 We are going to talk about three ingredients that go into the recovery process, and that is tenacity, persistence, and patience. Why you need them, what they mean, and how to use them in recovery. It's Monday, which means it's recovery Monday, episode 20. Let's get cooking. So let's see who pops in. Usual suspects are arriving. I am sure let me put the chat overlay up. Just let me let me know that you can hear me. Let me know that everything is okay. Let me know where you are from. And just a quick program note as you guys pop into the stream. For those of you who have put up with, oh, my God, looks awesome, says Bethany, thank you, B. So for those of you who have put up with crappy video quality and freezing video and bad streams, thank you very much. I kind of finally figured that out. It took some equipment, some technology, some investment, but I'm happy to have done it. So this is good. So welcome if you are watching on Twitch, which I'm sure you are not, or if you're on Twitter. But today we're going to talk about persistence, tenacity, and patience, and what they mean in the recovery process. I will remind you that we are doing lessons from this book every week. This is the anxious truth. This is the recovery guide that I wrote. You can find it on my website at the anxious truth dot com. If you don't have it and you want to follow along, we're just going through lesson by lesson in the book, we're 20 weeks into it. And I don't know, we've got a couple more months to go for sure. So we're going to go through this today. Let's see, where's everybody here? Terry's here live streamed from Ottawa. Welcome, Canada. Back after two weeks of COVID. Welcome back. Mia Voss is here. Mia Voss in the house host of the shit. We don't talk about podcasts, which I'm proud to produce. He is one of my favorites. What up, Nikki from England, New York in the house. Love it, fellow New Yorker. So let's get cooking here. Twenty six people. That's more than enough. Let's talk about these three ingredients that go into the recovery process. So we are always to remember that recovery is about learning how to form a new relationship, grease belly garages here, GBG in the house. We are always looking to form a new reaction to and relationship with anxiety and fear and all the stuff that comes along with it. That is recovery, right? So as part of that, there are some things that we have to really sort of get on board with. There are, you know, things that we have to kind of use and learn and really kind of get into the slipstream with. And those three things for me were definitely tenacity, persistence and patience. They are part of the recovery process. So I want to kind of go through them as we go. And let's talk about tenacity first. Like, what is tenacity? Tenacity to me, and I'm going to do a bit of reading out of this book today, because as it turns out, I wrote some pretty cool words. So what is tenacity? To me, tenacity is that thing where you want it really bad and you are not going to be denied. Now, look, this is not about running over anxiety. It's not about just willing yourself to recovery. That we can't do that, but we can be tenacious about how we engage in the process of recovery, right? So we don't know what the outcome is going to be from day to day. We're looking for a longer term change over time. So this being tenacious doesn't mean I'm going to run this over, man, and I will not be stopped. It means that I'm going to commit to this process and I'm going to be tenacious in the way I execute it, even when I'm not sure of what to do, even when I'm feeling doubt, even when people are maybe questioning as to why I'm doing this. Like, that is tenacity. So I'm going to give you a couple of quick examples. And hey, everybody, Laura is here, Anna, what's up? I'm getting a couple of quick examples. So I said, be prepared for days when you feel like it's not working, but you got to keep going. That's tenacity. I feel like it's not working. I can't really be sure I'm feeling a little discouraged, but I know I got to keep going. That's being tenacious, not allowing the less than perfect days to throw you off, trusting the process, like executing a plan, even when you're not sure how you're supposed to execute the plan. You just do the best you can. You don't be denied. Keep going. Keep working it. That's tenacity. We need that. And tenacity in my mind is really driven by like, no, no, no, I don't want to live like this anymore. I want it to be better. I don't want to be like this anymore. So that desire for change is what drives tenacity and kind of lights the tenacious fire. One of the things I wrote is knowing when it's time to put on blinders and engage laser focus is being tenacious. So when all of the conventional wisdom or when you're a fear and your anxiety, the rational fear is telling you to act a certain way or do certain things to feel better or soothe yourself. Tenacity is the ability to say, no, that's not what I'm doing. I'm doing this because I know it's going to help me get better. I'm going to put on my blinders. I'm going to get laser focused and I'm going to engage in the process, even though it seems really counterintuitive to do that today. So that that is tenacity. That's really important. And the third thing, the point that I made about tenacity was that one of the hallmarks of tenacity that I wrote being tenacious means taking what you think as a failure and turning it around. So I did a podcast episode, which, by the way, you can find all of the episodes. If you go to the anxious truth dot com, just click on the podcast