How To Build a NON-ANXIOUS Life - Dr. John Delony

If you owe somebody money, if Toyota motor company is telling you what you're going to do tomorrow, or your mortgage company is going to tell you what you do tomorrow, your body would be failing you if it let you sleep deeply. It would be failing you if it let you focus on sex and reproduction. It would be failing you if it did anything other than screamed at you to say, hey. If you say one wrong thing at work or put one wrong thing on Twitter and you get fired, you lose your home, you lose your car, you lose your food and your family goes. And so we, if you, you can literally lay the US Both collective and individual debt loads and it maps right on top of the trend line for anxiety and depression in this country.

All right, John, welcome to the Man Talk show. How are you doing today?

I'm great, Connor. Thanks for, thanks for having me on, man.

Yeah, well, thanks for being here. I've, like I said, I've seen a bunch of your content over the last year or two and really loved what you've been putting out and the conversations that you have. And I know you've been sort of, you've been around for a while. You know, you've been, you've been in this game for quite a long time supporting people and helping people. And so I'm, I'm very excited to get into your work and, you know, your latest piece of work, which is building a non anxious life, which I think is very timely for a lot of people because there's a lot of anxiety, there's a lot of social anxiety, there's a lot of existential anxiety, there's a lot of individual, relational, you know, health anxiety. There's a lot of, there's just a lot of anxiousness. I think that's floating around. So. But before we dive into all of that, tell us a story about a defining moment in your life that made you who you are today.

I. It's just such a good question, man. I could go a hundred different directions. Here's the one that just popped into mind. I was a loud mouth, brash idiot growing up. Like, I followed Pantera around and I had a bunch of friends who had, were missing multiple screws. And so I was very good at getting a group riled up and then slowly stepping back where my buddies would get into these shenanigan brawls. And that was just like kind of my thing. I'll start it. And then these tough guys and then we'd all talk about like, yeah, yeah. And I spent my, my teenage years in various mosh Pits of punk bands and metal. Anywhere I could find a mosh pit that was going to go well. It was when I got my first big boy job after college. I was the dean of students at a small university and I had this moment where my, somebody said something to my wife was we were coming out of an event and I remember thinking, what are you actually going to do? Because. Because there's always that voice in the back like you're kind of a wimpy, skinny, punky, loudmouth idiot. And so I picked up a phone book and I, we just went down the phone book. If you, if you don't know what a phone book is for you younger folks, it's when they used to print off parts of the Internet and just drop them on your front porch. And so I went through the phone book and found Fight gym. And this was before MMA was a thing. And I just went to this local kickboxing, wrestling, jiu jitsu gym and they were one of the first in that area. And it was between Albuquerque, New Mexico and Dallas, which if you know anything about mma, that's kind of the like the birthplace, like Ken Shamrock and all these, in Jon Jones, all those gyms were going back and forth. And so I just walk in and it was three o' clock in the afternoon. I knocked off work and this 26 year old male nurse named Mateo was this. It was. I outweighed him by about 80 pounds and I was about a foot taller than him. He was so lovely and so sweet. Connor, he beat me sideways. He, I mean it was just a workover. And then the coach came out and was like, hey, actual Practice starts at 8pm tonight. Hope to see you back. And I went home and then, dude, I went back and that was a defining moment was I loved the competition part of it, but I also loved the, I want to go back and figure this out. And then I just fell in love with the whole thing. But that gave me as I entered into grad school and kept going into doing harder and harder and wilder things with my profess career, my personal life. That was the moment. Are you gonna go back after just getting worked? Man, I had everything proven to me, which was you're not very good at fighting and you can't really do anything to protect your family. You're just kind of that guy that talks a lot. And it was that moment of I'm gonna go back. And I, I didn't stop going for years and it was a, it was a good confidence boost. So that was one of Those before and after moments.

For me, I love that. I love that. And, uh, it is interesting because when you started talking about the story, I was like, oh, we've got a lot in common. Like, I. I wasn't a Pantera kid, but I was definitely like Metallica, Green Day Slayer, you know.

And System of a Down, you know, all sort of, like, in that vein. But, you know, it's interesting because do you think that there's something within most men that we, at some point in our lives, need to test our physical capacities? Like, I think Jordan Peterson has talked about this. You know, love him or hate him, you know, love and hate the rest. You know, wherever you stand on the. Jordan Peterson field, he. He said something around, you know, all men should know that they're capable of being dangerous. You know, some iteration of that. And I found that for a lot of young guys, there's this pull towards that. Like, I got into a lot of bar fights growing up. I was a hockey player. You know, I was definitely. You were the guy started the fights. I was the guy that, like, got into the fight, you know, and then, like, you know, beat the crap out of people. And that was just something that, that we did, especially growing up in northern Alberta. It was like, part of the culture. You just. You got drunk, you got into bar fights, you drove your car through farmers fields, right? Like, that was. That was pretty much. That was pretty much it. But what do you think it is about men or young men that were pulled in that direction? And what do you think is the value of learning to use your body in that type of way?

I, I. Let's back out. I live out in the woods in Nashville, and the other morning, my son and I just watched a mom, a mother deer, a doe walk out with two little deer, and the deer didn't know we were. My son and I were sitting on my front porch just watching them, and those deer started running around. They were sprinting, like, maniacally, as though they had had 500 milligrams of caffeine. They were just. They were bamming into each other and jumping up and down. And there's this whole. And you watch any videos on bears, all animals have this play that involves crashing into each other and at some level, testing feeling. It's this. It's a kinetic response. And so I think it gets over masculinated, if you will, and then ends up with those guys just get drunk in bars and then drive out in farmer's fields. I think there's a whole. There's a whole gap between that. We've just sucked out that kinetic hitting into each other and testing each other and play and fun and bamming. And bamming is the word I keep coming to mind here. And we, especially with little boys, with little girls too, we tell them to sit in a chair for eight hours. And if you can't do that, you're somehow dysfunctional, you're broken, there's something wrong with you. And I think that's insane. I think that's a madness. And then you move all the way up the up, you know, age wise. Yeah, man, I think it's important to know.

I think it's wired into us. And only in the last few hundred years have we been able to think our way into positions of power. Right. Have we been able to philosophize our way into different hierarchical structures. But I think woven into us is can you go get food for your family? Can you stand shoulder to shoulder with a group of other men and protect your family from, and your tribe from whoever's coming over the hill? I think that's just wired into us, man. And I think it's silly of us. It's just nonsensical. It's like pretending math isn't real. It's nonsensical to just try to erase that with, with a strongly worded letter or a couple of good journal articles in academic journals that no one's going to read. I think the better idea is how do you channel that? Where do you point that? And where, where does society create avenues for the.

Useful indulgence in that?

Yeah, I like the way you frame that. And how old's your son?

He's 13.

Yeah, so mine's two and a half. And it's interesting to watch my two and a half year old boy go through that right now. Right? Like coming into his body, jumping off the couch, jumping off the couch to like, you know, Hulk Hogan onto me, you know, sort of testing his, his physicality in that way. But there is something, you know, I haven't raised him to do that. That's just something that he started to do and to express. And I do think I like the way that you framed it in terms of like the kinetic part of us wants to sort of bump up against, you know, other people and test boundaries and test edges. And it is kind of insane or insanity making to put, you know, kids into a chair for eight hours a day and expect them to just sit still and only use their brain. And it's almost like we, we teach kids to disconnect from their bodies.

And, and if you, if you go back to the definition of trauma, that's. The definition of trauma is you disconnect from yourself. And we do that systematically in or for the sake of order and predictability, which are in and of themselves good things, but man, they cause chaos in the, I mean, in, in a, in a total feedback loop. And if you. There's. There is just reams of data on the importance of roughhouse play with dads and their kids.

Yeah.

Just for that very reason. And that's daughters too. My daughter's a human hurricane, man. She's. She's seven and dude, it is like wrestling with a weed eater, man. But it's so good for both of us.

Yeah.

I love that we have, hey, we have. I have a roll out gym. I mean, an Olympic rollout mat in my living room. My wife is the most patient woman in the world and. But it's one of those things like my daughter will just say, are you ready for some of this, dad? And I'll be like, bring it. And she'll go, roll the mat out. Literally. I have a, I have a roll a mat living room. And it's, it's just so good for us.

That's awesome. I've just gotten into the habit of like moving the coffee table out of the way. And then we've got this big pillowy couch and we, so we take all the pillows off and throw them on the floor and that becomes our little arena.

That's amazing.

Yeah. My son will just go wild on it. But I want to. The reason why I'm going down this path is because I've always. And I don't know if there's data to back this up or, or if it's just sort of an inclination, but I've always had this sort of inclination. That part of the reason why specifically. And I'm going to stick to men here, but we can broaden it out to just people. But part of the reason why men are starting to become more and more anxious in some ways is because they're so disconnected from their physical form and what their bodies are capable of or even having some type of relationship with their body outside of. Okay, my body drives me to work and then I sit at my desk and then I go home and then I eat and then I watch Netflix.

