 Hey, what's up guys drew here that anxiety guy comm coming to you from my extremely messy home office behind me I apologize for that and I got to put on my cheesy drugstore glasses so I could see So let's talk about exercise because we should it's an important topic and it bears discussion Has anybody ever told you that regular exercise would be good for you? Not for the obvious reasons that we're all aware of but because it would actually lower your overall anxiety level Maybe make your panic attacks less frequent and easier to manage now Have you ever looked at that person after they said that like they were completely insane? Because for you exercise has the exact opposite impact. It may cause elevated anxiety levels or even lead to full-blown panic Well, if this is you and it was me that used to be a problem for me, too But this is you I can tell you that you are far from alone It's an extremely common problem for people who are dealing with anxiety disorders, especially if there are two conditions present number one if you're having panic attacks on a regular basis actual panic attacks then the odds become a little higher that you're struggling with exercise number two if you are in that mindset where you look at anxiety and Panic attacks especially as something you need to have a plan for because you need to try and avoid it You need to try and stop panic from ever happening in the first place And above all if you feel that a panic attack is an event that you need to be Rescued or saved from whether you're doing it yourself or you're relying on other people to do it for you If this is the way you view anxiety and panic, then there's a very good chance That exercises more than just a struggle for you It may actually be just something that you say that you cannot do now This is a common problem as I mentioned But it's also a really solvable problem and it's worth solving for a variety of reasons number one If we don't exercise we're certainly missing out on the potential positive benefits of exercise There are health benefits. There are mental health benefits And yes, even though it sounds like crazy talk among those are a decreased overall anxiety level in your life So if we don't exercise we're gonna miss out on those things, but more important I think there are two things that we have to look at here. If you don't exercise there are real tangible negative Psychological impacts that come along with that They really revolve around adding yet another item to the long and possibly growing list of things that you can't do Because of anxiety. This is not good for your self-image. It's not good for confidence It's not good for your overall outlook and it makes things feel like they're getting worse instead of better Which is something that we do not want, but I think more importantly along those lines When everybody is telling you your friends your family your doctors the internet everybody's telling you that exercise will make you Feel better, but it actually makes you feel worse. I know when I was in that situation myself I used to think to myself. Well, everybody is telling me that this will make it better, but it actually makes me worse So I must have the worst most unique never seen before Untreatable alien anxiety ever and you know, I'm joking a little bit about it But it was a real issue for me and it used to weigh me down a lot It was not a good thing to have in my head at all So we really want to avoid these psychological negative impacts that come along with not exercising Because of the way it makes you feel but here is probably the most Overlooked and probably the most important reason why this is a problem. That's worth solving When you can solve the exercise problem when you can learn to exercise regularly While being comfortable without going into freak out mode Then there the odds become very high that not only will you have solved that problem? But because exercise is an excellent form of what's called interoceptive exposure You will have also sort of accidentally solved other problems too So learning to exercise comfortably learning to exercise without going into panic Can actually be a springboard for improving the entire rest of your life with regard to your anxiety situation So because you learn to walk on the treadmill or because you learn to go to the gym or run on the track or walk Your dog or whatever exercise you like to do swimming whatever it doesn't matter When you learn to do that and be comfortable doing that then the odds become Extremely high that you will also be much more comfortable Tackling those other problem areas that you've been dreading Maybe things like going to a movie or going to school or work or going to a shopping mall or a family function Or being left home alone These things that seem like Intermountable things for you to overcome at times can actually become much easier to deal with much easier to fix Once you have fixed the exercise problem So most people don't realize this and it's at such a point in my opinion That I think if your life is shrinking to the point where you have a very long list of things that you won't do anymore That include just general life tasks like shopping or picking up your kids from school And you're relying on your wife or your husband or your boyfriend to do that for you And it's causing relationship problems and you feel like things are just getting worse and worse and worse I would almost advise you to forget the rest of it for now Forget that and let's just work on learning how to exercise because if you can learn how to exercise I'm not saying that exercise is a cure-all for every evil in the world It's certainly not but in our situation and we can learn to exercise You can very often start to overcome all those other obstacles in a much more rapid fashion Then you otherwise would have imagined that you could do right So this is why we want to start talking about this and this is why we want to look at how to solve this problem So I think I'm going to make this a two-part series. This will be a two-part podcast episode two-part video whatever way you're consuming it What we want to look at now is let's look at the mechanism that causes this problem because it might seem obvious But there's a twist to it and the twist is extremely important So we need to go over that so as I'm sitting here talking to you. I'm actually sitting on a stool in my messy office I'm looking into my my Macintosh and I'm talking to you So my body is not doing much work at all