link. They're all there. But one of the episodes that I did is what do we do when we fail? Like air quotes fail, one of the hallmarks of being tenacious in recovery is saying, well, I think I failed today. How can what can I do with that failure? How can I turn it around? And I gave a whole sequence of steps. It's called what do we do when we fail? You can find it. It's a podcast episode. It's a YouTube video. And it talks about that. How can I respond to that failure? How can I do something different that takes this failure and turns it into something positive? You can't always flip. We're not always trying to turn negative into positive. This is not the power of positive thinking. This is not manifestation. But I can say, well, what can I learn from this experience? How can I take what I learned and turn it into maybe a step forward, even though I feel like I did take a step back? We're not trying to deny reality, but we're just trying to work with reality the best we can. And being tenacious sometimes means I'm going to sit on the sofa for a little while and lick my wounds and talk about how I kind of screwed up today. I'm not happy and I'm frustrated, but then I'm going to get up and I'm going to do that again. I'm going to do a scaled scaled back version of that exposure today just so that I don't end the day like defeated. That's tenacity. That's part of being tenacious, really important, right? So let's talk about let's move on to the next thing. And that would be persistence. So persistence is pretty self-explanatory. And sometimes we might interchange persistence with motivation, possibly. But here's the difference. And this is something that I read recently. I don't even know what book it was. It might have been the the antidote, the Oliver Berkman book, where there's a whole section where he talks about how people think that they have to feel motivated before they do things. But that's not true. You don't have to feel motivated or confident before you can act. So persistence is acting just because you know that you want to or you need to. Or I'm going to do something good for future drew, even though current drew doesn't really want to do that today. That's persistence. When I had to drag my butt out of bed and get in the car and do my driving exposures in that bitter cold winter that we had that year. Like that was persistence. I didn't really want to do it. I wasn't feeling it. It wasn't particularly motivated. But I was I learned that I was able to act even though I didn't feel like acting. I still had the opportunity to do it. So a lot of times persistence is one of those things that that that is it a. What's an acknowledgement that says I don't have to feel a certain way to do this work. And one of the mistakes that happens in recovery all the time is like, well, no, I have to be in the right mindset. I have to be having a good day. I have to have a calm day. I have to be feeling confident. I have to be feeling focused. No, not really. Like being persistent in recovery means I'm going to do it even when I don't know if I have a good handle on it, even though I'm not feeling good today, even though I don't want to do it. This is when it's most important for me to do it. So persistence is one of those things that I think is super critical because persistence leads us to be consistent and and consistency is also important in recovery and persistence and consistency addresses that thing that where the mistake that is. Well, I did a really hard exposure on Monday. So that means I'm just going to rest until Friday. And then maybe I'll do another one if I feel up to it. I don't have to rest like everybody's entitled to rest. Everybody gets rest. Rest is not a reward like rest is just a part of being human. But being persistent is a guard against. Well, I'm going to start a retreat because retreat feels better, but I'm going to call it rest or I'm going to call it reward or I did enough. So I don't have to do this stuff for the next three days. I'm just going to take a few days. Me day, self-care days, self-care days are important. Me days are important. But persistence is a guard against that irrational fear and those avoidance behaviors, masquerading as self-care or or rest. So it helps us keep stay grand in the reality of like, no, I'm really tired right now and I'm going to rest because I'm tired and I deserve to rest versus I don't really have to rest right now. But I'm going to call it rest anyway, because I really don't want to go back to that scary supermarket again, right? So to me, that's persistence, persistence is sort of tied into motivation and learning that lesson that says, even though I don't feel motivated, I can actually still act and do something that's good for myself. Now, in that situation, I can relate my own experience here. I always had to remind myself that I was doing current drew that was afraid and didn't really want to do it and didn't go to bed. It was freezing. I was getting tired of doing it. I was getting bored of doing it. But I felt like, well, I can indulge current drew, which is current right now in this moment, and I want the soothing and this comfort and the safety in this particular moment. But I really should probably act in the best interest of future drew. Why? And this might sound silly, but this helped me sort of frame it in a certain way, which was current drew has this much time, right? This is my slice of time currently right now, the next moment, the next five minutes, the next hour, the next day, maybe the next week. But there is a whole lot of time that future drew has on his hands. So