One of the biggest takeaways from this conversation with Emma is that anxiety, depression, and burnout aren’t character flaws—they’re nervous system responses to feeling unsafe.
We talked about how depression often mirrors the nervous system’s shutdown response, and how anxiety shows up as fight-or-flight. When your body feels overwhelmed for too long, it doesn’t motivate you—it protects you.
Why Worry Keeps You Stuck
Emma explained that worry is actually reinforced behavior. When we worry and nothing bad happens, our brain learns, “That worked—do it again.” Over time, worry becomes automatic.
This is why telling yourself to “just stop worrying” never works.
One Tool That Can Reduce Anxiety by Up to 80%
One of the most practical tools we discussed is Scheduled Worry:
Instead of worrying all day, you train your brain to worry at a specific time—usually 10–15 minutes in the afternoon. Outside of that window, you gently remind yourself, “I’ll deal with this at 5pm.”
This retrains the brain instead of fighting it.
Burnout and Fear-Based Fuel
Emma shared how she burned out after years of pushing herself—weekly YouTube videos, pregnancy, parenting, and running a business. What stood out most was this idea:
Fear is a dirty fuel source.
When we’re driven by fear—of failure, not being enough, or letting others down—we eventually crash. Healing often means switching fuel sources to trust, values, and self-permission to slow down.
✅ Action Steps for Listeners
- Set a daily check-in alarm (once an hour) to notice:
- What am I thinking?
- What am I feeling?
- What’s happening in my body?
- What am I thinking?
- Practice willingness instead of avoidance
Let the feeling exist without trying to fix it. - Try Scheduled Worry for 7 days
10–15 minutes/day, written out. - Clarify your locus of control
Separate what you can control from what you can’t. - Choose one value-aligned action
Small, doable, and grounded—not fear-driven.
🔗 Resources Mentioned
- Therapy in a Nutshell (YouTube)
- Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Burnout by Emily Nagoski
- Slow Productivity by Cal Newport
- The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry
Guest Contact Info: https://therapyinanutshell.com/
👊🏼Need help applying this information to your own life?
Here are 3 ways to get started:
🎁Free Guide: 30 Tips for Your First 30 Days – With a printable PDF checklist
Grab your copy here: https://www.soberlifeschool.com
☎️Private Coaching: Make Sobriety Stick
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Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Amazon Music, or you can stream it from my website HERE. You can also watch the interview on YouTube.
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-one-day-at-a-time-recovery-podcast/id1212504521
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Transcript:
Emma
Well, Emma, thank you so much for joining me today. Hey, happy to be here. Thanks
for having me. Yeah. Emma from therapy in a nutshell.
To everything about like the logo is like a walnut and that it cracks open and
there’s a brain. I was a genius. That was so creative. Who came up with that?
I came up with the idea of, because walnuts, like the actual nuts kind of look
like brains. They totally do. Yeah. And then my husband did that animation. He’s an
animator. Is he? Is he for hire?
He’s busy enough. I’m sure he is. I’m the slave driver here. Just cracking the whip
on it. Cracking the lip. Good for you. Well, listen, I am super excited to talk to
you because your YouTube channel is huge. It’s got, I think I checked today at 2 .3
million. What does that feel like? Does that feel like a huge accomplishment? Oh,
it’s so wild. It’s so hard to even comprehend. So first off, subscribers is a
vanity metric. Like, if you compare engagement to subscribers, subscribers, subscribers
does not actually mean that much on YouTube. But the reality is, like, millions of
people have watched my videos. And I hope have been helped by my videos. And that’s
just like so cool. Like I’m so so grateful that I get to do this work. I never
thought this would happen. I’m just like a little therapist in Utah. I’ve got four
kids. And I like I just couldn’t sit still. So I started like making the videos I
wished my clients could have. And that turned into this, which is still just,
yeah, I can’t really understand it. That’s so interesting. Well, I have to say
you’re a really good teacher, and I really appreciate the style of your teaching.
It’s just, like, super practical. You’re super relatable. And I love,
I’m all about action steps. Like, it’s important for me to, like, understand the
theory. And by the way, today we’re going to be talking about your most downloaded
or watched video intrusive thoughts and overthinking. But I also thought we might be
able to touch on, you know, how to process your emotions. I look at everything
through the line.
so much better. Yeah, and that’s the thing is most of our parents did not have the
skills to teach it to us. So we sort of fumble about through life and some of us,
you know, distract from our pain with addiction issues. I feel like the purpose of
addiction is distraction and people do that in a variety of ways. But ultimately it
comes down to not being able to process your emotions in a healthy way. So we’ll
definitely touch on that. But I thought we might start with the,
well, first, I’m just so curious. What compelled you to become a therapist?
Was it born out of overcoming your own struggles? Well, it’s such a good question.
You know, and I think my answer to this is changing regularly as well.
But like the truth is, like I did struggle with depression as a teenager and a lot
of social anxiety. And I felt very kind of helpless and definitely like depressed at
times in my early 20s. I wanted to work outside.
I loved working. I loved being outside. That’s like one of my safe places. And so
I worked at like a youth camp that was like a church youth camp that was very
like fun and exciting and like let’s play and laugh and joke. And like I just was
that was like too high energy for me. Like I’m just like sustain it. Yeah. Like
I’m really introverted. I love like quiet walks in the woods and like one on one
conversations. But I don’t necessarily do big groups. Yeah, over -stimulating.
