The Mind-Body Couple

The Unexpected Link: Connecting Chronic Symptoms, Obsessive Compulsive Patterns, and Anxiety

• Tanner Murtagh and Anne Hampson • Episode 92

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What if your dizziness and anxiety were more connected than you ever imagined? Join us in a groundbreaking conversation with Dr. Yonit Arthur, a board-certified audiologist and vestibular specialist, as we unravel the unexpected link between chronic dizziness and mental health challenges like anxiety and obsessive-compulsive patterns. Dr. Arthur sheds light on how sudden bouts of dizziness can trigger a cascade of anxiety, even in those without previous mental health issues, leading to a cycle of distress that can magnify symptoms. Understanding these intricate dynamics is crucial for anyone striving for effective recovery and relief.

As we journey through the emotional landscape of neuroplastic healing, we emphasize the balance between seeking reassurance and embracing uncertainty. Dr. Arthur explains how excessive reassurance can lead to unhelpful obsessive patterns, while learning to tolerate uncertainty can pave the way for long-term healing. By fostering a personalized healing approach, especially for those with obsessive-compulsive patterns, we empower listeners to manage fear and anxiety more effectively.

Dr. Yonit's Services: https://thesteadycoach.com/ 
Dr. Yonit's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheSteadyCoach  

Tanner Murtagh and Anne Hampson are therapists who treat neuroplastic pain and mind-body symptoms. They are also married! In his 20s, Tanner overcame chronic pain and a fibromyalgia diagnosis by learning his symptoms were occurring due to learned brain pathways and nervous system dysregulation. Post-healing, Tanner and Anne have dedicated their lives to developing effective treatment and education for neuroplastic pain and symptoms. Listen and learn how to assess your own chronic pain and symptoms, gain tools to retrain the brain and nervous system, and make gradual changes in your life and health!


The Mind-Body Couple podcast is owned by Pain Psychotherapy Canada Inc. This podcast is produced by Alex Klassen, who is one of the wonderful therapists at our agency in Calgary, Alberta. https://www.painpsychotherapy.ca/


Tanner, Anne, and Alex also run the MBody Community, which is an in-depth online course that provides step-by-step guidance for assessing, treating, and resolving mind-body pain and symptoms. https://www.mbodycommunity.com


Also check out Tanner's YouTube channel for more free education and practices: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-Fl6WaFHnh4ponuexaMbFQ


And follow us for daily education posts on Instagram: @painpsychotherapy


Discl...

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the MindBodyCouple podcast. I'm Tanner Murtaugh and I'm Anne Hampson.

Speaker 2:

This podcast is dedicated to helping you unlearn chronic pain and symptoms.

Speaker 2:

If you need support with your healing, you can book in for a consultation with one of our therapists at painpsychotherapyca or purchase our online course at embodycommunitycom to access in-depth education, somatic practices, recovery tools and an interactive community focused on healing. Links in the description of each episode. Hi everyone, welcome back to the podcast. Today I'm very honored to have Dr Yonit Arthur, who is a board-certified audiologist, vestibibular specialist and coach, who specializes in helping people with chronic dizziness and other vestibular symptoms, as well as tinnitus and hyperacusis. So thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Speaker 3:

Well, thanks for having me, Tanner, and it is so great to see you again. We've had some great mutual conversations on my channel and on yours already, and just what a delight to see you again.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's wonderful. I know I was thinking back. It's probably been a year and a half, two years. Yeah, right about there. We were on each other's channels. And then you also came and did a consultation with the team at the therapy clinic, which we really appreciated, Because you're just a wealth of knowledge when it comes to treating chronic dizziness and vestibular concerns, which is great.

Speaker 3:

Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much again for having me.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and we have an interesting topic and a really important topic to discuss today and what we're going to dive into is obsessive compulsive patterns. And so you know, for the viewers, I think a lot of people have heard about obsessive compulsive patterns and maybe relate to them to some degree, but how do you kind of explain this to people Like, how do you explain what obsessive compulsive patterns are?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, okay. Is it okay if, before I answer that question, I answer like the precursor to that question, like why we might even want to talk about this Is? That okay.

