 Every Monday, this is episode number, episode number 63, and today we're gonna answer the question, but what about morning anxiety? So I know my morning anxiety crew is gonna roll in here, I'm gonna talk about it, because everybody wants to know about morning anxiety. What do I do about morning anxiety? I'm anxious in the morning. How do I handle it? How do I overcome it? So today we're gonna finally talk about morning anxiety. I have written about morning anxiety when I wrote The Anxious Truth. And if you do not have that book, you can find it on my website at theanxiestruth.com. When I wrote The Anxious Truth, I talked about morning anxiety. I even wrote about a thing I call the morning effect, which I may or may not have invented, probably not, but it sounds good. And when I wrote my first book An Anxiety Story, which is also on my website and you can get for free, I actually talked about how I did so much of my work in the mornings, my recovery work in the mornings, because I had such crippling morning anxiety. So we're gonna talk about that. Let's put the chat overlay up so you guys can talk to each other. Well, hello, and what do I do about it? Hello, everybody. Just let me know how everybody's doing. Let me know that everything's working, that you can hear me, I hope so, because I've been talking for already a minute, so it would suck if you couldn't hear me. But just let me know where you're coming from. Let me know how you were doing today. We'll wait for a few more folks to show up, and then we will get into it. Surprisingly, I will not have a whole lot to say about morning anxiety. Oh, I know what I have to do. I have to make the browser bigger. That's why it looks so weird. Hang on a second, guys. There we go. All right, now we're cooking. Now we're cooking with gas. I changed my browser settings so everything was a little bit weird. YouTube hears me, excellent. Hello, Amy. Hello, everybody. Julie's here. Hey, Drew. I'm from Montreal. Hello, Montreal. I'm sorry if you're in the Facebook group. I can't see. I cannot see your name. I can only see Facebook user. That's only because Restream hasn't figured that out yet, but that's okay. Warmed my hair in a pompadour. Oh, it looks, I just came out of the wind, by the way. So yes, it does look that way. And also it was so funny because I was outside and my glasses got really dark. So I'm like, I want to start this livestream with super dark glasses, like some sort of, what, I don't know, a hipster. Look like CosmoCramer. Anyway, Katya's here. Hello, hello, hello. Michael, I'm going to block you from this livestream too. And I'll tell you why, because the tantrum thing is not in any way okay. And I blocked you. Bethany didn't block you. I blocked you. Because throwing a tantrum when you don't get what you want is not a way that we conduct ourselves in a group. So you can stay today if you want and watch the rest of the thing. And you can stay in the group if you want. But lashing out is not a thing that you can do to the admins in the Facebook group or to me or to other people in the group. So it's your choice on how you want to go forward there. So I would, if you want to stay, you're certainly welcome to do that. So anyway, today we are, no, no, just take what I told you and run with it. No apologies, just let it go. That's what I'm going to do because I'm happy to have you around. So in the end, let's talk about morning anxiety and what's going to suck is that I'm not going to have a whole lot to say about morning anxiety. And I know you're going to hope that I'm going to give you special tips for morning anxiety and think that it's something special but it's sort of not. So the overriding principle here is that morning anxiety is just anxiety that happens in the morning. So I know that a lot of people will try to dig into things like cortisol levels and cortisol levels are high in the morning so I have to try and manage my cortisol. Yeah, there's certainly truth in that. That's been sort of studied. Our circadian rhythms mean that our hormonal levels change during the day. That's true, but we can't get into a situation where we are trying desperately to control that system. We think we have to try and hack our endocrine system, something that was never designed to be hacked or controlled. So, you know, it's kind of tough. In that situation, we have to recognize that we might feel more anxious in the morning and if you are a morning anxiety person, which I certainly was, I'd wake up in the morning and boom, my anxiety was already really elevated. The minute I became sort of aware and I get that because you're in that sleeping state where you're not anxious, but then the minute like that consciousness or awareness would kick in, then suddenly you would be in that situation where boom, my anxiety level would immediately jump up and I would begin to feel things right away. So if that's you, I get that. Other people I want you to consider are not morning anxiety people. They get more anxious as the day goes on. So when they wake up in the morning, they feel the best they're gonna feel that day and then they get more anxious as we go toward the evening and into the nighttime. All right, so consider that. And the only reason why I say that is not to minimize how you feel in the morning, but as a little bit of a reality check. Like you might say that morning anxiety is killing you and it's crippling and you can't do anything and you need tips and you need things to be done about it. But in the end, what about somebody who suffers from anxiety in the evening or the night? They would say the same thing about that. And they feel the same way in the evening that you feel in the morning. So we have to back up a little bit and kind of really look at that and say, well, I don't like this and this is really uncomfortable and this is really disruptive and I'm really afraid, but I have to stop treating it like it's a special thing. And a lot of people will also say, hey, I've done really well. I've overcome so many other things. I'm doing great later in the day. You know, I'm doing my exposures. I'm getting better, but the morning anxiety and really and truly the overriding principle is what you've applied in those other areas, you would, areas, listen to me in my Long Island accent, what you apply in those other areas, you would apply in the morning also. Now, exposure is not a thing you necessarily do in the