The ARM Listening Lounge

This is the Anxiety Recovery Mindset Podcast.

Welcome to episode five of the ARM podcast. My name's Bryan. I am the author of the book and your host. This week we're gonna do something a little different. We will do a mini pod, so it'll be a bit shorter, but hopefully still informative and enjoyable. But very quickly before we get into any topics, I wanted to let everyone know that we now have a downloadable two-chapter version of the book for free. It's the first two complete chapters in PDF or EPUB format. So if you just wanna look at it on your computer or phone, you can click on the PDF link. If you'd like to bring it into a reader like a Kindle or Apple Books, that's easy to do by grabbing the EPUB version. Again, that's the first two chapters for free. You can sign up using the link in the description or the show notes, depending on where you're listening to this or watching it. Drop your email and we will send it right over. So we'll do a quick one today, but I wanted to jump into a topic that has been at the forefront of a lot of social media hype lately. This trend has undoubtedly crossed your radar, and it's one that most of you are gonna have some familiarity with. I'm talking about nervous system regulation. Now, if you come from the anxiety recovery world or have any background in doing this research, even the word nervous system was something that you probably didn't use on a regular basis before you started reading about this stuff. After all, for most of us, there's not a lot of reason to care. The nervous system does a great job on its own. It always has for most of us, and if it doesn't, we would address that thing specifically at a doctor. But again, I'm going to imagine that most people listening to this have not paid a lot of attention to their nervous system for the majority of their life. It's not a daily topic. It's not something they thought about. Now, if you've learned a bit about recovery, you have discovered that this is a very important system in the body, and it is the genesis of most of the things that bother us in anxiety disorder. So the people that I generally speak to in these podcasts, in the videos, in the book, are people who have had disorder-level anxiety. Does that mean everyone who's listening to this is in a terrible place or has been? Not necessarily. There may be people listening who just have mild anxiety or possibly some daily worries and anxiety and things they don't want to turn into serious issues. Regardless, I go back to the point that most of us probably just didn't spend a lot of time thinking about our nervous systems before endeavoring to recover from anxiety. So with that as our backdrop, knowing that there's this important system inside of our body that regulates so many of the things that define our daily lives, you would probably think that I would be happy to see a societal shift towards paying attention to the nervous system, this notion of regulating or balancing the nervous system. This sounds like a good thing, and if you told me this was going to happen years ago, I probably would've said, "Yeah, that sounds great." Of course, we want more awareness on what's happening inside of our bodies. We want people to be able to understand those of us who have had experiences with anxiety. It would seem overall like a positive trend, and to some extent, there are plenty of positives about it. But I am gonna try to differentiate and point out a few things that you may be seeing out there that could have you scratching your head. So we are gonna take a little jog through social media right now. I'm not gonna name the site because it doesn't matter, but I'm gonna click on a post here, and the post says, "Five simple steps to reset your nervous system. Step one, hold the back of your head with your left hand. Step two, look to the right without turning your head for 20 seconds." I don't know why it's 20, but that's what this person has decided. "Reset and look straight." All right. "Switch hands." So now we're gonna move to the right hand. "Hold the back of your head with your right hand. Look to the left without turning your head. Hold for 20 more seconds."

So, when I read that to you, does that sound like good medical advice? It doesn't to me.

And this is the type of thing we are seeing a lot of as this trend of tending to our nervous system becomes popular. You're going to see a lot of things regarding the vagus nerve and how we need to massage it and roll our eyes and sort of tend to and mend different parts of our neck and head and engage in these rituals. So let's see what else we can find out here. Here's something called nervous system regulation beginner chart. Box breathing. Okay, there could be some benefit to different types of breathing patterns. Five, four, three, two, one grounding. I've certainly heard of that one. Cold splash, shake it out, self-holding, activate. Okay, that's enough of that one. And we'll look at one more here. That one's too small. I can't read it. Nervous system reset coloring book. So there is a coloring book if you would like to do that to reset your nervous system. Ironically, that may be one of the better ones we've stumbled upon here, for reasons that I will explain later.

Here's 10 ways to calm the vagus nerve. If you don't know what the vagus nerve is, it is essentially the longest cranial nerve in your body. It serves as what they're calling the main highway of the parasympathetic nervous system. Digestion, heart rate, mood — it carries information to a lot of places. It's a central passageway of the nervous system, for a non-scientific explanation. And this, of course, has become a center of focus with a lot of the social media hype and some of the pseudoscience. There have been some real studies done on stimulation, very carefully and medically and for different reasons, that have shown mixed results. But thus far, there's really none of this tending to the vagus nerve that has any practical proof in the clinical settings that I've read. That doesn't mean that there never will be, or that there's not some exception. But from a zoomed-out perspective, this notion that we have to massage or tend to this specific nerve in our body is an unproven concept that a lot of people are running with, and they may be having what they feel like is some success with this via placebo effect or who knows. Everyone responds differently, but this is another one of these sort of hot trending items right now. So going back to what we were reading before, this is the vagus nerve morning routine. Probably don't need that. Sipping warm herbal tea, gentle neck stretches. Those sound fairly reasonable.

Anyway, I think you're getting the idea. Oh, here's this one. I have to read this one to you. "This one-minute brain hack can instantly reset your nervous system," and this is backed by neuroscience, this post says. "Ease mental tension, lower stress, and reboot your brain in sixty seconds." So it's that easy, I guess. What you do is you fill a bowl with ice water, you submerge your hands in it for thirty to sixty seconds, and you think of one to three things you are grateful for.

And look, I'm sorry to... If anyone listening is doing any of this, I have done much worse in my efforts to find a way to feel better in the past. You name it, and I've tried it. None of these types of things would have been off-limits for me early in my recovery. And I don't really begrudge anyone for trying something as benign as putting their hands in a bowl of ice water. Now, do I believe that it has any scientific backing or any practical or proven backing in actually achieving the kind of things that people want to achieve who have anxiety disorder? No, I do not. So that brings me to the real point here that I want to discuss, and you don't have to take my word for this. You can do your own research and do it however you want. You can use AI, you can use Google, you can use medical text, whatever sources you'd like to use. There is no data that shows we need to regulate or manage our nervous systems whatsoever. Now, can our nervous systems become dysregulated? Yes, they can. We use the term sensitization. Dr. Claire Weekes made this term popular. This is a state where the nervous system is overreactive. It is oversensitized. It is hypersensitive to stimulation due to long-term taxation, stress, overwork, overuse. This is a real state, and to say that we don't want to remain in that state is an accurate statement. It is the underpinning of anxiety disorder and many other chronic conditions that people feel. So it is a real concern to have a sensitized nervous system. The question goes back to: do we have to have a heavy-handed approach to sort of forcing the nervous system into submission? And the answer is clearly, clinically, no, we do not. When I say clinically, I'm not a doctor. I'm talking about what the medical text says, and you can check it for yourself. Even doing just the slightest bit of research as I read this here, I pulled this up on Gemini, and it says, "Interference risk. Overthinking your involuntary functions can cause stress. Hyperfocusing on your heart rate or breathing patterns triggers the exact anxiety you are trying to avoid." So again, we have a concept of wanting to balance the nervous system, which is well-meaning, and then we have methods which turn out to be the same methods that get us in trouble in the first place. It becomes about doing. It becomes about managing and thinking about and putting more effort into and watching and keeping an eye on it, and it becomes this job, and we try to sort of force it into a place of submission using ice cubes and hanging upside down and anything people could think of. And again, I'm having some fun with this, but I'm not judging anybody, because I've certainly tried worse, like I said.

