Your Anxiety Toolkit - Practical Skills for Anxiety, Panic & Depression

This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 297.  Welcome back, everybody. How are you really? Just doing a quick check-in. I love the quick check-in, the drop down into your chest, the drop down into whatever discomfort you may be having. And just take it a minute to actually check-in. So important. How often are you doing this? Hopefully, multiple times every day.  All right. Today, we are talking about accountability, and this actually came, I was listening to something. I can’t remember even what it was, but someone was having a strong reaction to the word “accountability,” which words matter. They really, really do. But what I think is more important is the meaning in which we place on words. It’s a huge part of diffusing from what we tell ourselves all day. So, the whole point of today is to talk about this important treatment concept or recovery concept. And I’ll come back to why. But it’s so important. It’s so, so important. I’ve got a couple of different views about certain things, so you’ll have to hang with me each. Everyone is so important, but hang with me. Before we do that, let’s first do the review of the week. This is from Maggie Paulson. Maggie wrote: “I love this podcast. I’ve never been diagnosed with OCD, but I recognize that I have anxiety. This podcast has helped me to learn more about how my brain works, and her gentle and loving approach to treatment has helped me learn to handle my intrusive thoughts and my anxiety. To say that has improved the quality of my life is an understatement. I’m very grateful for Kimberley and her podcast.” Thank you, Maggie. You fill up my heart. Thank you so much for your reviews. All of you, even if you just click the five-star review or however many stars you think it deserves. You don’t even have to write a review. You can just give it stars, and that helps me. So, thank you so much.  All right, drum roll. We have the “I did a hard thing” segment. This is from Anonymous. Anonymous said: “Today, I manage not to lapse into a behavioral addiction that I’ve been struggling with for over a year. It’s very easy for me to use this addiction as a coping strategy for the stresses in my life. But I realized today that a good life free of this addiction is better than a good feeling that only lasts momentarily.” Oh my gosh, Anonymous, I want to give you a standing applause right now. “Although every day is going to be challenging when it comes to not lapsing into addiction, if I take each day as it comes and have the attitude that it’s a beautiful day to do hard things, I know I can live addiction free.”  So good. So good, Anonymous. Oh my gosh, lLet me read this line again. It says, “I realized today that a good life free of this addiction is better than a good feeling that only last momentarily.” So much wisdom in that sentence. Amazing. So much wisdom. That is true for all of us. Isn’t it? So true for all of us in that we just-- the real living we want, the real pieces on the other side of that hard thing. So, so true. Thank you so much, Anonymous, and thank you so much to Maggie Paulson for that amazing review.  All right, folks, here is something I want to first start with. So, we’re talking about, can you hold yourself accountable without being self-critical? That’s a really important question because, and the reason it’s so important for recovery is, unless you’re in an intensive treatment center, where you have services 24/7, chances are, you’re doing a lot of this hard work. You’re doing a lot of these “hard things” on your own. And in order to do a hard thing, you do have to be accountable. You have to generate. If you could see me, you can see me like my arms are moving like cogs are turning. You have to generate motivation to do these hard things, because the truth is, no one wants to do these hard things. That’s why they’re hard. I don’t blame you if you don’t want to do hard things today because hard things suck. I keep saying that lately and I mean it. It’s hard. I don’t want to discount and make this podcast out to be like, “Oh, it’s just easy. Just do these five mindful things and you’re going to be fine.” No, it’s hard work. You have to generate motivation and you have to generate accountability. The accountability is what gets you to do it, even though you don’t want to do it. And here is the point I want you to really take from this episode. Hopefully, this is a shorter episode, because I know I’ve been going a little longer lately. I’m a bit chatty. I’m chattier lately. I don’t know why. Here is the point. Being accountable is not synonymous with blame and harsh treatment. So, let me put that same concept into different words. Holding yourself accountable doesn’t mean the same as blaming yourself, beating yourself into doing the thing that you said you were going to do. That’s not accountability. Accountability is just holding yourself accountable to do the thing. Saying have some accountability doesn’t mean treat yourself terribly. And as I was saying at the beginning, I had heard something and I don’t even remember where. I’m assuming it was on Instagram. They were saying like, “Don’t tell me to be accountable. That’s just mean. That’s just mean that you would ask me to be accountable.” And I’m over here going, what? No, hun, someone somewhere you’ve picked up the idea or someone’s taught you that accountability means getting whipped and that isn’t true. That’s not true.  Accountability, we just last session, last episode did 196. It was about, what is your recovery goal? So, we got really clear about what do you want your life to look like. If you haven’t listened to that, please go back and listen to it. So, we got really clear on that. And accountability is saying, I love myself so much, and I love those recovery goals so much that I’m going to do this thing. That’s accountability. I value my well-being so much. I value that goal that I want for myself. I believe in myself so much that I’m going to do that thing. That hard thing. It’s not whipping and beating. It’s not mean words. It’s not saying get off your butt your lazy thing. That’s self-criticism. That’s not accountability. That’s just bullying. That’s self-bullying.  And so, what I want you to look at is, accountability is simply saying, I’m going to do the thing I said I’m going to do because I deserve it. I deserve the outcome, the dream, the goal, the life that lines up with my values. Accountability isn’t saying, push through no matter what, no matter how much pain you’re in, just like plow through it. Believe me. I’ve been there. I’ve been there. Sometimes you have to do that. I’m not going to say that that’s particularly even wrong because sometimes we do have to push through, but you don’t have to be mean. And it’s asking yourself, how willing am I to show up and do this hard thing so I can get this goal? Exactly like Anonymous said in this “I did a hard thing” segment. That’s accountability. Everything that Anonymous said is accountability. I should have actually-- sorry, Anonymous. I should have just read your “I did a hard thing” and said, “There you go, folks. That’s the episode. That’s what accountability looks like.” So, it’s accountability. Compassionate accountability will still get you across the finish line. Often when I talk to clients about roadblocks to self-compassion, they’ll say, “Well, I won’t get up and do it if I don’t beat myself up.” Is that you? Maybe I should ask that question. Does that resonate with you? Like, “I won’t get to the gym. I won’t exercise. I won’t do the exposure unless I beat myself up. That’s the only form of transportation to get myself to do the thing.”  If that’s the case, please make today the day that you start trying something else. I’ll tell you why real quick and then I’m going to finish up. Yes, there are times when being self-critical gets you to do the thing. And if that’s what it takes, it’s up to you. You get to choose. I’m not going to tell you what’s wrong. I’m not going to tell you you are wrong. I don’t want you to feel judgment about that from yourself or from me because we’re all doing the very best we can with what we have. So, that’s totally fine. But if you use that as your only way, the chances are, eventually, it’s going to burn you out. You’re going to start to feel so bad about yourself that you will give up. We’ve got all the research and science to back it.  So, it’s only short-lived. This is only going to work for a certain amount of time until it stops working. So, let’s use today to try something different. Let’s put eggs in different baskets. Let’s practice compassionate accountability.  Again, I’ll say it, compassionate accountability is doing the thing that you set out to do, because you love yourself and you love your goals so much that you’re willing to do the hard thing. That’s it. That’s it, friends. That’s all I got to say.  All right. I love you. Have a wonderful day. I just love you. I’m squeezing my fist. I just love you guys. Thank you for being a part of my community. Thank you for supporting me. I totally understand you have gazillions of options for podcasts and gazillions of people who are probably doing great things. Thank you for letting me be a part of your journey. It’s an honor. Really it is. Have a wonderful day.

In This Episode: The importance of having a specific recovery goal Why you need a recovery goal in order to gain traction with OCD and other anxiety disorders  What does your “recovery dream” look like?  What is getting in the way of your recovery goal?  Learn to live your life “as if” you had already reached your recovery goal.  Links To Things I Talk About: https://www.cbtschool.com/overcominganxiety ERP School: https://www.cbtschool.com/erp-school-lp Episode Sponsor: This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com.  CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors.  Go to cbtschool.com to learn more.  Spread the love! Everyone needs tools for anxiety... If you like Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, visit YOUR ANXIETY TOOLKIT PODCAST to subscribe free and you'll never miss an episode. And if you really like Your Anxiety Toolkit, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two). EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION  This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 296.  Welcome back, everybody. I am so fired up for this episode. Oh, I just love this stuff. I love it. I love it. I love it.  Okay. Let’s get started. First of all, let’s do an “I did a hard thing.” This one is epic. This one is from Fisher and they said:  “I have OCD, health anxiety, and panic disorder. And last year, I was diagnosed with POTS,” which is postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. That is the chronic illness that I have also. And they’ve said: “This was very overwhelming for me. I was petrified of exercising because of the exercise intolerance that comes with POTS and worrying that it was a life-threatening cardiac issue.” Oh, I am with you, Fisher. So, for those of you who don’t know what exercise intolerance is, it’s like it’s almost impossible to do exercise. When you stand up, you pass out. And when I’ve been triggered by POTS, it’s hard to even do a block around, walk around the block of my house.  “My doctor did all the cardiac tests to rule out any underlying issues before diagnosing me with POTS and recommended cardiac reconditioning to help me get started with recovery. My first barrier to overcome this was to trust in my physician and their diagnosis and follow their recommendation for exercise therapy. My second barrier was facing my fear of exercising. I can now say that I’m in my last week of the program after going twice a week for three months, along with exercising on my own at home. It’s been a struggle. There are some days where I flare up.” I hear you, Fisher. I totally get you. “And it seems impossible, but accessing self-compassion, budgeting spoon usage for the day, and moving things around to allow myself to rest have been invaluable tools to help me with the experience. A wise person told me after my diagnosis, the only predictable thing about living with a chronic illness is that it is unpredictable. So, I try to accept that uncertainty as a part of my life, living with anxiety and POTS.” Fisher, I just love you. You’re killing it here. “I have a lot of work to do in learning to live with my chronic illness and my OCD and health anxiety recovery, but I make a little progress each and every day. P.S. Would you consider doing an episode on coping with chronic illness that mirror anxiety symptoms like POTS? I’d love to hear the skills that have helped you and some of you recommend coping strategies. Thanks for all the hard work that you do on this podcast.” Fisher, I would love to have you on the podcast. I am going to write it in my notes to reach out to you because I think this is such an important topic, one that I myself have gone through, and thank you for writing this. You are doing badass, amazing hard work. So, yay. Thank you. You will hear from me. If you don’t hear from me, reach out, because I think that would be wonderful.  Okay. Let’s take a breath because that brought up a lot for me. I just feel such deep compassion for Fisher and all of you who are just doing the hard thing. So, so cool.  All right. Quickly, review of the week from Mosley23. They said: “I’ve been listening for several years and can say that this podcast has helped immensely to understand my OCD and anxiety. Kim and her guests have provided very helpful ideas, strategies, and encouragement that have been so key in helping me to get to a good place with my mental health. Could not recommend it more highly if you or someone you love have an anxiety disorder.” Thank you so much, Mosley23. Your reviews mean the world to me. The world really. Really, it’s so helpful. And again, if you give a review, and I know specifically what episode you’re talking about or what specific thing, it means then I can do more of that and help more people. So, yay.    All right. Let’s talk about recovery. It’s taking all of my energy not to bang my hands down on the table and be like, “Let’s do it.”  All right. So, I take walks every morning and I often listen to podcasts or audiobooks. I’m a big self-help, non-fiction kind of gal. And I’m often listening to these most motivating speakers and it gets me so fired up. This morning, I got so fired up because this is such a part of the work of being a clinician. We get trained on all the theory and the statistics and the diagnoses, but we don’t get taught very well how to help a client identify what is your recovery goal. What are you here for? And so, even though you, listener, loving beautiful person, human friend – even though you’re not here for therapy, because this is not therapy, I want you to be really intentional about your recovery goals.  Why is that important? Because, when you’re dealing with a mental health issue, you’ve already got a full-time job. You’re working your butt off to manage that. And sometimes we can put our attention so much on the disorder instead of making time and carving time and having a mindset towards, what do I want life to look like once I recover and how can I use that recovery goal to fuel the work I’m doing now while I’m in the trenches? So, what I’m not saying here is, list off 20 magical things that will happen to you in the future when you get rid of your anxiety disorder, because that just means now you have an additional list of things to check off and it’s overwhelming and anxiety producing. So, I’m not talking about just lists. I’m talking about getting clear on what you want life to be like, even if anxiety is there.  So, let me ask you. You guys know, I love questions. First question, what does your recovery dream look like? What do you wish it looked like? So, often when I ask that to clients, their first response is, they put their hand on the buzzer and they’re like, “Pick me.” I don’t want anxiety and I don’t want that to be your goal. So, the absence of an emotion is not a recovery goal. We need anxiety. If you didn’t have anxiety, you’d put your hand on the hot plate. You’d jam your hand in the door. We need anxiety. So, try not to make that your goal. I’m talking about specifically, zoom in and imagine that you are the ring camera on your house. What would be happening in your house, around your house, around your life? How would you be interacting with the world? That’s the stuff I’m really interested in knowing.  So, for me it’s like, okay, if I was in my fullest recovery, I would be with my kids. I would be helping my clients and my listeners and my followers. I would be a connected wife. I would be a wife that shows up for my husband, even when it’s tough and we’ve got stuff to work out. I’d be someone who still has good days and bad days. But the bad days I just keep showing up, like it’s a beautiful day to do hard things. I’d be that person. I’d embody “it’s a beautiful day to do hard things.” That’s what recovery would look like for me. It might not be that for you. And please don’t just use mine because mine is just for me. Make it specific for you and look at that, write it down. Because in those answers, in those questions and answers is all of the details in which you can start to implement today.  So, example being, if that was my recovery goal, what can I do today? I can get down on the floor and I can play with my kids, even if anxiety is there. I can go to my husband and say, “How are you? How are you really?” And practice staying in the moment and practice listening instead of letting my anxiety do all the talking. I still do the talking, but I’m listening to my partner, not to my anxiety. I’m practicing this and it’s not perfect. I might even suck at it. That’s fine. But I’m already working towards the recovery that I want, the life that I want, the dream that I want.  While I have anxiety, and if it’s there, I’m also going to bring myself into intention that my goal was to help people, to be of service, to show up for you guys and have a couple of giggles and be myself because that’s a huge goal for me, to be more myself, which means I have to share a few layers of professionalism and just show up as Kimberley, the imperfect, giggly, silly, goofy, all-over-the-place Kimberley. So, I’m working towards that, whether anxiety is there or not. And by practicing that, I’m already 20 steps towards the recovery goal because I got down-dropped into what was it that I was looking for? So, this is the work, guys. Don’t use this recovery list as a list of expectations that you tell you, you won’t ever get to. Instead, use it as a way to implement it today.  Now, what I just said is the perfect segue into identifying the next question I had in my prep for this. Are you living according to old stories or your recovery goal? Because often, if we’ve made mistakes in the past or we’ve struggled in the past or we have messed up in the past, as we’re engaging with our goals, we’re telling ourselves a story. What’s the point? Look at that, what I wrote down. Like, I want to show up for my followers and listeners. I want to be a wife that’s engaged and connected. I want to be a mom that’s on the floor playing with their kids. I want to be a therapist that is just pouring my heart into the people. So, that’s my list.  But if I’m living according to old stories, I’d go, “Yeah, that’s not going to happen because you totally screwed up with that one client that time, and you totally said something inappropriate to that one person and offended them and harmed them.” And so, you’re just, “Nah.” You think you don’t deserve to have that recovery or it’s just not possible for you, Kimberley. That’s what we call a fixed mindset. You’re living off of old stories. “No, I couldn’t do it in the past. I tried. So, there’s no point. There’s my recovery list. I’ll never get there.” That’s old stories.  And the whole point of me talking with you every week on doing the “I did a hard thing” segment isn’t just because-- well, yes, it’s because I love it. I ain’t going to lie. I love it so much. But the whole point I do that is so that you guys can see baby steps lead to medium size steps, leads to large steps. And you mess up and you totally screw up. I’ve done whole episodes about this in the past. Just recently actually. You mess up and then you go, “Okay, I’m going to just do one more.” It’s going to try one more time, and one more time. The whole AA approach, if you have an addiction, if you go to alcoholics anonymous is one more day. And there’s some research around that model because it helps you just to stay in the short term, doing today, not looking at the long term, and changing the story.  The next question I have is, are you really clear of what recovery will look like, and does that line up with your values? The reason I ask that, and that’s the final question of this episode, is when I ask my patients like, “Okay, let’s get a recovery plan together. What are your treatment goals? What do you want to look like once therapy is done? How would we define that?” Often, because they’ve been trained and conditioned from society to be this, they’re like, “Okay, so I want to have a house and I want a car and I want to have 100,000 followers on Instagram and I want to be a size blobbidy blah.” And it’s just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Is that what society told you or is that actually what you want? Do you actually value those things? Are they coming from a place of getting other people’s approval or are they coming from a place of what really feels good to you, really feels good? What feels true to your values? Because yeah, it’s easy to say, “I want to have this many dollars in the bank,” or “I want to have achieved a certain thing.” That’s fine. I’m not against that. In fact, I love that kind of thing. I love goals. But I first want you to ask yourself, why? Why do you want that goal? Is it because you want approval or is it because you want to prove you’re worth? Because if it’s any of those two things, it’s probably going to be a painful process. Because, number one, you won’t get approval from other people that’s long-lasting because that depends on their mood and their values themselves, and you won’t get up to a place where you feel worthy because you’ve based that on a conditional relationship. The only way we can actually build self-worth is to drop all the conditions and recognize that you’re worthy right now, whether you reach this goal, this recovery goal or not. It’s not a condition. The thing to remember here is your worth doesn’t go up if you reach these goals. Please remember that. Your worth is the same whether you reach them or not. You’re a valuable, important human being that deserves love and kindness. So, just keep an eye on that. I’m sorry, I’m going on a little tangent there, but it’s so important as you embark on getting really clear. And I really want you to be really, really clear. I really do.  I’ll use a really ridiculous example, and mind me, I understand that this is a very privileged example, but my daughter is going off to middle school. She’s going to a school that’s very far away. And so, I have to engage in a carpool. We have a four-wheel-drive that we use to do all of the outdoor stuff that we do. So, I need a bigger car to fit seven people. And so, I’m trying to get really clear on values as I buy this car. I understand this is a ridiculous example, but let’s use it as an example. As I go to buy a car, what do I want to feel when I get in the car? What are the things that matter to me? Is it the brand? Do I have to drive a Mercedes Benz or is it the functions? Is it the way it makes me feel? Is it the color? Is it the way my kids feel? That will help me to make a decision. So, I drop down into, really what do I want? What’s important to me? Is it important for me to have technology or is it important for me to have ease? Is it important for me to have technology or pay less for this car? And so, it’s asking questions. Don’t go overboard here, but asking questions so I get really clear on what matters to me, what values matter in this decision.  So, again, I get the ridiculous privilege of that whole question, but they’re the questions I want you to ask about you, because you deserve that. When you make decisions about your recovery and your life, you want to ask the questions that are detailed so that you can pivot in those areas. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but get clear on what you want recovery to look like. Because if you don’t, you’ll probably find that you’re wavering around feeling directionless, not sure why you’re doing all these hard things, feeling like, what’s the point really? But when you know exactly what the outcome you want is, you’ll know exactly the point.  Okay. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. Thank you for being here. It is a beautiful day to do hard things. I hope that was helpful. I will talk to you guys next week, and have a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful day. By the time you hear this, I’ll be back in the United States from my trip. If you want to go back and listen to the old episodes, I encourage you to do that. All the goodness is right there in those early ones.  Have a wonderful day, everybody. Talk to you soon.

