Anxiety Relapse Prevention - Morning Routine (Podcast Episode 349)

One of the more common mistakes people make in anxiety disorder recovery is to try to carve out that recovery process as being completely separate and disconnected from the rest of their lives. That is a mistake. We need to address that through a process we call relapse prevention. So, we're going to talk about that today. What is relapse prevention? When somebody is sort of coming out of the recovery process or is showing progress in their work with a anxiety disorder like panic disorder or OCD or health anxiety and they are starting to see the end of the tunnel and we're starting to think about maybe they don't need to be in therapy anymore, we want to start to introduce the concept of relapse prevention. Relapse prevention is what we do to try to adopt healthy habits and sort of widen the strategies and the concepts used in treatment into the rest of your life to help you not fall into the bad habit of fixating on how you feel or drawing catastrophic conclusions based on how you feel or starting to avoid or retreat from or try to engineer your life around how you feel physically or somatically, emotionally, or mentally. So, we introduce concepts like relapse prevention to help you steer clear from that. In relapse prevention in anxiety disorders, we can never guarantee that you're never going to have a lapse. In fact, honestly, most people probably do from time to time. You might call that a setback. For some people when they have what they call a setback, they start to feel bad again and sometimes they even declare an emergency and they will say, "Oh, no, I'm back to square one. My recovery is ruined." Which isn't really true. But when we incorporate relapse prevention strategies in toward the end of treatment or as you're coming out the other side of that, we make you a little less vulnerable to bad habits that can contribute to those lapses and they can help those lapses resolve in a much quicker way. So, I want to start to introduce that and I want to try to introduce that uh within the framework of say a morning routine. I'm not saying this is a special morning routine that you are supposed to exactly follow just like I do and you will always be optimized and leveling up and never be anxious again and never have a setback. That is not what this is about, but I have found that introducing routine of some kind, be it a morning routine, an evening routine, an afternoon routine, it doesn't really matter. It depends on how it fits for you, is a really good way to start to incorporate treatment concepts, treatment principles, uh treatment strategies into the rest of your life. We sort of want this to spread to a certain extent. Now, remember, not everything in the universe is a floating, facing, accepting, willful tolerance exposure problem. Life is really difficult and we don't always get to just sort of float through that. Sometimes an emotional response or specific control or avoidance responses are actually necessary. It's how we solve actual problems in life, but we want to try to make sure that the discernment that you have uh achieved or built as you go through anxiety sort of treatment starts to follow you into other parts of your life. Now, why is this important? Because if you are predisposed to treat unexplained or difficult internal experiences like emergencies, when you you're start to feel a way that is very uncomfortable and you can't necessarily know why you're feeling that way, then it makes you especially vulnerable to a lapse or a relapse or a setback or whatever it is. So, we want to make sure that we start to build skills that you can practice and habits that you can develop that help you build and maintain that sort of mindful awareness of the gears turning when they start to turn, the discernment of when I should be responding to an emotion or a sensation and when I don't have to, when I could just let it go and let it run its natural course. So, since anxious people that develop these problems tend to be predisposed to them, there's nothing wrong with trying to build healthy habits and useful, constructive, adaptive habits into your daily life to help protect you or keep you a little less vulnerable to having a relapse or a setback. So, that's why we introduce relapse prevention. And one of the ways I want to introduce relapse prevention, like I said, is in the guise of a morning routine. Now, again, don't twist this. If you've listened to this podcast or watch my YouTube channel long enough, you know that I'm never here doing, "Here's a morning routine that will make you unrecognizable in 6 weeks." Or, "This is never going to be anxious again if you follow my magic morning routine." Or comment routine, you know, so I can give you the secret to eternal life if you do the special morning routine. It's never anything like that because, frankly, that simply doesn't exist. I'm going to call that as nonsense, but that's a rant for another day. Do not let clickbait on the internet convince you that if you just do a special routine or do a special thing, you will never be anxious again, you will never have a setback, you will never have a relapse. That is nonsense. Nothing