What We Avoid, Why We Avoid it, And How It Causes Our Anxiety to Get Worse

In this episode, Sarah is joined by licensed therapist Mike Comparetto to explore the concept of avoidance—specifically, experiential avoidance, which refers to the tendency to avoid unpleasant thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. Together, they delve into how we often dodge discomfort by overworking, overthinking, or turning to substances and distractions like social media. While these strategies may offer short-term relief, research shows that chronic avoidance is linked to serious long-term consequences, including anxiety, depression, and even physical health issues like cardiovascular disease and cancer. Mike shares how leaning into discomfort, rather than resisting it, is not only more effective in the long run but also a key step toward reducing anxiety and building emotional resilience.

Mike Comparetto's website: https://striveon.me/

How experientially avoidant are you? Take the Quiz:  https://novopsych.com/assessments/formulation/brief-experiential-avoidance-questionnaire-beaq/ 

Download the tool to identify your emotions: https://www.tsdmind.org/_files/ugd/8bdf26_e098853c2ccd431eab2923afa955ee10.pdf

The Aware Mind's host, Sarah Vallely has been teaching meditation for over 20 years and is a private coach, helping clients heal from a narcissistic parent, abusive partner, trauma from growing up with ADHD, intrusive thoughts and overwhelming anxiety. 

Important links:
Sarah's Mindfulness Coaching website: https://www.sarahvallely.com
TSD Mindfulness Coach Certification https://www.tsdmind.org

This episode is a meditation for beginner mindfulness meditators and anyone interested in learning supports for a variety of mental health challenges, including overthinking, trauma, intrusive thoughts and self-worth.  The Aware Mind produces content that supports stress reduction, anxiety relief, better concentration and focus, and trauma healing.

Transcript

 I am here with Mike Comparetto. He is a licensed therapist who owns his own practice, overseeing several other therapists in his practice.

Mike specializes in anxiety and uses acceptance commitment therapy approach, which we're gonna talk about more today. Mike, welcome back to the show. I'm so glad you're here. It's been way too long. I know. It's been a while. It's good to be back. Mm-hmm. Sure is. I wanna talk about acceptance, commitment therapy here just for a minute before we go into the topic of our show today.

And I wanna back up a little bit first for the listeners. When we start therapy, we often don't think about the fact that there's all these different kinds of approaches that therapists use. And one therapist is, might use one approach, and then another therapist might use a completely. Different approach.

Uh, there is CBT, which is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. A lot of people are familiar with that. There's DBT, dialectical Behavioral Therapy. Some people are aware of that. Internal Family Systems is gaining more popularity. Somatic work is something that's been out there for several. Years and there is this approach called a CT Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which in my opinion doesn't get enough attention.

It's a wonderful approach to mental health and there is such a big component of mindfulness in in a CT therapy, which is why Mike and I just love talking on this show about mindfulness. Mike, you can correct me if you're wrong, but it's my understanding that a CT is part of the cognitive behavioral therapy world.

It's based on helping clients accept unpleasant thoughts and feelings instead of fighting or avoiding them. Right? And a CT encourages people to observe their experiences with mindfulness and compassion. So if any of my clients are listening, they know this is what we talk about in, in our session. So what you're gonna hear.

This episode is going to be very familiar and supporting what, what we're already doing. Uh, so Mike, can you talk a little bit more about a CT, including what types of mental health issues you see this approach really helping? I. Sure. I mean, it can theoretically address most mental health issues. I'm not gonna say all, let's say anything that the average person would be coming to therapy for.

So, anxiety, depression, OCD, trauma, anything that is. That doesn't fall under the category of extremely severe or complex, I would say it would be a great approach. Theoretically, it can, it can address most, if not all things, and it is, as you correctly pointed out, it is under the umbrella of. CBT. It is a, it really focuses on the idea of behavior, but where there's a little bit of a loophole is that in act, kind of everything's a behavior.

The way you're thinking is a behavior, ruminating as a behavior, beating yourself up as a behavior. So behaviors are not just, you know, I'm going out and doing this thing. For the record, I do all of the things that you mentioned. Act is probably my favorite of all of those. But it's like having a Swiss Army knife.

You need to have different strategies to lean on if, if something comes up. And as you pointed out, one of the big differences. Between CBT and ACT is the way thoughts are approached. The traditional approach in CBT is to try to what we call reframing thoughts. So let's say you have a negative thought, like, oh, I'm such a loser.

