Live Q&A Relationships & Emotional Intelligence: How to Stop Choosing Emotionally Unavailable Peopl

Foreign. Hey there, everybody, and welcome today to today's live Q and A. Sorry, I'm getting in here, like, right at the buzzer. I was kind of looking at the weather. We have family that are in the path of Idealia, but right now it looks like Idealia is a lot less well formed, if you will, than the one that's headed for South Carolina. So hopefully that one will turn and everybody will be safe and lovely and it will all just go off without a hitch. Mojo, quit drinking my water. Anyhow, how is everybody today and what questions do you have? For me, they can be about relationships, emotional intelligence, or mental health issues. I am getting ready to do a video on how to stop choosing emotionally unavailable people. So I figured I'd throw that out there to y', all, so I would make sure that I covered all the main concepts, if you will, that you are interested in. So good morning, Cindy. Good morning, Adriana and Jocelyn. Always glad to see you all. How do I stop doing that? It is a good question. And one of the things that I'm going to talk about in the video is that it's important to explore, number one, what that behavior is saying about you. Why is it that you engage in that behavior? And some people will get into relationships because they are familiar. They may not be what they're looking for, but they're familiar. So I. I've been in a relationship with someone who's emotionally unavailable before. I was raised by people who are emotionally unavailable. So I know what to expect. This is what I'm used to. So we gravitate towards things that we're used to, even if it's not something that we necessarily want in our life. So that's the first thing that is important to consider. What are some reasons that that might be happening? Sometimes we gravitate toward emotionally unavailable people or people who are wounded in some way because we have a need to be needed and a need to be fixed. But when people are wounded, when they're in crisis, when they're struggling, it's really hard for them to be emotionally available to us because. Because they're all caught up in their own stuff. So we want to look at that. But there are a lot of reasons why people are emotionally unavailable that have nothing to do with pathology. And what. What do I mean by that? Sometimes people are raised in a culture where they're taught not to talk a lot about feelings and emotions. So. Okay, so they don't. That's not something that they put a priority on because that's not how they were raised. And it's not that they have a problem with it. It's not that they won't do it. It's just not something that comes to the front of their mind. So we do want to consider. Have we expressed our need for emotional availability? And have we told them what that looks like to us? Because when I say I need you to be more emotionally available, I know what that looks like to me. I know what I'm looking for. But my husband, who is much more of a. An introvert, thinker type person, emotional availability looks very different to him. And he is a very intense person, a very emotional person. He just expresses it a lot differently. So in the first decade of our relationship, it took some time to come to understand that and start communicating about it. Once he understood, for example, that when I'm upset and he recognizes I'm upset, I don't need him to fix it for me, thank you very much. What I need is for him to validate my feelings and serve as a sounding board. So when I'm ready to fix it, I will. And. And that's a common mistake that a lot of people who are thinkers or who are raised in a do it type of culture make the mistake of. They see somebody who is suffering, who is struggling, and they're like, oh, my gosh, I don't want you to hurt, so I'm gonna fix it for you. Instead of letting you have the ability, giving you permission to have your feelings and sit with your feelings and then deal with your feelings in your own time and on your own terms. Aisha says, I modified my diet and lifestyle, which helped a lot, but I still struggle in. Language and observation. I think I need a little bit more explanation about. There's. There's a lot of stuff there, And. And I'm not really understanding your question. So I. I need to understand more about, number one, how diet and lifestyle are related to pursuing a field in psychology and in what ways you feel like you're falling behind your peers. You're talking about incorrect word grammar and sentence structure. So it sounds like you're trying to provide counseling in a language other than your primary language. And that, in and of itself is going to be a hurdle for you. And that doesn't mean that you're bad at doing psychology. It means that you are struggling communicating in someone's native tongue that is different from yours. You. I'm tired of being emotionally vulnerable with people and even friends and family. It can be exhausting to be vulnerable and not get those Needs met. It's important to explore whether we are telling people what we need or expecting them to read our minds. If I'm