 sometimes judge our recovery progress. That's normal and natural. Today on Recovery Monday, we're gonna talk about the best way to judge that progress most productively without beating yourself up. So let's go. I'm gonna put up the chat, as I usually do here. Let's put the chat overlay up. Welcome everybody, welcome, welcome, welcome. We are in week 31 of these. I cannot believe that we've done 31 of these, but we are. Just a quick reminder, as everybody's filing in, every Monday we do lessons out of this book, The Anxious Truth, this is my recovery guide, and it is available all the places to find this book if you don't have it, or on my website at theanxiestruth.com, so you should go check that out. We gather every week. We're almost at the end of the gathering now, because we've been through almost the entire book at this point, but yeah, we do this every week. And today we're gonna talk about how to most productively judge our recovery progress, because we do need to do that now and then. It is helpful, but we wanna make sure we don't fall into traps of judging our progress based on the wrong criteria, and winding up in that trap of like kind of beating ourselves up and harshly judging ourselves for no good reason. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. It might not be terribly long, because it's a relatively short chapter, relatively short lesson to teach, so we'll go through that, and then we will go through some comments as we always do, and I'm getting a phone call, I'm sorry. So let's see, everybody, where is everybody from today? Is everybody doing today? We're at the UK here. We have Russia, Katya's here, hello. Hey Tiff, what's going on? Everybody is here. So as you guys are filing in, and I'll just remind you by the way that if you're watching from the Facebook group and you comment, it'll just say Facebook user. It doesn't show me your name. I'm sorry, that's just the way Restream does it, but that's okay. If you wanna say your name, that's totally fine. Twitch greetings from nowhere, Nevada. What up, Becky? Thanks for always representing for Twitch. I appreciate that. I actually found out some people are watching on Twitter too. Who knew? I'm like, this is being broadcast everywhere, but last week I discovered people were actually watching on Twitter. Go figure. I don't really have much of a following on Twitter. Anyway, let's get into this. Judging progress is something that's going to happen. Now sometimes we judge progress when we don't have to, like we, because I understand everybody wants to get better. We wanna get better, we wanna get better. So you're likely to keep looping back and sort of accidentally am I better now? Am I better now? Am I better now? Now that's not necessarily productive. We don't wanna get caught in doing that all the time, but sometimes emotions do enter into this. It's going to happen. You're gonna find yourself kind of checking to see how you're doing. And that's okay. You also have to realize that sometimes we do actually have to try to objectively judge our progress. There's two reasons why you'd wanna do that. Number one, how do you know how you're doing? If you don't take a little bit of time to review what's going on sometimes in a healthy way, in a productive way. And also it helps to help us celebrate our progress. Like our wins, the things that we are doing right. So if we never do that, then sometimes we lose touch with the fact that, hey, we're actually doing good stuff and we need to sort of applaud that, pat ourselves in the back for that. So there are times that you will accidentally fall into judging your progress. And then there were times when we're gonna kind of wanna do that. I have it in the book as part of the idea of executing your plan is every once in a while you kind of revisit, adjust, see what's going on. So this is gonna happen from time to time. What does this mean though? When we judge our progress, what do we want to do to productively judge our progress to not beat ourselves up, to not fall into some of the more common traps that sort of can sabotage us a little bit even though we don't mean to do that. So what we care about is, I'm gonna go right back to the very beginning of some of these recovery concepts. It's never about how you feel. It's never about how you feel. In the end, I understand that the only reason why you're doing any of this is to change how you feel. I do get that, we can acknowledge that. But the target of recovery is never directly to change how you feel. This is such a critical concept in the process to really understand and really accept even though you might not wanna accept that. The target is never let me change how I feel or let me somehow stop feeling this way. Changing the way you feel is a happy side effect of changing what you do. So in the end, this is a process of changing what you do. Changing how we react to, how we relate to our anxieties and our fears and our vulnerabilities and those scary thoughts and sensations and all of those things. We change the way we behave toward it so that we can show our brains that we are always safe even though we are uncomfortable. But in the end, that isn't necessarily, the target isn't I do this so that I feel better. I do exposures to feel better. I do exposures so that I can learn a new way to relate to this problem so that I can learn in the end that I don't have to be afraid of it like I used to. I don't have to declare it