The approach would be, let's think about that differently. Is there any evidence that actually contradicts that thought? I'm a loser. Whereas in act, we try not to give thoughts too much power at all. So the idea in ACT would be more so, well, that's just a thought. I'm gonna let that go. And personally, I actually find both of those strategies to be incredibly useful at different times.

Yeah, I completely agree with you about this idea of having different. Tools. An example I can give is, you know, I do internal family systems work too. IFS and I find that it doesn't really, I don't, I don't think it works well to start a client off right away with IFS. It's a very intimate type of of work, so it's nice to have something that's more cognitive.

You know, I'll often start with the, the cognitive, um, reframing things like that in the beginning. Develop some trust, um, have the client start to really feel safe. 'cause you really do need to feel, have a lot of trust and feel safe when doing the IFS work. So, yeah, it's nice to have those different modalities.

Yeah, and I personally practice what I would call a top down approach, meaning if a client comes in, I'm not necessarily on day one, gonna try to go right for the root of the problem. There's exceptions to that, but for the most part, I start with trying to teach a client tools to manage their symptoms and, and learn to cope with what they're experiencing before we start getting to the deeper root.

Levels of what's going on, because that can, having those tools before doing the real heavy lifting can be really beneficial. Yeah, yeah, totally agree. The focus of our episode today is on experiential. Avoidance, which I'll be honest, I just learned this term the other day when Mike emailed this to me. I, uh, I, I love it.

I love this because it is a research term. It was coined by a CT Experiential avoidance is a research term. Another research term that I love to talk about is cognitive elaboration, which means, uh, worry basically more specifically. When we don't have all the information, we fill in the blanks with our own notions.

And the research shows that this leads to anxiety and depression. Uh, just like rumination, just like shame thinking. Experiential avoidance means avoiding or suppressing uncomfortable emotions. Uncomfortable physical sensations, uncomfortable memories, uncomfortable situations. Of course, I always talk about this with clients, but I didn't know this was what it was called, so I'm so excited.

I'm going to share some stats here about experiential avoidance. The Journal of Advanced Nursing published a study that shows. Those of us who engage in experiential avoidance are 48% more likely to have depression, anxiety or PTSD and 30% would be statistically significant. So 48% is, is a a lot. Uh, the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science published a study that showed experiential avoidance, was linked to physical health issues, uh, such as obesity, diabetes.

Allergies, cancer, heart disease, gastrointestinal problems, and respiratory diseases. So I found that very interesting. Uh, another study showed if you engage in experiential avoidance, meaning avoiding certain situations, avoiding your emotions, difficult emotions, um, you are 68% more likely to use self-harm.

Ooh, that seems like. Really important finding with what's going on with a lot of teens these days. Uh, in the last statistic here, a study in current psychology showed experiential avoidance makes eating disorders worse. So yeah. Mike, I'd love to hear your thoughts on some of these stats and your, you know, explanation of what experiential avoidance is.

I mean, those stats definitely don't surprise me. Just to kind of restate what you already outlined, because I think since it's an unfamiliar term, I think it probably bears repeating to kind of define it. It's any attempt to avoid any part of your present experience. That can be your thoughts. It could be your.

Emotions. It could be your physiological sensations, it could be memories that arise, it could be external situations. And I think the first and possibly most important thing to say here is that it's not possible to completely eliminate experiential avoidance. One thing that I find really cool about act, it's a very.

Flexible modality and it doesn't propose anything, be black and white. It has a very sort of, um, adaptable approach to life. We're all gonna do this sometimes, all gonna have that night where we're just like, you know what? I'm gonna check out and. Binge my favorite show, and that is not inherently bad.

However, if it is a pattern and if there is emotional content that needs to be processed that you're continually avoiding, it will make things worse. And specifically, you know, we're, we're mostly talking about anxiety today. A pretty well understood mechanism of anxiety is that if you. Avoid dealing with the anxiety or facing the fear that you're experiencing.

You will typically get some degree of short-term relief. However, in the long run, it will cause your anxiety to exacerbate, and this is exactly. What happened to me when I look back over my life, I can look at the way I experienced anxiety when I was young and how it was very sort of specific in, in certain situations.

