The Panic Pod: Anxiety Help

Starting out this week’s episode with a bit of slam poetry, Josh and Ella discuss anxious relapse. It’s a term that can evoke the feeling that anxiety is a vice that we fall back into or succumb to but, as we know, anxiety is not a wanted or enjoyable experience. On the other hand, we can consider anxiety an addiction to reassurance. It can manifest in our behaviour as safety behaviours: carrying first aid kits, emergency snacks, or other tools with us when we fear our anxiety will resurface, seeking out people that comfort us, or avoid things that challenge us. These are the compulsions that frame our anxiety. So long as we live in the loss of confidence in our ability to tolerate anxiety, we are still “in” anxiety, which is sometimes felt as a “relapse”. Ella’s background with addiction and recovery sheds a little light on how actually the stress of anxiety and the substance abuse cycle can link up to create a cycle of bad behaviour. Josh redefines “anxiety relapse” with a phrase that’s as self-compassionate as it is accurate about what’s actually happening to us.

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Ella is @ellaofthenet and Josh is @anxietyjosh

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When you have a panic episode, adrenaline floods the system in a way that was biologically developed to help our survival. As chronic anxiety sufferers know, this adrenal flood happens when there is no tangible threat around us, so it feels like a biological response that is "out of control". Cortisol is another hormone that makes us feel stressed, but it operates differently. Cortisol flows in the morning, which helps regulate our sleep schedule, but it is also a hormone scientists believe serves a greater self-regulatory purpose: it reduces the amount of adrenaline we need to produce in order to survive. It’s a stress response that helps us to guide our attention to potential threats around us. If this served a purpose in our primitive days as humans, it might have been the hormone which helped to remind us that the bears come out to eat at dusk, so we need to do our berry-picking and hunting beforehand, lest we become their food.

Now that you know cortisol’s role, you have the opportunity to use it in a way that feels balanced for you!

Note on the audio: Thank you listeners for putting up with the steady beeping that was coming from Ella’s side of the recording. New recording space caused some issues! We apologise if it annoyed you throughout the episode, but we have resolved the issue for episode 25 and onwards!

We are so grateful for your kind words, follows, and feedback! Keep in touch with us to know when we upload new episodes!

@thepanicpod on Instagram and Facebook

Email [email protected] with a question or feedback.

Catastrophic Thinking is when we consider the spectrum of possibilities that can result from an event and believe in the most drastic, negative outcome. This pattern of thinking can affect our behaviour over time. That’s when anxiety starts to really affect us negatively. Hearing “your behaviour is the problem” when you’ve suffered an anxious episode is probably the last thing an anxious person can cope with hearing, but as Josh illustrates, these small acts of bravery - changing our behaviour in spite of our anxiety - can help to remind us what we’re capable of, and slowly re-pattern the anxious thought patterns we have grown accustomed to.

Note on the audio: Thank you listeners for putting up with the steady beeping that was coming from Ella’s side of the recording. New recording space caused some issues! We apologise if it annoyed you throughout the episode, but we have resolved the issue for episode 25 and onwards!

We are so grateful for your kind words, follows, and feedback! Keep in touch with us to know when we upload new episodes!

@thepanicpod on Instagram and Facebook

Email [email protected] with a question or feedback.

Self-discipline is something many people wish they had more of, but from Josh and Ella’s experience, people who have tenacious self-discipline can experience anxiety when their inner monologue gets drunk on power and outweighs self-compassion. When we condition our minds into using self-discipline to be productive and achieving results, we must also remember to balance that with moments of pause, reflection, and giving ourselves praise for accomplishments.

Sometimes people don’t like being nice to themselves. Sometimes people don’t know how to accept praise. Anxiety doesn’t manifest in a void. It feeds off of insecurity and trauma that hasn't been assessed. By understanding and accepting ourselves, we create the space we need to reflect on where our anxiety came from. Put your recovery first.

We are so grateful for your kind words, follows, and feedback! Keep in touch with us to know when we upload new episodes!

@thepanicpod on Instagram and Facebook

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Based on many questions we’ve received for the podcast, we wanted to put together an episode on recovery. Recovery from chronic anxiety, in essence, is when the frequent, unprovoked feelings anxiety are no longer part of a person’s day-to-day life. It does not, as some anxiety sufferers believe, mean that anxiety will forever disappear. The challenge those in recovery face is to be with anxiety while working on how to recover. This means, fundamentally, recognising symptoms of anxiety are not physically harmful or dangerous. While there are treatments that may reduce the effects of aspect of anxiety (e.g. physical sensations), there are three pillars that anxiety sufferers face, defined by Josh as:

1. Physical sensations

2. Intrusive thoughts and thought patterns

3. Feelings and emotions

Recovery is not eradicating anxiety completely. It is learning to accept anxiety with self compassion in order for the anxiety symptoms to gradually subside over time.

