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

SUMMARY: We all know that self-compassion is am important tool for anxiety recovery.  In this weeks episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit podcast, I address a common concern; “What if I dont deserve self-compassion?”  This is such a common reason people do not provide themselves with compassion.  In this episode, review the reasons YOU DO DESERVE SELF-COMPASSION and some key concepts and self-compassion mediations to help you practice self-compassion. In This Episode, we cover: Self-Compassion Definition Reasons people feel they do not deserve self-compassion Ways to manage feeling unworthy of self-compassion How to practice Mindful Self-Compassion Links To Things I Talk About: Self-compassion Mediation: Here is a link to several self-compassion meditations from previous episodes. https://kimberleyquinlan-lmft.com/episode-2-lovingkindness-meditation/ https://kimberleyquinlan-lmft.com/ep-134-giving-and-receiving-meditation/ https://kimberleyquinlan-lmft.com/ep-110-this-compassion-practice-tonglen-meditation-for-anxiety-will-change-your-life/ 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 223. Welcome back, everybody. It is a joy to be with you again. Thank you so much for being here with me. Thank you so much for putting aside your valuable time to spend it with me. I feel so honored. Today, we are talking about a question. And in effort for us to respond to this question, we’re actually going to ask ourselves some questions and I’m going to have some questions for you, and you’re going to think about them, hopefully, and then make some changes if you think that is what you need. The big question of the week is: What if I do not deserve self-compassion? Now, one of the most common questions I get is this question, particularly when I’m with patients and we’re discussing the idea of practicing self-compassion or kindness towards themselves. Often, that is a question they ask, what if I don’t deserve it, or they may even make a statement like, “I don’t deserve self-compassion.” Now, this is particularly true for those who are very self-critical and blame themselves for certain things that have happened either to them or that they have done. Like I’m saying, it’s like things that were accidental, things that they didn’t have control over, or maybe some things and mistakes that they did make. This is a really important question for us to explore. I’m going to hopefully get to explore it with you. Before we do that, I would like to do the “I did a hard thing” for the week. This one is from Sophia. Thank you, Sophia, for writing in and telling us your hard thing. Sophia said: “I suffered from OCD starting when I was 19. My hard thing I did was I reported my stepfather in for sexual abuse that occurred when I was nine when I found out I wasn’t the last victim. It took me 28 years to get to this place. And let me tell you, OCD really played into my intrusive thoughts. It made the process so much harder. But I did it and I feel like I’m out of the web of manipulation from my stepdad. This podcast helps so much and the book for self-compassion and fear workbook my OCD therapist recommended to me. I saw your podcast listed in the first few pages. Thank you for being a part of my support system without even knowing.” Wow, that was an amazing “I did a hard thing.” Thank you so much, Sophia, for sharing that amazing hard thing. You are showing up and facing fear and pulling your shoulders back and living your life according to your values. That is impressive. I’m so honored to have you share that with us and really do wish you the best. You are doing amazing things. Okay. So, let’s move into the bulk of the podcast in terms of let’s talk about what if I don’t deserve self-compassion. This is so important. I’m going to first pose to you the first question I have for you, which is, who actually deserves self-compassion? If someone says to me, “Well, I don’t deserve it.” I’ll say, “Well, who does? What do you have to do to be warranted of compassion? Who does deserve it?” I really pose this question. I really hope you answer it. I would like actually you to sit down and ask yourself, “Well, then who does?” And you will begin to see very quickly, I’m guessing, the rules in which you have for yourself that keep you stuck. Oh, the people who don’t have these thoughts, the people who don’t make mistakes, the people who are perfect, the people who look like they’re happy and are doing well. Or often people will say, “Everybody else is off the hook. It’s just, I’m not off the hook. Everyone else can be imperfect, mistake makers, but not me.” You’ll quickly learn the rules of your life. I want to ask you, do you want to live by those rules anymore? Because this is not playing games. This is your life. Do you want to keep holding yourself to those rules that you just listed off? How does it benefit you to continue to hold yourself to that high, high standard? Often, we say, “I shouldn’t have these feelings. I don’t deserve it because I’m weak. I don’t deserve self-compassion because I’m not valuable. I don’t deserve self-compassion because of the content of my thoughts. The content of my thoughts is too heinous.” Okay. So, there you might want to look at, again, what are the rules and do you want to live by those rules? Because the truth is, you can’t control your thoughts and you can’t control your feelings and you can’t control life a lot of the time, almost all of the time. And so, again, do you want to live by those rules? Next question: Are you beating yourself up for something that’s not your fault? Meaning can you control your thoughts? Because my thoughts aren’t my fault. I know my feelings aren’t my fault. I know how I interpret things aren’t my fault. That’s usually coming from years and years of being trained to think that way. I know my beliefs aren’t even my fault. I actually think we’re just creatures of habit and we were raised to believe certain things and we are going to make mistakes. I’m going to say this again: What would you have to do to warrant deserving self-compassion? Often when we actually explore this, I really, really hope you start and actually write your answers down to these questions because when we stop and we look at like, okay, so if you don’t deserve self-compassion, we really know the benefit of you practicing self-compassion so much so that I am in the process of creating a course that will teach you. I’ve already written a book for people with OCD, but I’m creating a minicourse on how to practice self-compassion. It’s that important. I want everybody to have access to it, not just those who have OCD. That is a big part of my mission, is to get everybody to be practicing self-compassion. Let’s say we really understand the benefits of it. We know it’s important. We know it can increase motivation, make you more successful, decrease procrastination, make you feel like a better sense of self. It can help you achieve your goals. So many benefits. It actually reduces inflammation. It gives you better wellness and health. It increases life satisfaction. So many benefits. Let’s say we want you to do it because it’s healthy, just like you would exercise because it’s healthy, or you would go get it to the dentist because it’s healthy. What would you have to do then to be warranted and deserving? And often then, again, you’re going to be very clear in terms of this list of things. I’m going to ask you, are the list of things even realistic? Really, if you said, “Okay, I’d need to no longer have these thoughts and I would have to have changed the past and done something different. I’d have to regulate my emotions all the time. Never snap at my children and never say something silly at a party.” Is that even possible for any human? Really for any human, is that realistic? Do you actually think you can actually achieve that really honestly? This is a question. This is not rhetorical. This is an actual question. The chances are, when you really answer it, the truth is, you’re not giving yourself self-compassion because you don’t feel like you deserve it. But the truth is, you will never be able to meet these rules that you’ve created for yourself. I don’t want to say that as if I’m blaming you. We’ve all done this. But I want you to be really honest with yourself in regards to, you’re never going to get to the place where you practice self-compassion if you keep those high level of rules, those perfectionistic rules. And then you miss out on this wonderful opportunity for your mental health and for your physical health, and for your wellbeing. Here is another question: What would you have to feel in order to offer yourself self-compassion? Meaning how would you need to feel about yourself? What emotion would you need to feel in order to feel like you deserve it? What would you have to experience about yourself? Not the rules, but like would you have to. Some people say, “I don’t feel like I deserve it.” It’s a feeling. The reason I ask this question is because often people will say, “It’s just a feeling I get. Sometimes I feel like I do and sometimes I feel like I don’t, usually depending on whether I’ve checked off all of these boxes.” But it’s still a feeling that you’re going off because it’s different. It’s not like you get your notepad out and you check the boxes. It’s a feeling. I might pose to them, could you actually offer yourself self-compassion without the feeling and just do it anyway? It’s a very, very radical thought. What a radical idea that you might offer it to yourself even though you don’t feel like you deserve it. Could you offer it because of what you’ve been through or because of the checkboxes that you haven’t checked? Meaning I believe, and I’ve said this on the podcast before, and I’m going to say it very, very clearly here for you, I believe the more that you suffer, the more you are deserving of self-compassion. It’s not the more mistakes you’ve made and the more you’ve suffered, the less you deserve it. It’s actually the more you deserve it. “Oh, I’ve made a lot of mistakes today.” Oh, you’re even more deserving of self-compassion. We want to offer more to you. Oh, you are having a really hard day with some really hard emotions and some strong emotions. Oh, even more of a reason to offer compassion. Now, usually when we talk about this, clients will say, “No, that’s just letting yourself off. That’s just getting out of jail free card.” I’m going to offer to you, like let’s trick this belief and check made it a little bit if we were talking chess, is self-compassion is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It doesn’t mean you stop holding yourself accountable. It’s actually what helps you towards change. You are saying, “I don’t deserve self-compassion. I need to suffer and be criticized and punished because of something that happened.” Does that actually move you towards perfection? No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t create any change. In fact, it keeps you now doing behaviors, like I said, self-criticism, self-punishment, which keeps you stuck in a cycle of feeling bad and negative thoughts and feeling depressed and feeling hate towards yourself. Very little good comes from that. That is not getting you out of any problem. It doesn’t lead you towards being the best version of yourself. In fact, it leads you towards more and more suffering. Mindful Self-Compassion Offering mindful self-compassion doesn’t absolve you from what happened in the past. Ideally one day you will forgive yourself, but that’s a different topic. Forgiveness is not self-compassion. You can do both. You could forgive yourself as a form of self-compassion and you could be self-compassionate, which could lead you towards forgiveness. But here, what I don’t want you to think of is that people who are self-compassionate are just like, “Oh no big deal. I just totally did a terrible thing, and it’s not a big deal. I don’t have to beat myself up because that would be unkind.” No, that’s not what we’re talking about. And no one does that. If that’s the case, you’re not practicing self-compassion at all. Self-compassion is just simply offering kindness towards suffering. That’s it. It’s not ranking you higher or lower and the good or bad person. It doesn’t mean that you don’t matter. It doesn’t mean that your pain doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean that you can’t hold yourself accountable and take responsibility. It just means the absence of beating yourself up and meeting your pain with kindness and compassion instead of criticism and punishment. The thing you’ve got to run mind yourself, and this is a huge thing I’m doing this year, is really trying to identify what’s working and what’s not. I do a lot of therapy. I think a lot. It’s one of my best skills and one of my biggest flaws, is I think a lot, I feel a lot. And it’s not a bad thing, but I’m really trying to be more efficient and effective. Meaning, okay, what’s the right amount of being responsible and taking responsibility? Because you could do a little bit, which is really responsible and very helpful. But then if you do too much of that, that doesn’t make you a super responsible person. It means now you’re moving into self-punishment. So, too much of one thing can be good and too much of one thing can also be bad. It gets you into trouble. So, how can you be effective with the behaviors that you engage in, is the amount of criticism or self-punishment or deprivation of compassion, which is what we’re doing here and talking about, does that bring you benefits to your life? It’s an important concept for you to think about. Whether you think you deserve it or not, or whether you feel you deserve it or not, is it effective? We’ll come right back to one of the first concepts, which is, just because you think it, still doesn’t make it true. So, just because you think you don’t deserve it doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it. It just means you’re having thoughts that you don’t deserve it and thoughts aren’t always right. We recently did a whole episode on guilt, quite a few months ago, but the whole concept was just because you feel guilty doesn’t mean you’ve done something wrong. Our brains make mistakes all the time. So, just because you think you don’t deserve it doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it. We think messed up, scary, wrong things all the time, and the truth is, anxiety lies. Depression lies. OCD lies. Panic lies. Chances are, a lot of these beliefs you have around self-compassion are also just lies. We want to move you towards recognizing that everyone deserves compassion. So, that’s the final where we land here, which is everyone deserves it. Everyone. Really to be honest, even when I say the more you suffer, the more you deserve it, that’s actually not completely correct too, because that would still be buying into this idea that certain people deserve it more than others. Everyone deserves it equally every day, 24 hours. It’s just a done deal. You don’t have to give yourself self-compassion. But what are the negative impacts of your life, if you don’t, and what are the positive impacts in your life if you do? Think about how much good you can do in the world if you did. That’s the point I want to make. Keep an eye out. We have a whole course on self-compassion coming. It will be for everyone. It will be $27. I’m in the process of making it. It will probably be available when this comes out, but just in case it’s not, keep an eye out in future podcasts. I will have a link on CBT School. You can go there and check it out. I cannot wait to share that with you. It’ll be a lot of these concepts, but actually more applicable skills for you to practice. Head on over to CBTSchool/self-compassion. I’m sure it’ll be there by the time we get to this episode and I am so excited to share it with you. Before we finish up, let’s do the review of the week. This one is from Kanji96 and it says: “This podcast is very helpful for me, especially when I’m going through hard times. Right now happens to be one of those hard times and here I am back listening to Kimberley. Thank you.” Thank you so much, Kanji. Your reviews mean the world to me. Please, please, please go and leave a review. I mean it. If you get any benefit from the podcast, this is one way that if you feel at all so inspired to leave a review, it really helps me. It helps me to reach more people. It helps people to feel like they can trust the information here. I would love your honest review. So, go over to podcast app or wherever you listen and leave a review there. I am so grateful. Have a wonderful day, everybody, and I will see you next week.

SUMMARY: This week’s episode is incredibly inspiring, with Lora Dudek talking all about getting real about OCD recovery.  Lora shares her experience of having harm obsessions and harm OCD and how she managed being a mom during ERP. Lora also shared some wonderful ERP activities she did to help her keep track of her exposures. In This Episode: What OCD Recovery looks like for Lora Her experience with Harm OCD What kind of Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) Lora used for harm OCD How she used ERP and recovery to decide what her values were (starting a career in ERP) Links To Things I Talk About: ​​Lora Dudek OCD Contact info: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/lora-dudek-lockport-il/935049 https://www.graceandgratitudecounseling.com/ourtherapists 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 222.  Welcome back, everybody. I am so happy to be with you today. Oh my goodness, I’m going to tell you a story, totally off-topic. But today’s episode is number 222, and coincidentally, it’s coming out just by coincidence the week of February 22, 2022. The reason that that is special for me isn’t because I have any kind of affiliation with numbers, it’s that I have this amazing memory of when I was very young. It was the 9th of the 9th, 1999. My mom, who is the most amazing human being in the whole world, had a 9/9/99 party, and everyone had to bring nine of something, nine flowers, nine chocolates. You could bring whatever you wanted. Nine of... We had nine of everything – nine shrimp on the plate, nine prawns. In Australia, we call them prawns. It was such an amazing memory.  I told my children that we were going to do something similar because I just feel like that was such a beautiful memory. And so, I feel like I’m beginning that whole celebration with you because coincidentally, it’s episode 222 on the week of 2/22/2022. Oh my goodness. I’m sorry. I know that has nothing to do with the episode, but it is a story that is so near and dear to my heart and I just wanted to share it. It isn’t actually an off-talk topic because I really do want to bring some more joy to this episode and I really do want to slow down and enjoy with you all. It is a huge part of my goal for this year. So, thank you for sitting in that joyful story with me. If you would like, I hope you do something with twos, if you can, on that day, something fun. Buy yourself 22 flowers, say 22 nice things to yourself, whatever it may be, because these are very much once in a lifetime experiences and memories.  Today, we have Lora Dudek with us on the podcast. Now, to say that I am a Lora Dudek fan is an understatement. I love this human being. She is such a shining light, especially for people who have OCD and want to feel like there is hope. She has such a beautiful story, such a hard, but beautiful story, and a real authentic, genuine story to share. I am honored to have her on the show like I am to have so many people come on who have a recovery story to tell. I particularly love when I can be a part of it and I was a part of their story, or CBT School was a part of their story or ERP School was a part of their story. And so, it is just such an honor to have Lora on here. She’s talking about what recovery looks like for her. The reason I love this idea is, recovery is different for everybody. I really wanted you to get an experience of what it looks like for someone who has really done the work. Like I said, so many of our podcast guests have done the work and Lora is no exception. So, I’m going to head over and let you guys listen to that.  Before we do that, I first want to do the “I did a hard thing.” This week’s “I did a hard thing” is from Fabian, and they said: “Hi, Kimberley. First of all, thanks for creating the room to write about my anxiety. I am recovering from OCD, and today I was at the dentist for a tooth filling. I don’t like it because my mouth is blocked and I’m scared of getting enough air. And moreover, I do not like to get injections.” Oh my goodness, Fabian, I feel you on this one. “I was able to face both and stay very present with the body sensations like cold hands, many, many thoughts, high heartbeats. It was a hard thing to finish the week and I’m happy that I did it. I will have to face it again in February 🙂. All the best to you and your team.” Amazing, Fabian. I feel you on so many levels. The dentist is so hard for me. No matter how many tools I use, it’s always going to be hard, but you did the hard thing. And that is what I love. So, thank you so much for contributing your “I did a hard thing.” I am honored and major props to you.  Okay. Let’s get over to the show. Kimberley: Welcome, everybody. I am so excited about this episode today. We have Lora Dudek. She is now a Licensed Professional Counselor, but when I first met her, she was going through her own journey, and I wanted her to share her journey with you today. Welcome, Lora. Lora: Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here.  Kimberley: Oh my gosh. Okay. So, we’ve already pretty much cried before we even got on today together, which is beautiful. And so, I can’t wait to get into this whole conversation together. You and I met online many years ago, and now you’re a therapist, which just blows my mind, helping people. Can’t believe that. So, that’s amazing. Do you want to share with us your full-circle story? Lora: Yeah, absolutely. So, one of the things that we were just talking about was that I started listening to Kimberley’s podcast back in 2017, somewhere around then, when I had been newly diagnosed with OCD. This is a total full-circle moment for me because she was such a-- I just called her a ‘lighthouse’ back in the day.  My own story really started when I was just a kid. I mean, I was a little girl and was having intrusive thoughts. My intrusive thoughts have always been harm-related. As a kid, I didn’t obviously really didn’t know what that meant. I had a big obsession with death. I was very, very scared to die and other people around me dying or me somehow hurting them. But when I was little, it always just manifested as telling someone I was scared that they were going to die, and then them reassuring me that they weren’t going to die, which is such an interesting thing to look back on. No one ever knew that. But that’s where the reassurance started.  I was looking back. I can see these areas of my life that were impacted from the get-go really. And then when I had my daughter in 2014, the anxiety just became absolutely overwhelming. From the moment that I knew that I was pregnant, there were just basically constant thoughts about something bad happening. I felt the entire time that I was pregnant like, I don’t know how to describe it really. Maybe nine months of almost getting ready to attend a funeral truly is how I felt, because it just seemed so heavy, already knowing I was going to be really responsible for this life.  While I was pregnant, I even got one of those sonogram machines or the fetal heartbeat machines. I would be sitting at the office and have an intrusive thought that something had happened to her, and I would rush home and I’d make sure that her heart was still beating. My doctor knew me very well because I was basically calling every other week with something that might be wrong, that never was. And then once she was born, it really manifested as just constantly checking on her. These intrusive thoughts that something really bad was going to happen to her, that I wasn’t going to be able to take care of her, and constantly asking my husband at the time that I’m an okay mom. I can do this. I’m able to do this.  