Are you a little more stressed than usual? Or maybe you’re even facing a drastic situation like an illness or job loss? In this episode Trent sits down with Catholic therapist Dr. Greg Popcak to learn some ways to overcome stress and anxiety.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Are you feeling a little bit stressed out more than usual? I know I am. We’re enduring a pandemic, government restrictions on our movements, kids jumping up and down at the house, always wanting our attention, some of us working from home, trying to balance that along with the usual stresses that we have with daily life, but do not fear. We’ve got a great guest on today to help us to overcome stress and anxiety from a Catholic perspective. Before we get to that though, I want to give a big shout out and thanks to our premium subscribers at trenthornpodcast.com. You guys are awesome. You make the podcast possible, and because of that, you get access to bonus content like sneak peaks of my new book, Can a Catholic Be a Socialist? And the audio book version of that that is now available, along with my other book that’s now an audio book format, Made This Way.
Also, you can get a discount on my new apologetics course at the School of Apologetics, schoolofapologetics.com. If you’re a premium subscriber to the podcast, just go to your account and you can go to trenthornpodcast.com. Check it out. You can get a promo code to get 20% off until the end of the month, til April 30th, on my new course, Evidence for Catholic Moral Teaching. So, all of that combined with the current discount we’re running is a 50% discount on my new course, evidence for Catholic Moral Teaching. You’re not going to want to miss it, the School of Apologetics. If you’re a premium subscriber, go to trenthornpodcast.com. Even if you aren’t, go and sign up for as little as $5 a month. You get access to that and other great bonus content and you make the podcast possible.
Now onto our guest today, our guest is Dr. Gregory Popcak, the founder and executive director of the Pastoral Solutions Institute. He integrates solid Catholic theology with counseling psychology, hosts a radio show with his wife, Lisa, A Mortal Life radio, that helps people overcome different kinds of stresses, anxieties in their life, and provides practical counseling solutions, including through the Pastoral Solutions Institute. He offers special telecounseling offer … sorry, services, that I think a lot of our listeners will be very interested in because a lot of us, it’s hard to leave the house nowadays, but great Catholic resources to help you overcome stress and anxiety are available on your mobile and internet connected devices. So Dr. Popcak, welcome to the Counsel of Trent.
Dr. Gregory Popcak:
Well, thanks for having me, Trent. Great to be here.
TH:
Tell us a little bit more about the telecounseling service that you offer, because I think there’s a lot of people who would be interested in something like that. They want to go find a decent, Catholic therapist, but there might not be any around or nearby in their area.
DGP:
That’s something we’ve actually been doing since 1999. We were probably among the first people who were doing Catholic tele-mental health. We have a staff of full time pastoral counselors, which are all folks who are licensed in their particular mental health field, but also have additional training in pastoral theology and spiritual interventions for various emotional and relational problems as well as psychological interventions. We serve clients all over the world. We are an exclusively telecounseling practice and we do over 15,000 sessions a year in English and Spanish, with Catholics across North America and all around the world.
TH:
So have you been noticing an increase in people seeking telecounseling services lately?
DGP:
Yes. You might not be surprised to hear that. The reality is, these are stressful times and when … especially when people are sheltering in place, those issues in your marriage or family life especially, that maybe you were able to kind of work around or ignore, all of a sudden the volume gets turned up on those 10 fold. So we’re getting a lot of calls about marriage and family issues, and of course we’re seeing a lot of folks who are calling about anxiety as well, as there’s just stuff to worry about. So we’re having people who are calling with health anxiety, anxiety about work situations, and just generalized anxiety, just a sort of feeling of agitation that’s impacting their overall quality of life.
