Listener Questions
Bryan answers listener questions on morning and evening anxiety, panic symptoms, and the loop of overthinking — drawing on the ARM method and a real question pulled from an online anxiety forum.
Show notes & transcript
In this listener-questions episode, Bryan tackles the anxiety and panic symptoms that flare in the morning and evening, plus the exhausting loop of overthinking and rumination. Drawing on the ARM method — and the historical approaches that have helped people recover for decades — he offers practical, been-there answers. He even heads out to take the pulse of an online anxiety forum and pulls a real question from the community.
In this episode
- Why anxiety and panic so often spike in the morning and again in the evening
- What to actually do when symptoms run on a schedule
- Breaking the loop of overthinking and rumination
- A real question pulled from an online anxiety forum — and Bryan's answer
- How the ARM mindset applies to the messy, day-to-day reality of recovery
Key takeaways
- Morning and evening spikes have understandable causes — and they respond to the right approach.
- Overthinking is a habit the nervous system can unlearn.
- Real recovery shows up in ordinary moments, not just good days.
Full transcript
This is the Anxiety Recovery Mindset Podcast.
Welcome to episode three of the Anxiety Recovery Mindset Podcast. This is Bryan, author of the book and host of the podcast. Last week, we talked about Dr. Claire Weekes. That was a fun episode to record, and I hope you enjoyed it.
We did promise towards the end of last week's show that we would take some questions this week, and we will do that, and we'll do it in a couple of ways. One is we will take some direct questions that were offered up through email, and I also thought it would be interesting to just find ourselves a sampling of questions out there from different places and see what people are asking. Where are people right now? Where are they in their recovery?
What kind of advice are they receiving? What kind of advice are they giving? I thought it might be helpful to jump into some of these spaces and do a bit of a stealth mission where we are going to read some of these questions, and we'll try to answer them here on our own. I will give my best interpretation of what I think the right answer is, and I'll try to qualify that as much as I can by referencing my own experience, what you can find in my book, but also going back to some of the classics and some of the established foundational concepts that we know work.
So what I'll try to do here is read the question. I'll give a little information about where it came from, and we will try to break it down little by little and see if we can provide some help. Now, of course, the original author of the question may or may not ever hear this, but it will certainly provide some value, hopefully to those who do. Because honestly, over the years, I've found that so many of these questions are the same one being asked in different ways that I think we can provide a little value by addressing even a few of these per show.
And by the way, that's okay. That's not a slight on anyone. I've asked the same question probably hundreds of times when I was in my struggle. This is a common phenomenon, and a lot of times we need the question answered in a way that's catered to our way of thinking or our specific set of symptoms.
One of the traits of the anxiety sufferer is we feel that the experience is intensely personal. We feel that no one can understand what we're going through, and whatever set of circumstances surrounds our struggle, let's say it's a specific set of mental symptoms or physical symptoms, or really any identifiable set of circumstances that pertain to how we go through this thing, we tend to cling to this as the only way that matters. You can hear a story about someone who has a different set of symptoms, and maybe you relate to it, but quite often people don't. This is why repetition is so important.
This is why coming at this from different angles for people is so important. Eventually, as we start to recover and we understand the concepts fully, it does sink in that this is really all the same thing. I always talk about this being under the same umbrella. That's a concept that we get in time, but it does take work to get to that point, and answering questions is one way to do that.
Hearing questions answered repeatedly, listening to how those who have recovered address these same situations with different details, this all adds up to eventually the process is landing and people rewriting the way they think about these things. So let's start off with a listener question. This was sent in by Janice, and the question is, "I'd like to know why my symptoms are so worse in the evening. I mean, I'm bad in the morning too, but the balance and dizzy are worse in the evening.
And why do my emotions drive the panic and anxiety? Emotions are like memories. I mean, it can make me spiral quickly. That's why I use mindfulness a lot." Okay.
A lot to unpack there. I'd start off with the fact that I find this question particularly interesting because my anxiety was much worse in the morning, and by much worse, I mean so bad on some days that I felt like a different person by 7:00 or 8:00 PM. And there is quite a good biological explanation for that. So if she were asking why things were worse in the morning, it's a little easier to explain using simple scientific things like our cortisol is highest in the morning because the body's preparing us to wake up.
Our adrenaline is higher. All the stress-related hormones are higher in the morning. So before you wake up, your body is already prepping you to get up. This is exaggerated greatly, of course, when you are highly sensitized.
