Thinking and Feeling ... About Thinking and Feeling | EP 293

It's incredibly informal . It's like the old days . I'm just looking into a camera and reading into a microphone , not even reading . I'm making this up as I go along . If you're watching on the YouTube channel , you can tell I look kind of tired this morning because I am .

And I'm going to talk about that to give you maybe a little bit of recovery encouragement , based on my own personal experience . And then we're going to get into the topic of what we think and feel about what we think and feel . Now there is metacognitive theory underneath this and some of the pinnings of metacognitive therapy and metacognitive type therapies .

That's true , but in metacognition we often talk about thinking , about thinking . But I heard Sally Winston Dr Sally Winston , who is a legend in this field . She said something in an IOCDF training video from about a year ago that really hit . She frames the idea of metacognition or these metacognitive concepts that we use as thinking and feeling .

About thinking and feeling , because I think the feeling part is really important and I especially want to go over that today .

Before we do that , just a quick reminder , as I always do every week you guys are probably tired of it at this point but a reminder that the Anxious Truth is more than just this podcast episode or this YouTube video , especially if this is your first time here and you just sort of stumbled in accidentally because you searched for something about anxiety .

There are tons more resources on my website at theanxioustruthcom . There are low-cost workshops and webinars , there are the books that I've written , there's all the previous podcast episodes . There's just years and years of free social media content .

So if you get a minute and you want to find more information about anxiety , anxiety disorders and anxiety recovery more resources check out my website at theanxioustruthcom . And , of course , if you're following along on a regular basis and you want to find a way to support the work , there's ways to do that on the website At a minimum .

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So let's talk about what we think and feel , about what we think and feel . Actually , before we get into that , I mentioned that if you're watching on the YouTube channel , you can tell I'm wearing a silly baseball cap this morning . I'm tired , it's early in the morning , it's a Tuesday morning . The podcast has to come out tomorrow morning .

I have more things to do than I can possibly do this week . I lost all of yesterday because of a family event which was actually quite impactful . I lost somebody very close to me . You know this person left us , unfortunately , back in January . It was a big , big loss in the family , a death in the family .

We did a memorial service and a burial yesterday and interning of ashes and all of that stuff and that is because I'm a human being . That is very draining . It's highly impactful . There's a lot of emotions that come with that . I am freaking exhausted , from a physical standpoint , a mental standpoint , an emotional standpoint .

There's just a lot going on right now Finishing my clinical work to finish my master's degree . I'm jamming a lot of hours into a short amount of time to satisfy my degree requirements . So , yeah , there's a lot happening right now . Is my life any more difficult than anybody listening ? No , definitely not .

But the reason why I bring this up and sometimes I'm hesitant to do this , definitely not . But the reason why I bring this up and sometimes I'm hesitant to do this , because I never want to tell you to do what I do or do what I did . That's not helping .

Like , I want to give you some of the principles that I followed and maybe once in a while , like now , I'll share a little bit of experience just to give you a little bit of encouragement based on the principles and the concepts , not just , hey , let me tell you what I do or what I did , because you might do something different , but you may still follow the

principles of recovery that we're talking about here all the time . So , yeah , I'm pretty run down , I'm feeling pretty beat up right now . The wheels are falling off on me a little bit . But guess what ? None of that leads to fear or anxiety or panic anymore , like it used to .

Back in the day , when I was really struggling with anxiety and intrusive thoughts and scary repetitive thoughts and probably diagnosable OCD and bouts of depression , this kind of thing would have plowed me under and I would spend all of my time trying to manage my body and stay calm and I would be going for the magnesium powder and I would be listening to , like

satellite radio , old shock jock satellite radio shows to distract me and I would have candles burning on my desk Believe it or not , the guy that always picks on the essential oils . I would use the scent of the candles as a distraction and I would be spending all of my time trying to manage my anxious and fearful state . But guess what ?

Now , at the tail end , well into recovery , when I do not have an anxiety disorder anymore and I am no longer afraid of how I feel , now I can really just be emotionally activated , emotionally worn down , drained , tired . My butt is dragging right now , but I will tell you that before I recorded this morning , I was out for a walk .

