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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 she doesn't want anyone with OCD to think they're failing when it happens to them. The way Jess sees it, when people say their OCD is back, what's really going on is they've started doing compulsions again. Looking at it that way gives you some agency, because compulsions are something you can choose to stop doing. We talk about why OCD tends to flare up during times of high stress, how to recognize when you're in the rabbit hole, and how physical sensations can be a clue that you're ruminating. OCD will try to tell you those sensations are proof that the thought matters. Jess shares her rule that no rumination is good rumination, the difference between problem solving and problem spinning, and why accepting the presence of a thought is different from accepting what it might mean. We also get into measuring recovery by impact. An hour down the rabbit hole is a very different thing from months of your life. Find Jess on Instagram at https://instagram.com/jessmarrinertherapy and at https://www.jessmarrinertherapy.com For full show notes on this episode: https://theanxioustruth.com/355 Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated! Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link. Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text. "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, and while I've learned to carry on with my day when it happens, my fully recovered anxiety expert brain still spends hours afterward scanning for signs it might come back. I know logically that it's over. My brain scans anyway. That scanning function is normal and it serves a purpose. It's thinking that happens outside our awareness, and it naturally goes after the things that matter most to us, like safety, health, identity, and what we value. So the work in recovery is learning to recognize that process running and let it do its thing without making it the most important thing in the room. That takes practice with attention and a willingness to act courageously when your brain is telling you something is wrong. Over time, your brain may learn it doesn't need to scan as much. I also talk about why this simple strategy is so hard to put into practice, and why you aren't failing when the scanning kicks in. For full show notes on this episode: https://theanxioustruth.com/354 Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated! Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link. Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text. "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 preventing a disaster that was never actually going to happen. The almost story feels completely real. The sensations were intense, the fear was overwhelming, and then you did your ritual or your avoidance and you felt better. So obviously the almost thing almost happened and your action stopped it, right? That framing is a cognitive distortion, and a costly one. Because when the almost story gets written on the back end of a triggered episode, it fuels anticipatory anxiety on the front end of the next one. The cycle repeats. You never get to see anxiety and discomfort rise and fall on their own because the almost story keeps telling you that giving it that chance would be reckless. I walk through where the almost story shows up in the cycle, why it's a story rather than a fact, what the proof of that actually is, and what it looks like to start recognizing and challenging it bit by bit. Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated! Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link. Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text. 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 individual accommodation to anxiety or OCD feels justified, smart, even cautious in the moment, while the cumulative cost quietly hollows out your life. Life gets smaller. Restrictions mount. Anxiety and OCD keep moving the goalposts. And the reason you can never seem to satisfy them is that they're not reasonable. You can't negotiate with a terrorist, and that's what anxious and OCD-driven demands actually are. I talk through why each individual avoidance feels like no big deal, why that feeling is part of the trap, and what it looks like when you start asking a different question: not "what's the harm in this one thing?" but "what does all of this cost me in total?" The answer is usually more than people expect. I also talk through why change here doesn't happen overnight and what it actually looks like to chip away at this bit by bit without declaring yourself a failure when things don't click instantly. The Act Triflex Episodes: Get PresentOpen UpDo What MattersFor full show notes on this episode: https://theanxioustruth.com/352 Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated! Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link. Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text. 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 fixing in anxiety and OCD (the intrusive thoughts, the physical sensations, the worries about health or relationships or moral character, the uncertainty you can't seem to resolve) are not the actual problem. The actual problem is the fear and discomfort those things produce, and the endless attempts to eliminate that discomfort are what keep the disorder running. How do you know? Because when you escape, avoid, reassure yourself, or perform a compulsion and feel better for a little while, the problem isn't solved. You just bought temporary relief until the cycle starts again. The strategy doesn't match the problem in front of you. I talk through what the right strategy looks like, why it's counterintuitive, what gets in the way of applying it, and why this whole framing is actually good news. You don't have to solve your heartbeat, or the opinions of others, or the unpredictability of being alive. That was never going to work anyway. For full show notes on this episode: https://theanxioustruth.com/351 Want to talk about this episode or interact with me, Josh Fletcher, and folks that are sharing your experience and understand it? I'm hanging out on the Disordered community app: https://disordered.fm/community Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated! Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link. Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text. 