Yeah, yeah. And I’m just, like, I’m just not that extroverted. Which is interesting
with this 2 .3 million. Yeah, like, that’s a really interesting thing. And I think
you might be surprised to find that more YouTubers than you would expect are
actually very introverted. Like, like 90 % of my work is sitting in my office
thinking and writing. Yeah. Like, that’s what I do. I film 15 minutes.
I mean, I film about a couple hours a month. and the and um
phrase for that an introvert extrovert like yeah i really love people i’m good for
an hour or two and then i need to go home and lay down yeah yeah yeah it’s not
like i don’t like people i just um i really thrive in in a setting um that’s like
smaller and yeah like i love deep and meaningful conversations i love being one -on
-one with someone i love talking about like like real stuff and so I ended up
working at a um so I worked at that youth camp one year then the next year I was
like I want to level up like I want to try this again so I worked at a
wilderness therapy program oh my gosh yeah with teenage kids um out in the west
desert of Utah and our shifts were eight days on six days off so I was um I was
out hiking with a group of eight to 12 usually young boys Um,
and the program was very relationship oriented. We weren’t like a punitive program.
We didn’t just like punish kids into compliance. We would like talk with them.
That’s what our job was. Imagine that. Yeah. Like listen to them. Like walk with
them. If they refused to like hike, then we’d just sit next to them and talk to
them all day. And like that turned out to be like, I loved it. It was so cool.
And these kids would see, we’d see these massive transformations in eight or 12
weeks. And I personally just learned so many things that kind of helped, that helped
me personally regain a sense of like agency over my life, where before that I felt
like really like, oh, my parents made me depressed or I’m broken or what’s the
matter with me? And after that, I like just my eyes were open to this world of
like whoa like if I if I have these different experiences and these different
learnings and these different mentors in my life like my life changed forever yeah
like I still have moments where I feel down and they’ll last at the most a couple
days where they used to last a couple months yeah so
for me. So I wanted to become a therapist. So I wanted to work wilderness therapy
forever. I thought, this is my, this is my career path. But I’d like the being a
staff out there was unsustainable. I did, I did work wilderness therapy for over 500
nights. Wow. Yeah, like a couple years of my life. And, and then that was when you
were young before kids. Yeah, yeah. I was in my like early 20s. Yeah. Yeah.
And then got my degree and ended up never ending up back in wilderness therapy. I
worked in a residential center. I worked at private practice. I did some other
things. An adventure therapy program.
But that’s how I became a therapist. So I mean, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The,
when I think about wilderness camps, I think about those people who like kidnap the
kids in the middle of the night and they take them out is it was it one of those
um
yes sometimes sometimes the only way parents could safely get their kids into our
program was by sending two large escorts to the kids house and bringing them there
now um on from the kids perspective i can see how this is really scary and
traumatic And from the parents’ perspective, I can see how they’re trying to save
their kids’ life. Yeah.
And, you know, there’s been a lot of stuff with Paris Hilton and, like, all the,
there’s been a big pushback on the therapeutic industry in general. And there’s some
wilderness programs that I know were very much more controlling, much more rigid,
much more at times abusive, like that absolutely did happen. I worked for two
different programs and then another residential treatment. I worked for two residential
treatment programs and two wilderness programs. And all of these programs I’ve worked
for, I only choose to work for the ones that are relationship based. So we try to
really honor the kids and listen to them and work with their parents and we do
systemic therapy. Like we try to change their parents, right?
And like we treat these kids with, with utmost respect. And so it’s interesting,
like, if you compare my time in wilderness therapy, I, you know, I did 500 nights.
That’s like multiple years being outside. And I did three restraints where we
physically like put our hands on a kid. And that was once because one kid was
going to clobber another kid with a log.
they would be doing multiple restraints a day. And like some of these residential
programs are doing multiple restraints every day. And I think that’s the kind of the
different, with the same group of kids, the same drug addicted, acting out,
oppositional defiant kids, as they’re called. These other programs were much more
forceful and I would say violent compared to the programs I chose to work for.
Yeah, When I asked you that, you looked really sad. Like, it must cause you so
much pain to know that these kids and parents that are so desperate for help are
sometimes falling into less than ideal programs.
But listen, I appreciate that you were able to find a program that was in alignment
with your goals and values, and you had such positive outcomes. So that’s a
beautiful thing. It’s important to know that both are out there.
out there. You know, it’s kind of interesting as, um, so I’ve been sober for a
long time. And, you know, I raised my kids and like in sobriety, like they’ve never
seen me loaded. Um, but when my younger son had some issues, it was like,
you would think because I’ve kind of in the business that I would know what to do.
But, um, we were in a new state and we didn’t anybody sort of out here.
