OMG! Nothing Works For My Anxiety!!! | EP 317

If you've reached the point of declaring "I've tried everything and nothing works for my anxiety," this episode is specifically for you. Many anxiety sufferers fall into this trap and conclude they're uniquely broken or have a special form of anxiety that's resistant to recovery.

As both a therapist and someone who personally recovered from panic disorder and agoraphobia, I'll explain why this frustrating experience happens. You'll discover why commonly-tried control and avoidance strategies can provide temporary relief but ultimately strengthen anxiety's grip on your life.

I'll break down the fundamental flaw in these approaches using a simple sailing metaphor: if you're trying to reach London from New York by sailing west, the problem isn't your sailing technique—it's your direction.

This episode offers a shift in perspective about what actually gives you a fighting chance at lasting recovery. Instead of searching for more control techniques, learn why changing your entire approach might be the key you've been missing.

No quick fixes or miracle cures here—just straight talk about why certain approaches fail and what direction might actually lead to meaningful change. Small steps in a new direction still count as progress, and recognizing what doesn't work is valuable learning on the path to reclaiming your life from anxiety.

Links and resources mentioned in this episode:

• Full show notes: https://theanxioustruth.com/317
• The Disordered Podcast: https://disordered.fm

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.

Transcript

The Nothing Works Crisis

Speaker 1 0:00

Oh my God, nothing works for my anxiety and I don't know what to do. If you are an anxious person and you are at the point where you are saying that nothing works for your anxiety, then welcome to episode 317 of the Anxious Truth. This one is for you. Hello everybody, welcome back to the Anxious Truth. This is episode 317 of the podcast we are recording in May of 2025.

Speaker 1 0:25

For those of you who are watching or listening from the future, I am Drew Linsalata. I'm creator and host of the Anxious Truth. I'm a therapist practicing in the area of anxiety and anxiety disorders in the state of New York. I'm also a former sufferer of the very problems that I speak and write about. I'm a three-time author on the topic of anxiety and anxiety disorders. Social media dude, psychoeducator advocate. You get the deal.

Speaker 1 0:46

This week on the Anxious Truth, we're going to talk about what happens when an anxious person starts to declare that they've tried everything and nothing works for their anxiety. It can lead you into a really dark place where you feel like you're worse than everybody else, or your anxiety is somehow special, or you have a special immune form of anxiety that doesn't respond to anything and you're kind of stuck. So we're going to talk about that today because it's a really common experience, unfortunately, in the community of people who listen to this podcast and read my books. Before we get into this topic, I just want to remind you that the Anxious Truth is more than just this video or this podcast episode. There's a ton more resources on my website at theanxioustruthcom, including all the previous podcast episodes, the other podcast I do with my buddy, josh Fletcher, that one's called Disordered. There's a bunch of workshops and courses, all of which are very low cost. There's a bunch of other free stuff, all the social media stuff, the books that I've written. Head on over to theanxioustruthcom and check it all out. There's a lot of good stuff, according to the people who use it, so avail yourself of all the resources.

Speaker 1 1:43

So I'm sitting outside today. It's a Sunday afternoon and I've decided to record on a Sunday afternoon. This is a little bit old school. I used to record podcasts this way. It's lower production value, but that's okay. I'm enjoying the weather and hopefully it's going to work for you guys, so enjoy the trees and the Japanese maple behind me. That's the big shock of red leaves.

Speaker 1 2:00

So let's talk about what happens when an anxious person is struggling for any period of time with chronic or disordered states of anxiety and they're working overtime for a very long time to try and get a grip on that. They may find that nothing is really changing. They're still being triggered. Quite often they may be having recurring panic attacks. They can't stop the overthinking, the worrying, the ruminating, the gad. It's just kicking into high gear or nothing is working for their OCD. And they may start to declare and this may resonate with you if you're watching or listening today they start to declare nothing works. I've tried everything and nothing works for my anxiety.

Speaker 1 2:36

And when that happens, an anxious person could start to draw really difficult conclusions like I am specially broken or my anxiety is somehow different than everybody else's, or I have a worse form of anxiety, or there's something structurally wrong with me or deficient, and nothing that I hear like on social media or on podcasts works for my anxiety. So there must be something wrong with me. And that can lead you to start to feel sort of despair or hopeless or feel like there's really nowhere for you to go. And some people start to reach the conclusion that, like I'm done, I'm just going to stop trying because clearly nothing works. And that's a tough place to be. We never want to get there because that starts to lead to depression and ugliness, like I stopped trying and I just disengage and I just decide to accept that I'm going to have to struggle with anxiety and be afraid of my own body, thoughts and emotions for the rest of my life, and that's not fair. We don't want you to wind up there because you don't have to wind up there. So what does it mean when anxious people say nothing works for my anxiety? Well, I can tell you that most commonly and this I can take after you know, however, many years 20 to 15 years of doing this podcast and building a very large audience and interacting with tens of thousands of anxious people I can tell you that often the person who says nothing works for my anxiety is saying that they've been trying everything that they could find, and I understand why. Why wouldn't you try this? You're trying everything you can find under the sun to manage your anxiety, to manage your symptoms, to control your nervous system, to regulate yourself, to forcibly heal something that you think is broken inside of you.

