WHY Did I Develop An Anxiety Disorder? (Episode 82)
Disordered: Anxiety Help
Josh Fletcher and Drew Linsalata
4.9 • 665 Ratings
🗓️ 18 October 2024
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Everyone that develops an anxiety disorder wants to know why that happened. Why do some people develop disorders while others are anxious and stressed all the time without ever developing a disorder issue?
Excellent question, and one that nobody would blame you for asking.
This week on Disordered we're exploring the origins of anxiety disorders, why they develop, what makes us more vulnerable to this, why symptoms and scary thoughts happen, and the relationship between stress (inevitable in life) and disordered anxiety.
We're also looking at how there can be many contributing factors that might trigger development of an anxiety disorder, but paradoxically directly addressing those factors is not usually the way to get out of the state you find yourself in. First we "turn off the tap" (tune in for more on this) and learn to stand up on our own, then addressing contributing factors and working on overall wellness and good relapse prevention strategies and skills can - and often do - become part of the plan.
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Disordered Roundtables are here. 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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In your experience, is there something that could be a catalyst for anxiety disorders to exacerbate |
| 0:06.4 | when essentially there isn't one major life event that it could be attributed to? |
| 0:11.1 | What I thought was a good idea at the time was just think, go through my memories and try and find out why. |
| 0:16.2 | If I could pinpoint the big bang of when it started, then I could work out how to get to stop it. |
| 0:22.5 | There's an accumulated stress, it overflows, and that's when the threat response misfires, |
| 0:27.8 | and that's where we get the scary symptoms, the scary feelings, the racing thoughts, the |
| 0:32.2 | obsession, the inwards compulsion, because the stress drug is overflowing, and I think that's |
| 0:36.3 | how anxiety disorders start. |
| 0:38.3 | Anxiety symptoms are the same. Look the same as somebody who would be stressed. The difference is |
| 0:43.9 | when we start to develop that anxiety disorder, now the stress response then becomes the threat response. |
| 0:52.9 | Welcome to Disorder. This is episode 82 entitled, Why Did I Get an Anxiety Disorder? |
| 0:59.9 | I'm Joshua Fletcher, also known as Anxiety Josh, and I'm a psychotherapist who specializes in anxiety and anxiety disorders. |
| 1:07.0 | I'm based in Manchester in the UK. I'm an author, podcast host, Instagram prancer around her, |
| 1:14.6 | and also just your everyday guy. And I'm Drew Lin Salata, the other co-host of this fine podcast. |
| 1:21.4 | I'm a therapist practicing under supervision in New York, also specializing in anxiety and |
| 1:26.1 | anxiety disorders, also a former sufferer of these |
| 1:28.3 | problems for many years of my life. I've written some books about this. I talk about it on |
| 1:32.0 | social media. I'm tired of talking about myself. So like, welcome, here we are in episode 82. |
| 1:36.5 | Why did I develop an anxiety disorder? That's a good question. Absolutely. I can't wait to get |
| 1:40.3 | stuck into this today. So we were looking at the questions that are sent in at disordered.fm. |
| 1:47.3 | And a lot of them kind of revolve around around this topic. |
| 1:51.0 | So thank you for your suggestions and for them informing today's episode. |
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