#51: The Psychologist's Guide to Welcoming Anxiety and Transforming Your Life with Dr. Alissa Jerud

What if everything you've been told about managing anxiety is making it worse? What if the kindest thing you can do for your kids — or yourself — is to stop trying to fix the feeling?

Dr. Alissa Jerud is a psychologist, Penn faculty member, and author of Emotion Savvy Parenting. She specialises in anxiety disorders, OCD, PTSD, and emotional regulation, using her ART framework — Accept, Regulate, Tolerate — to help people build a fundamentally different relationship with discomfort.

In this conversation, Frank and Alissa explore why our instinct to soothe anxiety is the very thing that sustains it — and what it looks like to actually let it be.

Topics covered: - Why anxiety misfires — and why that doesn't make it your enemy - The exposure therapy process: what 10–20 sessions really look like - The "fly at the picnic" analogy that reframes everything about acceptance - Why popular anxiety advice in the media is doing more harm than good - How Alissa's own parenting struggles transformed her clinical practice - What it means to be the "rock" for your kids without fixing their emotions

---

Emotion Savvy Parenting — Available here: https://www.amazon.com/Emotion-Savvy-Parenting-Alissa-Jerud/dp/1032544945 Learn more at: alissajerud.com

---

Mindform is an exclusive membership platform that gives you access to an ever-expanding toolkit for mental mastery and a community of passionate psychitects. Apply to join Mindform or get the free Psychitect's Toolkit at https://mindform.io/podcast