Let Me Tell You How I Feel (Episode 153)
Let's start with a success story from the UK. While being medically monitored for four hours, our listener realized how much attention she was giving to her physical symptoms. Her story highlights the difference between noticing a sensation and compulsively monitoring it.
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Which leads us to a conversation about the urge to ALWAYS talk about how you feel - either out loud or silently in an internal dialogue.
We discuss the "telling compulsion," which is a common behavior for those struggling with anxiety and OCD. This is the urge to immediately report every physical sensation or intrusive thought to someone else.
The Safety Seek: Telling others how you feel is often a safety behavior used to gain temporary reassurance.
The "Problem Shared" Myth: While talking about emotions is generally seen as healthy, in the context of an anxiety disorder, it can become a repetitive loop that keeps the brain in a state of high alert.
Internal Monitoring: You don't have to say it out loud for it to be a compulsion. Constantly checking in with yourself and asking "how do I feel now?" is the internal version of the same behavior.
Conventional wisdom suggests you should always express your feelings. However, for someone with an anxiety disorder, focusing intensely on every "buzz" in the head or "jelly leg" sensation actually reinforces the idea that these feelings are dangerous.
Therapeutic Missteps: We acknowledge that even therapists are sometimes trained to push clients to "probe" and "feel more deeply" into sensations that are actually just symptoms of a misfiring threat response.
The Goal of Discernment: Recovery involves learning when it is productive to talk about an emotion (like anger from a fight with a partner) and when it is better to disengage from a physical anxiety symptom.
A few key principles you may bring with you from this episode:
Labeling Feelings: People often wrap every emotion in the label of "anxiety." You are allowed to feel angry, sad, or even happy without it being a "symptom" that needs to be reported.
Psychological Flexibility: Recovery is about learning to be with difficult internal experiences rather than trying to control or prevent them.
The Amygdala: Constantly talking about your anxiety to seek relief keeps your threat response turned on.
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The Disordered Guide to Health Anxiety is now available. If you're struggling with health anxiety, this book is for you.
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Struggling with worry and rumination that you feel you can't stop or control? Check out Worry and Rumination Explained, a two hour pre-recorded workshop produced by Josh and Drew. The workshop takes a deep dive into the mechanics of worrying and ruminating, offering some helpful ways to approach the seemingly unsolvable problem of trying to solve seemingly unsolvable problems.
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Want to ask us questions, share your wins, or get more information about Josh, Drew, and the Disordered podcast? Send us an email or leave a voicemail on our website.
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Disordered Roundtable is coming! Think of it as "Disordered Live", a way for members of our audience to spend time with us in an intimate virtual setting (attendance is limited) to engage in real time sharing and discussion on specific anxiety disorder and recovery topics. To be notified when new Disordered Roundtable sessions are scheduled, sign up for our email list using the form on this page.
