 Everybody, we are live for another Recovery Monday, this episode 83. Today we're gonna talk about nervous system regulation and dysregulation. And the question today is, if you're an anxious person and you're struggling with chronic or disordered forms of anxiety, is your nervous system dysregulated? And you'll notice right away that I go into air quotes so that should probably give you a hint as to what we're gonna talk about today. Today is really meant to give you something to sort of think about. For those of you who are here, and let me put the chat overlay up so you can see each other, for those of you who are here, whether you're live or whether you're watching on a replay, hoping that I'm going to give you all kinds of tips, tricks and hacks for somehow controlling your nervous system, probably not. Cause we're gonna really sort of challenge the idea that being anxious automatically means that there's something wrong with your nervous system. Is there, you know what? I gotta get rid of the logo overlay real quick. Let's hide it, there you go. This way we can see the chat, that's cool. Let me go back to the chat window here. So normally I hang out for about roughly 45 minutes in these, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to, I'm watching for some messages to come in. So I kinda wanna get it in pretty quick. Let me know where you guys are from, let me know what's going on, did you make it out of the DMV? I see Amy was watching my Instagram story, I did make it out of the DMV. That's the Department of Motor Vehicles, I had some stuff to do today and it was just like, oh my God, I'm never leaving here. I found it interesting, those of you who are watching, oh, the coffee bean background, good idea, let me see. Do I have it? There it is. Is that the coffee beans? No, that's snowflakes. I don't think I have the coffee beans. Oh well, maybe I'll just keep the snowflakes, it'll confuse people. Nah, I don't want snowflakes, I want this one. Let's use this one, cause that's like super psychedelic. That's pretty cool. Anyway, no, the DMV doesn't look like my office. Yes, it was just a long wait as the case will be. And I just found it interesting as I'm standing there and like, I just wanna be frustrated, which I was frustrated waiting there, but I found it interesting that like, oh, this is like a recovery lesson that I learned back then. Frustrated, I'm pissed off, I'm angry, I'm annoyed. I got things to do, like I'm getting agitated physically, agitated by that, like, well, I just gotta have this experience now. And I did ultimately make it out, so thanks for asking me. All right, so let's get into this. Hello, Laurie, welcome. I'm glad that you made it to your first live. Welcome. Caroline, that's a cool name, is here from Nashville, hello, Nashville. And yeah, we got about 55 people in the room. So let's get cooking. By the way, if you're in the room and you're on YouTube, maybe just hit the thumbs up button cause evidently I'm supposed to ask you to do that during the lives. YouTube alerted me on time, it's a good day. You never know. Like I have like YouTube notifications turned on for certain channels that I follow and I don't wanna get the notifications anyway. So anyway, technology, it isn't always what it's cracked up to be. So let's talk about the nervous system, dysregulation. Hello, SouthSatalkit, we are neighbors. You are, we could probably walk to each other from SouthSatalkit. So cool, good to see that. I love when the Long Island people check in, very cool. Hello, Vicky, how are you? Hello, Anna. Hello, Bessie. What up, GBG, Jason's here from Florida. So let's get into nervous system regulation and dysregulation. Hello, Elizabeth, thank you for the emoji. I appreciate it. The first thing I wanna talk about is let's define those terms, right? Regulation and dysregulation. Because the first thing I wanna do is make sure that I validate that sometimes people do actually have physiological issues. They could be hormonal or neurological. There are physiological issues that can put you in a state where you're just constantly feeling agitated and in that anxious feeling all the time. That can happen. There are endocrine issues. There are neurological issues. So I'm not trying to tell you here that those things do not exist. They do. They tend to be the exceptions rather than the rules. Of course, we're always predicating this discussion on the idea that you have been checked for those things and screened for those things. Many of you have probably been checked and screened for those things again and again and again. So by show of hands for the 66 people in the room, how many people have been checked again and again looking for those kind of things. Commonly anxious people will look for hormonal issues, gland issues, brain tumors is a common thing for anxious people to want to be checked for. And if you have been medically cleared and it does not appear to be a physiological reason why your nervous system might be in a state of dysregulation which it could be, it's possible for that physically to happen. We don't wanna invalidate that. As long as you've been checked we're gonna sort of check that out. We're gonna sort of say, okay, well that's not at play here. If it is at play for you then this conversation doesn't necessarily apply to you but you might have some things that you take away from it anyway. So you're welcome to hang out. Everybody's always welcome. Only check once as Bessie turns out my thyroid is rocky. Yeah, some people do have, say thyroid issues, right? Thyroid issues can make you feel agitated and feel those anxious things all the time. So Bessie got that checked out and sometimes you do have to like deal with thyroid issues or endocrine issues or neurological issues. So it could be a real thing. The other thing that I want to address is emotional dysregulation or emotional regulation because we gotta talk about that. We can't use the word regulation and dysregulation in this video if I don't touch on that. So there are contexts, be they mental health context neurodivergent issues, those sort of things where some people in our community do have a hard time doing what we would call, oops I forgot to turn up my screen blanking software so let me do that real quick, where people in our community will have a hard time with emotional