Speaker 3:

Okay. So the reason this is such an important topic and so near and dear to my heart in particular is because of the thing that I specialize in specifically, which is chronic dizziness. Now, as you and I have talked about before, tanner, neuroplastic symptoms are neuroplastic symptoms. Many of the treatments end up being very much the same. So I send people to your channel all the time, you send people to your channel all the time, you send people to my channel all the time. But there are some important distinguishing characteristics that not define chronic dizziness but that tend to show up much more with chronic dizziness and other vestibular type symptoms. So derealization, dissociation, brain fog, you know kind of the more vague, like in your head, type symptoms versus something that's pain related or a little more concrete. And that particular factor is the presence of anxiety.

Speaker 3:

The presence of anxiety and the thing with the anxiety that shows up with neuroplastic dizziness, or neural circuit dizziness as I often refer to it, is that it often is a brand new phenomenon for someone. So we will often assume in the neuroplastic symptom world that if someone shows up with chronic pain or some other type of chronic symptom, that that person may have experienced anxiety before and that the anxiety is is is involved in the evolution of the symptom, right, some people, of course, don't have it, but often people do with chronic dizziness. Many people have really never once in their lives had anxiety. The dizziness itself can bring on anxiety. It's not that someone had some kind of psychiatric condition that was hidden and then suddenly it all comes to light because they have dizziness. It's that dizziness, the disorientation of dizziness itself, lights up the fear networks in the brain.

Speaker 3:

So we end up with this interesting phenomenon in which people with chronic dizziness and related symptoms in particular show up with very high levels of anxiety, whether or not they've had anxiety before, and they develop these interesting patterns of how they respond to and deal with their anxiety that can unfortunately, actually make symptoms worse and actually make it harder to recover from neuroplastic symptoms. So the reason that I've honestly just had to learn about how to help people specifically with anxiety and obsessive, compulsive patterns of thinking and reacting and behaving is because it shows up so frequently in people with chronic dizziness and related symptoms, even if that person never ever had and really doesn't have any kind of mental health disorder related to anxiety yeah, yeah, and I think that's that's interesting, you know, because I do think that that's the assumption a lot of times that people have and and lots of people do, don't get me wrong, like sure you know this this precursor of anxiety or some type of mental health concern going on.

Speaker 2:

But you see it, with such a sharp onset of symptoms such as dizziness, as I know we've talked about in the past, it's so sharp. But you compare it to someone who slowly develops knee pain right, such as myself. That was my first symptom. I slowly developed knee pain over a few weeks. It wasn't like this sharp zero to 10 experience. Now that does happen for some people with pain as well, as you know, fatigue and things where it's just sudden. But you see this when you talk about with dizziness is it is a very kind of sudden onset, as we've talked about, and as a result, the patterns of anxiety and these other patterns start to develop like instantaneous with it.

Speaker 3:

Essentially that's right, that's right.

Speaker 3:

Obsessive compulsive patterns can start to show up, because when people hear OCD or obsessive compulsive patterns, they think this person is obsessively hand washing, and that's not what we're talking about here.

Speaker 3:

I'm talking about when people are dealing with relentless high levels of anxiety and they don't know what to do with it, because often they've never had to deal with anxiety like this before and they're also dealing, quite frankly, with probably medical trauma or or some very distressing onset of symptoms, plus just the the, the the fact that they're debilitated and not functional the way that they want to be, and again, often that takes place suddenly as well. This this can lead the brain to adopt these new coping mechanisms for the anxiety that are problematic, and we're gonna. I'm already previewing what we're probably going to be talking about later on in this conversation, but this means that the general recommendations for how to implement tools that really help people with neuroplastic symptoms and people who are dealing with a lot of anxiety should still use them. They need to be modified because if they become part of this cycle of health anxiety and obsessive compulsive thinking and basically a cycle of trying to fix and stop anxiety, then it's actually going to make things worse, not better.

