The

The Welcome back to Anxiety Slayer.

Ananga and I are so grateful that you're here with us again this week for a conversation about our mind stories and the

fiction that our mind creates that we sometimes believe wholeheartedly and that can cause

us a whole lot of suffering and a whole lot of harm. So we have some ideas today about how to work

with that and how to eliminate what feels so real in those stories that our mind creates.

Welcome back inanga.

Hey, Shen.

Some of the stories that we hear about often are stories about health or social scenarios

or just being in a position where our mind makes us feel small, like we can't do the things we want to do.

Those are the three things that I hear about the most.

Yeah, yeah, I think those are really common experiences, the stories, the catastrophizing,

the way the mind can take something just a daily thing and take

it to the worst case scenario, the unhelpful internal dialogue that says we can't do this,

or this is always going to be this way, or that's going to get worse, and we don't know

those things, and it takes away aware ability to be resourceful and

adaptive and kind of shrinks us and I think if the mind gains traction if it gains energy from

our anxious response it can really hijack us and once it builds that kind of energy it's

very difficult to get out. And it can be a

prolonged experience of, as you said, Shan, real suffering. And it's all inside. It's a total inside job.

And then we're meeting friends or working or doing the things we need to do, trying to look okay,

trying to be functional.

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