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Foreign. Everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Fear Cast. This is the podcast dedicated to OCD and anxiety and anxiety spectrum disorders and getting your life back. I'm your host, Kevin Foss, and I'm a licensed therapist specializing in OCD and anxiety disorders. Thank you all so much for joining me for today's episode. I hope everybody out there is doing well and are riding the roller coaster that is the world that we live in right now and the dumpster fire that we happen to be in. That sounds very pessimistic. Let's not start that way. For those of you who are new, this is a question and answer based podcast. If you have questions about OCD and anxiety disorders, you can go over to fearcastpodcast.com, send me a message over there and you can get a question on this podcast that I will read lists, read, consider, and likely put up on a future episode as I'm doing today with Kelly's question. If you would like your question to jump ahead of the line and be the next recorded question, go over to Instagram, or you can send it over to me at Fearcast Podcast, but go over to Instagram, send me a direct message and record your voice and I will likely put that up on a future episode. So I'm Fearcast Podcast over at the Instagrams in case I haven't gone over that. I haven't gone over that in this episode anyhow. So let's see. So, yeah, so I've got Callie's question and what's so funny is like, I, I sat down to record and like, inevitably, as I record the time that I try to record on like, Thursdays, I sit down, I set up the camera, I set up my mic, and I get all the things ready. I try to get all the distractions out of the way. And then the dude who comes by to try to, like the gardener that comes by to try to clean up the parking lot and the plants and stuff that's just outside my office right here. He comes by right at this time with a giant air blower. So it's. You can hear everything with this mic. So I'm just sitting there, like, just waiting, just waiting for it to be over. It keeps going and it just keeps happening. It just keeps happening. So I've got to be flexible and that's what's going to happen. So before we get off on this, on to Callie's question. I was talking to a client earlier this week and we're talking about kind of the rhythms of anxiety. This isn't kind of the main topic of today's question, but I was starting to think about how can we anticipate the rhythms of how our anxiety tends to show up? Because remember, what we're talking about here isn't how do we eliminate all anxiety or how can we never experience anxiety or how can we, you know, when anxiety and fear shows up, how do we shut it down immediately? Instead, it's how do we learn to live with the reality that sometimes we're going to get anxiety, sometimes we're going to get these intrusive thoughts, and they're not very fun, but how do we learn to ride through them in an effective sort of way? And it got me thinking about, you know, being aware of and anticipating the rhythms of our own anxiety. What I mean by that is, you know, there are times in life, and I'm sure, you know, everyone out there listening, you know, think about the times in your life, life when anxiety has been, has been the highest, or if there are seasons in your life or times of the year or events that tend towards impacting your anxiety the most. Right? For some people, it can be the holidays. For some people, it can be anniversaries of something for. For some people, it can be events. So it's going to be, you know, midterms and finals. For some people, it's going to be, you know, their anniversary and they're trying to, you know, muster it all up because they fear that they don't, you know, truly love their partner, whatever it might. And. Cause I was thinking about that, obviously. I do the podcast weekly. I've been doing this for a long time. I present various places. I'm pretty comfortable doing this. However, I'm doing a talk next Wednesday at a local college on social anxiety. And what's funny is I'm putting the talk together and doing my slides and all this stuff. And we talk about anxiety all the time, so it shouldn't be something that, that provokes anxiety. But, you know, even as I prep for a conference talk, as chill as it is, as, as, as comfortable as it is with the people I, I present with typically or in places and for events that are, you know, are right up my alley or, and even talks that I've done before, a little bit before, maybe a couple of days in advance, my anxiety starts to ratchet up just a little bit that worry of, like, well, what if something does happen? What if I, gosh, what if I say something wrong? What if I present wrong? What if I lose all my words? What if I that the common thought is, you know what? I'm going to go out here and I'm going to destroy my career. That's what it is. I'm going to say something wrong. I'm going to say something that's just inaccurate. It's not so much offensive, but it's like, I'm just. Someone's going to