This week on the Anxious Truth, we're going to talk about sitting with anxiety.
Speaker 1:Do you really have to literally sit with it? It's a confusing topic. It trips a lot of people up, so let's get at it today. Hello everybody, welcome back to the Anxious Truth. This is episode 295 of the podcast we are recording July 1st of 2024. If you are new to the Anxious Truth, this is the first time you've stumbled upon the podcast or the YouTube channel welcome. I hope you find what you hear or see here today useful in some way.
Speaker 1:I am Drew Linsalata, creator and host of the Anxious Truth. I am clearly a podcaster in the anxiety and anxiety disorder space, a three-time author, a psychoeducator, an advocate, a social media dude and a therapist in training in New York with a specialization in anxiety and anxiety disorders and a former sufferer of panic disorder, agoraphobia, ocd and depression for many years of my life, on and off, but doing much better now, thankfully. Better now, thankfully, and actually this is the first podcast episode in three weeks where I haven't been sick recording, so I'm thrilled that I can actually sit here and enjoy looking into this camera and talking into this mic and maybe being helpful today, of course, if you're a returning viewer or listener to the YouTube channel or the podcast episode, welcome back. I hope you find again what we say here today useful in some way and if you are watching on YouTube, whether you're new or old, maybe consider hitting the like button if you do like this video and subscribe to the channel, because it definitely helps me out. Leave a comment if you have a question. I'm happy to interact with you guys and if you're listening to the podcast on Spotify or Apple and you dig it, a five-star review is always helpful, and maybe even a quick review with a paragraph or so that says why you love the podcast is also helpful because it helps me reach more people and provide a little bit more assistance to people who are struggling. So thank you so much for that. Any way that you choose to support the work, new or old, to the Anxious Truth, welcome. Let's get to it.
Speaker 1:So this week we're going to talk about sitting with anxiety. Do I have to actually sit with my anxiety? This is a thing that we hear all the time. The phrase sit with it is kind of a quasi therapy speak thing that gets tossed around in mental health circles all the time, and we do hear it quite often in anxiety and anxiety recovery and the anxiety sort of community, people will talk often about the need to sit with it. Just sit with it. Sit with your anxiety, sit with it. We hear sit with it all the time, and I understand why it's confusing. A lot of people in our community will get sort of tripped up and want to know does this mean do I literally have to stop dead in my tracks when I get anxious and sit? And the answer is well, sometimes you will, but no, that is not automatically required. Sit with it is not a literal term. It's really important.
Speaker 1:Now I understand that people who are in the depths of an anxiety disorder, who are struggling to get better, who just want to feel better and I get that and I support you guys in that I want you to feel better too. But often the fixation on the recovery process, on getting it right so that you can get rid of your anxiety and feel better and recover as quick as possible, can sort of kick into high gear and then you start to get overly concerned with whether or not you're doing it right and that sometimes means spending a whole lot of time overthinking a little bit of these concepts and trying to make sure that you're hearing it correctly and you're doing it correctly and you're not getting it wrong and you're not making yourself worse. And sit with it is one of those terms, innocent though it might sound, and I know that everybody that uses it has the best of intentions. They're trying to illustrate a concept here, but sometimes it can get a little bit off the rails and drive anxious people to get really worried that they're not doing recovery right. So what would it even look like to just sit with your anxiety? Well, on a literal sense, just sitting with it. If you literally were to stop and sit down, you are essentially just sitting there, being still and allowing yourself to feel whatever it is you feel, and that really is the core concept that we care about when we use the phrase sit with it.
Speaker 1:So, while you may find that you have already been literally sitting or laying, maybe you're home relaxing, you don't have anything going on. Maybe you're sitting reading a book, or maybe you're in bed, you're trying to fall asleep and you wind up getting one of those big anxiety spikes, maybe even you start to experience a panic attack. Well, you're already sort of sitting, or maybe laying, which is close enough, and you may decide to continue to do that. You may decide to continue to just sit and allow yourself to be anxious, and we're going to get to all of that stuff. Or you may be out and about, whether you're out of your house or at school, you're at work, or maybe you're doing some chores, you're shopping, you're taking care of the kids, whatever it is you're doing, and then boom, the anxiety hits.