regulation, right? Or and what we mean with when we're talking about that and that's not really what I'm addressing today but just so we can define that and make sure that we have it in context. People who have a hard time emotionally regulating will find that they cannot, they're instantly overwhelmed when they're presented with emotions. Sometimes any emotion, sometimes just big emotions that could come based on again, physiological issues could possibly cause that, developmental issues, environmental issues, experiential issues. So you hear that a lot from people who identify as maybe ADHD or on the autism spectrum or maybe people who are neurodivergent will often have issues with emotional regulation and being overwhelmed by their own internal and emotional states, that's a thing. Not invalidating that, that is in fact a thing. That's not really what we're talking about today but that does happen. People who have lived through traumatic experiences where there are things in the environment or experiences that evoke memories or flashbacks or even remotely similar and it only has to be similar to you, not anybody else to those experiences that were really tough for you, that were traumatic for you, that were maybe legitimately dangerous for you. Sometimes there can be emotional regulation issues there. When triggered, you get overwhelmed by that state. That is okay, that happens. So we're not invalidating that. And that's why things that you hear in sort of like generic advice for anxious people, count five blue things, put your feet in the ground. Like those are emotional regulation tools that are often used especially in dialectical behavior therapy that is targeted, that sort of things that can be certainly useful. And if you're struggling with those issues, I see you, you're welcome, we're not invalidating those things. So I just wanted to make sure that we touch base on that. What I'm talking about today is the nervous system dysregulation phrase that, and I joked about it not too long ago, I believe that if we go back to 2023 or really into 2022, narcissism was the word of the day, right? Everybody was a narcissist and there was gaslighting was another one of those things. We go through these like mental health or self-help trends where certain words become buzzwords and they're in every post and everybody decides to talk about them. Well, for a while it was gaslighting, then it became narcissism, boundaries is a big one too. I'm not saying these are wrong terms but they just become knee jerk terms and they become algorithmically driven. And I believe in the last six months or so we are now in the heyday of dysregulation, okay? So it love bombing, Bethany says correct. Love bombing was one of those that got a lot of attention for a while and then suddenly it's just not, you don't hear about it anymore. Why is it not valid anymore? No, because it's not the hot phrase. And I believe that emotion, that nervous system dysregulation or the phrase dysregulation is now has its time in the sun. It is time for its 15 minutes of fame on dysregulation. And while there can be some merit to that discussion, I'm glad we're having that discussion. We need to have that discussion. But at the same time in our community, we're always talking about people who are dealing with disordered states of anxiety, anxiety disorders, related mental health concerns where things are often backwards. That conversation can be very counterproductive. So by show, yeah, I thought everyone was a narcissist, right? Everyone was a narcissist. Everyone was being loved, bombed. Everybody was being gaslighted. If someone disagreed with you then they were a narcissist or a gaslighting narcissist. And now if you experience anything that you wanna experience, well it's probably because you're dysregulated in some way. So some people might say, well, yeah, I'm gonna define regulation as I'm calm. And if that's your definition of regulated, then that's totally fine. You can pick that. And then technically and semantically, then yes, if you're not calm, then you could say that you are technically in a state of dysregulation. That's semantics. You can argue that if you want to. And if that's the way you wanna conceptualize your nervous system, you are 100% welcome for that, right? Welcome to do that. So I think what we care about here is the automatic assertion that if you are experiencing anxiety, especially in the context that we're in this community, that something must be dysregulated about your nervous system. When you are anxious, afraid, terrified, panicked, triggered, all the scary thoughts are in your head. Could you say that's a state of dysregulation? Yes, you could say that. But I'm here talking about, and I'm gonna ask you to challenge the idea that something is wrong with your nervous system because you're in that state. And therefore there must be something that you can do to your nervous system to fix that or to somehow make that go away or repair it so that you're not anxious anymore. So how many people in the room, and I'm seeing your chat almost in real time, which is good so I can kind of keep up with you guys. Let me go to it. How many folks are in that situation where you're maybe following along with the content that I produce or content like what I produce, maybe you're right, Claire Weeks or you follow other people like frequent collaborators like Josh or Kim and those people. And you're also in the nervous system regulation rabbit hole. So does anybody find that they're also like kind of stuck there as well? So I'm trying to do the acceptance, I'm trying to do the surrender, I'm trying to do the willful tolerance, I'm trying to do all of those things, the Claire Weeks float stuff. But I'm also following all the bio-hackers that talk incessantly about emotional nervous system regulation and keep trying to offer me ways to regulate my nervous system. Okay, so Karen says yes. Karen, I appreciate you sharing and be open. Hopefully this is a friendly place. I can't, I'm not gonna call it a safe space because I can't control the internet but I appreciate when you guys share with each other because I think it's very helpful. So as you can see, people are already chiming in. Yes, like I listened to the anxious truth, I listened to disorder, maybe I read the books that you write Drew, whatever