say, ah, he doesn't know what he's talking about. What an idiot. And it's like the end of my career. So that shows up, and I've learned kind of to live with it. I say kind of because it's not fun, it's not my favorite thing. But I've come to anticipate that that's something that's gonna happen, it's gonna show up. And when it does, I go, oh, yeah, there it is. Of course it is, right? And, you know, one can argue that it's a helpful thing. There's something called the Yerkes Dodson line. It's kind of this, like this arc where as anxiety increases, your performance level, the ability to perform well also increases. But there is this magical line where there is this pinnacle between anxiety and performance. And then as anxiety continues beyond that, your performance starts to decrease. I think it's an important thing to remember because it's not to say anxiety is bad. And I've spent this entire podcast talking about how anxiety often isn't bad. It's a helpful thing. It's just obnoxious, right? And it can be helpful until it's not right. We can think about, like I think about for myself, my rhythms of anxiety. It's going to go up and it's going to increase, but it also keeps me on my toes. It's putting me in that headspace to run the slides in my head or to kind of have it. Have my head in that space that's been redundant, but tend to anticipate and prepare. Right now, I can go overboard with that. If I spend hours and hours a day prepping for this talk or any talk, that would be excessive and unnecessary. But a little bit of preparation, a little bit of nerves, like, hey, I need to get. I need to be on my toes for this can be really helpful. But regardless of helpful or unhelpful, it's that my anxiety is going to rise a little bit, right? So I offer this as something for everyone out there to think about as they're going throughout their day and struggling with their anxieties. Are there times when anxiety is greater or worse than other times in life? And can we start to anticipate that instead of treating it as I'm getting worse versus better? Like, you know, I used to be really good, but now it's worse. Like, six months ago, I was better. Ah, it's falling apart again. Is this part of your rhythm? Is it that we're getting into the holidays? We're getting close to that anniversary? It's that, you know, you're. You were doing great because you were in summer break, right? But now you're in school and you've got finals, and that anxiety is starting to rise. Or now you're, you know, now baseball is in season. So, you know, you got games coming up, and there's the performance element of it. Right. So something to think about as you kind of move forward in this. And how do we treat yourself? With compassion and understanding and acceptance. As you resist compulsive behavior. As you continue to resist going well overboard in the things that are completely unnecessary and doing all right. So enough of my yammering. Let's get on to Callie's question. So Callie says, I've suffered with OCD with numerous themes throughout my life. They were all frustrating and annoying, but I was able to manage. A year ago or so, I developed so O. Ocd. So sexual orientation ocd, which was soon accompanied by rocd, relationship OC and T ocd, transgender ocd. We haven't done a lot on that, plus the occasional magical thinking ocd. Through therapy and through proper medication, it has become more or much more manageable. My question, though, is, why does it feel so real? Sexual orientation OCD convinced me that I was a lesbian, parenthetically, she says, even though I didn't want to touch women in that way. She goes on to say, and this really put a damper on my heterosexual relationship. I've been. Oh, I've been. Or the relationship that I've been in for eight years. I still find myself going back to soocd themes and wondering if it's OCD or not. All other themes have calmed down, but so OCD lingers. The other ones pop up from time to time, but I pretty much know how to handle them. Any advice? Thank you. All right, Callie, thank you so much for this question. Again, this is a really good question and a question that pretty much every person who comes through this office asks at some point. So I wanted to just spend a little bit of time talking today about why anxiety and OCD feels real and what we can do about it. So, first off, so it feels real because it is real. That's What I got for you, Have a good day. Wouldn't that be terrible if that's how I ended the episode and I just said all your fears are real. Good day. Ugh, I'd be the worst. I just want to try it one more time. OCD feels real because it is real. All right, again, another. Another terrible ending. I shouldn't do this, but I have access to things, so I'm going to try them anyways. All right. It. All right, so I'm going to say it again, though, because the joke is also kind of the fact. OCD feels real because it is real in a way, but not all the ways that anxiety wants you to think. All right, let me explain. Okay, so we have this fight or flight