Transcript:

Julie: Welcome everybody, so excited to have this group of guests with us tonight. We have Travis, Antje, and Zoe. Antje and Zoe have both been here before. Travis is the only newbie. So I’m gonna let you go last and let the girls go first. Antje, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself?

Antje: Hi Julie, hi Steve. Thanks for having me. I’m Antje and I’m one year and two months sober, and I’m excited to be here.

Julie: Amazing. It’s really nice to have you. Antje is a dear friend of ours and is on several episodes so it’s nice to see you again. And next we have Zoe, who is also returning.

Zoe: Yes. I am Zoe. Thanks again for having me. I am 28 years old. I have two kiddos, and I am two years into my sobriety.

Julie: Awesome. Really cool, it’s nice to have you again. And that leaves Travis, how are you tonight?

Travis: Hi Everyone, my name is Travis, I’m 33 years old. I live in Connecticut. I am a person in mental health recovery, and what that means to me is that it’s been about six years since I made a choice to heal from depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, and some substance use as well. And I’m just really happy to be here talking about recovery with you guys.

Julie: We’re really happy to have you. And Travis we actually met… We haven’t actually talked about this on the podcast yet, but Steve and I recently took recovery coach training and Travis was our instructor there, and that’s where we met him. Really excited to have you on tonight.

We hear people say all the time that they drink to settle their nerves, and they drink to numb their anxiety. Most people know that alcohol actually makes us more anxious, and yet they still fall into that trap. Anxiety is a really, really uncomfortable feeling and it’s easy to want to run away from it. So we’re going to talk about how we deal with anxiety without escaping from it. How has anxiety affected your life and what have you learned about working through it?

Antje: Great topic Julie. Right on.

Julie: Antje and I were talking earlier and saying we both really probably still need to work on this.

Antje: Yeah, I think that’s where I started about three or four years ago, my big journey of therapy is that I went to the doctor and said, “Help me with my anxiety! I just can’t deal with this.” I just wanted something, I was hoping to maybe get some medication. And he was like nah, how about with try some therapy? And I was like, Oh no. But then I said yes, and I just needed some tools, and I went from there. So I’ve been dealing with anxiety for a long time and yeah, I’ve developed some tools. I can share some now, or we can just talk about the icky feeling of being anxious and what that’s like for awhile. (laughs)

Steve: The icky feeling.

Antje: Ugh, it’s like the worst. It is this thought distortion that everything spirals out of proportion. It’s just icky.

Julie: And it just takes over. For me it’s ruminating. I will have one worry or one thing that I’m anxious about and it’ll just spin around in my head all day long, or sometimes for days at a time and it’s exhausting. I completely understand why people want to run from it, why I wanted to run from it. Because it’s so… it just sucks you in.

Antje: Yes, it’s like you can’t focus on anything else anymore, whatever is going on in your life gets drowned out by this obsession about something. Some fear that something’s going to happen, that you messed something up, and it just goes snowballing in all directions from there. You’re an awful person, and you’ve done this before, and you should’ve known better. You know? It’s just, yeah. Actually what I’ve learned to then to identify this and try to stop it – which is still hard – is to say, “Hold on. This is anxiety.” And just even be at that level to say, “Okay, I’m anxious. Hello, here’s anxiety.” And to just kind of look at it in the eyes and say, “Okay this is what it is.” It doesn’t help that much to make it better, but it’s the first step at least to say, “Okay, I’m in this place because… everything got triggered.”

Travis: It has teeth, doesn’t it, anxiety? To people who don’t experience anxiety, I always say it’s like being nervous, but with teeth. And I don’t know about the rest of you guys but it’s something I’ve experienced my whole life. When I was a kid I was really attached to my mom. She was my emotionally available parent, whereas my dad, love him to death, just not the same way. So whenever my mom wasn’t around I remember being a little kid waiting in the window, just ruminating and ruminating, “When is my mom coming home, when is my mom coming home?” and I got the message as a little kid, the way to solve problems, the way to get mom home, was my thinking it into oblivion. Right? So I went into life thinking this was normal. It wasn’t until I had some serious mental breaks, abusive relationships, where the teeth really came out and it became debilitating as an adult. For me when I went to therapy and I was trying to figure out how to deal with this and they take you through the exercise where you close your eyes. You have to think about what you can feel, what you can smell, you know that grounding exercise? That was really helpful but I think for me, it was creativity that really helped me. I really got into poetry and music and ways to name my feelings. Label them and explore them in ways that were on my terms. That was really important, for me at least.

