If You Struggle with Anxiety, These Tricks Could Save Your Life
Fa3mQnJv_z0 • 2021-06-05
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Kind: captions Language: en [Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory today i'm going to be going through the topic of anxiety now much to my dismay this is a topic that i know a lot about i am very intimate with anxiety as a lifestyle uh there was a point in my life where i was completely debilitated by anxiety that that is not an exaggeration and today we're going to be going through some of the issues that i know that you guys are struggling with and by the end i hope that i can show you how you can get a handle on that and reverse that trend so that you can really move yourself out of that conquer anxiety and feel super human and that's how i used to talk to myself was when i'm not anxious i feel like a superhuman but when i get anxiety i actually feel the region of my brain shutting down and the more i researched anxiety the more i realized that is literally what is happening there is an area of your brain called the prefrontal cortex which is responsible for your higher level cognition your decision making future planning all of that good stuff and it literally goes offline because blood is leaving that region of the brain and going to the centers of your brain that handle fight or flight so it is a diabolical syndrome in my opinion because it can take you from really feeling confident grounded and you have abilities that actually deteriorate and disappear when anxiety kicks in and so putting in the work to get a hold of your anxiety is one of the most fruitful endeavors you will ever embark upon so all i can tell you is that there was literally a time in my life where in a living room full of like five of my immediate family i was so anxious i couldn't tell a story that my wife was asking me to tell i literally couldn't do it i was like out of breath it was so crazy like to think back to that time in my life is really bizarre and it felt hopeless and so i'm here to tell you that there is hope and as i often say there's a process for that so what we're going to be walking through today in answering some of the concerns that people have sent in is what is that process and how do we get a grip on our anxiety all right let's go by the end of this you guys are going to be powerhouses or at least you're going to have the process by which to become a powerhouse all right number one everyday tasks can be overwhelming and the anxiety of not completing tasks or the anxiety of feeling like a failure because you are going at a different pace compared to others how do you control the mind once it's in the anxiety state and return back to the calm more positive and motivating state thank you okay so first of all comparison is the thief of joy so be careful just outright comparing yourself to other people and in fact understanding what anxiety is at like its most foundational level i think is going to be really helpful anxiety is simply it is literally nothing more than this it is simply you living in a future state worrying about something that has not actually happened and what you're doing is what i call rehearsing failure so you're looking at somebody else you're seeing how amazing they are you're imagining your future and you're saying you know i'm never going to live up to what they've done i'm never going to accomplish that level now you can imagine that's very different than saying oh look at what they've done that's so incredible i'm super inspired and i'm going to get that good i may not be that good yet but i'm going to get that good now one of those rehearsals creates anxiety that i'm never going to be that good the other one reduces anxiety and it actually puts you in an action-oriented state now action cures all that's one of my like just dead reckoning things that i say to myself all the time action cures all so when you look at somebody that's killing it in a way that you want to kill it step number one is to just recognize that you can get good you can get better that that is just the nature of the human animal you don't need to believe you're special you just have to recognize the truth of the human condition so anything you put energy and effort into getting better at you will actually get better at anything that you rehearse over and over and over anything you repeat is going to become real mentally so if you look at someone else and say i'm never going to be that i'm never going to be that good i'm a loser i'm a failure whatever that's the thing that you repeat you're catastrophizing okay to use the language of cognitive behavioral therapy but you're not if you're not familiar with that that is the number one defense against anxiety read the book feeling great absolutely phenomenal book about how you stop the cognitive distortions as they're known and get into a state where you are in that calm state that you're looking for okay so you interrupt that cognitive distortion of catastrophizing your future and you break the very link that allows anxiety to take hold because what's happening ultimately is your brain is calorically ravenous okay your brain weighs about three pounds and takes up like 20 or 25 percent of the energy usage of the entire body okay that's freakish unto itself now because it's so calorically ravenous it is also extremely conservative in terms of if you do something a lot it wants to make sure that it makes that easier and so what it does there's this phrase neurons that fire