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 between the content of your anxiety and the process. The content is the scary thought, the intrusive image, the somatic symptom, the worry your GAD has decided is urgent today, the OCD theme that won't let go. None of that is what you're avoiding. What you're actually avoiding is the discomfort that content triggers inside of you. Avoidance is everything you do to make that discomfort stop. The reassurance seeking. The compulsive looping and arguing with thoughts. The safety behaviors, the escape, the checking, the constant attempts to prove the thought wrong or calm the body down. That's the avoidance. And the action of letting a scary thought or sensation just be there without responding to it? That is not avoidance at all. This distinction matters because it changes the whole picture of what you have to work on. I walk through how this plays out across panic disorder, OCD, health anxiety, GAD, and agoraphobia. For full show notes on this episode: https://theanxioustruth.com/350 --  Want to talk about what you heard in this episode, or interact with me, Josh Fletcher, and others that share and understand your experience? I'm hanging out in the Disordered Community Space: https://disordered.fm/community Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated! Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link. Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text. 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 helped you make progress in the first place. -- Want to talk about what you heard in this episode? I'm hanging out in the Disordered Community Space: https://disordered.fm/community -- This is not a magic morning routine. I'm not going to promise you'll be unrecognizable in six weeks or that you'll never have a setback. What I will say is that people who build consistent habits around these practices do tend to fare better when life gets hard again, and life always does. The old pathways never get deleted. They just get unused for a while. So it's worth building habits that make it harder to accidentally fall back into them. I walk through a four-pillar framework for building that kind of routine: attention and mindfulness practice, physical movement, emotional expression, and what I'm calling exploration, which is the part where you stay connected to the things that actually matter to you and feed something other than your anxiety. I also talk about the trap of feeling good, because feeling good is exactly when a lot of people start quietly abandoning the habits that got them there. And I have a word for the internet, which tends to ruin this kind of thing with aesthetics, comparison, and influencer nonsense. For full show notes on this episode: https://theanxioustruth.com/349 Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated! Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link. Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text. Everybody wants to know how to stop obsessing over whatever has them scared right now. In this episode I explain why that's the wrong question, and what to ask instead. In OCD and anxiety disorders, an obsession isn't just a strong thought or a passing worry. It functions like a threat. That's why you can't just decide to turn it off. You can't out argue it, out logic it, or replace it with a happier thought, and I'm guessing you've already tried all three. The real leverage is in the compulsion, the thing you do to try to feel safer once the obsession fires. Checking, reassurance seeking, mental rituals, researching, arguing with your own fear in your head. Those are learnable, even though resisting them is genuinely hard. I get into why the distress that shows up when you resist a compulsion doesn't mean you've made a mistake, and why stopping the obsession ends up being a side effect of working on the compulsion, not the goal itself. -- Want to talk about what you're hearing in this episode? You can interact with me on the Disordered Community Space: https://disordered.fm/community -- Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated! Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link. Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text. In my anxiety recovery journey, there were no game-changing moments. No mic drops, no epiphanies, no single concept or technique that suddenly moved me forward. And when I look at the people I've worked with in my therapy practice and the community I've built around this podcast, that's pretty much how it goes for everyone. You're probably searching for one, though. I get it. Everybody has a right to want to feel better quickly, and the endless scroll is very good at promising you the ONE thing that changes everything. But that search can quietly become its own problem. In this episode I share what my recovery actually looked like: slow, quiet, and mostly unnoticeable until it wasn't. The progress showed up as backward-looking realizations, not forward-looking epiphanies. I moved out of that "anxiety disorder apartment" one item at a time over a long stretch. Then one day I looked around and the place was empty and it was time to leave. So anti-climactic! I also talk about the important moments that did show up along the way, why even those weren't game changers, what the actual mistake is when you've been searching and scrolling for years, and what a genuine shift looks like when you're ready to make one. For full show notes on this episode: https://theanxioustruth.com/347 Want to talk about this episode, interact with me and Disordered co-host Josh Fletcher, and participate in a community of supportive people that are sharing your experience? I'm hanging out in the Disordered community space: https://disordered.fm/community Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated! Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link. Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text. In this episode, we are breaking down five core principles of OCD recovery. To help explore this topic, I am joined by Kimberley Quinlan, an anxiety and OCD specialist practicing in Los Angeles and host of the Your Anxiety Toolkit podcast. OCD recovery is often viewed as a rigid list of steps, but it is better understood through specific attributes and ingredients that you can learn to practice and strengthen over time. Here is what you need to know about the core components of OCD recovery: 1. Clarity of Vision Having a clear picture of what you want your life to look like is a powerful predictor of success. This does not mean you must have every detail mapped out perfectly, but you need a general template of the life you want to live. Recovery is not merely the absence of intrusive thoughts or anxiety; it is about deciding what your life will look like when you choose to let those thoughts exist without letting them run the show. 2. Willingness to Endure Discomfort You must be willing to let OCD come along for the ride. This means moving forward with your valued life plans whileexperiencing discomfort, intrusive thoughts, feelings, sensations, urges, and images. Whether you are practicing driving in your neighborhood or returning to school, you must learn to slow down and be in relation to actual physical discomfort. 