 me. Anyway, welcome back to Recovery Monday. I feel like we haven't done one of these in a super long time, probably because we haven't. It's been, I don't know, at least a month or so. I think the last time we were supposed to do one of these, well, we ran into a holiday in the States, and then we ran into a week off that I had from school. So here we are. Anyway, back, back after a while, I'm glad that we can do another one today. It's been a little while and I missed it. So let's get the chat overlay up so that you guys can talk to each other. Chat overlay. Bam. There we go. So you guys can chat amongst yourselves as you usually do. Where's my background? Hang on. Let me put a background up too. I like having a background. There you go. Man, not that one. How about that one? Let's do that one instead. Anyway, Bethany is here. Hello, everybody. Today we're going to talk about a common thread. So yesterday on Instagram, I said, hey, we're going to stream on Monday. Hey, Moira, Moira, how are you doing from Montreal? And I asked for questions. What do you guys want to? Nice Marmot. Yes. Big Lebowski reference. I always appreciate that. Hello, everybody. So yesterday I asked my Instagram audience, like, what do you, what should we talk about on the Recovery Monday livestream? And I got a bunch of questions, which were great. And a lot of those questions were the same question, just phrased in different ways. There's a common theme. And that theme is generally like, what about if this makes me worse? And we'll talk about that because it actually expresses in a bunch of different ways. And we're going to attack the idea of what worse even means. Like, what does it mean if it gets worse? Like, what are we actually after in recovery? Why are we actually even using terms like worse? Does that imply that we're trying to definitely get rid of it? And but instead it might make it worse. So we're going to talk about all of those things, right? And let's see who's here. Aurora is here. Hello, Aurora. Not feeling anxious, but don't want to go to a drive for a drive because I know it will make me anxious. Okay, well, I mean, you probably know what to do with that then for sure. Hello, Penelope Cruzify. It's been a long time. How are you? Katya's here from Russia. Hello, Melanie. First time that you made a live. Congratulations. Glad to see that you're here. Fell along Islander. Christine is here. Hello, Barbara. How's it going? Let me look at the chat in the window here. There we go. Now I can see everybody. So let's get into it, right? So usually I yak at you guys for a little while and then we can do questions and comments and that sort of stuff. So let's talk about that fear that this and I put this in like asterisks or air quotes, insert your fear here, like whatever it happens to be, what if this thing makes my anxiety worse? And in this situation, we can look at a couple of different things. What if doing the exposure makes my anxiety worse? If I go toward what I fear, or if I go, you know, and face my fear, what if it makes the anxiety worse? What if talking about anxiety makes my anxiety worse? So one person said, how do I know if I should continue therapy because I'm not feeling so anxious, but maybe talking about anxiety will make me feel worse. Another common thread was, can you talk about what happens when you can't seem to get rid of scary thoughts and you fear that the fact that they hang around too long means that they will get worse. They will begin to come true because they've hung around so long. So there's a ton of different sort of variations on this theme. And the common theme is that you have the belief, which is really the doubt that anxiety will put in your head, that if the state changes or your experience changes in some ways, you will not be able to handle it. It will overtake you. It will overwhelm you. It will break you. It will cause some catastrophic feared actual outcome. It will outstrip your ability to cope and handle it. You will be permanently incapacitated or damaged. You are failing as a human being. You're unworthy. Whatever that outcome is that you cannot tolerate and must avoid at all costs, that's really what you're asking here. So like, I am really nervous about feeling a different way, either maybe feeling my anxiety more intently or feeling a different type of anxiety or not being able to banish the scary thoughts. And therefore, I am going to fear that if I feel this different way or it changes in some way or experience it in a different way, I'm going to go back to the doubt that I can't handle this or that somehow magically my thoughts will start to become true or I will have that psychotic break or I will die or whatever it happens to be, right? So if I let these thoughts be here, it makes me worse. That was me. I was afraid certain thoughts would cause or could cause permanent distress or depression. This is good. Let's go right to comments right away because this was one of those common things. I should be able to show this. Mustard rain. There we go. Let's put it up on the screen. So this is a good comment. This is very typical of the idea that like this might make it worse. And this is if I allow the thought and I allow it to be there without fighting it and I learn to navigate through it without trying to banish it or replace it or argue with it or prove it wrong, then oh no, it might get worse, right? It might actually get worse if I do that. The other part of that was if I do exposures, but if I keep putting myself into an anxious situation, won't that make me worse? That's another common fear there, right? If this goes on for too long, I'm just going to keep getting worse. So let's really talk about what worse even means. But the way I want to really kind of frame this if we can is I would ask every one of you, Dan from Leeds, do you remember me? Hello, Dan from Leeds. I kind of do remember you. I like ukulele covers as a good name. Does that mean you're making ukulele covers? So hey, Wisconsin here. Excellent. Let's see who else is here real quick. Annemarie is here. Hello. Welcome, Wisconsin. So let's talk about why we do recovery. And what I mean is not why you get better. Everybody knows why we want to get