We need to learn the difference between the symptoms of an anxiety disorder and OCD and the regular normal emotions that come along with being alive.

Many anxious people who are dealing with panic disorder or agoraphobia or health anxiety or OCD or gad and going through the recovery or desensitization process will unnecessarily layer that process on top of normal human stress and normally

triggered human emotions. That's a problem. We need to talk about it. So let's do that right now.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to The Anxious Truth. This is episode 3.41 of the podcast. We are recording in April of 2026 in case you are listening from the future. I'm Drew Linzalata, creator and host of The Anxious Truth. I'm a therapist, but not your therapist, specializing in the treatment of anxiety and anxiety disorders practicing in New York.

I am a former sufferer of the things that we talk about on this podcast.

I am a four-time author on the topic with more books coming.

Social media guy, advocate, psychoeducator, guy with way too many expensive cameras and microphones

that likes to point them directly at this particular topic, which is anxiety disorders and OCD and anxiety recovery. Yeah, happy to be here for another episode. If this is your first time with The Anxious Truth, welcome. I hope you find what we do here helpful in some way, shape, or form, and you hang around. Of course, if you are a returning listener or viewer, welcome back. Thanks for hanging out with me this week, and I hope you get

something out of this particular episode. So what are we going to talk about today? Let's talk

about that thing where you are looking at the world through anxiety disorder or OCD colored

glasses. When you have been working on anxiety disorder or OCD recovery or desensitization for any length of time.

And for many of you, it's very common.

It's not failure to have been working on this sort of stuff for months or even years.

You can start to view every uncomfortable sensation in your body, every unwanted or

unexplainable intrusive thought, any big emotion that you feel like is taking

you underwater as a setback or a relapse or a recovery task to be undertaken.

You will see everything as a floating accepting willful tolerance, exposure, ERP,

Claire Weeks thing, and that isn't necessarily correct.

So we want to look at the mistake that many anxious people make of turning every single

difficult internal experience into an anxiety recovery or an anxiety treatment problem.

That's a very common mistake and actually can cause them problems.

We are going to rest this entire episode, like we rest many episodes,

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