 We are here with episode 59. And today we're gonna talk about why I use the word surrender so damn often. You're probably tired of hearing of it, hearing it at this point. And I wanna kinda talk about why I came up with that word, why I say it so often, and how it relates to some of the other popular words that we use like accepting, floating, tolerating, willfully tolerating. We're gonna talk about all that stuff. So let's get the chat overlay up so that we can see what's going on. Hello, Carol. Just let me know that you can hear me. I'm guessing that you can. Everything seems to be working great these days. Not a whole lot of technical problems, which is great. Thank you for the check mark and the thumbs up bee. I appreciate it, so I know what's going on. Remember that if you are coming from the Facebook group, I'm only gonna see Facebook user. I won't see your name. Sorry about that. It's just the way Restream does it, but we'll do the best we can. If you're coming from my Facebook page, if you're coming from YouTube, if you're coming from Twitch, Becky, the one Twitch user we ever have, I will actually see your names. So hey, Matt, what's going on? Lisa, welcome. I'm glad you guys made it. Where is everybody coming from today? How's everybody doing today? We'll wait for everybody to sort of file in. Last week was super popular with Jackie Shepin. We talked about, what did we talk about last week? I can't remember what we talked about last week, but it was actually a really popular one last week. So a bunch of people were here. We went up over a hundred for the first time. Christine is here. Rebecca is here. Omar is here. Hello, hello, everybody. So we'll wait for a few more folks to show up. This one, I don't know. We'll see what kind of crowd we get. Eye in the Sky. Hello, Eye in the Sky. We did anticipatory anxiety. Thank you, Bea. You're 100% correct. So a lot of comments on that one, which I appreciate the feedback. Thank you very much. And we'll have Jackie back on again, because she was really great to do that with. Next week, just a program note before we get started today, Jenna Overbaugh is going to come on next week and we're going to talk about what the hell is the difference between one kind of anxiety and the other? Like, what if I have OCD versus what if I have GAT? So that's going to be great. Jenna's awesome. You guys have seen me work with Jenna and she'll be on next week. So let's get into this. We've got 32 people. As you guys roll in, you know, we'll do the thing. I'll do my little spiel and then we'll go back and take questions and comments and all that stuff. So let's get cooking here. Mike, dude, thank you so much. You did not have to do that. So what we'll do in these, just like if you're in my Instagram subscriber group, YouTube does let you do like super chats and super thanks. They're going to push you to buy those things. You don't really have to do that. But if you do do that, I promise like what I do in my Instagram subscriber lives. If you do that, I promise Mike, I will donate that money to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. I have a little pool going and when I get enough money, I just throw it over there. So thank you, Mike. I appreciate that. I will pay it forward by donating that money. So let's talk about the whole surrender thing. You have to remember that when I started doing this stuff back in the day, it was all Claire Weeks, right? So you guys know I'm a huge Claire Weeks fan, giant fan of Dr. Weeks. I kind of feel like if she doesn't exist, then there is no such thing as the anxious truth. In fact, if Claire Weeks doesn't exist, there's a lot of platforms and methods or books or podcasts that probably wouldn't exist. She did not invent this stuff, but she was really, really good at explaining it to the lay person. That's where Dr. Weeks really, really shine. And she had that Australian grandma thing going on. She seemed so gentle and so kind and so soothing, which was great. So much of my work was based on what I learned from Claire Weeks when I read her books, when I was going through the worst of it. And she uses the word acceptance. And so we started using the word acceptance and acceptance is all over the place in the anxiety and anxiety recovery community and for good reason. I mean, hell, one of the forms of therapy that I will likely use quite often when I am practicing down the road is acceptance and commitment therapy. It's actually in the name, the damn therapy, right? So the word acceptance that Dr. Weeks talked about so eloquently in the work that she did is pervasive in the work. And if you go back through some of my earlier podcast episodes, you'll hear me say the word accept, accept, accept, accept. She also used the word float. Float was huge for Dr. Weeks. If you ever listened to any of her audiobooks or you read her books, you'll know that she talks about accepting, floating, letting time pass. It is a formula for success the way I see it, right? Now she maybe never got into great detail because she was writing in the 1950s and 1960s. She did not have the internet. She couldn't just fire per camera and livestream to people like I do every week or podcast. So she kind of never got around to being super detailed. I'm sure she was super detailed when she worked directly with her clients, but she was essentially giving like a 50,000 foot view of the process in her books. And like the stuff that she did on the BBC radio and things of that nature which you find online now. Hello, Illinois, how are you? Hello, England. So what I found over time is that the words acceptance and float, and if you like those words and they work for you, I ain't here to take them away from you. Like you use whatever words work for you, but the reason why I started using the word surrender probably, I don't know, three, four years ago is because the words accept and float, I was spending so much time trying to explain people what acceptance meant and how to float. Because in many instances, people think that accepting a thing has a positive connotation. And in this situation, it doesn't. It's not supposed to. So accepting your anxiety, accepting the repetitive intrusive thought that you may harm your family has nothing to do with liking it or embracing it or wanting it in any way, shape, or form. But people often feel like, well, if I accept it, it means that I have to like it. It's a positive thing to accept something. And in most of life, it is. Like if you have a falling out with your brother because you don't see eye to eye politically and then you wind up, you know what? I accept you anyway. You have a big old brother hug and everybody's happy and yeah, it's a positive thing. But that's not what Dr. Weeks was talking about. And the same thing