And what’s available for kids is really elusive. It’s very vague. So it’s, you know,
I really feel for the parents who are trying to find help, like the ones that are
desperate that are trying to help their kids, it can be a very harrowing, a very
harrowing situation because kids can be so like they think that they’re invincible.
they know everything and yeah it’s just a really hard situation to be in it’s so
tricky yeah and with one of my kids same thing it’s like i’m trying to find a
therapist for her and i’m like i don’t know like this is hard to find like yeah
right people you know hard to find therapy for kids listen it’s hard to find
therapy for adults i was just recently interviewing this guy who said that he tried
one or two and it wasn’t working out so instead of
was like, wow, what a different way of addressing. But, you know, like in 12 -step,
I come from, you know, the 12 -step world. And sometimes you have to try a few
different sponsors before you find somebody that’s right for you. But it doesn’t mean
that you give up on the program. It means you, you know, just try working with
somebody else. I feel like therapy is like that, too. Like, in order to find a
good therapist, you sometimes have to try a bunch of different ones. I think this
mindset is so important because, like, the people who succeed do this,
right? They get out the spreadsheet. They make a study of it. Like, I interviewed
my friend Rachel Galvez on my channel, and she, like, she had severe anxiety. Like,
so bad. She wasn’t getting out of bed for, like, weeks. She would just, like, she’d
go to church sometimes, and she’d just be shaking and, like, pacing in the halls,
like, that bad of anxiety. And she tried a couple different medications. She tried a
couple different therapists. And she was about ready to give up. And she’s like, no
what? I’m going to just try some new stuff. And in that video, she talks about
like over 20 different things that she tried. And she kept a journal of all the
different things that she tried. And now she’s like functioning really well. Like her
anxiety is probably down like 70, 80 percent. Like she’s doing, I would not say she
was like cured and everything’s all better. But, like, her life’s pretty good. Yeah,
like, she gets out of bed. She’s functioning well. She’s there for her kids. She’s
not, like, she’s, she’s doing great. That’s amazing. And this process of,
like, I’m going to try what I can try. Like, I’m going to explore. I think it’s
just so crucial. And I think it’s important to understand as well, like conditions
like, like depression or anxiety, I think we think of them as a single diagnosis,
like, oh, you get diagnosed with the flu, you get diagnosed with depression. This
must be caused by a single issue. And the truth is depression is probably much more
accumulative situation where a lot of things add up to tell your nervous system that
you might as well shut down and give up. And so if we want to treat depression,
we have to look at it from a lot of angles and be like, okay, how do I help my
body be healthier? How do I manage inflammation? How do I manage my stress levels?
How do I manage my thinking? How do I retrain my nervous system to be more safe
more often? And when you think about it that way, like there’s so much that can be
done that adds up in these little doses and then like your life can transform.
Yeah. You know, I talk to a lot of people that struggle with
does that resonate with you or yeah i think there’s a lot of factors that can
contribute to depression and i think it’s um i have like a chart over here that’s
like 500 treatment options for depression because literally yeah yeah like i
personally believe there are that many like contributing factors if we lump them into
categories though um dr nealy puts them in 10 categories and this includes like
stuff going on biologically and and this can be something as simple as like anemia,
low thyroid.
and got very depressed out of the blue, like very depressed, suicidal, could not
function. They tried to antidepressants. They tried therapy, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah. Finally, they, like, they did a brain scan, and they saw there was something
going on in her brain. They decided to do exploratory surgery, and it turns out she
had a, this is a very rare case, okay? So, y ‘all, if you have depression, don’t
assume this is the problem, but it illustrates a point. They found that she had a
parasite in her brain. She had a worm in her brain.
Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah. And this worm was causing inflammation,
which made her brain not function as well.
Right. So, like, we have – Horrifying. Yeah. So I personally do not buy the chemical
imbalance theory, though there are, like, chemical and wiring issues that can
contribute to depression. Like, that’s absolutely true. But the drug companies really
promoted this idea that depression is a single cause issue can be treated by a
single treatment. And I think that’s a false idea. Medications are great. They help
65 to 75 % of people, like SSRIs, for example, help 65 to 75 % of people have
better decreased their depression symptoms. So I’m not anti -medication. I’m just
saying if you want to treat depression, you can’t just look at it as a thinking
pattern situation because you’ve got to look at your body as well and what’s going
on. Other illnesses can contribute to depression. And then, like,
if we look at that, then we also look at thinking patterns, right? Thinking patterns
are such an important part of depression. And here’s what I think is the unifying
theory here, is that when our nervous system
It goes or feels threatened. It goes through a tiered response. So if something
small attacks me, I fight it off. If something big attacks me, I run away.
If something really big attacks me and I can’t run away, I freeze and then I
dissociate. I shut down. So this is the nervous system states. Fight, flight, freeze,
shut down. And depression and shutdown, this is the dorsal vagal response in the
nervous system, look very similar. Like, if you overlap them, it’s the same thing.
Your body feels heavy. You feel hopeless. You feel like isolating and withdrawing.
Your thoughts are much more hopeless. You feel numb and detached. You can’t feel joy
anymore. This is, like, actually a nervous system protective response that’s like,
oh, you know what? I’ve tried to be perfect for 100 years and it didn’t work so I
might as well give up. That can send to the message of like, yeah, quit, shut
down. This threat of like, if I’m not perfect, I’ll never be okay, that sends a
message to the nervous system to shut down. If your body is sick and you don’t
know and you just try showing up to work every single day and showing up in life
every single day and then you just get exhausted, your nervous system says, hey,
this is overwhelming, time to protect yourself, curl up in your cave and wait until
you feel better, right? Like, you got to restore your resources. Or if something
you’ve tried over and over again isn’t working, like, let’s say systemic racism is
beating you down, or your thoughts are telling you. Like, your thoughts have become
distorted enough. Then when something good happens, you downplay it. Like, oh, what a
beautiful sunset. Oh, it’s probably pollution. Like, oh, my boss just gave me a
compliment, oh, he’s probably just trying to butter me up so I take on more
projects, right? Like that constant downplaying. It’s like a self -protective thing we
can fall into. And that constant negative thinking patterns can send that message
that I’m not safe and there’s nothing I can do about it. And then your nervous
system responds by physical changes, physiological changes that go on with depression.
