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There are a couple of great questions here. The first is some confusion around the difference between tracking anxiety sensations and tracking pain sensations. The short answer is: there is no difference.

Here's the long answer. Both pain and anxiety are danger signals, as we learned earlier on in the program. When we are sensing danger, the result in our bodies can be either anxiety or pain. Both anxiety and pain are physical sensations. Pain, of course, feels like...pain. It can burn, ache, throb, stab, etc. Anxiety can feel like lots of different sensations. It can feel like tightness in the chest, butterflies in the stomach, a tension in the shoulders or neck, etc. Whether you're feeling anxiety sensations or TMS pain sensations essentially does not make a difference - they are serving the same purpose. What sensation you feel (burning, throbbing, tightness, tension) doesn't make a difference. Where you feel it in your body doesn't make a difference.

Here's what does make a difference: being able to attend to that sensation without fear. For some people, attending to the physical sensations of their anxiety can be a little easier than attending to the physical sensation of their TMS pain, because there is more inherent fear attached to the TMS pain (namely, because it hurts). Take a listen to Libby's clip again to hear that play out. But the ultimate goal is to be able to attend to all of these sensations in the same way -- objectively noticing and attending to them, without running from them, and without fear.

The second question here is how somatic tracking is different from preoccupying over our symptoms, because we have all learned that preoccupation will perpetuate our symptoms. GREAT question. Preoccupation is a form of fear (i.e., "Is my pain going to get better in the next half hour?" or, "Why is it worse now than it was this morning?!). Somatic tracking is paying attention to these sensations without fear. Somatic tracking is essentially learning to notice these sensations without preoccupying over them at all -- noticing them objectively, confronting them confidently, and knowing that it is safe to do so. So, while preoccupying and somatic tracking may seem similar at first glance...they are actually almost complete opposites.

To take this even a step further, I believe that the pressure we put on ourselves "not to preoccupy" over the symptoms sometimes gets confused with this notion that we must "ignore" our symptoms. I don't know about all of you, but when I was in daily and near constant pain, there was no way that I could ignore that physical sensation. IT HURT! And putting pressure on myself to ignore the sensation only made me feel like I was failing, which scared me ten times over. Pressuring myself to "ignore" the sensation was actually just preoccupation sneaking up on me in a new form, because "trying to ignore" the pain was a full-time (and virtually impossible) job. In my tremendous efforts "not to preoccupy," ALL I WAS DOING WAS PREOCCUPYING!

Teaching myself the technique of objectively noticing the sensation without fear, while telling myself that I knew exactly what that sensation was, and that it was safe and okay to notice it, was a gigantic relief. It takes practice, but I know you guys can do it