Anxiety: A Signpost to Unmet Needs - Emotion Series #6

To love it, to invite it. I can't wait to be anxious again. When you're at that place, that's the real freedom, where you're not trying to manage yourself. That's where the real freedom is.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host Joe Hudson. Alright, hello Joe, how are you doing today?

I am a bit under the weather today, actually. I woke up with a— or went to sleep with just like a little bit of a sore throat. Did the whole COVID testing, was negative, but yeah, a little under the weather, but still happy, still feeling good, just a little lack of energy.

Yeah, I know that whole, oh, I'm having some symptoms. Is it COVID? Oh, a little anxiety there. Oh no, what's this gonna, is this gonna be a 2-week thing? Is it gonna be over in a couple of days? Is it gonna become far worse? Did I give it to somebody? Who gave it to me? Do they know they have it?

That's not happening, but yeah. But yeah, I can imagine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I guess I just assumed, 'cause like last time I spoke with you, you said you were in a love relationship with anxiety. And so I'm like, oh, well, if I was in a love relationship with anxiety and I woke up feeling under the weather, those are— this is like the go-to. Yeah, right where I would go.

The love relationship with anxiety came out of an experiment that I wanted to do, which was to, as much as possible through the day, feel whatever anxiety I might be having. So to get in touch with it in my physical person. And just like, okay, just be in touch with it without trying to change it, without trying to do anything, just to like increase my awareness of how anxiety moves through my system. So that's what the love relationship with anxiety was. And that experiment has ceased. I haven't, I'm not doing it right now, though it seems like it would probably be appealing to do again, but vacation happened.

You've beaten anxiety.

You've passed the level.

No.

Ouch.

No, no.

You know, for whatever reason, experiments come for a while and then they go for a while and then sometimes they come back. There was just this awareness and during it, I recall just an appreciation for the anxiety, the love for the anxiety, and that the more that I paid attention to it, the more that it transformed inside of me, the more it, just showed that it was life force. That's the best way that I can describe it.

Well, let's, let's define it. What, what is anxiety to you? What do you, what do you mean by anxiety?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I would talk about anxiety from the perspective of, you know, the three brains, uh, the head brain or the human prefrontal cortex, the emotional side, the mammalian side of the brain, and the nervous system side of the brain. So for me, anxiety for the head is just a constantly preparing for attack. It's trying to figure out what's gonna go wrong and modulate your performance and your environment to prevent anything from going wrong, whatever that is. Meaning there that a lot of times what we think is wrong actually turns out to be a huge gift. And then from the heart perspective, from the emotional mammalian perspective, I would say it's unmet needs, right? If you just think about a mammal, they're anxious when their needs aren't being met. Our needs, because we have a sense of self, are far more complicated probably than many mammals, but it's any kind— you have an unmet need, which I think is really important to see because it allows you to take immediate action when you're when you're having anxiety. And then from a nervous system, it's just that constriction of life force, the anxiety. And I think that's when I was saying the more I paid attention to it, the more it's life force. And what's happening there for me in that experiment was that the more I paid attention to it, the less the constriction was necessary. It was like, oh, I'm good. You know, it's like almost like a child acts one way if it's wanting your attention and acts another way when it gets your attention. And so it's, for me, the anxiety is really just a constriction of life force on the nervous system level. So that's how I would define it.

Okay, yeah, so you described these three levels, which we've talked about before. It's like, you've mentioned before as the head, heart, and gut, and it's shown up in some of the exercises and courses where you do practices in each of those states, each of those places, also describable as like the prefrontal cortex, the logical mind, the limbic system, the emotional mind, and the gut, just sort of like the, you know, that deep nervous system looking for its safety and its food and hunger. Kind of what you just described is that this feeling of anxiety is a constriction of life force. What do you mean by life force? Is that like emotional movement? Is that—

Yeah, so two things with that. So what do I mean by life force? I mean that when we are alive, there is something that animates us. You know, like there is an energy, you could call it like the battery pack of a phone, you know, it's like the energy, it's literally the energy. So I'm not trying to do anything spiritual with that. I just mean that we have something that propels us forward. And I'm using that for life force. You can use the word energy for it. It's what allows you to be awake and moving around. You know, it is life. It is. And so that's what I'm speaking to. It's nothing— think about it just very practically, like a battery pack or what the battery would move through your body and then the battery and what moves through your body to get you going.