together wire together so what's happening is you're rehearsing failure you're rehearsing catastrophe your brain goes oh okay cool this anxiety feeling that we have this thought about ooh the future is this really dangerous thing i need to hardwire that i need to make it easier to think these thoughts about the danger coming in the future i need to make it easier neurochemically like literally it is easier for the electrical chemical signals to traverse between the synapses because it's wrapping it in what's called a process of myelination so it's wrapping this fatty tissue between those connection points okay that's the wire together part of neurons that fire together wire together so now you have this myelination and the brain's like ah i'm so much more efficient at thinking and feeling this rehearsal of failure and so what starts as a somewhat minor concern about not being as cool as the next person not accomplishing as much as they do not being as smart or as talented whatever and it becomes this full-blown i mean this can really go into like full-blown panic attack syndrome because you're repeating it the more you feel it the higher the anxiety so it's a positive feedback loop so i feel anxious about this which makes me more anxious about this which makes me think about it and worry about it more and so now my brain is wiring it and the amplitude is going up and so when you get into a positive feedback loop like that that's destructive now you're in a really dangerous place so step number one don't compare yourself in to others in a way other than i could become that with enough time and energy and effort put into it and then number two recognize that when you have a cognitive distortion like catastrophizing i'll never be that good right you don't have evidence to support that and even if you do it does not serve you to spend time catastrophizing so you are way better off just from a neurochemical standpoint you are way better off doing what's called a pattern interrupt stopping yourself from thinking that and instead of saying so the nice simple pattern interrupt here i'm never going to be that good wait pattern interrupt i'm not that good yet but i can get that good okay and that becomes the way that you break that cycle and the only way to undo that anxiety is to let it atrophy now the fastest way to make something atrophy is to focus on something else so now the thing that we're going to replace that catastrophizing with that's hardwiring into our brain is we're going to replace it with the way the human animal works i can get good at anything right so if it's what i call the only belief that matters if i put time and attention into getting better at this thing i will actually get better that is the nature of the human animal and so i would just repeat that i can get good at anything i can get good at anything and so that becomes my pattern interrupt that becomes the thing now that i'm reinforcing in my mind that becomes the thought that hardwires that becomes the feeling that hardwires and now all of a sudden when i encounter somebody that's doing something better than me that's outpacing me whatever the case that's raising my anxiety levels and i want to get back to that calm state i'm going to pattern interrupt that and i'm going to repeat now something that empowers me and makes me feel better and by doing that now i'm reinforcing something that makes me feel good that makes me feel expansive versus contracting so it makes me feel expansive like i can tackle the challenge and that's what i'm going to hardwire that was a game changer for me so i highly encourage you guys to put massive amounts of time and energy every single day to hardwiring that expansive thought and letting the contracting thoughts the anxiety-provoking thoughts diminish over time just by atrophying because you don't allow yourself to think about them all right next how do you deal with the physical effects of anxiety like adrenaline i am so glad you asked so this is where meditation comes in if you guys have been listening to me for a while you've probably heard me say that meditation saved my life and while i was never clinically depressed i will say that the anxiety was getting so bad that if i were to carry that out another year or two years i could see it really being very problematic and the most distressing period of my life came about i don't know a year or two after i started meditating so i just cannot stress enough how powerful it is to recognize what i call physiological hooks so there are physiological hooks into the brain into your neurochemistry into adrenaline pumping cortisol pumping so that you can change your neurochemistry and i'm obsessed with this idea you can change your neural chemistry consciously now how do i know that's true and if you don't believe me what do you think the odds are that i can prove it to you in a single sentence where you will believe at the end of that sentence that tom is right i can consciously control my neurochemistry go ahead lock in your answer now here it is for anybody that doesn't believe that you can consciously control your neurochemistry i'm going to give you two sentences option number one this is the most immediately profound put on that song that makes you feel hyphy you can't help it the second you put that song on your neurochemistry is gonna change number two studies have shown that even if you fake a smile that smile merely holding your face in the position of a smile will change your neurochemistry now this one i