Yoga For Trauma: The Inner Fire of Yoga

Rewiring the Brain: Anxiety, Depression & Corrective Experiences With Brian Sachetta Ep | 16

• Liz Albanis - Senior Yoga Teacher • Season 1 • Episode 16

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Liz chats with Brian Sachetta. In this powerful conversation, Brian shares his lived journey. Through anxiety, depression, and OCD. How he’s come to approach healing as a long, incremental process rather than a sudden fix. He speaks openly about the neural rewiring. Required to redefine old patterns rooted in trauma and fear. How “corrective experiences” help shift the pathways we’ve unconsciously reinforced.

Key Takeaways:

  • The distinction between everyday sadness or nervousness and clinical depression/anxiety
  • How fighting intrusive thoughts can unintentionally strengthen them
  • The role of exposure therapy. Taken in small, supportive steps, in rewiring fear responses
  • The importance of holding space for gradual growth, relational vulnerability, and non‑judgment
  • Medication as one piece of the puzzle. Not a silver bullet
  • The messy, nonlinear nature of healing (two steps forward, one step back)

About the guest:

Brian Sachetta is an author, blogger, and mental health advocate from Boston, Massachusetts. After grappling with anxiety and depression throughout his young adulthood, Brian became determined to find better ways to navigate such challenges. As a result, he turned to therapy, immersed himself in mental health literature, and experimented with a wide array of tactics for managing his well-being. Over time, these efforts led to significant breakthroughs on his mental health journey. Inspired by his progress, he began sharing his story to empower others facing similar struggles. Today, Brian’s mission is to alleviate psychological suffering and guide individuals toward taking control of their mental health. He brings that mission to life through his popular book series, "Get Out of Your Head," as well as his many podcast appearances and blog posts.

Connect with Brian: https://getoutofyourhead.com/about/

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Warning: this episode contains topics such as violence, death, suicide, depression and anxiety. It could be triggering for some.

The content shared in these conversations is intended for informational and educational purposes only, and it is not suitable for listeners under the age of 18. Please use discretion and consult a qualified professional before making changes to your health or wellness routines.

If you’re interested in being a guest or know someone who might be head to my website: https://www.lizalbaniswellness.com.au/podcast/yoga-for-trauma

Join the 3R Program: Regulate, Rebuild, Restore. Start your journey with a 14-day free trial and learn how to create a sustainable, personalised yoga practice that supports your mental health and nervous system. https://www.lizalbaniswellness.com.au/plan

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[00:00:00] part of therapy and part of healing is you have to go in and have corrective experiences that in one way or another, kind of reach into that part of the brain and rewire it . In reality, a lot of these changes, changes in life in general, but also with your mental health. They come over long periods of time with incremental change. 

Welcome to The Inner Fire of Yoga, a podcast about transformation, resilience, and the power of yoga beyond the mat. I'm Liz Albanis, senior yoga teacher and yoga therapist in training. This podcast was born in 2024 after I survived my second fire. Fire has been a recurring theme in my life, not just in the literal sense, but as a metaphor.

It has asked me to burn away [00:01:00] what no longer serves me to transform and to rise stronger each time. This podcast is about that fire, the one that challenges us, but also fuels us to grow.

Have views and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host Liz Albanis. The content shared in these conversations is intended for informational and educational purposes only, and it is not suitable for listeners under the age of 18.

Please use discretion and consult a qualified professional before making changes to your health or wellness routines.

Welcome to the show, Brian. Thank you, Liz. I'm excited to be here. Great to have you here. All the way from Boston, USA, like one of my other guests recently. , I just wanted to start with what got you doing what you're doing now with mental [00:02:00] health? Yeah, great question. So, I always say that I got into this field as a product of personal experience, and that really just means having struggled with anxiety for about a decade, having struggled with depression on two separate occasions of like essentially two different episodes of major depressive disorder and also just kind of all the in between, right?

​Some OCD. , Which is obsessive compulsive disorder. Just kind of, you know, as I think about filling those gaps of all these different conditions are related, right? So then you start talking about just mental health in general. And I know that along the course of my adolescence and my young adulthood and whatnot, I struggled pretty mightily with all of these things related to my own mental health.

