 Back for episode 42 of Recovery Monday. Today we are going to do chapter nine in 7% slower, and we're going to learn, but how can I actually learn to slow down? So let's wait for folks to show up. I will just give a quick reminder that every Monday, at least for the next couple of weeks we're almost done with this book. We are teaching lessons out of this book, 7% slower. This is a book I wrote about how when you learn to slow down, as opposed to speeding up when anxiety and fear and stress want you to, you can really help your recovery along and build that new relationship with anxiety, fear, discomfort and stress. So today we're going to talk about sort of the $100,000 question, why you would buy that book to begin with, but how in the world can I learn to go slower and slow down? So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to do chapter nine in the book today. We'll go through the usual format. We'll do a little extra out of the book. We will then do some Q and A. So we'll take some time for everybody to kind of wander back in here. I will put the chat up on the screen, I promise. If you do not have 7% slower and you would like a copy of it, you can get it here at this URL, 7% slower.com. All the links and ways to get it there. That's a page on my website. And while everybody's sort of streaming in, just a quick reminder that tomorrow, Joanna and tomorrow will be August 16th, if you're watching this in the future, August 16th, 2022. And I believe one or 2 p.m. Eastern time tomorrow, Joanna Hardison I. Joanna is an anxiety specialist and OCD specialist at Cleveland. We are running our first online seminar about how to learn to tolerate discomfort and fear. It's basically the principle of distress tolerance. We are doing that tomorrow. I will put this up on the screen, right? So that, we're running this for the first time tomorrow. It's about a 90 minute Zoom-based webinar. There's only a couple of spots left for tomorrow session, but we're gonna be doing this every month. At least we believe we are, maybe even more than that, depending on how many people wanna go. So I will put a up on the screen. I will throw this up for you. This is a link that you can go to, to get more information about, oops, hang on here. Start up there. That's the link right there. And then I can even put it in the chat, which I will do for you guys. And then we will get onto today's thing, because people asked me last week for the URL. I'm gonna throw it in the chat. There it is, if anybody needs that. Let me hide this graphic because we don't have to have that now. And then we will get into today. Let's go back to my captions and let's go back to the recovery. Okay, so anyway, let's get to it. So anyway, there's a couple of spots left for tomorrow. If you wanna grab, hit that URL, you can check it out. And if you can't get into tomorrow's or you can't make tomorrow's, you can put yourself on the mail list anyway, because we're gonna do them every month. I believe we're gonna do them every, should be good. So chapter nine and 7% slower, we're gonna talk about how can I actually do this? So here's the deal. When I talk about these things, when I talk about 7% slower and slowing down instead of speeding up and I go through these things, I get usually two responses. One is, oh my God, this is life changing. This is freaking amazing. I love it. It's working and that's awesome. I love when I get that feedback, right? So some people take this concept, they read the book, whatever, they're watching these videos and they love it. It's working for me, I'm doing it. This is the best thing ever, okay, cool. Yes, I did turn off my screen blanking already. I'm getting smarter at this. And the second response that I get is, okay, this all sounds really good, but how do I do this? So many of you are like in the dark, like yeah, this sounds like a great idea. I see people are saying that they use it, they love it, the concept is helping them, but how on God's green earth do I do this? Which I completely get because it's not necessarily intuitive to slow down when your lizard brain is screaming danger, danger, danger, and it wants you to run around and escape and rush and rush and rush to keep yourself safe. It's not intuitive to slow down. So I get that. And some people labor under the assumption that like I have no say in this, I can't do it. This is just impossible. There's no way I can not slow down. It's not gonna happen. And some of that is because you don't believe that you have agency in the process and you have to actually try that and start to learn that you have agency in the process. The other thing that starts to happen is people will think, well, when I try to do it, it's uncomfortable. So therefore I can't do it. You gotta give me more tips, more techniques, but it's going to be uncomfortable. So let me preface this by saying, if you're wondering how am I supposed to do this? And you're asking me how, because when you try to do it, it's just uncomfortable and you're thinking that it shouldn't be, whether it should be a way to not be uncomfortable, you'll be disappointed. When you do things that operate counter to that threat response, we experience discomfort. It gets up right up in our faces. So you will be uncomfortable, right? So let's try to get into it. And like if you really want to talk