having a bad day and I'm just pouting around the house and I'm hoping my husband will notice and open a conversation that's very passive in communication and I'm expecting a whole lot from him to be. To have his emotion radar on. I don't want him to have to be that hyper vigilant. Now if I'm having a bad day and I go to him and I say I'm having a bad day, then we can talk about it. And if you do that with your significant others and they shut you down, then yeah, that's, that's a whole different issue that we need to consider because it can be difficult to always feel like you're the one that's opening your heart, that's being vulnerable, that's trying to make connections. And other people are so busy in their own lives, either they don't notice or they don't reciprocate in a way that you want. Another thing that I'll be talking about in the video is love languages. Remembering that we all have our particular love languages, acts of service, words of affirmation, gifts, physical touch and quality time. And that in large part is based on how we were raised and our love map, if you will. So significant others may often communicate to us, communicate their love, communicate their willingness to be available to us in their love language instead of ours. If we have different love languages, that may, may be another important aspect to consider is you're being vulnerable and you're trying to express your feelings and show love and consider the way you know how, the way you receive love, the way you understand love. And they may not be, they may not be getting the message. It's like speaking Greek to somebody who speaks English. They're like, I see you doing something, I'm not sure what, what you're doing here. And that can be another area to have a conversation. It can also be exhausting to be vulnerable when, when you are hoping that somebody is going to change. I will do this and I'll make myself vulnerable in or. And when I do this, I expect them to do the same. Well, if you don't communicate that, then they may not reciprocate. If you communicate that and they don't reciprocate, then again, we want to look at what is their behavior saying? Is their behavior saying I don't care? Is their behavior saying, I don't know how to do that or is their behavior saying, I just. That's too overwhelming and I won't do that. How do you deal with emotions after leaving a treatment facility when you are super vulnerable? That is a wonderful question. When you're in treatment, it's sort of a controlled, semi safe environment. And you say leaving a treatment facility. So I'm thinking residential. But Iop could be the same where you've got regular contact with someone who is able to identify and empathize and do all those things and you get out into life on life's terms and you start experiencing. Not only do you feel vulnerable, you may feel anxious about what's going on. You're trying to change people, places, things you're trying. You're running into triggers, like all the time. So it feels like you're walking through a minefield sometimes. And that can be just absolutely exhausting and it can trigger a lot of distressful emotions. I would refer you to the Emotions Anonymous, just for today. And I actually have a video of that on the website that helps us recognize the how we're feeling and be empowered to recognize our emotions. We say, I'm, I'm powerless over this feeling right now. I can't make it go away. I can change how I react to it though. Just like when you're faced with alcohol, you can't change how that alcohol is going to impact you, but you can change how you react to that alcohol. What you do when you're in its presence, you can alter that and make a different choice. So that's something that you can recognize. Being compassionate with yourself is also important. If you've just left a treatment facility, you're still in early recovery. And as much as you probably hate to hear that you are. And another video I would refer you to is the one on pause or post acute withdrawal syndrome. I'm assuming could be a faulty assumption, but I'm assuming you weren't in treatment for six months or more. So your brain chemistry is still rebalancing itself. You are still likely coping with some things that you uncovered and you may have, still have stuff that you have yet to deal with that is causing stress and triggering that HPA axis. So it would make sense, and it makes perfect sense to me for people when they are in early recovery, and I use that term pretty broadly, like the first year to 18 months to experience periods of emotional dysregulation. That is your brain going, I'm holding on as best as I can. But then one more thing. It's like the Straw that broke the camel's back. Okay? Recognizing that's not just a cognitive thing. That is a neurological thing. And your brain is just sending a tsunami of fight or flight hormones, stress hormones, to help you protect yourself. So then you start feeling really angry or really scared. Acknowledging that and acceptance and commitment therapy is another tool that can be really useful. Acknowledging the discomfort, not fighting with it, not saying, I shouldn't be