 is today's an important message on Monday, recovery Monday, episode 32. It is that not everything is recovery. You cannot be recovering 24-7. Life is happening at the same time. Life is recovery, recovery is life. So let's talk about it today. Let's pull the chat up. So you kind of pile it in the room. Hopefully the usual suspects will arrive. As you get in, just let me know that you can hear me. Let me know everything is working. I'm gonna turn up my volume just a little bit. Make sure everything is good. Seven people. Where's everybody coming from today? Has everybody doing? I will remind those of you watching while everybody's sort of filing in that every Monday, at least for the past 31 weeks or so, we have done lessons out of this book, The Anxious Truth. We just take one lesson after another out of this recovery guide. If you do not have a copy of this book and you would like it, you can get it on my website at the anxioustruth.com. Everything I do is there actually. My books, all the podcast episodes, all my social stuff, the anxious morning email newsletter and podcasts is there, which is free, so go check it out. So yeah, pop on over to the website and see what's there. There's a ton of good stuff, hopefully for you to take advantage of. So today we're gonna talk about the idea that not everything in recovery is recovery. We also have to know that life is happening and the two are kind of connected and intertwined. So we're gonna talk about that. What is up everybody? Who do we have? Bethany says she can hear me. Thanks B, South Africa, Sweden, Oklahoma. Katya's here from Russia. Long Island, fellow Long Islander, looking down at the comments, not trying to be rude. I just gotta see the screen. If you're coming from the Facebook group, I'm sorry, Restream doesn't show me your name. So if you wanna make a comment, just maybe tell me your name. I only see Facebook user. Tennessee is here. We always have a really varied audience and I certainly appreciate that. You guys come from all over the world. And it's great that we get to gather here every Monday at this time. We only have one more of these. So we're gonna have to think about what we do after this. But hey, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, what up Colleen? So we got about 30 people. Everybody's still Nova Scotia is here. Everybody's still filing in. Let's get into it. I wanna talk about the idea that not everything is recovery. So one of the most common mistakes, and it's not really a mistake. I'm not blaming anybody. Everybody gets caught up in this. In recovery is that people start to think that every waking moment is about doing recovery. Like, and I get it. Everybody wants to get better. Everybody's desperate for improvement. You wanna do everything you can, do it right, make all the right moves and move forward. I get that. But it's easy to fall into the trap where every waking moment is seen as recovery. Like, I have to do my recovery every moment that I'm awake. And that can be bad. That can lead to paralysis or over-analysis where you get into a situation where you're constantly questioning everything that you do all day long. Is this recovery? Is this recovery? Is this recovery? Am I doing it right? Is this wrong? Is this against the rules? Am I messing up? So it's really common for people to kind of fall into that trap where they start to judge every single thing they do during every waking moment in relation to recovery. And if it's good for recovery, bad for recovery, and if it's making them better or not. And that's, you don't have to be there. That's not practical. You cannot be recovering during every waking moment. You cannot be actively recovering 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It just doesn't happen that way. So that's the first part of the chapter that I kind of wanna go over. I'm just gonna read through a little bit as you go. And the common questions that people start to ask is, should I be doing this now? Am I supposed to be having these thoughts? Did anyone else do, and then you insert your thing, this thing during recovery? Am I doing it right now? What about now? Am I doing it right now? So that becomes really, really common, especially in the beginning, where you're trying to make sure, like, oh, I just wanna make sure I'm doing it right. Which I completely get, especially after maybe what could be a prolonged period of months or even years of sort of maybe going down counterproductive directions where things weren't changing. Now everybody sort of gets fired up because like, oh, I got this cool new way to recover and you get really caught up in it and you wanna be doing it all the time, right? And you're hoping to get really fast relief if you do it right. But that's not fair to yourself, it can't happen. So you have to accept that in the end, life is actually happening all around you, all the time. So while you are recovering, life is actually happening. And this is really important. And it's funny because I'm a huge Pink Floyd fan, you know, classic rock, I'm a Pink Floyd guy. And Roger Waters, who was the bassist in Pink Floyd and wrote many other songs, once said in an interview about the song Time, Pink Floyd has a song called Time. And he said, the origin of that song was kind of a British thing when he was growing up and he was sort