holds true with floating. So when she would say you have to accept your anxiety and then float through all those nasty feelings, people often got confused and felt like floating is supposed to feel better. And it doesn't. In fact, floating is such a fluffy, happy kind of cloud serene word, but it actually feels exactly the opposite. Like floating doesn't feel good at all. In the end, persistent, repetitive floating may get you to the point where you do start to feel better than you do when you're worst, but the act of floating is not designed to make you feel better in the moment. So I was running into all kinds of problems where I was spending a lot of time trying to explain what acceptance is or people would say, how am I ever supposed to accept this? And I get that. If you're having a really hard time and you are just resisting that idea, there is no way I can accept this, then that word isn't working for you. Even though there's nothing wrong with the word, it's just not working for you. But again, I just wanna remind you, if that word works for you and floating works for you, then use them. There's no crime there. So I started looking for a different word and I came up with surrender because surrender is a little bit brutal. I'm gonna surprise Drew came up with a brutal word, but there is no ambiguity in surrender. So the only thing that I tend to have to explain about surrender is that surrender doesn't mean giving up. Like people think, when I say, well, you have to surrender, people will say, well, that means I just give up and I just gonna be this way the rest of my life. No, it doesn't mean that at all. Surrender doesn't mean giving up on the macro level. Surrender literally means giving up the fight and the micro level, like at the moment. So when I tell people to surrender, I'm basically saying, which Dr. Weeks, I believe meant when she said accept, you are giving up your resistance. So acceptance is essentially dropping your resistance. I will not drop, I will not resist this because if we go back and look at the word acceptance, not accepting it is pointless. And I've had this discussion before and sometimes it seems, it's a little weird. We could probably have this discussion for hours and hours, right? Because you don't get to just not accept your anxiety, not accepting, okay, so you don't accept it. What is that? What happens? Does it go away? Cause you don't accept it. And I've used this analogy before, anxiety, panic, intrusive thoughts, symptoms, sensations. They're not like an undercooked steak that you send back at a restaurant. Like it comes to you, you don't like it, you don't accept it, they fix it and bring you a better one. That's not the way this works. So not accepting is kind of pointless. It does nothing to not accept. Other than I think people are misunderstanding the idea of acceptance, like acceptance meaning like I'm glad it's here. No, of course you're not. You're definitely not glad it's there. You don't have to be glad. Acceptance meaning I like it? No, you definitely hate it and you're allowed to hate it. So acceptance, I believe Dr. Weeks was just saying, drop your resistance. And so to me, you can try to accept and float or you could just surrender. Like in the end, just surrender. Just surrender is probably gross over simplification because the next objection that I get from surrender after, does this mean I have to just be anxious my whole life? That's not what surrender means. Again, not surrender forever in the macro. Surrender in the moment. Surrender, stop fighting in the moment. So okay, once they get that, then the next huge smack in the face with my word surrender is, oh, wait a minute. You're telling me that I have to stop fighting? The answer is yes. That's what we do when we surrender. So literally, if we wave the, what is it, the white flag of surrender? That's white, right? So if you wave the white flag, I give up. I'm not fighting anymore. If you're a boxer and your ringman throws the towel in, I surrender, I give up. I'm not fighting you anymore. I believe in chess, if you, I believe it's called the surrender, right? If you say, oh, look, I'm beaten. I'm not gonna play anymore. You surrender to your opponent. So essentially what you're doing is you are deciding to not fight. And that gets, excuse me, that gets super scary. Oh, it's so funny. You might watch things I'm walking. It gets scary for people because then they'll say, but if I don't give up the fight, does that mean that the scary thought could come true? Well, that's what you think is gonna happen. So you are very afraid that your scary thought will actually happen or you're very afraid that the panic will overwhelm you and make you go crazy or will kill you or will make you lose control or whatever your feared outcome is. You'll be humiliated, you'll be ashamed. So when we surrender, we are essentially allowing the worst thing to happen that you fear will happen. That is a big ask. And I will never gonna stop saying that it's a big ask because it is and it's really hard to do that. But people will kind of bristle and think like, well, wait a minute now. How am I supposed to allow that to happen? Well, you have to allow it to happen to learn that it never happens the way you imagine it and that you can deal with whatever that adversity is that does come up. That is so important because in the end, it's the declaration that this is unhandleable, unnavigable, too hard, impossible. Then it's that assertion that creates the problem you're trying to solve. So it's really hard to hang on to that assertion. I have to fight this or bad things might happen and also demand to get better at the same time. I don't believe that you can do both of those things at the same time. I don't believe that that's my opinion on this. And it's based on my theoretical orientation and approach to this problem. But I think it's really difficult to hang on to, no, no, no, I must fight or bad things will happen. But I also want to get better at the same time. It's really hard to do that. I don't know if those two things can coexist. So, where does that lead us? It leads us to why I use the word surrender so often because to me, it's less ambiguous. There is no positive connotation to surrender at all like accepting and floating, which seems very fluffy and people expect that float means they will somehow go above. I've heard people almost literally take floating as like literally like all float above and pass the anxiety. No, no, no, you'll literally wade through it. So sometimes I think, and we'll never know this unfortunately because Dr. Weeks has gone many, many years now, but maybe one day I'll get to ask one of her heirs. I don't know. I know her nieces now run Claire Weeks publications. Lovely people. Maybe