Speaker 2:

Yes, I agree with you here, where, when you have these like such obsession, like obsessive thoughts taking place about the symptoms itself or, for example, the anxiety in and of itself, and then you have these compulsive behaviors that get paired with it, it makes sense. I definitely have this, this tendency, with myself as well, that I've had to work on. But then you get these compulsive behaviors trying to control the symptoms that I've had to work on. But then you get these compulsive behaviors trying to control the symptoms, trying to control the anxiety, doing everything they can. It's a hard combination to overcome and it can become basically someone's whole world really, really fast. And for some people it's more gradually, these obsessive compulsive patterns developing. But for some people it's more gradually these obsessive compulsive patterns developing. But for some people it's really sharp, where they're just starting to do anything and everything to manage their physical symptoms, to managing their anxiety. And then you come to a mind, body, managing their worries and fears in general.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and then you come to a mind body approach, which is very beneficial, a brain and nervous system approach, and the exact same thing that's been perpetuating everything forward is now applied to this new healing practice exactly people become obsessed with healing.

Speaker 3:

they become perfectionistic about trying to find the trauma that has that needs to be released in order to heal. They start taking on shame and guilt about whether they're implementing correctly or whether sometimes they'll have doubts about the diagnosis that they obsessively try to research or reassurance their way out of. They obsessively try to research their way or reassurance their way out of. So and I want to touch on some of the more subtle things that can happen too, because a lot of people listening to this right now are probably nodding and being like, oh my gosh, that's me, yeah.

Speaker 2:

That's me.

Speaker 3:

But there are some other things that happen that are a little more subtle, that people may not realize they're doing. I just want to circle back to your original question in terms of how I frame kind of these obsessive compulsive patterns. It's just like what you said. When people have these very high levels of anxiety either often brought on by thoughts, but also can sometimes be brought on by more vague feelings or imagery, like imagining how you might be in five years if you don't get better, like imagining how you might be in five years if you don't get better they, they have these stories that come up and then the the obsessive compulsive pattern essentially looks like that person trying to neutralize that, that thing, whatever it is. That that rarely distressing feeling, thought, imagery, imaginary story, whatever it is, the person's trying to neutralize it using some kind of behavior, often right, which is all the things we have already talked about, where people try to heal perfectly and they try to research and they try to reassure their ways out of it. But this can also take a much more subtle form because it can also happen in someone's mind. So people rumination is actually a form of trying to think your way out of a particular image or thought Right, or sometimes people will have mental reassurance. They will mentally reassure themselves over and over again, and this can get really tricky because these are tools we actually try to get people to do Like I'm safe. I'm telling myself I'm safe. We do that all the time, tanner. We tell people to tell themselves, but it can become a way to try to neutralize all anxiety and all worries and all concerning imagery, and then again that totally backfires.

Speaker 3:

And then one more thing I want to mention here is avoidance. Avoidance can also be practiced in a compulsive way, where people not just avoid triggers, which is something of course pretty universally in the neuroplastic symptom treatment world. We're trying to get people to not do, but they'll avoid things once they get into the healing realm. They'll avoid things that they think are not consistent with their healing. So they'll develop a whole new pattern of avoidances. So rather than avoiding going out and doing things that are involved with you know, for example, in my case many times dizziness they'll do something like avoiding stress. I must avoid all stress, because if I stress myself out, then I'm going to light up my nervous system and I'm not going to heal.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, you see this pattern, and one thing we talk about at our clinic that I'll tie into the conversation here, because I think it's just a useful way for people to think about this, whether it's before they come to you know a brain and nervous system approach that we both utilize or after they come, is something I called the pain or symptom rulebook.

Speaker 2:

This rulebook is the idea and it's it's useful, because I have people do this early on, for good reason, because basically, we develop all these rules and we talk about the rules to eliminate our chronic symptoms, to eliminate our anxiety. They're do or don't rules, and I think both are important Because there's some people that will do these very rigid patterns, whether it's with their healing or not, like, do somatic tracking five times a day at very set times, um, you know, do hot yoga for 90 minutes a day because that's somehow going to help me. Or don't write like don't eat certain foods, don't, you know, don't jump up and down, whatever it is. But like it's all these and they can be more subtle things as you're talking about, like every time you have a fear thought, give yourself a message of safety For someone that doesn't have an obsessive, compulsive pattern. Sure that can be a very useful practice, but for someone that does, it just gets wired into. It's another rule that we need to do to somehow eliminate things.