Zoe: I really like the “Anxiety with teeth.” I really, really like that. Because as a kid, I would describe anxiety as, “I’m excited but it’s bad.” I never knew what it was, I just knew when I felt triggered I’d get that racing feeling and I’d get this whole body response. I’d be stoic on the outside, but on the inside I was screaming. I never knew how to articulate that. I didn’t know I had anxiety until I was in high school. I was a teen mom, so I’m finally being told – I’m about to have a child, and I’m being told by my friends, “Oh, you’ve got anxiety.” And I’m like, “Oh is that what that feeling?” I’m anxious. Wow. And it just carried on into my adulthood. I saw the progression of that when my drinking and substance abuse started getting out of hand. I was like, “Wow, this is an unhealthy coping mechanism.” This is how this manifests in different ways. So yes, I definitely feel your pain Travis. I’ve had anxiety my whole life. I still struggle with it. But definitely have learned throughout the last two years how to cope with it better. But I still exist with it. I co-exist with my anxiety, just a lot smoother than I used to.

Antje: For me I didn’t realize the association between skin picking and anxiety. I was not aware that those are related. I would think, think, think, think. And I had to think while picking my skin. And I didn’t not realize. The best show would be on TV that I missed. I would be looking forward to it all week, and then something happened and I got so anxious and I had to think think think that the entire show went by, and I was in the bathroom in front of the mirror, picking my skin and thinking thinking thinking. And hating everything and wanting to stop and wanting to watch the show, and from commercial break to commercial break just couldn’t get over there to watch the show, and then it was gone. And I didn’t know that those things are one way that it manifests is by picking or nail biting or food eating, or trying to cope with being anxious by just stuffing things in your mouth and trying to zone out and not feel the anxiety. Those insights really helped to realize that’s what I’m doing when I’m anxious. And this feeling that I’m trying to get rid of is anxiety. You would think people would tell you that at some point, like they tell you other things. Like, “This is how you feel when you’re angry.” Somebody would let you know, this is anxiety. Like what you were saying Zoe. It would have been so helpful for me to know that. I just hated that I was doing these weird things that I felt like nobody else was doing. And I didn’t know that I was trying to cope with feeling anxious.

Julie: And skin picking especially. Skin picking is something nobody ever talks about. So like nobody is going to say, even to a teenager, “hey, this is why you’re doing that.” Nobody even acknowledges that that exists as a disorder and that it’s directly related to anxiety. That seems to be something that nobody talks about. It’s something I did forever, and still do occasionally, and that seems like nobody wants to talk about it. So then we all sit there drowning in shame thinking we’re the only ones that do that, until we talk about it.

Zoe: Yeah, it’s serious. That’s something I still struggle with. And it got to a point where I wouldn’t leave my house without a full face of makeup. So me being on here with no make up on at 29 years old. Like 5 year ago, I would never. I wouldn’t leave my house without foundation on, concealer, eye makeup. And it sounds silly, but I would sit in front of a mirror and destroy my face and then I’d be so pissed at myself for doing it. It’s a vicious cycle, like most things. So the skin picking is definitely something I’ve experienced as well and it is awful.

Julie: There is actually… so Antje, Steve and I all met on the app I Am Sober. And when you first sign into that app you select the thing that you’re recovering from, the addiction that you’re recovering from. And skin picking is actually listed as one of those things to track, how long you go. Which I thought was amazing and actually just thought that it was incredible that there is support for that too. And that it can be considered an addiction. It’s just another thing to recover from.

Zoe: That’s crazy. I have the day counter app. It helped me a lot with my sobriety because I’m a milestone person. I needed to see, okay, I’m on the right track. And it’s sounds minute but for me it was a big deal and I know for a lot of people it’s a big deal. So I’m actually probably after we get off going to put that on my thing and see if I can stick with it and see days accumulate because that’s rewarding.

Julie: Yeah, we have a friend that actually did that with nail biting too.

