Addressing Anxiety || Podcast (Episode 2) || Ishan Shivanand

Welcome everyone to our second episode of our podcast. Today's episode will focus on addressing anxiety coping strategies and how it's impacting our generation. Many people use anxiety as a term to describe overwhelming concern or nervousness about the future, and many others can describe it in terms of a physical sensation. So Ishanji, I'd like to ask to help give an idea to our listeners, how would you define anxiety?

Unwarranted fear. I would define anxiety as— so first of all, let us try to understand our body. Everything that's inside our body it has some use for ourselves. Evolution didn't put anything inside us to harm us. So if we put ourselves in, let us say, in the savanna, and we are living 10,000 years ago, and at that time there are lions on the loose, there are animals on the loose that can harm us. So if we are in a state of anxiety, then that anxiety can, can save our life. Because if we are worried that if the leaves or the grass is moving, then of course there has to be some form of predator behind it. And if we get anxiety from that fear moving, then we react and we run away. The more we react, the better our chances of survival. But now we come back to the present moment. In the present moment, we can feel anxiety before there is a game, we can feel anxiety before we have to do public speaking, we can feel anxiety before we are going on a date. And each time that anxiety, if It is up to a certain manner, it can sort of help us sharpen ourselves, sharpen our senses, and be a bit more alert and aware. The problem comes when the anxiety becomes chronic and unwarranted, when we are having feelings of fear, dread, without any reason, or we become unnecessarily pessimistic, or we can't control our heart palpitations, or we can't control the physiological symptoms of anxiety, the psychological cognitive functions of anxiety. And to a sense, we are thinking logically the anxiety is not making sense, still we are having it. We are getting overpowered by it, it becomes a dominating force of our life, that is when anxiety is an issue. So per se, anxiety is not bad. It is an everyday part and parcel of our life. But uncontrolled, unexplainable, unwarranted, overpowering anxiety That is an issue which we must overcome.

Yeah. In our last episode, we talked a lot about, um, meditation and how it helps us take the time to focus on ourselves and use this as an opportunity for self-love and looking at ourselves more in depth. Um, when we talk about chronic anxiety, how can we use meditation as a coping strategy for anxiety?

Grounding and awareness exercises can help. A lot of psychologists also use meditation-based modalities. They call it 333, which would be that if somebody is having a panic attack, tell them to feel 3 parts of the body, try to feel, take 3 deep breaths, etc. These are grounding exercises. These are awareness-based exercises. So, as I was telling you last time as well, anxiety is I am thinking of a future, so I'm not in the present moment. And I have seen it in my research, in my work, and a lot of psychologists will collaborate with what I am saying. That if somebody is going through an attack, if somebody is going through this feeling of anxiety overpowering them, one of the things that can help them is feel their body. So a technique that I like to teach is count of 4, so 4-count breathing. And how I tell them is take your awareness to the hand and give this count: 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2, 1. 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2, 1. And as you are moving your fingers, you breathe. You take a deep breath with a 4 count. So in your mind, you are doing the count, your hands are giving that count, and you are breathing. So 4-count inhale, 4-count exhale. And what this will do is this will help you ground yourself. You will become aware of your body, and you will find slowly your anxiety dissolving, it going away, and feeling of happiness starting to come on the surface. So I would recommend this exercise to anybody who feels that anxiety becomes uncontrollable, it is so very easy to do. It can be before you are going to the examination, you're feeling uncomfortable, just, just focus on one hand. The one hand is giving the count and you're doing deep breaths. Because a lot of anxiety has to do with the heart rate as well. So if your heart rate is increasing, increasing, increasing, then that palpitation, that feeling of dread is increasing. But if we We breathe in this manner, slowly, calmly, 4-count. What we are doing is we are bringing our heart rate down, we are relaxing our mind, and physiologically we are coming in control. So I really recommend this. And you can do this as a meditation exercise. Close your eyes, sit straight, and then do this. Or you can do it as a crisis management exercise. Well, you are walking and part of your brain is working, but the other part of the brain is focusing on the breath, meditating, and relaxing.

That's incredibly helpful. I think especially as a, how you mentioned, as an on-the-go tool when people are on the way to an examination or walking to somewhere important, it can be incredibly helpful just to stop and have your own hands as such a useful tool. To be more clear, how do you think it could help them slow their thought process down? How do you think it could bring them back to a sense of self?