I think that part of this anxiety that's starting to brew up in a lot of people is that there's this disconnection from physical form in such a huge way. And so I want to start to go down this path of. And again, I'm going to mostly pull us towards men, but you broaden it out to just people in general, wherever necessary. Do you feel like there's a correlation between the, this disconnection with our bodies and our physical forms and the sedentary life and the escalation and anxiety that seems to be so prevalent within our culture?

I think there's 1,000%, yes. I. For your listeners who don't know, I spent 20 years in higher ed. I'm a nerd as a researcher and a professor and as a dean of students, I'm just a dork of nerds. Nerd of nerds, as my friends call me. And I think a lot of it started there with the specialization. And you go to one building for mental health, and you go to literally another building for physical health, and you go to another campus for medical health, and you go to another campus for theological health, and you go. So I think. And then you go to the campus center for human Interaction. Right. And so we've created all these artificial bifurcations that aren't real. And I 1 million percent agree with what you just said. We've. We've told a generation of person that good mental and emotional health is getting all the thoughts in the right order and sit and talk and sit and talk and sit and talk and sit and talk. And if you can't sit and talk, dope up. And there's a place for sitting and talking. Absolutely. And there's a place for what an exquisite sliver of history we live in where there's, there's such powerful medications for certain things. Both those are great. But man, it doesn't get at the root, which is we've designed a civilization that our bodies are not designed to live in. And we're where. We've created a civilization that our bodies aren't designed to live in. And so we're mad at our bodies for being anxious and we're mad at our bodies for being worried and frustrated. And that's just madness. It's like, it's like getting mad at the smoke alarm in your house for going off. It's. You want it there. And if we look back at our bodies, like not being frustrated with them about all the anxiety and all the worry and all the depression, instead of saying, what is our body trying to tell us in this moment right now that we have created chaos and we're not designed for it and we need to solve for the root problems here.

Yeah, I think that's a great way to put it. And it's interesting, the smoke alarm analogy. It's like, now I gotta chuckle out of that because I feel like my smoke alarms just go off when I'm cooking steak. And not once where there's an actual fire, but yet I know that having them there is imperative. Having them there is so important. And it seems like that's a good analogy for what happens in our body in the sense that oftentimes the alarms are going off in our body for reasons that we don't even know about or, you know, that don't even make sense to us. So let's just go.

Let's follow that. That analogy all the way down.

I have a.

And there's just reams of data on this, too. I am a sensitive guy, and not in a pejorative way, but my, My smoke alarm, if you will. My anxiety alarms are very, very sensitive. They go off when there's. The hot water's too hot, right. And there's steam in the, in the house. And then it goes off when you're cooking eggs in the morning. My wife, I mean, the house has to be caving in on itself, and she's like, we should probably get out of here. Right. So her calibration is different. The, the work both of us have to do on either side of that barbell is not to go up and pull the batteries out and just. Or smash it with a hammer and say, that thing's can't make any more noise. I have to know, hey, your alarms go off quicker than others. So what do I have to do up river? Whether that's exercise, whether that's moving my body, whether that's making sure I got a group of men. I'm. I'm regularly in touch with whatever that happens to be so that I can clearly hear those alarms. And when you're cooking steak, you just know that's. That's the steak. You don't instantly go fire everybody out because, you know. Right. And my wife has to know. I don't tend to feel that until maybe the tipping point has already passed. And so I need to be extra alert for when those things might start chirping at me. Right. And so I think all of us, the work is figuring out what our alarms do and what they don't do and then making our adjustments and our individual lives upstream.

So for you, anxiety, I'm going to give you a two pronged question. One is just can you. You know, because there's a lot of talk about anxiety nowadays. And I just, I'd like to just sort of get your individual take on how would you define anxiety? What is it? And then secondly, what are some of the, in your experience in working with people, what are some of the biggest quote unquote causes that are feeding into people's anxiousness?

So anxiety just cut and dry is simply an alarm for your. That your body sets off, generally speaking. Now you can have some brain lesions and epilepsy and things like that, but on the whole, your brain is sounding an alarm that's telling you that you're not safe or that it has identified a scenario, a situation or an environment that you're not safe. It can also set off when it finds you that you're alone. We are wired in to be in a tribe. And 250 years ago, if you'd found yourselves on the northern New York plains in the woods and your tribe had left you, you are probably going to die. You're going to die of exposure, you're going to get eaten by something, you're going to run out of water. So our bodies will sound every alarm we have when it notifies it. Then we were identified as alone. And our alarms will ring when we lose autonomy or freedom in our life. When somebody else is deciding what we do. And we think instantly of that, that just jerk boss, right? Or that guy that just you're going to be here and answer my emails within 15 minutes. We think of that. Some deeper levels that we don't think about is if you owe somebody money, if Toyota Motor company is telling you what you're going to do tomorrow, or your mortgage company is going to tell you what you do tomorrow. Your body would be failing you if it let you sleep deeply. It would be failing you if it let you focus on sex and reproduction. It would be failing you if it did anything other than screamed at you to say, hey, if you say one wrong thing at work or put one wrong thing on Twitter and you get fired, you lose your home, you lose your car, you lose your food and your family goes. And so we, if you, you can literally lay the US Both collective and individual debt loads and it maps right on top of the trend line for anxiety and depression in this country. And that's just something we don't think about, right? And it's just become so unintentional. Of course you go get a car loan, of course you go take out a 30 year mortgage. But your brain is designed to keep you safe. It doesn't care about how good A deal you got if you go even further. Our calendars are so chaotic and if you miss one, if you're two minutes late to one thing at 8am the whole week is shot. Our, our little league coaches are telling us, you know, our son's little league coaches are telling us what we're going to do for the next seven years of Saturdays and Sundays and where thousands of dollars go. Somebody else is running our life in so many different areas. And when your body knows you are not driving your own car, you're in the backseat of your own life, it will sound the alarms for you. So really I like Wendy Suzuki. She's a professor up there at nyu. She calls anxiety friend, right? She says it's, it's good. I don't if it is. If it's my friend, I've been doubled over. So if it's a friend, it's not like a person I want to hang out with a lot. But if I reframe anxiety as when I start feeling anxious or burned out or worry and by the way, there's a clinical anxiety, I think I just got kind of done with that. It's become a colloquialism in our culture and just refers to any sort of discomfort. But dude, when I feel anxious, if I can just stop for just a second and be curious, like what's my body trying to tell me? Oh, me and my wife needed to sit down right now or my kids don't want to be in the same room as me. What's happening in my life, man? Now you're talking about. Anxiety is a pretty good indicator on your dashboard. And that's it, man, that's it. I don't want to over dramatize. That's what it is.

No, it's, that's perfect. You know, I think as you were talking about the, the debt and overlaying that on anxieties and depression, I mean, I think this, this calendar year was the first year that the United States citizens credit card debt topped $1 trillion, right? So Americans now have over a trillion dollars in credit card debt. And I mean, listen, I, I get it. Like I remember being in debt where my credit card was just maxed out and they just kept raising the limit on it and it was just maxed out and maxed out and maxed out. And I always had, you know, sort of like 250 to $500 little tiny breathing room, right? Kind of like just sipping air like you're in water and the, the room's filling up and you're just kind of sipping air from the top of the room. You living like that is very stress inducing and anxiety inducing. I'm curious to get your take on with the cultural shifts that we've seen, the societal shifts that we've seen over the last few decades. Do you think that men and women have different, different avenues that cause them anxiety? Like, do you think that men have different things that are causing them to, to be anxious in their life?

Yeah, I mean I, I, I think, I think it's all gonna, it's all gonna distill down to some sort of identification of a lack of safety. But I think that's gonna manifest differently. Right. My wife has notoriously. We go into some place and I start chitchatting with somebody and she'll say, she'll grab my arm and say we need to go right now. And when we were first together, I'd be like, you're, come on, we're having fun. That guy's just being loud a hundred percent of the time. She said we need to go. It ended up being an issue. Something popped up. And so now after being with her for a quarter of a century, when she says, hey, we need to go, I, I don't even like, I smile and I grab my stuff and I say hey guys, I'll see y' all later. And we leave. And I don't even need an explanation anymore. I don't. It's right. So she has an innate sense that hey, there's something about to set off. I think in men there is a, an innate where is our tribe and shame we're not enough. And when our body begins to feel like we're not enough, we're going to be on the outside of this thing. We either have to band together with a group of people which currently in this ecosystem is who we all hate together, not what we're all constructively doing together, but who are we all against? Which is such a navel gazing way to burn your own house to the ground. And you start looking for not ways you can go solve problems but people you can point at. And it feels like you're doing a thing with a, with a tribe, but it is just a nasty gnarly like cut rate substitute for actual shoulder to shoulder. We're solving this thing, we're going to get food, we are going to build. Right. It's much easier to burn to the ground. And I think that's the difference. I mean you see that over, you've seen that for generations in the Middle east, right? Instead of seeing a tall tower and saying, hey, I can build that too. It's. You see a tall tower and, nuh, you're not going to have a taller tower than me. Let's knock it down. And I think we are. We are on a bullet train towards that cultural attitude kind of rolling over on us too.

