Anxiety Game Changers (that never come)

In my anxiety recovery journey, there were no game-changing moments. And in the journeys of the thousands of people that I've interacted with online throughout the years, there have been no game-changing moments. If you give me about 15 minutes today, I will explain what I mean. Before I was a formally trained anxiety therapist, I was an anxious person, like a full-time anxious person. I dealt with panic disorder and agoraphobia and OCD and depression for many years of my life. Now, I don't normally like to share my personal experience in this kind of detail cuz I don't think it's fair to hold up what I did as a blueprint for what you should definitely do. But today I do want to share for a little bit cuz I think it'll be helpful. And if you like this kind of content, if it's helping you in your own anxiety recovery journey, consider liking the video or maybe subscribing to the channel. So, when I was struggling and suffering, I desperately wanted game-changing, mic-dropping, epiphany moments. But no matter how much I wanted them, I had none. I was desperate for anything that would instantly change my mindset or make me shift or make it click or make me less afraid or make me less anxious or make me more functional instantly. I was desperate for that sort of thing, and I really held out hope for a long time that I was going to somehow stumble upon that. But no matter how much I looked for that and how much I wanted that, there were no mic-dropping, game-changing moments full of epiphanies that suddenly fixed everything or started me in high gear or moved me along very quickly. It just didn't happen that way because that's generally not how it happens for anybody. Remember, I was doing this work way before the era of the endless scroll, and in a way, I'm really thankful for that because if I had been recovering in the era of the endless scroll, I would probably still be endlessly scrolling looking for these big game-changers and mic-drop concepts that were going to fix everything for me. So, I feel very fortunate that I did this work before the endless scroll. In many ways, while I was frustrated, while I was impatient, while I wasn't necessarily sure that I was doing it right, while I couldn't really see progress from day to day, while I was getting really angry sometimes at the process, I really had no choice but to just sort of keep slogging through the mud to see how it would turn out. I didn't have the option of endlessly scrolling and endlessly searching for something that was going to make it better. It just didn't exist, and for that, I am truly grateful. Now, if you're listening to this, you are probably searching, maybe endlessly scrolling for that game-changing thing, that mic drop, that epiphany, something that's going to make you feel different, that is going to make it click for you, that's going to make you feel braver, or less anxious, or less afraid, or more willing to face your fears and do the difficult things I talk about on this podcast. And I don't blame you for that. It's okay that you're doing that, because everybody has a right to want to feel better, and I certainly don't blame you for searching for something that will make you feel better quickly. That's not a crime. So, if you are in fact doing that, I do not blame you for that, but I'm guessing that you're just bouncing from mic drop to mic drop, from game-changer to game-changer, from epiphany to epiphany, and nothing is actually landing. Nothing is having the effect that you're hoping it will have. I do want to acknowledge, though, that the endless scroll today in the social media environment that we're in, in an attention-based scroll, where everybody's just trying to get you to like or subscribe, or keep scrolling, or to get sticky, or to buy something from them, many, many, many people, some of which even have qualifications and training and should know better, will promise you game-changers. You will hear the word game-changer, the phrase this changed everything, over and over and over. So, just be aware, if you are hooked into that cycle, it's kind of not your fault, and it's really easy to get hooked there. But, that doesn't mean you need to stay there. So, what did that process actually look like for me? Well, to be honest with you, it was quiet. It was not exciting. It was not glamorous. There were no big shifts. There were no moments where I leaped ahead forward. It was just slow and tedious and sometimes frustrating and sometimes it made me angry and sometimes I was unsure what was even happening or if anything was happening. But what it started to look like over time with repeated experience with consistent action that I was taking, it started to look like moments where I would have realizations, not epiphanies. Now, an epiphany is sort of forward-looking. A realization is backward-looking. There were times when I might notice that for the last couple of hours I wasn't fixated solely on how I felt. I wasn't glued to staring at my own body and mind and I would wonder in those moments, "Wow, that's pretty cool. How did that happen?" I didn't know how it happened, but I started to realize I was having those moments. Then I would start to recognize that I would go for maybe a day or two or even a few days at a time without trying to manage my anxiety or even caring that much about it. Sure, I'd have moments where things got dicey, but suddenly I discovered that I was having days at a time when how I felt wasn't the most important thing in the room. And invariably I would think when I realized that, "How did that happen? I don't How did I get here?" And I hope it lasts. Even when I was having those realizations, I wasn't necessarily sure what was creating those shifts and I wasn't certain of what would maintain those shifts, so I just had to keep going. And in the end, my recovery kind of looked like slowly moving out of your old apartment item by item instead of in one big moving truck. You just keep taking things out and taking things out and you're not sure that you're actually even moving, but one day you look around and discover that the apartment is empty and there's nothing else to move and you just sort of quietly turn off the lights and close the door behind you and it's over. It's very anticlimactic. There was no celebration, there was no parade, there was no fireworks, there were no high fives. It just sort of petered out and I didn't even know how that happened, but I noticed that it did. So, what does that look like for other people? People in my therapy practice or people in my social media community. Well, kind of looks the same. Everybody spends a lot of time searching for mic drop moments and epiphanies and game-changers like I did. And often they spend much more time than I