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"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 Present
• Open Up
• Do What Matters

For 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

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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.

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Want to talk about what you heard in this episode? I'm hanging out in the Disordered Community Space:

https://disordered.fm/community

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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.

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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

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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.

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.

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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

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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.