So, you know, when you struggle that hard with something, it becomes a part of you and it becomes an important part [00:03:00] of you. And as I lived my life and tried to better my own conditions, I started to make progress. And I eventually turned around and said to myself, okay, if I've started to improve my lot when it comes to anxiety, and I've started to improve my lot when it comes to depression.

Could I take some of my knowledge and turn around and share it with, with other people? Uh, and the real impetus for that was just knowing how painful it is to deal with these things. And I talked to a lot of people along the way who also shared in the experience of the pain of dealing with anxiety, dealing with depression.

And when you talk to folks like that, it really hits close to home, you know? And so all of those things kind of came together where I saw an opportunity of, I had experience myself, I had some skills, uh, I also just enjoyed writing and speaking and all that. And so it kind of came together to say, I feel as though I have a unique skill set or an opportunity, um, to.

Take this [00:04:00] information, share it with other people, help other people. But also it's something that I just enjoy in general. Right? So all of that got me into it. And what keeps me going is just, you know, those messages that I hear from people of, Hey, I read your book, or I listened to this podcast, or whatever, and that helped me.

Or a certain idea you talked about was enlightening to me. So I'm just really trying to help spread the positive vibes as much as I can and, and help people along their journey. 'cause I know it is really difficult. Yeah. And it's, uh, I still believe there's quite a bit of stigma there and, but it's slowly getting better.

Would you say that? I would say that, right. If you think about where we were 20 years ago now, that was probably pre-social media, or at least what social media looks like today, right? So maybe I forget the exact years, but I'm sure. The original Facebook, the original version of Facebook was out. But you know, Instagram was not, if it was out, it wasn't in its form that it is today.

[00:05:00] So today, right, we have content creators, influencers, folks who are known for these different subjects, bringing light to these various topics such as anxiety, depression, mental health, and all that. And I think those conversations have helped usher in a new, a slightly new age or era of a little bit less stigma.

At the same time, we still have a ways to go, right? Because you will hear of somebody dealing with something or, we still just look at these conditions as, oh, I, you know, I wouldn't have to, I wouldn't want to have to deal with that or this person, you know, depending on what they deal with, we may.

We might not say it outwardly, but we might think inwardly, ooh, that person's a little off, that person's a little cuckoo or something like that. Right? So I think it's still important to continue to chip away at, at the stigma and understand. Right. Um, there's a little bit, it's like, it's something of a gray area where, where I would say is there's, there's a reason, there is something of a stigma, right?[00:06:00]

Unfortunately, if somebody is in a horrible, horrible place, right? If they have really disconnected from their own life and they've lost sense of who they are and lost track of their own values, and they go commit some heinous crime, right? Let's say they commit a shooting or something like that. Yeah. , , We certainly don't want to say that that is okay.

Right? And so part of, of the stigma is knowing that folks who go down that path can sometimes take actions like that and that's horrendous. At the same time, the person who just deals with anxiety or depression and it's just kind. They're dealing with it themselves, they're internalizing it and they're struggling.

Those are the folks that for whom we really want that stigma to be lifted. And we just wanna make sure that those folks who are suffering in silence know that one, you know, it's okay to experience these things. And two, it's also okay to speak up. And I think that's the most important part of alleviating that stigma is just letting people know that a lot of folks around the world deal with this kind of [00:07:00]thing.

We can talk about this kind of thing without it being, you know, this touchy subject. And the more that you actually talk about it, you know, you get the different issues that you're dealing with without into the light. You know, sometimes people will say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. I really believe in that kind of thing.

And when there is a large stigma over the mental health topic, it becomes harder to put those things into the light. So I do think that we've made progress. We continue to make progress, but we still also have a little ways to go. Yeah, we do. That makes me realize, yeah, there are good things about social media that , we can spread the awareness.

So if someone said to you talking about stigma, depression is just sadness, what would she say to that? Because I've had that for sure. Very good question. How I look at it, right, is there's, with all of these conditions, there is sort of the lay [00:08:00] person's definition, and then there's also a definition that comes from the DSM five, which is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

And that's sort of like, you know, to put it in easy terms, it's sort of the dictionary for mental health disorders, right? Yeah. So a clinician would go into this DSM five and say, okay, I am looking at Brian as my patient. I'm trying to understand if Brian meets the criteria for depression. So why I give this kind of preamble is to say that, you know, when we talk amongst ourselves or we.