morning, although I did all my exposure work in the morning intentionally, but some people will then say, well, what exposure do I do for morning anxiety? Well, you can either plan your daily exposures to happen first thing in the morning, or if you are confronted with morning anxiety, the best thing that you can do is to start to move through it as best you can. So let's talk about what the options are. If you wake up in the morning and you instantaneously feel anxious, which I did, you could either lay there and think about how you feel and hope that you don't feel that way and try to find out why you feel that way and think about your cortisol levels and think about how terrible this is and how you can't handle it and it's just crippling and it's killing you and it's ruining your life, or you can actually put your feet on the floor and begin to move forward through that anxiety, which was a game changer for me and it is for so many people. They might still feel more anxious in the morning and have a propensity to feel more anxious in the morning than other times because again, some people are morning anxious people, some people are evening anxious people, it's gonna depend, right? But as opposed to just sitting there and declaring failure because you feel a way, which is a thing maybe you used to do in other aspects of your life, maybe you used to do that while driving and you're not doing that so much. Maybe you used to do it when being home alone and you're not doing that so much or maybe you used to declare failure when you have scary thoughts and maybe you're not doing that so much anymore, which is awesome, like that's great. But if you're then declaring failure or throwing your hands up or waving a white flag because you feel anxious in the morning when you wake up because it's jarring when you wake up, that's a thing that you don't really have to do and that's sort of not fair to yourself. That's kind of not fair to do with that one. So my best advice for morning anxiety is to stop calling it morning anxiety and calling it something special, recognize that it might be more jarring because it happens to be the minute I open my eyes which is jarring like an external panic attack, 100%, we're not minimizing that, that is true. But instead of saying I have a special morning anxiety and I need special tips for morning anxiety, it's just I'm anxious in the morning, I experience this when I wake up in the morning and it's just semantics, changing the way you say it isn't going to be, that's not the cure, that's not gonna fix it for you. But the first thing to do is I'm feeling, I'm experiencing this thing that I don't like, this thing that scares me, thoughts or symptoms that scare me and they feel unhandleable. But even if you just lay there in bed and be anxious, you are actually handling it. And laying in bed didn't stop you from dying, laying in bed didn't do any of those things. So it really is sort of a resignation to the fact that morning anxiety can't be treated as a special thing. Then once you've got that, the object of the game then and Claire Weeks actually wrote about this when you wake, rise, I don't know how she said it, she said it in her Australian kind of way. So rise upon waking I think is a thing she wrote all the time. So instead of sitting there and just seeing how you feel, the minute I would open my eyes, I would put my feet on the floor and start to move. And that was really, really hard at first because I felt like, but I'm panicking in the morning. This is not working out, I need to wait until the afternoon when maybe I don't feel so bad to do, no. I would wait as soon as I open my eyes, I would put my feet on the floor and begin to move forward. It didn't mean I got up, jumped out of bed and immediately started sprinting around the track at the local high school or immediately started lifting weights or immediately like jumped on a plane and flew to Tokyo. It meant that I would put my slippers on or I actually didn't have slippers, I had flip flops. But I would put my flip flops on even in the winter, always flip flops. And I would just kind of go to the bathroom and do what I had to do in the bathroom and brush my teeth and run a comb through my hair or a brush through my hair and throw on some clothes like a little bit at a time. And so I talked a lot about how it was that thing where I had to learn to panic while I brushed my teeth and got dressed and brushed my hair and walked into the kitchen and got a glass of apple juice or whatever it was before I'd go out and do my exposures and I would do the exposures right away, first thing in the morning. And that was a huge change for me. I stopped dreading the mornings. The mornings were not fun and they were difficult to do in that state for a very long time, but they ultimately taught me like whether I'm anxious in the afternoon, the evening, the night, the morning, 9 a.m., 6 a.m., 2 a.m., 10 p.m., 6 p.m., it's the same, it's the same. Just because I don't like it more in the morning doesn't make it different, okay? So I'm happy to take questions and I know everybody sort of wants to say, like, yeah, but you don't understand but I'm anxious right away when I wake up and that means it's crippling. You have a right to call it that but I'm just offering you a suggestion on a way that you can deal with or overcome or handle morning anxiety and that is step one is to understand what it is. It's just, you just experience it at that time of day. And step two is to say, well, what do I have to do with this? I would do with it, I do the same thing I do with it as I do with every other type of anxiety in every other situation. And if you are saying, yeah, but I am still doing that and it's still there, the fact that you are judging it because it is still there is usually the red flag there. Like, yeah, but when I did all my driving exposures, I made it go away, then my exposures made it go away but what exposure does it do to make it go away in the morning is a common question that I get asked. What do I do to make it go away in the morning? You don't do anything to make it go away in the morning. First, you learn that even being anxious in the morning is not taking you down and is not a reason to wave the red flag and say that you're not recovering. So it's really important, really important the way you approach that. If you can call it special if you want, I can't stop you from doing