do I want to serve the next week? Or do I want to serve the next 30 years of my life? That helped me stay persistent, like understanding that, like, I could trade what I want today, but today is only 24 hours long. But I'm trading that against the next 30 years of my life. And that helped me stay persistent. So to me, that was persistence. Persistence was acting even when I didn't want to act. And I learned over time that, like, I actually started to get more motivated. The more is persistent. So persistence for me, bred motivation. And that's because once I started to see, like, oh, I could do this even when I don't feel like it. And even when I wake up terrified and I don't want to get in the car. If I do get in the car when I finish, all right, I don't feel great. But then I feel that sense of accomplishment, like, oh, I did do it. And that repeated again and again and again, right? So that that all matters. I'll get to the comments in a little bit. I promise. And then the third thing I want to talk about is patience. Now, in the book, I specifically address this because I know that many people will look at me and think this guy is some sort of like cyborg recovery terminator. And in the book and my other book, An Anxiety Story, I wrote about taking no days off. And I literally, this is a term that I do. I don't have many regrets in life, but I have regret about this. I literally wrote that I did not know self compassion. Like I was seeing those things mistakenly as bad and I can own that now. That was a mistake to say that. But here is where I actually learned that I was actually self compassionate. And that was because even though I'm one of the least patient people I know, I was able to say I have to be patient here. So patience is where like recovery terminator cyborg drew actually does talk about self compassion. I just didn't know that that's what I was talking about. And I didn't know that that's what I was doing for myself. I I didn't know that at all. I only learned that probably in the last year when the light bulb went off and I like, oh, patience is a form of self compassion, which I know is an important part of the process. We are doing scary things. We are doing difficult things. We are doing challenging things. We are literally acting in opposition to our survival instincts in many ways. We are doing things that nobody else probably thinks we should do to get better. Everybody wants us to take a pill. Everybody wants us to buy weighted blankets. And meanwhile, we're like, no, I'm going to get in the car and drive around. So I panic on the highway. Like the rest of the world must think we're crazy sometimes. So acknowledge that that is not an easy road to travel. We have picked a difficult path. And when we do difficult things, it takes us a while to do them. Like Rome wasn't built in a day. The oldest cliche in the book, or at least as old as Rome anyway. But we know these things. We have sayings and cliches and little things in life that remind us that things worth doing take time. Patience is a virtue. Rome wasn't built in a day like over and over and over. We hear these things, right? But we have to be patient. And when I wanted to be recovered tomorrow, it was Tuesday morning. And all I wanted to be was better on Wednesday. I had to come to grips with the fact that there is no way I just cannot be recovered tomorrow. I can't be recovered next week. I can't have gone from practically housebound for the last three months to going on a family vacation in 10 days. That is not practical. Like I must be patient. I hated that realization and I still hate it for you. But that's truth. So being patient with this process and Claire Weeks wrote about it. And everybody that was worth their salt has written about it in the end. And I guess I'm lucky that I accidentally put it in the anxious truth in this book we're talking about. But you must embrace the fact that this is a time consuming process. It doesn't happen overnight. And you must be patient with yourself. Being patient is a very self-compassionate thing because it means I can't fix this today. I'm working on it. And maybe today didn't go so great. But today is just one block in this structure that I'm building. Today stands alone for this experience that it can teach me. But it does not stand alone in terms of my success and failure. So I hate this part. I do. I hate the patience part, but we don't have a choice. And paradoxically, the more we want to deny that and try to find a fast way, just give me a fast way. I need a better way. Is it the right way? There must be another way. Let me try another book. Let me try another set of videos. Let me try someone else's seminar because they say that I can be better in five days. The more we do that, the more we glue ourselves into those uncomfortable feelings. One of the hardest things that I do was kind of like one of the hardest things I had to do was to just sit and say, well, I guess I'm just going to be afraid today. I don't know why I don't want to be afraid. I hate this with every five of my being, but part of the process that today I will be afraid for some reason that I cannot put my finger on. That was really hard, but that was a pretty big deal because it was like, all right, I'm going to have to do the best I can today at being afraid. And over time that changed. It was it was important. It was important. We cannot make this go away really fast. So I cannot repeat this enough of these three things. Tenacity, huge fan to my personality to be a tenacious SOB. Persistence, not I would refuse to give in to like I would