Stop Letting Anxiety Hold You Back

Today, anxiety as a disorder, as a diagnosed mental disorder, afflicts about 40 million adults, and that's way more women than men. For whatever reason, women are a lot more anxious than men are. This seems to most people to be a real scourge, a real problem, something to eliminate if at all possible. The job for us to live better is not to eliminate anxiety, but rather to manage it to levels that do not obstruct our quality of life, But exist to the point that they give us the benefits that they're supposed to give us. If anxiety is part of your life that you don't like, let's talk today about how we can make it into something else. Anxiety into adventure. Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about love and happiness. The science behind those ideas, tangible ideas that you can actually take from the greatest that has been thought and said in research and scholarship and use in your life. My job is to translate a lot of the technical material that's out there in terms that non-scientists can use, but more importantly, that they can teach as well. My ambition as a happiness teacher is to create happiness teachers as well. So thank you for sharing these ideas with others. Thank you for coming back week after week. If you're a veteran of this show, if you're not, welcome. I hope you hit the like and subscribe button so that the algorithm can send this material to more people who might just need it. As always, please do feedback. If you have ideas for future shows, you have comments or criticism, especially if you have questions, please write those to officehours@arthurbrooks.com. If you'd like more material along these lines, maybe a written little note each week, you can get my, my, my completely free newsletter that comes out on Friday mornings. And you can get that by going to arthurbrooks.com/newsletter. Where almost 300,000 people are actually getting it every single week. That's just 300 to 500 words every week. And I throw in a few anecdotes and, and, and, and dad jokes just for good measure. And I hope you enjoy it and, and do share that with other people as well. Right now you're like Neo in The Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life, or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore, but it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system, just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings. You're addicted. You don't like it, and I don't either, but I can't just tell you to stop doing it. That's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. Well, here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile. It pays you to use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you. Use less data, earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life, and you're going to like how it feels. Today, I want to talk about something that is not a source of happiness typically, but it could be. Hmm. I'm actually talking about anxiety, and I want to talk about how you can see anxiety in your life or the lives of other people in an entirely new way, not based on just wishful thinking, But based on the best research. And I started thinking about this actually because of a very personal thing. You know, I have 3 kids, they're in their 20s. Not that long ago, obviously they were teenagers and they were angsty as anybody else. Now it's in the wind. I'll give you the data in a minute that young adults today, they're suffering from anxiety at higher levels than we've ever seen in the past. And it's not just measurement. It's not just diagnosis. It's not just that people are paying attention to it. I think it actually really is the case. And I'll tell you why I think that is the case. And, you know, my kids, like anybody else, were anxious because it's hard being a teenager and a young adult and people in your 20s. But a couple of my kids, they solved it or they didn't eliminate it. They learned to manage it in a counterintuitive way, perhaps. What did they do? Well, you have to get a little bit of background here. 2 of my 3 kids are US Marines. I wasn't a Marine. I don't actually know what happened. I barely made it through a year of the Cub Scouts. But when my second son was graduating from high school, he decided that college was not for him, at least temporarily. He actually is in college and finishing up and getting great grades now in his 20s. But at the time it wasn't right for him. So he went and worked on a farm for a while, and then he realized he wanted something even harder. He wanted something that would challenge him even more, that would maybe even actually satisfy his need to see the world and understand his own fear differently than he had in the past. So he joined the Marine Corps. Now he became a scout sniper, which is an elite unit of the Marine Corps. Those of you who on Netflix saw the documentary Marines, I strongly recommend it because it followed the 31st MEU, the Marine Expeditionary Unit, to the South Pacific on training exercises. My son actually did that as a scout sniper. And doing the infantry training battalion as well as boot camp, of course, and then this indoc for the scout sniper platoon, It was the hardest thing he ever did. And the job itself was really hard and dangerous and quite frankly, pretty scary sometimes. His little sister followed him into the Marines as well. Not, she didn't enlist like he did. She actually did Officer Candidate School, which is sort of the bootcamp for officers. And, and, and she's currently a 2nd lieutenant in the Marine Corps after incredibly arduous training as well. Now, why did they do it? Well, once again, it was to take on parts of their own life that they wanted to confront. front in a big, hard, strenuous way. How do I know? They told me, as a matter of fact. And here's the funny thing. After doing these hard and frankly pretty scary things, I mean, my daughter's still in, she's got years left and she's in the middle of it as well. I've noticed something about them. They went from angsty young adults to people of equanimity. It's not just that they grew up, It's that they, that they see their lives differently, including the source of their old anxiety. They turned their anxiety into an adventure. Craziest thing I've ever seen. And when I saw this happening, I thought, what's going on? What explains this? More importantly, how can I do that? How can you do that? How can anybody do that without joining the Marine Corps? And I've got the answers for you today. If anxiety is part of your life that you don't like, let's talk today about how we can make it into something else. Anxiety into adventure. Now, this isn't a new