better. We want to feel better. Okay, fine. But in the theoretical orientation that you guys always see me talk about on these videos, the YouTube channel, my podcast, the books that I write, whatever, we are going toward fear. We are talking about surrendering to fear. We're allowing it to happen. We're taking a chance or taking a leap of faith. We're getting right up against that discomfort and that distress so that we can learn that we can navigate through it and we can handle it and we can tolerate it. Why are we doing that? Keep that in mind. Why are we doing that? What is the lesson that we are trying to learn? So I'll pause for a second here. If we do this, why are we trying to, why are we doing that? Are we doing that because somehow that makes it stop or go away? Are we trying to learn something about our relationship with that discomfort and that distress? I'll wait. But once I answer the comments, it's fine. I know it's a little delay. I'm just kind of kidding with you guys. And if you're watching on a replay, you're going to be like, why am I watching this guy just sit silently? I'll answer it for you. We are doing it so that we can learn that we are able to move through those things. Not optimal, not, hey, fake Canada, how are you doing? So we are learning that we are able to move through those things. The things that anxiety makes us doubt. I won't be able to handle it. It will be too much. I will be overwhelmed. I will not be able to cope. I need rescuing. Somebody has to save me. Whatever it happens to be. These are the things that drive the avoidance. These are the things that drive all of the, you know, the escape behaviors that make your life really small and restricted. We are learning that we don't have to do that anymore. So if I or somebody who sounds like me, your therapist, Claire Weeks, someone else like me on social media, who happens, whatever it happens to be says, well, the way out of this is partially based on accepting, allowing, tolerating, not fighting, dropping your resistance, doing exposures, heading toward the thing that you fear. We are literally telling you that in this moment, I want to make your anxiety worse, right? So consider when we do exposures, we are intentionally trying to trigger ourselves. Why would we do that if we fear that anxiety might get worse, right? So you are literally in triggering the worst state. If you have OCD and you're doing your ERP homework, whatever it happens to be, you are intentionally triggering the worst state right at a short term to know that you can get through it. So it's not that we should have a fear that it will get worse. We almost need to experience that worst that it can be to understand that like, Oh, look, I can handle that. I don't like it. It's really hard to handle it. I still feel really afraid. I still am full with full of doubt, especially in the beginning when you do this. But over time, those experiences teach us that like, Oh, my estimation of the threat was off. It isn't as much of a threat as it, as I thought it was. I can't just decide not to care about how I feel, but I can learn over time through these experiences moving through the worst air quotes worse, that I don't have to care about it as much. I can't just decide to not be afraid, but I can learn through the experience of moving through the worst that I don't have to be as afraid of it as I used to be. So over time, our sense of self efficacy changes, our feelings of competence. Yes, I can handle this start to change our confidence. Yes, it lags, but it does grow over time. And our assessment of the threat in terms of our thoughts, the physical sensations, just the feeling of agitation, the anxiety state itself, our assessment of that threat begins to lower. So we invite worse so that it can teach us a lesson. So when you say, will this make me worse? Well, the short answer is doing an exposure will make you worse for the duration of that exposure. That's true. Talking about anxiety might trigger you and you might feel worse in that moment. That's true. But we are practicing being triggered. What do we do when triggered? Now, let me clarify that. This does not mean that you have to talk about anxiety and read anxiety stories and read anxiety forms and scroll Instagram about anxiety all day long. That is not what I'm saying at all. But any situation where you feel like I probably shouldn't do that, because it will change the way I feel or make me feel more intensely. And I can't have that because I can't handle it. It's too scary and I won't be able to cope. That's a miscalculation there, right? So this is where things always get difficult. And I hate having to deliver this message. But the idea that I am afraid that this thing will make me worse, I would say that it's really the life math that you do that leads you to the conclusion that includes the word worse leads you to the conclusion of worse is faulty. So worse just means I will feel things that I don't want to feel. And really what I'm trying to do here is I listen to this guy every other Monday or listen to his podcast or read his books. I'm really hoping to learn how to not feel these things anymore. So if I do feel them, I'm going to raise the white flag, call it all over, say I'm back to square one, all bets are off. This is ruined. I'm feeling things again. And look, it means I'm worse. No, it just means you're feeling things more. And often when you take this approach to an anxiety disorder, you will in fact feel things more. Even going back to Claire Weeks, she alluded to worse before better. And I would say not worse before better feeling more before feeling less, especially if you have been in highly avoidant restrictive, lots of conditions, engineering to make sure you're never triggered, always having your safe people, you know, doing all the avoidant and safety things. When you stop doing those things, you will start to feel it more. It doesn't mean it got worse. It means you're feeling it more. And the propensity in this community is to equate more feeling or intense feeling with worsening of the condition. When in reality, the condition has always been there that way. You've just gotten really good at glossing over it, keeping it