it is, I get what you're saying but I'm also listening to Huberman Labs because he keeps offering me bio-hacking supplements and techniques and tricks that are supposed to be able to control my nervous system or my body in some way. A lot of people get stuck in that. So I want you to consider an analogy, right? So you know me, I'm the kind of the king of analogies and I do understand that sometimes these analogies are very simplistic, but they're simplistic for a reason. They're overly simplistic in terms of sort of addressing the actual mechanics and the complexity of some of these things. However, they are not too simplistic to make a point. So follow me along with this. Let's say that you are given an automobile, a car. Someone hands you a car and it's a really nice car. Maybe it's a Porsche or a Ferrari or some cars. It's a 1967 Chevelle. They make the Chevelle in 1967. It's got a big block engine in it and it's a muscle car. So it can go fast. So you get this car and you get in the car and you decide that you are gonna drive around. You want the car to take you places and you decide you need to get on the highway. Driving anxiety, notwithstanding, let's pretend that nobody in there is driving anxiety, just go with me. You're gonna get on the highway or the motorway, whatever you call it where you live, the freeway and you hit the accelerator pedal and the car starts to accelerate. But then at the same time, the minute the car starts to accelerate, you go, oh, no, no, no, no, no. And you try to keep the car from going too fast. See how that would become a bit of a problem? So you slam on the accelerator pedal because you want the car to go fast because you wanna get somewhere. And then when it does what you ask it to do, you immediately recoil and say, no, no, no, no, no, and you try and slow it down. And not only do you repeat that cycle, but then you keep bringing it to the mechanic and saying, I don't understand why this car keeps going fast. Like I don't understand why this car keeps going fast. In meanwhile, you drive it every day and you stomp on the accelerator pedal. Maybe you don't stomp on it, but you do hit it. And when you hit that pedal, the car will in fact accelerate. Maybe a little bit, maybe a lot, depending on how hard you hit it. And when it begins to accelerate and do what you ask it to do, then you declare that something is wrong with the car. You probably have to find a way to regulate it and you probably need to bring it into a mechanic to see if there's something wrong with it. And you start to spend all day long, you are searching car forums and mechanic forums and listening to car podcasts and listening to all the ways that you can repair a car and listening for people who say, oh, I had that problem too, my car was going too fast. And you get stuck in this loop, but you keep hitting the gas pedal. So that analogy, but now let's take that oversimplified ridiculous car analogy and let's move it into the context of chronic or disordered anxiety. So if you have decided, and this is not, this is not accusatory, this is just the way this works, right? If you have decided that those internal experiences of anxiety symptoms or scary thoughts or feeling afraid or whatever it happens to be is off limits. I cannot have those because they feel genuinely dangerous. And now I'm afraid of being afraid, right? So I'm afraid of being afraid. So I try to never feel those things. I'm only okay if I can just stay super calm. But I'm so afraid of those things that I spend all day long trying to engineer my day so that they don't happen. Again, is this sounding familiar to some folks in the room? Or even if you're watching on the replay feel free to comment, right? I spend all day long trying to manage my body, trying to manage my anxiety, avoiding my triggers, trying to make sure that they stay calm. I got plenty of sleep. I took my magnesium. I take care of all my things. I do all my rituals. I avoid certain places. I don't do a lot of things so that I never get triggered. So I don't feel, I see the DPDR. I'll try and address some of that stuff if I can. I don't get DPDR. I don't get scary thoughts. I'm not triggered by like, oh, I have sexual orientation, OCD. And so I avoid anything that even remotely has anything to do with those things. You are on alert all day long. And then when you find something that matches your alert, which is, oh, this could be triggering or that's a trigger. And then your nervous system says, oh, okay, yeah, we found a trigger. Uh-oh, here we go. And it ramps you up. Then you decide something is wrong with my nervous system. So the point of today's episode was, and we're about 17 minutes in, that I finally get to it. In that situation, is your nervous system dysregulated or is your nervous system following your instructions? And I would venture to say that for people in our community in this particular context that I'm talking about, having already acknowledged some of the other definitions of regulation and dysregulation, in this context, I want you to take some time and at least consider if I spend all day long trying to micromanage my life and full of avoidances and rituals and special things that I have to do or not do so that I don't get anxious and I don't panic and I don't trigger my OCD and I don't trigger this and I don't feel these things and I stay calm and I do my tapping and I have my weighted blankets. Then if you are in fact triggered because it's virtually impossible to not be at some point, is the problem that your nervous system is somehow broken or is the problem that you've literally told your nervous system to be on alert for things and the minute you encounter one of those things, it alerts, right? So if you go all, let's use a very typical example, right? A lot of anxious people, especially if you're dealing with more somatically based anxiety or you're afraid of your physical sensations in some way, will try to regulate their temperature. So there's like 103 people in the room right now who spends a lot of time trying to make sure that they are either, they're neither too hot or too cold, right? So is anybody in the room right now who will make sure that they try to stay at a constant temperature or a very narrow range of temperature? Because if I get too cold, then I start to panic. If I get too hot, then they