How To Stop Being So Afraid Of Everything

Do you experience a lot of anxiety and worry? Kind of about everything. You know, some people experience anxiety in a certain area, like, oh, I'm anxious around my boss, or, oh, I'm afraid of, she's cute. I don't want to talk to her. That's localized anxiety. And then you could have what's known as generalized anxiety. And that's more of a curse, my friend, where it's not just, ooh, I'm afraid of the boss and her. It's also like, what about what could happen tomorrow? What about my finances? How about my health? What about my family's health? How about business? I should worry about that? What about, is there gonna be a forest fire near my house? Because it could burn my house down? And then when you're not particularly worrying about even something in specific, you could be sitting there, maybe enjoying a meal with your family or your friends, and you're kind of laughing and having a good time. But also, somewhere in the back of your mind is like a tightness in your chest or your stomach, and it's like something could go wrong. I don't relax right now. Is this familiar? I've definitely lived with this in my life at many times, and it can be really, really uncomfortable. And then it can make you more afraid of all the other things. Now I am afraid to go talk about money or take actions or spend money. Oh, I'm afraid to, you know, make any changes or invest in my house because it could burn down. I'm afraid. I'm afraid, I'm afraid. And the world starts to actually seem much scarier, more threatening. And if it gets real bad, you can start having panic attacks where it's like, oh, my God, the grocery store. I had a panic attack in the grocery store. Can't go back there. Felt like I was dying or on the bus or whatever. You can have a sense of, if it's real bad, you get agoraphobia, right? It's like, don't leave the house. Close the blinds, Peek through once a day to make sure that no one's coming at you. But you might not be that far. But it's a spectrum. And so how do we deal with this? How do we shift this? The good news is you can. And there's just a couple of key things that you must do. Now, sometimes people say, well, you got to face your fear. Go approach the thing that scares you. That works really well for localized anxiety. Are you afraid of your boss? You actually should approach authority figures more often. You're afraid of the Ladies, which I was for many years. You go talk to the ladies. You realize that they're, instead of being like a wolf, they're more like flowers and puppies. Some of them can be wolves, though, so stay away from the wolf. In any case, that doesn't work as well for generalized anxiety because the source is not. You're not actually afraid of those things, right? You're just in a state of fear and it gets associated to everything in your world. So here's what we got to do. First, you have to realize that the pattern is not coming from out there. It's not like your world is full of scary things. I know it feels that way, but actually it's a pattern in here. The pattern in your mind that makes everything seems so scary. And if you're with me so far, then good, we can move to the next step. If you're like, no, it's really my finances and it's really my boss and it's really my house and it's really this person, it's really my neighbor. What's the one common denominator in all of those equations? It's you. Right? So again, there's nothing wrong with you. You don't feel shame about it. It's just a mental pattern. It's like a little glitch in the software that we need to up, debug and upgrade. So we got that. Now, number two is what is the glitch? The glitch is a pattern of worry. Worry is a hallma feature of generalized anxiety, which means a certain type of thought pattern that's scanning the horizon for threats kind of all the time and probably over predicting the likelihood of the threat, the severity of the threat, and your inability to handle the threat. So that trifecta makes it seem like versus like, oh, yeah, I guess I could go wrong. It's probably unlikely, and even if it did, I could handle it. That is going to diminish your worry. But when we're in a state of chronic worry and they start to stack, right? Like you don't even. Can't even finish worrying about that one thing before you start worrying about this other thing. And then you're worrying, oh, my God, what was I worrying about? I don't know. So something over there, and it just compounds. We have to catch that it's worry. And the third thing you have to do is you have to discover something profound about worry. Worry is not actually protecting you and it's not actually solving problems. I know. It really seems like it is. You're walking down the street, you're hearing the birds, you're breathing in that sunshine and smelling it. It does. You can smell like when the earth get hits by the sun or the concrete gets hit by sun. It smells good, doesn't it? It's like summertime. The sun is just permeating the air all around you and you're feeling great. And then all sudden you're like, I forgot to send that email. And look, your worry just totally protected you there, right? Actually, you could remember to send the email without a squirt of panic and cortisol going through your system. He's like, oh, that email, okay. Oh, it's a good thing. It smells so good in the sunshine and you can be fine and then take care of the action. And