SUMMARY: Today we talk all about how to manage when your fears appear in your dreams.  This was a heavily requested topic, so I hope it was helpful for you. In This Episode: Why our fears and obsessions show up in our dreams What to do when your fears appear in your dreams  How to manage the distress when dreams feel “real”  Links To Things I Talk About: ERP School: https://www.cbtschool.com/erp-school-lp Episode Sponsor: This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com.  CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors.  Go to cbtschool.com to learn more.  Spread the love! Everyone needs tools for anxiety... If you like Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, visit YOUR ANXIETY TOOLKIT PODCAST to subscribe free and you'll never miss an episode. And if you really like Your Anxiety Toolkit, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two). EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION  This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 295. Welcome back, everybody. It is Episode 295, which sounds like a whole lot of episodes. It really, really does. Actually, it shocked me when I saw that number. Today, we are talking about when your fears show up in your dreams. I would say quite regularly, actually, a client, particularly morning clients will often say like-- I’ll be like, “How are you? How was your week?” And they’ll say, “Well, I’m just feeling really overwhelmed. I had the most bizarre dream last night and it’s hard to shake it off.” And so, I’m wondering, I’m guessing. I’ve had this experience, I’m guessing you have too. And I wanted to talk this episode about how we might respond to that situation and what we need to look out for when we have this situation, particularly if you have anxiety. That’s really the specific group of humans we’re speaking to today. And I’ll share a little bit more about that as we get going. All right, before we do that, let’s do the review of the week. This one is from FullWalrus and they said: “I found this podcast by Googling an issue I was having, and this just popped up.” FullWalrus, this makes me so happy. Thank you so much for Googling this and finding me because that means we’re doing a good job at being on the internet and helping people in that way. “I had kept away from podcasts about mental health in fear of being triggered or being told I was crazy after all, and that didn’t happen obviously. Kimberley is a gifted presenter and a therapist who introduced me to Buddhism and mindfulness in a way I’d never thought of before. For the first time, I feel like I actually have the tools to help me manage OCD, and this show is sure a beautiful compliment to any therapy you should be currently undergoing because we all need therapy. Thank you for everything, Kimberley. My life is forever changed and I am forever grateful.” Thank you, FullWalrus. What a wonderful, wonderful review. I just love hearing how I’m helpful. I love hearing what episodes are helpful and it’s really cool that I’m a really-- I love Buddhism. I find it to be exactly what I need every time I’m in a hard time. So, I’m so glad that I’m bringing that in a way that isn’t overwhelming or overpowering. So wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. This week’s “I did a hard thing” is coming to you from Holly. Holly says: “Last week, I went to court to obtain full custody of my son since his father has become a threat to him. This was extremely difficult seeing as we have been in an abusive past. My anxiety was the highest it’s been in a very long time, but ultimately, I knew I had to take action. I did my hard thing and I couldn’t be more proud of standing my ground and not succumbing to so many fears.” Holly, sending you so much love. This is 100% doing the hard thing. It’s so hard, because often we’re talking about irrational fears and so forth, but I love that you brought like I’m doing this real thing. This real thing. And I love when you guys share with me both you’re facing your fears related to your disorder, but also just facing fear about showing up and living according to your values and showing up for your family. And Holly, just so good. Thank you so much for submitting that “I did a hard thing” for our “I did a hard thing” segment. Okay. Let’s talk about dreams. So, again, often people will bring to my attention like, what do I do if my fears show up in my dreams, or even fears you didn’t have right. Like fears that you never considered during the day, but once you go to sleep, it gives it to you, sucks it to you, and whatnot. So, what do we do in this situation? Most people will report they wake up in a massive ball of sweat, high heart rate. It feels so real. It feels like it actually happened. And it takes some time for that to burn off. It really, really does. Some people say it even takes the whole day to burn off. And so, if that’s the case for you, you’re definitely not alone. Now, one thing to think about when we’re thinking about dreams is we’ve been fed this belief that dreams are like windows into our soul and that they must mean something, and that some people interpret dreams. In fact, I’ll tell you a story. I’m a clinician, I’m a CBT therapist. I use science-based treatment methods. And I do remember looking for a therapist several years ago actually and asking some colleagues. And one colleague, who knew me really well, referred me to this dream analyst. And I went for the first session. I was like, “This is not going to work for me,” mainly because of exactly what I’m going to tell you. Now, if you like dream analysis, 100% no judgment. The reason that I had a strong reaction to it is I was going through a very, very anxious time, and I knew that if I engaged in that behavior, it was going to trigger me in ways that I’ll share here very soon. The way I understand and the way I was trained and the way I’ve researched dreams is dreams, are just thoughts you have at night. So, if you’ve listened to this podcast, you’ll know that during the day, if you have a thought, I’m probably going to tell you, thoughts are thoughts. Don’t give them your attention. Don’t give them too much kudos. And so, dreams are no different. They’re just thoughts that you have while you’re asleep, and do your best not to give them a ton of importance, a ton of weight, a ton of value, because when you do that, you can get in trouble, particularly if they’re anxious thoughts. Now, let me say here, I am notorious for having the weirdest dreams. My husband often, when we first got married, would sit up in the morning and be like, “Tell me everything you dreamed,” because I dream about like, I once had this dream about turtles and we went scuba diving together. And me and these turtles, they were like cartoon turtles. We’re like going through these tunnels together. Ridiculous stuff. I’ve had dreams of going hot air ballooning with a giraffe, and I have had this dream many, many, many times. I would say tens of times. And so, yeah, sometimes dreams are just silly and crazy. But where they’ve got fear attached or danger attached or catastrophes attached, it can be really hard for us to not get caught up in them. So, the next question is, is it effective to interpret our dreams? My opinion is there’s nothing wrong with it, but here are the things to look out for. If you have a dream and it’s attached to your obsession and you’re interpreting your dream, it’s a chance that you’re doing compulsions to try and get certainty around that obsession. So, if you’ve already got the fear and the obsession, interpreting the dream actually maybe just reinforcing the fear, giving it too much importance, giving it too much value, and therefore feeding you back into a cycle where you’re going to keep having more of them, and you’re going to keep having anxiety about them, because you’re responding to them as if they’re important and dangerous. If they’re just random like you wake up, often people say, “I had a dream that a loved one died,” or “I had a dream that a loved one was in an accident or it was my fault or so forth.” If you have that, what I would encourage you to do is look at it curiously. For me, it’s either like a really silly cartoon style dream or it’s that I’m responsible for something, which just is a sort of, if I’m curious about that, I’m like, yeah, that makes sense. I tend to be hyper-responsible. I tend to take responsibility very seriously. So, that makes sense. But I’m not going to go and dig around more than that because now I’m digging around in the content of my fears and giving those fears way, way, way, way too much attention. Way too much attention. So, is it effective to interpret your dream? It depends. And I will say really clearly, if it is around your obsession, I strongly discourage you from doing it with one caveat, with one exception, which is unless it’s for the purpose of actually doing an exposure that’s scary. So, that would be the one time I would say, yes, it’s cool to interpret your dream. If you’re doing it on purpose in effort to actually induce the actual obsession and fear that you have so that you can practice tolerating the uncertainty and you can practice writing that wave of discomfort. We can and we do do exposures to the content of your dreams. So, again, if a client has a dream or you have a dream and it’s triggering you, whether it was a part of your old obsession or just a new one, you can choose if it’s really bothering you to do an exposure. You could do an exposure with imaginal exposures. We cover imaginal exposures in ERP School, which you can go and find out about at CBTSchool.com if you’re interested. ERP School is our online course that teaches you how to apply ERP to your obsessions. So, you could do an imaginal exposure where you write a story about your worst fear coming true and the consequences of that, and you read it over and over and over and you just allow the anxiety to rise and fall. You could do that. Or let’s say if it’s a fear like, not long ago, I had a dream about this one area of the corner of my kid’s school. It was like this really bad thing happened. So, if it’s really bothering me and I’m struggling with reducing my mental compulsions about that. Yeah, I might go into that corner and just sit there and read a book or just wait there for my kids or whatnot. So, yes, you can do exposures to the content of your dreams, particularly again, if they’re really strong, repetitious, and they seem to be persistent. What we can do in addition to that is apply a ton of mindfulness to the dream content itself. So, this is what this would look like. You wake up, whether it’s from the morning or from a nap. You’ve had a dream. It’s really overwhelming. It feels really real. It might even feel like you’re actually in the moment of this catastrophe or this event. And even though it feels real, we’re actually just going to be mindful of that. Now, what does mindfulness mean? Let’s do a quick recap. Mindfulness is being present with what’s actually happening. So, within that moment, what’s actually happening is things feel unreal, things feel strange, things feel scary. Your heart might be beating faster. You might be sweating. You might have a tummy ache. So, that’s what’s happening. We’re present with that, but we’re also present with what else is happening. Oh, the birds are chirping. I feel my pajamas against my skin. This is the taste of the coffee I’m drinking. I can smell the coffee as well. We’re just being very mindful of what else is happening, and we’re doing all of that nonjudgmentally. Key point: We’re doing all of this. We’re having the weird feeling. We’re having the anxiety. We’re smelling the coffee. We’re feeling our feet against the floor and we’re practicing not judging these things as good or bad, even though they might be uncomfortable. When we are acknowledging that they’re here, we’re allowing them. We’re being willing to experience them, not pushing them away, and we’re practicing being non-judgmental. Now you may need to do this, and this is often our clients will say, “Yeah, I did that, and then it kept bothering me.” And I’ll say, “Well, did you do it again? Could you do it a little longer?” And they’ll go, “Yeah, I did. But then it kept bothering me.” And I’ll joke with them. I try never to be condescending, but I’ll say, “But did you then do it again? Did you keep going?” And that’s the key to mindfulness. Mindfulness, we don’t do these behaviors to make the discomfort go away. We do them moment by moment, minute by minute, 10 seconds by 10 seconds, just to practice being in the presence of this discomfort and giving the discomfort zero of our tension. Now, the other thing we may want to do here is activate a behavior. So, if you’re feeling totally overwhelmed, totally anxious, everything feels like it really actually happened. A lot of clients will say somebody died in their dream and they actually cry and they’re experiencing grief as if it actually happened. That’s true too. That often happens. We would engage in behavioral activation of going, “If I didn’t have this feeling, what would I be doing?” Such a good question. If I didn’t have this experience, what would I be doing? And go and do that thing. So, if I didn’t have this dream, I’d be getting up and I’d probably go for a walk or I’d sit down and check my emails or whatever it may be. Make sure you do those things and try not to divert away from the behaviors you would’ve done had you not had this dream. That’s the response prevention piece. If you didn’t have this dream, would you be giving this content your attention? So, let’s say I had a dream about my child dying, which is devastating, the idea of it. So, when we say I wake up and I feel like it actually happened, my body is telling me it actually happened, even though maybe my child is right in front of me. Then how do I engage with the rest of the day? Am I ruminating about ways to prevent that from happening? Am I actually implementing behaviors to prevent it from happening? Because if I’m doing those things, I’m actually doing compulsions. I’m trying to solve a thought that I had, not an actual thing. And so, this is why this is so important that we understand that dreams are just thoughts you have at night or during sleep. That doesn’t mean that they’re important and they need to be analyzed and that it’s a sign of something to come, because we wouldn’t do that with an intrusive thought. We’re learning not to do that. So, when we have a thought, we’re learning not to go, “Oh my gosh, that must mean it’s a sign.” We’re learning to undo that reaction and going, “Yeah, thoughts are thoughts.” So, this is how I want you to maybe consider changing your response to dreams, especially scary dreams. Again, let me be really clear. If you love analyzing dreams and you find it helpful and you don’t find it loops you back into the anxious cycle, wonderful. No problem. I’m definitely not against dream analysis. But for those folks who were anxious, I just want you to know this information, keep it in your back pocket, or maybe even your front pocket for the times when you catch yourself engaging in behaviors that become ineffective. My word of 2022 is “effective.” I have it written everywhere. It’s a huge part of the decisions I make every day, every minute. Does this keep me in being effective? And so, it’s such a great question when we ask ourselves, is this behavior effective? It won’t always be, you don’t always have to be effective. But sometimes again, when you catch trends that are getting you to be ineffective, we want to see if we can make a change. Okay? So, that’s Episode 295: When your fears show up in your dreams. I hope it was helpful. Do not forget, it is a beautiful day to do hard things. This work is not easy, friends. This work is actually-- let’s just be real. This work sucks. It really, really does. It’s exhausting. It’s hard. It’s taxing. It beats you down. So, please be gentle. It is a beautiful day to do hard things. Please remind yourself of how brave and strong you are because you’re stronger than you think. And I will see you next week. Have a wonderful day.