Speaker 1:And now this is where people start to get really confused, like okay, I know I'm not supposed to try and fix that, I know I have to accept and allow and float and surrender and tolerate, and they always tell me to sit with it. I better sit down. Well, in that situation, you may choose to sit down if you think that's the best course of action in that particular context and, by the way, that context is going to change from minute by minute, hour to hour to day by day. But you may also decide to not sit down and just to keep going, and that's as equally valid and valuable an approach as anything else. So the point here about sitting with anxiety is that you are not required to stop dead in your tracks and literally sit still, because I've encountered quite a large number of people in this community and it's no crime if you misinterpreted that and tried to do it that way that spend weeks, months. I know one person that spent actually several years before they got clarification on this thinking that every time they had a scary thought or intrusive thought or they got triggered into an anxious state, they had to stop everything that they were doing and find a place to literally sit, and it became a bit of a ritual for a long time for that person.
Speaker 1:But other people have made this mistake too. I have to sit and people have asked me things like I can't just go and sit somewhere while I'm at work. Or I've had teachers who will say I can't just stop teaching my class when I get anxious. How am I supposed to sit with it? Well, again, the principle really behind sit with it is don't resist it. Happen to be physically sitting at the time and that is a good way for you to practice not resisting it. Then by all means, if you can and you choose to do that and it is practical, go ahead and literally sit with it or lay with it, or remain sitting or laying with it, if that is what you were doing to begin with. But you can also be air quotes sitting with your anxiety anytime. You continue along with whatever activity you were engaged with or want to be engaged with and you allow yourself to feel whatever it is that you feel, without resistance. So the key here in sitting with your anxiety comes back to the idea of willful tolerance or surrender or floating or acceptance or whatever words you like to use. You know I keep recycling those over and over, because you pick the ones that you like. You're allowed to do that.
Speaker 1:It really has to do with choosing in that moment to say I'm not going to resist this. This is, in fact, my reality. I am maybe having a panic attack, or I'm having some really scary thoughts that are related to my OCD, or I'm just experiencing that wave of anxiety. It feels like it's building. I'm very uncomfortable. I'm having scary thoughts about a heart attack or death or existence or insanity or psychotic break or whatever it happens to be. My health anxiety has been triggered and now I'm in that like really super scary, highly agitated, racing brain thing when it comes to whatever health concern that I fixated on. Right now, whatever the situation is, this is my experience. This is what's happening right now and I can try to resist it by fixing it or solving it or stopping it or running away from it or avoiding it, or I can accept that this is in fact, my experience right now and resisting it is tends to make it worse over time. Right, so I've done a lot of talking about that, writing about that.
Speaker 1:We can't cover every aspect of recovery in every single podcast episode, but we're going to have to rely on the idea that resisting that experience actually makes it worse over time. And if you look at recent podcast episodes, I did a series here on the podcast of the channel called Foundations of Panic. We talked about that, why running and avoiding is a bad idea. That's what creates agoraphobia, it's what cements the disordered state. It's paradoxical. You want to resist it, you want to fight it.
Speaker 1:In fact, a lot of conventional wisdom will use language like warrior and fight it and resist it and overcome it and run it over and don't, you know, be fearless. But really and truly, what we're learning to do in recovery, if we do it the way my theoretical orientation dictates that we do it and suggest is the, I think, the most effective and long lasting way we learned to sort of flex into that, relax into that, let it happen, bend without breaking. I don't care what metaphor, imagery you want to use, but we're going to choose to not resist the experience, because that is the reality of what's happening right now. In my own recovery I really worked very, very hard to try to resist it, block it, fight it, run it over, like do my usual thing, I'm gonna run roughshod over this and kick its ass, and that wasn't working and it was just exhausting me and making me frustrated. So I had to come to the conclusion my own experience here again, everybody's gonna vary, but like this is happening and I cannot seem to be able to stop it or manage it consistently or effectively. It's happening. So like I'm going to have to do the best I can with this experience and that is in fact, the crux of sitting with it.