did looking for those things because now you can. But in the end, when they sort of get there and they feel like they have reached that desensitized or recovered state, which is going to vary by the way from person to person and day to day, they don't really even know how they got there. They just know that they sort of look backwards and see like, "Oh yeah, that just sort of slowly changed over time and suddenly I don't ask my anxiety for permission to live my life anymore." And when they realize that, it's a really great day and it's always great to be able to share those things with people, whether it's my therapy clients or or you guys listening and watching. But it didn't just look that way for me. It kind of looks that way for all recovered people. Now, this doesn't mean that there were no important moments. There were certainly important moments in my journey and there were important moments for everybody along the way. For me, when I discovered that I didn't want to not only feel like I was failing, but I started to feel like a failure. And when I noticed that I didn't want to feel like a failure anymore, that was a big important moment. I actually made a couple videos about that years ago. And I'm not going to deny that that was an impactful moment. It was a shift. There was no doubt about that. But it was more of a subtle shift. Even when I discovered I didn't want to feel like a failure and I decided that that feeling was unacceptable, that might be the moment when I tipped over from like the pain of not changing was greater than the pain of changing, it still didn't make any major operational or functional changes right away. I may have had that realization and reached that conclusion, which was certainly important, but it didn't change how I felt or how I was functioning right away. I was just as afraid an hour later as I was an hour before that moment. I was just as afraid the next day as it was the previous day. So, while it maybe helped me find a little bit more motivation, consistency, or even the ability to be brave on a more regular basis, I still had to go through and have those experiences and keep doing the things. That important moment of deciding feeling like a failure wasn't going to be acceptable was not a game-changer. It really just sort of informed a slight change in the way I was doing the process, but it was the doing of the process that ultimately made that slow, gradual, very unglamorous, incremental, almost unnoticeable change until it was noticeable. And so for you, just like other people in my therapy practice or my social media audience, I'm sure there will be important moments. Moments where things do sort of shift a little bit, but a little bit, not major. It's not game-changing. It's not mic-dropping. It doesn't change everything like the internet or all the gurus and healers and coaches are going to promise you. Hell, even some therapists who should know better. There are important moments and you can lean on those. You can rely on those and they certainly matter in your personal experience like they did in my personal experience, but we just can't see them as like major game-changing moments where suddenly everything clicked and you moved into high gear because the odds are very high that that's not going to happen that way. So, what mistake might you be making? And I I hate to use the word mistake, but let's be honest, it is a mistake and I made that mistake, too. If you are still hanging on like hot death to the idea that if you just scroll a little more or read another book or watch another video or follow another person on Instagram or listen to another podcast or watch another lecture or join join another support group or join another coaching program. If you are laboring under the belief that if you just keep doing those things, you will find the key that unlocks your recovery, you might have to consider not doing that anymore. That is ultimately a mistake. What's the mistake there? It's not a moral failure. It's not a character failure. It doesn't make you weak. It's not a crime. It doesn't make you a bad person. But, the failure or the mistake there is that doing that tends to get in the way of doing actual recovery. If you give an anxious person the choice between buying another book or facing their anxiety, learning to willfully tolerate, mindfully be aware of what's going on, and move forward anyway, they will pick the book. I know I would have. If you give an anxious person the choice between finding the next new food that will fix them or or improve their gut health so their fear goes away, or going and doing a scary thing 20 miles from home or not responding to scary thoughts about stabbing your dog if you have OCD, for instance, you will pick the new food. I will try the new food or I will eliminate bread from my diet, and that's going to fix it because it's certainly easier to do that. So, it is not a moral failure or a character flaw if you're doing that. But, if you are searching for a game-changer, and you've been searching for a game-changer for a very long time, which is trying one after the other, the mistake is that that often gets in the way of actually doing the recovery things that I talk about all the time. But, it's okay. Be nice to yourself cuz all of us get caught in that trap. I did for sure. So, where's the shift? I think the shift is both emotional and behavioral in nature. On an emotional level, the shift has to be coming to terms with the fact that the game-changer isn't coming for you. It doesn't happen that way. You have to get okay on an emotional level with the idea that the way to recovery is slow, tedious, repetitive, systematic, like slogging through the mud, and being unsure or uncertain or feeling less than certain about your outcome, maybe even doubting yourself. That is the process of recovery. And while no one wants it to look that way, there's an emotional shift that has to happen. I have to get okay. You have to get okay with the idea that that's more likely how you're going to get out of the hole that you're in. It's not going to come with a big game-changing moment because of to one thing you saw on TikTok or YouTube. It's going to come because you are doing things. And it's the doing of the things repetitively, systematically, with self-compassion, with patience, with kindness, with an awareness of why you're choosing to do difficult things like not save yourself when you think you're supposed to. It's the doing of the things that's the behavioral shift. Now, in some instances, like especially health anxiety and OCD, it's not doing things. So, the emotional shift is getting okay with the fact that you kind of have to do it this way. And the game-changer isn't coming to fix everything overnight for you. And the behavioral shift