 Welcome to The Anxious Morning. Every weekday morning will take a few minutes to go over some important lessons that you can use in your anxiety recovery journey. Away from the endless noisy scroll of social media, The Anxious Morning brings you support, education, inspiration, encouragement, and empowerment. For more, visit us at TheAnxiousMorning.com. If you are terrified of your own heartbeat and find yourself focused on it during every waking moment, I get you. I used to be that way, too. I walked around all day long thinking about how my heart might be damaged if it was beating too quickly and gripped with the idea that it might suddenly stop for no reason at all. That's no way to live. I understand how torturous that can feel. These days, anyone with a few bucks can walk around with a reasonably accurate heart rate monitor strapped to their wrist all day long. This is, most often for anxious people, not a good thing. A smart watch or fitness watch is great when we're trying to use the data it provides to track exercise goals, measure training progress, or get a rough idea of how we're handling stress. Wrist-based heart monitors are not perfect by any stretch, but they're pretty good at doing these things. You know what they're not good at doing? They're not good at protecting you against some cardiac disaster that does not and has never existed. If you are otherwise healthy, your fancy Apple Watch is not a protective device. If you are afraid of your heartbeat and worried about heart problems that you don't actually have, your Apple Watch is just a torture device. Now why would it go so far as to call your smart watch a torture device? Because it's literally doing nothing useful. It is only gluing you to the cycle of checking and scanning fueled by the irrational fear that is in some cases ruining your life. When your medical team has assured you that there is nothing wrong with your heart, there is zero point in using your watch to monitor it for any reason whatsoever. None. There is no reason. How can you use your smart watch effectively? Well right now, maybe you can't. If you are obsessed with the data it produces and trapped in a compulsion to check it repeatedly to make sure that you are okay, then you can't use it effectively. If this is your situation, it's time to lock away your watch until you're in a better place. This may be very difficult and may feel very scary at first when your brain tells you that you're now unprotected and might die as a result. But there is only one way to break that checking behavior that cements the fear of non-existent heart danger and this is it. One day when you've learned that monitoring your heart rate, even during a panic attack is pointless, then you could take your watch out and use it effectively for what it was designed to do. Until then, steer clear if you have to. Lock it away or disable the heart monitor function. It'll make you cringe at first, but in the long run it will help teach you one of the recovery lessons you need to learn. Tomorrow, we're going to look at the difference between having anxiety and experiencing anxiety. Hey, if you're enjoying the podcast and you'd like to get a copy of it delivered every morning into your email inbox, including a full text transcription, head on over to theanxiousmorning.email and sign up for the newsletter. And if you're listening on iTunes or Spotify or someplace where you can leave us a rating or a review, take a moment and rate the podcast and maybe write a small review. It really helps us out or just tell a friend about us. Thanks a lot.