What is up daddy gang? It is your founding father Alex Cooper with call her daddy Dr. Julie Smith is a clinical psychologist online educator and author of the book,

why has nobody told me this before?

Today's episode is about anxiety, a feeling we all experience at some point in our lives and I'm really

excited to speak with you today. Welcome to call her daddy. I'm really happy to be here.

So let's just start with the basics. How do you define anxiety? Okay, so anxiety is that

feeling you get when your stress response is switched on. So all the time your brain is looking out for

signals that you might not be safe or things might not be okay. And so your

brain's job is you know, well we kind of think these days our brain's job is to keep us happy, it's not, it's to keep us alive. So your brain is constantly searching for any kind of signs that all is not well and its job is to let you know whenever it detects any kind of signs that that you might be under threat to kind of gear your body up to move and do something about that really, really quickly. And anxiety is that feeling that we get when our body is gearing up for action. So you get your kind of pounding heart, like you feel like your heart's going to burst through your

chest sometimes don't you or you feel like the butterflies in your tummy feeling or you feel sick

and you might tremble and your muscles might start to kind of really shake even and lots of people get like a dry mouth as well or

find it hard to swallow and all of those things are kind of different symptoms of the fact that your

body is working really hard to gear up so that you can either fight this threat off or run out of there or freeze and whatever it is you need to do.

So yeah, it's just that feeling that we get.

The way do you just describe those feelings too,

I'm like, oh my God, you did them so accurately,

I'm starting to get anxiety thinking about the symptoms.

I'm like, oh my God. Oh my God. Something I've seen on social media that I think is really interesting is the concept of being introverted and someone canceling plans because they don't want to leave their house and they're introverted verse having social anxiety of cancelling plans.

Can you describe the difference and also is there any connection of do introverts have

social anxiety?

Interverts can have social anxiety just like anybody else, but extroverts can as well.

So, you know, social anxiety, we would generally associate with a sort of fear of being around other people and fear of social interactions and often that involves that kind of very inward focus is sort of a worry about how am I coming across are people judging me Am I getting this wrong? There would be lots of sort of anticipatory anxiety leading up to some sort of social event and then afterwards they might come away thinking, oh God I said the wrong thing. I must have come across terrible then. I wish I'd not said that and you kind of berate yourself and it becomes this kind of cycle of anxiety that makes you avoid social interaction. Whereas, you know, introversion, extra version is a description of personality

traits where somebody might, for example, with introversion, people often maybe prefer to be alone or they find being alone

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