Hi, my name is Scott, and I am anxious, or at least I used to be. Um, the truth is, I really do not do that much these days, I guess I would say, of my life that I would consider to have been derelict by debilitating anxiety. I used to have so much anxiety I basically couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t do any normal person things like drive my car, make phone calls, leave the house, go to school, go to work, talk to people.

First Stop Avoiding

So I am going to tell you the six things that I stopped doing to better manage my anxiety. And the first one is avoiding, meaning I stopped avoiding. Now, this one is tricky, I know, because this is what anxiety tells us to do. Anxiety tells us to avoid it. Anxiety tells us that’ll be terrible, you don’t have the skills to handle it, everyone’s going to hate you, you’re GNA fail, right?

Stretching Your Comfort Zone

And you don’t want to just throw yourself head first into anxiety-provoking situations necessarily, but I think of it as a lot like stretching, you know, like if you’re doing calisthenics, if you start to stretch and the second you feel any physical discomfort, you don’t progress in that movement, you will not make any progress on your flexibility because the progress that you make on your physical flexibility comes from entering that discomfort zone, right, the Zone where you start to feel my body’s in a position that it doesn’t find itself in very often, and that’s loosening and stretching my muscles and my tendons and things like that.

Facing Anxiety’s Script

In other words, you have to at least occasionally put yourself in situations where it is possible for the script that your anxiety is telling you, that running voice of, you know, it’s all going to fall apart, it has to be in sit. You have to be in situations where it could be wrong.

If you listen to your anxiety and every time your anxiety tells you something bad’s going to happen, you don’t go and do that thing, then it is literally impossible for your anxiety to be wrong because you are not in situations where it is challenged, and it will always end up being right, at least that will be the message that you hear in your mind when you think back on the things you didn’t do. It’s good that I didn’t do them because you never had an opportunity to be wrong about the script your anxiety was telling you.

The Second Change: Cutting Stimulants

The second thing I stop doing to lower my anxiety level is, I, you guys are going to be mad, some of you are going to be mad, but remember I’m not the boss of your life. These are just ideas. Take what you will from them, okay?

The second thing I stopped doing is I stopped giving myself unlimited access to stimulants, and I don’t necessarily mean like street drugs, I mean like coffee and energy drinks and pre-workouts and Mountain Dew because caffeine is the most commonly used stimulant for people, right? Stimulants and anxiety are not necessarily the best of friends, okay?

How Stimulants Affect Anxiety

Stimulants increase brain activity. They make more happen, and they make it happen more quickly in your brain, but they do it in a very non-discriminatory fashion, right? And so stimulant use essentially makes your brain think quicker and generate more thoughts. It doesn’t necessarily make the thoughts that your brain is generating any better or healthier or less anxiety-provoking than they otherwise would be.

In other words, stimulants just supercharge what your brain is already doing, so if your brain by default on its own produces a lot of really anxiety-provoking thoughts and you drink three espressos, you’ve probably just doubled the amount of anxiety-provoking thoughts you’re going to experience that day.

You just gave your anxious mind all the fuel that it needs to supercharge its ability to create all the doomsday scenarios that it was going to create anyway.

The Third Change: Stop Doing Nothing

The third thing that I stopped doing to better manage my anxiety is nothing. Now, this isn’t some annoying therapist riddle where you have to figure out like, oh, what’s the no. I mean it literally, I stopped doing nothing because I spent so much of my time when I was anxious doing nothing, and here’s what I learned from that time:

My brain, and I assume everybody else’s brain too, I always, I always assume my brain works like most people’s, which might be a dangerous assumption because I’m kind of a strange person, but my brain essentially uses any unoccupied part of itself to generate anxiety, so if I’m not really doing anything or if I’m doing something that isn’t very engaging or isn’t very stimulating, I have a lot of leftover thoughts, like a lot of mental that is not being used by the task at hand, and I’ve learned that my brain will take all that extra and basically extrapolate every possible worst-case scenario for everything that’s happening in my life right now.