away, stamping it down, duting it. And so if you stop doing that, which are the things that sort of keep us stuck in this cycle, you will start to feel it more. But that doesn't mean it's worse. So you really have to go hard and challenge the idea that I can get worse, right? That's it's important that we really define that. I would ask you, what does it mean if you get worse? Now, listening to the last, my last 12 minutes of rambling, what would it mean to you? And you could throw in the comments for sure. What would it mean to you that if this got somehow worse, right? So let me let's pop over here for a second here and let's put this back. Oh, we're going to go to comments. Who he is? Let me go back to the chat and see what everybody has to say. Instead of talking more, let's see what everybody else has to say first. Let's see here. It has, I'm doing okay. All right. Penelope Crucify is actually doing better these days. I love to hear it. Excellent. I'm here to watch you watch the comments. It's very exciting, very. Let's see. If I let the thoughts be here, it makes me worse with me. Yep. I was the bus dude on Disordered. Oh, I love it. Oh, Dan from Bleeds. It's so funny, dude, because so Dan sent it. I did it anyway to Disordered. The podcast I do with Josh Fletcher and we played it on the air and literally I think one or two episodes later, I don't know if it's come out yet. We literally called it the Dan episode. So congratulations, you're famous. And we laughed about it too. Like, oh, it's the Dan episode. Anyway, good job, brother. Mike says six weeks of no reassurance living my life as a non-disordered person, very hard. I kind of killed that. I should have gone to do not disturb. Six weeks of no reassurance. Let's put this up. This is a big deal because I know this is a very big deal for our friend Mike. Six weeks of no reassurance living my life as a non-disordered person, very hard, but I'm ready feeling results. I feel stronger. And this is a perfect example of worse. Like I took away all the reassurance and all the, you know, am I okay? Save me, coddle me, make me feel better. Probably felt a lot worse, right? Mike would probably say, well, I feel worse now. Well, you feel more. But over time, he's starting to build that feeling that like, oh, I'm strong enough to handle this. I didn't think I was, but the experience is really hard, but it's teaching me that I can handle this. So we can kind of need the worse. I hate that. Fear of worse is just trying to find meaning when there is no real meaning. Okay, that's a little esoteric. Let's get into this a little bit. It's just trying to find meaning when there is no real meaning. Well, you would say anxious people tend to want to make meaning out of the way they feel and probably people in general, not just anxious people, we want to make meaning. Clearly, we're meaning making machines. People that are dealing are in the grips of disordered anxiety, really, really, really need a meaning to that. It's a signal. It's a sign. It's my intuition. It's the universe telling me something. It's an omen that something bad is going to happen. It means there's something physically wrong with me. It means I'm never going to get better. We try to find meaning. So it means in an excessive way and an urgent, frantic way, it means that any change of state is interpreted as things like worse. So you're right, to a certain extent. I appreciate that. Let's see here. An array from Long Island, another fellow Long Islander. Welcome, Strong Island representing. How cringy is that? Strong Island. We say it. What can I tell you? Me of us. I'm going to put me of us up on the screen. He's been running around. I haven't talked to my friend me in like two weeks now. It's been a long time. Barbara de Drew got to put me on the screen just because it's me. Becky says next week, I'm attending the same event that I, oh, let's put this up. Love it. I'm attending the same event that I had panic attacks all the way through last year and I'm excited about this. Love this. Love this from our lone Twitch viewer. Always Twitch represent. And I'm going to say that every week because I never get tired of it. Good job, Beck. Love it. Let's see here. I know that especially if you're new, oh, I forgot to say, if you're in the Facebook group watching, I can't see your name because it only says Facebook user. And I know that some of you are a little bit new and you just want me to talk about the symptom you have. Please tell me how to get over feeling like I can't breathe. Please tell me how to get over feeling dizzy. Please tell me how to get over fear of passing out. They're all the same. I very rarely, rarely will ever give you advice about this particular fear. They're all the same. It's all the same. So and the way to do that is to go ahead and allow yourself. I know that sounds crazy, but you're going to say, wait, I have to allow myself to pass out. No, you just have to stop acting as if that feeling is real or valid or true. The feeling is valid. It's just not based on any sort of reality. And like, I'm going to have to take a chance to see if I actually do pass out. Like I can handle all of this. So I'm sorry. I'm just I'm never going to really address. Please tell me how to fix this particular symptom. Let's see here. That's all right. Okay, let's pop this up on the screen. Hello, Charlie. I struggle to get triggered with exposures. Everybody does like so don't judge yourself harshly for this daring a person in the room that can't wait to go and trigger themselves. Like it's a this is one of the things that makes this such an effective way to deal with anxiety disorders, but a difficult way. Like these are not like really complicated concepts. It's a simple plan is a simple idea. It's really hard to execute because of this exact thing, which is almost universal, like no human being wants to choose to be triggered. So it's okay. And what I also say to that is everybody gets to that point in their own time in their own way. So if you are listening and just I just can't bring myself to do that, I just can't bring myself to do it. That's okay, you'll get there when you get there. So that these type of videos, psycho educational material, the