deployed very early in my life it's one of the most profound things i've used in my marriage which is when you get really pissed off you're angry about something you're anxious whatever if you force yourself to laugh out loud you will feel utterly ridiculous but if you force yourself to laugh out loud you will feel the neurochemistry change now anxiety is tough and if you've spent all the time hardwiring it when you're laughing you will feel an alleviation of the symptoms and then as you stop you're going to feel them start creeping back but i want you guys to get used to doing things like that so that you realize you can control at will your neurochemistry now once you believe that it can be done now we can get into doing things that have really um they stack that the more you do it the more control you get the better you get at dealing with anxiety over time and the most profound thing i have not found anything that is as phenomenal with dealing with anxiety than meditation now the physiological hook is that you're breathing from your diaphragm it really is that stupid simple like a faking a smile can change your neurochemistry breathing from your diaphragm is profound and i remember the first time i consciously took a diaphragmatic breath it was a game changer it literally in that moment i was like what is happening so the reason meditation works is you're having a biological experience meditation is a physiological hook to consciously take control of your biology so you're going to sit in a comfortable space you're going to breathe from your belly okay that's what we mean when we say a diaphragm breath so you're going to breathe way down low like you're trying to make yourself look fat okay you're gonna breathe low in the belly when you first start doing it it feels really unnatural but it feels really good and so you just breathe from your diaphragm breathe low from your belly okay what i just did is a really high breath that that in fact not only will it not lower your anxiety if you're breathing really shallow up high that's a physiological hook to trigger anxiety because what's happening is that is associated with the fight-or-flight mode okay so if you do the physiological thing that's related to what's called the sympathetic nervous system fight-or-flight then you're going to feel that if you do the things related to the parasympathetic nervous system rest and digest then you're going to feel that and they exist on a seesaw you cannot be both calm and anxious at the same time you either anxious or you are calm there's not going to be the two at the same time ever so it's a negative feedback loop so as you sit down and meditate and you breathe diaphragmatically for whatever reason evolution has given us that physiological hook that will work whether you wanted to or not you breathe from your belly you will feel your anxiety lower and if you're not feeling it this is one of those where you need to practice learning how to breathe effectively from your belly because it's not a maybe it works it is it will work every time and what i've learned in my life is i'm never more than 45 minutes away from total equanimity now what do i mean by that there are times where when i sit down to meditate it only takes me two minutes five minutes to slip into just totally calm and peaceful no background radiation so no adrenaline no cortisol no sense of stress no sense of anxiety no impending doom none of that i just immediately slip into feeling good but there have been times in my life where the stress levels are so high and the there is so much on the line there have been times in my life where i'm dealing in hundreds of millions of dollars and at those moments as you can imagine anxiety is through the roof and what i learned is even in those times where it's like crazy stressful and my biology is going nuts my adrenaline is pumping the blood has left my prefrontal cortex it's all doom and gloom all i can see is a future where everything is bad i'm catastrophizing the life out of everything if i sit down and diaphragmatically breathe coming back to the breath meaning i don't allow myself to just you know let my mind wander to the things that i'm worried about every time i catch myself i come back to the breath breathing from my belly now when i'm really stressed it takes a long time but by 45 minutes no matter how much stress has ever been present in my life i have never needed more than 45 minutes of diaphragmatic breathing to get back to total calm no sense of stress or anxiety now there have been times where it will take me 45 minutes to get back to that and two two hours later i'm back to stressed out and during those periods i made sure that i had time two or three times a day to meditate now as i mentioned at the beginning of this meditation stacks so the more you do it the better you get at it the less time it takes the more your brain actually begins to change there are regions of the brain that actually grow larger more dense in response to meditation in fact you can scan somebody's brain and if they are a lifetime meditator you can actually tell the difference just by the structures of their brain if they're a long-time meditator or a non-meditator that's pretty extraordinary when you think that what meditation is doing is allowing you to get control of that biology to move yourself from the sympathetic fight or flight to the parasympathetic rest and digest where you feel nice and calm so there are many physiological hooks but that is the prime one so if you don't