that and you could decide that none of this is special and I have to do it some special way, but I just won't have a special way for you other than to kind of go directly into it like we would any other time of the day, right? So that's my 11 and a half minutes on morning anxiety. So I'm gonna go through the comments a little bit and see what everybody has to say. I knew this would be a popular topic because I get asked about it all the time. Um, let's see. No, no, no, no, no. Some folks have a name with a Facebook icon and some don't wonder if it's a browser versus phone thing. It's a restream thing. Becky, I'm pretty sure. Hello, Joe from Ohio. Welcome, my friend. Good to have you here. What about night anxiety? The fear about not being able to say, okay, that's a different topic. So some, like I said in the beginning, some people get really, really anxious at night and sometimes that's based on the fear of what if I don't sleep? And if I don't sleep, then am I damaging myself? Am I never gonna recover? Am I gonna feel anxious the next morning? So what I would say is if you're curious about that, go to my website, the anxioustruth.com and search for sleep. And you will see a bunch of episodes, podcast episodes that I did about the fear of not sleeping and being anxious around sleep and the idea that I won't sleep and I can't sleep and this is a disaster. So check that out. That might help. Let's see, I have a tantrum in the morning. Why does it seem so much more intense in the morning? Well, that's a reasonable question. I don't know, you know, because it's jarring. It's really jarring in the morning, the first thing that happens when you open your eyes. And believe me, it was, I remember the sensation of, like a lot of times now in the morning, I'm not exactly sure when I exactly wake up, but those days I knew exactly when my brain turned on. I don't know if you guys can relate to this, but I would feel in that moment, like that's when my consciousness or my brain would wake up and the minute it went from sleep mode into conscious mode or aware mode, that is when the sensations would immediately begin to bubble up and I would feel anxious. I could feel it. I knew when it was gonna come. And for a long time, I did all kinds of stuff, like wearing a sleep mask and binaural beats in my headphones and like darkening the room and trying all kinds of crazy stuff, not only to deal with some sleep stuff, but to try to make a gentle wake up and it didn't work, it didn't work. It was, it didn't work. It was just frustrating me. So it's really jarring in the morning, but why does it feel much more intense in the morning? Cause it just does. And so you don't have to answer that question necessarily, just know that it's not dangerous and you'd have to move forward. Hello all from the UK. Hello, Carol, good to see you again. My morning anxiety is like three times as intense. I'm gonna put these up on the screen when I can. My morning anxiety is like three times as intense as any other time of day. Yeah, it kind of feels that way, sure does. What's interesting though, and this is one of the thing that I had doctors say to me all the time. I, it is true. Like anxiety exists in a very narrow range, believe it or not, of physiology. So like if you were wearing a heart monitor or you were having your breath measured or a galvanic skin response measured or anything like that, you would probably have very similar numbers in the morning than you do any other time of day while anxious. You feel that it's much more intense and that's fine because ultimately that's the arbiter anyway, right? But interestingly, like a most panic attacks look pretty much the same physiologically, even though we will often say, this one was the worst one ever. Well, my interpretation, I was more afraid of it than the last three or whatever. And a lot of people will say it's much more intense, but if you could measure it, it would physiologically feel the same or the numbers would be very close to the same all the time you get anxious, your body actually does the same things all the time, which is fascinating to me and tells us something. So as soon as I wake up in the morning, I immediately start thinking how I feel or going to feel, this is good, sorry, I can't see your name, Facebook user, it's because that's the re-streaming thing, immediately start thinking how I feel or going to feel for the day. That is a huge comment. Thank you so much for making it whoever said that because in a way that will drive warning anxiety too. This is a really good point. I totally missed it in my little blabbing at you for 12 minutes. If you are super concerned all the time with how you feel now, how you felt an hour ago and how you're going to feel an hour from now, then that trigger in the morning because you are an hour aware and can start to project and scan again, that would certainly be a driver of morning anxiety. But in this situation, you have to recognize that like, oh, okay, well, I understand that I wanna lay here and think, oh God, I have to drive, oh my God, I have to do my exposures, oh my God, I have to get the kids to school, oh my God, oh my God, I'm gonna panic, this is scary, this is horrible. Or I could say when this sucks right now, don't like feeling this way, but let me go up, get up and move through the day the best I can because thinking about it and ruminating on it and catastrophizing about it isn't helping me, it's making me worse. So recognize it, that's a huge comment. If you recognize that you're doing that, can't just turn that off, but you can say, well, when I do start to think about how I'm feeling and how I'm gonna feel, should at least be moving forward while I'm thinking. Try that, try that. Yeah, good, Becky just said, Clary said to point your body toward the day and that's exactly what I would do. I would literally just move my body into the day even though my mind was still having anxious thoughts and thinking about how horrible it would be and am I gonna panic today and why am I like so wobbly and something doesn't feel right, something is definitely wrong. So it's good, that was a really good comment. Thank you, I appreciate that. Let's see, I gotta put it up for Disco Inferno for sure. This morning it was Disco Inferno. Every morning starts with racing thoughts and whatever song I heard playing in my head over and over. It scares me, it makes me think I'm going