Heat Anxiety (Episode 68)
Disordered: Anxiety Help
Josh Fletcher and Drew Linsalata
4.9 • 665 Ratings
🗓️ 28 June 2024
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Summer has arrived in the US and the UK, so let's talk about anxiety based on the heat. Summertime is often a difficult time for people struggling with anxiety disorders because the seasonal change in temperature becomes an anxiety trigger.
Today the guys are talking about:
- How heat is just uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable in any way is often unacceptable for people with anxiety disorders.
- Heat may trigger feelings that resemble panic attacks or that might remind you of times in the past when you've had scary or difficult experiences that you've attributed to high temperatures.
- How anxiety disorders will argue irrationally about the danger or risk posed by summer temperatures, often totally discounting the ability of humans to exist quite safely in a very wide range of even extreme climates.
- Typical exposure ideas that target heat centric anxiety.
- Why working on your heat anxiety means you're also working on other triggered because heat anxiety is just another expression of the single core fear that comes with things like panic disorder or OCD - that thoughts, feelings, and sensations will be too much.
As usual there are questions from the community and a few "did it anyways" to provide encouragement and inspiration.
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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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Visit us on the web at https://disordered.fm
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi, Drew and Josh. Thank you both for all the amazing work you do. I was wondering if at some point you'd be able to talk about heat anxiety. It's something I've always struggled with since suffering from panic disorder, and I'm fairly certain it's because my first ever panic attack was on a really hot day. And looking back, I'm pretty sure it was all the physical symptoms of overheating that started my panic attack. The excessive sweating, feeling sick, feeling faint, and not being able to cool down, which just fed my panic attack, and ever since I've hated the hot weather, even though in the past, I used to love it. I just can't enjoy the hot weather anymore. I always need a wet towel with me if I'm out of the house for a long period of time, a fan, and of course my trusty bottle of water. Is there such a thing as heat anxiety or |
| 0:41.7 | weather anxiety? Have either of you to ever struggle with the heat? And is there anything I do, |
| 0:46.4 | I can do to try to enjoy the nice weather again and not always struggle with this? |
| 0:54.1 | Welcome to Disordered. This is episode 68 entitled Heat Anxiety. My name is Joshua Fletcher, |
| 1:03.0 | also known as Anxiety Josh, on social media, and I'm a psychotherapist who specializes |
| 1:08.3 | in the world of anxiety and anxiety disorders. I'm a previous sufferer, an author of the book, and how does that make you feel? And I am Drew Lin Salata. I am a therapist in training in the U.S. in New York with a specialization in anxiety and anxiety disorders, also a podcaster, clearly because I'm here, also an author in this space, social media guy advocate, former sufferer of anxiety |
| 1:28.4 | disorders, OCD depression for many years of my life on and off, but doing better now. |
| 1:32.2 | I'm happy to be here. |
| 1:33.4 | What up, dude? |
| 1:34.7 | I'm good. |
| 1:35.5 | I'm good. |
| 1:36.0 | Did you ever struggle with the heat and notice that the temperatures would affect your anxiety at |
| 1:43.7 | all? |
| 1:49.0 | I'm not sure that I suffered to the extent that the questions send her in her, because she didn't say that we could use her name, did, |
| 1:51.0 | and thank you for the question by the way, but yeah, the temperature would have an impact |
| 1:55.0 | because the temperature, which the heat mainly, not cold, heat, would change the way I felt, |
| 2:00.0 | and we can't be having that when we're in the grips of things like panic disorder. the heat mainly, not cold, heat would change the way I felt. |
| 2:04.6 | And we can't be having that when we're in the grips of things like panic disorder. |
| 2:13.0 | Yeah, because it can remind you, can remind you, I get this a lot of lots of clients that have had this. |
| 2:19.3 | I did a post on my social media over day about how the heat um, it's not the heat itself but it reminds you of sometimes |
| 2:22.9 | of the symptoms that you don't like or at times |
| 2:26.0 | when you felt anxious and rock bottom maybe |
... |
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