idea that anxiety can become an adventure. On the contrary, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, I've talked about him before on this show. He talked about anxiety in these terms. He called it an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition. In other words, he said, you have to turn your anxiety into an adventure. Now, he talked about that as the most important thing in life. The trouble is he didn't say how. He just kind of asserted that. I'm going to tell you how to do it, because since Søren Kierkegaard in the 19th century was writing, we actually have a ton of research on shows exactly how we can do it. And it's incredibly useful. It turns out to be precisely what my kids did, as a matter of fact, without actually having to go and study the social psychology. But for those of us who are not doing that, the research is going to make life a lot easier and a lot more straightforward. Now let's get a little bit of background on anxiety itself. I'm going to define anxiety in a second, but it's a problem. Anxiety disorders, a dysregulated kind of anxiety in life. It's actually the most common mental disorder, mental illness in America today. That comes from Scott Stossel in an article he wrote in 2014 called Surviving Anxiety. I'll put it, I'll put it in the show notes. I'll put all this stuff in the show notes as I always do. Today, anxiety as a disorder, as a diagnosed mental disorder, afflicts about 40 million adults. And that's way more women than men. For whatever reason, women are a lot more anxious than men are. That actually comes from the Anxiety and Depression Association of America from 2025. Okay. So that's really recent data. This seems to most people to be a real scourge, a real problem, something to eliminate if at all possible. But as my kids showed me, that's not the right approach. As Kierkegaard argued, for most people, elimination is not the right approach to begin with. And I'll come back and show you this in a minute too. It's not possible. You can't eliminate your anxiety, at least permanently. That's an exercise in futility. So management is the only option. And even better if you can turn it into something positive. If you do, here's my promise as we get to the end of this episode. Within healthy boundaries and properly managed, anxiety can become an integral part of your life, something that you actually treasure, something that you're grateful for. It can give you greater learning. It can raise your performance, and it can even make your life more fun and interesting. So don't turn off this episode. I promise you're going to get a lot of really, really easy tips that you're going to be able to use. Now let's start with the science by defining some terms. Now, When people talk about anxiety, there's a lot of terms that get thrown around and they're sort of interchangeable, so they seem, but they're not. Terms like anxiety and fear and worry and stress. Here's how they're all related. Anxiety is an unfocused form of fear. Now, fear is an ancient primordial negative basic emotion. It has to do with the activation of the amygdala, which sends a signal through the hypothalamus to the pituitary glands, which then stimulate the adrenal glands sitting over the kidneys to to spit out stress hormones. We are evolved to experience fear episodically and intensely. Our bodies are made so that something actually is perceived as threat. We smell something, we see something, we touch something, we hear something, that, that's a threat. That's supposed to stimulate the amygdala. And that whole process kicks into gear. You run before you ask questions, climb a tree, and then figure out whether or not that threat was real. That's what it's supposed to be. It's supposed to save your life. That's what fear is actually for. Unfocused fear, that which is kind of chronic and not something we're entirely aware of, something that's at a relatively low but nagging level. That's what we think of as anxiety. That's one of the best definitions of it. It's characterized anxiety, that unfocused fear, that kind of scratching at the amygdala, which actually sends a weaker signal through the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland. So you get a little drip of these stress hormones. It actually is characterized by recursive negative thoughts. That's a fancy way of saying you worry. Recursive negative thoughts are worry. So psychologically, anxiety is accompanied by worry and physiologically it's accompanied by stress. Stress is not a psychological phenomenon. It's a biological phenomenon. Stress has a lot to do with those stress hormones like epinephrine, AKA adrenaline. That's in the near term that gets you pumping. That gets you sweating and your heart pounding, or just you're getting the flutter in your stomach chronically at 2 o'clock in the afternoon when you're experiencing a lot of anxiety. And those of you who have trouble with anxiety, you know what I'm talking about. 3 o'clock in the afternoon, you're like, I'm kind of freaking out. I don't know why. And that feeling of lightness in your stomach, that's adrenaline that's actually being pumped out of your adrenal glands. And over the longer term, what's keeping you in a state of alertness because of anxiety is generally Cortisol. So if you go to the doctor and you have chronically elevated cortisol levels and it's not letting you sleep, that's what that's all about. But they're both coming from the adrenal glands, cortisol from the cortex of the adrenal glands. So that's the whole point. Anxiety is unfocused fear characterized by recursive negative thoughts, AKA worry, and physiological manifestations, AKA stress and stress hormones. That's how it all hangs together. Now, evolutionary biologists, they will suggest that fear is absolutely not a glitch in the matrix. You do not want to live without fear because you'll get, you know, run over, eaten by a tiger, attacked by a stranger because of a stupid mistake or error in judgment that you make summarily. Fear is super important for you. But evolutionary biologists will also argue that anxiety itself, that low-grade fear, that unfocused fear, that that's actually evolved as well. And it's actually protective because that's part of our alarm system. When there are kind of chronic low-grade threats that should have no small part of our attention and non-trivial attention that we'll pay to it. Attention to threats, like there are enemies, maybe pay attention. You know, there's somebody over there that I'm not quite sure of. That should make you anxious, not afraid. There are pathogens out there, anxious, but not afraid such that you pay attention and