Speaker 3:

Exactly, that's exactly right. Yes, and it's so. I think you can agree with this. It's so hard because people are suffering so much and they're just like give me a list of 10 things, for God's sake, that I can just like give me rules that I can just follow, and so it's so, so hard that you and I are now saying, well, hang on a second.

Speaker 3:

Even the things that we tell you are beneficial. It's really about adapting them to your particular situation. That can be really tough for people. I think one really useful thing that I will often say to people right about this stage is you need to practice everything that we talk about as a B-minus student, and it is not about what you're doing, it's about how. It's about how you're practicing it. So I think one of the tools that's really important for people to gain or a skill really for people to acquire, is the ability to to pause and just notice how they're doing something. So this is probably the most important thing I'm going to say in this conversation. Who knows who knows what kind of stuff I'll say later, but I think this is just the most important thing I'm gonna say in this conversation. Who knows who knows what kind of stuff I'll say later?

Speaker 3:

But I think this is just so important as a takeaway for people when they're like listening to this and they're like, oh my gosh, am I doing that? Am I doing that ocd thing that's actually going to make things worse, or am I doing that like health anxiety thing where I'm trying to fix things or research things? Just all you need to do is just be honest with yourself about how you're approaching a particular tool. When you're doing somatic tracking, are you doing it in a way to try to combat, fix, eliminate fear and symptoms, or are you truly doing it in a way that involves helping your nervous system in a kind and caring way, in a loose way, to gain a new skill that will help you moving forward? We call it outcome independence right, but this becomes particularly important for those of you out there, I think, who are dealing with a ton of anxiety.

Speaker 2:

I agree with you and this is the. You know, this is the. This is one of the hardest things to to teach, because I could, I could teach you know, probably similar to yourself someone 20 different things in my sleep, like I. I just I know how to explain it. I know how to teach it. This is how you utilize it and that's great because it's very concrete in the way you explain things, and someone and I learned this early in my career someone with obsessive, compulsive patterns, really want that. They want the concrete answer of do this, how many times, what time of day, in what situation, just like laid out. And you know, earlier in my career I think I fell victim to this in the sense that I would provide that to someone. I'd be like okay, well, yeah, you're right, like let's make a perfect plan.

Speaker 2:

The problem is is that when it comes to this work, as they're saying, it does come down more to the attitude. The attitude is equally, if not more, important in the way that you facilitate this. The problem with the explaining the attitude is we, we do our best to kind of explain it to people, but it is abstract. It is like a felt sense of how you're going about something and and that's where the I think there's so much exploration, as you're saying, for people to be really honest about them with themselves, like, why am I doing this right now? What's, what's the goal? Is the goal to cultivate more of a sense of kindness? Is the goal to cultivate more lightness or ease, um, to slow down? And again, we're not going to force that attitude.

Speaker 2:

I'm always clear with people like don't listen to this and then go out people and try and force calmness. It's not going to go well. That's not going to go well. No, but we can do things to cultivate moving in that direction. That's right and that's the ideas of, you know, doing somatic tracking informally. I know this is the example you could do with any strategy, but doing it informally like, oh, I have five minutes, I'll do this for five minutes to be kind to myself, to slow my day down, to really just create a felt sense of safety as best I can, great. That's such a great way to start to utilize these things on the go, instead of doing it in this very rigid way where it becomes as another rule, another obsessive, compulsive pattern that we're adding to the mix.

Speaker 3:

That's right. And another metaphor I'll use to describe what you just said is are you running toward something? Is are you running toward something or are you running from something? And there's always a little bit of an element of both. Right, so it's not always super cut and dry, but with obsessive compulsive patterns, what I'll often see is that people have I'm gonna borrow a term from ICBT right now but there's a feared possible self.

Speaker 3:

So people are practicing things partly out of the fear of becoming someone who is not aligned with the values that person has and in fact, values are another way. Someone can kind of check themselves and say, hmm, is this maybe kind of getting into obsessive compulsive land? Is this something that, if I don't do this right, I'm going to be someone who I don't like or I don't approve of? So when we have something again, we're talking about somatic tracking, but this could apply just as equally to graded exposure or graded motor imagery or practicing feeling emotions you want to ask yourself, like, truly, why am I doing this? What am I running toward and what am I running from? And again, there may be elements of both, but we should be biasing ourselves to have the attitude of running toward something rather than running from something, running from some worse outcome, bad outcome like oh my gosh, I'm never gonna get better, or me becoming a person that I do not like or I do not approve of.