might begin to panic or I get uncomfortable and uncomfortable isn't okay because uncomfortable is scary and then I think I can't handle it and it snowballs into full-blown anxiety, huge anxiety wave or a full-blown panic attack. So a lot of people will try to do that. They'll try to regulate the temperature that they're at all day long, but then you can't always regulate the temperature, the room that you're in. So if it's winter and you have to walk outside and it's really cold, you walk out into the cold air, all of your micromanaging and your avoidance and you're trying to engineer and keep yourself calm is shattered because now it's cold. Okay, so WowBagger says hot is a trigger. So if it gets really hot in the summer because you don't get to decide whether it's going to be hot outside or not, you don't control the weather, then you are presented with the trigger that you're trying to avoid. And since you've literally told your nervous system to be on alert for extreme temperatures, if it's really hot because it's July in Nevada, then your nervous system says, okay, problem, and it sounds the alarm and the sequence starts, the anxiety sequence starts. So again, in that situation, is your nervous system broken or dysregulated? Does it need to be hacked? Do you need advice from Andrew Huberman on how to keep your nervous system from firing off in July in Nevada, if you're terrified of the heat, or have you told your nervous system that the heat is not okay? And so you get triggered and you get anxious and you get afraid. Is it dysregulated, broken and need of some sort of hacking control, micromanagement or repair, or is your nervous system following directions? I cannot tell you for sure in an internet video on YouTube or Facebook or whatever the hell you happen to be watching, I cannot tell you in 20 minutes on a live stream on a Monday afternoon, whether or not it's broken or it's just following your instructions. But I want you to maybe take away from this video today the idea that maybe my nervous system isn't dysregulated. Like again, if we want to go semantically and just by the letter of the words and kind of take it literally, okay, if I'm triggered, then I will say I'm in a state of dysregulation because I'm experiencing very big, intense things. Fair enough. And if I say I'm only regulated if I'm calm, the flip side of that would be, well, okay, semantically, you're probably right. And again, you get autonomy. You get to choose that if you want, in which case what I'm saying makes no sense to you and you hate it and you click out of the live stream. I get it, not insulted. But the flip side of that would be if I ask my nervous system to accelerate, like when I hit the accelerator pedal in my car and it does, is it dysregulated or is it working exactly how it's supposed to work? So I'm only here to maybe make you consider the possibility that your nervous system is actually working okay and it's following your instructions. So if you are living a very highly-avoidant, micromanaging, controlling lifestyle that is designed to try and make sure that you never ever get triggered into an anxious, fearful, uncertain, vulnerable state but then you do get triggered because you can't control life to that extreme. I don't know if that means that, does that mean that your nervous system is dysregulated or does it just mean that you cannot control everything and your nervous system is responding the way you've asked it to? Please let me know if we are too hot. Please let me know the minute it's been more than two hours since we ate last because then I have to get freaked out and nervous and anxious and panic over that because I think I have blood sugar crashes and I need to eat something frantically right now. Is that nervous system dysregulation or is that an expression of that highly-avoidant drive to micromanage everything so that you're only okay if you exist in a very narrow range of internal experience? Again, I'm not trying to tell you that you are not dysregulated, you can choose to be dysregulated if you want to but to me, I think there's some power in sometimes challenging those things especially when you are immersed all day long every day and if you're watching this video right now whether it's live or on the replay regardless of the platform that you're watching on there's a good chance that you are seeing social media content that uses the word dysregulation every day, every day. And I'm here to tell you that from a clinical perspective not every single experience, even the unpleasant ones would be called a dysregulated experience. So some of this goes back to the idea that like humans sometimes have unpleasant experiences. So if something horrible were to happen I just lost the loved one, right? So I'm experiencing things. Am I nervous, am I dysregulated because I'm experiencing some really big emotions and having to work through some things? Well, probably not, right? So I think you have to be careful about that sort of stuff. So let me go into, again, my goal here is just to make you think a little bit, right? Let me just make you think about this a little bit. So much of the recovery process is about uncovering the irrationality of the process well-meaning yet maybe irrational. It is full of, you hear the word paradox all the time this process is full of paradoxes, full of them. They're everywhere we turn, there's another paradox. The thing that I think I'm protecting myself I'm actually, I think I'm protecting myself by engaging actively in worry and rumination all the time but I'm actually making things worse. The thing that I think helps makes it worse. The thing that I think I'm supposed to do actually makes it worse. Everything is backwards, we're full of paradoxes and one of the first things that we do in the recovery process is to start to see those paradoxes and begin to at least consider that there might be another way to look at this and challenge some of those ideas. So I'm trying to get you to challenge that a little bit. And am I pushing back on the typical, now everybody wants to use the word dysregulation in the title of every video because it's hot algorithmically. Yeah, I'm sort of calling that out a little bit. That's not helpful for people like us. It's not helpful in this community because it's a not very discriminating use of that