What they do talk about in all of the science, and what the greats like Dr. Weekes and others have talked about, is the nervous system does need to regain a state of balance, but the way we do that is by getting out of the way. We do not need to teach the nervous system how to do its job. It knows exactly what to do. It has evolved to keep you safe. It has evolved to run a number of different systems in your body. It's working right now as you listen to this podcast. It is doing multiple tasks at the same time. Our nervous systems don't have to be reprogrammed. They do need the space to do their own work, however. So when you talk about rebalancing your nervous system, are there things that can be useful? Of course there are, and those things are a lot of the things we've talked about — you've heard some of the better teachers talk about stress reduction, anxiety reduction, working on behavioral patterns, working on mindset, which primarily is what we focus on here. There are plenty of things you can do to create the space for your body, your mind, your nervous system to do what they know intrinsically how to do on their own. This is to find a state of balance, equilibrium. Your body is always striving for this state. This notion that if we don't force it in a certain direction it won't be able to find this state is not correct, it's not medically backed, and quite the opposite has been proven by those who follow the right processes to overcome stress and anxiety. Yes, reducing stress is absolutely a smart thing to do, as long as we are doing it in a way that's not creating additional anxiety. We don't want to worry about trying to eliminate the worry. We want to give the system space to do its own work. It knows what to do. And as much as we like to be proactive in our recovery and our healing — and in some facets of fitness and different areas like that, there are more hands-on things that can be beneficial — letting your nervous system reset itself requires much more of a passive approach than it does an active approach. These aren't my ideas. These are medically grounded, proven concepts. And if you speak to anyone who has recovered from anxiety — and that's what we're doing here on this show, we're talking to people who are trying to pull themselves up from very difficult situations, often having experienced this for months or even years — nervous systems do become overtaxed, and they do need to find ways to let themselves recover. But that's the key: let themselves recover. Let the body do what it knows how to do. Give the body space, get out of the way, and you will see it work its magic. And I hope this fills you with optimism, because the message here is that you don't have to have a magic formula to recover. As we talk about in the book, this is a simple process. It's not an easy process, but it doesn't require a complex set of difficult skills to implement. It requires commitment to a few basic principles that, more than anything, require time and patience. And the good news is we can all do that if we put our minds to it.

So that's it for episode five. Hope you enjoyed the chat, and we will have some great episodes coming up soon. A couple of interviews are in store, so stick around for more information about those. Don't forget about the free two-chapter book available to anyone who signs up for the mailing list. Link is in the description or the show notes. Jump on in, get the free book, and you can even make some suggestions for future podcasts or ask questions for the show. Thanks again for listening. Appreciate it. And until next time, take care.

This is The Anxiety Recovery Mindset Podcast.

Welcome to episode four of the ARM podcast. My name's Bryan, I'll be your host, and I am also author of the book. A quick plug right up top, if you haven't checked the book out, go to theanxietyrecoverymindset.com. You'll find a link there.

You can also just visit Amazon, and it is available in paperback and on Kindle. So if you missed last week's episode, please go check it out. It would be episode three, and it's on all platforms, including YouTube. We took some questions from people.

We answered some emails, and we also went into the wild and dug up a few questions of our own. It's always interesting to take the temperature out there a bit and see how people are reacting to their condition, what kind of questions they're asking, really just get a read on how people are perceiving things these days, what the overriding opinion is, what kind of advice is being offered, and it is a mixed bag, I will say that. Not without some good information. There are some people out there that really understand this and are offering some quality advice, even on these forums, which I generally don't recommend.

But you can run into some complications out there because the opinions being offered are not always coming from a place of experience and/or having done the work to understand this. A lot of times it is something that may have helped one person or something that someone heard helped someone else. For example, you may have someone say that you need to change your diet because they've heard from some person that certain foods can agitate the nervous system. While there may be diets that are more conducive to helping us through what we're going through, that's generally not the place I would recommend people look at first.

It's one of the mistakes I made early on because I was trying everything, and it's the kind of thing that typically shows up in a place like a message board because it's easy to package and pass on. It sounds like it would be correct, but in real-world application, I don't know anyone who has recovered from a true anxiety disorder by simply changing a few things in their diet. That's just one example, and again, I'm all for a healthy diet, but the point here is to illustrate that information is freely available, but it's not always dependable and well-researched. And as I've said on this show and in the book, if nothing else, what we're gonna try to do here is give you information that has been vetted and proven.

So we are going to focus on methods that we do know work, things that people have used to recover, and methods that have stood the test of time. So with that said, I thought this week we could build a bit on this concept of information gathering, and by that I mean what is happening out there in the world as far as how people are perceiving anxiety, what kind of information is the general public trading back and forth, and I thought a good way to do that would be to take a jog through the news. So we're going to do a different type of show today, and we're gonna dig around, read what's happening out there in the news, and see how it can apply to what we discuss here. I'm gonna focus on a couple of main articles I found.

One I thought was great and the other a bit more questionable, and I found it extremely interesting how no matter how much time passes, there seems to be some consistent themes on how the public is presented the idea of anxiety and anxiety disorder. By the public, I mean people who may be experiencing this, going through it, looking for help through mainstream media sources, and those who are making and presenting the news. Those are two very different entities with two very different objectives. One of them is a group of people who are looking for the truth, looking for help, and trying to find a way out of what they're going through.

The other is an organization that needs to write a story that will capture your attention. That doesn't mean that it's not well-intended, but it means that the objectives are different. And when we're working with different objectives between two parties, as you can imagine, the needs of either one may or may not be met at any time. So with all that said, I wanted to start with an article from

An outfit called Science Alert. Let me see if I'm saying that right. Science Alert, and it is titled, "Humans have a sixth sense you have probably never heard of, and it appears to be key for mental health." The article goes on to start by saying, "We all know that humans have five senses, but a growing body of research shows that we have a sixth one that almost no one talks about, and it may be just as important for our well-being as any of the others. It's called interoception, the body's ability to sense and interpret its own internal signals.