And like you said, trauma and anger can both do that. So if you’re like, you feel
angry, like everyone’s mistreating me. I’m just, and you feel like you can’t take
action to do anything about it. That’s where it gets stuck. And then your nervous
system’s like, I feel like stuck. I feel like I need to fight. I feel like I need
to say something, but I can’t say anything or I don’t know how to productively say
something. Then you’re nervous and like, well, this must be a big threat. I guess
I’ll shut down. It’s so interesting because a lot of, you know, depression, anxiety
is centered around needing to feel safe. And, you know, there are those of us who
grew up, you know, on, you know, neglected or had traumatic experiences.
We get this really deep -rooted sense of I’m not safe. And so anytime we try to,
you know, go outside of, like, we’re easily triggered and in my mind under every
trigger is a treasure like if you have the support and fortitude to sort of lean
in and you know you can allow that trigger to bring up the emotion that needs to
get processed to resolution like I think that can be a really important skill but
it’s so interesting that on both sides of anxiety and depression it’s sort of rooted
in this idea of I’m not safe and so we even even Like I was telling you before
we hit record, it’s like I go through a workaholic burnout cycle. And that seems
like the anxiety is like, oh, I need to do something. So I go into hyper
productivity mode, hyper responsibility mode. And I’m just like pegging it in the red
for like way too long. And then I crash and burn. Yeah. And then I need to
hibernate for a while. Like I did a self -care summer this last summer. I,
it was interesting. I noticed that, and I know you had a story of burnout as well.
I’m really interested to hear what sort of bled up to that.
But like I was working really hard and then things didn’t go the way I wanted to.
Then I burned out. So I was like, okay, I’m just going to stop doing anything
except for like the podcast and working out like I had this whole list. And I
turned my self -care summer into another thing that I. Like a big to -do list. It’s
a big to -do list. I’m going to do course of miracles, a morning page.
practice this place of like surrender and what is God’s will for my life and see
if I can quiet my mind and my heart enough to get in touch with like I call you
know the inner compass like I want to be led through love and joy and so but it
took a while to calm everything down so that I could sort of get in touch with
what brings me joy what feels like a loving action. Do you know what I mean? It
like takes a minute from a whole nervous system to calm down. Even as you’re
talking, I’m like, oh yeah, I’m like, take a slow breath. I know I saw you lean
back. Yeah, blink a little slower. Because I love getting stuff done.
Like I love being busy and like working and making content and checking my
analytics.
Achieve, achieve achieve yeah right and when i’m truly like more centered and happy
i’m like pausing five minutes every hour to like slow down and check yeah practice
that mindfulness that you talk about um what how so what caught what preempted your
burnout where did that come from for you um i i was putting a lot of pressure on
myself with work. So I, um, from 2021 to 2023 or four,
I was publishing one video every week on YouTube. And these videos take 15 to 20
hours, like at least 15 hours to write. Um, and then, you know, to produce,
I have a team who helps with that, but a couple more hours there. And I only work
like 15 or 20 20 hours a week and I was pregnant. I had my fourth kid in 23.
Yeah. I was like pregnant, not sleeping. Then I was nursing, not sleeping, taking
care of kids, like managing a home and a business and just running too fast.
Yeah. So I, yeah, just too, like too stressed out too long,
trying to do too many things by myself. What were kind of the symptoms of
everything just felt like work it just felt like something i had to do i had no
more joy in like what i was doing yeah um i felt tired felt really tired and just
not excited about things that normally get me excited just totally uninspired yeah
yeah i was just cranking out videos because i had to yeah and uh what was your
healing process like yeah um i read i read read like four or five books.
And the one like they just came to my mind while you were talking earlier was the
ruthless elimination of hurry. What? And I believe that book is about Jesus.
So for your audience, for those of you who aren’t like huge fan of religion, maybe
not the best book for you. But that book was about how Jesus didn’t run around
like a chicken with his head
I’ll love me some Jesus. I’m not, I’m not religious at all. But I think he was
pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. So he was just like, you know, how do we, how do we stop
being just so flustered all the time? I read Burnout by Emily Nagowski and then I
read slow productivity. And I read another book about like hurry. I read two books
about hurry. I can’t remember the other one. And So the Cal Newport book stood out
to me so much because his basic idea was, you know, hunter gatherers would have
these moments of high stress and high activity. And then they’d sit around a lot.
Like that was a much more realistic like work schedule. And our current work
schedule is basically like, you know, 50 weeks of the year, you should be busy and
doing the same thing and maybe two weeks of the year you can have a vacation and
so yeah and so like that was his first main point which was like oh what if we
work seasonally instead of like every week the same thing yeah so i decided that
i’m not working summers anymore like not really um i like hiked a lot last summer
yeah you’re been on hiking huh And then the other main point that he made that
stood out to me so much was, how do you determine when to stop adding things to
your plate? Like, what do you use as your metric? I would just be curious.