about how there are mechanics around how and chapter nine in the book is one of the longer chapters, it talks about this. There are the three foundational skills that I talk about all the time. I talked about them in the anxious truth. They're in all my podcast episodes. I write about them all the time. I bet you guys can tell me already what they are. I probably don't have to say them. There's people here in the chat that could probably tell you what these are. Relaxing your body is number one. You can practice learning how to relax your body. You may say, I can't possibly relax, but you have to try. You have to practice this. If your default state is twisted up like a spring and rock solid and guarding against the worst to happen, you have to practice letting go of that tension. So being able to relax your body is one of the foundational skills in learning to slow things down. And honestly, by transitivity, being a bit more mindful. So you have to work on that. That's the thing we can practice. We can do progressive muscle relaxation. It's a short little exercise that I talk about all the damn time. But if you don't at least start to practice that, you're putting yourself up against the wall to begin with. It's really hard to slow down if you're carrying your body like you're about to get hit in the face by Tyson all the time. You got to learn to relax your body even when your mind isn't relaxed. And I talked about that in the book. That's the difference between relaxed and calm. They're two different things, but they can be independent. The other one is breathing. And not because breathing is a magic shield. And I know a lot of you guys are breath sensitive to your breath and your breath is part of what makes you anxious. But when I say learn to breathe, it's all about not holding your breath. Like we want to do is practice not going into the default mode of either breath holding or panting. So when I talk about practicing diaphragmatic breathing, the reason why I do that is because for me, I do it so often and have done it so often for so many years that I'm guessing that I don't breathe into my diaphragm all day long. But when I want to, I can do it on demand. And it keeps me from breath holding and it keeps me from over breathing and doing that big try to fill up my lungs and big heavy size, which makes things worse. When you do that, it raises your heart rate. You can start to become a little more derealized. You become a little lightheaded. So I talk about learning to breathe properly just to avoid the breathing mistakes. I'm not trying to tell you to breathe your way out of anxiety or anything like that. But if you're tense and holding your breath, it's really hard to learn to slow down, right? Cause those are all signals that say, get the hell out of here. And the third one that I talk about all the time, I'm sure you guys know what the third one's gonna be, that is learning to pay attention. We've talked about all of these things in previous videos. I've talked about them when we did recovery Monday through the anxious truth, which ran on for a very long time because that's a much bigger book, learning to pay attention, pay attention. We care about being able to pay attention to the things that are going on around us in the world, even while we have a lot of things going on inside us. So those internal experiences are what trigger that alarm that say go faster, go faster, go faster. We want to have those internal experiences, but still pay attention to what's happening outside of our own skins. We learn to pay attention when we practice things like meditation for short amounts of time, a minute or two, here and there, a couple of times a day. I can have all kinds of thoughts, I can think all kinds of things, I can feel all kinds of sensations, but I can still pay attention to talking into this camera at you wherever you happen to be in the world. And to be honest with you, if you have watched these videos for any amount of time, you have literally watched me speak into this camera while I was feeling a little anxious on certain days, or I've actually done these feeling kind of depersonalized, but I just am able to like, I've done this so often, I know how to pay attention. And at this moment, I need to pay attention to this camera lens and these notes on the screen and the things that are going on in the chat. So those three foundational skills are important, learn to relax your body, learn to not hold your breath in pant, learn to breathe properly, and learn to pay attention, practice that. That's the hardest one. That is by far the hardest one, but that's a work in progress. You practice, you practice, I practice every day because I have to. And it just helps in other parts of life too, right? So when we have those three foundational skills, we understand like that's part and parcel of learning to go slower. If you're not going to pay attention to those and say, nope, not going to do it. Don't want to learn to meditate. I'm not saying you have to sit on a cushion for an hour a day, but if you refuse to do that, I'm sorry, my mind just won't shut down, so I'm not going to do it. Well, then you're going to have a hard time with this concept, right? It's really hard to say, I won't do those things, they're uncomfortable, or I can't, I just can't even try to do them. We start