because I'm not asking it to so my heart rate is pretty low pretty close to my resting heart rate I'm not breathing very heavily. I'm certainly not sweating and if you were to measure my blood pressure I'm sure that would be pretty low And if you were to measure the muscle tone of my body since the chair is holding me up And I'm not doing a whole lot of work that would be pretty low too So since I am not putting any demands on my body right now I'm at a pretty low energy state and I think no one would be surprised at that I might not be as low an energy state as if I was sleeping or laying on myself or reading a book But pretty low pretty low nonetheless now Let's assume that I pick up the camera and I take it with me to the gym And I walk it to the gym and I put 400 pounds on a barbell I stick it on my shoulders and I start doing squats So after the first set of say six or eight squats with 400 pounds on my back and by the way I'm not telling you that's what you have to do. Whatever works for you is fine It doesn't matter what it is. But after that first set of serious exertion with 400 pounds across my back It's a sure bet that I wouldn't look like this My face would be red. I probably be sweating like crazy My heart would be pounding probably up over 100 beats per minute I would be breathing very heavily kind of gasping for air because that's what squats do for me If I would like I said I would be sweating I would be crazy hot and I think if you were to measure my blood pressure That certainly would be highly elevated and if you were measuring things like muscle tone on my body That would also be through the roof now Assume for a second that I have a team of world-class physicians surrounding me and they have me hooked up to every possible Modern medical monitoring device while I'm doing that well I would lay dollars to donuts that none of those doctors would probably even bother to look up from their phones They'd be watching Netflix or YouTube or texting or doing whatever it is They do because none of what they would be seeing on those instruments would be of note to them at all All of it would be completely predictable completely expected totally within the bounds of normal and certainly completely safe because the normal physiological response to exercise includes a Rapid heart rate heavy breathing sweating increased blood pressure All of those things are supposed to happen when you ask your body to increase its energy output Now I think we all know that but if you look at let's take three of these things because they're probably the three most important things Let's take the racing heart the heavy breathing and the sweating and think for a second because it's only gonna take you a second What else involves a racing heart heavy breathing and sweating and I think like I said you're gonna know right away a panic attack So here's where most people say well This is the problem when I exercise it feels like a panic attack and that is true But that is not the whole problem here's where the twist is and it's a really important twist so hang in there with me I'm gonna use my own story as an illustration here of where the real problem actually lies so back in the days when I lived my life completely consumed with anxiety and panic and I was worried about the next attack terrified of it and Wondering what would I would do to save myself or have my wife or my mother or whoever Saved me from that panic attack when I was in that mode and maybe you're in it now I was also about a hundred pounds heavier. I was in terrible condition So for a variety of reasons my doctor and virtually everyone else in my life was all over me To exercise regularly and rightly so so I broke down and brought a treadmill through to my basement And I would drag my rear end down to the basement get on the treadmill and all I could do in those days Was walk at about two miles an hour But that's fine because that was exercise for me then the exercise itself and the intensity doesn't really matter as You'll see after walking on that treadmill and only two miles an hour for maybe a minute or two Naturally, my heart rate would go up Then my breathing would start to increase as well because my heart is beating more quickly I need more oxygen to my cells so I need to take in more oxygen so I breathe more heavily Now after another minute or two after that my body is performing more work. It's increasing its energy output That means I'm generating more heat and since humans need to stay cool our natural cooling mechanism is sweating So I'd begin to sweat my forehead would get all wet I would start to sweat right here under my nose and on my chin And I would begin to feel that I was say hot on my neck because I was generating heat But yet I was cold and clammy up here, which is what's supposed to happen because when the perspiration evaporates your skin gets cooler That's exactly what the mechanism is it's supposed to happen But as soon as I would feel that change in temperature in my skin as soon as a sweating kicked in That's when things would really go off the rails for me So because I was living my life Completely consumed with how I felt and worried about that next panic attack and what I was going to do to stop it or save myself from it My brain would interpret that Normal bodily function that came along with exercise as danger So I go into fight-or-flight mode the adrenaline dump would hit and I would immediately go into that Startled and braced I'd be braced against the fear and I would go into what I call. Oh my god mode Oh my god mode means that probably 70% of the thoughts that roll through my head contain the phrase Oh my god, which we know is never good and the other 30% were probably centered around the phrases It feels like or what if so the negative thoughts would start to run through my head I would begin to engage them in an inner dialogue. So I would I would make them worse Oh my god, what if what if and I would start to think about what could be wrong? Oh my god What's going on here? I would be terrified and within another minute or two What started as a little two mile an hour gentle walk on my treadmill would be a full-blown five alarm panic attack and that included Depersonalization Derealization dizziness stomach problems wobbly legs shaking Fear dizziness all of it would be there at the same time and now I'm in a full panic It's important to understand that things like depersonalization Derealization had nothing to do with walking on the treadmill and