Yeah, yeah. So basically like impulse from deep within you that is driving your behavior. Driving what you want, driving what you need, driving the safety you're looking for, driving the— yeah, the passions that you're into before you construct an emotional or logical story around them.

Yeah. And the second part that makes that really important is that there's studies in animals, uh, now I think it was mice, maybe it was rats, and it's like 3 generations. So if a, if a baby mouse maybe baby rat isn't cared for in the proper way, like in a typical way, and then they have an anxiety that occurs in their system, what we would call an anxiety, and they're jittery, they're more, you know, fast-paced, they're more anxious, and they don't raise their children the same way. And it takes 3 generations of safety for small mammals without cognitive ability to go from anxious anxiety to non-anxious anxiety, to non-anxiety, excuse me. So that nervous system side of things is really, it's really profound. It's a very profound thing.

Yeah, that's, I think that's fascinating for the way that a lot of us relate to anxiety is that we will try to figure out what it is and why it's there. And I think really a lot of something that's been really helpful to me is just to let go of trying to figure out what the anxiety is and just let myself feel it because whatever is going on in my body, especially like deep down in my nervous system, is far too complex for there to be a story or a narrative around. And maybe something like epigenetically inherited by like through my family or passed down through behavior of family or society, uh, and a lot of it just being associated with perhaps the way that life has changed so much in a couple of generations that our nervous systems aren't ready for, prepared for.

Yeah, it's an interesting thing. What you said is true that some people are trying to figure out. Oftentimes people are beating themselves up for it. Oh my God, I gotta stop being so anxious. Anxiety is something that, you know, the other day I was having a session with somebody and, you know, within 30 seconds I was like, oh, so tell me about your anxiety. It was the first time I'd had a session with the person. They're like, how did you know? Did somebody tell you? And it was like, no, it was all over, you know, the way that she held herself, et cetera. But the way she said, "Who told you?" It was shame-based. She had shame about her anxiety. And I think a lot of people have shame around their anxiety. So it's not even trying to figure it out. It's like, I want to get rid of this thing. And that of course only creates more anxiety. Only creates more anxiety.

Yeah, I mean, it looks like what happened there was that, You know, her intellect was looking for the threat as you just described. And the threat was somebody recognizing my anxiety and me being rejected for it.

That's exactly right.

Yeah. Yeah. So what would make it that we would constrict ourselves from this, like feeling this life force or feeling these unfelt emotions that results in our anxiety?

Yeah. Well, it's uncomfortable until you, you know, it's a bit like a deep tissue massage anxiety is. Like if you're not fully in contact with a deep tissue massage, it's gonna be really painful. And sometimes it's gonna be a little painful even if you are in deep contact, right? So if you're getting a deep tissue massage and you're talking on the phone, it's gonna be annoying as hell. If you're getting a deep tissue massage and you're in a quiet room with relaxing music, it's gonna be less annoying. I think anxiety is very much like that. It is a direct signal telling us that something is wrong. So we want to take action over that. Like, that's the nature— that's where it comes to the unmet needs, right? It's saying, oh, something is wrong. We need to take some sort of action to fulfill, to make sure that we're safe, right? That's what it's meant for in a general place. However, anxiety was built for, I think, probably far more about the physical body than the sense of self. And the physical body can't really be under threat for sustained periods of time unless it's in a war. You know, it's kind of these short moments, whereas you get this long sustained anxiety because a sense of self can be under threat all the time, all the time. If your sense of self is a CEO and your company is having a hostile takeover that, you know, which leads to like an 8-month legal battle or 6-year legal battle, like that's your sense of self is under is under attack for that whole time, right? So that's just, that's brutal. So I think there's a sustained thing that happens, which is what's new in our modern society. But what's true historically with anxiety is it's telling you that there's some unmet need that's going on there. And that insight is the most profound for taking action around anxiety.

It's true that we recognize even that when there's anxiety, there's some unmet need and there's some action we want to take, often that action is that we want to think about what to do, and then we circulate in that for a long time, thinking and thinking and thinking, because no action feels like it's actually leading to a safer place, because we're stuck in some local optimum and every way, every direction feels like it's worse before it potentially gets better, and we might not see that.