angry or I shouldn't be this angry, but saying, all right, I am really ticked off right now. And, you know, maybe it really didn't deserve this level of anger, but that's where I am. It is what it is. What can I do to improve the next moment? How can I use my energy in a way that will help me move toward my rich and meaningful life? And recognizing that that emotion is not going to overwhelm you. Just like alcohol isn't going to pour itself down your throat, an emotion is not going to consume you. You've developed distress tolerance skills in counseling, hopefully in treatment, and you've experienced distress when you were in treatment, and you developed skills to tolerate it. You don't have to like it. It can really suck. All right, you're angry or you're scared or you're overwhelmed about something, all right, it sucks right now. Acknowledge that and then say, what would I do if I had a friend who was in this position? How can I. How would I be compassionate with them? What can I do for me in order to exercise that same compassion? It's not easy. Even, you know, once you've got multiple years of recovery under your belt, sometimes it's not easy to deal with the stuff that life throws at you and being vulnerable, whether it's in relationships or in life, however, you've overcome a lot of stuff just through the recovery process, just through being in treatment, you. You probably can look back over those weeks or. Or months if you were in it for a while and see how you've grown and see how your ability to tolerate emotions without using has grown. What did you do when you were in treatment you couldn't use? So what did you do when you were in treatment that helped you feel safe, that helped you feel empowered? Ultimately, a lot of our feelings, the majority of our distressful feelings, come from a place where our brain is telling us, you might not be safe, you might not be powerful, and there you might be helpless in this situation. And it's up to us to say, all right, there's a lot of mites there. Let me look around and say, this is how I feel. Let me evaluate the facts in context. Am I safe? What am I empowered to do? And is there hope? And I mean, generally, I think in most cases you may. There may not be hope for getting what you want exactly right now, but there tends to be hope. I hope. How do you apply therapy skills and approach or methods differently? What's. Okay, what separates the two? And the video that I did on that was talking about the difference between skills and methods. So a method is a comprehensive approach and skills are individual things. For example, let's take woodworking. A method would be being able to use all of the tools that you need in order to build a bookcase. A skill is knowing how to use a screwdriver. Now, knowing how to use a screwdriver comes in handy a lot. But just knowing how to use a screwdriver doesn't mean that you know how to build a bookcase. Just knowing how to use distress tolerance skills doesn't mean you know how to do dialectical behavior therapy. The process. So a method or a process involved is typically manualized and in a way that you can follow it and typically has multiple components to it that have to be put together in a particular way. Wife broke down after first child was born with postpartum depression in the middle of the pandemic. Oh, that sucks. I'm sorry. When the travel ban was lifted, mother in law arrived from the UK and they went on vacation. And then wife and daughter. Wife and mother took daughter to the uk. As far as suggestions go, I would really reach out to father's groups that are online. There are some fathers father's rights groups that you can reach out to. That's a legal issue more than a mental health issue at this point. How can you make your friends understand why you keep them away while you are working on yourself? They want to help, but it isn't helpful because they might be part of my triggers. All right, well, that's wonderful insight. And when they're trying to help, let's look at that behavior. When they're trying to help, what they're doing is trying to express to you, hey, I love you and I want to try to encourage and support you the best way I know how. Well, what I'm hearing from you is they may not know how to do it in a way that's useful to you and that's okay. But when you distance yourself from them, they may feel rejected, they may feel unloved, they may feel like their desire to support you is being rebuffed. And what can be Helpful is to acknowledge them and acknowledge that to them, that, hey, I'm going through some stuff right now, and I really need to clear my head. And I'm not rejecting you. You know, I. You're a friend. I love spending time with you, but right now I just need to get some clarity on what's going on in my mind, and I need to do it in my own time. Helping them recognize that you're not rejecting them unless you are. And then that's a whole different conversation. But what I'm hearing is you just need some space from them in order to figure out, you know, what is healthy and what do you want, instead of having all these voices coming in your head saying, well, this is what