a giant emergency. I don't have to hit the panic button, call out the reserves, stop everything, disengage from life. I don't have to do that. I can actually get through this. I can tolerate this. I can handle this. So that is the crux of recovery. In the end, when we do that and the relationship with anxiety and panic and fear and those sort of things change, then you will begin to feel better but that is the secondary effect. You have to be willing to accept that that is the secondary effect. And toward that end, when we're going to judge our progress, we should never really judge it based on how we're feeling. And I'll tell you why. Now, as you go down the road and you make more and more progress and you've been at it for a while and you're consistently doing the work and you stumble from time to time but you're making forward progress, even if it's slow. What's going to happen is you will discover that you are feeling differently over time. That does happen, but it happens slowly. It happens subtly. It happens bit by bit. It's not like you wake up on morning and like, oh my God, I feel recovered, it's gone. Like that doesn't happen that way. So you will begin to feel different as you go. But if we say that that is the measure of progress then conversely, if you have a day where you do feel things again, you do feel badly, you are feeling anxiety, you are having those scary thoughts, you will say, oh, my progress is a race and that's a problem, like that's a problem. So we can be happy that we're starting to feel different over time. There's nothing wrong with that. But we cannot let that be the measure of success. And again, this is really subtle. There's no hard and fast rule here and you kind of live this experience organically over time and it evolves as you go. The process sort of unfolds this as it goes. So I can't tell you like, yes, you judge your progress based on the amount of anxiety you have or you do this XYZ, it's not math. There's no math here, unfortunately. But in the end, we really wanna say, am I living my life in a different way than I used to? Am I doing things that I used to refuse to do? Have I dropped the conditions that I used to impose upon life? I can only do this if I have this particular condition met. Am I starting to drop those special conditions? Am I engineering things less? Am I going more into the fear or toward the things that I want to do as opposed to running away because of fear? Am I doing that more? Have I begun to move through these uncomfortable sensations on a more consistent basis? Not are they there? How am I reacting to them and relating to them and responding to them when they do come up? This is the way we measure. So we kind of wanna measure based on how different does my life look from a behavioral standpoint than it used to look? That's the best measure of progress because honestly, that's what matters most. If you are in fact doing more, then by definition, you are in fact getting better. I know that the feelings or the state of feeling that you want, which is I want to be completely calm, I don't wanna have any panic, I don't wanna have these scary thoughts, I wanna be happy and joyful and I wanna be the old me, you can't get there without going through this intermediate process, you can't get there. There's no way to get there without doing this first. So in the end, if you are living your life differently, then by definition, you are making progress because that state that you're hoping to achieve in the end will follow along. So sort of like, we talk about this sometimes, right? The old school CBT, and this is a really common thing. And I think one of the episodes this week in the anxious morning is called, is this CBT? We talk about it a little bit. I think it's Wednesday, so tune in for that. But one of the things that sort of old school CBT was focused on was like, oh, you can change your thoughts. If I can catch my thoughts, in fact, check them and replace them and be logical and change the way I think, then I'll change the way I feel. But really we know now, we change the way we behave and the thoughts and feelings follow behind that. That's really important, it's really important because you can't get there without changing what you do. It's proving to be very difficult. That sort of old school stuff with the worksheets and the fact checking and the replacing thoughts. Yeah, it was effective. It was still the most effective thing we had at the time, but that was backing, that was prone to relapse for that reason. So we lead with behavior and if you're making behavioral changes consistently then even though you don't feel the way you ultimately want to feel, you are feeling the way you need to feel now, now. CBT is cognitive behavioral therapy. It's one of the foundational things in everything I've ever write about. So that's CBT is something you should have heard in this podcast again and again and again and in my book. So that's really important. It's really, really important. The behaving is what opens up those lessons. The doing it even though I think I can't opens up those lessons. The change in feeling comes later. So it's really important when we sit down to say, okay, let's do a little review. How am I doing? Do I need to change some stuff? Do I need to change my exposure plan? Can I maybe think about going back to work or school now? Have I progressed enough? You have to ask those questions which are kind of dry and