Speaker 1 4:11

Generally speaking, the primary approach to trying to deal with chronic and disordered forms of anxiety tends to be control-based strategies and in this context I'm going to say that's control slash avoidance. I'm going to put them in the same category. Either I'm going to start to avoid anything that might trigger these difficult sensations or scary thoughts or really big emotions that I fear so much and that put me into a spiral, or I'm going to avoid and also trying to figure out ways to control those things. I want to control my thoughts, I want to control my emotions, I want to control my symptoms. Isn't there something I can do to instantly like tap on my cheek and turn off my nervous system and calm it down right away? And, generally speaking, people will default to avoidance, which perfectly makes sense. I mean, nobody wants to repeat difficult experiences.

Control & Avoidance Traps

Speaker 1 4:59

So we go first to avoidance and then we tend to go toward control, and this is fueled by the current environment that we're in right now, where anybody that can fog up a mirror can declare themselves a wellness or a mental health expert. Anybody who's ever had a panic attack can decide that they're an anxiety influencer or healing coach and start to tell you ways to control your anxiety or manage your anxiety, and it can lead you down a path where you figure like well, okay. Well, the conventional wisdom here is I have to learn to avoid my triggers, or I have to learn how to manage my symptoms, or I have to change my gut health, or I have to get the optimal amount of sleep, or I have to make sure that I don't drink caffeine, or like there's a lot of control stuff that goes with that, and along with that might be things like you have to start to recognize those triggers so you can avoid them. And you know, yeah sure, if I'm afraid to fly, I might not want to fly because that triggers my fear of flying.

Speaker 1 5:50

But this is more pervasive throughout somebody's entire lifestyle. They begin to avoid anything that might possibly trigger difficult sensations or scary thoughts or really powerful emotions. So people's lives become more and more rigid and restricted and things get smaller and smaller, and that by itself can lead you into kind of a dark place. So if you're looking to try to feel better which everybody does and there's nothing wrong with that I would certainly expect you to try to feel better, naturally, or want to feel better, but it can lead you down the road where you're either avoiding the feelings that you've learned to fear or you're trying desperately to find techniques that control the way your body and mind work, and lately I've been using the metaphor of knobs and levers, right. So what we do is we fall into the trap of trying to figure out special ways to like, turn the knobs and pull the levers on our nervous systems or our bodies, or endocrine systems, or our thoughts or or our emotions, to control them, so that we can force ourselves into this very narrow range of state that we find acceptable, which is generally neutral or calm or maybe happy. But even paradoxically, many anxious people have a little bit of a problem if they get too happy or too excited, because that can morph into fear or panic.

Speaker 1 7:03

So when we try so hard to control these things, or we avoid, avoid, avoid things don't really go the way we want them to. Those strategies tend to lead to temporary relief in the moment, like sure, if I, you know, I'm having a panic attack and I run out of the room and get in my car and race home to what I think is my safe place, suddenly I feel better. Many people in that situation will say the minute I start to head out of, you know, the party that I'm in, or I get in my car and start to head toward home. The minute that happens, I immediately start to calm down. So sure you start to feel better. So I understand why you might default to that sort of thing. But then there's a price to pay on the other side, which is I left another social event, or I ran out on dinner dinner, or I left the shopping cart, you know, full of groceries at the supermarket again and like this has become a problem for me.

Speaker 1 7:47

So when we avoid, we tend to escape the feelings that we don't want to feel, the sensations, the thoughts, the emotions that we don't want because we fear them so much. But there's a price to pay. So we get temporary discomfort, but we get longer term pain in the form of the consequences that come from that avoidance. And when we try control-based strategies, we find that we get stuck in loops all the time. They don't work consistently and they certainly don't work on the long term. So while you may be running for ice packs or immediately calling a safe person, or doing all the things that you could think of to intentionally distract yourself from how you feel, so you can get away from those scary thoughts and those scary sensations, you might in fact get some sort of temporary relief, but once what winds up happening is, that never lasts. You get triggered again in an hour or in the next day or two days from now and you have to repeat that loop again and again and again.