take appropriate action. So you're taking protective action as opposed to defensive action. You see the difference between the two? That's why anxiety actually is something that we've evolved and it's something that actually can be protective. Now, the problem is that that's normal anxiety, which everybody feels. There's not a person on the planet. I know that the chillest people you meet, they experience some amount of anxiety, maybe less than you. The trouble is when it actually becomes dysregulated or exaggerated, When it becomes a chronic problem. Chronic anxiety is a maladaptation to threats. It's kind of like a smoke alarm that's turned up too high. And so, you know, you light a match to light a birthday candle on a birthday cake in your apartment, and suddenly the smoke alarm goes off. It just becomes way too sensitive. The threshold is too, is too low. And there are some people for whom that's the case. They're chronically afraid of crime. They don't want to go out of their apartment because you never know. There's predators every place. That depends on the neighborhood, of course, but there are a lot of people who have this kind of paranoia and they can become agoraphobic as a result of that kind of anxiety. They'll have fear of sickness. You know, I knew people during the, even when the coronavirus epidemic had largely passed, who insisted on wearing masks outside. You decide in your own prudential judgment when you're going to wear a mask inside or on a plane or something, but people outside wearing them. And for a lot of the people that I would talk to, because I'm very sympathetic to that, I'm not critical. I'm not laughing at anybody. They would say, I just can't get over the fear that I have of this. And that's anxiety. That's an unfocused fear of a pathogen kind of in the ether that they're worried about. People who are afraid of flying, that's another thing. I mean, it's just like this unfocused fear of something that might happen. People were really, really nervous flyers. That's kind of this chronic anxiety because of these threats. The smoke alarm of your limbic system is turned up a little bit too high. That kind of dysregulation can lead to an anxiety disorder. which can significantly interfere with the functioning of your quality of life. And in fact, you'll be diagnosed with generalized anxiety and anxiety disorder precisely on the basis of whether or not it does interfere with the quality of your life. It's not how much anxiety you have, it's how much trouble it causes, as a matter of fact. And the people who have been diagnosed, formally diagnosed with this, has been going through the roof. From 2008 to 2018, the percentage of 18 to 25-year-olds, and this is where anxiety is most acute today. It's where we see the numbers going up most is with young adults. The 18 to 25-year-olds diagnosed with anxiety disorder, it doubled to about 15%. And then during the coronavirus epidemic, it went up by another 5 percentage points to 20% and has basically gone up from there. And so it's just not going back down. Obviously that's a big problem. A couple of references on this. One of them is the, is from JAMA Pediatrics, a pretty good overview of this global prevalence of depressive and anxiety symptoms in children and adolescents. Since during COVID-19. So that'll give you the data that I'm talking about here. And if you want to go look at it yourself and chart it up, you can do it using these links in the show notes. So what's the cause? What happened? Why is it going up all the time? Then you could just say the world's more stressful. I suppose so. But you know, I'm actually not persuaded of that. As somebody trained as a social scientist and looking back at history, it's actually probably not the case. There's something about the way that we live today. And that's something according to most people who are looking into this, certainly Jonathan Haidt at New York University, Jean Twenge at San Diego State University, they would place no small part of the blame in the way that we're using our brains in the way that we interact with our devices. So the intensive use, overuse, misuse of technology has everything to do with this. And it sort of makes sense. I mean, the rise of social media has been so extreme according to the American Psychological Association. The average American teenager spends about 5 hours a day on social media platforms. So what? I'll put that into the show notes as well. So you can see those data. So what? The answer is that the risk, literally the risk of an anxiety disorder, a diagnosed anxiety disorder rises linearly with the amount of time that a person spends on social media. And it's especially true for young adults. So, and I'll put those references in as well. Now, why? That's really interesting. And that's something I've looked at a lot in my own work. I answer that with respect to the way that we use our brains when we're using technology. The average person, American, checks her or his device 205 times a day, which means we're constantly going into these, into these platforms again and again and again and again. When we do that, we fall prey to problems of hemispheric lateralization. Now, hemispheric lateralization, if you've been watching the show, you know, it's a fancy way of saying that the 2 sides of the brain do different things. The right hemisphere is about mind wandering and mystery and meaning and love and happiness and why questions of life. That's where most of those things are really adjudicated. The complex things that you can never solve, but you could understand and live with. And then the left side of the brain is more how-to and what. It's the engineering side of your brain. It's the lists side of your brain. That's where you're actually figuring out how to do stuff. And that's what's most active when we're bombarding our brains constantly with these computerized algorithms. That's mostly what you're using when you're looking at AI, for example, or just being fed an algorithm of endless YouTube Shorts of information that we didn't ask for. So that almost exclusive use of the left hemisphere of the brain is marginalizing the part of our lives that we need for love and happiness and mystery and meaning, the right hemisphere. So guess what? When you marginalize that stuff from your life, when you eliminate that from your life, the mind wandering, the meaning-making from your life, you're going to get stressed out. You're going to be anxious. You're using your brain wrong. That's one reason. The second reason that when this shows up a lot in the literature is that when people are on social media a lot, they become very anxious because