TH:
What’s weird is I feel like the anxiety people are dealing with … now, some people, it’s front and center. They’ll say, “I’m stressed out, I’m anxious, I’m worried, I’m dealing with a lot,” but for many other people, I think it kind of sneaks up on you when you’re trying to understand this. It’s sort of like the frog in the pot that boils. You turn it up one degree at a time and you don’t notice. I know this morning, for example, I said to my wife, “Hi.” She’s like, “Are you okay?” I’m like, “Yeah, I think so.” Then I got a phone call from my events coordinator who helps me to coordinate my events and I picked up the phone and I said, “Hello.” She’s like, “Are you okay?” I’m like, a second person. How do-
DGP:
I’m not now.
TH:
Right? Although I said, “Women, they’re so intuitive. How did they just like … ” this one word answer, they can immediately tell, whereas for me, if I asked my wife, I said, “How’s everything going?” She’d say, “Fine.” I’m like, “Oh good, everything’s all right then,” because I’m a man and incapable of determining that, but I think for me, even, the anxiety, the stress. I think, “I’m handling this well. I’m doing all right,” but it can affect you. Can stress affect you in ways, like in that subliminal way until you finally snap?
DGP:
Yeah. So one of the things we do with our clients at catholiccounselors.com is that we will teach an exercise we’ll call the emotional temperature exercise, because a lot of times people aren’t aware that they’re having an emotional reaction or an emotional problem until they’re in the middle of it, right? So they’ll say, “I don’t know, Dr. Popcak. It’s just the weirdest thing. It’s like I go from a zero to a 10. I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine, all of a sudden I’m in a panic attack” or “I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine, and then all of a sudden I’m just lashing out at somebody. What’s going on with that?” Really, it’s not that they go from a zero to a 10. It’s that they’ve been living at a maybe a seven for so long that they think that their seven is everybody else’s two or three on a 10 point scale, right?
TH:
Right.
DGP:
Then one more thing happens and it bumps them up a notch and now they’re at an eight or a nine and then they’ve got no place to go but crazy. So what happens is, we don’t tend to pay attention to how those background stressors that you’re talking about pile up. We think that because I’m maybe out of that situation … let’s say I had a bad day at work, but I’m not at work anymore, so I’m fine now, right? But I’m still being affected by the adrenaline and cortisol that was dripping into my bloodstream for that eight hour day and I haven’t done anything with it to process it. So it’s still got my emotional temperature jacked up to about a seven. Then I walk in the front door and I’m happy to be home, but I’m still up at that level and my wife says, “How are you?” I say “I’m fine.”
TH:
Right.
DGP:
Then the kids, the toys are … and then all of a sudden I’m losing my mind and I don’t know why. It’s because I haven’t been paying attention to monitoring that emotional temperature throughout the day and doing what I can to take it down until it bursts through the surface in some kind of inappropriate emotional display.
TH:
Right. So, how exactly does someone … I know we probably can’t go through the entire method here, but what are some basic principles in taking your emotional temperature to see where you really are at instead of where you might misbelief where you’re at?
DGP:
Yeah. Well, the short version is, you can’t ask yourself how you’re feeling. You have to ask yourself how you’re behaving. Right? So I’ll start at the top end of the scale. So from one to five, you’re basically fine. Okay. You’re handling things, you’re in control of things. I could break it down more, but we won’t do that for the sake of time. You get up to about a six, that’s where the adrenaline and cortisol and other stress chemicals are starting to drip in your bloodstream a little bit, right? It’s a little bit … forgive the analogy, it’s a little bit like trying to act sober when you’re buzzed. You can still be solution-focused and respectful, but you have to think about it, right? At a seven, those chemicals have built up to the point where now they’re starting to assault your nonverbal filters in your brain, right?
DGP:
So at a six or lower, you weren’t rolling your eyes when people were talking to you. You weren’t grimacing, you weren’t all fidgety. Now at a seven, though, you are. You don’t care that people notice that you’re irritated or that you’re nervous or you’re frustrated or whatever. Those nonverbal signs of agitation are coming out because, as I said, the chemicals have built up in your bloodstream enough to shut down those parts of your brain. At an eight, now it’s starting to affect the verbal centers of my brain, where I’m not yelling or screaming or freaking out yet, but I am, maybe … well, I’m either starting to run off at the mouth a bit, talk faster, be a little more defensive, maybe a little more blaming, or I’m starting to shut down. Some people’s temperament is that they just go quiet. So, maybe I’m starting to agree with you just to shut you up or just to get past this thing.