insane. Why? This morning it was Disco Inferno. Well, first of all, condolences on the Disco Inferno, which really isn't the worst song. There are worse songs than that. Not many, but there are worse songs than that. But why is it happening? Why is it happening? Sticky minds, sensitized minds, tired minds, low resiliency, under the gun, things get repetitive, loops start to happen, thoughts get sticky. It's to be expected. Some people will ruminate on their health, some people will ruminate on horrible catastrophes about their loved ones, about themselves. Some people will get stuck on memories, some people will play songs in their head. Like that's okay. I understand it makes it feel like you're going crazy, but like, oh yeah, I have a really sticky, tired, sensitized mind right now. So what can I do while I'm humming Disco Inferno? Get up, start your day and get going. Tell yourself you will have morning anxiety and expect it. This was another good quote. This isn't a just man up, man, just push through it a little bit. There's some of that, of course, in this message all the time, but I used to have to tell myself, I know I'm gonna feel that way when I wake up. I know it's coming. So I can know it's coming and resist it and then it gets worse because my resistance never worked and it felt super frustrating and super like out of control. Or I know it's coming and I will plan accordingly. So I know I'm gonna feel like shit when I wake up tomorrow morning, but I'm still gonna do that. I'm gonna run the plan. So when I started using the word playbook, if you've read the book, so you listen to the podcast, you know that I use playbook a lot, like the bad day playbook. And for those of you not in the United States are not an American football fan. A playbook is literally the book of scripted plays that an American football team uses so that they're not telling everybody what to do every time they touch the ball. They run plays out of a playbook. It's a plan. These are activities I can do. So I literally created a morning playbook. I literally created a morning playbook and then I ran that playbook. The reason why football teams in American football have a playbook is also to help them make a game plan. So most of the time, if you watch an American football game, when that game starts, the first 10 or 12 plays that each team is gonna run is already scripted. They already know what they're gonna do. Yeah, maybe not every team does that, but that's a very common way to coach of a game. Like this is what we're gonna do. We've scouted the team that we're playing. We know what their weaknesses and strengths are. We think we know what they're gonna do. These are our first 12 plays and that's it. And they run that. They don't think about it. They don't have to think about it. They just do it. So my morning playbook was feed out of bed, stand up, put on the flip-flops, walk to the bathroom. Like I literally had a playbook. So even though I was panicking in many mornings really worried about how I was gonna feel all day long based on the challenges, I just had to run that playbook. I didn't have to make up the morning as I went along. I already knew what I was going to do. I already knew what it was gonna do. Hopefully that helps. Like have a morning playbook. Comment, what's up peeps going to Ireland in two days? Just wanted to say thanks again. Katie, Katie's going to Ireland. Cool man, love it. Maybe it's the morning coffee that gives us anxiety. You know what, it's funny because that's a different topic altogether, the whole coffee and caffeine and alcohol thing, which I talk a lot about. If you search, like go through my old Instagram feed, just search for coffee, alcohol. Like I talk about it all the time. But interesting morning anxiety tends to happen to people before they've ever had any caffeine. But I do believe that morning anxiety is probably one of the most damaging things for the coffee industry in general because anxious people have morning anxiety immediately stop drinking morning coffee or tea. Anything with caffeine, like, oh, gotta get rid of that. Which I kind of get, totally get it. Lost me at the football references. Katya's in Russia, I know. What can I tell you? Let's see, built-in exposure in the morning, that'll work just fine. I'm gonna scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. I still sometimes have it. Oh, Jenny's from Australia. Good morning, Jenny. So it's morning for her right now. This is good, good opportunity to move through your morning. I still sometimes have it, says Katya. For me, it's similar to anticipatory anxiety. This is good too. Let me throw it up here, old Greg. For me, it's similar to anticipatory anxiety. It fades away once I shift my focus to other things rather than my interstate. But again, that's a thing that is a really good plan. That would be Katya's morning playbook because I'm just gonna get up and engage in things outside of me. Like things that are outside of me. And ultimately that teaches you that lesson that like, oh, what's inside of me is important. Don't get me wrong. But it doesn't have to be the most important thing all the time. Very good, thanks Katya. Appreciate it. Okay, let's see. I'll have to go to work. It's just something I've had to get most of the time. I do get up and get ready. Weekends are hard for me. So if we, sometimes people will say that getting up and going to work is better for them. So Julie was saying the weekends are hard because I don't have anywhere to go on the weekends. Make a weekend playbook then. You can do that, it's okay. So if you struggle on the days where there's no work or no school because at least the work and school kept you from just sitting around thinking how you feel, create yourself a Saturday, Sunday morning playbook. That's the wrong with that, right? So like when I wake up on Saturday morning, I will get up, I will brush my teeth, I will comb my hair, I will put on clothing, I will go and drive around the block, I will go for a walk, I will make breakfast. It doesn't matter how I feel, I will do these things as opposed to I have nowhere to go. So I'll just think about how I feel for two hours. You don't have to do that. So hopefully that helps. This is a big one. Hello, Frank. I don't recognize your name, hello, France. France B. I wake up anxious, thinking I would go crazy, feeling like I'm about to faint and keeping me from doing anything. So