to run out of options then if we're not going to do these things, right? So once you have those things and you realize, well, I have to practice these three foundational things, then we get down to the nitty gritty. And this is really weird to say, and when I wrote this in the book, I even thought like, this is so strange that I'm going to write this in the book, but one of the ways that you learn to slow down is to actually practice going slow. I know that sounds crazy and it's very meta and that's like, I don't know if you guys know, Steve Martin, the old comedian used to do a bit and he would say, how to be a millionaire? And he'd say, you want to know how to be a millionaire? First, get a million dollars. And that was a big joke. So here I am telling you, like if you want to learn to slow down first, slow down, which I know sounds ridiculous. But the reason why I say that you can practice slowing down is that we never even think about those things. And we often think about like, I only have to slow down when I panic. I have to slow down when I'm trying to do the shopping and I want to run out of the store. I have to slow down when I'm driving on the highway and I want to race home. But you actually aren't going to be able to slow down in those situations. That would be a big no on the vitamin B1, that we're not the swallow things. You're not going to find any support for that here. Not going to find any support for swallow this and it will fix your anxiety. But if you're not practicing slowing down in other areas, you cannot expect that on demand that you're going to be able to do that. So you can't say that on demand, you're going to be able to slow down and only when you need to, it doesn't work that way. So it's really important that you begin to practice. And in the book, I talk about practicing doing everything slow. So if you notice at this very moment on this live stream, I'm going to start speaking more slowly. I'm going to wave my hands around like I always do, but I'm going to do that more slowly. If I had something to write, I would pick up this pen really slowly and do the bolt action to get it to be able to write. And then I would pick up this book really slowly. And this feels ridiculous to me. But did you notice that? And in the book, I give a whole bunch of examples. There's one page in the formatter and layup person did this. I can't take credit. She made a really cool graphic that occupies an entire page of the book that gives you examples of things that you do every day. And when this book was released last year, I did a series of live streams where I went through a lot of these activities when you're taking laundry out of the dryer. Do it really slow one piece at a time. When you're eating, eat one bite at a time and slow and chew your food really slowly. When you're brushing your teeth, do it nice and slow. When you're walking through your garden, walk really slow. And you exaggerate, exaggerate, exaggerate because I had to do that all the damn time because I had no idea what moving slowly felt like. As crazy as it sounds. I 100% had no idea what it felt like to slow down. Wasn't good. So I had to do these things again and again and again. And you see how it felt comical to me when I started being really slow a couple of minutes ago and like showing you guys how slow I could be felt really comical. But in the end, you practice, you practice, you practice, you practice. Because when you can slowly load the dishwasher or slowly pump gas in your car or slowly walk to your mailbox and slowly get the mail out and slowly walk back to your house. When you could do those things, then when you're in the supermarket and you wanna run out of there at high speed because you think you might panic with a cart full of groceries. It's way easier to slow down because you already practice that and know what it is. You know what it feels like, really important. And I say the same thing about the progressive muscle relaxation and the breathing and the paying attention. We practice, we practice, we practice. We are practicing new skills so that we can use them. So it sounds ridiculous that I would write an entire book about how to slow down and it sort of culminates with the punchline just slow down. But I'm not saying just slow down. I'm saying find all the things in your life that you can do much more slowly and deliberately, purposely and practice doing that as much as you can so that you can bring that skill into the fire when there's a fire and you need it then, okay? It's really, really important to practice. And then the other thing that I'll throw out there before we sort of wrap up the lecture is we gotta include a bit of a feedback loop. Now this is where it sounds almost like I'm countering myself because I'm always talking about never going back to check in on how you feel and we don't wanna do that. So we're never looking at how do I feel now and how do I feel now? How do I feel now? But what we do kinda need to do is build in a little bit of feedback loop that says, am I rushing? Am I rushing? Am I rushing? Which you'll notice has nothing to do with do I feel better? Or do I feel worse? It has nothing to do. The question is not how am I feeling right now? The question is, am I rushing around again? Because I would slow down during my exposures or if I was experiencing