one day I'll get to ask them, I don't know. But I suspect that if Dr. Weeks had the benefit of the internet when she was writing and she could get feedback from tens of thousands of people over a couple of years, she might change her words maybe because when she saw how people were sort of misconstruing them, she might actually either vary words and start to use different words or she might change her words. So then let's talk about some of the other words that we hear. We hear tolerance, right? So I know you guys that followed Josh Fletcher, he likes to say willfully tolerate which is correct, I think that's great. We hear the term navigation. I use navigate a lot as well. So tolerate, accept, surrender, navigate, willfully tolerate. These are all kind of the same thing. The main component all that is stopping the fight like I'm going to give up the fight. So letting go, very good Daniel, I like that. Letting go is another one. I've written about letting go because people refuse to let go. So in the end, if you're gonna surrender, you will let go. You might feel like you're hanging on like hot death. I can't let go or bad things will happen. It is the act of fully letting go and letting the chips fall where they may and learning experientially again and again and again that I can handle it wherever those chips happen to fall which I get is a big ask, especially if we're at the beginning of this. So that's where the word surrender comes from. It is a brutal word, I get it. Especially I think, especially in the West, especially in the U.S. where we are obsessed with competition and domination and hustle and being the best and all of those crazy ideas. They're not crazy ideas. Like they have a place in life. But I think it's really hard because the word surrender does have a negative connotation because it feels like losing. It feels like giving up, only losers surrender. Like no, no, you're supposed to dominate this and run over it and especially for men we get those messages all the time like an alpha male doesn't surrender. Like come on guys, I don't know why I'm talking about that. Like we gotta back away from some of those silly ideas. So I do understand that the word surrender could be hard for some people to put their brain around because that has really negative connotations of loss or giving up permanently or being a loser or being weak. But for anybody who has ever done this and I know you're here because there's 45 of you here. If you have ever fully let go even just once and allowed the worst thing to come true that you fear and then discover that you didn't, I dare anybody to call you weak or a loser because that is absolutely the last, that is the least weak thing that I can imagine somebody ever doing. But if somebody has not lived this then they don't understand that. And I do understand and if you've never let go and come out the other side fully then you might not be understanding it also. But so that's sometimes the objections to surrender is I don't wanna surrender, I'm supposed to be a warrior. I'm supposed to be this is a battle, this is a war. I'm supposed to win the war, I won't surrender in this war. But in the end, what I say all the time is the weird thing about this war, it's like, do you guys ever see the movie War Games? I'm dating myself here with Matthew Broderick from the 80s. Would you like to play a game? You know, the computer takes over no rat and almost starts a nuclear war. And at the end, the computer stops everything just before it launches like nuclear armageddon and discovers, and its last line is strange game, the only way to win is not to play, which is really, really very, there's a parallel there. So the only way to win this war is to stop fighting it. It's crazy as it sounds. Like you win this war when we stop fighting it like it's a war. So I've said things like it's not a war, it's a classroom, you're not a warrior, you're a student and that all plays into the idea of surrender. So where am I? 16 minutes, not too shabby. Let's pop it to the comments. A little smaller crowd today, that's all right though. Let me close this so I can see what you guys have to say today. Not a lot of questions, so that's okay, we might be fast today, I'm good with that. If anybody has anything you wanna throw out, throw it out there, that's cool. Hello UK, India, no, no, no, Pennsylvania. Okay, what does Bethany have to say? I like how in one of her other books she described it as relaxing with action. Ooh, that's pretty good. That's actually pretty good. So it's almost like I could see her maybe say things like it's intentional relaxation or there is intention in that. So acceptance and floating seems very passive but there is acceptance in that, that there is action in that. Believe it or not, surrendering, floating, accepting, tolerating, those are active processes. I know they seem very passive which is another reason why they are distasteful to some people, like I should be doing something, shouldn't I? I shouldn't just do nothing. I don't know, I also use the phrase do nothing and do nothing just means stop fighting. Stop fighting, you don't have to fight. So, you know, that's kind of the way that goes. Let's go here, I'll pop this up here from YouTube. Hello, does surrendering mean accepting your current thought processes? What if you deem your thoughts as not helpful or destructive? So you surrender to these self-sabotaging thoughts. Okay, it's a really good question. Thank you for asking. So surrendering to the thought doesn't mean I'm gonna call myself a loser and then be a loser. That doesn't mean that at all. It's surrendering to fighting the thought itself. Now, if you are harboring, let's say you're harboring a negative self-image, right? That is a thing that we would work on for sure. But the issue is the fight against the thought because you are afraid of the thought, right? So if we see ourselves in a, that's a good example too. If you see yourself in a certain light and you're always speaking negatively of yourself or judging yourself harshly or treating yourself harshly and you can see that and you wanna, you wanna do something about that then you should do something about that. You don't surrender and do nothing about it. Surrender doesn't mean we don't get better. It means we do get better. What we care about is the part where we are afraid of what we think and that the thought is predicting something that isn't true or isn't gonna ever come true or the thought scares you because it's not who you are. Like the reason why we call thoughts intrusive or they're scary to us is because they're the opposite of who we are, they're the opposite of what we want. So we care about those thoughts more than anything else. This is an interesting question because