do the work even when I want to do the work. It's in my personality. Being patient and nice to myself was not in my personality. It had to it had to come. I had to work on that. And that's the thing that I want you to take away from this more than anything else. Really important. OK, let's see. So let's see some of the comments here. I the weird thing about this new comment that the camera set up is I really look down to look at the comments. I'm not trying to be rude. I just want to read what you guys are saying. Tenacious SOB, like Tenacious D. So good screen name, good band name, like I have a starter band. Maybe we'll be called Tenacious SOB. So let's scroll up a little bit and see what we got going on here. Let's see. Hello, everybody, from all the different places you are. Both the audiobooks. Yala, thank you for supporting the book. I hope you find that useful. The book is, in fact, available in print, electronic audio. All the ways to get it are on the website. If you go to the anxious truth.com and click through to this book, you'll see all the ways you can get the book. So I'm glad it's working for you guys. Happy Valentine's Day to everybody. Oh, yeah, it's Valentine's Day. That's right. I'm a terrible Valentine. I will admit it. All right. So let's see here. Let us see what Nikki says. I'll put some stuff up on the screen here because I love when you guys are going in the comments. Tenacity can be when I get the momentum going. Yes, could be more powerful than the anxiety is. Yes, yes, yes. That's a huge yes. Giant fist bump there, Nikki. Good comment because that's true. When you are tenacious and persistent, you literally begin to build momentum and at some point that literally starts to override the anxiety. It does. And Nikki, I'm so happy that you put that up there because that is 100 percent true. It's 100 percent true. Motivation begins to build and that persistence that builds motivation, not motivation, momentum. Momentum actually helps carry you through the bad days, too, and the failures or the setbacks. So when you are persistent and tenacious and you are doing this work consistently and you are being patient at the same time, you will find that you start to get a little bit more immune to the idea of setback, right? Oh, it's a setback. That's it. It's a setback back to square one. Everything went out the window like that becomes less and less as you build that momentum. It sort of carries you over those bad days. All right, this is part of the process. I am tenaciously committed to this process in bad days. Sometimes you're bad part of the process. So great comment, Nikki. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it. Michelle says love that persistence is key, not motivation. That is a big deal. And this one is only listen, listen, I'm connecting dots all the time. Even now I'm connecting dots. And so when I read that book, when I and I'm pretty sure it was in the antidote, which is a great book. I think the subtitle is Happiness for People That Hate Positivity. Pretty tongue in cheek. It's a good book. I just finished it. I really enjoyed it. So he talked about that like one school of thought, which is you learn that you do not have to be motivated to act. People think that, well, I'm just not motivated. I don't feel like it's so therefore I can't. It's not true. People do things that I don't feel like doing all the time. So be persistent. Don't wait to be motivated. You persistence will build the motivation in the end. So let's see. OK, this is a good question, Kat. Let me put it up here. Sometimes I get angry with that anxiety. Is that is that tenacious? Could be like it's part of motivation. I don't think there's anything wrong with being angry at the anxiety. Let's clarify this for a second. So being angry at the anxiety itself sometimes could be really a motivator. And I know a lot of people will tell you, oh, anger. It's a useless emotion. It's misplaced, blah, blah, blah. OK, maybe I get that. But anger sometimes is fuel in the recovery process. The times that I move forward were sometimes the time that I was most angry and like, I am not doing this anymore. The difference is, and this is really important, using anger as motivation and fuel sometimes is a good strategy if you can do it, but never at yourself. Like never, ever, ever turn that anger on yourself. I'm tired of being like this. For me, the anger and this wasn't intentional, I'll be honest with you, I wasn't intentionally trying to do this. I'm not that smart, not that wise. But I never thought I'm tired of me. I only thought I'm tired of acting this way. I'm tired of living this way. It was never I'm tired of who I am or how I am. Or it was never anger directed at me. And so I would urge you to really be careful about if you're going to use anger and that's fine. You're going to get angry if you want to get angry at it, if you want to get frustrated with the things that you are doing, how you are behaving, maybe some mistakes you're making in the things that you do and how you're living life. That's fine. That's OK. Never about who you are. This is never about your flaw. OK, it's super important that we not turn anger against ourselves as some sort of judgment, negative judgment about who we are. All right, so hopefully that helps. Let's see. Julie, what up? Welcome. Is how I come to work daily when anxiety is hard. I keep going. I'm comfortable. But yes, I try. Excellent. That is tonight. That's being tenacious. That is being persistent. Being patient could be one of those things. But also let me be clear about this because our