system, right? We've heard about fight, flight, or freeze, right? In response to a danger, perceived danger or something like that, we go into fight, flight, or freeze responses, right? This is our sympathetic nervous system kicking up, and it's a great. It's a wonderful biological thing that we have, and it gets us really activated towards something, right? If there's a danger, we want to be prepared to fight whatever the thing is that's coming to run away or we freeze, right? We kind of. Well, you get the idea. We freeze right? Now, there's a lot of reasons why we do those, and I'm not going to get into all those things, but what's happening in the sense of danger is that. Is that into our amygdala goes these thoughts or goes into the experiences. What's kicked out is this anxiety. And we get this just huge release of various chemicals into our system that create this fight, flight, or freeze response. Now it's going to be this, like, life or death response so that we can live, right? But through this process, and eventually through this process, I'll say the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in and calms those systems down. Our body and our brain don't like to be at heightened anxiety for an extended period of time. So we have another natural process that brings all of this down. For some people, it comes down faster. For some people, it comes down a lot slower. But the point is, it will come down, and you've heard me talk about that a bajillion times. It will come down. We need to give it the time for it to come down and not show ourselves that it's going to come down because we did compulsive behaviors. But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. Okay, so there's this interaction between our brain and our body. And our anxiety. Okay, so we have. I've heard it said before and I've said it here before, is that. And I referenced it just a moment ago, our amygdala doesn't care whether or not the danger is imagined real. Into the amygdala go those things, and out of it spits the same anxiety, the same feelings in various levels or whatever it may be, but we still feel it because we are having a feared and fight or flight response to it. But two either imagined situations or two real situations. So we can practice this. Maybe not with fear necessarily, but we'll try. We can also practice this with the way that we just imagine something. We can feel it physically, so we can have a physiological response to something. So I want to go through this little exercise and, you know, if you are. If you are driving, don't close your eyes. If you're at the gym, don't close your eyes. But, you know, imagine this happening. So I want you to imagine that you're holding a lemon, all right? I'm going to presume y' all have seen a lemon and know what they're like. If you haven't seen a lemon before, this is just not going to work. But I'll do another exercise in just a moment. So we're going to imagine this lemon, okay? So imagine holding it, right? You feel the weight of it in your hand. You know, it's not too light, it's not too heavy. You can kind of squeeze it just a little bit, right? You can have, you know, feel it, the skin on it give a little bit, right? There might be a different texture between, you know, the skin and feeling the kind of the flesh of it inside, right? You feel the skin on the outside, maybe, you know, smooth or bumpy or kind of, you know, a combination of the two. Now, now that you've done this, I want you to imagine you grab this knife and you're going to take it and you're going to gently cut that. That lemon open. You're going to open it up, okay? So now imagine looking at this, the. The flesh inside that lemon, right? You can see it's kind of, you know, it's kind of shiny because it's wet and all this stuff, right? And I want you to take that and I want you to bring it up to your nose in your mind's eye, mine's nose, anyways, and pull it up and smell, right? So you can kind of smell. It's tart. It has that, like, fresh smell that we associate with, okay? So you're doing that. All right, so now I also want you to imagine taking your tongue, sticking it out, and putting your tongue directly on the flesh of it and doing a big giant lick, right? Imagine what that's like. Now notice what you feel. Notice how is your body responding for some. You may be experiencing a little bit of saliva built up, right? I'm kind of experiencing that now as I'm even describing it. You may, like, as you were imagining kind of squishing the lemon, you might have felt something kind of in your fingertips, as it were, right? You kind of, your hands know what that sensation is like, so you kind of felt it in a way, right? But as you were smelling it, and as you were smelling it, you might have experienced something very similar to smelling the lemon or having associations with smelling it. And as you licked it, you might have gotten that, like, tangy like that. I don't know what that feeling is, but like that tang in your neck feeling, maybe that's just me. Or you might have