Send in a question or comment via text.

Anxiety recovery can be a highly individual journey. This is especially true if you have ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, or otherwise identify as neurodivergent. While there are certainly general principles we rely on, every person will find recovery to present specific and unique challenges that have to be addressed as part of the process. For neurodivergent members of our community, this is also true.

This week Dr. Terri Bacow took some time to chat with me about the intersection of anxiety, recovery, and neurodivergence. Terri is experienced, well trained and qualified in these areas, and does a great job of presenting an accessible, kind, compassionate view of how recovery strategies can be adapted and tailored for neurodivergent folks working on overcoming chronic/disordered anxiety.

Find Dr. Terri Bacow:

https://instagram.com/drterribacow

https://drterribacow.com

For full show notes on this episode:

⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/277

---

My books, social, and other links: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/links ⁠⁠⁠⁠

Support The Anxious Truth: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/support ⁠⁠⁠

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 the recovery process do not exist in a vacuum. You are an entire person, and all the parts of you come into this process. Holistic is not a word you hear me use often, but it is a word we need to acknowledge because when dealing with chronic/disordered anxiety and the recovery process, your background, experiences, beliefs, and views of yourself and the world will enter the picture in various ways.

* They will influence how you conceptualize your anxiety.

* They will influence how you embrace and approach the recovery process.

* They will influence the parts of recovery you "get" and the parts you may need to adjust here and there.

* They will cause you to confront emotions, situations, and challenges that aren't always about anxiety, but may be indicative of other parts of you and other parts of your life.

Forgetting this - forgetting that anxiety and recovery do not exist in a vacuum - can lead you into a trap where you're judging yourself negatively, giving up, or seeing your situation as hopeless when you don't have to see it that way.

As always, comments and questions are welcomed. I hope you find this episode helpful in some way.

For full show notes on this episode:

⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/276

---

My books, social, and other links: ⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/links ⁠⁠⁠

Support The Anxious Truth: ⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/support ⁠⁠⁠

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.

The anxiety cycle starts as a seemingly never ending loop where you get triggered, you fight through it, you calm down, then you worry and fret over the next time you might get triggered. It can become an exhausting merry-go-ground if you're new to this process and convinced that high anxiety and panic are horrible disasters that must be avoided or "managed" at all costs.

But over time, you will likely begin to notice that your logical brain will question that assertion, and you will start to see that you are not just being triggered into an anxious state, but that you are being TRICKED by that anxious state. When you begin to see the trickery involved in internally focused disordered anxiety, things can begin to change.

When you can nail a "tricked" point to the circle, that can become the point at which you start to peel off the circle on a tangent toward recovery. Noticing and understanding that anxiety is tricking you into behaving as if you are in danger creates a fork in an otherwise endless circular road. It gives you a point at which you can choose a new path and ultimately break the cycle that has trapped you up to this point.

For full show notes on this episode:

⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/275

---

My books, social, and other links: ⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/links ⁠⁠⁠

Support The Anxious Truth: ⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/support ⁠⁠⁠

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.

No new podcast episode this week, but we will be back next week with a new episode on September 27, 2023. Going forward, new episodes of The Anxious Truth will be produced every other week. I'm making this change based on time constraints and the fact that we are producing episodes of "Disordered" every week, and that's a really good podcast!

Listen to Disordered here:

https://disordered.fm

On the weeks with no new episode of The Anxious Truth, you can catch my "Recovery Monday" livestreams on YouTube (either live or via replay any time):

https://youtube.com/@TheAnxiousTruth

See you next week, and thank you for all your support!

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.

Self-care in anxiety recovery. We hear about it all the time, but is self-care always essential oils and hot baths and candles and soothing? It certainly can by, but self-care is also giving yourself what you really need, which isn't always what you want. Sometimes self-care means challenging yourself a bit to help break the avoidance cycle. Sometimes self-care means you choose to be uncomfortable now to feel better about yourself later.

Let's take a closer look at self-care in a way that might not all that obvious.

For full show notes on this episode:

⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/274

---

My books, social, and other links: ⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/links ⁠⁠⁠

Support The Anxious Truth: ⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/support ⁠⁠⁠

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 week we answered some common - and not so common - questions about anxiety and recovery. Thanks to everyone on Instagram that submitted a question. I appreciate it!

First I reviewed some basic principles you can fall back on when asking many of the questions that were asked. That's about the first 15 minutes of the episode, which will be useful if you're new to this or need a refresher to remind you of what you're dealing with.

Then we moved on to some specific questions.