SUMMARY:  Correcting thoughts can but a very helpful tool to use when you notice that you have lots of thought errors.  However, in some cases, correcting thoughts can become a compulsion.  In this episode, ask the question, “Can correcting thoughts become a compulsion?” And review what you can do to make sure you are not engaging too much in the content of your thoughts.  In This Episode: How to correct your thoughts and how this can help people who have errors in their thinking How to determine when it is helpful to correct your thoughts  How to determine when correcting thoughts is becoming a compulsion Links To Things I Talk About: Overcoming Anxiety and Panic https://www.cbtschool.com/overcominganxiety ERP School: https://www.cbtschool.com/erp-school-lp Episode Sponsor: This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com.  CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors.  Go to cbtschool.com to learn more.  Spread the love! Everyone needs tools for anxiety... If you like Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, visit YOUR ANXIETY TOOLKIT PODCAST to subscribe free and you'll never miss an episode. And if you really like Your Anxiety Toolkit, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two). EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION  This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 294.  Welcome back, everybody. What a special treat to have you here with me today.  Today, we are talking about when correcting your thoughts, we call it cognitive restructuring in therapy – when you correct your thoughts, when does that become compulsive? Or we could also say problematic. And so, we’re actually going to go into this today, and then I’m going to let you decide for yourself what is helpful and what’s not. But I hope today is really helpful. It’s a very, very, very important topic. It’s often one of the biggest mistakes therapists make, particularly those who are not trained in anxiety disorders and OCD, and ERP. It’s probably one of the biggest mistakes that they make. So, I want to really review this so that you can have the information in your back pocket and you can make the decisions for yourself. Before we do that, let’s first do the review of the week. This is from Cynthia Safell and Cynthia said: “I first was introduced to Kimberley’s clear and compassionate teaching style when I took the ERP school course for therapists.” This is wonderful, Cynthia. So, for those of you who don’t know, we have ERP School, which is a course where I teach you exactly how I would do ERP if you were my client. And then it turned out that a lot of therapists were taking this course. And so, we duplicated the course and I added a whole bunch of modules for therapists, so they can become excellent therapists for people with OCD as well. So, I am so delighted that Cynthia has written this review. She goes on to say: “In the past 3 weeks since taking the course, I recommended both the course and podcasts to my clients. So helpful. Thank you, Kimberley.” Wow, Cynthia, literally, that is the biggest compliment. Really, it is. If a therapist can trust me so much that they would recommend it to their clients, that is the biggest gift to me. And thank you so much for telling me that, because it just brings me so much joy and so much pride. So, thank you so much, Cynthia, for that amazing review.  Alright, before we move on to the bulk of the content of this episode, we also want to do the “I did our hard thing” segment. This is from Abby and Abby is over here doing some hard things. So cool. Let’s go. It says: “I have come on holiday. I’m terrified of flying. My anxiety was high. My thoughts were racing, but I did it.” So good, Abby. “I got on the plane and I got on holiday. It was scary, but I did it and I’m proud. Now to commit to the holiday first two days have been hard, but sitting with it and not letting it ruin my time.” Abby, this is so good. Not only did you get on a plane, but you’re doing all the hard things in addition, and that’s so good. What a treat for you. What a reward for you. You did the hard thing and now you’re on vacation. Isn’t that so cool? Thank you so much, Abby. And thank you so much, Cynthia, for being an amazing part of our community. Alright. So, let’s get down to it, shall we? So, I am a cognitive behavioral therapist. I love cognitive behavioral therapy. If you haven’t heard what that is, I’m assuming you have, but basically what that means is there is a cognitive component to treatment, which is focusing on your thoughts, and there is a behavioral component to treatment, which is where we focus on changing behaviors.  Now, in some disorders, we spend a little more time on cognitions and a little less time on behaviors. And in other disorders, we spend a little more time on behaviors and much less time on cognitions. So, I think it’s important for you to know that it depends on your disorder on how much cognitive restructuring or changing and thinking we do. And so, the whole point of today is to explore, is your cognitive restructuring, is changing and challenging your thoughts helpful for you and your set of symptoms? And you get to make that decision. I’m not here to tell you what’s right or wrong, but I do want to give you some guidance.  So, first of all, the big question that my staff bring to me when we’re in supervision, and this was actually inspired by a conversation we had during supervision, was what is the role of correcting distorted thoughts in treatment? So, if someone presents to me a distorted thought, a statement, they might say, “I’m an idiot,” or “What’s the point? I only ruin it and mess it up anyway,” or “I always make mistakes. I never do anything right.” I as the clinician and them as the client may benefit by pausing the session and checking in with them in how true is that statement. Is it really true that you never do anything right? Is it true that you are an idiot? Could we challenge that and could we start to have you practice changing the words you use towards yourself?  I am a massive, massive advocate for cognitive work because I think that in general, we walk around and we say a whole bunch of stuff that’s not true. I do it too. I actually have put-- in the last 18 months, I have put in massive amounts of time and energy into catching because I was finding I was saying a lot of sweeping generalizations like, “I feel terrible today.” Even though I didn’t feel well, it’s like, okay, I’m saying these words, “I’m so tired.” That was another big one I used to say every day. My husband would ask, “How are you, Kimberley?” “I’m so tired.” And it’s not that that thought was wrong or not true. I was really tired. But I had to check, is it helpful for me to keep saying this? Is there another way that I could maybe reframe this or present this or look at this? So, yes, there’s definitely a role in challenging and correcting errors in our thinking. And so, it’s important that we first look at what is a thought distortion or a cognitive distortion, or a thought error. It’s usually any thought that’s, number one, not true or not helpful, or keeps you responding in a way that isn’t beneficial. So, again, the thought for me is “I’m so tired.” It’s true. Is it helpful? No. Does saying that actually make me feel a little bombed and a little down? Yes. Could I maybe replace it with something else? That’s up to me. There’s no right or wrong.  I want to be really clear here in that when we talk about correcting thoughts, we are not saying toxic positivity, like, “Oh, I’m supposed to tell myself I feel fabulous because I don’t.” That’s not what this is about. We don’t do that kind of thing. We just make small little shifts depending on what feels helpful to you.  So, let’s go through a couple of scenarios. Does correcting thoughts help with depression? Now, based on the research, the treatment for depression is actually really balanced in terms of doing 50% cognitive work and 50% behavioral work. These numbers I’m throwing out aren’t science-based, but just in general, I want you to think about like, yeah, you have to do both. You have to look at correcting the lies that depression tells you, but you also have to look at your behaviors and how can you engage in behaviors that actually make you more fulfilled and happy and not feeling down.  So, yeah, with depression, we look at a lot of thoughts that are very critical, sweeping generalizations, we look at a lot of thoughts that discount the positive. I thought that’s like discounting the positive like, “Well, yeah, even though I got an A in that test, still, I’m probably going to fail my last year of college.” So, they discount the positive thing and they make another sweeping statement. So, we really want to make sure we’re correcting thoughts when it comes to depression. It’s really important because depression lies.  Do we correct thoughts when it comes to generalized anxiety? Well, yes, we can. But this is where this topic is so important, is you want to be careful. If you’re spending a lot of time correcting thoughts, there’s always room to correct your thoughts about things. But if you find that you’re trying to correct your thoughts just to reduce or remove your uncertainty, then it’s likely that it’s going to get you stuck in a loop where you have to keep doing that thought correction in a somewhat compulsive way to feel good. And so, what we want to do here is, yeah, we want to be mindful of our thoughts, and then we may choose whether we want to correct it or not, or whether we just want to observe that I’m having a thought. This goes for depression as well because mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is a huge, huge science-based treatment for depression. So, you’re going to see a trend happening here. So, we always want to observe the thought because it helps us to diffuse from the thought and see it in perspective. And then we can choose to correct it if it’s helpful in that moment. Maybe if you’ve never corrected it before, if it’s a new thought that it’s helpful for you to do a little thought work with. And then again, you’d still do the behavioral piece with generalized anxiety. So, if you’re having a lot of anxiety, you still want to work on not avoiding things and not seeking reassurance and not doing any self-critical behaviors, and so forth.  So, yes, what I would say is there is some benefit to correcting thoughts. The main thing with this is as long as it’s not the only tool you’re using, because if it’s the only tool you’re using, you’re going to be putting in a lot of work, a lot of time of the day correcting thoughts, and that’s probably going to take you away from living the life you want. Several episodes I did a podcast about your recovery plan and what’s getting in the way. The truth is, if you can identify the things you want to be doing when you’re recovered, once you’ve done that, you can start implementing that right away. So, I often will check in with myself because I’ve been doing a lot of work too. Okay, I could correct the thought right now, or I could just immediately throw myself into the behavior I want to live by. That’s according to my values. And then I make a decision. What would be most helpful? Should I explore this thought? Or would this be a wonderful time to do my paint by numbers? PS, I love Paint By Numbers. It literally got me through COVID. You have to try it. It’s the coolest thing and it’s so fun. But I ask myself like, do I want to just allow the thought to be there and go do the thing I love? Or would it be helpful for me to correct it? There’s no right answer. But if I’m trying to correct things that I’ve already corrected and that I already know the answer to, yeah, I probably am going to choose to do the Paint By Number, if I’m completely honest. I think that’s a more effective route. You are going to have to think about it and do a little cost-benefit analysis for yourself.  Then we are going to move over here, and this is very similar. Does correcting thoughts help with obsessive-compulsive disorder? You can see a progression here with depression. Yeah, we do quite a bit of it. Generalized anxiety, a little less because it can sometimes be very repetitive. When it comes to obsessive-compulsive disorder, guys, you have to be very careful about correcting thoughts. Because if you’re correcting thoughts to try and reduce or remove your uncertainty, it will most likely, and I would probably go as far to say, definitely turn into a compulsion that will keep you stuck. Because remember, the treatment of OCD and obsessive-compulsive disorder often involves leaning into discomfort, leaning into uncertainty, leaning into doubt, leaning into tolerating whatever experience of uncertainty and discomfort that you have.  So, here is what I say to my clients, and this is exactly what I said to my staff. One of my staff had said, “Okay, when do we correct thoughts and when don’t we then?” And here is the thing. If somebody is coming to me and they’re saying something that’s an error in thinking around their ability to cope with discomfort, I would 100% correct that. So, an example would be, if a client says to me, “I can’t handle my discomfort,” I will probably have them challenge that. I might even say, “How do you know? Could this be the first time that you actually do tolerate this discomfort or cope with this pain?” So, I would 100% challenge and correct thoughts around their coping.  But if someone has a thought, “What if I have a panic attack?” the truth is, trying to correct that is uncertain anyway. You’re not going to be able-- you can’t say, “No, I won’t,” because you don’t know that. You can’t say, “Yes, I will,” because you don’t know that. So, only correct thoughts around your struggle to cope. Never correct thoughts where you’re trying to reduce or remove your uncertainty. That would be my best advice to you.  Another point here is, if you find you’re correcting the same thought repetitively, chances are, it’s a compulsion or will turn into a compulsion. The reason that I push this so heavily is you’re going to-- here is where I really struggle the most, is you’re going to-- if you’re on Instagram, a lot of you come, listen, you follow me on Instagram. We have an Instagram account called Your Anxiety Toolkit. There are hundreds of accounts that tell you to correct every single thought you have, and I don’t agree with that. I do not agree with that. I think that that is terrible advice. Because number one, you could spend your whole day doing that, particularly if you’ve got bad anxiety or depression. Number two, you could spend your whole day doing the exact same behaviors you did last yesterday and last week that obviously didn’t reduce or remove your discomfort. And the third thing to remember here is we have scientific evidence specifically for obsessive-compulsive disorder, but also for generalized anxiety disorder, that most people who have these disorders, there is a certain set of things happening in their brain where cognitive restructuring just doesn’t stick. The part of their brain that allows them to correct things, there’s a weakness there or there’s this bad connection there, which means if this were to work, it would’ve worked already and they probably wouldn’t suffer because they would go, “Oh yeah, you’re right. That doesn’t make any sense.” And off they go.  It’s really frustrating because I know a lot of you see your partner or your friend who can quickly correct a thought or quickly do a quick Google search, quickly get reassurance and they’re fine. They get to move on. But the brain of an anxiety disorder is different, specifically the brain of someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder is different. And so, for you, you might get a moment of relief, but then you find the thought comes right back. And so, again, there’s no real point you can. Doing it is like whack-a-mole. If you do it,then discomfort goes away and then it comes back and you do it again. And now you’re just stuck, like weeding weeds that keep growing.  So, these are the things I want you to think about for yourself. I’m definitely not telling you what you have to do. Again, this is not therapy. But I want you to do a little inventory for yourself and just ask yourself what would be helpful and what’s not. The last question I have here for myself is, when does correcting thoughts help in recovery? Just like I said before, if it helps you in terms of reducing your self-criticism, increasing your sense of mastery over a task, or increases your ability to feel like you can cope, well then, I think it’s a helpful tool. I’ll give you an example of that.  I personally hate running payroll. Every month, I have these beautiful 10 and 11 staff. It’s actually more like 13, 14 beautiful staff who work for me. And at the first of every month, I have to run all this payroll stuff. And guys, to be honest, I suck at it. I’m terrible with numbers. I get all the numbers mixed up. It takes me twice as long as it would, but I really do value the importance of me knowing what’s happening in my business. So, I do it. I’m doing it. While I’m doing it, I have a lot of thoughts like, “I can’t do this, I don’t want to do this,” and a lot of like, “Ah, this is too hard” thoughts.  So, in that situation, I’m correcting my thoughts so that I can embody a sense of like, “No, I’m a really good boss and I’m trying to run a business that helps other people with their life.” And so, I correct my thoughts so that I can embody like, “No, this is important. I want and I’m choosing to do this. This is important for my staff. It’s important for me to get it right. And it’s worth the time.” So, in that situation, correcting the thoughts is really helpful because it helps me with that degree of anxiety. However, if I was having thoughts like, “What if you make a mistake? What if you make a mistake? What if you make a mistake?” correcting my thoughts to like, “You won’t make a mistake or that’s not even true. So, it’s not going to be helpful.”  So, again, let’s go back. When it will help is when it’s around your coping, when it’s around your capabilities. So, if you’re having a lot of thoughts like you suck and you can’t and you’re not good enough, you’re not strong enough, you’re not wise enough, you’re not courageous enough, yeah, you can correct that into more encouraging statements. But we don’t do it around uncertainties. We don’t do it around uncertainties. That will keep you stuck. Now the last thing I will say here before we wrap up is, is there a difference between education, reassurance, and assurance? So, let’s just break that down. If a client comes to me and they say, “Oh my gosh, I keep having these horrible intrusive thoughts. Something must be wrong with me,” through the lens of education, I might educate them and say, “Listen, everyone has intrusive thoughts. You’re just like everybody else and you shouldn’t be ashamed. And I really want you to understand that having intrusive thoughts is a normal part of having a really healthy working brain.” I consider that education. And you deserve to get education around things. So, if you have, let’s say, a new illness, it’s okay to go and get educated about the new illness. That’s not a compulsion. Now, there will be times where you educate yourself and you need to tweak what you know or learn something new, and that is also fine. The thing I would have you as we leave for this episode just continue to think about is the thing that we want to look out for is when it’s called reassurance, which is repetitive over and over attempts to reduce or remove a thought specifically related to your anxiety or your uncertainty. So, that’s the real thing I want you to think about and look out for. Take note. And the other thing I want you to remember is, please don’t beat yourself up if there are days when you do a lot of thought correction and it turns out to be a compulsion. You’re just a human being. There is no right or wrong. Often, I’ll say to a client, they’ll be like, “But what if I do correct a thought?” I’ll say, “You know what, you’re going to have ups and downs. So, try not to get too perfectionistic about this practice.”  There’s just these general ideas and you’ll know in your body if you’re doing it compulsively. A great and easy way to know if you’re doing something compulsively is, are you doing it with urgency? Are you doing it with an experience of resisting discomfort in your body? Are you doing it to reduce or remove a thought that you’re having? And are you doing it repetitively? Those are things where if you’re doing those things, you will know you’re probably doing a compulsion. And in fact, I encourage you to get really good at catching those things because then you will be one step closer to recovery.  Alright, my loves, that ends the episode on whether correcting thoughts is a compulsion or not. I’m going to let you really come to a conclusion on your own, or you can go and speak with your clinician and get to the bottom of that for yourself. Have a wonderful, wonderful day. It is a beautiful day to do hard things, and I will talk to you very, very soon, aka, next week. Have a good one, everyone.