Travis: That’s me. I’m a nail biter, and it’s funny that we talk about it as a way to track. I’ve been biting my nails as long as I can remember. My dentist every time I go in is like, dude, you’ve got to stop. And I can’t. It’s like comforting and it’s strange. I guess it’s not strange. But I think that when it was pointed out to me by my parents, I was shamed for biting my nails as a kid. Just like I was told I was weak for talking about my feelings. It all goes together. So then of course I’m biting my nails, I can’t talk about how I feel. It’s no wonder why I spiraled out of control for so long. The stigma is there.

Antje: I think those were the first symptoms, before alcohol came. I was too young to really think, “Oh, I’m going to have a glass of wine.” That got modeled later – I’m so stressed, just have a drink. And so then you stop with the skin picking and then you start drinking instead. Or your food addictions get worse because you have more control over, as a kid you don’t help yourself in the kitchen too much. But then as you get more independent you get yourself comfort food or you start drinking. So I think early on, you have these other coping skills for anxiety like nail biting and skin picking and so on.

Julie: And like you said, nobody ever taught us to name that. Hey, that’s anxiety. That would’ve been so freaking helpful to me. My anxiety – that I recognized – didn’t really show up til I was a teenager. Mine has always been much more social. I started getting all of my self worth from outside of me in my teens. So the anxiety set in. And then it was the constant, “Oh my god, what do they think of me?” That drove me crazy. But nobody ever recognized that and I didn’t understand what it was. Like you were saying Antje, I think it was you, you’re able to say now, “Oh, this is anxiety.”

Antje: Yes. I do that quite a lot.

Julie: And it doesn’t make it go away, but it almost gives you a certain amount of power. I was driving down to town yesterday and all of a sudden got that rush of anxiety. Where your heart starts racing and you’re sweating and for me, the thoughts go so fast that I don’t even know what I’m thinking about. And for no reason. This is completely out of the blue. This is generalized anxiety disorder. But I’m like, “What am I going to do with my life? I’m failing as a parent. What is my kid going to be when she grows up?” Like all of this stuff just rushes to the surface at the same time, and I’m crushed under all of it. My heart is racing. I’m like, “This is anxiety. I am thinking about this huge, big picture of my life and panicking over all of it. And that might’ve been the first time that I really recognized exactly what was happening and I was able to bring it back and be like, “Okay, what can I do right now though?” Because I can’t help my kid become a successful adult today. She’s fifteen. But what can I do? Well, I can go show up in her bedroom and be like, “Hey, how are you? Do you want to talk?” So bringing all of that big picture down to, “What can I do at this moment?” really settled me. I feel like I just learned that yesterday. So I’m hoping I can remember that the next time that happens.

Steve: It’s all about a whole bunch of things you can’t control.

Travis: My therapist calls it making movies in my head. Stop making movies in your head Travis. You can control what you play.

Steve: It’s exactly that. For me I don’t get anxious too often. It doesn’t turn into something that I don’t recognize and I can’t easily let go of. Like, no, there’s nothing I can do about this, I’m just going to let it be and walk away from it, even if it’s upstairs. I had to learn a lot of the time to just give it away, tell someone what’s going on in my head so I can stop, what Travis says, stop creating the movie in my head. If I let myself sit with that movie I can write the entire script and it becomes more and more a travesty, and more and more catastrophic as I continue to write the script of that movie. If I don’t get myself out of it. So then my anxiety builds and builds, and what I do when that happens, I run to it. I don’t run away from it, generally speaking, I run to it. If it has to do with a person, I go to that person. That’s my method of getting rid of it is facing it. I like to go right up to you and say, here we are, let’s talk about the problem. If I don’t do that, I’ll sit in it for a really long time. I’m better at it now, acknowledging that it’s not always about me.

Antje: That’s actually the first thing I learned. Fact check. Fact check your assumptions. Step one – make sure that what you’re assuming, what’s going on in your head, is actual fact. That’s what you’re doing, it sounds like. Talk to the person, clarify the situation, right? It’s easier said than done for others Steve. It’s good that you can do this! (laughs)

Steve: I get that too. A lot of it comes from if you worry about what that other person is going to think. The problem is that at that point in time, I feel so crappy that I’m not so worried about what the other person is going to think, I’m really concerned about myself. Because I’m really concerned about myself, I’m willing to stand in front of it. And if sh– blows up in front of me, while it’s happening, at least I can deal with the situation and apologize for it, do whatever. None of that almost ever happens, because that’s the story I play out in my head too. It’s difficult, it is absolutely difficult. But for me it’s more of a driving force than it is a debilitating force, unless I let it get too carried away. I’m still definitely guilty of writing a catastrophic movie in my own head and the worst part is, after that, I still have to get it out.

