Anxiety Recovery: Worse Before Better - Part II (Episode 110)
Disordered: Anxiety Help
Josh Fletcher and Drew Linsalata
4.9 • 665 Ratings
🗓️ 23 May 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"Help! I started doing exposures and trying to accept my anxiety and its getting worse!"
This is a very common experience in anxiety disorder recovery. Its been spoken about at great length in the community surrounding the Disordered podcast. This week we're tackling the "worse before better" issue.
When you stop running, hiding, avoiding, escaping, distracting, and otherwise drowning out your anxious thoughts, fears, and sensations, you will find yourself in a situation where you feel them more fully. This is natural, normal, to be expected, and part of the recovery process as designed. However, it can be easy for many reasons to interpret this as things getting "worse".
Tune in to this episode as the guys are talking about how this interpretation is created, why feeling more does not equal getting worse, and how fully experiencing the things that disturb and bother us is a required part of the recovery equation.
If you're adopting acceptance, tolerance, or non-resistance and feel like this is "making you worse", this episode is for you.
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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 unsolvable problems.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Feel worse before we feel better. |
| 0:05.0 | Yeah, the only way to get through this stuff is to feel this stuff. |
| 0:08.0 | Okay, I'm doing the things now. |
| 0:10.0 | I'm doing my exposures or I'm doing willful tolerance or I'm adopting acceptance strategies. |
| 0:14.0 | And it's getting worse, but is it? |
| 0:16.0 | Maybe you're just feeling something horrible, you conceptualize it as it being worse. Practicing willful tolerance, |
| 0:22.6 | which means I am going to feel more intense things in the short run so I can feel less intense things |
| 0:32.1 | in the long run. No, no, no, remind yourself when you wake up in the morning on picking the path |
| 0:35.9 | of tolerance or acceptance today. |
| 0:37.9 | So that means I'm going to feel it. |
| 0:39.3 | I expect that to happen. |
| 0:40.6 | Feeling it more is part of the equation. |
| 0:42.6 | And I think that inner critic will quickly, but that's not pleasant. |
| 0:46.5 | I don't like that. |
| 0:47.7 | So that means it shouldn't be part of the equation. |
| 0:53.7 | Welcome to Disordered. This is episode 110 entitled It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, |
| 1:01.2 | a bit like having your back waxed. My name's Joshua Fletcher, also known as Anxity Josh, |
| 1:08.0 | and I'm a psychotherapist and author who specializes in the topic of |
| 1:12.0 | anxiety and anxiety disorders. I'm a previous sufferer of OCD panic disorder, agrophobia, social |
| 1:19.3 | anxiety and IBS weirdly. I can't wait to do this episode today. 110 episodes with my fellow podcast co-host. |
| 1:31.7 | And just a nice thank you for tuning in. |
| 1:34.6 | And over to my co-host. |
... |
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