Those went on really. These thoughts and that heightened anxiety went on for-- she was 16 months old at her first Christmas or her second Christmas, sorry. We traveled with family to go see family, and I was putting her down for her nap and ended up laying down beside her. She fell asleep and I fell asleep next to her. It was in a bed. When I woke up, my first thought was, oh my God, is she breathing? I thought I had smothered her. And so, I put my hand on her chest and I could feel that she was breathing and I went to get up and walk away. I had the thought, what if she’s not? I was like, “Okay, let me check one more time.” That is where I say the walls came down, because from that moment on, it was like, there wasn’t any-- the checking just got out of control and it flipped. It got into this area where I was scared that something bad was going to happen to her, but now, I was going to do something bad to her. It just changed flavors really quickly.  We got home from that trip and I told my husband. He had to go on a business trip for two days. I basically didn’t sleep for two days. “I thought I’m going to hurt her. Something awful is going to happen to her. I can’t take care of her.” Just going out of my mind. I used to get up and check on her, probably 10 times a night, to make sure she was still breathing. At this point, I became so scared of myself that I would block my bedroom door at night with my dresser to make sure that I wasn’t going to get up and do something to her. I was like, “Whoa, something’s really wrong here.” So, I looked up an Anxiety Specialist and went and saw her. It took me about a couple of months seeing her and building rapport with her to actually let her in on some of the thoughts that I was having. I remember very vividly. It was an early morning appointment. It was a 7:00 AM appointment. The night before I barely slept, because I really did think like, this is it. I’m going to get hauled away tomorrow. I’m going to tell her these thoughts I’m having, and this is going to be the end of me. And so, that morning, I kissed my daughter, I kissed my husband. I walked out the door and got in my car and I was like, “All right, that’s the last time I see him for a while.”  But I got into my therapist’s office and I broke down. I’m like, “I have these thoughts that I’m going to hurt my daughter. It’s the worst thing in the world.” She was like, “Do you want to?” I was like, “Oh my God, how could you even ask me that? She’s the most important thing in my life.” She asked me a couple of other questions. But then she said, “Do you know anything about OCD?” Through my tears, I was like, “Yeah, I do. I know OCD. I’m not clean. In fact, I’m really messy. I don’t even know why you’re asking that.” I was frustrated.  And then she told me about intrusive thoughts and compulsions, and it was the biggest light bulb moment of my life. Everything just started making sense really from some of my earliest thoughts. I do have to say it was a bit of a relief at the beginning. So, that’s the story. That’s how I got diagnosed, and it started a whole new part of my journey. Kimberley: Yeah. So you had relief.  Lora: Yeah.  Kimberley: And then what was your emotion? Lora: Yeah, I mean, the relief was like, I’m not crazy, that it was so like something has got to be really wrong with me. And then it was just like, whoa, I checked the box for everything she just talked about with this disorder. And then the emotion, after a little bit, the emotion became like, this is going to take a lot of work. This is going to be a level of acceptance that was like, I started getting acclimated to what exposure therapy was. She didn’t practice exposure therapy, but she was amazing in the sense that she was like, “I have the person for you.” She knew enough, which is so important-- Kimberley: Yeah. Thanks for that. Lora: Yes. To send me to an OCD Specialist. That therapist was amazing. She laid out for me how this was going to work, what we are going to do. It was a relief at first. And then there was a lot of grief. There was a lot of heartache, realizing how much this disorder had taken from my life. Ignorance can be bliss sometimes. I think that I dismantled that notion through doing ERP and exposures, and it became a very interesting part of the journey. Kimberley: I know, I was thinking about you. You were saying you got in your car, you said goodbye. And then you had to walk back to your car and drive back to your house, right? How is that? Lora: It’s like, I mean, I have some health anxiety too, so I always liken it too. I walk into a doctor’s office thinking this is going to be cancer. And then I walk back like, “Okay, now I just go back to life.”  Kimberley: Right. I can just have this image of you, walking back to your car, going, “I guess I’m going home now.” Lora: Yes. And I got back. My husband was like, “Hey, you doing okay?” I was like, “I got to tell you what just happened. This is what they said. Did you know that obsessive-compulsive disorder is like this?” And he is like, “No, but I mean, makes a lot of sense.” Kimberley: Yeah. How crazy. It’s so amazing that you had that opportunity. Again, we know that that’s not a lot of people’s stories, so I’m so happy that you had that experience. Lora: The thing, Kimberley, is that I do want to point out that I had been seeing someone for anxiety almost my entire adult, different therapists. This is the first time. Like, I said, I would have these harm thoughts, but I was just like, push them away, get rid of them. This was the first time I’d ever come head to head with being actually like, “I’m responsible for a little life. This is all on me.” It felt like I wasn’t going to be able to live the life I truly wanted to live. Other times, it was just like, okay, I can walk away from it. I can find some way to not be around it. Now I’m talking about my daughter who means more to me than anything in the world. Something has got to give. Kimberley: Yeah. That’s really helpful to know that you have been in therapy.  Lora: Yeah. Kimberley: When I had previously done a presentation with you through the International OCD Foundation, and you shared about your exposure board, this whole idea blew my mind. The reason I really want the listeners to understand, when I teach ERP, I’m literally just teaching my way of doing it and I love hearing other people’s way of doing it. It’s the same, but it’s different. And so, I’d love for you to share about that as an idea for people.  Lora: Yeah. Well, what started as one of the biggest, I felt like, almost hindrances of my pregnancy was that at the time I was pregnant, there were seven other women at my work that were also pregnant. I remember seeing them all being so happy. And then they had their babies and they were so happy, and they were-- obviously, it wasn’t like, we’re not going to blow this up like some kind of blissful totally time. They were new moms too, but they were going out and doing stuff. And that’s all I wanted. That’s what I wanted so badly, was to have those experiences with my daughter.  So, my therapist and I started with imaginals and started with some really small things. I mean, I laugh about it now, small. Back then, it was like, no way. I did one where I was going crazy, where this wasn’t really OCD, the timeless tale of it’s not OCD. Such a classic. So, we started with imaginals and then even imaginals into sleepwalking at night, hurting my daughter, things like that. So, we worked our way up then to one day I was sitting in her office and she said, “What do you want to do?” I was like, “I just want to do normal stuff. I want to go to the zoo.” And she’s like, “All right, we’re going to the zoo.” And I was like, “What?” Kimberley: You’re like, “Take it back.” Lora: “I don’t say zoo.” Kimberley: “I meant Zoom.” Lora: “I want to have a video conference in the safety of my own home.” So, we started putting together this hierarchy based off things that I wanted to do with my daughter. And then she said, “I think a really good idea would be to take some pictures while you’re doing these and we’ll see what happens.” And I was like, “I’m absolutely not doing that.” There’s no way I’m taking pictures, because as I’m sitting there and having this conversation with this OCD on my shoulder, telling me, “You’re going to bring pictures back in here of you dumping your daughter into a tiger cage. Great. Let’s do that.” But we talked about it and I was like, “Okay, I’m going to do it.” So, that was the first real exposure I did when I went out on my own. We start actually-- I should back up, we did start with driving, because I had this thing with my daughter not actually being in the car. I had left her somewhere. So, we drive and I wouldn’t look in the rear view. That was a whole exposure. When we got past that, then we went to the zoo. We went to the mall to have lunch. We went to the swimming pool, which was just like the death pool as far as I was concerned. Let’s see, I have the whole exposure board still on the side of my wall. I mean, we went and got pedicures and manicures. We did things that I wanted to do with my daughter. We got flu shots. That I wanted to do with my daughter that OCD told me was absolutely not possible, without having someone to tell me the whole time what I was doing.  My reassurance came in the form of calling my husband, texting my sister pictures because then everything’s okay. They can see what I’m doing. And so, doing these exposures without engaging in calling anybody the entire time, without texting anybody the entire time. Just me and OCD and my daughter and here with the three Amigos. Here we go. Kimberley: Mom and daughter and the third wheel, right? Lora: Yeah. So, that’s how they looked. It was like, I really, really hit it hard over a summer, the summer of 2018. I called it my summer of ERP. Once I got going, I just wanted to keep going. It was terrible at the beginning, terrible because I would complete an exposure and I’d get home and then the rumination would want to start. It was difficult not to engage in that. It was difficult to just watch it. But through the exposures, I said at one point that the butterflies were my yellow brick road. Whenever I’d think about something and I got that feeling like, oh, it was OCD being like, “Really, are we?” And then I was like, “Ah, okay, here we go. Follow, follow, follow, follow.” Kimberley: Isn’t it that in and of itself is beautiful? I always say with my staff, is you follow the smell. Meaning wherever it’s smelly and you don’t want to go, you go there. And that’s what you were doing, is just wherever you felt butterflies, if I’m right, you would go and do that thing.  Lora: Yeah, absolutely. Because it became that-- my therapist phrased it in a way where she was like, “We’re going to play scientist.” That’s what she’d tell me. “We’re going to go try this out. Let’s just bring back what we find.” It was such a compassionate way to do that. It wasn’t like, “Here’s your exposure, do it. Go. Boom,” which sometimes I think can be a little helpful. But for me, it worked to be like, “Let’s go see about this.” Kimberley: Yeah. “Let’s be curious.” I love it. Now I’ve seen this exposure board and it is so beautiful. You would have no idea you’re doing exposures. You look delighted most of the time. I wonder if you could even send me a photo and maybe we could show that in the show note, that would be wonderful. Lora: I would love to.  Kimberley: Yeah. I’d love to be able for people to click and actually see what it looks like. Maybe we could even say-- I try to give homework during the podcast. We could even say, “If you have anxiety, you could create your own.” Lora: Yes. That would be awesome, because I’m telling you, whoever’s listening to this right now, you’re going to see that I look back on this board and it’s us smiling. There is one picture where my daughter is screaming, but that was the flu shot picture, and we did a hard thing. It was a beautiful day to do a hard thing, and I put it on that board, man. Kimberley: Good for you. She deserved to cry. I think that you’re making a good point here, and I’ve had this conversation with some of my clients, is exposure is even if you don’t smile for the photos, still put it up because you did it, right? Lora: Right. You did it. And that’s a thing. Along the way, those victories, I really don’t believe that there’s such thing as small victories. I know we say it a lot. A victory is a victory is a victory. Take it, hold onto it, and know that’s the fuel that you’re putting in this device right now that is getting you through this. Kimberley: Yeah. I love it. Are there any other exposures that you did that you want to share that people may find different or creative? I love the creative ones. Lora: Well, I just think that the exposures started to become organic. When I was first diagnosed with OCD, I did not know OCD’s voice at all. I was like, “No, no, no, that’s the voice that’s kept me safe my whole life.” And so, along the way, the more I started to do some of the work, I started to realize that that what-if voice, that’s when I’m like, “Ah, if I’m going along and doing something, what-if pops up.” That’s my voice of OCD. I’ve learned that. And so, for me, a lot of my exposures, even to this day, have to do with when the what-if pops up. How can I look the what-if in the eye? I left out obviously in a place where my daughter couldn’t get them, but I’ve left out kitchen utensils before. Just last night, I mean, I mentioned how I’m doing some OCD work again right now because it continues. The what-if popped up and my daughter hadn’t drained the bathtub. I was going to drain it right away. Now it’s not even like what-if. It’s OCD being like, “Whew, way to think of that one.” That was it really. And then I stopped myself from draining the bathtub and it’s like, “No, no, no.” And so then, I left the bathroom and I’m like, “We’re just going to leave that tonight.”  Kimberley: That’s so cool.  Lora: Really anywhere that I can poke the bear, I guess me and my daughter doing things out in public, then that just confronting that fear of me that I’m going to lose control, not be able to help her if she needs it. All those things, wherever the what-if pops up, that’s where I knew my work was. And it still is to this day. Kimberley: Yeah. I love that you share that too. So, it sounds like some people, when we’re hearing this amazing story, they think it’s just, you’re done. Your exposure is done. Is that the case for you? Lora: Yeah. I was one of those people, I’m going to get through this summer of ERP, which is why I still call it summer of ERP. It was the one summer. I had these high hopes that then once I get into grad school and once I really start working with people with OCD and helping people that the OCD just fizzles. I have recently just come into this space of understanding and ultimately, some acceptance of like, this is kind of a way that I live right now. I don’t know what five or 10 years down the road looks like. And I’m really, as far as OCD is concerned, not too focused on it. I’m focused right now on, how’s it showing up and are the things that I’m doing helpful? Are they getting me to where I want to be or am I staying in the same spot? That’s my litmus test, is am I living the life according to my values that I want to live? So, recovery for me right now looks like I do exposures still, and I have even after the 20 months of COVID. I thought, man, I bet it could be really helpful to speak with an OCD Specialist again to get a little bit of guidance, get some creativity because that can help sometimes. So, I’m doing that right now even, and it’s been amazing. I think it’s just a process of building the muscle, of keeping the muscle and I think I’m gaining more acceptance by the year.  Kimberley: Yeah. I mean, that’s a piece of it. You had said before, as we talked like mindfulness and self-compassion and act was such an important piece of your work and acceptance is such a core part of all of that, because there is so much grief. We don’t talk about it enough, right? Lora: Yeah. There is though. Kimberley: What was it like for you-- let me rephrase that. Was mindfulness and self-compassion a part of this process for you?  Lora: Yeah, absolutely. So, my amazing therapist knew about Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and she had mentioned it to me. There was a program that was going on. I lived in Dallas at the time, at the Dallas Yoga Center. It was an eight-week MBSR program and I signed up for it. We did a body scan, a 40-minute body scan, the first class, and everybody woke up and they were like, “That was so relaxing. That was so awesome.” I raised my hand, I literally raised my hand and I was like, “I don’t think I did that right. I just had a 40-minute panic attack.” It was awful.  But I should say too, that shortly after I got diagnosed with OCD, I realized I had become incredibly dependent on alcohol, especially being a new mom. So, I had completely quit drinking. I was like, “All right, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this. Let’s go.” I quit drinking. I didn’t want to have that crutch. I was in the MBSR program. I talked to the teacher. She convinced me to come back the next week. And then the next week, we did another meditation. Towards the end of it, she read a Mary Oliver poem that ends with “Tell me what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.” It felt like a dam burst open in me at that moment. I was like, it is so precious and it is so amazing, and like, “Lora, you can do this. Let’s give this everything we’ve got, the exposures.” Learning to sit with myself through mindfulness was huge because OCD and anxiety do not like that. We need to be moving.  So, mindfulness was so huge for me to be able to just breathe and be in a moment and watch my thoughts instead of engage with them. Mindfulness then I say was the gateway to self-compassion because I’m not sure-- maybe I would’ve gotten there, but it wouldn’t be as soon to be able to be with myself and to hold myself and that loving-kindness. When you don’t even want to sit with yourself, it’s really hard to be able to look at yourself and be like, “I’m here.” You want to be like, “Let’s go.” So, yeah, self-compassion then was huge, because that voice of OCD is so nasty. I worked on a self-compassion journal for about six months straight, every day, really journaling. Kimberley: What would you write? What would that look like?  Lora: Yeah. So, I read and worked through with my therapist the Kristin Neff’s first book. And so, each day I would pick something that had happened, that was a little difficult and I would break it down into the three components of self-compassion. I would be mindful about what happened. Didn’t need any of my judgment in there. Let’s just lay it out there, what happened. Then the common humanity of it. Who else do you think in the world might have experienced this, or that feeling of not being alone. Man, probably a lot of people ran into something like this today. And then self-kindness. A lot of times, my self-kindness sounded like, “I’m really proud of you. That was really hard.” I don’t know how many entries I had over those months of being in a grocery store. Like a toddler going nuts in a grocery store and then just the flare-up of like, “Ah!” At the end of the day, that’s what I choose.  I remember a couple of months, maybe three or four months in, where I was sitting down to write and I couldn’t think of something really hard that had happened that day. And I was like, “What?” It was such a weird feeling. After months and months and months of really intense therapy and some difficult things I was working with, I was like, “Today, I’m just going to be compassionate then about how much work I’ve been doing.” Kimberley: Wow. I love that you’re sharing that because I’ve found even since-- I mean, I wrote a book on self-compassion, but since I wrote the book, I’m even pushing my clients to do it even more. The journaling and the writing to themselves seem to be the most powerful part of the work, the writing to themselves. Lora: Yes. And I think that the writing to myself and the speaking to myself was the most powerful part of it. In the beginning, it was absolutely the hardest, especially with the voice of OCD. When I would look in the mirror and I would say, “You’re doing the best you can, Lora. You’re really doing this,” OCD would be right there to be like, “Are you?” It’s so egotistical. It just wants all the attention. “Maybe you’re not.” I sat down with my therapist a couple months into really keeping that journaling and I was just exhausted, just so tired from some of the work. I don’t know if you can see it. Can you see on my back wall “As long as it takes”? Kimberley: Yeah. Lora: I sat down and I just started crying one day and telling her this has just been so hard that sometimes I feel like I haven’t made any progress. I feel like I take two steps forward and five steps back, and was just really down about stuff. She sat there, just really holding some amazing space for me, but I said, “How long is this going to take?” She just looked at me and she just put her head to the side. Really, she’s such a sweet person, and she said, “As long as it takes.” She said it just like that, “As long as it takes.” And I was like, “Okay. As long as it takes. Throw out the timeline then. Let’s just keep going.” Kimberley: Yeah. I love that I got goosebumps hearing you say it. All the hairs in my arms are standing up. And I love that you have it on the wall, because I read it as we were starting. I was like, “You know what? We’re good.” It shakes off all the rules and stories we tell ourselves. Lora: Yes. My mom actually, she made that for me, for my graduation from grad school. She made that and framed it for me.  Kimberley: I love it. Yeah. You are so inspiring really. Lora: Thank you so much. Kimberley: Yeah. Number one, I’m so grateful that you’re here and you’re sharing this, and number two, I’m so excited that you’re going to change lives for people, being a therapist and so forth. I’m just so grateful that I got to see some of it. Lora: Yes. Because before we even started recording, we were talking about how on the Mondays-- what were they? Magic Mondays? Kimberley: Magic Mondays. Lora: Magic Monday. I’d be like, “All right, it’s magic Monday.” I’d log on and I’d ask questions and I was really inquisitive and you were so sweet. You answered all the questions and you were just so-- it was like this feeling of it’s going to be alright. It is. I think when we can cultivate that and know the sky sometimes can feel like it’s falling, we do really have the power to look around and say like, “Here I am.” Here I am, put our hand on our heart and say, “This is what I can do in this moment. I can at least show up for me at the very least.” And that’s not the least thing at all. Kimberley: No, no. Like I said, you’re so inspiring. I’ve written so many notes, which is so fun. I don’t usually get that many notes down. So, I’m just so grateful for you for coming on and sharing your story. I loved presenting with you. That’s where I felt like I got to know you, so I’m so grateful. Where can people find you? Lora: I am on Instagram and the account that I share a lot of my OCD journey with and things that I have learned along the way is Judgment-Free Anxiety, but it’s judgment_free_anxiety. Kimberley: I love that. What’s for you in the future? Tell us about what’s popping out for you. Lora: Oh man. Well, right now, I hope to be employed somewhat soon. It’s a new life now after grad school and after becoming licensed, and just hopefully a lot more adventures with my daughter, going to do that. And man, that’s it. I did actually recently become certified to teach mindfulness, so I’m also looking at doing something with that as well, but I’m not sure exactly what. Kimberley: Yeah. Such good skills to have in your toolbelt. Lora: Yes, absolutely. Kimberley: Well, thank you so much. You filled my heart up today. Thank you.  Lora: Thank you so much, Kim. Thank you. ----- Thank you so much for coming and listening to our podcast. Before we finish up, let’s do the review of the week. This is from nmduncan827, and they said: “Compassion, comfort, and wisdom. I’ve been following Kimberley Quinlan for years now and I can’t say enough wonderful things about her and her work. As someone who has had OCD their entire life, I feel like finally at the age of 33 I’m beginning to find helpful resources to really push me along in my road to recovery. Between Kim’s Instagram page and her podcast and her new book— there’s little nuggets of compassion, comfort, and wisdom. I found this no matter where I am on my journey. I couldn’t recommend this more for my fellow OCD and anxiety-disorder community! So grateful for Kim.” Thank you, nmduncan827. Thank you so, so, so much. I am so honored. And of course, you can find me at Your Anxiety Toolkit on Instagram. You can get my book anywhere where you buy books, specifically on Amazon and barnesandnoble.com called The Self-Compassion Workbook for OCD. And of course, the podcast is here. Any time you like, go back, listen to old episodes. Sometimes they’re the best ones. I will see you guys next week.

