Overthinking Everything? Here’s How To Find Peace

In today's video, you'll learn five techniques to immediately reduce anxiety and stop overthinking. Then we'll cover five mindset shifts to let you instantly feel more confident. The first trick when you're feeling anxious is to use your body to calm your nerves. We all know that emotions affect your body language. What most people don't realize is this connection is a two way street. Your body language has a big impact on how you feel. Listen to Tony Robbins explain how he uses this as the first step he takes when helping someone with depression. If you take that same person and you change, change the tempo at which they move. You bring their shoulders back and change their breathing pattern. If they make a faster gesture, if they speak more rapidly, it fires off a different biochemistry in you. Anxiety works the same way. This means personally taking on calm, confident body language will actually help you feel more calm and confident. You can also use anxiety reducing breathing techniques. There's a ton of breathing techniques out there, but there's two we found are by far the most effective. The first is the Navy SEAL method of box breathing. Pre buds we learned a breathing technique called 4x4 breathing. It's a four count in breath, a four count hold, hold, a four count exhale, four count hold. It's going to keep you from panicking. If we let that worry, anxiety and stress, if we let it overcome us, that's what it leads to is panic. The second breathing technique we recommend is Dr. Andrew Huberman's extended exhale. So if you want to calm down quickly, you need to make your exhales longer and or more vigorous than your inhales. Both of these breathing techniques signal your autonomic nervous system to slow your heart rate down and stop sending panic stress signals to your body. That's how you can use your body to calm your mind. You can also use your mind to calm your mind. The first way you can do this is the snap method. Anytime you catch yourself dwelling on the past or worrying about the future, snap your fingers. Obviously this works best in private, but once you build the habit, you can even give yourself a mental snap when you're with other people. The goal is for the snap to be a reminder to come back to the present moment. Because it is impossible to be anxious and fully present at the same time. This trick of anchoring back to the present moment is how Chris Evans got over his anxiety about playing the role Captain America. Like most of our anxiety in life, it's about these fears of what will happen, you know, when you're able to still your mind and be present in your body, those fears melt away. Anxiety in general is predicated on living outside of the moment. You know, analyzing the past and worrying about the future. Being present is a superpower, but learning to consistently live in the present moment can take months or years of meditating to achieve. Definitely a worthwhile pursuit, but you're probably hoping for something a bit faster. Luckily, there is a faster way you can use your mind to reduce gratitude anchoring. When you're grateful, you can't be worried. You can't be fearful. You may think you need some huge win or big achievement in order to be grateful for your current life. But the real trick is learning to be grateful for something every day, no matter what your life looks like. For example, listen how Ellen tries to frame Chris Pratt's life for him, emphasizing the quote unquote big wins. It's a good time for you right now. Your show was nominated for best comedy and you're in a hit movie, Moneyball, which is. That's a big, big little chunk of time for you right now. Now listen to how Chris reframes her worldview and explains what he's grateful for. This is a great time. I feel like I've, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, I kind of hit 10 when I stopped having to serve people food. So I've been riding 10 ever since. And this is like a really nice part of that. The easiest way to build a gratitude habit and wire your mind to anchor to gratitude is with a daily morning journal. Take just three to five minutes each morning and write down three things you're grateful for. This can be anything from family and friends you're happy you have in your life to more simple things like enjoying the SM of your morning coffee. If you had a terrible week and you're struggling to think of anything to be grateful for, you can use the stoic practice of negative visualization to recapture your gratitude. Sam Harris describes it well in this next clip. You can think of all the things that could happen to you, right, that haven't. And if any one of them happened to you, you would consider your prayers answered if you could just be returned to this moment. The goal here is to take your focus away from the happiness gap, the gap between your life and what you wish your life was, and help you appreciate what you already have. One important caveat here with gratitude. Don't let your attempts at gratitude turn into feelings of guilt. No matter how blessed your life is, it is normal to experience negative emotions sometimes. So don't let your gratitude practice turn into a repression practice or a practice where you beat yourself up thinking, I have so much to be grateful for. I'm a bad person for feeling negative feelings. Now, if you're in a really high stress situation and you're still feeling nervous even after doing everything we've covered so far, there is one other thing you can do. Own it with a smile. Watch this next clip for a great example of what this looks like. Yeah, we met through the course of the audition and it was, you know, I don't know. Did he make you nervous? I'm nervous right now. I'm between two of my favorite people in the world. You should feel my heartbeat. Your ideal is probably to not feel nervous. But if you do feel nervous, the worst thing you can do is be ashamed of that nervousness. Shame does not make anxiety go away. So if you find yourself really caught in your head or tripping over your words, it's okay to simply call out your own nervousness with a smile. Ok, so those are tools you can use in the moment when you're already feeling anxious. Now let's talk about five mindset shifts that can help minimize your anxiety. The first mindset shift is counterintuitive. It's to accept your anxiety. Just because you feel your heart rate increase or a bit of adrenaline, that doesn't mean things are going wrong. Some of the greatest performers of all time got nervous. I just hope I don't forget the words. I just can't believe it. I'm scared to death. I'm totally afraid. I'm afraid of everything. I'm afraid of losing. I'm afraid of being humiliated. There is power in recognizing that it's okay that you feel nervous. No one is immune to fear. So don't aim to be fearless. Aim to be someone who can feel fear and