Speaker 1 8:37

So the person who is defaulting to primarily control strategies is trying desperately to manually control feeling and thinking and evaluating systems inside them that were never designed to be manually controlled. If we could find ways to hack the fight or flight response, we'd be in trouble because we should not be able to turn that off. That's not correct. We need these processes, we need those systems in our minds. We need that threat detection system. We need the alerting system, like we. There should not be a way to turn it off just because you don't like what it's doing at the moment. So we wind up fighting against our natural state and when we really like just posted about this on my Instagram too, a couple of days ago.

Speaker 1 9:17

If we really really look at the current state of things like neuroscience or cognitive science right now, you start to see that, yeah, we're learning a huge amount, but so much of what we're learning is focused directly on like wow, these systems are really interrelated and they're really complicated and they've been evolved to work at peak efficiency without us even knowing about it, or having to intervene Makes sense. These are complicated systems, primarily outside of our control, that are designed to keep us safe and alive and we don't get a say in how they work, because that would be a terrible design. Yet, somehow or other, we even find ourselves in an environment today where people take a lot of that science and a lot of that research and somehow twist it into saying, well, because we see sort of how these interrelated systems work, that there must be some way now for us to hack into that system and manually control it Again, bad idea. So when people reach the conclusion that you know I tried everything and nothing works for me, generally speaking, what they're saying is I've been trying to control my anxiety, or I've been just exclusively avoiding it for a very long time, and sure enough, I don't like the life that I get from that. So where do we go from here? I would also have to throw in another little caveat, which is some people will say well, I know what you're saying, drew.

The Misuse of Acceptance Strategies

Speaker 1 10:32

I listen to your podcast, or I listen to Disordered, or I follow you on social media. I read your books, I get it. It's acceptance, right, it's willful tolerance, it's surrender, it's mindfulness, it's all of those things Correct, and I've been doing that and that doesn't work either. And whenever somebody tells me acceptance doesn't work for me, mindfulness doesn't work for me, then that the question itself or the statement itself indicates well, this is somebody who is trying to use these things acceptance as a feeling better technique. If I accept my anxiety, then this is a way for me to turn knobs and pull levers. That calms me down and makes me feel better, makes the anxiety go away. That's not the way this works. So we don't use acceptance, willful tolerance, surrender, meditation and mindfulness. We don't use those things as ways to operate our anxiety or operate directly on thoughts or emotions or feelings or bodily sensations. We use those things to learn how to move through those uncomfortable states in a more productive way. Because, in the end, the problem here is that those of us who struggle with this particular issue chronic and distorted states of anxiety will learn to be afraid of our own bodies, our minds and our emotions. So what we're using when, what we're doing when we use acceptance and mindfulness-based strategies, is we are learning through experience that we don't have to fear our bodies and minds, our emotions, anymore. Those are uncomfortable and difficult things to deal with sometimes, but not dangerous things, so we don't have to be fearful of them anymore. So, all that being said, where do we go from here?

Speaker 1 11:59

If you find that you are in a place where you keep saying I've tried everything and nothing works, then you have to ask yourself what have I been trying? Have I been trying primarily avoidance and control-based strategies? If you have, then that's not your fault. I mean, I understand why you would try things that are designed to make you feel better and sometimes do right away in the moment. I get that. I'm not taking that away from you. You're allowed to want that. But if that's a strategy that you have been primarily trying for however long weeks, months, years and you keep feeling like that doesn't work, well, take heart in the fact that it was never going to work, and what I mean by work in that context is it was never going to lead to long like larger, broader, lasting, durable change. Those things were never going to lead to that.

Speaker 1 12:49

Ask anybody who feels that they got better using primarily avoidance and control strategies and then it came back. What that looks like Nine times out of 10,. What that means is I learned strategies to control my anxiety, but then at some point life overwhelmed those strategies and I did feel the things that I fear so much, and then I didn't know what to do because I still fear them. I couldn't control them. My control fell apart. It was overwhelmed by the circumstance or for whatever reason. Maybe I was sick, or maybe I was in a difficult time in my life, or maybe I was under a lot of stress and my control strategy failed me. And then all of a sudden I was. I was hit with those feelings again that I fear so much, and then I say that I'm in a setback and it came back and all bets are off and I don't know why this keeps happening to me. So nothing works, for my anxiety often appears as cyclical recovery. I feel better and then I don't. I'm doing better and then I don't, and I go to for an agoraphobic. It's often like, oh, I was able to push out and I expanded my comfort zone and I was living most of my life, and then, blam, it all came crashing down again in the span of two weeks after I had two big panic attacks and it was all over.