At a nine on that temperature scale, now my verbal filters have completely collapsed and I’m just saying stuff. Whether I’m angry or I’m anxious or I’m anything else, it’s just emotions are coming out. Or, again, if my temperament is more quiet, I kind of lock down and they start stonewalling people. You’ll ask me a question, I’m just staring off into space and I don’t answer you. At a 10, that’s where the physical filters collapse. I start doing really kind of destructive things in response to my anxiety or my anger or whatever, or I shut down for the rest of the day and I just can’t function. I just have to go to bed, if I am that persona, but once we get up to that six or seven, it all falls apart pretty quickly. So the key is not so much asking how do I feel, but how am I acting? Because based on where I’m at in my behavior, that tells me what my temperature is and how quickly I need to intervene to get that temperature down back below the six so I can still function from a more responsive mindset than a reactive one.
TH:
Two points on that. First, nowhere to go but crazy. I’m going to borrow that if I need a name for a band in the future, at the very least an album title, but I just imagine it, “Okay, coming up now opening, we’ve got Nowhere To Go But Crazy,” so I’m going to hang on to that. Number two, I love you’re saying that to do a correct inventory, we should examine what we are doing rather than what we’re feeling, because you’re right. Jeremiah 17:9, in the Old Testament, it says, “The heart is a wicked thing. Who can know it?” That we deceive ourselves sometimes thinking that we’re okay when we’re not, but to real … and we think, “Oh I’m fine,” but if I really did an inventory, like what am I doing both physically and mentally, it would reveal a different picture.
For example, I might get home and think I’m fine, this happens to me, because I am able to successfully compartmentalize what I’m worrying about in one part of my mind while simultaneously trying to be present with my wife or present with my children, but I should take a step back and realize, “Wait a minute, if I was at a two or a three on the emotional temperature scale, I wouldn’t even be doing the compartmentalizing. I wouldn’t even have that in my mind. The very fact … I should say, “Hey, wait a minute. I’m not in a great place right now by the very fact that I have to compartmentalize whatever stress that that I’m dealing with.” So so I like that. I like that.
DGP:
Yeah, I’ll just give a personal example. When I’m at a seven … I tend to be a little more visual myself, so I don’t normally … normally, if I’m calmer, I don’t normally care about the crooked picture frame or the messy stuff on my desk or whatever. If I get to a seven, all of a sudden, I’m like, “How can I work with all this stuff around here? I can’t … ” I used to think that it was because my office was a mess or something, but now I realize it’s “No, I’m stressed about a whole bunch of other stuff.” I can go straighten the picture frame if I want to, but the real issue is this deadline that I got to attend to or this other thing, and so I got to put my energy into getting that duck to get in line, to get that duck in a row, as opposed to just running around cleaning my house.
TH:
Right. Before we get into more specific tips for stress and anxiety people might be dealing with right now, how is a Catholic approach to therapy for stressors? How would that be different from just a purely secular approach? Obviously there’s going to be a lot of overlaps, but where might there be also differences?
DGP:
Well, we integrate a lot of Catholic spirituality into the work that we do. One really specific example is when we talk about cognitive distortions, which are sort of bad thinking habits that are taught by cognitive behavior therapists. There are about 10 different categories of bad thinking habits that people will have. Well, at the same time we talk about those cognitive distortions, we’re also introducing Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s concepts of discernment of spirits. So we’ll talk about consolations or desolations, which essentially are our thoughts or impulses or desires or feelings that either push us toward God and a more godly life or pull us away from God and make it more difficult for us to be the person God wants us to be. So the way we frame it is those specific cognitive distortions are essentially different categories, if you will, of desolation, of lies that Satan will whisper in our spiritual ear that attempt to pull us away from God or the person God wants us to be. So we’ll talk about how to fight both the psychological and spiritual battle at the same time so that people can really see that it, that the process of therapy isn’t just about feeling better. It’s about being more of that person who can be receptive to God’s grace and growing into the person that God wants me to be.