worry was not necessary at all. Another aspect of worry is it's actually not problem solving at all. Because when you're saying what if, what if, what if you're not sitting down with a sheet of paper or a notepad on your desktop and saying, okay, let me come up with my. If this happens, then I'll do. That's like contingency planning. And you could do that. It's actually very helpful. But that is not what worry is. And as long as you think worry is productive, the pattern will continue. So you with me so far. We got to. Worry is not productive. And then when we notice worry, this is like a mindfulness component of freeing yourself. You become aware and you label it. You say, ah, that's worry. That's worry. Ah, that's worrying. If you have a lot of anxiety, you'll be doing that all day long. That's okay. Just notice it, label it as worry. Then what do you do? Well, then you have be able to let the worry go. That doesn't mean you stop worrying. That means you stop feeding it. Now how the hell you do that? Well, the worries are going to be very alarming. They're going to want to pull your nervous system. What's the threat? Especially if you've conditioned yourself over months or years. So what do you do? You have to realize that what's underneath the worry and underneath all generalized anxiety is an excessive need for control and a unwillingness to be with the fundamental uncertainty that is in this life. I know that was a mouthful, but that's probably the whole big reveal of this video. An excessive need for control and an unwillingness to just be with the fact that things are uncertain. In other words, that you don't have control. You have control of a very, very Very small amount of things and even things that are in your life like your health and your finances and all the stuff and your kids and all the stuff you worry about. There's this much you can do and then there's this much that's not in control. You could work your ass off, you could manage your money well. And that doesn't mean that you have total certainty of where the next check is coming from, the next income is coming from. You can do all the right things with your health, eat all the vegetables and exercise and sleep 8.2 hours a night and whatever else you're doing. And you can still just like wake up and have some issue like my stomach. And you go in there like, hey, you have a tumor in your guts. You're like, what the. I was doing everything right. I'm not saying you got a tumor in your guts. We don't need to create a new hypochondrias worry fest right now. But what I'm saying is we don't have control and we're not in charge. And there's two ways to react to that. One is the panicky state you might have been living in for decades. So thumbs up or thumbs down on that? I'd give that one a thumbs down for personal experience. The other way is to soften and surrender and find some freedom in that. You're not in control. That one might seem like a bit of a stretch. And I've found that we don't get to this one just like with a quick thought like, well, I'm not in control. That's a relief, right? It might be for you as you're watching this, but actually it takes a little bit of practice. So as you can do, give yourself five or ten minutes in silence. Find the party that's like really scared, like, what if this happens? And be with the fear and keep surrendering. The need to control anything, even the need to know what's going to happen, even the need to reassure yourself you're going to be fine, you're going to be fine. Just I don't know what's coming next. I feel real freaky. If you want some guidance with this, I have a audio. It's called the peace process. About 20 minutes. And it guides you through somatic mindfulness technique to help with this surrender and letting go. It's useful for all kinds of anxiety, including this type of anxiety. If you want to get it, go to we give it away with my book not nice. Notnicebook.com and enter your email and you'll get access to all the resources from the book. And if you haven't read the book, you might want to pick it up. It's a good one, but you can just go there even if you haven't read the book. And you also get assertiveness training course as well for free. So bonuses galore. But right when you enter your email, you'll get access to the peace process. You can listen to that, follow along, do it every day if you want, and it'll be profoundly helpful. You can shift this. It's a retraining of yourself, but let me tell you, it is worth it. Because having experienced social anxiety in my life, as well as a lot of generalized anxiety and worry and a need for control that manifested in anxiety and chronic body pain, which is a whole other story. Having shifted those patterns for the most part, I still get a little pain and nervousness and anxiety sometimes, but for the most part it might not be being a dominant part of my life anymore. Is radically life changing. Not because everything around you is instantly different. You're living in a mansion or something. It's just the little things feel better when there's not some freaking death threat over your head every day. And that's what anxiety can feel like. And that's why I'm so passionate about this and I hope this serves you so. Share down below in the comments what you're finding most valuable, any questions you have, and until we speak again, we have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.