This sense detects things that seem invisible but are happening constantly. Your heart rate, your breathing, your hunger, the temperature running through your body," and it goes on to quote, "'Although we don't take much notice of it, it's an extremely important sense as it assures that every system in the body is working optimally,' psychologist Jennifer Murphy of Royal Holloway University of London says." It goes on in the next paragraph to continue by saying, "But researchers are now beginning to realize that interoception goes beyond simply regulating our biological needs and may play a part in a range of mental health conditions, including anxiety, depression, PTSD, and eating disorders." So I doubt that anyone listening to me read this right now neglected to see that coming. It is very interesting, and this sort of sixth sense that they're talking about here mirrors the defense system that we've talked about a lot. We talk about in the book the alarm system that the body has developed over our evolution to keep us safe from predators and weather, any sort of threat that we may have faced.

So I find this interesting, and of course, none of this is brand new to us. We, as people who have or have in the past suffered from anxiety disorder, certainly understand how in tune our brains can be with what's happening in our body. But I think the interesting thing here is to think about how this translates into an overall sense of perception of the sort of unknown. And I don't mean that to sound supernatural, but I mean feeling things as they're happening, if not slightly before they're happening.

This is a sense of anticipation, so of course, we're feeling things in our bodies that, are happening at the moment. But I've noticed back in the day when I would have panic attacks that eventually I got good enough to figure out if I had a panic attack, and it seemed to come out of the blue, if I took a few minutes once I settled out and really thought about where my mind was and what I was doing in the prior ten or fifteen minutes before that,

You could almost always nail down some sort of thought process or happening, some small event that your mind interpreted a certain way and sent you this massive defense system that we call a panic attack, and we don't like it. But, it's very interesting how all of these senses are working for us all the time, probably working without our awareness, and really it is a bit of a superpower. And to me, that opens up a new way we can think about what's happening inside of our body. We have this heightened sense of awareness, and that can be called hypervigilance by people who study this, and it often does go into a place that is unhelpful.

We are analyzing, we are too aware, we are too tuned in to what's happening, particularly inside of our own bodies. But at the same time, as we learn how these processes work, it's worth appreciating that this is really an impressive system, and it is built to keep us safe. So while they do go into disorder territory at times, and yes, we do have to unwind them when they do, it's worth appreciating this immaculate sense of awareness and self-protection that the body has put in place. And my view on that is if we can learn to use it for good, sort of like, again, the superhero that's been given this special power, I do think it portends good things for us going forward in recovery.

The article finishes by saying, "What we can say for sure is that humans are much more sensory than we give ourselves credit for, even if we don't have a name for those senses as of yet. They're playing a bigger role in our wellbeing than we realize." And then it quotes, "Better understanding of all of the factors that affect interoceptive ability may be important for someday developing better treatments for mental health conditions." That makes sense, and I think really at the core, that's what most of the quality recovery programs, tracing again all the way back to Dr. Claire Weekes, have done. They're looking at what the body is doing, what it's sensing, what it's perceiving, and then how that's translating into the mind, the prefrontal cortex, the front of the brain, the newer brain, for lack of better scientific terminology. I'm not a scientist.

But the more developed part of the brain has a choice in how it interprets and reacts to what's happening, and that reaction is ultimately what decides if we move through it peacefully and allowing it to happen or if we move into a place where anxiety disorder can snowball. And of course, we talk about all that in the book, and we'll continue to talk about it week to week in the podcast. So that's a fun article. Interesting.

I will try to link it in the description, so check out the show notes or description of whatever platform you are listening to at the moment. Hey, this is Bryan with a quick reminder that if you're enjoying the show and you'd like a bit more, you can check out the book. It's available on amazon.com. You can also visit the website at www.theanxietyrecoverymindset.com.

You can jump on the email list and receive exclusive articles, early access to blogs, and other free goodies. Okay, and that brings us to the next article I wanted to look at today. This one is called, first of all, it's from US News & World Report, and it's called Health Conditions That Mimic Anxiety. Is It Something Else?

Dun, dun, dun. Okay, let's get started. The subtitle is "Experiencing panic, a racing heart, or tremors? Discover the medical conditions that mimic anxiety and learn how doctors tell them apart." So this is a recent article, to the time of this podcast.

You may be listening to this in the future, but my point with mentioning that is that I didn't have to dig far to find this. I did a couple of basic searches, and this type of article always comes up, and it came up again, and it was written within the last week. So I'll read a little bit from it. I'm not going to go too much into depth here because there's some things that may upset some people, and frankly, I would rather discuss the article's concept more than the article itself.

So, but I will start from the top here. It says, "Anxiety can cause very real, very physical symptoms, racing heart, shaking hands, shortness of breath, and stomach pain, for example. But these same symptoms of anxiety can also be signs of other serious medical conditions. Anxiety and anxiety disorders, including GAD, panic disorder, specific phobias, and social anxiety disorder, are among the world's most common mental health disorders." So far so true.

According to the WHO, anxiety disorders affected 359 million people worldwide in 2021. That's probably accurate. It's probably more than that because lots of people don't report it and are not treated for it. The article goes on to say, "Confusing the two can have major health consequences.

Assuming you're experiencing anxiety when a more critical issue is at play could potentially delay life-saving care." So here we go.

"Figuring out whether your symptoms stem from anxiety or a physical illness can be challenging, but getting an accurate diagnosis is the only way to get on the right treatment path." Well, this is correct. That much we agree on. "Read on to discover the medical conditions most often confused with anxiety, how experts tell them apart, and the important red flag symptoms to watch out for."

Okay, we're not going to read on to, learn about all those. I will come back to the article a bit here and show you how they finish up, but essentially, this is a long laundry list of basic anxiety symptoms like a racing heart or shallow breathing or nausea, things that are extremely common, and it is attempting to make connections between those things and what I would consider to be abnormally rare explanations for them. So I think it's probably worth stopping right now and making it very clear of what I'm not saying. I am not suggesting in any way that anyone should not seek proper medical attention when they have a symptom, particularly if it's the first time they've had the symptom, and particularly if it is alarming and feels like it's off the grid, so to speak, for what a normal stress symptom would be.

In fact, in the book, the first thing we talk about is one of the most effective ways to address recovery is by going deep on the front end. So as soon as you start experiencing these things, going as deep as you need to go to prove to yourself that what you are experiencing is panic and anxiety driven. That means lab work. That can mean MRIs.

It can mean, for a lot of people, weeks, months, possibly longer. It is important to rule out structural causes first. This is literally step number one in the book, so I don't want to come across as someone who is saying that we should ignore what our body is telling us. Quite the opposite.