the passivity there in like surrendering somehow can get just like accepting and floating. People think that you accept and float through all of life which is no, not everything is an accepting and floating problem in life. Sometimes there's action to be taken, that's true. But in this situation I would say that's a nuance but no, you do not surrender to being, if you think yourself a loser or you think yourself incapable, you don't surrender to that and decide that you are but you don't also have to be afraid of that. That's not a thought that would necessarily be, it could be an intrusive thought but you could say, okay, well, I don't have to go into a panic over this thought. What can I do to actually show myself as capable? So hopefully that makes some sort of sense. It depends though, you have to be careful now that I read it again. If you deem the thought as not helpful or destructive you have to be careful what is not helpful or destructive, right? So I can't be sure because I don't know what the thought really is but you have to be careful by calling a thought destructive because it's a negative thought or you think it might compel you to do a thing. So there's some nuance there for sure. I hope I answered that as best they could. Marina is here, let's see. I was one of those people who did not understand how to accept the word surrender made instantaneous sense. You give up the fight and that's why I use it. And again, I'm not saying it's better than accept. I'm not saying it's better than float. I'm not saying it's better than tolerate. I mean, hell, I'm doing the stress tolerance thing with Joanna Hardis. So I'm using the words tolerate all the time now, right? So, because it is a tolerance problem. But yeah, so you know what? It's not a better word, it's just a different word. Maybe less ambiguous for some people, that's all. So I'm not dissing Dr. Weeks. I'm a huge fan and it's so interesting because there have been times when I've caught all kinds of heat because I'll say, well, she was confusing some people. How could you possibly say that about Dr. Weeks? Well, hang on a second here, she didn't mean to, but you can't predict how everybody's gonna hear your words. I wrote a lot of stuff in my books that I wish I didn't write because now I see how people read it or heard it and I'm like, oh, I would have changed those words. So, but I have gotten some beatings over like, how dare you? Dare you change her words? So I get it though. Okay, this is cool. Ronnie, good to see you brother. Right, you're here. Like accepting your wet when it rains, but not happy about it. So I use this, the rain thing is one, that gets used all the time. The rain analogy is a great analogy. So I've talked about the rain thing, like, okay, if you, let's say that you are out and you're walking and you didn't bring an umbrella and it starts to rain. You didn't know it was gonna rain. It was a freak storm or you didn't check the weather whatever. Now it's raining and you are getting wet because you are out, you do not have an umbrella and it is raining. So what good is not accepting that? You are gonna get wet. So the best you could do is to say, well, this is what I got going on right now. I'm gonna get wet right now and I'm just gonna go to wherever it is that I gotta go and then I'll dry off and then I'll deal with it from there, change my clothes or be wet for the rest of the day. So you see the difference, like I don't accept this, I don't accept this. You won't, you're not changing anything by not accepting it. So that's really important. Good point, Ronnie. Thank you for bringing it up. Christina's here and she says, having a hard time surrendering to death. So there's two subjects that people will fight me to the death part of the pun on. And that is I cannot surrender to death and I cannot surrender to healthier. And you can make those choices. Those are entirely within your rights to make. I would still cheer for you as one human being to another. However, the issue with I can't surrender to death is you have to look at how you're talking about death. So believe me, I was you on the death thing. I was totally you on the death thing. I couldn't even hear the word. You guys have heard me talk about this before I forbid my kids. They were young at the time. I wouldn't let them say words like death and dead. They used to say stupid things like not alive. I mean, it's to face palm when I think about that now, right? Because the word death would trigger me so bad. But that's because I was acting as if I was dying that moment and I had to deal with it in that moment every effing day. So you're not, you don't want to surrender to death because you are seeing death like it's right here all the time, but it is not. I mean, for every one of us, any day might be our last day, but you can choose to not surrender to that and fight that all the time and try to not die every single day. But you're here watching this video because that's not working for you. So at some point we recognize, what am I resisting? I'm resisting as if I am dying right now every day. I'm treating every day like today's, it's my last and I've deal with it now, but it's likely not. And even if it is, there's nothing you do about it anyway. So living by trying to not die is, in my opinion, no way to live. And I'm guessing you would agree because you're here watching this video. So at some point you have to confront the irrational and distorted view of death that you think you have to fight. It's, I mean, death is death. We all know what it is. It's a reality. But when your view of it is irrational, magnified and distorted and glued to you all the time, you're fighting a thing you don't have to fight. Hopefully that makes sense. Hopefully makes sense. Okay, Ronnie, thank you. That's really honest, brother. I'll be honest, I turned the volume down when you started talking about death. Okay, I get that. I would have, can I tell you something, man? I would have done exactly the same thing. I would have turned down the volume or possibly just clicked out, just clicked out of the video back in the day. I get that. So we gotta be super careful. And then on the health side, people will say, there's no way I'm surrendering to the idea that I might have cancer. Okay, nobody's telling you to surrender to cancer and abandon your health, but you have to remember that the thing you think you can't surrender to is a distorted, irrational, magnified, over-exaggerated threat of cancer, just like death. Death is a real threat to all of us, but you're making an exaggerated threat today as people with health anxiety make diseases that they don't have, that may never have threats today when they're not. So what are you fighting against? The disease itself? No, nobody's telling you to just give up on your health, but know when you're fighting based on a distortion and a magnification. But again, everybody has a right to choose to do it any way they want. It's okay. Ooh, Ronnie, man, you're killing it today. I dig it. You're surrendering to the response, not the challenge. It's 100% right. 