of high levels of social comparison. You don't have to spend any time on social media to see a lot of social comparison going on. I mean, you have this, she has that. She's got a better life than you. You're comparing yourself to millions and millions of other people. And this is especially deleterious for young women is what's been found. And that is extremely anxiety-provoking. The third reason is because a lot of social media, what it does is that you start to mediate your relationship through a screen. There's less in-person interaction and eye-to-eye contact, which has strong neurochemical implications to it. But the bottom line is that leads to loneliness. If you're spending more than an hour a day, give or take, your results may vary, but they probably won't vary much. And this is based on very interesting experiments in workplaces and among young adults in general, that if you're spending more than an hour a day or so on social media, each hour you spend is going to make you lonelier than the last, which is really ironic when you think about it, right? I'm lonely. So I want some human contact. So I look at social media, but that's like eating fast food. You know, when you're really hungry, you binge on fast food and your brain says, okay, good calories. But immediately your brain registers that your nutrients are insufficient. You'll get hungry again really fast if you eat fast food because you haven't met your nutrient needs and your brain and body know that. They're smart, but you've met your caloric needs, which means you can become malnourished and obese simultaneously by eating the wrong kind of food. You binge the food that actually meets the apparent need, but you don't meet the actual need. That's like social media. Social media is this fast food of social life. I'm lonely, so I binge on social media. And I get lonelier, so I binge more and it gets into this vicious cycle. You know, this is very, very suboptimal. That's the third reason that overuse of social media and tech would lead to these anxiety problems. And then fourth is kind of tangential to it, but it's worth pointing out. According to Jonathan Haidt, the average 12-year-old spends between 4 and 7 minutes a day in nature. There's a ton of research out there that shows one of the best ways to lower your anxiety is to go outside. is to, you know, touch grass. That's the reason they talk about touching grass. You're kind of freaked out looking at your device and you're getting out of touch with reality. And I'm going to go touch grass. That means put down your phone and go outside and look at a leaf or literally take off your shoes and touch grass. And there's a ton of research that shows that it will lower your anxiety and will lower your depression. It's good for you to do that. But the lack of nature is something that accompanies the way that we actually use tech today. So there's myriad reasons that this is the case that actually explains this pattern, this linear and direct correlation between anxiety, diagnosed anxiety, and the amount of time people spend on social media. These effects were exacerbated during the pandemic lockdowns, of course, which is why we saw these explosive increases, inflections in generalized anxiety, especially among young adults. who are most likely to be locked down at home and looking at screens for more and more and more time. Jean Twenge, who I mentioned before, has written about this. I'll put in a 2020 article called the US Census Bureau assessed prevalence of anxiety and depressive symptoms in 2019 and during the COVID-19 pandemic. That's from a journal called Depression and Anxiety. Yes, there's a whole journal dedicated to depression and anxiety. That this leads to not just discomfort and unhappiness. This leads to huge health issues. One of the things that we find is that high levels of anxiety, they increase interleukin-6, which is a cytokine protein. And that's associated with autoimmune disorders, with cancers, even coronary artery disease, coronary heart disease. As a matter of fact, I'll put the notes on that. You can learn more about interleukin-6 if you're interested. It exists for a reason. It has beneficial impacts, but when it's, when they're chronically high, it has a deleterious impact on the human body. You know, we find in some of this research that highly anxious people have rates of heart attack comparable to that of cigarette smokers. So if you're anxious, definitely don't smoke. So all this is bad, obviously, and you might be tempted to conclude as so many people have, That, that in, in, in positions of leadership and in, in sort of the therapy system in this country, that anxiety is the enemy and actually should be eliminated. I mean, that's something that's actually been proposed to a lot of young people today. People I talk to, my students and others, many, many times saying, we have to, you know, deal with your anxiety, understanding that it's an unvarnished terrible in life and it's best to get rid of it. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could live without it entirely? And, and of course that's not true. But even the eliminationist approach that many therapists and school counselors and teachers and leaders are talking about is misguided. The job for us to live better is not to eliminate anxiety, but rather to manage it to levels that do not obstruct our quality of life, but exist to the point that they give us the benefits that they're supposed to give us. That's what we want. That's the trick. What we need to find is the balance in people's lives. Now, I suppose for some people's lives is to get more anxiety than they currently have. They're too chill, but that's not what I see. It's actually to lower it to the point where we're not trying to eliminate it and not even seeing it as the enemy, but lowering it in our lives and managing it and framing it up in such a way that we start to get the benefits from it without the deleterious costs from it. We want anxiety at normal levels, which will render it healthy and good. Now, Is that possible? And the answer is yes. Tons of research shows this as well. There's an old saying often attributed to the Dalai Lama himself that sleep is the best medicine. The older I get and the more I study human happiness, and if I'm being honest, the worse my own sleep tends to get with age, the more I know that he was exactly right. Here's what the science actually shows. Poor sleep doesn't just make you tired, it can actually make you less happy. You can't build a meaningful life on frequent, chronic, broken sleep. So I take my sleep seriously. One of the best investments I've made in this area is my Helix