Julie: I’ve heard some of these catastrophic movies and they’re impressive. You are an impressive screenwriter. (laughter)

Antje: Oh mine would be impressive too, Julie.

Travis: Mine too!

Steve: I still have to get it out. Julie has been privy to some of these catastrophic movies. I’ll write it out because as soon as I give it, as soon as I put it out there, I can’t write the movie anymore.

Antje: I do something similar. I any more go ask my husband for help. I just lay it out there. Here’s what happened, here’s what I’m thinking. And I almost can’t breathe, just sorting it all out. And of course I’m thinking, oh my god it must be getting so old. Because I know while I’m saying it it’s all anxiety. But he’s right there. And he asks, “Why do you care?” He just comes from a complete different, neutral… And it is so good to get that feedback. Hey look, this is what’s in your head, this is what I see, here is what’s really going to go down. And then the “So What” game. If this really comes true – so what? And he’ll go down this road. So what if that person is pissed? So what? Let’s play this game until you beat it down to the ground. In the end, the world is not going to end.

Julie: That’s something my therapist said early on that stuck with me. Ask yourself, what is the worst thing that could happen here? And 99.9% of the time, it is something I will survive. Once I recognize the worst thing, it makes the whole situation seem like something I can handle.

Travis: I agree. And the main point here – I love that you guys reach out. I do that too, and I learned a long time ago that I need to reach out to the people that love me and try to reason with this thing. Because it’s a beast that is hard to reason with on my own, right? But the problem is, for me, if I don’t have someone around, I can’t get ahold of somebody. My nervous system doesn’t know the difference, whether this movie is real or not. So like I said, I got into writing and creativity, making music, as almost like a way to make friends with it and explore it. Kind of the way, Steve, you said running into it, facing it that way. So I guess it’s really just a question for everyone, do you guys have any experience of, other than reaching out, which I feel is the first thing everyone should do, how do we make friends with this monster, if you want to call it that?

Antje: I go running. When you’re anxious and you pour yourself a drink and you get this letting go, this relief. I get the same thing out of running. I know and I’ll do it intentionally. I will feel so crappy, and I will come back through this door after a run, it will feel like I had a glass of wine. It will feel the same way, and I’ve got it out of my system. Exactly what happens. I run, I run, I run and I come back and I can’t even relate to it anymore. And that’s how it used to be. The same thing would happen with drinking. You’d sit there for an hour and you’d be like, “Oh whatever.” Right? But that wasn’t healthy to do it that way, and now I can just go and run and come back and I get that same relief. I am forever grateful for running for that. My world would end if I couldn’t run anymore, that’s my biggest fear.

Zoe: My thing is, I also have poetry. That’s something that I do when I can’t stop thinking about something. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, or I’ll wake up early in the morning, and I’m like, “I can’t stop thinking about this. I need to write down my feelings.” And I’ll pull up a note and start writing out my feelings. And I’ll write and I’ll write and I’ll write. And as I’m writing, I’ll feel myself start to regulate. Once I’m done with this, and I’m read it, I’m like, “Yeah. I got all these feelings out. I feel so much better!” Organized my thoughts, made it sound pretty. What I usually do after I do that is I’ll call my sister. I have two younger siblings and we all have pretty similar anxiety responses. So I’ll call my sister and ask her, “Do you want to hear a poem I just wrote?” My initial thing when I don’t have someone is to write it out. I’ve also been teaching my kids, who have terrible anxiety too. I’m a terrible example with the skin picking, so they pick their fingers and their faces too. What I do now is, my daughter likes to draw. So when she starts to get anxious I’ll tell her, “Draw it out.” And she’ll draw me pictures, and sometimes they’re pictures of me yelling at her. She’s like, “And I was sad.” But you know what? I’m like, “You drew it out. Do you feel better?” And she’s like, “Yeah, can you put it on the fridge?” I’m like, “Sure, let’s put it on the fridge.” Those are little things that I’m learning as an adult, and I realize these are tidbits I can give back to my kids because I’m not going to fulfill their emotion needs all the time and I’m going to beat myself up for it. So instead of beating myself up for it, why don’t I just treat them like I would treat myself in this situation. I think it’s really cool that you use creativity and that you brought that up because that is something that I also cling to when If eel like I can’t talk to somebody or I just have no available resources.