experienced some salivating, right? So that's kind of a weird experience because I assume y' all didn't have a lemon in front of you to actually do this with, but you just simply imagined it. And as you imagined it, your body had a reaction to it. And that is part of the way how our brain responds to fear and how we can experience it and how OCD feels so real, because it is real, but it's imagined, right? Your body had a real reaction when you were imagining the lemon, but you didn't have a real lemon in front of you right? Now, similarly, we can do this by imagining another one of your fears, right? So this may not be a fear for everybody, but, you know, if you're sitting in a chair or in your car or something like that, I want you to imagine that like a medium sized spider just started to, you know, jump on your foot and just kind of crawl up, right? It's not a big enough spider, so you can like really feel it. You just kind of know that it's there, right? And it's moving ever so slowly, and then it starts moving closer towards your ankle, closer and closer. And then it moves, like quickly and slow. Like, you know, it has that kind of erratic spider motion that happens sometimes. Right? Now, for some of you out there who have a fear of spiders, you might now all of a sudden be noticing a feeling in your body, maybe that pit in your stomach, that tightness in your chest. You might have felt an urge to move your foot, right? You might have Even moved it, just instinctually, right? Or you might have had a sensation in your foot, maybe not an urge, but like a sense of a presence of something there on your foot, like an awareness of your foot. Right where you imagined that spider, right? This is again another way that our brain can start to imagine and start. Well, as we imagine something, our body will start to manifest sensations, awareness, or even urges. And some of you out there may have even followed through on that urge and kind of shook your leg a little bit to like shake the spider off or something. Right? Even though there was no spider on your foot. Right? Now, this also happens with sexual content, sexual thoughts, right? So what we're having, when we imagine sexual thoughts, whether it is of a. A sexual image of something that we are interested or not interested in, our brain recognizes it as sexually relevant content, sexually relevant information. Right? Now our body then has this awesome way of responding to sexually relevant thoughts. So when that happens, we may start to feel a sensation in our groin. We may even start to feel hot or feel tingling in other areas of our body. Right? But certainly our attention might go towards our groin and we might start to. Or other erogenous zones on our body and start to feel sensations there again, whether or not it's an image of something that you have desired in the past. Right? And they've done some super fun research on this, and I'm not going to get into that at this time, but that's one of the ways that our brain and our body are connected in the. The best and most terrible way. Right? So now you've heard me describe this before. As, you know, we've talked about thought action fusion before. It's that connection where it's as if we've, you know, we have a thought and we experience it as if we have actually already done it. Right? So sometimes we can feel the guilt or the responsibility or shame of having imagined something. Sometimes the thought action fusion can be, you know, having a thought and then believing that the more we have that thought, the more likely it is to actually happen. That's another way it manifests. But with this. This is also how I've said, you know, all chick flicks work and all horror movies work. When you're sitting in that movie theater and you're watching whatever that movie is, you're not in the movie, you're watching it, you're sitting back and you're just seeing various, you know, overpaid actors do stuff on screen and they may be running from a bad guy, they may be falling in Love with somebody and we may feel what they're feeling, right? This is how jump scares work, right? If you didn't feel lovey dovey feelings watching a chick flick and having them fall in love or do that, meet cute or running and meet each other and hug each other at the airport terminal or whatever it is, which is a thing you used to be able to do back in the day, by the way, for all you youngsters out there. Anyways, so. But with like horror movies, you're not in danger, though you may feel tense and have that response. If you are in danger, you're not. You're not. And you're not falling in love with that other actor. You're not. You're just imagining it. Do you know what we call movies that you watch? Love love stories or horror movies or thriller movies that you don't get that response to. We call them bad movies. That was a bad movie. Why? Felt nothing. But if you paid good money to go into a movie to be terrified, you said that was a good movie. I felt like I was gonna die. I felt like someone was gonna go murder me. It