I did 15 minutes worth of other exercise . I've been doing my email , I've been taking care of my stuff . I sort of set the rest of my schedule for the week . Yeah , do I feel good ? No , I pretty much feel like crap this morning . But I feel like crap because I'm a human being under the gun right now . And what recovery taught me ?

In following the principles of recovery that I talk about all the time on this podcast and everything that I write and say , whether it's in books or on social media posts , the principles of recovery taught me that I do not have to fear my own experiences , my inner experiences . I don't have to fear my own body . I do not have to fear big emotions .

I don't have to fear my own body . I do not have to fear big emotions . I don't have to fear my thoughts . Am I still prone to maybe have a catastrophic thought here and there about how I feel ? Yes , but guess what ? I learned that I do not have to follow them . And so they occur , fleeting . Maybe I don't even

recognize them . Half the time I might notice that , oh , I'm a little bit anxious for the last few minutes . What's up with that ?

It might have been triggered by a passing like sort of catastrophic interpretive thought about how I feel , but I let it go and I go on with my day and now , instead of the focus being how I feel and what I'm thinking , my focus is on taking care of the tasks in front of me , and I only wanted to share that for a few minutes at the start of this

episode , because I can't bring myself to do a whole episode on that . It just seems a little bit too self-serving and self-centered . But I wanted to pass it along as maybe a bit of recovery encouragement for those of you that are struggling and listening to this today .

You may be at that stage of the game where times like this would be incredibly difficult and triggering for you , because you're so focused on how you feel and what you think and what your emotions are , and you're spending all your time trying to manage your anxious state because you think you have to stay safe , or you insist that you have to manage it because

otherwise it will run away from you and you won't be able to tolerate it . Well , guess what ? I was you once too , and the work that I did in recovery taught me the lessons that I try to impart to you all the time . I don't have to be afraid of myself anymore . So I'm allowed to feel what I feel .

Don't like this , can't wait for it all to be over , but I don't have to fear what I feel in my body and what happens in my mind . I don't have to fear my emotions anymore .

So , while I might be dragging today , and if you're unlucky enough to be watching this as a YouTube video and subjected to this face today , thanks for hanging in there , thanks for not being too judgmental today . Thanks for hanging in there , thanks for not being too judgmental .

And yeah , I wanted to kind of just appear on camera this way this week just to give you an idea of like this would have been really hard years ago and now it is hard , but it's hard for a different reason .

Anyway , I hope that helps because sometimes hearing from people on the other side of recovery even if it is the guy with the microphone doing the podcast can be helpful . And you guys ask me a lot about my experience . I'm always selective in the way I answer it again , because I don't think it's fair for a helper to just keep saying , well , why ?

Well , I Look at me , I did , I feel . I don't think that's okay because it does not account for the wide variety of individual experiences and it can lead people astray and be a little bit invalidating .

And it can be frustrating for people to just hear me say , well , I did , well , I did , well , I did , and if you try to emulate me and it doesn't work , you're going to be frustrated . So I try not to do that , but today a little bit , I hope it helped . So let's get back to the topic at hand today , which is thinking and feeling .

About thinking and feeling . We are about eight minutes in , so thinking and feeling , about thinking and feeling really kind of fits right into what I was just saying , about what I'm experiencing right now .

You'll notice that you know , a couple of minutes ago , when I was telling you what's going on with me right now , I said I don't fear my thoughts anymore , I don't fear big emotions , I do not fear my internal experiences . Well , why is that ?

One of the things that I find most fascinating about this topic is trying to figure out , and I don't know if we ever will . Maybe we will . I don't know the answer to this .

But why do some people in our community have such a difficult time ungluing themselves from their thoughts and their symptoms , while others want to stay glued to thoughts and emotions and symptoms because it feels safer but have an easier time of recognizing oh wait a minute my emotions , my internal experiences . I have interpretations of those .