Not only did that anxiety get worse, it became generalized, which means rather than I. Being triggered by specific interactions or specific stimuli, it started to just become a way of life. Whatever it is that makes you anxious when you're, when you're first starting to experience anxiety, the more you avoid that, the more your anxiety actually grows.

And we may have talked about this on a previous podcast episode, but if you think about the idea of your comfort zone, the smaller your comfort zone is, and the more you stay in that, the smaller it will become. Think of it like a muscle. If you don't exercise that muscle, it will not grow. And as a matter of fact, if you don't use it at all, it will atrophy.

What we want to do is figure out how do we start to face those things, and that's, that's kind of where I'm sure you have a plan for how we're gonna get into that, but that's essentially where we're going. I actually didn't make as much of a plan as I usually do because you're just so good. You're like such a good guest.

Oh, thank you. Like, I'm so glad Mike's on like, I don't have to work so often. Yeah. So we both have a background in Buddhism, and I love how you described about how when we avoid, avoid, avoid, it can make things worse. And that's based in, in Buddhism, right? And in Buddhism we believe that what we push away, um, gains more power.

It's, it's like that aversion. We use the word aversion in, in Buddhism and I like. To think about the biological reason. I haven't researched this or asked chat GPT about this, it didn't occur to me when I was getting ready for today. But, uh, I would imagine the biological reason for experiential avoidance is some kind of like survival, right?

Like thinking about our ancestors and having, you know, certain things just be like, you know, I'm not gonna survive if I. Lean into this, like I could, I could, um, you know, get, get hurt by the enemy or, or or something like that. So I'm sure it's the way our brain is designed and I like that you reminded us that, you know, it's okay if we go into this here and there, you know, have a, have a drink once in a while because we had a hard day.

But, you know, noticing those habitual patterns that make it. Worse. And this idea that we need to lean into those fears to help us heal our anxiety. I have seen with every single one of my clients, when they learn how to process their emotions, their anxiety gets much better. And for me. Personally, I'm not a super emotional person, but the last five years or so I've done, you know, a lot of work in this realm and have been able to become more emotional.

My anxiety is much, much better, but I'll be honest, you know, having those emotions isn't a cakewalk either, but it's better on your body. First of all, like the anxiety does these, um, negative has these negative impacts on your body. I think allowing a real emotion of grief and loss to come through is, has a healthier effect on your body and it, it, it, overall, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, it feels better than anxiety in my opinion.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of the phrase, there's no free lunch. You can get away with avoiding that stuff for a little while and maybe not have any real consequence. Another saying I love is pick your pain. You're either gonna have the pain of facing the feelings or the pain of the consequence of avoiding them.

In the short term, it feels like the much better thing to do is to avoid them. It can be very hard to connect the dots and realize that. In the long term, as things get worse, it's because you were avoiding. And it can also be hard to recognize how you're avoiding. I mean, we're, we've talked about some of the more obvious examples, but there's some really subtle examples.

And one of the things that I found really cool, getting deeper into act, uh, it's kind of a mindfulness practice for the therapist. Watching your clients and looking for the ways in which they engage in subtle experiential avoidance in real time. As you're talking, it can be as subtle as a little like the eyes shifting away or the hands starting to fidget.

You wouldn't immediately think of as, oh, thi this is me trying to avoid. But what it is is a very natural response of trying to self-soothe. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying self-soothing is a bad thing, but again, we have to look at the overall pattern and the overall tendency. If you're never spending any time sitting with an emotion or facing a fear, then self-soothing is just a bandaid.

Everything from our muscles tensing up to going on a different train of thought when we encounter a scary idea. There's essentially an infinite number of ways we can experientially avoid. The goal is not to find and root out every single one of those things and assume that it's always bad. It's to prioritize the ones that are contributing the most to this feedback loop that we're talking about.

That's where the acceptance part of acceptance and commitment therapy comes in to. To really replace that avoidance with acceptance. Wonderful. Yeah. I wanna let our listeners know that in the show notes, I have a link to an online assessment to see where you fall in the spectrum of experiential avoidance.

Some of the questions include, am I quick to leave a situation that makes me feel uneasy? Do I try to put unpleasant memories out of my mind? Do I procrastinate? Do I believe pain always leads to suffering? So you can check that out. And yeah, so it's this idea that we're distracting ourselves, uh, with substances.