Speaker 2:

I really like that definition of how you explained it, because it and for good reason um, myself included, I think you probably have both going on at any given point.

Speaker 2:

But I think people view it so rigidly where, even when I explain the rule book to someone, I'm explaining do's and don'ts, because otherwise people think if I'm not doing something, that's avoidance, If I'm doing something, that's not avoidance.

Speaker 2:

But the reality is it is a lot of the time, especially with the healing work, where a fundamental for exposure work, which we know works brilliantly with neuroplastic symptoms, neural circuit symptoms but the goal is like you're facing something, you're moving towards something to overcome the fear of it. That's generally the idea. But the problem is like, for example, if you're using somatic tracking, that is exposure, but people can quickly shift that without realizing to avoidance. That's right, where they're now running away from the symptom that they're experiencing or they're running away from their anxiety. And again, we need to do this gradually, of course, because I think it can be really overwhelming for someone with obsessive, compulsive patterns to start to like fully open up and approach things. So it needs to be graded. But but that's the idea, is like that scale of moving towards something a little bit more than the percentage that you're running away from something it's on a spectrum.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, like it doesn't need to be zero or a hundred Like, even if it's just a little bit more protein, perfect, like that's Exactly. That's really essential when someone identifies themselves as having more of an obsessive compulsive pattern going on.

Speaker 3:

Exactly and to remind people. It very well may be that you were the most laid back person ever before all this hit you. It can be the result the symptoms themselves can spark. I would never have said this a few years ago because I didn't realize it. It's just become so clear to me over the last few years. I think neural circuit dizziness sparks neural circuit OCD, like a little like kind of an obsessive compulsive pattern that develops specifically because of the appearance of neuroplastic symptoms, even when that person didn't have them before. So I just wanted to emphasize that again in case you're listening to this and you're like I don't have that or I wasn't like a super organized, perfectionistic person before any of this. No, this is something that may have come on with your symptoms any of this.

Speaker 2:

No, this is something that may have come on with your symptoms. Yeah, yeah, I think it's a really essential step because some people can identify. Okay, since childhood, like it's been around different things. But there's no question, like for myself, I speak for myself personally, but that's just been a pattern throughout my life. The topic keeps changing, but it's a pattern and so when symptoms came on, it made sense that it just sparked, sparked it and took off. But for a lot of people, especially when symptoms start to become more and more intense and so overwhelming, like that pattern can develop very sharply, yeah, um, which I think, yeah, like people, people kind of don't really notice that that's necessarily the thing, because they can't make sense of it, of why, all of a sudden, this pattern, this obsessive, compulsive pattern, could just be triggered and sparked right off the bat.

Speaker 3:

That's right, and it just makes things so tricky. You use the word tricky and I think that's exactly the right word to use things so tricky. You use the word tricky and I think that's exactly the right word to use Because you know, tanner, at the beginning of someone's journey with this stuff, that person, people need to research and they need the reassurance they need to obsessively watch success stories, they need to ask questions over and over again and get reassurance and be like well, are you sure that this? Have you seen? People like me, what about this symptom? What, what, if, what, if, what, if they missed something, people have naturally have those questions and they, they, they need to be addressed up front when someone is first wrapping their heads around. Do I actually have a neural circuit or neuroplastic disorder? But I think people need to realize that and this again, this is where the trickiness comes in.

Speaker 3:

Once you've gathered the information and you're pretty sure this is what's going on, it's okay to still have doubts. It doesn't mean that you're doing something wrong. If you have doubts, you kind of need to operate as though you are sure. Even if you're not sure, you kind of need to operate as though you are and that at this point, the strategy needs to change. You need to start paying attention to whether reassurance is actually just causing you to be hungry for more reassurance, in which case we might be dealing with an obsessive compulsive pattern, or whether reassurance is really actually helpful. And, tanner, speaking only for myself I don't know if you experienced this I always want to meet people human to human first.