word. It's meant to just get attention. It's meant to drive marketing sales, course sales. Like, yeah, I'll call that out. Like people, there's times to use the word dysregulated not every time. And right now it's being used excessively and I think that's damaging at least in our community and this is the community that I'm in. And yes, I'm using the word community and you know who you are, it's just triggering for you. Let me tell you. Anyway, sorry, let's look at some comments. First thing I'm gonna say about comments. Excuse me, let me take a little drink. Okay, sorry about that. Let me look at what's going on here. I'm gonna go from the bottom up, how's that? Because I see a comment here, who's the cat? Raiden, hello, Raiden. The problem for me is I'm gonna make a blanket statement. Now I haven't even read the rest of your comments so I apologize before I jump the gun here but I'm gonna use that as a moment for anybody who is either in the live stream now who's waiting for me to answer the comment who wants to comment on a replay. If you want to start your comment with a couple of phrases but the problem for me is or but what about? Like if it starts with but or you want to raise a specific circumstance that you think, yeah, but what about this? You can't be talking about that. There's a very high probability that I'm gonna say that's not an exception to the rule. So just to throw that out there. I know it's really common to hear stuff like this and say, yeah, but what about yeah, but what about when I have heart anxiety? Yeah, but what about when it feels like I'm going to go insane? But let's read Raiden's, rest of Raiden's comment because I know I'm not being fair because I didn't read the whole comment. I probably have scary thoughts OCD so every time my anxiety spikes I engage ruminating. That's why I resort to a safe zone and my world is kind of shrinking, right? And so you see, but the problem for, hey, I'll put it up on the screen, but the problem for me is and thank you, Raiden for sharing this. I appreciate that. I'm not trying to pick on you. I hope that's okay. Just use it as an example a little bit. That's why I resort, but the problem for me is and the indicator there is but you don't understand my thoughts are very scary. So the problem here is I can't do what you're saying. It doesn't make sense to like let them go or roll the dice on them. I can't do that. My thoughts are scary, right? So it's a very common thing to want to counteract what you're reading or hearing in places like this, my channel or my podcast or disorder or the other places like this to want to counteract it by saying, but, but what about? Well, you didn't talk about, right? So that's really common. I'm not trying to pick on you guys. I understand it, but if you're waiting for me to respond to one of those, the odds are you're not going to like my response. Anyway, let's keep going. Once check, blood workers are good, EKG, very good. Okay, so let me throw this up. In the beginning I talked about being checked, right? You've been checked or checked multiple times or whatever you've been screened and everything comes back, okay, you're healthy. It's okay, you don't have to get checked and checked and checked and checked and checked. That's not required. You don't have to do that. If you are okay and you trust your healthcare team and you have been checked and given a clean bit of health and it's only been once, that's totally fine. If you get peace of mind from that, you trust it, it seems correct to you, nothing wrong with that. So you don't have to get checked and rechecked and rechecked. You have to, and this is very individual, right? There's no way to know for any individual person how much checking is too much. From a medical standpoint or an objective standpoint, I have literally no right to say to you, once you've been checked four times, that's enough. Don't know. Is it one time? Is it two times? Is it four times? Generally speaking, it's when you know, I shouldn't, I don't need to be checked again, but I feel like I have to be. That's when you start to veer into that area where maybe it's a problem for you. You get to define when there's an impairment. And by impairment, I mean when I'm engaging in a thing that I don't want to, but I feel like I have to. So I just want to clarify that. Okay, thank you for bringing this up. Anice, it's a great name. I like that name. Fell down to Polyvagal Theory Rabbit Hole and didn't come out for months. So when I was talking about those of you who are trying to do the accepting surrender, or will follow Claire Week stuff, whatever you wanna call it, third wave CBT type stuff, and also trying to micromanage your body, this is one of those things. So Anice, thank you so much for bringing it up. I appreciate you sharing that. The Polyvagal Theory Rabbit Hole. The Polyvagal Theory Rabbit Hole is people that will somehow say that you should be able to control your vagus nerve, and that your vagus nerve is different and different parts of, anyway, it's a whole thing. Polyvagal Theory is something that a lot of people will continue to talk about, even though literally the person who created Polyvagal Theory, I'm not gonna go into too much detail, stop defending it in academic and scientific circles, because this person asserted that there's different, there's branching in the human vagus nerve that makes us different from our ancestors, so you can't apply like lizard brain thinking, I'm oversimplifying. And then when the evolutionary biologist chimed in and said, not for nothing, but you're wrong, and just unloaded on Polyvagal Theory, because it's an academic debate and that's supposed to happen, that person defended it at first, and then just stopped defending it, and instead turned it into an empire. And so a lot of people will still say, well, I like Polyvagal Theory. Yeah, but you realize that it's been debunked over and over and over. Yeah, but I like it. Sometimes the Polyvagal Rabbit Hole will be one of those, I'm trying to find ways to micromanage my nervous system, and it's not working, and then I'm getting frustrated. It doesn't work. So, it is what it is. Just started going to do uncomfortable situations for me. Is it okay if I say, let's see, what do I got here? I could do about another 10 minutes. So far so good. Let me move the screen