I. Overwork food media. Uh, mine is definitely work. I, and that's because I get the most dopamine hits from work. So that's my challenge. Uh, perfectionism is an example of this type of avoidance, and I would say that's because we wanna avoid those shame cycles coming up that I'm not good enough. Um, I, um, I'm, I make mistakes and so we really lean into being perfect to a avoid that.

We talked about this a little bit already, but I wanna ask you again, you know, why does this experiential avoidance lead to long-term suffering? Two more anxiety, um, that it's bad for us. And I know when we spoke before, you had mentioned this idea of this quicksand, so, um, I, I, I'd love to hear about that.

So to go over the quicksand analogy, if you imagine yourself in quicksand, what are we always told? The more you struggle, the more you're gonna sink into the quicksand. There's a lot of mechanisms that we can use to explain why this is because it's a good question. Well, why does experiential avoidance make things worse?

And the first and most obvious is that we're just. Not dealing with the problem, we're ignoring the problem. One way I like to think about the function of emotions is as messengers, right? They are messengers from your brain and body. Those messages might be totally flawed and irrational, but nonetheless, if, if somebody's knocking on your door and you just keep ignoring it, and they're very insistent, they're gonna keep knocking.

And you could turn your TV up as loud as you want. The knockings not gonna stop until you answer the door. We can actually fold in a little bit of IFS here. Think about the ways in which. You have parts that protect your exiles. So those of you who aren't familiar, uh, just think of exiles as your, your deepest wounding, your traumas, your negative core beliefs, the worst experiences of your life, right?

You have other parts that show up. To try to protect you when those exiles feel vulnerable. Sometimes that's done in a healthy way, but oftentimes that's done through experiential avoidance and in IFS. The way to heal those exiles is to start to let those protective parts step back a tiny bit and to start to really address the exiles.

As they are and let them know they're safe. I'm kind of giving the Cliff notes version here, but to essentially heal those exiles by working with them directly to look at it from the Buddhist perspective. As you pointed out, clinging and aversion are the root of all suffering. In Buddhist philosophy, they're two sides of the same coin.

Typically, when we're clinging towards something, we have aversion towards something else. Or typically when we're experiencing aversion to something like, let's say a difficult physiological sensation, we will naturally clinging to something else. So let's say I am feeling anxiety start to move through my body and it feels uncomfortable, I start to experience aversion, and then I start to clinging towards, ah, I really just wanna feel better.

I can only feel okay if this feeling goes away. That is in this Buddhist model, the root of all of our suffering. By learning how to let go of clinging and aversion, we can start to reduce our suffering by continuing to avoid, by continuing to not face what's really there. We keep shrinking our comfort zone and we keep limiting what we are okay with in life.

Our life becomes small and unfulfilling. It's a recipe for. More suffering and more anxiety. Yeah. So if I'm feeling neglected, if I'm feeling misunderstood, if I'm feeling disappointed, it's not a mistake, right? It's not like, oh, that's a mistake. Let me just kind of push that down, or, you know, that's just gonna weaken me.

There's a reason. And if we think about through the lens of IFS. That, yes, as these exiles are inner child that's feeling these things and there's a reason and we need to listen to it. Right. So it's, that's where so much healing can come from. Uh, I believe we cannot heal emotionally until we feel our emotions.

In the right way. And I know you're probably not supposed to say that, but, uh, I think the idea here is that people wouldn't avoid these emotional experiences as much if they knew how to feel them in the right way. And, and I guess basically a better way to say that is to feel them in a more compassionate way because what we're thinking in our heads, while we're feeling the pain.

Matters. Uh, and so I think that being able to learn that practice is super important. Uh, and also that emotional awareness in general. One more statistic here, the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science says that people who struggle with emotional awareness. Mindfulness of your emotions are 97% more likely to engage in avoidance behaviors, um, in this experiential avoidance.

So basically everyone, right? 97%. Uh, yeah. What do you think? Well, also, I mean, just to kind of demystify it a little bit, like. Can you really blame people? We are creatures that we don't like pain and we love pleasure, right? So if you're feeling even a subtle, even a subconscious emotional pain, what are you gonna do?

You're gonna say, well, let me reach for my favorite food, or reach for a drink, or turn on the tv, or start scrolling, right? And we can't blame people for that because that is, that is our nature, the thing. That is counterintuitive about most forms of self-growth is that they actually require us to go a little bit against our habitual nature.