mechanical. Does my life look different behaviorally now than it did say two months ago or six months ago? Not do I feel different? But honestly, if you can answer that question, does my life look different behaviorally now? With a yes, there's a really good chance you do feel different now. You just don't feel the way you hope to feel in the end. That's really important. So when we judge progress, we wanna do it that way as much as we can. Now, there's two things that are really important here. Emotions do matter. Like we are emotional beings. You're going to get frustrated. You're going to get discouraged. You're gonna get angry. You're gonna get disappointed. All of those things will come up. And that means that you will sometimes fall into the trap of judging your progress based on emotions. I just wanna feel better. I just want to, okay, that's okay. Sometimes we're gonna have those days. It's okay to have that. I cannot teach you away nor what I ever try or want to to completely engineer your emotions and your feelings out of this process. It's just not possible nor would it be healthy or advisable. So it's really important to remember that. Even though I'm telling you like we have to be careful about judging based on how we feel, we never care how we feel only what we do. That's always within the lens of our total humanity. You will feel things. You will have emotions. And in fact, for a large portion of the community, the ability to feel emotions that are not necessarily anxiety. Then uncertainty, anger, disappointment, frustration, those things that would instantly morph into fear and anxiety, learning to experience the full range of your emotions again is actually part of this process. So we would never want to engineer those out nor could we if we wanted to. So sometimes, excuse me, you will make emotional judgments of your progress and how are you doing? That's going to happen. This is where having a good support system that can give you a place to vent and cry a little bit when need be is great. And then like, hey, let's remember though what you're really shooting for here. The people who can get you back on track after a little bit of time expressing those emotions or wallowing, if you will, we all wallow from time to time. It's okay, that's going to happen. So it's really important to try to judge progress properly. I'm saying properly. I'm gonna say maybe in the more most constructive way, right? Maybe in the most constructive way. So it's not really how to judge your progress properly. It's more like how to judge it most productively and at least expense to you because if we don't do it this way, and you guys are in the Facebook group, you see this all the time, people will roll in and this post happens almost daily. I was doing so great for two or three weeks and now it is all out the window because I had a panic attack last night. You see the problem there? That becomes like now judgment becomes a weapon pointed back on yourself. So when we try to do it this way, like the way I wrote about here, we can kind of keep that from happening to some degree. Not always, we're never going to completely eliminate that but we can at least decrease the probability that you will take your emotions and turn them around and point them at yourself and shoot yourself in the foot with them. That's not okay, that's not fair to you. That's not being nice to you. So part of doing it this way is a way to maintain sort of an environment of self-compassion or kindness to yourself. An understanding of the process, what's going on, this is hard, you're gonna have emotions. You don't have to be turned against you. You don't start calling yourself a failure. This is never gonna end. Oh my God, I'm not getting this. That has nothing to do with it. So we try and be as objective as we can that helps. So the final thing that I wanna say that I mentioned in this chapter of the book is we, and I said before, there's no math here, but we do wanna have as much math as we can have. And by math, what I mean is making things measurable, right? So one of the things that we wanna do in recovery is to try to make things measurable. And this is why I spent so much time in chapters three and four of this book and so many words talking about creating a plan. Understand the idea of a plan confuses some people because they don't understand, well, what's my plan for GED? We've talked about that sort of stuff, but we want to try to make our goals as measurable as we can make them. Not everything in the world is measurable. Not everything in a human life is measurable. Some things are subjective. We cannot measure them. But we want as much objectivity as we possibly can. So when we say one of my recovery goals, part of my fear ladder, is to be able to go and pick up the kids at the bus stop every day. Well, we can measure that. I will go to the bus stop, which is a mile away. I will stay there for 10 minutes. Then I will go home. Did I do my 10 minutes? Yes, when? There's no question there. Not, I went, but I was afraid it's a failure. I can't, I don't know. I just can't get rid of these failings. Did you do the 10 minutes at the bus stop? End of story, when? Did you work up to the point where you wait for the kids, they get off the bus, you bring them back home? When? So we want to try to make our recovery goals as measurable as we can and as objective as we can, as often as we can. Again, not everything can be measured