was great, right? We're ridiculous people. Anyways, point is, we have this reaction now for all of you out there and Callie, you included. Now you can imagine your worst fear happening, right? So for somebody, you can imagine having your house broken into, hearing the sounds of glass breaking or that lock somehow unlocking and the door opening in the middle of the night, having your children kidnapped, having somebody show up like this may be producing some, you know, a sense of fear, a sense of anxiety for some people, right? You can even think about, you know, going to the, going to the bathroom and like touching the taps or something like that, or just even touching the door and, you know, touching some, you know, weird substance or, you know, some unknown substance that, you know, imagining now that thing getting into your skin and somehow causing you disease and you spreading that to your family. I mean, that might produce anxiety for some people. Imagining blaspheming against God. Just having a thought about it, feeling that responsibility as if you've actually done it. I mean, that sense of abandonment, that sense of loss, and that mental image about spending an eternity in hell, that might all produce this worry. And from all those things, you may kind of like that spider example, feel the urge to do something about it, right? So you may have felt that urge to, like, I gotta go check the doors, right? You may even feel what it's like to click that door. And you. Like sometimes we, you know, when we're going through and like clicking locks and whatnot, we're trusting that feeling, right? We're looking for that feeling. So you may feel that in your hand as I'm talking about it, you may feel the urge to wash, right? As I'm describing that, you know, the sink scenario, you may have the desire, the urge to wash, or from other people, you know, if they're imagining, you know, having a blasphemous thought, they might not be engaging actively in that blasphemous thought, but all the subsequent images or feelings of loss that might be producing in them this kind of urge, this desire to pray as their response to it. Now, similarly, Callie, for you, it's the that if you imagine that you're gay and then imagining that upending everything you believe about yourself or putting you on this trajectory in life that you didn't want, that might make you feel really uncomfortable. Now, I don't know why it is that that story is, but I want to talk about that in just a minute. So we've talked a little bit about this thought action fusion and this brain and body reaction or interaction, rather. Now I also want to talk about how these things can then be amplified by other psychological characteristics. So one, the more time we think about something, the more we're going to think about that thing. All right? So I've heard it said, the more we think about it, the more we think about it, right? So it's maybe a silly thing, but it's like you may be thinking more about, I don't know, if you're going to buy a car, you think a lot about a specific type of car, and you start seeing it everywhere, right? That's a different effect. Perhaps, you know, another way, a more specific way is the Tetris effect. If you've never heard about that, look it up. It's this thing where if you play Tetris, the game Tetris a lot, you may start to then see it everywhere, start to imagine it, or start to go to that place of thinking about it more and more. If you think about work a lot in your downtime, you're probably going to think about your work and your downtime, right? Let me rephrase that better. If you think about your work a lot and you're stressing about work and you've got a lot of work going on, then when you're in your downtime and you're bored, your brain might think about work, right? Think about anything that you think about a lot, your brain's gonna go There, right? I've heard John Hirschfeld talk about this. He said your brain doesn't know you have ocd. Your brain just knows that you think about this thing a lot. So it goes, gosh, Callie loves to think about her sexual orientation a lot. So I don't know, let's give her more of that, right? It's not what you asked for, it's not what you wanted, but it's what's happening because you think about it a lot. So your brain goes, I guess we're going to think about it a lot. And I guess you like to think about it because you think about it. So here you go, mazel tov. I don't know what I'm saying, but point is that that's, that's kind of one of the processes that happen. Another thing that can influence the increase of this is having an overestimation of risk. Right? Now, one thing that you can look into is cognitive distortions and the ways that our brain tend to skew our perception of things. And one of the ways is an overestimation of risk in whatever that thing is or the likelihood of this danger actually happening to you. The more faulty beliefs you have, the more distorted thoughts you have, the more that you are likely to buy into the legitimacy of that thought when