friend, Julie, it's good that you're using these things, Julie. But remember that these are in the beginning. I said that this is not about I'm going to run this over. I'm going to kick its ass. These are ingredients in the recipe. They are not the whole recipe, right? So just being tenacious and just being persistent. That's not recovery by itself. They are ingredients in the recovery stew, but they are not the whole recipe. It's really it's important for me to say that because there's other things that go into this, right? Like how we actually relate to that. We are working on identifying our reactions and changing them and trying new things and learning to go through fear. Like there's a lot that goes into this in a way. So it's not I'm not telling you like if you're if you're persistent enough, you will recovery. I got to do all of that. Got to do all the stuff. I think I'll start turning to be your one Twitch watcher. Am I one Twitch person? Yeah, I don't know. I can stream to Twitch, so I will. What the hell? Maybe one day I'll be a Twitch star. I don't think so. Let's see here. What else we got going here? I started a job. Oh, I love this. Let's put this up on the screen. I'm a huge fan. Eight months ago, couldn't even go to my living room and spent my whole day in bed. Uh oh, am I still live because my screen just blanked out and I hope I'm OK. I hope the batteries are dying on my stream, which would suck. So I'll try to wrap this up really quick. Now I started a job again doing daily walks, feeling better, takes a lot of courage. Very good. Very good. Love it that that is persistence paying off right there. Very good. San Francisco, a fear of medication and supplements, blah, blah, blah, we keep scrolling down here. Patience is the hardest part. Patience is the hard part for a lot of people. It was hard for me. So it's hard to learn to be patient, especially if we're not really like, thanks guys. I see that my screen and the camera went off, but that's OK. Clearly I'm still alive. Patience is the hardest part for a lot of people. It's really hard, especially if you're not a patient person like me. I'm a whole lot more patient than I used to be. And the recovery process helped to teach me that skill. So patience is a bit of a skill that we can learn, just like anything else. So do the best you can. Just try not to be hard on yourself, right? Patience is a big deal. Let's see. Nice camera quality. Thank you for noticing. It's been a little bit of a crazy, like, bunch of technical experience to get this to work. So let's see. OK, let's put this up because this is an important comment. Ashley, thank you for sharing this. I have very little patience for myself. I always feel like I have to be better. I have to do better and fast. I do know it takes time. I like how you said I have very little patience for myself. One of the things that's kind of interesting is I bet you have a whole lot more patience for other people, right? Which is really common. Like, I would drive. I still do. I will still drive myself pretty hard. I would never drive somebody else the way I drive myself. And we are often guilty of that. Like, so self-compassion, a lot of ways is described as, like, treat somebody. Treat yourself like you would treat somebody else that you care about, like you would treat a friend or someone that you care about, right? So that's pretty important. I have very little patience for myself, but I bet you're more patient with other people. So treat yourself like you would treat those other people. Let's see. What does Bethany have to say about patience? Because I saw the scroll by patience is active in this case too. It means putting in the consistent daily effort. Yes, very good. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, B. This is huge. Like, patience doesn't feel a certain way. In fact, a lot of times patience feels frustrating. So I think it's not like, oh, I'm going to be patient and serene and calm, oh, no. Like a lot of times being patient was a real struggle for me. It did not feel good at all. It didn't feel natural. I was impatient. I'd get agitated or get angry, but what can I do? Like, all right, I'm going to have to be angry and agitated today. There's nothing I can do about this. I'm going to have to let time pass the best I can. So that's a really good point. Most of what we do in recovery is never designed to create a specific feeling or a specific outcome in terms of the emotional reaction or things like that. So a lot of people make that mistake. Patience being like, you know, like I'm supposed to be calm and zen or, you know, when I'm done with my exposures, I'm supposed to feel a certain way. I have to feel calm. No, we learn and recover that we can feel any way that we want to feel. And you might write that in the style of a certain person because certain person says stuff like that all the time. Right? So let's see here. No, no, no, no, no, I'm going to scroll down here and let's see here. Okay. So let's see here. Okay, this is a good one too. Sometimes this is pretty common mistake too. Thank you for sharing this. I was thinking that maybe if I have a better sleep, I will wake up and don't feel anxious until I realize that I need to do things and be patient. Yes, the patient's being inactive process for sure. That's another common thing that tends to happen. Like, oh, if I could just get some rest, if I could just, if I could just do this one thing, then it'll be better. Like, but it's not just one thing. It's generally not just one thing. So sometimes that makes me crazy where people will say like, here's the