a challenge. I know I use the supermarket, it's just an example. It could be at a movie theater or a concert or a social event, doesn't matter. But I would begin to speed up and I would know it had to slow down so I would do that and then two minutes later I would discover, oh, I'm rushing around again. I'm tensed up. I'm doing everything fast. I'm talking really fast. And I would have to loop back and like am I slowing down? Am I slowing down? Am I slowing down? I did a silly little thing where I set a timer on my like, like first gen iPhone that I had at the time. And I would just set the timer and go. And so when that timer went off, I think initially it was every 90 seconds or every couple of minutes, I would remind me like, slow down, slow down, slow down. That was super inconvenient and really unnatural and not organic, but it really helped me with that feedback loop that maybe make sure it's slow down, slow down, slow down. And then over time, I was able to stretch those little alarms out so it wouldn't have to be 90 seconds, three minutes, then four minutes and five minutes and then I didn't need it anymore. It just became a habit and I built that level of awareness that like, oh, I'm rushing again, I can slow down. Hugely, hugely helpful, right? So that is how you learn and not so much learn, but that's how you practice the skill and the art or whatever you will of slowing down even when your lizard brain is demanding that you go into speed demon mode. Completely counterintuitive, you have to learn these things, you have to practice them, you have to do it again and again and again and you can get better at it over time. That's it. That's how you do this. That is how you do it. And there's a lot more detail, trust me, I go in a lot more detail in the book, chapter nine, so it's more than I can say in these 11 minutes or so that I've been talking, it's in there, but that's the talking points. So you'll learn to find places where you can slow down in your daily life and then do that, right? And then do that. So important, last thing that I wrote in this chapter because it is important, you always have to be mindful of things that you cannot slow down, so stop trying. Number one and number two would be your heartbeat. You cannot slow your heartbeat down, so do not think that Drew wrote this book about slowing down and being mindful because it'll lower my heart rate. That may be a happy secondary effect, yes. When you've gone through the peak of panic and the peak of anxiety and the peak of the stress, yeah, then naturally, physiologically does what it does and your heart rate goes down, but these are not tricks that are designed to take your 110 beats per minute and instantly bring it down to 75, not at all. So you cannot slow your heartbeat down, don't focus on trying to slow that down. You cannot slow your thoughts down. So when your thoughts are coming at you a million miles an hour, this little trick or hack or whatever you wanna call it is not designed to stop them. It's not designed to slow your mind down. You're acting in opposition to that racing mind. I can slow down even while I am having all these racing thoughts, that's okay. So you cannot slow your thoughts down. Be careful about that expectation. Oh, I'm just, I don't like having all these rapid fire thoughts. So this is a way that I can stop them. No, the thoughts slowing down, spreading out and being of less duration. Again, happy secondary effects when we build these new relationships with anxiety and fear, but you can't slow it down on demand. You just can't do it. You can learn not to engage with them. Anybody will tell you, like you're learning to disengage from those rapid fire thoughts and slowing down, being mindful of what's outside your own skin, paying attention is one way to disengage. Another thing you can't control is other people. You can't control how fast they're going. You can ask your partner to slow down and walk with you. That's true, but you cannot demand that the world slow down when you wanna slow down. Now this works both ways. In one of these videos, somebody once mentioned when they wanna run through the store because they're really anxious and get out of there, they get angry when other people didn't feel their sense of alarm and we're just going too slow for them. The flip side, when you wanna slow down, slow down, slow down and maybe the world is rushing around around you and amping you up a little bit, there's not much you could do about that. You cannot demand that the world slow down with you, but you can operate at your own speed within the world. And by extension, anything outside your own skin. So if you're gonna try to control the speed of the whole rest of the universe, the world, other drivers, people walking around you, how fast Drew speaks, you can't control those things. But part of what we're doing is when we can slow ourselves down, we learn to tolerate the discomfort that the speed of others may cause for us, right? So just keep in mind, those are four things you cannot control. Can I control the speed of your heartbeat directly? Directly, you can't control the speed of your thoughts. You can't just put the brakes on and stop them from coming. You can't control the speed of other people. And by extension, you cannot really control anything else outside of your