Anxiety Help: Learning To Do ... Nothing? (Podcast Ep 272)
Channel: The Anxious Truth
Date: 2023-08-30

This week my guest is anxiety and OCD specialist Joanna Hardis who stopped by the podcast to talk about the art of doing ... nothing.

Wait ... what? Nothing? Yes.  Nothing.  

Humans are conditioned to automatically spring into action to solve problems, and often we declare that our emotional and mental states are automatically problems that must be solved.  When we experience discomfort, distress, anxiety, or any "negative" feeling we can get trapped into automatically trying to do something .... anything ... to solve that problem and make it disappear.

The thing is, this is often paradoxically harmful in that it can keep us trapped in the very state we're trying to escape.  Learning that it is possible to do nothing about negative internal experiences - learning to ride through them without hitting the panic button - can go a long way toward getting us closer to where we want to be both in anxiety recovery and in life.  And as it turns out, if we look at what Joanna wrote about in her book "Just Do Nothing", we see that even as we struggle with recovery from an anxiety disorder, we're not all that different from all the other humans walking the planet.  The issues are often the same, just experienced at a different degree in our community. This is good news, because we're afraid and unsure, but not defective and not broken.

For more information about Joanna and her book:
⁠https://joannahardis.com⁠

For full show notes on this episode:
⁠⁠⁠https://theanxioustruth.com/270⁠

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🎵 Music Used on My Podcast: AfterGlow by Ben Drake (with permission)
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