The Social Impacts of Anxiety (Episode 75)
Disordered: Anxiety Help
Josh Fletcher and Drew Linsalata
4.9 • 665 Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2024
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week Drew and Josh are looking at the social impacts of anxiety. What happens when panic attacks, anxiety waves, or a flood of scary intrusive thoughts happens in public or while in social situations or when interacting with friends, family members, co-workers, or relationship partners?
If your past experiences in life or past relationships have contributed to developing self-beliefs or persistent worries about being rejected, excluded, or being exposed as being "less than", you may be tempted to insist that being anxious in social settings can't possibly be OK and that there must be some special way to approach this issue.
The short answer is that there really is no special way, and the same principles will apply. Its always helpful to be able to identify reasons why your threat response has latched onto themes like rejection, exclusion, or being unworthy or less than.
Even then the path forward is THROUGH. In this episode we're talking about identifying and challenging core beliefs focused on social fears, and learning two valuable lessons :
1. The worst case often does not happen
2. Even if it does, you are capable of handling the feelings that come with that
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Disordered Roundtable is coming! Think of it as "Disordered Live", a way for members of our audience to spend time with us in an intimate virtual setting (attendance is limited) to engage in real time sharing and discussion on specific anxiety disorder and recovery topics. To be notified when new Disordered Roundtable sessions are scheduled, visit our homepage and get on our mailing list.
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Struggling with worry and rumination that you feel you can't stop or control? Check out Worry and Rumination Explained, a two hour pre-recorded workshop produced by Josh and Drew. The workshop takes a deep dive into the mechanics of worrying and ruminating, offering some helpful ways to approach the seemingly unsolvable problem of trying to solve seemingly unsolveable problems.
https://bit.ly/worryrumination
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Want to ask us questions, share your wins, or get more information about Josh, Drew, and the Disordered podcast?
Visit us on the web at https://disordered.fm
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, Drew and Josh. I'm Anna. I'm from Brazil. My question is related to the social consequences of a panic attack or an anxiety attack. You guys said that people tend to evaluate the severity of their panic attacks based on the social consequences of it. |
| 0:21.9 | And it got me thinking about how I know that I have to surrender to my anxiety, |
| 0:27.1 | to expose myself to my triggers. |
| 0:30.2 | But the biggest obstacle for me is fearing how people are going to perceive me |
| 0:36.5 | if I get anxious in front of them. I tend to have |
| 0:39.6 | the freezing type of panic attacks and I feel horrible afterwards, you know. It ruins social events for me |
| 0:49.1 | and I tend to avoid them because of that. I know that I have to accept the possibility of getting anxious. It's hard |
| 0:55.2 | for me to do because of this fear of how people are going to perceive me. Is it a type of social |
| 1:00.7 | anxiety? What's your take on it? We'd love to hear it. Thank you. Bye-bye. |
| 1:09.8 | Welcome to Disordered. This is episode 75 of the podcast entitled The Social Impacts of Anxiety. |
| 1:16.2 | I am Drew Lin-Salada. I am one of the co-hosts of Disordered, a therapist practicing in the |
| 1:20.7 | supervision in New York and the USA specializing and treating anxiety and anxiety disorders. |
| 1:25.3 | I am a former sufferer of anxiety, anxiety, |
| 1:27.7 | disorders, and depression for many years of my life on and off, three-time author on the subject, |
| 1:32.3 | social media dude, educator, advocate, I don't know. I'm just happy to be here. I'm happy you're here |
| 1:39.2 | too. I'm Joshua Fletcher, also known as Anxiety Josh on social media. I'm a psychotherapist who specializes in anxiety based in Manchester in the UK, also the co-host of this podcast and author of the book, and how does that make you feel? And a fine book it is. Welcome, dude. It's been a while. It's been a while. It's good to see you again, Andrew. Yeah, we had a little mini summer hiatus so those of you who missed us thank you yeah i enjoyed the uh |
| 2:06.6 | the comments the messages of concern and the is this a test you're trying to make us anxious |
| 2:13.2 | aren't you i pretty yeah i did those were really funny you guys. Anyway, so today we're going to talk |
| 2:18.0 | about the social impacts of anxiety and thank you to Anna, the question send her in her, for asking a really good question and really kind of giving us a topic to talk about today because I think it matters. How do you think anxiety and like chronic and disordered anxiety can impact people from a social standpoint. |
| 2:40.9 | I think if you particularly struggle with shame, it adds an extra layer of fear to what's an already stressful and high pressure, scary situation. |
| 2:46.1 | Not only am I struggling internally with anxiety, but there's my threat response is also |
| 2:53.1 | latching on to the consequences of that. What will happen socially if people see me anxious? |
... |
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