that I'm going to say here in in the framework of sort of using a a morning routine to build these habits is meant to be a life-changer or some sort of magic mic drop game-changing moment. And that's the thing I talked about in a previous podcast episode just a few weeks ago if you want to go back and take a look at why we don't look for game-changing mic dropping moments. But, in this situation, I want to use a little bit of my own experience and the experience of many others, both in my therapy practice and in my social media community, that this can be used as a bit of an example or a framework that you can begin to follow to apply the principles of relapse prevention through the building and practice of healthy habits. Uh people who tend to develop morning routines or afternoon, evening routines, just routines of some kind where they get involved in the consistent practice of the things that I'm talking about, do tend to fare better. Uh when they do get triggered again, when life gets really difficult, and maybe they start to feel things they haven't felt in a while, they are much more likely, I am much more likely, to not get hooked into that old anxiety disorder response. Remember, I say all the time, actually Steven Hayes, the founder of ACT, is the one who who said this to me and I will always remember, he said, you know, there's no delete button in your brain, which there isn't. So, like those old avoidant, control how I feel is an emergency pathway pathways never get deleted, they just get sort of like unused for a while and while you build these new flexible, psychologically flexible, discerning, floating, tolerating, accepting, distress tolerance pathways. But, everybody at some point is going to get triggered or scared or uncomfortable enough where it seems like the right idea to go back to the old way. If you could build a routine, whether it's in the morning, the afternoon, whatever, we're going to talk about morning routines today, that help you maintain connection to the strategies, the concepts, uh you know, the the techniques, if you will, of therapy that helps you progress, then you have a better chance of catching that when it happens, seeing it for what it is, and not getting dragged down the rabbit hole for 2 weeks for no good reason. Um again, that's my personal experience. Uh not too long ago, uh I talked about I think I did a podcast episode here on The Anxious Truth about how I don't get triggered. Did I do that? Maybe I did. But, or how I stay recovered. I also did some short-form content on that. This is one of the ways I do it. As somebody who suffered from raging anxiety disorders, like panic disorder, agoraphobia, OCD, which is I know technically not an anxiety disorder, but close enough, for many years of my life on and off, I talk about this stuff all the time, every day in my therapy practice one-on-one with a very large social media community, in the disorder community, uh with people who are sharing their experience, and I don't get triggered into any sort of relapse. Part of that is because I have a new relationship with my own thoughts and emotions and body, but also I have developed this morning routine that keeps me connected to those concepts and sort of keeps me sharp. Uh is it, you know, ironclad titanium coating that means I'm never going to be anxious again? No. It just means I don't get carried away and accidentally fall into those old maladaptive responses when you do start to feel things again, right? So, one of the things I want to talk to you about before I go into a morning routine that's based on sort of four pillars. And again, this is like a broad broad strategy. You're going to have to apply it specifically in the way that works for you, but I want to talk for a second about the idea of feeling good. One of the things that is weird about this is that I often have to talk about the trap of feeling good. Now, it's awesome when you feel good. I love when you feel good. Everybody that cares about you loves when you feel good. You love when you feel good. And you should. Like everybody wants to feel good, nothing wrong with that. But often when we feel good, it can become very easy to start abandoning these habits, these strategies, these concepts that got you to where you are now. If you are further down the road, feeling better, feeling like you're making progress, feeling like you're nearly recovered or desensitized or whatever it is, like abandoning the things that got you there is really common when we start to feel good because we accidentally start to see them as these are techniques that helped me overcome my anxiety disorder, but now I don't seem to have that anymore. So, I'm going to just leave them there and carve that out. That's what I said in the beginning of this episode. I'm going to take my anxiety recovery and carve it out as separate, and I'm not going to use any of these principles in any other parts of my life. So, I'm going to immerse myself in stress, I'm going to immerse myself in conflict, I'm going to not take care of myself, I'm going to run myself ragged, I'm going to go back to worry and rumination habits because I'm better, so I don't have to do that. I can go back to