100% right. You're not surrendering to the grocery store. You're not surrendering to the highway. You're not surrendering to whatever it is that you think is your trigger. You're surrendering to the feelings you have when you do that. That's a really good comment, man. Ronnie, you're killing it, man. Good job. This is good. This is part of it. It takes a leap of faith like when you first learned to float on your back in the water when you're learning to swim. So much of this is leap of faith. When you surrender, especially when you do that for the first time, and you fully let go, fully surrender, fully accept, whatever, fully tolerate, whatever word you wanna use, you are taking a leap of faith. That first time is the biggest, scariest leap. No doubt about that. No doubt about that. It is 100% a leap of faith in that moment. That's true. So good on you for recognizing that. Whoever you are, I'm sorry, I can't see your name. Okay, so I'll ask, how's this one? Okay, how long did it take you to recover from sensitization? When did you first go through this? So, hang on a second here. If you want to know, now this book, if you go to my website and click on the link for this book, you could buy this book if you want, but I also give it away for free. So you can get this book and, okay, this answers your question. It goes through the whole, it tells my whole story. If you wanna find out the whole story and see who this crazy dude is on the camera, it's called An Anxiety Story. If you follow the link to get it on Smashwords, it's name your own price, which could be zero. I'm totally, totally cool with that. I have literally given away, I don't even know at this point, 15,000 copies of that book, I don't even know. So you can get it for free as an MP3 download for audio on the website. So go check it out. If you wanna know my story, that will help you. But when did I first go through it? It started in the 1980s for me, but the whole story is in that book. How long did it take to me recover from sensitization? I don't know. When I actually got my shit together and started doing it, I would say I was probably 70 to 80% recovered within eight months or so. Does that make sense? But I always hate to answer that question because we're all different. I was really persistent and tenacious in my recovery. And so it went pretty quickly. And for various reasons, I probably had a leg up because of personality type and my sense of self-efficacy and all that stuff. But it will take as long as it takes. Do not put a timeline on it. It's not fair to yourself. Very good, GBG coming in here. Jay, good. Over time surrender becomes much easier than fighting, but it does take practice. That is true. So in the beginning, fighting seems like the easier choice. This is good, man. That's a really great comment. The first time you do it, fighting seems like a better choice, resistance seems like a better choice. It seems like an easier choice because it's the thing that you think is keeping you safe. So at first, surrender, which actually involves doing less, seems harder. So it's harder to do less. It's easier to do more. But in the end, when you start getting better at doing less, which is surrender or floating or tolerance or acceptance, then that gets easier than the fighting. As crazy as that sounds. This is a really good comment. Until you've been through it, you don't fully understand what Jason just said here, but it is true. Dan is here. What up, Dan? Good to see you. Let's see. Hello, I am the sky. I love that name. What I'd be surrendering if I got DP and felt like I was losing it, then told it to F off and just drive me crazy. Yeah, no, it's totally fine. So when I say that surrender, tolerance, floating is an active process, this is part of what I'm saying. Like, there are framing statements, positioning statements. People use them all the time, right? For me, when I got to the point where I was so angry at it, I would literally frame my surrender with like, you better come and kill me now. I would literally have that thought on my head and that's what set me up. Okay, come on, come and get me. And that's it. So this is fine, you could say that. What we don't try to do is actively surrender in the point where like surrender means, you got this, you got this, it's just anxiety. I'm okay, you're safe, it's just anxiety. It's only that's not surrender. That is resistance and spades. You think you should do that, but don't do that. But if you wanna just say, you know what, F you, you're back again, you keep failing to bring me down. I used to say, you keep failing to bring me down. I would literally say words like that. You keep trying to bring me down and you never bring me down. So come on, come on. And it got to the point where I was so defiant, it would be like, come on, come on. Like try it again, try it again. And I would almost taunt it in a way. So yeah, you could do that, that's surrender for sure. It's crazy because it's an active thing like F you, come and get me. And then come on, come on, come and get me. Hit me, hit me harder. So one of my favorite, I'm a big fan of the silly Rocky movies. I know I've talked about this before. Rocky III, if you haven't seen Rocky III, go watch Rocky III wherever you can find it or just find the fight scene from Rocky III. It's Sylvester Stallone playing Rocky and Mr. T is Clubber Lang. Yeah, that's an old movie. What can I tell you? But go watch the fight scene from Rocky III because Clubber Lang is this big strong. He's bigger and stronger than Rocky. And he's just kicking the shit out of him. But Rocky wins that fight by, you'll see what happens. The tide starts to turn because he keeps getting hit but he keeps getting back up. And at some point he starts to taunt Clubber Lang. You ain't so bad. You ain't so bad. Hit me harder champ. I think at one point he says, my grandmother hits harder than that. It's really, it's a good analogy. It's a good analogy. So let's see here. What does Ronnie have to say? How are we doing here? 30 minutes? Yeah, we're good. We're good with time. Can you plan an exposure in which you surrender if you know how long it's going to be before you're in a safe place? Or does knowing this make it pointless? That's a good question, Ronnie. I think it's sometimes you can't plan it completely like life just does shit and you don't know how long it's going to take. So I get that, like maybe you have to do a thing and you don't know how