this is a comment that you made, let's see a while ago, 1409. So almost a half hour ago. So if you've heard the conversation since then, it's the part where you don't do anything and you just sit paralyzed and following that fear. If I do something I might actually go crazy or I might faint and I'll just sit here, that is definitely not a good way to do that. Unfortunately, it's really scary and difficult, but at least take some small steps into that fear. The only way to know that you're not gonna go crazy is to stop trying to not go crazy, which I know sucks, but that is kind of the way we do it around here. Bethany says, I remember when I made a shift in how I approached my morning anxiety, I said to Ben to think, oh well, the mental shrug practicing that, this is cool, let me put it on the screen, you guys need to see this. Very good. The mental shrug, shrug is one of my favorite things is the like, oh well, what am I gonna do? So Bethany put that into action and it does sort of change things a little bit. The shrug, in my opinion, when you answer yourself with a shrug, which is really what we're doing, so when your anxiety says you're gonna die, you're gonna faint, you're gonna go crazy, this is too much, what if you panic, you can't handle a day, if your answer is, this is fine, this too shall pass, it's okay, I can do it, I'm strong, okay, maybe you say that once or twice to get yourself moving, then there's the shrug, because if I come up to you and say, you are the worst human being I have ever met in my entire life, you're disgusting and nobody likes you and you just go, the argument is over. Like no matter what I say to you, the argument is over, it's not an argument to begin with, it's like, oh, didn't I just say something horrible to you? Don't you wanna yell back at me and you do, what you're basically saying is you say whatever you want, man, I couldn't be less interested in what you say. So the shrug is a way that we can answer ourselves, it's a way that we can talk to our lizard brains, our anxiety, like, I know you think this is super important, but eh, go ahead, keep droning on and on, I'm gonna go make some eggs. I know it doesn't feel that easy and it's not that easy, but that's a powerful, powerful tool. I'm gonna put this up here, I yell back, fair enough, you know, you kinda do it their own way. Thinking positive thoughts helps, this is the only thing that I would throw out, there's nothing wrong with thinking positively, don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever, that's not a crime, it's not wrong. We just have to be mindful of trying to count your scary things with other thoughts. So if I have a thought I don't like, I try to replace it with happy thoughts, that's a slippery slope. It's probably a better scenario to just let the thought be there because what we really need to learn is, I don't have to replace that thought, I don't have to drown it out with something happy or positive. So, nothing wrong with positivity, you wanna be positive, there's nothing wrong with that, just be careful about doing that in an effort to make it go away. If I think a scary thing or a negative thing, I will immediately try to replace it. There's a lot of research that says that is actually counterproductive and it doesn't work in the long run, you get a very short amount of relief and then you have to keep doing it again and again and again. So you can get stuck in that loop. It's always something funny to come out of Florida. I'm too stiff and sort of be in the AM3, just my goal is to waddle to the bathroom. Fair enough, dude, good luck with that. Let's see, I think my anxiety starts days before an event. Yeah, that's anticipatory anxiety. So last week's podcast episode with Marty Seif and Sally Winston was all about anticipatory anxiety and you might experience anticipatory anxiety in the morning and I have even heard some people call morning anxiety anticipatory anxiety which there may be an element of that. If you're worried about what the day is going to be, then it is a form of anticipatory anxiety but like everything else, we just kind of move through it. So Carol, that's pretty normal. That can happen, that happens to everybody. That's anticipatory anxiety. I'm gonna keep going here. Where are we? 2.20, are we doing pretty good on time? Oh, love this net, Natalie. How strong we are on how anxiety has gone eventually. Yeah, I mean left to its own devices, one of the lessons of recovery is that everything is temporary, right? Everything is temporary. All feelings are temporary. Scary feelings, happy feelings, excited feelings, angry feelings. Unfortunately, it would be cool if happy feelings weren't temporary but all feelings are temporary. All states are temporary. We are constantly, constantly changing what we think, how we feel physically, mentally, emotionally and anxious thoughts and anxious feelings and fear are the same. If you are actually in a dangerous situation and under stress and threat of actual danger or harm like people in war or people who are in say law enforcement or in dangerous situations, doing dangerous jobs or in abusive, manipulative, hurtful relationships, then that's a little bit different. Those things sometimes are not temporary because the real threat and the real harm is happening to you all the time. But outside of the situations with the way we feel and what we think changes all the time, up and down, up and down, up and down. We can handle all of that. So let's see. I wake up in anxious, now I'm going into exposures in the morning. Just go do them that easy, but it's my best learning. That's a good plan. I am behind that for sure. No doubt about it. So morning anxiety is like any other anxiety, yes, Sonya? It is, that is, it's anxiety. It just is. So I will get to the cortisol thing in a second because I'm going to dump all over the cortisol in just a second. Hang on, I'll get there. Plantar fasciitis, I had that for a while. I had to wear a stupid plastic boot when I slept. It helped though, fixed it. Let's see here. Anxiety right away is an exposure, blessing and disguise. You guys are doing great today. These are really good comments today. Anxiety right away is an exposure, blessing and disguise. There's no ability to procrastinate. That's really good. That's really, really good. Like if you wake up and you're instantly anxious, what choice do you have? Like you're in an exposure