Yeah, you're right. We get scared of the consequences. Yeah, we're trying to avoid a consequence, and so we're looping to create, you know, like 100% certainty, which is— that doesn't really— it's not really how life offers itself. And the cool thing about that is that we don't actually need 100% certainty. We just need to be convinced that there's certainty. Meaning one person walks, you know, goes outside of their house and walks to the grocery store. In their mind, there's 100% certainty that they're gonna get there and they're gonna get back. Intellectually, they might be like, yeah, there's a small chance, But they don't think about it. It's like there's no— where somebody who's scared to leave their house, they're not certain of that, right? So it's really not even that it's logically certain. It's far more about whether that perceived certainty is there, which is somewhat ridiculous because it's the results that we think we want are usually not the best results.

Yeah. And the results that we get from acting on the first impulse from anxiety are often not the best results.

Yeah, right. They're usually the— they're usually the most likely thing is for them to create the thing we're anxious about.

Yeah. In particular, if we're, if we're trying not to feel the anxiety, if we're trying not to feel the anxiety, then the unmet needs are going to come out as proposed actions that we take that are, you know, askew to the actual unmet need.

They're going to create it, probably.

Yeah.

Right? If I'm anxious that I'm gonna lose my job, if I'm anxious that I have to keep my boss happy to lose my job or I'll lose my job, I am far less likely to keep my boss happy.

Yeah, and far more likely to lose the job.

And far more likely to lose the job because I am not acting in flow state. I am not getting things done as quickly. I'm second-guessing myself all the time. I'm trying to get it perfect instead of understanding the deeper requirement that the boss has. I mean, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, and I think on some level we know this, which is why we want to be calm. So we want to move ourselves into this calm state, which feels like it's like moving away from anxiety is going to get us there. But it's actually the anxiety that is the signal that's showing us how to reach homeostasis. It's showing us the unmet needs that are going to bring us back into equilibrium. And I think often what we mistake is what part of us has that need. Like what you were just describing is that the sense of self is something that can be under attack all the time. And if we feel the anxiety and just let it move, what happens to that sense of self that we think we're defending? And what happens to what we think the unmet need is when we actually sit in the feeling of the need being unmet instead of immediately trying to fix it?

Yeah, there's levels of the need and there is an annihilation of a sense of self that happens, which is what I would also call that a sense of freedom, right? So the annihilation of a sense of self, nothing less to be defended, more freedom. But what's interesting is, let's take the example of the boss, for example. Like, how many people do we know who have that fear that the boss is going to fire them? It's like, it's pretty prevalent in our society. Here's what's not prevalent in our society: somebody saying, hey, to their boss, I notice that I'm operating out of anxiety that I'm going to get fired at some point, and and I want to not operate out of that anxiety because I'm gonna be more efficient and I'm gonna do better and I'm gonna enjoy myself more. I'm gonna burn out less. I'm gonna have more energy for you. So I'm wondering, can we get really clear expectations of what you want from me so that I know exactly what's needed to keep my job and that we can make an agreement that if I do this, then we get there. It's not happening. That just, that simple conversation. And that's an example of getting your needs met. So what the anxiety, like that first, like, oh, I'm anxious, I'm gonna take action without any being with it. What it does is it kind of hits the most surface level of the need instead of the deeper need.

So the process of sitting in the anxiety, feeling the anxiety, being curious about where it's coming from, what it is, not even a story about it, but just somatically feeling it. What does this feel like in my body?

Yes.

Gets you deeper.

I would even say you can do all that and it won't work very well if you're trying to get rid of it. 'Cause what's gonna happen is if you start doing that process, if you're like, "Oh, where is the anxiety right now?" You're gonna notice that the anxiety loosens and like the life force is less constricted. And then the brain is gonna say, "Oh, if I'm with this, if I be with this, then I can get rid of it." which isn't actually addressing the underlying need, and then it stops working. So it's far more about loving it than it is about being with it. So the kind of the translation of the Eastern meditation stuff is all about be with awareness, you know, and it's great, very important stuff. And to love it, to invite it. I can't wait to be anxious again. When you're at that place, that's the real freedom where you're not trying to manage yourself. That's where the real freedom is.

Yeah, I can see the, I can see the subtle management in the concept of being with a feeling because there's like the feelings there, you're next to it, you're sort of observing it as a way not to really feel it. And you're like, there they are feeling, right?

Yeah.

Joe says to Recognize that you exist here. So I'm just going to stand here and watch you change into something better.

Right. Instead of, instead of I can't wait to feel this again.