of being taught that like, well, you're learning to get ready for life. You're always getting ready for life. And he realized one day, well, wait a minute, but life has been happening since I was born. What am I getting ready for? I'm in it now. So he was sort of being raised and taught like, hey, we got to prepare for life. And then he realized one day that like, oh, wait a minute, life is actually happening now. And that was a hugely impactful statement to hear him say in that interview, which was years ago. And if you ever want to look it up, it's there somewhere, but and that kind of prompted him to start to write Time, which is one of their classic songs. But it really does apply in the recovery situation too. Like we often make the mistake of thinking, oh, I have to do recovery so that I can live my life. But really and truly life is happening even during recovery. And if you want to get super philosophical about this, and I wrote about this not too long ago, I think in one of the morning newsletters, you actually don't recover to do life. In the end, when you start to get the hang of this and get into a groove, you're actually living life again to recover. Boom, like mic drop, I don't know, mind blown sort of thing. But that's true. That is actually true. We don't recover so that we can live our life. We start to live our life again, little by little as best we can so that we recover. See how that works? It's actually the other way of what most people think. So it's important to recognize that life is happening all around you, even while you're trying to do recovery, you cannot separate them. Now in the book, I talk about it as soup. Like if there's life soup, as we live our life, we're making life soup. Recovery is just one of the ingredients in that soup. So you can't take the ingredients away and somehow deconstruct the soup like the soup is there. So you sprinkle some recovery into your life, but life soup is always being made and it's full of a bunch of ingredients. Recovery is just one of them. It's not the soup itself. So we don't make recovery soup and put life in it. We're always making life soup because we're just in life anyway. So recovery is one of the ingredients in our life soup. You cannot separate them out. It's still just soup. It all gets mixed together. And once it's in, it's in. So you can't take it back out. That's really important. So you have to remember that life is happening all around you and that in the end, we have to start to really think about the fact that we're engaging in life in order to get better. So not everything, first of all, not everything has to be judged in the context of is this recovery? Is it not recovery? Oh, my friend called me. I haven't seen them in a couple of months and they want to go out for coffee. Is that okay? Like if I do that, is that recovery? If I don't do that, is that avoidance? Like just do the life thing as best you can and it's not gonna be perfect but people tend to start to take those sort of life events and try to analyze it based on is this good for my recovery or is this good recovery? Is this good form? Is it a mistake? Will it be air quotes too much? We'll talk about too much in a minute. Very common concern. Like oh, this is gonna be too much. It's gonna set me back. It's gonna ruin my recovery. But in the end, the goal is to try to get to the point where your friend calls you and asks you for coffee and you really wanna go, you don't even think about it. You just say yeah, sure, I'll meet you for coffee tomorrow. So the only way to get better at that and to get to that point is to actually go ahead and meet that person for coffee even when you're not so good at it now. So it's super important to remember all of this. Life goes on. Now, how do our exposures fit into that? How does our intentional practice fit into that? How does sort of the mechanics of what we call recovery fit into that? Well, we're trying to get to the point where we use those exposures to sort of artificially manufacture situations that will trigger your fear, right? Recovery is all about learning to move through that fear and building a new relationship with anxiety, putting it back in its normal place, healthy place in a human life. And to do that, we have to actually face it. So we use exposures as ways to sort of artificially manufacture the anxiety, the fear, the panic, the discomfort, the thoughts, the sensations. We use exposures to manufacture those things, to trigger them in situations that you might otherwise not be in. You've withdrawn from life in certain ways, depending on what your context is. So we start to intentionally make activities up that sort of simulate life, but they're really designed to trigger those feelings so you can practice going through those feelings. Now, that's the way everybody starts. We start by just sort of, I'm gonna do my planned exposures, my planned practices. That's okay. There's a reason why we do it that way. But as you start to go down the road, you have to start to think about integrating life into that too. Because our exposures, they were basically mimicking life events. Like nobody has to learn to drive around the block. Driving around the block doesn't help you at all. In life, driving helps you in life. Oops, I gotta turn off my screen blanking. I forgot all about