We kind of say things off the cuff, right? Somebody might say, Hey, uh, I watched my favorite sports team last night. They lost, I'm so sad. I'm depressed. Right? So in common terms, or like everyday language, we may sometimes throw that term around the real definition of depression is not that sadness. If you look at the DSM five, there's actually like, I forget how many criteria [00:09:00] there are.

It's either nine or 11. Yeah. Makes so, but there's a certain number of criteria that you have to meet for a period of two or more weeks in order for a doctor to say, Hey, you meet the criteria for major depressive disorder. Now there are obviously also other kinds of depression, right? You might have seasonal affective disorder.

That's what can happen if, you know, during the winter months when there's less sunlight, you have a bit of a mood disorder. You might like women who are giving birth, they might, uh, you know, suffer from postpartum depression. So there are obviously different. Qualifiers or, , different categories of depression, but when we really boil it down, right, it's, it's much more than just the sadness.

I would say my definition, the layperson's definition that I think aligns more with the DSM is that depression is a pervasive state of helplessness and hopelessness, right? So it's more than just that sadness. It's that feeling that I can't get out of bed, I can't do anything. Why even try to do [00:10:00]anything?

Because if I do try, nothing's going to change. Nothing is going to improve, right? So it's that sense of having lost your agency and lost that hope, and just saying there's no reason to take action in the world because the action that I take is not gonna make a difference anyway. So it's certainly more than just that sadness.

There's a lot of criteria to it, right? If we looked at the DSM five, it's like, you know, , some of those, some of the criteria there, uh, revolve around like. Uh, you know, changes in, uh, in weight or appetite, uh, loss in activities that are normally exciting to you. Yeah. Uh, we could go down the list and all that.

A co One last thing I guess I wanna bring in here is yes, when you feel, you know, when you are depressed, yes, you probably are sad, you might be like horrendously sad, but another kind of depression or another manifestation of depression is actually this term, uh, or experience called anhedonia, which is actually the inability to feel pleasure, [00:11:00] right?

So when folks say, oh, uh, you know, let's say you reach out to a friend who maybe you somehow find out is going through depression. You say, Hey, we're gonna go to the bar tonight. Like, we're going with all the friends. And they, they're just like, I don't want to go. That's not interesting, whatever. Or, Hey, uh, I know that you know the Patriots, the, the football team or the baseball team or whatever.

I know that's your favorite team. I bought tickets to the game tonight. We're all going, you know, and they may say, no, I don't really want to go tonight. That anhedonia manifested itself by that friend saying, I don't want to go. And what's really going on there is. Even though normally that activity is exciting and fun for them, their depression has taken over them and they don't experience that excitement, that fun around the activity anymore.

Or at least in the, you know, the present circumstances. So to sum it up, depression is definitely more than sadness. It might be a lot of sadness, pervasive sadness, but it can also be other things as well. And , it's [00:12:00] certainly a prolonged thing where if you're sad for a day or really sad for a day, don't get me wrong, that stinks.

I don't want anybody to have to go through it. But at the same time, , that's life and that's kind of normal. Whereas two or more weeks of these really pervasive and strong symptoms, that's when it starts to tip into the category that a practitioner would say this is actual depression based on the DSM.

Yeah. . It's good you brought up the DSM. , As I've said in other episodes, I was sad when my mother died. I was grieving, but I could go on with my life, , , I could get out of bed. I wasn't numb. . I was grieving, I wasn't depressed. Not that I wasn't upset, but it was different, you know?

, And having had major depression, myself, , I've had days where I, I can't get out of bed. And it can be really frustrating, , for caregivers, , trying to help people 'cause they can feel hopeless too, and. It can also be [00:13:00] frustrating for caregivers who are told, well, why aren't you helping them?

It's like, well, I'm trying to, but , you can take a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. You know, people who haven't supported someone with severe mental health issues don't always realize that, you know, it can be really frustrating and people can sometimes judge you and think, oh, well, they're not being a good parent.

They're not doing enough for their child. Well, it can be a really tricky situation , , knowing that from having friends with children who've had major mental health issues and having a family member who's died because of it, not committed suicide, but just stopped taking care of himself and, , ended up.