Julie: I find when I’m really anxious, my creativity shuts down. I am a very creative person by nature and I am constantly painting, sewing, whatever it is. When I get super anxious, it’s like I can’t even find two colors that match, let alone go through the process of actually creating something. I have to settle it first. One thing that came to mind is, I started playing piano when I quit drinking. And I play piano very poorly. I took like 6 months of piano lessons when I was 8 years old and that’s what I’m working off of (laughs). I mean, I’ve come a long way. Steve has heard it. But I have to concentrate so hard to play a song that I can’t think about anything else. I have trained myself to just focus on the keys and I’ve taught myself a few fairly complicated song that really take a lot of attention because if my mind starts to wander, everything falls apart. That’s actually been a really good calming technique for me. I highly recommend piano. You don’t have to be good at it for it to be helpful.

Antje: I second that. I’m actually a fairly long and good piano player, I played for ten years and did very well. My son has that same outlet, he got my genes for music and so he noticed, because he has anxiety too, that he can let go when he plays. That was something as a teenager when I was still in school and taking lessons that would kind of center me. But honestly for me, music is more of a depression thing. That’s where I can keep staying functional when I’m depressed, more so than anxiety, the running is for me more effective. I second though in general, for mental health, music does a lot for me too.

Travis: It’s meditation for me too. I play guitar and I’m a vocalist in my band also. So when I’m in a song, I’m not thinking about anything else. I’m full present in whatever I’m creating in that moment. I hear you, it’s that escape that we look for in substances, if you have it there. It’s beautiful, it’s really cool that we all sort of share that same short of thing here. So thank you.

Steve: Yeah, for me it’s a heightened sense of emotion. When I’m experiencing a heightened sense of emotion, it comes out generally in my writing. In a journal entry or sometimes in poetry because I have recently written some poems, too. But generally it comes out in a journal entry where I have pictures in my mind and emotion gets wrapped into that and it comes out in those words. That’s where it kind of all settles out. It leeches right out into the pen. And so does the feeling. Generally speaking, it’s even more fun to send that to someone. It’s like you sharing it with your sister, Zoe. It’s neat to be able to share that heightened sense of emotion with someone because there’s connection there. When you share that connection too, it’s also relaxing.

Antje: I have to say that, I’ve noticed, I’ve tried it, that I like yoga a lot. And it does not do anything for me. So the other thing is I’ve learned in therapy all the things, meditation, breathing, deep breathing, square breathing, all the stuff does not work well for me. I was in yoga class and I came completely anxious and I thought, okay, this is going to do the trick. And I suffered through this class, I wanted to leave so bad, I couldn’t stay, I was just barely hanging on. I wanted to crawl out of my skin I was so anxious. Nothing in that class was in any kind of way settling me down. It was torture to stay there. So yeah, the yoga and the anxiety, that does not work for me so well. I need to move, I need to get it somehow out of my system by wearing myself out is the thing that works for me. So everybody’s a little different, some people the yoga might work really well but for me, yoga class is not for crisis mode anxiety, it does not work.

Julie: I think it’s important too just to recognize it’s okay if that doesn’t work. You hear so many people say, “Oh, if you’re anxious, you just need to do yoga.” And that’s okay, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, that just means there’s something else that’s going to work better for you. I think it’s good to just recognize that and not try to force it to be the thing that you need. There have been things that everybody says that I need. I need to meditate. I don’t meditate well. I can’t meditate, and all it does is frustrate me. And I still tried and tried and tried to meditate because that’s what everybody said would make me feel better.

Steve: Meditation gives me anxiety. (laughter)

Julie: Yeah, it’s okay just to let things not work.

Steve: Right, yeah. It’s frustrating right? It’s working for everyone else, it isn’t working for me. There’s probably three other people thinking the same thing, right?

Antje: But here’s the thing. Those kinds of things help me for from an operational level. My stress level, to kind of keep in general. I do go to yoga twice or three times a week, just to stay balanced. I mean more crisis mode go to mechanisms. Yoga does work for me. It just does not… the running works. But I think yoga has a good place in my life to just keep me balanced in general as a person, without the regular spikes of “oh my god.” Meditation could be the same, that it keeps your system in a good spot but it doesn’t work in crisis mode.