I call it Titanic syndrome. Remember when the movie. You may be too young. When the movie Titanic came out. I don't care who you are. It was the. It was the most extraordinary spectacle ever. I cried. I cried twice when I saw it in the theater. One of those times I went by myself. Connor. That's how, that's how manly I am to admit that out loud. And everyone. I went, Everyone. I went with the toughest, biggest. Like, everybody was like, caught up in that spectacle. And then once it became such a spectacle, everyone's like, ah, that movie sucks. And it was, it was. It became the most important thing to tear it down. Right. And does it hold up over time? I mean, not great, but it was. It was what it was. And we just are so uncomfortable with saying something's good. But yes, I think ultimately men and women, they can. Their bodies can detect different sorts of threats and depending on where they happen to be. But I do think it's asking yourself, what. What's my body trying to get my attention for?

Yeah, it seems like the, the cultural.

War that seems to be happening. I mean, one. It's just. It's so easy to get caught up in, you know, because there's something, There's. There's something almost intoxicating about the, the row that happens online and on social media. And it's so easy to have your nervous system be hijacked. Like, I've. I've been. I've been saying on my show for a while, like, the, the people who are the most successful in the next, like, 10 to 20 years are going to be people who are able to regulate their nervous system underneath duress, you know, when there's stress and duress online and offline because so many people have become so easily hijacked by the. The narratives of social media and getting in the culture wars and getting into political wars. And. Yeah, I mean, it's. It's almost like it gives us this illusion that we're a part of something. I like the way you said that. Which I think ties into one of the things that I was going to bring up, which is that it. It seems like on average, not. This isn't like the rule across the board, but on Average. I would say that men are just generally lonelier than women. And one of the things that you were indicating is that loneliness is a pretty solid predictor of anxiousness. And so I would just love, I.

Would go as far to say it's causal. And I, as a, as a science nerd, it's, you got to be careful whenever, any time you say this equals that. I'm, I'm 100% confident in the causality. If your body identifies that you're alone. And, and by the way.

So we've got these phones. I can text my wife a thousand times today. I love you. I'm so grateful for you. And what I'm doing is I'm giving her data, I'm giving her zeros and ones.

What?

And you've heard the statement. And it's, it's any number of statistics. I, I've, I've tried to track this, the actual study done, I can't find it. But 70 to 90% of communication is nonverbal. We just suck that out. And I tell her I love her. I love her. And then I walk in that day, I need to tell you I love you. I told you a hundred times. Today, I go get my drink, I sit down on the, on the couch, I throw my feet up, I turn the TV on, and her body says, not safe. Her body says, that guy's avoiding us. She misses the eye crinkles and the embrace and the seeing my shoulders drop and exhale because my home is warm and I can't wait to see her. And I've missed her all day doing stupid spreadsheets at work, whatever the thing is. And so we substitute communication transmission for actual connection, for friendship, for actually solving a problem. The most beautiful way I've ever seen this done is there was a group of guys back in Texas when I lived there years ago. And here's what they did. Once a month, they all got together on Saturdays. And here was the rule. You had to bring your kids and you had to bring something to like eat or something, or something to drink, right? So there's always just pizza and beer and cereal. I mean, it was just nonsense. But they would every, at two o', clock, whoever was left, everybody put their name in a hat and draw it. And then 30 days later, you sent out whatever you wanted done and a whole herd of people would show up to your house and like electrical work, we need to change the bumper out. I need someone to paint the bathroom. I need someone. I need four guys to move six yards of sand over Here. And over the course of about a year, everybody learned how to kind of do a little bit of electric work and everyone kind of learned how to level a yard. And we all laughed and our kids all got to see us have friends and our kids all got to see their dads working hard. But it was this sense of we're gonna solve a thing, we're gonna accomplish a thing. And we, so we saved thousand tens of thousand dollars in labor costs. We all learned some stuff, we all laughed really hard. Some guys got terrible paint jobs in their house, right. That I'm sure they had to hire back out. But it was this sense of we're going to stand shoulder to shoulder for something and that's to take care of. So that's just one example of man. I, I think if men and I even, I even heard this recently, that, and I'm still letting it roll around that over the last 25 to 50 years the male obsession with.

Sex and what kind of sex and how how like increasingly erotic and alive, we have to is a proxy for a lack of connectivity in our day to day lives. You take men over thousands and thousands of years, millions of years who dug holes together and went hunting together. All that's off the table. And now I sit in a cube next to somebody with my headphones on. My body needs that connection. And so all that gets dumped on my romantic partner at home, on my wife and that she's gotta, she has to make all that aliveness that's on her. Right. And so I don't know there's any data to back that up, but it sure rang true to me.

Well, I would imagine that that's a hard one to try and.

Put some research around, but I would agree with you 100%. I think I've seen that in a lot of men where they come out to a weekend or they come to do some work with us. And a lot of the challenges that they're facing is that they're their relationship. Right. Because it's always, it's almost always like there's something going on in my relationship. I don't know how to deal with it. It's in a crisis point, you know, what do I do from here? And when I start to dig in, almost always part of the issue is that there's no one outside of the relationship supporting the individuals in the relationship.

And they can't carry that much. We're not designed to carry that much.

No, I can't carry terrible.

I can't be a co earner. And a co worker and a co partner and smoke show hot 247 and your therapist and your roofing buddy. I can't. Nobody can do all of those things. Right. It's. And. And your poet and also your, you know, your finance co. It's. It's madness what we've dumped into these relationships.

I think you'd make a good poet, John. I think you'd probably. Your wife has probably got some good poems from you.

She. My wife actually gets up every morning and writes poetry. She's. And I do not. I do not.

Yeah, but I think. I think that's one of the big pieces. So can you. I know this is maybe a little bit away from what we're talking about, but can you maybe point to some of the things. Because you've talked to a lot of people. Can you maybe just point to some of the things that you. That you believe are pulling male friendships apart? Specifically pulling men into more atomized, you know, sort of lone wolf experiences?

I mean, if I just walk it back. My great grand. I mean, not my great. My granddad, David Deloney was a World War II vet. He fought Nazis shoulder to shoulder. And then he came home with all that trauma and sat in his recliner and put up a newspaper. There was no groups to go talk. There was no veterans groups to go, hey, let's go hang out. There was maybe the rally or whatever, but that wasn't his jam. And so he got involved in a local church in a very managerial kind of way, not in a relational kind of way. And he sat behind a newspaper. He had three boys and his daughter. And they're all savants, they're all brilliant. And they all saw you do life by yourself. You do life by yourself and you go get what you can get. He also grew up in the Great Depression, so he straightened nails because he had to, right? They had a big coffee can full of string. I remember that as a kid, like, what is this? And it's just wired in. So my parents generation got the very clear message, you are on your own and go get what you can get whenever you can get it. And they just happened to create this dope little thing called a credit card at the time. And so there was. It just became unlimited. There was no, there was no breaks. And so I think where I sit in the men like, you know, 15, 20 years younger than me sit is we have no models, we have no mental map of dads who had friends who go hang out. And even I think about this, I've become Pretty pathological about it. Like, anytime somebody, we watch the fights every time we go do things together. But my son doesn't see that. He doesn't know that. He just knows Dad's not here. And so I've had to find very intentional ways, my friends, I'm notorious for. If you invite me, my son's coming. Unless it's going to be, we're out till midnight being stupid or we're going to some Dave Chappelle show, it's probably not kid friendly, right? But other than that, like, if we, if you invite me hunting, my, my son's coming, you invite me fishing, my son's coming, my daughter's coming with us. And they need to see their dad having friends. And so I think we've landed where we have no picture of that. We don't even have buddy comedies anymore. I mean, remember, like, there's no Die Hard movies where guys are doing this thing like, or there's no what was, like, Bad Boys or. Those movies don't exist anymore. They don't even make them anymore. And so we have no picture for what it looks like. We do have a lot of lone wolves. And then you hand somebody a cell phone and Andrew Tate comes up on the thing and says, follow me, and you are off to the races, or whoever the demigod of the day is. Follow me. And I remember, dude, I. My dad was a homicide detective and a SWAT hostage negotiator. He was a bad dude. And so I heard the stories and I saw him, but I didn't see all the camaraderie because I was a kid, right? I didn't, I wasn't going out with him. And so I didn't see all him shoulder to shoulder with all these guys making hard calls and then him going out and doing the thing. And then halfway through my childhood, he quit and became a pastor at a local church, at a giant church there in Houston. And so I got this toggle of my old man, but I was desperate for somebody to look at me and say, you've got power and strength, too. And that was just. There was no, there was no, it wasn't part of the culture. Pantera gave me that. And I remember shaved head Phil Anselmo standing on a stage screaming his head off and saying, you can get up and go do it right? And I, I, I really believed in the old punk rock message back in the 80s and 90s was the systems against, you go get them. You know what I mean? Like, they were 20 years ahead of where we are right now and that I bought it, I bought it full, full sale. Because I didn't have another picture, right? I had this awesome picture of this badass dad, but I did not have a. You can too. Right? And so I think men are desperate for somebody, especially in proximity, to put their arm, arm around them and say, you, you can and you have value and I expect more of you. And not only that, I'm going to give you a road map too. And I think you either get all these roadmaps with no expectation accountability or you just get people screaming at you. You do it, do it. And we can't all go out and run 200 miles like David Goggins on a, on a Saturday. Right? And so there has to be an in between, which is mentorship and connection and friendship and bring your son along even though you're going to shoot less deer and catch less fish, even though your bowling league is going to suffer because your kid's 13 is going to throw it in the gutter every time you're playing a 30 year game. And, and so I, yeah, I think there's just no road maps, there's no models for this. And then it's going to take a group, a generation of men putting their arms around younger men and saying, come with me.