Speaker 3:

So when someone asks me for reassurance and someone's asking me for information, my immediate impulse is to answer the question. I mean, you and I both have YouTube channels. All we're doing is putting out information all the time, right, but that can actually not be in someone's best interest sometimes. So again, I'm not talking about the beginning stage, where people really need to learn they need. So, if you're new to this idea of neuroplastic or neural circuit symptoms, by all means obsessively watch our YouTube channel for hours and hours and hours, go for it and obsessively ask questions and get lots of reassurance.

Speaker 3:

That's supposed to happen at the beginning. But then, once you're on the path and you're like okay, I may still have some doubts about this, but this is what I have, I'm going to move forward with treating this as though it's a mind, body or neuroplastic condition. Then you need to notice does getting more information make you feel better temporarily and then make you need to come back the next day to be reassured again, and then the anxiety gets worse. And then you have no matter how much information you get. It's like an endless hole of anxiety and you just you need to keep upping the ante in order to try to meet your anxiety. Yeah, or is the information actually helpful? You say, okay, I got my question, I can check that one off the list and I'm going to move on now.

Speaker 2:

I agree with you and this is you did a really good job explaining that, because this is a hard thing to catch, Even as a professional. It's hard to catch sometimes when that takes place because the repetitive reassurance it's not going to be beneficial long-term, Like we're not going to heal, you know, obsessive compulsive patterns or neuroplastic symptoms by continuing to engage in that pattern. That's right.

Speaker 2:

And it's difficult because you know we are at first. When someone comes to this approach, it's a completely different paradigm, like they need a lot of information, they need to understand that this makes sense, they need to understand that there's evidence to support it makes sense for them. But there is that line of you know I'm sure you've witnessed this too where people are like I've been watching a YouTube channel for 10 hours a day and it's like, well, maybe for the first week, but now we gotta like we gotta ease this off, because it it becomes this pattern that that's just gonna keep things going, because it's gonna keep those those fear centers in the brain just lit up constantly that's right and we're the worst youtubers ever, tanner.

Speaker 3:

We're like hey, listen everyone, stop watching our channels, go do stuff I know, I know we're just like destroying our channel as we talk about it on our channel.

Speaker 2:

I'm gonna turn this off now, yeah it's just it's just not useful long term, and so I think that's that's the tricky part is making that transition for someone. And I think another thing you're kind of moving towards and hinting at that I often see is one of the big solutions with this pattern is our ability to sit with and tolerate uncertainty. Yes, Amen.

Speaker 2:

Like that needs to happen and people hate that, myself included.

Speaker 2:

It's like, oh yeah, like you have to like learn to sit with uncertainty and not engage in all these thoughts and behaviors to try and make everything certain. That's a really hard thing to do and, again, like people need to be gradual with it, but that's essentially it is. We need to learn to sit with the uncertainty. Realize that we sat with the uncertainty, we didn't engage in things for a few days and the whole world didn't end, it was okay, like there's this pattern I think is what you're speaking to of. You know, not doing everything to try and make the outcome certain, like being able to sit with uncertainty. You can still be hopeful about your journey and hopeful about this process, but with any new strategy someone's taught there is uncertainty of how you, how it needs to work for them, how often they should do it like, like that's that's going to take a bit of time to figure out. And so there's this exposure of tolerating that uncertainty as people are sitting with us, absolutely, absolutely, and we get it.

Speaker 3:

It's so hard, especially when you're physically miserable and you're kind of putting a lot on the line here anyway, just even treating this as a neuroplastic condition, when that may be uncomfortable or new to you, considering what you've been told previously by medical professionals or other well-meaning people in your life. So we get it. It's what we're saying. It sounds, it sounds simple in practice, but in practice it's very difficult to do what you're talking about. And that's why I want to add on to what you just said and just tell people, when we talk about sitting with uncertainty, you don't have to sit with the uncertainty around your biggest fear first. So you might say, okay, so I've noticed what Tanner and Yonit are talking about today. I've noticed I kind of try to fix certain things in my life or certain things about my recovery I've become rather perfectionistic about, and these are the fears, these are the reasons why I must do those things in order to get better right, and you might notice that some of these fears are much worse than the others. Some of them are a little bit smaller, like oh, you know, for example, are much worse than the others. Some of them are a little bit smaller, like, oh you know, for example, let's just say you say, okay, I've been kind of treating graded exposure in a bit of a compulsive way, like I've been kind of trying to deliberately expose myself over and over again because I worry that if I don't, I'm not going to get better. So you might want to break that down a little bit and say, okay, what am I really worried about here?