What do you think? Like, at what point do you decide you have to start saying no
to things? Like, how do you make that decision that you’re not adding more to your
plate? Yeah, I really struggle with that. But Peter Drucker is this business guy who
said that if you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any. Ooh, I like
that. And so I, my cheat is that, um, I just have like three umbrellas.
So I’m like coaching. I have podcasting. And then I have like, this is going to
sound silly, I have this, uh, soap making hobby. Yeah. So, because I love it.
I need to force myself to do some joyful activity and for me like soap making it
was like handcraft stuff as like my therapy. Great. And so anyway, but I’ve tried
to do like the essentialism and and say no to things. But I find that very
difficult because under those three categories is a ton of stuff. That’s what I was
just thinking. Like there’s like just with your coaching business, you could you
could scale that infinitely. Right. Like you could just take I got more and more
and more and more, more, right? Yeah, I cannot. Yeah, and like with social media,
so like with my YouTube channel, there is always more more that I could be doing.
I could always take more sponsorships. I could always make more videos. I could
always make more shorts. I could always improve my optimization on my videos. I
could always make my videos more exciting, more entertaining, more story -driven, more
visually interesting, right? There’s like an infinite number of things to do. Cal
Newport said most people when they choose how much to put on their plate they
choose to fill it up until they feel very anxious and stressed and not until they
feel very anxious and stressed do they decide that fine i’m not doing this anymore
and so that’s like that’s like their speed limit their speed limit i’m going to do
more and more and more until i burn burnout. Yeah. And then I’ll back off.
And he’s like, what if we didn’t have that as our like goal?
What would work look like if it didn’t, oh, that was the other book. Work doesn’t
have to be crazy. Or that I read like multiple summaries of that book. What would
it look like if we didn’t have to fill up every single single moment. So the
bookwork doesn’t have to be crazy. The CEO of that company, he was like, okay, we
do a six -week sprint to finish a project, and then we have two weeks where we
don’t really do much. And it would be easy as a CEO to be like, we should do
more. We should build more. And instead, if they finish the project early, they
don’t do more. And at the end of six weeks, they like play ultimate frisbee and
stuff
and they were trying to, they were getting so frustrated and finally he gives up.
And then the next morning he walks out. And within two seconds, he was like, oh my
God, the bottom part was upside down. Yeah.
Yeah. And so you need your brain just like if this intense focus often prevents you
from taking a setback, seeing the big picture and discovering the solution. Yeah.
Yeah, I think so. And so what keeps us stuck in that, like, mode of just trying
to figure out that door, and it’s usually fear. So it’s usually, like, I’m driven
by, like, oh, what if I don’t make enough money? What if my YouTube channel fails?
What if, like, so fear, like, when we let fear make our decisions, we fill
ourselves up until we burn out. Yeah. And the alternative is say, well, like, what’s
the amount of productivity I want to choose to be? And I think in our, like,
capitalist hustle society, I’m like,
to so many things at work. I’m going to say no to all these interview requests.
I’m going to all these sponsor requests. I’m going to say no to all this money. I
say no to a million dollars a year. I guarantee you. Do you really? Oh yeah. I’m
sure. I’m sure I do. By choosing to only work 15 hours a week, I’m sure I say no
to a million dollars a year. Okay. Yeah. And I choose that because I’m choosing
that my family is my kids my young kids are most important to me yeah they’re only
little for so long yeah now i still struggle i still stink as a parent sometimes
and i still get stressed out like i have a hard time paying attention to them
because i like working so much i know yeah so like i’m no i’m no perfect parent
but like when i’m when i’m calm and collected i remember like oh it’s okay yeah
just money like it’s just it’s all good yeah it’s all good you know you can get
at it when they’re when they’re busy because i tell you what when they turn into
teenagers they’ll turn on you they’ll be interested when they’re little they want
your time and when they’re older they want your money so brace yourself okay okay
but i had promised we would talk a little bit about intrusive thoughts and
overthinking and how to process your emotions and i want to see if we can sort of
backload this episode with some practical strategies and i find that in truth.
problems. It’s like, and I feel like there is a lot of this, like this,
you know, self -help junkie, overconsuming to sort of drown out the thoughts.
What are some practical solutions we might be able to try to incorporate to sort of
quiet those intrusive thoughts? Yeah. So, I mean,
I think When it comes to overthinking, well, let’s use some terms here really
quickly. So in general, I’m going to use the term intrusive thoughts to refer to
more like unwanted thoughts, like OCD -type thoughts that are like, oh, okay. A lot
of times intrusive thoughts are more like, oh, this is something painful that I
don’t want to think about. And common examples of intrusive thoughts are like, what
if I hurt someone, pastor present? Like, what if, like,
I’m trying to think of, like, good examples of intrusive thoughts. Like, what if I’m
a bad person,
you know, like a lot of what ifs, like a lot of, like, kind of scary thoughts.
What if I hurt my kids? What if I relapse? What if I’m gay? Like, what if I,
yeah, like, people, like, have these common intrusive thoughts. And then overthinking,
I would put in the category of, like, worrying and rumination. So, yeah. And then
just like and then and then there’s like the ADHD category of like needing my brain
to be busy all the time, which can also fit into anxiety. Like I just need to be
busy all the time. And so like there’s a couple things that can be going on here
with worrying and rumination. Like this can be an avoidant pattern with worry.