long it's going to take so you can't plan it. But otherwise I'm a big fan, especially in the beginning of timed exposures. So because the reason why I say to do timed exposures or specific distance exposures, if you will, is not because there's necessarily magic in that other than it makes you set a goal and like I'm going to do this thing and it's going to be over in 45 minutes. And at the end of 45 minutes I'm out, okay? So that's okay because if you did your 45 minutes, you win the timing of that when you can plan those things especially in the beginning, there's no ambiguity there. I did my 45 minutes, I win, it's a win. I put it in the win column, big green checkbox because I did my 45 minutes. Otherwise you wind up in the like, yeah but it felt so bad, I felt like this, I felt like that. So I'm a fan of timed exposures but you can't always do them. So is it not surrendering if you time your exposure? No, because in those 45 minutes or however long you decide to stay in the exposure, it's a challenge for you, you're surrendering in those 45 minutes. So no, time them, totally cool. But mix it up, sometimes you do stuff because life makes you do them and you can't time it. Hope that helps, let's see. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Every time you survive to your exposure and anxiety after surrendering is empowering. Yeah, it is very, very true. Anybody who's done that and come out the other side, you literally, it's like you're like superhero feeling when you come out the other side of that. It's a really great feeling, it's a really great feeling. And you can become a little bit addicted to it, I'm not gonna lie. The only word that I don't like here is survive. Not that I don't like it, I would maybe change that. Every time you move through the fear that you think you couldn't do, you are empowering yourself. You are always gonna survive, always. Like that's why I always say, never say you made it, always say you did it because you were always gonna make it, always. It was never a doubt. Let's keep going here. Because no one ever disagrees on all texts written by people who are no longer there. No, we never disagree on that sort of stuff. Once a book is written, man, it's fact. Entire wars, forget about it. The whole history of civilization could probably be based on disagreements about old books. Probably, good point. Did it take you? Okay, let's see here. Hello, Lindsay. Did it take you a while to learn to surrender with your driving anxiety? Have a hard time fuller surrendering with it? Yep. Oh, okay, so this is good. I'm trying to surrender to the physical symptoms and not the thoughts. Well, I would definitely say you gotta do both. Like you can't say I'll surrender to the sweaty hands and racing hard, but I won't surrender to the thought that I'm gonna crash the car. Like that's, you gotta do the whole thing. So did it take you, did it take me a while to learn to surrender driving? Sometimes it takes you a while to get to the point of surrender, but I will tell you that once you do it, you can't undo it. So it can be hard to get to the point where you decide to take the leap of faith and fully let go, including to the thoughts. You gotta do it all. You can't just do the sensations. But once you do reach that point and you start to let go, you kinda almost can't undo it at that point. You've had the experience that says, ooh, oh, look, look. And it's never gonna be the same for everybody because everybody's a little bit different and one person's experience does not guarantee or predict another person's experience. However, I think that it seems in the patterns over time with a large enough sample of people that I'm fortunate to have in front of me, that's you guys. When people actually hit the letting go part and the true full surrender giving up the fight point, that is when things begin to start to go faster. Because like I said, once you've done it, then you get it. And I say all the time that this is not a thing that you fully get until after you do it. So so many people struggle with things like flow, tolerate, accept, whatever, surrender, because they're trying to get it first and then do it, but you don't get it until after you do it. So Lindsay, I hope that answers your question. It might take you a while to get to the point where you're willing to surrender while driving. But then once you do do that, it really could be a game changer, not overnight, but things you see start to look different when you do it. So when Lindsay says I'm trying to surrender to the physical symptoms without the thoughts, it brings up a good point that I wanted to talk about today before we go. We gotta know 10 minutes we can do. But here's the deal. Surrender is like acceptance. And I think I wrote about this in the anxious morning, one morning, and it rubbed some people the wrong way. But I don't remember who it was. I think it was on an Instagram live, somebody said to me, my therapist keeps telling me that my acceptance knob only goes to nine. So acceptance, tolerance, surrender, that is a binary function. And people hate when I say this, but let me explain. You are either surrendering or you are not. Now, you may take a while to turn the surrender knob up from zero, total resistance, to 10, no resistance. It might take you a while to get there, but until you go all the way to 10, so that there's an inverse relationship, the higher you surrender, the lower your resistance. Until you get the knob all the way, the surrender knob all the way, you're actually not surrendering. So that's not blame, that's not your fault. It takes a lot of people time to turn it up. You turn it up a little bit of time, okay, I'll do a little more, a little more, a little more. But until you actually go from 9.99 to 10 and your resistance drops to zero and then inverse relationship, you're actually not doing it. So that's why it's cruel, but you can't decide to mostly surrender. Bethany says it's like mostly dead. Right, you can't be mostly dead. So you can't mostly surrender. You can and that will move you closer to total surrender. But when I say surrender as part of recovery, I mean surrender where the knob is buried at 10. If you don't do it that way, you will get frustrated. And I understand why you don't wanna go to 10, but you gotta go to 10. So it's a binary function that until it goes all the way, it might as well. I'm gonna say it might as well be zero. So it's not probably fair to say that, but you gotta get all the way. If you don't go all the way, you're gonna get stuck. And then you have conditional okayness and conditional acceptance and conditional recovery. So when you find people that say, I'm doing so much better, but then something happens that pierces like goes through that thing that