and not everything can be objective. But it's so much better to do that than to just have a generic amorphous goal that says, I want to get better. I just want to feel better. It's really hard to measure that because that is entirely subjective, entirely emotional. And then you will wind up being rubber banded back and forth between, and you guys see this in the community. We get rubber banded back and forth viciously, dragged up and down the street by, I'm doing great, I'm recovered, I'm almost there. And then two days later, if you're only judging based on amorphous, how you feel goals, I'm doing terribly. I thought I had this and I can't get it. I'm clearly doing something wrong. That's so not productive and it's so not fair when somebody gets caught in that. So if we can be as objective as we can in the process, whenever we can, measure it and then know, I met the measurement, that's it, that's the end of the story. Now, some of that is a little bit unnatural to say, well, I'm going to get in the car and I'm going, and I did that. I had to drive around, I will drive around today for 22 minutes. I mean, I do remember a day where I did that. Did I do the 22 minutes? That's it, that's the end of the story. Done, mission accomplished, finished. But, and if I do my 22 minutes consistently, then I achieve a longer term goal. Okay, I now can go out and drive around for a half hour. I can drive a half hour away. And I did that by driving for 22 minutes, then 25 minutes and 28 minutes. So do you see where that matters? As opposed to just making a very rough, kind of gauzy, not concrete, I just want to be able to, yes. Now break that down into objective, measurable steps if at all possible. And then it gives us a way to measure. Then we have to check our progress. We can say, how do I know that my life looks different behaviorally? Oh, because I am doing the bus stop pickup now. Because I get up in the morning and I do not lay in bed anymore. I know this because I, whatever, I spend much less time Googling than I used to now. See how those are like measurable things you can point to? I can't remember the last time I Googled the symptom. Boom, that's progress. Doesn't matter how you feel. That comes later, all right? So that's what we got going on. I'm going to scroll through here. It looks like comments stopped. Hopefully we're still cooking here, but we're already 17 minutes. I will try to take as many questions as I can. Let's see what we got going on here. You guys want to ask questions? That's great. Hello, hello, hello from Canada. What's up? I'll pop this up on the screen. Gary says, and I sort of answered in the middle of the stream, I think, but I'll put it up anyway. Surely progress can be measured by the amount of suffering one is undergoing. And I would say that the answer to that is not so much because if you know, because you are looking for like, I want to be free of suffering. I do not want to suffer anymore. So if there is any suffering left, then you're going to call that not progress and tell me how you measure suffering. I understand that on a, yes, a human being understands I'm suffering more or less. I'm not denying that, but that is so emotionally based and so subjective that what you think is a little less suffering on Tuesday may feel like an avalanche of suffering on Wednesday. So it completely and utterly clouds your judgment there. And we're really learning too that like words like suffering are part of what sort of create the problem. Like I'm facing adversity here. I'm feeling very uncomfortable and afraid. I'm feeling vulnerable and uncertain. Yes, that's very uncomfortable. That's distressing. That's terrifying. But if I'm going to plant my flag with suffering, well, I'm taking it to a whole other level altogether. So I take a little bit of exception to using that word is we're gonna use it sometimes, but definitely I would not use it as a measuring stick. It's a bad idea. What's up here? What do I got going on? May I request if you could do a podcast on baseline anxiety? I am expecting it is, but how do I deal with it, baseline anxiety? I'm not 100% sure what you're asking to be totally honest with you. I don't know if that's, if you're asking about GAD, it's important to remember quickly. I'll try and answer it really quickly. And if you could explain a little more, maybe I might be able to podcast episode on that. But it's important to recognize that almost everybody that's dealing with every version of these disorders has baseline anxiety. And over time it begins to lessen as we do this work. But sometimes we are under the assumption that like, oh, I must be special because I still have a base level of anxiety that isn't going away. I know GAD people fall into that trap. Well, I have GAD, so I'm anxious all the time. Well, here's news, people with panic disorder and agoraphobia are also anxious all the time. People with OCD are also anxious all the time. So got to clarify that a little bit, but that base level anxiety isn't special anxiety. So I don't know if it needs a podcast episode or not. I'm not sure I understand the question. Sorry. Let's see. Nikki here, what up Nikki? My conscious brain knows that there is nothing to fear. My other brain doesn't, so that can be frustrating. Yeah, when you know, but your body needs to get the memo. Interestingly, it's actually your brain that needs to get the memo. So this is a good comment. It's a really good