EP 197 – Anxiety Recovery: Comparing Success and Struggle

In today’s episode of The Anxious Truth, we are going to talk about success and struggle within the anxiety recovery process and how, for many people, the two can look very similar at face value.

As I have said many times, anxiety recovery is possible when we are able to sit in the discomfort of doing the hard things. Doing the things that scare us. Doing the things that purposefully put us in an anxious state so that we can learn to disassociate it from actual danger.

Now, this might be what could be considered the ‘struggle’.

Yet, how is it that one person can be seen doing the things, facing challenges, embracing the struggle, facing their fears, and make progress while someone else can appear to be doing the exact same things and remain feeling stuck?

Today, we discuss one possible reason for this.

Key takeaways for this episode:

• The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is a part of the brain that filters our attention.
• The person who engages in the hard challenges of anxiety recovery and gives attention to the lessons learned from the process and the positive impact of every perseverance often makes progress.
• The person who engages in the hard challenges of anxiety recovery and only filters in the negative (such as how afraid they were or how hard it was) STRUGGLES to make progress beyond that.
• Dr. Bridget offers an ‘AND or BUT’ exercise which allows you to look beyond the negative filter of ‘this is just scary’ or ‘that is too hard’ and finish the sentence in a way that gives room to progress. For example, this is scary BUT I’m doing it anyway.

Tune in for the full episode to compare success and struggle in greater depth.