that. Yes, skip it, please. So let me turn this off. Anyway, driving around the block isn't a life skill, but driving is a life skill. So we take driving around the block as practice for getting back into the skill of using driving as part of your life. Staying home alone for a half hour is not a life skill, but the ability to be alone or with other people and in all contexts and be okay. Yeah, that's life. So we manufacture these things with exposures to artificially trigger those things. But down the road, we actually start to have life seeped back into that. So let me sort of dovetail them together now. Now you're doing only planned exposures, especially in the beginning of your recovery. You've withdrawn completely. You're refusing to engage with life, generally speaking. So now you're going to start to do planned exposures to start to get back into that. But then life is also gonna throw stuff at you. I did a podcast episode, I don't know when, about unplanned exposures and life challenges. If you go to my website, theangstruth.com and search for unplanned exposures, you'll see that. But life will begin to throw challenges at you. And you see it all the time in the community. Oh my God, I just got invited to my friend's wedding and that's in two months, how am I ever gonna do it? I haven't been to a restaurant in two years. Well, life starts to happen and life throws things at you and those are unplanned exposures. So in that situation, that's when we start to have to embrace the idea that, oh, that's right, I'm in recovery right now but life is also happening. Life is also happening. And the object of my recovery is to begin to live life again so that I will get to the end of recovery. So I'm gonna have to go to that wedding. I can practice doing things but I'm going to do it because I understand it will be really challenging. I might feel really uncomfortable. I might feel uncertain. I might not have very much confidence that I could do this but I'm going to do it because this teaches me how to live life again and that is how I recover. So it's super important to do that. Just to go through this a little bit. One of the questions that people wind up asking, they start to ask, should I do that? Or if I don't do that, is that avoidance? Am I doing too much? Will I trigger a setback? But in the end, what I essentially wrote here is, you're gonna be tempted to overanalyze everything that isn't specifically part of your recovery plan. You may worry that accepting an invitation to share a cup of coffee with a neighbor isn't right. Your child's upcoming holiday band concert could become a source of stress as you try to make it fit into the context of your anxiety disorder. I'm asked all the time about vacations, family functions, job interviews, parties, picnics and a wide variety of other typical life events. Like, oh, does this fit into recovery? Is this okay? Is this part of recovery? And the answer is, yeah, it's part of recovery. It's all part of recovery. Now that being said, it's important to understand that if you have withdrawn for the most part for a lot from life, and for instance, in the case of an agoraphobic, if you're basically not leaving the house without a safe person and haven't done that for a year, it's a huge ask to say, oh yeah, my family reunion is across the country. I have to fly six hours and stay for two weeks. That's a big ask, of course. And I wouldn't, that's not where you start. But we're heading toward that. And along the way, we try to do as many regular life events planned or unplanned as we possibly can. Life is recovery and recovery is life. As we start the process, it looks almost like all recovery and no life. But as you go down the road, and I know I'm sort of watching people in the comments here and I'll go back and go through that, some folks who are down the road and a little bit more advanced in this can attest to this. And if you're in this situation, by all means, chime in. At first, it's all recovery all the time. But as you start to get down the other side of the road, it just becomes life most of the time. And you realize like, oh yeah, I'm still recovering. So at first, it looks like all recovery. By the end, it looks like all life. But in the end, it was all life anyway. So you can't draw a line between the two. So it's really important. There you go. So GBG says that for sure. I know Kathleen is here. Kathleen is out on a trip. It's a big deal. But yeah, in the end, this is what happens. Like they start to become intertwined. Your exposures start to look more like life. Life itself becomes the exposure more and more and more often. And suddenly, you discover that you're not just recovering anymore. You're living again. Maybe not perfectly. Maybe not exactly the way you want to. But over time, you've gone from doing recovery to doing life while recovery is still happening. Really important. It's this may be one of the most subtly important lessons in the book in the end. I did in the end, you know what? I'm not going to go through the whole thing. I don't want to read the whole chapter for sure. But the one thing that I do want to end on, and then I'll go into comments and questions and stuff is, and I'll just read what I wrote. Finally, I want to touch on the drive to have someone confirm and validate every life choice you make along the road to recovery. This is not required, which I say all the time over deadly. At first, you're learning. So you're going to ask those questions. That's normal in the beginning. Like you're going to want to ask me. You're going to want to ask the Facebook group. You're going to want to ask your support people. Is this right? Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? It's natural at first to do that, but you have to start to wean yourself off that. Is this okay? Is this okay? Is this okay? It's actually not required. Just go and do and let the experiences teach you and guide you. So much of recovery is learning and rediscovering your own capability and building that sense of competence and confidence that you don't need the constant assurance from your support group that, yeah, that's okay to do that. Yes, that's okay. Yes, that's okay. In the end, you'll start to back away from that, but you don't have to have every single step validated for you. Like stand up, start to do things, and then you will understand that like, okay, how did that work for me? It worked like this, it worked like that. It worked like this, it worked like that. I can adjust. I can learn from this. So so much of it is learning to navigate on your own. Not that your support people should abandon you or shut you down, but in the beginning it's really common to want to verify that you're making right choices on every step, but as you start to progress and get the concepts under your belt and understand the concepts of recovery, I did a podcast episode on this too. This is your main to this topic. I urge you, if you want to find a way to integrate recovery and life and make them start to mesh together and look like each other, one of the best things that you can do is to start to understand the concepts of recovery so you can apply them rather than continually asking for directions. I did a podcast episode on that in the last six months. Again, search for that on my website. It's critically important. That's one of the ingredients that helps you move from recover, recover, recover to life. Like, oh, I could just apply the concepts because I understand why I'm doing this as opposed to asking for tips and tricks and directions in every specific circumstance. Okay, now tell me to do if my heart beats too fast. Now tell me what to do if I get nauseous. Oh, now tell me what to do if I get depersonalized. Understand the concepts underneath it all and you could start to apply them in multiple contexts. And when you start to apply recovery concepts across multiple contexts in multiple situations, suddenly, accidentally, you start living life again. Thank you, B. So Bethany just put up that podcast episode. It was episode number 179. When you listen to my podcast, if you know the episode number, you can always go to the anxioustruth.com slash and the episode number and you get to it. So thank you, I appreciate that. All right, peeps, that's about it. So 17 minutes in, I'm done yacking. Let's go through the comments and questions. I'll answer as many as I can. Let's see what we got here. Washington, New Hampshire, and then I'll be in New Hampshire actually in June. I will be in Nashua for about a week. Let's see here. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, Canada, St. Louis, Taos, New Mexico. Donna says, I love how this flows into many other things. I'll just put Donna stop. I'll start putting stuff up on the screen best I can. Can't put them all up on the screen. It can't answer every question, but I'll try. I'm an emotional train wreck. Well, you always say that, Donna, but I'm not sure that you really are an emotional train wreck. I'm sure that you're having a lot of emotions, but you're always handling it, always, right? But I know how, I know to get out there anyway, do it anyway, walking out anyway. So much of this happens. And part of that recovery process and learning to live life again is that, yeah, sometimes life will trigger big emotions. Sometimes we have really shitty days where we feel sad or we're shattered or we're angry or we're disappointed or just things that humans feel. But we begin to learn that, oh, this isn't necessarily a recovery question. This is just a life question. So I'm gonna have to get better at experiencing life and all its forms. So there you go. No, no, no, who is in a Pink Floyd fan says, says Colleen, I don't know. I haven't found one yet and I hope to never find one. If you're not a Pink Floyd fan, we can't be friends. Anyway, this is good. So let's put Nikki up on the screen here. When you learn a new way to relate to anxiety, you start focusing less inwards and more outwards. What is the outward focus? Life engaging with life, engaging with life. That focus question is that focus concept is really a big one here and is part of this topic today. That inward focus, recovery, recovery, recovery is, how do I feel? Am I getting better? How do I feel? Am I getting better? When your focus slowly starts to move from in here, out here more and more and more, it's because you're engaged with the world, that side of your own skin. And the world that side of your own skin is called life. So that just starts to happen. Oh, this is perfect right here. Thank you, Kat. Kat listens to Pink Floyd while reading my book. That's a perfect combination. I