Right. I've been moving through that a lot myself in just the past couple of weeks. We, for, for the audience here, we actually had an episode on this topic that we recorded and later on we were like, oh, let's redo it. We could do a better job of the performance on the episode. But in the episode I had like started to feel something in my throat and we went into that and I sat with that as a sort of a meditation over the next couple of weeks. Just like, what was it in there that I was feeling in this constriction? And just going in and like letting myself like love feeling it.

Yeah.

Has opened up a lot of things and a number of things have shifted in my life. It's hard to point it all back to one thing because everything's so multifactorial, but it's been a really interesting journey for me to be loving the anxiety, not just seeing it as something that's like theoretically welcome.

If you had to point to one thing that you think, obviously you can't prove, but what do you think has shifted by feeling that the anxiety that lives in your throat?

Yeah, so I mean, when we were talking about anxiety being a constriction of life force and there being emotions that are unfelt, but particularly that constriction of life force, I felt that in my throat. I was feeling anxiety in times when I felt like I was limiting myself. And times when I was making myself smaller or hiding. And then I used to be in sort of a cycle where I'd feel that in my throat and that would be a sign that I'm like hiding. And then I would be like, oh look, I'm doing it. And then I would just try to not be doing that by like altering my behavior rather than just by feeling, oh, what's this thing that I'm, this constriction I'm feeling in my throat. And then, you know, going into that and finding that there's other constrictions, there's really subtle muscle tension in certain parts of my body. And then just sitting in those. The other day I was having a really rough day where just like a lot of like challenging information was coming to me from all sides and I was feeling overwhelmed. And I sat down like to meditate, which I haven't been doing much. And I was a little bit beating myself up about like, oh man, I really gotta get meditation back in my practice. But I sat down and like, I didn't do any particular kind of meditation practice formally. I just sat down and I felt what was in my body. And I was anxious. And then I just loosened the tension in my muscles a little bit more and I felt more of the anxiousness. And I just sat and literally 30 seconds later, instead of getting up and going to the fridge and doing more avoidant things, I pulled up my like phone and sent a couple messages that were really important and started some conversations that were really fruitful. And every time I felt a little bit avoidant that day or procrastinating, I just sat down and felt it. In very little time, suddenly an impulse came up to do something that was actually beneficial for me.

That's really beautiful. What, what you're saying, that avoidant behavior, it's actually one that I have a little bit of challenge with in the fact that it's not in my system at all. So I don't have direct— for whatever reason, as a kid, I was the person who was, you know, created the conflict. It didn't avoid the conflict. I was, I was like the family crucible. I was the person who always said what was wrong that everybody wanted to avoid. And so I don't really understand the avoidant behavior the same way I understand a lot of other behaviors. And, but what I just heard you say was that the more you were with your anxiety in wonder, in vulnerability, in view, if you will, or with love, then the less the avoidance happened.

Yeah, and another thing that shifted was that my, the conversations that I was having, the same kind of conversation, a difficult one by many metrics, suddenly became more enjoyable. I was able to experience the, like, the pleasure of showing up.

Right, and also notice that in the conversations, my guess is that you were addressing unmet needs.

Yeah, speaking things that were important to me that I hadn't been saying before. Also not buying stories that weren't true for me, but also being there to like validate the feelings in them.

Yeah.

And overall feeling the anxiety of the consequences I'm afraid of.

That's a beautiful distinction you just made, which is like, I didn't buy the story, but I validated the emotional experience of the person. That's like, just, I wanna say how beautiful that was.

And, I wasn't afraid of the consequences.

Yeah.

I was doing it from what was alive for me and in my enjoyment and not trying to manage the situation, not trying to manage the, the people I was talking to. And it really shifted the relationships that I was involved in, in this dynamic. It shifted so quickly that I actually can't even tell that it was me shifting it or if all of us dropped a thing at the same time. Or if one of them dropped it first and then that impacted me. I really don't even know. It just like a lot of things just shifted all at once. And what I do know is that I started to feel a lot more pleasure in the, in the process of digging up like what would normally have been uncomfortable topics.