so I could read it. Just started going to do uncomfortable situations. Is it okay if I say, give me your worst anxiety, let's go. Yeah, sure, it's okay to do that. Well, that's like self-talk that informs action. Like, okay, bring it on, man. You're not bringing me down, let's go. You just, I always only care. I love self-talk that inspires and empowers and encourages you and makes you feel like you're ready to do the scary thing. I'm not a fan of mantras and this too shall pass. Yes, this will pass. Remind yourself that it will pass. You need that reminder. But repeating it again, I am a warrior, I'm a, it's just anxiety, it's just anxiety. When it becomes repetitive and you're using those type of phrases to try to calm it down and stop it, that's when it starts to get counterproductive. But yeah, I'm totally cool with that. Let's see here, Taylor Swift is now trending. That is true. That's a whole other thing. I'm in a vicious anxiety loop. I've been good for years, but now it's back. I'll throw this out. This is the, so if you guys listen to, I don't know what episode of disorder it is. If you go to disorder.fm and just search for reversion or setback in the search tool, Josh and I did an episode on that, I've done episodes of that on the anxious truth podcast where setback is what I like to use the word reversion. That's the thing I've been starting to talk about in the last six months or so. I don't know, maybe I'll have to develop some sort of therapy over that. But reversion is when I was doing better, which means I was feeling better. And then the minute I didn't feel okay, I reverted back to the old way of responding. So usually it's two things. I was so scared in that moment, which can happen. That's not a crime. It doesn't mean you did anything wrong. I was so scared. I ran back to my old habits. I ran home. I hid. I avoided. And then I kept doing those things. And now I'm gonna say that all of my recovery is shot on a back square one. That's reversion. Sometimes that's triggered by, I was shooting at the wrong target. I was learning to not be anxious. And then when that collapsed, because it always will, if your recovery is, I'm learning how to do things without being triggered, at some point that's gonna collapse on you situationally. And then people will say, it doesn't work. I panicked again, boom, square one. And you go right back to the old way. So it's just reversion. I call it reversion. I think of it that way. You have some power there. And if you wanna go listen to that episode of Disorder, Disorder.fm, just search for setback. I don't know what episode it is. I don't remember. Oh my God. Amy says I still don't understand what guestlighting is. I'm not gonna, I'm kind of with you, Amy. I'm not 100% sure. I mean, I know that it's like when you intentionally try to make somebody think that they're crazy. All right, so it's that, but I think it also got really like way out of, way out of hand. So I'm gonna keep scrolling here. Somebody, your question looks so wrong. That's adorable. I do not love for any capacity by respect to from very afar. I get random feeling. Yep, okay. This is, I'll address this really quickly. Oh, you got that right, man. Travis, I hear you on that comment. I get random feeling of anxiety like nothing can trigger it, it just shows up. Sure. Well, this is in the context that we're talking about here, especially for those of you who are new, maybe you've just stumbled upon the channel. We're talking about this. This is the exact context we're talking about. It feels like it comes out of the blue, but my guess is, and Katie, that's another great, Kate and I, I like the way you spell that. So Katie, if you are afraid to be triggered, like, oh my God, please do not let me be anxious today. If you start your day that way, which by the way, you have a right to do. Nobody wants to feel this way. So I get you if you don't want to feel the way. It's okay. But if you start every day with, how do I feel? Am I anxious? Oh, please, please don't be anxious today. Oh my God, oh, please don't be triggered. If you spend all day like that, because you are afraid of being triggered, it's not even what the trigger is. It's not even like, oh, there's an actual danger, or I'm going through relationship problems, or I have money problems, or I just lost my job, or my pet died. Nothing like that, which are real things that can make you feel things in life. Like you are literally in a situation where, no, no, I'm just afraid to be anxious. I don't want to be anxious. I don't even have a root cause. I don't have a cause. It's just this. Then you are in a situation where that is the trigger, right? It doesn't just show up out of nowhere. If you're scanning for it all day and hoping against hope that it doesn't show up, that is the trigger. The anxiety is the trigger for more anxiety. So maybe that helps. That's one of those sort of foundational things if you're kind of new around here. Let's see here. I must have missed something funny here. What a, what a gender, oh, the polyvigourette. Oh, that did look like a wrong question. You're right. That's pretty funny. I backed away pretty quickly. Okay, so in this situation again, you're in your, I always want to acknowledge that you guys have autonomy, right? You get to pick whatever you want. I can't tell you what not to watch or who not to follow. That's, I don't even want to do that. Like you get to pick what you want to put your stock in or, you know, put your eggs, which baskets you want to put your eggs in. But sometimes you find that like, well, I'm trying, I want this to work. I want polyvagal to be true for me. I want to be able to just rub my neck or tap here or pinch my ear and calm down. But no matter what I do, it doesn't seem to work consistently. Sometimes you say, well, I tried it and it didn't work for me. Okay, and guess what? By some chance that does work for you, then cool. Have at it, nothing wrong with that. Let's see. Why when my anxiety is very high, I feel like my mind is going to break or I will scream at somebody. Because almost everybody in this community will feel one of three core fears. I'm going to go insane or my mind will break. Like you just said, my mind will break and I will lose control. I will die. That's the second most common one. And the third one is I'm going to cause