SUMMARY: Today, we are going to talk with you about the 7 common struggle you have with time management.  Do you find yourself constantly looking at the clock? Or, wishing time would go faster?  Do you feel like your to-do list is so long that you will never get them done? Or, do you feel like you never have time to prioritize yourself?  In today's, podcast, we talk all about your relationship with time and why it is a HUGE part of managing anxiety, depression, and stress. In This Episode, we address the 7 common struggles you have with time management. “I don't have enough time” “I have so much to do” “I have so much I want to do” “I struggle to start and stop activities” “I don't a good understanding of how long things take” “I don't like structure” “I hate being told what to do with my time” Links To Things I Talk About: ONLINE COURSE Time Management for Optimum Mental Health https://www.cbtschool.com/timemanagement 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 221. Welcome back, everybody. I am so thrilled to have you here with me today for Episode 221. Oh my, how is that possible? We are getting so much feedback, such amazing feedback from last week’s episode. I wanted to additionally offer you one more bonus piece of content from our new course, which is called Time Management for Optimum Mental Health. You can check it out at CBTSchool.com/TimeManagement. It is a course. We have it for $27. It’s a mini-course, so it shouldn’t take up a ton of your time, and it’s me showing you exactly how I manage time. Now, the reason I created that course was because so many people were reporting to me – clients, followers, listeners – that COVID has destroyed the rhythm and the routines that they had, and that they really want to find a way to implement during their day time to do their therapy homework, do get exercise, maybe have more pleasure in your life, maybe reduce overwhelm, a lot of overwhelm because the to-do list is always so long. Am I right? The to-do lists are always so long. There seems to be a never-ending list of things to do. So, I added all that in, showed you exactly how I did that. Again, you can go and check that, or you can click the link below in the show notes. But as a bonus to that course, I did a Q and A where people submitted their questions. I have addressed that in that bonus, and I’m today giving it to you free in today’s podcast episode. If you want to get a feel for what we’re covering, you will have some reference to the course throughout, but you don’t need to purchase the course to get benefit out of this episode today. However, together they would be really beneficial, I’m sure. Today, we’re going to cover a couple of main topics. Here I’m going to give you some overview. Some of the questions people or the concerns or roadblocks they had around time management were things like, “I don’t have enough time. I have so much to do on my to-do list.” Another question we will cover in today’s episode is, “I have so much I want to do. I just can’t, again, find time.” Someone brought up-- multiple people, forgive me, brought up that they struggle to start and stop activities. They struggle to get the motivation to get going. And then once they’re going, they have a hard time transitioning into other activities. We address that as well. Someone posted in that they struggle with having a good understanding of how long things take. This is one of the reasons I have myself had to use a lot of time management, is I was underestimating how long things were taking and I was leading to a lot of anxiety and overwhelm. We also address people who don’t like a lot of structure in their life and we also address people who don’t like scheduling and don’t like time management because they don’t like being told what to do with their time. We’re going to address all of that today, but we also go much deeper into that in the time management course. You can run over there if you want to take a look at that. Before we get into the show, let’s do today’s review of the week. This one is from Sheffie, and they said: “Wonderful resource! You can’t help but love Kimberley.” Oh, that’s so kind. Thank you, Sheffie. “She has such warmth and sincerity, is positive and funny, and spreads so much good into the world. On top of all that, she’s a gifted clinician who does a great job sharing her knowledge with others. And she does all this with a lovely Australian accent.” Oh my goodness, this is so kind. “All of her content is fantastic, but I especially love the podcast because each episode is packed with so many nuggets of wisdom that are applicable to so many situations. They’re thought provoking and I find myself pondering them for a long while after. They’re also a good length - great content without going on for hours, very digestible.” Thank you so much, Sheffie. That is so kind. Actually, one thing, as I’m really listening and reading that off, sometimes I know I’ve mentioned this before, but creating a podcast can feel really lonely because I’m talking into a microphone. Sometimes I don’t know if things land for everybody. I’m talking about what resonates for me and what I know has resonated from my clients, but it’s never really sure, like how is anyone feeling about this? So, just getting your reviews actually is very heartwarming to me. So, thank you. It actually helps me to feel like I’m on the right track and I’m helping and I’m bringing value to your life. Thank you so much, Sheffie. Please do go and leave a review. It does help me so much in my heart, but so helps me just to get more followers and listeners. All right, let’s get over to it. Let’s talk today about your relationship with time. Let’s address some of these common roadblocks to time management, and I hope you find it incredibly helpful. Have a wonderful day, everybody. Welcome, everybody. I am so excited to be here with you to talk about your relationship with time. Now, this is an interesting topic, I think, and one that very much relates to our mental health. I personally find a lot of my thoughts are around time and about my belief that I don’t have enough of it. This has probably been a very big part of my own experience of suffering because I keep telling myself, “I don’t have enough of it.” I really want to see whether this is true for you. Now, I did a poll on Instagram and asked my friends there to give me their biggest struggles with time management. As you may know, I have a full course on time management specifically related to managing mental health, how you can make time for your recovery, how you can make time for things that really benefit your mental health. A lot of the times we end up getting our to-do list done instead of scheduling in pleasure and downtime and rest, and we don’t rest and have pleasure until we’ve got our list of to-dos done. But the problem is, the to-do list is always longer than the day. Am I right? We cut all of these submissions of things that people struggle with, a lot of the topics we discuss directly in the course, but a lot of them I wanted to discuss today specifically related to these struggles and the relationship people have with time. The first one here is, “I don’t have enough time.” Now I have two answers to this concern. number one, chances are, you are right. You don’t have enough time to do the things that you are pressuring yourself to do. Now, I understand that many of you have jobs and you’re going to school and you have children or you have loved ones and you have your own chronic illnesses or mental illness. So I agree. The list of things to do is very, very long. But I’ve wanted to first just ask you, is all the things on your to-do list being demanded of you, or are you demanding them of you? It could be one or the other. I just wanted to ask you, because I know for me, there are lots of things that I get demanded to do. I have to work. I have to make money. I have to be a mom. These are things that I really value and I want to take care of. But in addition to that, there’s a lot of things on my to-do list that I actually don’t have to do. I place those stresses on myself right. Now we’re not here to blame. I never want this to be about blaming ourselves, but it’s helpful to inquire. What things on your list do you have that actually create more stress? Is it helpful to add those things on your list? Is there a way you could maybe give yourself a break from the long things of all the things you have to do? Assess for yourself what’s important. Is it important to me to get this done? But here is the thing. As we talk about in time management, the online course, is I have so many things that I value. I have so many things I want to do. I have so many ways I want to show up for people and friends and family. At the end of the day, it’s unrealistic. Even though I want to do it, I don’t have the time. To reflect, I don’t have the time. Yeah, that’s true. Sometimes the most compassionate thing I can do is to acknowledge that and be more realistic with the projects I put on my to-do list. Often I’ll speak with clients about, are you taking too many courses? And they’ll say, “No, I have to. Everybody is taking this many.” And I’ll go, “But is it working for you?” If you’re really honest with yourself, does taking that many courses benefit you and give you time to recover from your mental illness? Does saying yes to volunteer, while volunteering is an incredibly valuable and helpful thing, are you in a place in your life right now or a season in your life where you can do that in a healthy way that still prioritizes your mental health? Just questions to think about. You may have some strong reactions to these, and I would inquire if you do. I’m not suggesting anything here, except I want you to inquire what is best for you. Now on the flip side of this, I can also say, even on the days when I’ve managed my time and my to-do list, I still just have the thought. “I don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough time.” And that’s my relationship with time. It’s not great. My personal relationship with time, I have a long way to go. My relationship with time, as if it’s a thing, is when I look at it, I say to it, “There’s not enough of you.” But I only have 24 hours. You only have 24 hours and we have to negotiate with what we want to cram into that 24 hours. It can be whatever you like really. You can sleep for as long as you think you need to sleep. You can work, you can go to school, you can take up whatever hobbies. Your job is to decide what’s best for you based on your values and your family and your needs. The next one is, “I have so much to do.” Again, we have a relationship with time. When it’s not about time, it’s about our to-do list. I really want this time management course that I’ve created. You can go to https://www.cbtschool.com/timemanagement. If you haven’t already, if you’re listening to the course right now, I want you to really, really think about the to-do list and reassess the to-do list. If it doesn’t need to be done, I would encourage you to consider taking it off. Now, I understand, a lot of things on the list have to be done and I want them to be done, which is why you should, if you need, take a look at the procrastination episode and module, and you can maybe look at that as well. But like I said always, a lot of the thoughts we have about time are either facts or the mindsets that we have. So, we may need to think about how much pressure we’re putting on ourselves. Another very small shift to that thought is, “There’s so much I want to do.” Now, here is another, this is very important. I personally, as a human being, there is so much I want to do. I have such passion to do this project and write that book and to create that podcast. I have all these things and hobbies I want to do. It’s a wonderful thing. Some of you may not have that experience right now and that’s okay. Sometimes depression and anxiety can take the passion out of things. But a lot of you, I hear because you want to get things done and you can’t find a way to put it into your schedule. I really want to encourage you to start to do these things you want to do, but you have to be realistic about time. A part of the reason I made this course and not other courses is that this course could be a very quick make. Meaning it didn’t take me six months to make some of my courses. The Time Management course is-- what is it? Almost 100 minutes or 120 minutes. It’s easier for me to do this than to create a six-month-long course. I did it in small 20-minute increments. I want to encourage you that if your relationship with time is saying, “I have so much I want to do, I don’t have enough time,” find in your schedule 10 minutes to start, because 10 minutes today and 10 minutes next week and 10 minutes the week after that, before you know it, you will start to have some momentum, even if it’s 10 minutes a week. A lot of times we don’t do things because we tell ourselves that there’s not enough time and there’s too much to do. Instead of just giving yourself permission to just do little baby steps, create what you can in small amounts of time. Somebody had written, “I struggle to start and stop activities.” This is very, very important. A lot of people struggle with time because getting going needs a lot of created momentum. The thing to remember is that motivation, and I will create a full mini-course on this very soon as well, is motivation is not something you just get. It’s not inherent. You don’t wake up with it. Motivation is something that you have to really create of your own. You have to cultivate motivation. You have to harvest motivation. It’s something that you generate on your own. So to start an activity, usually, you will need to look at first what’s getting in the way. We talked about procrastination in last week’s episode and in other modules of this course. That’s a big one. Starting usually means you have to generate motivation based on willingness to be uncomfortable, cleaning up any negative thoughts you have or critical thoughts you have about doing the activity. Setting time and reminders to remind you, because sometimes really honestly, you’re busy. You’re a busy person or you’re an overwhelmed person. So, you will need timers and reminders and calendars, but it’s really generating that activity. One of the best things to do is to keep in mind or to draw on a piece of paper or write it down, how you will feel when it’s done, what it will look like when it’s done, like a vision board almost, but it’s okay. Put some time into it, like what emotions will I feel when I’ve completed this email? Or what will be the result if I create this course 20 minutes at a time? Little baby steps. When it comes to stopping, it’s probably going to be much of the same tools. Schedule your time to do things, set an alarm or a reminder if you’re someone who gets stuck in it. So set a time or a reminder, put up sticky notes, and then also be willing to be uncomfortable. When I let my kids have tech time, we schedule tech time every day. When I say, “Turn it off,” they don’t like it. They’re in this mode of playing their game. They’re watching the thing they want to watch. Moving out of that can feel very jarring and uncomfortable. And so, we have planned ahead for that. We know that when tech time is over, my husband and I, we may want to implement some family time or snack time, something that can help move us onto the next activity. Something motivating and pleasurable is often very helpful when moving from some kind of either uncomfortable experience to a different experience or you’re in a pleasurable experience. You’ve got to move into something uncomfortable. There are some tips that may help that you may want to experiment with. The next one is, “I don’t have a good understanding of how long things take.” Now, this is huge. Again, if you’re listening to this on the podcast, this is another reason where I stress the importance of you. If you want to take the course, I stress how helpful it can be. I write down how long things take often. Probably once a month, I do an inventory of my day. How long does it take to get my emails done? How long does it take to get the kids to school? How long? While this may seem like a lot of work, it pays off because I will then realize I only scheduled 30 minutes for emails, but to be honest, emails are taking me 45 minutes. Helpful data. Important data to help me then renegotiate my schedule so that it is kind, or to really work at not spending as much time on emails, or to be less perfectionistic about emails, or to delegate emails or whatever project it is that you’re doing to somebody else. It may be that there are multiple solutions to this problem of not understanding how long things take. But I think the first thing is, you’ve got to have data. You can’t assume a solution if you don’t know what the problem is. Please, I encourage you. It doesn’t take long. Just have a little notepad, scratchpad, how long things take, particularly the things you’re having trouble in the day. It doesn’t have to be the whole day. The next one is, this was very cool, “I don’t like structure.” Now, if this is you, I am so with you. I was and have been in my life someone who doesn’t like structure. It stresses me out, makes me anxious. The pressure is overwhelming. I don’t like structure. However, as someone who was forced to practice these skills, because life was so chaotic and unmanageable, I have found now I have a much better life with structure. I have found I’m more creative and spontaneous now that I have structure in my life because I know the things I need to get done are done. So then I feel free to go and do spontaneous things, take a drive, go on a vacation, and so forth, because I know. Or in this case, during COVID, because everything is so uncertain, I know how long things take, the structure of days. If there were, let’s say someone in my family gets COVID – my children, myself, my husband – I know how to renegotiate the day really quickly because I have a really good understanding of the structure. It helps me to recalibrate if there is a major change in the day, because I’m used to that structure. I know how long things take. I know the practice of things. It’s been overwhelmingly beneficial in my life. If you don’t like too much structure, it doesn’t matter. You can actually just block schedule. I like to really be specific, but I know a lot of my colleagues and clients that I’ve taught this to, they just like blocks, like bigger blocks, like four-hour blocks. From 10:00 to 2:00 is work, from 2:00 to 5:00 is this. And those blocks can actually just create a little bit of structure for them. And then they can slice in new projects if they have them. Homework for therapy, if they need it. A lot of my patients, I see they’re professional successful people who are now I’m giving them additional 45 to 90 minutes of homework a day, and they say, “How am I ever going to fit this in? I’m already overwhelmed.” We go through this process and we look at where they could slide in, 10 minutes here and 15 minutes here. Can you do some of your homework on your way to work and so forth? That can be really beneficial. That way, even though they don’t like structure, they’ve found a way to prioritize what they need to get done so that they can get the benefits that they wanted. Last one, this is a big one, “I hate being told what to do with my time.” This is actually, I think, sponsored by my husband, but this was actually given to me from many social media people who have submitted their questions about time management. But I agree. I think my husband would very much agree with this – I hate being told what to do with my time. There is, when it comes to time management, a-- I wouldn’t say it’s a humbling, but it’s a letting go, a letting go of control, because when you don’t want to be told what to do with your time, it feels like you’re being controlled. Again, I don’t think you have to do any of this if you don’t want to. I wouldn’t encourage you to make any of these changes if you really, really disagree with them. However, I would encourage you to consider at least giving it 30 days, because what you will find is, when you schedule things, it might feel like you’re being told to do something with your time. You’re doing it. I don’t want you to have anybody else telling you what to do, but if you’re putting down on your schedule what you want to do, I want you to remind yourself why. Why are you doing this? Often it’s because the chaotic and unplanned day only creates more suffering. Chances are, you already have a lot of suffering. I’m guessing because you know about me, you have some kind of anxiety or depression or medical or mental struggle. So, even though this scheduling and this time management practices can feel like you’re using your freedom, I personally think it’s gaining freedom. It’s taking back control over the chaos in your mind – the running list, the mental rumination, the anxiety of all the things, and having it to be where it’s all there and it’s done. Now, it doesn’t have to be for you. I want you to find specifically, and you will see, remember we talk about in the course, we have a whole module on considering your specific set of circumstances. I want you to consider what’s good for you and make plans and adjustments, but keep my voice in your mind. Sometimes the more you plan it, the more freedom and free space you have in your mind to do the things you want, because you’re not constantly carrying around the to-do list. It’s there anyway, you might as well handle it efficiently. So, that’s my real encouragement. Again, I’m really for it. You may not be for it. I’m not going to harass you and make you agree with my view on it. But I know the science here and I have seen it benefit so many people, and I really hope that you can give it a go and let your guard down and let go of your need to have that control and honor what’s important to you and follow through with what’s important to you so that you get the things that you want and you get the mastery of the things in your life that are important to you. I hope that’s helpful. I’m so grateful to have you here with me today to talk about your relationship with time. There may be many other things I haven’t addressed. If I haven’t addressed your specific struggle with relationship with time, I encourage you to journal down and explore how you might manage that because we do only have 24 hours and I want you to really find some peace in some of those parts of your day instead of carrying around the to-do list. Have a wonderful day and I will talk to you very, very soon.

SUMMARY: In this episode, we review how important it is to address procrastination, as it impacts so many people in so many ways.   We also will review how procrastination is the same thing as avoidance and how people can work towards implementing time management skills to help them build a routine that helps them get the things they want to get done. In This Episode: We outline procrastination definition and procrastination pros and cons. How procrastination is simply an avoidance safety behavior. How to manage procrastination in , Anxiety, OCD and OCD recovery Our new course called Time Management for Optimum Mental Health Links To Things I Talk About: ONLINE COURSE Time Management for Optimum Mental Health https://www.cbtschool.com/timemanagement 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 220. Welcome back, everybody. How are you? Really, really, how are you? How is your heart? How is your mind? What’s showing up for you? How are you? I really want you to check in, in case you haven’t checked in for a while. How are you doing? It’s important. Let’s make sure we check in. Today, we’re talking about procrastination. It’s one of the most common questions I get when I’m doing live calls on Instagram and Facebook, like how do I manage procrastination? A lot of you are also managing perfectionism and it’s getting in the way of you doing the things you want to do or doing the things you have to do. Because I get asked this so much, I actually wanted to show people how I do it. So what I did is I created a whole mini-course, it’s called Time Management For Optimum Mental Health. You can get it if you go to CBTSchool.com/TimeManagement, or you can click the link in the show notes below. It’s a full course of showing you how I manage time and why I manage my time to help manage my mental health and my medical health. A lot of you know I have struggled with a chronic illness. Time management has been huge in me staying functioning and managing mental overwhelm and a lot of procrastination. In the course, it’s only $27, it’s a mini-course and it shows you exactly-- I have recorded the screen as I’m showing you exactly how I do it. If you’re interested, go over and check it out. I’d love to have you take the course and put it into practice. Now, one of the things about this episode is this is actually me giving you a sneak peek into the course because it’s one of the bonuses of the course to talk about procrastination. So I wanted to share it with you here on the podcast as well. You will hear me refer to the other parts of the course as you listen. That doesn’t matter. You’ll still get everything you need to know about procrastination and how to manage it today. But yes, if you’ve already taken the course, you probably have already listened to this bonus. But for today, let’s talk about procrastination. Before we head over into the episode, I wanted to do the review of the week. This is a review from Sadbing, and they’ve said: “Desperately needed. I am an LICSW that has searched high & low for a podcast that delivers quality content. I felt relieved to finally find one! This podcast provides an honest depiction of how anxiety shows up in people’s lives & gives you effective feedback on how to live with it. Thank you!” Thank you, Sadbing. Thank you so much for that amazing review. I do ask that anyone who’s listening, please, the one thing you can do, this is what I offer freely to you all. If you get a second, just click below, in whatever app you’re listening to, and leave a review. It helps me so much reach all the people. The more reviews we have, the more people will trust the podcast and continue listening to this free resource. So, yay. All right. Let’s get over to this episode about managing procrastination. I hope you find it helpful. If you want to learn more about time management, head on over to CBTSchool.com/TimeManagement, and you can get a mini-course for 27 bucks. It’s amazing value for a short period of time and a short amount of money. So, yeah. All right. So happy to have you here with me today. Thank you for giving your time to me and trusting me with your precious time. I will see you after the show. Welcome. You wouldn’t have a time management course without really addressing procrastination. Procrastination is, number one, the biggest question I get, which is another reason why I wanted to make this course, is because it’s so common. It’s such an easy trap to fall into. It’s such a human trap to fall into to procrastinate. But I wanted to take a deep dive into procrastination today and talk about some skills that you can practice to manage procrastination. Let me really just dive into, first, what is procrastination? Now simply put, procrastination is an avoidant safety behavior. What does that mean? When human beings assume or see or assign things as a threat, our mind does that. So our mind will assign something as threatening, whether it be, “I have to write this email.” It could be as simple as writing an email. It could be, “I have to present something. I have to get a project done. I have to go and exercise.” Our brain will present that as some kind of danger or challenge or threat. Now you might be thinking to yourself, there’s nothing dangerous about exercise or writing an email, but there may be for you because doing that means you have to have some uncomfortable feelings. Maybe shame, maybe anxiety, maybe irritability. Anger might show up. Guilt might show up. Because those emotions are uncomfortable and maybe if we haven’t developed skills on mastering those emotions, events like writing an email or exercising or doing a project may be experienced as dangerous or a threat. When our brain interprets things as a threat, naturally, it is going to set off the alarm and try to either get you to run away from it, to fight it, or to freeze. That’s how fight, flight, and freeze response. And the most common as humans is avoidance. We avoid the thing that will create discomfort for us, and simply put, that is what procrastination is. Now, why do we call it a safety behavior? We could call it a compulsion. But we call it a safety behavior because not everybody does it compulsively, but they may do it to create a false sense of security, a false sense of safety. As human beings, we want safety. It feels good to feel safe. It feels good to feel like, “Oh, I don’t have to face that hard thing.” So, yes, we consider it a safety behavior. Now, does that mean that you’re bad and lazy or not good? Absolutely not. Everybody engages in safety behaviors. It’s a human part of life. But what we want to look at here is, is it creating trends in your life? Is it creating impact or consequences to your life that create more discomfort and more distress later? Most of the time people say, “Yeah, I avoid,” and it’s getting to be a problem. If that’s for you and that’s happening to you, you’re definitely not alone. Now, how do we manage procrastination? The first thing is identify what it is you are avoiding specifically. Don’t just say, “I’m avoiding the email.” Don’t just say, “I’m avoiding exercise,” or “I procrastinate.” Don’t say those things. I mean, you can, but ideally, you will stop and go, “Okay, what is it about the email that I don’t want to tolerate? Ah, writing an email brings up social anxiety for me,” or “Ah, writing the email reminds me that I’m really behind on that project. Writing that email brings up shame because last time I spoke to them, I said something silly or something like that,” or “I don’t want to exercise because, ah, every time I exercise, it creates discomfort in my chest and it makes me feel like I’m panicking.” So you’ll identify the specific thing that is causing you to avoid specific. You might even get a specific like I did. It’s the physical sensations I don’t want to feel. Or it’s the thought that this was my fault that I don’t want to think. You may get to the bottom of that. Now, of course, if you guys know anything about me, I’m always going to say, it’s a beautiful day to do hard things. The only way we can overcome these strong emotions, particularly fear and guilt and shame, is to stare them in the face. Our job, and this is what I’m going to encourage you to think about, is to really look at, yes, avoiding. What is the pros of avoiding this? And then on the right-hand side, you could write this on a piece of paper, what are the cons? What are the consequences of me continuing to avoid this thing? Now often when you write that down, that in and of itself is a motivator because you’re going, “Oh my goodness, writing the email is uncomfortable for the duration that I write the email, not writing it is uncomfortable, even when I’m not working on it, because I’m constantly nagged by the fact that I have to write it, or it’s constantly sitting on my list or I constantly see it in the schedule.” A lot of you in, and we’re in the Time Management course – a lot of you have avoided managing time because putting this in the calendar makes you face the fact that you’ve got something scary to do. Now, you will see me, I’m holding my hand on my chest right now and I’m sending you much compassion because these are really difficult things. These may seem easy for other people, but they’re hard for you and me. And so we must be compassionate with the fact that they’re hard. Here is what I’m going to say: Being compassionate can actually take some of that pain away. It won’t take it all. You still have to do it. You have to ride the wave of discomfort. It will rise in full as you go. But you can also be gentle with yourself and reduce your suffering instead of criticizing yourself or how hard it is for you. Don’t compare how it is for you compared to your friend or your seatmate or your neighbor. This is what you do. You practice compassion before you do the activity first. I’m sorry. You commit to doing the activity. You put it in your schedule. You write down when you’re going to do it and how long you think it’s going to take. And then you practice compassion. “Wow, I’m going to be really gentle with myself as I ride out the emotions and the experience of doing that thing.” You may want to get a partner, an accountability partner, who can help remind you and support you as you do the thing. A lot of my patients have an accountability partner. They’re like, “It’s three o’clock.” They’re texting, “It’s three o’clock. I know you’re about to do a scary thing. Good job. Keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t back out. I’ll be right here. You text me as soon as you’re done.” See if you can do that. If you don’t have someone to do that, be that for yourself. So it’s in your calendar. You’re going, you’re gentle. You’re going to do the thing. What I personally like to do is keep a notepad down next to me as I’m writing an email or recording a podcast or doing something that creates anxiety for me. I jot down the thoughts and feelings I’m having. Not a lot, bullet points. Like, “Oh, I’m having the thought that this is not helpful. I’m having the thought that this is not good enough. I’m having the thought that this should be better. I’m having the thought that I made a mistake. I’m having the thought that this should be going fast or better.” Like I said, and you may start to notice – and this is true, I’ve seen a lot of patients say – as you write it down, it’s the same five thoughts over and over and over. When you’re not aware of that, it feels like 55 thoughts or 55,000 thoughts. But once you have it on paper, you will see, often our brain is just repeating the same thing. When you can see that, you can go, “Oh, brain, I’m sorry that you’re sending those messages. Thank you for showing up. Thank you for trying to alert me to the possible dangers, but I have avoided this for so long, and it avoiding it and it procrastinating only delays and continues my suffering.” And you feel your emotions. You ride them out. You tender with yourself as you do the thing. And that’s how you get through it. Once you’re done, you must celebrate and say kind things and congratulate yourself. Don’t forget that stage because that’s so, so important. But the main point to remember here is that avoidance keeps you stuck. Avoiding the thing you’re afraid of is actually what then creates some depressive thinking, some hopeless thinking, or helpless thinking. “I’ll never be able to... I won’t be able to... I can’t...” We really want to be careful of that type of thinking, because that is the thinking where depression lives. Again, the more you face the things that are uncomfortable, you will build a sense of mastery of that. It won’t go well the first time, I promise you. Most of life is trial and error. I have found the only way to move forward is to practice failing. Here is what I’m going to ask of you. As you practice this activity or practice of not procrastinating, of facing the thing you’re afraid of, of doing the thing you’ve been avoiding, I want you to practice or remind yourself that you are really not growing if you’re not failing. I’m going to say that again. You’re really not growing if you’re not failing, because if you’re only doing things that go well, chances are, you’re avoiding a lot of things. If you’re only doing things that are going well, the chances are, you’re not building mastery with the hard things in life, and life is 50/50. We know this, that life comes with 50% good and 50% hard. We have to practice failing so we can learn how to be better. This whole course is about that. You’re going to practice not procrastinating. You may or may not succeed. That’s not really the important part. The important part is that you look at the data, the data being, how did it go, like that reassess stage, which we have as one of the steps in the course. Look at the data, what worked, what didn’t and what do I need to change? This is not a perfect practice. It’s going to be changing as you change. And so having the ability to adapt and having the humility to say, “All right, it’s not working. What do I need to do?” This has been probably my biggest struggle in my entire life, is I avoid looking at the data of what’s not going well. If someone tells me what’s not going well, I get offended instead of going, “Okay, this is not personal. It’s just data. How can I use this data to help me not make the same mistake over and over again?”  Often what I’m doing, I’m churning out a lot of content and I’m not looking at the data when the data could help me to say, what is the most effective? What is the most helpful to other people? How can this be as jam-packed helpful as possible? I have to look at the data, and in order to do that, I have to be willing to fail. It’s okay to fail. This is a practice. It’s not perfection. But when it comes to procrastination, you have to be willing to be uncomfortable. You have to be willing to do hard things. This is why we keep saying, it’s a beautiful day to do hard things. Now, of course, go back, follow the steps of the whole course. You’ve gotta get it in the schedule before you can really do that. But then I want you to even get very microscopic and look at when you’re scheduling. Let’s say there’s something you’re avoiding and procrastinating on. Schedule small activities so that you don’t procrastinate. One of the best lessons I’ve learned when it came to me, recovering from my medical struggles, is I have to get a lot of exercise. Not running exercise, a lot of personal training, physical therapy type of exercises, and I hate them. They’re the most boring, annoying, monotonous things on the planet. However, I have found that if I schedule, “Kimberley, at this time, you’re going to put your shoes on. Kimberley, at this time, you’re going to fill up your drink bottle,” I am more likely to do it. I get very microscopic in my planning. Now, again, you won’t want to do this with all the things in your life. Pick one thing if that’s what you want to work on, and work at creating a system that gets you to do the thing that you continue to procrastinate on. I would not probably do my physical therapy and my training, these annoying, repetitive activities, if I hadn’t created a system that makes it doable. I have a Bluetooth speaker, I put very loud music on. It’s usually reggae or something very hippy, so I feel like at least I’m chilling out as I do it. I marry the thing that’s uncomfortable with something that’s tolerable. Now, you won’t always be able to do this, and that is fine. Sometimes you just got to ride the wave and face your fear. That’s okay. But that is an idea if it’s for things like daily activities and routines in your life. If it’s facing fears and exposure work, well, no, we don’t want to marry it with these things because that can work as a neutralizing compulsion. If you’re someone who is in treatment for an anxiety disorder and you’ve been given an exposure, well, no, you’re just going to have to practice riding the wave of discomfort, but do not forget that self-compassion piece. It is crucial. Do not forget using your mindfulness skills where you allow your discomfort. You’re non-judgmental about your discomfort. You’re willing to allow it to be there. These are all crucial practices. I would even consider writing down all the things where you struggle with procrastination and work through them, practice them, just like you would be lifting a weight, just like you would practice if you were learning French or piano. Pick up the basic things and practice the basics first and go through all of them. Try to get yourself through as many as you can so that you build a sense of mastery like, “I can do that. Even if I don’t want to, I can. I could if I had to,” which I think is a really great way of thinking about things that are uncomfortable in your life. “I don’t want to do them, but I could if I had to.” It’s better than “I can’t” and “I don’t want to.” All right. That is procrastination. I hope that has been helpful. I really want to stress to you that procrastination is a thing that everybody does. Again, it’s not personal, but I really, really encourage you to master doing the things that you avoid. Avoidance keeps anxiety strong. Avoidance keeps you in the cycle of anxiety, and we want to break that cycle. I hope that is helpful. I am really excited to see you go out and do those things. If you want to, you can share them with me on social media or things that you’re doing. It’s a beautiful day to do hard things. I love when people tag me with that. Have a wonderful day, everybody, and I will see you in the next module.