Speaker 1:Now, if you do, if you can or are sitting or laying when it happens and you choose to continue to be in that position, that's totally fine. In fact, we could argue that sometimes that is the more difficult way to do it. I will tell you from personal experience and crowdsourcing thousands and thousands of the experiences of other anxious people that the idea that you could sit quietly, still and silently and allow yourself to have really scary thoughts or have that wave of panic crash over you, that seems impossible for so many people and that is in fact a very difficult task. To sit quietly and let yourself panic without going into fidget mode and running mode and blah, blah, blah. Listen. It's almost impossible to sit completely still, because chemistry is chemistry. But to not launch into your saving rituals or escape rituals and to sit quietly and still and simply experience it as loudly as it wants you to experience it and as intensely as it wants to, so that you can have it peak and then fall down the other side without contributing to it, that is a golden experience.
Speaker 1:It's a very difficult experience, but the act of sitting with it physically, literally, can be very valuable and I do believe that at some point that is an experience that every recovering person kind of has to have. It just doesn't have to be the default experience because, again, if we go back to the concept that we are really, we're not trying to recover so that we can live our lives, we're really just trying to get back to living our lives to the best of our ability so that we recover. Our lives, do not revolve around instantly stopping and sitting or laying whenever we feel something that nobody lives that way. You couldn't live that way. Your life wouldn't really work out terribly well if you did it that way. So if you are sitting or laying or you can and decide, let me try this. Today I'm going to practice this thing that Drew was talking about the sitting without resistance really hard. This is going to be really difficult. It's a challenge for me. By all means, go ahead.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you may choose to do that. Sometimes you have to do that because that's just the context you're in. But even if you cannot stop and sit silently and quietly in a still place, you may have to just do the best you can to continue on in the meeting. You're in. On the phone call you're on, or the Zoom you're on. Or walking the dog or doing your workout or cooking your in, or the phone call you're on, or the Zoom you're on, or walking the dog, or doing your workout, or cooking your dinner or whatever it is you happen to be doing, walking through the supermarket, driving down the road, whatever it is.
Speaker 1:If you can allow that experience to move through you, to peak and, you know, come back down, naturally in the other side, while you continue as best you can. You're not going to be optimal, you're not going to be perfect, you're not going to be the best person in that meeting Well, maybe you would be, it's possible. But if you can move through that anxious, terrifying, scary experience that you want to push away, resist, fight and stop, you can let that happen while you continue to live your life and whatever that means in that particular moment. You have also sat with it and you are winning, right. So you don't have to just stop everything and go quickly, find a quiet place where you have to literally sit and let your anxiety be. You're not distracting, right?
Speaker 1:So, listen, there's always an element of distraction. I've talked about it in this podcast. I've talked about it on disordered, the podcast that I do with Josh Fletcher, which is at disorderedfm, by the way. You should check that out. It comes out every Friday. But there's always some element of distraction there. But your primary purpose is never distraction. Your primary purpose is I'm going to have to experience this anxiety while I'm engaged with my life. It's still going to be there, I still hear it and still feel it, but right now I'm going to hear it, feel it, experience it. It's going to hit me really hard while I sit quietly or while I continue to engage in the task at hand to the best of my ability.
Speaker 1:The key here is I'm just going to do the best that I can to not resist it, not fight it, not try to stop it, not try to solve it, not try to figure it out, not get hooked in to by the thoughts and the emotions and the and the sensations that combine to make it feel so real, which is why it's so hard to allow it, because it feels so dangerous and feels so difficult. Am I going to try something a little bit different this time and recognize that those things are hooking me and dragging me down a path I didn't want to go through, they're making me avoid, they're making my life worse? Or do I want to at least consider the possibility that I may have another option? I could sort of zoom out, see what else is going on here and allow that experience to just sort of be part of my life right now for the next 10 minutes, 20 minutes, hour, whatever it is, because I need to learn that I can handle that, I can do that. I do not have to engineer my entire life around being anxious or being afraid or being uncomfortable. This is the lesson we're trying to learn recovery right, trying to learn that, like well, I have other options. When I get anxious, I could do other things other than just dropping to the ground or into my chair, or I have to go find a quiet, calm place to sit. Now I can do other things too.
