 Welcome to the anxious morning every weekday morning will take a few minutes to go over important lessons that you can use in your anxiety recovery journey The anxious morning brings you support education inspiration encouragement and empowerment Read or listen quietly on your own time free of the endless noisy scroll of social media Use the information to help you along the path to recovery from panic disorder Agoraphobia and other anxiety problems for more visit us at the anxious morning calm Yesterday, we looked at breaking the habit of talking about your anxiety all the time Learning to remain silent when you want to speak your fear repetitively is part of the recovery process This causes confusion in some cases people hear me say this and they respond in disbelief Sometimes people hear me saying that they must never express themselves. This is not what I'm saying at No point is anxiety recovery about hiding or suppression your emotions ideas or opinions I would never teach or encourage that. We are not trying to be robots here Just better healthier humans You are allowed to express yourself and encourage to do so What I am saying is that you must be careful about how you define expressing yourself Being afraid of your heartbeat for the 17th day in the row and speaking that fear to your partner again is not part of that definition Insisting to your online support group that it feels like you are going to pass out when you never do is not a healthy form of expression That is maladaptive expression that fuels and cements the disorder Speaking irrational fear over and over does not help us and it does not fall into the realm of productive expression of who we are When someone says something hurtful to you speak up when you lose the loved one and you need to express your grief speak up When you're frustrated at work because of politics and bureaucracy speak up When you cannot watch the New York Jets lose another game and you want to scream speak up But when you want to tell me for the 47th time in 22 days that it feels like you are about to go insane Take a break for a minute. Think about what that statement is going to accomplish Do your best to acknowledge that it's not helping you to do that Try to remain silent Show yourself that you can navigate through that fear without asking the world to carry it or soothe it for you See the difference You may be resistant to this idea This is quite common. If you're having a hard time hearing what I'm saying just think about it Take some time today to think about how you may be defending a maladaptive Repeated speaking of fear as being some form of required self expression Consider the common but unhelpful habit of insisting that we must vent our fear all the time to get better Be honest with yourself in assessing how this is all working out for you Is this helping you and serving you in some way or is it just reminding you that you are unwell and Reinforcing the belief that this is all just too scary or too hard Sometimes recovery is about taking a brutal look at our habits so we can begin to change them for the better Tomorrow we'll look at the idea of being anxiously busy rather than actually living 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 the anxious morning dot 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 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