That is the first step to moving through panic or anxiety or any related stress disorder of this type. But, and you could tell there's a but coming, this article represents a perfect example of how anxiety tends to be presented in the media, and I don't know why this is. Actually, I probably do know why this is. This article is scary.

It has a scary headline. It is concerning if you read it. If you have anxiety symptoms, you are definitely going to read this. If you're on the fence, you're probably going to click on it.

It's designed to get clicks. Now, the problem is, is that it's also defensible on some level for someone to say, "Yes, but you shouldn't ignore a racing heart because it could be XYZ." Of course, no one is saying that you should ignore anything. The problem I have with this type of media, which is so common in mainstream news coverage of the condition, is that these articles are always geared towards the worst case scenario, and they are almost never geared towards the overwhelming vast majority of people who think they have medical conditions but don't. So a good way to test this theory out, if you have access to your local doctor, a GP, a family doctor, someone you can ask a quick, simple question, ask them this: Do you more often find that people come in with symptoms that turn out to be anxiety, or do you more often find that people who have been diagnosed with anxiety actually have true underlying health conditions?

I know what the answer to that is going to be, but please go research for yourself. Again, only anecdotal. I don't know if there have been any large scale studies on this, but specifically with the population that I am attempting to reach here with what I do, there are far more people who are worried about the what if than there are people who haven't given adequate attention to that. In other words, most people suffering from anxiety, by design, by the nature of what anxiety does, are already so analytical that they have gone down every road with every symptom and had it checked out to the most extreme degree possible.

I don't know anyone with anxiety disorder who lets things go, who overlooks symptoms, who overlooks how they feel. Now, in the general population, it may be true that people may ignore some symptoms, but that's not what this article is purporting to be true. This article is presenting the notion that your anxiety may not really be anxiety. It may be something dangerous, so you should click on this article.

Now, I will throw in a rare exception to the norm for people who are suffering with anxiety is the health anxious person. There may occasionally be people who do not seek the proper care and do not search out symptoms because they fear going to the doctor, fear getting testing, fear what they'll find out. That was me at certain times in my journey, although I'd had enough initial testing to probably protect me well enough, but there were times that I probably could have gone to the doctor, and I didn't because of health anxiety, just not wanting to get more tests done. This is an exception, and if that's you, that is something to consider, and we do not want to let things slide for reasons of being fearful either.

Remember, going back to the first step, the rule is we exclude structural things first. We get a clear bill of health first, and then we address anxiety. So again, this is a hot button topic for me because I remember being in a state where it was so hard to find good information. You would click on a news story like this hoping to find some bit of uplifting information or guidance through the disorder, and instead what you got was something that fed the very worst case scenario.

We call them the what-ifs, right? Again, Claire Weekes talked about this at the beginning of her book. What if? These are the two words that get us all in trouble with anxiety disorder.

And I just find it hard to believe that so many articles focus on this tiny percentage of dangerous outcomes that could be found from somebody who has already been diagnosed with a specific mental health struggle. So anyway, this article goes on to finish by saying, "Anxiety versus physical illness, how to tell the difference. One thing psychiatrists look for when distinguishing between symptoms of anxiety disorder and other medical conditions is what came first, the feeling of fear or anxiousness or the physical symptoms." I would actually agree with that. I think that's a fairly reasonable way to start the discussion.

I think that's a practice we can use at home as we are in recovery and we have something new pop up. That was actually a litmus test I used to give myself quite a bit when I would have a new ache or pain or sensation. I would ask myself, "How afraid of this am I? Was I afraid before this happened?

What is my reaction to this? Is it disproportionate?" That is a good sort of home method to determine what you're dealing with. I actually think that part is good. It goes on to say, and this is quoted, "If someone says, 'I'll suddenly start to have this feeling of doom or fear, then my heart races,' well, then anxiety clearly brought that on.

In contrast," he explains, "if someone says, 'My heart races, then I get really scared I'm having a heart attack,' then it's more likely a separate condition and not anxiety." This is where we disagree. That isn't true. In fact, anyone listening to this right now who has had physical symptoms can attest that that's not true. Yes, it can be a good method to use your level of fear and anxiousness around a symptom to gauge what it might be.

It is not accurate to say, however, that because your heart raced first and you felt the fear second, that this indicates it must be a physical problem or a true medical issue. You can react fearfully because of anxiety to any bodily symptom. In fact, that is part of what creates anxiety disorder itself. We react to things that happen in an extreme way, in an exaggerated and hypervigilant way.

So I do not agree with that. I think a better way to determine the difference between a true physical structural problem and anxiety is to think about when it happened, to understand the difference between a few palpitations, your heart racing a little bit, and a heart rate that may be out of the normal range that anxiety can cause. I'm not going to go into those things. If you want to research those, they're easy enough to find.

But just to say that because I became scared after I felt a symptom, then it must be a physical problem, that's not accurate. And that's my opinion. But you know, I get to say my opinion here. We'll finish up.

It says, "Individuals with pre-existing medical conditions are at higher risk for panic disorder because they often fear their symptoms are physically dangerous. In contrast, healthier people tend to view occasional panic attacks as isolated incidents and move on with them without lasting worry." That's also an interesting take on this. I would agree that healthier people might be more willing to overlook a panic attack, but I was at peak physical condition when I had my first panic attack. I did not overlook it, and that was more to do with my psychological wiring, my learned behavior, my personality, things that are just sort of baked into us, and I had to learn a new way to address them over time.

So having good physical health does not guarantee that you will react properly to a panic attack. Conversely, some people who are healthy may find that they can skate right through a panic attack or two. I would also imagine that it's true that someone could be out of shape, not particularly healthy, but just not care enough to pay a lot of attention to a panic attack that happens. Perhaps they're just not very attentive to their body in general.

So I don't think that that's a good blanket to put over things anyway. In any case, it's a long article. It finishes-- Let's just read the end here to see if there's anything salvageable from it. "Anxiety isn't all in your head.

It's a full body experience driven by evolutionary survival mechanics." That's true. "However, because its symptoms can mimic other health conditions ranging from thyroid disease to heart arrhythmias, you should never simply write off your symptoms as anxiety." Okay. Again, that is, in a vacuum, a true statement. If it's the first time you've ever felt a symptom and it's extreme and you have not had it looked at, it is medically responsible to have it looked at.

The problem that I have with media like this is it is directed towards people who have anxiety already. Most of those people are hypervigilant, they are very analytical, and they have had their condition diagnosed. They have been told, "You have anxiety. It is going to produce symptoms.