couldn't get any better than that. That made me laugh. Thank you. Let's see. Okay. I feel like I have to be on with my anxiety practice. It does get tiring. Yes. If it comes back then I must have done something wrong, but Julie, the feeling it is why you do the practice. Like you don't do the practice to try and make it go away. The practice is just to get better at moving through these things. So if you immediately declare, I failed, I am a failure. I can't do this. I don't get anything right. When you feel things, that's gonna be so challenging for you. My friend, it's something you have to, somebody, I'm gonna bring it up here. It's not fair to do it in a public forum, but that continued return to, but I'm failing, but I can't get it. I'm failing, I can't get it. Is it an obstacle for you? That I would love it if you signed to kind of address that if possible. Let's see. I know it's exhausting. Today drove someone that gave me panic. That's a big comment. So we'll just cover the whole screen. Progress, baby step at a time. Okay. So somebody talked about doing a difficult drive today. It gave me panic. I made it halfway there and then turned around. Okay. That step counts. So that step actually does count. And sometimes it happens. We bail, and we're gonna call it, oh, we failed in that situation. Like, oh, we didn't really fail. But as long as you learn a lesson, then it's okay. As long as you learn a lesson, then it's okay. So good job. Oh, this is good too. Feeling like they can't do it because they haven't gotten to that part of their fear ladder. So when I say re-engaging with life, that's why I made that comment, maybe five or seven minutes ago, that you have to get in a situation where you also are realistic. If you're completely homebound, it's not realistic to say, oh, Drew said live life again, so I'm gonna take a cruise around the world next week. Yeah, that's not really gonna work out in the end. So it is important to understand that you are, this is incremental. There's a progression here for sure. Yes, leaning toward our values. This is huge. You know, I say this all the time, like recovery is just one giant march away from fear-driven decisions and toward value-driven decisions. The things that matter to you, they become important again. What you value becomes important again, as opposed to just avoiding fear. So yes, it is definitely value-driven for the, for most part. Oh, this is good too. GBG always with great comments. Recovery for me has been solely losing interest in recovery. Ah, that's a golden comment right there. That is 100% true. People ask me all the time, like how do you know that you're recovered? Well, the answer is when you stop asking if you're recovered, which sounds like a really glib, smart ass kind of thing to say, but this comment right here from a member of our own community confirms that. Slowly losing interest in whether or not I'm recovering or not, I'm just doing things and how I feel or not. It's just, oh yeah, I can handle all of those feelings. So that's really great comment. Love it. Kathleen says the same thing. Ooh, love it. This is a good one from Katya. At some point I stopped calling everything I do an exposure. I could not love this anymore. That's true. Like in the beginning, everything is, oh, I had a big exposure. But then it just becomes life. Like, yeah, it was a challenge. Maybe it was difficult thing, but it's not and not everything looks like an exposure. This is so good. You guys are killing it today. Love it. Let's see here. All right, well, hang on a second here. But this is, so I'm stuck on the exposure thing and I forget to really live my life in the moment. Don't beat yourself up on that. In the beginning of this journey, that's where everybody starts. And I started a chapter by saying that, like everybody starts that way. It's all about recovery, recovery, recovery. It's the progression over time where it's less about doing recovery, doing exposures and more about just engaging with life. But that's a progression. Everybody starts being almost totally attuned to just recovery and forgetting about life. So that's okay. In the beginning, like I said, don't be hard on yourself. That happens. So let's see. It's a slow process, but it's liberating. That's very true. This is really great. You start to forget that you're doing recovery. That is correct. So GBG said before, like, I stopped thinking about recovery so much. Katya says, well, I just stopped calling everything exposures and Viola says, I kind of just forget that I'm doing recovery. That's really good. Really good. Let's see. You got it, you got it. Oh, we're coming to the end of the comments. This is great. We're cranking here. Kid, I've been a glorophobic. I'm ready to start working. I've done a few exposures. I haven't done enough. Let's pop this up on the screen real quick. Hey, kid. I've been a glorophobic and I'm ready to start working. I've done a few exposures, but I feel like I haven't done enough. That's kind of a common feeling. The job that I have requires me being in the car a lot. Is it okay if I go for it? Well, that's an individual thing. Sure, it's okay. You know what you're capable of. First of all, I always say, we're capable of everything. We choose not to do the things because of how we feel when we do them. So it's always