I think the first thing to understand with worry, like if you’re constantly worrying
about the future, it’s important to understand that you are doing that on purpose.
It doesn’t feel like it. Emma, how dare you call me out like that? Because if I
just said, hey, just stop worrying. What would you say? Yeah, no chance of that
happening. Right. Like that would be nice, but it doesn’t work. Yeah. So what the
brain consistently does is what the brain gets positive reinforcement. Oh dear.
The brain, the brain likes to do what it does over and over again. So if it’s, if
you’re doing a pattern over and over again, the brain is getting something out of
it. With worry, here’s what’s happening.
You have a thought that says, hmm, what if I do a bad job on my coaching session?
You have a thought like, what if I run out of money this month? Mine’s like a,
Mine’s like, what if I waste my life and don’t.
danger. Like, what would happen if you don’t fulfill your potential? Yeah, like
people actually, yeah, people actually die. Like, I’ve been sober for 31 years and,
you know, Dia de los Morthos just passed and I had my little table and I have
like many friends on that table. Like I started my podcast because a friend of mine
died because she had some issues. Sure, sure. So it’s real. It’s so it’s not like
part of this is not like just imagined. It’s like people actually die. I have been.
So you have this perception of fear, perception of danger, which I’m not saying it’s
not real, but I’m saying the response is then to worry about it.
So if the brain is like, hey, I had this thought, this perception of danger, and
then I took an action, the action is either to like get really clear on what’s
going to help the problem, or the action is going to be, like, do some other thing
that will avoid, like to flight, to avoid actually solving the problem. And then
when we do that avoidance, the brain is like,
oh, few, because I avoided that and no one died, that means that was the right
thing to do. Let me give a better example. I’m going to start with a dog. Let’s
say you’re afraid of dogs. You see a dog on the street. You have a thought. What
if this dog bites me? There’s your perception of threat. Okay. If you run away from
that dog and you don’t get bitten, you don’t die,
your brain is like, whew, I kept my human alive by running away. I’m going to make
my human do that again. I want to make sure my human stays alive in the presence
of dogs. So I’m going to make my human make sure that he runs away next time. The
way I’m going to do that is I’m going to increase their anxiety around dogs.
So that’s the anxiety cycle. When we avoid something, it learns from the feedback of
us not dying, that that was the right thing to do. And then we avoid it again.
Now you might do this with drugs, right? Oh, like I feel really sad. I’m going to
smoke some weed. Now I don’t feel so sad. Cool. I can’t handle sadness. Sadness is
threatening. I’m going to smoke some weed every time. And that’s going to make your
brain be like, cool. I’m going to make my human want more weed next time in
response to emotions that feel threatening right yeah so worrying is part of the
anxiety cycle when you have a perception of threat your brain’s like what should i
do to be safe from this perception of threat i’m going to worry for most of the
day and when i worry and no one dies today then your brain is like cool that
worked i’m going to make my human worry again yeah again. And then no one dies and
your brain’s like, great. Worrying seems to be a very effective solution. Now,
sometimes clearly this doesn’t work. Like, worrying is not actually, worrying is a
form of magical thinking. Right?
Like, it’s not actually the worrying that solves things. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like
this really applies to like those of us that are like self -help junkies. So, You
know, you learn that, oh, if you sort of explore your emotions and you learn
something that you can feel better and change your life, but like I see people in
12 -step or just people on sort of the recovery journey that the overconsumption of
mental health information, some of it, like yours is actually really practical, but
it’s taking action. it’s the taking action piece that’s missing like it’s it’s
sometimes there is um like the avoidance for me is like oh I learned something new
and like time passes I don’t have to really feel my feelings I’m not really taking
action I’m just consuming and so I think it’s really important for us to like start
taking action but I it’s easy to get caught in the consuming loop because that
feels like you’re doing something when you have like this magical insight. That’s
right. Yeah, it feels like you’re doing something, right? Like, I’m going to explore
and explore and explore. Like, what happened in my childhood and ask that question a
hundred times? Like, why am I the way I am? Yeah, people are lost in that. Yeah,
and it feels really good, honestly, to be told like, oh, it was this or this that
made you this way.
But you’re right. Like, in the end, if we look at, if we look at, for example,
your situation, like, if I don’t, if I don’t make great recovery content,
then someone else might, might die. That’s a tricky one, right?
So what, what action do we do to create like a same workspace for you?
Yeah. Yeah. So I, a lot of, a lot of mine is around detachment. Like, I have like
this hyper responsibility tendency, hyper responsible.
Yeah. And like I have a desire to like, you know, solve problems for other people.
But I think there is a balance there. There is like some surrender in there and
acknowledging that I am actually not responsible for fixing or saving anybody.
Yes. Yeah. And I switch from this, I call it like a dirty,
like fear is like a dirty fuel source. And that’s what I really learned over my
self -care summer is I was being propelled by a dirty fuel source of like trying to
prove that I’m good enough and trying to rescue and save and fix and all that
stuff. And I’ve decided to switch it to like a fuel source that’s based off of
trust and love, like I trust sort of in the universe, God, higher power,
whatever people want to call it, that, you know, I’m just responsible for just like
showing up and, and honestly sharing what’s going on on my heart. And the rest is
not, it’s not on me. It’s not like I, it’s not my, I don’t take credit and it’s
not my fault. Yeah. Like, depth, the whole fuel source from fear to what’s,
what does love want to express through me today? So that feels like a super
paradigm ship. I love that. And those are two skills that are so valuable. The
first one I would call is locus of control. Like you identify, except what you
can’t change, change what you can. I’m sure your audience is familiar with that.