They can look like this." I had symptoms for years and years that mimicked all of the ones they talk about here, and they were totally harmless in the end. Wrapping up, always start with a proper health screening, and then investigate individual symptoms that need to be investigated, get a checkup, get a full body scan, whatever you need to do to prove to yourself that your body is functioning optimally. This is how we begin going through the condition. And once we have those things, we are required to eventually begin to accept the protest that our body is sending to us.

In other words, the symptoms, the discomfort, the occasional racing heart, the nausea. It's understandable not to like these things, but it is our responsibility to investigate these things early on to prove to ourselves they are not structural and not concerning, and then move on with our lives. This is how recovery takes place. Articles like this, in my opinion, are not written with the best interest of the audience in mind, and I wanted to point that out because as negative as this may seem on this article, I do feel like this can help us as we go forward and we encounter these types of stories to keep things in perspective and take a proper viewpoint on how to proceed.

So I hope you found that information to be useful or at least interesting. I do think there was a lot of great information in that first story, and there was a lot to learn in the second article. We are going to encounter stories all the time, and I think I'll try to make it a regular feature on the show to bring up a few articles and really take a look at what's happening out there. I want you to have the best tools that you can possibly have every day as you head out into the world and you go through your recovery.

So stick around and we will do more of this in the future. That's gonna do it for episode four of the Anxiety Recovery Mindset podcast. Thanks for hanging out with us, and we will be doing another episode next week. The topic remains TBD at this point, but I'm looking into a couple of guests, and I hope to have more information on that soon.

Please visit the website, theanxietyrecoverymindset.com. Jump on the email list and send us a message. Let us know what you'd like to hear. Ask any question you'd like to ask.

We will read it on the show. We appreciate you listening and want to make the show the best we can for you. That'll do it. Talk to you next time.

Until then, take care.

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.

This is the Anxiety Recovery Mindset podcast.

With utter acceptance, letting it come, even going toward, going out prepared to take what will come. Let one's body do what it wants to do. Don't check it. Don't try not to panic.

Don't think of something else. Into it willingly. Just as in Australia, when the big waves come, we don't stand up against them. We get dumped if we do.

We go under them willingly.

Welcome to episode two of the Anxiety Recovery Mindset podcast. That was Dr. Claire Weekes with some sage advice on anxiety recovery and a nod to the surfers out there. If you've read the book or listened to episode one, you know how important Claire Weekes is to the work that we've done here and the concepts that we're trying to convey. I don't know if she was the first person to teach these kind of philosophies, but for my money, she was definitely the most impactful and the first one to really package this for public consumption in a way that was simple to follow, believable.

She taught with a certain kind of confidence behind what she spoke of that really hits home with somebody when they're in a vulnerable state. And when you're going through a disorder-level bout of anxiety or panic, the last thing you need is uncertainty. And I remember the first time I heard her voice on recording. She has this great Australian accent, of course, and even though my grandmother didn't sound like that, you get a grandmother vibe from her, this sort of lived experience that you can hear in her voice, and that confidence comes across as very reassuring, which is valuable to somebody in a high-anxiety state, particularly somebody who doesn't know what to do.

So we're gonna talk a lot about her and her philosophies going forward because they're woven into everything that we do here, and I've said before, I mention in the book that I think they are woven into nearly every anxiety recovery program out there. So in some ways, I feel like every anxiety program that works is going to be a repackaged version of the kind of things that she taught 60 or so years ago. The things I write about in my book are no different. They're modified, and they're viewed through the lens of time and experience and other people's experience, but they do draw back to the same concepts that she taught a long time ago, the kind of things that you heard in the prior quote we just heard.

So I thought it might be useful to bring her into focus for this second episode as a way to continue to help lay the groundwork for what you might be hearing in future podcasts. And I know that if you tuned in for help trying to manage your anxiety, you may not have thought you were signing on for a history lesson, so I won't go too deep into this, but I thought, if nothing else, I could just read off of her Wikipedia page a little bit for those of you who might not be familiar. So Claire Weekes was born in 1903 and passed away in 1990. She was an Australian general practitioner and health writer.

She had also had an early career as a research scientist working in the field of comparative reproduction. Weekes is considered by many as the pioneer of modern anxiety treatment. I certainly believe she was. Weekes found that many of her patients suffered from various anxiety disorders, and it gives a list here, panic, generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a number of others.

This is interesting. Weekes avoided the term anxiety state as she felt it was too medical. Very interesting and something that we've written about and we will come back to again and again. So she replaced it with nervous illness instead.

Weekes was concerned with the severe long-term effects of anxiety and panic disorders and the effect they had on the lives of her patients, and listen to this one, as well as the high failure rate of typical psychiatric treatments. Very interesting, especially psychoanalysis, which many sufferers had tried. Instead, Weekes developed her own unique treatment program. She noted that the patients did not suffer from anxiety problems because they had flawed personalities or traumatic childhoods.

Another big one. Another big, big, big clue right there. Rather, the problems were caused by patients having a habit of fear avoidance, bingo, made worse or caused by a responsive, sensitized nervous system. There's so much to unpack in this paragraph alone.

She was critical of both Freudian approaches and attempts by behaviorists to desensitize their patients by using relaxation and breathing techniques. This is so ahead of the curve for what was going on at this time. I would have to look here and see exactly the year she was practicing, but I believe it was early '60s. Yes, her book came out in '62.

So it, we have to understand, in 1962, not only was it somewhat of a rarity for a woman to be pushed into the center of, a medical issue like this in the public eye, but to take on a lot of these, sacred cows like Freudian analysis, psychoanalysis, and the psychiatric approach, it was just about unheard of back then. Even now, we're still having these arguments today, and here's someone who did the work and figured out back then what, in my opinion, those who really understand anxiety recovery now know. We've had a long time to study her work. We've had a long time to look at data.

We've had a long time to look at the effects of medication, positive and negative. And we've come to conclusions having decades to study that she figured out in a short time. And the way her work stands up today is fascinating. I honestly haven't read through her history in quite a while.

And to see this again, understanding how the modern recovery programs are structured, it's just mind-blowing. And I will continue to focus on her work here as these concepts were definitely instrumental in helping me develop the steps that I suggest for people to overcome anxiety and panic disorder, possibly modernized a bit, but really broken down in a way that I hope people can relate to, particularly people who may have been at this for a while and have somewhat of an idea of what they're doing but are having a hard time making the concepts land. One of the things I tried to do in the book was to take these concepts that may sound simple and help them find a way to sink in. Because over the years, I discovered it really comes down to how this information is packaged for most of us.

And unfortunately, that's not going to be exactly the same for any two people. But there are some commonalities that I do believe are fairly universal. And really, it's just about coming at this from enough angles that one of these resonates with a reader. My hope is that someone will hear or read something and think, yes, that's it.