one thing that you can do. Like there's never one thing. There's a bunch of things. Yeah, is it one thing in the end? Yeah, conceptually it's probably one thing, but there's a bunch of little things that all add up to that one big thing. So I like it. Let's see here. Hey, Gary, what's going on, dude? Let's see, I'm losing my battle. No, you're not. I promise you're not losing any battles. First of all, it's not a battle. It's a classroom, it's not a war. I cannot desensitize my nerves at all. I'm so desperate now because I feel so bad. Well, the issue here is even though you feel bad right now, you are still upright. You're still standing. You just made a very cogent, not a pleasant statement. I'm very sorry that you're feeling the way. I don't want you to feel that way. Clearly we don't like when other human beings are in distress, but you were able to very clearly communicate in an internet livestream full of other people how you feel right now. So even though it feels really bad, you are still actually doing life. You just don't like the way it feels when you do it. So part of the first step here is to understand that like if I can't make myself feel better than I am failing and I am losing the battle, that's not true. Take the lesson that even though I felt really bad for the 10th day in a row, nothing actually bad happened except I felt that but I still did my life. That's a big shift. I'm not trying to minimize how anybody feels right now in any way because I do understand how much that suffering sucks on ice. I did it for a long, long part of my life. I did it, I understand. But it's really important to also understand that reality is showing you that that suffering never takes you down even though you want to say that it is, but it's still not taking you down. And like the demand to feel a certain way completely ignores your built-in human ability to feel a lot of ways, including anxious and afraid. That's so important. If I can give you any kind of encouraging words, it would be that. Like if you feel like you're losing the battle because you can't seem to find a way to feel better, you are completely giving up all the power that is part of you to feel all the ways that humans feel. Consider that it could be a change but step in the right direction. And so be careful about, I have to desensitize my nerves so that I make it go away. No, desensitization is really the process of learning. Oh, I am capable of moving through this. I don't desensitize to make it go away. I move through it to learn that I can and that I don't have to be afraid of this. And that's how I desensitize. You may have it backwards. Very, very common. Okay, this is a good question. Setback's always a big thing. Do setbacks come to an end at some point or do you just stop caring if they come or not? I think they come both. The answer to that is both. They come to an end because you stop calling them setbacks. So when I would have an anxious day as I progressed in my recovery, part of the hallmark of recovery is that I put less weight on that anxiety. Like in the beginning, feeling anxious was everything. It was literally everything. All I cared about was how anxious and afraid I was. The thoughts and this I was afraid of my heart and I was afraid of eating this and drinking that and what was gonna trigger me at any given time. That's all I cared about. But as you progress in recovery, you do begin to care less how you feel becomes less and less the most important thing in the room. And when it is no longer the most important thing in the room, it's still an important thing, but no longer the pivoting thing that everything revolves around, there can't be a setback. You know, if you walk out of your bedroom right now and you jam your toe on the dining room table, that would hurt like hell and you would hate it and maybe be in pain for a few minutes or even an hour or maybe you'd break your toe and have to limp around for a couple of weeks. But you wouldn't call it somehow a setback in your life. It's just a thing that happened that you didn't like, don't want to happen again. It was really inconvenient, but it didn't change the course of your life. So setbacks stop happening because I don't, I don't, there is no such thing anymore. It's just, oh, sometimes I feel anxious, but I can handle that. Hopefully that makes sense. I know it's really weird. There's no set answer to that. Let's pop this up real quick. Is wanting to understand anxiety and truce of thoughts right with 30 minutes, scientifically a compulsion. Anything can become a compulsion, right? So I think that was just mentioned, I don't know who just mentioned that if it was Lauren Rosen, Kimberly talks about all time, Kimberly Quinlan, you guys see me work with her. Anything can become a compulsion, right? So the idea that somehow like, oh, if I just keep researching and I just keep learning and I just keep understanding, if I could just understand it more, it makes it less scary. There's nothing wrong with understanding, like actually trying to understand as part of psycho education, understanding like, okay, well, sometimes humans have these thoughts. We know that a lot of the research shows that when we are more worn down, we're under stress, we're more likely to have sort of relapses of OCD and things like that. Yeah, that's all out there. There's nothing wrong with availing yourself of that knowledge that is assurance, healthy assurance and knowledge, nothing wrong with that. It becomes compulsive when you feel like I need to know a little more or like this didn't perfectly answer my question. So I