• AFTER THE CRISIS HAS PASSED, DO YOU STILL NEED THERAPY? DO YOU STILL HAVE TO WORK ON YOURSELF?
• WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN OCD AND GAD OR PANIC DISORDER AND HEALTH ANXIETY?
• HOW CAN YOU BE SURE THIS IS JUST ANXIETY?
• WHEN AM I ALLOWED TO REST?
• HOW DOES MINDFULNESS FIT INTO RECOVERY?
• ARE POSITIVE AFFIRMATIONS OK?
• HOW DO I ACCEPT ...?
• WHAT ARE THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAYS OF SELF-REGULATING WHEN ANXIOUS?
• WHAT ABOUT THIS KIND OF ANXIETY?

For full show notes on this episode:

⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/273

---

My books, social, and other links: ⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/links ⁠⁠⁠

Support The Anxious Truth: ⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/support ⁠⁠⁠

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 week my guest is anxiety and OCD specialist Joanna Hardis who stopped by the podcast to talk about the art of doing ... nothing.

Wait ... what? Nothing? Yes. Nothing.

Humans are conditioned to automatically spring into action to solve problems, and often we declare that our emotional and mental states are automatically problems that must be solved. When we experience discomfort, distress, anxiety, or any "negative" feeling we can get trapped into automatically trying to do something .... anything ... to solve that problem and make it disappear.

The thing is, this is often paradoxically harmful in that it can keep us trapped in the very state we're trying to escape. Learning that it is possible to do nothing about negative internal experiences - learning to ride through them without hitting the panic button - can go a long way toward getting us closer to where we want to be both in anxiety recovery and in life. And as it turns out, if we look at what Joanna wrote about in her book "Just Do Nothing", we see that even as we struggle with recovery from an anxiety disorder, we're not all that different from all the other humans walking the planet. The issues are often the same, just experienced at a different degree in our community. This is good news, because we're afraid and unsure, but not defective and not broken.

For more information about Joanna and her book:

https://joannahardis.com

For full show notes on this episode:

⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/270

---

My books, social, and other links: ⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/links ⁠⁠⁠

Support The Anxious Truth: ⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/support ⁠⁠⁠

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 this is all new to you, asking for more information is normal, expected, and healthy! Everyone needs more information and explanation to start.

But if you are not new to this and you've heard me and others talk about your scariest symptom or stickiest recovery issue over and over, ask yourself what you are hoping to get when you ask us to talk more about it. After multiple books, videos, social media posts, livestreams and podcast episodes on a given topic, it can be helpful to stop and consider what more you think you need to hear, and why you need to hear it.

Consider that asking for encouragement or cheerleading is likely more productive than getting stuck in the "tell me more" cycle, which can lead to judging yourself negatively because you can't seem to move forward.

For full show notes on this episode:

⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/271

---

My books, social, and other links: ⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/links ⁠⁠⁠

Support The Anxious Truth: ⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/support ⁠⁠⁠

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.

Help! I can't get motivated to do my exposures and work on my recovery!

This is a thing I hear often in this community, so this week let's address motivation and the myth surrounding it. Often we think that getting motivated means that we create a certain feeling, then we act on that feeling. This is incorrect. In fact, it's almost entirely backwards! Demanding to conjure of a feeling called "motivation" before you can act is selling yourself short and can accidentally lead harsh self-judgment that doesn't have to be there.

In this episode we talk about the myth of "feeling motivated", how feeling does not have to precede action, values and goals in relation to motivation and how to tap into self-compassion and smaller steps to build momentum and feelings of motivation through action.

For full show notes on this episode:

⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/270

---

My books, social, and other links: ⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/links ⁠⁠⁠

Support The Anxious Truth: ⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/support ⁠⁠⁠

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.

EMDR. It's become an insanely popular therapy over the last few years. Originally developed as a trauma recovery tool, EMDR is often touted as being appropriate or effective in many more clinical circumstances. But ... is it? Is EMDR an anxiety disorder recovery treatment? This week I'm joined by Florida therapist Anne Thomas to talk about EMDR, what it is, what it isn't, and how it might be applied in the context of panic disorder, agoraphobia, and other anxiety disorders.

The takeaway here is that EMDR is not going to magically fix your anxiety problem simply by moving your eyes back and forth. There's still real-world work to do as usual. But there may be instances where EMDR can be useful in addressing some of the negative beliefs about yourself and about past events that can be real obstacles in recovery. Expectations and a clear sense of what EMDR can and can't do, are always going to be important as they would be with any type of therapy.

In this episode we mentioned EMDRIA, which is the organization that trained Anne and trains other EMDR therapists.

https://emdria.org

To find Anne on Instagram:

https://instagram.com/sitwithanne

For full show notes on this episode:

⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/269

---

My books, social, and other links: ⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/links ⁠⁠

Support The Anxious Truth: ⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/support ⁠⁠

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.