right then and there. It sucks to wake up in an exposure, but this also would hold true for nocturnal panic attacks. It sucks to wake up in exposure, but you're in one. So if this is the reality of my situation, what do I do about this? When sometimes people will ask again and again, but what do I do? But what do I do about morning anxiety? But what do I do? How come it's still here? It's not going away. It's essentially a resisting of what is. Well, it just is. So let me work with it the best I can. At some point, we do fall back on certain things that are almost more philosophical than they are psychological. Like I can resist this and try to make it not be this way, but it is this way. So I don't get to not accept it and make means that it goes away or find a way to stop it or change it. What can I do to work with it? And if we learn to work with it, we have a much better chance of moving past it through it and then leaving it behind in some way, shape or form. So the continuous return to, but it's still here, but it's still here, but it's still here. Okay, then do the best you can to work with it because nothing that you've been trying to do to make it go away is helping. So stop trying to make it go away, which is easier said than done and very simplistic, but this is always a simple plan, just really hard to execute. So let's keep going here. How do I go about my day feeling uncomfortable? I went about my days feeling very uncomfortable for a very long amount of time. If anybody is in the comment section and is further down the road or feels they are recovered, how did you go about your day being uncomfortable? We just have to choose to do that sometimes. We just have to at least consider that it is in fact possible to be uncomfortable and to do your day, right? So if you can't start there, then it becomes very frustrating. At least consider the possibility that you could be very anxious in the morning and still actually do your morning. If you're not willing to at least consider that possibility then you wind up stuck in a loop where you just keep going back to the same things again and again and again. Okay, this is cool. Diggin' this. I'm seeing some new names today. Hey Leslie, as soon as I grasp that my cortisol levels are sky high, as soon as my eyes are more skillful, I was able to manage mornings. It's just my body doing its normal thing. This is my body doing what bodies do when they are stressed, when they are afraid, when they are under the gun, when they think that there is a threat or a danger. This is my body doing what it's designed to do. At the wrong time, it sucks, it's uncomfortable. I hate it, but that's a great comment. Thank you Leslie, I appreciate that. And notice how Leslie did not talk about trying to manage her cortisol levels. She just talked about accepting the fact that I guess my cortisol levels are high in the morning and I feel a thing as a result. Two very different things. And there you go, somebody that isn't me who makes the assertion that who gives a f what your cortisol levels are, the morning is still possible. So the thing where it's like, yeah, but you have a cortisol dump in the morning. Sure do, many people do. What are you gonna do with it? So let's see. Let's see here. I get a lot of anticipatory anxiety prior to exposure, that's really common. I'm gonna keep scrolling, keep scrolling. There's the sleep thing. I see Natalie, you're talking about sleep anxiety. If you go to the anxious-truth.com and search for sleep, I just did a bunch of episodes in the past few months about sleep that might be helpful. I keep waking up at three or four o'clock. Okay, I can relate to this one too. I think this certainly contributed to my morning anxiety with a certain extent because I was under the gun in the morning physically because I'm a, I've said this, you guys have heard me say this so many times. I'm a terrible sleeper as it is. I tend, I've been better lately. I've been trying to be a better sleeper and working on it, but I'm an awful sleeper. I require much less sleep than most people. I stay up far too late. I get up early. It's not good. When I was at my worst struggling with anxiety and recovery, I would fall asleep at one o'clock in the morning and be up at two and not be able to fall back to sleep again until three or four or 4.30. And I knew I had to get up early. It was no good. So that contributed for sure, but that ultimately, as I became a little less sensitized and my brain, my body started to sort of calm down a little bit more because I was showing it that it could, that did resolve. Now I'm just back to being just a regular crappy sleeper. So, okay, some people do talk about this. Let's pop this on the screen. The dream thing. Some people will say, yeah, but I have really bad dreams, okay? Like sometimes that happens. People can have bad dreams. Again, when I do this, I'm sort of throwing the shrug at you. I'm already talking about shrugging as an answer to yourself. There are many times when I'm sort of doing this to you and because that's sort of my job. So the assertion that like I had a bad dream, so I felt angry or upset or sad or whatever, afraid when I woke up, then I have to somehow do something different because I feel away. That's the assertion that we're trying to combat here. Like I woke up and I feel scared because I had a really vivid dream. So therefore I must now build my activity around the fact that I feel scared or upset or angry because I had a vivid dream. So you have to be really careful about that. We can acknowledge that we feel things and we can acknowledge that in an anxious sensitized state, we might feel them more intensely than we otherwise would. But part of what sometimes creates this problem or at least cements it is the idea that like, oh, if I feel a thing that everything must be built around how I feel, which is a thing that we are trying to combat and we're trying to have experiences that say two more than one thing can be true at a time. I can feel badly, but also be capable, not optimal, capable, start there. So that's one way to look at that. I understand that you are so afraid. I totally get that I'm so afraid. I'm gonna go through a couple of quick comments. I know you're so afraid that something's going to happen to you physically or mentally, but all the attempts to try to be sure that nothing will happen, asking people like me for soothing words and