you should do. This is what you should do. I'll help you do this. Well, I didn't ask for that. It is difficult. And it's also important to recognize that if they get their feelings hurt because you are not willing to or able to involve them in your recovery process, part of that is on them. If you've expressed to them, hey, I love you. I'm not abandoning you. I just need some me time, then they're actually violating your boundaries by refusing to take no for an answer, by refusing to go away. And we've talked about boundaries before, like a house and that friend that refuses to hear, hey, I just. I need some me time. I'm going to sit on the couch and watch Netflix today. I just can't take any more input. Whatever. I'll call you next week. You can say that to them. You shut the door. And as soon as you shut the door and start to walk away, they start knocking again. But I can watch Netflix with you. What did I just say? So it's important to recognize they may be reacting out of a place of fear, of abandonment. They may not realize how intrusive their behaviors are. But it's also important to help them recognize that by doing that they're actually violating your boundaries by doing. By not respecting your thoughts and needs, that they are actually being more harmful than helpful. My husband has a good love language. He's an. He's an emotionally unavailable husband. He's a narcissist. Well, there's a lot of things in there that I'm hearing. And love language falls into one of those five things that I said. So one's not good or bad. Love language is just how you communicate love. If he has narcissistic traits, then, yeah, he's probably going to be emotionally available. But we need to ask Ourselves. Why? Why did those behaviors develop? And in most cases, almost all cases of personality disorders, those behaviors developed as a way to cope with trauma in their young lives. Abandonment, trauma, insecure attachment, you know, all those sorts of things. And this is their. This is how they were taught is okay, is safe to survive. Can the voice diary apps, where you save entries in the form of voice notes instead of writing them in words, be considered journaling as a part of depression treatment? Yes. A lot of people will vlog or voice journal because either they can't write or they choose not to write. That's fine, you can choose. I know, I was just using it before we started this. I was using the dictation function in Microsoft Word, so in order to work on a syllabus. But you can also do that for journaling. Why? Why did I bring that part up? One of the benefits of journaling is it gets the words down there in black and white or whatever color font you use. You can see them. When you say something, you say it and it just kind of disappears when something's on paper. They found that it stickier, if you will, for people, and they tend to ponder it and reflect on it more. So writing it down can be helpful. They've also found that when people write things down, that there is, it sort of triggers a switch in their brain that can help them stop ruminating about that. If I know I need to get cat litter and I don't write it down, then back in my brain, I'm constantly reminding myself, I got to remember to go get cat litter today. And that's my brain going, this is important. You need to make sure that you don't forget it. When I. As soon as I write it down, my brain goes, okay, I don't have to worry about that anymore because it's on one of those little sticky notes that she has somewhere. And if she loses that, well, that's on her. If somebody wants to journal or is willing to journal but they're not willing to write, then certainly voice journaling is better than nothing. Voice journaling can be converted. There are a lot of AIs now, although they're not HIPAA compliant, There are a lot of AIs now that you can upload an audio or a video file and it will create a transcript. So then you have it in text where you can look at it. You can use the dictation. So you're still talking and not writing, but you are dictating it. There are a lot of different ways that technology has altered Journaling. In general, a person who is narcissistic has a lot more than just being selfish or self centered. Being diagnosed with narcissism, there are a lot of different criteria that people need to meet. And it's also important that the person who displays the narcissistic tendencies, they've displayed it since adolescence, at least maybe before that. And, and that it is true across settings. It's not just in their relationships with their significant others or at work or with their friends. It's with pretty much everybody all the time. And that is a defining feature of a personality disorder. It's not something that is contextually specific. Ultimately, it's important to look at the behaviors and whether the person has narcissistic personality or they're selfish or whatever the behavior is that is causing you distress, it's important to look and say, okay, is there a way to address this behavior? And what steps do I need to take in order to feel safe, feel empowered and use my energy to work, work toward my rich and meaningful