So if you're in the middle of an anxiety disorder, you will wake up quite often at your very worst. So I find this question interesting, and I remember back in the day when things were really at their peak for me, I would have traded any day. At least that's what you always say, right? Whatever symptoms you have, you always think that it would be better if you had the other one.
So taking a shot at this, she says she's also bad in the morning. Well, this is a sensitized nervous system. If you're bad in the morning and you're bad at night, good chance that you are just sensitized overall. So what do we mean by that?
Well, a lot of you may know, so I'm covering ground for some people that may be a bit redundant, but a sensitized nervous system, which was an expression made popular by Claire Weekes, but used by nearly everyone nowadays, and Jim Folk over at, Anxiety Center talks about sensitization and hyperstimulation.
This is a state of extended stress on the body, which essentially sets into the nervous system. When we are exposed to long-term stress, so that can be worry, lack of sleep, life stress, different types of traumas, these things can eventually put the body in a state of such hypersensitivity that our reactions become extreme. So, we can have symptoms that are impossible to explain. We can have, of course, as you know if you're listening to this, you've probably had them.
You can have panic. You can have stomach issues, burning skin,
Lists of hundreds of things, and we'll do a show on symptoms at some point. But when I read this, I hear someone who has a sensitized nervous system. Now, why is it getting worse in the evening for her? Well, my guess is that for her, the morning does not present as much of a challenge.
Perhaps she wakes up, has her coffee or her tea, whatever she does in the morning, and gets on with the day and has a bit more in front of her to keep her occupied. Again, I'm just speculating here. But most of the people who I've read who have more problems later in the day do so because the mind is looking towards the evening as a problem area. So, you have this snowball building throughout the day.
If you have a symptom that is a little more difficult later in the evening, and she mentioned dizziness, for example. So, let's say dizziness is the prime symptom that she's having. Dizziness is a symptom that I've had, and it's highly reactive to stress load. So, the level of sort of your, your fuel tank, your gas tank, how full or empty it is, is very influential on what type of spinning, dizziness, wobbliness that you may be.
Is wobbliness a word? Wa-wobbliness? Whatever you're experiencing, this can be influenced heavily by just where you are energy-wise, right? I can still find myself these days, and I'm, you know, relatively recovered, but I can find myself occasionally feeling a little wonky or dizzy in periods of long stress, especially if lack of sleep was involved.
So, if she's sensitized and the end of the day brings her sort of most tired state, well, now she's got a mind that is starting to anticipate this. And she says, "And why do the emotions drive the panic and anxiety?" Well,
Sh- the emotions are fueled by the fear of what's coming. So, she wakes up in one state, perhaps it's not great, but it's not that bad, and works her way into sort of this, dread of the end of the day coming and bringing these symptoms that she really doesn't like. So, this is not unusual for somebody to have the end of the day be... Well, I shouldn't say that.
I, I think it probably is less usual because of the physical factors that we mentioned earlier do, I think, lead most people to struggling a little more early in the day, but not everyone. And my guess is that in this case, it is driven largely by anticipatory feelings, looking forward to having to sort of be with herself at the end of the day. That's not easy. You know, I remember before I went to bed when I was at my worst, really having a lot of rituals and things that I did to get myself ready because you knew you were gonna be finally at that quiet time with your thoughts, racing thoughts, perhaps physical symptoms, and you really couldn't hide from it at that point.
And that's okay, by the way. You know, as we'll talk about, that's where you want to be. But as you're getting used to this process, that can be a difficult time of day.
And I was, I suppose, lucky enough to start bad, but have things gradually get to where I almost felt normal sometimes towards the end of the day. And if it's the opposite direction for someone, I can see how that would lead to an anticipatory, situation. So, my advice there would be to consider all of that in the solution. So, if you know that the end of the day may be more difficult for you, then we want to begin to be able to welcome that as part of the daily rhythm.
We wanna be okay with those feelings coming. We wanna clear the space for them. We want to do our very best to not judge them and allow them to be there. The more we can make an agreement with those symptoms that they are okay, we don't have to love them.
If they don't feel great, we don't have to lie and say that they do, but we don't have to solve them. We don't need a plan for them. We don't need to explain them or Google or research or necessarily journal about them. We need to be okay with them being there to do what they need to do.