podcast, the books, they can start to inform that journey to the point where you are willing to roll the dice, take the leap of faith, be intentionally be triggered, whatever you want to call that surrender, allow the worst, whatever words resonate with you. But sometimes it takes a while for people to get to the point where they're really ready to do that. If you're not ready to do that yet, keep going and keep working toward that. So it's okay. It's okay not to be there. Sometimes that's a consequence thing. One of the more common themes that we find is you just need more negative consequence. I know for me and a lot of people echo this. So I'll say that it seems relatively common in this community. The pain of not triggering myself with exposures was greater than the pain of the trigger. So when it got to the point where not doing exposures and not getting better was worse than the fear of the exposure, then things changed for me. And almost everybody has to get to that point in some way. There's a lot of variation there. That's where everyone's different really does come into the picture because well, different life experiences and different things we brought with us and lessons we've learned and our views of ourselves in the world. So that will all look very nuanced and different among different people, but it's really common to have to get to the point where living the way you live in an avoidant way is worse than being triggered. I'm going to go and do the hard thing now because I don't want this anymore. So sometimes it just takes a while to get there. It's okay. Let's keep going here. Oh, this is a good comment. I went to the grocery store by myself for the first time in a while. Well done. The worst happened and I had a huge meltdown. Okay. I was sobbing in the produce section. It may seem like a bad thing, but I was able to get through and get my groceries. Yes, at face value, how many people in the room would be like, that's the worst case scenario that I can never ever allow. I cannot allow that to happen. So yes, at face value, I was sobbing in the produce section sounds horrific to many people. If you have a bit of social anxiety, if you're afraid of making a scene, you don't want to be judged, whatever it happens to be, sobbing in the produce section sounds at face value like a nightmare. But on the other side of that is the lesson that we're hearing here. I love this comment. I was able to get through and get my groceries. The worst, it got worse in the grocery store. What if this makes me worse? It did get worse and a lesson was learned from that. I love that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you sharing that. Let's see here. What does Lori have to say? Hello, Lori. I am doing some exposure therapy with my therapy by learning everything I can about my C-section before I go in and I've been so much more anxious. Well, C-section is a surgical procedure. It's a big deal, right? New baby coming into the world. You're supposed to be anxious. Everybody would be anxious. A normal thing for any human being would be, I'm apprehensive about this. I'm nervous. It's a surgical procedure. I'm concerned about the baby. I'm concerned about me. Has everything going to go? Okay. It's totally okay to be anxious. It's okay to learn everything about it. This is where we have to recognize there's nothing else for me to learn. Am I trying to learn the way a C-section works and what I should expect and how we prepare and what does the doctor do? Totally cool. That's a really adaptive, healthy thing to do. When you keep going back for more information because you're not looking to learn, you're looking to get 100% guarantee of the outcome, that's when you have to recognize I'm fueling my anxiety because I'm frantically looking for more and more information. But what I'm really looking for is a guarantee of the outcome that I can never, ever get. And since I don't get it, I get even amped up even more. So recognize that you're going to be apprehensive about that because why wouldn't you be? Of course. But also recognize when the obsessive never ending need to guarantee an outcome by googling and searching and reading and researching is making things worse. I've learned as much as I can. I can incorporate that. I can make a plan to prepare, be ready. And then I'm just going to have to allow myself to be nervous about this upcoming procedure, which would make anybody nervous. You're allowed to be nervous. It's okay, be nice to yourself. You don't have to engineer away all of the anxiety or the apprehension, right? Important. She also said to do the exposures when I'm calm and I never feel fully calm. Okay, well, so you're working with a therapist, you might want to just bring what I said to your therapist because in this situation, I should have read the second comment. I'm really sorry, Laurie. I'm not going to like counteract what your therapist said on YouTube. I don't know you. Your therapist does. So just talk about maybe bring it to the next session and see. And I never fully feel calm. You're not going to fully feel calm. So say that it's okay, tell your therapist that I don't feel calm and do the exposures when I feel calm, like, but I'm trying to learn that it's okay if I don't feel calm. So anyway, I have to be careful about what I say here. Again, I cannot going to talk about how you stop your symptoms or stop a feeling or stop a thought, go back and listen to the beginning episodes of the podcast or read the books that I've written. There's a ton of information about that. I know if you're new here, you're hoping them are going to tell you how to stop a feeling or stop a thought or stop a fear. It doesn't work that way. Try and access the rest of the information and you'll see how that does. Cool. I don't know. Sorry, I didn't see your name because you're in the Facebook group caffeine exposure done. Love it. Sometimes caffeine, alcohol or exposures for people. Good job. Let's see here. I fainted at a job interview from a panic attacks. I'm a bit on edge now. So the way that there's two reasons that people might faint during a panic attack. One is you hyperventilated and fainted, which is can happen. So if you are holding your breath or