a scene. I'm going to be incredibly embarrassed and ashamed because people will see me in this out of control state. So I feel like it's going to make me out of control. Is it absolutely core fear that runs probably through at least 40% of the community watching right now? 104 people in the room. How many people, show of hands, had that like, this is gonna make me lose control. It will push me into an area where I will be overwhelmed and I will not be able to control myself. You're not alone in that, it's okay. But also remember, it feels like, feels like is your enemy. Let's see here. Okay, so Beth, again, I appreciate you chiming in. This is good because you get to advocate for yourself a little bit and represent yourself, right? So I do have a physiological condition that caused a dysregulated nervous system. So that's what I, we started in the beginning, like, yes, this can happen sometimes. And I'm sorry that you're struggling with that. That's a real struggle, right, for sure. And it's been a big roadblock in my recovery trying to tease them apart. That's hard, right? So let's acknowledge the challenge. It is hard to tease them apart, right? So when there's a real issue there, hang in there, like we're rooting for you. But thank you for like advocating for yourself and mentioning that, I appreciate it. Let's see here. Let's throw this up real quick. How to deal with DPDR existential thoughts. Again, super fast because this is kind of back to basics question. DPDR and existential thoughts are also just thoughts. So this people might ask, how do I deal with thoughts about my heart? How do I deal with thoughts that I don't love my partner? How do I deal with thoughts that I might hurt myself? How do I deal with thoughts that I might die? How do I deal with thoughts that I'm gonna cause a scene? It's always the same. The fact that it's DPDR and existential, the content of your thoughts is irrelevant. It doesn't matter that you're having existential thoughts. Again, I'm disturbed by a thought that I am having and I want a solution to the thought itself. And we never talk about that. If you go to theanxistruth.com and search for thoughts, intrusive thoughts, you'll see an episode that I did with Dr. Marty Seif, Martin Seif from a few years ago. It's one of the most popular episodes I ever did. Again, just use the search tool on my website. He talks about that. The content of the thoughts never matter. It never, never, never matters. It's just that you're disturbed by that. So you think you need to address the specific content or the subject of the thought and you don't. So that's a big 50,000 foot answer I never give you guys like, this is what you do about this symptom, this is what you do about this thought. It's always generic answers because the generic answers are actually the answer. In your own practice and applying it in your actual life, yes, then there are specifics, but that's when you would get into like, I'm your therapist, we're working one-on-one. I get to actually know you. You can't do that. There's a limit to what I can do in a one-to-many like this, okay? Let's see here. Or this is a good comment, right? So this is very good, Kalen. Thank you for sharing this. Now that I'm in the recovery stages, I feel like when I'm dysregulated, it's more of an awareness of my mood being off. Okay, cool. And move on from it, I don't focus on it. I recognize its presence and continue the best I can. That's totally cool. I love this comment and I appreciate you sharing that. It's really important that and I love that you came to that conclusion. And if the word dysregulated seems to be correct for you in that context, cool. Like, I love it. Thank you for sharing that. This one, I'll throw up really quickly too. Forget ignoring, right? If I gave you a million dollars, you guys have heard me say this many, many times. If I gave you a million dollars to ignore your anxiety, you would not be able to collect the million dollars. So again, if you go to my website, theanxiestrut.com and search for ignoring, you'll see an episode I did that compares the difference between ignoring anxiety and acknowledgement, but non-engagement. It's two different things. I'm trying to ignore it. That's whether you're trying to pretend it doesn't exist. No, no, no. You need to acknowledge it. It actually does exist, but I'm gonna carry on regardless even while it exists, right? So it's important. Let's see here. Let me, I'm gonna scroll down a little bit because I am starting to run out of time. Like I said, a little shorter. No, no, no, no, no. Anxiety over real issues. It's not out of nowhere. I wanna find ways to help myself. Hang on a second. Let me try and answer this real quick. Am I not supposed to be here? Everybody's welcome here. I'm trying to peer over that comment. I have anxiety over financial abuse. I have a, there's a difference. I'm always addressing anxiety because you're anxious and more than one thing can be true at a time, right? So if you're in a really dangerous situation, anybody who's watching that's in an actually dangerous threatening situation, maybe it's physically abusive situation or a very high crime, or you're in physical danger or you're being abused mostly mentally, emotionally, financially. There is such a thing as financial abuse. You're naturally going to be anxious over that. So that's, I'm not teaching you how to not be anxious when you're actually in danger or being abused. That would be ridiculous. I'm never, I gotta repeat that. I'm never trying to teach you how to not be anxious when you're literally being abused. That's not okay. No one should be teaching you how to do that. And I'm never, ever, ever telling you, you have to learn how to tolerate, surrender to, willfully accept, or float through abuse or actual danger. Never, ever, ever. That's never what I'm saying. I cannot say that strongly enough. It's very important. But more than one thing can be true at a time. So you could start being anxious for those reasons and then just learn to be anxious about being anxious. So it could be very complicated. Do you not belong here? I'm not, everybody's welcome here. But remember that there's differences and never, ever try to apply these concepts to, I'm being financially abused or I'm being emotionally manipulated or I'm being held in a relationship