own skin. We're only working on slowing down our own behaviors when we want to, as a way to form that new relationship with anxiety, fear, stress, panic, uncertainty and discomfort and all those things. And I talked about the seminar that Joanna and Joanna Hart and Hardis and I are doing tomorrow for the first time in every month. It speaks directly to that. This is one of those distress tolerance skills that is often overlooked. In the end, we are learning to slow down so that we can build our ability to tolerate distress in the form of anxiety, discomfort, fear, pending doom or catastrophe in your own head. Those are all forms of distress. So that's one of the things that Joanna and I worked on and we made up the curriculum for the seminar that we're doing. It is all ties together. Plus, a lot of what I'm talking about will sound very familiar. If you've read the anxious truth or you listened to my podcast or you're in my Facebook group, these are concepts that come up again and again and again and again. It all sort of ties together, right? So that's our little lecture. Let's go through some comments. Let's see what we got going on here. See where everybody is today. Everybody's doing today. I see the usual names that I recognize. From Michigan, Ohio. Hey, Jessica, what up? Aurora is here. Where am I? Says Kathy Johnson. We can't tell you, Kat. You're here with us. Thanks for being here. Bessie's here. I don't see any Twitch icons. I could be really upset about this. There's always some stretch from Twitch. Montreal is here. Oh, Kathy, what podcast? I'm sorry, Kathy, that would be the anxious truth. If you search for the anxious truth on any podcast, you would find that on any podcast platform or on YouTube. All my videos and stuff are there. Who else is here? Aurora says, let's put up some things. PMR is progressive muscle relaxation. It has been amazing for me. It is a super useful tool. And again, please remember that none of these things are anxiety shields. They're not instant magic wands that make you not anxious instantly. But PMR stands for progressive muscle relaxation. Here's a ton of really cool videos on YouTube that demonstrate this. They're guided. Most of them take just a few minutes. It's a really simple thing that you can practice a couple of times a day. It's great. It's been a big tool. People that I know that get into practicing progressive muscle relaxation find that they start doing it intentionally like, okay, go sit on my sofa or lay in bed or whatever. Then they discover that they do it. Oh, I was emptying the dishwasher and I was practicing. Like they just start practicing all the damn time. So it's really cool. It's really cool. So that's what PMR is. People I don't know. Cat, what up cat? Meditation is a big key. It is. And I always try and be mindful of the fact that some people are just watching for the first time. We're not necessarily talking about home, meditation. There's no melting down on Twitch, just awesome ones. Sorry. We're not talking about achieving different states of enlightenment or higher, or achieving the perfectly calm mind. Not at all. Not at all. Gigachat. I'm sorry, that just cracked me up. Gigachat. Sounds like some sort of like transformers kind of thing. I love it. So meditation is super helpful, but we use it only as a way to practice paying attention. That's all, no more and no less. Maybe down the road it'll become more for you, which is cool, totally can be. But for now, it's just a way to practice paying attention. That's it. Let's see, what meditation app do you use? They vary. I used to like to use Calm. Calm is still good. Headspace is good. I have guided meditations on the Insight Timer app. That's the one that I use now, because it just has a lot of features. I don't pay for it, by the way. You don't need to pay for Insight Timer to get my guided meditations there. But I like Insight Timer. But if you like Calm or you like Headspace, it's all good. They're all pretty helpful. Yeah, somebody just said Headspace is really cool. I see that we have a bunch of Steve Martin fans, which I am here for. Steve Martin, one of my all-time favorites, we're just a funny guy. Let's see here. Okay, Julie's practicing. Good job, Julie. I really am practicing doing things slower. I know it works. Sometimes they do get going totally, right? So I was talking about the feedback loop. Like, yo, am I doing it again? Am I rushing around again? And man, I gotta tell you, I've been at this for years and years and years. It's okay when you find yourself like, oh, I'm doing it again. I still do it. Like, I find that I have days when I am just rushing around like crazy. I pile up my to-do list. I have a ton of stuff going on. Business, I got this. I got school, I'm writing, blah, blah, blah. And I start rushing through my day. So I do it too. We all do it. It's okay if you find yourself like, oh, shit, I'm rushing around again. Totally okay. Just check it and then slow down. Do the best you can. The big deal. Let's see, what does Laura have to say? What up, Laura? Just drove super slow while anxious today and it's crazy, but it helps to not add. Okay, this is cool. Laura, this is a great, great, great comment. I drove super slow. Now, of course, legal disclaimer, you're not gonna get on the freeway, the motorway, the highway, whatever you call it