is starting to actually do the recovery things or in certain situations learning to not do the things that will lead you to recovery. Now, that's a big ask, but it can be done. It's the shift that you have to make. It's the shift that I had to make, and it's the shift that everybody who's ever overcome these type of problems has had to make at some point. So, you're not alone in that. Keep that in mind. Now, this does not mean giving up. People sometimes hear me talk about this stuff and they think I'm telling them to give up. I'm never telling anybody to give up. You don't have to give up on the recovery process. You don't have to give up on yourself. You don't have to give up on the life that you hope that you're going to have. It's not about giving up hope. It's not about giving up the fight. It is a little bit about giving up the fight cuz this isn't really about fighting. It's about learning, and you don't have to give up on the process of recovery. You just have to shift into doing the process of recovery instead of thinking about it or hoping that the process will deliver you some sort of magic, you know, fix or information that's going to change everything. There's no giving up here. If there's a giving up, and I talked about this recently in my short-form content, YouTube shorts, and Instagram, if you're not following me on my Instagram, you should maybe do that, the.anxious.truth. I talked about that. Sometimes quitting in anxiety recovery is important, and when I talked about quitting, I was kind of facetiously saying that sometimes we have to quit strategies that aren't working. So, this isn't about giving up. You do not have to give up and just be resigned to a lifetime of misery or suffering. You are just probably going to have to give up on the thing that you've been hoping is going to fix you when that's not actually coming to fix you. And as it turns out, paradoxically, as if we need another paradox, that we can give up on the things that aren't working like hoping for the mic-dropping game-changer, then we can actually engage with the things that were more likely to work and give us a better chance to get where we want to be. So, please don't hear this as needing give up or resign yourself to just always being anxious and always suffering. It doesn't work that way. Sometimes we just have to give up some things to get other things and but that's just life in general, isn't it? Now, always remember, as usual, the stuff that I talk about in this podcast, these are difficult things. They're easy concepts. They're not difficult concepts, but they are difficult to implement. They are big asks. They require, you know, courage. They require counter-instinctual type of stuff. There's nothing common sense about this, especially in the heat of the moment. It's actually the opposite of common sense. That's why we use the word paradox here all the time. It's the opposite of what you think you should do. I want to save myself. I won't. I want to get away. I won't. I want to avoid. I won't. Nothing about that is easy because courage is involved. It doesn't make any common sense and it goes against that powerful drive in the moment for all human beings to seek comfort. So, if it's difficult for you, know that it is difficult for everybody. You have to be nice. You have to be kind. You have to recognize you're trying to do a difficult thing. Again, you have to be patient. If I didn't think you could do it, I would not sit in front of these cameras and microphones every week on two podcasts and keep recording. I think you can do it. I just think it's hard work. So, if I'm going to summarize in my own experience, as much as I wanted big mic-dropping epiphany game-changing moments, there were none. The recovery process doesn't look like that. Didn't look like that for me. Doesn't really look like that for anybody. And sometimes we get caught in the mistake of desperately searching for that over and over even though it's not coming and that blocks us from taking the actions that we need to take to actually enact the process. So, if you're stuck in there, the shift you have to consider today would be can I find the willingness to abandon that strategy and can I find the willingness to start to move in a behavioral direction where I start to actually do the process of recovery. And by the way, if you're not sure what the process of recovery looks like, there's 346 other podcast episodes, at least in the anxious truth, that you can go back and listen to and there's all the episodes of the disordered podcast that I do with Josh Fletcher. That's at disordered.fm. So, if you stumbled upon this podcast or this YouTube channel today and you're like, "Okay, fine. What does that process look like?" There's a ton of free information that I put out that teaches you how to do that. So, that is episode 347 of The Anxious Truth, I guess, in the books. If you made it this far in the video, thank you so much and if you liked it and that's why you hung around so long, maybe consider hitting the like button on the video cuz that tells YouTube that you like when I make content like this so they don't just automatically bury it in the algorithm. And if you really dig The Anxious Truth, hit the subscribe button. Many people who watch these videos are not subscribed to the channel and while that's perfectly fine, I don't care if you hit any buttons or not as long as this helped you, I'm happy. It is just one click for you, but it means a lot to me cuz it takes a lot of effort to make these videos every 2 weeks. Of course, if you want more than just this episode of The Anxious Truth, there's a ton of other resources available on my website at the anxious truth.com, many of which are free. Go check that out. And hey, if you want to ask me questions about what you heard today or saw today or you want to interact with me and Josh Fletcher, my co-host on Disordered, and a community full of really awesome people who are sharing your experience and know what it feels like, you can always check out the Disordered community app. That's at disordered.fm/community. And of course, while you're over there, check out that podcast, too. That is not required. We are not promising you recovery. It is not group therapy. It's not coaching. It's not a cult or a mentorship. It's just a little extra support and the ability to maybe interact with me and Josh if if you you fit. But, you could do all of this without that, so that's entirely optional. Thanks for hanging out with me today. I appreciate you listening or watching. And if you made it this far, thanks so much. I'll be back in 2 weeks with another podcast episode. Not sure what I'm going to talk about, but I will be here. Thanks for chilling today. I hope you got something out of it. I'll see you next time.