This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 293. You guys, I’ve totally screwed up. Oh my God, it’s going to be one of those episodes where I laugh a lot. Maybe not. Who knows?  Alright, I totally screwed up. It’s funny because I have for months been thinking about doing an episode and reminding you guys mostly so I could remind myself that I’m a human being, that I’m going to make mistakes, and it’s one of the biggest lessons that I have had to learn over and over and over and over again. It’s really frustrating, you guys. I’m so frustrated by this fact that humans make mistakes. I don’t like it. It makes me mad. If only we could figure out a way where we don’t and we don’t disappoint people and we don’t screw up. If anyone has figured this out, let me know. Just shoot me an email, tell me your special secret, because I haven’t figured it out yet. So funny.  Okay. Before we get into it, this is actually pretty much a coincidence and I love when big coincidences happen, but the review of the week is actually from Flashcork. They’re writing a specific review on Episode 193, which I think is really cool because this is by coincidence 293. And they said: “This episode 193 is just what I needed to hear today. I’m stressed and anxious about my upcoming trip and experiencing racing thoughts. This will help me to manage those feelings and practice by shortening the leash.” Now, if you haven’t listened to this episode, it is probably one of my most favorite episodes. A lot of my patients and clients have said that this concept has helped them a lot. And so, really go back and listen to 193. If you want to practice being able to be in a place where you can manage those thoughts a little better, go back and check that out. It’s just a metaphor.  Flashcork says: “It makes sense because it has worked for me walking Sally, my Golden Retriever.” I make a reference to thoughts being like a dog on a leash. So, you can go back and listen to that anytime. That’s the review of the week. Thank you, Flashcork. So happy to have you join us.  The “I did a hard thing” is from Allison. Allison says: “I’m going to go on a job interview next week after applying to a different job, going through the grueling interviewing process and at the end not being successful. I’m working really hard to believe in myself, screw up my courage to attend this interview and be open-hearted about the new possibilities. It’s hard to pick yourself up and try again, but I’m doing the hard thing of trying again. I’m scared, but I’m proud of myself.” Allison, you are doing the work. And I’m actually going to take your advice today, Allison, because this is so perfect for the topic of today, which is like, yeah, sometimes we do screw up and we just have to get up and we have to try again. It’s so important. I’m so, so I’m impressed. I’m just so impressed with your courage and thank you so much for sharing that because I think we’ve all experienced it.  So, Allison, let me tell you my hard thing. I want to preface this with, I think in my-- if I’m being completely authentic with you guys, I think that I’ve somehow, for many years of my adulthood, without me realizing, and in not a super severe way either, it was a very secret underlying compulsion I think I’ve been doing for years that I didn’t even know I was doing until the last couple of years is I was trying to find a way, constantly striving to find a way that I could live in a world where I didn’t make a mistake. Now I understand I’m a human. I don’t think I’m a superwoman. But in my mind, I think I’ve had-- well, I know I have, let’s be honest. I think in my effort to control my emotions that I’ve engaged in these little nuanced secretive behaviors of constantly trying to find the formula where I don’t upset people and I don’t screw up. Let’s just take a minute because it’s funny for me to say that because how many times during the week with my clients and with you guys and everything I do is about self-compassion and letting go of control. And all along there was this nuanced little secret slither going through my life. And I think that number one, a part of this is true for a lot of people who have anxiety and are high functioning. Because I spoke to a couple of friends about this and they were like, “Yeah, to be--” when you have anxiety, to be high functioning, you have to put in place systems and procedures and routines to keep you going. And it makes sense that we often engage in other little behaviors that make us feel like we’re getting control when we don’t.  Everybody knows, I even spoke about it a couple of sessions ago, that I am so in love with calendaring. My life has changed since I’ve been more intentional about my calendar. I’m not compulsive about it at all. Because I’m managing two children and two businesses and a chronic illness, if I can be really intentional and effective with my schedule, I can go into the day. I never worry about what I have to get done anymore. Really, I don’t. It was the best change I ever made because I have a system where I write down what I need to do and I throw that list out because I immediately calendar the times that I’m going to do it. So, I know it’s going to get done because it’s in the calendar. And if I don’t get it done, I’ll reschedule it. And I know I’ll get it done. And through the process, I’ve actually built such trust with myself. I know. I know I used to worry that I won’t get things done. I never worry about that anymore because I’ve gotten really good at this process. You guys know what’s going.  This week is literally the only week of the year where the things on my calendar cannot be rescheduled because my beautiful daughter, who is a delight, she’s growing up to be this absolutely gorgeous human. I wish you could all meet her. She’s just so good. I know I’m biased, but she is just so wonderful. It’s her graduation. She’s graduating elementary school, you guys, and I’m going to have a middle schooler next year. So, the one thing this year-- because I’m my own boss. I can schedule what I want. The one thing I can’t miss is her graduation. And last week, you know what’s going to happen here I was prepping to present at this conference and I got on the call and then we were doing this rehearsal and she said, “Okay, great. I’ll see you next Friday.” And I was like, “No, no, no, no. It’s the week after.” And she said, “No, no, no it’s next Friday.” And I’m like, “No, no, it’s not. And I’m always right. It’s in my calendar.” And she’s like, “No, it’s really not. It’s next Friday. You agreed to it on this date.” And I realized she’s right. Now, I said to her, literally, “I cannot do it with this whole thing. I can’t do it. I’ve totally screwed up. This is not something I can reschedule.” And she was like, “Oh, okay.” So, she had to basically message a whole foundation. They had to change everything. They had to try and figure it out. This is where it was so humiliating, is they had to reach out to the person who was going after me, who is a very, very, very well-known person in the OCD community who I respect and don’t know. So, it’s like I have a relationship and had to ask him to reschedule his entire day because I screwed up.  Now, I know this is not a huge disaster. This is in the grand scheme of things. This is not a huge problem, but I felt so bad. Oh my God, it was so painful. I was in this meeting and to see their faces of just pure annoyance and frustration and anger of like, “What? You got the date wrong?” They were very kind, but I could tell they were annoyed.  And so, my question to you, because I love questions, is what do we do when we screw up? What do you do when you screwed up?  Now you might be thinking this isn’t a big deal. I want you to think about a time when you did screw up that’s a big deal for you, and I want you to ask yourself, what did you do when you screw up?  Immediately for me, this is the reason I wanted to really do this episode, is there was this interesting shift in me this time where-- because I haven’t screwed up this big in a couple of years. This was a pretty huge screw-up. I looked like a complete fall in something that was organized months ago, we’ve been talking about it, emailing back and forth. How did I miss this? I don’t know. But what was fascinating to me is, once upon a time, I would’ve said some very mean things to myself. Really, really mean. And I probably would’ve-- now that I’m noticing it is I would’ve responded, not just with self-criticism, but I would’ve tightened my belt even more with checking behaviors, rechecking, more controlling calendar, like compulsive calendaring. I would’ve overcorrected because I have been known to overcorrect. If you ask my partner, he’ll tell you I often used to overcorrect pretty bad. If I make a mistake, I would-- if I upset someone, I would go overboard trying to get them to like me again. Or I remember I used to-- if I was worried I offended someone, I would like to apologize over and over and over again. I don’t know if you’ve done any of these behaviors. You might want to gently say, “Kimberley, you’re not alone.” I’m kidding.  But this time what? I notice this shift in me where I was like-- what I say to my son all the time is, “Oh my gosh, I’m such a ding-dong.” I’ll say you’re such a ding-dong and he’ll say you’re such a ding-dong. It’s a funny thing. It’s lighthearted and it’s not critical. It’s just like, “Ding-dong. You’re such ding-dong.” And what was interesting is I responded by went, “Oh my gosh, I’m such a ding-dong,” but it wasn’t-- I said things that sounded critical, but it wasn’t. There was this giggle to it. There was this acceptance of my humanness to it. It was so playful in my response. And I mean, this is a big deal for me because I very much value the respect of the people in my field and I work really hard to get their respect. Not in a people-pleasing way, but it’s a very big value for me. And it was funny. I just went, “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. I’m a ding-dong.” And then I said, “What can we do to fix it?” It was just a very transactional thing. Whereas before I would’ve, “Oh my God. I’m so sorry. I’m such an idiot. I can’t believe I did this. You should fire me.” I would just go overcorrect.  So, let’s come here to the questions because I love the questions. If you’re driving, don’t do this. But if you’re not driving, I’d love for you to actually sit down with a notepad and just journal some of this out. So, when you screw up, what do you do?  The second question is, is it okay for you? Because it was fine for me, and I want you to actually check-in, is it okay for you to make jokes about yourself? Answer it honestly. If it’s a yes, that’s okay. It can be giggly, nothing too harsh. If no, take that and really follow that out when you do make a mistake.  Number three, is it helpful to apologize? Yes, of course. When we screw up, we should apologize. But how many times? And how do we apologize? Do we say it in a way that’s very factual, “I’m so sorry, this is a huge inconvenience for you”? Or do we say, “I’m sorry, I’m such a mess, screwed up person. I’ve ruined your day,” and make up a whole story about it? Because a lot of us do that when we screw up. Do you apologize over and over and over?  Catch how do you respond to try and make it up to them. And that’s a really big one. Because if you find that you’re trying to make it up to them that’s okay. But are you doing it because it equals the degree in which you screwed up or are you doing it just to remove the discomfort you feel about the fact that you’re a human being? Make sure it’s in proportion. So, if you, let’s say, forgot to text somebody about something, you wouldn’t need to buy them a $100 gift card. That’s going overboard. Maybe it depends on the situation, but we’re just making an assumption here. If you forgot someone’s birthday. Well, yeah, you probably need to take them out for dinner and do make a big deal about it. But do you need to do that four times this month or throw them a party that puts you out of pocket? No. Don’t try to make it up to people in a way that actually takes away from your well-being.  This is the next thing, is-- once I did this, I was really proud of myself. I’m not going to lie. I handled it pretty well, I think, and I was like, “Wow, I’ve made some pretty big growth in here obviously.” What was interesting is, once I hung up from them and I was like, “Oh dear.” I have all of these emotions, which I’ll talk to you here in a second about, I had to ask myself. The next question is, how long am I going to be on the hook for this, meaning from myself? How long am I going to hold myself on the hook? When am I going to let this one go? Because what I could have done is I could have said, “Okay, I made a mistake. It was not a good mistake there.” Obviously, I need to make some changes, but I’m going to beat myself up for the rest of the day. I’m going to ask yourself, how effective is that and is it in proportion with what happened, and is it effective? Really, does it make it less likely that you’ll do it again? The truth is, if I beat myself up all day, it’s not going to reduce the chances of this happening again, because it was a human mistake. And then the last question is, what can I do to resolve this if anything? But let me come back to the emotions because those questions are very much related to these emotions. When you make a mistake and whether-- let me pose a couple of things to you. It could be something you do to somebody else. It could be something you do to yourself. Meaning if you do a ton of compulsions and you are up all night and now, you’re exhausted, or it’s any mistake you make. You had a huge panic attack and you left the party of your best friend and she’s really mad at you because you left her birthday party. It could be that you were depressed and you just couldn’t show up for your friend this day. So, there are so many ways in which this plays out. It doesn’t just have to be with scheduling. When we upset other people or our behaviors impact other people, it’s normal to feel strong emotions. That’s normal. Often what we do is when we feel those strong emotions, we respond to them as if we need to squash them immediately, because we’ve told ourselves we can’t tolerate them. Guilt is probably one of the most common, shame being the second. There may be some anxiety related to it as well, or maybe some other emotions as well. But let’s take a look at those emotions and just quickly review how they may actually impact you.  So, when we feel guilt, guilt is usually you’ve done something wrong, and I had done something wrong. So, guilt was an appropriate emotion. But I always think of guilt-- I’ve done episodes on this in the past. I think of guilt as just a stop sign to ask you, is there anything I can do to fix this now or in the future? Again, just really logical. In this situation, yeah, I can reschedule. I can be honest. I can do what I can to apologize. But beyond that, there isn’t anything else. And so, any residual guilt I feel from there, I must just tolerate. I must compassionately ride the wave of guilt. Often, I see my clients, and I’ve done this myself, is if guilt is here, I’m going to beat myself up for it. No matter what, that’s the conditions. If guilt is present, I will beat myself up. And I want to invite you to have guilt and just be kind and let it ride. It’ll burn off like a candle. It’ll burn itself out and it’ll slowly dwindle away.  Guilt is “I did something bad.” Shame is “I am bad.” If you do something and you screw up, and you feel shame, your job is to check-in and recognize that mistakes don’t make you bad. Literally, no mistake. There is not a mistake you could tell me of that makes you bad. Even if there was an absolute catastrophe that happened, mistakes don’t make you bad. You’re a human being. You’re going to make them. And I know, like I said to you, if you figured out how not to be human, please email me. I’ll happily take your email into my inbox and I’ll apply your rules. But the truth is, I know none of you are going to email me because it’s not possible and we have to accept it. We have to accept it. I’m just joking really about the email.  And so, there is really no place for shame. If you feel shame, same as guilt, write it out compassionately. Give it very little of your attention. Don’t get into the content of what your shame is saying. Write it out and let it go. Meaning, like I said to you, there’s really no point in me dwelling on this because it’s done and I can’t do anything about it. All I can do is be kind to the feelings I’m feeling. Now, a lot of people will say, “Oh my gosh, I wrote this response on an email or call or I presented, or I was in a party, and now I feel nothing but anxiety because I totally made a mistake.” I’ve had people even say like, “Oh, I was at a party and I passed gas,” or “I said something stupid.” I mean, I could tell you some absolutely ridiculous stories.  Actually, let me tell you a quick, funny story, because I’ll come back to this, is recently, I attended this creative writing course, but it was actually a writing course for people who are business owners, and they were talking about getting really clear about you and the message you want to give and how to tell stories about it and so forth. And he was asking these questions about, who are you? And what’s something that the people closest to you would say? And I was thinking about it and I don’t think you guys know this about me, but I have, not in my professional life, but in my personal life, I have a way of the most bizarre things happening to me, like silly things. I always find myself in these situations where everyone is like, “Oh, only Kimberley would get put in that situation.” So ridiculous. I can’t even-- one day I think if I really let go, I’ll tell you some ridiculous stories. But if something really bizarre is going to happen, it always happens to me. And so, I just wanted to tell you that, because I want you guys to know that as the podcast is where I get a little more personal and bizarre things totally happen to me all the time. But let me go back.  So, let’s say you have anxiety. You’re having anxiety about something that happened, and you’re thinking like, “Oh my God.” And your brain is just telling you catastrophe after catastrophe, after catastrophe, all of the worst-case scenarios. The truth is, that’s your brain’s job. Its job is to tell you of all the catastrophes, but it doesn’t mean you need to respond as if they’re all true and happening. And so, again, we go back to these core questions, is how can I stay with the facts that it happened? How can I acknowledge that it is what it is and that I can’t solve it, I can’t make it go away? And how can I act in a way that doesn’t overcorrect again, not over-apologizing, not asking for reassurance, not avoiding those people, not saying too many jokes, and so forth? So, we want to catch that. We want to catch how we go into anxiety and respond in that compulsive way.  As I said to you at the beginning of this episode, I think that I was for many years doing this very nuanced compulsion of over-checking schedules and even being super neutral and kind to people so that I would never offend them. Stripping my personality down just so I would never harm them or never hurt them, which is not me being authentic, and I can see that now.  So, these are the things I want you to think about. And then once you identify these strong emotions – again, we’ve looked at guilt, we’ve looked at shame, we’re now looking at anxiety – the job is to ride them out, let the anxiety burn out on its own. We don’t need to tend to it. It happened because we’re human and we’re going to allow it to rise and fall on our own.  So, here is where I want you now to, number one, give yourself permission to be a human. Humans screw up. It’s a fact. It’s something we have to accept. How can we be in these situations and change the way we react so that we are not beating ourselves up and we’re not overcorrecting for the future?  The only last thing I’ll say here is, if you’re trying to control what people think about you, you’re never going to win because what they think is a reflection of them. So, here is the last point. I screwed up. It’s just a fact. I put other people out. My mistake is probably going to interrupt some people’s time next week. I don’t like that. That doesn’t line up with my values, but it is what it is. There’s not a lot I can do. But what they think about me is completely a reflection of them.  So, if let’s say this one person goes, “Oh my gosh, she is such an unorganized person and is horrible,” that really shows the degree in which they’re judgmental. Meaning they haven’t allowed me to show them that I’m more complex than that, that I have many other qualities, and so forth. If they were to say, “Oh my God, you’re fired, you’re terrible,” again, that’s not a fact either. And that’s a reflection of them and their struggle to be flexible and find solutions and so forth. Not that they’re bad, it’s just it’s more of a reflection on them because, in this situation, the people were very kind and they said, “We’ll work it out. We’ll see if we can reschedule you to be later on in the day,” and that it really was a reflection of how flexible they are.  So, I want you to really remember here that you making a mistake doesn’t make you good or bad. Their judgments about you doesn’t define whether you’re good or bad or that they’re good or bad. It’s just we’re doing the best we can and it’s just it is what it is.  So, that’s it, guys. We make mistakes. It’s terrible. I know it’s hard. It’s really painful, but can we hold space for the pain and the emotions associated and ride them out without beating ourselves up? That’s the real question.  Have a wonderful day, everybody.