There is a very beautiful saying, an old ancient, thousands of years old, and it goes, and it's based in India, Avidya Asmita Ragdvesh, Abhivesh, Kalesh. And what it means is that all sorrow of my life, it begins with Avidya. Avidya means lack of awareness of the self. Lack of awareness of the self leads to false ego because I don't know who I am, so I want to define who I am by the people around me. So whatever they value is how I try to make myself. And if I am living my life to please other people, it will lead to 'rag' and 'dvesh', which means a form of disgust towards people who do not appreciate me and a form of attraction towards people who appreciate me. And from this way of living, I live in a state of 'abhivesh', which means fear which means chronic anxiety that will somebody accept me or reject me. But how is this whole cycle beginning is through the first problem, which is avidya, lack of knowledge of the self. When you focus on the breath, when you do any form of meditation, what you are doing is You are knowing yourself. Even in scripture it is written, love thy neighbor as you love thyself. To love thyself, you have to know thyself. And when was the last time you spent time with yourself? Why people in the West have fallen in love with yoga is because that is the time when they are doing some stretches where they are thinking about the mind-body connection, when they are feeling each and every single muscle. Because when you are just doing exercise, you are pushing your body again and again. You, you are just expecting from the body without knowing the body. But when people do things like yoga, it is a dynamic meditation. You're getting to know your body, you're starting to appreciate your body, you're starting to love your body. To know yourself, you need to spend time with yourself. And things like this that we talked about— the awareness, the breath— it allows us to, to go inside. And when we go inside, yes, in the beginning, definitely, of course, they are going to be a bunch of thoughts. But what is going to happen is the deeper and deeper I go These superficial thoughts, they will go away and I will not react so much to them. It is like scuba diving. When you are scuba diving, your boat is on the surface of the water and there are waves, and the waves is shaking the boat. So you are getting shaken in the boat and you get seasick and you want to— but wear the scuba gear Jump inside the water. Now there are no more waves. Go deep, deep, deep, deep, and there is silence and there is calm. If we are just superficially looking at our thoughts, random thoughts which come out of random stimuli that is all around us, then of course we will be in a state of anxiety because we'll think this is who we are, this is what our mind is. It is not. Take time, go deeper. Go deeper into your subconscious and you will find you are beautiful, you are creative, you are wonderful. You have this depth inside you that is so phenomenal that people used to talk about when you were young and they used to say, oh my God, this person is special. You will discover what is special about you if you go down deep inside. But I don't know why people have this fear. Of going down deep inside. It happened with me. I remember I was in the London Tube, and when I was inside the tube, I saw everybody in the tube was looking down either on their smartphones or their newspapers or something like that. And I was the only guy who was just looking at everything. And when I was looking at everything, I saw some cops and they were looking at me. Becoming suspicious that, 'Oh my God, why is this brown guy with a beard looking at everything, looking at the CCTV, making notes and everything?' So then I realized, if I have to be in society, I have to look busy. So even I would take out my phone when I would see a copper and I would be like, 'Uh.' But the thing is, We keep ourselves busy. We don't go inside. We live a superficial life. And when we do practices like this is when we bring depth into our existence. So I would recommend this. Whenever you have some free time, some transitory time like travel or in between work, rather than just wasting that time in knowing what's happening around the world or what's happening with Kim Kardashian or what's happening at the Cannes Film Festival, why don't we just utilize some of that time to know what's happening inside us? Because our life will not be impacted by what is happening at Cannes. But our life will be impacted by what's happening inside us. So that is my suggestion.

Currently, a lot of teenagers and young adults face a lot of stress and uncertainty and just general confusion about the state of the world, and some are just not sure how to respond with so many overwhelming feelings. Um, I guess my question would be, what tools can we provide to our generation to help support them with this anxiety that they deal with about the future?