The light bulb goes on and suddenly this starts to make sense. So returning to her bio, she did a series of talks with a British TV show in the 80s called Peace from Nervous Suffering. And this was also turned into a book. She has another book called Hope and Help for Your Nerves, which is what I would recommend people start with if they haven't read any of her work.

Her audio is also available on iTunes and you really can't go wrong, honestly. So it describes here how she became interested in this topic. And it says here, Weekes described her own battle with nervous illness in her final book in which she explained how she began suffering from anxiety. At the age of 26, she was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis, which caused her to become anxious and introverted.

Understandable. Weekes' anxiety lasted for two years and gave her valuable insight into nervous illness. So this is how it became personal for her. And her course through it is, again, just fascinating because there were so many ways she could have gone at the time.

And I'm guessing she tried a lot of those avenues and they didn't work for her, which is a familiar story for a lot of us. The difference is she turned it into a career and essentially a legacy of helping people overcome this condition. Hey, this is Bryan with a quick reminder that if you're enjoying the show and you'd like a bit more, you can check out the book. It's available on Amazon.com.

You can also visit the website at www.theanxietyrecoverymindset.com. You can jump on the email list and receive exclusive articles, early access to blogs and other free goodies. So it says here, Weekes described in her book the three main pitfalls that lead to nervous illness. They are sensitization, bewilderment and fear.

She explained that so much nervous illness is no more than severe sensitization kept alive by bewilderment and fear. What she means by that is the long-term impact of stress on the body. Sensitization has sort of become a medical term in recent years, but she really meant it to say if you've been anxious, if you've been under stress, if your body, your mind, your nervous system have been facing this form of taxation where you are a worrier combined with a lifestyle, potentially combined with how you were raised or genetics or yes, even life experiences, these things set into the nervous system, not in a way that is necessarily medical, but in the way that if you don't sleep for a couple of days, you get tired. It's not something permanent, but it's something that does happen, right?

And sensitization was a term that she coined, as far as I know, to describe this process. And when we are in a highly sensitized state, we become hyperreactive to basic things. So small stressors hit us harder, impacts from things feel more severe, and symptoms can indeed become very severe and very difficult to understand and difficult to bear. So that state was one she focused on because it's not something you can flip off automatically.

And the bewilderment part really comes down to our inability to understand this when it first comes on. I have this as one of my steps, and I believe it's step two in my book. I should probably know this, but it is about really understanding the mechanisms. The first step one in my process is understanding what's happening to you.

So not believing that you have a medical condition or some sort of foreign entity doing this to you. But the second step is really understanding the mechanics and having a basic idea. You don't have to be a research scientist, but you do have to have an idea of how the body works. And sensitization is one of her core principles that she used to help people understand what had happened to their body, their mind, their nervous system, and was creating these unbelievable symptoms.

So it says Weekes analyzed fear as two separate fears, the first and the second fear. This is another one of these concepts that everybody in the world has borrowed. A lot of people may not know it or they may not admit it, but this comes back to her work. She explained that first fear is the fear that comes reflexively, almost automatically.

The patient usually immediately recoils from it, and as they do, add a second fear to the original fear. Examples of second fear are, oh my goodness, here it is again, I can't stand it. It's the second fear that keeps the first fear alive, keeping the sufferer sensitized and keeping them nervously ill. These are her words.

This was, again, 60 years ago, and incredible how relevant they are now. So to wrap up our overview on Dr. Weekes, I thought it might be fun to read one of my favorite quotes. It says here, Robert L. DuPont describes in his book, The Anxiety Cure, in 1998, that in 1983, he asked Weekes if she had ever had panic disorder.

She replied, yes, I've had what you call panic attacks. In fact, I still have them. Sometimes they wake me up at night. DuPont responded by saying he was sorry to hear that.

He described Claire Weekes looking back at him in shock as she responded, save your sympathy for someone else. I don't need it or want it. What you call a panic attack is merely a few normal chemicals that are temporarily out of place in my brain. It is of no significance whatsoever to me.

So it's easy to see why this is one of my favorite quotes. You have this woman who was willing to stand up against an entire industry, stood up against her peers, was brave enough to speak out and change the way we look at this condition, but also brave enough to stand up to the condition itself at a time when information was not freely available. She wasn't just speaking from scientific literature. She wasn't speculating.

She had been through this. She stared it down and she led the way into a new era of viewing this kind of phenomenon happening in the body as being normal, a completely healthy response, a disordered response for sure, but a healthy response. As we mentioned earlier, if you didn't eat, you would become hungry. If you didn't sleep, you would become tired.

And if you have long-term stress and taxation on the nervous system, you can get symptoms and those symptoms can be scary. They can be overwhelming. And she was the first to come out and recognize this as something that is manageable, can happen to normal people, is not indicative of some sort of mental illness, did not require being traumatized or having any kind of particular childhood adversity, but rather a normal, uncomfortable, natural occurrence that can happen to any one of us. So you can see the relevance she has to the topic and what we're doing here, the book and really the movement in general of trying to steer people towards understanding these techniques that are so successful and have existed for quite a long time, despite not being talked about in all corners.

It's funny listening to some of her old audio here. I can find myself getting a bit choked up as I remember just how impactful this work was for me. And I'm sure it's been that way for countless other people. If you ever want to be inspired, you can go and read the reviews of her book on Amazon, pick any book, and you don't have to take it from me.

I wrote a book. I'm selling a book and I hope you'll check it out. But there's no book I would ever recommend before hers when it comes to understanding what's going on with this topic. So I hope you enjoyed this little trip down memory lane with Claire Weekes and learned a few things.

We'll try to do this with some of the other impactful authors out there, old and new. If you have any suggestions along those lines, please feel free to share them. You can get in touch with me by email. Visit the site at www.theanxietyrecoverymindset.com and we have a contact form there.

You can fill it out and drop me a line. Make a suggestion for the show, a topic, a question. Check in anytime you'd like. Once again, the book is also on Amazon, The Anxiety Recovery Mindset.

I hope you'll check it out if you haven't already. Next episode, I thought it might be fun to answer some questions. So feel free again to send those in. We'll answer those in real time, live on the podcast and see how that goes.

Thanks again for listening. And until then, take care.

And now a last word. It doesn't matter how big a coward you may think yourself at this moment or how long you may have been ill. If you follow the advice I've given you, however haltingly to begin with, if you never let yourself completely despair and are always willing to try once more, to practice once more, you will recover. I assure you of this.

This is the Anxiety Recovery Mindset Podcast. Greetings, and welcome to episode one of the Anxiety Recovery Mindset Podcast, AKA the ARM podcast. My name's Bryan. I am the author of the book by the same title, and I will be hosting this podcast.

