Why You’re So Anxious And Distracted (And What To Do)

Welcome back to the Mantalk show, guys. I'm Connor Beaton. Today I'm going to be talking about why you are so anxious and distracted. So you're anxious and distracted. Maybe it's adhd, maybe it's too much coffee. Maybe it's the constant and unrelenting IV drip of social media content, porn and information that's pushing itself deep into the heart of your consciousness on a regular, daily basis. Now sure, of course those things don't help. Those distractions don't help you focus, they don't help you be less anxious when you're constantly doom scrolling through social media of another violent video or something that's reinforcing a bias or something that's, you know, showing how bad the world is and it's going to end tomorrow. But there's something deeper that you're avoiding that's the cause of all of these wonderfully addictive distractions and that's the unknown, the uncertain. Everything that cannot be categorized that leads to uncertainty. You see from a psychological perspective, uncertainty when faced, when felt is experienced subjectively inside of you as anxiety. So when you meet any uncertain conversation, the unknown of how a relationship's going to go, whether you should walk up to that girl in Starbucks and ask for her number, your boss asks you to come into his office tomorrow morning and have a conversation, all of that uncertainty is going to create an open loop in your brain where your brain is going to try and predict what's going to happen to no avail. So every time that you start to think about what to do at night when you have nothing to do, friends are all busy, you're by yourself, and you've got a hundred different choices of what you can make for dinner, what you could watch on Netflix or Amazon prime, all of these hundreds of choices create this loop of uncertainty. I don't know what to do. And you're unsure about which one to choose. And the brain encodes this uncertainty as anxiety. Or say that you want to have a meaningful or hard conversation with your girlfriend, with your wife, and this could be about anything moving in together, something that's not working in the relationship. You know where you want to go on vacation, but you're unsure about how that conversation will go, the brain again cannot predict what's going to happen. And bam. Anxiety said simply, the unknown and uncertainty itself are anxiety. They are anxiety provoking and anxiety producing experiences. Now for many of you, this might seem like, yeah, I kind of know that, or it doesn't seem like such a big deal. How do Some of these other behaviors play into that, all these other distractions. Well, for the majority of the men that I've worked with over time, what I have started to notice is that many, many, many men are afraid, are scared of being with the internal experience of the unknown. There's a big career change that's happening in front of them. Maybe you're me met with a decision to stay or leave a relationship, to stay or leave a job, whether to buy the house or not, to invest in the stock or not, whatever that decision is, that seems completely unknown. And it's easier for us to become distracted by our phones, by scrolling through social media, by going and watching porn. Those distractions can alleviate the internal stress and pressure of anxiety that comes along with entering into the unknown, having to deal and face with uncertainty. Because the truth is that when you're left with your uncertainty in silence, you're left with the unknown in silence. Your brain starts to try and predict what's going to happen. You see, your brain is a pattern recognition machine and it's a machine that tries to recognize patterns that it already knows. And so when you're met with the unknown or the uncertain, what will often happen is that depending on your internal bias and your internal inner critic and how your inner dialogue is, your brain will try and predict patterns, oftentimes coming up with the worst possible outcomes. And again, this adds to the anxiety. It happens indefinitely, this process of trying to predict what's going to happen when I have that conversation with my boss, when I have that conversation with my girlfriend, what's going to happen when I go on that trip and I don't know how things are going to look? What's going to happen when I show up to this social gathering? Right, for some of you might be dealing with social anxiety. What's going to happen? Who am I going to have to talk to? How's that conversation going to go? How's that interaction going to go? What are they going to think about me? All of these open questions that seemingly do not have an answer cause your brain to start to cycle through different possibilities indefinitely, coming up with possible outcomes that are often based on worst case scenarios so that your brain can predict what to do if and when those things should happen. And again, that produces what? More anxiety. So the brain likes to default to these known patterns of what it thinks is going to happen, tasks, things that it can predict the outcome of. And when you're faced with a decision or a choice in your life, your ACC or your anterior cingular cortex starts to go into action to trying to determine what the right choice or the right decision is. You see, your ACC is responsible largely for decision making. And this is activated specifically when not only a choice is in front of you, but when uncertainty is in front of you. And the interesting thing about the ACC is not only is it the part of your brain that is responsible for decision making and choices, when the unknown and the uncertain are. Are in front of you, but it's also the part of your brain that is connected very deeply to anxiety. So then next, when you layer in the paradox of choice, the more choice that you have, the harder it is to choose. I call this the Cheesecake Factory effect. And I remember specifically being a kid, and sometimes my parents would take me to the Cheesecake Factory, and I would sit down, and you'd open up the menu, and there would just be, like, page after page after page, and it felt like an almanac of food. And if you go into that and you're hungry, all of a sudden you're met with just this massive amount of choice. And so if you don't go into that process knowing, you know, I want chicken nuggets, you know, or I want the, you know, Alfredo fettuccine, right, with some chicken, like, that's what I want, by the way. That's what I used to order, is the chicken Alfredo. But anyway, if you don't go into that knowing exactly what you want, then you can be met with this huge, massive amount of choice that then your brain has to cycle through which is the best option for it based on the moment. And when you have that abundance of choice, it makes it harder for your brain