and do 15 miles an hour. That would be super dangerous, so please don't do that. But you will probably find that if driving is one of the places that you are experiencing anxiety or panic, you are operating that vehicle like you're in an Indie car race or you're a NASCAR. I know I was. Everything I did in that car was at like hyper speed. The knobs, the radio, the signal, like I discovered at one point that I was turning, I was hitting my turn signal, like I was mad at it. I was slamming on it, bitch, and I don't know why I was doing that, but I had to catch that and just start being more deliberate in the way I was operating my vehicle. And it did help. So what Laura is saying is really valuable, to be honest with you. And you can slow down. You actually can slow down. Let's see here. So I love that. You can drive a little slower. Be careful, don't break the law. Don't be dangerous, but you can slow down. Let's see what Julie has to say. Slowing down my speech. Dude, I'm feeling you on that. Anybody who's ever listened to me talk on one of these videos will tell you, I speak pretty quickly. And I'm probably always gonna do that. What can I say? Slowing down speech was huge for me too. I will never forget one day. Let's see. I will never forget one day I had an appointment at my doctor when I was going through the thick event. And I am such a fast speaker that at one point he actually suggested, I'm a little nervous that you may be bipolar. It was the only time I ever had anybody say the word bipolar to me, which is amazing, because it often gets thrown into the mix erroneously. So if you've ever had that word thrown out to you and it scares you and it doesn't belong there, I hear you. But I was speaking so quickly, trying to explain to him how I was feeling, because I was all amped up and nervous at the time that he was seeing pressured speech, which would be one of the things he might look for if he was trying to diagnose somebody as being at risk for being bipolar. But I've always been a fast talker. So that's a thing. It is hard to learn to slow that down, but it really is helpful. So at work, I seem to speed up here where I am now slow. That's a good point, Julie, because you'll literally speed up in the places that make you most anxious. That's 100% true. Like, if I'm doing something that's super relaxing or that I enjoy and it's just for fun, I'm not gonna be rushing through it. If I'm in a situation that's stressful, I'm gonna go 100 miles an hour and that's when I gotta start to slow down. So I get that. Totally get it. Let's see, pop down. Slowing down, okay, cool. Jessica's on fire today. A lot of good comments from Jessica, thank you. Slowing down meant not avoiding literally running from feelings can be overwhelming. So in one of the previous 7% slower Recovery Monday episodes few weeks back, we talked about a lot of the reasons why people say, yeah, but, and it's this reason is the number one reason. When I slow down, if I practice progressive muscle relaxation or I practice breathing or I try to do meditation or I try to move slowly when I'm anxious, then I feel all the sensations. Running is a way to smooth them out and try and take the edge. It's like smoothing the burr off a piece of metal. Running is a way to try and take the edge off it, like take the grit away from it. So when you stop running and you slow down, unfortunately you feel the full grit of those feelings like just scraping on you. You 100% feel that. So you can't help but to come in full contact with your own internal experiences which is critical as part of this process. Jessica, that's a great comment. 100% true, when you slow down, you will feel these things with greater intensity. They will scrape against you and you will not like that. But we need that experience, right? We need that experience. This is good, what does Michael have to say? Just got my blood results back from my dizziness and I'm trying to slow down my processing at all. Excellent, this is a really good example of when you might be tempted to go into speed demon mode. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Slowing it down will be a big help in navigating through whatever those that blood work comes back as, right? Which I hope is good news. Of course, we hope you're okay. Let's see here. Plains, trains and automobiles, B.L. reference, great, great, great movie. Love it. Let's see here. Here's our, there we go, Twitch is here. She was late, that's okay. How do we get rid of the chest? All right, I'll throw this out here because I know that sometimes there are new people that sort of wander into the videos. I get that, so I'll throw this up. We never talk about how to get rid of particular symptoms. Just understand that we're never trying to get rid of them. What you're doing is I do breathing and slow down but it's still there, but there's a lesson in that. You're breathing and slowing down and you're not rushing around and trying to not go into OMG, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God mode and they're still there but still nothing is happening as a result, right? So the lesson here is not that I'm slowing down but it's not getting rid of them because I keep repeating and getting it again. None of these things are shields, none of them are cures, none of them stop your symptoms. That's not what