Mm-hmm. You know, that's, that's the trick, right? Breaking our patterns, changing our patterns. Mike, how do we stop avoiding these uncomfortable experiences, you know, sitting with, what is your advice about that when, or maybe even some of your personal experience? Yeah, I think, um, the first thing I think I want to do is define acceptance, because that is a, a very misunderstood word when people hear.

The idea, you know, accept your emotions or accept your situation. It can often sound like, well, are you telling me I should be okay with it or I should like it? And the answer is no, not at all. Simply put in act, we define acceptance as not struggling with reality. To go back to the quicksand metaphor, if you are struggling while you're in the quicksand, you're gonna sink deeper.

Similarly, if you're experiencing any type of difficult, emotional, or mental experience and you struggle with it, you will sink deeper. And to share a little bit of my own experience with anxiety, you know, the, the more I. Found myself hating my anxiety and wanting to force it to go away the worse it got.

I experienced that quicksand metaphor so acutely and so deeply, and it, it took me a while to realize that, to realize that by trying to avoid it. I was only making it worse. How we start to turn that ship around is first recognizing the fact that we avoid recognizing the ways in which we do it because you can't fix the problem until you clearly see it.

Start to identify the ways in which they experientially avoid. Now, depending on the person, I might. First, teach them some basic grounding techniques, which I'm gonna assume most of your listeners have. But it can be as simple as pausing, taking a few deep breaths, feeling your feet on the ground, feeling your body in the chair, and just let things be.

And that is a form of acceptance. When we start to identify the ways in which we're avoiding, we can start to replace them with acceptance strategies. And this entirely depends on what we're avoiding. So if it's an internal state that we are avoiding, then maybe the antidote is to do a simple.

Mindfulness meditation, where we're really focusing on that act of acceptance. I forget, I wanna say it was Aja Sumito, but there's a, there's a monk who had this really well-known phrase Right now it's like this, and that is one of my favorite mantras. You know, you could go through your whole day and in those challenging moments, just take a deep breath.

Right now it's like this, right? To expand on the idea of acceptance, I also think it's important to note that it does not mean not taking action. Acceptance does not mean resignation. It doesn't mean giving up. It just means not struggling. And so this becomes especially important when we're talking about life situations and sociopolitical issues.

Even acceptance doesn't mean I hate my job, but I'm just gonna stay here 'cause that's. You know, I'm just gonna accept it. No acceptance can mean taking action, but first you have to start with meeting reality where it's at. Because if you're struggling with the fact that you don't like your job, you're only gonna suffer that much more, and it's gonna be that much difficult to see clearly what the next steps are.

To move out of that, there's these more internal approaches to acceptance, like mindfulness meditation, but then there's some external behaviors that we need to address. Like let's say you've got social anxiety and you're avoiding social gatherings. Well, that's when. You would do what we call exposure therapy, right?

Where you slowly in a measured way, and hopefully with the help of a professional start to face those fears so that you are no longer avoiding those scary situations. You start to do the things that you are afraid of. Starting with the ones that feel a little bit easier and it will be challenging, but that is also the point that without feeling the anxiety that comes.

With facing a fear, you can't push through it and overcome it. What you were saying about this acceptance doesn't mean non-action, which John Kazen talks about really well, and I wanna give an example of that. If you are in an abusive relationship and you don't accept that it is abusive, you're just in denial about it, then you don't take action.

So actually moving into acceptance about the reality that, yes, I'm in an abusive relationship. Allows you to take that action to end the relationship and be safe. Yeah. Yeah. That is a misconception that, you know, when we accept something that we're accepting, oh, we're like going to be okay with whatever happens and we're not taking action.

It's just literally accepting that this is the reality, this is the reality. Of what's going on. And the right now, it's like this, one of my favorite mantras. It's just radical acceptance. It's just like, yes, right now my nervous system is triggered. Yes, I'm having, um, a, approaching an anxiety attack. This is, this is what's going on.

And just complete accepting that that's what's happening instead of fighting it, uh, which will make the anxiety attack worse. Uh, so yeah, this idea of how do we stop avoiding these uncomfortable situations? Naming the emotion, that emotional awareness, I think that is key. And so I will also link in the show notes my tool that lists 300 emotions.

So you can go on there and put some words to the emotion. I haven't always believed this, but in the last couple years I've come to realize that every single instance of overthinking is driven by. An emotion. So that's also a really good place to start, is every time you notice yourself overthinking, that would be worry, rumination, shame, thinking so much problem solving, so much projecting planning, uh, that type of overthinking to just take a moment and say.