crappy habits in the rest of my life. Uh and that's kind of silly. So, the reason why we want to develop a morning routine is to develop habits. The reason why we do this is not so that we feel better when we start to slip and be anxious again. We do it so that we are better prepared on a day when we might be feeling more really stressed or maybe a little overwhelmed by life or even anxious and we don't know why. So, keep this in mind. Do not get tricked into thinking, "Well, I'm feeling pretty good, so I don't need to do this." I can easily get tricked into that. We all can. Like, why should I sit and meditate? Why should I write my journal this morning? I don't want to do that. I just want to drink coffee and sit on my deck and just chill. Okay, fine. But, just keep in mind, you miss here and there, it's totally fine. We don't have to be rigid here, but be careful of falling into the trap of I'm feeling good, so that means I don't have to do these things. That's exactly when we want to do them. Remember, we're building habits. We're not just trying to learn ways to calm down on demand. So, in the example of a morning routine that I want to give you in this episode, I'm going to look at a routine that you can go through or build every morning that it rests on sort of four relapse prevention principles. Attention and mindfulness practice, because we always want to remain mindfully aware of when we are being triggered into ooh, I don't like this internal experience. I want to fight it. Should I? Right? That's part of that whole how to accept anxiety. I did that a year or so ago on the podcast. You can check that out. Well, we want to use things like physical movement. Why do we want to use physical movement? Well, PS, physical movement is a really great way to practice mindfulness and attention just in a different way. It doesn't always have to be sitting on a uh a cushion or a sofa cross-legged, right? But, also physical movement is just a good habit. It keeps you connected to the idea that you have to take care of yourself. And there's nothing wrong with being physically healthy. This is where we can start to introduce that. We want to work on expression of emotions in a healthy, adaptive kind of way. People that develop anxiety disorders develop a really difficult relationship with their own emotions, especially anxiety, fear, uncertainty, discomfort, feelings of vulnerability. So, we want to work on maintaining that good relationship with our emotional selves. And that means practicing expressing our emotions in a good way. And the last one, yes, I'm actually going to say this, so hang on to your hats. I'm going to call it feeding your spirit or your soul. I know I didn't get hit on the head. I promise I have not been abducted by aliens and replaced by a fake Drew. Those things actually do matter. We don't normally talk about that when we are talking about the process of anxiety disorder treatment therapy recovery, but if we want to prop ourselves up and live in a way that best keeps us from being too vulnerable to a relapse, you know, feeding your spirit and your soul, the things that make you happy, exploring that part of you is a big part of that. I'm going to get to that. So, let's look at the first pillar, which is that attention and mindfulness practice. Remember, we do not use attention attention and mindfulness practice as a soothing or calming thing in this situation. This is a habit. It's a skill, if you will. It's a muscle to build. You just want to be able to pay attention to your experiences as they are unfolding so that you can see I had a scary thought that bothers me. I'm hearing an automatic instruction to fix it, but if I fix it, I run into trouble. So, oh, that's right. I'm supposed to just let that discomfort come and go on its own. That is a function of mindfulness. I teach the practical mindfulness course with Joanna Hardis and Lauren Rosen because it is in fact the foundation of acceptance. If we're going to do mindfulness and acceptance-based approaches to anxiety, which is what I'm teaching here, mindfulness and acceptance. We have no acceptance without mindful awareness, right? So, we want to build a morning routine that involves practicing paying attention and being mindful for 5 or 10 15 minutes at a time. You do not have to sit for an hour on a cushion every morning, I promise. But, I we do hear people in meditation and mindfulness circles talk about the word sitting. Oh, I have to sit. I make sure I sit every day. Sometimes they call it cushion time. Yeah, those are kind of colloquialisms, but it doesn't have to be taken literally. What you just want to do is build yourself your morning routine that involves 10 15 minutes every morning, every afternoon, every evening, whatever works for you, where you are practicing bringing your attention back to the moment that you are in over and over and over. We're simply just keeping that attentional control and awareness muscle active, strong, sharp, in practice. We don't want to let that get dulled or we run the risk of just accidentally falling back into just knee-jerk reaction reflection mode, you know, reflexive response mode, which gets us into trouble and anxiety disorders. So, we