Speaker 3:

Not getting better might mean many different things. It might mean that tomorrow I might have an uptick in symptoms. I might decompensate that's a word, tanner, by the way, that people with dizziness disorders sometimes will hear from medical professionals. If you don't get vestibular stimulation, your brain will decompensate, your brain will forget how to balance. Okay, oh my gosh. So people get these messages from somewhere. They're not just making it up.

Speaker 3:

But sorry, that was a little tiny soapbox. I'll decompensate and I'll be dizzier tomorrow. That may be one smaller fear, right, and then there might be a really big fear. If I don't do graded exposure tomorrow, then that means that I'm a failure of a human being. My partner is going to leave me, my children are going to hate me and become drug addicts and I'm going to be dizzy for the rest of my life. Okay, there are levels to these fears and we can start with sitting with the uncertainty around a specific, smaller fear first. We don't have to be like, okay, I just have to be okay with the idea that you know my children are not going to do well in life.

Speaker 3:

We can say, okay, well, let's focus on that little, small, little it's not little but that more containable fear that tomorrow I might be more dizzy, my vestibular system may decompensate because I'm not doing graded exposure today, and let's just sit with the feeling that come up and the fears that come up around that and be uncomfortable about that thing first, and then you can sort of up the ante over time to the bigger fears and the bigger things, the bigger have-tos, the bigger musts that you feel like you have to do during the recovery process to start to ease up some of that perfectionism and also just gradually expand your capacity to deal with the uncertainty.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I fully agree. You don't want to deal with the uncertainty. Yeah, I fully agree. Like you don't want to start with the scariest thing, because they are and and yeah, kind of like you said, in terms of like the scariest thing, it's not necessarily the biggest thing. People have to really grade it in terms of like's scariest to you, like what's absolutely what creates the most fear. If you imagine you didn't do that thing, that's right.

Speaker 2:

Or you did this thing, like because like some of the bigger ones, for for an individual, something really small could be one of the scariest things.

Speaker 2:

Like me doing somatic tracking twice less this week could be the scariest thing, even more than if they went and, you know, walked for an hour which they haven't done in a long time. Like people just need to be kind of clear with themselves of like okay, like where can I start? Like where's my starting place? Right, because that ability to tolerate uncertainty, like I think that's such a useful skill, even long past just just getting better from our symptoms, because this is a skill that you know, if this is a pattern that people have been struggling with, especially their entire life, it's a really useful skill to have to be able to face uncertainty in life, not compulsively engage in trying to fix it, and being able to sit with it like it's so useful long term for people to be able to do this and for people to be able to maintain their healing even after they've gotten better, like. I think that ability to somatically sit with the uncertainty and feel over time like more safety with it is so key here.

Speaker 3:

As you're kind, of discussing absolutely and to your point. This is something. This is the way to make this kind of practice outcome independent, like we were talking about before, where you're not trying to. You know, baseball bat your way into being good with uncertainty. You can be compulsive about that too. You can be perfectionistic about that too, but you can say to yourself I'm building skills here that are going to be useful for the rest of my life. This isn't about symptom recovery and the more you can honestly say that to yourself, understanding umbrella. You would not be watching either of our channels if you weren't concerned about healing from symptoms. We get that.

Speaker 3:

And of course, you're always going to have that thought in your mind, but the more honestly you can say this is truly going to improve my quality of life forever. This is something that's a skill that I'm acquiring and that I'm going to just take quality of life forever. This is something that that's a skill that I'm acquiring and that I'm going to just take time to acquire. The less pressure you're putting on yourself and the less compulsively you're going to do this thing, whatever it is yeah, I think that's really what it comes down to is.

Speaker 2:

It comes back to, like the attitude you're using some of this and so you know, I really like appreciate this, this topic, and you sharing your, your wisdom around this, because I think it's such an essential thing that people want to identify sooner rather than later. I think that's the idea is absolutely, you don't want to wait.