know how to meditate go look up mark divine box breathing it's a very simple method of meditation it's where i started and it was a game changer for me so yeah don't sleep on meditation man next what are some ways to snap out of social related anxiety i.e going to the gym bar etc okay so again what is anxiety anxiety is you are catastrophizing about the future so i'm guessing if you're worried about going to the gym you're thinking oh my god they're going to judge me they're going to think i'm a loser i'm fat i'm weak i'm skinny i'm whatever your concern is you've got to pattern interrupt that you've got to stop it you've got to focus on not what other people think about you you've got to focus on what your goal is and if your goal demands you go to a gym if you want to be more social and your goal demands you go out and meet people then that's what we're going to do so we're going to do whatever we have to in order to get beyond that sense of like this is a terrible thing so now this is where we put our meditation in this is where we stop our catastrophizing we do the pattern interrupt we start thinking about oh man this is going to be great i'm not good at social stuff yet but i'm going to get good tom told me action cures all so i know i need to go do this thing there's nothing to panic about because the only thing that you're quote-unquote panicking about is some future thing that's going to happen but what's really going to happen let's say everybody judges you they they think that you are a loser they think that you are fat they think that you are skinny they think that you are dumb whatever now did you die or do you survive that and more importantly do you get a little bit better a little stronger a little more resilient it's really easy to think about when you think about going to the gym if everyone there thinks that you are fat or skinny or whatever but you show up to the gym every day and you put in the work they cannot stop you from getting the result that you want so they can throw all the shade they want which by the way they're not nobody gives a about anybody else to be honest like they might give you a sideways glance and think you're a loser but they're worried about themselves they're thinking about themselves they're trying to look cool or feel good or be proud of themselves or move forward in their life or whatever and the odds that they're spending any significant amount of time thinking about you is basically zero so the great news is no matter what they're thinking about you they cannot stop you from getting the result that you want when you show up and put in the work so focusing on getting a little bit better every day that's really the goal so whatever your goal is it mandates certain actions the good news is action cures all the even better news is that you can interrupt that escalation mentally with a pattern interrupt with a focus on the fact that you can get better reminding yourself of empowering statements instead of disempowering statements and then you just get to work just do the thing and every time your brain starts worrying about the future remind yourself if i let myself sit here and think about this this will become the easiest thought for me to think this will become the easiest feeling for me to feel which means that when my brain walks into a gym or a bar or whatever i will have trained it to trigger over into this negativity and so that's why we want to use the empowering thoughts as mental jujitsu so now crossing the threshold into the gym or to the bar or to the party or whatever is the habit loop trigger to say something empowering to ourselves on repeat to remember to smile to remember to breathe from our diaphragm to remember to interrupt with our own just internal voice i don't allow myself to think that i literally say that to myself all the time i don't allow that i'm i am not going to think about that anymore and i force myself to say in my head something empowering it's so weird how effective that is it just works you will become whatever you repeat if you repeat oh my god i'm so anxious this is terrible whenever i go to a party like oh my god i feel terrible my anxiety spirals i have panic attacks then that's what's going to happen because you keep repeating it and your brain goes oh okay we think this thought a lot we feel this feeling a lot we need to reinforce it so break that pattern all right next where does anxiety come from sometimes i feel it and i don't know why all right this is known as generalized anxiety disorder now generalized anxiety means that you have so many triggers now for your anxiety i'll give you one of mine this was so bizarre to me this is when i first thought oh i don't think i'm nervous i don't think i'm a nervous person i think this has officially reached levels of anxiety if i turned so i used to work in a parking garage where you know you would go up to four or five or whatever and every day i would just turn right turn right turn right turn right all the way down but you could turn right or left and i remember one day for whatever reason i turned left and i had this sudden spike of anxiety and i was like why the hell would i be anxious about turning left and so that was when i realized okay whoa whoa like this isn't even now attached to any sort of major thing this is about me overextending doing something new going into the unknown and i realized that that was the beginning of the anxiety for me that because i'm not a born entrepreneur getting into business was this incredibly