life instead of constantly defend against attacks or disappointments from someone who doesn't have my best interest at heart? There are a lot of different videos that I have on mindfulness and cognitive distortions and those things. And we are in the process of creating worksheets for all the videos that will be available on the Docsnipes.com education site for people who sign up there. But currently I don't have particular worksheets for particular classes or particular videos. I do have, I don't know, I think I have 13 classes that are already up in the Doc Snipes self help or education website that you may be able to look at. Narcissism is not intermittent narcissism. A person is either narcissistic or they're not. That's why I said it's not context specific, it's not time specific. And it's important to examine if something is intermittent like that, what is prompting it, what triggers those behaviors? And that really highlights the impact of trauma in that person's life because they may drop back into particular behaviors when they're feeling unsafe. What other questions do you all have for me? All right, this is a very quiet group today. How do I learn to work on myself emotionally? And I'm trying to understand the question. Steps to work on yourself to develop more emotional awareness would be engaging in mindfulness activities. And one of the activities that I suggest frequently is creating a sheet or a collage for each emotion. And start with the big ones. Anger, anxiety, Depression, curiosity, happiness, and identify for those emotions what triggers it for you and what it feels like. And then once you're aware of. Yeah, okay, I'm getting this feeling. This is. This feels like anxiety to me. Or this feels like excitement or anticipation. All right, cool. But first, knowing what it feels like for you and what triggers it, then when you. When you start feeling that emotion in your mindfulness journals, you can identify what you were feeling, why you were feeling at that point in time, and what you did to either cope with it, or if it's one of those positive feelings, what you did to nurture it. What are some. I'm sorry, I jumped. I'm not understanding the question. Verbal and nonverbal communication skills for identification of emotions. If you could clarify that for me. Distress tolerance can turn into a problem when it's used for avoidance. Distress tolerance, its function is to help you sit with distress until you can either address it or the problem passes. The hurricane headed towards Florida, right now, there's nothing I can do about that. Am I anxious about it? Yeah, because I've got family right in its path. And so using my distress tolerance skills is helping me sit with that emotion and recognize what I do and don't have control over. And worrying about it and fretting, that's not going to change the path of the hurricane or anything that will happen. So it's important for me to recognize that. And once the hurricane comes through, then bada bing, I can address it at that point. So sometimes distress tolerance is a way of acknowledging how you feel and the fact that you just can't change it, but that's okay. Other times, distress tolerance comes in handy because it helps you get into your wise mind when you are enraged, when you are scared to death, you're not thinking clearly. You're not going to make the best cognitive or wise mind decisions until you can get some of that adrenaline and glutamate and stuff out of your brain until you can activate the wise mind aspect. So distress tolerance can be really helpful at helping people identify. Hey, my brain is telling me there might be a threat. Right now I'm feeling scared, all right? I can sit with this fear, and I can recognize that it doesn't mean just because I feel anxious doesn't necessarily mean there's a threat. So I can sit with this feeling for a second until I can get into my wise mind and explore whether there's a threat or not. And other times, the distress tolerance skills can be helpful because it prevents you from engaging in impulsive behaviors. When you're feeling really angry or really anxious and you want to scream at somebody or put your fist through a wall or use drugs or whatever your unhelpful coping mechanism is, the stress tolerance skills can help you validate that feeling and say, this is how I feel right now and this is my urge. This is what I want to do, but I don't have to. And once you down regulate your stress response and get into your wise mind, then you can decide or then you can approach the situation. So if I get angry at my boss, it's not helpful for me to scream and throw a temper tantrum, but I can turn my attention to my distress tolerance skills, get in my wise mind, figure out what I'm going to say, and then I can go back and calmly discuss whatever it is with him. Can narcissism narcissism be hereditary? Sort of. It is not. There's not a genetic predisposition for narcissism. But people who develop narcissism can be raised by parents who have narcissistic traits or are emotionally unavailable or abusive in some way. And because the environment is so dysfunctional, they develop