The Anxious Morning

I know you guys wanted me to talk about my own experiences in these final few editions of The Anxious Morning. I’ve been trying to do that because I’m happy to share. This morning I want to share the experiences of others because part of the power of this platform is the ability to aggregate so many inspiring and encouraging stories.

Belief often - usually - comes AFTER acting. Call it acting “as if”. Call it faking it until you’re making it. Frame it any way you that helps you. That’s totally fine. But today, once you’re done framing it, look at some of these stories. Look at the common thread of disbelief and take some inspiration or encouragement from it ...

Even for a fully recovered person, there can be challenges.

I often speak about how our psychological flexibility and resilience takes a hit when we’re under stress. Well last night I was a textbook example of how that works. I spent a good two hours or so struggling because I wound up in the center of a perfect storm of the crap that life sometimes throws at us ...

When I talk about the need to be honest with ourselves when it comes to fatigue and taking breaks, I’m often asked what to do when you’re not sure if you’re tired or afraid.

Doesn’t it seem odd to not be able to identify what you’re feeling? I get it though. I had this issue. Many many people in our community have this issue. Anxiety and fear can get so cloudy and confusing that sometimes you just don’t know if want to crawl under the covers because you’re really tired, or because you’re just afraid or anxious.

If you find yourself facing this dilemma, know that you’re not alone. Let’s spend a few minutes to address this and to look for some basic strategies we can use when we’re in that “grey zone”. Please keep in mind that recovery is imperfect. We make mistakes. Sometimes what we do is more impactful, sometimes it is not. This is OK. Do not get caught in the “doing it right” trap. Before we can talk about what to do when you’re not sure what you’re feeling, you’ll have to accept that sometimes you might get it “wrong”, but that it’s totally OK to get it wrong. It’s how we learn.

This really speaks to the topic of self-compassion, which I think I will talk about next week, so stay tuned for that.

If my voice is in your head asking you if you’re really tired or just making an excuse to avoid … I’m sorry. I never plan to be a voice in anyone’s head, but evidently I am. Forgetting how annoying I can be at times, kudos to you for confronting that issue with or without me. When you start to see your avoidance more clearly (nobody sees it early on), you’re making progress. As crazy as this might sound, when you find yourself scratching your head because you can’t tell if you’re tired or afraid, pat yourself on the back. Think of the days when this was not a question because you’d already be on the sofa binging Netflix. Here you are NOT automatically doing that. Winning!

Now that you’ve pumped yourself up a bit, what next? You still don’t know if you’re tired and should rest, or afraid and trying to justify avoiding. What should you do? What I learned to do in those situations was to scale back and go from there. When I wanted to go lay on the sofa and fire up my TiVo (yes, that was a thing back then), I would go over a short list of little things I could do instead. They were often VERY little. Getting dressed. Showering. Making something to eat. Running the vacuum over the carpet in the living room. Walking around the block once. Sitting outside in the sun for 15 minutes. Maybe taking a 10 minute drive around the neighborhood. See how small these are?

I would pick one of those things and do it. Often this would clarify things for me. When I finished vacuuming (for example), I often found that I was actually not as “tired” as I thought I was. This often turned into doing a few more things on my short list. In some cases, this turned into a full day where I wasn’t on the sofa at all because I saw that I didn’t need to be. I had uncovered sneaky avoidance masquerading as fatigue. On other days, I would take a short walk around the block and discover that I really was pretty tired so I would take a break. Sometimes that break was an hour or two, sometimes I might actually fall asleep and it turned into almost a full day off (I had always done my driving exposure in the morning).

On some days I wound up on the sofa for two hours only to discover that I really wasn’t all that tired. Did I beat myself up for getting it wrong? Nope. That’s not usually an issue for me, so please don’t make that mistake. You’re gonna get it wrong sometimes like everyone else. This is not a crime and you did not just ruin your recovery. I promise, you didn’t. When I got it wrong, I’d get up and get on with my day as best I could. Those days counted too because I learned something in those moments and took those lessons with me.

