Anxiety Recovery PROCESS vs CONTENT (Episode 162)

So the content of your anxiety is, is the subject, if you will.

Like, oh, you know, I get really scared of my heartbeat, or I'm scared of the dizzy feeling, or the jelly legs, or the DPDR, or, or if you have intrusive thoughts or health anxiety, I'm fixated right now on cancer, or I'm fixated on this disease, or if you have OCD, it's this particular...

What about a thought that I might not love my partner? That's the content, right? The, the subject matter, if you will, and people with anxiety disorders get fooled into thinking that they have to solve the content.

But really we don't care about the con- which sounds uncaring.

It's not uncaring on a human level, but we don't focus on the content, and if you've been struggling for a long time and trying to figure out the content, you may have discovered that it's not really working for you, or that content is hopping, right, from topic to topic over time.

And, uh, then it becomes really difficult.

Once you solve one...

That's why we're not talking about symptoms, or we don't have tips for specific intrusive thoughts.

Because if you try to solve one thought or one fear or one symptom, another one just pops up and takes its place.

So we care about the process.

What, what do you think the process is that we care about?

Yeah, I agree.

The process is, is, is the threat response, the doubt response, and all the physiological symptoms that come with it, and the thoughts, and whatever the threat response is to you.

So your brain, uh, your anxiety will bring your attention to threat 'cause there's a threat response, and it's usually, uh, are we teaching the brain that this threat is real and thanking the threat response for firing off all day, every day? Or is it a, "All right.

Okay.

That's, I don't like that, uh, how that makes me feel.

I feel unsafe, I feel untethered, um, and I feel doubtful, but this has happened over and over and again.

I need to turn off this misfiring threat response." Um, and I think that often that's kind of you're looking at the process, not the content.

However, I would argue, and it's really important, this is why we love talking about psycho-education and stuff like that.

Mm.

If you don't know enough psycho-education about your anxiety-

Mm-hmm

... about your anxiety disorders, it's very difficult to then suddenly go, "Well, the process, you know, the content doesn't matter."

Yeah.

No.