these coping strategies once they become a narcissist. Hate the word, but I'll use it. When they have children, they're not able to connect with those children. They're not able to form a secure attachment with those children. So those children start figuring out how to cope in a narcissistic household. So narcissism can be intergenerational, it can be passed down. It's not genetic. But dysfunctional learning promotes dysfunctional learning until somebody steps in and goes, hey, there's a better way to do this. Does emotional intelligence fluctuate with age? Emotional intelligence grows with age. Children don't have emotional intelligence. Young children have not learned how to identify their feelings. And that's what the One of the functions of the secure attachment with their primary caregiver is to help the child learn to identify feelings, understand what triggers them, learn how to tolerate them, and then how to cope with them. So it will grow over time. But does it go up and down? No, not really. Is there a difference between asking somebody to be emotionally available and empathetic? It depends on how you define emotional availability. For some people, emotional availability means show me your. Your emotions. You seem like a stone. Be vulnerable to me. For other people, being emotionally available means be empathetic and aware of my emotions and aware of how you impact me. And then for others, it means both. Emotional intelligence is people's ability to identify, understand, and effectively respond to emotions in themselves and others. Somebody who is emotionally intelligent will recognize, for example, how it would impact a friend if they had a harsh discussion with that friend in front of other people. They'd recognize how they would make their friend feel. So emotional intelligence may be more on point for what you're asking about than emotional availability. But that's your call. When you're communicating with somebody whose primary language her. Her primary language is different than yours. It's going to be important to. To recognize that there will be obstacles, there will be hurdles in communication. Different cultures have different understandings of feelings. Different cultures have different words and ways of expressing feelings. So it's important to try to understand each other's culture and try to understand each other's phrases and what they actually mean to that person. Not necessarily what Google tells you they mean, if you're using Google Translate. But what did. What did the person actually mean by what they said? In general, therapists identify their personal approach through practice, and it starts when you're in graduate school. When you're in graduate school, you are encouraged to explore your understanding of mental health, mental illness, relationship problems, and what you think contributes to them and what you think contributes to healing. It's also important to recognize that not everybody's going to agree with you. And if you're working with a client who has a different worldview, then understanding that and either choosing an approach that is appropriate for them or making a referral, depending on what will work. Not everybody, for example, is good with cognitive behavioral therapy. So it is important to be sensitive to the person's perspective. And you do tend to solidify, if you will, your therapeutic approach over the first couple of years. By the time I got licensed, I was pretty set in my approaches that I thought were effective. Now, does that mean I don't embrace any other approaches? You know, y' all know I'm cognitive, behavioral, and trauma informed, but emdr, that's not in my wheelhouse. Do I believe it works? I certainly do. However, it's not a technique that I am trained in using. So it's also important to recognize that you don't have to be everyone to every therapist, everybody. You can have your specialty and your understanding. What can I do for myself when my husband's giving me the silent treatment? The silent treatment is a very passive aggressive form of communication. And without knowing a whole lot more, it's hard to say. The short answer and the somewhat uneducated answer about your particular situation is when that's happening, recognize how it's impacting you, and recognize that his behavior is more of a reflection of him. And it's important to talk about things. So his behavior being not an assertive form of communication, may be the only way he knows how to communicate when he feels threatened, when he feels challenged in some way. So it's important for you to respect his feelings. That's how he feels. Not going to tell him how to feel. But it's also important to reflect on how you feel and say, okay, what can I do in this situation to feel safe and empowered? And it may mean talking to a friend. It may mean going out for a walk because it's too stressful to be in that environment. I would also explore prior situations with other people, even in which you've gotten the silent treatment, and how you may be reacting based on some of those experiences as well. Lana the way to encourage people to be emotionally available is to talk