Speaker 1 13:58

So where do we go from here? The first thing I would urge you to do is recognize that you may have been relying on strategies that were never going to work for you, but that's not your fault. We're never going to work for you, but that's not your fault. It's okay to try those strategies and everybody defaults to them at first. Again, that's okay, sort of the natural progression of this. But remember that just because you want something to work doesn't mean it's going to work. So I think the first big takeaway I would ask you to sort of consider in this podcast episode, in this video, would be knowing the difference between what you want to work and what actually has a fighting chance of really working.

Changing Direction for Recovery

Speaker 1 14:31

We want everything to work. We want to feel better right away, and that's okay. Sometimes we want it really really bad. Sometimes we hold beliefs about wellness or the way our bodies work. We just like concepts like regulating our nervous systems and that sort of stuff, and so we like them so much that we want strategies that revolve around those concepts to work so bad. So we keep trying them again and again and again Again. All human beings have emotional bias. That's okay, not a crime. Just know that if those things are not working for you, that's not a you problem, that's a method problem. Right, that's a? Well.

Speaker 1 15:05

I took the same path that all anxious people take, at least in the beginning, and I may be learning the hard way now that like that really isn't the way to lasting recovery, that's okay. Even learning what doesn't work is learning, and it counts. In fact, I would venture to guess and I might assert as I'm kind of talking out loud here that almost every anxious person that gets all the way to you know what they will determine to be a recovered state, which, by the way, means that they might still experience anxiety or fear. They're just not afraid of the fear, they're just not anxious about the anxiety anymore. Anybody who gets there probably went through this part where they tried all the other stuff. Sometimes they got some temporary relief out of it, sometimes they made some progress, and then it collapsed again. They kept up, they were on the hamster wheel, they couldn't get off it and ultimately they had to learn. Well, I guess that doesn't work. So that's okay, that's how we learn, that's how we learn in life in general.

Speaker 1 15:57

We try things, we see what works and we go with what works, and then we abandon what doesn't work and try different things. It's experimentation, right, say that almost every anxious person has to go through this time where they take the path that seems to be the common sense one, or seems to offer immediate relief, seems to offer quick relief, seems to get us a quick distance between us and those thoughts and those sensations and those emotions that we fear so much and that feel so overwhelming and dangerous and urgent. And then we discover, like, this isn't working for me, but that's okay. When you reach the conclusion I think this isn't working for me, just don't make another leap that says, well, because something that's wrong with me, that's not because something is wrong with you at all, it's just because I was trying something that was never going to work. I mean, heck, I really want the New York Rangers to win the Stanley Cup again, but no matter how much I, you know, hammer on a piece of wood on my desk, nothing works for the New York Rangers, because hammering on a piece of wood on my desk was never going to make them win the Stanley Cup. Now, that's a ridiculous. You know little, you know metaphor there, but you get the idea it was, if the thing was never going to work, because it's just not really a path that leads to lasting recovery or lasting improvement or major like significant, durable improvement, then it's not a you problem, it's just that was just the wrong path.

Speaker 1 17:17

So sometimes what I tell people is that your first, you know, your first way to start to move forward again into a direction that might work for you is just changing direction. So I've kind of used the ship on the ocean metaphor before. I've used it with my therapy clients. If you're in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and you really want to get to London, well, you have to be sailing east. You got to be going east. If you keep going west and don't understand what's happening because you keep hitting your boat into North Carolina, well that's not a you problem, it's not even a problem with your boat, it's not even a problem with the fact that you want to go to London. Like all of those things are okay.

Speaker 1 17:53

The problem is you've been sailing the boat in the wrong direction and every time you smash into North Carolina you back up and do it again and again and again and really hope that the next time will be London. That was never going to work. So sometimes it is a huge win just to recognize well, nothing works for me, not as a declaration of disaster or failure, but as a recognition that it's like oh, I might have to try something different here, and I'm allowed to do that because that might be how I'm going to learn something new. And if you can start to turn that boat toward the east, even if you're not moving toward London yet yet, but you're just facing london this time, you are winning right. And sometimes, just you know, coming to grips with the idea that, like, sailing west is just not working, even though I want it to, and there may be a lot of emotions and resistance and you may have to be angry about that and you may be a little resistant to that. It's totally normal, it's okay. You're a human being, you're allowed to feel those things. So sometimes it just takes a long time to just start to turn the boat in the right direction, and if that's where you are right now, that's okay.