And yeah, beautiful. Yeah. So that's an interesting question, right? And to me, if I'm listening to this podcast, I would think to myself, how do I I'm not sure if I have a great answer for this either. But the— I would be thinking to myself, how do I stop caring about the consequences? And I think the best answer I can have— I have on that one is, is that the consequence that you're scared of is actually an emotional state. And if you can love every emotional state, you're not worried about the consequences. And somebody is probably saying, I'm not scared of that, I'm scared of losing my job and not having any money. And if I said to you, and if you lost your job and didn't have any money and you were totally happy and blissed out, what would be the problem? You would still be standing, sitting, and lying down just like you are today. So, and obviously there's some place where it's like we have a, primal instinct to be fed.

Yeah.

But we all know that, like, we definitely make these big mountains out of molehills. And so I think in general, what I would say is most people's fears over having to feel some way about themselves or have to feel some way, that's the consequence that we're actually avoiding.

Yeah. I feel like the process in my, in my feeling my anxiety was that I, I got deeper than the threat to myself. And felt what, by feeling the anxiety and loving the anxiety, I started to feel what was really a threat and what was not a threat at all to my actual physical self. And most of the story fell away as, oh, that's actually not a real threat. And I can actually see how it, like having that story is more of a threat than, you know. And so then it just was easy for that to shift. It felt a little bit discordant for myself to be enjoying difficult conversations so much. Which brings me to another thing that, another set of emotions that people don't tend to notice can be part of anxiety is unfelt joy, unfelt happiness. And let's talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, it's an odd thing. It's like we all want it. We all want joy and happiness. Most of products are sold on the idea that it'll make you happy. So it's something that we all want, but we're all actually really, really scared of it, is my experience. And there's a couple ways to see this and think about this. The first one is if you think about you're alone in a cafe that's full of people and you start crying, or if you get angry, or if you, um, get, um, scared in a cafe? And how about if you just start laughing out of just pure bliss and joy? Like, which one's gonna make people most uncomfortable? Like, which one's gonna be the most scary? You know, so it, it points to you. And also, if you look at like little kids, how many times, hey Johnny, calm down, hey Johnny, not like— how much is of that exuberance is like totally squashed in kids all the time, that just like rampant joy. So that's another way that you can see how our society does not accept like a deep level of joy, a deep level of exuberance. So there's a couple ways to look at it. The other thing is that there's just something about pleasure anxiety as well, which is like, you'll see people oftentimes like laugh because they get it in a session and then they'll stop laughing. And they'll stop the laughing because it's— they have this like, oh shit, I'm not allowed to feel good. And sometimes that comes into, if I— if the other shoe's gonna drop, that's the thought. If I let this in and feel good, the other shoe's gonna drop it. If I let this in, I'll get hurt in some way. If I let the love in, then that person can hurt me. There's all these very false conceptions that happen. So another way to really see about this is Like how well do you accept compliments? Do you let the, like if someone compliments you, do you let it in? Do you say, "Hey, thanks," or you say, "Oh no, no, that's not me," or are you like, "Wow, thank you very much"? How does it hit you? How much do you let it tickle you and feel good in your system?

And how much does it bring up anxiety?

Yes, and how much does it bring up anxiety? Exactly, right. And it's the same with like other things of pleasure, orgasms or whatever. Or laughter, you know, how openly can you laugh? How long is the orgasm? Like all these things are good indicators of how much joy you can feel.

I think a thing in common with all those is some form of loss of control or there's a feeling of a loss of control. And then anybody who's around you might also fear that there's like a loss of predictability.

Right, yeah.

The guy who's laughing maniacally for reasons that I don't understand in a, coffee shop. I mean, I've seen in movies that that's probably the guy who's like planted a bomb at the local hospital and is about to paint his face with a crazy, like, so the, the base rate there is to expect something unexpected. And that scares us.

It's the most common thing I hear about the podcast when people talk to me is they're like, your laugh. They like, and some people are like, I don't trust your laugh. Like that's, and some people just make fun of it. But like my laugh is is the thing that I get the most comments about.

Yeah.

So it touches something.

I remember a moment in a week-long workshop with you where as part of an exercise, somebody told me something that was for me to hear and to process.

Yeah.

And to reclaim about myself. And speaking to this history I have in extreme sports of having a lot of friends having died, They said, "You did a shitty job mourning your dead friends." Oh. And I let that in and it imploded into grief as I expected it to, but then it just exploded into the supernova of joy that I just didn't understand.

Yeah.

And the joy felt like a celebration of every one of their lives and a celebration of me still being around. And like all the positive feeling associated with, having been through this life path. And not much, like nanoseconds after it began and I nearly leapt out of my chair, I like calmed it back down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I brought myself back into the present, you know, into the moment.