should be trying to build a morning routine that involves the principle of set, I'm going to call it set, just to describe attention and mindfulness practice for 5, 10 minutes, 15 minutes every morning, every afternoon, every evening, when you decide to do this. You can do it any way you want. There's a million different ways to do it, but we are not doing it as grounding, calming, soothing. Tend not to want to use things like guided imagery. If you love guided imagery for relaxation and pleasure, use it, but not here. We We want to work that attention direction muscle every day to keep us aware of what's going on moment by moment. Um I do think this should be a formal practice. Yes, you can use informal attention and mindfulness practices by paying attention to little regular hygiene tasks and things like walking to the car, walking across your house, eating snacks. Yes, you can do that, but I really believe that your morning routine should involve a formal mindfulness or attention training practice for 15 minutes, 10 15 minutes every day. You can build up to that, but that's a reasonable target. You don't have to do an hour, I promise. The second pillar I want to call move. That's the physical movement, physical activity thing. This is where if you're one of my somatic therapist colleagues or friends, you get to cheer out loud. Uh I'm kind of joking, but not. In my world, uh you know, in in my morning routine, like intentional movement in the form of some kind of exercise has physical benefits for me. Clearly helps keep me physically healthy, strong, flexible, balanced, all that stuff. But it also has mental benefits. Um I think that you can combine those two things. So, if I'm doing a cardio workout, one of the cardio workouts I really love is riding my bike outside. If I can, I want to get outside and pedal outside. When I'm doing that, not only am I working on my cardiovascular fitness, burning calories, helping, you know, battle that weight gain thing, which I am prone to if I'm not careful, but also I'm being very mindful because I'm paying attention to what's going on, the pedaling, the breathing, this the scenery going by me. I'm not really thinking about podcast episodes or therapy clients or projects or money or anything. I'm just thinking about the thing that I'm doing. Um so, it can be really a great way to to do that. Uh move your body for the sake of physical health, for sure, but also as a way to maintain the practice of being in the moment and giving yourself the opportunity to simply exist in that state. I'm just exercising for the next 15, 30 minutes, whatever it is, I'm allowed to do that. Because people who will fall into the trap of I don't have time for that, I have to run into my busy life, I have to be the caretaker, I have to be the problem solver, I'm the multitasker, I got to do all my projects, I got to check all my boxes, I don't have time for that sort of stuff, makes us vulnerable to falling back into the habits that can start to create anxiety disorders to begin with. So, it's really important to do that. Um I will acknowledge, and we're talking about the move pillar, the second pillar of a morning routine, that my somatic therapist friends have a really good point when they talk about movement being a great way to, you know, kind of soothe, ground, regulate, and express emotions or release emotions. That is 100% true. That is a thing. When I hit the publish button on my very first book, I had some feelings about that. I'm a pretty confident guy, but it was the first time I ever published a book, and I thought it would be a good idea to go down to my basement where I had my power power rack, and I lifted heavy weights for like 45 minutes right after that. That was my response to that. And guess what? It made me feel a whole lot better. So, it is certainly okay to recognize the emotional and calming, grounding, soothing, regulating benefits of physical exercise. We do not have to deny that. We don't go to that when you're in the thick of panic disorder and OCD, but certainly when you're coming out the other side and trying to build healthy habits that keep you a little less vulnerable to relapse, relapse prevention, that's what we're calling it. There's nothing wrong with taking advantage of that. If exercise is a way for you to be in the moment, keep your body healthy, uh you know, do good things for yourself, and release some emotions, go for it. Literally nothing wrong with that. I I highly uh uh endorse that plan, right? So, let's get to the fourth thing, which is expression of emotion. We're going to talk about This is where the journaling fans get to cheer, right? This is your moment to shine if you're a big journaling person. I have spoken and written extensively, you could search the back catalog of podcasts, about the concept of journaling in anxiety disorder recovery, and journaling is not something that people like me, therapists like me with the specialty, automatically talk about. Like, "Oh, you should journal your feelings." No, people with anxiety disorders tend to write journals that are nothing more than just repeating horror stories every day of how they felt and what they thought was going to happen. I