I am thinking about what I'm thinking . I'm feeling big about feeling big . So maybe I don't have to follow that . Maybe my big emotional reaction to how I feel is steering me wrong and they're able to start to apply the lessons and sort of pry themselves away from that and just let symptoms and thoughts happen . They let emotions happen . It's not easy .

They stumble I stumbled all the time in my recovery but they're able to move along at maybe a little bit more quicker or maybe a more consistent pace , while other people have a very difficult time doing that .

They may and this may be you , if you're listening or watching right now and you listen to me say things like it's okay to have really scary thoughts and let them be , and you get that logically , but it still seems ridiculous to you or incredibly scary or risky to do that .

Well , that's kind of what I want to talk about today , those metacognitive beliefs , the beliefs about thinking and feeling .

So I think and feel and then I have thoughts and feelings about thinking and feeling can play a big role in how we approach the recovery process and how rapidly we progress and how much we might struggle or not struggle and what possibility is there of a relapse down the road . Those things .

The more I get into this and the more I sort of get into metacognitive theory , the more I feel like it's getting more and more .

I feel like it's more and more important and I think it offers us a pretty reasonable explanation for the wide variances in recovery experiences and why some people do it and get through and kind of never look back and other people will struggle from time to time . Thinking and feeling about what you think and feel is something that every human being does .

Here's the issue and this ties in . So metacognitive theory and the theories underneath ACT you guys know I'm a big ACT fan acceptance and commitment therapy . They do start to dovetail here . Part of the issue that we have as human beings is we have experiences .

Of course we have experiences , we're alive and then that meaning making and interpreting part of our brain that is based on the ability to think abstractly and in symbols and think about things that aren't the actual things .

They're just thoughts about the thing that is such a huge power , it's such a huge , amazing part of the human brain puts us at the top of the food chain here on planet Earth and all of that , and it's responsible for the beauty and wonder that humans can create .

But sometimes that goes off the rails and we start to get into that situation where when I have internal experiences like symptoms in my body or thoughts that pop up in my mind or big emotional experiences internally , the meaning-making , pattern-matching , symbolic , abstract thinking part of an evolved human brain kicks into overdrive and needs to find an explanation for

that , needs to figure it out , needs to see what it's predicting , needs to stop that and try to manage the internal experience . And that's when things really get off the rails and that's where things get really difficult and we start to veer into that chronic and disordered state of anxiety . So I want you to take a second and think about .

Stop the video , stop the podcast , if you want , just think about this . What do you think and feel about what you think and feel ? So when you hear somebody like me say , having like scary thoughts about harming your family is no different than a thought about a peanut butter sandwich .

When you hear me say that , you might have a logical reaction to that , like , oh yeah , I guess that could possibly be , but what is your emotional reaction to that ? Do you think no , that can't possibly be true . That indicates metacognitive belief structure . It indicates or it's a clue as to what you think and feel about what you think and feel .

And the issue here is if you find that when you are emotionally activated by your internal experiences and I know some people will argue that symptoms are not internal experiences , but I'm lumping it in here for the sake of brevity and simplicity If you have anxiety symptoms and then you interpret them , you have thoughts based on those symptoms , and who knows ,

thoughts first , symptoms first doesn't matter .

But if you have a combination of physical symptoms and thoughts that create big reactions like fear or extreme sense of vulnerability or uncertainty or feelings of weakness , big emotional states , those , the bigness of that internal state , can be like glue that binds you to the thought and the symptom and then that abstract , symbolic thinking part of your brain says oh

, feeling a thing and thinking about a thing is the same as the thing . That's where we get into trouble . That's where our beliefs about thinking and feeling , what we believe , what we think and feel about thinking and feeling , that's where that really matters .

So that will show itself as oh , I feel so big about this thought that I keep having , or about the symptom that I'm having and the way I interpret it in my brain . That big feeling makes me fuse with that and I'm not going to get into the technical part of it . But then I start to treat the thought as a real thing .

Here's an example , the example of the typical I fear that I will have a psychotic break , or I fear that I will lose my sanity Very , very common fear . If you go back a couple episodes to the word cloud that I did , it was right there in the center , right Death , insanity , loss of control .