SUMMARY: Today we have Amanda White, an amazing therapist who treats anxiety, eating disorders and substance use. Amanda is coming onto the podcast today to talk about her book, Not Drinking Tonight and how we can all have a healthy relationship with alcohol. Amanda White talks about ways you can address your relationship with alcohol, in addition to drugs, social media and other vices. Amanda White also shares her own experience with alcohol use and abuse and her lived-experience with sobriety. In This Episode: Do you have a healthy relationship with alcohol Why we use alcohol and substances to manage anxiety and other strong emotions How to build a healthy relationship with alcohol. How to manage substance abuse, anxiety and substance use in recovery. Tools and tips to manage alcohol use and abuse Links To Things I Talk About: Easiest place to get Amanda’s book with all links amandaewhite.com/book Instagram @therapyforwomen My therapy practice therapyforwomencenter.com 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 219. Welcome back, everybody. I am thrilled to have you here with me today. You may notice that the podcast looks a little different. That is on purpose. We have decided to update the cover of the podcast. It now has my face on it. There were a lot of people who had reached out and said that the old podcast cover art looked like a gardening podcast. And I thought it was probably time I updated it. So, that was something that I had created years and years and years ago. And I’m so thrilled to have now a very beautiful new cover art. Okay. This episode is so, so important. I cannot stress to you how overjoyed I was to have the amazing Amanda White on the podcast. She’s a psychotherapist. She’s on Instagram, under the handle Therapy For Women. She’s so empowering. And she talks a lot about your relationship with substance use, particularly alcohol. But in this episode, we talk about many substances. And this is a conversation I feel we need to have more of because there are a lot of people who are trying to manage their anxiety and they end up using alcohol to cope. Now, this is a complete shame-free episode. In fact, one of the things I love about Amanda is she really does not subscribe to having to do a 100% sobriety method. She really talks about how you can create a relationship with alcohol based on whatever you think is right. And she has a new book out, which I am so excited that she’s going to share with you all about. Before we get into the episode, I’d first like to do the review of the week. Here we go. We have this one from Epic 5000 Cloud 9, and they said: “This podcast has absolutely changed my life and made my recovery journey feel possible. After completing ERP, I felt lost and confused as to why I did not feel ‘better’. Kimberley has given me so many tools to build my self-compassion, grow my mindfulness skills, manage OCD, and do all the hard things.” So amazing. I’m so grateful to have you in our community. Epic 5000 Cloud 9. So happy to have you be a part of our little wonderful group of badass human beings. I love it. Let’s go right over to the show and so you can learn all about Amanda and this beautiful, beautiful conversation. Have a wonderful day, everybody. Kimberley: Okay. Well, thank you, Amanda, for being here. I’m actually so grateful for you because you’ve actually brought to my attention a topic I’ve never talked about. And so, I’m so happy to have you here. Welcome. Amanda: Thank you so much for having me, Kimberley. I’m excited to chat with you. Kimberley: Okay. So, tell me a little bit about you first. Like, who are you? What do you do? What’s your mission? Amanda: Yeah. So, my name is Amanda White. I am a licensed therapist. You might know me on Instagram from Therapy For Women as my handle. I’m also sober and I’m really on a mission to destigmatize sobriety and destigmatize the idea that you can question your relationship with alcohol. And it’s really why my Instagram page and everything I do isn’t sober only focused because I want it to be something where people who maybe aren’t necessarily sober or haven’t thought about it can, in a safe unstigmatized, unpressured way, also explore their relationship with alcohol. And that is what led me to write a book. And my book is called Not Drink Tonight. Kimberley: So good. So, I already have so many questions. Why wouldn’t one question their relationship with alcohol? Because what I will bring here is a little culture. I’m Australian. Amanda: Yeah. I was going to say. Kimberley: I live in America. The culture around drinking is much different. I have some great friends in England, the culture there is much different. So, do you want to share a little bit about why one wouldn’t maybe question their relationship with drinking? Amanda: Absolutely. I think I can only speak for America specifically, but I know enough people in England and Australia, too, that there is a culture of drinking is good, drinking is normal. We watch our parents or adults drink when we’re young. We think that’s what makes us an adult. If you look at the media, you look at movies, TV shows, it’s what everyone does when they’re stressed. Women pour themselves a glass of wine. Men pour themselves a bourbon. So, I think that we’re just raised in the society that doesn’t ever question their drinking, because alcohol use is so black and white, where you either are normal and you should drink alcohol and it’s what’s expected, or you’re an alcoholic and you should never drink alcohol. And there isn’t a lot of space in between. So, if someone questions their alcohol use, people assume that they’re an alcoholic. Kimberley: And so, now let me ask, why would we question our relationship? What was that process like for you? Why would we want to do that? Some people haven’t, I think, even considered it. So, can you share a little bit about why we might want to? Amanda: Absolutely. I think it isn’t talked about enough of how much alcohol really negatively impacts your mental health. For a while, I know doctors used to talk about there are some heart-healthy benefits of alcohol, which new studies say is not true. There really aren’t any benefits to drinking alcohol in terms of our health. But really, I think especially anxiety and alcohol are so intertwined and people don’t talk about it and don’t think about it. And what I want people to know is when you drink alcohol, it’s a depressant and your brain produces chemicals because your brain always wants to be in homeostasis. So, your brain produces anxiety chemicals, like cortisol and stuff like that, to try to rebalance into homeostasis. And after alcohol leaves your body, those anxiety hormones are still in there and it creates the phenomenon where you end up being more anxious after you drink. There’s other mental health effects too. But I feel like, especially on this podcast, it’s so important that people realize how intertwined alcohol and anxiety is. Kimberley: Right. You know what’s interesting is I do a pretty good amount of assessment with my patients. But really often, I will have seen them for many months before-- and even though I thought I’ve assessed them for substance use and not even abuse, they will then say and realize like, “I think I’m actually using alcohol more than I thought to manage my anxiety.” And I’m always really shocked because I’m like, “I swore I assessed you for this.” But I think it takes some people time during recovery to start to say like, “Wow, I think there is an unhealthy relationship going here.” Is that the case from what you see or is that more my population? Amanda: No. Absolutely. Because I think it’s easy to lie to yourself. Maybe not even lie, just like not look at it because again, it’s so normalized because we have an idea in our head of what someone with a problem with alcohol looks like. We don’t consider ourselves to have that problem. But just because we aren’t drinking every day or we’re not blacking out or something like that doesn’t mean that we might not be using it to numb, to cope with anxiety, to deal with stress. Kimberley: Right. You know what’s funny is I-- this could be my personal or maybe it is a cultural thing because I always want to catch whether it’s an Australian thing or a Kimberley thing, is I remember-- I think hearing, but maybe I misinterpreted as a young child that you’re only an alcoholic if you get aggressive when you drink, and that if you’re a happy drunk, you’re not a drunk. You know what I mean? And that it’s not a bad thing. If it makes you happy and it takes the stress away, that’s actually a good coping. So, I remember learning as a teen of like, oh, you get to question what is an alcoholic and what’s substance abuse and what’s not. So, how would you define substance use versus substance abuse? Or do you even use that language? Amanda: I mean, yes and no. I use it in terms of it exists, and it is part of the DSM. So, it is in terms of, I do diagnose when needed and things like that. A lot of times though, I think the current narrative and I think people spend so much time trying to figure out if it’s use or misuse, that they miss out on the most important question, which to me is, is alcohol making my life better. Kimberley: Yeah. Amanda: And if it’s not, if it’s right-- I have exercises in my book and I talk a lot about like, what are the costs of your drinking, and what are the payoffs? And if it’s costing you a lot or it’s costing you more than it’s bringing to your life, I think that is where you should question it. And I think your life can change. You can go through different things in your life and maybe that’s when you can ebb and flow with your questioning of it, especially people get so obsessed with the idea of whether they’re an alcoholic or not. And the term ‘alcoholic’ is completely outdated. It’s not even a diagnosis anymore. It’s now a spectrum. So, to me, that word is just so outdated and unhelpful to think about really. Kimberley: Right. And even the word ‘abuse’ has a stigma to it too, doesn’t it? Amanda: Right. In the DSM, it’s alcohol use disorder and it’s mild, moderate and severe. But it’s wild thinking back. I mean, I was in grad school. Oh my gosh, I’m going to date. I don’t even know how long ago, 10 years ago. Kimberley: Don’t tell them. Amanda: A certain amount of time ago, I just remember being in ‘addictions class’ as it was called and we were talking about what is the difference between use and abuse and what makes someone an alcoholic. And I think people also get very attached to being dependent. It means it’s abuse. And it takes a lot to become dependent on alcohol physically. So, we’re just missing out on so many people. I say often, we can question so many things in our life. I’m sure you do too with your clients. I question how their sleep habits interact with their mental health. We talk about how getting outside impacts their mental health, all these different factors. But for some reason with alcohol, which is a drug, we don’t question it or we are not allowed to. Kimberley: Right. Yes. I will address this for the listeners, is I think with my clients, one of the most profound road, like if we come to the edge of the road and we have to decide which direction, the thing that really gets in the way is if I put a name to it, then I have to stop. And that can be, a lot of times, they won’t even want to bring it up – be in fear of saying, well, like you were saying before, is that meaning now-- as soon as I admit to having a problem, does that mean I’m in AA? Is it black and white? I think that there’s so much fear around what it means once we really define whether it’s helpful or problematic. That can be a scary step. What are your thoughts? Amanda: Yeah, I completely agree. And that’s why I really believe in looking at it as a spectrum, especially I think about disordered eating, right? It’s like, we know that based on studies, if someone engages in disordered eating, they’re more likely to develop an eating disorder. So, in my book, I coined this term ‘disorder drinking’ and how I really think we need that term where people can-- it makes the barrier to question your relationship with alcohol much lower, where I find in my practice because I work with a lot of people with eating disorders. People are very open about saying, “Yeah, I’m maybe engaging in some unhealthy, disordered eating. I don’t know.” But there’s a whole step there before maybe you recognize that you have an eating disorder, where I really think that that is what we need with alcohol. We need to be able to talk about how, like, yeah, most of us in college engage in disordered drinking. It’s not super healthy, the way that we drink. Or we may go through a period of time in our life because we’re super stressed or something’s going on, where we engage in that. And that doesn’t mean that you have, for sure, a substance use disorder or you’re addicted or you have to never drink again. But I think it’s important to recognize when we start to fall into that so we can change that pattern. Kimberley: Right. Particularly with COVID. I mean, alcohol consumption is, I think, doubled or something like that in some country. And I think too, I mean, when we’re struggling with COVID that we have less access to good tools and less access to social. So, people are relying on substances and so forth. Yeah. So, what is this solution? There you go. Tell me all your answers. What is their options? How might somebody move into this conversation with themselves or with their partner or with their therapist? What are the steps from here, do you think? Amanda: Yeah. So, I think that the first step is to try to take a break. I think 30 days is a good starting point. A lot of times, if people just start off by cutting back, they don’t really get any of the positive feel-good benefits of taking a break, which is why I recommend starting with taking a break first. Obviously, I believe in harm reduction. And if you are in a place where you can’t take a break, moderation is definitely a good tool and better than nothing. Kimberley: Can you tell what harm reduction, for those who don’t know what that means? Amanda: Yeah. So, harm reduction is the idea that rather than focusing on completely eliminating a behavior or especially completely eliminating a substance is we think about cutting back on that. And I think about specifically, if someone is in an abusive situation, if someone has a lot of trauma going on and alcohol is the one thing that’s keeping them afloat, that to me is like, of course, I’m not going to say you must quit cold turkey or something like that. And even if you’re talking about, alcohol is very dangerous to physically detox from if you are drinking every day, which a lot of people don’t know. In those cases, yeah, it’s really important to get support and detox in a safe environment. Kimberley: Right. Okay. So, sorry I cut you off. Take a break-- Amanda: No, it’s okay. Yeah. So, that’s what harm reduction is. But yeah, in general, I recommend starting with taking a 30-day break, seeing how that goes, see how your health improves, see how your anxiety might be reduced and improved. And really to me, the goal is to learn how to live your life without being dependent on alcohol. Because if we can’t process our emotions, set boundaries, socialize, go on dates, whatever, without the help of alcohol, we never really have freedom of choice over drinking or not drinking because we need it on some level. So, my whole goal is for people to learn how to do some of those skills so that they don’t have to rely on alcohol, and then they can use alcohol in a healthier way for celebrating or in a way that positively impacts their life and they don’t use it as a crutch. Kimberley: So, that’s so helpful. I’m pretty well-versed in this, but I wouldn’t say I’m a specialist. So, I’m really curious. So, if somebody is using alcohol or any other substance to manage their anxiety, would you teach them skills before they take the break so that they have the skills for the break or would you just start to take the break and then pick up what gets lost there? What might be some steps and what skills may you teach them? Amanda: I think it’s a bit of both. I think if you only teach skills before, someone might never take the break, which is fine. But I think if you are only teaching the skills, a lot of times, the skills, I think that’s really good to start before you take the breaks. You can learn how to start dealing with your emotions maybe without drinking, for example. But some of the other stuff like going to a party, without drinking is something where if you don’t actually take that step, it’s probably unlikely that you’re ever going to do it until you’ve pushed yourself to take that break. But in general, yeah. I mean, I think one of the most important ones is learning how to cope with your emotions. People use alcohol all the time, especially alcohol becomes a way to deal with loneliness, to deal with stress, to deal with sadness. And I think-- Kimberley: Social anxiety is a big one. Amanda: Social anxiety. Absolutely. And I think a lot of us literally don’t know how to process an emotion, say no, set that boundary, take care of themselves on a basic level without drinking. So, those are some of the skills I think are really important to learn. Kimberley: I mean, yeah. And for a lot of the folks that I see because their anxiety is so high, would you say they’re using it to top off that anxiety to try and reduce it? In the case where if you’re not drinking, you’re having high states of anxiety. Is there any shifts that you would have them go through besides general anxiety management? Amanda: I think the example I’m thinking of is maybe social anxiety. If there’s a specific instance, right? I know you talk about this a lot on Instagram, like exposures can really, really help with reducing anxiety. And I think there are steps that you can take that are small if you have a lot of social anxiety about going to a party and not drinking, for example, and you’re relying on alcohol to deal with going to a party. I mean, some of the things off the top of my head I can think about are like driving to the place where the party is before it happens, talking to someone who is going to be at the party – taking these small steps to desensitize yourself to it so you can build up your tolerance before you go. Or maybe you go, if this is the first year and you only stay for a short period of time, rather than going from nothing to expecting yourself to go and have fun and stay at the whole party the whole time. Kimberley: Right. What was your experience, if you don’t mind sharing? What were those 30 days like, or can you share it, put us in your shoes for a little bit? Amanda: Yeah, absolutely. So, I struggled a lot with an eating disorder and I kept relapsing in my eating disorder when I would drink. And I had said to my therapist at the time, “I think that I might have a problem with alcohol. I don’t know.” And she recommended me do those 30 days. And it was really hard for me. I didn’t actually make it to the first 30 days when I originally tried because I was so afraid of the pushback of friends, of people asking me why, of not being able to be fun. A huge part of my identity at that time was all wrapped up in what people thought of me and going out and being the fun, crazy one. Kimberley: Yeah. And it’s interesting how the different experience, because I too had an eating disorder. But my eating disorder wouldn’t let me drink. Amanda: Yeah. Kimberley: That would be letting go of control, and what if I binge, and what if I ingest too many calories? So, it’s funny how different disorders play out in different ways. It was actually an exposure for me to drink. What we quote, I think I’d heard so many times “empty calories” or something. So, that was a different exposure for me of that. But I can totally see how other people, of course again, it does-- I mean, I think that this is interesting in your book, you talk about the pros and the cons. It does make it easier to be in public. It does “work” in some settings until it doesn’t. Amanda: Exactly. And I think that’s so important to normalize and it’s part of why I wrote my book because there aren’t many books that are, you’ll get this as a therapist. I can think of many different situations where, like you said, I wouldn’t tell a client, “You should absolutely stop drinking,” because everything is unique. So, I really wanted to write a book that took into account different things and really led the reader through their own journey where they get to discover it for themselves because while there’s amazing books out that I love, there aren’t a ton that talk about this gray area, drinking, this middle lane, this truth that a lot of times you can feel lonely when you don’t drink because you’re left out of certain things. And that can cause more anxiety. So, we have to navigate all of that. Kimberley: Yeah. It’s interesting too, and I don’t know if I’m getting this research correct. And maybe I’m not, but I’ll just talk from an experiential point. It’s similar with cigarettes, I think. There is something calming about holding the wine glass. Even if it’s got lemonade in it, for me, there’s something celebratory about that. And so, the reason I bring that up is, is that a part of the options for people? Is to explore the areas? It’s funny, I remember my husband many years ago that we talk about cigarettes, because he works in the film industry, and he would say, “The people who smoke cigarettes are the ones who actually get a break because they have to leave set and they get to go outside and sit on something and breathe and have a moment to themselves. If you don’t smoke, you’re lazy if you take a break.” And so, is that a part of it for you in terms of identifying the benefits and bringing that into your life? Like, I still now drink sparkling cider or something, an alcoholic in old champagne glass. My kids are always joking about it. Is that a part of the process? Amanda: Absolutely. And that’s something that I completely agree with you. I think sometimes we don’t even want an alcoholic beverage. We want a moment. We want a break. We want a feeling different or celebratory, which is why we take out the wine glass that isn’t a regular glass, something like that. And that is why I really believe, I mean, it depends on the person. And sometimes if someone has more severe drinking a non-alcoholic beverage initially could be something that’s triggering for them. But I am a big believer too. And yeah, put it in a fancy glass. If you enjoy a mocktail, drink something different than water, you can explore different options. And I think some people are really surprised at how much it’s not actually about the drink sometimes, it’s the ritual of making a drink or the ritual of using that special glass, or the ritual of drinking something that isn’t water. Kimberley: Right. Yes. Or even just the ritual of the day ending. I always remember, my parents would be five o’clock, right? And at five o’clock they would have the-- this is a big family tradition, is at five o’clock, you’d bring out the cheese and the crackers and the grapes and the wine. And it was the end of the day. And so, I could imagine, if someone said, “We’re going to take that away,” you’d be like, “No, that’s how I know the day is over. That’s how I move from one thing to the other.” And sometimes we do think black and white. It means you have to take the whole cheese platter away as well, right? Amanda: Absolutely. We can get almost in our heads of maybe we think we’re more dependent on that cheese platter or the wine or whatever, without realizing that what we really like about it is the ritual. Kimberley: Yeah. So, you can share it or not, how does your life look now? And for your clients, give me maybe some context of what do people arrive at once they’ve been through this process and how might it be different for different people. Amanda: Totally. So, I’m completely sober. I don’t drink alcohol. I’ve been sober for seven years. And in terms of how the process looks for me, I drink mocktails. I drink out of wine glasses sometimes. I love going to a bar and seeing sometimes if there’s an alcohol-free option on a menu, I think that’s really fun. And for me initially, when I was thinking about this and working on it, like I said, it was very tied to my eating disorder. But the biggest thing for me is I used to think, well, I can’t totally stop drinking because that’s black and white, and that’s not freedom. Freedom is being able to decide. And I think what is different and unique compared to an eating disorder, for example, is that alcohol is addictive, right? Unlike food, it is an addictive substance that we can live without. And for me, I used to, or for me, I don’t have to think about it if I don’t drink. When I was trying to moderate, it was a lot of decision fatigue. It’s like, “What am I going to drink? How much am I going to drink? When will I stop? Am I going to drink too much?” It was all of these decisions. And freedom for me now actually is just not drinking and not thinking about if I’m going to drink or not. So what my life looks like now is I’m sober, I’ve been sober for seven years. I enjoy going out to restaurants and getting alcohol-free drinks and things like that. And I used to be really worried that that was too reductive, that I was too black and white if I just said I wanted to be sober. But the truth is unlike food, alcohol is an addictive substance. When you have one alcoholic beverage, it does create a thirst for itself for most of us. So, for me, the freedom is actually not worrying about whether I’m going to drink or not. It’s so exhausting for some people, myself included, to be constantly thinking about how much you’re going to drink, if you’re going to drink, when you’re going to drink, what you’re going to drink. And now, the real freedom for me is I don’t drink. I don’t think about it. And that’s the freedom because-- sorry, I just got caught up in what I was saying. Kimberley: No, I think that that is so beautiful. As you were saying it, I was thinking about me in a Fitbit. I will never be able to wear a Fitbit. Because as soon as I know, I could wear it for day-ish. And day two, I’m all obsessive and compulsive. I just know that about myself. And some people can wear it and be fine, and I can never wear a Fitbit. I just can’t. My brain goes very, like you said, on how many? More or less, what’s happening? And so, I love that you’re saying that, is really knowing your limits and whether it’s-- the Fitbit, it’s not actually the problem, but the Fitbit is what starts a lot of problematic behaviors that I know is just not helpful for me. Amanda: Yes. And I think it’s important to recognize there are factors that make us more likely to be able to moderate successfully or not, right? The amount of alcohol you’ve drank throughout your life, your past drinking habits, whether you have a history of addiction in your family or substance use, whether you have trauma, whether you have anxiety, all of these things might make it more difficult for you to moderate compared to someone else. Kimberley: Right. I don’t know if this is helpful for our listeners, but I went sober. My husband and I did for the first year of COVID. What was interesting is then I got put on a medicine where I wasn’t allowed to drink and I felt offended by this medicine because I was like, “But you’re taking my choices away.” And so, I had to go back. Even though I’d made the choice already, I’d had to go back and really address this conversation of like, “Okay, why does that feel threatening to you” and to look at it because a part of me wanted to be like, “No, I’m going to start drinking now just because they told me I’m not allowed.” So, it’s so funny how our brain gets caught up on things around drinking and the rules and so forth. So, I didn’t think of it that way until you’d mentioned it. Amanda: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that can be why people rebel against “I’m not an alcoholic” mindset instead of it being a choice, instead of it being “My life is better without drinking.” I often say, my drinking was like Russian roulette. A lot of times it was fine when I drank, but the times where it wasn’t fine, I was not willing to put up with it anymore. And I don’t know whether I could drink successfully or not, but it’s not a risk that I’m willing to take. And it’s not worth it compared to all the benefits that I have from sobriety. And because of that, it really feels like an empowering choice. Kimberley: Yeah. My last question to you before we hear more about you is, what would you say to the people who are listening, who aren’t ready to have the conversation with themselves about whether it’s helpful or not? I think I learn in a master’s grade the stages of change. You’re in a pre-contemplation stage where you’re like, “I’m not even ready to contemplate this yet.” Do you have any thoughts for people who are so scared to even look at this? Amanda: Yeah. For people who maybe are in that pre-contemplation, not sure if they want to do the deeper work to question their relationship with alcohol, what I would recommend to them is start by just trying to reduce some of their alcohol intake. They don’t have to stop drinking. They don’t have to even think about whether it’s serving them or not, but there are so many amazing alcohol-free beverages that exist now. I mean there’s alcohol-free beers and wines and all kinds of things. And you could just try swapping one of your alcoholic beverages with that when you go out or at home and just see how that makes you feel. Kimberley: Yeah. It’s a great response in terms of like, it is. It could be. Would you say that’s more of the harm reduction model? Amanda: Yeah, absolutely. Or someone who’s not ready or really interested in the big conversation. That’s one of the reasons I really support and like the alcohol-free beverages and stuff like that because it gives people, I think, an easier way to step into it. And sometimes even realizing too, like alcohol-free beverages can taste really good compared to the beverage that has alcohol in it. So, you’re not drinking this for the taste. Kimberley: Exactly. Sometimes when I have drunk alcohol, I’m like, why am I even drinking this? It’s not delicious. Amanda: It’s true. Kimberley: It’s not delicious. I love that you say that about-- I think one of the wins of the world is they are creating more, even just the bottles and the look of them are much nicer than the general or dual looking kind of bottles, which I think is really cool. I love this conversation, and thank you so much for bringing it to me because I do really believe, particularly in the anxiety field, we are not talking about it enough. So, I’m so grateful for you. Amanda: Absolutely. I’m so glad that I got to chat about it because, yeah, the anxiety connection is huge. Kimberley: Yeah. Tell me about your book and all about you. Where can people find you? Amanda: Yeah. So, my book comes out on January 4th. It’s called Not Drinking Tonight. And 2022, because this is out. Kimberley: Yeah. Amanda: Sorry if I messed up. Kimberley: No, no it’s good. So, for people who are listening on replay, it will be out as of 2022. Amanda: Yeah. It’s called Not Drinking Tonight: A Guide to Creating a Sober Life You Love. It is broken up into three different sections so that you can learn in the first section why you drink, and I go into evolutionary psychology and trauma and shame. In the second part, it’s about reparenting yourself or the tools that you need to stay stopped. So, I talk about boundaries and self-care and all of the things, emotional health, how we take care of our emotions. And then in the last section, I talk about moderation, relapsing, the overlap of alcohol use and other substances or ways we numb. So, really though my book is structured around alcohol. I talk a lot about eating disorders, perfectionism, workaholism, other drugs, because I think a lot of it is the same in that sense. Kimberley: 100%. Amanda: So yeah. And you can find me on Instagram at Therapy For Women, or my website is amandaewhite.com. Kimberley: Amazing. Thank you so much. It’s so great to actually have a conversation with you face to face. Well, as face to face as we can be. So, thank you so much. Amanda: Thank you. This was so great. ----- Okay. And before we get going, I’m sure you got so much out of that episode. Before we get going onto your week, I wanted to share the “I did a hard thing.” This one is for on Paula, and she said: “I started ERP School earlier this year. While looking into my OC cycle, I was surprised to find out that I had some overt compulsions. I thought they were mostly mental. And that’s when I figured out I had a BFRB. My loved ones had commented on my hair pulling in the past, but I didn’t realize how compulsive it could be. I watched Kimberley’s webinar on BFRBs, and I got inspiration to be creative. I tried to use hand lotion, so it would make my hands sticky and demotivate hair pulling. I also got a fidget toy to keep my hands occupied whenever I felt like pulling. But what worked best was you using a transparent elastic band to tie up the two strands I used to pull. It’s perfect because it creates a physical barrier to pulling, but also a sensory reminder. If my fingers feel the band, I can say to myself, “Oh, the band, that feels different.” And because I’m trying to make a change, way to go me. Thank you, Kimberley, for all the amazing work you do.” So guys, this is amazing. If you didn’t know, if you go to CBT School, we have a free training for people with BFRBs. If you have OCD, we have a free training for people with OCD. So, head on over to CBT School, and you can get all of the cool resources there. Have a wonderful day, everybody. And thank you so much for the “I did a hard thing.” That was so cool. I was not expecting that, Paula. Congratulations! You are doing definite hard things. Have a wonderful day, everybody.