still take action. Ironically, accepting that it's okay to be nervous will help calm your nerves. Now, that said, there are degrees of anxiety. It can range from I feel a little anxious to really crippling, something that can hold down your whole life. So let's go through more mindset shifts that can get you closer to the former. Let's start by stating something obvious. Performance anxiety comes from feeling pressure to perform. Duh. Well, that pressure to perform comes from feeling like you need a certain outcome. If you can release that need, you release the pressure to perform. Listen to Russell Brand describe it well here when talking about how he calms his nerves before big performances or a big podcast. Now, when I arrive here And I see this place, like, even wordlessly, my emotions inform me, oh, what's it going to be like? Is everyone going to like me? What's going to happen to me? Who are these men? What's happening here? Like, all of this stuff starts happening and. And then another part of me goes, you've got nothing to get. No one can give you anything. You're all right. You don't have to be afraid. For a lot of people, that idea of you have nothing you need can be tough because you want to change your external circumstances. You want more friends, more dates, a better job. So how can you pursue those things without feeling pressure to perform and getting performance anxiety? One way you can do that is to shift from an outcome mindset to a process mindset. So if you have anxiety approaching someone attractive, you would shift the goal from making them like you to. To simply taking pride in starting a conversation. No matter how it goes, that's something totally in your control. This will get you into more conversations, which, funny enough, will help you eventually learn how to have them go well. This is how many successful actors dealt with the anxiety of constantly facing rejection from auditions. More than anything, more than one random successful audition. I think just as consistently putting out as much good work as possible in audition form and casting form is a step in the right direction. Another example would be on a first date, shift your goal from I want this person to like me to I want to have fun on this date. And assume that if you focus on having fun, you'll eventually end up dating the right people and polarizing the wrong people away from you. That takes us to our next mindset that reduces social anxiety. Be willing to polarize. Don't try to make every single person you meet like you. Tom Hardy is probably the best celebrity to watch to see what this attitude looks like in practice. For an example, listen to him answer the interview question. What kind of snack would you be? More of a Twiglet. How about that? A bag of Twiglets. You would be a bag of Twiglets. Yeah. You either love it or you hate it, don't you? You either love me or you hate me. Either way, I'm a bag of Twiglets, man. I don't know anyone that you're gonna do about it. What an image. Another trick to reduce anxiety is to reframe the situations that make you nervous. Here's Hugh Jackman explaining how he does this for his auditions. I used to always go into an audition as though it was a rehearsal. If they said, look, I think you should sit, sit down in the chair? I'd say, you know, I think the character would stand. It was just my way of trying to redress the balance. So it wasn't just you've got all the power and I'm trying to please you, but rather we're trying to work together. So for instance, if you find yourself entering a date or an interview feeling pressured to perform or impress, make sure you find time to ask questions designed to see if you like them too. This will reframe the situation in your mind and give you more confidence. Another way you can reduce performance anxiety is to zoom out. Instead of focusing on getting one particular job or one particular person to like, you focus on becoming the type of person who has options. So if job interviews make you nervous, focus on building the charisma skills to interview well and focus on building work related skills that you know will make you a standout applicant. Then interviews will be something you actually look forward to because you know you'll crush them. Or if dating makes you nervous, don't worry about making any specific person like you. Instead, focus on growing into someone who many people want to be with the fastest way I know of to build a life with options is to develop your charisma. Becoming world class in most skills takes years, sometimes decades, but you can achieve exceptional growth in charisma in just a month or two. Most people simply never try to learn it, or if they do, they don't know how to do it effectively. If you want the fastest way I know of to develop your charisma so you can quickly start living a life with less anxiety and more options, you may like our program, Charisma University. It's a step by step program that tells you exactly what to do every day so that 30 days from now you radiate confidence in charisma naturally, without even thinking about it. Rather than tell you about the program myself, here are a few things that past members have said. I was at a low point in my life when I began the course suffering from heartbreak. The trifecta of healing myself was exercise therapy and Charisma University. Whereas before I was always one of the most socially awkward within a group, I am now one of, if not the most charismatic and confident, and I'm only a little over halfway through the course. I recommend this to anyone suffering from social anxiety like me, who is sick of the dead air that often appears in conversations. Another member wrote in I wasn't truly confident. I was constantly seeking validation and cared too much about other people's opinions. But now my life has improved tremendously because of Charisma University. I find it way easier to connect with people, to have great interactions, and to be happy even if things don't go the way I want them to. Taking this course has been one of the most impactful decisions of my life. I can't recommend it enough. And lastly, one member writes, I am way more confident now, having gone through the daily action guides, and I can see a big difference in the attention and respect that I get. It makes life so much more fun. I don't think it's an overstatement to say Charisma is literally a gateway to getting anything you want in life. So thank you for making Charisma University. We guarantee Charisma University will change your life. That means you can take the entire course, and if you don't think it's worth every penny, you can give yourself a full refund from right inside the program. If you want to see if it's right for you, click the link on screen now or in the description below. Either way, I hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you in the next one.