Dr. David Rosmarin

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139 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard May 2025

Dr. David Rosmarin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Mel Robbins Podcast · The Secret to Stopping Anxiety & Fear (That Actually Works) · 26 May 2025 podcast

And then you're ruminating about all the stuff that you said that you shouldn't have said because you're a little bit tipsy.

Great. So let's just say these hands have been in many places that I will not tell you about. Today? Not today. Not today. Don't worry. And I do wash my hands before I eat. But before washing my hands and before eating, you'd be surprised where these go. Because part of being an anxiety therapist means you have to do everything that your patients do also.

Okay, so I'm thinking of a specific patient who came in who was terrified of germs and for many years had been avoiding all sorts of situations.

Really wouldn't open car doors, certainly wouldn't ride the subway, and was at one point putting gloves on their hands, lots of Purell, lots of excessive washing, had actually had very significant chafing, even needed some medical treatments in order to be able to deal with abrasions on their hands from all the washing. And

Really, we started with touching things that would make them feel uncomfortable. Started with things in the office. It could have been as simple as this desk surface. It could have been things that, you know, in the bathroom would be next.

And eventually moving towards the inside of a toilet bowl or things that are way over the top that you wouldn't normally do in order for them to develop the resilience to stand up to their anxiety head on.

The first step is always the same, which is do you want to do this? Once somebody wants to face their anxiety and build their resilience, by deliberately putting themselves in an anxiety-provoking situation, like once you catch the bug, like once you want to do it, there's nothing that'll stop you.

So we prep people beforehand. They will think, I can't do this. I'm not going to be able to handle this. My anxiety is going to spike. I'm going to get sick. All of those thoughts are going to be rocketing through your head because that's what facing anxiety entails. That's part of the process. And that is exactly why it's an opportunity to build emotional resilience.

Often we see a significant drop in anxiety even after once or twice from doing it, but sometimes it does require many, many more repetitions. In some ways, it depends on how long they've been avoiding situations. If people have been avoiding germs and microbes and all sorts of things for decades, it might take a while for them to get through it.

But it's kind of like a mortgage, like eventually you pay it off.

When we push kids to do things that they don't want to do, there's a balance. And helping scaffold kids that they want to do it, selling them on it, so to speak, onboarding. We talk about onboarding kids, onboarding teens. Once somebody recognizes this will help build my resilience, this will help make me a stronger emotional person, then they're like, okay, I'm in.

And at a certain point with planes, you might be there too. Like, you know what? I want to do this. I don't want this to get in my way in any way. I want to be more fearless in my life. Just like you want to learn how to pump iron or be able to run a marathon or run at a certain time pace or whatever it is. We all have our fitness goals. And I think we should also have our emotional goals.

We don't have that.

Thank you.

It takes so much of the edge off as opposed to giving me more of a reason to be anxious about my anxiety. It normalizes and makes it so much more manageable. It's just a different, that different framework. It's kind of like having glasses that are like a different color. It just changes the whole view of everything around you. And by the way, it's not just the parents and the teachers.

It actually comes from the medical profession. Something crazy happened last summer. Something very unfortunate. What happened?

Well, there was a federally funded panel of physicians in the United States who came up with, I think it was in some ways, I think it was well-intended and I think it was a good idea to screen all patients at their annual PCP visits, primary care physician visits, for anxiety.

Now, I have no problems with screening people for anxiety, but the way it's done, well, the recommendation was to use the GAD-2, which is a two-item measure. It asks how much anxiety have you had in the last two weeks and how much worry have you had in the last two weeks.

Well, the cutoff, who's going to say zero to any of those questions? Right. The cutoff was set at a zero, which means any modicum of anxiety or stress over the last two weeks is actually enough to flag a person today in their PCP office for clinical anxiety and treatment. What?

It's the latter, but it's actually both. We are definitely over-diagnosing lower levels of human stress and anxiety as a pathology, as opposed to something normal. I agree with you. Who have you met in the last two weeks who have had no anxiety and no worry?

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