mattress. What I like about Helix is that they recognize something obvious but important: different people sleep differently. Their website has a short quiz that asks about your sleep position, firmness preferences, and other sleep habits. Then they match you with one of more than 20 mattress models designed around your specific needs. Once that choice is made, the mattress ships directly to your door. It's a simple idea, but it's surprisingly rare. Start with the person, not the product. If you're serious about improving your sleep and your happiness, visit helixsleep.com/brooks for 20% off site-wide And additional offers. Invest in your sleep. Everything else works better when you do. Healthy levels of anxiety are highly protective, as I mentioned before, for alerting you to potential threats, keeping your attention on potential threats. For example, if you would eliminate anxiety while you're driving, you'd absolutely not be sufficiently alert to dangers in traffic. But there's interesting research that's obvious. But there's interesting research as well that shows that healthy levels of anxiety can promote empathy because they raise one's awareness of other people. And as such, it increases levels of self-knowledge. That's something that Scott Stossel talks about in the article I referred to earlier called Surviving Anxiety. But what I want to talk about here mostly is the benefit that we get by by having an adventure in life that depends on the anxiety in our lives. Yeah. Is that possible? I want to tell you about a pretty interesting study from the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2014. So it's about 12 years old now. In that study, scholars were looking at how a person's anxiety affected a task and how the task affected the state of flow that they were in. So they were performing tasks and they wanted to see if people went into a flow state. Now, Most of you know what that is, but I'll remind you, flow is a book called Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who's the great social psychologist, now of blessed memory, who taught for many years at the University of Chicago and later at Claremont Graduate University. And Csikszentmihalyi wrote about flow as an incredibly pleasurable state where you're kind of in a zone of doing something that's hard, but not too hard, totally engaged. Now, everybody watching us, you've been in a flow state before. Maybe you wish you were more. I mean, everybody wishes they were more where hours turned to minutes. It's like, wow, the whole morning went by. It's so amazing. For some people it's riding bikes. You know, one of my sons was a very good cyclist, was, you know, at one point wanted to be a professional cyclist. And when he was on his bike, I mean, the whole world went away because he was in this flow state. I have another son who, you know, he would, it's sort of incredible, you know, what he would What he's able to do when he's talking about deeply philosophical ideas, or for that matter, doing math. He's really kind of a brainy kid. And when he's in the zone talking about something that's really complex in this way, time goes away. And it's, it's just beautiful to watch as a matter of fact, um, because this is where he's supposed to be. This is his happy place as it were. Anyway, so this article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology from 2014. Looked at how the role of anxiety in getting people into the flow state when they're doing different tasks. Flow states they found were highest in people when they displayed a moderate level of sympathetic arousal and activation of the— I promise I'll define this— the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the HPA axis. In other words, they were experiencing measurable levels of physiological stress. They were anxious. They felt anxiety. They were not overwhelmed by it, but they actually felt it. They were kind of on the edge of their seats. This is what we're actually trying to get to. You're not freaking out. You don't think a tiger is going to eat you, but you're vigilant. You're trying to do something well. You don't want it to go poorly. You're not super relaxed. When you are in a state of moderate anxiety, you have the highest likelihood of going into a state of flow, which is bliss. That's the way that we actually turn anxiety into an adventure. And that's what we want more of in our life. That's what I want to tell you how to do, because otherwise, why would you keep listening? And by the way, one other piece of research before I go into the how-to, anxiety has actually been found to be therapeutic, even when it's, even when it is a little too high. So, I mean, it's like, you're not going to be able to turn it like a dial. Like, I'm going to get it just right. I'm going to calibrate my anxiety. A lot of times it's going to be too much. But research has shown, um, from the Journal of Positive Psychology that when people actually are experiencing uncomfortable levels of anxiety, I mean, really uncomfortable. They don't like it. They find a lot of therapeutic benefits from it, usually after the fact. It's kind of like a treatment that's not so great, but, you know, they'll find, for example, that when they go through a really anxious period in life, that, that tends to be quite freeing from limitations. So this is the key thing to think about when inevitably you're, you're experiencing a level of anxiety that's higher than you like. You need to reframe this as, yeah, I'm learning something. And I'm going to be free from limitations as a result of this, as likely as not. And by the way, that's not just wishful thinking. This is here in this article by Russo Netzer from 2025, Positive Anxiety: Existential Authenticity as a Pathway to Well-Being. That's from the Journal of Positive Psychology. Once again, in the show notes, go read it. It's good. People after the fact, after uncomfortable anxiety, they tend to have a clear understanding of life's meaning and they're better able to find authentic direction in life. Most people, when these things happen, say that they're grateful for the anxiety that they felt. This doesn't mean that you're, you should be looking for debilitating and dysregulated anxiety. That's too much. What I'm telling you is this isn't your enemy. That's really what we're talking about here. So what do we want? We don't want to get rid of it. We don't want to be afraid of it. We want to manage it, especially such that we're in the zone that we can actually get to flow. And we're not worried about it when it's higher than that. Okay. This is the goal that we actually have. How do we do it? How do we make it into our friend? Step 