you were like trying to calm down and you start to get really dizzy and you get tunnel vision and you get tingly and your hands and feet get numb and your lips get numb and then black out, you hyperventilated yourself into passing out, which does not have to happen if you work on diaphragmatic breathing and you understand how to breathe more productively. So that's a skill that you can learn. Or some people are subject to an extreme vasovagal response, which means they are fainters. If you have that, if you are a vasovagal person, you know that already because maybe Roro has is that person and has discovered that. Unfortunately, that's just the way some people's bodies work. It's not that common, but if you have it, then you already know and then you have to just start to accommodate that because there's nothing you can do about that physiology. But passing out during a panic attack, that is not the default. Either you have that exaggerated vasovagal response or you are because your blood pressure is up. So it's really hard to pass out when your blood pressure goes up during a panic attack or you're hyperventilating your way into passing out, which is the more common way to go. Yeah, I have vasovagal syncope. You'll know. Yeah, people who have that already know because those are people who often will faint for happy reasons. Anytime they get agitated or roused emotionally, they faint. It's a drag. It's a really lifestyle impacting. So I'm sorry that it happened. Just recognize the two reasons why it probably happened and be careful about now going into extreme overdrive to try to 100% engineer every variable to ensure it never happens again. That's a trap. That's the distorted anxiety trap. Let's see here. I've read that when you experience this, it's a great opportunity to rewire. Okay, so it's true because when we experience those feelings, it's a great opportunity to rewire your brain as the circuits you are trying to change are now available to you. Yes, you cannot rewire the lower part of your brain unless it is activated. This is why you hear me and other people like me say all the time, you can look at all the inspirational memes in the world. You can discuss anxiety until you're blue in the face. You could read every word of every book I ever write or have written. You can listen to every podcast, watch every video. But until you feed your limbic system, different experiences while it's activated, it tends to fall on deaf ears because that part of your brain is not even listening. It's not open to anything unless it's online and activated. So that's true. We kind of need to do our work when we are triggered, waiting to feel calm, to go toward the fear. It's better than not going toward the fear, but it's really the most valuable experiences and the most progress comes on the days when you feel the worst and act anyway. Think about that. Let's see here. Me too, Becky. I would have to echo this. I'm so happy for everyone who is doing the hard things and get to brag about it. I love when you guys get to brag about it and you totally should brag about it. There you go. This is a thing you just have to believe I can overcome this. Well, you won't believe it though until you do it. Two things that I say all the time. You don't believe it until after you do it and you never get it until after you do it. So the two things that I see people get stuck on are that if I could just believe it, then I would go and do my exposures. Then I would take the leap of faith. Then I would surrender. But you don't believe it until after you have the experience, which is a crappy deal, but it's a deal we have. And if I'm just trying to find, I'm going to read that one more book or let me ask you a question again for the 18th time. Maybe this time I'll hear the thing that makes a click in my brain so I get it and then I'll start to recover. You don't get it until after you do it. This is almost entirely experiential. Now, psycho education, learning, framing, talking can inform the leap of faith, but you don't understand until you leap. I hate saying that, but you will never gain a level of understanding or belief that you get after the activity, after the experience. That's when the belief starts to get built and that's when the understanding goes up a notch, many notches. So you have to act even though you don't believe it. I don't believe I can do this, but I'm going to act like I can. I don't believe I can handle this, but I'm going to have to act like I can and see what happens. I'm still really afraid, so therefore I must not have gotten the right info to make it click because if it clicks, then I won't be afraid. No, you have to act while you're afraid. This is how we learn. Crappy deal. Always going to always acknowledge it. Don't like it, but it's true. Let's see here. How can you prove to your brain, I'll throw this up here real quick. How can you prove to your brain that you aren't in danger when the danger is feeling bad in this community? The danger is feeling bad. That's not a different thing. So like your scenario here where know how I feel is the danger is the same thing that everybody in this room has experienced. You'll say that your people will say, well, my problem is driving, my problem is being home alone. My problem is watching scary movies. My problem is anytime I hear the word murder or suicide or whatever, like I get triggered. No, no, no. The problem is that you're afraid of how you feel when you get triggered. So this is the same thing. How do you get proof to your brain that you aren't in danger? I'm afraid of how I feel. We're going to have to bring that fear with me and do the best I can to navigate through it. That's how, experientially. But the fear of fear, the danger being how you feel, is literally what defines the problem that we all share in the room. So know that that's not unique. That's a good thing. You don't want it to be unique entity. That's a good thing. Went to my kid swim lessons last week. It was intense. Love this. Let's see here. It definitely felt worse and I'm nervous to go this week doing my best to trust the process. Yeah, that's that is that leap of faith, right? I'm going to have to trust this process even though I didn't