gonna happen. Doesn't happen. Now this is a shift over the last 20 years, 25 years or so in the way we sort of approach these things. I approach these things, I would say. People who are a little bit more into, you know, we would call the third wave or the next wave modalities or whatever, would say that, yes, that's true. You do learn through experience that 99% of the time, the irrational outcome that you feared, a heart attack stroke going crazy, whatever, suffocating because you feel short of breath, doesn't happen. That is 100% true, you do learn that but you also, there's that other part of it that matters more these days. Like, well, no matter what happens, I will find a way to deal with it until the day comes that there's no more dealing because that's my last day. This is tough. That's a big philosophical like, and I might have freaked a bunch of you out. How many people got freaked out that I said that? But that's kind of the way everybody lives their life and that's the way a non-disorder person would live their life. I will handle whatever I can handle until I can't handle it anymore. But you're treating things now that you can handle like you can't. But when you truly can't, then you truly can't and you know that day. So tough one, right? Okay, it's true. It is human nature to not want to feel awful. So thank you, Sonya, for bringing this up because that's another misinterpretation. One, I have to learn to just not, because there's a couple. One is that really frost me. Oh, I just have to not care. No, I went through that a couple of minutes ago. You can't just turn off the caring switch, right? You will care. And the second one is this because some people will hear like, are you telling me I have to feel like this for the rest of my life? So the way to get better is to feel horrible until I die? No, no, no, not at all. But you have to be, and I've done, I did a stream on this I don't know, months ago, whenever, that misconception, but another paradox, these are paradox all the time, is that you have to be willing to feel that way and only then do you stop feeling that way. Does that make any sense? It doesn't make sense because like, wait a minute, I have to be willing to feel, well, if I feel this way, I can handle it. Then you stop feeling that way, but you have to aim at the first goal first. It is critically important that you aim at the first one, which is I am capable of feeling this way without hitting the panic button, without hitting the eject button, without calling it a nightmare, right? So that's the, you gotta get there first. Cause if you try to leapfrog that and just go to, I feel better, you will be sorely, you'll be frustrated over time. Setback I talked about, Mike, so hang in there. You're making choices to go back to the old ways. So what were you doing that was moving you forward, go back to doing that again, even when that's scary and hard? That's super simplified, but that is the way you deal with a setback. Just start doing the things that were getting you better. You've modified that in some way, shape, or form. So you gotta look at that. This is great, love this. Wow, I'm only halfway through the comments. I'm never gonna get through all of these because I ran out of time very shortly. That's why I do my exposures when I'm at the highest anxiety. Guess that's when I take the leap of faith. That is when exposures are actually the most valuable. But see this, this decision this person made right here. Sorry, I can't see your name. That's willingness. This is willingness and acceptance at play. That's what it looks like on a practical level. Cause you're right, those are the moments that you learn the most. Let's see here. I mean, I get it. I don't want to see, we don't want to see Jason in the speed up, maybe that's probably not me. Listen, I didn't say it, you did. When I'm having a good day, Heather says the thoughts of acceptance, acceptance seems easier when you're having a good day, but the comment I just put up about doing exposures on the most anxious days, that addresses that completely. Anybody can go do challenging things when we feel great cause then it's not a challenge. The trick here is to do things where we're not feeling great. And I do understand that for Heather, she says the thought of going crazy can be overwhelming. Anybody else in the room, we can insert a bunch of different stuff in there. The thought of insert your fear is overwhelming. So for Heather, for you, it's the thought of going crazy, but there's 10 of the people in the room right now that would tell you it's death or that would tell you it's harming their children or do something really embarrassing. That just happens to be the thing you think is the scariest. That's a good perspective to have. Oh, that's my scariest thing. So then you'll treat it as special because it's scariest to you, but it's just another thought. Acceptance takes mass courage, it does. It really does. There is 100% no doubt about that. It is the dirty little secret of recovery is that you have to be brave. This is the thing that I'm doing with Jenna. I don't know if you guys are following along with me and Jenna Overbaugh. I think it's on the 19th of May. We are doing a workshop on approaching anxiety courageously because that is the part that trips so many people up, even in the acceptance thing. So I should probably put up a page for that, but I don't know. If you go to Jenna's site, I'll put up something at the end, but you can check that out because that's the thing we need to talk about more for sure. Let's see. When you no longer have to actively surrender. Yes, yes, this. We no longer have to actively surrender. You're doing it right. Because surrender just becomes a default. Right now the default is push it away. For me, the default is like a, and people who get into the recovered state, the default changes. Yeah, Carol, it kind of is. Feel the fear and do it anyway. But so the third thing that I was gonna say, the third misinterpretation is I'm just supposed to not care. I have to feel this way for the rest of my life and just do it. People think that recovery is a Nike commercial or it's like this. There's like a pop psychology book that was really popular. I wanna say in the 70s or 80s, I'm