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Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to episode two of season three of owning it the anxiety podcast with me, your host, Caroline Forin. I hope you were taking extra good care of yourself

right now. As I said in episode one for season three,

I am now focusing on shorter solo episodes with just myself to provide you with some more

specific tools or coping mechanisms or simply just things to consider that might help as you

continue to own your anxiety. And I will be back with season four, which will be my guest interviews

very soon. This week, I wanted to hone in

on something. I explore in quite a lot of detail in my second book, The Confidence Kit, and I want to

bring it to your attention now, and it's something called a stretch zone experience. Stretch zone experiences

are absolutely essential if your aim is to lessen the grip that anxiety has over your life.

That being said, when you're feeling really anxious, the last thing you want to do is put yourself in the position of a stretch zone experience.

Before I explain exactly what a stretch zone experience is, we have to understand the comfort cell model, which again, I map out very clearly in my second book

if you haven't had a chance to look at that already. So I think it's safe to say we're all

very familiar with the comfort zone. I think it's different for everyone, but has been defined

as a psychological and behavioral state in which we feel emotionally safe and at ease. Some people

will feel that they're in their comfort zone when

they are curled up on the sofa, watching Netflix, that's certainly my comfort zone. Others will

feel completely at ease hosting a live radio show. I just did an episode yesterday for a guest for

season four with Alison Curtis who hosts a Today FM show, her own weekend show, and she was

saying that despite her experience of anxiety, when she's sitting down in front of that microphone,

she just could not feel more at ease. So however your comfort zone looks, there's no stress here,

as we know exactly what we're doing. We are anxiety neutral. We're in control. Nothing is strange to us here and

...