important to start from the premise that says, well, I'm capable of actually doing everything. So even the homebound agoraphobic is literally technically, physically capable of taking your cruise around the world. Like that's true. Just that they will feel terrible when they do that. And it's just a matter of how much can I tolerate feeling terrible? So really, kid, it's a really good question. I can't answer it. There's no harder, fast yes or no on that. Do as much practice as you can and in the end understand what that means. Like I might have to be in the car a whole lot more because I've accepted this job that I want to accept because it's important to me. And I have to know that I have to be willing to tolerate the discomfort that I experience while I'm in the car. And in that situation, it's like, well, can I tolerate that every day, four or five hours, eight hours a day, three days a week, whatever that job is gonna be. And know that I'm practicing my tolerance and practicing my navigation when I do that. So I wish I had a definite yes or no answer. There's no right answer to that. Just know what you're getting into going in and this way it can help you navigate through it if you decide to take it. And whatever way you do it, I hope it works out for you. Thanks for the question, man, appreciate it. Oh, no, no, no, no. How do you not, okay, this is a pretty big one. How do you not fear the fear even if you sit with your anxiety? You don't, this is a very common misconception also that somehow or other there's a technique for not being afraid. There is no technique to not be afraid, right? So it's really important. You will be afraid. The object of the game when we do these recovery things and in the beginning where it's solely focused on exposures and recovery, you will be afraid. The fear is the point. So it's really common for people to think like, oh, please give me the tip on how to turn off my fear so that I can do this. Well, no, no, you do this while afraid so that the fear over time begins to dial back down. You don't get to choose to be afraid or not be afraid. You only get to act certain ways and over time that fear will start to decrease. But when you do this, and this is really meta, it's a very circular reference in a way, but if you're sitting, so you say you sit with the anxiety, if you sit with the anxiety and you sit wringing your hands, oh my God, I'm afraid, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, but I'm sitting, oh my God, oh my God, it's that part that keeps the fear alive. So, okay, I'm really afraid right now. I'm really uncomfortable right now. I'm going to engage with my life to the best of my ability right now even though I am afraid. And those repeated experiences with the positive outcome and a positive outcome is, I didn't die, I didn't go insane, I didn't snap, nothing bad really happened. I was just uncomfortable, but I could handle it. Over time, that's what turns down the volume and brings that fear knob back to its normal, healthy place in your life. I hope that helps. It's really important to think, to understand that, no, no, no, there's no knob. You can't just turn off the fear and decide to not be afraid. That takes time, it takes time. Let's see here. I look, I'm seeing an answer here to Gen P. What did Gen P ask? Cause somebody said, I've been asking that and haven't gotten a straightforward answer. Gen P, I'm scrolling up, what did you ask? That somebody hasn't gotten a straightforward answer? I've wondered that too, Jamie. Oh, here you go. Is it this? I'll try and get this. Do you think you can overwhelm yourself with anxiety content? Yeah, you completely and utterly can overwhelm yourself with anxiety content. 100%. So, Gen, I don't know if that is what you're saying, Jamie, that you've asked the same question. Yeah, you can completely and utterly overwhelm yourself. You can paralyze yourself with that. I'm not telling you, you're here in my video, so thank you for watching, I hope I'm helping, not telling you to only watch me. But it's really important to understand when you are just going from video to video to podcast to podcast, to book to book to book to post to post. You belong to 16 anxiety groups on Facebook. That is in no way healthy or productive in any way, in no way. So let me be, if so, Gen said, I've yet to get a straightforward answer, I'm gonna try and give you a super straightforward answer. Don't do that. That is 100% overwhelming and can often lead to paralysis, especially if you're going to consume content, say like mine, or maybe Josh Fletcher or Kimberly Quinlan, or anybody that sounds like us, like Lauren Rosen, who this same sort of approach. And then you're also gonna try and temper it with the gentler kind of things. Paralysis can happen super fast, super fast. So you could choose the sources you want. I'm not telling you you must choose me as a source. I appreciate if you trust me that you do, but pick a couple that align sort of together and then go down that road. You may decide, nope, that road is not for me and then you can go down a different path. But no, you can't, you just don't drown yourself all day long in anxiety content. It's not gonna help you at all. Because recovery and engaging in life, like we're talking about today, is a process of doing. It's a doing thing. So