they're designed to do. But being slow and still having maybe a few PVCs or feeling a rapid heartbeat or whatever you're experiencing, still nothing is happening. Of course the assumption is that you've been medically cleared by your doc or your cardiologist, whatever it is, which I'm guessing you have if you're here but please make sure you have, nothing is happening. Look, even when I slow down and disengage and don't try and save myself, nothing bad happens other than that's uncomfortable. That's, it's important that you take that lesson and not try to see this as ways to make your symptoms go away, really important. So let's see, Florida here, hey Florida, what up? Let's see, they notice because they're going fast, sometimes it isn't me physically, it's mental. Okay, this is a good comment here. True, sometimes the speeding up is not physical, it could be mental. For me, the mental part of it did sort of manifest in a lot of physical ways because I would try to do everything faster because I was trying to think everything at the same time. So I found that I was trying to solve this problem up here at like light speed, which meant that I was trying to write everything, move everything, I was fumbling around, I was dropping my keys, I couldn't hold on to things. And that was in a way directly connected to the fact that my brain was in super high gear when I was most afraid. I was literally performing huge numbers of calculations every second to try and figure out every possible outcome, predict everything, control everything, and find the way out. So that worked out better when I started acting in opposition to that. The happy end result was that my thoughts did begin to slow over time, but excellent comment. It's mental in a big way. GBG tried to slow down playing the drums and it didn't work, you kicked out of your band that way brother. Unless you just do in slow jams all night, that's a good way to lose your drumming spot. You'd be like, poor Pete Best, got replaced by Ringo Starr, you'd be the next Pete Best. This is good too. Let's put Jim's comment up. For somebody that loves to accomplish a multi-process, slowing down is a real challenge. Hello, guilty. I feel personally attacked by this statement. So many of us here wear multitasking, accomplishing, being productive as some sort of, you're very welcome, New Orleans, as some sort of badges of honor. I'm the guy that always does a lot of things at one time. I'm the guy that gets things done. I'm the guy with the huge to-do list. I literally talked about it like three minutes ago here on this very video. Like, see that slip up that will happen? Like, why did I say that? And why do I do that? Why do I care that you know that there's a lot of my to-do list? So it's a really good realization to understand that that is a challenge. If part of your personal identity and your sense of worth is based on being the fast guy, and by the way, I do talk about that in one of the chapters we're gonna do in the next couple of weeks in this book. I talk about that. If part of your identity is based on being the fast guy or the fast person in the room and the multitasker at I do, I always have a lot of things going on at one time. I'm a juggler. This is gonna be even more of a challenge on a personal and emotional level, but that's okay. We can do challenging things. Jessica, I'm just gonna run Jessica's comments through all the time, because everything you're saying here is you're killing it. I appreciate all of these. Slowing down during the day helped my nighttime and early morning anxiety. Amazing, right? And again, it's always important to recognize that this isn't Jessica saying, oh my God, it's going slower or cured my anxiety. It changed her relationship with anxiety. And Jessica, you could chime in here if I'm reading you wrong, but you change your relationship with it so that we're not afraid of it anymore. We're not frantic over it anymore. We don't see it as a disaster or an emergency anymore. And then things begin to change. Then it starts to fade in the background, but you gotta get that. You gotta get that. Let me see if I put this in correctly. See here. It's inside the anxious truth. Try that one, Jim. That's the link for Insight Timer. I think that that should work, I believe. That'll get you to my page on Insight Timer and you can get the app. Don't buy it. It's free. You don't have to buy anything on Insight Timer, I guess, unless you want to. Let me go through. Let me go through. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm anxious. I practice slow walk. Oh, this is really good. Christina's here, fast talker. Welcome to the Fast Talker Club. It's what we do. Chatter, chatter, chatter. We can learn. I still talk fast most of the time, but if I have to, I can slow it down. This is good. I practice slow walking in my living room. Tai Chi. Tai Chi, I think is lovely. Tai Chi is a lovely martial art. I know a lot of people shit on Tai Chi, but back in the day, I think I probably told the story, I bought a Tai Chi CD because I thought, well, this will fix my anxiety. I thought if I learned how to do Tai Chi, I would no longer be an anxious person. As it turns out, I was just an anxious person that knew some Tai Chi, but it's, I think it's lovely. I think it's very, I think it's a great practice. So anytime you can