So I'm having thoughts about losing my sanity or losing control of my mental faculties or having a psychotic break . Well , that's pretty scary , right ? So that thought then triggers symptoms . Or the other way , maybe I've experienced depersonalization or a dissociated state and then I have a thought , interpreting that , that says this is what happens when you go crazy .

Now I have a huge wave of emotional reaction to that in the form of fear , horror , dread , oh no , this can't be . And that emotional , that big emotional reaction tells my belief about thinking and feeling .

You better treat this as true , because I feel so big about this and I believe that the bigger the feeling I have , the more likely it is that I have to work on my internal experience . So this gets again . This is super meta . So if you have to listen to this a few more times , totally fine , I get it .

But one of the things that you can look for is when somebody tells you that a thought that you find so scary or a symptom that you find so scary is irrelevant and safe to have . Logically , you might get it , but emotionally , how much are you resisting hearing me say that ? Or people like me ? It doesn't have to be me .

Maybe you're reading the Claire Weeks books or maybe you're listening to my frequent friends and collaborators like Josh Fletcher or Kim Quinlan or whoever it happens to be Joanna Hardis , and you hear them say things like this and you think well , logically I get that , but I cannot bring myself to emotionally embrace that because I feel so big about these experiences

that that big feeling tells me that I have to treat this , this thought or this sensation as true or as a predictor , as an omen , as something that I need to follow through . I need to put my hands on this internal experience and I need to manipulate it , fix it , figure it out .

Now , people who have a little bit looser beliefs about thinking and feeling my metacognitive beliefs aren't as rigid is I can recognize now , if I bring it back to , I'm exhausted , but I'm not afraid of that I can recognize oh , I'm having big internal experiences because of whatever XYZ going on in my life .

My evolved brain kind of wants me to feel better and treat this as something that I'm supposed to figure out or fix . It wants me to put my hands on my internal experience and start to fix it or solve it like a Rubik's Cube .

But now I know that really what I have to do is take my hands off it and leave the Rubik's Cube of my internal experience unsolved , although that might be difficult . I don't want to feel sad about the loss of a loved one . I don't want to feel like you know , the fatigue . I don't want to feel overwhelmed , but I feel them .

So I'm going to have to just do my best to feel them , even though I'm having big internal feelings about that and big emotions about that . The big emotions no longer command me to follow my thoughts and my bodily sensations as if they are true dangers or they're actually true .

So if we go back to the , you know the fear of insanity or psychotic break , having a really big emotional reaction to that thought that you might be losing your mind or you might be tempting fate with some sort of horrible thing that might happen to you down the road .

If you don't , you know , save yourself , run from your anxiety or perform , you know , compulsive rituals , that big emotional state causes you to say no , no , no . I have to follow this . But here's the interesting thing that would be what you feel and what you think about what you feel and think .

I feel that if it's big enough , I believe I need to follow it . That's thinking and feeling , about thinking and feeling . So ask yourself where you are in that . Here's another thing you can kind of look for .

If you feel strongly that you need to interact with your thoughts and your feelings and your internal experiences , you believe that thinking and feeling is important and you have to interact with those internal things . But then you discover afterwards that , like , why did I do that again ? It tricked me again .

I did an episode not too long ago about being tricked by anxiety . If you , like you know , hit yourself in the head , I'm like I can't believe I fell for that again . I wish I could stop doing this . I wish I could stop ruminating , I wish I could stop worrying .

If you find that you love thinking and feeling , or you think it's really important to base everything on thinking and feeling , but then you wish you could stop doing that , that's a good also indicator that your metacognitive beliefs may be keeping you not stuck , but they are certainly presenting challenges in this process . So what would we do about that ?

And again , I know I'm spewing a lot at you right here , I'm going off the cuff . I'm hoping it's making sense . But in this situation you can use that to frame exposure , yes , but also tolerance , floating experience . Right now , that tells me that I should hang on resist , fight , manipulate , figure out , solve , prove untrue .