Steve: Yeah, general self care probably doesn’t work when you’re in crisis mode. That requires level one, level two, level three of – that’s not going to work. I would venture a guess that if you don’t do yoga, crisis mode probably happens faster. That’s what happens when we let go of self care. We let life get too busy, and we start ignoring the things that keep us sane and help keep us grounded and help keep those thoughts from running away from yoga and into actually running.

Travis: That’s what it is for me too Steve. All these self care things… what I really appreciate about the group is you’re all really good at validating what you actually mean, what works for you in certain situations. I look at it like for you it’s running, for me I go to the gym. Sort of slows things down. I have my writing and I have my music. I kind of look at it like putting on my armor. I’m big into video games so my brain always goes there. So I’m putting on my armor so there’s less crisis. So when the crisis does happen, I have a plan. I’ve already been there. It’s really just about mitigating the disaster that used to be every day. You guys know. I love this conversation, this is great. (laughter)

Julie: It is, it’s a good one. We are probably getting close to wrapping up. Before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about medication because I have talked to so many people who feel like they’re failing at recovery if they go to the doctor and get medication for anxiety or depression. I think that’s something that probably needs to be talked about in every podcast and every conversation ever. I know for me, I was on anxiety medication the whole time I was drinking and I thought, “Obviously, this is not working.” Come to find out, turns out, it was the alcohol. But my anxiety definitely decreased a ton when I quit drinking. So then I thought, “Oh, well maybe I don’t need the anxiety meds because the drinking was causing the anxiety.” So I did, with my doctor, weaned off of the anxiety meds. And then I realized those meds were actually doing a lot for me that I didn’t recognize and then I went back on them. And I don’t at all feel like I’m failing at recovery for that. I feel like I’m doing what is necessary. I just hear so many talk about that, and feel like now that they’ve quit drinking, they’re supposed to be handling everything in life without any medication. I think it’s worth bringing that up and talking about it.

Steve: Yeah, for sure. There’s this sense of perfection there. I quit drinking and now I’m going to recover because one of these people that I know is doing it without it. When I quit I went right to my doctor and I told my doctor that I have a drinking problem and this is what I’m worried about. He said we’ll just put you on some anxiety meds just to level you out for the first year, and then take you off. I ended up stopping them completely after 8 months. And they helped me at the beginning. At the beginning, I wasn’t capable of regulating my thoughts. I just wasn’t. It was very difficult to not tell myself a story that didn’t exist. I was amazing at writing those movies. And that helped me not really do that, at least to a point where I could control what I was going to do day to day. I think it’s important to recognize what those needs are and go and ask for help if you think you need help, and then accept that help and give it a try. You really don’t have anything to lose, other than finding the answer, if you’re going to get help.

Zoe: I was diagnosed with a panic disorder when I was 19 years old. I was with my son’s father and we were in a really toxic relationship and I was prescribed Lexapro and Xanax. I liked Lexapro, I hated Xanax. I didn’t like how it made me feel. It personally, it didn’t feel like… I remember taking it and being like, “I don’t care what’s happening right now but I know my problem still exists.” I don’t like this because I feel like for me, this is dangerous because I don’t like to get into the f— it’s. When I get into the f— it’s, I do really awful self sabotaging stuff. So after that relationship ended and I met my now husband, I was still on Lexapro, but I was drinking because I was nearly 21, and I was blacking out very very easily on the medication. I would drink a beer or two, wake up, and have no memory of my night. So I decided, at 21, I’m not depressed. I want to keep drinking. I’m going to stop taking my antidepressant. And I did that just because I wanted to drink more. And how that ended up manifesting is over the new few years, I was the most depressed I’d ever been and it was because my alcohol use just kept getting out of control. So while I’m not on anything now, antidepressant wise, and I don’t feel the need to be, I don’t downplay anybody who uses antidepressants because everyone’s just trying to survive. My vice was alcohol. A lot of people’s vice was alcohol. Just because you stop drinking doesn’t mean your depression goes away. Some people still need help with that. So I don’t understand why people are like, you have to completely fix everything and you’ve got to do it without any kind of help. That’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Being like, here, you’re on a sinking ship but we’re going to take all your life preservers away because we know that one of you is a cross country swimmer so he’s gonna make it, and the rest of y’all are going to make it. I don’t know, it’s just insane to me. People’s problems – when they quit drinking, it’s not their antidepressant. So to tell them to stop their antidepressants too bothers me. I go a holistic route, but that works for me. I’m fully aware that recovery is not one size fits all. So to sit there on my high horse and be like, “Oh well I don’t do it, so nobody else should be able to do it.” That’s dumb, because I don’t know what other people have been through. So if it works for you, it works for you. If people have something negative to say about it, then f— ’em.