You know, there's a lot in what you're saying because I think it almost sounds maybe to some listeners it almost sounds like too simple, you know, and, and I think, and I think that that's the, that's the catch. Like, what I'll say is I had this moment with my son yesterday, actually, where I'm, I'm like you, he's two and a half. But whenever I have the opportunity to have him do anything with me, he will come and do it with me. Even though he just, you know, like I took him to go wash the car the other day, you know, at the wand wash. Like he doesn't understand what the hell is going on, but he's just so freaking excited to get to help me. And so yesterday I had this moment where I packed up all the garbage. He helped me take all the garbage and all the cardboard and we have this long driveway and the stuff's all, you know, at the end. And so we pack it up into the car and then we drive it all the way down the driveway and then down the road where the garbage bins are. And I had this moment where.

I.

Pulled up to the garbage, I threw everything out, he helped me throw everything in the garbage bins. He's so excited. He goes back in, he opens the door, gets back in the car, and we drive back to the house. And as we're coming back up the driveway, I started to cry. I started to get really emotional. It could make me emotional right now as I'm talking about it. And I realized that those were the things that I missed out on as a kid.

Yeah.

You know, those were the moments that I was like, dying for as a young boy. And it's, it hasn't been until I've had my own son where I've actually realized, like, oh, that's the loneliness that's lived inside of me. You know, that's the thing that I've been battling for so long. It's just this kind of vacancy that's lived in me that I kind of knew was there, but didn't really know how to identify. And it's been in these moments of having my son and bringing him along and having all these different experiences where I've been like, oh, that's it. That's the thing that I was craving for. And, and I think that that's, you know, I'm fortunate in the last, you know, decade that I've really prioritized building out exceptional relationships with the men in my life. But I didn't have that before. And I think it's part of the reason why, why I bottomed out.

And so I want to, I want to double click on that. Like, please, as you're talking. I kept thinking one sentence. This is fatherhood. It is not the big spectacle and the big, like, let's go on a camping trip with a sword and I'm gonna knight you. That, that, that moment's good and important and fun. Right? But like my buddy, Lane Norton, he's, you know, late weightlifter extraordinaire and protein. Probably the smartest guy on protein on planet. He always is laughing because I'll text him, hey, what about this? What about this? Hey, call me real quick. I need to ask you this. And he's like, dude, you are majoring in the minors and you are tripping over $100 bill up pennies. We like what you just described as fatherhood. And there's a little nine year old boy inside of Connor asking, what was so wrong with me that you wouldn't even take me to take the trash out. What was so wrong with me that you wouldn't even take me to like, help your buddy move his boat that fell off the thing? Like, and that question haunts us, right? What was so bad about me that my dad wouldn't even fill in the blank. And I think it's. You mentioned it. I've had some great conversations behind closed doors with some of the best neuroscientists, some of the smartest guys on planet, and we've gone round and round a little bit, but I think we have over, over, over, over intellectualized and over dramatized. And as I've traveled the country over the last three years, completely away from scientists and just sitting with guys who own gas stations and small business owners and single moms and truck drivers, there's a desperation, can you help me right now? And it's like, yes, turn your phone off and call a friend over and get whatever crappy casserole you have left. And y' all eat that together. That's how you turn this whole ship around. And you can go down, listen to all the nonsense. You gotta have this app or this thing or this whatever. AI is gonna get to know your freaking neighbors. It's not hard. I mean, hold on. Getting to know your neighbors is excruciating, but intellectually this isn't, this isn't hard. It's not hard. It's just really difficult. It's hard just to eat less than you burn and to lift weights three to five times a week and then do some cardio. It's hard to tell your wife that you love her and hold her hands in your face. It's hard to get down on eye level with my 7 year old daughter when she's driving me crazy and actually listen to her and let her be heard instead of me just barking orders. Four feet taller than her. None of that's like innately. I mean, that's, that's, that's how you turn this whole thing around, man. And that's kind of been my thing is, dude, we're going to take all this drama and data and all the stuff. I'm going to let the dopamine researchers do their dopamine stuff and I'm going to let the whoever's do the whoever stuff. I'm going to sit with firefighters and say, hey, your life can suck less if you would do these three things. And it's just become, like you said, it feels so easy. And I'm so glad you had that moment with your son, man, because that's fatherhood, when you help me at the trash. And I also want to be careful about this. I have a buddy named Nathan and he, he texted me once. It was kind of a heartfelt lament. He Has a young son and his buddy's boat, that's where I just got his buddy's boat fell off the, off the trailer. And so he texted a bunch of guys, hey, and gentle, come help me put this back on. A bunch of guys showed up and he brought his son. And his son was off to the side and started to get in. He goes, hold on, hold on. Back up, back up. And then they all these men lifted this boat back up, put it on there. They all high fived each other and got back in the truck. And he said, he looked at his son and said, wasn't that awesome? We got to help so and so. And his son said, dad, I didn't do anything. And we can't lie to our kids either. We got to let them participate. Like you that want, like taking your kid to watch your 2 year old to wash your car means you're gonna spend an extra hour there and have a soaking wet car on the inside outside. And that is fatherhood, man. That's it. That's the magic of it. And let him squirt you with a hose and you squirt him with like. That is fatherhood, right? That's it.

Yeah, yeah. It's like the magic of, of presence.

It's present.

I've tried to, like, communicate, I think, in, you know, certain conversations that I've had, that I think that there's this kind of like nutrient or form of sustenance that we need, you know, that so much of what it looks like to be a man is presented through modeling, you know, and young boys, they watch and they mirror and they mimic. And, you know, all those pieces are incredibly important. And so it's very hard to do that without. Without presence, without somebody there. And it's interesting because as we were talking about anxiety and anxiousness, I think sometimes it can be the thing that is pulling us away from presence, you know, pulling us away from being present with our kids, with our families, with our partners or, you know, business partners.

I gotta say, it's about presence, please. Most men believe so little in themselves that they don't believe their presence with their kids is enough. They don't believe just sitting next to their wife for 45 minutes or an hour and letting her exhale, not even talk.

Is of any value. We have so diminished our role as human beings into this utilitarian. I am only as good as the thing, the problem I can solve. I'm only as good as the action I am doing in this present moment. And if I'm not If my wife doesn't need me to solve her problem at work, she just needs me to sit with her while she says it out loud, then she's stupid, and I'm a. I'm a waste of space. And there has to be a revolution of men recognizing that they have innate value just because they are. And then you've got work to go do. But the work is often the presence. And it's just our inability to sit still because we think so little of ourselves. And that has to stop, man. That has to stop.

Man. I'll get choked up saying this. My daughter. Here I am. I teach relationships and marriage and parenting for a living. That's what I do. And the big dirty secret in my house was my daughter would not hug me. She was a maniac. And I know she loved me. And I'm not loud. I don't. We don't yell in our house. I don't hit my kids, anything like that. My daughter wouldn't hug me. She wouldn't come near. And when I would try to hug her, she would dug. And she had all. I mean, did like, she had all these maneuvers. And, dude, Connor started to get on me real hard, and I was bigger than her, so I could pick her up and make her hug me, but she would get real rigid. And then my wife gently said, have. You're always teaching me about neuroception and all these internal radar systems with our bodies. What about your body? Maybe makes her not feel safe. And, dude, I was like.

So I went and sat with a trauma counselor and said some things out loud, Connor, that I've never told anybody, not even my wife. And some things about my childhood, some things that I just locked in. And I went through a whole series of trauma counseling. And just yesterday, I noted to my. I can't get my daughter off of me. She. She's like a monkey. But there was a little nuclear reactor that said, you're not enough. You're not enough. You got to fix. You got to fix. You got to fix. And my daughter internalized that angst and that anxiety in that nuclear reactor as unsafe. And so my wife did, too, by the way. She had just learned to stick her hand into the fire and reached across, right? And my wife, Will is just constantly saying, the whole house feels warmer because I went and did that work, right? That's presence, man. Presence has a. A. A masculine presence in a home has a powerful therapeutic effect on the entire system. And it's not just about. I can. I can fix the cabinets, right?