got to keep digging until I get perfect assurance about this. If I just know more, if I just know more. So I cannot tell you if you're acting compulsively or not clearly, but it is possible for almost anything to become a compulsion. And again, I'm not trying to scare you. You just have to be aware that like at some point, one good thing that you could do is to say, well, I'm only gonna spend three hours a week on this. Since I am not an neurologist, I am not a neuroscientist, I am not a psychologist. Like I don't need to spend any more time on that. So I'm giving myself three hours every Friday night for fun to do my research. That's one way to see if it's really hard to not do it for any extended period of time, then there's a good chance that it has become a compulsion. But if you could just decide, well, I feel like doing it, but I just won't. Okay, that's a good test. All right, so let's see here. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I see you, you didn't die. Let's see. Okay, let's talk about helpful anger here. I'm sorry that Restream only shows me Facebook user. I have to peek over the top of this comment because it's so big. Unhelpful anger is excellent. I'm useless. Why can't I just be normal? That is not useful. That is not helpful anger. There's no reason for that. That is full of distortions, cognitive distortions. Why am I like this? Why can't I just get it? Why am I so stupid? Why am I so blah, blah, blah? Why am I broken? That is unhelpful anger. And honestly, sometimes using those statements becomes a soothing thing in and of itself. Oh, if I just call myself an utter failure then I'm off the hook. But that is not in any way helpful. Nobody here is a failure and nobody here is broken or damaged in some crazy way. I promise you're not. So very good. Thank you for whoever that was for putting that up on the screen. Super important. So let's see here. I'd like to take my own advice but if you are afraid of something you should try to face it ASAP, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. I understand what you're saying here. I'll throw this up on the screen real quick. I'd like to take my own advice. If you are afraid of something you should try to face it ASAP. That's true. And that is difficult to overcome if you don't face it right away. So taking your own advice is interesting that you should say that because we often have no problem telling other people to do these things, right? So especially like if you're in the Facebook group or if you're active in the community when you see somebody struggling you're very, we're always quick to tell other people like, well, just do this. Have you listened to this podcast? Have you read this book? Have you tried this? But then we're sometimes going to do it ourselves but that's a good point. The more you wait to face that fear the bigger it becomes in your mind. It becomes, oh no, it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Ripping that Band-Aid off I'm oversimplifying is not a bad thing to do because it does help to a certain extent. Not waiting, okay? All right, let's see here. I'll start this up real quick. And then we're getting to the end. This is good. I'm enjoying this one today. You guys are doing great in the comments here. A challenge for me is the fine line between exposure and kindness to myself. For example, I'm going to the dentist after avoidance but I want sedation, okay. All right, I don't see a problem there. Like there's literally an entire subset of the dental community that specializes in sedation dentistry. There's a, I think it's a pretty big practice here. I don't know if there are no other places but here on Long Island I see them all over the place called gentle dental and they sort of specialize in people who have that fear that phobia of going to the dentist. Many, many people do that. So I don't, I don't see any problem with that at all. You don't have to like power through going to the dentist is not something you have to do every week as part of your life. It's just not. So like this is the dude that's telling you to not back down from stuff. I will fully admit that the person who flies once every 10 years because that's just what the way their life looks like and has a couple of drinks before getting on the plane or pops that one Xanax every 10 years. Okay, you know, if that's your life, then that's fine. If you had to go to the dentist every day as part of your life, oh, then maybe it's a different story but the occasional dentist appointment and you want to avail yourself of sedation dentistry go for it. Done. Be nice to yourself. Like that's okay. It really is. It's so much of this really is you really have to look at the impact on your life. Not everything is solved by exposure. Not everything has to be solved by exposure. It just doesn't. So there you go. So let's see here. Yeah, this is a big deal. Thank you for like acknowledging that I said that we can feel any way we have to feel in life, right? And when you say it's life changing for me to realize I am often absolutely blown away by the fact that that is life changing advice. I am amazed at the fact that we don't just teach this and I don't mean in schools, schools, it's not the job of schools to teach everything but just societally, at least in the West how do we not like move that on from generation to generation? That like being human means experiencing many different emotions, many some positive, some negative success and failure, good outcomes and bad. Like I don't know why we are not better at teaching that societally from generation to generation. Because