So that, like, this is going to sound like I’m being ridiculous but I’m not, that part of my brain, if it’s not stimulated, will be like how are you going to go broke? 

 

And it’s usually a pretty high activity level, and you can’t stop them from having that activity level. They are children and they just have it, but what you can do is direct their energy.

If you give them fun and exciting and engaging things to do, they will probably do those things. If you don’t give them anything to do, that’s when you end up finding that they’ve made their own little Van Gogh drawing on your wall in permanent marker because they needed something to keep them occupied and you didn’t give them anything, so they made their own thing.

And when they make their own thing, it may not be something you want them to do. Treat your anxious mind kind of that same way, treat it like a kid with a lot of energy. It’s going to have a lot going on, but you can direct it, and if you can keep it occupied, especially if you can keep it occupied with things that are beneficial or meaningful to you, but really even just anything, an unoccupied mind is a catastrophic mind.

That’s where so many of your catastrophic thoughts are going to come from, is boredom and understimulation and just a lack of a place to direct your mental energy.

So try to give yourself projects, hobbies, tasks, whatever it takes to keep your mind occupied so it doesn’t have time to just sit around and ruminate about all the worst doomsday scenarios it can come up with because it will, or at least mine did.

Fourth Nutrition Matters

So the fourth thing that I stopped doing to better my engagement, my anxiety, is I stopped eating like crap, and I stopped skipping meals. I started to take my nutrition very seriously, and I eat three, like, I’m not going to say that I’m some health nut because I’m totally not. I mean, I would previously, and that’s the point is that wasn’t good for me, um, because that’s all carbohydrates, and carbohydrates don’t actually nourish your brain very long.  

And those of you who have watched some of my other videos might say, hey, he’s just saying this thing again because he also said that he stopped skipping meals in his six things I stopped doing to better recover from depression video, and you’re right, and you know why? ‘Cause it’s that important, you guys. Because full calories is actually an abbreviation. The full term is caloric energy. It’s literally brain fuel. That’s what food is. Food is brain fuel, and if you skip meals or restrict just eat really tiny meals or eat meals that are mostly just carbohydrates, your brain will run out of energy, and when it runs out of energy, it’s going to preserve, obviously, like keeping your heart beating and keeping your lungs breathing and keeping your music system going because that’s your danger sense.

So your emotion regulation, your distress tolerance, your social engagement, those are all the things that are going to go out the window, and you’re going to be an anxious mess if you don’t take care of your nutrition. It’s just not optional. It’s part of what your brain needs to be healthy and functional, and you just, you just got to take it seriously. There’s no way around it.

The Fifth Change: Asking for Help

The fifth thing that I stop doing to better manage my anxiety, I’m to be honest with you, this one was the hardest one I did, and B, like the first four, I feel like I’ve got those pretty, I’m not gonna say perfected, but I do those at a high level.

This one is, I’m still working on this one.

This one is an ongoing growth edge for me.

I stopped trying to do everything myself, and that one even like still hurts a little bit to say out loud because to be frank with you guys, I have trust issues, and not even just like, oh, I think everyone’s going to hurt me and betray me, but, you know, I was the guy who, like, when I was forced into a group project, I would tell everyone to send me their slides or their Word documents, and I’d be like, oh, I’ll just put it all together for you guys because, you know, someone has to like collect all of it and make it one single thing.

Then I would go through and edit and like fix and improve all their work so it didn’t look like crap for me, and if anyone who’s gone to school with me is listening to this and you realize, sorry, I now just told you that I fixed your crappy work, but that’s the kind of person I am.

And for a while, like I was able to do everything myself, but the older you get, the busier you get, and the more spread thin you are, and it just, you will reach, if you’re not already there, you will eventually reach a point in your life where you cannot do it all yourself.

And I still hate that that is true.

I like, as I say that, I cringe because this is how I’m built, but it is true.