1, accept it. Look, anxiety is normal. Look, for the past 7 years, I've been teaching at the Harvard Business School. And I tell them usually in the second lecture of my Science of Happiness class, you're studying at Harvard University at the best business school in the world. If you're not stressed out, You need therapy. This is important and it's hard and you're doing it on purpose, but remember, you're doing it on purpose, which means you need to accept it. And all of us are doing things on purpose. Look, you're putting one foot in front of the other. That's great. You're doing something in your life. Everybody who's watching Office Hours actually wants to live a better life. You're involved. I mean, I wish everybody watched Office Hours, but the ones who are most likely to are strivers. And strivers are asking for stress and anxiety, even sometimes fear, certainly lots of worry. A lot of you are chronic worriers. I hope by the end of this episode, you're like, yeah, I'm worried less about my worry because I'm going to accept it. I'm going to accept it as a part of the life that I have accepted. You know, it was really helpful for me earlier in my life. I was a, I took a job as a CEO, a big Washington institution, policy think tank. And it was at the center of a lot of controversies actually. And, and I started getting not just hate mail, sometimes even threats for the very first time. It bummed me out. It stressed me out. It really made me really anxious. And so one day I realized that, look, if I'm going to dish it out as CEO of this organization, saying hard truths as I see them, I got to take it too. This is a cost of doing business and it's well worth it. And that's really what I'm talking about, except that anxiety is normal. And this is a life that you've chosen. And that's pretty empowering, I have to say. And by the way, trying to eliminate it doesn't work anyway. So you can accept it or you can rail against the moon, which doesn't really work. And it's not really helpful. That's step 1. And that acceptance is really important. I would actually put a little mantra together if you suffer from a lot of anxiety. I don't know what this day is going to bring, First thing in the morning. And I know it's going to bring a lot of anxiety, but I've chosen this life. Bring it on. That will help you. It has certainly helped me. Number 2, remember that to have an adventure in life, something that's out of the ordinary is exactly what you want. Now, remember, anxiety is your alertness to things that are out of the ordinary. Right? Something's not right. Something's not right. Something not right is what you're actually looking for, for adventures in your life. If you're going to do something that's actually kind of dangerous, if you were doing an extreme sport, you're looking for something that's out of the ordinary and kind of dangerous on purpose. Your version of that is actually what you're doing, fellow strivers. I want something that's not boring. It's probably not, you know, trying to go spearfishing with great white sharks or something, but there's a lot of stuff that actually does feel really dangerous that people are doing. A lot of people are really worried, for example, about first dates and romantic love. And And this is one of the things that I've done in conjunction with a dating app that I was working, that I've been working with. And if you're watching my show, you know exactly what I'm talking about here, that I say, see dates not as problems, but as adventures, like new things, new horizons, new things to learn. And here's the problem. Here's why that's hard. Most people treat anxiety as what the Harvard Medical School professor Kevin Majors, who's a psychiatrist, What he calls adrenaline with a negative frame. So you get the adrenaline and you have a negative frame around the adrenaline. That's what, that's how we actually experience anxiety typically. Now people say, okay, I got to get rid of the adrenaline. No, no, no, no, no. You got to get, you got to change the frame. Adrenaline with a negative frame has 2 levers. One is to try to lower the level of adrenaline. The other is to try to change the frame from negative to positive. And there's a whole bunch of different ways to do that, to say, you know, this is exciting. I'm learning something. I'm out on a date with somebody and it, And it might go really badly, in which case it's going to be funny after the fact. You know, I'm going to have a funny story to tell my friends, or, you know, this is exciting because it actually might lead to something really, really good, or it might actually lead to me feeling really, really bad. But that's, that's the kind of thing I'm in for right now. Reframing it in that positive way from this is stressful and harmful to this is exciting is something you can absolutely do. And by the way, that kind of reframing is something that people do all the time. This is once again, not wishful thinking. If you say it, it will be true. Lots of research that shows that you can do exactly that. Now to do that, it's important to kind of lean into the source of the anxiety. And this is step 3, deepen your engagement with the parts of your life that stress you out. Don't lean out, lean in. On the contrary, you know, conflicts in the workplace. I'll tell you how to do that in a second. Conflicts at home, major source of anxiety for sure. Worries about your health, worries about politics and the state of the world. I talk to people about this all the time. I mean, these are very, very common sources of anxiety. It feels like, yeah, I'm just going to not think about it. No, that's that. I mean, sometimes, yeah, but, but in general, you're not going to be able to do that. And if you're trying, trying not to think about it, guess what you're going to think about right now? I tell you, don't think about a purple unicorn. Okay. You just thought of it, right? And the more I say, don't think about the purple unicorn, the more you're going to think about it, which is paradoxical about the way our brains work. And so when you're actually trying to lean out from a source of anxiety, most likely you're going to be leaning in in the most detrimental, counterproductive way possible. So lean in of your own volition and in a positive way. And here's how you do it. Reframe the things that are stressing you out. In a way that makes them into a productive challenge, an exciting challenge, not as a black cloud. For example, if you're having trouble with your marriage, envision yourself engaging in a new and energetic way with your spouse. Think about all the different ways, things that you're going to talk about with