SUMMARY: In this episode, we explore how to manage uncomfortable sensations. Many people do not struggle with intrusive thoughts and intrusive images, but instead, struggle to manage intrusive sensations. My hope is that this will give you some tools to manage these uncomfortable sensations and help you reduce how many compulsions you do to reduce or remove these feelings. In This Episode: What is an intrusive sensation? What is the difference between an uncomfortable sensation and an intrusive sensation. How to manage uncomfortable sensations such as rapid heartbeat, tingling limbs, numbness, lightheadedness, chest pain, etc. Links To Things I Talk About: ERP School: https://www.cbtschool.com/erp-school-lp Episode Sponsor: This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com. CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors. Go to cbtschool.com to learn more. Spread the love! Everyone needs tools for anxiety... If you like Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, visit YOUR ANXIETY TOOLKIT PODCAST to subscribe free and you'll never miss an episode. And if you really like Your Anxiety Toolkit, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two). EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 292.  Welcome back, everybody. Today, we are talking about something that I very rarely talk about that I should be talking about more because it’s like 20% of the conversations I have with clients. And I’ll explain to you why in just a second.  First, I’m going to do the review of the week. This one is from Linelulu. And they said: “Grateful. I am so grateful that I stumbled onto your podcasts. Your soothing voice enhances your messages as I am trying to understand more about anxiety, and panic attacks to be a better support for someone very close to me. Thank you!” You are so welcome, Linelulu. Thank you for that beautiful review. Please, I know I ask you every single episode. If you benefit from this podcast, this is one way that you can help me. So, if for any reason you feel like you have a few spare minutes, please do go and leave a review.  The last thing before we get talking about sensations is to do the “I did a hard thing” of the week, and this one is from Camille. Camille says: “I’ve been managing my dermatillomania,” which we also know is compulsive skin picking, “very well. However, I had a very stressful day and picked my skin pretty bad, in my opinion. I had a party to go to that night with a bunch of people. I didn’t know. And I almost didn’t go. But I pushed myself to go and no one said one thing about my skin. I’m so glad I went and got over the fact that my skin needs to be perfect in that instance.” Camille, this is so good on so many levels, that you showed up and you did the thing that you wanted to do. And ugh, it’s so good. And how wonderful that you had supportive friends. Again, we sometimes were really hard on ourselves and we think people notice everything about us, every flow, but how wonderful that they embraced you and no one said anything. So, thank you so much for Camille for putting in that “I did a hard thing.” I just love hearing you guys doing all the hard things. Now, why do we do this segment? Let’s just go back and look at that. So, most of you know that the thing I say all the time is “It’s a beautiful day to do hard things.” Our brains naturally default to this idea of like, “No, I shouldn’t do the hard thing. I should do the easy thing.” Marketing keeps telling us don’t do the hard thing, do the easy thing. Commercial advertising is always sharing the easy five-step way to do something. And we want to flip the script because while it’s good to have things be easy, when it comes to anxiety and these kind of conditions that we’re often talking about, it’s often important that you stare that scary, hard thing in the face.  Now, that is the perfect segue into this week’s episode about sensations. Now, at the beginning of the episode, I said it’s crazy that I haven’t done a lot of these episodes because sensations is 20% of the work. Now, why did I say that? In total, the clients that I see and that my staff see in our private practice, they’re coming to us for one of five reasons usually. They either have an intrusive thought that they don’t know what to do with, they have an intrusive feeling that they don’t know what to do with, they have an intrusive urge that they don’t know what to do with, they have an intrusive image that they don’t know what to do with, or they have an intrusive sensation that they don’t know what to do with. Five things.  99.9% of our patients and of the people that we help come with one of those five problems. It doesn’t matter what you call it. They’re coming with, “This is the experience that I’m having.” That’s so overwhelming and difficult and hard that then they go on to do behaviors to try and manage it, and we teach them how to manage those five things in a way that doesn’t require them to do the behaviors that cause them trouble.  So, let me give you a little more information about that. So, when we’re talking about sensations, we’re talking about-- let’s first get a definition. What is a sensation? A sensation is a physical feeling or a perception resulting from something that happens or that comes into contact with the body. So, really what we’re saying is a sensation is an experience you have in your body and it’s very specific. So often when I’ll say to a client, “Okay, how can I help?” they’ll say, “Well, I’m anxious.” And I’ll say, “Okay, tell me about your anxiety.” And they’ll then usually go on to say, “Well, I’m having these thoughts,” or “I’m having these feelings,” or “I’m having these urges. I’m having these images,” or “I’m having these sensations, and I don’t like it. They make me uncomfortable.” And when I have them, I do these again, like I said, behaviors that kept me into a ton of trouble. Meaning they’ve got big consequences.  So, often a sensation we consider to be an obsession, just like an intrusive thought, is an obsession. It’s as relevant. And it’s important if someone has anxiety for us to go, “Okay.” This is a common question. If you were my client, this is a common question I ask. I’ll say, “Imagine that I’m an alien and I’ve never, ever once in my life experienced anxiety, and I want you to tell me what it feels like because it doesn’t make any sense to me.” And often clients will struggle with this because they’ll be like, “Well, I just have anxiety.” And I’ll say, “No, we need to understand what specifically, how do you specifically know you’re anxious?” “Oh, I have tightening in my chest or I have shortness of breath, or I have a lump in my throat or I have these butterflies in my tummy.” So, immediately, once we get that, we’re like, “Okay, now we know what we’re dealing with. Okay, now we have specific sensations and now we can develop tools around them so that when you have them, you don’t either engage in avoidant compulsions or physical compulsions or mental rumination or reassurance or self-punishment.” So important.  Now, let’s slow down here a little and look at what that looks like for many of my patients and many of you. So, this is not scientific, what I’m about to tell you. This is really just coming off of my stream of consciousness and my experience as a clinician, is I’ve broken them down into four main sensations that my patients report to me. Again, this is not a clinical list. So, I want to preface. I don’t want to ever mislead you into thinking this is scientific. But often one of the sensations that people will feel are physical experiences of anxiety, like I listed. It could be butterflies in your tummy, tightness in your chest, as I just said, and I’ve listed them off.  The next one is specific sensations around what we call depersonalization and derealization. I’ve done full episodes on those in the past. So, go back and check them out. But this is the experience of this weird feeling. The sensation is like, everything feels strange. I feel like distorted, like I’m in a daydream. It feels very hazy and strange, or I feel like I’m outside of my body. Now while we have words to describe derealization and depersonalization, they are also at their most basic form of sensation, a basic sensation. So, I put that in its own category.  The next one is similar to anxiety and derealization and to personalization, but I’ve put them under the category of panic. Now, the reason that it’s so important for us to talk about sensations is, people who have panic disorder are very sensitive to the sensations that they have because panic is such a 10 out of 10 anxiety. So, it’s like can’t breathe, racing thoughts, major overwhelmed, dizzy, sweating. These are all sensations. These are all things that we perceive or we experience in our body.  And then the last one is physical pain. This is a sensation too. When you physically have pain, a tummy ache, that’s also a sensation.  Now, let’s talk about why I separated those, because I’ll give you a really perfect example of how this gets messy. Most of you know that I have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which is symptoms of dizziness, lightheadedness, headaches, stomach troubles. And often if you stand for too long, you faint. Now, what does that sound very similar to? You guys are probably laughing at me already. Anxiety. It looks exactly like anxiety except the fainting piece, dizziness, lightheadedness, stomach aches, headaches. So similar. And so, when we have, and this is where it gets difficult, when we have a chronic illness or if we have health anxiety, when we experience a sensation, sometimes we can’t figure out whether it’s real pain and real threat or if it’s anxiety.  The thing to remember here is the response needs to be similar. So, for me, when I had dizziness and lightheadedness, yes, of course, I’m not going to push myself to a place where I pass out, but I’m going to first stop and go, “Hmm, let me try to dip into these sensations. Instead of catastrophizing them as this is terrible and bad things are going to happen, I wonder what would happen if I just labeled them as a sensation.”  The thing here is, when we have sensations, and you’re having them right now, believe it or not. It could be an itch. It could be a muscle that’s sore from a workout you had, it could be a stomach ache because you just ate an amazing dinner and you just had a little more than you wish you had, or you’re having anxiety. We all have them. Where we often get into trouble is when we label them as good or bad. So, that’s the main point here first. Are you labeling your sensations as good or bad?  When I would have my POTS symptoms, I get dizzy. At the beginning, I go, “This is bad, this is bad. Bad things are happening,” which would then give me anxiety, which would make it worse. And now I’ve got this hot mess. Massive hot mess. Same for people with health anxiety. They have tightness in the chest and they go, “Oh my God, I’m dying. I’m having a stroke,” or “I’m having a heart attack.” And when we label it as bad, we get more anxiety, which makes it worse, and now we’re in a cycle. If you’re having a panic disorder and you’re starting to notice that small little tingle of anxiety coming up, this like whoosh of anxiety that whooshes over you when we have a panic attack, and you label this as, “Oh, this is bad, this is terrible. I got to get it to go away,” you can bet your bottom dollar, it’s actually going to feed you more anxiety. So, question whether you are labeling your sensations as good or bad. Now I’m guessing some of you are thinking, “Well, Kimberley, of course, I’m going to label it as bad. It is bad. It’s terrible. I don’t like it.” And I get you. But we’re here to learn. We’re here to grow. We’re here to recover. So, I want you to think beyond that judgment and look at first the judgment doesn’t help you. Whether it’s true or not, it’s not helpful. It makes it worse. So, let’s work at being nonjudgmental about the sensations that we have.  The response we have to your sensations can determine whether you get stuck in a cycle of having more discomfort. Let me rephrase that in a different way to make an even bigger point. The response you have to your sensations can determine whether you have anxiety about them in the future. Because if you treat the sensations today like they’re dangerous and harmful and they require immediate emergency, you’re training your brain to perceive those sensations as scary and bad and dangerous. And so next time you have them, your brain is going to send out a whole bunch more anxiety. So important.  I’ve had my share of panic attacks in my life, but when I have them and if I’m like, “Oh, dear God, please don’t,” I know my brain is going, “What, what, what? What’s wrong, Kimberley? Why are you telling me this is terrible? Okay, it is terrible. I’ll keep sending out anxiety.” But when I can respond by going, “Good one, brain. It’s cool. There’s no amount of sensations I can’t tolerate. It’s fine. I’m going to ride it out.” Again, we don’t know how to bypass it with positivity by going, “It’s great. I love it.” We’re not saying that. But we are saying if we can reframe the sensation as tolerable and manageable, you’re less likely to have anxiety about the sensation tomorrow. Now, I know a lot of you may be asking, “But how do I know when it’s something to just be uncertain and nonjudgmental about or when I should rush to the hospital and so forth?” Number one, you’ll know. But the other piece, I don’t want to discard you on that one because that’s hard to say, especially if you have anxiety, especially OCD and health anxiety. But the other thing is, for me, if I’m having it and I’ll use me as an example, if I’m having dizziness and lightheadedness, which could be anxiety or it could be my POTS, I just keep on the deferring. I keep on deferring like, “Okay, can I just stay with it nonjudgmental for another few minutes?” If I’m getting to feel really horrible, of course, I’m going to sit down and take a rest. I’m not going to push through and be unkind. But I just keep being curious. Could I it do a little longer? Could I have a little more? Could I be nonjudgmental for another few minutes?  It’s so important because when it comes to anxiety, the way in which we respond to the sensations is as important as how we respond to intrusive thoughts. Particularly like I said, if you’ve got depersonalization, derealization, panic disorder, physical pain, generalized anxiety, health anxiety, so important. If it’s social anxiety, it’s a big one because a lot of people with social anxiety have an aversion to the sensation of being flushed in their cheeks. But if you respond to your cheeks flushed as bad, you’re probably going to get more of it. It’s paradoxical. Now, here is one other point I want to make before we finish up, which is there is no sensation you can’t ride out. This was a huge one for me because I’ve had anxiety and I’ve had some pretty bad chronic illnesses. If I go into the day telling myself, “I won’t be able to handle it,” I usually have anxiety about the day. Have you noticed that? I know you can’t answer back, but I really want you to consider the question. Do you notice that in your experience? When you tell yourself “I can’t handle things,” does that actually then create more anxiety for you? And sometimes more depression too, if I can be completely honest.  Last week, we did a whole episode on depression. I think it’s really important to recognize that. Even I should say other sensations are like depression, that’s that sinking, dark, gray sensation that goes with having depression. I should put that there as the fifth type because that’s a sensation that can be scary too. Grief can be an experience that-- there are sensations associated with grief that feel intolerable. But when we tell ourselves we can’t tolerate them, we actually then create more anxiety and depression. So, these are things to think about when it comes to sensations.  Now, if you were in an office with me or one of my staff, we are most likely to say, at the end of the day, you’re going to have to say, “Bring it on.” Once you identify the sensation, it really comes to, do you avoid it or do you say it’s a beautiful day to do this hard thing, to experience this hard thing? And so, we would say, “Bring it on.” Now, in ERP School, we talk about this. I probably should do an episode on this. Let me just actually write myself a note to episode on this. If someone really comes to our office with a stronger aversion to certain sensations, we do what we call interoceptive exposures. We talk about this in ERP School. It’s an online course. But an interoceptive exposure is where we purposely expose you to the sensation that you’re avoiding.  So, examples might be, if you really don’t like dizziness and you’re doing things to avoid dizziness, we would sit you in our chair and we would spin you around 30 times and then we’d walk the hallway ways with you while you’re dizzy.  If you’re afraid of shortness of breath, we would give you a very small straw. One of those straws that you use to stir your coffee with, and we would have you practice breathing through that so that you, on purpose, tolerate the feeling of having shortness of breath.  If you really don’t like the feeling of shortness of breath, like tightness in your chest, we might wrap a bandage around your chest, so tight that it feels like you can’t breathe, just for a few minutes. We’re not here to torture you. But these are examples of interoceptive exposures that we do because not only are we like “Bring it on,” we’re like, “Let’s have more of it.” Let’s practice doing it so we can practice nonjudgment, we can practice non-aversion. We can practice saying I can handle this and learning that we can handle this is cool. So, so cool. That’s the thing.  So, depending on where you are and how severe you are in your aversion to sensations, there are multiple ways you can respond. I want you just to use this episode as an opportunity for you to check in, where are you in respect to your experience with sensations? Do you have aversion to them? How willing are you to feel them? Questions are my favorite, you guys. You know this about me. So, ask yourself these questions. So important.  All right. That is it for sensations. I hope that is helpful. I know I took you on a couple of meandering tangents there, but I hope you stayed with me. I love talking to you about this stuff and I hope that that did give you some clarity on how you may handle it in the future.  All right. I will see you next week. Have a wonderful, wonderful day, and don’t forget, it’s a beautiful day to do hard things. I’ll talk to you later.