I Appreciate you sharing that piece with us because I think it's, it's so important for us as men to realize, I think this is part of, is part of my, my beef, I guess you could say, with something like the red pill movement or the Andrew Tates of the world, which is, you know, there's, there's parts of what they're saying that are beneficial and then there's parts of what they're saying that are very non relational. And I think that that's, you know, a lot of what I gravitated to about you and your work is that I think at the core, and maybe this is my own interpretation, but I think at the core of our philosophies is a, is a belief that things need to be relation relational, you know, and that in relationships we find a lot of the answers and a lot of the solutions and a lot of the challenges and obstacles and just, I mean, you could just go on and on and on that we actually need as individuals and as a collective. And when you move relationships and being relational down the ladder of prioritization and importance, there's consequences to that, you know, because we begin to objectify people, we dehumanize them, we treat them less than we, we become superior or, you know, we take this position of inferiority that we're then trying to always get out of. And so I don't know if that resonates with you, but I think, I think it seems like a big piece of your work is saying, hey, get back into prioritizing your healthy relationships, whether it's your neighbors or your kids or whatever it is, because that will inform either the work that you need to do or, you know, the thing that's important right in front of you.

I'll go as far to say, based off John Cassioppo's work, which has been just exquisite, um, and the cascade of researchers that followed him, there is none. Zero. There is no mental health, there's no emotional health, There is no physical health that does not, is, that is not built on a foundation of healthy relationships, period. You can get abs. Great. You're going to die young. You can.

Increase your bench press. You're going to die young. You can sleep with a whole bunch of people. Congratulations, you're going to die young, or you're going to die a miserable, catastrophically slow death. You're going to netflix yourself to death. Congratulations. Here's my golf clap. Right. And that's my beef with a lot of psychological studies these days is they take individuals and they Put them in a room and they try to gauge their response. And I contend that you can't gauge an accurate emotional health response. You can't gauge an actual, an actual neurochemical response that is similar to out in the wild unless you do that in a context of relationship. You gotta have people around so that we can actually see what our brains are doing and our bodies are doing. But you cannot. You cannot be well. You can meditate all the time. You can eat a Mediterranean diet or a keto diet or a vegan diet, whatever makes you feel good in the mirror. You can have a million friends on Instagram, whatever. The thing is, you will not be well without a cork, without a core tribe, period. End of story. So you can. We can all lie to ourselves, dude, and we can flex and do all these things. I've just been.

Like, none of that matters if my kids don't want to talk to me. None of that matters if I make my life, my wife's life, more electrified than peaceful. None of that matters if when I show up at work, my co workers flinch a little bit instead of going, oh, sweet, he's here. None of that matters if I show up in when my neighbor's house is on fire and they prefer me not to go in and help. What's the point? What's. What's the point, man? It's just stupid. And so, yeah, a hundred percent of this is on a foundation of relationship.

I'm going to take a little bit of a right turn into the nerdy, since that seems to be a little, a little bit of your background and a part of who you are, which I love. You mentioned neuroception and I would love for you to just break down what neuroception is, how it's relevant for the individual when it comes to dealing with something like anxiety and understanding the nervous system that's at play that might be causing the alarm, the alarm bell to go off within us.

I, I think it's just simply. It's a radar system that's scanning 24, 7, 365. As the great Vander Kolk says, the body keeps the score, right? That this is the scorecard and it just scans and it's why you feel your heart rate. You get that email from your boss that says, be in my office at 4 on Friday and your body's off to the races before you finish that email or even seeing their name at 4 o' clock on a Friday, your boss is like, come into your email box. You just see the name and Your body's off to the races. It is a step ahead of you. And if it waited until you identified threat, if it waited, it's too late. You'd get eaten. Right. And so it's just that, it's just that radar system that's going. I think the problem is we want to continue to live lives that are insane. We want to stay up all night, eat whatever we want, watch pornography 24 hours a day. We want to do all these things and not pay the piper on the other end. And we. So we have exquisite systems in our current culture to shut that alarm down, shut it down, turn it off. Yes. This relationship's not safe. Dude, I used to, I used to do this thing when I was the dean of students at the law school in Texas. I would do this big long survey. I was out of Southern Illinois, and I would give it to all my law students and then I would, when I got all the data back, it was all randomized, so I didn't anonymize. So I didn't know who it was. I would read it to him. And the single data point that always silenced this entire theater of law students was this. The number of people who had to consume three or more alcoholic drinks in order to feel sexy or to engage in sexual activity. And I would always get real quiet when I read that. And I would always make a point to say, if you have to drink yourself numb so that you will do something that your body is telling you don't do.

Please don't do that thing, whatever that thing is, if you have to, at 9 o' clock at night, take a whole bunch of caffeine so that you can go out to the club, your body is telling you we need to sleep. If you have to drink three drinks in order to sleep with that guy or that woman, don't. Your body is telling you if it. You'll know on the other end when it's like, this is go time. Like, you'll know, but your body's got innate systems, right? And so that, that, that's a super oversimplification neuroception, but that's what it is. And so I think asking ourselves all the time, what's my body trying to tell me? And let's make peace with maybe I'm not going to be a CEO. I, I can't run 20 hours a day. That's okay. I can, I can be the best number two in this company that has ever, ever lived. I can be the best associate director of this mail room ever. While I was writing this book, dude, I had a conversation that stunned me, and it actually sent me on a tailspin. My. My son's baseball Little League coach is this, was this extraordinary guy. He's a veteran. He's awesome. His name's David, and he was a little League coach, and he was a great Little League coach. And when you know. When you see a great coach, you know it, right? They're just so good, and they're good coaching, and they're good holding kids accountable, and they're good at making them run, but also good at cheering them on. And so we were talking one day, just having a drink and hanging out, and he is the. He runs the technology for a local middle school. And I said, like, this is awesome, man. What do you do? What's next? Are you gonna, like, take over the district? And he looked at me and he said, dude, this is my dream job. And I said, what? And he goes, every day, I get to help teachers figure out their technological issues so that they can teach these kids, and I get to teach these kids how technology works in a safe way. He's like, what else do I. I mean, what else do I want, Connor? I did not have a psychology for that. Like, I had a psychology for the moment you get this promotion and this raise, you better be on to the next one. And I watch a guy who lives a very different life than me, but his kids sure love him and his wife sure loves him, and he has a human magnet. People want to be around him because he just operates life through peace. And he's gonna have to drive different cars, and he's gonna have to live in a different house because he's not ever gonna make a jillion dollars. But it's a different way. And I, I, I didn't have a psychology for enough. I didn't have that. And so that's been my journey the last year or two is, what is that? What does enough look like? What does. We're my family's good? And so all I have to say is, yeah, man, it. It just.

I don't circle back to that presence conversation, man. When can you look in yourself in the mirror and say, we're good? Like, I'm still working hard, and I still got ways to go, but I'm worth being loved. That's a scary, tough question for a man to ask himself.

Yes, 100%. And I think that that piece about enough. I remember working with a gentleman, a guy that came to work with me, and he ran this massive, massive law firm. Like, huge. And, you know, he built it up and, you know, is making so much money. And there were private jets and there was all these. All this stuff. And part of the reason why he'd come to work with me was about his relationship, but the other part was that he was just pretty unhappy. And I said, you know, in your ambition towards whatever it is that you're building, did you ever have a point or a piece of your vision where you knew that it was going to be enough, where you were going to be able to say, I'm satiated. This is good. And he's like, well, no, not really. And I said, well, I think my guess is that you actually don't know what to do with yourself when you reach that place. Like, you actually don't know what to do when you create the space and the time to actually be present. What I've learned in working with rock stars and entrepreneurs and doctors and, you know, just men from all walks of life is that it is insanely confronting for us to actually get present and slow down, because when we do, there we are, right? There we are every time. And it's the thing that so many of us are running from is just us. It's just what's happening in our mind and our bodies and the thoughts that we're having. And, you know, I love what you were saying because in some ways, I remember reading about polyvagal theory and sort of diving into that and then studying polyvagal theory and learning that, you know, the vagus nerve that runs your. The entire length of your torso up into your brain, which is the main highway between your brain and your body, actually has 80% of the pathways into the brain and only 20% from the brain down. And so it's like, wait, your body's sending 80% of the data up to your brain and your brain's only sending 20% down. Like, I thought that you're. You know, I think before that I was like, oh, my brain totally controls my body. And I was like, wait a second. Like, that's a. That's a bit of a mind, you know, a mind screw. But so all of this to say I think that we, we can do a better job of getting present. We can do a better job of slowing down that. Finding moments that are just enough. Like, I try and look for a couple of those every single day, every day. Like, is this enough right now?

You know.