against my will by a controlling person who's literally hurting me. Nobody here is ever teaching you how to float or accept that or float through it, ever, ever. Did I say that strongly enough? I feel really strongly about that. I mean, VAL, hang in there. It doesn't sound like you're in a good situation and we're rooting for you here. Let's see here. Let me scroll down to the bottom because I'm kind of out of time I love July in Nevada. How? I was thinking it's weird that we choose in the US. I mean, we're Americans, it's what we do. Like we have the utmost in hubris and ego here and arrogance. So we just decided let's go live in the desert. That seems like a pretty good idea. It gets to be 110 degrees, but it's all air conditioning, it's all good. Weird, right? Humans are weird. All right, so I'm not gonna be able to get everything. Let me scroll down to the bottom and see what the last comments are and I'll try and get one or two more and then I gotta end it. I appreciate that, I'm gonna get away. What about, what about thoughts about thoughts? So see how there's always any, but what about, what about thoughts about thoughts? Thoughts about thoughts are still thoughts, right? I know it sounds ridiculous and like I'm not trying to be dismissive or shrug off your question at all, but a thought about going crazy is a thought. A thought about a thought is also a thought. I'm, the best way to learn to respond to that sort of stuff is, oh, I'm thinking again. Oh, I'm thinking, right? So I'm thinking, I'm allowed to think, I'm having thoughts. Okay, I'm having thoughts. So that's okay, it's a thought about a thought. Oh, I'm thinking again. What else can I do while I'm thinking? I mean, it's grossly oversimplified, but that's generally the thing when you get caught up in a thought loop. So for those of you who are actually, like the worry and rumination workshop that Josh and I are doing on Wednesday, we're gonna talk about that stuff. Just go to my website, it's there, I don't know. Let's see here, let me go up a little bit. There was one other thing that I just saw. You'd have to ask Billy what he's doing. Billy's a great guy, but I think he's doing okay. I think that's it. I'm kind of out of, and thank you guys for supporting when I asked you guys to confirm like what you're afraid of. I appreciate you guys popping in and like supporting each other and all that stuff. I'm gonna make a quick statement before I go up, because I think it's important. Sometimes, and this is out of the blue and it makes no sense, but one of the comments that I just saw makes me wanna say this, because you know that I go off on these tangents sometimes and I think it's important. And this applies to me too. This is not like, oh, look out for other content creators or educators or whatever you wanna call us, influencers, whatever you wanna call us. Me too, apply this to me too. Be careful about establishing a pretend relationship with somebody like me, right? So for instance, you guys know that I have a dog named Copper. And sometimes you see him and I put him on my stories and he barks and everybody loves Copper. I think you guys like Copper more than you like me sometimes, which is fine, I like Copper too. But be careful about becoming too attached. And I'm not telling you to not like me, but be careful about forming that power social relationship because I will tell you that the influencer playbook says I should encourage you. So when somebody wants to ask me, and I'm not picking on your rate, I'm okay with the question, right? When you wanna ask me something about like old videos or remember when you has Billy doing, and not that it's okay to ask about Billy, Billy was a great guy, I want you to ask about him. But be careful about that because you can accidentally get stuck in a situation where it's like, I might, what if I start saying weird things one day that don't help you, but you've sort of got into that thing where you feel like you like me so much that you'll listen no matter what and lose your discriminating ear. I always want you to treat the things that I say with a high degree of discrimination, always be at least a little bit skeptical always, no matter how much you trust me or Josh or Kim or anybody like that, take that with you all the time and just be careful about starting to see us as people that you are overly familiar with because on social media, that could be a trap. That might not make sense to you and you might not even understand why I'm saying that, but for some of you, it might make sense and maybe that will be helpful in some way. I appreciate the support you guys give me and I appreciate how kind you are to me and you're gonna hear copper again because he's not gonna be quiet. That's just what he does. Just be careful about that because it will literally be leveraged to manipulate you if you're not careful. So, the red flame says I don't trust anyone. That's one way to go. Anyway, so I know that was a little bit weird at the end and maybe didn't make a whole lot of sense and it was a little bit like, what happened to this dude? Which just went wrong there. But just be aware of that stuff because that's the stuff that people who want to charge me for things, like they wanna teach me how to be better at social media. They want me to build, they want me to show you the dog. They want you to show me. They want me to show you my family. They want me to talk about my personal life because it means that you start to form an attachment to me then I'm stickier. So just be careful because that's the playbook. All right guys, I'm out the door. If you wanna come back and re-watch this, you can do that anytime you want. Leave comments. I circle through YouTube all the time to try and answer them as best I can. The best way to re-watch these I think is to subscribe to my YouTube channel because they're easiest to find and they're in a playlist called Recovery Monday. You can find them on Facebook too. I don't know how, man. I just stopped trying to search Facebook. So I appreciate you guys being super supportive of each other and friendly with each other, be friendly with each other more than you are with me. Has that for rule of thumb because it's just cool when you guys do that anyway. Thanks for watching. I'll be back again in two weeks for another one. And that's it. We're out.