listening, learning, reading, watching, reading, watching, asking, questioning, discussing, that's not recovery. In the end, reading my books, listening to my podcast, watching these videos is not recovery. This can only inform your action, the action is recovery. Really important. Oh, no, no, no, no. I see a loaded question here about another anxiety quote, coach. I'm not gonna put it on the screen. Do you know what his name on the screen? The answer to the question is, when somebody who claims to be a mental health helper also describes the content they put out as cutting edge marketing, which he does, that guy has unabashedly called it that, I would tell you that what I'm putting out is psycho-educational content, hopefully encouraging content, informative content. My content is not marketing to get me clients or sell books, but that dude unabashedly tells his high-impact, big-ticket sales, closing sales force that he is priming you with his cutting-edge marketing of drone footage at Hudson Yards in New York City so that you call and talk to a closer to buy an $8,000 coaching package. That's a problem. That's not helping. That's not ethical. None of that is. So the answer is, what do I think of him? That's what I think of him. I think very little of him. And I don't have a problem saying that either. And I'll put his name on the screen because I don't need any more publicity for that guy. Anyway, okay, so that was my little mini rant here. Let's see what else we got. When you stop buying every book ever written on anxiety, it's a good thing. It's a good thing to not buy every book ever written by anxiety, buy my book. No, I'm just kidding. You don't have to buy my book. There's a lot of, you know what? Let's touch on that for just a second, 31 minutes. So why do I write these books? If I'm telling you to buy them or not buy them, which is true, like in the end, buy them, don't buy them in the end. But why is something like this? Why did I write this? Like a lot of people asked me to write this book for years and I'm like, eh, I don't have to write a book. But the difference between this book and not this book, just this book, I'm not comparing it to anything else, is here I was able to lay it out in a logical sequence. So I could keep asking and answering the same questions again and again and again on these videos in the comments, social media posts, in the Facebook group, Instagram comments, the same questions again, again, again, again, or I can put the content in a logical sequence that you can follow step by step by step and then go back to refer to it. That's why I did that. That's why I did that. So that's the benefit of the books. So the books are really meant, the good books are not cures, they don't fix you and they are not recovery, but they should give you the information you need to at least base your actions on, which is why I wrote this particular book and why I wrote 7% slower. All right, let's see here. I think I need to work on my attitude while doing things that make, okay, well, that's okay. Let's throw this up here. Sup Shaughnessy, good to see you. I think I need to work on my attitude while doing things that make me uncomfortable. I keep thinking I'm really not enjoying this, but that's okay. It's not supposed to be enjoyable. I mean, it would be nice if it was, but nobody does hard things and finds them enjoyable. I know that that's really like in the personal development space, that's a little bit of a trope like, yeah, get comfortable being an uncomfortable man. Yeah, and it sort of implies that somehow you should be embracing the process. You can understand why you're doing it and understand why you are intentionally doing things you don't like. Why am I intentionally making myself uncomfortable? So it's okay to sort of understand the why you're doing that, but it's also okay to not like it. It's okay, like it's okay to say that. I really hate doing this. I used to go out and drive every morning and I would think, man, I hate this. Because I did, I did hate it. It was okay, but I knew I was doing it for a reason. So both of those things kind of go together. This is how does someone do exposure for derealization? You don't because it just happens. So whenever it happens, that is your exposure. If it happens to you right now, then unfortunately you're not getting to plan it. I mean, unless you specifically know of situations where you can definitely trigger it or you're likely to trigger it, then okay, you can do those things. But generally speaking, exposures for derealization is not when it happens, it happens. That is your opportunity to do the exposure in the practice. Hopefully that helps. People ask that all the time. Derealization and depersonalization are just other anxiety symptoms. So if it's a symptom that gets triggered when you get anxious, then go do things that make you anxious. If it's a little bit more amorphous and you can't necessarily guarantee that you will trigger it, then whenever it happens is your exposure. So in that situation, you have to understand, okay, when it happens, this is what I do. Which essentially I do nothing. I just let it happen. Hopefully that helps. Let's see. I tried to read everything. Oh, this is so good. This is so good. Like I'm hidden behind the comments here. I tried to read everything about