like that experience. So just be careful about it felt worse. So therefore I shouldn't do that anymore. It felt worse. I hated it. It really challenged me, but I did it. But I did it. Like you always have to land on that at the end. I felt bad. I was afraid, but there was no other outcome other than I was afraid. Land on that and then know now I'm going to go show myself that I could do it again. That's really important. The narrative is important. Things like I did it. Not like I made it. You might have said, yeah, I made it through swim lessons. No, no, you did it. You didn't make it. So be careful about the narrative and it's normal to have trepidation. Human beings are not wired to repeat negative experiences. But remember that when we refuse to repeat this negative experience where the assessment of danger is wrong, that's what gets us into the problem to begin with. So keep in mind two important things. I did it. I was able to do it. I handled it even though I didn't like how it felt. And the second thing you got to hang on to here is when I shoot, when I run from that experience again, that's the problem I'm trying to fix. I can't fix this running problem by running again. So keep that in mind. It can help maybe inform the action. And by the way, apprehension ahead of time, totally normal. You're not failing because you're anxious about doing it again. That's normal. Let's see. I always want to know why I'm feeling the way I feel. No, that's a tough one. Again, people will argue this. I get in huge debates about this all the time. You have to feel it to heal. You have to know what it is. You got to dig it. You got to know your core fears. You got to know the reasons. Not necessarily. If you are only afraid of how you feel and you are driven to figure it out and find a cause only because you're afraid of how you feel, not because you care about the cause, then the cause has been decoupled. It doesn't even matter anymore. So maybe you'll figure out what triggered you today or what it was, but then if you get triggered again tomorrow and you don't know the cause tomorrow, you're right back to where you are. So people who get stuck in this state that we talk about in this community have to at least for a while abandon that like, I need to know what this is. Because if I'm afraid of it, if I can nail it down to some specific thing, then I know how to fix it or I know that I'm safe or whatever it is. Like, no, I'm just afraid of how I feel. I think things that disturbed me, and now I got to figure out those thoughts. Be careful. Trying not to white-knucklet. Very hard, Vicki. Another Long Islander. We are. We're a strong island representing in a big way today. More Long Islanders and Twitchers in the room. How do you like that? Trying not to white-knucklet is really hard. The white, the resisting hanging on like hot death, that's what we call white-knuckling. That's, it's really hard to drop that little bit at a time, little bit at a time. I'm going to start to run out of time in a couple of minutes here. I can't do as long as possible today as usual. Let's see. Do core feel, let's put this one really quick. I have no urge to move to Long Island. Don't move here. It's okay. There's a good move. Stay where you are. It's no problem. Not that we wouldn't want you. I'm sure you'd add, you'd class the place up and it would be more fun, but don't move here. Do core fears matter when trying to recover? Like, maybe we really aren't scared of feeling things, but if something else we need to figure out. Generally speaking, if you, I'm not saying that you don't have a core fear. This is difficult because there's no blanket answer. I'm not saying that you don't have a root cause or you don't have a core fear. You might, but when you are only afraid of how you feel, figuring it out often leads to the big epiphany. Like, oh, I figured it out, but yet I'm still stuck. Why? Because I still feel the way I feel and I'm afraid of how I feel. So what happens quite often in this community is maybe there was a core fear or a triggering event or a root cause that started all this, but then that root cause gets disconnected and trying to figure out the root cause is like, so I strike a match. I light a fire here on my desk, which I wouldn't want to do. That would be bad. That fire is now burning. That's the anxiety disorder. Here's my root cause. I blow it out. The fire is still burning because it's already been lit, right? So that is the analogy I like to use here. You got to put that fire out and we put the fire up by who cares if you blew the match out or not. Dummy, don't keep throwing a match on it, of course. And sometimes we have to do more than one thing and there are more than one issue in our life that has to work on. Not everything is an anxiety disorder, Claire Weeks exposure problem, but in many instances, the insistence that you only get better by digging through for a triggering event or a core fear is not so good. And empirically speaking, if we look at the data, clinical evidence that's been looked at for a long, long time, those type of therapies that insist that we must uncover root causes to cure panic disorder, for instance, are not effective. They are not terribly effective. So you have to really look at your own individual thing, that I have a triggering root cause, maybe, but if I've just become afraid of how I feel now, then I have more than one problem I have to work on. So just figuring it out doesn't often solve the problem for people. Let us see here. Is doing interpretive therapists psychodynamic psychotherapy good for anxiety? Generally speaking, no. But again, this is very, very individual. I do not know you and do not know your problem. The gold standard treatments for anxiety disorders like agoraphobia, panic disorder, OCD, health anxiety is our cognitive behavioral exposure based acceptance type therapies. Psychodynamic therapy. I'm not picking on it. It has its place for certain things, but it is not really a terribly effective treatment for these type of problems. Now, if you have other issues that may be helped by psychodynamic therapy, then it's a good thing. But for this, it wouldn't be the go to, right? Again, I can't say for sure. I'm