Let'S take. Let's take it out of a character, cowardice, bravery realm or courage realm. And I think that's where we lose a lot of men, is we make those moments. You either do this or you're a coward or you suck at being a dad, dude. I think most men would give up anything for that. To have their kids want to come sit in their lap or to have their wife like, be so grateful that they were home. Not like that. You know, most men are wondering, like, why does my wife not like me? And do. I think it's a. I think it's a skill set issue. And so if I look at it as a set of tools in my toolkit, I don't have a great story here. Like, so in my previous job, I was on call 24 7, 365 for almost 20 years. That was just the nature of the that job. My wife knew at any moment's notice, we're going to town, we're going to whatever. If somebody's going to kill themselves or was going to die by suicide or there was some, I'm out and I may come home in two days, but we're dealing with this situation. I'm going to end up at some hospital and I'm going to end up telling some parent that their kid has passed away. Like that was just the nature of my life. And I took this job. And my boss was walking through and he was head. Dave was doing media later that night or late, late into the evening, it was about 7 o' clock and I was reading some nerd journal article articles and he stuck his head in and said, what are you doing? And I said, oh, I'm just finishing up this thing. And it was for work, it was legitimately for work. And he said, go home. I've been a boss for 20 years. I've told everyone like, you need to go on home. They're like, okay, cool. But you gave me this project I gotta finish, so I'll go home when it gets done. And I said, I will, I'll go home. And he looked at me, he goes, no, no, right now. Get up, go home. And I kind of looked at him and it was not a fun. He wasn't playing. And I looked at him and he said, if you're no good there, you will be no good here. Go home and be with your family. And I did. I got right up. And what I learned over the next few weeks was I did not know how to be a dad. From the hours of 5:00pm until 8:00 clock. I knew how to swoop in at 7:30, wolf down a meal with everybody at the table. And act like I was dad of the year and then razz my son a little bit and talk to my daughter for three or four minutes and then bedtime. I didn't know. I mean, and it's, I'm embarrassed to say that, but I didn't know how to just be a presence in my home that was, hey, how are you? How was your day? Just listen without trying to solve everything. Randomly kick a soccer ball with my daughter out in the front yard, which is mind numbingly boring. And also that's parenthood. Right? And how to listen to my son's explanation of some. I didn't know how to do any of those things. And so it's been a. I had to learn new skills. It wasn't because I was a bad guy. It wasn't because I was. I didn't care about my family. I just didn't have that talent. I didn't have that skill. It was, it was a talent I didn't have. So it's my job to go learn those skills. And now I crave those moments when literally we're doing nothing but we have to do nothing and we get to just be with one another. And that just took some time, man. It took some time. But if I kept over dramatizing it and turned it into this like jocko moment, who I love, he's a buddy, I love him. But if I turn everything into a you gotta crush, I would quit. I would quit. I would find another way to go. Be busy.

I agree. 100 and I think it is one of those skills that I've had to learn because I couldn't sit still. You know, growing up and into my 20s, like I was the kid with ADHD in, in school and one of the. I, you know, I like to joke that I was one of the first lab rats on Ritalin and I used.

To beg my dad for Ritalin. He wouldn't give it to me. No, man, you got to figure this out. One out.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it's definitely one of those skills that I've had to learn because sitting still, standing still, being still, being present did not come naturally or easy to me. And it's taken a long time.

You asked about the nervous system. I think it's important to note this isn't just woo woo kind of stuff. Your body maps out your nervous system when you're a kid. And it uses mom and dad, the two parents at home, as the roadmap for here's what love looks like and feels like. Here's what safety looks like and feels like. And if home wasn't safe or if home was chaotic, or if your parents loved you to the moon and back, but they both work 20 hours a day. Your nervous system develops based on that story. And that nervous system is the highway that your body uses when you fall in love. The first time when you get upset with a professor, the first time when your boss calls you in their office and says, hey, if you don't improve, you're going to be gone on. That's the same highway. And so often we find ourselves using the adaptive tools we learned as kids. Hey, dad's coming home. We needed to get real quiet and go in the room and shut the door. Mom's on one of her rampages again. Let's go ahead and just go outside. Well, all of a sudden, when your wife is frustrated with something, man, I'm just going to disappear, which kept me safe as a kid, is going to destroy my marriage if I don't lean into that discomfort. And so, or if every time my boss calls me I get nervous and freaked out, my boss will feel that too and wonder what's going on. Why is this guy anxious all the time? Why is this guy sweating? I have to learn. That's my adult job, is to learn how to lean into my nervous system and begin to create new pathways and new behaviors. And you can not do that by trying to outthink it. You have to out act it. You have to go, do I have to sit here in this discomfort.

And ask my wife how can I love you right now? Which is different than you need to tell that boss that he sucks and he. That's not what she needs. She needs me to sit here and just trust her wisdom too, until she asked me. Right. And, and we have to. So our nervous system is wired up. It's good to go. And we have to know that it's, it's plastic and it can move. And we, our job is to create new, new paths, man.

So let's, let's go down that path and talk about some of the skills or the tools of dealing with anxiety and building a non anxious life. And so I think where I want to start is because I can hear my audience sort of asking the question based on what you're saying, which is how do I help my partner who's anxious? How do I support my partner who's dealing with anxiety? Because I think that's a very common thing that people deal with today. So what would you say when people sort of pose that question.

Anytime somebody says, hey, the person I love is struggling with anxiety, the person I love is struggling with these things. The two things I always tell them is, number one, make sure you're a safe place to land, which means you probably have to go work on you. And that's a scary place for a lot of us because it's way easier to help somebody else than it is to look in the mirror and say, I need to lose £50 and I need to pay these credit cards off and I need to go sit with a trauma counselor and talk about my abuse and I need to call my dad and say I'm sorry. Like it's much easier to sit with somebody else. So that's. Number one is you have to do your work to be a safe landing place. And number two, you have to seek connection, not seek to solve. What does that mean? That means, hey, honey, would you be willing to sit down with me?

Let me say it this way. The state of our finances scares me to death and I can't breathe. Would you be willing to sit down with me and make a budget? Like just plan and when you make a budget, and it's funny, I've been sending people to make a budget with their spouse for years. Because when you sit down and make a budget, you have to decide what matters to you as a couple. You have to decide what matters, where you're headed, where you want to be someday. What kind of house do you want to live in, what kind of college you want your kids to go to, kind of cars you want to drive. It forces all these other conversations into a who are we gonna be? And. But if you start it with, you spend too much and you do this and you're always anxious, then she has to go to war with you. She has to. If you sit down and say, I'm so scared I can't breathe. I'm afraid in 25 years we're gonna have to move back into my parents house within their 80s because we haven't done what we. What I haven't done what I have to do. Would you join me in this? And that's the magic moment, right? I think sitting down and seeking connection, not to solve. You know, you'd be less anxious if you just didn't eat grains or sugars. That's not gonna help.

I'm thinking about changing the way I eat. Would you honor me enough to, to make a whole house change here and just follow me for 30 days? Would you be willing to honor me that way? That was a conversation I had with my wife, and she turned into such a gangster over a period of a year where she just would be like, hey, it's, it's the first of the month. What are we this month? And I'd be like, raw vegan. And she'd be like, okay. And she'd, she'd try to figure something out. And the next month be like, we're just, we're just all carnivores. She'd be like, that sounds weird, but okay. And she, she just rolled with me, but it was because she was doing it a love and honor of, and respect for me, not because I was pointing my finger at her.

Right.

And so seek connection, man. If you, as soon as you find yourself trying to solve your partner, that is a recipe to spin up that anxiety even stronger and stronger and stronger.

It almost like reinforces that there's something wrong in them 100%.

Instead of honoring there's nothing wrong with your body's working exactly as it should, let's figure out what's setting those alarms off. And often it is an anxious partner. Often it is, hey, we keep staying up till midnight to watch the next whatever. Can we just go to bed at 9:30? It's often, hey, we have a pot of coffee and then another pot of coffee and then we both get a Red Bull on the way out the door. What if we just chill for a little bit? Often it's, hey, it's October 1st and November. Thanksgiving is hell because your parents tell us what we're doing and we have to spend money we don't have and travel to places and your body just starts ramping it up because it keeps the score, man. It knows what's coming. Even if you're not thinking about Thanksgiving, it sure as hell is because it went through it last year and the year before and the year before. So let's set up some boundaries here. So it's, it's just honoring. Oh, sweet. Her alarms are going off, his alarms are going off. Let's get to the bottom of what's actually setting that off and what role can I play in that?

Yeah, I mean, I think a good example of this is like 4 years ago I decided to stop drinking it just entirely. You know, I kind of, I, you know, hadn't been drinking a lot. I was having like, you know, a beer when I would go out with friends or, or, or a couple, you know, sometimes but, or 10.

That's cool.