You know, I'm in this overthinking. There's got to be an emotional aspect here that I'm actually avoiding with this overthinking. That's, that could be, um, that is so helpful for my clients. I wanna ask about values. I know that acceptance commitment therapy. Involves a lot of understanding of values and, and making sure that we're aligning our life with our values.

And I'd, I'd love to hear a little bit about how this, um, avoidance, experiential avoidance plays a role in, um, in a barrier to really, um, being in alignment with our values. Yeah, so just to kind of set the stage for that, one of the cool and somewhat unique things about acceptance and commitment therapy is the way happiness is defined.

One of the sort of official definitions of happiness in ACT is living a rich, full and meaningful life. And you'll notice that definition says nothing about pleasure, and it says nothing about the presence or absence of difficult or negative. Emotions. You can still have a happy, rich, full, meaningful life.

Get satisfaction out of your life. Even in the presence of anxiety, the anxiety does not have to go away before you are able to be happy. And I'm sure we can all think of examples where we have experienced this in our life, right? You can think of times, happy memories where you were actually experiencing some kind of difficult emotion.

You know, I often think about, uh, when I graduated college, I felt this weird mix of like happiness and sadness at the same time. And they did not cancel each other out. They just both existed. Or I can think of moments where I had to do something really hard, but I felt really proud and fulfilled for doing that even though it was incredibly hard and depending on what it was, you know, maybe physically or emotionally painful.

At the end of our lives, when we look back over our lives, we are not going to be focusing on the times when we had the most pleasure. Oh, that time I was watching my favorite show and I had the perfect meal with the perfect little dopamine rush. We are going to be looking back on. The moments in which we felt the most fulfilled and satisfied, that's where the values come in.

So our core values are the things that matter most to us. Values can be things like integrity, honesty, loyalty, mindfulness, compassion, kindness. You know, those are just some random examples of what core values could be. Everybody's different and everybody's gonna have their own core values. If you are living a life that is out of alignment with your values, not only are you gonna be less satisfied and fulfilled in your life, but I think you're much more likely to exacerbate your anxiety.

Whereas if you're living a life. Where you are engaged with your values, you might still have some anxiety, but it's not going to be as predominant and it's not going to get worse in the same way. Again, assuming you're not engaging in as much experiential avoidance, I mean essentially if you, if you wanna be a little bit hyperbolic about it, like following your core values as a recipe for happiness.

Obviously life is never that simple, but you know, it's, uh, it's a pretty good rule to live by. Values are all about how you do something, so there's less of an emphasis on what you do and more of an emphasis on how you do something. In other words, if a client comes to me and says like, well, I don't know, like, how am I supposed to live in line with my values when I don't do that much or see that many people.

And I'm like, well, do you go to the store? Do you have a, do you have a chance to interact with the cashier at the store? Do you have the chance to hold the door for somebody as they're coming out behind you? Do you have the chance to view anything you do as an opportunity to engage your values? And that is where you can get really creative and say, well, every little thing is an opportunity to engage with my values.

If I. Approach it correctly. It really is a huge part of finding some happiness and contentment in life. Very good. When you were talking about you can have anxiety and happiness at the same time, it made me think of, I. What I call the joy, pain experience. When you truly open up your heart, I mean, there's joy there and there's also pain during the pandemic.

Being out on my paddleboard in the middle of the lake and just collapsing on my paddleboard and tears for. All the, the kids who had to go through, you know, everything that they were going through, having such pain about that. But also since my heart was so open, I also felt some joy that I was able to experience this, that I was able to be so heart-centered that I could just be so connected to all these children and, and what they were going through.

So that. Happening simultaneously is, um, is a very interesting, freeing experience. If I had to guess, I would say some of your core values have something to do with kindness or compassion or connection. And so in that moment, you were engaging with your core values and that that's part of why you felt happy.

Yeah, I felt good about being able to be so real in that moment. It just felt like. A real moment. You know, you reflect on your life and you can kind of pick out like these few moments. It's just you were just so being so real, so authentic. Yeah. Yeah. Authenticity is a core value. The general theme here is not thinking that eliminating pain and maximizing pleasure is going to.