to choose, which, again, induces more anxiety. And so when you couple some of these challenges and these factors with endless distractions, endless choices, right? Maybe you're the single person that's swiping through Tinder nonstop or Hinge or Bumble or whatever dating app that you're on. And it seems like the options are just endless. Like, there's just so many people that you could date. That choice paradox makes it incredibly challenging to choose, because your brain has now seen how many people there are that you could quote, unquote, possibly, and potentially date or be with. And so when you get into a relationship with somebody, your brain has remembered, whoa, there's this whole encycloped digital encyclopedia and yellow pages of people that are single and want to date. What if one of those millions of people are better for me than the one that's in front of me? So when you put all this together and you combine that with all of the things in your life that are vying for attention. It makes it harder and harder for you to focus on what matters. It makes it easier for you to be distracted, and it makes it easier for you to feel like there's something fundamentally wrong with you, when, in fact, most of our lives are now conspiring in some way to grab our attention. That's why it's been called the attention economy for such a very long time. You are in that attention economy. Everything is vying for your attention in some capacity. So what do you do? Well, there's a couple things that I have found that have worked very, very well for me, because when I was growing up, I was that classic kid. I was distracted all the time. You know, in grade two or three, I think it was in grade three, I was, quote, unquote, diagnosed with adhd. I was put on Ritalin. Uh, and, you know, it. I think it was more of a novelty than anything else. I don't think that it necessarily did much. It certainly didn't help my grades in any way, shape or form. I just became the kid that was like, passing out, you know, ADHD meds to other kids, like, sharing the. The. The medication, like a PEZ dispenser. And it was sort of this novelty because I was one of the first kids to be put on to Ritalin or medication in my school. And so there was like, a little bit of, like, lore around what was happening, but I went through that period for a long time in my life of thinking there's something wrong with me. I'm constantly distracted, I can't focus, when in reality, my environment and my life was not conducive for producing a brain and a body and a being that could focus and execute on a task. So I've had to work diligently over the last 10 to 15 years to start to implement certain things that have really helped me to focus and that have really helped me to reduce anxiety and stress and overwhelm when it comes to making certain decisions, but specifically when it comes to facing the unknown. For me, one of the things that I think that I've learned, that has become one of my greatest strengths, is that I am able to bear and face the unknown with ease, with a certain amount of grace, with a certain amount of acceptance and surrendering and not having to fight or battle or, you know, constantly ruminate and mentally masturbate about what might happen or be paranoid about what outcome might unfold. I can Let it go. I can enter into the unknown. And that has become a kind of superpower in a time and an age where people have become almost disabled and crippled in their capacity to face any type of uncertainty. And I see this in so many men. And this might be you, and it's not a judgment of you, it's not to shame you. It's just to say, this is a skill that you can actually develop. The skill to be able to bear and face the unknown and the uncertain is a quality that modern men are lacking. Lacking, and that modern society is requiring. So here are a couple things that I have found to be incredibly helpful. Number one is the power of constraint. Creating active structure and constraint can actually benefit you in reducing anxiety and leading to a higher level of focus. For example, if you went to the Cheesecake Factory, I don't know why I'm like, stuck on this example, but clearly I. I'm, you know, I'm hungry. I must be hungry. If you went to the Cheesecake Factory and there was only three options, and two of those options were things that either you didn't feel like, or they had ingredients in it that you didn't want to eat or, you know, this didn't sound appealing, it would make it much more simple to have the choice of, that's what I'm going to eat. So this means building active constraint into your life. Whether it's in what time you're going to wake up, what your morning routine looks like, what you are going to eat and and not going to eat. Constraint is going to produce and alleviate a lot of the anxiousness that you feel when it comes to making choice, right? So this means building active constraint in your life. It's why you see people like Jocko posting photos of their watch on Instagram from, you know, 4:30 in the morning. He has built constraint into his life. He is not free, free to wake up whenever he wants, right? He's not free to just get up at whatever time he wants. And we have, we have encoded this in a misconceived way. That freedom for you as a man is not about being able to do whatever you want, whenever you want. It's actually being able to set the parameters, the constraints and the structures of your life that you can operate within effect effectively and powerfully and diligently. And once you can find some of those constraints and that structure, it will actually empower you to be able to operate in a way that, that reduces your overwhelm, that reduces your stress, that reduces your anxiety. You Know, this is why I mean, and it took me a long time, I had to fight for a long time to build a structured morning routine for myself. Where I got up at a certain time, I did certain things in the morning, There was a certain structure to how those things unfolded. You know, I'd get up, I would stretch, I would journal, I would, you know, drink water and yada, yada, yada. And still to this day, I have structure in my morning, I have structure at night. And you can think about these as routines, whatever, but building in these constraints about when you are going to do something and when you are not going to do something, you know, what you're going to eat, how you're going to work out, what you're going to do for your workout, simple things, you know, like for me, I will fill up a mason jar of water, bring it up with me to bed and put it beside the bed so that when I wake up in the morning, it's the first thing I do every single day. I drink water first thing in the morning. That might seem small and insignificant, but that type of developing constraint before I go to bed, I