Hello everyone and welcome to therapy in a nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family therapist.

And this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized nuggets of health.

Imagine this for a moment. I have you hooked up to monitors that measure your anxiety.

They can tell when your anxiety increases with perfect precision.

You also happen to be strapped to a chair, sitting on a trapdoor over a shark tank, filled with very hungry sharks.

You're perfectly safe in the moment, but then I come in and I tell you,

look, you're safe right now, but if you get to a level six of anxiety, I'm going to have to drop

you into the shark tank. So just don't get anxious, and you'll be fine. So you try your hardest to

not get anxious, and you try to force yourself to not be anxious.

And I can constantly say helpful things like, remember, don't get anxious. The more internal and

external pressure about your anxiety, the worse it gets. And as you see your anxiety creeping up

the scale from a four to a five, the pressure mounts,

and you worry about what's going to happen if you get there.

Before you know it, your anxiety is shooting through the roof and click, drop, splash.

Now, folks, I would not do this to you.

This is just an analogy, but many people do this to themselves.

Many people with anxiety, chronic pain, panic disorders, depression, tinnitus, vaginismus,

muscle tension, and strong emotions in general often experience something like this frequently.

The harder you try not to feel anxious or the more you worry about and pay attention to your

chronic pain or your tinnitus or whatever, the worse it gets.

When we fight and struggle against our thoughts and emotions, we tend to make things worse.

In this video, which is skill number five from my course, how to process your emotions, you're

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