assurance. Are you sure it's, are you sure it's just anxiety? Asking doctors, asking your friends, whatever it is, laying in bed, not getting up so that you don't go crazy. That actually never works to convince you that you're safe. It only confirms to your brain the fear center that's firing these alarms that you are unsafe, but that's not true. These are false alarms and the only way to learn that they're false is to act like they're false. This might be new to you. I don't really recognize the name. So I get it if you're new, this is a really like what the hell is this guy telling me? But that's a critical thing. Like the only way to know that they're false alarms is to act like they're false alarms. That's kind of a basic recovery thing. So if you're not familiar with the concepts, go back to the earliest episodes of my podcast. I see you're on YouTube. If you go to my channel, the earliest podcast episodes, they're in a playlist. Listen to like the first 15 and it'll explain or read one of the Clare Weeks books or read the anxious truth, which explains the whole thing too. I know it's really scary though. And that goes true. The same thing I just said goes true for this. I get a shaking feeling, correct. Like anxiety will manifest in a ton of different, I get shaking, I feel a sense of doom. I panic like if you look, if you go to theanxustruth.com and search for symptoms, you'll see that only about a month ago or a month or two ago, I did an episode on anxiety symptoms. And in the middle of the episode, I almost comically just recited symptoms for about five or six minutes with no break, just to illustrate how common and how widespread physical feelings are with anxiety. Like I asked my Facebook group, tell me your symptoms. And everybody was like, this is a trap, right? We're not allowed to talk about symptoms. So I took their answers and I literally just recited them, literally just recited them. So that might help you. Let's see here. I get up around six o'clock every day. If I wake up at four a.m. or five a.m., what's a good thing to do? That's a reasonable question. It's a little bit more a sleep question, but that's fine. So the people that are smarter than me about sleep and sleep hygiene and all that stuff will say, if you wake up and you try to go back to sleep and you can't in 10 or 15 minutes, get up. That might mean that you're gonna be really tired that day, but okay, like it's the thing where you wake up at three or four o'clock in the morning and then you try desperately to go back to sleep because if I don't go back to sleep, then I'll be tired, which means I'll be anxious, which means I'll feel things. So it's that whole like, I gotta, I'll just let it be what it is. Like I'll have to be tired today, I guess, because I can't go back to sleep. So I'll just get up and do something. So the best advice that people, I've heard people consistently give who are knowledgeable and whom I trust will say, if you're not back to sleep in 10 or 15 minutes, you can lay there if you want, listen to music, read a book. I don't know, watch videos. Maybe that'll put you back to sleep or get up. That's okay. It's okay. Let's see here. I also wake up at four or five for an hour. Yeah, it happens. It happens. So Jessica, I'm gonna suggest that you do the same thing. Go back to the very beginning of the podcast episodes on YouTube, they're all on YouTube. Go back to episode one and listen to about the first 15 or 20 and you'll get the basic principles. The moment I wake up, the physical symptoms are the worst. They're strong. When I wake up in the morning, I don't like them, but it's that continued cycle of they're the worst, they're the worst, they're horrible, they're awful. You gotta start to change the way you talk about it a little bit and therefore the way you begin to work with it. There you go, I've just finished 15. So hopefully that helps. You start to get an understanding for how different the approach is, as opposed to that normal like, this is horrible, what do I do about it? Well, you don't do anything about it. You actually work with it. We're almost at the end here. Let's see, 39. I got a few more minutes. My heart rate goes up in the morning when I wake up and then eventually it goes down. I'll throw that up in the screen because this is one of those things that's really important too. Throughout the day, any human being's heart rate goes up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down. Like I wear the stupid whoop strap, monitors my heart rate for exercise and fitness tracking and all that stuff. But if I ever look at the heart rate data, it's like, man, my heart rate is all over the place today. Even if I'm not doing anything, I might work out in the morning and that you see, but the rest of the day like, wow, sometimes it's 110, I didn't know that. Or sometimes it's like 70, sometimes it's 60, it goes into the 50s. I don't even know. So it's just, heart rates will vary all day long. Sometimes when you get up in the morning, your heart will race a little bit. That's okay. You gotta let it go. This is really good. I always thought coffee triggered my aim, anxiety, palpitations. I started, anxiety seems to cower when invited. That is true. So much of what we do here is all about, like, well, you're just gonna have to go ahead and do it then. If you're gonna make me go crazy, go ahead, go ahead. Microsoft out, you're gonna kill me. Go ahead, kill me. I guess you're gonna have to kill me now because I'm not gonna run from you anymore. So you better kill me. If you say you're gonna kill me, you better do it. Which I know sounds terrifying. If you're in the thick of it, you're thinking, I can't let it kill me. That's the only way you learn that it doesn't. Jessica, that's a, Jennifer, that's a great, great comment. Love it. It cowers when challenged. That's true. This made me laugh. I saw that come up on the screen. This morning was good, but then I got up. Songs in our heads. I'm sorry, I'm gonna scroll down a little quicker because I'm running out of time. Okay, this is this part. The horrible cortisol rush. It is the worst time of the day for me. And I'll just come back to the comment that was before about cortisol. I realized that my cortisol is high in the morning and I just sort of worked with that. So correct, you might have a cortisol dump and a cortisol rush in the morning. That doesn't mean that the rest of the entire day or