practice, slow walking in the living room, totally fine. Practice sorting the silverware. I don't care, just do it slow. Oh, good man. It's a good question. I'll throw it up here. For those of you reading the anxious morning, this morning I did a little bit of an update from my grad program. I love the huge comments that I have to look over. This has nothing to do with the anxious morning. Really interested to know if what you're learning in your master's program is the same thing you teach here. This is gonna sound a little bit weird, but so this term coming up, yes, I'll be more immersed in theories. So I'll go through some of these theories, but not really. Like what so far what the master's program is more about is the practice of providing therapy, the ethical things, patient safety, client safety, therapeutic skills. Yes, we're gonna get into psychopathologies and theories and things of that nature, but for the most part, one of the things that's really interesting is that you can go and get this master's level education and then meet all the requirements with your 3000 clinical hours after your master's, this is a long haul. So it's 3000 hours after my master's of supervised clinical work and then you can become licensed to be a therapist in most states in the US, but you can do that without ever learning a word of what I write and talk about. That's true. So when I talk about finding a therapist that specializes in anxiety disorders, that's kind of why, because the person that has a master's degree or a PhD isn't guaranteed to have actually learned any of what I'm talking about at all. Clearly I have been immersed in this for 10, 12 years now. So I'm very grateful for the fact that my master's program and the professors are confirming that, yes, I actually know what I'm talking about. That feels good. So I actually know what I'm talking about. So I become the go-to in a lot of those discussions. Well, he knows, Drew knows about it because it would be on me to learn these things after graduation. And it would be on any therapist to get certified in whatever practice area that they want after they finish their degree. So keep that in mind. So yes, it does line up because I can apply the knowledge using these therapeutic skills that I'm learning and the practice of providing therapy, but hopefully that was a long answer to a short question. Sorry. Let's see here. I think almost everybody in the world this is 100% true. I think almost everyone could benefit from slowing down anxious or not. The world is so fast for everyone. You will not hear me argue with that in any way. Jenny's here from Australia at 4.30 in the morning. Did we wake you up? If you haven't saw me, we'll keep you company. It's all right, Jen. Let's see here. There's the link to insight timer. My wife is the least anxious person I know and she's also moves very slow. Maybe she's not anxious because she moves very slow but seriously though, it is a good practice. And I use it all the time. I'm not in recovery anymore. I don't have to recover from an anxiety disorder. I do not have an anxiety disorder any longer but I use this skill all the time. It makes my life better a lot. So there you go. And now we're gonna mention that. So there you go. I'll just say it again directly into the camera. We are at 36 minutes where you are good to go and we are out of comments I think. Oh, Christina says I've been told by every medical practitioner to do Tai Chi. I'm the same. Just turns out I'm an anxious person who does Tai Chi. That's all right. I totally get that. But when people suggest that sort of stuff, I understand like your medical professionals even some mental health professionals they will offer those suggestions. You should do Tai Chi. You should meditate. You should do this. You should do that. Everybody's trying to help, right? So sometimes I feel like I'm shitting on that stuff a little bit. I'm not shitting on those people. They probably genuinely believe that they are trying to help. And to be honest with you, like there's nothing wrong with doing Tai Chi. It could be a very relaxing thing. It's not a bad thing to incorporate into your life. Taking your walks, meditating, chanting. I don't care. We should all be taking time to take care of ourselves, look down, try to manage our stress, alleviate it, disconnect from the stress for world. All of those things are important. So it's okay that your doctor told you to do Tai Chi. It's okay that I bought a Tai Chi CD. DVD, I still have it somewhere. I'm never gonna watch it again, but that's okay. Anyway, guys, that is where we are today. Thanks to all for coming by. I'm gonna throw this stuff up on the screen one more time. I'm gonna put this URL up here. This is for the webinar that Joanna and I are doing tomorrow. For the first time, we are, oh, look at that, it's over my head this time. I'm learning, I got all the toys here. I got all the toys. So if you want to get more information about that webinar, just go to that URL, bit.ly.toleratingdistress. That will pop in over there. If you can't make the one tomorrow, we'll email you because we're gonna do them every month. So don't worry about that. And yeah, that's the deal. If you want the book, go to 7%slowward.com. I appreciate it. I will see you guys next week. We're gonna do chapter 10 and we're out of here. Happy.