EP 287 - When Everything Becomes An Anxiety Trigger (Foundations of Panic #6)

In case you are listening in the future , I am Drew Lincellata , creator and host of the anxious truth . This is the podcast where we talk about all things anxiety , anxiety recovery and anxiety disorders .

So if you are new to this podcast or this YouTube channel and you've just sort of stumbled into the door accidentally , I do hope that you find the content here helpful or applicable in some way . And , of course , if you are a returning listener or viewer , welcome back .

Thank you for your continued support and I will do my best today to be as useful as I can for you . For those who do not know me , I am a therapist in training specializing in anxiety and anxiety disorders in the state of New York in the US of A . I am an author on this topic . Have been written three books on anxiety and anxiety recovery .

I am an educator and a psychoeducator on this topic .

You can find all of my goodies on my website at the anxious truthcom and I am also a former sufferer of anxiety disorders and depression and even probably diagnosable OCD for many , many years of my life , on and off , before I managed to find my way through the recovery process which started this whole thing that we call the anxious truth .

So let's talk about why everything can become an anxiety or panic trigger for some people . This is part of the series that I've been calling foundations of panic .

This is really geared toward people who are kind of new in the community , who are beginning to struggle with panic attacks or recurring panic attacks , who do not understand what's happening to them and need some basic guidance . I am certainly happy to provide that . So if you are new , welcome . I hope you find this helpful .

If you are an older member of the community or if you have been around for quite some time , this content might not necessarily be applicable to you , or maybe it's just a bit of a refresher , in which case you might want to click out and come back for the next podcast episode . But if you do , hang around .

Thank you and , again , I hope you get something out of it as well . So let's talk about this thing where everything can suddenly become an anxiety trigger , because it's real , it happens to a lot of people and it can be incredibly confusing .

Remember that panic disorder we're talking about foundations of panic but also most anxiety disorders , because they're all kind of related to each other are based on developing a fear of the anxious state itself . The symptoms of panic anxious thoughts , feelings of doom or danger those are the things that we begin to fear .

We begin to get anxious about being anxious , we begin to be afraid of feeling afraid , and when we fear those things , we may begin to stay on high alert all the time , and by that I mean that you are constantly checking for signs of anxiety and panic . When you are afraid of those things , it would be natural for you to be on the lookout for them .

You will begin to go into detection mode all the time . That means we start to dial in our focus .

We pay very , very close attention to what our bodies are doing , or what thoughts our minds are producing and what emotions we are experiencing that stuff becomes really important to us , and since we're paying very close attention to things that we would normally not be paying any attention to in a normal situation .

Every sensation , every thought , every emotion becomes amplified , and if you're listening to this , you might know what I'm talking about . So here's a few examples .

If you are in this anxious state and that's why you're listening to this podcast or watching this on YouTube have you ever noticed that when you are in that state , you begin to feel every like itch , every twitch , every tingle , every little subtle change of temperature in your body ?

You noticed every noise your stomach makes you notice every pain that shoots up your back for just two seconds . Everything becomes amplified .

Or how about that thing where maybe you have a slight change in mood and that suddenly turns into an emergency because you've developed a fear that you might become depressed , even though you exhibit no signs of depression right now ?

Or that thing where you start to feel really excited because , I don't know , maybe you're on a date with a partner that you really like and you're starting to feel excitement and suddenly that becomes an emergency because that sort of starts to feel like anxiety or panic . This happens all the time .

It's actually quite common in our community and when we are in that hypersensitive mode , because we're always on the lookout for things that might lead to or look like anxiety or panic . Any sensation , any thought , any experience can quickly become interpreted as danger by your overactive lizard brain . Suddenly your list of anxiety and panic triggers starts to grow .

So in a typical example , somebody may first have a panic attack , say while driving the car , and then they form the association that they should not drive the car because that's where they panicked . And then all of a sudden it's not just driving the car , it's also maybe walking down the block because you had a panic attack then .

Then maybe it's the supermarket . So because you had a panic attack then and now you don't wanna do that . So over time you start to see that your list of panic triggers or places or big things begins to grow . But also your list of little triggers begins to grow .

Because you're in a hypersensitive state , you're in threat detection mode , you're keenly focused on things and a non-anxious person is not even focused on at all and might not even notice . But you not only notice them , you feel them very intently and your hypersensitive brain , on high alert , interprets them as signs of danger or threat .

And then one day you wake up and you discover that , a smell that you didn't expect , or maybe there's a little breeze in the air and it gives you a quick chill . Or maybe your partner didn't load the dishwasher correctly and that frustrates you . Or maybe you watch the sad story on the news .

Suddenly , you find that these things quickly send you into the dreaded sort of anxiety or panic spiral Use of the term spiral all the time .

You , at that point , will start to feel confused , you'll be even more afraid , you'll be frustrated , and many people are tempted at that point to throw up their hands and proclaim that everything is now a trigger and they don't know why it's happening or how this happened to them .

And one of those common things that you hear all the time in the community is I don't know how I became this person .