Sadly dying, , because he didn't get the help he needed. Despite his family's efforts, they did all they could. So it can be [00:14:00] hard for people to understand what it's like , , caring for someone too. I think so there's a bit misunder, well, I shouldn't say a bit. There's understanding with, , anxiety as well, because , I heard this in a podcast that you were in this morning about, you know, people like, oh, you're just nervous.

You're just excited because you got a maths test, or you got this big presentation at work. That anxiety, especially generalized anxiety disorder, , it's not just nervousness. It's more serious than that. More debilitating. Yeah, absolutely. I think , one way to look at all of these things, right?

Because going back to the first question, right, like sadness is part of life. Yeah. I would say everybody experiences sadness or 99.999% of people experience sadness. I think a [00:15:00] similar amount of people experience nervousness where these conditions or these emotions start to tip over into what are more of the disorder kind of things is when those emotions are so strong and so all-encompassing or last for such a period of time that the person experiencing them is held back in their life, prevented from living a normal life or the life that they want, right?

So most of us, right, and it's funny to think about if you look at. Public surveys, the number one fear Oh yeah. That people have is public speaking. Number two is death. Which, yeah, I remember Seinfeld saying that. Yeah. On an episode. Yeah, sorry. That's funny. So I mean, you know, everybody has different views on things, but death is pretty scary.

And yet we fear [00:16:00] public speaking more than we fear death. This big unknown thing. Right. And also, I guess just as a side note, like in American culture, right? Death is this horrible, scary, terrifying thing in other cultures, you know, in the East it's not quite that way, but that's how we've been trained, right?

It is to really fear that thing. All of that is to say that when the average person goes and gives a speech, they are more likely than not, I would almost say they're guaranteed to feel some kind of nervousness. Now, what's the difference between nervousness and anxiety? It's that. Duration. It's that intensity.

It's the frequency with which that thing arrives, right? So if I said to you, you know, how often were you nervous last month? Or I asked a person who gave a speech and they maybe thought to themselves, well, I was really nervous for that speech that I had to give, but that was kind of it, right?

That doesn't really qualify as an anxiety disorder. That is a situation where you're presented with a [00:17:00] stimulus or you know, a task that you have to perform. And that task is something that's scary. And honestly, rightfully so, your body goes into a heightened state and says, this could go wrong. I could mess up what I'm saying.

I could look like a fool in front of my peers or in front of the audience. And again, rightfully so, the body has this response of thinking. This is a bit frightening. Bad things could potentially happen here, and so we need to turn on the alarms, right? The alarms being the sympathetic nervous system, the acceleration of the heart rate, maybe the sweat glands activating that kind of thing.

But if that person, you know, if we kept talking to that person and they said, Hey, that was really it, we'd say, okay, that, that doesn't look like an anxiety disorder. , Where nervousness tips into anxiety or anxiety disorder is, again, back to , those qualifiers of frequency, duration, intensity, that kind of thing.

So for somebody, right, if we look at generalized anxiety disorder, we would say. [00:18:00] Somebody has an anxiety, a nervous response in their body related to a ton of different things. Right. And that's why it's called generalized rather than like a phobia, right? A phobia, yeah. And generalized anxiety disorder.

They're on the same spectrum. They're just on opposite sides of the spec spectrum in the sense that phobia is that intense fear over one specific thing. Maybe like going out of the house or something. Exactly. If you have multiple phobias, then maybe multiple things. But generalized anxiety disorder is that anxiety response in the body again, again and again over many different things.

Right. So maybe it's, oh, I have to go to school today. That makes me nervous. 'cause I'm gonna be in front of my peers and then I'm gonna have to stand up in front of the class and that makes me anxious. And now I'm thinking about, oh, I have to go to the library and interact with people. Right. So just that constant revving up , of the nervous response or the anxiety response.

, That's where we draw the distinction between, you know, just the [00:19:00] emotion and then tipping into the disorder. And, , it can be challenging, right? Because in this day and age, it's a relatively stressful world that we live in. And so if you're constantly going from stressful event to stressful event, you may look around and say, well, you know, my anxiety response is revving up again and again and again.

, It's possible that that's anxiety disorder. It's also possible that that's just you living a stressful lifestyle and your body reacting to that kind of thing. So that's why , it's important to, to work with a professional and figure out like what exactly does that thing, whether it's nervousness or anxiety, or maybe even panic disorder.