Help you in the long run is a trap. You know? And I know that's tough because that is, again, that is kind of our essential nature. What gave me the idea for this, this podcast topic to begin with was I was actually looking for interesting topics to talk about by. Asking chat, GPT. You know what's an interesting angle on talking about anxiety?

And it came back with this thing that said, I tried to meditate my anxiety away. Right? And it's funny because when I look at the trajectory of my own personal journey with anxiety, meditation is one of the number one things that has helped me. However, if I'm being honest with myself in the early years.

There were times where it was actually experiential avoidance, or I was trying to avoid what I was feeling in those moments. Anxiety was no different than a Xanax. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Xanax is always bad for people to take, but if you're just trying to mask a symptom. And not actually address what's underneath it.

It'll only get you so far. I think when I was like maybe 22 or something, I read Radical Acceptance by Tara Brock, which I feel like is just, you know, necessary reading for anybody looking to do this kind of work. It definitely. Kind of shifted my perspective on what I was doing. It forced me to get more embodied, really look at, can I just be present in my body and feel the sensations that are happening and just be with them and accept them.

It also forced me to see some of the ways in which I was, you know, maybe even using. Meditation as as an avoidance. So about 10 years ago, I was meditating like crazy. I was going on multi-day retreats. When I didn't have my kids for the weekend, I would just do my own retreat in my home and meditate for, you know, two days straight almost.

And I noticed that my personality was changing. I wasn't laughing as much. I was just very like monotone. And I noticed I didn't wanna celebrate birthdays anymore because it didn't make any sense to me. I was like, every moment's just the same moment over and over, and a birthday doesn't really make any sense to me.

I mean, I went into this, this place and I actually intentionally consciously decided to not meditate as much because I was noticing what effect it was having on me. There's definitely a tendency with some people who meditate to want to use it like a tranquilizer and try to achieve some kind of like unrealistic, serene state.

Now, I, I think there is a realistic state you can strive for, but it has to be done with non-attachment and it has to be done in a healthy way. We could get into a whole other podcast about spiritual bypassing, but I think that is. Kind of the, the theme there. Another quick tip for people who want to actually use their meditation practice to not avoid is to just take a few seconds in your meditation to sit and get grounded and then just ask yourself, needs to be felt right now, or what's wanting my attention And to just have that.

Open, curious attitude, and that doesn't even have to be done as a meditation practice. It could just be done as a moment in time where you're sitting at work and you're answering emails and you notice there's something going on under the surface and you just sit back in your chair and you say. Huh?

What's wanting my attention, what needs to be felt in a lot of ways. I actually think those sort of integrated practices in our day-to-day life are more important than a formal seated meditation practice. I used to have my teacher back in New York, Josh Corda, he used to say like, okay, great. You're meditating 30 minutes a day.

What are you doing for the other 15 and a half waking hours? Are you leaving your practice on the cushion? That really resonated with me because it is something you can integrate with your life. You can find moments in real time to practice acceptance, and that's one of the things that ACT aims to, to do, is to teach those skills and find ways to do that rather than it having to be this sort of.

Official moment where, okay, now I'm gonna practice acceptance. It's something you integrate into your life. Yeah. And Mike, you are saying, we don't need to stop meditating, which is kind of how I made it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're saying just meditate differently. Meditate with more curiosity, which is the right answer.

Yeah, and I think that that curiosity is. So key here, you cannot avoid, you are not avoiding if you are being curious, right? Yeah. So just that act of being more curious about what's going on in my body, what's going on in my emotions, is a great way to be less avoidant. Been very rooted in mindfulness practice.

The curiosity piece is, is very important. Well, Mike, it's been so great talking to you. What a great conversation. Listeners, if you liked this episode, you can check out the last episode that Mike was on with me about self-worth, and that episode was uploaded on June 28th, 2024. Um, Mike, I'd love for you to.

Take a few minutes and share a little bit more about your practice and how people can get ahold of you. Sure. Thanks. Yeah. My practice is called Strive on Counseling. Our website is Strive on.me. That's ME? Yeah. We're just a local group practice here in Asheville, North Carolina. I don't know how many of your listeners are local.

It's myself and five other awesome therapists. It's the kind of. Practice where we all just really love what we do and are super passionate. One thing I did wanna plug is about a year ago I created an online course for anxiety that includes a lot of the stuff we talked about today, including some guided exercises, and you can find that on the website, strive on.me or go directly to the link, which is strive von.me/anxiety course.