So for episode one, I had big plans. I recorded a long podcast. I edited things together, really tried to stay organized and present something that would make sense for a first-time listener of the show and maybe someone who read the book as well. I've since changed my mind, and we are just gonna wing it.

I figure this is what we're generally going to do going forward anyway. We're gonna get on here. We're gonna talk. I'm gonna try to answer questions.

I'm gonna ask questions. I don't have all the answers. That's part of the beauty of this is we are gonna attempt to go through this and learn together and draw the information out of this topic together the best that we can. So with that said, what I decided to do instead of a structured podcast for this first episode here was more of an introductory show, and this would be a chance for me to cover some topics that I think people might wanna hear about early on.

In particular, it's probably a good idea to start with some basic questions about why we're doing this, what we're gonna be covering. How did I even end up in a position to want to do a podcast? I'll try to cover as many of these things as I can early on, but I thought the goal that would be best for the first show here is to give you a reason to wanna come back for the next one. I'd like to build some engagement through this because this is really about the listener, what you may be going through, what you may have been through, and the steps that you can take to find your way out of this thing.

And by this thing, I mean anxiety disorder, stress disorder, panic, anything you may be going through at the moment. We're gonna try to cover a little bit of all of it. I know what my history with this has been, but I wanna learn about yours, and really, this is gonna be driven by what the needs are out there. The reason I wrote the book was partially because I felt like there was such a lack of good, quality information.

When I was first going through this, it was a while ago. Doesn't seem like things should be that different, but even if you go back 10 years or so, the access to information back then was so different than it is now. There were far fewer things like YouTube channels, less good books. There were certainly no AI that anyone was using reliably to kind of aggregate information or data on any of this.

So it was really a different time, and that forced me to do a lot of research on my own. And doing that research, I would not recommend for most people. It probably did me more harm than good in a lot of ways, but one thing that did come out of it was this deep understanding of what people go through. Some of the science behind this, I'm not a scientist.

I'm not going to claim to be. I won't spend a lot of time in scientific neighborhoods, but there are some basic concepts that I feel comfortable enough discussing. I'll disclaim everything and let you know I'm not a doctor. None of the things you're gonna hear on this show are going to be medical advice, and in fact, we're going to cover how to clear yourself early on if you're going through some of this, as that's a very important step.

So I thought it might be good to sort of reverse engineer this first show, meaning I will answer questions that you haven't asked yet. How am I gonna do that? Well, I'm going to guess. I'm gonna take a bit of a look around, and I'm gonna draw from my history of knowing what kinds of questions people generally wanna know early on.

I'll talk some specifically about this podcast and the book, and then we'll get into some actual meat and potatoes anxiety-type issues, and we'll try to lay the groundwork for future shows. I've got a lot of good ideas. I've got a lot of ideas I think that could be very helpful and even a little fun. So with that said, let's dive into a few of these questions and give a little background and a little setup for what might be coming on future shows.

And we'll start with what I'm calling question number one. What is this podcast about? Well, the title gives it away a bit, but I'm hoping to do something a little bit different with this show. I'd like to approach some of these topics from a different angle.

There's a lot of information out there, and this is going to be a theme that you hear me repeat over and over, whether it's about podcasts, whether it's about YouTube or books, anything, even, even to some extent what we're taught in school about this topic. There's a lot of information out there. You'll hear me refer to it as noise. In fact, the subtitle of the book is Cut Through the Noise, and you can see on the front page there's a, a figure there, and the person is holding their ears, sort of blocking the noise out.

That is, of course, indicative of what I feel it's like to be suffering from anxiety and having so much coming at you from so many directions. You can see that the figure is covering their ears. You see what looks like the beginning of a peaceful state. And I think for me, that was when things started to settle down, when I was able to break through all of these different protocols and methods and hacks and opinions, and then you have doctors pulling you one way, friends, concerned relatives, people who love you pulling you another way.

It's very difficult, and there are not a lot of solid foundational structures that really teach similar proven strategies, things that people have gone through that you can find recovered people who say, "This worked for me." You can find a lot of people out there that say they got some relief from doing this or some relief from doing that. They tried an exercise. They took a medication. They took a supplement.

Most of these things are temporary. And none of them seem to be consistent. As it turns out, there are some consistent things that you can find among people who have recovered, and that's what we're gonna try to discuss on this show primarily. The focus of everything we do is going to be pulling that information together, putting it in one place for you, and giving you a structure to follow and a mindset to put yourself into that you can practice consistently that has proven results.

These things were drawn from people who have recovered. One of the most consistent things you're going to hear on this show, in the book, in anything that I'm associated with, is I want to use proven techniques. I wa- this is what I wanted to know when I was going through this. I didn't want opinions.

I wanted to know what worked, and I wanted to hear it from people who implemented those things themselves. Personally, for me, I needed those things to be natural because that's the course that I was going to follow, and this show, the book, it will be about natural methods. So if you're looking for something that involves medications or some other sort of protocol, that's not what I'm going to be doing here, and, I wish you luck. But if you are interested in doing this work on your own and trying to find organic and natural ways through this, they do exist, they are real, and that's what we're going to be doing here on this show.

So to wrap up the question number one, why are we doing this? I went through a very long struggle, longer than I needed to. I got to a good place finally. I'm very happy about that.

And so much of what I learned was passed on to me, in fact, most of it, from people who were not doctors. They were not scholars or writers or therapists. Nothing wrong with any of those people, by the way. Some of them are giving great advice on the topic.

But I found in my experience it was the day-to-day living, the day-to-day habits of the everyman, the person who was just like me, working a regular job with a family, and they found their way out of it by doing the right research, ending up in the right place. And a consistent theme among those people was that they were always willing to share it, and I thought that was so great that these people were passing down this information that really could be lost in the noise that was out there if they wouldn't have done so. And not everybody wants to hear that information. Lots of people don't want to do this work.

This is hard work. It does take commitment, and it's often not instant. So I think for a lot of people, you have to get to a place where you've tried things and they didn't work, and you are ready to commit to something real and long-term. That's what this book was about for me.

That's what this podcast is about for me. It's about passing that information on and doing the same thing for others that people did for me. Hopefully, I can be a little voice in a sea of information out there and help with the preservation of this information for the next generation who may be going through anxiety, panic, stress disorder. These things aren't going away.

They seem to be increasing societally. So it's more important than ever, in my opinion, that we retain this knowledge in the public sphere however we can. So if I can play a little role in that, I'm happy to do so. Moving on to question two, who is this podcast for?

Well, it's for the same people that I had in mind when I wrote the book. And of course, when people write on subjects like this, it's usually informed by their own past, by their own experiences. I'll definitely be discussing what I went through, as in a way it's a model for what not to do . I think my journey through this experience can be very informative for those who are at the beginning or maybe have gone through this for a while, are looking for answers, and just can't quite seem to land in a place they're comfortable with.