We need to remove as much respect from them as we can, meaning we don't need to place them in a place of reverence or fear. We need to do our best to allow them to come, do what they need to do, and continue our preparation for bed. Easier said than done, but the more we do this, the more the pathway is rewritten in the brain that this is okay. This is a nervous system that is kicking off some symptoms.
It's kicking off some electrical energy. This is how it's expressing it. The body's sensitized and it had a long day. I'm a little wobbly towards the end of the day.
It's okay. The more safety we can attach to that, the more likely the brain is to begin to calm the nervous system and this snowball, instead of building up through the day, begins to level off. In long term, the mind is now seeing those symptoms as no longer a threat, but just a normal occurrence that we can calmly allow to happen and then pass. So, that's a great question.
Anyone who has symptoms at a certain point of a day, I certainly did. I will at some point do an entire podcast on mornings because it was such a conundrum for me. I couldn't figure it out. I couldn't believe it.
Even now, looking back, it, it is astonishing- How my mornings started. But we're all different. We're all biochemically different, and this is how this goes. We are all going to experience things in our own way, and I will address that at some point.
I'll do a whole show for the morning anxiety people out there, and we will have a run at that. Anyway, thank you, Janice, for sending that in, and we will move on to the next question. So up next is a question that I found out in the wild. I infiltrated a couple of anxiety forums, and what I found in these places was worse than what I had expected.
I found enough to fill an entire episode. So we will do that in a future podcast. We will take a jog through these sites and look at some of what is going on there. And while of course I have empathy for anyone who is struggling at those places, wow, it is-- the landscape out there is frightening.
The information is generally not good, and I really do feel for anyone who has to resort to those, types of forums to find information. Now, there are a few exceptions, and we will talk about those very soon. For now, I will read the question that I found. And the title is, "I'm new and have been struggling with anxiety." So I'm going to read this as is, so forgive me if I stumble a bit with, any grammar or syntax issues that are in place here.
Okay, it says, "When I'm trying to relax, my thoughts keep going. I wish I knew how to turn them off, but I don't. Sometimes I don't even know what emotion I'm feeling anymore because there are so many at the same time. I feel sad because I'm tired of struggling.
I feel anxious because I don't know when these feelings will get worse. I feel frustrated because I wish I could make them stop. I feel guilty because I don't like that the people who care about me have to see me struggle. I feel angry because I'm tired of fighting this battle every day.
Then I feel guilty for being angry." So this goes on for a while. And I don't say this to belittle the person. We are wordy. By we, I mean people who tend to struggle with this condition.
We are not concise when we write. I'm guilty of that sort of before and after, so I'm in no position to judge anyone for being wordy. But this goes on and on for a while. Again, I can see myself in this writing, and I am not judging.
But in that, you sort of see what happens when people feel the need to keep expressing and expressing and expressing. You can sort of tell what's going on underneath there. She finishes by saying, "I compare myself to the person I want to be, and when I can't reach that version of myself, I become disappointed in myself. I put so much pressure on myself to be okay with that when I'm not okay.
I feel like I've somehow failed." Okay. Again, so much to dig into here. But I'll bet if I could get responses from people in real time here, which I can't because this is a podcast, a recorded podcast, I'll bet if I gave you a minute to stop and think about what the biggest problem here is, most of you would come back with a version of the same thing. And as you read this, this is a person who is intensely introspective.
They are analyzing their feelings about their feelings about their feelings. They are three, four, maybe five levels deep of analyzing how they're feeling about how they're feeling, and then they're anxious about the analyzation of what they're doing. I-- it, it's hard to even put together. So what's the solution here?
Well, when I read this, the first thing that I think is this person has to find a way to detach from this, even temporarily. This is an overactive mind that has turned inward on itself. Dr. Claire Weekes talked about that a lot when it came to obsessive thoughts, where the mind becomes fatigued due to sensitization. The brain patterns and the thoughts start to follow predictable patterns.
We start to analyze those patterns. We start to look for danger. And you can see this person is not only looking for danger in their life, so they've got an anxiety condition, but they are starting to look for danger in their own ways of analyzing what's happening to them. This is not that unusual.
I just found this particular letter to be, or post to be unique in that it summarizes this version of mental struggle that people have so well. So as we look through this couple of paragraphs, and I've shortened it, but we have, "I'm trying to relax," "I'm trying to turn them off," "I don't know what emotion I'm feeling." So there's an analysis there to make sure that he or she, I believe it's a she, makes sure she knows what emotion she's feeling. "I feel sad. I'm tired of struggling.