And I have a couple stories, like it was very common for me when I'm working with people for them to just like start laughing hysterically for a while when they see something, when they see through something. There's a great quote that I love that I've probably mentioned before here, which is, God is a comedian playing to an audience that's too afraid to laugh. And I remember like multiple stories of this, of, you know, even one of the people who mentored me, Case, like I one day was like noticing, I'm like, you stop your laughter. Could you like, what's going on? I'm scared I'm gonna offend you. I'm like, if I can be offended by your laughter, man, like bring it. Like I'll find something about myself. That laughter is like such an amazing thing and so many people like stop it. And, but the most annoying one was that I was at, I think it was my last meditation retreat with somebody else leading it. And not that I, maybe we'll do another one, but I think maybe this is part of the reason I haven't is because I was laughing at everybody's questions. All these very sincere people were coming up and like asking these questions that were, I'm sure, deeply profound for them. And I just like kept laughing and I realized like I had made a decision in myself that I was going to laugh whenever I felt it. And, you know, which makes it difficult for me sometimes in sessions, because like, I will laugh at somebody's pain sometimes. And I'm not laughing at it like, haha, you're hurt. I'm laughing at it like, haha, like, you believe that, you know, like, it's like, it's like, I just find it like so amazing and hilarious at the ridiculousness of ourselves, not just them, but of me as well, and how I could be in that. And so, but I was laughing for 5 days of a silent retreat. Every other question or something like that, there's some jackass who was me in the back of the thing laughing just hysterically. Uh, and, and I, I know, I know, like, because afterwards I, I was around for like an hour and I had a couple people who clearly I got, I got their ire, right?

And so how do you think that retreat would have been for you if you had been trying to hold in that laughter and instead do be, be a good meditator, a good silent retreater? Oh, what would you have been feeling in your body?

Oh wow, that's a great question. Um, what would I have felt?

There's a hint, it's a topic of our current episode.

Oh, it is? Let me just— yeah, let me just— yeah, it would have been discontent for sure. And I think anxiety would have been I think there would've been more anxiety and more shame, probably both.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think the anxiety from the constriction of it and the shame because I noticed that the more that I'm not authentic, the more shame I have in my life. I don't know why that mechanism happens, but it does seem to be the case. The more authentic I am, the less shame there is.

Yeah, I think there's something, some part of us that just knows. If we're not being authentic, even if nobody else sees it, we see it.

Yeah.

And we feel that shame. Yeah. And so that makes maybe shame another great topic for this emotion series as another lovable emotion with a very valuable signal in it.

Yeah, for sure. Just to sum up on that, I do see that a lot of the constriction of life force is a constriction of of joy. And the other thing to say about anxiety that I think is really important, like, life requires friction, it requires resistance. Meaning a cell can't survive without some level of friction or resistance. A sun can't exist without some level of resistance or friction. We can't exist without it either. So To try to get rid of anxiety is somewhat ridiculous. It's like, life has this as an aspect of it. If we took all of the resistance or the friction of life out there, it's death. Somewhere, I think 4 years, 5 years, maybe even more back, I was doing this meditation where I was trying to hold my anxiety as lightly as possible without letting it go. Where I wanted to make sure, and it wasn't anxiety, was it anxiety at the time? I think it, I think it, I think I didn't even call it anxiety at the time, but I think I called it just like the dis-ease. I was trying to hold my dis-ease as, as, as lightly as possible without letting it go. And it was, it was a great, really great experiment. Highly recommend it.

So to close this episode, what's one question that we could sit with to develop this relationship with anxiety?

I would recommend if you're gonna do the experiment, which I highly recommend you do, to be with your anxiety as much as possible in a way that you're grateful and you're embracing it. Then a great question is, how is my anxiety right now? It's a great question. And it's a little awkward. The question's a little awkward. How is my anxiety right now? And it's designed that way because it, keeps the head out of the action a little bit, right? So how is my anxiety right now? If you— so just ask it and feel it for a moment.

Yeah, I feel like that question goes more to the, the quality of the anxiety instead of a story around it. Yes.

Yeah, exactly.

The felt sense.

Cool. Great. A pleasure.

Yeah, thank you, Joe. Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and rate us in your podcast app. We'd love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions or comments. You can reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.