not sure when it was written. Yeah, kinda. It is kinda like that. That is true. But anybody who wants to roll in here, and believe me, I've had a few of those people, you're saying just do it. It's just do it. Just man up. Like you are missing all of the new ones. Could you imagine that somebody would spend eight years of my life and wrote and spoke hundreds of thousands of words over hours and hours and hours of my life just to somehow pad the phrase, just do it. It's definitely not just feel the fear and do it anyway. Monica wants to know how I accept the no air feeling with acceptance. My breath should not even be concerned. I'm so hypersensitive to it. You can't run for yourself. Go ahead and suffocate. Like I know that sounds insensitive and cruel but like you need to hear somebody say that to you. I used to do the same thing. I would walk around all day long trying to fill my lungs up to here. I was desperate to get a feeling of full lungs. Go to my website, the anxioustruth.com and search for breath or breathing. You will see a podcast episode that I did on that. And in that situation, I have to take a leap of faith that says even if I do not fill my lungs completely, we'll get enough air. So your acceptance is the leap of faith as I'm gonna stop trying to get such a deep breath. I'm gonna stop trying to make sure that I'm breathing when I let myself suffocate. Super scary. That sounds crazy and super scary but that is really the path. So, and again, remember that for you, you'll say it's a short of breath feeling. That's the worst, but there's 93 other people in the room and we probably have 25 different things where they would say, no, no, no, that's not the worst. I literally at one point had somebody say, I would pay to have gastrointestinal problems because that would be way better than heart fear. And I've had other people say like, I would pay to have heart fear. I'm afraid I'm not gonna make it to the toilet. So you see what happens there? Let's see here. I'm gonna scroll down to the bottom because I'm literally running out of time at this point. I control the circus. Oh, you are right. Thank you. I picked the coffee beans on purpose because the last time we did coffee and alcohol, you're 100% right. Thank you, babe. Hey, Kelly, good to see you again. I have a big cycle that I can't escape. Yeah, it is, this is true. I can't argue with this. You cannot practice death. That is 100% true. But you can practice living as if you are not dying right now. That's really important. I'm gonna scroll to the end. I'm sorry, guys. I'm gonna miss a bunch of comments, but I gotta hit it. I see a perfectionism thing. Okay, what Bethany is saying. So David, what Bethany is saying to you is 100% correct. Go be reckless. Like for you, your challenge, your leap of faith is I might do it wrong. And even if I do it wrong, I'll wind up okay. So you perfectionism will drive you to say, if I do it wrong, that's a disaster. That is, I can't allow that. I was like, go ahead, go be reckless and do it wrong. And a lot of this, if you go to, I'm gonna send you back to my website again, TheAnxiousTruth.com and search for the word reckless. You will see a podcast episode I did on living recklessly, parentheses, not really. So, because it feels like you're being very reckless to be imperfect. But you're not really. And in time, you learn like, oh, that wasn't reckless at all, even though you thought it was. Okay, I think that's it. Yeah, this one, right? I get it, man. The short of breath feeling, I deal with that feeling too, it sucks. And the default for almost anybody that feels short of breath is to try to fill your lungs and expand your rib cage and get air so that you literally feel it at the bottom of your ears. Like you want to fill your lungs all the way up to here. But that is not cool because at the moment that you're super anxious, the muscles in your chest are constricted because muscle tension, anxiety, and here's news, your rib cage is bones. So like it is flexible because they're not all completely knitted together but it doesn't, you're thinking that you should like blow your rib cage up like a balloon. You know what can blow up like a balloon? Your belly. So that's why I talk about belly breathing and diaphragmatic breathing because you can expand your belly. So again, go search for the breathing episode. I talked about all that stuff. Diaphragmatic breathing is not a panic shield and it's not a cure for your anxiety. But if you deal with air hunger, taking a leap of faith that just pushing your belly out and filling your lungs at the bottom where they're supposed to fill, that won't feel right. It will feel like you're not getting enough air. It will feel wrong. It will feel dangerous. Try that. Try that. And you suddenly discover like, oh, check it out. My body's got plenty of oxygen. Who knew? Also, well, I don't want to go into it. There's a whole bunch of breathing stuff but sometimes it's because you literally you're inhaling too much, too much inhale, not enough exhale. So exhale longer than the inhale. Anyway, that's it. All right, so we are good to go. Thanks guys for coming by. This was a good one today. Great comments, great questions. We had a huge audience. I think we popped out about 110 people, which was amazing. I think that might've been a bit, nah, there was one that was a couple that were bigger. We've gone almost an hour. This will stay. So all of the extra goodies, if you wanna, if you're new to this and you're new to the channel, welcome all the extra goodies beyond this and my social media posts are on my website. Just go to the anxioustruth.com, the books, the podcast episodes, all the old stuff is there, workshops and all the good stuff that you wanna check out. Just go there, it's all there, right? And then this will stay in the Recovery Monday playlist on my YouTube channel. So if you're not subscribed on YouTube, you can do that because this shit is impossible to find on the other platforms. I don't know how Twitch goes, but whatever. I don't do these every Monday but I do them every other Monday. So I'll be back not next Monday, but the Monday after we'll do another topic. Hopefully it'll be as fun and informative as this one. We're out. Thanks everybody. Take care.