I used to be afraid of nothing or very little , and now I feel like I'm afraid of everything , because everything becomes a potential anxiety and panic trigger to an anxious person who's in a disordered state where everything gets interpreted as danger .

That is a tough place to wind up and that's why I'm recording this episode , because I know it's really hard for people . And this is when they start to experience this . They start to form the opinion that like , oh , things are getting really bad now I'm getting worse . This is growing . This feels out of control . But guess what ?

Even this doesn't mean that you're broken or like uniquely worse than everybody else or somehow beyond hope . You're not . I know it might start to feel this way when your list of panic and anxiety triggers gets longer and longer and suddenly you feel like you're afraid of everything .

But really you're afraid , you're just afraid and you'd rather not be afraid , like most human beings . So now you become afraid of anything that might make you feel that afraid feeling which is really kind of mind blowing . It's quite circular , it's very meta , right ? I'm afraid , I'd rather not be afraid .

So now I've become afraid of anything that might make me feel afraid . That's a tough spot to be in and it can make you feel sort of out of control or like you're being overwhelmed or your life is being taken away . It's really hard to deal with that .

So my job here today is to try and explain why that happens and to let you know that it's actually quite common . It's not an unusual situation at all . It's not just you .

It is not just you If you find that you are in this situation where your brain has now decided that everything and anything is a good reason to panic and go into that fight or flight mode . Please know that it is not just you Like I wanted to repeat that as often as I could .

It's actually the logical progression of disordered anxiety in many , many cases in this community and unfortunately it is what leads to a wider and wider range of avoidance and sort of early detection habits that are all designed to stay far away from those horrible triggers and the scary inner experiences they produce .

And the fact that I call them inner experiences is important because you have to remember this .

If you're in a situation where you feel like everything is a possible anxiety trigger for you or a panic trigger , remember this it's not the breeze , it's not the scent or the smell , it's not the twitch in your left thigh , it's not suddenly feeling cold or getting into an argument with your best friend . It's none of those things .

It's actually really just one thing your anxious brain has decided that any feeling that doesn't seem right or feels a bit too big might be air quotes too much and is then caused for alarm . So do not worry or focus too much on trying to figure out every trigger or why everything is a trigger .

I just told you why Do not sweat trying to engineer ways to avoid all of them one by one . That becomes frustrating and becomes exhausting , because it's really hard to start to engineer all of these like regular , innocuous things that happen every single day in human life .

You will start to try to engineer them out of your life , which is a big ask and can lead to frustration and even more feelings of being disheartened or defeated or defeated , and this is how you wind up , stuck in a very small or highly restricted life . So we need to remember that it's not all the triggers . It's one thing .

I'm afraid of the way I will feel when those triggers appear and I interpret them as danger . I am afraid they will start those internal experiences that I want desperately to never have again . It's one thing . It's not a million triggers , it's just a million ways to get to the same fear .

So if we can recognize that what we fear is the internal state fear , anxiety , uncertainty , discomfort , distress those are the things that the triggers create inside of you . The internal experience is the thing , not the event or input that causes it . That's why it has nothing to do with avoiding cool breezes or only going out when it's warm enough .

When you're triggered , then it's time to practice . Then it's time to practice that new reaction and relationship with that uncomfortable experience , rather than focusing on eliminating the triggers or trying to force your body and brain to not react .

Maybe you're trying to hack your brain or micromanager gut biome and , by the way , you're welcome to make those choices but if you've been trying to do that and you're super confused and disheartened because that's not really working for you consistently or at all , I urge you to consider that .

What if the way forward was to take this framework that I'm giving you today and maybe use it to inform a new way to react to how you feel when you're triggered ?

Now let me sort of rephrase that again , or repeat that Maybe what you can do is to consider that this sort of framework and explaining that long list of triggers this way can be useful in helping you form a new way , not to relate to the triggers themselves , but to react to how you feel when you encounter those triggers that are growing in number every day .

Now . We talk all the time in this podcast about learning how to drop safety behaviors and escape behaviors and save people and crutches , so that we can learn to fully face and practice tolerating and navigating through those scary , challenging , distressing moments that we would call anxiety spikes or anxiety attacks or panic attacks .

There's a ton of content about that in the old podcast episodes and episodes of Disordered , the podcast I do with Josh Fletcher . That's at Disorderfm , if you want to check it out . It's all in the books that I've written . It's in my social media feeds .

There is a ton of content that I produce that speak to this thing where we learn to face that fear , surrender to it , accept it , float through it , willfully tolerate it , navigate it . I don't care what word resonates with you . There's a ton of content about that .

So if you're listening to this and you're kind of new to this podcast or you're new to the whole sort of panic and disorder , anxiety thing and the question in your head right now is okay , cool , so how do I overcome ? I would urge you to take advantage of all those resources . There's a lot of content in here that talks about that .

But for today and for the purposes of this podcast episode or this , you know , youtube video , let's just try to leave here with a new intent . Let's take .

Let's leave here with the intent to take a few minutes or as much time as you need really to try to sit quietly and open yourself up to this way at looking at triggers and why your list of them is getting longer and longer .

