Asking For Anxiety Help (Episode 156)
Disordered: Anxiety Help
Josh Fletcher and Drew Linsalata
4.9 • 663 Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2026
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Asking for help can be difficult, especially when you are struggling with anxiety, panic disorder, OCD, or agoraphobia. In this episode, Drew and Josh break down the nuances of asking for anxiety help. There is a fine line between asking for genuine support and looking for compulsive reassurance or soothing to make the discomfort disappear.
Drew and Josh discuss why so many people feel like a burden when asking for support and how anxiety often twists the desire for help into a demand for certainty. You will learn how to shift away from asking for short-term fixes and instead ask for the encouragement and reminders you need to tolerate difficult feelings and build long-term psychological flexibility.
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Want talk about this episode with Josh and Drew and others that share your experience in a supportive environment? We're hanging out on the Disordered Community space.
https://disordered.fm/community
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The guys also share inspiring "Did It Anyway" stories from the community, demonstrating how learning to accept discomfort—and sometimes even choosing to do less or rest—is a vital part of the recovery journey.
Reassurance vs. Support: Understanding the difference between asking for tools to cope and asking for temporary soothing to make the feelings go away.
Overcoming the "Burden" Myth: Why anxiety makes you feel like an inconvenience and how to reframe asking for help as a step toward growth.
Asking for Encouragement over Certainty: How requesting reminders of your past success and capability can help you step into feared situations.
The Courage to Do Less: Why sometimes the best way to do it anyway is to give yourself permission to rest and step off the productivity treadmill.
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The Disordered Guide to Health Anxiety is available as a paperback or on Kindle
https://www.disordered.fm/the-disordered-guide-to-health-anxiety/
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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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Got a question or did it anyway to share? Send us an email or voicemail on our website.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Asking for help sometimes is hard. People are embarrassed to ask for help. Sometimes they're ashamed that they're a little bit resensitized. There's the, am I asking for help or am I asking for compulsive reassurance and soothing? |
| 0:11.0 | When I understood my anxiety, my asking for help was asking for support. Help take these feelings away, save me. Help me be my cheerleader, supporting, reminding me, having a different perspective of how I'm doing, believing in me. Yes, I think that's cool. Can you remind me that I can do hard things? Can you remind me that I can tolerate these feelings? Can you remind me how well I've been doing? And there's a reason for that because I've been flexing my tolerance muscles. We've got people constantly asking for help to the point where they're doing everyone's ed in. |
| 0:38.3 | And then you've got the other side, which is I'm so petrified of asking for help. |
| 0:42.3 | I don't want people to see me as a burden. |
| 0:44.3 | Asking for certainty will get you nowhere. |
| 0:47.3 | Asking for encouragement will get you everywhere. |
| 0:53.3 | Welcome to Disordid. This is episode 156 entitled How to Ask for Help. |
| 0:59.7 | I'm Joshua Fletcher, also known as anxiety. Josh, and I'm a psychiatrist who specializes in anxiety and anxiety disorders, having also been a previous suffer of OCD and pain disorder and agoraphobia, health anxiety, etc. |
| 1:13.3 | I'm looking forward to talking about this subject today because it's a nuanced one. |
| 1:16.5 | How to ask for help when we're anxious. |
| 1:19.6 | And I'm joined by my esteemed co-host. |
| 1:21.7 | Yes, from across the Atlantic. |
| 1:23.0 | I'm Drew Linzalata, the other half of disordered, what that guy said, |
| 1:26.3 | also a therapist that specializes in treating anxiety disorders and former sufferer of these things and an author and clearly a podcast because I'm here. And yeah, we're going to record an episode. We haven't recorded in a couple of weeks, so I'm happy to be back. And this is one of my favorite hours of the week for sure. And today we're going to talk about how to ask for help. |
| 1:46.7 | Yeah, it's a good, it's a good question. And it was suggested by a member of the disorder community. |
| 1:50.0 | And I thought, yeah, you know, we thought that's a really good topic. |
| 1:53.4 | How to ask for help. |
| 1:55.3 | It's a short episode. |
| 1:56.2 | You just sit there and go, help. |
| 1:58.8 | Cue the piano. |
| 2:00.1 | We're finished now. |
| 2:18.3 | Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week, guys. Yeah, yeah. Help. Really get some good, like, peril and helplessness in there as all. Help. Help. But you know, it's funny. Like, in most of life, yeah, you would just say, hey, a little help. You know, you're carrying something heavy, you whatever. Like, hey, help, it's easy. |
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