TH:
Okay, good. So now that we’ve laid the foundation for that, let’s jump into some areas people might be struggling with right now. First, that’s focused a lot on what I might call severe anxiety or just really abnormal things people are dealing with, especially worrying about health, especially people who may not have been worrying about health before. They’re not normally hypochondriacs, but given all the news coverage related to this pandemic, are more worried about their health or the health of their loved ones and they normally would, and then people who might be worried about economic problems than they normally would have, unusual things related to job loss or job instability. So those severe kind of stressors, what are some recommendations you have for that?
DGP:
Well, so the challenge here is that behind every lie, there is a grain of truth, right? So the kinds of anxiety that come off of health anxiety or anxiety about job loss or financial pressures, they might fall into the category of cognitive distortion, bad thinking habit that we call catastrophizing. The best definition I ever heard of catastrophizing was a friend of mine who says that she goes from zero to widow in 60 seconds when her husband doesn’t come home on time from work. Right? So it’s the idea of these what if scenarios start going through my head. What if I get COVID-19? What if it ruins my job? What if I kill all friends and family just by shaking their hands?
We have all these thoughts that go through our heads about these catastrophizing scenarios. The thing about it is, people could say, “Well, they could happen. That’s a possibility.” The answer to that is something called grounding, where you really have to kind of be in the moment. Even from a spiritual perspective, I like to say that grace is in the situation, not in our imagination. God doesn’t supply grace to deal with imaginary problems. He’s present to help us deal with actual things. Satan, what he tries to do is get us worried about things that aren’t happening, so we can’t connect with the grace that God has given us to deal with the stuff that is.
So in these situations, it’s fine to realize that yes, these are possibilities, but the best way I can respond to those possibilities is by being present in this moment and taking whatever precautions or doing whatever actions I need to take now to be responsible and healthy in this moment. So I kind of look around now and ask myself, “Am I healthy in this moment? Yes. Okay, I’m going to praise God for that. What do I need to do to take care of myself and the people around me? What do I need to do to take care of my finances or attend to my job responsibilities or whatever it is? What do I need to do in the here and now and what help do I need to get from others? What resources do I need to pull in? How do I need to pull God’s grace into this moment?” All so that I can be more present right now in dealing with that thing. So the point is, when I’m catastrophizing, when I’m having anxiety about all the things that could happen to me, I’m living in my imagination and not in the situation. So I have to teach myself to kind of step back out of that catastrophizing fantasy, ground myself in what’s happening in the here and now, and focus on what God is asking me to do in this moment.
TH:
What comes to my mind right now is Jesus’s teaching in the sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:34. “Do not worry about tomorrow for today has its own evils” or has enough evils.
DGP:
That’s right.
TH:
The evil of today is sufficient for us to worry about that. I like that, that we live in our imagination or live in our future when we catastrophize. I like your reply, because some people, when others catastrophize, I think they reply with unhelpful recommendations, usually something like, “Oh, that’s not going to happen,” or “Don’t worry about it,” so it represses it.
DGP:
Well, how do you know that’s not going to happen?
TH:
Right. That’s what the catastrophizer will say. “Well, you don’t know that.” So it’s not helpful for them, but to validate somewhat, that could happen, but other things might happen too, and then maybe looking at this kind of branch tree of opportunity in the future perhaps.