In today’s episode, Kimberley Quinlan talks about the importance of identifying catastrophic thinking. The reason this is so important is that this type of cognitive distortion or cognitive error can increase one’s experience of anxiety and panic, making it harder to manage it at the moment. Kimberley talks about the importance of mindfulness and self-compassion when responding to catastrophization also.  In This Episode: What is Catastrophization? Why is it important that we catch how we catastrophize? How to manage Catastrophization? How correcting our thoughts can help, sometimes..but not always. 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 218. Welcome back, everybody. How are you doing? How are you really? Just wanted to check in with you first, see how you’re doing. We’re friends, so it’s my job to check in on you and see how you are. Thank you for being here with me again. I do know how important your time is, and I am so grateful that you spend it with me. Thank you. That is such a joy and it’s such a wonderful experience to know that I am spending time with you each week. This week, we are talking about the danger of catastrophization. Now, I’ll talk with you a little bit more about what that means here in a second, but basically what I want to do in this episode is really to take off from the very first episode of this year, which was the things I’d learned in 2021. One of the points that I made there was to really take responsibility for your thought errors, right? And I wanted to pick one of the thought errors that I see the most in my clients. In fact, in the last couple of weeks, it’s been an ongoing piece of the work we do. It’s not all of the work, but it’s a piece of the work, is for me just to be, I’m still doing teletherapy. So, we’re sitting across from the screen and just reflecting and modeling back to them some of the ways in which they speak to themselves and really looking at how helpful that is and how that impacts them. So, before we get into that episode, I want to offer to you guys to submit your “I did a hard thing.” Today, as I went to prepare for this episode, I checked the link and we’d actually used up all of the ones that were submitted probably in August of 2021. And so I’m going to encourage you guys to submit your “I did a hard thing” so I can feature you on the podcast. When we first submitted, we had like 70 submissions, and I’ve used all of them up. And I would love to get new ones to share with you and have you be featured on the show. So, if you want to go over, you can click on the show notes for the link, or if you want, you can go to kimberleyquinlan-lmft.com. So, that’s Kimberley Quinlan - L for License, M for Marriage, F for Family, T for Therapy.com. Click on the podcast link, which is where we hold all of our podcasts, and you could submit your “I did a hard thing.” And I’d love to have you on the show. It actually is probably my favorite part. I could easily just have a whole show called “I did a hard thing” and it could be just that. All right. So, let’s get into the episode. Today, I want to talk with you about the danger of catastrophization, and let me share with you how this shows up. So, I want to be clear that you cannot control your thoughts, your intrusive thoughts that repetitively show up, and you can’t show your fear up. You cannot change your feelings. So, you can’t tell yourself not to be sad if you’re sad and you can’t tell yourself not to be anxious if you’re anxious and you can’t not panic if you’re panicking. But you can change how you react and how you behave. That is a common CBT rule. Now often, when you have an intrusive thought, a lot of my patients or clients will report having anxiety or having a thought or having a feeling or having an urge or having an image that shows up in your head – because that’s what I do, right? People come to me with a problem. The problem is usually a thought, feeling, sensation, urge, or image. That’s what I do. And what I try to do is change the way they respond. That is my job, right? Now, what often happens is, there is a thought or a feeling or a sensation or urge, impulse, whatever it may be that shows up, and they often will respond to that by framing it in a way that is catastrophic. I’ll give you some examples. So, when they have the presence of anxiety in their body, they may frame it as: “I’m freaking out.” That’s a catastrophic thought. When they had a lot of anxiety or maybe they had a panic attack, they frame it or they assess it by saying, “Kimberley, I almost died. I had the biggest panic attack of my life. I almost died.” Or “It nearly killed me. The anxiety nearly killed me,” or “The pain nearly killed me.” They may have tried to do an exposure or they may have tried to reach a goal that they had set, and they’ll say, “I failed miserably. It was a total disaster.” They are trying to recover from a mental illness or a medical illness, and they’ll say, “I’ll never amount to anything. I’ll never get better.” Or they’re suffering. We have different seasons in our lives. We have seasons where things go really, really well and we’re like winning at life. And then we have seasons where things are hard and we just have hurdle after hurdle, after hurdle, and they’ll say, “There’s no point, my life is not worth living,” or “I’m never going to be able to solve this.” Now, first of all, if you’ve thought any of these things, I am sending you so much love. Your thinking is not your fault. I’m not here to place blame on you like, “Oh, you’re bad at this,” because our brains naturally catastrophize, because our brain wants to make sense of things and put them in little categories because that is the easiest, quickest way to understand our world. So naturally, we do this to make sense of the world. If I said to my daughter, “How are you doing with math?” She’d go, “Oh, it totally sucks,” because it’s easier to say, “It totally sucks,” than to say, “There are some things that I’m doing well with and some things that I am not. I am struggling with this thing, but I’m finding this part really enjoyable.” That takes a lot of energy to say that, and it takes a lot of energy to hold opposing truths. We’ve talked about this in the past. It’s not the fastest, efficient way to live when you’re living in those types of ways. So, what we often will do, particularly if we are having a lot of strong emotions, is we catastrophize. Now often a client will say some of these or many others. There’s many ways we can catastrophize, which is to make a catastrophe out of something. When they say it, I don’t say, “That’s wrong. You’re bad for thinking that.” I’ll just say, “I’m wondering what percent of that is correct. Like I almost died. Okay, I’m interested to know a little bit about that. Did you almost die?” And they’ll be like, “No.” I’m like, “Okay.” And I’m not there to, “I really want to model to you.” I’m never across the screen or across the office with my patient, trying to tell them how wrong they are. Never. That’s never my goal. But I want them to start to acknowledge that the way in which they think and they frame an experience can create more problems. Now if they said to me, “Kimberley, I want to think this way. I like it. It makes me happy. It brings me joy. I’m fulfilled this way,” I have nothing to fix. But often, once we reflect, and I often will then ask my patients, “So when you say ‘I totally freaked out.’ You had anxiety and you said, ‘I totally freaked out,’ how does that feel?” And often they’ll say, “Not good.” They’ll say, “It actually makes me feel more anxious.” Or if they had an intrusive thought, let’s say they had OCD and they had an intrusive thought and we can’t control intrusive thoughts, and then their response was, “I’m a horrible human being who doesn’t deserve to be a mom for having that thought,” I’ll say, “How does it feel to respond to your intrusive thought that way? How does that have you act?” And they’re like, “Well, it makes me feel terrible and not worthy. And then I don’t want to do anything, or then I just want to hide, or then I have so many emotions. I start freaking out even more. And now it’s a big snowball effect.” So then we start to gently and curiosity-- sorry guys. Then we begin to gently and curiously take a look at what are the facts or what actually lands to be true and helpful. I want to be clear. We do not replace catastrophization with positive thinking. I would never encourage a client to replace “I am freaking out” with “I am feeling wonderful” because that’s not true. They’re actually experiencing discomfort. They are experiencing panic. They had an intrusive thought. They’re having an urge to pick or pull. They’re having an urge to binge. They’re having depression. They’re having self-harm thoughts. So I’m not here to, again, change those particularly. But I really encourage them to look at how you frame that experience, how you respond to that experience. What would bring you closer to the goal that you have for yourself? Because usually, when people come to me, they’ll say, “I want to feel less anxious,” or “I want to do less compulsions,” or “I want to pick my skin less,” or “I want to binge less,” or “I want to love my life. I want to feel some self-esteem and worth. I want to take my depression away.” So, we want to really look at catastrophization and look at the danger of continuing to use that pattern. Now, let me get you in on a little trick here. I titled this podcast “The Danger of Catastrophization” because the title in and of itself is a catastrophization. Did you pick that up? That’s a lot of what happens in social media, is they use catastrophic words to peak your interest. It sells a lot of things. In fact, some businesses sell on the principle of catastrophization. They tell you what catastrophe will happen if you don’t buy their product. They might say, “You’ll have wrinkles. Terrible, old wrinkles if you don’t buy our product.” And that may feel like a catastrophe because they’re trying to sell you their product. They may say, “If you don’t buy this special extra filter for your car, it could explode on the highway.” That’s a catastrophe. “Okay, I’ll buy it.” So, even my naming of it, I want you to be aware of how it piques your interest, the catastrophes, and how it draws you in because nobody wants a catastrophe. But for some reason, we think in this way. So I made a little trick there. I tricked you into listening. I try not to use it as a tool, but I thought today it would be really relevant to bring it up and see whether you caught that catastrophization that I did to get you onto this episode. I’m a naughty girl, I know. There it is. I want you to catch how you frame things and how you tell stories about things that you’ve been through or about the future and catch the catastrophization that you do. If you have a supportive partner or friend or somebody in your life, a loved one, and you trust them, you may even ask them to just give you a little wink every time they catch you using a catastrophization. Sometimes you don’t catch it until someone brings it to your attention. Because again, our brain works on habit. Our brain works on what it knows, and it doesn’t really like to change because that means you have to use more energy. But I promise you. I promise, promise, promise you, this is the energy you want to use. This little extra piece of energy is totally worth it, because think about it. If I said to you, “I had a panic attack, it was really uncomfortable. I rode it out. There were some moments where I felt really confident and some moments where I was struggling, but it did go away eventually,” ask yourself how that feels. And then I’m going to tell you a different version: “I was totally freaking out. I totally thought I was going to die. It was so bad. I really think it was the most painful thing I’ve ever been through in my whole entire life.” How does that feel? It feels terrible. A lot of panic comes from people catastrophizing, using language that feels really dangerous. The danger of catastrophization – remember, it feels dangerous when we use catastrophization. So, just be aware of it. Catch it if you can. Okay? All right. Before we finish up, I want to do the review of the week. This is by Dr. Peggy DeLong and she said, “Wonderful practices!” She gave it a five-star review and said, “I appreciate that you highlight these skills as practices. Coping with anxiety is not a one-and-done deal. Practicing these skills, even on good days, especially on good days, helps to promote long-term well-being. Thanks for providing this service!” Thank you so much, Dr. Peggy DeLong. I am so grateful for your reviews. Please, go and leave a review if you have some time. I would be so grateful. It really helps me reach people who, let’s say, look at the podcast and think to themselves, would this be helpful to me? And if there’s lots of reviews, it helps build trust for them that they would then click, and then hopefully I can help them. Okay? All right. Sending you all my love. One quick thing to remember is if you go over to cbtschool.com, we actually have a full training on this, on correcting the way that you think. Again, the goal is not to change your intrusive thoughts, but the goal is to work on how you reframe things. So you can go there for that training. All right. All my love to you guys. Have a wonderful day. It is a beautiful day to do hard things.