Right. And I think you write this on a piece of paper. Like you draw the lines
and right. Here’s everything I cannot control. Here’s what’s in my control. And
here’s what I choose.
yeah because when you’re in the middle of it even if you know all this stuff like
we’re we’re still you know the human animals like we need outside support and like
it’s so nice to have friends or a therapist or a coach or somebody who you can
sort of check in with occasionally be like hey this is this is what’s going on and
people go oh when was the last time you practice self -for -giveness or you seem
like you might be a little out of balance here or there. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think
that’s true. And our nervous system, like, we can’t just thrive in a self -help
environment, you know. We can’t just, like, be so individualistic and be okay.
So I love that you bring that up. Yeah, I feel like hyper -independence is kind of
a sign of trauma that there’s a lot of people sort of exploring their recovery
space, like getting sober who really want to do it on their own. Yeah. And I feel
like that’s driven out of fear that you can’t trust others or an inability to be
vulnerable. It’s really interesting this whole, like, I want to do it on my own.
Like, I feel like there is some pride in that. Like, people think, oh, if I can
do it on my own, then I can be out of myself. But the truth of the matter is it
takes a tremendous amount of courage to be willing to be open and vulnerable with a
therapist or a coach to process your feelings to resolution. Totally.
Which kind of sort of leads me to how to process your emotions. I know we only
have a few minutes, but I want to be sure that, and I know you have lots of
videos on your YouTube channel, so I will direct everybody there. But do you have
sort of like an overall general process on how to process your emotions?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think, I think we could do this even like with the
worrying example. Okay. But like there are practical skills for each of these things.
And when it comes to overthinking, like what happens is a lot of times our thoughts
and our feelings, they’re just kind of vague to us. Like we don’t even notice we’re
thinking these thoughts. Like we don’t even notice that we’re worrying all the time.
going on. And I think it helps to call it like a story or something like that or
to think of your brain as a word machine. So you could you could imagine your
brain like a machine that like cranks out paper with words on it and you’d be
like, oh, there’s that worrying again. There’s that worrying again. And this helps
with overthinking as well. Like name that thought. There’s that story that I’m a
victim again, showing up again. There’s that story that the reason I feel this way
is because of my parents. Now, I’m not going to deny that, like, parents impact us.
But when we stick to that story as justification, it doesn’t. It’s not as helpful,
usually. Right, right. So the first, the first step is to notice what we’re feeling
and notice what we’re thinking. Notice our thoughts, notice our feelings. And I think
when people are new at this, they think they just, if they just try harder, they’ll
do it. And that never, like, let’s not do that anymore, guys. Yeah, trying harder.
Yeah, figure it out. Try harder. That’s not a thing. Yeah, we’ve got to build
systems around this. So I would say, use a, use an app like Lotus Bud or
Mindfulness Bell and set a prompt to go off once an hour so that you check in
with your thoughts or feelings once an hour. What am I thinking right now? So the
chime goes off and you’re like, oh, I was worrying and I didn’t notice it. Oh, my
gosh. I’m feeling anxious and I didn’t notice it and my shoulders are up to my
ears right like I’m all tense right now so you check in with your thoughts your
feelings in your body right your thoughts your emotions in your body’s like oh my
shoulders are dense my breathing is tight I’m thinking about how if I don’t make
great content you know bad things will happen those are my thoughts that’s my story
and my feelings are like I feel a little anxious or a little stressed right now
Yeah, that’s a really good. So that’s the first, that’s the first step is like, can
we just notice this? Notice, okay. And then the second step is willingness.
We have a default reaction to feelings. Like, we all do.
And the reason we have a default reaction is we probably learned this when we were
very young. And so we learned when we’re sad, we need to do something about this
sadness, whether it’s go get a hug or go eat a cupcake. Like we learned some kind
of reaction to make that sadness go away. And if we were surrounded by a lot of
safety, we might have learned that like, it’s okay to cry. It’s going to be all
right. This will work out. I’m just going to let this feeling be here. But many of
us through our painful experiences, we didn’t know what to do with emotions. So we
developed some kind of reactive way to stuff, suppress, or avoid our feelings.
So step two is like, let’s do the opposite of that. And that’s called willingness
and acceptance and commitment therapy. I’ve probably got like 20 videos about it on
my channel. Oh, yeah. I was going to ask you about that. That is the main modality
of that you use is the act. Uh -huh. Yeah, act is acceptance and treatment therapy.
It’s got like six main, six main like strategies in it. And the second one is
willingness. I find willingness to be so interesting because it’s so hard to
manufacture. Like it’s willingness almost seems to come after some sort of pain.
Right. So willingness seems to be hard to manufacture. The other form form, because
willingness is a willingness to do something, right? And you were talking about like
do the office. Is that true? So the way, when I say willingness, other words for
the, the way I’m talking about it is more like acceptance is what the more common
term is. But when people think of acceptance, they usually think, oh, I just have
to accept that my boss is a jerk. Right. Like, that’s what they think of with
acceptance. And what I mean is actually a bot, a switch inside of you that says,
I’m going to let myself feel what I’m feeling right now. That’s what willingness is.