giving you a very broad generalization. So I would ask your therapist that, although you may find that your therapist, if they already died in the wool Freudian psychodynamic therapist or an Adelaerian, then they may believe in their heart that this is how you fix an anxiety disorder. But you know, you'd have to really look at the data, which says generally speaking, they're not terribly effective therapies for these problems. I'm going to scroll a little bit here. Ah, okay, this is cool. Matt, thanks for sharing this. My symptoms are getting better from exposures, which basically means you have learned that you don't have to fear them as much so they happen less. The intensity is coming down and they're a little bit further and fewer and further between, which is really great. My nervous system feels like it's finally starting to heal. I would reframe that sometimes and healing is a wonderful thing and I want everybody to heal if they have to heal, but let's not automatically say that we have to heal. You may be learning. My brain is learning and therefore it does not crank up my nervous system automatically inappropriately. So maybe your nervous system was never damaged. Maybe it was just being used incorrectly by an oversensitized brain, which is now learning new lessons. I'm a big fan of challenging the healing narrative as the default now because it indicates that I'm broken and something has to be fixed or it's damaged and or might not be damaged, just misused. Good job, Matt. That only comes from hard work, man. Let's keep going here. Let's keep going. I almost, I just finished listening to the Claire Weeks audiobook. It's already giving me the courage to go out. Love it. I'm a huge fan of Dr. Weeks, tremendous fan of that. If there was no Claire Weeks, there is no anxious truth, right? So I will fully, fully, fully credit her and acknowledge her all the time. So yeah, when I first read Hope and Help for Your Nerves, it changed my life. I mean, it didn't fix things in the end for me. And I talked about that in a podcast episode with Josh on Disordered. I kind of had a light bulb moment in that podcast episode, but yeah, Dr. Weeks was awesome. Take a problem. The symptoms got too bad. I can't, this is a tough one. Take a problem at all. If symptoms are too, I'm not sure how to respond to that. I'm not sure if that was part of a bigger discussion about taking a pill if symptoms get worse. I'm going to just leave that. Let's see here. Can practicing exposures cause an escalation of baseline anxiety? Well, this is the question of the day, right? Will this make me worse? It seems to be getting worse the more I do exposures. No, you're probably feeling it more. So if you, again, think about it this way. It's the, if I am afraid of the wall, if I want to learn how to swim, I'm desperate to learn how to swim. I haven't used my pool analogy in a long time. I'm desperate to learn how to swim. All I want in the world is learn how to swim, but I also don't like being wet. So what I spend all of my time trying to make sure I never get wet while I still want to learn how to swim. And then one day I decide I really, really, really want to learn how to swim. And I go to take a swimming lesson. I jump in the pool. I'm wet. And so I jump out of the pool and I declare this is not working because I'm wet. Can you finish that right in your head? Like do the math there? So it's like say the old pool analogy says, Bethany, I haven't brought this one in a long time, but I think it's an accurate analogy. Like if you decide I really want to learn how to swim and you jump in the water, then it's really hard to say, we got a problem here because I'm wet. Yeah. You've been spending all of your time trying to never get wet and now you decided to jump in the pool to try something new. So of course you're wet. Is that worse? No, it's different. Let's see. Sometimes there is no meaning. My brain misfire the fight-or-flight response. True, true, true. Anybody needing inspiration? Darkness by Peter Gabriel. Peter Gabriel reference. Gen X checking in, love it. I'm a fan of all of that stuff. So Peter Gabriel live at my university, a while ago. Again, the gray beard. Good show. He was really great. I'm about to go to the airport for one hour flight dreading it, but trying to stay positive. Well, it's okay. Like recognize I'm really is a challenging situation for me. So I'm having a lot of apprehension here. I'm feeling anxious about it as I would expect to be and I will not judge myself negatively for being anxious. I'm supposed to be anxious now. I'll move through it as best they can. Hang in there. Let's see. This is the second best life. Jenna talks about it. Jenna Overbaugh is the one that introduced me to second best life and I don't know. I think it may have been Jonathan Grayson, but I'm not 100% sure. Second best life was one of the more genius things I've ever heard. And when Jenna actually said it on a live that we did together, Jenna Overbaugh, if you guys follow along with Jenna, Jenna talked about second best life. Your first best life, let's talk about this for just a quick second. Your first best life is like your fantasy life. So for anybody who's in this room, who's dealing with avoidance because of an anxiety disorder or triggers and they can't allow these things to happen, you know the deal. Your fantasy life is I never ever get triggered and I'm never ever anxious and everything just works out exactly the way I needed to because I can't handle anything but that. That's your fantasy life. That's the best possible life. That doesn't exist, right? That will never ever ever exist for any human being. That's just life and sometimes we run up against almost philosophical things in this game called recovery and that's one of them. Life will challenge you at some point multiple times throughout your lifetime. You will be challenged. The A in acceptance and commitment therapy accept that the human experience includes challenge, adversity and even suffering. So since you can't get your first best life, your fantasy life, what about the second best life? And that's what we're learning in recovery. It's awesome. It's such a great concept. I love it because it puts you right up