anxiety provoking endeavor the stakes were so high i felt like i was constantly on stage like it was nuts and so i realized oh my god anytime i do something quote unquote out of my comfort zone no matter how minor my brain has now allowed itself to condition itself to be anxious about anything that sort of deviated from the norm and when we boil it back down to what is anxiety anxiety is living in the future and worrying about it okay you're mentally projecting into the future and you are worried about it and you allow yourself yes allow yourself to worry and it feels like it feels like you're doing yourself a solid because you're thinking through all the things that could go wrong so you want to be ready i remember i used to okay i'm gonna get in you know this situation in a meeting or whatever and at some point the eyes are going to turn to me so what do i do if my heart starts racing and i'm getting panicky what do i do about that and i realized that i would sit there and be like okay i'm gonna you know maybe i can say that i've got a stomachache or a headache or something and i'll find a way out of the room all i was doing in those moments was rehearsing it going wrong that i was going to get into this situation and need an exit and then i realized you know a better approach because all my planning to make sure that i'm ready is the thing that's making me anxious okay i i want that to hit home that is the thing that's making you anxious is that you're thinking about you might get anxious like i remember when i was young and i first started experiencing nerves i remember thinking the only thing that i'm nervous about is other people realizing that i'm nervous like if i knew that my nerves were invisible i wouldn't worry about it but it was always that sense of like oh is my face going to turn red am i going to sound out of breath is my voice going to quiver and worrying about it was the very thing that made it happen and so i began to realize a big part of getting out of this anxiety death loop was going to be to never again rehearse failure and so i started saying to myself let failure surprise you so when i succeed i'm never surprised because i rehearse the at a success i and think about olympic athletes they talk about visualization right i would visualize this is going to go well i'm going to kill it i would remember the times even when there were very few of them i would remember the times where hey this went really well it went exactly like i thought oftentimes it would be because i would get caught off guard and so i wouldn't have time to worry about it somebody would just ask me something i would answer and i'd be like oh my god the answer was actually really good and i realized okay if i don't know what's coming i can just get into the flow so i'm like this isn't even a skill set problem this is a i'm worried about not performing well problem and so once you understand all anxiety is is a physiological response to you worrying about the future so your brain goes whoa fight or flight we're in it this is dangerous and it has ancient mechanisms for dealing with that and those ancient mechanisms take over and so i stopped rehearsing failure i started rehearsing success and i just said i'm gonna let failure take me totally by surprise if it ever happens because i'm never going to allow myself to think about it and so now anytime i find myself like ooh that could be like a risky situation i say to myself no no this is an opportunity for me to shine this is going to be amazing i'm going to kill it i'm going to get out there i'm prepared i always prepare myself you know that you're ready to rock and roll let's do the damn thing and because that's what i start repeating in my head now when i think about something like that i'm not nervous i've rehearsed that feeling good i say those things to myself in an elevated state so i'm excited about them and so now all of a sudden i'm rehearsing this feeling good i'm rehearsing it being fun and so that's what comes to mind when i enter what used to be a very stressful situation all right since anxiety is always there what is one way we can use anxiety to our benefit all right so this is actually really interesting question so any emotion anxiety fear anger rage all of them actually serve an evolutionary purpose so anxiety when it's mild is actually very useful because it makes you take things seriously it makes sure that you're prepared and make sure like for instance with my schedule i have just enough anxiety that i won't be prepared for something that i check my calendar in the morning i make sure that i understand what's going on that day so that i can make sure that i'm prepared for it and my whole sort of modus operandi in life is to be prepared for things to be well researched to you know study to um rehearse that success all of that and that actually is born out of that just a little bit of anxiety of like hey i could really do something special here this could be amazing but i need to take it seriously and so when it's that it actually is my friend and so at that sort of useful level i express gratitude i will welcome emotions as old friends i will actually say welcome back old friend i used to do this with hunger all the time and i was really getting lean i would say ah welcome back hunger i know that you were here because i am burning fat and so i am so grateful for your return and so when anxiety is at that useful level it's you know welcome back old friend this is amazing and then once i start thinking