comment, right? And I see what you're getting, but I would tell you to flip that. It's actually your brain that needs to get the memo. Your body is just doing what it's designed to do. It doesn't need a memo to say stop. Basically what has to happen is you need to send your brain the memo that says, well, my body still works, even though it's working not the way I want right now, it still is working. So I totally get the analogy you're trying to put out here, but I would flip that. No, no, no. If I do things while my body is doing these things I don't like, then I send a memo to my brain and then the brain can say, I can start to turn those responses down a little bit. So we gotta flip that just a little bit. Good question though. When judging progress is language important? Well, language is how we speak to each other. Language is how we speak to ourselves. Like we have an internal language too. So yes, language is important. Telling ourselves that we had a bad day after we've done really well, that we are going backwards. Well, I mean, technically then, yeah, that's bad language. Yeah, that's bad language. But that language is an outgrowth of conceptualization. It's not the language, the language doesn't exist in a vacuum, right? So if you are having a good day or a couple of good days and then you say you have a bad day, that language is an outgrowth of what you judge as to be a good day or a bad day. Now again, on a human level, emotionally having a happy day where you don't have any panic and that sort of stuff, we all would say that's a good day. That's not a problem. But in the context of the recovery process, you have to understand that the best days are the days when we feel the worst, but still function, but still do things. In recovery, those are actually the good days. That's super counterintuitive, so I wouldn't expect you to just take that as your default mode. But in the end, the language is an outgrowth of how you're conceptualizing this process. Like, well, I'm having a really good day. Yeah, it was a good day. That's everybody's happy for you. Now I'm gonna call this a bad day because I feel bad, but really in recovery standpoint, those are the best days because these are the days that I can actually learn some lessons. Anybody can have a happy day. I want you to have happy days. We all want to have happy days, but anybody can have a happy day. The happy day doesn't teach you anything. What teaches us stuff is when we have those days where we feel crappy stuff and we move through it successfully anyway, because we always do. We always move through. If you're watching this, you've moved successfully through everything you've ever felt. Think about that for a second. If you're watching me right now, repeat it. You have moved successfully through every single thing you have ever felt since the second you were born if you're watching me right now. By definition, you cannot tell me I'm wrong. You didn't like how it felt sometimes, but you were successful in getting past it. Every single time. And you got to really look at like, well, that's the goal of recovery. I need to see those lessons as often as I can. Hopefully that helps. GBG is now, my anxiety is gone because I'm angry at the guy for selling the car. I get that, totally get it. Let's see. Okay, let's pop this up here. What's up, Nath? It's difficult to not beat myself up for setbacks. This is important. It's important. I did, I did. Listen to me, I can't speak English today. I don't know what podcast episode it was. It was probably in the last six months or so. I did a podcast episode with Josh Fletcher about the self-belief, like the internal beliefs that sometimes can hinder progress. That was a good episode. You go check that out. If you feel that like hitting yourself over the head is your automatic default and you don't know how to stop that, that could be, it could be. I cannot diagnose anybody on an internet video if you're on the internet at all, but it could be an indicator that there are other things. Not everything is a mechanical panic, anxiety, flow, except surrender problem. So if your default mode always is I did it wrong, I don't get it, I'm not smart, I'm not good enough, that's something else that might have to be looked at too. That could be a self-limiting belief that does get in the way, that presents a greater obstacle in the recovery process. But we have to do all the stuff. We have to deal with all of our humanity. Unfortunately, I wish I could tell you that everything was about floating and accepting, but it's not, not every problem is solved with this stuff. I'm gonna scroll up a little bit here. What do we got here? I used to white knuckle through life. I did a podcast, I think it was a couple of weeks ago, by the way, for those of you who don't know what white knuckling is, I did a whole podcast about white knuckling. So you should go check that out. It was in the last couple of weeks. I used to white knuckle through life in the beginning of recovery. I did what I used to, but I felt much worse. That is a big point. In the beginning, a lot of people will say, and this goes back to today's topic, which is judging progress, people will say, oh no, it's getting worse. I'm doing this thing now. I read your book and I'm doing this stuff or my therapist has me doing exposures and it's getting worse. No, no, you just feel it more. But remember that the recovery process is about intentionally feeling