Speaker 1:I may choose to go find a quiet place to sit, or guess what, if you're going to go the literal sit route with sit with it, it's not always going to a quiet, dark, serene, calming place too. Sometimes you may choose to sit in a noisy place. I myself have I'll relay this experience. There have been times when I would be at a mall. There's a pretty big mall not too far from me. I've been in that mall in a long time just because malls are stupid. I don't like to go to the mall. I'm not a shopper, but I would go to that mall to do exposure and there were times when I sat in the middle of that mall. There were a couple times when I sat in the food court in that mall on a Friday night when it was kind of busy and I I panicked in the food court, which is a very noisy, there's a lot of people, it's very chaotic, it's hectic, there's it's bright lights, it's a big space.
Speaker 1:Sometimes sitting with it means sitting in whatever environment you're in right now to learn like, well, yeah, I can handle that too. So if you are going to take the literal approach and say no, no, I want to sit with it, you, that doesn't automatically mean I go to a calm place and I put on calm music and I get my lavender oil and I put on a candle. Okay, maybe that's not a crime if you do that sometimes. But we don't want to interpret sit with it as sit with it means this is the way that I calm it down. That's another misnomer about sitting with it. Sitting with it has nothing to do with I achieve a state of calm and relaxation. Sitting with it means I am just going to not resist this. I'm going to do my best to just let it run through me without saving myself, so that I learn that I can do that. And guess what? Over time the experience becomes less scary, which means I don't have to like build my whole life around it. So that's really what sit with it is all about.
Speaker 1:Sit with it is sometimes sitting. Sometimes it's sitting in a quiet place. Sometimes it's sitting in a calming place. Sometimes it's sitting in a loud and noisy place because that just happens to be where you are. Sometimes it's literally pulling over in your car on the side of a busy road. That's not calming or quiet, but that counts and you can do that. Sometimes sitting with it is figurative or metaphorical and you're just going to drop your resistance and do the best you can to continue to move through the experience you happen to be having when you get anxious or triggered, regardless of what that might be. So that's where sit with it is. Sit with it is sometimes confusing, but it doesn't mean you got to instantly run to your favorite quiet place and your favorite soft chair with a blanket and candles and music and sit. You might or you might not.
Speaker 1:It is contextual and I will add to that by saying there is no perfect way to do this. So one of the things that people will say when they hear me try to teach this lesson is but how do I know when I'm supposed to sit with it and when I'm not, guess what you don't really know. Just use the guiding principle I am going to try to not resist this, I'm going to surrender to this, I'm going to let this happen, whatever way that looks this time it looks, and in retrospect you may look back after that and say, you know, maybe I should have went and sat down for a couple minutes to see how that goes. Okay, cool, no, no problem, you can learn from that and say, well, I'll, maybe I'll try that next time. Excellent, you incorporate the experience, you learn from it, you adjust the next time. That's okay. But please do not make the mistake of thinking but I can't tell if I'm supposed to sit or not. So therefore I might make the wrong decision, do it wrong and never recover or somehow ruin my recovery or learn the wrong lesson or damage myself. No, it doesn't work that way.
Speaker 1:Remember that flexibility is really at the core of the recovery lesson. Here we're not trying to learn how to not panic or learn how to not be anxious. We're learning to build our psychological flexibility, meaning whatever I feel anxiety, panic, sadness, anger, disappointment, rage, regret, guilt, whatever, like excitement. I can handle all of those experiences because that's part of being human and I don't have to take specific action to fix those experiences or avoid them or somehow figure them out. I can just let them all happen, including anxious and panicky and OCD-type moments. That's the lesson here, right? So we do not want to fall into the trap of creating specific conditions or rules or rituals. I have to make sure I did it right. Maybe I did it wrong this time and maybe I'll only know that next week, but that's okay. I can make mistakes and I can learn from them. That's part of flexibility and that's part of recovery.