SUMMARY:  A few months ago, I posted on social media and asked “What are your best tips for depression” and the response was incredible.  Hundreds of people weighed in and shared their best tips for managing depression with OCD and other anxiety disorders.   In This Episode:  Hundreds of people with depression shared what skills they use to manage OCD and depression  What skills can become compulsions  How to manage day-to-day depression when you are feeling hopeless (OCD hopelessness)  Links To Things I Talk About: Kimberley’s Instagram Page https://www.instagram.com/youranxietytoolkit ERP School: https://www.cbtschool.com/erp-school-lp Episode Sponsor: This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com.  CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors.  Go to cbtschool.com to learn more. Spread the love! Everyone needs tools for anxiety... If you like Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, visit YOUR ANXIETY TOOLKIT PODCAST to subscribe free and you'll never miss an episode. And if you really like Your Anxiety Toolkit, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two). EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION This is Your Anxiety Toolkit Episode 291. Welcome back, everybody. So, I want to set the scene here because things are shifting. Things have shifted. So, I am right now sitting in my office, which is in Southern California, in the United States. But as this launches and goes live, I will be in Australia for the summer. I think I’ve talked to you guys about this in previous episodes, but my husband and I made a decision that the children and I will go to Australia to see our family for the entire summer. Oh my goodness, what a huge undertaking, but we’re doing it and I am so excited. So, really, I’ve had to batch 10 episodes ahead of time.  Now, what I’ve done is I’ve done my best to make these the best episodes I can batch for you, like the things that seem to be coming up the most for my clients, the questions my staff seem to be asking the most, and the things that everyone seem to be really, really liking and appreciating on social media. And so, in preparation for today, I was thinking about what’s one of the most helpful, most enjoyed, and engaged posts on social media, because I do spend a lot of time over on Instagram. And by far, interestingly by far, my most popular post I have ever made in the whole history of me being on social media is tips on managing depression. What? I’m an OCD and an Anxiety Specialist, but yet my most popular post in the whole time I’ve been there is on managing depression. So, that’s what we’re talking about today.  Now, in order for me to do 10 posts, 10 podcasts, excuse me, in order, I’ve had to manage my time down to the minute because right now we are leaving in 18-- no, what is it? Not 18 days. It’s like 15 days. So, we’re leaving in 15 days. I have all of this in addition to the work because I usually just do these here and there. I’ve had to manage my time, and what I have relied on the most is managing my time using what we call “calendaring.” I talk a lot about this on my online course. If you go to CBT School, we have a whole course on managing time.  But the reason I also share that with you is as we talk about skills today, we’re going to be talking about cognitive skills and behavioral skills. And if you have depression, I strongly encourage you to go and sign up for that course. It’s not an expensive course. It’s jam-packed with how to schedule your time so that you can lessen the heavy load that you’re carrying or the time about the lists of things you have to do and get done. So, I do recommend you go check that out. Go to CBTSchool.com and I think it’s /time management. Yes, it is.  We’re about to get into the show. First of all, let’s do the “I did a hard thing.” This one is from Anonymous and it says: “I stopped driving and spending time with children because of OCD. But yesterday, I drove my little sister to school. I was scared, but I’m so proud of myself. Thank you, Kimberley.” This is so good. I can’t tell you how many people when they’re anxious, they stop driving. It’s actually a really common question I get on social media. It actually surprised me at first in that how common it is. It’s one of the first things people stop doing, is driving. So, Anonymous, amazing. You are just all for the correct courage and all for the bravery and I’m celebrating you right now. That is so, so amazing. Great, great job.  And one more thing, let’s do quickly a review of the week. This is from Robin. Robin says: “I’m not sure how to condense all of my happiness and thanks, but I’ll try. Was recommended to listen to your podcast by my therapist (who is just superb and I’m grateful she exists) and I instantly fell in love with your genuine desire to help which seeps through the sound waves. I am hooked on the real-life stories that I can connect to my own experience and have gotten my sister hooked as well who struggles with anxiety as I do. Thank you for your tools and support!” Thank you, Robin, for that amazing review. Please do go over. And if you listen to the podcast, leave a review. It does help me help other people and more than ever, that is my biggest mission.    Tips to Manage Depression (From Hundreds Who Have Been There)  All right, let’s do it. So, let me just give you a little bit deeper context here. So, what I did is I did a poll on social media. So, just to give you some context, I have around 75,000 followers on social media. So, I posted: “Please just give me your best tips for managing depression.” Hundreds of people wrote in and the reason-- I don’t give you the numbers because I’m bragging. I want you to know this is not just from me. This is from hundreds of people who weighed in, who’ve been there, who’ve had depression and they shared little nuggets of what has helped them. And I want to-- in fact, we actually had to split this post into two because there was just so many submissions that we couldn’t fit them all in one post. So, here we go.  The number one tip for managing depression and these aren’t in order, by the way, this is not the one that was most popular. This is just as we went through, these were the ones that seemed to be really coming up for the same a lot of people. The first one is-- this is going to be a fun one for you, is many people reported that having a dog or a cat or a pet helped them to feel like they had a purpose in the world, that they were there to take care of someone, and that that pet gave them an incredible amount of love.  I loved this one. What was interesting, I’ll give you feedback right away, is there was a little controversy and feedback around this. A lot of people were saying, “Please don’t encourage people to get a pet just because they’re depressed. Taking on a pet is a huge responsibility.” There was a little controversy, a little backlash, I would say, over that point. But I really do agree that those who do have a pet and can commit to taking on a pet have found that that’s really helpful for their mental health. Most people said having a pet is the most mindful they are in the day when they’re petting their pet, feeding their pet, cuddling with their pet, listening to their pet, and so forth. So, that I thought was an amazing, amazing tip or thing you could practice.  Number two, probably again, one of the most important from a clinical perspective is exercise. Now, yes, I know, it’s hard to exercise when you’re depressed, but we do have a ton of research to show that exercise is in fact as effective as an SSRI. Not to say you shouldn’t be on an SSRI. I actually am on all four meds. But exercise is an additional benefit. And so, I strongly encourage everyone to at least get out. It doesn’t have to be strenuous, but around 25 minutes was what most people who have depression said, that was the ideal amount. If you get to that point, you actually get more benefit, which I thought was really cool.  The next one is: Practice mindfulness. Now again, so helpful. If you have depression, usually, I’m going to guess, your mind tells you a lot of lies, a lot of horrible lies, a lot of absolute painful lies. And a big part of managing it is using what we call mindful-based cognitive therapy. And so, what we mean by that is, first, we are aware and we just observe thoughts as thoughts. We don’t take thoughts as facts. And then the cognitive therapy side is once we identify that we’ve had a thought, we may actually stop to correct it. So, if your brain says, there’s no point, you’re a waste of space or the future is going to be nothing but terrible or my life is nothing but terrible – when it tells us these lies, we can actually stop and go, “Okay, now, number one, that’s a thought and I’m going to observe that thought nonjudgmentally.” And then you can also go, “Okay, let’s actually check the evidence for that depressive thought. Hmm, do I bring purpose into the world? Is the world going to be terrible?” and look for maybe some holes in this theory and start to be curious about whether that’s in fact correct. It’s so important. Mindfulness. I personally think these two, the exercise and the mindfulness, are key, are major keys to managing depression. The next one that was suggested by a lot of people was to talk to family and friends, even if they don’t fully understand. And I loved that little caveat to go on. As much as depression makes you want to isolate and shut down, make sure that you are going and you’re just connecting with them. You’re talking with them, you’re sharing what you’re going through, even if they don’t understand, because the truth is they won’t. Even if they’ve been through what you’ve been through, they won’t fully get it. They’re not the ones getting fed the lies of depression like you are. Or if you’re a family member, I want you to understand it’s really not helpful to say to someone with depression, “I totally get what you’re going through,” because the chances are you don’t. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t relate on some level. That doesn’t mean we can’t connect and support each other. So, important. So, so important.  This one was an interesting one. And I want to-- some of these surprised me, but lots of people reported that attending couples therapy, couples counseling, if you’re in a relationship, was helpful for their depression. Now, I wonder if that is because maybe their relationship was a part of what’s very difficult for them, but I can see the benefit in that. I don’t talk about this very often, but I personally love couples counseling. I have no problem admitting that we’ve been to couples counseling before. It is thebomb.com. It is such a beautiful thing to do with your partner. Is it hard? Yes. Is it bumpy? Yes. But there’s something really cool about knowing that you’re showing up to the same place every week with the same goal, which is to strengthen your relationship. That in and of itself is just really, really cool. And a lot of people responded saying that that was really helpful for their depression, which I thought was really cool.  Next one, you guys aren’t going to be shocked by this, and I definitely wasn’t, which was to practice self-compassion. You guys, depression is nasty. It tells you nasty. I’m doing everything I can not to swear here, but it’s like BS. It tells you such nasty BS. And one of the best insurance policies against that, or one of the best defenders against that, or I should say offense, the offense against that is to practice compassion for yourself, to practice being kind and respectful and being tender to the suffering that you’re experiencing. Because believe me, I do know, I’ve experienced depression throughout different parts of my life. It’s horrible and it feels-- the only way I can explain it is you can’t understand it when you’re in depression because you’re in depression. But once you’re out of the depression, for me, it felt like someone had pulled this gray veil off my head that I didn’t even know was there until I’d come out of a depression by going to a lot of therapy and so forth. And I was like, “Whoa, I had no idea everything was under a gray veil until the gray veil was lifted.” So, that compassion piece is really important because I didn’t know the depression was there until the depression had lifted, if that makes any sense. And had I known it, I probably would’ve been much, much, much kinder to myself.  Next point, I love this. It’s very similar to what we talked about before, but it says, no matter how much you don’t want to, get up and move your body. Now, I could have easily put this under the category of exercise. But a lot of the comments weren’t-- this wasn’t talking about exercise. It was saying, stand up and stretch was one of them. Just stand up and swing your body around, move it around, get into the flow, let the blood flow around your body. And they were saying that that is a shift in mentality. It’s a shift in mindset. I know even today as I’m recording all these episodes, I’m going to need to practice this, because if I just stay here and I stare into this microphone and I’m looking at the screen, my brain is going to get a little distorted and strange. I’m going to have to go upstairs, shake it off, get a cup of tea, move around. And so, I love that they distinguish this separate from exercise. Next point, oh my gosh, this is gold right here. It says, do something you used to enjoy. Now, when we’re depressed, often nothing feels enjoyable. Even food isn’t enjoyable anymore, or company might not be enjoyable. The things you used to love, the vibe is gone. But what a lot of people were saying, and this is again from people who’ve had depression and managed it, is they were saying, whether or not you enjoy it now, continue to do the things you used to enjoy, but also spread out.  This is one thing I didn’t mention here, is a lot of people said, be curious about little things that you used to enjoy that you never really developed as a hobby. So, an example would be, I think somebody said something to the likes of like, I used to love hopscotch. Of course, they loved it when they were very, very little. So, as they got older, of course, they stopped playing hopscotch into their adulthood. But they were like, “I literally wrote down a list of everything I used to enjoy and I just did it, whether I’ve done it for 40 years or not.” So, little things. It doesn’t have to be grand things. It doesn’t have to be hobbies. It could be going, “I remember as a kid, I used to love boba or whatever.” Go and get some. Do the things you used to enjoy, even if they’re teeny tiny.  Another huge group of people said sunlight. Sunlight is a huge part of managing depression. Now, thank goodness for these, my community, because if I was putting together a podcast or managing depression, I would’ve completely forgotten about the people who have seasonal affective depression because I live in California and I wouldn’t have thought of that. But so many of my followers are from all around the world and hundreds of people responded saying, you have to get sunlight. You have to get exposure, UV lights. There are all these really cool exposure lights that you can talk to your doctor about getting. So, thank you to everyone who wrote this in because I would’ve forgotten that.  And for me too, what I will say is I work indoors a lot. I work at my desk a lot. Most of you know I am running two separate businesses at once. My private practice and CBT School. So, the days where I don’t just-- even if it’s go outside and sit in the sun while I have a cup of tea for 10 minutes, I do notice a shift in my mood. Again, don’t do too much. We don’t want you to get sunburn. We don’t want you to have too many exposures to UV rays. But I do believe there’s such a benefit for mental health.  Okay, next one. This one is amazing. So, many people wrote some variation of this, but we pulled it into this one point, which is write a list of “I can” statements. Meaning, when you’re depressed, depression will tell you can’t. “You can’t do that. You can’t do this. What’s the point of doing that? You can’t. Don’t do it. You won’t do it. Don’t do it.” And so, a lot of people were talking about writing a list of either your strengths or your characteristics or things that you can do. And I think that that is such an amazing shift – to write a list of I can’s. I can work out. I can call my friend. I can get some sun today. I can go to therapy. I can play with my dog. It’s very similar to the term “should.” That simple move of saying “I should exercise” to “I could exercise” like “I should be kinder to myself,” or you could say, “I could be kinder to myself,” those small shifts in sentences can make such a difference. So, I like either of those. Next one, appreciate the little things you do for yourself. You might start to see a trend here. When you’re depressed, the big stuff feels really hard. So, you got to zoom in on the little stuff. And they were saying, appreciate the little things you do for yourself. So, an example might be, “It’s really nice that you made yourself a cup of tea before you recorded these podcasts, Kimberley,” or “Wow, it was kind of you that you bathed today. Great job. Making sure you ate breakfast. Great job. Getting out of bed today.” Often with depression, we go, “Oh, that’s stupid. Why would I celebrate getting out of bed? Everyone gets out of bed. I’m such a loser because I can’t get out of bed.” I mean, that’s the mindset of someone with depression. And so, we want to shift that away from such critical voices and going, “Good job you got out of bed. That’s a big deal when you’re depressed. Good job on brushing your teeth when you’re depressed. That’s a big deal. Good job on saying no to that thing you didn’t want to do. That’s a big deal.” Really, really important.  I have three left. The third last one is, take your medication. Hundreds of people wrote this in and I just loved it. It filled me with joy because whether you choose to take medication or not is entirely your decision. But 10 years ago, I remember when I was-- 15 years ago when I was starting to do my internship, there was this article. I think it was like a USA Today article or something, and it was talking like, let’s take the stigma out of medication. And so, great. We’re starting to have those conversations. But to see now how the response was of like, “Just take your medication,” it just really made me feel joyful that maybe that means there’s a little less stigma about it, and I really hope that I help you to take the stigma out.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with taking medication. In fact, I’ll tell you a quick story about myself, when I-- you’ll probably remember I went through a period in 2019 and 2020 where I was very, very sick and I had severe depression alongside it. And I remember the doctor saying, “Okay, we’ll prescribe you such and such for this condition and such and such. And we’ll prescribe you an SSRI for your depression.” And he didn’t really even ask if I was depressed, he just prescribed it. And I was like, “What? You didn’t even ask me if I was depressed.” And he goes, “No, no. Most people who have POTS,” I have pots, “they get depressed.” And I was like, “Huh, that’s interesting.” And I thought to myself, okay, I don’t-- for a second, I thought, no, I don’t really need it. But then I was like, “You know what? What a gift to give myself the help. If it’s going to help, I’m going to do it. What a gift.” Not that I’m at all encouraging you to take medication, but I just want to share with you my experience. I could have seen it as like, “Oh, I’m so bad. That’s weak and that’s lazy and I should try without it.” But I was like, “You know what? I’m really not well. I’m going to take all the help. And if one form of the help is to take a pill, I’m going to take a pill.” I’m not going to tell myself a story that that’s lazy. In fact, I’m going to say that’s pretty badass, that I would accept the help. I’ll get going. Sorry, I had to tell you that really important story from my perspective.  All right. Two to go. Second last one: Surround yourself with people who help keep sight of what’s important. This is important. If you’re depressed and you’re surrounded by people, whether it’s physically or on social media, people who are very materialistic or they are striving towards things that actually make your depression worse, find different people. You want to find yourself around people who strive for similar things that are aligned with your recovery.  I’ll tell you again a different story. As a business person, I love business. I really do. I love being a therapist, but if I wasn’t a therapist, I’d go to business school because I just love it. But I notice that if I’m hanging around with other people who are business-minded, it can get really icky and the messages can get really gross. And I can find myself falling into this trap of winning and wanting more. I was finding that I was starting to be hard on myself until I caught this and was like, “Whoa, I need to unfollow these people because this is not good for my mental health. I need to surround myself with people who have the same goals, like what’s important as their goal.” And that was really, really monumental for me. So, do an inventory of your friends, your family, your social media, your colleagues, and try to only surround yourself with people who support your recovery.  Last one is, when you’re having this feeling, don’t numb it out. I’m leaving this at the end. I probably should have put it at the front, but don’t numb it out. It’s okay. Sometimes you will need to turn your brain off and watch some TV. But if that’s all you’re doing to manage your depression, the chances are you’re going to get more depressed. That’s why I keep talking about scheduling and calendaring. Because often when we’re depressed, we want to just stay in bed and numb the feeling out. Sleep all day, watch TV just to numb the depression. But that only makes it worse. And this is the behavioral piece of managing depression, which is one of the gold standard treatments for depression is what we call time blocking or activity scheduling so that you schedule your day. Nothing heavy, nothing crazy. But you do that so that in doing that, you actually reduce your depression because you feel accomplished and you don’t feel like the day was a complete waste. Again, there’s a balance. You don’t want to overschedule, but you do want to engage in the day. You want to make sure that you’ve got things planned. So, don’t numb. Try to activity schedule.  If you need help with that, head over to CBTSchool/-- sorry, you’ll go to products and then there’ll be time management there, or CBTSchool/timemanagement. You can learn that in that course. It’s a really pretty cheap course and it’s pretty quick. It’s like a two-hour course and I walk you through exactly how I do it.  All right. So, that’s it. There are tips for managing depression. There’s like 12, maybe 15 of them. They’re from hundreds of people who have been there. I just love this community so much. If you haven’t followed me on social media, head over to Instagram under Your anxiety Toolkit, and I’ll be there. Thank you.  All right. Have a wonderful day. I will see you next week. Next week, we’re talking about sensations and anxiety and panic. So, I’ll see you there. Have a good one, everyone.