they built where they're not panicking or they're not scared, then they, and they fall apart like everything crumbles to the ground and they're in a setback in square one and I've been in bed for two days. Often that was because they turned the knob up to nine, lived at level nine, and then life is going to push you to 10. One day will do that. So if you try to partly do this, life will at somewhat regular intervals poke right through that and then you will be exposed. And that often leads to that like, I don't know what happened, I was doing so great and now I'm back to square one. That's a tough one. Anyway, thank you for asking the question, Lindsey, because you prompted a thing that I really wanted to talk about. If amygdala doesn't get the messages of surrendering and always goes in overdrive, it is because it is established at times. Okay, so Ivan is, it's a big comment, so it'll take up the whole screen. Ivan is asking, what's the guarantee that my amygdala will get it? Well, the problem is that you're asking for a guarantee. So listen, why is your amygdala different than anyone else's? I would challenge the assertion that, well, default from my amygdala is to be in high anxiety mode all the time. Okay, well, the default for many people in the room right now is that way. But does that mean that that's hardwired in that way? Like, if you're asking somebody whose theoretical orientation toward this problem says that this is partially a problem that we learned to have, can there be genetic predisposition? Yes, can there be experiential and background issues? Of course there is. But generally speaking, it's the continued avoidance cycle that turns the volume up on your amygdala to where it is now. So the whole idea of like, well, it's always an overdrive because often that means that you're doing the things and you're like, okay, I'm gonna surrender so that it drops, but it doesn't drop. Like when you surrender, it feels worse. It feels worse. So in the beginning of this video, I said when Dr. Week said to float and accept, people think that it makes you feel better. Okay, I'm accepting. It's not working. It's not accepting, is it working? Floating, is it working? Surrendering, is it working? Because they think that if they surrender that somehow instantaneously the volume will come down. But that's not true. That's not the way it works. It will feel worse for a little while. It will probably feel worse for a little while. So that's the best answer I have to that. What's the guarantee that you will get it? Well, stop demanding that she get it and allow that lesson to take its course. But it's hard to learn the lesson if you evaluate how you feel every time you do it. Like when I was doing exposures, I knew that I was gonna be afraid like I expected it. So you have as much control of death as you do over birth. Cool. How long did it take you to become sensitized? I went through that already. Sensitized. We should surrender to intrusive thoughts but not negative thoughts, such as I won't get better. Okay, hang on a second here. This is where it gets tough. Now you wanna start talking about each individual thought that you don't like and it's hard for me to address everybody's individual thoughts. But I won't get better. I'll be like this forever. I can't bear this. That's a distorted thought, right? So I can't address every single thought you have because I don't know you and that wouldn't be really right. But the thought I'll never get better is just a thought like what if I stabbed my dog or what if anxiety makes me go crazy? There's no difference there. There's no difference. So yeah, that's a thought that I would tell you to surrender to. So when your brain says, what if I never get better? Then the answer would be like, I don't know. Guess we'll deal with that if it happens. Like that's surrender as opposed to, oh my God, I'm thinking I might never get better. How can I guarantee that I will get better? So that those are thoughts that you would in fact surrender to. Hope that helps. But again, it's really hard to address every single thought because I don't know. Do you think the CBT process is part of surrendering? Yeah, it is. So CBT is such a crazy term these days. What we called CBT in the 1970s, for instance, and even the early 1980s is, I mean, it's still there, don't get me wrong. Old school CBT is still there. So some of the old school, like fact checking, thought challenging, thought records, which some people are still doing today, trying to change your thoughts by not arguing with them, but challenging, using logic to change the content of your fear is not a thing we really wanna rely on much anymore, but some of the techniques there can help to frame the surrender, yes. So when people do thought records or people do fact checking, I thought I was gonna die today and I didn't die. I thought I was gonna die again and I didn't die. I was sure that I was gonna die and I didn't die. That's a useful thing because when it comes to the surrender moment, you can fall back on those and they can inform your action. So yes, some of those old school techniques can be helpful. This is good. Thank you, Daniel, for saying this. That is correct. Everybody's different. Don't put a time on it. That's super not fair. Don't engage with them. That's how you surrender. Very good. Thank you, Maureen, for asking that question. So, this is always a tough one because I never wanna make it sound like I'm telling you that you're wrong for taking meds. Like, listen, you know my stance on meds. I don't wanna talk about it because it just gets into a never ending debate that will just never, ever end. It's taking rescue meds during panic fighting. If you're asking my opinion, yes, I think that in the end it is because I believe my theoretical orientation toward this problem and you are free to disagree with me and I would not take it personally. I don't believe that there is actually a full recovery when we put conditions on our alkanists. Now, does that mean that the person who is terrified to fly, who has a panic attack on the plane once a week, nine months when they have to fly there once or twice a year, should not take his annex? No, I'm not saying that at all. Like, those medications can be tools. They can have their place. They're not inherently evil. However, I think every time we use them to get away from this thing that we think is too much, we basically reinforce the idea that it was too much. So I think you'd have to say, okay, I did it this time, I took my rescue med. That's okay, you didn't do it wrong, you didn't commit a crime, you're not kicked out of the community, but what can I learn from that? Did the rescue med save me or did it make me just feel like I was safer? Which is really what we're