it. So that usually the thing I felt worse, it's getting worse when I started doing this stuff. That's an inaccurate judgment of progress right there. Because that says, oh no, I'm doing this to get better, which I know you are, but the intermediate step is, no, no, I have to feel these things. I've been trying so hard to not feel them. Now I must feel them. So if you start to choose to feel them, of course it's gonna feel worse or you might subjectively interpret that as worse. The best analogy I can come up with that, which when people always say like, oh no, it's worse, it's back, it's a setback, it's like trying to learn how to swim. And I've used this a million times before. If you don't know how to swim and you hire somebody to give you swimming lessons, imagine if you declared a failure every single time you discover that you were wet. You have to jump in the pool and you have to get wet. That's recovery. So it's important to understand that. That's really important. So let me scroll up here. I don't know what today's anxious morning podcast even was, but thank you. Sometimes I forget what I even wrote, to be honest with you. Let's throw this up. Leslie, good to see you. This is so important, it can be so hard, seeing what we are doing now and didn't do before. Is logical and objective, yet we always question the feelings when that happens. That is logical and objective and we want that. We need that logical objective view of things. And that's where having outside helpers and support people sometimes can be really useful. Because we get caught up in our own emotional judgments and having outside people to be able to say, hey, but remember when you would refused to go to parent-teacher night at school and now you go, oh, that's right. Yeah, I do do that now. So it's really important. Because unfortunately, logical and objective often simply do not enter into this. I wish they did, but they don't. We have to drag logical objective back in here kicking and screaming. We have to inject reality into the situation, kicking and screaming. I hate it, but it's true. Let's see here. I'll put this up on the screen. If you were screamed at by a teacher in school, which is a shitty situation, I'm sorry about that. And bullied in school and we're different. Do you need to go to the past or do you do it when fully recovered? I can't answer that question. The fact that you're bringing those up is really good. I applaud you for that. That's a brave thing to do. You're understanding some of those issues, but I can't tell you whether or not you have to go back and work on those or not. Maybe you do. Maybe you have to do it before you can do anxiety recovery. Maybe you have to do anxiety recovery first. Sometimes it's a matter of putting out the fire first and being able to stand up. And that's the stuff that I talk about. And then maybe you have the capability to go up. I can look, but I can't tell you that. Unfortunately, Muhammad, I'm sorry that you had those experiences, but I cannot give you the answer to your question. I don't know. Thank you, Nikki. This is a very nice thing to say. I'm working on it. I'm working on it. A final project due this week too on one of my classes. So let's see. Big win for me. I'm not gonna throw this up the screen because it'll fill the whole screen. Big, big win driving to the library. Good job, whoever that is. Excellent. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. I've not driven okay. So this is a big one. So hey, Tiff, I have not driven in two weeks without someone in the car. I am really trying to get behind the wheel alone. I will do it just really scared. It's super scary. And like, you know what? I give you a big fist bump because I know you're really doing hard things. None of this is easy. We always have to acknowledge that. The thing that, people say a lot of stuff to me online. What am I gonna do? This is my life. And I've been called a lot of things and told I don't know what I'm doing and blah, blah, blah. And that's fine. That stuff never bothers me. The only stuff that does kind of get me a little bit is when people do the, oh, easier said than done. Because we never, I never say it's easy, never. So I just want to acknowledge, Tiff, that I know you're doing hard things and it is really scary, but a little bit at a time. A little bit at a time. You can do it. And you know what? Keep this in mind. Because then when you are driving by yourself more and more, that's how you judge your progress. Oh, look, I remember when I couldn't get in the car when I was alone and now I get in the car when I'm alone. Remember that, write it down because it's gonna be important. Write it down on the road. Scroll down to the bottom here. Let's see here, baseline of the minute. Okay. Let me, I'll pop this up here because I asked you to comment again, baseline anxiety, the minimal anxiety which always lingers around it does, it does not make us feel 100% despite all the hard work. Okay. Again, the bad news there is that's not necessarily special anxiety. But the fact that you are like, well, I'm not 100% because I feel anxious. No, but I'm way closer to 100% than I used to be and I can continue to work on that a little bit at a time. That's that eradication thing that's, no, I got to get rid of all of this. If I do not get rid of all of this, then it's not acceptable. And here's part of the paradox of recovery. And I can't, I don't know your specifics so I can't