3. Self-Compassion and Kindness Practicing while uncomfortable is difficult, and it requires kindness toward yourself. This means eliminating the critical, negative inner dialogue that tells you that you are a failure or that you should be further along in your journey. Kindness also means physically validating your own distress, acknowledging your racing heart or somatic symptoms, and making space for them rather than fighting them. 4. Attentional Awareness Attention training is your ability to intentionally choose where to direct your focus in the midst of chaos. Intrusive thoughts feel chaotic, but you have the agency to anchor your attention to a focal point in the present moment, whether that is a sound, a physical task, or a loved one's voice. This is a muscle that you strengthen through small, repetitive daily actions. 5. Focus on Response Prevention While exposure and response prevention (ERP) is the gold standard for treatment, the emphasis belongs heavily on response prevention. Identifying your compulsions and safety behaviors, and then slowing down or stopping them, is far more critical than seeking out the most intense exposures. Take an honest inventory of your compulsions and work consistently to reduce them. A Note on Consistency These attributes are not static personality traits, nor will they remain at a constant level every day. Some days your willingness will be low, or your self-compassion will wane. Recovery is messy, and consistency matters far more than intensity. Be gentle with yourself, allow space for humor when you catch your OCD trying to trick you, and keep making small, practical choices to move forward Find Kim online: Instagram Website Podcast For full show notes on this episode: https://theanxioustruth.com/346 Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated! Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link. Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text. How Does an Anxiety Therapist Talk About Anxiety All Day Without Getting Triggered? People ask me this constantly. I'm a former sufferer of panic disorder, agoraphobia, OCD, and depression — and now I spend my days immersed in all of it. Therapy clients, podcasts, books, social media. Anxiety is basically my entire professional life. So how does a person like me not end up right back where they started? The answer isn't a trick or a technique. It's what recovery actually produces — and once you understand it, it reframes what you're working toward in a pretty significant way. In this episode I explain why talking about anxiety all day doesn't trigger me, what changed through my own recovery process, and why the same change is available to you. I also share a real example from the last few months involving my dog Copper, some stress-related symptoms that showed up during a difficult time, and what it looked like to have those experiences without fear driving the whole thing. We also get into my OCD history with existential thoughts — something that used to pin me down for weeks — and what that same material looks like now. Same discomfort. Completely different relationship to it. This one is old school Anxious Truth. No script, no notes. Just an honest answer to a question a lot of you have been asking, and what I think it means for where you're headed. For show notes on this episode: https://theanxioustruth.com/345 Want to talk about this episode with me, Josh Fletcher, and others that are sharing your experience and know what it feels like? I'm hanging out on the Disordered Community Space: https://disordered.fm/community Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated! Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link. Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text. Many people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) struggle to understand how the concept of acceptance applies to their recovery. While it seems straightforward in the context of panic disorder or health anxiety, where sufferers learn to accept temporary physical sensations, applying acceptance to distressing intrusive thoughts and images can feel confusing or even dangerous. In this episode of The Anxious Truth, I'm joined by OCD specialists Joanna Hardis (Cleveland) and Lauren Rosen (Los Angeles) to clarify the role of acceptance in obsessive-compulsive disorder treatment. --- Want to talk about this episode with me and others that share your experience? I'm hanging out in the Disordered Community Space https://disordered.fm/community ----- Key Takeaways Accepting Thoughts vs. Agreeing with Content: Acceptance in OCD does not mean you agree with, like, or approve of your intrusive thoughts. It means acknowledging the realistic presence of the thought or image in your mind at that moment instead of trying to fight, fix, or erase it.The Role of Uncertainty: A major hurdle in obsessive-compulsive disorder recovery is the urge to reach 100% certainty about your fears. True acceptance requires sitting with the discomfort of uncertainty regarding your thoughts, feelings, and what they might imply.Experiential Discomfort: Ultimately, the core of OCD acceptance is learning to tolerate internal uneasiness and anxiety without turning to compulsions, safety behaviors, or rituals to get rid of it.The Reality of Progress: Giving up the struggle against your thoughts doesn't result in a dramatic parade or instant relief. It is a gradual, quiet process of allowing discomfort to exist while you choose to move forward with your day anyway.Find Joanna Hardis at https://joannahardis.com or on Instagram at https://instagram.com/joannahardis Find Lauren at https://theobsessivemind.com or on Instagram at https://instagram.com/theobsessivemind For full show notes on this episode: https://theanxioustruth.com/344 Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated! Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link. Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text. This episode of The Anxious Truth dives into the messy intersection of neuroscience and psychotherapy. I’m joined by Ana Lund, a UK-based psychotherapist specializing in the link between brain science and clinical practice, to discuss how we actually use research to help you recover. -- Want to discuss what you heard today? I'm hanging out on the Disordered Community Space https://disordered.fm/community -- We often hear about "evidence-based practice," but translating a laboratory study into a therapy session is a significant challenge. Ana and I discuss the reality of staying current with research, the limitations of single studies, and why "neuro-nonsense" often takes the place of actual science in social media mental health content. Key Topics Covered: The Challenge of Staying Current: Why it is nearly impossible for any single practitioner to keep up with the massive volume of new neuroscience research.Research vs. Practice: The gap between understanding how the brain works and knowing how to "work" the brain in a practical, therapeutic way.The Role of Meta-Analyses: Why looking for trends and body-of-knowledge reviews is more reliable than hanging your hat on one exciting new study.Constructed Emotion: How modern theories like Lisa Feldman Barrett’s "Theory of Constructed Emotion" change the way we approach feelings in the therapy room.Affect Labeling: How describing what you feel (without needing a "perfect" word for it) helps regulate distress and prevents the jump to catastrophic predictions.The "Secret Sauce" of Mindfulness: How neuroscience helped validate and secularize eastern practices by stripping away unnecessary "bells and whistles" to find what actually works: slowing down.Our goal is to demystify how science informs recovery. Understanding that your brain isn't "broken" but is instead following natural, albeit difficult, processes can empower you to take the small, practical steps necessary for long-term change. Find Ana on her Substack: https://neuroscienceandpsy.substack.com/ or on her website: https://www.neuroscienceandpsychotherapy.com/ For full show notes on this episode: https://theanxioustruth.com/343 Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated! Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link. Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text. If you recognize the sound of a Velcro rip and your heart starts to pound the minute you hear that familiar hum, we need to talk. You likely bought a home blood pressure monitor to feel safer and healthier, but now you might feel like a slave to a rubber tube and a plastic screen. In this episode, we are looking at how a responsible health habit turns into a psychological nightmare in the form of fixation and obsessive fear. We discuss why blood pressure anxiety happens, often in the complete absence of an actual medical issue. Let's talk about how you can start living your life again without being tethered to a machine. --- Want to talk about this episode? I'm hanging out in the Disordered Community space: https://disordered.fm/community ------ What we covered in this episode: The Paradox of Stress and Vitals: How the act of worrying about your blood pressure is exactly what drives the numbers up.The Certainty Trap: Why checking for reassurance only leads to more uncertainty and more frequent checking loops.The ACT Lens: Learning to accept the reality of health uncertainty rather than trying to perform behaviors to make the fear go away.Metacognitive Beliefs: Examining why you think worrying about your vitals is protective and learning to treat these thoughts as mental events.Detached Mindfulness: Using tools like the Blue Tiger exercise to recognize when you are being hooked by a scary thought.Rebound Anxiety: Why it feels reckless and scary to stop checking, and why that feeling is a normal part of the recovery process.Recovery from blood pressure anxiety is not about reaching a perfect, guaranteed number. It is about changing your relationship with your physiology so you can move your energy back toward the things that actually matter in your life. For full show notes on this episode: https://theanxioustruth.com/342 Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated! Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link. Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Send in a question or comment via text. Want to talk about what you heard today? Interact with me and others that understand your experience on the Disordered Community app. https://disordered.fm/community ---- In this episode, we tackle a common trap: viewing every uncomfortable emotion through the lens of anxiety recovery. When you spend months practicing desensitization, acceptance, tolerance, and exposure, it is easy to mislabel normal human stress as a setback, a relapse, or a recovery problem. Disordered vs. Non-Disordered Anxiety Disordered Anxiety: This is defined by a fear of the internal experience itself. You become afraid of your own symptoms, thoughts, and sensations.Non-Disordered Anxiety: This is a natural response to external stressors like grief, job loss, or relationship conflict. You cannot "float" or "mindfulness" your way out of a legitimate life crisis.The Recovery Trap Many people "hijack" normal human emotions and try to apply recovery techniques to them. Trying to use willful tolerance, acceptance, or principles of exposure on a situation that requires practical action or just feeling emotions only keeps you stuck. We often do this because the recovery framework feels more familiar and safe than facing complex life problems. Moving Forward Check the Context: Before assuming you are having a "relapse," look at your life. Are you under actual pressure from work, finances, or family?Validate the Stress: It is expected and healthy to feel stressed by difficult circumstances. This is not a failure of your recovery.Take Action: If the problem is external, it requires a practical solution, not just a psychological one.Accept Your Humanity: There are no "hacks" for being human. Recovery means learning to live with a full range of emotions, not eliminating discomfort.For full show notes on this episode: https://theanxioustruth.com/341 Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated! Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link. Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.