Even though my big emotional state leads me to fuse with my thoughts and my internal experiences and try to fix them and resist them , I have to surrender and just let those experiences be why not ? So I could get used to the experience although , yeah , you do , that's true .

But also I have to learn that my beliefs about what I think and feel , about what I think and feel , might be steering me wrong . It is possible that making my decisions moment by moment , based on a highly charged emotional internal state , is steering me wrong .

So we start to use things like tolerance , surrender , letting go and floating as little experiments that help us learn experientially that our beliefs about thinking and feeling , the way we interpret and act on what we think and feel , might be wrong . And that's a big deal , because it's more than just , oh , let your heart race and just let it sit there .

Yes , that is true , that is what the act looks like , that is what dropping resistance looks like , that's what surrender looks like . But what is it teaching me ? Well , it's teaching me that I don't really have to fear my heartbeat like I used to . Out of my own personal experience , I'll share that right .

But if we look under the hood even more , what it taught me is that when my brain creates interpretations of a rapid heartbeat and then that creates a big emotional response in me called fear , I do not have to treat it like my heart is literally exploding .

Only the emotion , the big emotion , the highly charged state is telling me that I need to treat it that way . I need to treat it that way because I feel big right now . That's wrong . That was dragging me and I had to learn through my experiences , exposures , behavioral experiments , whatever you want to call it .

I had to learn that my beliefs about what I thought and felt were wrong and they were contributing to this problem . Now some people have more deeply held beliefs about thinking and feeling . You feel very strongly that what you think and feel is very important and needs to be taken care of and fixed and interacted with .

Some people have more loosely held , monocognitive beliefs . To start the process , those are the people that have a little bit of a leg up , but these are not things that , in my mind , are set in stone . We use these therapeutic techniques , we use principles like acceptance and mindfulness to get through these experiences and learn to navigate through them .

When we use these tools , when we use these techniques , when we use these treatment modalities , we get to change our metacognitive beliefs . Will you become a different person altogether ?

No , that's not the object of the game , but you can loosen things up a little bit so that you don't get dragged around by a highly charged internal emotional state all the time and then wish that you hadn't . So that was 22 minutes . If I look at the clock , that's a little longer than I thought it was going to go .

Today I don't think I took more than four breaths through this entire episode . So I'm really sorry if it's just a word vomit like a fire hose at you . If you you got to go back and rewind a little bit , that's fine . So I'm going to wrap it up here Again super no production values this week , so there's not going to be any music or anything like that .

If you have questions about this . Interestingly , if you're listening as a podcast episode , look in the show notes of the podcast episode on your podcast player . There's a link there where you could text in a question . I will see that .

And if you're watching on YouTube , because you subscribe to the YouTube channel , hint hint and you've liked the video , leave a comment and I try to circle back once or twice a week to answer comments on the YouTube channel for sure .

So you have a way to kind of talk back to me now in two places , either from your podcast app or in the YouTube app or on the YouTube website . However , or in the YouTube app or on the YouTube website , however , are you watching ? I hope you found this useful . In some way . You might be able to apply these concepts .

Maybe it is something that will click with you a little bit more like oh my goodness , I'm so heavily invested in my thoughts and feelings . Yeah , I get what this guy is saying . Maybe it will give you just a little bit of a different look at your situation to help you change direction , just a little bit .

And again , I will remind you , as I always do , that no matter how small you act today , no matter how small the action you take boy , that was super awkward , right , but I'm not even going to edit it no matter how small the action is you take today away from your fear and toward the life that you actually want , or either trying to attain or rebuild , it

counts .

If nothing more than listening to this podcast today and at least being a little bit more open to the idea that following a highly charged emotional state is a bad idea , you are winning . All of these things add up . There are no giant grand gestures that make you better overnight .

We have to add them up little by little , bit by bit , and sometimes , yes , we do have to challenge our beliefs before we can take those actions . Challenge the belief , test the new belief with little actions . Those are exposures , those are experiments , and all of them count , no matter how small they are . Thanks for hanging out today .

I will see you in two weeks with the next episode . Take care .