against the reality that like you could try to live a trigger free life if you want but you see where that is getting you. So love it. Thank you for bringing that up. It's a really great thing. Let me keep going here. The first leap of faith, trying recovery and insurance. Sure. I've always had a fear of fainting. I've never fainted but I didn't know I could from hyperventilating now triggered. Okay. So now you learned a new thing about fainting. It's okay. Go ahead and be triggered by that. That's okay, right? Because just because you didn't know about it doesn't mean it's real. Yeah. People can hyperventilate themselves into fainting. That's true. If you have never fainted it means it's not happening to you and you're not hyperventilating your way through. So go ahead and be triggered and see how you work through that. It's okay to be triggered. This is practice, right? I'm kind of at a time, guys. So let me see what else I have. I didn't even get in close to it. Let's keep going here. Stopping halfway. Let's put this up here really quick. This is good. I watch YouTube vids for my health anxiety. Watching people face what I fear. Key was to turn the video off halfway. So there was no resolution. I'm not going to hear anything better than that today. That is outstanding. In fact, I see Bethany even said that too. I love that idea. There was no resolution because I watched to the end to make sure the person was okay because I need to feel like I'm going to be okay but I don't know if I'm going to be okay. There's uncertainty in life is all around us, right? So that's another one of those philosophical things. Life is going to challenge you with adversity and challenges and even suffering sometimes. And uncertainty in life, the fact that all of life is uncertainty, is one of those like smacks in the face that we have to get to here. So there you go. Sometimes I grip triggering health anxiety. Should I just accept them and carry on, not let them shape my day? With health anxiety, you're... So when we talk about things like panic disorder and agoraphobia, we are basically trying to do things to intentionally trigger ourselves so that we can work through those triggers with things like health anxiety. You don't have to do anything. You're just automatically triggered by things you hear or just your thoughts and your job is to not do things. I'm not going to stop dead in my tracks in Google. I'm not going to look in the mirror. I'm not going to take pictures of myself. I'm not going to ask my partner if I look pale. I'm not going to research cancer for the 17,000th time. I'm not going to do those things. I'm going to bring that trigger with me. Very, very broad generalization with health anxiety. Yeah. Really good though. I love the halfway thing. Yeah, Christina likes it too. I like that YouTube exercise. I'm going to do that in my health anxiety recovery. Sure. Because in the end, health anxiety, which is kind of really so close to OCD at this point, that uncertainty will always whisper in your ear. It's possible that I'm not okay. Like if I fear getting cancer, it is in fact possible that I have cancer right me, talking about me, like specifically me. It is possible that I right now have cancer and don't know it. That is in fact a possibility. I have no evidence that says that this is true or any reason to believe it or think that. But I would have to face the truth that it is possible that I do have it. But in the absence of some reason to believe that I do, I can either act on that fear or that thought and make it my primary driver in everything I do during the day or I'm going to say, well, until I have to worry about that, I won't. And so the difference between a person with health anxiety and a person without health anxiety is the tolerance of that doubt or that uncertainty. I am certain enough that I'm healthy right now. A person with health anxiety will never is never certain enough. And every time you give in to the argument or you want to advance the argument, but what if every time you stand up for your health anxiety and argue for it on its behalf? But I can't take that kind of chance. This is too big a deal. But what if the doctor is wrong? But how can I be so cavalier about my health every time you do that? You are literally saying to your brain, keep going. Thank you. You're keeping me safe. So we have to be really careful about that. And when you roll the dice and take that chance, again, if there is clearly a health problem, you deal with it. If you have no reason and all the medical professions keep telling you, I have no, you have nothing, it's nothing for me to treat. I can't find anything wrong with you. You're fine. And you keep acting as if something is wrong and then want to know how to overcome health anxiety. That's a tough place to be. You are rolling the dice over time. You also learn to be sure enough, like the rest of us are. So there you go. All right, guys, 45 minutes. I'm out because I have a whole bunch of stuff going on the rest of today. Thanks for hanging out with me. I appreciate it. I will put, I guess it doesn't really matter in the end. Could I shut up with the caption back up? Yeah, sure. I'll put the caption back up. So this will stay on the YouTube channel. There's a playlist called Recovery Monday. If you ever want to go back and watch the other 75 of these, that's fine. Subscribe to the YouTube channel if you haven't. It stays on Facebook too, but it's so hard to find stuff on Facebook. I hate Facebook. So YouTube is always the better way to come back and watch these videos. We do them every other Monday. Sometimes there's holidays and stuff. And basically in case anybody cares, there's no episode of the anxious truth this week because that's going to go to every other week. So one week we'll do Recovery Monday live stream, then another week we'll do another episode of the anxious truth. But every week on Friday, there's a new episode of Disordered that I do with Josh Fletcher. That's now my weekly podcast at disorder.fm. Go check that one out. I'll have a little update on Wednesday for the anxious truth that explains it a little bit more. But yeah, thanks for hanging out. Always fun. See you in two weeks. Take care.