I spent far too long looking for good information on this subject, and I have real sympathy for anyone trying to do the same right now. So in that sense, this book is for anyone experiencing disorder-level anxiety. It's for anyone struggling with their day-to-day life, and anxiety can be defined in so many ways, but for this show, for the purposes of what we're doing, the kind of anxiety we're talking about here is the kind that interferes with your life. We're not talking about worrying about bills or your job or family issues.

Those are worry issues. They can certainly produce a level of anxiety, and we all have those. They're very important, and there's probably a lot of great podcasts out there that cover those things. What we're talking about here is finding hope for people who are in a bad place, and that can range from being afraid to leave the house to wondering if they can keep their job.

It can be people who are in a place of real fear every day. People wake up with panic, with anxiety. This can be a terrifying condition. I remember what that's like.

I haven't forgotten it, and I want this to be a place that we can have honest conversation about what's going on in the day-to-day lives of people who struggle with this condition, and not just talk about it to commiserate. Certainly, we will try to be supportive on this show and in the book and anything else we do, but this is going to be a results-oriented podcast. At least the attempts, the things we do are all going to be aimed at finding answers and solutions. I feel like a lot of the information out there, a lot of the channels, the podcasts, the books, these things are often about managing anxiety, about learning to live in the state that you're in.

And to some degree, we do have to do that. To some degree, we do need to learn to function and exist in a state of heightened anxiety. But while we're doing that, we should be employing methods, mindset work. Day-to-day behaviors that lead us away from that state.

These two things can be done congruently. In fact, they work very well together. But the goal has to be clear, and the mindset to make this happen is very specific. It's nuanced, it's simple, but it is very specific.

The process of moving through this condition contains so many small details, it's very easy to miss one here or there and really continue to perpetuate a state by not changing these behaviors. So again, everything we try to do here will be based on changing behavior, changing mindset, changing viewpoint, and leading people into a place where they're having a better life because of these changes. So that might mean this won't always feel good. The things we talk about won't always just be feel-good topics.

Occasionally, we will have to ask difficult things of ourselves to move forward. That's what we're going to be doing here. I hope that's why you're here and what you'd like to hear. That doesn't mean it's always gonna be difficult.

I do think that learning this information in and of itself provides a certain comfort and a certain reassurance. Just having a plan, just understanding that your day-to-day actions are leading you to a better place, that is reassuring, and it is a place we can all get to. As I've said, it takes a lot of work. Some people will have a much easier time with this.

Others may need more time. I was stubborn. I needed a lot of time. Most of you will probably do better than I did, but it's not a contest.

We can all end up in the same place, and this podcast is geared towards anyone struggling with their day-to-day life due to anxiety, due to panic, any of the conditions, obsessive thoughts, depersonalization, any symptom you want to name. We can identify most of these as being a result of sensitization of the nervous system. Anxiety, I'm using as a general umbrella. So we plan to include anyone who's going through these conditions who can identify that as different as what they feel may seem, it actually does live under the same umbrella as anxiety, panic, sensitized nervous system.

These are all things we're going to discuss. So if any of that sounds like you, please stick around for future podcasts. We also have the book on Amazon. I'll give the link to that later.

But I think if you hear yourself in those descriptions, you will find this podcast to be helpful in the future. So I hope you tune back in. So for question three, I thought it might be fun to ask, "Why should I listen to you?" That's a good question. Why should you listen to me?

I'm not a doctor. I'm not a therapist. I'm not a social worker. I could understand if somebody turned on this podcast and wondered, "Who is this, and why do they feel like they have the ability to give someone advice on how to recover?" Well, I think the answer to that for me goes back to what I said before.

Most of the information that I found the most useful on this topic came from people who were not professionals. Again, nothing against people who do this professionally. Some of them have actually helped me out and taught me a lot. I have worked with therapists who did help me, but there's something about having the lived experience of having gone through this that makes the information feel real.

That was my experience when I learned from people. It was always apparent to me when someone had been through this. They didn't learn it in a textbook. They lived it.

They experienced it. You cannot fake that. You can't manufacture it. You either experienced this or you didn't, and most of us would not have ever known what this could be like before we did.

Before I experienced what I called a nervous breakdown at the time, I would have had no idea that the human body was capable of any of this, not to mention the brain. When I heard people talk about anxiety before I had my breakdown, I always assumed they were talking about worry, as we mentioned before. I thought they probably just needed to relax. They needed to find better coping mechanisms.

I certainly would not have had the kind of sympathy that I have for anyone now having gone through this. And not only did I go through this, but I went through it for a decade. You don't have to go through it for a decade, so don't let that scare you when you hear me say it. I told you I was stubborn.

I took the long way out of this, and it took me a long time to find the right information. But I did learn a lot in that time. I studied a lot. I did a lot of research, and I do feel comfortable sitting in a room with someone who is a doctor, with someone who is a therapist, and discussing this condition.

I feel like my general set of knowledge on this is more than adequate for me to offer people advice on something that I've gone through, had experience overcoming, and talked to and worked with countless people and heard their stories. You can read about them in the book. There's a whole chapter in the book dedicated to people. It's called From the Recovered.

These are people who just give quotes and blurbs and thoughts. So I've gone deep into this topic for a very long time. I do have a lot of opinions about it. It doesn't mean they're all right, but I'm not shy about sharing them.

I want to help people who want this kind of information. Some people won't, and that's okay too. So in truth, there's no reason you have to listen to me any more than you have to listen to anybody else. But I might make the case that a good reason to check out this show and the book is that we are going to be approaching things from a different angle.

It's going to be from real lived experience, and it's going to be information that I know does work, that I've seen work with regular people. I feel like I've become a bit of a human search engine on this topic, and I hope that what I've learned can be useful to you and that you will give it a chance to make an impact in your own life the way this information made an impact in mine. So we answered a few questions here that hopefully give you an idea of what the show is going to be about. I hope it provides enough reason for you to want to stick around and come back and check out the next one.

I promise you it's going to get more interesting as we go on. I know today was a bit general, but we will be getting more granular in the future, I guarantee you that. And one thing that would really help is if I could hear from you and you let me know what you'd like to hear on this show. You can get in touch with the show by visiting the website and checking out the link there.

The website is theanxietyrecoverymindset.com, or you can email me directly at bryan@theanxietyrecoverymindset.com. Drop us a line. Let us know what you'd like to hear. Feel free to ask questions or give any suggestions you have, and we'll definitely be making room to answer some questions from you on future shows.

So please feel free to reach out. The show is about you. We'd love to hear from you. That's it for now.

Thanks for listening to this babbling first episode. I promise you things will get tighter going forward. Please check in next time, and until then, take care.