thought I was going to lose it. I I barely escaped. That is not a good journaling practice. When you are out the other side of that, and that's not necessarily a problem anymore, journaling can be a really good thing. Like, I take time every morning to write in a journal, even if it's only a page. Handwriting is what I do, and it's just a way to keep things sort of lubricated. If you are in the habit of denying your emotions, trying to like everything becomes a float past the thought, every emotion is something I just float past, every thought is something that I just float past, and you you know, you're not really good at at interacting in a discerning, helpful way with your thoughts and emotions, expressing your emotions in the form of a journaling exercise every morning is a really good way to do that. Like, uh uh you don't have to use prompts. You don't have to do anything in particular. You could handwrite if you want. When I write in my journal, often it is absolutely illegible. If I had to go back and read it in 2 days, I probably wouldn't be able to decipher my own handwriting. It just sort of helps me get thoughts out. It gets that muscle moving in the morning. It sometimes does actually help me work out things that are on my mind. And that's fine. Sometimes it's super mundane practical crap. Sometimes maybe it's a little more heavy. There's no wrong way to do it. It's just being in the habit of making sure that you recognize that you have to express your emotions on a regular basis because pretending that they're not there and squashing them is one of those things that leads us into a very uncomfortable situation. They're going to come back and bite you in the butt. And people that are vulnerable to relapsing into a disordered state of anxiety will possibly do that when they start to feel uncomfortable. So if you're bottling things up or not addressing things that need to be addressed because you're just trying to keep a lid on your emotions and your thoughts all the time, you could start to feel that and then you start to feel that and declare emergencies about how you feel. So how about we just learn how to be better at relating to our thoughts and our emotions. And I think journaling is one great way to do that. So that would be the third thing that you would want to incorporate into a morning routine as you build one as part of your relapse prevention strategy. Again, maybe it's a more afternoon routine. Maybe it's not routine. I don't care. Some routine, right? Anyway. So I think one of the things that I want to add quickly about the ex- the the the journaling or expression thing is it doesn't have to follow strict rules, right? It can be completely free-form. You can type. You can write by hand. You can paint. You could draw. You could sing. You can write poems. You could dance. I don't care. Like you pick what form of emotional expression and working through your thoughts works for you. It doesn't have to be sitting with a cup of coffee and the window with the perfect lighting and the Instagram story post about how you're journaling or having your study time. It can be if you want, but it can be anything you want. All I'm talking about is let's maintain a healthy relationship with our thoughts and our emotions going forward so that we don't have to slip back into that sort of toxic relationship with our own with our own minds and our emotions, right? So keep that in mind. And then the fourth pillar of a good morning routine that helps aid, I think, in relapse prevention is the explore I but that's the part where I'm going to say sort of feed your soul or your spirit, right? It's the exploration pillar. For me, I I see this as learning because but that's just me. I love learning new stuff. I am a junkie for new information. I love that sort of stuff. So, like I try to make time every morning for learning. For me, that's usually in the form of reading, right? I will spend some time every morning reading so that I maybe learn something new a topic that is interesting to me or new to me. But, it can be really anything. Like anything like learning feeds my spirit, my soul. It keeps me connected to just taking care of me. Being happy or at least in allowing space for some happiness, right? I can't I can't guarantee happiness. We're not We're never trying to engineer feelings, but it is a really good thing. It's a stress reducer. It is a stress management tool. It is a way to express ourselves in certain ways, of course. Like connect with the things that you care about. And if you're not quite sure which care about anymore, then experiment with things. It is safe to do that. One of the reasons why we want to rely on the sort of the explore or feed your spirit or soul pillar as you're building say a morning routine here afternoon routine, evening routine, doesn't matter is it helps keep you connected to number one things that can bring you joy and enjoyment and pleasure, which is always a good thing. We all love that. But, also it reminds us it is not only safe, but a really good idea to practice not solving your problems for a little while. So, if you're into gardening, cooking, recipes, new music, poetry, art, stamp collecting, watch collecting, I don't really care what it is that feeds your soul or your spirit that you want to explore, take some time every morning if you can. I understand that it may have to be different times of the day and everybody's going to have different amounts of time that available to them, but take some time to explore those things. 