after anyway. So just know what you're looking for, I think, and try to take the lesson out of it when you do use the meds. But I do believe that in the end, it's really difficult to hang on to, that's that binary function, like you gotta surrender all the way. It's really hard to say, I'll go this far, but if it gets past this line, then I'll take my meds or go home or avoid, it's gonna be really hard. People wind up frustrated and I just don't want you to wind up there. You live your life any way you want. It's just really difficult and heartbreaking to see people get frustrated because of that sort of thing. So I hope that helps. Okay, hey, Jem is here, what's up, Jem? Haven't seen you in a while. I'll never forget the day when I believed in every part of me that I couldn't do the contrast MRI scan and we were on the phone and I did it. I even came out of the MRI and went back in. So you're like, that's that thing. You are convinced that you cannot do these things, it is too much, it will never work. Like I can't do it, I'll be overwhelmed and invariably that turns out to be wrong almost every time. I can't think of a time when it shows to not be wrong. And you might say, well, the time that I bailed says that I was wrong, I couldn't handle it. Well, no, it only says that you bailed. It doesn't say what would have happened if you had stayed or then you would have felt really bad. So, okay, let's see here. When this is over, I'm gonna listen to either Tiger do it. I'll tell you what the better one is and that is burning heart. So if you really wanna do that, go listen to the Rocky V, which was the one with Ivan Drago. That's four or five, listen to that soundtrack. That's like all the goodness without any of the drama. Like we're just gonna go right to the montages, the inspiring music, go to that one. Let's see here. If you don't have health anxiety, I got a couple more minutes and then I gotta end it. If you didn't have health anxiety but yet you were panicking driving, what was the secondary anxiety you had about driving? If you didn't have health anxiety, those are two different things. I'll try to clarify that really quickly in the time that I have left. People think that when we talk about health anxiety, we're talking about a pervasive worry about health conditions that don't exist. People who fear panic or panic attack, that's not health anxiety. That's the fear that the panic itself is somehow a danger to you in that moment, but that's not actually health anxiety. So the fears during panic all come down to, it'll be too much. It'll be too much. I won't be able to handle it. I won't be able to save myself from number one death, number two loss of control, loss of sanity or somehow a psychotic break, or number three horrible humiliation and embarrassment and shame that you'll never recover from, or that will make you feel so awful that it will overwhelm you. Those are the top three things. So you have to really ask yourself, well, it's the panic itself or the high anxiety while I'm driving itself that I worry about. The practical fear for people is that it will take them over and therefore they won't be able to drive the car. But I've talked about this before, the whole driving anxiety thing. I would almost guarantee anybody in the room that has driving anxiety, okay, get it, thank you. That's a great comment, best comment today. All right, I get it. I would almost guarantee everybody in the room with driving anxiety has had at least one instance when you were sure that you couldn't control the car, yet drove home at high speed like Mario Andretti or Dale Earnhardt or pick your favorite driver, I don't know, I don't know drivers, which tells you something. All right, let me scroll onto the bottom here because I don't think I have any more. I don't have much more time than this, let's see. Ronnie says, you ever worry about researching anxiety, made it worse? No, for me it didn't, but I do complete, you know what, but it was different. I was doing my recovery work like 2007 through 2008, 2009, like that time. The internet looked very different. There were resources online, but not like we have now. You have so many things available to you. So that was never a problem for me but I do recognize that it can be a problem for many people. I should start getting keeping points to comfort, saying I'm better, but I am not. So just be careful about over-consuming anxiety information. So it doesn't, after a while it doesn't help you. Yes, when I surrendered to my mom's car, that was the first time I did it all the way. That is 100% true. And I think we're in. Okay, no easy way out, yeah, that's in that one. That's in the one with Ivan Drago too. I know way too much about Rocky movies, way too much. Moira, I will answer that one too. Looking to start working with a good mindset coach. Is this a good idea? Okay, you asked, so I will answer. No, no, no, not a mindset coach. This is not a mindset problem. If you are in fact terrified of the things that you think and you feel that your thoughts and your bodily sensations are too much for you, they're terrifying to you. You have to run from them. You can't let yourself panic. That is not a mindset thing. So I would urge you to maybe not look for a mindset coach because a mindset coach has no idea and no training with an anxiety disorder is. And so much of this stuff, it looks at face value like this is a mindset problem, but it is not a mind, it's partially a mindset problem, but a mindset coach is not where you wanna be. A therapist that specializes in anxiety disorders is ideally where you want to be. A therapist, a qualified counselor that has training and anxiety disorders is where you wanna be. I know it looks like a mindset problem, but you cannot just fix this by changing your mindset. Trust me on this, because I know way too many mindset and life coaches that think that they can do this and wind up causing all kinds of problems. Are you guaranteed to have a problem with a mindset coach? No, I can't, I don't know you and I don't know the mindset coach, but since you asked, that is my opinion on that. All right, I hope it helps. Becky pops in from Twitch because she forgot to pop in. Thank you, Becky. You keep my Twitch streak alive like I owe you for that. So we are out, guys. Thank you for coming by today. I appreciate it. Always like to spend the hour with you. We'll come back again next week. Oh, next week, Jenna is gonna come. Jenna Overbaugh. We're gonna talk about what's the difference in GAD and OCD? What's the difference in panic disorder and GAD? Like we're gonna talk about all that cool stuff. Jenna is awesome. So come by next week. It's gonna be great. And that's it. I will see you guys next week. Thanks for coming. As always, we're out. Later.