Anxiety Recovery ... Chasing "Rest and Digest" (Episode 93)
Disordered: Anxiety Help
Josh Fletcher and Drew Linsalata
4.9 • 663 Ratings
🗓️ 3 January 2025
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"I MUST BE CALM OR ALL BETS ARE OFF!"
If this feels like a rule you're living by, you may find that you're chasing calm all the time, looking for ways to force your way into the coveted parasympathetic "rest and digest" state. Anxious people tend to work very hard to create calm and to maintain it at all costs.
This week on Disordered the guys are talking about "rest and digest" or the state of neutral calm that an anxious person would pay a large sum of money to achieve. What is rest and digest? How does one get into that parasympathetic state we hear about from all the wellness gurus online? There must be some way to calm and regulate your nervous system to get to that place, right?
Well, as usual, we're looking at a paradox here. An anxious person chasing calm - trying to force "rest and digest" - is not terribly likely to achieve or maintain that desired state.
Great. So are you and your anxiety stuck forever? Not really. Tune in and give this episode a listen for more on why demanding calm is generally a bad plan, and why its safe to stop doing that, even if you're really anxious!
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Struggling with worry and rumination that you feel you can't stop or control? Check out Worry and Rumination Explained, a two hour pre-recorded workshop produced by Josh and Drew. The workshop takes a deep dive into the mechanics of worrying and ruminating, offering some helpful ways to approach the seemingly unsolvable problem of trying to solve seemingly unsolveable problems.
https://bit.ly/worryrumination
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | How do I rest and digest? Fight, flight, freeze, for basically, if you're anxious, you're in a sympathetic state. |
| 0:09.0 | And then on the flip side, you've got your parasympathetic nerve system, which is the rest and digest. |
| 0:15.0 | If I am not calm, I'm screwed. All bets are off and I have to start to take special evasive action. |
| 0:20.0 | I either want to get back into the calm, rest and digest, or I want to prevent ever leaving it. |
| 0:24.8 | I'm only okay if I'm there. Impossible. |
| 0:27.7 | They're constantly trying to chase calm, but it has a paradoxical effect. |
| 0:31.6 | I'm trying to control a thing, a state that is not meant to be controllable, for the most part. |
| 0:38.4 | Anxiety recovery is when the majority of our days are in rest and digest, but we don't care |
| 0:45.4 | if it goes into sympathetic state because life is stressful and anxiety does trigger. |
| 0:53.0 | Welcome to episode 93 of Disordered. Today we're talking about rest and digest. How do I |
| 0:59.0 | rest and digest? I am Drew Linzalata, a therapist practicing under supervision in New York, |
| 1:05.0 | specializing the treatment of anxiety and anxiety disorders. I am a former sufferer of anxiety |
| 1:09.0 | disorders for a very long time, an author, |
| 1:16.9 | a podcaster, an advocate, an educator on the topic, and yeah, one half of disorder, along with I'm Joshua Fletcher, also known as Anxiety Josh on social media. I'm a psychotherapist who specializes |
| 1:22.3 | in anxiety and anxiety disorders, previous sufferer, author of several books, a podcast co-host, |
| 1:29.0 | and I like to rest and digest |
| 1:31.2 | by eating something |
| 1:32.5 | that's been deep fried |
| 1:35.5 | and lying down. |
| 1:38.6 | I've not eaten yet today. |
| 1:39.7 | Now I'm starving. |
| 1:40.8 | What is rest and digest? |
... |
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