really give you specific advice here but one of the biggest paradoxes in recovery is the idea that if we focus solely on getting to 0%, I must eradicate all of my anxiety and it's almost impossible to eradicate the anxiety. Like you literally have to get into a mode where you're willing to say, well, I could function this way if I had to for the rest of my life. Not that that's your plan to be that way the rest of your life, but if it's like, well, I got to keep ferriting and thinking and finding ways to get rid of the rest of this anxiety, well, that could be really, really difficult, really difficult. It puts you in a little bit of a no-win situation. So just be careful about that. Hope that helps. I have outlawed conversations with my brain about how calm I was. I'm sorry to pretend to be the help me so much. I'm glad I've been able to help Melinda. Thank you so much. Those are kind words. This is a good one. People are always confused by the idea of mindfulness and I do get that. It seems like such like an amorphous sort of thing. How to become more mindful. Mindfulness is simply paying attention. So hopefully this helps. The answer to how to become more mindful is just pay attention. Anything that helps you pay attention. That's it. Mindfulness is paying attention to what you want to pay attention to without judgment. That's really important without judgment. It was a little bit of a thing in the Facebook group a little while ago where somebody was somehow intimating that there was a proper way to be mindful. There's actually no proper way to be mindful. Let me be very clear about that. Because there's no judgment. You cannot judge your mindfulness that ruins the mindfulness. So mindfulness is just let me just pay attention. And that means that when you are engaging and feeding back into the loop of, oh my God, what's gonna happen? Oh my God, I feel, I feel the symptoms of this thing. What am I, worry my rumination? Okay, you can literally be mindful about that if you want but I know that's not what you want. Instead, I'm gonna be mindful about the fact that this microphone is in front of me, that this light is on and that I'm reading comments even though I feel a thing. Even though I feel a thing. So I can tell you that I've had a little bit of an ear problem the last two days. So today I got a little bit of this thing going on which happens to be from time to time. Mindfulness is just that, well, I can pay attention to doing this video instead of necessarily paying attention to this thing that I got going on a little bit. So you can practice that, you can practice that. I understand being mindful can be mysterious to some people. And to be totally honest with you, shameless plug, I wrote 7% Slower, which is the third book that I wrote, 7% Slower.com if you wanna go there. If you don't know that book, 7% Slower is really a practical guide to learning to be mindful by slowing down. You can't help but pay more attention when you slow yourself down. So maybe that would be helpful. I'm gonna put this up real quick, a couple more minutes. Would you say that my intrusive thought that I can't breathe is OCD? I don't know. Nobody on the internet can tell you whether or not you have OCD or not. I cannot diagnose you as having OCD or not. So I'm sorry, but I wanted to put it up because it's really important that you understand that nobody on the internet, not me, not me in two years when I have a license as a therapist, not an existing therapist, nobody on the internet can diagnose your OCD. It's really important that you know that. Let's see. I'm gonna throw this up. Because this is a common theme. It's a common theme for many people and it's a common theme for you specifically. And certain ideas, irrational fears, structure specific anxiety symptoms, making them trigger each other and feel more important even though they're actually separate. The most important, there's a little meta here. What's important word in your comment here is more important. The word important matters here. Remember the pattern here. The pattern, it's the pattern from thought to thought to thought. Well, this feels important. The last one felt important, but yeah, you're right, it wasn't important, but this one, this one really feels important. Oh yeah, remember when I had that thought two weeks ago? That really felt important too, but this one really feels important now. So can you tell me about this one now? Is this really important? So can they start to string together? Yeah, they're separate. They are separate thoughts. Sure, the content is separate, but you have to recognize the pattern. And that pattern can apply to thoughts or emotions or physical sensations. Like, oh yeah, I know you said that the breathing was no big deal, but now I'm feeling some stomach stuff. Is that, is this, this feels more important now because it's a different one, but it's not. The pattern of how you interpret these things matters more than anything else in that chain. So Bethany just said fear always feels important. Correct, but sometimes it's really helpful. And I think, I don't know if this is coming up on the anxious morning. I don't remember where I put it, but I'm starting to lose track of where my content is. But in the end, if you start to, we talked about journaling at one point and success journaling, an adjunct to that might be, every time I feel a thing or think a thing that I think might be really important, let me just