In This Episode, we discuss: Is it important that you stop doing all your compulsions? How can I practice Self-Compassion as you move through recovery? How can you balance facing fears and also being gentle on yourself? Links To Things I Talk About: ERP School: https://www.cbtschool.com/erp-school-lp Episode Sponsor: This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com.  CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors.  Go to cbtschool.com to learn more. Spread the love! Everyone needs tools for anxiety... If you like Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, visit YOUR ANXIETY TOOLKIT PODCAST to subscribe free and you'll never miss an episode. And if you really like Your Anxiety Toolkit, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two). EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION  This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 290.  Welcome back, everybody. 290, that sounds like a lot of podcast episodes. It’s funny. Sometimes I don’t think of it. If you have asked me on the street, I’d say, “Yeah, I’d have about maybe 110 in the can.” But 290, that is a lot of episodes. I do encourage you to go back and listen to them, especially the earlier ones. They’re my favorite. But no, go back, play around, check out the ones that you love. There’s probably some things there that you could probably go back and have a good giggle at. All right. We today are talking about a question that came from a student in one of my courses. I’ve found this question to be so important. I wanted to bring it in and have it be a podcast episode because I think this is a very important question and I think it’s something we can all ponder for ourselves. Now, before we go into it, I would like to give you the “I did a hard thing.” This is a segment where someone shares a hard thing that they’ve done. And I love the “I did a hard thing” segment probably as much as anything. This one is from anonymous and they said: “I have contamination OCD. And one thing I’ve avoided for a very long time is raw meat and eggs. Over the winter, I discovered that ERP is so much EASIER (and I use this term very loosely in capital letters) if my exposures are value-based.” This is so good, Anonymous. “So I decided that I wanted to be the mom that baked with her kids, anxiety be darned. I wanted my kids to have warm memories baking in the kitchen with their mom as the snow fell. So each week over the winter, we picked a new recipe, and over the weekend we made it as a family. The first time I cracked an egg, my husband took out his phone and took a picture. He was so proud. The exposure was still hard and I didn’t feel calmer at least while baking, but I tried my best to present and enjoy the time with my kiddos. Later, my son brought home A Joy Is book made at his school. Each page had something on it that brought him joy – fishing with dad, some are vacations. And there on the page.” Oh my God, Anonymous, I’m getting goosebumps. “There on a page was ‘making cookies from scratch with mom.’” Oh my God, I think I’m crying. Oh my goodness. I have goosebumps everywhere. “It is so hard to measure success with ERP sometimes, but that gets real, tangible evidence that I had accomplished something and it felt so good.” Holy my stars, Anonymous. This is incredible. Wow. This is what it’s all about, you guys. This is what it’s all about. For those of you who are listening, I don’t read these before the episode. I literally read them as just I pull them up and I read them. This one has taken my breath away. I just need a second. Oh my goodness, that is so beautiful. So beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Oh my gosh, that is so perfect for this week’s episode. All right, here we go.   This week’s episode is about a question, like I said, is it okay to keep doing some of my compulsions? Again, this came from one of the courses that we have. We have two signature courses for OCD. One is ERP School, and then the other one is this Mindfulness School for OCD that teaches mindfulness skills. Now, the reason I love this question is, they’re asking me as if I am the expert of all things, OCD. And I want to let you in on a little truth here – I am not. You’re probably like, “What is happening? She’s been telling us that she’s an OCD specialist all this time. And now she’s telling me she’s not the expert.” I am not the expert of you. And I want to really make sure that is clear. Anytime someone says, “What should I do? What’s the right thing to do for me?” I try my best not to tell them that is best for them because I’m only telling them what I think is best for them. That doesn’t mean it’s the facts. So, I want to be very clear. I am not the expert in you. You are. You do get to make choices of your own. That being said-- and I’ll talk more about that here in a second. But that being said, let’s look at the question and just look at it from a perspective of just general concepts of OCD. Now, in the beginning of ERP School, we have a whole module that explains the cycle of obsessions and compulsions. I draw it out on a big sheet of paper, like this huge sticky note. And it’s actually really funny because I’m trying to squeeze myself into the frame of the video with this huge sticky note. When I think back to it, it makes me giggle. But here let’s take a look. The thing to remember here regarding this question is, if you have a fear and the fear is what we call egodystonic, meaning it doesn’t line up with your values, you know it’s a fear, and you know it’s probably irrational. If you have this fear and you respond to the fear as if it is dangerous and important and urgent, you actually are keeping your brain afraid of the fear. And you’re continually keeping your brain stuck in a cycle where your brain will set off the metaphorical fire alarm every time it has that fear. When you have fear and it doesn’t line up with your values and you have the insight to see that it’s irrational or that it’s keeping you stuck and it’s not effective for you and not responding anymore, your job is to practice changing your behaviors and your reaction to that thought so that you can train your brain not to set the fire alarm off next time. It may take several times or many times. But again, if you have a fear and you respond to it like it’s important, your brain is going to keep thinking it’s important. If you have a fear or an obsession and you keep responding to it with urgency, your brain is going to keep interpreting that fear as urgent, serious, dangerous, scary things. So, I’m always going to encourage my patients and my students to always check in on this one golden question, which is, what would the non-anxious me do? Or what would I do if I weren’t afraid of this thought? Or another question is, am I responding from a place of fear, generally? And if that’s the case, then I would encourage my patient to really work at reducing that compulsion because the compulsion keeps the cycle going. Now, that being said, still, again, I’m going to say, under no circumstances do I get to tell you what to do. Only you will know what’s right for you. And I have had clients, I will say, I’ve had clients where they’ve written out their hierarchy. They’ve gone all the way to the top. And there’s several things at the top where they’re like, “No, I’m actually going to keep these ones. These ones are ones that don’t interfere with my life too much. I’m comfortable. I’m not ready to face them yet. And so, no, I’m going to keep doing them.” And I respect that. Again. I am not the expert on everybody. Everyone gets to make their own value-based decisions. That’s entirely okay. I always say to them, going to the top of your hierarchy and cutting back on all of the compulsions is, think of it like an insurance policy on your recovery. It’s not going to completely promise you and guarantee that you won’t have obsessions in the future or you won’t have a relapse here or there. No. And that’s okay. That will happen. We’re going to actually have a conversation about that here in the next few weeks on the podcast. But you can help train your brain by marking off all those compulsions. So, what I’m going to leave you here with-- this is actually not going to be a long podcast, but what I’m going to leave you with is the actual answer to the question. Is it okay if I keep doing some of my compulsions? Yes, it’s okay. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to win all the challenges. And for reasons that are yours, you get to make those decisions. And really that’s your personal decision as well, and-- we don’t say “buy,” we say “and.” And just keep in mind the nature of compulsions. Compulsions keep the cycle going. Just keep that in mind gently, in a tender place. Put it in your back pocket. And here is the question I’m going to leave you on, is ponder why you don’t want to stop this compulsion. What’s getting in the way? If you’re really honest with yourself, what’s the reason you want to keep doing it? Does doing it keep you aligned with your values? Is there a way to be creative and strategic in this situation where you can slowly reduce the compulsion, even if it’s a baby step? It’s so important just to be pondering and asking yourself questions. I have to always stop and say like, “Okay, Kimberley--” I call myself KQ. Everyone calls me KQ. “KQ, let’s get real. What’s really happening here.?” And I’m not doing it in a mean way. I’m having a heart-to-heart. What’s really happening? What’s really getting in the way? Are you being honest with yourself? And sometimes you have to have really honest conversations to be like, “Oh, I know. I’m totally giving myself stuck here.” And it might take some time before you’re ready, and that’s okay too. Okay? So, I want you to think about those things. Maybe even write the questions down. Go back and listen, or you can go to the transcript of this podcast. Write those questions down and go back and review them every now and then, because those are questions I ask my patients every single day. Every single day. And the questions I ask myself and the questions I ask my patients are often what defines how successful they are because we’re questioning the status quo. And that’s what gets them better. Before we finish up, let’s do the review of the week. This is from Robyncox and they said: “Thank you, Kimberley. I’m not sure how to condense all of my happiness and thanks but I’ll try. I was recommended to listen to your podcast by my therapist (who is just superb and I’m grateful she exists) and I instantly fell in love with your genuine desire to help which seeps through the sound waves.” I love that. “I am hooked on the real-life stories that I can connect to my own experience and have gotten my sister hooked as well who struggles with anxiety as I do. Thank you for your tools and support!” Thank you, Robin. Again, I love hearing your reviews and I just love hearing that I can be of service and help you and be a part of your day. I love knowing that people are like taking walks, listening to me and we get to have chats together. It’s beautiful. It’s really, really such an honor. All right. That’s it for Episode 290. That’s a lot of episodes, but I think we’re doing well. I will see you next week for Episode 291 and we will go from there. Oh, one thing to note. By the time you talk to me next time, I will be in Australia. We are going to spend the summer there this year and I could not be more excited. I’ll send you my love from there. Have a great day.

In This Episode: What is whack-a-mole obsessions?  Why do my obsessions keep changing?  What is the treatment for fears that keep changing?  Episode Sponsor: This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com.  CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors.  Go to cbtschool.com to learn more.  Spread the love! Everyone needs tools for anxiety... If you like Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, visit YOUR ANXIETY TOOLKIT PODCAST to subscribe free and you'll never miss an episode. And if you really like Your Anxiety Toolkit, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two). EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION  This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 289.  Welcome back, everybody. I am so happy to be with you again. I won’t lie. I’m still on a high (that rhymed) from the managing mental compulsion series. Oh my gosh, you guys, I am so proud of that series, that six-part series. If you didn’t listen to it, please do go back. I’ll probably tell you that for the next several podcasts, just because I am really still floating on the coattails of how amazingly, so wonderful that was. And it really seemed to help a ton of people, which is so fulfilling.  I do love-- it’s not because of the ego piece of it, I just do love when I know I’m making an impact. It’s really quite helpful to feel like you’re making an impact. And sometimes when I’m putting out episodes, I really don’t know whether they’re helpful or not. That’s the thing about podcasts compared to social media, is with social media, if you follow me on Instagram @youranxietytoolkit or Facebook, I can get a feel based on how many comments or how many likes or how many shares. But with podcast, it’s hard to know how helpful it is. And the feedback has been amazing. Thank you, everyone who’s left reviews. What a joy, what a joy.  What the cool thing is, since then, it’s actually created this really wonderful conversation between me and my therapist. So, for those of you who don’t know, in addition to me owning CBT School, I also own a private practice where myself and nine of my therapists were actually, now 10 extra therapists, in the process of hiring a new person. We meet once a week or more to discuss cases. And the cool thing about the mental compulsion series is it brought the coolest questions and conversations and pondering, what would this help this client? How would it help that client? These are the struggles my clients are having. Because as I kept saying, not every tool is for everybody. Some you’ll be like, “Yes, this is exactly what I needed,” and there’ll be other things where they might not resonate with you. And that’s totally fine. It doesn’t mean anything is wrong. That’s because we’re all different. But it’s really brought up a lot of questions. And so, now I’m actually going to hopefully answer some of those questions in the upcoming podcasts.  Today, we’re actually talking about what to do when your obsessions keep changing. Because we’re talking about mental compulsions and reducing those, and that’s actually the response prevention part of treatment, what’s hard to know, like what exposures do you do for somebody whose obsessions keep changing or their fears keep flip flopping from one to the other? One week, it’s this. Next week, it’s that. And then it’s funny because a lot of clients will say, “What was a 10 out of 10 for me last week is nothing now. And now all I can think about is this other thing. I was really worried about what I said to this one person. Now, all I can think about is this rash on my arm. And the week before that, I was really upset that maybe I had sinned,” or there was another obsession. Again, it’s just what we call Whack-A-Mole. We’re going to talk about that today.  But before we do that, we are going to do the “I did a hard thing” segment. This one is from Marisa. And Marisa is at the @renewpodcast. I think that might be her Instagram or their Instagram. Marisa said: “Last week I submitted my dietetic internship applications. It was a long, stressful process and anxiety definitely came up during it. And I was able to move through and do the hard thing. I kept reminding myself that the short-term discomfort of submitting the application was worth the long-term reward of hopefully getting a step closer to my goal of becoming a registered dietician through completing the internship. Even though there is still uncertainty and the outcome that I have to sit with while I wait to find out the results of my application, I have learned through my ERP work that I can sit with the discomfort and uncertainty. Thank you, Kimberley, for reminding me that it is a beautiful day to do hard things.” Marisa, I hope that you get in. I hope that you get all of the things that you’re applying for. This is so exciting. And yeah, you really walked the walk. This is exactly what we’re talking about when we do the “I did a hard thing” segment. It doesn’t have to be OCD-related or anxiety-related. It could be just hard things because life is hard for everyone. I love this. Thank you so much, Marisa.  If you want to submit your “I did a hard thing,” you may go to my-- it’s actually my private practice website where I host the podcast. If you go to KimberleyQuinlan-lmft.com and you go to the podcast link, right there, there is a link that says “I did a hard thing.” It’s actually KimberleyQuinlan-lmft.com/i-did-a-hard-thing/ okay? But it’s easier just to go, and I will try to remember to put this in a link in the podcast.  All right. One more piece of housekeeping before we get going is, let’s do the review of the week. This is from Sass, and Sass said: “I have had an eating disorder for many years and I spent my adult life trying to understand my compulsions and obsessions. When I found your podcast last summer, everything started to make sense to me. You have given me an understanding and acceptance I couldn’t get anywhere else. I look forward to your weekly podcast and enjoy going back and listening to the earlier podcasts as well. Thank you for all you do.” Sass, I get you. I was exactly in that position when I had my eating disorder. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t feel like people explained it in a way that made sense to me. And the obsessive and compulsive cycle really made sense to me. So, I am so grateful to have you, and I’m so grateful to be on this journey with you. Really, really, I am. Thank you for leaving that review.    Okay, let’s do it. Today, we are talking about Whack-A-Mole obsessions. Now, Whack-A-Mole obsessions is not a clinical term. Let’s just get that out of the way. There is nothing in the DSM or there’s no-- it’s not a clinical scientific term, but it is a term we use in the OCD community. But I think it’s true of the anxiety disorder community. Maybe even the eating disorder community as well, where the fears flip flop from one thing to the other. This may be true too if you have health anxiety. It might be true if you have generalized anxiety, social anxiety, where one day everything, it just feels like this fear is so intense and it’s so important and it must be solved today. It’s so painful. And then for no reason, it goes. And then it gets overshadowed by a different fear or obsession or topic.  And what can happen in treatment is you can start to treat one, doing exposure. This was actually one of the questions that came up through ERP School, which is our online course that teaches you how to create a plan for yourself to manage OCD. Some people will say, “Oh, I created a hierarchy. I followed the steps in ERP School. I started working on it and I did a few exposures and I did a few marginals. And boom, it just went away and then a new one came or the volume got turned down.” It could be that you addressed it a small amount, and then it went away and got replaced by another. Or it could be that you didn’t even get time to address it and it just went to a different topic. And this is really, really distressing for people, I’m not going to lie, because you’re just constantly whack-a-moling. You know the Whack-A-Mole game? You’re whack-a-moling things that feel super important, super scary, super urgent.  And so, what I want to do first is just validate and recognize this is not an uncommon situation. If this is happening for you, you are definitely not alone. And it doesn’t mean in any respect that you can’t get better. In fact, there’s a really cool tool, and I’m going to teach it to you here in a second, that you can use. We use it with any obsession. This is not special to Whack-A-Mole obsessions, but you can use it with any exceptions or if things keep changing. But first of all, I just want to recognize it is normal and it’s still treatable.  What do you do? The thing to remember here is, when you zoom out, and this is what we do as clinicians, our job as clinicians, and I say this to my staff all the time, is to find trends in the person’s behaviors and thinking. And what you will find is, when you’re having Whack-A-Mole obsessions, while the content may be different, when you zoom out, the process is exactly the same. You have a thought, a feeling, a sensation, or an urge that is repetitive, that is uncomfortable, that creates a lot of distress in your life. And of course, naturally, you don’t want that distress. That’s scary. And so, what you do is you do a compulsion to make it go away. It doesn’t matter what the content is. It doesn’t matter what the specific theory is. This is the same trend. And so, when we zoom out, we can see the trend, and then we can go, “Aha. Even though the content is the same, I can still intervene at the same point.” When we talk about this in ERP School, is the intervention point is at the compulsion.  And so, the work here is the content doesn’t matter. Your job is to catch and be aware, like we’ve talked a lot about mindfulness, is to be aware and identify, “Oh, I’m in the trend. I’m in the cycle.” While the one content has changed, the same behaviors are playing out. So, you catch that. You then practice being willing to be uncomfortable and uncertain about the content, because that’s the same too. The same cycle is happening. The thought and the fear create some anxiety, some sensations, and so forth.  And then we have an aversion to that. And then our job is to work at not engaging in that compulsion. So, that compulsion might be mental rumination. It might be doing certain behaviors, physical behaviors. It might be reassurance seeking. It might be avoidance. It might be self-punishment. It might be self-criticism. And your job is actually to go, “Okay, it really doesn’t matter.” And I really want to keep saying that to you. If the fear is, what if I have cancer? What if I’m going to hurt someone? What if I’m aroused by this? What if I have sinned? What if things are asymmetrical? What if I got some contaminant? What if I don’t love him enough? It doesn’t matter. What if it is not perfect? What if I fail? It doesn’t matter. I’ve just listed some, but if I didn’t list your obsession, please don’t worry. It’s for every one of these. The content for all of them are equally as important.  Sometimes what we do is we go, “Oh, that one is okay. But this one is really serious, and we have to pay attention to it.” And so, we have to catch that and go, “No, it’s all content. It’s all--” you could say, some people say it’s all spam, like the spam folder. Because when we get an email, we have emails that we really need to see – events, meetings coming up. And then we always have spam, the stuff that’s like, “Please send me money for Bitcoin,” or something. So, we put that in the spam folder. And so, your job is to catch the trends here, the patterns, and learn how to put those obsessions in the spam folder, no matter what the content. Now, this does require, and here’s the caveat, or I would say this is the deal-breaker, is it does require a degree of mindfulness in your part to be aware of what’s going on. And this is a practice, like a muscle that you grow. So, what it requires is you have to be able to catch that you are in the content. You have to be able to catch that you are in the cycle that keeps you stuck. And that does require you to be mindful again. And I get it. I’m not saying that you’ll ever be perfect at this because I don’t know anyone who is. There will be times when you’re so caught up in the content and you’ve been doing compulsions for an hour, two hours, two days, two months and you haven’t caught it. And you’re like, “Oops, wait. Oops, I didn’t catch that one.” That’s okay. We don’t beat ourselves up. Then we just go, “All right, I’m at the point where at least I’ve caught it. I’m aware that I’m in the content. I’m aware how this is playing out exactly the way that it played out yesterday, but with a different obsession.” And then you just move on from there. Don’t beat yourself up. But it does require you to strengthen the muscle of being able to catch that you’re in the content. And it’s what we call insight. It’s having the insight to recognize. Now, insight is something we can strengthen with practice. It’s not just one and done. It’s practice. It’s repetition. I have to do this all the time for myself. While I don’t have OCD, I do have anxiety and I will catch myself going down the rabbit hole with something until I’m like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you’ve been here before. It looks exactly like what you did on Tuesday where you’re trying to figure out something that’s not in your control. Kimberley, this is not in your control. You’re trying to control something that isn’t even your business.” And I’ve seen that trend in me. And so, my job is to catch it. Once I can catch it, then I know the steps. I know, “Okay, I got to let this one go. I got to accept the discomfort on this one. I’m going to have to ride this wave of discomfort. I’m going to have to radically be kind to myself.” We know the steps. And once we can get those steps down, it’s about catching it. But this is what we do when the obsessions do keep changing.  Now, I’m not going to say this is easy because it’s not. And if you require help doing this, reach out to an OCD therapist or an anxiety specialist who knows ERP. Remember here, and I’m telling you this with the deepest, most absolute degree of love, is CBT School, the whole mission of CBT School is to provide you tools and resources for those who don’t have tools and resources. So, if you haven’t got a therapist and you’re finding this really, really helpful, but you’re still struggling, don’t be afraid. It doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you. It just means maybe you need some more professional help. Maybe you have a therapist and you’re listening into this just to get extra tools. Great. Take what you learn and then take what struggles you have and figure that out.  I really want to stress here, and the reason I bring that up is, when I say this, it isn’t as easy as it sounds and it does require sometimes having somebody else, this is why I go to therapy myself, is even though I know the tools, it’s really nice to have a second set of ears just going, “Wait a second. Sounds like you’re caught up in the content.” If it’s not a therapist, maybe you could have a loved one or even journaling I have found is really helpful in that when you journal it down, and I do this regularly, I then read it, not to judge it, but just to see what trends. And I get a highlighter and I just highlight like, where are the trends? Where am I seeing the same patterns playing out? And that’s where we intervene.  So, that’s Whack-A-Mole obsessions. That is what to do when your obsessions keep changing. I do hope that that was helpful, not just to validate you, but to give you some skills moving forward. I am so grateful to have you here. Don’t be afraid to let me know what you think. I love, again, getting your feedback via reviews. I urge you to join the newsletter. That will then allow you to reply and give me feedback that way. I love hearing from you all.  All right. I’m going to sign off and I’ll talk to you very, very soon.