confidence and without fear. Think about ways that you're actually going to lean into it to solve these problems. That way you'll actually By the way, it will no longer be abstract. And the more concrete the vision is, the less you'll worry about it. Because worry is this recursive thought about abstract things. That's how worry actually works. So make it less abstract. It'll be better. If your health is a problem, put together a protocol, a new plan for bettering your health. With one of my kids who recently made a move, you know, it was a, it was a really, really stressful move. Right. I mean, and she's, by the way, this is my Marine. So she's actually learned how to deal with a lot of anxiety in her life, but the move itself was the first big, huge move by herself across an ocean. And so one of the things that we talked about was, okay, write a list of all the things that actually might go wrong and what you will do literally in each one of these cases. Right now, there's a reason for this. This is basically how you take uncertainty, which is a source of fear that you don't like, and turn it into risk. This is what insurance companies do, is by saying, okay, in each case, what might it be? And what would I do in each case? That's classic technique, classic cognitive technique. And that really lowered her anxiety about something. And she went forth with confidence to do that. In the case of your health, you say, okay, I'll give you an example. You're really anxious about a test that you've got with a doctor. And it's, you know, you took the test and it's going to come back in a couple of weeks. That's a long time to be in agony about the anxiety. Write down the best case, worst case, and most likely case. Okay. What's the worst case? Some dreaded thing. The most likely case, something I don't like, but I can deal with. The best case is nothing. Let's say, uh, for purposes of argument that that's, that's legitimate. Now put kind of probabilities on that. You know, I think it's actually probably realistically a 10% chance is the worst case. I think it's about a 20% chance is the best case. Well, that means by process of elimination, it's a 70% chance is the most likely case. That's most likely. What am I going to do in each case? Write it down, write it down. And when you do that, what you're doing is that you're deepening in your engagement with it and you're turning it into a task. If it's not an adventure, at least it's something that you can manage. Think about rebuilding your career as opposed to worrying about your career. What are the steps that you need to do Take a constructive local action for a cause you care about in the world. If you're worried about the world, you get my point, lean into it so that you can actually manage it. That's step 3. So the big steps again are number 1, accept anxiety as a part of your life. That's the first step in managing it to levels that become beneficial to you. Number 2 is remember that you're anxious about things that are out of the ordinary. But an out-of-the-ordinary life is actually something that you want. You don't want to be bored and doing the same thing day after day after day. And number 3 is to lean into the source of the anxiety as opposed to leaning out of it. So you can actually organize it in your own mind and think of it. You're more likely to be able to think of it as an adventure, as opposed to a curse, a threat, something that you want to eliminate. Now, one last question you might ask, hey Arthur, if I take your advice, does it mean I won't mind my anxiety anymore? Am I going to get rid of the unpleasantness of it? I hope I've already covered that, but in a word, the answer is no. In many cases, you're still not going to like it. But back to Kierkegaard, he called anxiety the dizziness of freedom. Think about that. The dizziness of freedom. You want to be free? Yeah, it's going to cost you. And that's what I, how anxiety kind of feels as a matter of fact, is the cost of doing the business of being fully alive. You're always going to have to pay that cost. The question is, how do you decide it's going to feel for you to pay that cost? These are the ideas that come from the literature that have worked in my life, the lives of people near me. And now I hope you can put together a master plan for how they can work in your life too. Let's take a couple of questions before we finish. Anonymous writes into officehours@arthurbrooks.com. I struggle with an addiction and I'm a poet. Now, anonymous is not saying that he or she is literally a poet. For those of you who haven't been on the, listening to the show for very long, poet is an affect profile. It's an emotional profile that we use in my work. That's somebody who has unusually high negative mood or affect and unusually low positive mood or affect. People who are intensely negative in their activity, their limbic system and their emotions and unusually weakly Positive. The reason that they're called poets is because really creative romantic people, they tend to have this poetic kind of melancholic temperament. It's hard, although it is really associated with creativity. So it has gifts. And if you want to know more about that, we'll put in the show notes or we'll put here a place for you to go click, whether it's above or below me, I don't know. You'll click someplace on an earlier episode on the emotional profiles on the positive affect, negative affect sequence. You can also go to my website, by the way, at arthurbrooks.com. You can take a test that will tell you your profile if you're that, that poet, or one of the other 3. Back to the question. I'm a poet and I struggle with addiction. The question I continue to struggle with, no matter how productive or healthy or even lucky the day is this: how could my life have meaning when each day feels like a net affective loss? I've been doing the work for a long time, even if not entirely successfully. Is there any solution at all? Or the poet? There is, and there are a couple of things to think about. I work, I've worked with a lot of poets in my time. Literally, I've actually worked with literal poets, but I've worked with people with this high negative, low positive affect profile. And basically there are a couple of things to be thinking about. Now, poets, they tend to be low in enjoyment and low in enjoyment psychiatrically is often referred to as a condition called anhedonia. The inability to experience enjoyment is anhedonia. And one of the things that poets need to do is to get better at enjoying things. They often just don't enjoy anything. And that means they need to lean into fun. I'll put something in the show notes about how to