SUMMARY:  Today we have Windsor Flynn talking about how she realized the benefits of meditation for anxiety and OCD in her recovery. Winsdor brought her lived experience and training to the conversation and addressed how meditation has helped her in many ways, not just with her OCD and mental health. In This Episode: The benefits of meditation for general anxiety The benefits of meditation for OCD The roadblocks to practicing meditation How Mindfulness and mediation help with daily stress (especially through COVID-19) Links To Things I Talk About: Instagram: @windsormeditates Instagram: @Windsor.Flynn Website: www.windsorflynn.com (Windsor is certified to teach the 1 Giant Mind 3 Day Learn Meditation course). 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 217. You guys, 217. That’s a lot of episodes. I’m very excited about that. Today, we have with us the amazing Windsor Flynn. I cannot tell you how incredibly by inspired I am with Windsor. She is very cool and has so much wisdom and so much kindness to share. Today, we have her on to talk about having anxiety and learning the importance of meditation. Now, Windsor speaks specifically about having OCD and how much it has helped her to take up a meditation practice. She goes over the couple of main key points, which is number one, anyone can meditate. And that meditation can be user-friendly for people, even with OCD. And she said, “Especially for people with OCD.” And she actually gives us the amazing gift of a guided meditation at the end, that just helps you bring your attention to the present and learn to drop down into your compassion and your body. And then the third point she makes is that meditation can be integrated into your life, even if you feel like you don’t have time, or even if it’s really uncomfortable. And she shares some amazing experiences and examples of where she really struggled and how she got through those difficulties. So, I’m going to quickly first do the “I did a hard thing” and then I’m going to let you guys get right into the amazing conversation with Windsor Flynn. So, today’s “I did a hard thing” is from Anonymous, and they said: “I wear a dress that has been sitting in my closet for months. I was always scared to show my skin since breaking out in hives over my social anxiety. I felt proud for the first time in a long time.” This is so cool. You guys, I love this so much. They’re really talking about showing up imperfect and all, or letting people judge them and going and doing what you want to do anyway. And that is what this podcast is about. It’s about living the life that you want, not the life that anxiety wants you to have. And often, anxiety will keep your life very small if you only listen to it and only follow its rules. And so, anonymous is doing this work, walking the walk, not just talking the talk. So, yes, I’m so, so in love with this. Now you guys, you can go over to my private practice website, which is where the podcast lives. It’s Kimberley Quinlan - L for License, M for Marriage, F for Family, and T for Therapist – I had to think there – .com. So, KimberleyQuinlan-lmft.com. And then you can click on the podcast and right there is a link for you to submit your “I did a hard thing” and you can be featured on the show. So, go do that, but not right away. First, I want you to listen to this amazing, amazing episode. Kimberley: Welcome. I am so excited for this episode. I have a reason for being so excited, which I’ll share with you in a second, but first, I want to introduce to you Windsor Flynn. She is incredible. I have watched you grow over the last what? A year or two years since I’ve known you. It is so wonderful to have you on, so thank you for coming. Windsor: Yeah. Thank you for inviting me. This is so cool because I’ve spent a lot of time listening to your podcast and, I don’t know, just hoping to be on Monday, but I didn’t know for what. So, this is really cool for me. Kimberley: Yeah, this is so cool. So, you’re coming on to talk about meditation. And the reason that this is so exciting for me is that is actually what this podcast was originally for – was to bring mindfulness and meditation practice to people who have anxiety. And I did a lot of meditations at the beginning and then I lost my way. So, I feel like you coming here is full circle. We’re going back to the roots of the show to talk about mindfulness and meditation. Do you want to share a little bit about your story with mental health and why you landed on this as being your passion project? Windsor: Yeah, sure. So, I started-- I guess my mental health story goes way back, but I’ll just start at the beginning when I first came to my OCD diagnosis. I had been experiencing anxiety. Looking back, I will say it was pretty debilitating, but I was sort of just powering through it. I was a new mom. I didn’t have a lot of mom friends, the first in my group to have kids. My parents are across the ocean in Hawaii. I’m in California, in San Francisco with my boyfriend who is shocked at being a dad. So, I’m very anxious, but I’m doing all the things. And I had started experiencing intrusive thoughts, which I didn’t know were intrusive thoughts. I was just really worried that I was going to become a headline for like moms that murder. I hate moms that kill because I had heard of this story. I’m sure so many people who grew up at the same time as me were really familiar with the Andrea Yates story. I don’t need to go full into detail, but she had some mental health issues and she ended up killing her kids. It’s a very, very sad story, but I had attached to that because I was just so, so scared that that would happen to me. And I don’t know why I was nervous that this would happen to me. But ever since I was little, I just always thought that anything drastic, it would happen to me. I would be there for the end of the world. I would be there to witness a mass murder, or I would be a victim of a serial killer. All these things, I just thought it had to be me. I don’t know why. So, of course when I have a baby, I’m thinking, “Oh no, this horrible thing, it’s bound to happen to me. I need to pay attention.” So, that’s when the hypervigilance started, all of these things that I now have language for, but I wasn’t quite sure how to explain, and I also didn’t want to explain it to anyone because it sounds unhinged. So, I was doing this alone. I was trying to keep myself very busy. I was doing all the classic compulsory activities that happen when you’re trying to avoid intrusive thoughts and avoid this massive discomfort in fear. And eventually, we moved out of the city. So, not only was I mothering by myself-- not really by myself. I had a partner, but he was working a lot just with his schedule. So, he was sleeping most of the day and gone all night. So then we moved across the bay to Alameda and then I just didn’t even have friends anymore. So, I was all alone. So, I was thinking, “Wow, if there’s ever going to be a time that I’m going to just completely go off, it’ll be now.” And then it just snowballed. It spiraled into this thing where I couldn’t not be scared and I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was convinced that I was going to kill my son for no other reason. Then I just had a feeling that something bad was going to happen. So, I looked up postpartum mood disorders because somehow, I knew those existed. And I was hoping that this had something to do with it. I still had hope that there was an explanation. And I found something that said Postpartum OCD, and anxiety. And of course, I hit every single track mark. It wasn’t mild symptoms. I was just, yup. Check, check, check, check, check. And so, I felt a little okay. Not really, right? And I finally saw someone who ended up being-- she said she was a postpartum specialist, which was great. I signed up with her. We talked. She told me I had OCD. It was cool. But she didn’t give me any tools. She was doing the root cause stuff, which is probably really helpful in other circumstances, not necessarily for OCD. But she reassured me enough that I was cool with my OCD. I was like, “Well, I’m not going to kill anyone. That’s fine. I can go home. I can continue being a mom as long as you’re telling me I’m not a murderer.” Just like, “No, you’re not a murderer.” I was like, “Great, well, we’re done here, I guess.” And I got pregnant again. And of course, I was so scared. I was like, “That’s going to happen again. I’m going to have postpartum OCD.” So, I couldn’t pause my whole pregnancy, but it was in the name of preparedness. So, I didn’t know that I was making my symptoms worse and worse and worse until I had the baby. This time I’m not scared I’m going to kill anyone. I’m just scared that now I think she’s the devil, which I did not know how to recognize it. So, finally, I’m experiencing a whole different subset of OCD symptoms. I didn’t know, but I just thought, well, it was OCD the first time. I’m just going to check. And luckily, I landed on my therapist. I still see-- even though this was four years ago, I still see her every two weeks. I love her. She’s the best. She’s given me all the tools I needed to manage my mental health, got me to a place where not only was I totally understanding the disorder, but I felt really comfortable sharing and sharing in a way that I thought would be helpful to other people. So, that’s when I started advocating for maternal mental health and OCD, and that’s how we know each other, through the internet, social media space. And I guess that was a mouthful, but that was how I landed onto the advocacy part. And eventually, I switched to meditation because I felt like this was a tangible way that I could offer a service that I know to be helpful for the management of mental health. And I know how much resistance there is towards starting this meditation practice because I too went through a number of years where I absolutely said no to this idea of meditation. But once I started, I realized, wow, I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner. There’s really something to it. And it’s very teachable. And I know from firsthand experience how beneficial it is. Kimberley: I love that. I actually don’t think I’ve heard your entire story. So, thank you for sharing that with me and everybody. I didn’t realize there were two waves of OCD for you and two different subtypes, which I think is common, for a lot of people. Windsor: Yeah. Kimberley: I love that. So, I think what you’re saying, and can you correct me if I’m wrong? So, the first wave was reassurance, what you used to get you through. And then the second you used ERP? Windsor: Yes. Kimberley: Okay, great. And then from there, the third layer of recovery or however you want to say it, was it meditation, or were there other things you did to get to the meditation place? Windsor: Well, I was doing ERP and that really helped with my OCD management. I was able to recognize whenever I had a new obsession, and I feel like I could recognize anyone’s new obsession. At this point, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s this, that’s this. It’s tied into this.” So, I had a really great understanding, and that was cool. But I still have two kids, we’re still in a pandemic, I still have communication issues with my partner – all these normal things that ERP doesn’t necessarily help with. So, it was really just about finding that balance between working on myself and stress management and really getting to be that calm, chill person that I’ve always wanted to be. Even when I was doing the best with my OCD, I was still not so relaxed because I had a lot of attachments to how I wanted people to perceive me, how my children were behaving, not necessarily in a controlling way, but just really feeling a lot of responsibility over everything. And so, the meditation was just this next step that I was hoping would get me there, because I was feeling a lot of stress, not even related to my OCD, just in general. And I wanted to be able to find something that would help me get through that stress so that I could start really figuring out what it is I wanted to do, just even for fun again, instead of just only feeling this overwhelmed. Kimberley: Yeah. No, I really resonate with that. All I can say for me is, while I had a different story, I had an eating disorder, I was trying to do meditation during that, but the thoughts and everything was just too big for it. And it was hard for me to access actual meditation without it just being an opportunity to ruminate, sitting there, just cycling. So, the main thing I really want to ask you, if you’re willing to share, is let’s say specifically someone with OCD, what were some of the struggles that you had with meditation? Because I know so many people with OCD are really resistant to it because the thoughts get louder when you sit still and so forth. So, what were some of the things that you had to work through to be able to sit on a cushion? Windsor: Yeah. That’s such a great question because I feel like, had I not figured out that I had OCD and then done all this work with ERP to really learn how to acclimate myself to the presence of intrusive thoughts, I don’t know that I would’ve been successful in meditation. Actually, I know that I wasn’t because I had tried it before, and it was too hard. So, I really-- even with ERP, once I started the meditation journey, the first few weeks were pretty challenging for me because as someone with OCD, every time I close my eyes and I’m not occupied, or my brain is not occupied, it’s like prime time. This is OCD’s favorite. It’s like the time to shine. It’s like, “Okay, here I am. What can we throw out to you today?” And so, knowing that this was a possibility, even when I signed up to learn meditation, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to do this. I’m going to try, I’m going to give college a try.” Then my OCD was like, “No.” You close your eyes, something could happen, like you could have a breakdown or you could make all these realizations that you are a psycho killer. And then you’ll just definitely kill everyone. Thank God you tried meditation. Now your true self can come out. And I was like, “Okay, I’m going to just do it anyways. I’m just going to meditate because I have to see, not even in a compulsory way, I have to see if this is true. But I can’t-- knowing now what OCD does, I couldn’t-- it was almost I took it as a personal challenge. Kimberley: Like an exposure, right? It was like an exposure, like, “Okay, fine. I’m going to-- let’s see.” Windsor: I signed up to learn meditation as a true exposure because now I had this fear that if I come to all these realizations, it won’t be cool. It will be devastating for everyone around me. So, I was like, “Well, I’m going to try. I’m going to try to meditate.” And do you know what? I cried and panicked the first time. I had to turn off my camera because I did not want the teacher to see. Kimberley: So you did it live. Windsor: I did it live. It was so hard. It was like a total exposure because this was in front of-- I think there were 25 people in the course and everyone was closing their eyes, I’m assuming. But 20 minutes is a long time to meditate. So, I know people were going to be opening their eyes. So, I was live having this fear that I was going to turn into a psycho killer on the camera. So, I was crying because it was hard. But you know what? I’m so glad I did because also ERP showed me that crying is fine. We can cry when we do hard things. I was doing the hard thing and I was proud of myself. I even shared afterwards. We were like, “Who wants to share?” And I was like, “Me.” I cried and I had a panic attack. Kimberley: See. That is so badass in my mind. That is so cool that you did that. You rode that wave. Windsor: Yeah. And it was great because if I didn’t do that or purposely put myself into the situation to cry and do this hard thing, I wouldn’t have been able to get to the good part of meditation, which I love. I like to talk about the good part of meditation. But having OCD makes starting the hardest part. Kimberley: Yeah. What is the good part of meditation for you? Because I think that no one wants to do hard things unless they know there’s some kind of reward at the end. Everyone’s going to be different, but for you, what is the why? Why would you do such a thing? Windsor: Well, because I learned this thing, right? That was so valuable. Someone told me, we don’t gauge the benefits of meditation for how we feel when our eyes are closed. We’re more interested in what happens while our eyes are open. How is it impacting? And I noticed almost right away that when tensions were high, when I usually would be the first to participate-- because I’m really affected by the way other people’s moods are. I feel responsible or I have to change it. I became dysregulated really easily. I noticed almost right away that when other people were feeling their feelings around me, I was able to observe them instead of participate in that, which was really cool. And it was just so much nicer to be able to be supportive instead of become one of those people who also needed support in that moment. And I also noticed right away that I had a higher tolerance for loud noises and just disruptions, because I’m pretty sensitive to lots of different noises at once. It gets me pretty anxious and agitated. So, having kids at home all day isn’t ideal for that. And so, the meditation really helped me a lot with that. I was able to recover more quickly from periods of dysregulation. Maybe I would become dysregulated, but I could calm down quicker. And so, I really loved that. And I noticed that as before where I would be like, I need wine at 4:30 or whatever time it was. Once I started meditating for a few weeks, then wine just became something that tasted good that I liked in the afternoons. I didn’t need it. Sometimes I would be like, “Wow, we’re having dinner. Oh my God, kids, I didn’t even have wine.” And they were like, “Wow, you’re right.” And so, I would pour myself a glass just because I like it. Kimberley: Right. Not because you needed it to get through the afternoon. Windsor: Yeah. And so, I really liked all those changes. And it just is really restful, which I wasn’t expecting. The practice itself, the one that I practice, it’s twice a day. And I find that doing those two meditations really gives me more energy because I’m not a coffee person. So, yeah, I just feel like what started as a thing that I wanted to feel more rested and less stress, it has actually become a tool that I can use to help maintain a busier lifestyle, which as much as I don’t love for everyone, I can’t avoid it. Anyway. Kimberley: That is so cool. I mean, how amazing that this practice came to you. So, you are talking about this specific meditation practice that you use and the benefits. Do you want to share a little about what specifically you use? I’m sure some people here have heard from me of self-compassion meditations and mindfulness meditations, but do you want to share specifically what practices you are interested in practicing? Windsor: Yeah. So, the practice that I find the most success and enjoyment out of is a silent meditation, which actually was the most intimidating for me, but I love it. It’s the one giant mind being technique. It’s called a being technique because, I guess the focus of the meditation is to connect with your being, which I guess if you say it without sounding too woo-hoo or anything like that, we’re just connecting to your true self apart from all the thoughts and the ideas and all the conditioning we have. Just getting back to you, which is something that I really wanted, especially after having two kids and being confused in the state of life that’s not really developed yet. So, I love that part. And since I didn’t have to focus on anything like someone else’s voice, or trying to follow a guided meditation, sometimes I feel that takes more energy because I still have to pay attention to something. A silent meditation allowed me to really find that rest and allowed my brain to just slow down. Kimberley: Yeah. I too. I mean, I love guided meditations for people who are starting off and need some instructions. But I find the silent meditation once I got the hang of it, I could practice it in a minute between clients. I could just sit for-- I could quickly go into that and then come out. Or if I’m presenting and I’m listening to someone, I could just drop down into that. So, I really love the idea of this as well because it’s something you can practice in small pieces.  Not so formally, but drop into just connecting down out of your head into your body kind of thing. Okay, so the biggest question I’m guessing people have is, are you “successful” with your meditations daily? What does it look like day-to-day? Are there ups and downs? How is it for you? Windsor: Yeah. This is something that comes up a lot when people ask, because we know that, yes, all meditation is helpful. But we also know that to get the most benefit out of meditation, it’s best to have a regular practice. And this could mean meditating once a day, or with this particular technique, meditating twice a day. And it sounds a lot. And I would love to say I meditate twice a day every day, no matter what. But I have OCD, so I allow myself to be a little bit more flexible. I don’t really love rigidity when it comes to things like that because I have a tendency to really grab onto them. So, I do allow myself to skip it sometimes, either for reasons like I forget, or the day just gets ahead of me. As important as meditation is, there’s a lot of things that trumpet, like do my kids need something? Do I have to pick someone up? Is everyone being fed? There’s all these things that are also really important. So, I do try to meditate twice a day. Most days I do. Sometimes I don’t. But that’s okay because I did what I had to do to keep everything going. Kimberley: What about during your meditation? Windsor: What, excuse me? Kimberley: What about during your meditation? Is that an up and a down process? Do you have “good days” and “bad days” with it or is it pretty consistent for you now? Windsor: Well, I don’t like to talk about the meditations as being good or bad. Some are really gratifying and some are less gratifying, because even the less gratifying meditations are really good for you. You’re still going to benefit from them, even though it wasn’t necessarily easy or didn’t feel good. But that’s just like a lot of things. Meditation can be categorized as something like that, like maybe brushing your teeth or exercising. Maybe you don’t love it all the time, but you do it because it’s good for your body and it helps you reach certain goals. And sometimes it’s really hard for me to get to a good juicy place, and that’s okay. I’ve just started to not expect a certain experience when I go into the meditation. And that makes everything a lot easier because then I’m not letting myself down or I’m not feeling disappointed or I’m not crushing a goal. I don’t go into the meditation feeling like I’m going to feel so relaxed and cool. I just say, “Oh, I’m going to close my eyes and we’ll just see what happens during this session.” Kimberley: And that’s why I love what you’re saying because it’s so in line with recovery, like dropping the expectations, dropping just the good feelings, dropping goals, having these big goals all the time. I think that’s-- sometimes I have found, what happens in your meditation is like a metaphor for life, right? Like, okay, today is a busy brain day. There’s going to be days like that. And I think that it’s a great way to just practice the tools in a small setting that you would be practicing in the day anyway. Windsor: Exactly. That’s why I love it for people with OCD too because let’s say you commit to doing it 20 minutes a day or 20 minutes twice a day. During that 20 minutes, you know that any thoughts can come up, any feelings can come up, and you’re just going to let them be there. And this is excellent practice for when you’re going about your daily life and you have no control ever over what comes into your mind or what happens. But since you’ve been practicing this in your meditations, those responses to accept and let go become more automatic. So, not only are you having great meditation experiences or anything, but in your life, you can use those same tools. It’s not just adding another thing. It all works together. The meditation is so helpful in every aspect. Kimberley: Right. It’s like we go to the gym to strengthen our muscles and we meditate to strengthen our brain muscles, right? Windsor: Yeah. Kimberley: Yeah. I love that. So, one thing I didn’t ask you ahead of time, but I’m wondering, would you be interested in leading us through a couple of minute meditation to get us experiencing that? Windsor: Yeah. And you know what? I was thinking of like, maybe I should think of something to say in case she asks it, but I don’t think she will. So, yeah, we can just do a short-- what I do sometimes when I don’t do the whole 20 minutes is I just do a short mini one, like a minute or two. Kimberley: Would you lead us? Windsor: Yeah. Okay. So, for everyone listening and for Kimberley, I just want to show you a little bit about what it looks like to connect to your being and to practice a silent meditation, just for a short little grounding experience in the middle of a busy day or before a meeting, anytime you need to. So, what I like to do before I meditate is to just get into a comfortable spot. You don’t necessarily have to be on a fancy cushion. You just have to have your lower back supported. And go ahead and close your eyes. And what I like to do before I start any meditation is take a few deep belly breaths. So, we’ll just breathe into our noses right now. Feel your belly. Feel your chest... And release through the mouth. One more deep breath into the nose... into your belly... and release. And one more deep breath into the nose. Feel your belly... and release. So, now you just want to let your breath settle into its own natural rhythm. This isn’t a breathing meditation. We’re not going to focus on our breath. And you can scan your body for any tension that you might be holding. A commonplace is in your neck and your shoulders. Make sure you drop your shoulders, can wiggle your jaw a little bit, and just let all of that tension go. So, when we’re meditating, we don’t want to put a focus on any thoughts that might come into our mind. But when they do come in, we just want to acknowledge them and recognize that this is a normal part of meditation. We never want to resist any thoughts or feelings that we might have. These are all important. And just continue following your natural breath. And has any thoughts come into your mind, just remember that we don’t have to engage with them. It’s okay to just witness them and let them pass through you. Maybe you might notice a sound outside or a body sensation. That’s okay. Just be a witness to that too. Now you can take another deep breath into the nose... Into your belly... and breathe out. And you can start to bring your awareness back to your body and see how it feels to be where you are. You can start to bring your awareness back into the space. And slowly, when you’re ready, you can open your eyes. Kimberley: Oh, what a treat. Windsor: And that’s a little meditation, but I was really feeling it for a second. Kimberley: Yeah. I just kept smiling because it was such a treat. What a treat that I get to have my own little meditation instructor in the middle of a podcast. It’s my favorite. What a gift. Thank you so much. Windsor: You’re welcome. Kimberley: Yeah. Thank you. I think I love-- I just want to highlight a couple of things you said, which is, for those who have anxiety, meditation is not the absence of thoughts and feelings, right? You highlighted that and that was so helpful, just to acknowledge that thoughts and feelings will happen, sensations will happen, but we just become an observer to them, which I think again, not only helps us with meditation, but it helps us with response prevention, during our exposures. It helps us during panic. Such a great tool. So, I’m so grateful for you sharing that. Windsor: Cool. Well, thanks for letting me. I love to talk about it when I have the chance. Kimberley: Yeah. Okay. So, I want to ask one final question, which is, what do you really want people to know? If there’s something we’ve missed today or if you want to drive home the main point, what is your main message that you’re wanting people to take away from today’s podcast? Windsor: I guess what I really want people to know about meditation is that you don’t have to be a certain type of person to do this. You don’t need to be a specific personality type or have certain interests to make meditation work for you. You can just be yourself and come as you are and treat this practice as a gift that you’re giving yourself, that you deserve to take part in because it offers such deep rest and relaxation. That meditation can be a part of a modern, busy lifestyle. You don’t have to be common Zen all the time to do it. I think that meditation is for everybody. Kimberley: I love that. I always remember, I think I could be killing this here, but the Dalai Lama says, and this always gets me laughing because he always says, if you don’t have time for meditation, you are the one who needs to meditate the most. Windsor: Yeah. I love that one. Kimberley: I killed the way that he said it, but for me, so often I’m like, “Oh, I don’t have time. Oh, I didn’t get time today.” And he really keeps nagging me in my mind in terms of knowing the more busy you are, the more you may want to prioritize this. Of course, like you said, that happens and priorities happen. But for me, that was the main message I had to keep reminding myself when it came to meditation. So, I loved that. Windsor: Yeah. Kimberley: Well, thank you so much. This is just delightful. Really it is. It has brought such joy to me today because like I said, it feels full circle to be coming back and talking more about meditation and doing more of that here. Where can people get a hold of you and hear about your work? Windsor: So, I have my Instagram, @windsor.flynn, and that’s my OCD one. I talk a little bit about meditation on there, but I know that not everyone is necessarily ready for that. So, I do have my other Instagram, @windsormeditates. And that’s when I focus a little bit more on the meditation. And if you’re interested in taking any of my group courses or private meditation sessions, you can just go to my website, windsorflynn.com. All very easy, just search my name on the internet, and then you’ll find some links for those. Kimberley: And we’ll have all the links in the show notes as well. So, if people are listening on, they should be able to connect to that. So, amazing. I’m so-- pardon? Windsor: I was just going to say thank you so much for having me. I’m a big fan of yours and I love the work that you’re doing and I feel so honored that I get to be on your podcast. Kimberley: No, I feel likewise. I love what you’re doing. There’s so many things I wish I could focus on. And I love when somebody like you will come along and they focus on that one thing. It just makes me really happy because I just love when people are finding little areas, particularly in the OCD and mental health space where it’s like, we need these sources. So, I’m so happy that you’re doing that work. Thank you. Windsor: Cool. Thank you so much. Kimberley: My pleasure. And like I said, go follow Windsor. She’s amazing, and I’m just honored to have you here. Windsor: Thank you. ----- Okay. So, before we finish up, thank you so much for being here and staying till the end. Before we finish, I want to share a review of the week. This one is from Cynthia Saffel and she said: “I’m so excited to share these podcasts with my clients.” She gave it a five-star review and said, “I first was introduced to Kimberley’s clear and compassionate teaching style when I took the ERP school course for therapists.” For those of you who don’t know, we have a CEU approved course called ERP School, where you can learn how to treat OCD using ERP. And she went on to say, “In the past 3 weeks since taking the course I recommended both the course and podcasts to my clients.” Thank you so much, Cynthia, for your review. And for everyone who leaves a review, it is the best gift you can give me in return for these free resources. So, if you have the time, please do go over and leave a review and have a wonderful day. It is a beautiful day to do hard things. Have a wonderful day, everybody.