it is there. When you buy into the legitimacy of that thought, you are going to respond to it either through thought or through action more and more and more. Another thing that can increase this is family or cultural narratives about specific dangers, right? So if you have a belief that being gay is sin or is bad or is rejectable or is worthy of criticism or negativity, or it is going to uproot your life, then the narrative is this is more of a danger than something else, right? If you grew up in a family where everybody talked about like speaking in public or interrupting other people in public was just awful, and we don't do that, right? You're going to learn that that's normal, that's expected, so there is a danger involved with that. Furthermore, historical trauma can influence this. Right? I'll address that in just a minute as well. But if you have a situation in your past that has triggered, that has caused pain or anxiety or discomfort or fear or whatever, it might be a traumatic event, that will increase the likelihood that you're going to think about this. Lastly, reinforcement through compulsion. We know that OCD is a self reinforcing cycle. The more that you give into compulsion. And this is why we keep harping on getting rid of Compulsions, the more you think about them, the more you do them, the more you engage with them and the more that you use them to solve the anxiety, the more you've given a neutral thought, a nonsense thought, credence and credibility through this action and effort and then getting that relief at the end of it, the conspiring of all of that will increase the follow through, the urge to do that again when this nonsense thought arose, arises again. All right, so. All right, so I hope that answers your question into like why it is that this thought emerges more why it is that, you know, OCD feels real. It feels real because it is real. You are having a legitimate biological physiological response, but to something that is purely imagined. And that's really what we're trying to do is to separate the story, the thought from what your body is experiencing. Right. That's where we talk about diffusion from your thoughts and simply observing your bodily's response while observing also your surroundings. Right. What is actually happened versus what your body is responding to. Right. If you are in a movie theater and watching that scary movie and you become very aware of your surroundings. Right. It pulls you out of the movie. Movie. Right. Good in that instance. Right. Or bad in that instance, if you really want to be into it. But we have that then separation from the stimulus that's in front of you that is not actually happening to you to what's actually happening in real life, which is nothing. You sitting in a movie theater or in this instance, it's going to be you having that feeling. But remember, we can remember your body is having that feeling. It has that reaction to imagined situations. And of course we know it's going to happen and we can expect it, we can anticipate it right through that. All right, so lastly, you also asked another question which I'm just going to answer very briefly and hopefully it's helpful. So why does sexual orientation, OCD linger? Well, to a certain degree I would want to know what the feared story is and what your compulsions are. Right. So we've already talked about minimizing or reducing or eliminating compulsions. We all know that that's going to be part of it. But what's the feared story associated with sexual orientation ocd? The ICBT folks would, would be asking, what do you, what does that thought leave you particularly vulnerable to? Right. What is like, what is the danger involved with that? What does it feel like you, you are particularly susceptible to? And it might be this, you know, the outcome of family rejection or, you know, uprooting or upending the course of your life or that you just simply don't know yourself. And that seems really scary to. So there's a lot of that. The Greenberg idea would be, you know, what are you. What is the feeling that you have in relation to that thought? That if you don't give into your compulsion, what feeling are you going to have to live with an experience forever? And it goes further in depth to that. But maybe that is something that is particularly sensitive to you. Right. You know, I would want to know, like, why is this of particular value to you? Why is it that, you know, needing, quote, needing to be straight or needing to. To know your sexuality, the fullness of your sexuality, when you told me you have a great relationship and you love this partner and you want to be with them, and you don't think about women in a, you know, ego syntonic way. Why is this thought so dangerous to you? And exploring a little bit of that will help to kind of illuminate why it is that this keeps holding on to you. Right. And again, a specific trauma from the past can also contribute to this thought being more dangerous. Now, I'm not saying all OCD is caused by trauma. I know there are people out there who have that perspective. I don't. I know that. I. Some of. I know that because of my experience talking with people, sometimes their fears are activated or triggered by or are influenced by traumatic events from their childhood. But again, they can have traumatic events that don't turn into OCD obsessions. They can have, you know, quote, minorly traumatic things that result in their big thing, or they can have bigger traumas in their life. And ultimately it's not this one to one relationship. Right. So they can influence. But that's something to be aware of. Lastly, I'll say, why is it that this OCD obsession is lingering? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know why this one does. Why is it that any of these show up? Why is it that anybody has any particular one? I don't have that answer. Right. But one thing that you can do is to anticipate it. You can know that it's going to show up from time to time. You've had this before, right? You've heard me say, like, oh, I've seen this movie before, right? What that ultimately means is like, you know, if you. If you started watching a movie and you started, you got like 10 minutes in and you're like, oh, I know what's happening. I've seen this before. You probably wouldn't sit there and go, let me watch it again to make sure it's going to end the same way. You would turn it off and go like, well, let's go to the next one. Like, you know, we, the Mrs. And I are watching Parks and Rec again. She got me Parks and Rec, Parks and Recreation, the TV show on DVD a couple years ago for Christmas. So we're just, you know, we put in the dvd and at night we just watch an episode or two. You know, if we watched an episode the night before, and then all of a sudden I, you know, I forgot what episode we're on. And I click on something and. And it starts to play the cold open. And like, I've seen that before, and it feels very familiar to me. I know it, right? I would remind myself, we already saw this. Now, it might be entertaining to watch it again, but I'd rather watch the next episode. So I'm not going to sit and watch the entirety of the episode, because what if it's different this time? It's going to pretty much. It's going to be the same, right? On the dvd. It's going to be the same. Callie, for your fear, it's probably the same. It's the same general story, right? So you've seen this movie before, You've seen the show before you know it. Why spend more time on it? To that end, you can remind yourself that this is old news, right? We're not going to treat it as if it's new and dangerous. It's the same thing you fought with and struggled with and obsessed about and done endless compulsions to and for and because of. It's old news. So when it pops up, you go, oh, yeah, this thing again. Back to the top of the show. Remember my reference to anxiety about giving talks? It's old news. I've seen this before. I've had this anxiety for giving talks for literally decades. And when it shows up, I go, oh, yeah, I know this story. All right, I'm gonna go throw my career away. Here we go. And I go, literally, I was talking to a friend of mine who we're going to try to present at another conference coming up soon. And we both said, let's go throw our careers away. Right? She shares that fear, as do I. Do I want it to happen? No. Is it possible? Sure. But it's part of our rhythm. We know that thought's going to be there, Callie. You know that thought's going to show up from time to time. But let's not treat it like now it's new or now it's special because it ain't so. All right, Callie, you've heard me yammer on enough. Thank you so much for indulging me. Thank you everybody else out there in podcast land, on YouTube land, or wherever you're seeing this, or hearing this for that matter. All you aliens in space who are listening to this thousands of years in the future because it finally got to you as it was projected out, or if you found this in some time capsule somewhere in 2750 and all of us are dead, I hope you are doing well. I hope things are better because things are weird here, but I hope they're better there. Anyways, until next time, everybody, take a risk, challenge yourself, and don't take your brain too seriously. Bye. Thank you for listening to the Fearcast. If you would like your question answered on a future episode, please click on the submitted question link@fearcastpodcast.com if you would like your question answered sooner, please send me a recording of your question to questionsearchercastpodcast.com or by sending me an audio message through Instagram by dming me @fearcastpodcast on Instagram. If you like the Fearcast, please write a review on your podcast platform of choice. Please remember that the Fearcast does not substitute for psychotherapy. If you need a little bit of help in your recovery, please go over to fearcastpodcast.com and click on the Find Help link and there's going to be some information for you there. So until next time, take a risk, challenge yourself, and don't take your break too seriously.