three or four hours in the morning has to be built around that. So I know that might be sound weird. Like what? Are you telling me it's not important? I know you feel like it's very important. And of course it's impactful, but we just, we have to kind of back away from that. Like, oh, I gotta build the next four hours of my life around this cortisol dump that happens at 6 a.m., but we don't. Let me keep going, keep going. A lot of coffee talk. When we talk about coffee, man, it always sparks a lot of stuff. People love their coffee and then miss it. Like, are you digging coffee? Are you not digging coffee? Are you trying to get back into it? It's cool. Let's see here. Dear Heart says meditation. Meditation is a tool that we use to learn how to navigate through those anxious moments. So when you wake up and you feel like you're shaking, meditation is not a thing that we would use. Yes, I'm a huge fan. I talk about meditation all the time. I've recorded meditations on the Insight Timer app. They're free, by the way, if you wanna check them out. But meditation is a thing that we use as a focus training tool that says, when all my brain wants me to care about and focus on is the shaking feeling and the danger that it seems to represent, I know that I can practice training my focus on something else. Yeah, Bethany says coffee is a highly charged topic. It is, man. We should might as well just talk about religion. Like, people get riled up about coffee and alcohol, two things. By the way, you could choose to never drink coffee again. That's totally fine. If you miss coffee and you really wanna drink it again, then that would be great if you could start doing that. So, I'm gonna scroll down a little bit. I'm sorry guys, I cannot get every comment. There's a lot of them. You guys are rolling in the comments today. So let me keep scrolling up a little bit and see what I got. I'll take two or three more and then I gotta go. Yep, this is good. I always appreciate when you guys come back and share. You have to develop confidence to go through your day anxious, a lot of confidence. So, one of the podcast episodes that I did called the Three C's of Recovery. Courage, number one C. Competence, number two C. Courage motivates action. Action builds a sense of competence. Competence applied over time repeatedly in multiple contexts builds confidence. So, this is a really good. It takes a long time to develop confidence. It's the last thing to develop. So, you can't just decide to be confident. First, you have to act when you're afraid that's courage. Then you have to repeat that and you start to realize that you're capable or competent and then you start to feel like you are confident. But that takes repetition. That takes time. Let's keep going here. Okay, this is cool. Like I'm tired of the word cortisol at this point because whenever we talk about morning anxiety everyone's talking about cortisol. But it is your waking hormone. We have cortisol. Cortisol actually serves a purpose in our bodies. It's therefore a reason. So, I don't want to rant about cortisol anymore but so much of the morning anxiety talk you will hear people talking about things that you can eat, changes in diet, things you can do to regulate your cortisol levels. And like you're trying to regulate an endocrine system that was never designed to be regulated. Unless there's something physiologically wrong when stressed we will have elevated cortisol levels. It's supposed to be that way. So what comes first, the chicken or the egg? You want to try and fix your endocrine system or do you want to try to work through that? And then magically people who do it that way don't have an endocrine system to fix anymore. So not for nothing and not that I'm not, not for nothing, that's the not for nothing podcast of Mia Voss is here. But I think you can make a compelling argument that there are a lot of people in this room that have stopped trying to regulate their nervous systems or their bodies or hack their endocrine systems or their nervous systems. Stop trying to activate their vagus nerve and are somehow getting better even though they didn't do that. So just saying. All right, let's see here. I think we get one more. Is there anyone left here? I can hit unconscious. Ooh, okay, this looks good. I didn't even read it, but I like it already. Unconsciously incompetent consciousness, conscious, incompetent, consciously incompetent, consciously incompetent. This tells me that I think I know who this is. Is that Australia in the room? So I think I know who said that. Is that Danny? Danny, is that you? I get it by the emoji. I recognize people's emojis at this point, but yes, that is 100% true. That is exactly how it works. So screenshot that. Like that's a really good comment. All right, guys, we are at 247. I got to hit the road. As always, I appreciate you guys coming and hanging out with me. Should I put this one up to end it? I'll put the caption back on. That's great. The comments section was on fire today. Everybody has been conversing with each other, helping each other. I love it. I see you guys being friendly to each other and extending a hand of welcome and being supportive. Thank you. That makes me super happy. It's probably the best part of this community that we have. I love it so much. So hopefully this has been helpful. I know I didn't give you any magic bullets to make you not anxious in the morning, but hopefully I did point you in a direction where you could start to see your morning anxiety as maybe not the disaster that I know it feels like and it's impactful, but let's stop treating it like it is the worst thing in the planet and start to accept that it just is right now. So what can I do to work with it? And that's what we'll get me through. So thanks for coming by. I appreciate it. We'll be back again next Monday. I'm pretty sure. In case something comes up. Don't know what the topic will be. I never know what the topic's gonna be. I usually figure these out on Sunday. If anybody has a topic that you wanna suggest for next Monday's of Recovery Monday, I'm all ears, but I usually think about it on Sunday when I make the post. So we'll see. Anyway, thanks for coming. This will stay in the Facebook group. It will stay on Facebook. It will stay in my YouTube channel in a Recovery Monday playlist. So if you're not subscribed on YouTube, do that. Thanks for hanging out and I will see you next week.