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Healing from chronic or disordered anxiety. How do we do it? Do we do it at all? This week on The Anxious Truth we’re talking about healing from anxiety because this is a topic so many people want to hear more about!

For full show notes on this episode:
https://theanxioustruth.com/296

If you are going to scroll through any of mental health social media today, you WILL see content that includes the word “heal”. Is that bad? Well, not necessarily. I’m not here today to be the anxiety word police, but given that our use of language and ability to think symbolically is one of the things that gets us into anxiety trouble to begin with, its is worth looking at the words and terms we use from time to time.

Disclaimer. If you love the word heal because it strikes a chord or feels like it really applies in your situation, then I am here to support you on that. Keep using it. Heal all day long. Heal like nobody’s business. Go for it. Everyone gets to use whatever language they want to use, and we all get to respect those choices.

But that being said, if you have been working like a dog to heal from anxiety and can’t seem to get anywhere with any kind of consistency, then maybe we need to take a look at that healing target. The words we use create the rules we feel we must follow. Our words create our internal algorithms and those algorithms do influence how we see ourselves, and the world, and they do influence how we behave. Since behavior change is really the tip of the spear when overcoming an anxiety disorder, we should probably look at this.

We all want to heal when injured or wounded. That’s not even a question. But when we are working on overcoming chronic or disordered anxiety, is healing what we’re trying to do? There are three primary issues with the word heal that I want to throw out there today for you to chew on.

Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee. This is never required, but always appreciated!

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

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What if you could transform your relationship with anxiety simply by changing your approach? This week on the Anxious Truth, we tackle the misunderstood phrase "sitting with anxiety" and reveal how it doesn't mean you have to be physically still. We'll break down the true essence of this concept, emphasizing the importance of allowing yourself to experience anxiety without trying to escape or fix it. Whether you're at work, running errands, or simply relaxing, the key is to let anxiety be present without interference, tailoring your approach to fit your unique circumstances.

Discover how embracing anxiety in the midst of your daily routine can actually empower you. We’ll share insights on how to navigate anxiety during meetings, phone calls, or even in bustling environments like a busy mall. By engaging with your life and tasks at hand, even when anxious, you’ll learn to manage these feelings without them dictating your actions. Tune in for a discussion that shifts the focus from achieving calm to accepting the experience of anxiety, ultimately leading to a reduction in fear over time. This episode promises to reshape your understanding and management of anxiety in a way you might have never considered before.

For full show notes on this episode:
https://theanxioustruth.com/295

For more anxiety and recovery resources:
https://theanxioustruth.com

Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee. This is never required, but always appreciated!

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text.

HELP! My panic attacks come totally out of the blue! I don't know how to handle that!

For an anxious person struggling with the process of anxiety disorder recovery, it can sometimes seem like panic attacks strike completely randomly and "out of the blue", where no clear source of anxiety can be identified as triggering the attack. This can be frustrating, especially if you've been working overtime to manage your anxiety and prevent panic from happening.

But there is no such thing as an "out of the blue" panic attack. In the context of disordered forms of anxiety, it is the resistance to panic and the urgent attempts to manage and prevent it that become the precipitating factors leading to future panic attacks. Trying hard to guarantee that you won't panic any more? Paradoxically, this is going to have the opposite effect, almost guaranteeing that you will likely experience more panic down the road.

When one is anxious about being anxious, or afraid of being afraid, the trigger for the most recent "out of the blue" panic attack can be found in all the panic attacks that came previously. The hidden trigger is in the checking, scanning, evaluating, and guarding against panic that allows a single sensation, thought, or feeling to trigger a rapid sequence of events that creates what appears to be a random, unexplainable instant panic attack.

It's actually good news that there are no true "random" panic attacks. We can use that information to make adjustments and change direction toward where we want be in recovery and in life.

For full show notes on this episode and other anxiety/recovery resources:
https://theanxioustruth.com/294

Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee. This is never required, but always appreciated!

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

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Thinking and feeling are important to humans. Thinking and feeling about thinking and feeling is important to anxious humans!

In the world of recovery from disordered or chronic anxiety, what we thinking and feeling about thinking and feeling - our metacognitive beliefs - play an important role in the process but are often overlooked.