You may be feeling , or you may have felt , like this was some kind of out of control process that you had no agency over or no influence in , that has slowly been taking over your life and ruining your life and making everything scary . But maybe it's not .

Maybe it's an anxious brain being too overzealous when trying to keep you safe and alive , which , in the end , is the job that your brain , especially the lower part of your brain , was designed to do . Remember , brains are not designed to keep us happy . Brains are designed to keep us safe and alive .

So what if this was all your brain just being very over enthusiastic about that job and going off the rails a little bit because it's sort of learned some bad habits that we have to correct ?

So what if just take some time to consider that , instead of trying to find a thousand different ways to avoid triggers or engineer your life around them which is really difficult or 500 different solutions for micromanaging your body and your brain , what if , instead , you just had to open yourself up to this one concept and work on learning a much simpler but

admittedly , very difficult to execute plan . And I say it's simpler because we don't target a thousand different triggers and try and fix them or avoid them . We don't try to target 62,000 you know little biochemical processes in our brains with 16 different supplements and and hacks and bio hacks . We focus on one concept and one fear . That is much simpler .

That's why I say it's simpler . Why is it difficult ? Well , it's difficult because when we talk about turning to face that fear , you know allowing , stopping the fight , allowing without resistance , surrendering , tolerating , willfully tolerating , floating all of the words you hear all the time on this podcast and related content .

That's difficult because that requires courage and it requires repetition and it requires taking at some point sort of a brave , informed leap of faith . That's why it's a much simpler plan . It lets you off the hook , but it is a hard plan to execute .

Whereas if you try to hang on to sort of the trigger model of recovery , which is I identify my triggers and I get around them , that would seem easier because it's trying to get you away from the thing that you fear , but it's much more complicated because the list of triggers gets bigger and bigger and bigger .

And here's the really nasty part about that If you try to eliminate trigger after trigger after trigger , you are training your overzealous brain to keep going and double down on that .

So it's very easy for somebody who is sort of using the fix the triggers model or micromanage my body and brain model to become overwhelmed Because just when I think I figured out one particular technique for avoiding this triggering , or I figured out one particular supplement or technique for , like , getting my my breath to slow down or something else , pops up and

now I got to learn something else , and that becomes super frustrating too and can lead people to believe I'm never going to get better , there's no hope for me , and that's kind of not true based on my theoretical orientation to anxiety and deciding anxiety disorders .

So if you leave this episode of this YouTube video with maybe just a little bit more openness to what I'm talking about here and willing to like , well , let me try and understand this a little bit more and what it would mean for my plan going forward If you had a simpler plan that let you off the hook instead of treating yourself like you're broken and having

to accommodate broken this if you leave , leave your , get yourself off the hook a little bit and maybe look at it as a much simpler , one problem issue , if you will . I mean , there are multiple problems , but you know , the core is kind of this one thing how would your life change ?

It's going to change because you're going to have to start to do difficult things and move forward . But it might change for the better because suddenly this is a holy way to look at this I'm not broken , I'm not diseased . I don't have to somehow change my entire life and try to micromanage my body .

I might have to just recognize why everything's become a trigger , understand the common theme . There is that I'm afraid of my own body and mind , my internal experience , and now I have to learn how to be less afraid of that through experience .

Not and I'll mention this even though I say it again and again in my books and the podcasts and everything else you cannot hear me say this and then just decide oh cool , I just won't be afraid anymore . It doesn't work that way . If it , if it did , everybody would get better much faster .

The change comes through different behaviors changing your behavior , changing the way you act , changing the way you react behaviorally , based on this new framework that I'm giving you today about triggers , right and internal experiences . But it's the different behavior which is difficult , because it requires courage and that informed , you know , sort of leap of faith .

That is what makes the change . So how would your life change if you took this explanation and tried to incorporate it a little bit ? Anyway , that is what 18 and a half minutes on this topic . I think that's probably more than enough . I don't want to confuse it too much .

Again , if you are new to this and the foundations of panic series is helping you , then that's great . I'm hope I'm able to continue it and I will . In two weeks , when the next episode comes out , we're gonna talk about how acceptance is a result , not a precursor . Think about that a little bit . I'll give you a little teaser .

Come back and listen to that in two weeks .

If you are digging this podcast and you're listening to it on Apple podcast or Spotify or some platform that lets you rate or review , then maybe take a minute and leave a five star review , or take another minute and actually write a review , because that helps more people find the podcast and then , sort of indirectly , you're helping more people get the help that

they want and

need . Of course , if you're listening to this or watching as a YouTube video , subscribe to the channel , hit the notification bell so you know when I upload new content like the video I think I said that and leave a comment , I will respond to you . I will do my best to read all of them and respond to as many as I can .

So just a quick reminder , as I do at the end of all of these podcasts , that anything you can do today to change the way you are reacting to that triggered feeling , no matter how small that change is maybe leaving one little crutch behind for a couple more seconds that counts .

They all add up , they all matter and in the end they get you where you wanna be . I know it's hard , I know it's scary , but I know you can do it . Thanks for listening . I'll see you on the next episode . Take care . Indestancesideing .