Or, or a call or a couple or more than that. And you know, I just Decided, like, I want to see what I'm capable of without drinking. And my. My wife was like, well, what about when we go out for dinner? What about, you know, if we have, you know, Italian food? Are you gonna have a glass of wine? And I was like, well, no, no, no. I'm gonna see what this is like. And so she didn't join me at first, but then probably about, you know, five, six months into it, we went out for dinner and I said, you know, are you gonna order a glass of wine? She said, no, I think I'm okay. And then, you know, a couple months went by and she hadn't had any drinks, and I was like, are you gonna, like, are you joining me? Or what's happened? What's happening here? And she. And she was like, oh, yeah, no, no, I'm not drinking anymore either. And she started, you know, she started, like, telling her family that she wasn't drinking. I was like, oh, that's super interesting. And so it's. It's fascinating how we can affect change in a relationship and how. And how often we're trying to sell the other person on the idea of the change versus actually just executing on it and moving in the direction and creating an invitation and opening for them to join us. And then all of a sudden, we find them, you know, rowing in the same direction as us.

Well, and I think from especially for men, but for women, too, for everybody. This idea that I have to hold my partner so tight that they can't breathe. The moment you can open your hand and realize there is one person on planet earth I can control, and that's me. That's it. And I would love if my partner would lose the 30 pounds because they don't sleep, they're miserable, they don't like the way they look, they don't like the way they feel. They take it out. I would love that. There is nothing I can do, but I can make sure that I'm taking care of me, and I can make sure that I'm whole and that I'm well and possibly I'm modeling. Here's what this could look like. That's. That's it. That's. That is it. And you can say, I'm worried about you and I love you. I'm worried about your health. You can say those things, but I can control my thoughts and my actions and that's it. And I think that's why we all get this existential angst around election time, because there's so much drum up and there's so much build up and the pressure is so great. We get one vote, I get my vote. And that vote matters. That vote is super important. I took my kid into the voting booth during the last election because I want him to see the process and how it worked and who was old man was all that. But we only get one, we get one toss of the, of the, the ping pong ball at the carnival and that's it. And then we go on to the next. And so it's just, there's no relief. We can control us. That's that. That's that. And the moment I can release my wife from my control is the moment then we can start having a marriage worth. Worth fighting for.

Yeah. Choice, right. Like reinforcing that the other person has a choice, that we have a choice and that one another's choices actually matter in the relationship. Because I think so often we're not actually asking somebody for their genuine choice. We're saying here's what I want, here's.

What I want you to do. Yeah, you mentioned something important. I think anytime it's, it's important to know anytime we make a change, we disrupt the homeostasis of our current relationships. And even if you like, you stop drinking. I bet every facet of your life got better. Your sleep got better, your ability to pay attention got better. You became a better husband and it left your wife on an island. And whether she means to or not, her body is going to try to drag you back too. It may cost, she may pick at you a little bit more, try to start a fight a little bit more or less, hassle you when you're tired a little bit more. Not trying to like, I'm gonna get him to drink again. Not at all. But her body wants to feel like the way it always has felt in relationship with Connor. And you both have to begin to create a new relationship where we're going to be, where we're going to create a new homeostasis. And that's why losing weight so hard, that's why I quit drinking so hard. Because all these other relationships get disrupted and they all want to pull you back like a tractor beam. And it's, it's. You just got to know that's coming and it norms it and then you can go on to the next. Right.

Amen to that, man. Well, let's maybe wrap with some of the tools because in your book Building a non anxious Life you have the six daily choices and you sort of break down some of the pieces. And I got the Fortunate enough to have the book here, which is pretty awesome. And was cruising through a bunch of it. I only got about two days ago. I think in reality, we've actually been talking about a lot of these different pieces. You know, connection, freedom, having choice. Can you maybe just speak to some of the tools that you write about that you found to be really effective for people to not sort of quote unquote, cope with anxiety or deal with anxiety, but to actually build a non anxious life? Because I think that's a bit of a different pathway.

Yeah, so my. The whole premise of the book is your body's a pretty smart machine. And so if it's anxious, then it is identifying things in your world that are unsafe. So instead of trying to shut that off, instead of racing to. Or let me just say it this way, this is as bold as I can say it as a mental health guy.

More people than ever before in human history right this second are under the care of a licensed mental health professional. More people than ever before in human history right now are being medicated for some sort of mental or emotional or relational challenge. And the trend line continues to be a rocket ship directly, a vertical rocket ship straight to the moon. And when they discovered penicillin, when they medicalized it, deaths from infections fell off a map because that solved that problem. And so I had to look back and go, what we're doing is not working. I do believe in counseling. I pick. I think I've bought my counselor a new lake house. I believe deeply in it and I've had season when I was using medication, it was very helpful. But globally speaking, that's not the problem. The problem is something much greater. So this book is like, hey, man, I'm going to change the architecture of this home. I'm going to bulletproof this house so that when that alarm goes off, I know there's an actual fire. And so you can't do any of that unless you choose reality. And I think we have to be cognizant of. We live in the age of distraction, man. And our brains have been hacked, our bodies have been hacked, and we haven't been hacked. That sounds like nefarious. We handed it over, right? We hand it over on a daily basis. And so the whole goal is to make our lives unintentional. I don't even have to think about pulling money out of my wallet anymore. I just wave my magic wand over a little beep and I can buy whatever I want. And if I don't even have money for it, I just Will pay for it later, and I can walk out the store with whatever I want right this second. Everything is designed to delay reality. And so I don't think there's any mental health foundation, emotional health, unless you choose reality. What does that mean? What is the state of your marriage? What is the state of your relationship with your kids? And if your kids are anxious, that's almost always a function of the environment they are living in, which means you as the adult in that house, it's on you to begin to make. Make changes. Right? And that's a very unpopular thing, but that's the truth. Kids absorb tension in their environments. What is the state of your health? What is the state of your weight? What is the state of how much you honor your body? What's the state of your relationships with your parents and your friends and your community? So you got to own reality there. And then we move into. As we talked about, you have to choose connection. Do you have a tribe? You have a gang? And this is especially challenging in, like, you were talking about the elite company. When you talk about military veterans, when you talk about elite performers, you talk about entertainers and musicians. Their worlds become so small because they cannot have a single conversation without somebody wanting something from them. Or if you're playing with a band in front of 50,000 people or 10,000 people or 2,000 people, the cohesiveness that it took the months of rehearsal and practice and common mission to get to the point where you could play on that stage, and then you perform that stage, and then you all go home, and then Dan, your neighbor, comes out in loafers and black socks to Moe's lawn. He's like, hey, Connor, what's up? Like, you're. It's just a hard jump. Or if you've been to war and some other group of men and women were willing to die on your behalf, and then you come home and get dropped off into some suburb somewhere or some apartment. It's very difficult. Your body knows what that anchored connection feels like, but you got to go do it anyway. You got to go make friends and connection and be awkward and weird and invite people to your house and to say yes to things, even when you're tired, you've got to go connect. The next one is, you have to choose freedom. And that's about calendar and finances, and that is about boundaries. That is about who is running my life, how do I put myself back in the driver's seat of my life? And then you have to, gosh, what's the other ones you have to choose mindfulness, which makes. You know, if you say that word, it sounds like some old dude with a beard sitting on a cloud somewhere. All I'm talking about is curiosity and awareness.

Why? What is my body trying to protect me from? That guy just cut me off in his stupid little Square Kia, driving 90 miles an hour down the road. I get to. I get to invent the story. Is it because he's on drugs and trying to kill everybody and he's a stupid millennial, or is he trying to get to the hospital before his wife dies? I get to pick which one of those stories I chase down and choose to internalize. One of those is going to give me empathy and peace. One of those is going to kill me sooner. I get to pick man. And so. And then the next one is going to be health and healing. If your body keeps the score, as we've said, if you had childhood abuse, if you haven't dealt with the divorce and you're still asking yourself what you did, if your dad beat you up and your mom was unstable, if you grew up with learning exceptionalities, you had ADHD or dyslexia, and you always found yourself on the outskirts, whatever, you have to deal with that. Your body created nervous system responses to those things. And you can flex and be tough all you want. If you want peace in your home, you got to go sit with a counselor. Grief demands a witness. As the great David Kistler says, you got to say those things out loud. That's why every major religion throughout human history has a confession component to it. Not just the things you did wrong, but here's what happened to me. And the body does that, craves that and health. Man, if you live off Red Bull and cigarettes, your body's going to be anxious all the time. Right? Then the final one. This is probably worthy of a whole other podcast conversation. And as I finished this chapter, I hit. I hit send. And I remember thinking, this is going to get me in trouble with everybody.