I gotta tell you, if in the last 50 years we were much better at teaching people that it's not a crime to feel sad or angry or low mood or you can handle it, it's not too much. Your emotions are not too much. If we were better at teaching that we, the royal we then I probably wouldn't be here doing this live video right now because I probably wouldn't have to. It's one of the things that if I could change anything in the world, I would try to get us to start to teach our children and each other that your humanity is not a fucking emergency. Like your humanity is not an emergency. It does, it's not, it's just not. I get a little bit riled up on that, can you tell? So thank you for putting that up. All right, let's see. Scroll to the bottom here, I think we're good. Oh, very good, thank you. I've been making sure to teach this to my kids. I think it's important that we do that and we have to teach that to each other also. Like part of the power of a community like this is we get to remind each other of these things, right? Like it's okay to feel almost anyway. You might not want to be sad today, but it is okay to be sad and you don't have to validate that. You don't have to apologize for it. You don't have to automatically fix it. Like not every emotion or feeling needs fixing immediately. Like we don't have to fix everything we feel. That's another one of those things that keeps people trapped. So when you get into this disordered anxiety situation, if you are in the habit of thinking I must never allow a bad feeling of any kind, this becomes a much taller order. So I'm a huge fan of that message, man. I would love to talk about it more and more and more. And I think we should all be talking about it in anxiety circles or not, right? This is big, I'll throw this up on the screen because now we're on a bit of a rant about this. My family culture punished negative feelings. So yeah, future self-loathing about feeling anxious and sad, that is huge. That is a huge thing to be taught. And man, I'm really sorry that you went through that and I'm sorry I can't see your name because that's a really important comment today to make. The family culture or family systems or societal systems, the groups we belong to. And I'm not just talking about dysfunctional families. So I'm gonna end it in a second. I promise I'm a bit off the rails on this. But I think this is important. It's not just family systems and dysfunctional families and narcissists and all the stuff that you hear about all the time. It could be anything. Sometimes in the West, in the US, athletic culture can breed that, especially among males. Like that locker room ethos, right? We are tough, we are warriors, we are in battle all the time. There is no weakness. Failure is not an option. If I hear failure is not an option, one more time I'm gonna puke because that is a problem, man. Like failure is an option for all of us every single day. It's not an option, it's an inevitability. So there is a lot of really sort of, I hate to use more toxic because it's bullshit cliche stuff, but there's a tremendous amount of this sort of positive thing that like you fix your positive, you fix your negative emotions, you turn them, flip them, turn that frown upside down. Man, these are terrible messages. I don't know why we're giving them out, but we give them out constantly for generations upon generations, at least in the West. And now social media and the mental health community and social media, mental health with air quotes in some instances perpetuates those myths. Positive thinking, the power of positive thinking and manifests and have the right mind state and vibrate at the right frequencies and oh, I wanna choke all y'all for that because it's not helping. All right, I'm done, I'm done with the rant. Sorry, guys. All right, so that's it. That is Recovery Monday, episode 20. Again, we are doing lessons in this book. If you wanna follow along, if you don't already have it. Glare, how's that look? You can find this book on my website at theanxiestruth.com, just click through to it. Next week we are gonna talk about, what are we talking about? Next week we go into chapter four already. Chapter four is the part where we learn to make a recovery plan. So chapter four is about making our plan and chapter five is about how to execute it. So next week we're gonna talk about how this is a doing thing, not a reading thing, not a discussing thing, not a watching video thing. This is a doing thing. So we will be back next week for the choking people, probably a good place to stop, right? You're right, B. So anyway, we'll be back next week. That's what we're gonna talk about. Same time, this will stay in the Facebook group. It will stay on my Facebook page. It will stay on my YouTube. And if you're watching on YouTube, maybe subscribe to the channel and like the video and do all the stuff that YouTube is just, I'm a YouTuber now, do you know that? I didn't know that, I don't know, but I am. Do all the things that we're supposed to do. And it will also, I'll put up on my Instagram, probably within about an hour or so once the video transcodes. Thanks for coming by. I will see you guys next week. We'll do it again, and I don't know. See you later. Oh, if you're not subscribed to The Anxiest Morning, the morning email newsletter and podcast, why not? Because it's a really great free resource and everybody's digging it and it's the thing I enjoy doing most. So just go to the anxiousmorning.com and subscribe to that for free if you're not already in it. And now I will let you go. Rant over. See you later.