Speaker 2:

Like you know, I I've seen that happen where people come to see me a year after they've already been doing all this and it's clear that this is the pattern that's been holding them up. So it's just, it's important for people to notice this early on, because then you can adjust your healing to be different. As you probably tell so many people, your healing is going to look different. Like what's going to work for you is going to be different for someone else, like someone with an obsessive, compulsive pattern. Like the healing, the way you go about it, as we're talking about it, really does, it's going to be different. Like. It's important to understand that, um, and adjust, adjust that like.

Speaker 2:

I think the healing attitude is important for everyone, but especially someone for obsessive, compulsive patterns. Like we really want to have that kind of iron in of like this is why we're engaging in these things. This is the idea, um, as you said about. I really liked your piece of wisdom of like are you moving towards something or running away from something? Right, because each time people go in and utilize some type of healing technique, just that quick question of like why am I doing this right now, um, and and trying to adjust course as a result. And at the end here in the last little bit I was talking about uncertainty, like the ability to tolerate uncertainty and sit with it. I think this is a good starting place for for people to start to adjust their healing to fit themselves when they have this obsessive, compulsive pattern.

Speaker 3:

That's right. That's right and it's particularly important to me, not just because of the things I said at the very beginning of this conversation in regards to dizziness, but because I actually think it's very important for people to be able to do emotional work. So not just I'm going to respond differently to symptoms, although that's super important and a major feature of all these treatments that people do cohorts. I don't know, but people do sometimes need to spend time feeling feelings and working through conflicts in their lives and looking back on some of the stressful experiences that they've had in the past. And I see these obsessive, compulsive patterns sabotage people's efforts to do those things in a healthy way, because they develop all this uncertainty and this obsessive thinking around the very things that I'm telling them to do that I know could actually help them get better. So it's not.

Speaker 3:

We focus today a lot on how people respond to symptoms, but the same principles apply to things like emotional awareness and expression, and you really need to be aware of these patterns. When I hear someone say something like listen, Yonit, I don't know how to pinpoint the trauma that got me here. Or like, how do I know if I can't figure out which stressor it is. That's making me dizzy. Okay, we need to have a whole conversation about what we just talked about, Tanner, because we can't take that angle on it if it's going to be effective.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, another common one that I often hear is like what's the emotion behind the symptom? Like what's?

Speaker 3:

the emotion which I let's release it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, like let's release that. I want you to identify the emotion, release it and it's the reality for people listening. This could be a whole, you know, 40 minute interview out of itself and sometimes there's not an emotion kind of symptom. I'm sorry to tell you I'm helping people have some uncertainty here, but but sometimes, like your brain has just become wired in this way over time and it's not like like there's not some secret trauma that's causing this particular yeah.

Speaker 3:

So I think that's.

Speaker 2:

That's the thing that we want to be cautious. I like that you said this at the end, because I think we focused a lot on the symptoms themselves and the strategies for the symptoms themselves. But it's all the work. It's the emotional work, the nervous system regulation work, the processing of trauma, like um, all of this stuff, like this pattern, is going to change how you start to utilize some of that.

Speaker 3:

That's right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, well, absolutely, yeah Well, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast and speaking with us about this. I know the viewers probably got a lot from this. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 3:

Of course. Thank you again so much for having me Always such a pleasure to talk to you, Tanner.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I will. For people listening, I'm going to put Dr Yoneed's links and information down below in the description of the podcast, with the YouTube channel, so people can access your stuff, your YouTube channel. I'm sending people to it all the time because there's just so much useful content, especially around dizziness, vestibular concerns, tinnitus. Like you really are a leading expert in this area, so if people aren't having these symptoms, please check out the links. They can be incredibly helpful.

Speaker 3:

Thank you and just throwing that compliment right back at you, tanner I send people to your stuff all the time and people love your work. So thank you so much for again for having me here and also for all the work you're doing in this space, because you're really you're putting out some great quality and really applicable tools, like not just oh, here, let's talk about it, but actually this is how you do this. That's helping a lot of people. So thank you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I appreciate that. So thank you everyone for listening and I will talk to you next week.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening. For more free content, check out the links for our YouTube channel, instagram and.

Speaker 2:

Facebook accounts in the episode description. We wish you all healing.