DGP:
Yeah, and what do I need to do now to cooperate with God’s grace and also, practically speaking, stack the deck in my favor for a more positive outcome? Those are things that I can control, what’s happening in front of me right now. The more I can focus on doing that, the better. I talk about this in my book, Unworried: a Life Without Anxiety, where anxiety, psychologically speaking, is sort of the process where I have this tornado in my head where two parts of my brain are at war with each other. There’s a part of my brain that says “I have to do something about this,” but then the other part of my brain says, “But there’s nothing I can do,” “But I have to do something,” “But there’s nothing I can do,” “But I have to do something,” “But there’s nothing I can do,” “But … ” It just starts to spin out of control as I just get cycled up in that whole idea of, I have to get control of, but I can’t do anything.
If I can step out of that catastrophizing mindset and stop living in the future, in my imagination, and ground myself in the situation, all of a sudden I can start to do certain things. I see, well, I could wash my hands. I could make a call to a friend if I’m feeling lonely, I could do this thing to try to get my finances in order. There’s something I can do in this moment. The more I can identify little tiny things I can do to make even the smallest difference, the less anxious I start to feel.
TH:
Let’s switch gears a little bit to other kinds of anxiety and stress people are feeling. I think there’s a lot of people, they’re not worried necessarily that they’re going to get an illness and die or not even necessarily worried that they’re going to lose their job, but they feel weighed down by an unusual amount of stress that has been placed on them now, especially if your movement has been restricted. This morning, for the first time, my wife finally went to the grocery store, because I had been going before. When it first broke out, I said, “Don’t worry sweetie, I’m going to go to the store. I’ll have the taser in my back pocket if someone tries to take my toilet paper.” I wanted to be the husband. I didn’t want to subject my wife to the … especially when it was real.
DGP:
You were embracing your traditional hunter gatherer role.
TH:
Yeah, it was weird. Before … Thousands of years ago, I would brave the wilderness to get the saber tooth tiger and now it’s like, I braved the wilderness to get the chicken thighs in the frozen … and it did feel like the wilderness at first. You would go to the store, especially when the panic buying was really at its fever pitch, and you’d see people, their white knuckle clenched around their disinfected shopping carts, walking around. The thing I noticed when I was at target, Dr. Popcak, and I was doing this at the beginning, trying to shop for my wife so she wouldn’t have to deal. The other thing I didn’t want Laura to have to deal with was going to the store and seeing all of the shelves empty. That hits us right at the base of Maslow’s pyramid, right?
DGP:
That’s for sure. Yeah.
TH:
So, for our listeners who aren’t aware, there’s the self actualization pyramid, it’s the hierarchy of actualization. It’s Abraham Maslow, I believe is his name.
DGP:
Yeah, that’s right. The bottom is basic needs, food and shelter and that sort of thing. Then yeah, you go to the … and those are the things you absolutely, absolutely need to feel basically secure. So you go to the grocery store, you see all the empty shelves, and it touches a kind of primal part of yourself. You start to worry.
TH:
Yeah. You’re just like … I remember I went to Trader Joe’s before they had the lockdown orders and I just saw all the crowd going in and I’m just like, “I’m going to get some extra bags of pasta, you know?” So, but now, finally, she’s been able to go back and ease into this, but it’s those little things about … it’s different going to the store. It’s different being at home with the kids now. I think helping people … how do people relate to the, quote unquote, “New normal” that is in a sense very abnormal and can cause a stress for them trying to get used to?
DGP:
I guess there are two things. I guess it’s kind of a broad question. So the first one would be getting used to sort of the new normal, in a sense. The more we try to cling to, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be, then the more stressed out we become or the more frustrated we become. I’ll give you an example. We had a call, actually, to the radio program just yesterday. It was an older woman who’s a grandmother and was just really frustrated because she can’t be around her grandkids. She said, “I just feel so useless. I’m a non-essential.” She used the label that is going around, non-essential workers. She said, “I’m just so tired of feeling non-essential. I can’t help my grandkids with their homework because they can’t come over to the house and I can’t … ”
The problem was, she was sort of wedded to one way of doing that, that she would be with her grandkids because they could come over to the house, but one of the things we talked about with her was you can also use Skype or FaceTime or those other kinds of technologies to interface with your kids and grandkids and be involved in that way. If you don’t know how, this is a great time to learn. The more we’re wedded to the way things … we like them to be or the way they should be, the more we tend to get frustrated and stressed instead of being able to say, “Okay, what do I have to work with and how could I make something good out of this? How can I work with God’s grace to make something pleasant or positive out of this experience?” The more I can be proactive about that, the more I can adapt to the situation. So a lot of that boredom or frustration or agitation kind of comes from not wanting to adopt to that new normal and be creative enough to think about, how can I use the time I’m being given here to make something good come out of it?