about something going wrong no pattern interrupt i don't allow myself to think that absolutely not i can get better at anything i can do this it's going to be amazing look at all the ways that it's going to go right so you have to get pretty deft at understanding how to handle that but that movement is there for you so just keep that in mind all right can a body be so used to anxiety after years of being triggered that always being tense is normal even at times when the mind is fine and relaxed yes this is generally generalized anxiety disorder this is where you're just your brain is so used to slipping into this negative mindset that it goes there very easily like me turning left and if you recognize that okay i understand how this works this is through repetition this was me worrying about the future worrying worrying worrying worrying worrying catastrophizing having all these essentially lies that i'm telling myself i'm never going to be that good uh this is going to be terrible i'm never going to work again whatever the you know list i forget how many cognitive distortions are but there's something like 15 and one of them is fortune telling right oh man i'm going to go in there it's going to be terrible they're going to eat me alive okay that's fortune telling you don't know that go and do your best that's all that you can ask of yourself right if you've prepared for it you put in the time and the energy and you go in and you fail so be it and here's the great news failure is the most information rich data stream in the world this is why tom says that action cures all you have to go out there and figure it out as you're engaging with something especially when you fail you get all this information back and so when you've got this information back now you can leverage that to get a little bit better and since one of the og pattern interrupts is i can get better at anything then you're going to say oh cool i've got this information i can now get better i can now progress but you have to be willing to go through that process so that you can begin to let things atrophy the anxiety atrophy because if you're you know in your 20s and you've spent the last 10 years looping on these things that make you anxious or if you're in your 30s or 40s or 50s and you've got decades behind you of putting in that work to hardwire the stuff one no the way the brain works just by default you are not special the way your brain works the human brain you can unwire that by putting your time and energy into repeating things about getting better about the ability to improve and if you just spend your time on that then you'll be just fine but if you allow yourself to keep investing in the anxiety not doing the pattern interrupts remember read the book feeling great by david d burns okay read that book takes you step by step on how to use cognitive behavioral therapy to begin to um not begin to to immediately immediately stop all the cognitive distortions and future worry that are creating that anxiety it's incredibly powerful now when you shift it to putting that same time and energy into rehearsing success into doing the things you need to do to actually get better at something now all of a sudden you've got all these expansive thoughts and they make you feel better now you combine that with meditation now you're able to lower that anxiety that's sort of ever present it's what i call background radiation okay so you're lowering that to zero and now you're replacing it with these expansive thoughts that make you feel better and now all of a sudden the anxiety begins to atrophy you begin to feel better over time now it does take time you have to focus on this new empowering way of thinking long enough that the old ways begin to atrophy so please do not be self-defeated and add another worry to your plate and say oh my god like this might work for other people but it does not work for me you just have to keep at it you have to keep repeating it and repeating it and repeating it and repeating it the diaphragm breath will give you some amount of immediate relief every time i do that even right now it just feels good so learn to diaphragm breathe and then keep repeating empowering notions pattern interrupting negative emotions using things that used to be an anxiety trigger now as a habit loop trigger to your new habit which is to think and empowering thought to take an empowering action to do something like breathe from your diaphragm the physiological hooks so that you can master your anxiety and that ultimately is what we're talking about you can do it i know because i put in the work for a very long time now something i think about frequently it's not something that at least in my experience that oh now i don't have to think about it i certainly don't have the debilitating anxiety that i did but by being just on top of thinking the empowering things and doing the meditation and all of that my life has completely changed so guys gals put in the work you will get the result i promise you can master your anxiety alright my friends i hope this added value to you if it did make sure that you smash the like button make sure that you are subscribed and that you don't miss a thing and until next time my friends be legendary take care hey everybody thank you so much for watching if you haven't already be sure to smash that subscribe button and hit the bell notification so you never miss a thing until next time my friends be legendary take care
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