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes if you could do it. I'm I'm happy if I get to squeeze in 10 or 15 minutes of reading in the morning. It's just a nice thing to do. It connects me to things that make me happy. It's a nice start to the day and I remember, oh yeah, that's right. I'm allowed to spend 15 minutes just drinking a cup of coffee, enjoying that, and enjoying this book. I am allowed to do that. I do not have to be managing my stress, my life, my problems. I don't have to be solving problems. I don't have to be achieving anything. I could just exist in this purely pleasurable or neutral state. It's a really cool exercise to do. So, the fourth pillar would be explore, which we'll call feed your spirit or soul. Build some of that into your morning routine as well, if you can, right? If at all possible. Now, one thing that I want to add is, you know, I'm using the word spirit or soul. It can be spiritual. It can be traditionally spiritual. You can even incorporate faith-based practices here. Totally fine. You can be as spiritual as faith-based or as secular as you want to be. When I use the word feed your spirit or soul, I'm being very generic here. If you have a faith, that might be a good time to spend some time exploring your faith. If you are spiritual in some nature, maybe what turns you on is exploring spirituality in some way, shape, or form. There's no wrong answer here. But just don't feel like you have to. I have to be I have to feed my soul in more of a traditional way or my spirit. Doesn't have to be. If it's literally, you could be engaged in daily devotions or you could be literally watching mini-documentaries on the evolution of the loot. Like either of those things is a totally fine way to spend a few minutes in the morning. It's all good. So, just be careful. Like all of that stuff counts, right? So, let's recap that a little bit. If you're going to build a morning routine or any kind of routine so that you can build good daily habits that are helping you with relapse prevention so that you become a little less vulnerable to those prolonged relapses or setbacks. You can recover from them quickly, get back on the horse, right the ship, get back to your life. You want to incorporate four pillars. Attention and mindfulness practice, we'll call that the sit pillar, right? You make time to sit, figuratively or literally, every day. Uh we want to move, like build in some regular movement for various different reasons. How about some practice expressing your emotions and your thoughts in whatever way you think that's appropriate, and feel free to explore all kinds of different ways to do it. Have fun with it, nothing wrong with that. And you want to explore the things that bring you joy, the things that feed your spirit and your soul. That is how you can start to build a morning routine or a routine that you use some part of the day, whether it's a grand total of 10 minutes, 15 minutes, or you have 2 hours to kill, God bless you if you do, then go for that. Try to build these four pillars into your morning routine, and hopefully, what you will find is that you are building habits that just become rote. They're just normal. Every day I practice mindfulness. Every day I spend some time reading. Every day I do some journaling. And you may find a benefit from that. I would suspect you probably would in some way, shape, or form. Helps me manage my stress. Helps me be more aware of when I'm feeling stressed and fighting against my own internal experiences. Helps me not get hooked into that control and avoidance thing again. Like these This is what we're looking for. That's relapse prevention strategies that we would talk about as you near the end of therapy and talk about what we would call discharge or termination, right? So, uh one point I do want to make before I wrap it up, right? And that would be I'm talking to you, internet. Do not ruin this for us, man. I'm talking about the internet and the endless scroll in general, right? At the risk of sounding repetitive about this, cuz I talk about this stuff all the time, but I think it's important in the environment that we're in because you're probably Why you might be watching this on YouTube, which is part of social media and the scroll. You may have found my podcast, if you're listening, because of social media. So, I know we're all involved in that, right? There are legitimately no wrong ways to build morning, afternoon, evening routines for relapse prevention, except maybe just deciding not to do it at all. Maybe that's a mistake. We could argue that, but okay, maybe that's the mistake. Relapse prevention and like this four-pillar morning routine that I'm talking about in this episode have no aesthetic, they have no right or wrong, they don't have to look a certain way, they don't have to be posted as content online, they don't have to be the interesting