Speaker 1 18:54

If you're still sailing west and feeling like, but I don't want to sail east, I want to get to London right now, but I still want to go west, well, okay, I understand why you feel that way Again, not your fault, it's not a flaw, it's not a problem. You want to feel better. It's really okay. But if you're feeling like nothing works for your anxiety, ask yourself what have you been trying? If you've been trying to avoid or control as your primary strategies, then you're trying to sail to London by going west, and that was never going to work.

Speaker 1 19:21

First thing you got to do is come to grips with the idea that you may have to turn your boat in a different direction, and then you actually have to turn that boat, and then you have to actually start sailing west, little by little. And guess what, when you turn the boat and you start sailing east toward london the proper direction this time, there's going to be bad weather, there's going to be storms, there might be other boats out there in the shipping lanes like. It doesn't mean just because you're going in the new direction, it's going to be super smooth sailing. In fact, that other direction might be really hard, but that doesn't mean it's the wrong direction, right? So where am I About 20 minutes into this? I don't want to belabor the point too much because you know I'll wind up just looping through the same things and just coming up with different metaphors for no good reason. But if I can give you one thing in this episode, it would be.

Speaker 1 20:01

If you are, you know, exasperated because you feel like nothing works, there's a really good chance. That is not a you problem, that is a path problem. Like, oh, I just picked the wrong path. Well, why did I pick that path? Well, because I wanted to feel better, and I'm a human being, I'm allowed to want to feel better. I made the best choice I could in the moment with the information that I had. That's okay, give yourself a break.

Speaker 1 20:23

Sometimes we can be really self-critical and we get that Craig the Critic thing and we just start to beat ourselves up for wasting time. But that's not a waste of time. If it taught you what doesn't work, then that counts. Learning what doesn't work is just as important as learning what does. So take that out of today, if anything, take that out of this episode.

Speaker 1 20:42

Well, nothing works for me. Okay, I hate that and I feel like I've wasted time and I want to beat myself up. But can I stop, take a few breaths and recognize feel like I've wasted time and I want to beat myself up, but can I stop, take a few breaths and recognize that like, well, if I learned something from this, maybe I've learned something about the way my anxiety works. Maybe I've learned something about myself. Maybe I've learned something about my values and what it's important to me, and now I can take those things and turn my boat toward London and actually go east and ultimately get there. That's okay, you can get there.

Speaker 1 21:07

So that is my 20-minute rant, or off-the-cuff sort of metaphor-laden nonsense, about what happens when nothing works for anxiety, with air quotes, right. So hopefully this has been helpful to you. Take it with you. Remember this, especially when you want to declare failure, don't get trapped in that hole. Your mind will want to trap you in that and tell you like, oh, nothing's going to work, you're screwed, you're never going to get better. Careful of that. No, will want to trap you in that and tell you like, oh, nothing's going to work, you're screwed. Nothing's that, you're never going to get better. Careful of that. No, it just means that I've been trying things that were never going to work. Now I might have to try something different.

Speaker 1 21:39

All right, so I will end the episode the way I usually do ask a couple of favors if you're watching, as on youtube. On my youtube channel, hit the like button, maybe subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell so you know when I upload new stuff. If you like the video or you have a question, maybe leave a comment or share it with some other people. Of course, if you're listening to this as a podcast episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and you can rate and review if you really like what you see or hear maybe a five-star rating and if you're really into the podcast, just maybe take a minute or two and write a little review, just a couple of sentences, as to why you like the podcast. It helps other people find it and then more people get help and that's why I do this to begin with. And yeah, that's it.

Speaker 1 22:20

I will remind you also that even if all you do today or for the next two weeks before my next podcast episode, if all you do is work on coming to grips with the idea that what I've been trying is never gonna work for me and I'm gonna have to turn my boat in the other direction, and if all you manage to do is turn the boat a little bit in a different direction, at least consider that I might have to go that way instead of that way, then you are winning, like that will add up. That is a step forward. You will get something out of that. It is part of the process. Do not minimize even the small things that other people might not be able to see, but you'll be able to see when you look in the mirror and I'll know you're doing it and I know it matters. So hopefully this has been helpful to you guys.

Speaker 1 22:57

I will be back again in two weeks with another episode of the Anxious Truth. If you want more than just every other week podcast, go to disorderedfm, because that podcast comes out every week. You can check that out if you feel like this isn't enough content for you. But also remember you can't really recover by listening to podcasts. You've got to actually go and do things the stuff that I talk about, the stuff that Josh and I talk about on Disordered. So thanks for hanging out this week. I appreciate it. I'll be back in two weeks to talk about something Not sure what yet, but something. I'll see you next time.