TH:
This kind of returns to your previous theme about, when we’re catastrophizing, living in the moment rather than living in the imagination. So, even if we are not experienced a severe stressor, it might not be helpful for us to be caught up in our mind of, “Oh, I remember when it was this way” or “I wish it could go back to this” or “I’m sad that it’s not this way” instead of focusing, “Okay, how can I make things go well or be their best with the hand I’ve been dealt right at this moment?”
DGP:
Yeah. You make an excellent point that in that sort of … anxiety is more of that living in the future of my imagination of all the things that could go wrong. Boredom, frustration, agitation, even depression is more of living in my imagination about past regrets and things that went wrong or the things that aren’t the way they should be and that kind of thing. By again, re-centering myself in this present moment and saying, “Well, what do I need to do right now to cooperate with God’s grace and the gifts that I’ve been given and the support I’m being given by the people around me to make something good and beautiful out of this?”
TH:
Very good. Well, I’ve been very blessed to hear your advice you’ve been able to share with us and I definitely want to let our listeners know that you can get advice just like this at the Pastoral Solutions Institute. So definitely be sure to go and check out their website, listen to Dr. Popcak’s show on Mortal Life radio, but is there anything else you’d like people to know about accessing the Institute or just any other thoughts to be kind of encouragement for what we’re dealing with right now?
DGP:
Sure. So if folks would like to come and learn more about our resources, including the book, Unworried: A Life Without Anxiety, or the Pastoral Solutions Institute telecounseling practice, they can go to catholiccounselors.com. The biggest takeaway from this, though, is that, whatever you’re feeling right now, whether it’s anxiety or frustration or agitation with the people in your house or whatever it is, the best way to approach all of those things is not to try to escape it, but really to try to embrace it and say, “How can I work with the grace that God is giving me with the support of the people around me and even the resources that I have or could access, to make something good and graceful out of this? How could I respond to this challenge in a way that would glorify God, that would help me grow into the person that God wants me to be, and enable me to work for the good or the people around me?” The more you can focus your energy in those directions, the more you’re going to manage your stress more effectively.
TH:
Amen to that. What is a website people can go to to check out Pastoral Solutions Institute?
DGP:
Catholiccounselors.com, two C’s in the middle, s on the end. Catholiccounselors.com
TH:
Oh, perfect. Well, Dr. Popcak, thank you so much for joining us today on the Counsel of Trent podcast.
DGP:
Pleasure, Trent. Thank you so much.
TH:
All right. Be sure to check out catholiccounselors.com if you’re interested in more follow up, maybe a telecounseling session you feel like might be helpful. Always something to look into. I’m appreciative of everyone who has been listening, who has been supporting the podcast. By the way, be sure to go to Google Play or iTunes. Consider leaving a review. I’m so grateful for everyone who’s already left a review on those websites. It’s helped to really let a lot of people know that the podcast is worthwhile for them to listen to. We’ve surpassed a thousand reviews, or a thousand ratings, which is really high actually among Catholic podcasts, so thank you guys and let’s keep shooting for the stars there. So consider leaving a review or visiting trenthornpodcast.com for bonus content, including the promo code to be able to access a discount on my new apologetics course, Evidence for Catholic Moral Teaching, available at the School of Apologetics, schoolofapologetics.com. You all have been great and I hope you have a very blessed and a very peace-filled day.
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