The Anxious Truth - A Panic, Anxiety, and Mental Health Podcast

Send in a question or comment via text. "I almost passed out." "I almost made a scene." "I almost ruined everything." If you have an anxiety disorder or OCD, you probably recognize that sentence. The word almost shows up constantly, and treating it like a fact is one of the things that keeps the cycle going. In this episode I want to talk about what I call the almost story: the narrative anxiety and OCD write after a difficult moment to give your escape behaviors and compulsions credit for pr...

Send in a question or comment via text. Every time you give in to an avoidance or a ritual, it seems reasonable. Skip one social event, spend a few extra minutes on a compulsion, take one "me day" instead of pushing through. In isolation, none of it feels like a big deal. What's the harm? That's the trap. Not the individual behaviors themselves, but what happens when you add them all up. In this episode I want to talk about what I call negotiated avoidance: the process by which each individua...

Send in a question or comment via text. Anxiety disorders and OCD are what you get when a perfectly functioning brain applies its usual problem-solving strategies to the wrong problem. Your brain is good at solving things. The trouble is it keeps trying to solve something that isn't actually the problem, and that's what keeps you stuck in the loop: trigger, fix, feel better for a while, repeat. In this episode I want to introduce the concept of strategy mismatch. The things that seem to need ...

Send in a question or comment via text. Anxiety and avoidance go hand in hand, and most people struggling with an anxiety disorder have been told that avoidance makes things worse. But there's a lot of confusion in this community about what avoidance actually means. What are you avoiding? What aren't you avoiding? And why does it feel like letting go of the scary thought is the same as ignoring the problem? In this episode I want to clear that up. The key is understanding the difference betwe...

Send in a question or comment via text. One of the more common mistakes people make as they progress in anxiety disorder recovery is treating recovery as something separate from the rest of their lives. You do the therapy work in one box, and everything else goes in another. That tends to backfire. In this episode I want to introduce the concept of relapse prevention, and I want to do it in the context of building a daily routine that keeps you connected to the strategies and principles that ...