This week on The Anxious Truth I'm pretty exhausted so we're going to take a look at that to highlight some important recovery lessons. Why is being so exhausted, drained, and emotional not leading to anxiety and panic? Because my recovery experience taught me a new way to think and feel ... about how I think and feel.

Let's take a closer look at what we think and feel about what we think and feeling. Metacognitive beliefs can sometimes be the glue that keeps us stuck to our symptoms, thoughts, and big emotions. Recognizing when strong beliefs about thoughts and feelings are leading us astray can be an important first step in challenging those beliefs and using the principles of acceptance, tolerance, surrender, and exposure in the recovery process.

For full show notes on this episode including a full transcript:
https://theanxioustruth.com/293

Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee. This is never required, but always appreciated!

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

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You’re in the middle of a huge wave of intense anxiety and fear, or maybe you’re experiencing a full blown panic attack. Someone with all the best intentions and trying to be helpful instructs you to identify five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste.

This is the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise. If you’ve followed along with me for any length of time you know that I don’t speak too kindly about grounding exercises. But today we’re going to revisit 5-4-3-2-1 and grounding exercises in general.

What if there is a way to use them to our benefit rather than having them blow up in our faces?

For full show notes on this episode:
https://theanxioustruth.com/292

Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee. This is never required, but always appreciated!

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text.

Among people that struggle with chronic or disordered forms of anxiety, there are a wide range of individual primary fears or concerns. When you ask a large enough number of our friends what they are afraid of, you’re going to get a pretty wide range of answers primarily because everyone experiences fear, worry, concern, and anxiety in a slightly different way.

But hidden within this apparently wide range of specific and individual fears are some common thread and themes.

This week on The Anxious Truth we're exploring four common themes found when a few hundred anxious people expressed the fears and worry they're struggling with right now.

• Fear of Immediate Physical/Medical Threat
• Fear of Immediate Psychological/Mental Threat
• Fear of Being Overwhelmed or Unable to Adequately Cope
• Obsessive Fixation on Specific Feared Outcomes

For full show notes on this episode:
https://theanxioustruth.com/291

For more anxiety and recovery resources:
https://theanxioustruth.com

Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee. This is never required, but always appreciated!

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text.

People struggling with chronic or disordered states of anxiety often find themselves in a situation where they are hyper aware and therefore overwhelmed by sensory input.

Non-anxious humans are so oblivious to what we sense that we sometimes pay to have people tell us to notice what our eyes, ears, noses, and skin are sending and perceiving. But for anxious people dealing with chronic or disordered forms of anxiety, this is not a problem at all. We have the opposite issue. We are constantly paying very close attention to sensory input. We are hyper aware.

Why are we hyper aware? Because we MUST evaluate ourselves constantly to stay ahead of our triggers. Anxious people are continually checking themselves for physical sensations that don’t seem right, thoughts that might be going south, or emotions that they won’t be able to handle. If you’re here today listening or watching, I would wager a large sum that a good portion of your time is spend checking on yourself, then evaluating the results of that internal scan to to see if you’re OK, or you have to start taking evasive action to stay safe … from yourself.

Episode 290 of The Anxious Truth provides a reframe on sensory overload and overwhelm that ties the experience directly to an overactive, overprotective threat detection and response system. This reframe and explanation could be helpful in informing new action that helps us learn the experiential lessons we need to learn in recovery.

For full show notes on this episode:
https://theanxioustruth.com/290

For more anxiety and recovery resources:
https://theanxioustruth.com

Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee. This is never required, but always appreciated!

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text.

Sometimes the toughest opponent we have in anxiety recovery is the belief we can't outrun. This episode challenges you to question the certainties that have defined your battle with anxiety. Is the intensity of our emotions a reliable compass? Is our self-knowledge as accurate as we believe? We'll explore the potential for a fleeting moment of power even amidst the storm of fear, and how reassessing our core beliefs can unlock new possibilities. The thought that what was once unthinkable can become thinkable, what felt impossible can indeed become possible. Reflect on the resilience hidden in your stories and perceptions as we navigate through the complexities of anxiety together.

For full show notes on this episode:
https://theanxioustruth.com/289

Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee. This is never required, but always appreciated!

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.