I think the summary here is that especially in the early days of recovery when avoidance habits are still strong, we try to err on the side of not automatically running for the comforter and the fuzzy slippers. Might you wind up pushing yourself a bit this way? You might, but that’s why I say to use a short list of small things to do in these situations. If you find that you are pushing into exhaustion or really tired territory, you can stop and go rest.

It’s OK to not be sure if you’re tired or anxious. Days like that help to teach us what we need to learn. They give us experiences that we need to have. When in your life did you ever think you’d have to work on identifying a basic state like “tired”? I bet never, right? So give yourself a break (no pun intended). Disordered anxiety throws all kinds of monkey wrenches and complications into the mix. Working through those is part of the process, so just do the best you can.

Have a good weekend. I’ll see you on Monday.

“But you might as well bid a man struggling in the water, rest within arm's length of the shore! I must reach it first, and then I'll rest.” - Emily Brontë, “Wuthering Heights”

Every Friday I’ll share one of my favorite quotes. They’ll often have direct application in recovery, but sometimes they’re just generally funny, inspiring, or thought-provoking.  I hope you enjoy them.

When I wrote “No breaks, no days off”, I was speaking directly to the critical need to break the avoidance cycle. The words I chose seem harsh and absolute in nature. If you read them literally - and why wouldn’t you - you would think that you must never take a break or a day off in recovery. You might decide that your job is to be recovering 24/7 without stopping. If you’ve read those words and come to this conclusion, or wondered why on Earth I would write that or say that … I’m sorry. Really. That was a really bad choice of words on my part. If I could magically a do a find and replace on the tends of thousands of copies of those books that are out in the world, I would totally do that. I would change those phrases today...

You know what appears to make distance between thoughts and reactions, but isn’t so damn “brain expensive”? Talking about yourself in the third person. In chapter four of Chatter, Kross talks about his research into what happens when people are coached to talk about themselves in the third person when reflecting on states of anxiety, uncertainty, and fear. He calls this “distanced self-talk”. The research they did showed that people that used this third person distanced self-talk experienced lower levels of distress when in anxious situations, ruminated less about anxious experiences, and were better able to objectively define the true level of threat in those experiences.

Pretty cool, and likely useful in our context, right?

Those were in many cases the days where at the end of driving around and sitting/walking in mostly empty parking lots I felt like a total superhero.

That was such a good feeling!

When you find that feeling, enjoy it. Savor it. Let it show you that you are capable of feeling strong and able and that change is possible. I remember recording myself - talking to myself - on a few of those mornings. I wanted to capture those moments so I could come back to them later when I needed to. I will admit that sometimes I tried really hard to find ways to make that badass unbreakable feeling last in an unnatural way. That didn’t ever really work out that well because I was trying to force an emotional state, but if you’re doing that, I see you and I do not blame you for trying ...

... in the second session with this particular therapist, she took the experiences I told her about in the first session - panic attacks, anxiety symptoms, a growing sense of pointlessness, increasing difficulty in being home alone, intrusive thoughts about being poisoned, etc. - and glued them directly to my parents’ divorce. She explained that I was probably afraid to be left alone because I was abandoned by my father. She told me I was having panic attacks because I never fully processed and healed from the pain of the divorce. She explained that my obsessive thoughts about my food being poisoned were really just a manifestation of deep unresolved pain that had to be expressed.

OK then. When I asked why I did not have panic attacks for almost ten years between my first go-around and this one, she talked about subconscious processes and repression as a defense mechanism. When I told her that that did not resonate with me in any way and that it didn’t seem right, she told me that my response was just part of that same defense mechanism ...

Many of you asked me to talk about finding hope, so let’s do that.

Today I want to look at hope in two contexts. Hope can make an appearance at the micro level in a given moment where you are concerned about immediate outcomes. “I hope I do not die right now” is a perfect example of how we might incorporate the concept of hope into the anxiety struggle. But that’s not the context that I think matters most. I want to examine hope on the macro level in recovery ...

Did I ever tell you about the time I literally spent three full hours standing at my front door, trying to get myself to open the door and step out? Well, let me tell you about it now. It was quite the scene.

When we are struggling and find ourselves in a challenging situation, we are often engaged in a slew of thinking all designed to answer one basic question:

“How will I get out of this?”