What does that look like for you? What does that manifest? How does that manifest for you? And then what does that actually mean? Right. Uh, again, , if, uh, you know, the doctor was saying, Hey, , you're going on a first date and then another date over here, and then you're giving a speech and you're going to all these high pressure events, it's k it kind of makes sense that you would be nervous.

Right. , But you're going and doing those things so you're not [00:20:00] being held back from them. You're just afraid of them or a little bit nervous about them. Whereas the person, as you alluded to, who is afraid to leave the house, somebody who has what's called agoraphobia, that is that condition where, or I guess it meet, meets, the qualification of that person is being held back from living a normal life.

, We would all agree that being able to leave the house , is a precondition for, you know, living a normal life. Yeah. Especially when it's in , a country that's not, you know, one of the most dangerous places to live on Earth. , It's sad when a mental health disorder can really affect their lives that much.

So are you willing to share about, , when you're at in your worst period, what it stopped you from doing, how it impacted your life? Yeah. I'm more than happy to talk about any of that, I would say. , And [00:21:00] here's like where some nuance will come in. I know that I, I just went on a, a rant of saying, you know, these, these disorders are where.

The condition holds you back or prevents you from living a normal life? Uh, a nuance would be that there are folks that are high functioning anxiety, high functioning, depressive, and what that means or could mean is that that person experiences that emotion a lot and in an in with a high intensity, but they are still going and living their life.

So let me give you a more concrete example from my own life. Yeah, that'd great. Just so that way, you know, we can make a little bit more sense of this thing. So I have always had, , dating anxiety and social anxiety. So the idea of going on a date has always been nerve wracking to me. And even though it's nerve wracking for a lot of people.

My mind hijacks me, right? So an example that I would give is, you know, uh, let's say 10 years ago I had a date scheduled with this [00:22:00] woman that I was pursuing. , I was very interested in her, maybe head over heels, something like that. The date was a week away. And this is, and I'm, I'm able to give this example 'cause this is a very common pattern for me.

So the date was a week away. And even though, you know, I, I would get my work done and I would work out and I would live a relatively normal life, I would be so anxious the entire week leading up to that date. And I would run, like my brain would run these ruminative cycles where what would happen is, and 'cause some of my anxiety is, is under the, it's in the flavor of OCD, right?

So if you look at OCD, obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Even though there are different manifestations of all these diseases, OCD included, , breaking down that term, right? So the obsessive piece is you have thoughts that are recurring, that are unsettling. The compulsive piece is as a result of having those thoughts flood your mind, [00:23:00] you perform some ritual, uh, to try to either counter those thoughts or distract yourself from them.

So for me, the anxiety would be, okay, I scheduled this date with this person that I really like and it's a week away. Knowing that it's a week away, my mind goes into protection mode of saying, okay, you need to picture yourself out on the date. You need to make sure that something isn't going wrong. And where, you know, , I've done enough psychoanalysis and also work with therapists to figure out like how this all came to be.

Right. So, peeling back the curtain a little bit more, , when I was young, so at the age of 17, and then at the age of 18 when I first started dating in general, I went on two dates or like had two, let's say like intimate experiences. Uh, and kind of like my, two of my first ever. Dates, uh, I had back to back panic attacks on and on both of those dates though, you know, they, the dates did not go well.

They kind of ended in disaster [00:24:00] and those relationships fell apart. And so from an early age, right, my brain connected the idea of, okay, I'm already nervous going into this date. Uh, and now like something terrible happened, as in I had this panic attack and the relationship fell apart. So my brain is making the association to say, dating equals panic attack.

Dating equals pain, dating equals relationship ending dating e equals failure. , And so fast forward however many years and. Let's say, you know, , the example that I was, uh, trying to give of 10 years ago, right? So I scheduled this date with this person that I'm really interested in, and as soon as it's scheduled, my mind goes into that mode of protecting myself.

Even though it's very painful, it's still a, an adaptive protective mechanism. So my mind is saying, okay, , here's the obsessive piece, right of the OCD is the obsessive piece, is a thought comes into my mind that I'm going to have yet another panic attack with this new person that I [00:25:00] like. And it's gonna be poorly received, the date's gonna go poorly.

I'm gonna look like an idiot. Uh, this relationship that I'm really interested in and pursuing is going to fall apart yet again. And so that thought comes in and if, like, this isn't like a, an ego thing at all because I, it's still something that I, , have to work through on a daily basis, but it's been long enough that I've made progress with this condition Is.