enjoy leisure in entirely different ways that's based on this. And I'm not going to, that would be a whole show. So I'm not going to go into that now, but do, Anonymous, please do go to the show notes to look into that about how to spend leisure time in such a way that if enjoyment is hard for you, you can actually enjoy more because that's the macronutrient of happiness that is usually weakest for poets. So they tend to be very low in enjoyment. Meaning is another macronutrient of happiness, is a different kettle of fish. I often find that poets will say my life feels meaningless, but they actually have incredible gifts for finding meaning. This is really important. This is one of the reasons that poets will write poetry, as a matter of fact, they're trying to find meaning. Focus more and more and more on this natural strength. Which is meaning. Become excellent in transcendence. For example, I recommend that people who are poetic, that they get much more involved in their spiritual lives, much deeper involved in a sense of personal philosophy. Anonymous, if you have a religion, it's time to triple down on it, right? Because what that will do is it will play to your natural gifts in meaning and accentuate that part of your happiness profile. So learn more to do enjoyment and bring out more the meaning that whether you feel it or not, you're probably naturally good at. So go look at the show notes. I'm going to put some stuff in there for you on that. Annette R writes also to the website officehours@arthurbrooks.com. How can you live out your morning and evening protocols when you're not physically healthy? Okay. Now Annette is referring also to a prior episode of the show, 2 episodes of the show, actually one of the morning protocols that got millions of views as a matter of fact, and listens on the platforms and the evening protocols. And they're very specific. I mean, this is not an optimization thing. It's how I live a healthier, happier life. And they're pretty rigorous because, you know, I'm blessed to have good health. I get up at 4:30. I work out from 4:45 to 5:45. I go to Mass every day. My diet is super strict. How I use caffeine, how I apply caffeine, what I eat and when, et cetera, et cetera. That's not appropriate to everybody. And here's the answer. My morning protocols are supposed to be illustrative. They're not supposed to be biblical. Nobody should be a fundamentalist about what I'm doing. Not even me, by the way. There are times when I need to relax and that's hard for me because I'm so rigid about it. And my wife has to be like, you know, you're actually, you're staying in bed. Sorry. And it's actually really helpful to me. So Annette, if health is a problem, look at my basic protocols and think how you can adapt them to your circumstances. Number 1, get up at the time that actually As early as possible, appropriate to your health. So you're getting your hours. Number 2, you're probably not going to be getting down to the gym and lifting heavy. Probably walking is the ambulatory exercise, if that's possible for you, is the way that you'll actually spend your hour. Which, by the way, the hour walk without devices, especially if it's before dawn, is called the Brahma Muhurta in Sanskrit. And they in ancient Vedic wisdom. And it has special properties for what it does for happiness and health. Number 3 is, you know, maybe you're not going out and going to a worship service, but what are you doing for meditation? What are you doing for prayer, which almost everybody can do? Fourth, drinks and drinking and eating in a way that's most appropriate to your health, as close to what I talk about as possible, but certainly not overlapping that. Make it your protocol that actually fits you best. Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. Okay. Last question. Sandy F writes in also to the website. Is there value in daydreaming? I love it. Sometimes I daydream by reliving things in my past. Other times about events I hope to have happen in my future. Sometimes they're pleasant. Other times they're not. What's the value to them? Is there any? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Go back to the hemispheric lateralization shows that I've done. When you let your mind wander, which means you can't be looking at something on YouTube or scrolling Instagram. You can't be doing it then because that's distracting you and turning off the parts of your brain that you need to daydream. Now, what are the parts of the brain? They're parts of the default mode network. Go back to the earlier episode and I've talked a lot about the default mode network. I am a huge proponent of boredom. We need to make boredom great again. And I don't mean to cast aspersions like the unpleasant boredom thing. I think we need to be more undistracted. So Sandy F, that your mind can wander. Your default mode network is responsible for your creativity, your flights of fancy, your, and ultimately the sense of meaning in your life is where you actually come up with these unbidden ideas. Are they always super fun? No, because the meaning of your life has unpleasant things about it. Good. That's all I can say. You need more mind wandering. I recommend that everybody set aside time to be bored, to do things that are boring, On purpose so that you can get the default mode network switched on to get the mind wandering that you actually need. Time to sign off. Always please continue to let me know your thoughts at officehours@arthurbrooks.com. Place comments where you're watching or listening to this. We read them all, positive or negative. They're super helpful for us. And even if they're negative, thank you for watching the show. We really, really deeply appreciate it. And if they're positive and you like it, please suggest the show to a couple million of your closest friends. We want this to spread. This is a movement of happiness teachers starting with you. So share the love. Leave a review. That's helpful too. Give it a thumbs up if you like and follow me on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on any other platforms on social. I'm on most of them for sure. And you'll get content on those platforms that actually come from me on other podcasts and random stuff. Sometimes I just record videos of things I'm thinking of that don't show up on the show at all. And while you're at it, While you're doing stuff, go order The Meaning of Your Life, my latest book, if you haven't already. And if you, if you like it, pass it on to somebody you like. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. As always, thank you for joining me for this time, and I'm looking forward to seeing you next week.