Steve: I’m going to leave that. (laughter) That’s staying! That is just mic drop.

Antje: I just want to add that there is a misconception that it’s either/or, and I think to really get a lot out of it you have to do both. The medicine can help you do the things you should be doing or can be doing. For me I can implement the things I can because of medication. I don’t know if I could get myself to go on a run without having some help. I think the misconception is that you do either one or the other. But really what it is is that one can help the other to work. Medication can set you up to have healthy coping skills. So I just don’t want it to look like there’s black or white. It’s just a means to the end to have good habits in life. You can see it that way. And if you need something to have good habits, why not use it. That’s what they’re there for. And you wouldn’t not take your blood pressure medication either, because your body is working well. That’s something I’ve learned and I think what I feel like we totally missed here in this podcast is that we all came to the realization that made anxiety worse that at first it was trying to help with. That was something I did not know and I just want to say that one thing again because there might be people that listen to this that are still in the dark about it. I did not know when I quit drinking that it would do so much for anxiety. I only listened to some quit lit literature where Alcohol Explained – a really good book that addresses that – where in the book what actually happens in your brain when you go through withdrawal. The withdrawal causes anxiety. That makes you want to drink. And you don’t learn that one causes the other because there’s this time delay that the anxiety, because of the withdrawal, kicks in so much later after you drank that you don’t connect one even with the other to really understand what’s happening. So that’s why I want to bring that up again. That is something that is also never really talked about, that alcohol is part of the culprit. Since I don’t drink anymore, my anxiety on it’s own has reduced quite a bit. Look forward to that! It is a blessing.

Julie: Yeah, that was something I got out of Alcohol Explained too, was the physiological effects of alcohol and the way that it actually causes anxiety. You hear so many people say they drink to calm their anxiety. And this thing happened when they’re on day four or day five of anxiety and they’re like, “Well my anxiety’s just out of control, I have to drink.” I wish that I could explain it the way he does in Alcohol Explained, because it changed the way that I looked at that.

Travis: It’s important to talk about it, right? I feel like everyone can relate to that, like, “I just need that drink.” It’s always, okay maybe you’re good for that first little bit, but it’s the withdrawal and the next day that is so awful. So I’m glad that we talked about that. I want to circle back to what we said before about medicated assisted treatment. And I believe in my heart that people are in recovery when they say they are, and how they are, whatever that means to them. So if it’s medication, that’s wonderful. Speaking personally, medication helped for me in the beginning. Over time, the anxiety is still there, I think Zoe said something like that earlier where, I had to dive a little bit deeper. But I’m not going to shame anyone for any pathway that they choose to get better. Because we’re all here to get better, whatever that means.

Steve: Okay guys. This was a really amazing, refreshing conversation. Everyone had so many good points. The one thing was Brene Brown says it – anxiety and excitement feel the same. So it’s easy to get them confused with each other too, because they feel physically exactly the same way. We talked about a lot of really good things. Travis, you talked about making friends with it, and everyone had a different way to make friends with it. How do we do that? The neat thing is, it’s one of those whatever works for you. That is its own discovery process. How to keep that anxiety grounded and Julie you mentioned medication and I think that was really great that we did talk about it. We all have experience with it and it was part of all of our paths, it was part of all of our journeys. It doesn’t make that journey any less or more than what it is. I think we’re all here very successful, working through what we need to work through. Everyone’s recover is their own. So that path, whether it includes harm reduction or medication or running or piano, it could be anything. As long as it’s something healthy, and it’s helping you move toward your goal, there is nothing wrong with it. So, Travis, Antje, and Zoe, thank you so much for your time, thank you for your thoughts. It was awesome having you guys on tonight.