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

Send in a question or comment via text. When you're really anxious, panicking, or in the middle of an OCD flare up, you feel strongly compelled to do something. A compulsion, a ritual, a safety behavior, reassurance seeking, an escape. It feels like you're doing something important. In this episode I explain why I call all of that theater. It looks and feels like you're accomplishing something, but all it really does is change how you feel in the moment. I start by walking through the anxiety...

Send in a question or comment via text. If you have OCD, you've probably heard that it can never be cured, only managed. That can leave you wondering what happens if it comes back. This week I talk with Jess Marriner, an OCD therapist in the UK who also has OCD, about what that actually looks like and what she does when it happens. A few days before we recorded, Jess had a morning where she fell down the rabbit hole of ruminating about one of her classic themes. She's open about that because ...

Send in a question or comment via text. "How do I stop scanning and checking myself all the time?" If you struggle with anxiety or OCD, you've probably asked some version of that question. Scanning your body for sensations. Scanning for bad thoughts. Checking whether a thought or emotion is the right one. I get asked how to make it stop almost every day. In this episode I tell you the honest answer. You can't turn it off. Even my therapist brain scans and checks. I get migraine aura, an...

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...