I feel anxious.
I don't know when they'll get worse." That's anxiety about something happening and getting worse. "I feel frustrated. I feel guilty." So we're up to t-- I was counting with my fingers. We're at seven or eight there.
We're approaching ten in the first two sentences.
This person needs to work with someone who can help them understand that the solution to all these things is to, first of all, allow all these feelings to happen to the best extent she can. Again, going back to the prior question, that doesn't mean it's going to be pleasant. It means that it's going to create a little bit of space for the mind to find peace. So even if it's five minutes here, thirty seconds there, as you pull away from this constant analysis, which is extremely fatiguing to the mind, the mind will start to ease.
The fear level will start to drop. The problem is this happens very slowly, and it happens under the surface. This isn't something we see results from right away. So the person who is scanning for danger to try to solve this problem that's happening in her mind at the time wants to see results.
So she is scanning and looking and digging and asking and posting. She wants immediate feedback. Well, it doesn't work that way. At best, she may get feedback from someone in the group who says something like, "Hey, I have this too," or, "It's okay," some sort of reassurance, which is, of course, also what she's looking for.
But if a solution is what we really want, it often means doing things that are counterintuitive and difficult, at least at first. So allowing these feelings and emotions to happen instead of trying to unpack every one of them doesn't feel good right away, and it may not feel good for a day or a week, but slowly over time, this is what opens the space for the mind and the body to do their repair work. The nervous system does its repair work, and as you do that, you're also training your mind to understand, "You know what? I don't need to babysit these feelings every few minutes.
Doing so has not helped me, and I've learned that not doing so has actually created moments of peace here and there." So if you can stick with that, you will eventually get the feedback from the nervous system that says, "That was the right thing to do." And that's the information that this person likely needs. I hope she gets it. And if you're having that kind of struggle, I hope you'll consider that. I know that from my own, overthinking, which was extensive and still can be at times, and I know that from studying this for the better part of 15 years, reading some of the classics, and speaking with people who have recovered.
Again, so much of what you're going to hear me talk about on this show is just information that I've been so lucky to have people impart on me, and learning how to allow those thoughts to be there and not have the feeling that they need to be tended to every minute is a skill set that benefits us long-term in anxiety recovery. So hopefully working through these kinds of questions together is beneficial. I find it to be very interesting. I hope you do too.
So many of these questions are, again, just modified versions of the same thing. I don't say that to belittle the importance. I say that because it's true. All of this can be boiled down to a few basic concepts, and the more we do that, the more it simplifies for us.
So as we hear other people tend to their own struggles, we hear ourselves inside of that story. I've even noticed over time that some people who are going through their own struggles have learned enough to actually be able to offer pretty good advice to other people. I was one of them. I wasn't really through the woods yet, and I found myself understanding all these concepts well enough to help people who were sort of lagging slightly behind me.
Now, eventually I went on to recover, but it's a slow climb, and we are all picking up this information little by little as we go, and I feel like it's really useful to take note of other people's stories, see if you hear yourself in them, and try to work through their situation, apply it to your situation, and continue to learn and continue to develop your awareness of these concepts. Of course, I talk about all of this in the book. If you don't have it and you'd like to, please go to amazon.com. The book is called The Anxiety Recovery Mindset.
It's available in paperback and Kindle. You can also visit the website at theanxietyrecoverymindset.com. I hope you'll consider dropping by and at least signing up for the email list because we are going to be taking questions like this more and more. I really would like to get direction for the podcast from you, the listener.
In doing some prep for this show, I found myself somewhere between shocked and sad when it comes to the information that's out there in the general public. People who are truly in the throes of this condition need good info. They need to be surrounded by people who understand what they're talking about, and they need to be able to access people who have really recovered. And frankly, most internet spaces and social media are just not good homes for that kind of thing.
So please, drop a line, get involved, say hello, let me know what you'd like to hear, and I promise you it'll be taken into consideration.
That's it for episode three. If you made it this far, thanks again for listening. Next show, we're going to take a couple of more questions for sure, and I'm working on lining up a couple of guests, which I think would be really interesting. So tune in for that, and we'll all learn something together.
Until next time, take care.
