You know you've got social anxiety when you negatively anticipate, maybe a social event, ruminate, try and play through scenarios, maybe even rehearse how you'll be with the social event.

During the social event, you're constantly self-aware, you know, scanning yourself, hyper-focused on your facial expressions, nodding, smiling,

a lot of placation sometimes. After the event, they will ruminate, analyze and go through the memory,

did I say the right thing, did I offend this person? Here's a threat to my identity and what I would like to be.

If there's an opportunity for someone to see me is

not how I'd like to see, my threat response would go off and fire off. Well, for a lot of us,

we just don't want to be seen. I forget judged. I'm already judging myself. I don't like what you

see when you look at me. Welcome to Disordered. This is episode 31 of the podcast entitled Social Anxiety and the Thorn Response.

I am Drew Linzalata, a graduate student in clinical mental health counseling, a therapist in training in New York and the United States, and a former sufferer of anxiety disorders and depression for many years of my life.

And I'm Joshua Fletcher, also known as Anxiety Josh. I'm a psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK, previous sufferer and co-host of this wonderful podcast. This fine podcast. How about we start with the did it anyway today, Josh? It's always a good way to celebrate the community. What have you got today, Drew? Let's do it. We have a good, we have a, did anyway from, oh, you know, I won't say her name. I think she says it, but let's see. Let's just play it. And then there's an even, there's a prologue for this too. It gets even better. Here we go. Hi, Drew. Hi, Josh. Thank you so much for it's a great podcast. It's been incredibly helpful. Today, I don't so much

have a did it anyway as a doing it anyway. So I have health anxiety. It's something that's

really, really been a big part of my life and it's been a really big struggle.

Since reading your book, Drew, I have realized that it's time to combat it.

So hopefully, whenever you guys hear this, I will be in the doctors getting my bloods taken,

which is something that I have been avoiding for the last decade, at least. I'm really frightened of going to the doctors. So unlike a lot of people

with health anxiety, I'm never near the doctors if I can avoid it.

So, yeah, I'm going to be going to get my bloods taken.

I don't know what the outcome is going to be.

I am intentionally not Googling.

And, yeah, I'm doing it anyway.

All right. This is the part where we would usually play some applause from the studio audience because, you know, we have hundreds of people here watching us record. But there's a prologue to this one. Two days later, this person sent us a voice message and said, I did it. So she did it on the way of the doctors and then followed up two days later saying that she did it. She was terrified. She was freaking out. She had all the symptoms and everything. But she got her bloods done. Thanks for the spoiler, Drew. I know. We could have, well, we could have left them hanging like Clickbay. Come back next week to see if she did it. Excellent. She did it. So now you get applause.

Super.

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