The One Anxiety Recovery Skill I Am Doubling Down On | Ep. 413

In this episode, Kimberly Quinlan shares the transformative anxiety recovery skill of embracing all emotions and offers practical strategies to help you reduce fear and build emotional resilience.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why avoiding emotions like shame, anger, or guilt can intensify anxiety.
• The simple mindset shift that turns uncomfortable emotions into growth opportunities.
• Practical steps to create a safe and compassionate space for your emotions.
• How to identify emotional avoidance patterns and replace them with healthier habits.
• Tools to build emotional mastery and foster long-term resilience.
• The key to reducing fear and reclaiming peace in your daily life.

Mastering Anxiety: The One Skill You Need to Double Down On

When it comes to anxiety recovery, there’s one core skill that can transform how you navigate challenging emotions and experiences. It’s simple, yet powerful: being willing to feel all emotions and make space for them.

This article will guide you through why this skill is critical, how avoiding emotions increases anxiety, and practical steps to help you embrace this transformative practice.

Why Facing Emotions is Crucial for Anxiety Recovery

Many people think anxiety is purely about external triggers—like social interactions, flying, or making mistakes. However, anxiety often stems from a deeper fear of experiencing certain emotions.

For example:

• Social anxiety might not just be about public interactions but the fear of feeling embarrassment or shame.
• Panic disorder often isn’t about flying or being in certain places but about the sensations of panic that arise in those situations.
• Perfectionism might not be about high standards but about avoiding the emotions of failure or inadequacy.

The key takeaway? Avoiding emotions leads to more anxiety and fear. Learning to accept and make space for emotions reduces this cycle of fear and gives you a sense of freedom.

Step One: Allow All Emotions

The first step to mastering your anxiety is radical acceptance of all emotions.
Ask yourself: Are there emotions I avoid or refuse to feel?
Common emotions people fear include:

• Shame
• Anger
• Guilt
• Disgust

When you reject emotions, you’re constantly on edge, fearing the moment they might show up. But if you allow emotions to come and go without judgment, they lose their power over you.

Step Two: Shift Your Mindset

When uncomfortable emotions arise, try flipping the script. Instead of seeing them as something to avoid, think of them as an opportunity for growth.

For example:

• Feeling shame after a mistake? See it as a chance to practice self-compassion.
• Feeling anger during a conflict? View it as an opportunity to explore your boundaries and values.

Step Three: Build Emotional Mastery

Emotional mastery doesn’t mean eliminating emotions. It means responding to them with kindness and care. Here’s how:

1. Pause when an uncomfortable emotion arises.
2. Acknowledge the emotion without judgment (e.g., “I’m feeling anger right now.”).
3. Ask yourself: What do I need in this moment?
   • Is it a calming breath?
   • A supportive conversation with a friend?
   • A reminder that emotions are temporary?

Practical Strategies for Emotional Mastery

Here are some tools to help you work through challenging emotions:

• Create a Safe Space for Emotions
  Imagine wrapping yourself in a warm bubble of kindness when emotions feel overwhelming. Remind yourself: “I am safe to feel this.”
• Be Curious About Your Patterns
  Reflect on moments when you’ve avoided emotions. What didn’t work? What could you do differently?
• Practice Self-Compassion
  If you tend to criticize yourself when emotions like shame or embarrassment arise, challenge that inner critic. Replace harsh words with gentle ones, like:
  • “It’s okay to make mistakes. I’m human.”
  • “I am doing my best, and that’s enough.”
• Lean Into Discomfort
  If you feel tempted to avoid or numb emotions, pause and ask:
  • “What can I learn from this feeling?”
  • “How can I grow from this experience?”

Why This Skill Matters

By committing to allowing all emotions, you reduce the power they hold over you. This doesn’t just help with anxiety recovery—it fosters self-acceptance and builds resilience.

Kimberly Quinlan, anxiety specialist and host of Your Anxiety Toolkit, shares that this practice has transformed her life and her work with clients. By leaning into emotions like shame or anger instead of avoiding them, you create room for personal growth and healing.

Final Thoughts

Anxiety recovery isn’t about erasing fear or discomfort; it’s about changing your relationship with emotions. The next time you feel the pull to avoid, remember: each emotion is an opportunity to grow stronger and kinder to yourself. It’s a beautiful day to do hard things.

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Transcription: The one anxiety recovery skill I am doubling down on

There is one anxiety recovery skill that I am doubling down on, and I am here to take you along the ride with me. Hopefully, you sign up for this as well. There’s nothing actually to sign up for. But I want you to think about how empowering this is going to be for your anxiety recovery and double down on this alongside me.

Hello, my name is Kimberly Quinlan. I’m an anxiety specialist, and welcome to Your Anxiety Toolkit. This is a podcast where we talk about compassionately managing anxiety, getting you back to living the life that you want to live.

Now, I talk about all kinds of skills on Your Anxiety Toolkit, but this is the one thing I’m doubling down on personally. I know so many skills. I know all the strategies. I’ve done a lot of therapy, and I have come to a place where I have realized that there is one main core strategy that I want to practice every day to bring home my recovery. And that is this: my goal from here on out—and has been for a while, and this is why I say it’s very much benefited me, and why I’m talking about it—the one thing I want to double down on is to be able to have any or all of the emotions, give myself permission to have them, and make space for every single one of them. That there is no emotion I am not willing to feel.