SUMMARY:  Today, I wanted to dedicate an entire episode to the five things that I learned in 2021. I have found 2021 to be one of the harder years, but probably the most transformational for me, and that is one of the things I’ll talk about here very, very soon. The 5 Things I learned this Year: Recovery goes smoother when you slow down and act intentionally Life is not supposed to be easy It is my responsibility to manage my mind Catch your thought errors I am not for everyone Links To Things I Talk About: Changed our name on Instagram Lots of exciting information on cbtschool.com 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 216. Hello, my friends. Happy 2022! Oh my goodness, it is crazy to say that. I’m excited for 2022, to be honest. I’ve had enough with 2021, I’m not going to lie. And I’m guessing that you are in the same boat. I’m grateful for 2021. Absolutely, I’m not going to lie, but I’m really happy to be here in 2022. Today, I wanted to dedicate an entire episode to the things that I learned in 2021. I have found 2021 to be one of the harder years, but probably the most transformational for me, and that is one of the things I’ll talk about here very, very soon. Before we do that, you may notice that the show looks a little different. We have new podcast cover art. If you follow me on Instagram, there’s a ton of different visual and aesthetic changes there as well, as well as that we have changed the name to Your Anxiety Toolkit instead of being Kimberley Quinlan. I will explain a little bit about why I’ve made these changes here in a very little moment. Before we get into the good stuff of the show, the bulk of the show, I want to give you the very best stuff, which is the “I did a hard thing” segment. So here we go. For those of you who are new, every week, people submit their “I did a hard thing” and we talk about it, and we share it and we celebrate the big and the small and the medium wins. This one is from Kboil, and it says: “I went to work for the first time in five weeks after a horrendous meltdown where I wanted to take my own life. I am still struggling daily with my anxiety and panic attacks, but I am doing it. XO.” This is the work, you guys, that may be triggering for some people. But the truth is we have to talk about how impactful our mental illnesses can be and how important mental health is, because if we don’t take out care of our mental health, it can get to the place where people are feeling suicidal. Let me also reframe that. Sometimes we get to those really difficult places and dark places. Not because you’re not taking care of yourself, but for multiple reasons, daily stresses, genetics, medical struggles, grief, trauma, high levels of anxiety. Kboil is really bringing the most important piece of mental health discussions, which is, when we’re really, really struggling, number one, it’s important to celebrate your wins, and number two, nothing is off-limits. We must be willing to talk about these really difficult topics. Thank you, Kboil. I am just so honored that you shared this and so excited that you’re taking baby steps, and I really wish you well. I know it says you’re still struggling, so I’m sending you every single ounce of my compassion and love to you. Ugh, it’s so good. My heart just swells for you all when you write in those “I did a hard thing’s.” Okay. Let’s go over to the five things I learned in 2021. The first one is probably the most important, and it does explain why I’ve made certain changes in the way that I run my business, the way that I show up on social media and here on the podcast, and why I really want to make some changes in 2022. Be very intentional. First of all, this is proof that people can change their mind. It’s okay to change your mind. Actually, that’s probably the sixth thing I learned. Number one is, it’s okay to change your mind. But really the number one was, it’s important to act intentional. I did a whole episode on whacking things together, how it’s okay to whack things together. I did that because I found myself becoming very perfectionistic. I am still a massive fan of the whack-it-together model, which is ultimately to practice not being perfect and just getting things done. But what I think I did is I went a little too far in the whack-it-together model and I wasn’t being as intentional. I was doing too much and not doing a great job of the things I was doing. I mean, it was still great and I was still helping people and I was still showing up and I’m so proud of what I did in 2021. But what I really learned is sometimes when you get into moving too fast and pushing too fast and too hard that you lose the intentionality. And when you lose the intentionality, you often lose the real lesson and the growth. If you’re in recovery for anxiety or an OCD-related disorder or an eating disorder, or a body- focused repetitive behavior, if you’re rushing through and pushing through and wrestling with things instead of slowing down and being really intentional in your practices, chances are, you’re going to miss a lot of opportunity for real growth and real recovery. So slow down and be very intentional. Some question you may ask is: What is it that I’m trying to achieve here? For me, often I’m like, because I’m trying to reach a certain goal or so forth, it’s like, well, is this rushing? Is this behavior actually moving the needle forward? If it comes to recovery, particularly if you’re having anxiety, I’m going to encourage you to ask: What am I trying to achieve here? Am I trying to get away from anxiety? Or am I trying to be with my anxiety? Because if you’re intentional and you’re trying to be with your anxiety, your recovery will benefit. Now, how does this apply to me and you guys and us together is, I really don’t want to be as much on social media anymore. One of the things I really learned this year is that it’s not good for my mental health when I push it like I was, and I found that I was showing up on social media. Even here on the podcast, I’m not afraid to admit, I would sometimes sit down and just throw myself into it instead of actually stopping and doing what I originally did, which is I used to, and I used to do this all the time, but I think I fell out of the practice, which was to stop, and before I did anything, get really clear on like, who am I speaking to? What do they need to hear? How can I show up and serve them in a way that also serves me? Am I just showing up here to say that I showed up and recorded an episode so I can say that I did a weekly episode? That’s not how I want to be anymore. I really want to move towards being intentional and engaging in behaviors that actually push the needle forward and that are healthy for me. I’ve moved Instagram from Kimberley Quinlan to Your Anxiety Toolkit because for some reason, every time I got onto Instagram, I felt like it was about me, even though I know it’s not. And I don’t want it to be about me. I want it to be about mental health and anxiety and tools to help you. So, that’s how it’s going to shift. We’ve got a ton of amazing guests happening, which I’ve already pre-recorded. And then after that, I think I may even take a little break from having guests and just practice sitting down with you and really talking about the important stuff I want you to know. Like this stuff that sits on my heart, that I really want you guys to know. So, that’s number one, is become a little more intentional if you can. Don’t become perfectionistic, but move towards being intentional. Life is not supposed to be easy. This is a huge one that I learned early in 2021. I was learning from a public speaker, and she constantly says, “Life is 50/50.” And that used to bug me so bad. It used to really make me angry because I’d be like, “No, life is not 50/50. It’s like 80/20. It’s like 80% good and 20% bad.” Until I was like, “Wait, if I’m really honest with myself, it is 50/50.” I think a lot of the suffering that I was experiencing, and I’m guessing a lot of the suffering that you were experiencing is trying to get it to be 80/20 or 90/10, because life is not supposed to be easy. Life happens. Life is hard. Bad things happen to good people, and that was a big lesson to me. A friend of mine was going through a really hard time. I kept thinking, this is crazy. Why is this bad stuff happening to good people? Until I was like, that’s an era in my thinking. When did I learn that bad things shouldn’t happen to good people? Because bad things do happen to good people, and it’s not their fault. Sometimes when we can give ourselves permission to drop the expectation of the 80/20 or the 100% or the 90/10 and just let everything be 50/50, it’s so much easier. Even as I parent my children, I think I was parenting them with this expectation that I’m supposed to be really, really good at it. But when I accepted that things will be 50/50, they’re not going to like when I ask them to pick up their room. They’re not going to like when I serve them vegetables that they don’t like to eat, and I can’t be disappointed when they’re disappointed about the vegetables I’ve served them because life is 50/50. One of the best lessons I can give them is for them not to expect too much either. I’m not saying drop your standards and accept terribleness at all. What I’m saying is, do the best you can. Go for your dreams. Love your life. But still come back to the fact that you still have to brush your teeth and we break things and we spill things and we have to pay taxes and we are exhausted at the end of the day after having a great day at work. You might have some negative parts of it too. There’s pros and cons to everything. So, that was really powerful for me, is life is not supposed to be easy. I’ve talked about this before. I think it was in the summer of 2019, where I would catch myself throwing mental tantrums in my head like, “It’s not fair. It shouldn’t be this hard.” And I’m like, “That is exactly the problem. Those mental tantrums that I have in my brain.” The other one, let me add, is I actually had a whole therapy session about this, which was about this entitlement that I caught in myself of like, “This isn’t fair. Things should be easier. Things should be going easier or they shouldn’t be so hard.” And this real entitlement that came with that, and even though we use the word “entitlement,” I’m not using that as a criticism towards myself. It’s just naming it what it was. I felt this entitlement inside me of like, “No, things should be good. I should succeed at everything I try.” And that’s totally not true. It is my responsibility to manage my mind. This one really hit me in September. I actually think I read something online that really hit me with this. I’m writing this down as I talk to you just so I make sure I get it in for you in the show notes. Often, I talk to my patients and clients that you can’t control your thoughts and you can’t control your feelings, but you can control your reaction to those thoughts and feelings. And when you do that, you may find that your thoughts and feelings start to change. It’s a very basic concept of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is a helpful modality of therapy for many, many, many different mental illnesses. But when I talk about managing my mind is being, again, very intentional about the way I respond to problems and stresses in my mind. I’m not saying that you can control your intrusive thoughts, but I’m going to say it is my job to manage when anxiety shows up. It is my job to manage when thoughts and strong emotions hit me and make me want to lash out or project. A lot of my patients have reported this. They’ll come to session and they’ll say, “You will not believe my husband. He just won’t do A, B, and C, and he knows it makes me crazy. He knows it makes me anxious. So why is he doing it? If he loved me, he wouldn’t do this.” And I have to keep gently reminding them, “It’s your responsibility to manage your emotions. It’s not their job.” We talked about this in one of the last episodes of the year in 2021, which is setting boundaries, you are responsible. You’re in your lane to manage your mind and your emotions. It’s not anybody else’s. I think what was really hard about this is when I heard this, I used to take offense and I’d be like, “Oh my God, that’s just so mean. What about the people who are really, really, really suffering?” or “Wow, that’s so abrupt and dismissive.” Until I really sat with it. I actually journaled a lot on this of like, what shows up for me when someone talks about the word “responsibility”? I wrote about this a lot in the self-compassion workbook for OCD – compassionate responsibility. And I think the word “responsibility” really triggers us into thinking that if we’re taking responsibility for ourselves, we don’t deserve other people’s support. And that’s not true. But when I really sat on “It’s my job to manage my mind,” everything changed. I think that’s why I came to the place where I was like, “Okay, I’m going to be way more intentional because it is my job. It’s my job to really slowly and in baby steps, work at changing how I react and having really hard conversations with myself on like, ‘Wow, you fully reacted in a little bit of a crazy way there.’” What was going on for you? What do you need to change? How do you need to show up for yourself different? How can you be intentional around this? Because it’s your job. I’m saying that to myself, “Kimberley, it’s your job. It’s your responsibility.” It’s the most compassionate act you can do, is to practice managing your mind. Catch your thought errors. Again, these all tie beautifully in together because once I took responsibility for really managing my mind and really owning what was showing up for me, it was then my job to catch the thought errors. Again, I want to be really clear here. I’m not saying that you can control your intrusive thoughts. Absolutely not. But what I’m speaking about more, and I’m actually going to do a whole episode on this in just a couple of weeks, is catching thoughts like, “I’m going to screw this up. That was the worst. I am a failure. I am freaking out.” These are all often not accurate statements, So I’m talking about the way in which we frame and perceive things, not your intrusive thoughts. I want to be really, really certain. We’re not in the business of correcting intrusive thoughts of anxiety. When it comes to depressive thoughts or very negative thoughts or catastrophic thoughts, or very black and white thoughts, we can be very intentional and be like, “Wait a second, I catch myself on this all the time. I’ll be like, my husband often comes home in the end of the day and says, ‘How was your day?’ And I’ll often make these sweeping statements like, ‘Oh, it was a really hard day.’ Even if that’s true, how does it benefit me? Was it 100% true? Because what’s probably 100% true is, oh, there are a couple of really, really difficult times that took me some time to come down from. But there were also some really beautiful moments.” That’s the truth. It takes more effort to say that and you have to be more intentional to say that. But if we say, “It was a really hard day,” our brain is going to pick up on that and it’s going to start to feel overwhelmed and heavy. I am not for everybody (and that’s okay). I’m going to leave you with this one because this one was the best. That is the lesson I took away – I’m not for everybody. I guess what we could say in parentheses is, “and that’s okay.” I actually was on a podcast this week with Bryan Piatt, an amazing OCD advocate. He had asked me this question and I was reflecting on it the other day, which is, I think that in my many years of being on the planet earth and being in my human body, I thought that if I was just kind, there’s really no reason anyone could not like me. If I was just kind to everybody and I did my best and I kept out of drama, everybody should like me. There can’t be much to hate. I think I banked on this as a way of avoiding conflict and as a way of getting people to approve of me. I learned last year that even when I’m kind, even when I show up in the best version of myself and I do nothing, but show up with loving kindness in my heart, I’m still not going to be for everybody. Do you want to know how crazy that made me when I realized that? In 2021, a lot of you may know, but I was very seriously online bullied and shamed and trolled. There is this one particular person who really trolls a lot of mental health accounts, and I seem to be one that they loved to really bully and shame. I kept crying and going home to my husband and saying, “But why am I so kind?” I had to realize it’s that same kind of concept of like, good things should happen to good people and bad things should happen to bad people, until I was like, “Oh, that’s not true.” Life is 50/50, and you’re never going to be for everybody. So, I’m going to offer to you the same thing. I’m not for everyone. You’re not for everyone. Try to get a good 10 people in your life on your side and the other billion gazillion people, you don’t need to please them. Just be a little intentional there. And I’m too, I’m doubling down now in really just being intentional on who matters and whose opinion does matter and everyone else can take me or leave me. I hope that those five things were helpful to you. Maybe they sparked some curiosity for you and you may or may not agree with some of those. The good thing to remember here is, these are the things I learned, but they might not be exactly what you needed to hear today. And that’s totally okay. Sometimes we need to hear things at a certain time. At other times, they’re not for you at that particular time in your life. And that is okay. So, there are the things I learned this year, in 2021. I’m so excited about this year because I have those amazing lessons that I learned. I’m going to be much more intentional about the podcast and I’m going to try to use the podcast to be a little more personal, where people in my podcast are more my insider group compared to social media because again, I want to be really intentional and healthy around social media. Before we finish, I want to do the review of the week. Please, please, please, please. If you can do me one gift, it would be to leave a review for the podcast. This one is from Kanji96 and they said: “Thank you, Kimberley. This podcast is very helpful for me, especially when I’m going through hard times. Right now happens to be one of those hard times. Here I am back listening to Kimberley. Thank you.” I’m so grateful, Kanji, for that you support me. Thank you so, so much. I’m going to leave you all with a quote that Kanji almost used and that I always use, which is, it is a beautiful day to do hard things. Let’s do 2022 together. I’m so incredibly thrilled to be walking on this path with you. I know that your time is valuable. I appreciate you coming and spending your time with me, and I’ll see you next week.

In This Episode: How to identify what your role is in a relationship How to manage a mental illness and set boundaries How boundaries are needed when you are in recovery How to set boundaries with a loved one during the holiday season. 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 215. Welcome back, everybody. It is the final episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit for the year 2021. I will not be putting out a podcast next week because it falls right on the holidays, and I really wanted to make sure I give you all time to be with your family instead of listening to my voice. If you are in the holiday season and you want to listen to my voice, there are so many, in fact, there are 214 episodes. You can go back and listen to. I just want to be with my family, and I want you to be with the people you love. Speaking of people you love, today we’re talking about setting boundaries with loved ones or managing our relationship during the holidays. However, I did a whole episode about this last week. You can go back. It’s episode 214, where we talk about holiday anxiety. We did discuss some of this there as well. So, you can go back and listen there. But for right now, I want us to talk about managing relationships, specifically during the holidays, but this episode can be applied to any old day of the week. Now, before we get started, we always do the “I did a hard thing.” This one is from Rachel. We do an “I did a hard thing” to motivate you, to remind you that there are more people out there going through what you’re going through. You’re not alone. Rachel shared with us today: “I have somatic OCD.” For those of you who don’t know what that means, it means that you have OCD about specific sensations that show up in your body. You sometimes feel like you can’t stop noticing them or you’re afraid you will never stop noticing them. Sometimes you’re afraid that the feeling will never go away and it can feel really disorienting. So, Rachel says: “I have somatic OCD, and I always need to distract myself not to notice them. I’ve been able to drive without the radio or calling anyone and it feels so good.” Rachel, this is so good. You’re doing what we talk about in ERP School. ERP School is our online course that teaches how to expose ourselves to fears, specifically obsessions for people with OCD, health anxiety, and these types of OCD, like somatic OCD, on how to practice facing our fear. In this case, it was her driving, that without using safety behavior or compulsions. So, in this case, the compulsion would be to have the radio on or calling someone to distract her on her somatic obsession or her sensation. So, Rachel, amazing job, you’re doing the work. You’re doing the exposure and the response prevention. One thing I want to mention to everybody, if you have OCD or an anxiety disorder, is we must do both. We must face our fears and not do the safety behaviors to reduce or remove that discomfort that we feel when we face our fear. So, you’ve explained this perfectly. Congratulations. I am so proud of you. Love getting the “I did a hard thing’s” from you guys. And so, just so thrilled to get that message from you. All right, let’s go over to the episode. It’s the holidays. You’re anticipating the gifts and the food and the time and the travel and all the things, but what’s worse than that is anticipation of the interactions that you’re going to have with certain family members. Now, if you’re listening to this and it’s not the holidays, it’s the same. You’re anticipating going to work, but you’re dreading the interactions. You’re dreading how messy things get. You’re going to school, and you’re dreading how messy things get with the people you have in your life – your students, your classmates, your teacher, your friends, whoever it may be. I want you to think about your responsibilities. And I talk a lot with my patients and clients about responsibility because it’s a really important part of recovery. When we think about the holidays, we think about a certain event that’s coming up. I’ll often explain to my patients that really all you need to do is you need to focus on your lane. So, I’ve talked about this before on the podcast, but I want you to imagine you’re driving on the highway, you’re in your car, and the only thing you’re responsible for is to not run into other people in their lane and to stay in your lane and to go at a pace that’s right for you and a speed that’s right for you and in a car that’s right for you. Now, that metaphor is exactly how you’re going to get through the holidays or get through this event that you’ve got coming up. Your job is to take responsibility for you and your lane. Now, sometimes people in the lane next to us come on over into our lane and they want to tell us how to act, and they want to tell us what to do, and they want to impose on you their beliefs. Now, our job is to remind them and set boundaries that that’s not your lane, that’s their lane. And their job is to stay in their lane. And our job is to stay in our lane. Now, in addition, we have to be careful that we are not popping on over into their lane and telling them how they should be, and telling them how they should act, and trying to take responsibility for their feelings, and trying to prevent them from judging you because that’s their lane. We talked about this in the last episode. Go back and listen to that. But that’s not your job either. It’s not your job to get their approval because that’s their responsibility. How they feel is their responsibility. We can’t control that. And so, first, before we even talk about setting boundaries, we have to be really clear on what’s in your lane. So, an example for me is, as I go into the holidays, I am going to be really aware of what is my responsibility, how do I want to show up? And then it’s my responsibility to show up in my lane doing so. But it’s also important to catch when I’m-- often we do this. It’s like, “Well, I’m going to do X, Y, and Z because I really want A, B and C to like me.” But that’s your lane. It’s not your responsibility. It’s not your job to get them to approve of you because we don’t have any control of that. And as we talked about last week, their judgment of us is their responsibility. It’s a reflection of them. It’s not a reflection of us. So, we have to be really careful of really getting clear on how we want to show up and only trying to control us, because we can’t control our family members. They’re going to do what they do. They’re going to act out. They’re going to be up in your lane. From there, we can set a boundary to protect ourselves from them coming into your lane. So, when we set boundaries, we usually set boundaries when somebody is imposing their stuff onto us. Imagine if someone came into your house and walked in with their shoes on and put dirt all over the carpet, you might say, “Excuse me, please would you take your shoes off?” There’s like a boundary violation. If they come into my house and they start smoking cigarettes, no disrespect or judgment on people who do smoke cigarettes, but I’m going to say, “I’m really sorry, we actually don’t smoke in this house. Can you please put your cigarette out and go out to the back?” And so, that would be me setting a boundary. Now, a lot of you brought in and you asked questions about this. Last week we addressed a lot of the questions. So, an example, somebody said, “How can I communicate with my family about my OCD and keep my boundaries?” So, what you might do is first ask yourself. If I was going to communicate about my OCD or my anxiety or my depression or my eating disorder or whatever you may have, panic, is ask yourself, are you communicating with it so that they change the way they act because that’s their lane? The only reason we would need to communicate about our stuff is so that we can set a boundary. Let’s say a really big one that I have had to practice is when family members comment about weight. I had a couple of family members in my childhood who every Christmas would, “Have Merry Christmas, Kimberley, your weight is blank. You’re up a bit. You’re down a bit. You’re bigger, you’re smaller, whatever.” And it was so incredibly painful and so incredibly unhealthy for me. And so, the boundary here would be to say, “I would really prefer that you don’t comment on my way. And if you do, I’m going to remove myself from this interaction.” So, that’s a boundary and it’s respectful and it’s compassionate, and I’m not doing it to harm them or discipline them or pay them back. I’m doing it because it’s a boundary violation, and it’s in my lane. When I’m in my lane, I want to have a really positive idea about my food and my body. If a family member is telling you how you should act, you might say to them, “Thank you so much for your thoughts. I am going to choose to do it this way. And I would really appreciate if you didn’t comment.  if you’re unable to hold that boundary, I’m going to have to leave,” or you can say whatever you want. You can just set the limit. Sometimes you don’t even need to tell them your boundary. You might just keep it to yourself. Like, “Oh, if they’re going--” if a family member says, “I’m so OCD about stuffing,” or whatever they say, “I’m so OCD about my cooking,” you might just not even need to express the boundary with them. You might gently just get yourself up and walk away. That’s a boundary. Sometimes we don’t have to verbally express boundaries because we can just remove ourselves from the situation and stay in our lane. Somebody said, “How to say no to things?” So, you’ve decided you don’t want to do something. We talked about this last week in Episode 214. You’ve decided you don’t want to do something. And so, you say to them, “I’m going to bring baked goods. I’m not going to bake them myself. I will buy them at the bakery. No, I’m not going to hand bake them.” Or you might say, “No, I’m not going to go to that Christmas party,” or “No, I am not going to buy gifts this year.” Okay? Now, that’s you holding your own boundary. Then your job, and again, this is why I shared about the lanes, is your job is to let them have their feelings about it. They’re allowed to have their feelings. They’re even allowed to act out. If they act out and they say something unkind, you may set a boundary with them. But we can’t hold everybody to our standards. Some people are going to act out. They may not have the skills you have. They may be triggered. They may have expectations of you. And that’s okay. They’re allowed to have expectations, but it doesn’t mean you have to do it. You may choose to follow their expectations. We talked about that again last week. But that’s your decision. You have to be responsible for you and saying yes to what matters to you and saying no to what doesn’t matter to you. Any time you notice resent, show up, that’s usually because you violated your own boundary. You did something you didn’t want to do and you should have said no to. It’s okay. I’m going to keep saying this to you guys. It’s okay to disappoint people. We will disappoint them. It’s either they get disappointed, or you do the thing they want you to do, and then you’re disappointed. And you have to choose. It’s your responsibility to choose. And we do this responsibility work compassionately. I speak a lot in my book, The Self-Compassion Workbook for OCD, about compassionate responsibility. That’s saying: “I am responsible for me,” but not in a disciplinarian, like you’re responsible for yourself, you’re alone, you’re on your own kind of way. It’s a compassionate act of, “Yes, I get to take responsibility for myself. I get to take care of myself. I get to say no, I get to say yes. I get to make those choices and I’ll do them kindly.” Somebody asked a question about managing irritability. This is a great one, because our family members and our friends and our loved ones and the people at our Christmas party or our Hanukkah party, our Kwanzaa, they may irritate us. Yeah, it’s okay to feel irritated by our family members. My husband and I always-- we learned this maybe five years ago. We get caught up in it. I’ll be like, “Why are you acting that way?” And he’ll say gently to me, “Kimberley, I’m allowed to feel this way.” And I’m like, “Oh crap, you’re right. I keep forgetting that you’re allowed to feel what you want to feel.” Or he’ll be upset and he’ll be like, “What’s wrong? Why are you being this way?” And I’ll be like, “I’m allowed to feel this way.” And he’s like, “Oh crap, you’re right.” You’re allowed to be irritable. You’re not allowed to be unkind. I mean, you are, but you have responsibility, There’s consequences. But ideally, let yourself be irritable. Be compassionate with your irritability. Like say, “Yeah, it makes complete sense that I’m irritable. This is hard. It makes complete sense that I’m annoyed. They’ve said something that annoyed me.” Again, they’re allowed to say annoying things. We get to remove ourselves if it doesn’t feel right or we get to express ourselves.” That really hurt my feelings. That made me upset.” This is why you’re allowed to share. Let’s see. Someone said dealing with a toxic parent. Well, it depends. My answer to that is it depends on whether you’re a minor or an adult. If you’re a minor, it’s hard to remove yourself from a toxic parent. They are your guardian. You’re legally under their care. But you can remove yourself from them physically in terms of going to another room. You can try and share with them. “That was really painful for me to hear that. If you do that again, I’m going to leave the room.” Or you get to make your own boundaries. They may be physical boundaries where you leave. They may be emotional boundaries where you don’t go to them and you don’t share with them if they can’t hold space for you compassionately and respectfully. If you’re an adult, you can choose to set as many boundaries as hard or as strong, as light as you need. Some people set boundaries with their family members. Like, “You can’t come here without announcing yourself. You must let us know first. You can’t say those things about me or I’m going to leave.” Or you may, again, you don’t even have to say them out loud. If they’re really toxic, you may say to them, “I’m not going to see you anymore if you keep acting like this towards me and my family. I can no longer put myself through that.” You get permission. We don’t get to choose our family, but you don’t have to see them either if they’re really unhealthy for you. You may want to get some therapy around it and have the help of a clinician to help you navigate what’s a right boundary for you. Everybody’s different. Someone said, “I get really bad depression during the holidays and people have expectations for me to be happy.” Well, that’s their lane. You don’t have to act or be any way. Be kind, be compassionate, but do the best you can. It’s your lane. You got to just do the best you can with what you have. So, again, I think that’s a really big part of this, is really take care of you because that’s your job. One thing actually, before we finish up, let me mention, it’s no one else’s job to make us feel better either. I know a lot of this today is going to feel like a lot of hard truths, but I promise you, there is so much liberation that comes from this. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but it’s still a really, really good pill. It’s a good pill. It’s a helpful pill. And so, it’s not other people’s job to make us joyful on Christmas either. That’s our job. I’ll tell you a story, when I was really a young adult, I think it was quite shocking to me that when you’re a kid, everyone throws you a big party. And when you’re an adult, it’s not as big of a deal. And I used to get really offended that people didn’t throw me a massive party until I was like, “Wait, it’s really not their job.” And so, I started doing it for myself, and I have no shame about it. If I know I want to feel special on my birthday, I always organize something really special for myself. For the last three years, except for the year of COVID, I always rent-- you guys, probably know this. I rent an RV and I invite my three best girlfriends and I have a party for myself, and I’m not ashamed about it. I’m happy to celebrate myself. A If you are feeling like other people’s job is to bring you joy on Christmas, I would say, no, bring yourself joy. Buy yourself a gift. Make your special meal you want to have. Treat yourself and shower yourself with the joy that you want to feel. That’s a huge liberation, a huge freedom. Such a gift. Okay. So, that’s it. That’s how you set boundaries. You get to set them. It’s your lane. You get to decide. But other people are allowed to have their feelings about it. And that’s okay. That doesn’t mean you’re bad. They can even tell you you’re bad, and that doesn’t mean you’re bad. They can say, “I don’t like you,” and you don’t think you’re doing the right thing and they get to have their opinion, it doesn’t make it a fact. This is hard work. I am not going to lie, I am still working on this. I’m still learning from this. I still have to practice it every single day. So, be gentle and remind yourself, this is a journey. This is not a destination that you’re like, “Yay, I’m great with boundaries.” It will be something you’ll have to keep practicing. But the holidays are the perfect time to practice them. It’s so important. My loves, you probably have lots of questions about this. Do go over to social media. I’ll leave links in the bio. If you want to send me questions, I do a live Q and A every second and fourth Monday of the month at 12 o’clock Pacific Standard Time. So, I’m happy to answer your questions there. Have a beautiful day. Happy 2021. I will be seeing you in 2022, holy macaroni, but I can’t wait. I’m actually really pumped about Your Anxiety Toolkit next year. I’m going to put a ton more effort into it. That’s where I want my attention to be next year. So, sending you love. Have a wonderful day, and I’ll talk to you soon. Oh no, wait. Before we finish up, what was I thinking? It is time for the review of the week. This is from IsaacRThorne, and they said: “Love this show and I look forward to it every Friday.” Sorry, Isaac, I nearly missed you here. “No matter what you struggle with, there’s more than one episode where your mouth will drop open, your eyes will grow wide, and you’ll shout: “That’s totally me!” Isaac, this is the best review ever. It just brings me so much joy. “Your mouth will drop open, your eyes will grow wide, and you’ll shout, “That’s totally me!” So, I hope this episode was that for you. Thank you so much for your wonderful review. Please, if you don’t want to give me any gift of the world, it would be to leave me a review on the iTunes app. Thank you so much for your reviews. They bring me joy, but they also help us reach more people. So, thank you, thank you, thank you so much. We are going to give a free pair of Beats headphones to one lucky reviewer when we hit a thousand reviews. We’re on our way. Please go and leave a review. It would be the best, best, best gift you could give me. Have a wonderful day, everybody. And now I officially say, have a wonderful day and I will see you in the New Year.