do this right. It's not necessarily a choice. It is a rote habit that will reduce anxiety because you're not having to think about, oh, what am I going to do tomorrow morning, am I going to remember to fill up the water, oh, what if I skip that and then, you know, just I make the coffee or I have breakfast and I blah, blah, right. So you want to close down the thought loops and build in constraint in your life. So number one, look at where you can develop constraint and structure within your life. Step number two, okay, this is two parts. Do it scared and do it to completion. Do it scared and do it to completion. You don't need to necessarily be neurotic about this because we can tip the scales to a kind of neuroses where everything needs to be completed, otherwise we're not okay internally. There is such a thing as ocd, and that's really what obsessive compulsion compulsive disorder is. Things need to be done a very specific way and they need to be done to completion until there's a certain level of satisfaction. And if you do that, and if there is no satisfaction, you have to go back and do it. So you'll see people that like have to wash their hands a very specific way and they might wash their hands that specific way, but it doesn't lead to the satisfaction, so they gotta go back and do it again. I'm not saying do it to completion in a neurotic way. I'm saying have the hard conversation to completion. I'm saying finish the email. I'm saying sit down and watch the whole movie. I'm saying watch less short form content. Focus on one thing at a time and intentionally and do the whole workout and specifically do it scared. So do it to completion. Whatever you're going to do, whatever you sit down to do and to focus on. Right? Like this video. I have gotten in the habit of doing these videos in one take. There's no editing, there's no nothing. And I have forced myself to do that because it's an exercise in practicing the diligence and the discipline of doing something to completion without needing to stagger everything constantly and chop everything up and make everything more scattered and more distracted for you as the viewer. Some people won't watch these videos to the end because they need that constant dopamine hit. I don't want to produce content like that. So I do this to completion. So look at your life and ask yourself what can I start to do to completion? And simple thing, I've stopped watching reels and stopped watching this sort of like short form doom scrolling content as much as humanly possible and, and gone back to just watching an entire episode of TV or you know, watching, sitting down and watching a movie with my wife. Those types of things will help you to maintain some type of attention. Going for walks with my wife and my kids without my cell phone where it's just, we're just in conversation and we go, you know, we set out a route and we do the entire walk to completion. So doing things to their complete completion, following through on the process and finalizing it and doing it to completion so that you can get the reward of that dopamine and that serotonin production within the body. And the second part to that is do it scared. Too many people who experience anxiety and who experience a good amount of distractedness are waiting to not feel scared, to not feel anxiety, to, to take the action. And it's an unrealistic expectation. And one of the simplest, fastest ways to deal with your anxiety is to do whatever you are afraid of while you are scared. Right? It's like if you are afraid of heights and you go to jump off a six foot ledge into the water and you stand there waiting for yourself to not be scared, you will literally stand there forever because the fear is not going to go away. If you have a fear of heights, it's not going to shift and so for those of you who are afraid of being in social situations, or you're afraid to ask for the raise or ask the girl out or ask for the phone number, approach somebody and just have a conversation. You have to do those things. Scared. You have to go to the gym for the first time. Scared. You have to get up in the morning, you know, and I'm not saying get up in the morning scared, but you. You have to get up in the morning and face the. Like. I don't know how this morning routine is gonna go, and I'm worried I'm not gonna be able to do it effectively, but I'm gonna do it anyways. I'm gonna do it just feeling some of that fear. So do it scared. Let that be your motto if you deal with a lot of anxiety. And lastly, number three, find the joy in the process, not in the outcome. Find the joy in the process or the practice and not in the outcome. This is something that I am trying to instill into my son right now. I have a couple sayings with him. Number one is, hard work is good work, and number two is the joy is in the practice, and the joy is in the process. And I keep saying this to him, and it's one of these things that we talk about, right? The joy is in the practice. The joy is in the process. So when you seek satisfaction in the outcome, you can go through the entire process miserable, anxious, distracted, not present. And it can keep you focused on the future outcome, which can create a kind of anxiety that will not leave until the outcome happens. And then oftentimes what happens is when the outcome shows up, all it does is alleviate your anxiety, and you don't feel the satisfaction and the fulfillment of the actual process that has unfolded. So it robs you of the experience of finding satisfaction in the process, in the journey, in the practice. So whatever you are doing, whether it's trying to get a journaling routine in place, a breath work routine, meditation routine, you know, maybe you're practicing a new hobby like photography, or you're trying to woodwork and build something. Whatever you're doing in your life right now that you are focusing on, that you are building, find some joy in the practice. And in the process, worry less about what the outcome will. Will look like. And the reason why this is so important for distraction and anxiousness is that for so many of you, when you are so fixated on the outcome, it produces anxiety in the present moment because you're not there, right? So your brain is starting to think about how do I just get there? What do I need to do? And it creates a kind of frantic energy within you and a frantic mental processing that pulls you out of the present moment and gets you stuck in a future fixation. And that process will always produce anxiousness internally, and it will also diminish the satisfaction in the process and the outcome. So share your thoughts and comments below. I hope that you found some value in today's video, and don't forget to man it forward to somebody that you know will enjoy it and could use the reminders. See you next time.