SUMMARY:  Today, I share what to do when you get “bad” news.  This episode will share a recent situation I got into where I had to use all of my mindfulness and self-compassion tools.  Check it out! Episode Sponsor: This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com.  CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors.  Go to cbtschool.com to learn more.  Spread the love! Everyone needs tools for anxiety... If you like Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, visit YOUR ANXIETY TOOLKIT PODCAST to subscribe free and you'll never miss an episode. And if you really like Your Anxiety Toolkit, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two).   EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION  This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 288.  Welcome back, everybody. We literally just finished the six-week series on managing mental compulsions. My heart is full, as full as full can be. I am sitting here looking into my microphone and I just have a big, fat smile on my face. I’m just so excited for what we did together, and I felt like it was so huge. I have so many ideas of how I want to do something similar in the future with different areas. And I will. Thank you so much for your feedback and your reviews. I hope it was as helpful as it was for me, even as a clinician. I found it to be incredibly helpful, even as a supervisor, supervising my staff. I have nine incredible staff who are therapists, who help treat my clients and we constantly keep referring back during supervision of like, “Do you remember what Lisa said? Do you remember what Reid said? Listen, let’s consider what Jon said or Jon Hershfield said, or Shala Nicely said.” It was just so beautiful. I’m so grateful. If you haven’t listened, go back and listen to it. It’s a six-week series and ugh, it was just so wonderful. I keep saying it was just so wonderful. So, if you go back, I did an introduction, Episode 282. And then from there, it was these amazing, amazing experts who just dropped amazing truth bomb after amazing truth bomb. So, that’s that. Today, I am going back to the roots of this podcast. And I’m sharing with you-- for those of you who have been listening for a while, we usually start the episode with a segment called the “I did a hard thing” segment. This is where people write in and tell me a hard thing that they’ve done. If you go to my website, which is KimberleyQuinlan-lmft.com. There on the podcast page is a place to submit your “I did a hard thing.” And today’s “I did a hard thing” is from yours truly. I just had to share this story with you. I feel like it’s an important story to tell you guys, and I wanted to share with you that I’m not just talking the talk over here, I’m walking the walk. So, today’s episode is called When You Get Bad News. I’m just going to leave it at that. Before we get started, I would love to leave you and share with you the review of the week. This is from hannabanana3131, and they said: “Fantastic mental health podcast. Such an amazing podcast. I have learned so many useful tools for dealing with my anxiety and OCD. And Kimberley is such a loving, compassionate coach - I feel like she’s rooting for me every step of my healing journey,” and she’s left a heart emoji. Thank you so much, hannabanana. I love, love, love getting your reviews. It does help me so much. So, if you have a moment of time and the podcasts are helpful for you, that is the most helpful thing you can do back. When we get reviews, then when people who are new come over and see it, it actually makes them feel like they can trust the information we’re giving. And in today’s world, trust is important. There is so much noise and so many people talking about OCD and anxiety, and it’s easy to get caught up in nonsense stuff. And so, I really want to build a trust factor with the listeners that I have. So, thank you so much for doing that. Okay. It’s funny that hannabanana says, “I feel like she’s rooting for me,” because the “I did hard thing” is me talking about my recent experience of having a root canal. Worse than a root canal. So, let me tell you a story now. I’m not just telling you this story to tell you a story. I’m telling you this story because I want to sometimes-- when we do the “I did a hard thing” segment, it’s usually very, very short and to the point, but I’d actually like to walk you through how I got through getting some really bad news. So, let’s talk about it. And I’ll share. I’m not perfect. So, there were times when I was doing well and there was times when I won’t. So, for those of you who don’t know, which I’m guessing is all of you, I have very bad gums. My gums, I inherited bad gums. It comes in my family. I go in every three months for a gum routine where they do a deep cleaning or they really check my gums to make sure there’s not receding too much. And because of that, I take really good care of my teeth. And because of that, I usually have very little dental issues. I never had a cavity. I’ve never had any cracks or any terrible swollen problems. That just isn’t my problem. My problem is gums and it’s an ongoing issue that I have to keep handling. So this time, I go in, I get my x-rays, and the doctor comes in. And I have this really hilarious dentist who has not got the best bedside manner, but I do love him and he has been with me through some really tough times that when I found out I have a lesion on my brain, I fully broke down in front of him and he was so kind and gave me his cell phone number. He was just so lovely. But he comes in and he rubs his hands together and says, “What are we doing here today, Kimberley?” And he looks at the x-rays and I kid you not, he says, “Holy crap!” Literally, that was his response, which is pretty funny, I think. From there, I proceed to go into some version of a panic attack. I’m like, “What? What’s wrong? What do you see? What happened?” And I think that was pretty appropriate for me to do that. So, I want to validate you. When you get big news, it’s normal to go into a fight or flight, like what’s going on, you’re hypervigilant, you’re looking around. Now, he waited about 45 seconds to answer my question. I just sat there in a state of panic while he stared at the x-rays on the wall. And these 45 seconds, I think, was the longest 45 seconds of my life because he wouldn’t answer me. And I was just like, “Tell me what’s wrong. What’s wrong?” So, he turns around and he says, “Kimberley, you have a dead tooth.” And I’m like, “What? A dead tooth? What does that even mean?” And he says, “You have a tooth infection that is dormant. Do you have any pain? Do you have a headache? What’s going on?” And I’m like, “Nothing, nothing. I’m fine. Everything is fine.” And so, he proceeds to immediately in this urgent, panicky way, call in his nurses, “Bring me this, bring me that, bring me this, bring me that. Bring me this tool, bring me this chemical or medicine or whatever.” And they’re all poking at me and prodding at me and they’re trying to figure it out. And he’s like, “I cannot figure out what this is and why it’s here.” So, bad news. Just straight-up bad news. Now, the interesting thing about this is, it’s hard to be in communication with someone, particularly when they’re your doctor and they appear to be confused and panicking. Not that he was panicking, but he was acting in this urgent way. That’s a hard position to be in. And if you’ve ever been in a position like that, I want to first validate you. That’s scary. It is a scary moment that your trusted person is also panicking. Just like when you’re on an airplane and it’s really bumpy. But if you see that the air hostesses are giggling and laughing, you’re like, “Okay, it’s all good.” But when you see their faces looking a little nervous, that’s a scary moment. So, first of all, if you’ve been in that position, that’s really, really hard. What he then proceeded to tell me is, “Kimberley, this tooth has to come out. It has to come out immediately. We cannot wait. It’s going to cost a god-awful amount of money. And this has to happen right away.” Now in my mind, you guys know me, I am really, really strict about scheduling. I have a schedule. I’m not compulsive about it, but I run two businesses. I have a podcast, I have two children. I have a medical illness. I have to manage my mental illnesses all the time. So, I have to be really intentional with my calendar. So, this idea that immediately, everything has to change was a little alarming to me. But what I remember thinking, and this is one of the tools I want to offer you for today, is being emotionally flexible is a skill. And what we want to do in those moments, and this is what I practiced was, “Okay, Kimberley, this is one of those moments where your skills come in handy. Thank God for them.” How can you be flexible here? Because my mind wanted to go, “You got to pick up the kids and you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to a meeting tomorrow and you’ve got clients and you can’t do this. This can’t happen this week.” But my mind was like, “I’m going to practice flexibility.” In addition to that, when things change really quickly, we tend to beat ourselves up like, “Such and such is going to hate me. They’re going to be mad at me. They’re going to think I’m a loser for having to change the schedule.” And I just gently said to myself, “Kimberley, we’re going to be emotionally flexible here and we’re going to let everybody have their emotions about it.” So, the kids get to have their emotions about everything changing and my clients get to have their emotions about it too. And having to cancel the meetings, they get to have their emotions. Everyone’s allowed to have their emotions about the fact that many, many things are going to be canceled in the next few days. And that has been such a work of art for me, but it has been so beautiful for me to say, instead of me going, “No, no, no, I can’t do this,” because I don’t want them to have feelings and I don’t want them to think this about me, now I’m just like, everyone gets to have their feelings. They get to feel disappointed. They get to feel angry. They get to feel annoyed. They get to feel irritated. They get to feel sad. Everybody gets to feel their feelings about it because that’s a part of being a human. That’s one of the tools I want you to think about. Just play with these ideas. You’ve just come off the six-week series. These are some more ideas to play with. But then from there, I had about 36 hours where I had to wait for this surgery. And during that time, I had to have an x-ray where I was told, and this is the real bad news, is this infection, actually, this is gross. So, trigger warning, guys. The infection actually ate through a part of my jaw bone. I know. Isn’t that crazy? The infection was so bad and it was right at this area where I guess nerves come out of your jaw. There’s this tiny hole right at the front, around the sides where the nerves come out of your jaw and up into your lips and the infection spread and was all over that area. I know that is gross, but it’s also really scary. So, not only did I have to think about all of the changes, but he, the doctor, the dentist had made me very aware that this surgery has to go really well, and that if he pushes too hard or he pulls too hard with a tooth or he had to put in a-- there’s these words I don’t even know, but like a canal, like some kind of fixture so that he can create a new tooth because I had to have a tooth completely pulled out. He was like, “If I push it in too far, I actually may hit this nerve, which could be very, very bad.” So, this uncertainty felt horrible to me. And of course, I’m going to have these intrusive thoughts like, “What if I never get to speak again? What if I lose a feeling in my gums and what if he pushes hard and this is terminal? What if, what if, what if, what if?” And so, my skill here, and we’ve learnt this from managing mental compulsions, is bring it back to the present. Until there’s a problem, we don’t solve them. So, that’s what I kept doing. “It’s not happening now. Kimberley, it’s not happening now. It’s not happening now,” even though it’s a real threat, even though it’s going to be something I have to face, because sometimes our fears are like, “What if something happens?” But it’s just a what-if. There’s no actual event that you know for certain is going to happen. This was like, “Yeah, you’re going to do this in literally 30 hours and all of these risks are here.” You guys have probably got stories like this, where you’ve gone in for some brain surgery or any surgery where there’s a risk, but this risk was pretty huge. He was very concerned. I think appropriately concerned. So, here I am for 30 hours, managing this stuff where I’m like, “Okay, this could go really well or this could go really bad, like really, really bad.” I giggle just because it makes me nervous just to think about it. That’s a nervous giggle that you just heard me. I don’t know. I often giggle when I’m nervous. But it’s a big deal. So, I, in these moments, had to weigh up, go back to what Lisa Coyne was talking about. I was like, “Okay, values versus fear. Which one do I consult with?” I had reached out to the dentist to say, “You know what, let’s just not do this. I’m not in any pain. Let’s just keep it there. Let’s just not.” And his response was like, “That’s not even an option. If you’ve already got this much damage, this could get worse and be very, very problematic.” So, I didn’t even have the option to back out. I had to do this. And so, as I proceeded forward, I had to keep being aware like what Jon Hershfield talked about and Dr. Grayson and Dr. Reid Wilson, and Shala. I had to really allow all the intrusive thoughts to come like, “Yup. Possible. Yup, that’s possible too. Yup, that’s possible too. Maybe it does. Maybe it will. Not going to give it my attention right now. I see you’re back again. Good one, bro. Hi there, I see you. I fully accept the uncertainty.” That was me for l30 hours, literally bringing in every tool I have. The cool thing is it was a hugely busy week. And because I have been really doubling down on my mindfulness skills over the last few months, that actually really helped. Every time I noticed that I was getting anxious, I was like, “Okay, what does the keyboard feel under my fingers?” I have these fiddles that I play with and I’m like, “Okay, what does this feel like? This rubber feel like, or this metal feel like, and so forth?” So, that was really helpful. The day of the surgery, I go in and I’m fully anxious. I’m going to the bathroom. I’m needing to pee. I feel dizzy. I’m not allowed to be on my medication. Oh, and that’s the other thing, is this maybe the-- what do you call it? The silver lining. Just a little update for you guys, is there is a small chance, because this infection has been here for a long time and we haven’t actually detected it yet, that it may be the reason for all my POTS symptoms. As some of you may know, I have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. It is a chronic illness related to dysautonomia. It causes me to faint and have headaches and nausea and dizziness and blood pooling and it’s the worst. And there is a chance that that might be why. So, I’m half scared and half excited all day, which is a lot to handle. But as the day is moving forward, I’m getting more and more nervous and I start to feel the urge to start to seek reassurance. I start to observe the urge to Google. I start to observe the urge to ask the doctors many, many, many, many questions. And when I say it, I’m saying that very intentionally. I observed the urge, which is I didn’t do those behaviors. I just noticed the urge that kept showing up. “Ooh, let’s try and get this anxiety to go away. Ooh, let’s try and get that anxiety to go away.” Knowing that when it’s my turn to sit in that chair, I will ask specific questions. So, I’m not saying you can’t ask your doctors questions, but that was key for me, was to observe the urge to seek reassurance, observe the urge to go into avoidance. I’m not going to make this story too much longer, but what I will say, I want to tell you the funniest part of this story. I’m in the doctor’s office because I had to go in for this very fancy x-ray that does all your nerves because he was afraid he was going to hit one. He’s showing me the x-ray and I’m literally looking at it. He’s showing me cross-sections of my jaw. And you guys, it was so scary. You can see the hole that it’s created. You can see the infection and how it’s deteriorated the bone. It was so scary. And so, he puts his hand on my-- and I’m like, at that point, “Is there any way we could get away with not doing this? Because this is really scary.” He puts his hand on my hand, he says, “I’m going to go and take care of all of these last patients I have so I can give you 100% of my attention and I will be back.” You guys, this is the funniest thing ever. So, the dental nurse is there watching me. My heart is through the roof. My blood pressure is all over the place. She stands in front of me and she says, “Miss Kimberley, don’t be worried. We’ve watched all the YouTube videos.” And I swear to you, every piece of panic that I had went out the window for that small second and I laughed so hard. She said, “In fact, that’s where the doctor is right now. He’s just going to watch the YouTube video one more time.” And I just died laughing. Now for some of you, that may have actually been really anxiety-provoking. But for me, it was exactly what I needed. I needed someone to make this so funny. And it was so funny. I swear to you, every time I think of it, the way she says it in her accent was the most hilarious thing ever. It was so perfectly timed. The delivery was perfect and I burst out laughing. He comes back in-- this is the end of the story. I’m not going to drag it out for too much longer. I promise. But he comes back in, and I just wanted to share with you, because I know last week with Lisa, I had a really emotional moment, and I think it was really tied to this. As he was putting in the IV – because I had to be knocked out. He said he couldn’t take a risk of me moving. So, he knocked me out for the surgery – tears just rolled out of my eyes. And I wasn’t going to be ashamed of it. And what came up for me was, I said, “Please, sir.” I said “Sir,” which I think is so funny, because I know him by his first name. “Please, sir. Please just take care of me.” And for me, tears were rolling down my face, but that was an act of compassion for myself. Instead of me saying-- because I know two years ago, or even six months ago, I probably would’ve said, “Please, don’t kill me,” or “Promise me nothing bad would happen.” But there was this act of compassion that just flowed out of me, which was like, “Please, sir. Please take care of me.” And it was coming from this deep place of finally in my life, being able to ask to be taken care of. And I’ve been working on this, you guys, for about a year, is having the ability to actually ask for help has been something I’ve really sucked at and it’s something I’ve worked so hard at. And for me, that was groundbreaking, to ask for help. Now you could say it was me pleading with him, but it wasn’t. It was me. It was an act of compassion. It was an act of saying, “I’m scared. I’m not asking you to take my fear away. I’m just asking you to hold me in a place of kindness and compassion and nurturing and care.” And that for me was profound. So, I just wanted to share that with you. I know that it might not be as skills-based as some of the other episodes, but I love sharing with you hard things and I love sharing with you that I’m a human, messy human who’s doing the best they can and is imperfect too. But I just wanted to give you a step-by-step one. It’s okay if it’s hard and there are skills that you can use and we can get through hard things. It’s a beautiful day to do hard things, I always say that. And so, I wanted to just record this and share with you the ups and the downs of my week and help you maybe if there’s a time where you’ve gotten bad news on ways that you might manage it. Now, what I do want to end here with is, I understand my privilege here. I understand my privilege of getting bad news and being able to get medical care and have a lovely dentist and a lovely nurse who makes funny jokes. And sometimes the news doesn’t end well, and I get that. I want to honor you that there is no right way to get bad news. And the grief process of getting bad news is different for everybody. This was more of an anxiety process, but I want to honor to you that if you’re going through some hard thing in your life where you’ve gotten bad news, I want to also offer you the opportunity to grieve that and I want to honor that this is really, really a hard thing to go through. So, I really want to make sure I make space for you with that because my experience is not your experience, I’m sure. So, that’s it, guys. That’s what to do when you get bad news. That’s my experience of getting bad news and I hope it’s been helpful. We are embarking on some shifts here with the podcast. I am so inspired to be more focused on just delivering the tools to you and being a safe place for you and being a bright, shiny light for you. And so, I’m doing a lot of exploring on how I can do that. So, if you ever-- again, please do feel-- if you want to give some thoughts, please do reach out, send me an email. If you’re not on my newsletter list, please do go and sign up. I’ll leave you a link in the show notes, or you can go to CBTSchool.com and sign up for the newsletter and you can reply there as well or you can leave a review. All right. I love you guys. Have a wonderful day. It is a beautiful day to get bad news and do the hard thing. I love you. Have a great day.