SUMMARY: I had so many people asking questions about how to manage holiday anxiety and stress that I decided to do an entire podcast on this.  This is part 1 of a 2-part podcast Q&A. In This Episode: Q&A from this episode include How do I enjoy the holidays? How do I let go of the last Christmas? How do I survive the Holiday blues? How do I survive the holidays? How do I manage social anxiety over the holidays? How do I manage holiday travel anxiety? How to manage the financial stress of the holidays? Mental Health Holiday gift guide? How do I let go of my holiday expectations? 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 214. Welcome back, everybody. We are approaching the holiday season. In fact, some of you may already be in the holiday season. And if that is so, I wish you nothing but joy and peace and fulfillment. I really do. I hope you have moments of elated joy. Now, while that is my wish and my intention for you, I also know that the holidays can be pretty dang hard. It is anxiety-provoking for the best of people, let alone if you’re already struggling with a mental illness or an anxiety disorder, or you’re struggling with anything really. It can be so incredibly difficult. So, what I wanted to do is answer some of your questions. So, what I did is I went on to Instagram and I asked my community: What are your questions? What do you need help with over the holidays? And they’ve given me a bunch of things to talk about, and I’m going to go through each and every one of them. Now, this is actually a two-part podcast. This week I’m answering general questions about managing anxiety throughout the holiday season, or just general stresses. And next week, we’re talking about setting boundaries during the holidays with family and loved ones. Setting boundaries. However, the truth is we don’t even need to make this specific to the holidays. This is for everybody at any time. So, if you’re listening to this and it’s not the holidays, it’d be probably helpful to listen to it at any point in time. Before we do that, I wanted to share with you the “I did a hard thing.” The “I did a hard thing” segment is where people write in and they share what hard things that they have been doing. This is a really important part of the podcast. If you’re new, or if you’re being with us for a while, I really want to stress the purpose of this podcast is to inspire you, is to help you feel like you’re on the right track, that you’re not alarmed, that people are doing the hard thing and I want you to know how they’re doing the hard thing. So, I’m going to share, this one is from Marilee and she says: “I’m facing the fear right now. We moved two weeks ago. Today when I was getting dressed and picked up my socks that were laying on the floor in the living room, a silverfish crawled out from where it was laying. I hate them. It’s probably a phobia. I compulsively checked and cleaned in the previous place to get rid of them. I feel them all over my body.” As you’re listening folks, you’re probably feeling a little itchy and scratchy, I’m sure. “I imagine them everywhere and anywhere. My hard thing is to feel these feelings. I’m going to give myself permission to feel anxious and freak out about it, to do the reasonable thing and buy lavender scented sachets and place around the house, to not compulsively clean and check to find them. I’m doing it right now. It is hard, but I’m not going to let this fear dictate how I live in my home.” Marilee, you’re literally walking the walk. This is so good. I love what you said. “I’m going to allow myself to feel the feelings. I’m going to give myself permission to feel anxious.” You’re doing the hard work, and that is the hard work. Even when I’m meeting with face-to-face clients, they often will say like, “But what do I do?” And this is exactly what you do. Somebody who’s doing it in real-time. So, yay. Congratulations, Marilee. You are doing the hard thing. Let’s get over to the questions. We’ve got a ton of them. So, let’s go through one by one. I’m going to do my best to address each and every one, but I’m guessing each of these could probably have an episode of their own. So, I’ll do my best to manage time here. 1. How do I enjoy the moment? Some of my thoughts may get somewhat repetitive, but that’s on purpose. So, here is what I’m going to encourage you to do: Going into the holidays, we want to enjoy it. Even the Christmas paper and the stockings, depending on what holiday you celebrate, and we want to be inclusive and uncover all of them, all of them are centered around community and joy and celebration. I want to give you permission to not have that expectation, to not try to make this holiday Instagramable. I know that’s not a word, but you know what I mean. So, when you drop the expectation that you’re going to enjoy it, then you can start to be curious about what’s actually happening and be present about what’s actually happening. And I want you to notice little things. This isn’t a real example. Every year, I make the same mistake and I’m promising myself I’m not going to do this this time – I know that putting up all the Christmas stuff is so fun. We turn the music on, the kids get all of the decorations out. In my mind, it’s such a special moment, but I’m rushing the whole time. I remember last year at the end of the holiday, I actually caught myself rushing and reminded myself, just get in touch with your senses. Of all the decorations, which one do you enjoy the most? Simple. Which texture do you enjoy the most? Which color? Which shape? Do any of them bring back memories? And just get really basic and simple. Don’t worry about the overwhelming joy and the satisfaction of it ending perfectly, but just get in touch with the small things. For me, it’s like, I hate wrapping presents, but I love giving presents, and I’m going to try to slow down and just really focus on the giving. And if I happen to receive a present, I’m going to really focus on the receiving. The receiving of the present. Just get in touch with the simpler things and put aside this massive goal to make this overly joyous. So, that’s that. 2. How do I let go of last Christmas? Last Christmas I had COVID, and that’s when my anxiety started. So, I’m going to generalize that often when we go into the holidays, we may actually have memories of events that weren’t so great in the past. Maybe you had a huge family fight last year, or in this case, you had COVID last year, or you were lonely and alone last year. A lot of us are probably grieving with what’s going on, and I’m going to give you permission to just grieve. Your question said, how do I let go of it? And I’m going to basically say, I think it’s important to check in on what letting go will look like. Letting go isn’t going to mean you have any less grief. We’re not going to get rid of the uncomfortable feelings. But what you might do is you might make space for that grief, and then you might put your attention on how you want this moment to be. Only this moment. Don’t even worry about the future and the holiday, but just focus on right now. Where am I? How am I? Am I okay? What’s going on? Again, go back to the sense and the smells and the shapes. And allow grief, validate your grief, pushing it away. It’s only gonna make it worse. So, validate it. Yeah, last year was hard. Last year was really difficult. I’m going to be super gentle with myself about that. Now, if you find you’re ruminating about it, you might want to catch yourself on that and bring yourself again, back to the present moment. That’s all we can do. 3. Surviving. Well, it’s funny because I actually like the word “surviving.” What that means is getting through one minute at a time. Just that’s sort of, you’re going back to the bare bones. This is going to be hard. We know it’s going to be hard. It’s a beautiful day to do hard things. You know I was going to say that. And I don’t mind the idea of surviving. But here is where you can make some choices. And this is important for the whole holiday, is we actually do have some choices on how we perceive the holidays. So, if we’re saying, “Okay, let’s just get through it minute by minute. But as I do it, I’m going to walk in with a real positive bias.” So, the thing to remember here is this positive bias and negative bias. Negative bias is, I’m going to look at the negative. Positive bias is, I’m going to look at the positive. You could also have a neutral bias. And so, what I want you to do is, as you go minute to minute, it’s important that you acknowledge that you have a choice on whether you say, “This sucks. This sucks. I hate it. It’s not good. I wish it was better. Why isn’t it better? This sucks. I wish it was better. It sucks. I don’t wish it was this way.” That’s really negative bias, and that is a choice. Unfortunately, I’m giggling. That is a choice we make. Now, another choice would be to go, “This is wonderful. It’s excellent. I love it.” But that might not even land either. That’s not super effective either. But what you can do is take the judgment out of it and just be aware of what is happening. Again, be aware and drop the expectations. Be gentle, and find joy in the little things. Last year, we didn’t get to see my husband’s family. We didn’t get to see my family. It was just us at home, and I thought it was going to be really terrible. But what I loved was making a big deal out of the simplest things. Like, hot chocolate, get your favorite mug, get the chocolate that you like, put the toppings on it that you like, and really savor it and watch the heat come off of it, and find joy in teeny tiny little pots of the holidays. Again, it doesn’t have to be Instagramable. It doesn’t have to be Pinterestable. And yeah, go minute to minute. 4. Winter blues. Now, this is a big one because some people do have a clinical diagnosis of seasonal depression. Now, if that’s the case, I encourage you to go and see your doctor. There are tests they can do. There are supplements you can take. There are UV lights that you can use that have some science-backed behind it that can help with the winter blues medication you can take. So, I don’t want to gloss over that as like, “Oh, you just feel sad.” No, that’s actually a clinical diagnosis and you deserve to get treatment for it. And so, definitely go and see your doctor and talk to your doctor about that. 5. Social anxiety. “I panic due to social anxiety. So, how will I manage that?” Social anxiety is, again, its own diagnosis, and it’s usually the fear of being judged. I will talk about this a little in next week’s episode, but here is the thing to remember: The truth is, people are going to judge you. They are. But that is not a reflection of you. It is a reflection of them, and it’s out of your control. If I wear fabulous purple boots to Christmas, which I am not going to, but I wish I was now that I think about it. If I wore purple boots to Christmas and a family member judged me, that’s not evidence that my purple boots are ugly. It’s evidence that they don’t like purple, and they don’t particularly like these purple boots. And that is a reflection of their views. It doesn’t make them right, it doesn’t make them valid and it doesn’t make you wrong. The best thing we can do for ourselves is give ourselves permission to allow people to judge us. And then our job is just to feel our feelings about that and be super gentle. Ouch, it hurts when people judge us. Yeah. But that’s very human. It’s a part of the human condition to not be the same as everybody else. Thank goodness. We’d all be wearing purple boots to Christmas. That wouldn’t be so fun after all. Now, when it comes to panic, we have tons of episodes on panic. I encourage you to go and listen to them and really double down on your practices there because the more you resist panic, the more panic will come. Your job is to allow it, to be kind, to send to yourself, to breathe through it. Don’t catastrophize and wait for it to pass on its own, which it will. 6. “I do not want these holidays.” It wasn’t really a question. It was a statement. It says: “Everyone is happy and serene, except me.” This is my favorite one, to be honest, this is the one that actually I think we get caught up in. Number one, there’s a lot of black and white thinking here. “Everyone is happy.” Well, that’s not true because I have a whole bunch of questions here from people who are telling me that they are not happy. “Everyone is serene.” Well, that’s not true. Most people find their mental health goes down over the holidays. That’s just the facts. So you’re not alone. Sometimes I find it really helpful to share with your friends that I find the holidays really, really hard, and they’re going to say, “Me too. This is what I find hard. What do you find hard?” And it might be different. They might find it difficult to get the shopping. You might find it difficult to manage the finances of gift-giving. They might find it difficult because they have food restrictions or an eating disorder. You might find it hard because you have anxiety and you might have anxiety about meeting people or OCD about contamination or whatever it may be, harm obsessions. It could be anything. And so, everybody’s diagnosis and everybody’s brain come with us through the holidays, which means not everybody is happy and serene. So, I want to just give you permission to not isolate yourself in your thinking and acknowledge that, no, not everybody is happy. And even if on Instagram, they have big, old happy faces. They may have just had a massive fight with their father-in-law or their sibling or somebody. You just don’t know. 7. “I have travel anxiety. How can I manage that?” Well, again, travel anxiety is no different to social anxiety or any other anxiety. I think it’s about your willingness to be uncomfortable, your ability to be compassionate and coach yourself through it. I would encourage everyone to start to do exposures to their fears ahead of time. That’s really important. We use exposure and response prevention a lot with specific fears like travel and any other fear. I have a whole course called ERP School that teaches people how to expose themselves to their fear. And so, that’s super important. That’s super, super important. So, yeah, that’s what I would encourage you to do. And give yourself tons of grace because not only are you traveling, but you’re traveling during a difficult time. The holidays are hard to travel in, not including it’s still COVID, not including we’ve had a lot of time where we haven’t seen a lot of people. So, seeing for the first time is really, really hard. Really, really hard. You haven’t had practice. You haven’t been naturally exposing yourself to it, so the anxiety is going to be higher. 8. How to get through the holidays without my therapist? Here is what I’m going to encourage you all to do. I have a patient who always jokes with her family, and her family always jokes with her. When she’s struggling, they sit down and they say, “WWKD.” WWKD is “What would Kimberley do?” or “What would Kimberley say” is sometimes the acronym, WWKS. And so, what I’m going to encourage you to do if you have a therapist and you’re unable to see that therapist is to ask yourself, what would my therapist say about this situation? What advice would they give me? What would they tell me to do? If you don’t have a therapist, you might say, “What would Kimberley have me do?” Even though I’m not your therapist, which I want to be really clear that this is a podcast, it is not therapy, but you know what I’m going to encourage people to do. I’m using mostly science-based treatment goals and tools. So, you could say, “What would the science have me do?” or “What would the general treatment look like in this setting?” And try to do that and get through it as best as you can. Again, go back to just getting through moment to moment. 9. “How to manage the financial aspect of the holidays? I don’t want to let people down.” Well, here is the thing: Whether you have $10 to spend on a family member or $100 or $1,000, it’s important to remember not to spend more than you have. The thing is, the people who love you don’t want you to go broke because of the holidays. Most people don’t want you to suffer and they definitely don’t want you to be under distress financially or emotionally. And I think it’s important that you acknowledge that. And it’s okay to let people down. If you let people down, that’s their business. It’s not your business to try and control how people feel about you and what you give. The gift of giving is exactly that – it’s about giving what you can, what’s meaningful. If all you can afford is to write a letter to them, and if they’re let down by that, again, go back to the social anxiety conversation. That is a reflection of them, it’s not a reflection of you. And if you want, you can explain to them, “Money has been hard, difficult and it’s tight time, and I really just want you to know that I put everything I have into this,” if that helps you. But again, we are not responsible for other people’s feelings. We’re not responsible for their actions. That’s their responsibility. All you can do is honor yourself and be true to what’s right for you. We’ll talk a lot about that in the next episode. 10. “I’m always so anxious that I’m not showing enough gratitude when I get a gift. I don’t want to seem like a brat.” Again, be yourself. If other people perceive you as a brat, that is a reflection of them. It’s not a reflection of you. People’s judgment of us is a reflection of them. It is not a reflection of us. If they think you’re a brat, that’s because they had expectations that you were going to act a certain way. That’s their stuff. You’ve got to stay in your lane. Now, I think the thing to remember here is you’re probably putting so much attention and energy and pressure on yourself that it’s probably feeling really inauthentic. I want you to receive the gift. I want you to thank them for the gift and then allow yourself to have anxiety about whether or not it was too much or not. Again, that’s their stuff. Try to be as true to you as you can. Ask yourself, what would I do if fear wasn’t here and try to do that? Now, if receiving gifts is so anxiety-provoking and you totally freeze, you may want to practice saying whatever feels right to you. For me, I might say, “Wow, that is so thoughtful. Thank you so much.” That’s really all you need to say. You don’t need to jump up and down and get all freaked out. Just be yourself. You may even be totally calm, and then write them a beautiful Thank You card a week later and share with them what you like about it. I try to teach my children when they write Thank You cards to just say, “Thank you so much for the t-shirt. I loved the color.” “Thank you so much for my drink bottle. It will fit perfectly in my lunch box.” “Thank you so much for this toy. I have loved playing with it.” This is just basic stuff. That’s all you need. It doesn’t have to be a full-on production. We’re getting closer here. We’re getting close. 11. “The holidays make me feel alone and lonely.” I am sure you know, I recently wrote a book called The Self-Compassion Workbook for OCD. The reason I bring that up is I’m going to emphasize, so much of the time when we’re suffering, all we need is compassion. So, you don’t need to read the workbook for this, but I’m emphasizing the reason I wrote that book is because when we are suffering, we need self-compassion. It has to be a part of the work. So, as loneliness and aloneness show up for you, really be tender to yourself. validate yourself. Acknowledge this is true for me. I feel lonely. Don’t tell yourself a story about it, though. Don’t go off into the narrative of, “This means I’m a loser and no one’s ever going to love me.” Don’t do that because that’s not a fact. There’s no evidence of that. So, I don’t want you to focus on that, but do give yourself permission to feel what you feel. How are we going? Are we doing good? We’re almost there. A couple more to go. 12. Another year of suffering, expectations not met. So, back in the past, we did a podcast on this. It’s called “It’s time for a parade.” It’s really early. It’s like number 14 or 15 or something like that. Go back and check on that, because so often we need to really lean into the present, really lean into dropping out expectations. And again, we want to be compassionate. Yes, it is another year of suffering. I cannot agree with you more. I have multiple times broken down over the last week into tears because yet again, I’m missing my family. Literally, every single member of my family I won’t get to see. And I know a lot of you have been doing this and are going through even much harder things. This has been a really rough couple of years. So, please validate yourself, acknowledge your suffering, allow yourself to grieve. Really go back to some of the tools we’ve talked about. Being present, getting really clear on the few rituals you want to do, the hot chocolate, the songs. Maybe it’s taking a walk, maybe it’s journaling, whatever it may be. I just want to take a breath and just really honor you all right now because the holidays are so hard. They’re so, so hard. 13. How to show up for myself during the craziness of the holidays? Here I’m going to give it to you. I ask you a question and I want you to answer it honestly to yourself. All of the things that you’ve planned, how many do you actually want to do? And of the things you don’t want to do, how many of the things you actually have to do? And then whatever’s left over, don’t do them. So often we add all this extra crap and we actually don’t need to do it. You’re allowed to keep it simple. You’re allowed to just make it really easy. You might say to your friends, “You know what, guys, I’m not doing presents this year. I’m only doing gift cards. Buy them online, be done.” Or you might say, “I’m not cooking/baking this year. I’m going to order them from the bakery.” Done. Make it easy. You deserve and it’s okay to drop the craziness. We don’t need the craziness. Say no to people. We’ll talk about this in next week’s episode. Say no to people. Don’t do what you don’t want to do if you don’t want to do it and it’s not highly valuable to you. Here’s the thing, and I’ll share a story. This Thanksgiving, while I’m recording just before Thanksgiving right now, there is a couple of things I don’t want to do around Thanksgiving. Now, even though I don’t want to do them, I’m choosing to do them because I think they’re really important for my children, particularly given the fact that they haven’t had a lot of social interaction over the last year and a half. So, I’m choosing to do it. Now, what I’m going to say to myself as I do it is I’m not going to go, “Oh, I don’t want to do this. Oh, I don’t want to do this.” I’m going to say, “I’m choosing to do this because...” and I’m going to answer, “because my children deserve this holiday.” And when you say, “I choose to do this, because...” it brings you into a place where you’re owning what you want to do and why you’re doing it, even if you don’t want to do it. But if it makes you crazy, don’t do it. There’s no need. 14. Gift guide for people with mental illness. If you go to cbtschool.com, we have a mental health gift guide. Go over and check it out. https://www.cbtschool.com/mental-health-gift-guide 15. Changes in the schedule. Now, this is where we use the tool of flexibility, and you have to be flexible during the holidays. Flexibility is dropping your expectations, dropping all of the goals and going with the flow. When things change, stop and ask yourself, what about this change is creating anxiety for me? Can I lean into it? Can I allow it? And go with it. Practice. Use it as an opportunity to practice the skill of flexibility. I’m not sure if I’ve done a podcast on flexibility. So, come to think of it, I will do one in the New Year. All right. You guys are so cool. I hope you have a wonderful holiday period. Before we finish the show, I want to do the review of the week. If you want to leave a review on iTunes, I would be so grateful. It would be the best Christmas gift you can give me. It’ll cost you nothing. And my wish is that if you do it, not for me, I don’t need the ego stroke, but the more reviews we get, the more people will click on it and the more people I can help with this free resource. So, here it is. The review of the week is from WalkerMom77, and they said: “Kimberley is a warm hug. While the content of this podcast is excellent and has inspired me to do further research, read books, etc., it’s Kimberley’s compassion that keeps me coming back. She is so authentic and genuine and her voice just relaxes me.” Thank you so much, WalkerMom 77. I love, love knowing that I inspire you and keep you moving forward and bring you some compassion. Well, that’s it for now. I’m going to see you next week and we can talk about boundaries with family members. I hope you have a wonderful day. Sending you so much love. Please be kind to yourself. It is a beautiful day to do hard things.