So you have a choice. It’s either on or off. You can either try to make your
feelings go away or you can say here in this moment, I feel sad. And I’ll give us
a quick example. This one time when I was like newer in my business, someone sent
me a letter that was like a cease and desist letter. And it’s like this legal
letter. And like, we’re coming after you if you don’t stop this right now. And I
was like, and I didn’t like have a lawyer at that time. I didn’t know what to do,
right? I’d no idea. I was like panicking a little bit. And I went on a walk and
I got to get myself to calm down. I can’t feel anxious about this. And I was like
trying to like breathe. And I was trying to like think through it. And I was
trying to do this. And I was trying to do that. And I just like was like, ah,
like feeling more anxious. And when I turned on the willingness switch, I was like,
it’s okay. What does anxiety feel like right now? Oh, I’m noticing that my chest
feels really tight. My stomach feels upside. Okay, I can let those sensations be
here right now. I don’t need to struggle against my feelings right now.
I can allow them in this moment to be here. That’s not the same as saying, I’m
going to feel sad forever. That’s not willingness. I’m going to feel anxious forever.
That’s not willingness. It’s just saying, here in this moment, I am where I am.
feelings. Yeah. Because prior to that, all action is revolved around avoidance.
Yeah, it’s all fear. Yeah, it’s got to make this go away. Yeah. I’m running away
from something. I’m running away from my feelings. And if we have, if we have the
ability to sit with our feelings, we don’t have to run away from them anymore. And
when you practice this, this is like difficult because I’m telling about a theory,
like instead of just having you practicing.
Like,
check out my videos i guess we don’t have a lot of time right now but there’s
like this sounds tricky and mental don’t think about it but watch one of the videos
that has an exercise and then just do the exercise and then experience that’s like
just experience it we can experience it right now go ahead and um i’ll just like
should
we do five minutes yeah if you want to oh man um i know your friend’s gonna be
like y ‘all there she is late for her hiking it. Yeah.
person. That’s like an inaccurate thoughts. We question our thoughts and we ask,
instead of fighting our thoughts, we just say, is this, is this thought helping me
right now? Is this thought helping me right now? And then we clarify our values.
What I most care about? And then the last step is you choose one action now that
lines up with your values. What’s most important to you? So if you look at yourself
and your values. You’re like, I really care about, like, helping people within my,
my realm of influence. And I’ve chosen to dedicate 10 hours a week to this. And
they say, within those 10 hours, I’m going to help people in this way. And you
choose that as an action to line up with those values. Yeah. I like breaking that
down into like little mini baby steps, because that feels doable.
And and then and then I can build momentum but that helps me gives out of that
breeze mode. Yeah. Yeah, I probably don’t have time to do a willingness exercise.
I probably should go meet my friend. But I will. Do that because you know what I’m
going to do is I feel like it would be helpful to do listen exercise.
So I’ll link in the show notes at ODATChat .com. I’ll put a link to the videos
that have extra.
few seconds and just allow that discomfort to be there without trying to make it go
away. Okay.
Let me just say one more thing. Okay, one of the most effective ways, I just, I
have so many things I love to share. Going back to this worry thing, going back to
overthinking, there’s different ways to manage overthinking, but going back to worrying
and overthinking, there’s actually a super effective way to manage worry and telling
your brain to not worry doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work because worrying is kind
of a reflexive thing we’re doing. So instead, we have to tell our brain when to
worry. Okay. So this skill is really,
really effective at decreasing general anxiety by like 80%. And it’s called scheduled
worry. So you say every day at a certain time, usually afternoon is best. Not right
before bed, not first thing in the morning. Every day, 10 or 15 minutes, I’m going
to worry on purpose. I’m going to worry on purpose for 10 or 15 minutes.
You do it on paper. Write down your worries on paper.
And then throughout that month during the day, you have to check in with yourself
and catch yourself worrying during the day and say, hey, brain, thanks for bringing
up that worry thought. I’m going to address this at 5 p .m. I’m going to address
this at 5 p .m. And you train your brain a puppy like you can’t tell a puppy
don’t pee you tell a puppy pee on the grass right yeah so same with your brain
you can’t tell your brain don’t worry you tell your brain worry at 5 p .m and so
then if you if you constrain your worry to 15 minutes every day your general
anxiety will go down like 80 so I have a video on that I have a video on that
too it’s called scheduled worry scheduled worry I will totally watch that and when I
do the intro for this episode. I will report back on how it went. Okay. I hope
it’s amazing for you. I’m sure it will be. So it’s so fun talking with you. I’m
sorry, we have to, we have to end. It’d be fun to talk another hour. I know. I
know. Well, maybe if you have time, come back. But I will leave links to therapy
in a nutshell, the specific videos that we talked about. I will do a summary and
post that on Stubstack, so it’ll have all the references and all that. So thank
you, Emma, thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to meet you. Thanks for your
help today. Yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Oh, look, who’s just
coming home from school. Hi, buddy. Did you make a picture? No,
it’s a turkey. It’s a turkey. This is the race and I have to go. We’re going to
Mary’s. So thanks. We’ll have fun on your walk. Thank you so much. Okay, have a
good day. All right, you too. Bye.
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