If you want to learn more about Self Compassion, listen back to Episode 14 on it (or for even more check out Episode 13: Conditions of Worth)

We are so grateful for your kind words, follows, and feedback! Keep in touch with us to know when we upload new episodes!

@thepanicpod on Instagram and Facebook

Email [email protected] with a question or feedback.

Hold onto hope, visualise your future, and use baby steps to walk towards the future you desire. The emotions we have aren’t metrics for our recovery.

OCD is a widely recognised name but fairly misunderstood disorder. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) can present itself in a variety of different ways including but not limited to; an anxiety about germs and bacteria, an attempt to align symmetry or order, a tendency to hoard belongings, a repetitive checking for safety from harm, or intrusive thoughts that cause unique physical behaviours. These are just some of the ways OCD can present itself. Unfortunately, in media and the way it's used in offhand language, many people will use the term "OCD" when they mean they are being meticulous or organised. These folks don’t know what it’s like living with the disorder. People who suffer from OCD often fear, “If I don’t complete this task or ritual, then something bad will/may happen”. This could be superstition about an external event, or an anxiety about how they’ll feel afterwards. In this episode, Josh and Ella discuss how this is related to anxiety using the Martin Seif and Sally Winston model of our “wise mind vs. false comfort” which we introduced in Episode 8.

If you want to learn more about Martin Seif and Sally Winston’s work, check out:

"Needing to Know for Sure: A CBT-Based Guide to Overcoming Compulsive Checking and Reassurance Seeking" by Martin Seif (PhD) & Sally Winston (PsyD)

https://www.amazon.com/Needing-Know-Sure-Overcoming-Reassurance-ebook/dp/B07MMQ7HRK

We are so grateful for your kind words, follows, and feedback! Keep in touch with us to know when we upload new episodes!

@thepanicpod on Instagram and Facebook

Email [email protected] with a question or feedback.

In this episode, Josh and Ella discuss the difference between feelings of anxiety and when anxiety becomes a disorder. Comparing it to a sleep disorder or an eating disorder, an anxiety disorder is something uncomfortable that keeps happening, but can be overcome. An anxiety disorder occurs when one finds themselves in a downward spiral of anxious behaviour, so much so that a tactic they are using to comfort themselves may be causing more harm to their recovery. Using examples drawn from his professional practice, Josh quizzes Ella on how to identify one or the other. Ella shares her experience of feeling anxious before a gig compared to unexpected anxiety while making dinner.

Please reach out to us!

We are on instagram as @thepanicpod

Email us a question or comment at [email protected]

In this episode of the Panic Pod, Ella has a conversation with Dr. Meg Van Deusen, a Seattle-based psychologist and author of the new book Stressed in the U.S.: 12 Tools to Tackle Anxiety, Loneliness, Tech Addiction and More. Through the stress of the Coronavirus pandemic, climate crisis related events, and state of racial inequality and the presidential election in the U.S., Dr. Van Deusen provides hope using tools that have come from practical experience as a therapist. Just a few of the many tools in her book are discussed in this interview against the backdrop of our present-day stresses.

Follow Meg Van Deusen on social media or learn more about her at:

https://www.megvandeusen.com/

Read Stressed in the U.S. - 12 Tools to Tackle Anxiety, Loneliness, Tech Addiction and More:

https://www.amazon.com/Stressed-U-S-Anxiety-Loneliness-Tech-Addiction/dp/1734032413/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=stressed+in+the+us&qid=1574677780&sr=8-1

Follow us on instagram at @thepanicpod

Ask us a question for the podcast at [email protected]

Josh and Ella discuss what life is like to have chronic symptoms of anxiety. One of the most common symptoms is called derealisation. If you have derealisation, all it really means is you have a heightened blood oxygen level from hyperventilation and are experiencing a “fight or flight” response. As a result you get a feeling like you are slightly detached from reality. You may have experienced this yourself whether or not you have chronic anxiety, but perhaps felt aloof when you received some shocking news. Josh and Ella also weigh in on the topic with examples from their lives. Ella likes Midnight Gospel as an ex-stoner Canadian and Josh doesn’t, which is okay.

Reach out to us at [email protected] or find us on instagram as @thepanicpod

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