Anxiety Recovery PROCESS vs CONTENT (Episode 162)

It's your heart. Or the dizziness. Or the one thought you can't get to leave you alone. If you could just solve that specific thing, you'd finally be okay. This week we push back on that.

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The subject of your fear, the heartbeat, the health scare, the intrusive thought, the situation you're avoiding, is the content. What's actually running underneath it, the same threat response, the same doubt, the same physical symptoms no matter what story your brain attaches them to this week, is the process. Chase the content and it just moves. Solve one fear and another takes its place, because you were never fighting the fear itself. We also get into the exception clause, the "yeah, but what about" that convinces you your specific situation is somehow different from every other anxious thought you've ever had, and why treating it that way only teaches your brain the opposite of what you're trying to teach it.

None of this means the content doesn't matter. Your health matters. Your relationships matter. That's exactly why it's so easy to get pulled into trying to fix it directly instead of doing the harder, less obvious work underneath. Plus, listener updates from the community:

* a mom who kept walking with her kids through a wave of panic in the heat

* someone who worked a full shift through dizziness instead of stopping to check it

* a listener who took a long-planned trip anyway, only to get a Meniere's diagnosis right after, and found she could hold both the diagnosis and the proof that she'd handled the trip.

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The Disordered Guide to Health Anxiety is available as a paperback or on Kindle

⁠https://www.disordered.fm/the-disordered-guide-to-health-anxiety/⁠

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Struggling with worry and rumination that you feel you can't stop or control? Check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Worry and Rumination Explained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, a two hour pre-recorded workshop produced by Josh and Drew. The workshop takes a deep dive into the mechanics of worrying and ruminating, offering some helpful ways to approach the seemingly unsolvable problem of trying to solve seemingly unsolvable problems.

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