And I've had conversations directly with Jordan about this, Dr. Peterson about this. I've listened to some exquisite work by Esther Perel. So we've got everybody on both sides of the conversation of the aisle here, if you will. This is the first generation in human history that walks outside and looks at the sun and said, we did that. We have a completely untethered society. And throughout all of human history, we looked to the sky and had a series of gods or a God or some sort of system that was bigger than us, that we took a Knee to in submission. Because if you walk outside and look at the sky and say God, please make it rain or my kids die, that's a different level. But now we've solved for hunger and we've solved for water. Can we pump it out of the ground? We've solved for all these things and we've gotten really arrogant about it. And so I don't believe that you can be non anxious unless you have some sort of belief system where you are tethered into something bigger than yourself. Or as David Foster Wallace says, everybody worships. And if you worship beauty, you're never going to be beautiful enough. And if you worship your money, you will never have enough. And if you worship your cars, they will always, you'll always see that little dent. So I'm not going to prescribe what it is. I'm a Christian guy. Everybody's got a different belief structure and system. You have to take a knee to something. You have to believe in something bigger than yourself. Then you have to go all in on that. I even have some atheist friends that I love dearly. Our kids play together. They're some of my closest friends. They believe deeply in the birth and life and death. We are a part of a bigger system, a nature. Great whatever. The thing is you have to take a knee that you are not the center of the universe. I guess the last existential thing I'll leave you with is all the psychological theories over the last 150 years end with self actualization. With us being being this shining beacon on top of a pyramid. And I think if we look around at what Freud was talking about and where we are now, what Ying was talking about, where we are now, we are actualized. We have everything. We have everything and we are terrified because the center doesn't hold. The self was never designed to hold up the universe. It was designed to take a knee to the universe and say please reign. And I think that is paradoxically the cap on the non anxious life. So that's the six choices. And if you make those on a daily basis, on a monthly yearly basis, I've always checking in with reality, checking in with who's running my life, checking in with my relationships, etc, the alarms will begin to silence themselves because I'm going to deal with these other things right now. I don't owe anybody any money. Me and my wife made that decision 10 years ago. We don't owe anybody anything. If I got fired today, I'd be pissed, I'd be mad and I'd be sad. Heartbroken I wouldn't be anxious because it wouldn't be on to the next thing because I'm not worried about my family starving. Right. It's a totally different. I got. I gotta sell this property because I leverage. I don't have any of that stuff. We're gonna figure out what's next. Right. So it's just living a non anxious life.

I love that there's a lot of pieces and.

Yeah, I just threw a lot at you there.

No, no, I agree. I was like looking at the. I'm like, oh, shoot. Like I only have a couple minutes.

Here, but pick one to pull it apart, man, if you want.

Well, no, I would love to. What I, I just was gonna say is I would love to actually have you back on at some point to talk about that last piece because I do think that it's important. And you know, I've been a huge.

Student of Carl Jung and developmental psychology and Gestalt. And one of the things that Jung said is that at the beginning of every kind of like what you were saying, which is at the beginning of every spiritual journey, at the beginning of every good therapeutic modality, is the step of confession and admission. And it's such a huge part. It's not the only piece, but it is a huge part of it. And then the other thing that he talked about in quite, in a huge amount of detail, especially towards the end of his life was that a lot of the crisis, the crises that was going on within individuals were spiritual problems. So, so much the degree that when he started to work with people who had addictions, he there. And there's a story about him working with somebody that ended up, you know, leading to the development of AA in some capacity. I don't remember exactly what the connection is there, but he essentially said, you, you don't have an. A psychological issue, you have a spiritual one. And so you need to go down a spiritual path because it's a spiritual problem. And I think in, in our culture it's hard when we have this, you know, massive ballooning of spiritual but not religious people, which there's not a problem. I think I probably fall into that category as well in, in a lot of ways. But when there is a disconnect, a disc. Yeah. A disconnection from.

The self and the individual being the ultimate. Right. Like when that's the belief and there's a disconnection from. There are things that are bigger, there are forces that are bigger. Right. Even just nature. I can walk out into my yard, we have five and a half acres and feel quite small, you know, and be like, oh, this is, you know, something that I live within that's quite a bit bigger than I am. That wasn't man made. That these trees were here before I.

Before I was born and they'll be here long after you're gone.

Right. And so, you know, I think that there's, there's, there's hints of God source, you know, the, the, the bigger piece, however you want to label that all around. And sometimes, especially in a time where existential anxiety seems to be skyrocketing, right, you know, climate anxiety and existential anxiety and AI anxiety. I mean, there's all these pieces where, you know, people are worried about the end of themselves and the collective having some type of remembrance of something bigger and some kind of connection to something bigger is incredibly important. And it's a hard one, I think, for a lot of people to get.

To because we've been told we are God. We've been told if you just listen to the right podcast or read the right book, you too can have the keys to the kingdom. And I think we have every key to every kingdom. And now the kingdom is like, hey, we'll just spit it out for you. And it goes back to that thing. You know Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs?

Yeah, yeah.

Mike was here doing a thing and we were chit chatting. He said something that was so transcendent. He said, we talk about. It was during the COVID And he said we talk a lot about.

Jobs that were necessary. Right. Or they, they were called.

What were they called?

Oh yeah, yeah, I know. You're talking about essential workers.

That's right. Essential workers. There we go. And he said when 30 million Americans were given the tag, you're an essential worker. He said, we simultaneously told 300 something million Americans, we don't need you. Just go home, we'll send checks. And we went mad. We went crazy. Because we're not designed to not have purpose. We're not designed to not have. Be a part of something bigger than us. Just go home, we'll send you. It was a, an acceleration of where we're, we're trying to head, right. We can just outsource every job and just sit at home and eat bonbons and stare off into space. We're not designed for that, man. We are simply not wired for that. And I think the spiritual. But I, I think all religion is. And it's probably get me in trouble. I just think religion is a group of people trying to put into practice what is living out this spiritual belief that we share? Look, like that's why I don't have any problems with, you know, 45 different Christian churches in my neighborhood. Right? Because it's a group of people saying, hey, we're going to live. We're going to agree to this set of rules and this is how we read this book. This is how we're going to live. Great. If you start burning down my building, then we're gonna have a problem. But religion is just people trying to solve that. I think when you try to do spirituality by yourself, you end up with nonsense like saying things like my truth, which is. Is it does. That doesn't even work. Right. And if you start saying my truth, then you end up with how I feel is the barometer for reality. And I need everybody else to. I need nature. I need human nature. I need nature, nature. I need heat, I need cold. I need everything to bend to my feelings because I am the center. I am God in this world. And I think that is a recipe for everybody ending up in ash.

Yeah, there's. There's a subjective truth, there's an objective truth, and then there's the truth of intersubjective reality. Right. Like there's my truth, there's the objective truth within reality, and then there's the truth that's embedded within story. Right. Because intersubjective reality is just the narrative.

It's a story.

That's right. Yeah, I agree. I think, I mean, I did this whole mini episode that was interesting around how I called it the weaponization of modern psychology and really how we've taken these terms and these labels and these frameworks that are supposed to be very helpful for us as human beings and we've now weaponized them. Right. You're a narcissist because you disagree with me.

Me.

Until you meet a narcissist in a psych ward, you go, oh, oh, that's what that is. That's not my mother in law. Right? Yeah. Like I remember I asked the guy who trained was like one of my chief mentors in, in psychology, in mental health. And I said, hey, just over dinner, is oppositional defiant disorder? Is that real? Is that real? And he goes, yep. And then he goes, you've never seen it? And I said, I don't know, there's. And he goes, stop me. And he goes, I was one time with seven grown men trying to hold down a five year old and we couldn't do it. And he said, then that kid got away from us. And said, he goes, that was oppositional defense because you've never seen it. But yeah, you're right. We weaponize it all. And that manual that was designed for practitioners to talk to insurance companies and for researchers to talk to other researchers as a way just to speak a common language has become our quiver of arrows that we fire at each other and that we shoot ourselves with. Right.

It's become a theology on its own. You know, like I think that that's, it's become, in some ways it's become a, an interim sort of replacement for the religious doctrine that people grew up in. Right. And so they've traded in Christianity or Catholicism or whatever it is for, you know, a list of therapeutics, psychiatry. That's right, right. That, that they then need to, to follow. And so listen, man, I do have to pause our conversation.

Let's get out of here.

I really enjoyed this. I feel like if I wasn't paying attention to the clock, we probably would have spent like another hour or two because we were just about to go down a path that I cannot wait to talk to you about.

Let's do it again, man. I'm grateful for you, Connor.

Yeah. I wish you all the success in the launch of your book. For everybody that's out there listening, definitely go pick up a copy. Building a non anxious Life. We'll have all the list links for you in the show, notes to John's site, to his show, to his book. But anything, John, that you just want to leave the listeners with in terms of what they can go check out or where they can go to find you and more of your work.

I think the last sentence I'll leave is, chances are you're not broken. Chances are your body's working exactly as it should and your mission is to figure out why it's trying to get your attention. You can go, you can follow me at John Deloney on all the internety things and you can pick up the book@john deloney.com. yeah. And the pre order, the pre orders through October 3rd. And if you pick it up on pre order, as you know, it helps all authors. It helps out a lot. So go check it out, man. And if you pre order it, well, I've got a bunch of bribes in there to get you to do it early.

I love that. A bunch of bribes. All right, man. Well, thank you so much for being on the show and for everybody that's out there, don't forget to man it forward. Share this episode with somebody that you know will enjoy it and until next week. This is Connor Ben signing off.