The Anxious Truth - A Panic, Anxiety, and Mental Health Podcast

Anxiety disorders and OCD are what you get when a perfectly functioning brain applies its usual problem-solving strategies to the wrong problem. Your brain is good at solving things. The trouble is it keeps trying to solve something that isn't actually the problem, and that's what keeps you stuck in the loop: trigger, fix, feel better for a while, repeat.
In this episode I want to introduce the concept of strategy mismatch. The things that seem to need fixing in anxiety and OCD (the intrusive thoughts, the physical sensations, the worries about health or relationships or moral character, the uncertainty you can't seem to resolve) are not the actual problem. The actual problem is the fear and discomfort those things produce, and the endless attempts to eliminate that discomfort are what keep the disorder running.
How do you know? Because when you escape, avoid, reassure yourself, or perform a compulsion and feel better for a little while, the problem isn't solved. You just bought temporary relief until the cycle starts again. The strategy doesn't match the problem in front of you.
I talk through what the right strategy looks like, why it's counterintuitive, what gets in the way of applying it, and why this whole framing is actually good news. You don't have to solve your heartbeat, or the opinions of others, or the unpredictability of being alive. That was never going to work anyway.
For full show notes on this episode:
https://theanxioustruth.com/351
Want to talk about this episode or interact with me, Josh Fletcher, and folks that are sharing your experience and understand it? I'm hanging out on the Disordered community app:
https://disordered.fm/community

Send in a question or comment via text.
Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated!

Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link.

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Anxiety and avoidance go hand in hand, and most people struggling with an anxiety disorder have been told that avoidance makes things worse. But there's a lot of confusion in this community about what avoidance actually means. What are you avoiding? What aren't you avoiding? And why does it feel like letting go of the scary thought is the same as ignoring the problem?
In this episode I want to clear that up. The key is understanding the difference between the content of your anxiety and the process. The content is the scary thought, the intrusive image, the somatic symptom, the worry your GAD has decided is urgent today, the OCD theme that won't let go. None of that is what you're avoiding. What you're actually avoiding is the discomfort that content triggers inside of you.
Avoidance is everything you do to make that discomfort stop. The reassurance seeking. The compulsive looping and arguing with thoughts. The safety behaviors, the escape, the checking, the constant attempts to prove the thought wrong or calm the body down. That's the avoidance. And the action of letting a scary thought or sensation just be there without responding to it? That is not avoidance at all.
This distinction matters because it changes the whole picture of what you have to work on. I walk through how this plays out across panic disorder, OCD, health anxiety, GAD, and agoraphobia.
For full show notes on this episode:
https://theanxioustruth.com/350
-- 
Want to talk about what you heard in this episode, or interact with me, Josh Fletcher, and others that share and understand your experience? I'm hanging out in the Disordered Community Space:
https://disordered.fm/community

Send in a question or comment via text.
Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated!

Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link.

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

One of the more common mistakes people make as they progress in anxiety disorder recovery is treating recovery as something separate from the rest of their lives. You do the therapy work in one box, and everything else goes in another. That tends to backfire.
In this episode I want to introduce the concept of relapse prevention, and I want to do it in the context of building a daily routine that keeps you connected to the strategies and principles that helped you make progress in the first place.
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Want to talk about what you heard in this episode? I'm hanging out in the Disordered Community Space:
https://disordered.fm/community
--
This is not a magic morning routine. I'm not going to promise you'll be unrecognizable in six weeks or that you'll never have a setback. What I will say is that people who build consistent habits around these practices do tend to fare better when life gets hard again, and life always does. The old pathways never get deleted. They just get unused for a while. So it's worth building habits that make it harder to accidentally fall back into them.
I walk through a four-pillar framework for building that kind of routine: attention and mindfulness practice, physical movement, emotional expression, and what I'm calling exploration, which is the part where you stay connected to the things that actually matter to you and feed something other than your anxiety.
I also talk about the trap of feeling good, because feeling good is exactly when a lot of people start quietly abandoning the habits that got them there. And I have a word for the internet, which tends to ruin this kind of thing with aesthetics, comparison, and influencer nonsense.
For full show notes on this episode:
https://theanxioustruth.com/349

Send in a question or comment via text.
Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated!

Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link.

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

Everybody wants to know how to stop obsessing over whatever has them scared right now. In this episode I explain why that's the wrong question, and what to ask instead.
In OCD and anxiety disorders, an obsession isn't just a strong thought or a passing worry. It functions like a threat. That's why you can't just decide to turn it off. You can't out argue it, out logic it, or replace it with a happier thought, and I'm guessing you've already tried all three.
The real leverage is in the compulsion, the thing you do to try to feel safer once the obsession fires. Checking, reassurance seeking, mental rituals, researching, arguing with your own fear in your head. Those are learnable, even though resisting them is genuinely hard. I get into why the distress that shows up when you resist a compulsion doesn't mean you've made a mistake, and why stopping the obsession ends up being a side effect of working on the compulsion, not the goal itself.
--
Want to talk about what you're hearing in this episode? You can interact with me on the Disordered Community Space:
https://disordered.fm/community
--

Send in a question or comment via text.
Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated!

Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link.

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.

In my anxiety recovery journey, there were no game-changing moments. No mic drops, no epiphanies, no single concept or technique that suddenly moved me forward. And when I look at the people I've worked with in my therapy practice and the community I've built around this podcast, that's pretty much how it goes for everyone.
You're probably searching for one, though. I get it. Everybody has a right to want to feel better quickly, and the endless scroll is very good at promising you the ONE thing that changes everything. But that search can quietly become its own problem.
In this episode I share what my recovery actually looked like: slow, quiet, and mostly unnoticeable until it wasn't. The progress showed up as backward-looking realizations, not forward-looking epiphanies. I moved out of that "anxiety disorder apartment" one item at a time over a long stretch. Then one day I looked around and the place was empty and it was time to leave. So anti-climactic!
I also talk about the important moments that did show up along the way, why even those weren't game changers, what the actual mistake is when you've been searching and scrolling for years, and what a genuine shift looks like when you're ready to make one.
For full show notes on this episode:
https://theanxioustruth.com/347
Want to talk about this episode, interact with me and Disordered co-host Josh Fletcher, and participate in a community of supportive people that are sharing your experience? I'm hanging out in the Disordered community space:
https://disordered.fm/community

Send in a question or comment via text.
Support The Anxious Truth: If you find the podcast helpful and want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee.   Other ways to support my work like buying a book or signing up for a low cost workshop can be found on my website.  None of this is never required, but always appreciated!

Interested in doing therapy with me? For more information on working with me directly to overcome your anxiety, follow this link.

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth  is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.