Early on in my own journey, and for folks who have just started the OCD journey, the thoughts come in and the first reaction that you have or you want to have is to say, no, no, no, no, no, no. Right? Block your ears, , kind of pretend as though it's not happening, or fight back against the thought. And it, you get this resistance response, right?

You, you resist the thought. You try to fight it off. And what ends up happening is the more that you try to resist it, the more that you try to fight it off, the more that it sticks with you. And even, , folks will say, neurons that fire together, wire together. So a way of looking at that is the [00:26:00] more that you fight against that thought or that category of thoughts, you are literally building neurocircuitry around that category of thoughts.

And so for me. I fought off those thoughts for years, for at least a decade, right? And so there's a part of my brain that literally says, dating equals failure. Dating equals panic. Dating equals disaster. Right? And so part of therapy and part of healing is you have to go in and have corrective experiences that in one way or another, kind of reach into that part of the brain and rewire it and say, Hey, I've had, I've now had experiences on dates that are not panic, that are not failure, that are not disaster.

And so you start carving out a new groove or a new pathway in your mind. But for a long, long time, that was very challenging for me, where all I wanted to do was, you know, I'd get that thought, I'd have the obsession, I'd want to fight it off. And as a result, right, the compulsion piece was me then going in and saying, okay, [00:27:00] in order to appease myself, to make myself feel better, I'm gonna run these mental.

Uh, projections or, uh, visualizations of seeing myself succeeding in the situation of the date. , It's a well-intentioned strategy where you're like, I'm trying to fight off the nervousness that has popped into my mind, but it doesn't actually work. Right? Because you are essentially giving weight to that thought.

You are considering it, you're almost saying to your brain, oh, this must be an important and realistic thought. 'cause if it wasn't, I would just let it go. Yeah. Yeah. So it's very challenging. Yeah. And eventually you have to get to the point of saying, , my compulsion of me running these visualization patterns in my mind.

They're not serving me. In fact, they're really just proving to my mind that I don't know how this date is gonna go, that I am not convinced that I'm not gonna have a panic attack on this date. So eventually the healing, you know, in the OCD space, and I will say right [00:28:00] OCD is lives under the umbrella of anxiety disorder.

So it, it really is an anxiety disorder. , Part of the healing in this space is basically getting to the point of realizing that your brain has many, many thoughts every single day. A lot of them are weird, a lot of them are strange, a lot of them are unsettling. And even though it does make sense that when those unsettling thoughts come in, you would want to fight with them and try to push them away.

The healing comes when you just get to the point of saying, I don't care. I'm gonna have the thought. I'm gonna let it go. I'm gonna let it move through me. And that's gonna be that, because then you're not building up that neural circuitry surrounding that thought, not having those neurons fire together and then wire together.

So I hope that's helpful.

. , The most important thing, like, for me, and I think for a lot of folks, right, is, and here's where things , I wouldn't say that they get complicated, just, they get, I'm gonna say less sexy, right? And from the standpoint of [00:29:00] we want to hear that you take some pill, uh, there's some silver bullet out there.

You do this one thing, all your anxiety is gone forever, right? Yeah. In reality, change happens relatively slowly. Both in the sense of, I built that neural circuitry up over a period of years, and then you unwind that circuitry over some period of years as well. And so all change and all growth, like, you know, not, maybe not every single piece of it, right?

But if you think about, like, if you're like, Hey, I want to go to the gym and I wanna put on some weight, you'd, uh, you know, or put on some muscle, sorry. You don't go to the gym and , do bicep curls one time, and then all of a sudden you're jacked. Right? You have to go to the gym, stay disciplined, do the workouts, that kind of thing.

In the anxiety space, there's a form of treatment, which is called exposure therapy. So exposure therapy, you know, it's, it's usually, it's most commonly used on phobias, which is, uh, you know, how they would [00:30:00] essentially put it into practice is as an example. If somebody's horribly afraid of spiders and they have a phobia of spiders, you don't just throw somebody into a spider pit.

It, you instead bring them into the office and , you start very, very small. So maybe it's, there's a picture of a spider on the other side of the room and the clinician says, when you're ready, I want you to open your eyes and I want you to look at that picture of that spider. And the idea is you're trying to give the nervous system enough room to feel comfortable in these small doses.

