My TOP 5 Hacks To Overcome Anxiety (As A Bipolar Person)

I mean, we could talk extensively about why anxiety has become so rampant and why it's such on the rise and the, you know, the different forms, existential anxiety, et cetera. But what are some of the very real practical things that you've found have worked for you and the people that you've interacted with?

Well, there's some obvious ones that get rolled out by most people in my position. So meditation, it's non negotiable. You just have to do it. And I am a shithouse meditator. I like, I have so much mental chattering and in fact, my conversation with his Holiness the Dalai Lama was to this effect. How do I stop it? Like, I know that that's meant to be the ultimate goal, but how do you do it? Surely you know how to do it. And his words were literally this, don't even bother. He said, maybe if I sat in a cave for two years and all I did was meditate, yes, I could make it happen. And he said, but waste of time, Sarah, waste of time. He said, you're far better spending your life attending to what he called altruism. So basically being of service to the world. So it's not so much the meditation that does the work. It's not the actual 20 minutes where you steal the mind that does the wonders. It's actually this torturous process. And anyone who's meditated knows what I'm talking about of having to bring like herd the mind back to either the mantra, the breath, whatever it might be, over and over again. It's like a parent grabbing the child. Come on back from the edge of the lake. Come on back from the edge of the lake. And you have to do that over and over again. And what that does is build up a muscle that means that when you go out into the real world and you're dealing with fractured thinking, you have this muscle that is used to bringing, bringing your chattering mind, your anxiety, anxious entity, back in, closer to yourself in relationship with yourself, back to your core. So meditation for me is, you know, I forget to do it, I kind of get the shits with it and then I come back to it and it makes a huge difference. The other obvious one is exercise. The studies, even since I've written the book, have rolled in to show the effects there, but particularly movement in, in nature. So hiking, that's something that I knew from a very young age, healed my anxiety. And so I have hiked all of my life and my most recent book, I hiked around the world for three years with one 35 pound backpack. In the footsteps of philosophers and poets to, to provide a path. I think the subtitle of my book is literally A Hopeful Path through a Fractured World. And it's really about the climate crisis. The other thing that I like to do is there's a couple of little mantras and wisdoms. Wisdoms I think are really helpful. So one of them is anxiety and excitement actually are experienced in the same part of the brain and experienced as very much the same thing. So there's an opportunity to reframe anxiety as excitement. And studies have actually been done to show that even just saying the words I'm currently feeling, feeling excited, is enough to shift your perspective. And I use that a lot. So when I've got to go and do public speaking or a podcast like this one today, I will say to myself, I'm currently doing excitement and can really dial down that sort of anxious chattering that can send you over the edge and, you know, affect your performance. The other thing that I find really helpful, it's. And it's a wisdom that if you live with someone or you know, somebody who is anxious and has panic attacks, this is a particularly good one. A panic attack will only ever last between 10 and 15 minutes. That is how long our biology is set up to, to give us this experience and exists for a very good reason. It's to, to get us alert and to, you know, flight or flee, sorry, fight or flee a situation. But obviously in the world that we live in today, we don't necessarily get that experience of running off from the thing that's making us anxious or fighting the thing. Right, right. So we've got to sit in it. Best thing you can do is remind yourself 10 to 15 minutes. I can do 10 to 15 minutes. And so if you're somebody who is sitting alongside someone who's having a panic attack, the best thing you can do is remind them of that. Just be with them, sit with them, you can do it. This is going to pass in, you've got another five minutes. We can do this. And that speaks to probably my favorite wisdom. And I think it's the most effective one. It's the one that really kind of causes penny drops for people, is that essentially it's do anxiety once. Anxiety is a very important mechanism. It exists primarily to get us, as I say, to run off from a threat or to fight it. The third mechanism, and there's about four that are identified today, but another one is the freeze mechanism. And I'm sure you've spoken about it with other guests on your program. We freeze as a kind of last resort maneuver. If we can't run, like if you think of a deer being chased by a tiger, the deer can, you know, only outrun it for so long. It certainly can't fight the tiger. Eventually, as a last resort option, it will collapse in a heap and essentially play dead. And mice do it when they're being chased by cats. We've all seen this in nature. It plays dead. And for all intents and purposes, it is. The lungs stop working, the heart stops beating, and the tiger kind of goes, oh, this is pretty chill situation. I'll go and get my cubs, come back, we can have a leisurely lunch. And. And in that time, the deer has a chance to jerk back online and flee the situation, right? In our culture, we experience anxiety. We go into the freeze state because we can't fight or flee the situation, right? And we stay in that freeze state. And it's highly problematic. What we do in that free state is, well, we're not shaking it off. You know, we now know the benefits of that shaking off trauma. And that's what the flight or fight mechanism does. It actually uses physicality to shake off the anxiety so that if you do survive it, you're freed of that anxious sort of buildup of hormones. So what we do is we sit in this free state and then we get anxious about being anxious because anxiety's been stigmatized, right, by the medical industry. It's a problem. So we get anxious about being anxious because we think we shouldn't be behaving that way, and this is uncomfortable and I shouldn't feel this way, so I must fix it. And. And then we get anxious about being anxious about being anxious, and we go down this kind of death spiral and it's impossible to get out of it. And anyone with anxiety will identify that experience. So back to the wisdom. Do anxiety once. And that is the whole premise of my book. When you recognize that anxiety exists for a reason, a panic attack lasts, you know, 10, 15, maximum 20 minutes. You can actually just sit in it, not fight it, not flee it, sitting it, pass through it. And then you can bring other mechanisms that can help, like movement, dancing, going for a run, things like this. And you do it once because you understand that it's an important process, all is okay. The body is doing what it needs to do to pass through a difficult situation. And that, I think, is actually one of the most important effective tools for dealing with contemporary anxiety.