There is fear and there is manufactured fear. Manufactured fear really helps consumerism and capitalism, because if you are, uh, not in a state of panic, why will you waste your money? You know, when, when, when shops do sales and say 50% off only today, only today, and then everyone— only today, 50% off— FOMO, fear of missing out. Ah, I have to run, I have to fight a battle to buy that thing that I don't need to impress people that I don't I don't know, spend money that I don't have. Who said this? I think it was a celebrity who came up with this line. I don't know, but it really makes sense. So there's a lot of manufactured fear that goes on in society. If we look at history of the world, and I really recommend people to learn history, to read history, what we will realize is that we are living in a golden time period. If we go back 200 years, there was so much uncertainty. You go back 300 years, famine was a part of life, war was a part of life, disease was a part of life. If you look at mortality of a human being, we could die from as simple as a scratch from a nail on the ground. We could die from bacterial infections, and if somebody could live to the age of 50, then that was considered old age. Education wasn't accessible to most of society. Women empowerment really did not exist. Food, food was difficult to procure. Imagine, today we can eat anything we want. Seasonal or not seasonal. Knowledge is so accessible. We are a Google search away to any thought and idea we can fathom. We are living in a golden period, and what we need to develop in our life is a practice of gratitude. And that is what I would recommend on top of a meditation practice— gratitude. Force yourself to think of 10 things. You get up in the morning, 10 things that I'm grateful for. And what we are doing is, from a pessimistic mindset, we are pushing ourselves to be a little bit more optimistic. And I think Both of them have a place in society. What George Bernard Shaw said, the optimist invents the aeroplane and the pessimist invents the parachute. But unnecessary negative thinking and complain is just going to lead to more anxiety and ill effects on your health. And if we find that our thought process has become like a fly, you know, a housefly, a Musca domestica, no matter what beautiful food you put in front of it, it will find shit and sit on it. And it just doesn't sit on the shit, it then sits on the food and corrupts the food. So if we find our mindset is that doesn't matter where we are living, in such a good time we are living, with such nice things that we have, we find shit, we rub ourselves on it, and then we complain to other people. This is just an unhealthy way to live our life. Gratitude will help. Try to find 10 things that you are grateful for in the morning when you get up, and 10 things you are grateful for in the night when you go to sleep. And if you tell me that, no, look at that person, they are living such a pathetic life, oh my goodness, they have nothing to be grateful for, how can you ask them to say something like that? Then I will say to you Doesn't matter how pathetic you think somebody's life is. I come from a third world country. I was born and raised in a monastery. I had to work 10 hours a day to get a meal, but even then I was grateful and I was happy. I have worked very hard in India, in Africa, in Southeast Asia, and I've seen people who according to Western standards do not have the most awesome lives, but they have a better quality of life than the West. Why? Because how they measure their selves, how they measure their life, is not based on just what you have, but what you feel. I have seen Children carrying loads on their head, dancing with a tune that they are carrying in their minds. So if that person can find reasons to be grateful about, anyone can find reasons to be grateful about. And this gratitude is just going to help us live our life. So I want you to try, just simple, simple. Get up in the morning. What am I grateful for? So for example, I'll tell you what I was grateful for when I woke up in the morning. I was grateful, number one, I was alive. I was grateful that I was about to have a cup of coffee. I was grateful that I had a roof above my head. I was grateful when I looked out the window It was a beautiful day and the sun was shining and the birds were chirping. And why I was able to see the birds chirping is because I've trained my mind to see the birds chirping. Anybody can train their mind. A mathematician trains their mind to see numbers. An accountant trains their mind to understand balance sheets. An engineer trains their mind to understand code. And a happy person trains their mind to see things around them that brings feeling of gratitude. And I'm sure you practice gratitude for one week, you'll end up having 20 more things to be grateful about.

Starting the day off with things that you're grateful for, I think, sets the tone for the day. It makes, makes set up so that it makes you look forward to the day and find more things to be grateful for for the next morning that you wake up. So I think that's a really great way to think about that. I guess my final question of today and just a final note I'd like to leave our listeners with is what advice would you give to people who just want to understand their anxiety and are on a path to help heal themselves from within and start using meditation or other tools to help them cope in their both day-to-day life and also just find lifelong happiness?

Hope. I would like to say to them, people who are trying to understand their anxiety, it is not an unconquerable demon. It is a part of ourself which, if we understand, work on ourselves, something that can be managed. Yes, it will not be easy. And yes, sometimes we are different. And yes, it would have been so nice if we would not have had these feelings. What we do. And if we work on ourselves, then this is something that can be managed. Millions of people around the world have managed. And if we put little bit effort, more effort, because I am sure already we are trying If we put correct effort, then there is a possibility of living a very happy, dynamic, and positive life. But the journey begins from hope. If we can try to believe in ourselves, root for ourselves, cheer for ourselves, and if just, if just We can sit and imagine, imagine a future version of us that has conquered our mind. A future version of us that is healthy, that is happy. A future version of us that's— that has achieved everything that you wish to achieve. Then that hope— I believe that hope will give you that extra motivation that you need to put a little bit of effort on the self. So my final thought or message is: believe in yourself, have hope for yourself. Hope is the most powerful emotion that humanity is blessed with. Somebody asked me, what is the purpose of religion? And my answer was, to give hope. Imagine, we have made such institutions to provide this feeling, because a hopeless man is a dead man. Even if we look at evolution, whenever an organism becomes hopeless is when the survival is gone and he has submitted to fate, and fate can be cruel. But if we have hope, the more hope, the more dynamic we are, the more effort we will put. And more destiny will smile upon us. So let us start with this: I believe in myself, and I have a hope for a better future, and I see a future self that is happy, healthy, and in bliss.

Thank you for listening to the Your Journey podcast. Make sure to follow us on social media to keep up with the latest episodes with the @yourjourney your_journey_podcast. We hope to join you again on the next episode of Your Journey.