write it down. Not delve into it for hours and break it apart and dissect it and try to solve it. Just today, I'm having thoughts about that I might not love my husband or my partner or whatever it is. And it feels really important. Really, that feels really dangerous and really important. Okay, just write it down. I'm having this thought today. And if you start to have a record of those thoughts, when you have another one that feels really important, you can kind of flip back and say, oh, I also had 17 other really important thoughts in the last three weeks. So sometimes that can help. Sometimes that can help. It's the pattern. It's the pattern. Let's scroll up here. I'm not gonna go into the GI issues that's not a thing. GI issues can just address that very quickly, very, very quickly. Your body can make you uncomfortable because we do sometimes have medical problems, but your body doesn't make you afraid of your body. See that there's really important, it's super important to draw that boundary and understand where it goes off the rails. You can have a health problem that actually makes you really uncomfortable, causes pain, causes discomfort that happens to human beings, unfortunately, sorry, it's happening to you. But your GI tract does not teach you to become afraid of your GI tract and to catastrophize about your GI tract and to take the sensations of gastrointestinal distress and turn them into something else. That is purely cognitive. That has nothing to do with your GI tract. That's really important. Okay, so I think we're pretty much at the end here. Okay, I'll throw this up, this is good. Thank you for sharing this Viola. I had a bad childhood, I'm very sorry to hear that, that's not cool. My parents are alcoholics, I was born with paralysis on the one side of my face, so I had a lot of trauma and I'm still recovering without working on the past. Thank you for sharing that, I really appreciate that. That's very personal stuff and I appreciate you sharing that with the community. It is such a individual thing, we don't know. Nobody can tell you, right? So the fact that you feel like you're making progress without digging into the past is really great. You may at some point decide that you do want to dig into the past a little bit. That's totally fine too. This is becoming a more and more of a hot topic, how trauma and anxiety recover, sort of anxiety recover, kind of dovetail, how are they the same, how are they different? It's more than I can cover in this, but it's a little bit controversial because anytime we suggest that we don't wrap ourselves in the trauma narrative, a lot of hate gets thrown, but sometimes, sometimes, the recognition that like, well, first I have to be able to stand up on my own two feet first. I've had many people who will say, there was no way I can go and do trauma work when I was literally terrified of my own body. So they do go hand in hand, but it's very individual. Thank you, Viola, I appreciate your perspective. So let's see here. Yes, and that's important. Your body doesn't make you afraid of your body. That's really super, super important, really super important. Let's put this up. Got to share my big win today. Got my hair highlighted for the first time since this all got so bad and I'm so happy. This was a big win for me. Bonnie, love to see a big win up on the screen. I'm a fan. Do I still get anxious? I still feel anxiety because I'm a human being. All human beings are anxious from time to time. I might have a panic attack once or twice a year. It's been a long time now. I probably haven't experienced panic for six or eight months. I might have one today, I don't know. I just don't care, that's the difference. So I have a normal relationship with anxiety, not a disordered relationship with anxiety. But I can still feel anxiety, just not have an anxiety disorder. Hopefully that helps. All right guys, I'm pretty much out of time. So that's about it. I appreciate you coming by. I think we only have two more of these. Let me look. Next week we're gonna talk about, let's see. And I think at the end, I'm gonna try and do something with some guests. Lesson five dot seven next week, same time as it's not always recovery. That is huge. So we really only have two more. We have next week and the week after. So I will try to plan something, I don't know what, fun, big, special, maybe clowns, juggling, fire eaters. I don't know for the last episode, we'll see. And then we're gonna have to see what we do after that. But the point is, if you would like to follow along, first of all, all of these episodes are here on my YouTube channel. So if you don't subscribe to my YouTube, you should do that. They are in a playlist called Recovery Monday. So you can go back and watch all of these again. We have essentially walked through this entire book now, almost the entire book. And if you don't have the book, you can get it at theanxustreat.com, all the ways to get it are there. All my other stuff is there. And what else? This also stays in the Facebook group, harder to search and find that way. On my Facebook page, impossible to search and find that way. So really the best way to come back and view these again, I would say, is probably YouTube. YouTube does the best job of organizing videos into things like playlists. Thank you guys very much for your time. I hope this has been helpful. I will see you again next time, so next week, Monday, same time, same place.