Are you struggling with panic attacks or agoraphobia or OCD or health anxiety or generalized anxiety disorder or other problems like that?

Well, this week on a really no frills version of the Anxious Truth podcast, an anxiety specialist, a therapist, that would be me, is going to answer a bunch of questions about those very problems.

So let's get to that right now.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Anxious Truth podcast. This is episode 328. It is an odd episode because we are doing an episode in a week where we normally wouldn't, but for a variety

of reasons I wanted to do a little fill-in episode. And today, we normally wouldn't, but for a variety of reasons,

I wanted to do a little fill-in episode. And today, we're going to do a Q&A, good old-fashioned, listener Q&A, about anxiety and anxiety disorders. I'm Drew Linzalata. I am a therapist practicing in the area of anxiety and anxiety disorders in the state of New York. I'm also the creator and host to the Anxious Truth podcast.

I'm a three-time author on the topic of anxiety and anxiety disorders,

psychoeducator, social media dude, guy with microphones and clearly cameras. And yeah, I'm here to answer a bunch of questions that my Instagram audience sent over in the last couple of days. We're going to do a quick Q&A episode of The Anxious Truth. If you're new to the Anxious Truth, welcome. I hope you find what you hear or see here today useful in some way. Of course, if you're a returning viewer on YouTube or a returning listener, welcome back. I hope you are able to find something in this episode that's useful to you. Before we get into that, just a quick Reminder, head on over to my website at the Anxistruth.com. There are way more resources there. All the previous podcast episodes and videos, my social media posts, some very low-cost workshops, the books that I've written, a link over to Disordered, which is another free podcast that I do with my buddy Josh Fletcher that comes out on Fridays. That's at Disordered.fm. Go to my website at The Anxioustruth.com. If you like what you hear today on this episode and avail yourself of all those other resources, they're just a ton of goodies over there. So take advantage of all of the stuff, especially the free stuff, and most of it is, in fact, free. So this week, I want to do a good old-fashioned listener, viewer, Q&A. I asked my Instagram audience yesterday morning to ask me questions, which I will do every once in a while. I haven't done a Q&A episode in probably six or eight months now. So I figured there's a little fill-in episode here in the middle of October of 2025, it was a good time to do that. So I'm just going to kind of look at some of the questions. If you're watching on YouTube, you will see me like looking over at my other screen here because I have a bunch of the

questions in front of me. And I'm going to try to answer as many as I can. I can't answer each

individual question. And it's important for me to say to you guys that there are certain questions

that an online helper just will never be able to answer for you

because we don't know you. I talk about this quite often. You don't want to fall into the trap of

thinking that the guy that you see on YouTube or Instagram with the big microphone and the deep voice

somehow is going to be able to tell you exactly what to do and exactly how to respond and exactly

how to handle your thoughts and emotions. We can't. I can't. I don't know you. So I can't answer

everybody's individual questions. Be careful about that. There is a limitation to the amount of

educating or helping that can be done in this kind of environment. So just keep that in mind

because I don't want you to fall into the trap of thinking that,

you know, I will follow specific directions from a guy on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or

on a podcast that's not really right.

It doesn't work that way.

There are times when there was just no substitute for qualified in person or one to

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