with them about it and help them understand what that looks like and what that means to you. Emotional availability. If I said that to my husband, he'd probably look at me and go, what are you talking about? Because that's a really sort of amorphous concept. So giving people examples of or clear direction on what it is that you want them to do. I'd like you to talk with our sons more about how they're feeling about things. I'd like for you to express your feelings and your thoughts, wants, and needs more effectively. I would like you to blah. And. And that can help people be more emotionally available. It's also important, though, to, as I said at the beginning of today's discussion, to be respectful of people's culture. A lot of people were raised in environments. Let me see how I can say this. A lot of men in the US Were raised in environments that were very traditionally male oriented, in which discussion of emotions was not preeminent. It may not have been discouraged, but it wasn't something that was truly encouraged. So that may be the way he was raised. I would explore with him. How did you experience. How did your parents communicate to you that they loved you? How did you experience attachment and emotional availability when you were growing up? It depends on the person. Aisha. I have pretty bad adhd. I like my alone time because being around people is overwhelming. Yeah, that's very common. That is very common. People with ADHD have difficulty filtering out all the stimuli. And so it's kind of like. The best example I can give you is when I used to volunteer for my children's Preschool class and one on one, I can handle, I can handle kids. You know, it's, I have a lot of fun playing with kids one on one, you know, even two or three. But when you have 20 in a room and you're trying to make sure that none of them hurt themselves or do something that they're not supposed to, it can be exhausting. And for people with ADHD, it's kind of like having those 20 little toddlers running around and you're trying to keep track of them all the time. It's exhausting. So downtime alone time is understandable. And you may, even though you're adhd, if you want to try to separate them. You may also be introvert in nature, in how you interact. Anyway, Some people are very well, you can have both traits. You can be introverted, you can like to have time alone, you can be more aware of what's going on inside you than, than what's going on around, which is a little bit different with adhd. But your desire to do deep dives, to know something in depth, is temperament oriented. And the ADHD may be like, you know, those 20 children going, hey, but pay attention to us, we're out here and understanding how you feel. Being in grad school, you're not going to understand your approach yet. You're going to start to explore it and then you're probably going to move forward. Clinical psychology is a bit different too, because clinical psychology, at least most of the programs in the US is focused on people with much more severe and persistent mental illnesses. It's not focused on your typical anxiety, depression, addiction, eating disorders. Chronic pain does affect your mind. Chronic pain can, is the result of inflammation and inflammation contributes to depression and anxiety. So yeah, it makes sense. It, it's frustrating to say the least. But I can see how that would happen. Why do I feel so depressed when I'm about to do something like I can't do it? I've been overthinking a lot how to stop this and how to stop doubting myself. It's exhausting to constantly doubt yourself. And what I'm hearing is you're getting ready to do something that you're already telling yourself you're going to fail at and that there's no hope that you can succeed. And the key features of depression are helplessness and hopelessness. It makes sense that you feel depressed, unmotivated, anxious, when that inner critic is just berating you, telling you that you probably can't do it, or causing you to overthink and overthinking can be exhausting too. I would encourage you to write it down on a piece of paper. What are the facts for and against the. Your belief that you cannot do it? What are the. What's the probability that you will fail? I mean, based on the facts, what's the probability that you will completely fail? And ultimately, if you do, what are the realistic consequences? If I go out and I apply for a job, or if I go out to give a speech and I just really flub it up, all right, I'm going to be disappointed in myself. I will have failed at that particular task, but ultimately it's not going to kick me out of my home or cause me physical harm in any way. And it is uncomfortable. There's part of us that wants to keep us safe. So there's a part of your brain, your amygdala, that says, hey, do you really want to step outside your comfort zone? Yeah, that could be bad. And we need to develop a relationship with our amygdala and say, yeah, it's scary and, yes, I could fail, but I'm going to do it anyway because I want to try. Alrighty, everybody. Thank you for being here today and I will talk to you next Monday, same time, same station.