Now I'm wondering if this is familiar to you. You experience the onset of anxiety.

You've heard all over social media on YouTube, you've read books about mindfulness,

you've heard about distraction techniques, and you're left so confused not knowing which one to use.

But the problem with that is not only are you anxious,

now you have even more anxiety and distress because you are confused about what is the quote unquote

right thing to do. So in this episode, my whole agenda is to help you to understand which is

better for anxiety and panic. Is it mindfulness? Is it distraction? Let's get to it.

Hello, my name is Kimberly Quinlan. I am an anxiety specialist. I help people all around the

world manage their anxiety. Get back to doing the thing that they love. And I am on a mission to do

just two things. Number one, I want to

reduce suffering and I want to increase the joy and the presence that you have in your life.

So let's talk about this kerfuffle conundrum problem that we have. When we experience anxiety,

it is very important that you understand the anxiety cycle.

And this is true for any anxiety condition or any anxious experience that you have. You will first

experience a trigger, something that triggers off your anxiety. It might be an internal trigger,

might be an external trigger, and then you

will feel anxiety. Now, what we tend to do when that happens is we going to fight, flight, freeze,

and form. There are the different ways in which we respond. And we engage in avoidance, rumination.

We might do compulsions or safety behaviors. Our goal is to get rid of that anxiety,

ASAP, right? We just want it gone. We want it sold. We want the uncertainty to go away and we want

life back to normal. So we engage in these avoidant compulsions or avoidant behaviors,

but what that does is it gets us some short-term relief,

...