So often, when I’m treating clients, when I am seeing severe anxiety disorders, it’s not just the social anxiety and the health anxiety and the panic disorder. That’s not what I’m treating. Often what I’m treating is their fear of an emotion. Let’s break it down. Let’s say they have social anxiety. It’s not always that they’re afraid of social interactions. It’s often that they’re afraid of the emotion of embarrassment or humiliation or shame.

When I’m treating panic disorder, it’s often not that they’re actually afraid of flying. They might be afraid to fly because they’re afraid of feeling the sensations of panic. When I had an eating disorder, it wasn’t so much that I was specifically afraid of gaining weight. I was afraid of having to feel unlovable, or less than, or feelings of disgust.

So what I’m realizing here, especially as I continue to fine-tune my skills as an expert, is with anxiety disorders, there is a feared situation, place, or thing, but there is a feared emotion alongside that. And one thing we can do universally is to get really good at having all the emotions.

So again, my goal is to have radical acceptance for all the emotions and commit to mastering all of these emotions. Now, one thing I can guarantee you is if you are afraid of any of these specific emotions—anxiety, sadness, anger, shame, guilt, disgust—if you’ve decided they’re emotions that you refuse to feel, I can guarantee you will have immense anxiety in your life. You will feel not at peace with yourself because you’re constantly afraid of when those emotions might show up.

However, if we can flip the switch on that or flip the script on that, what we can do is to say, anytime an emotion shows up that I don’t like, it is an opportunity for me to continue my mission to master that emotion.

Now, what does that mean? For me, it doesn’t mean that I master it by making it go away. It’s that I master it by unconditionally rubbing myself, like completely surrounding myself with warmth and love and kindness in the presence of that emotion. One of the emotions that I used to struggle with the most was anger. I used to have a lot of anxiety about anger. I used to feel a lot of judgment around anger.

What I found is anytime I went to have an argument with my husband or a conflict in my daily life, I would have the conflict and the anxiety because I was afraid of the anger that would show up. Anytime that I would be in public and I felt ashamed, I was noticing again, it wasn’t the public thing. I was pretty comfortable public speaking, but I was completely on my knees around feeling shame. I had built no mastery on the emotion of shame.

And so what I’ve been trying to do for about almost a year is, as those emotions show up, I pause and I go, okay, this is an emotion that I have pretty repetitively tried to avoid. That’s not working anymore. How can I lean into this emotion in those moments? What is it specifically that I need? We’re thinking, I want you to think like long-term effective skills.

What is it that I need when I feel anger or anxiety? What is sustainable and helpful to me as I feel it? Is it reaching out to a friend? Is it identifying errors in thinking? Is it taking a breath? Is it saying kind things? Is it saying encouraging things? Is it slowing down? Is it speeding up? We have to be able to identify, number one, the emotions that we’ve been running away from, and turn around and lean into them, and ask ourselves some difficult but very important questions. What do I need? What have I done in the past, and has that not worked? What could I do differently? Am I willing to take some risks and feel some uncertainty while I trial and experiment with other options?

Now, this is profound work, you guys, and what it involves is really doubling down on how kind you are. What I have found with my patients and clients, and with myself, is one of the reasons that people don’t want to feel specific emotions is because, number one, the emotion is uncomfortable. Absolutely. But number two is they’re afraid of how much they’re going to beat themselves up when that event happens.

Let’s use embarrassment or humiliation as an example. So you’ve embarrassed yourself. You’ve said something that you wished you didn’t say. All humans do it. It’s not like you’re the only human on the planet who is, you know, doomed with making a mistake. But when you make a mistake, then you go in hard with the whip. You’re whipping yourself on what an idiot you are, how you’re so stupid, and no one else does this.

So often it’s not just the embarrassment, it’s that you’re afraid of how poorly you’re going to treat yourself while you feel that feeling. So, the piece here in how we again commit to feeling all the feelings is we also commit to creating this lovely warm bubble around us while we feel the feeling. When somebody doesn’t like me, which happens a lot, I give them permission not to like me. And then I sit so kindly with myself. I’m like, “Mm-hmm, yep, not my favorite feeling. But they get to not like me. They get to disagree. They get to misunderstand me. Maybe I made a mistake.” And I am going to be the safest place to allow that emotion to rise and fall until it burns off.

It might take minutes, hours, or even days in some situations for it to get a little less painful and prickly. But am I willing to try that? Now, you don’t have to do this. You don’t. However, before you turn this podcast off and you’re like, “Yeah, no, that’s a good idea, but it’s not for me,” I want you to think about what you’re currently doing and how is that working out for you? I want you to do a little bit of an analysis of the pros and cons.

And my guess is the way that you’re running away from emotions is causing more pain than it is preventing. For me, I had to, a real-life example, I’ll give you a personal example: when I’m having a discussion with my husband and shame shows up, I often move into being defensive. Sometimes I get a little blamey and a little just mean. He’s trying to share with me something that hurt him, and I can’t hear it because I’m refusing to allow shame to be present in this conversation. So I stop and I pause and I say, “Okay, can I change this? Because what I’m doing is creating more pain.” I’m being defensive. Then we have an argument and it only gets worse from there.

So do an evaluation and see if that’s something that might be helpful for you.

That’s it, you guys. That’s what I want you to work on. That is the major anxiety recovery skill I’m doubling down on because life is scary. Let’s work at not having emotions be one of the things you’re afraid of.

Have a beautiful day. As always, it’s a beautiful day to do hard things.

Please note that this podcast or any other resources from CBTSchool.com should not replace professional mental health care. If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day, and thank you for supporting CBTSchool.com.