here's where that twist comes in Because we need to break the link right we need to break unlink exercise and panic We need to break that link. So if we say but I exercise I end up panicking Let's follow that through when I got on my treadmill The only thing that that actually caused the only direct result of me walking on my treadmill in those days Was that my heart rate would increase? I would breathe more heavily I would sweat and I guess my blood pressure would go up muscle tone would increase Those are the only things that I could directly attribute to the treadmill itself So you would say yeah, but you got in the treadmill and you panicked if I exercise I have a panic attack But the only thing that was directly caused by the act of walking on the treadmill Were those normal changes in state in my body increased heart rate increased breathing Sweating higher blood pressure more muscle tone and so forth and so on So if we're going to unlink the exercise in the panic We have to break the chain right there and draw a line Because if if we break that link and it wasn't the treadmill that caused the panic, then where did the panic come from? Well, I think you kind of get where I'm going from at this point the panic came from here So what wound up happening is since I viewed my panic attacks and anxiety as dangerous things that I needed to be Saved from because I feared them so much. I knew they weren't actually dangerous. I I totally knew that I I completely understood that but since I feared them I felt that I needed to be rescued from the fear since those were dangerous things to me My brain would incorrectly interpret the natural state of my body on that treadmill as a danger As something that needed to be fleed from escaped from avoided fought against And I would go into fight or flight response and once the adrenaline dump hits we all know where it goes from there So you see we're we're able to unlink that break that chain between the treadmill the exercise and the panic It's not here. Here's the biggest point. I'm going to make in this video before we go to part two It is not the exercise that causes your panic Right, so if you are living your life right now in such a way that you're telling everybody that you can't exercise Because exercise makes you panic we need to stop that because it's not the exercise that makes you panic The exercise only changes the state of your body It's the incorrect Interpretation of that state change that causes the panic because you fear the way your body feels Then you're always on guard for signs of panic because you feel you need to be rescued from it or avoid the fear You're afraid of the fear Then your brain is incorrectly interpreting that natural state change as a danger and there you go Now you're into fight or flight mode and now we have panic creeping in so the incorrect Interpretation of the state change that cognitive distortion A rapid heart rate which an olympic runner or a normal person on a treadmill doesn't give a second thought to they expect it For us that rapid heart rate is a sign of danger and it triggers all of that panic response And then that even though that's incorrect It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and you may end up in a full blown panic attack because you try to exercise So this is the most important part of this video It's not the exercise that makes you panic the exercise only changes the state of your body It's the way your brain interprets that state change that causes the panic So even if you don't fully believe it right now Fake it pretend that you do because in order to solve this problem You're going to have to ultimately believe that and buy into it and I know that you can do it But for now at least fake it humor me on this It's not the exercise that causes the panic It's the brain part that causes the panic and we can work on that now. Why is this so important? You might be saying yeah, but that's just semantics. It's intellectual. It's academic. It's bullshit or whatever excuse my french But uh, you may be thinking of this as no, that's that's not anything. That's not going to help me at all, right? But that's not really true and here's why if you say That exercise makes you panic then the natural solution to that problem is to not exercise So if you say that exercise makes you panic the natural solution that you will come up with is to not exercise And we all know why that's bad So now you're going to add that to the list of things you can't do and the problem never gets solved If however you change that statement and you say I am able to exercise my body is perfectly able to exercise It's just the cognitive stuff that makes me panic. Well, now you have a different problem to solve You don't have to never exercise again Now we have to work on the cognitive part that distortion that incorrect interpretation Now I do not mean to imply that that's necessarily an easy thing to do as you'll see in part two coming up It is actually an easy plan. It's just hard to execute because of what it involves But there's a big difference. So I want to end this with recapping again It's not the exercise that causes panic It's the cognitive distortion and the faulty interpretation that causes panic So therefore you must not say panic causes exercise What you want to say is that you're fully capable and able to exercise But you have some bad brain habits is the best way I could say it and it happens to all of us happen to me too We have some brain bad brain habits that we have to unlearn so that we can exercise comfortably Right and and effectively and productively. So I'm going to end it here I would say come back for part two where we're going to talk about the actual plan on how to solve this problem And where it can lead you after that. So I appreciate you stopping by if you have comments If you're watching on youtube by all means comment in the comment section If you're listening as a podcast hit my website that anxiety guide com You can find my facebook and my twitter there. You can comment right there Any way that you want to ask a question make a comment make a suggestion whatever it is Yeah, let me because you hate me whatever it is. I'm all good with it Just send it on by again. I appreciate you taking the time And for my friend holly holly in the uk or wherever she is now If you're listening going to end this the way I told you I was going to edit them all and that is with this And you guys are going to get this as we go Stay present and prosper