The Anxious Truth - A Panic, Anxiety, and Mental Health Podcast

Anxiety disorders and OCD are what you get when a perfectly functioning brain applies its usual problem-solving strategies to the wrong problem. Your brain is good at solving things. The trouble is it keeps trying to solve something that isn't actually the problem, and that's what keeps you stuck in the loop: trigger, fix, feel better for a while, repeat. In this episode I want to introduce the concept of strategy mismatch. The things that seem to need fixing in anxiety and OCD (the intrusive...

One of the more common mistakes people make as they progress in anxiety disorder recovery is treating recovery as something separate from the rest of their lives. You do the therapy work in one box, and everything else goes in another. That tends to backfire. In this episode I want to introduce the concept of relapse prevention, and I want to do it in the context of building a daily routine that keeps you connected to the strategies and principles that helped you make progress in the first pl...

Children with OCD and anxiety disorders have the same diagnoses as adults, but their experience looks and feels different in important ways. In this episode, I sit down with child anxiety and OCD specialist Natasha Daniels to explore those differences and what they reveal about the fundamental nature of these disorders. When you ask a young child why they're doing a ritual, they often can't tell you. They report vague discomfort or say "it just feels weird if I don't." Adult brains, on the o...

Anxious parenting can feel overwhelming, especially when your own anxiety drives you to do more - more rescuing, more protecting, more intervening. But what if the path to better parenting actually requires learning to do less? In this episode, I'm joined by anxiety/OCD specialist Joanna Hardis to talk about how anxious parenting patterns keep us stuck and what we can really do about them. Joanna just released her new book "Just Do Nothing (For Parents): Parenting Better by Doing Less". Joann...

Anxiety that you cannot control, that keeps coming back, that you don't understand and are terrified of, will trick you into believing that something is really wrong. But what if that intense fear you experience—while absolutely real—is based on a prediction your brain is making that isn't actually true? In this episode, I speak with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, neuroscientist and author of How Emotions Are Made and 7 1/2 Lessons About The Brain about how anxiety is constructed in the brain. Dr....