panic because I was searching for the golden nugget that would help it go away faster. That is so incredibly common. That's so incredibly common and it's why people get stuck in the old like, oh, I'm gonna read another book. I'm gonna read another podcast, I'm gonna follow another person. Always hoping for that one thing, the thing that will make it click. I just need a way to make it click. I just need a way to make it get okay with it so that it can start to recover. But in the end, there is no golden nugget cure. That's 100% true. And there's also nothing to click. Like this sucks because it only clicks after you do it. So so many people get stuck in paralysis, reading and reading and trying all kinds of different sources, hoping to find something that will make it click so that they can start to recover, but it only clicks after. And then that's, that's shitty, but that's true. So you only get it after you do it. We only learn it after we do it. First we do, then we learn. So you're doing it while afraid. You're doing it while unsure. You're doing it without thinking that you know what to do. Is this gonna work? I don't know. I don't know until I do it. So it's really important, really important. Okay, we're scrolling to the end here. I'm gonna wrap it up in a few. Let's see here. No, no, no, I just got back from a very large trip. She made an app, she untitled soul. No, no, no, I'll throw this up here. I think I saw a comment about this. How is the best way to talk to your anxiety? You don't. I did a podcast episode on that too and I saw a link, maybe that was it, I don't know. There you go, Bethany put it up to comments down. The answer is you don't because it's not listening. You must talk to your anxiety with action. It only knows experiences, it doesn't know words. So you can again and again and again, you could try to talk yourself down and say mantras and this too shall pass and I'm safe and everything's okay and your lizard brain, your amygdala, it's not listening, doesn't understand. It's like trying to call somebody who doesn't even own a phone. So you cannot talk to it, you must teach it through action. And if you look at the link that Bethany couple of comments down, that's a podcast episode exactly on that. So hopefully that helps. No cracking the code moment, no, no, no, no, no, no. There you go. Oh, this is good. All right, so we'll follow up here with Viola's comment about derealization for the person who asked about that. Used to be my main symptom. Once I realized what it was and then I wasn't going crazy, it started slowly going away. I get it now and it doesn't even bother me. 100% like for me too, if I'm having an anxious day, derealization and depersonalization are symptoms that I can still experience. Those are anxiety red flags for me. That's how I know that I'm having an anxious day. I will start to experience those things. I just don't care. And since I don't care, which I think Viola is saying here, they tend to not to hang around. I notice it like, oh, okay, something's going on here. And then I'm able to sort of like slow things down and really just start to get a little bit more mindful and realize that maybe I've gone off the rails a little bit into some bad habits. And then I realize that, no, I'm not even paying attention to my derealization anymore. So it doesn't last very long at all. I cannot answer this question because I cannot diagnose you here. I don't know. I've done a lot of exposure, where do we think I'm going wrong? Without knowing you, I would have no way to answer that question. There's probably 10 or 15 different things up top of my head that I could think of that might be a problem. But unfortunately, I can't answer the question because it would be completely irresponsible. I don't know. I can guess, but I don't know. Okay, folks, that's it. We are at the end of the comments at 38 minutes. We're two minutes under our usual. So I appreciate you guys coming by. I think this is a good sort of under-appreciated lesson in the book. It's one that we don't talk about a lot and I'm glad we got to talk about it today. I do believe though that next week, chapter six is the end of the book. Chapter six doesn't have lessons. It actually just is a chapter. It's called, What's Next? So just a housekeeping thing. We'll be back again next Monday in the same place for the very last entry in this book. And then we have to decide what we want to do from there. So do we want to keep Recovery Monday going? What format do we want to be in? Do we want to have Q&A? Do we want to have different topics? So if you have ideas on this, by all means put them in the comments wherever you happen to be watching. Otherwise, I thank you for coming by today and I will see you again next week at the same time. And then we'll see where we go from there. I like the Monday live streams. I love interacting with you guys. I like the Q&A part that's kind of cool. So maybe we'll combine it in some way. I'll put up a Q&A post on Instagram or something and you guys can ask questions and then I can answer them that way. So we'll figure it out. Anyway, thanks for coming by today. I'll see you again next week. This will stay on YouTube, Facebook, Facebook group, online yards. You can come back and watch these as many times as you want. And that's it. See you guys next.