Speaker 1:So the sit with it thing sometimes sounds like a specific instruction from people like me Sit with it so that you can get better. It's not. It's a metaphor in a way. It's just don't resist it and if you're sitting, keep sitting. If you want to sit, go sit. If you can't sit, go sit. That's a big ask. It's hard to do that. But it's also hard to just keep going with whatever it is you're doing and not go into reaction mode. That's hard, no matter whether you're in motion or whether you're sitting. That's really hard to do. So remember, if you're just getting into that and just starting to do that, be nice to yourself, be patient, be kind to yourself. It is not instinctual to allow yourself to be terrified. So you're just looking for a little incremental improvements in your ability to allow, to surf through it, to tolerate it, to whatever you want to call it. You're just trying to get a little better. Every time at that, you're trying to make little changes, little incremental improvements as you go. That's allowed. It's kind of you gotta do it that way.
Speaker 1:Nobody hears one of these podcast episodes and instantly goes into perfect ninja surrender mode and recovers in three days. It just doesn't happen. So, regardless of whether you're sitting, standing, walking, driving, talking, sleeping, eating, chewing, it doesn't matter. However way you're experiencing the metaphor of sitting with it dropping your resistance, however, of sitting with it dropping your resistance, However way it plays out, it plays out.
Speaker 1:Did I win this time? Did I do it a little bit better? Did I do it a little different? Did I move a little closer to what I really want in life instead of running away from how I feel all the time? Then I won, did I not do so? Well, okay, well, what can I do different this time? Then I learned and then you win. So I feel so strongly about that.
Speaker 1:Be careful of perfectionistic tendencies, thinking that you must follow the instructions or the steps perfectly or it's not going to work. That's not okay, that that's just going to drag you around. You got to drop all that stuff and do the best you can. So that's my 20 minutes on the idea of sitting with your anxiety, a little bit of a ramble, totally unscripted, making it up as I go along. But I've been talking about this stuff for so long that it's just sometimes I just have a lot to say on it and it just sort of comes out however way it comes out. So just a quick reminder before I sign off.
Speaker 1:If you have enjoyed this and you know somehow it's been helpful, of course, if you're watching on YouTube, maybe hit a like or leave a comment or subscribe to the channel. Of course, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or iTunes or whatever, maybe leave a five-star review for the podcast or write a review of this episode if you think it was really good, because it helps other people find the podcast or the YouTube channel and helps me help more people. And, of course, the anxious truth is more than just this one particular podcast episode or YouTube video. If what you find here is helpful and you want to get more resources or more information or more help about anxiety, anxiety disorders, depression, ocd, that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1:All the goodies are on my website at theanxioustruthcom, much of which is free. There are books, there is more social media content, there's all the other podcast episodes and videos, much of which is also very low cost. The books are very, very low cost. There are workshops and seminars and stuff in there. They're also very low cost. So go to theanxioustruthcom, look for all the other resources, use the free ones for sure. If anything strikes your fancy and you want to support the work by buying a workshop or buying a book, I'm not going to argue. Thank you so much. I always appreciate that stuff. But go check it out, because there's more than just this podcast episode and there's a really good chance that if this podcast episode or video has led you to ask questions like but what about, or can you tell me more about? Head on over to my website and use the search term, because you're probably gonna find that there's been a podcast episode or video about that already. So avail yourself of those resources.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for like hanging out with me today for these 20 something minutes, for letting me ramble about sitting with it. Hopefully I've been able to clarify it with you. Remember whatever you do today to make a little bit of a change in direction, from running away from your anxiety and fear toward you know the new direction, to maybe being able to face it a little bit more. Work through it, navigate through it. Stop letting it drag you around and rule your life. However small the step is that you take in that new direction today, it counts. Give yourself credit, take it, build on it. They all add up. They'll get you to where you want to go in the long run. Be nice to yourself, be patient with yourself, be kind with yourself, believe in yourself as best you can, but act even when you don't believe. That's how you learn how to believe. I hope you find this helpful. I will see you in the next episode. We're out. We'll see you next time.