to anybody but you. Some days are not even interesting to you, but you do them anyway. They don't need an influencer or a coach or a guru, says the guy with the expensive microphone, to tell you how to do them. This is why I'm not giving you specific things to do, I'm just trying to give you four principles that you can follow you as you learn to build and experiment with your own routines. The a morning routine or a routine at all based on building these habits as part of relapse prevention are almost the opposite of that. Like the internet will ruin everything for us because it gets very prescriptive and judgy about it. It makes you compare your routine to other people's routine. Does the CEO of this amazing tech startup that's now a billionaire, what's his morning routine? How does she do it? I got to do what she does. No, it's what we want is almost exactly the opposite of that. You want flexibility, you want to test your own capacity, you want to explore on your own, you want to be able to trust yourself to make the right decisions to, you know, discover and and uncover and work with your own strengths, your own skills, your own interests. Like don't let the internet ruin this for us, man. Like don't let it tell you how to do that. Like it tends to ruin everything by telling us what we're doing right and wrong and making us feel crappy if we don't do it the way some guru or influencer does it. Do not do that. Your morning routine does it you don't have to aspire to do someone else's morning routine. Figure out your own. Much more valuable that way, right? Do not outsource your relapse prevention work to the endless scroll, just like you don't want to outsource your actual recovery or desensitization work while you're in it. I say this stuff all the time. That will backfire on you if you're not careful. So, that is my little rambling, 30 minutes or so, on relapse prevention in the form of building a morning routine based on these four pillars. Uh hopefully you got something out of this and if you are at that point where you're starting to feel like, "Yeah, I'm making really good progress. I'm starting to see the end of the, you know, light at the end of the tunnel here." Or maybe you're working with a therapist, maybe one of you're my therapy client, possible, right? And we're talking about maybe, "Hey, how much longer do you think you need to be here?" This is a good time to start to talk about this stuff. To be completely honest with you, we should be incorporating relapse prevention from day one in treatment, but often we're doing it we're doing that, but we're just not recognizing it as that. So, remember that principle that we don't recover to live, we actually start working on living to recover. Kind of relapse prevention, sound familiar when I talk about that stuff? So, take what you can out of this episode, use it to experiment, to explore, to test your boundaries, to like try new things, to challenge old beliefs about how fragile and incapable you are, especially if you're the type of person that has that critical or catastrophic voice that says, "I'm doing so much better now, but what if it comes back?" Well, here's a great way to respond to that. You know what, inner voice that says, "What if it comes back?" I can't answer that question. I don't know if it's going to come back, but I can do this. This is something I actually can do that's good for me and I how about I increase my odds of like maintaining the healthy state that I find myself in? How about I reward myself and treat myself nicely? I don't have to determine I don't have to predict now if it's going to come back in 5 years, but I can do this. So, at least give it a shot, right? So, hopefully that helped. I appreciate you hanging out here and, you know, spending 30 minutes with me. Hopefully, I was able to give you something useful. Remember, any change that you make today, any change you make today, whether it's this or any of the topic I talk about in the podcast or in Disordered that I do with Josh Fletcher, any change you make that helps you experiment with discovering your capability, your capacity, your strength, your flexibility, instead of cowering in fear based on your own body, mind, and thoughts is a win. It doesn't matter how small it is. Every one of these things counts because there are lessons in every one of those new actions, right? So, thanks for hanging out. I'll be back in again back again in 2 weeks with another topic. I'm not I think I know what it's going to be. That was supposed to be this week, but we'll probably do it in 2 weeks. Hopefully it'll be something good, so come back then for sure. If you are watching on YouTube, since most of you that watch these videos are not subscribed to the channel, maybe hit the subscription thing on YouTube and the notification bell. It tells YouTube that you actually like when I make these videos, otherwise they tend to just bury them in the algorithm cuz it's not entertaining and I guess I get it, but it's one click for you, helps me a lot. Thanks for hanging out. Thanks for supporting my work in whatever way you can. Check out the anxious-truth.com and disordered.fm for more resources. See you in 2 weeks. We're out.