You have to be able to ask for help sometimes, you have to be able to delegate sometimes because if you try to do everything yourself, there’s going to be days when you need a 60-hour day to do it all, and looking at your to-do list and seeing 40 things on it and saying I have to do it all myself, no one can help me with any of that, it’s not going to be good for your anxiety.

There’s just no way.

This is what really sucks about anxiety: anxiety typically also creates really high expectations for ourselves.

Like there’s a huge overlap between anxiety and perfectionism, and so most people who struggle with anxiety don’t like to delegate because their standards are higher than most people’s and their anxiety tells them you have to reach the standard or some unspecified or sometimes specified bad thing will happen if you don’t.

But it also means if you have anxiety, doing all those things is even more stressful for you than it would be for someone else, so you kind of get this double way of stress.

You’re going to have to ask for help sometimes, you’re going to have to delegate sometimes, and I’m saying this to myself just as much as I’m saying it to you as someone who is about to open the doors to his new business in a week.

I want to do it all myself, but I know I can’t or at least I know I shouldn’t.

Like maybe I could if I got like four hours of sleep at night, but that’s also not good for your 

The Sixth Change: Trusting Yourself

And the sixth and final, not final thing because I did more than six, but these are like my top six because if I really told you all of them, this would be like 90 things that I stopped doing and the video would just be much too long, but the sixth thing that I stopped doing to better manage my anxiety, I’ll have to explain this one too because it might sound weird at first, is I stopped treating myself like an untrustworthy person. What I mean by that kind of goes in with number five of like trying to do everything myself, but I also used to act like I couldn’t trust the future me, and I think this is where there’s a lot of overlap between depression and anxiety, right?

And we’re still trying to figure out exactly how that works and why that is, but I think a big part of it is when you have depression, you often don’t do the things that you know you need to do because of anhedonia, low motivation, chronic fatigue, whatever it may be. And you start to view yourself as someone who doesn’t do the important things, and if you also have anxiety, what ends up happening is you end up in this weird space where you’re like, I cannot trust my future self to do things because like what if he gets, what if he gets depressed, what if I have a depressive episode tomorrow, all this stuff on my to-do list, I can’t put any of it on tomorrow.

Instead, I have to do it all today because who knows what kind of shape I’m going to be in tomorrow, but what I eventually realized about that strategy is it, it’s treating myself like an untrustworthy person, and for a while I was, is the thing, like while I was not managing my mental health very well, I was not somebody I could trust, and so I kind of had to live that way, but it’s one of those things where we don’t always recognize change in real time. It can take us a while to realize that something that was true in the past is not true in the current moment. So for a long time, I still treated myself like this person I can’t count on, like this person who, you know, at any given time is just going to become some flaky, unreliable guy, and that meant I refused, not only did I refuse to delegate to other people, I refused to delegate to my future self, and every single day, whatever was on my to-do list, I was so rigid about this.

I will get to them. That took a lot of conscious recognition on my part because as I started this video by explaining, there was a time when I really didn’t do anything. So to go from that to saying, you know what, I trust that I’m going to get all the stuff done that really needs to get done eventually, and I don’t have to try to do it all today, that’s a big change in self-concept, so that one takes some time, that one takes some patience.

Like I said, it takes a lot of mindfulness just like really asking and answering questions, am I still that person? Who am I today? What does my most recent data show me about who I am? But I very, very strongly believe that people who work on integrating some of these ideas can see massive reductions in their anxiety. I know I certainly have. I mean, like I said, I think I’ve been on kind of both extreme ends of the spectrum anxiety-wise, you know, going from being completely dysfunctional to doing things that make most people in my life say like, whoa, you’re doing what? That’s kind of crazy, and I mean it, it’s real.

Like it has been my story. Anyway, it’s been my experience that anxiety can be defeated. I truly believe it can. I believe it can be conquered, and it’s not because mine was mild because it was not. It was not.