Right? So you're trying to do that rewiring. Little step by little step. And so you go from looking at a picture of a spider to, , maybe holding a book on spiders and then flipping through some of the pages, and maybe at some point in the future there's a spider in the room with you that is, you know, has been put there.

Eventually you get to the point of standing closer to the spider, and all of this , could honestly, [00:31:00] you know, this could be over the course of many, many sessions. It's not one of those things where we do all this in one session, right? Eventually you want to get to the point of. Having that, like unwinding that phobia, showing the person that they can be around the thing that scares them without their nervous system going completely haywire.

And so I, the reason that I say all of this is, so going back to the idea of exposure therapy, is you're taking those baby steps, allowing your nervous system to say, Hey, this isn't this life or death scenario that I have made it out to be. And it's not, and again, it's not black and white of, hey, you throw them in , , , the pit of spiders and the nervous system makes that determination immediately.

It's little, little baby steps. And over time the nervous system becomes more comfortable and more comfortable with these changes. So for me, it was the same kind of thing of exposure therapy, which was to say, Hey, okay, so when I was 22, 24, because I had, , the , negative [00:32:00] experiences of going on dates and having panic attacks, what.

Helpful for me was to, you know, essentially have a crutch of, uh, of drinking, right? So like having a couple drinks before I go on a date, or if I'm going out in a social setting, getting drunk, you know? And so you lose that anxiety 'cause you have the liquid courage and , the exposure therapy for me that I kind of put myself through was to say, over time, I need you to go to more of these social outings, uh, you know, in small doses, make sure that you warm yourself up to them, but then I also need you to go to these outings and maybe if a previous outing, , you were having five beers, I need you go to go down to four, and then I need oh really to go down to three and go down to two.

And it just became my own version of the exposure therapy, the own, the, my own version of, of that warming up kind of thing. , I make it sound as though it's a linear progression when it's really not right. A lot of people will say progress. [00:33:00] Exactly. It's, you know, it's, it's, uh, two steps forward, one step back, maybe one step forward, two steps back.

The general direction that you're moving in , is up into the right. But if you look at any one step, right, it, it might be forward, it might be backward, it might be all tangled up in, in itself, you know, so the direction is, again, taking these baby steps and trying to make that progress. And I guess why I gave that that little distinction was to say that it wasn't as though it was like, Hey, you know, I'm at five beers now.

I'm at four, now I'm at three, now I'm at two and one, and oh, everything's amazing. It's like, okay, you go to four and you're like, oh, geez, I, I don't know how to handle this. I need to pick up some new skills. I also need to become more comfortable what it's, uh, with what it's like to be at four beers or two beers, or whatever it is, you know?

And so part of the messiness there was. Going on a date and having it not go well or going on a date and being really nervous, but not having a full blown panic attack. Right. Getting to the point of experiencing [00:34:00] all these different kind of experiences, for lack of a better word, and just getting to the point of making it so that my nervous system didn't react as strongly to these different things.

, This is a little TMI, but, , you know, I, I'm dating somebody right now, and when we first started dating, uh, I, I wouldn't call it a panic attack by, by any stretch of the imagination, but, you know, I was at her house and I was nervous, and in previous years, like a younger version of Brian would've said.

Uh, you know, tried to fight it off and pretend as though he weren't nervous. That kind of thing. In this moment, I had done enough work on myself to say, okay, it is, it's okay for me to turn to this person and say, Hey, look like I'm just a little bit nervous right now. Can you give me five minutes or is it okay that I'm nervous?

Uh, and that's another form of that corrective experience, right, is to say you can be nervous, you can maybe even have a panic attack and maybe the person that you're with is going to respond to it differently, right? So it's just getting your brain to see that there are different outcomes [00:35:00] that are possible out there.

Uh, and then also being exposed to enough of these experiences to also have your nervous system see that it might not always go so poorly. Uh, there are different things that can occur and eventually, , maybe you find those little wins that you need to keep marching forward. So long-winded way of saying that, I basically ran exposure therapy on myself and that became very helpful to.

Unwind that neurological wiring and eventually get to the point of, you know, my nervous system not going completely crazy in haywire, just at the prospect of going on a date. , How did you come up with this beer or alcohol exposure therapy model? , , I'm the kind of person that is very introspective, uh, and very analytical.

And some of it was just understanding of like, okay, you know, I'm going out. Last night I went out with my friends and we drank a lot and , we tried to, uh, meet women 'cause that's what we wanted to do when we went out. , so two pieces. [00:36:00] One of getting to the point of, hey, you know, , it's almost kind of sad, you know, to be like, oh, I have to have like five beers before I go talk to a stranger.

Like, for me, I just felt like that was a little sad. The other piece was, you do that often enough and, and you know, maybe the number's higher than five to be completely honest, but it's like, hey, you had nine beers, right? And then the next day, how bad do you feel in terms of physically how bad's the hangover?

So as I got older, I, I kind of saw this, I saw this like calculus in my head of like, yeah. And I saw the pattern too of, okay, you are, you're basically saying to yourself right now, the only per way that I'm gonna give myself permission to go talk to somebody that I'm interested in is to be drunk. And if that results in me having a horrible hangover, then the other calculus is the only way that I can go to give myself permission to go talk to somebody is , to, to give myself a hangover as well.

And you go through enough of those hangovers, you know, and , it's two things. It's not just that it feels horrible, but you all like in the moment, but you [00:37:00] also add up enough hangovers and you're like, I'm doing some damage to my physical health. You know? And that's not a place that I want to be. So just going through all of those things and eventually seeing that, that formula that I unintentionally built for myself and saying, okay, I don't want it to be like that.

I don't want the conditions to be such that I ha, I essentially have to have a hangover in order to go talk to someone. So I eventually was just like, I need to challenge myself. To work myself back on the drinking and, , being a little bit more courageous and talking to more people. And over time, , and here's where I'll wrap things up and kind of put a bow on it, is the reason why I started by saying it's what I'm gonna talk about is not sexy, is we all want that quick cure, that, you know, silver bullet, that magic pill kind of thing.

In reality, a lot of these changes, changes in life in general, but also with your mental health. They come over long periods of time with incremental change. And the challenge is that, , [00:38:00] if that were turned into a headline, nobody's clicking on that article, nobody's reading the book in which that headline is found.

It's not interesting. , It doesn't get clicks and eyeballs on it and whatnot, but the reality is that is how most of life works. Oh yeah, exactly. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. , I have nothing against medication and even a lot of yogis and yoga therapists don't.

, And medication for mental health can be essential, but it's part of the puzzle. Just one little piece and Absolutely. And , I do just really quickly wanna say that I, I have no problem with it whatsoever either. Oh, I'm sure you don't. Yeah. Yeah. But even, even at that, right? Is if you look at, okay, so the closest thing we have to a silver bullet on the anxiety front is a benzodiazepine, which is a very addictive drug, right?

People go to rehab for them all the time. So , if you're in a panicked state and you take a benzo, that can help you get out of it, which can be [00:39:00] great. But the downside is that you can get addicted to those kinds of things. Whereas, you know, cases of addiction to SSRI basically don't exist.

And so where I'm going with this is to say. If a benzo is close to a silver bullet, right? The downside of the silver bullet is, hey, you know, it's not quite the silver bullet we make it out to be 'cause people legitimately get addicted to these things and have have issues. If you look at more towards the SSRI side, which you know, is another form of treatment for anxiety and depression, , that's actually not a silver bullet that, you know, in SSRI you get on a treatment like that, it takes you like a month for your brain to even start registering effects from the SSRI to actually , get positive benefit from them.

And even then you sometimes have to adjust the dose or try a different medication and whatnot. So all of it is to say the real positive changes are coming over, , longer durations and a holistic approach because if I just relied on medication for my mental health issues, I don't think I'd be alive anymore.

, It's often, not [00:40:00] enough, and for sure. It can have , a reductionist effect in that the efficacy can go down rather than up. But I'm not against medication and I would never tell people not to take it. It's not my role. And yet we're on the same page there.

Thank you for joining me podcast. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired and informed and empowered to take meaningful steps towards your wellbeing. If there's a topic you'd like me to cover, or if you'd like to share your story, I'd love to hear from you. Just fill in the form on the podcast page of my website.

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Until next time. Take care of yourself and never forget the power, the possibilities 

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Liz Albanis

Host
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Brian Sachetta

Guest