What To Do When You're Struggling

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Hey, welcome to today's episode. Today we're going to talk about what to do when you're struggling, suffering. I think this is a very important topic because we don't do it very well. I certainly don't. And I know a lot of clients and people I work with don't either. We freak out, we make it worse, we get dramatic, we try to run away, we use escape pods that don't serve us. And yet it's an inevitable part of life. And here's the thing. The more you step into a life of courage where you are taking risks and speaking up and being authentically yourself and putting yourself out there and just being more vulnerable and real and connected to life, you're going to feel more. And it might be uncomfortable. I mean, there's. When we create that kind of sheltered life of social anxiety and self criticism and avoiding risk and being really nice, we kind of create this bubble, this little cage to live in. And it's painful. Oh, yeah, Extremely painful, extremely limiting. But we're also a little bit numbed out. And when we start to really open up to life, it's like, boom, we kind of become this. It might feel like a raw nerve at times, and it could be scary or uncomfortable. And so this is so important because what we don't want to do is say, man, put myself out there taking risks, being more me. This is really hard and uncomfortable. I'm just going to go back. I'm just gonna go back to the cage. It's kind of like, who is that guy Cyrus or Cypher or Cyprus or whatever his name was from the original Matrix movie. He ended up being a little bad guy, but he was one of the crew on Morpheus's ship. And, you know, Morpheus is. All those people are outside of the Matrix and he's like, put me back into the Matrix and I'll betray all my friends. Right? I just want to go back in and that's kind of what we do. We sell ourselves out. And you might not think that you're betraying your friends and everything else, but you are maybe even future people, your future partner, all the stuff that you could do, your future self, you are turning away from that when we go back into that cage. So no, no, no, no, no. Going back into the cage is not an option. So what do we do? Well, we blaze forward. And the way that we do that is we actually learn how to get better at suffering, at, at knowing how to navigate it when we're struggling. So let's define it. What is struggling? What is suffering? Well, it's when we feel painful feelings. It could be physical pain, but often for us it's emotional pain too. And those can sometimes be blurred. But anxiety, stress, fear, panic, that's kind of one side of the spectrum. Worry. The other side might be hopelessness, heaviness, despair, depressed, discouraged, that's the other side. Those are the two sort of big forms. And then of course there's anger as well. Anger, frustration, impatience, irritability. And there's a whole other variety of ways that we can suffer. But those are the kind of the big three that we, you know, we might feel like we're helpless, we might feel angry at other people or blame, we might feel stuck, might feel hopeless. And let's look at how to be with that. Because if we don't and we just try to avoid it, then we don't have any tools, we don't know how to navigate the terrain. And if our only tool is to numb out, like, oh my gosh, I'm feeling bad, let me watch something. So just call them out. What are your escape pods? What are the ways you numb out? Is it watching a bunch of shows, streaming shows? Is it eating extra food, rich foods? Is it alcohol, cannabis, other drugs, painkillers? Is it porn? Is it getting hyper, hyper focused on your phone and just scrolling and engaging in apps and clicking around nonstop? Is it the sophisticated man or woman's avoidance? That's the one I go to. It's going to be like hyper studying, getting really mental learning a lot. I mean, I'm always like, I love to learn. And I think it's a beautiful quality and really benefited me in my life being a lifelong learner. And I can use it as an escape. Oh my gosh, I'm feeling stuff. Let me study things. So you know, what are some of your go to's? It's important to see those and you know, maybe they serve a function Maybe they help for a little bit, maybe they also have a cost. But if we're doing that to the exclusion of really addressing what needs to be addressed and really shifting things, then there's going to be a major downside to that. I think some here and there, avoidance is okay and inevitable, but we also want to have the tools, the capacity to say, okay, let me face this, let me face this discomfort, let me face this suffering. So how do we do that? Well, we start by literally facing it. What does that mean? Well, you turn towards it and that means like notice right now might be even happening right now. Sometimes there's like a background suffering we experience and if not, well, just think about. Maybe there's an area of your life that you tend to feel negative or stuck or frustrated or it's right there accessible if you focus on it. So go ahead and either it's present right now or you can focus on something that bothers you right now and just notice there's going to be start to be sensations. And if you're super mental, all you notice is the mental, the chatter in your mind. Okay, we'll start with that and see if you can just notice the chatter, not just like get into it and be like, oh, yeah, that person is bad and you're off to the races. I mean, like, observe, like notice some of the thoughts mindfully. Oh, wow, I'm thinking about that. Okay. Also bring more awareness to your breath. Can you feel, can you feel in your chest? Take a full breath in right now and let it out. Bring a little bit of sound to the breath, make it fuller and deeper. It could be through your nose or your mouth. And then breathe it out. By breathing fuller and deeper for a few breaths, you actually kind of awake some of the sensations in this core. Notice, do you feel pressure in your chest? Tightness in your solar plexus right there at the bottom of your sternum? Tightness in your chest? Emptiness, aching, squeezing in your throat. Other places your body feel tight or contracted, like your back or your buttock muscles or your upper neck or your shoulders. Just notice more and notice if there's any sensation you're trying to get away from right now. We spend much of our lives like literally trying to almost like climb out of our bodies and there's a muscular tension with that, like we're trying to get away. It's almost like if there was a, you know, a hot fire nearby and you were too close, you would kind of move away from it. But let's say you were rooted to the chair. For some reason you couldn't get up from the chair. So you're kind of just like leaning your body away, your upper body away from the fire. Well, that's kind of what we do with emotions inside and experiences. We kind of lean away from them energetically and even physically, but we can't get out. There's nowhere to go. So it will. But there's this like, this tension inside that's created. So maybe you notice that too. And the first part is just to drop. Needing to get away from anything, trying to run away from pain will only create more Pain avoidance equals pain in the short term or in the long term doesn't matter. So just move towards it. Create some space to allow it. At first, this can be uncomfortable. You feel like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Gotta get out of here. It's like, okay, yes, yes, yes, yes. This is like a muscle. This is a strength, this is a skill. This is one of the most valuable skills you could ever develop in your whole life. To move towards, to allow, to make space or whatever is there. That's the first step. The second step is we want to bring in curiosity. Curiosity is such an amazing way of being. Mindset, attitude, energy that shifts things, it opens things, it creates opportunities. It's such a gift. So bring curiosity first to those sensations, right? Like, wow, what does that feel like? You can get more aware of, is it moving or is it static, stuck? Does it feel big or small? Does it feel like it's like flowing? Or does it feel like it's fire? Does it feel like it's a stone? That's really dense in there. What's the sensation of this whole thing? And you can also be really curious about your mind too. Like, what is the. Instead of, what are these stories? Like, if you were to observe them from just a little bit further back, like you're looking at the sky and seeing different clouds. What are these clouds like? Are they stormy? Are they angry? What's going on here? And then we want to turn the curiosity up even more and start to ask questions like, how am I creating this? One of the most liberating questions you can ask yourself when you're struggling or suffering. How am I creating this? I mean, there's so much good in that question one. It reminds you that you are creating this. It might not seem that now if you ask that question and just you get a bunch of like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Then drop back to the being with stage and maybe you need to just feel more, settle more Create more space. But then we want to get really curious and say, how am I creating this? What story am I telling myself? What perspective am I looking at this from? What am I making this mean? What future am I predicting right now? What pressure am I putting on myself or others? What circumstance or situation am I trying to make get away from or make sure never happens? You want to become really curious about those things because it's going to start to show you. You'll start to realize that in your suffering, it's not the circumstance. And that might seem crazy because you're like, no, this person really does suck, or I really don't like this job, or that person did leave me. And so I feel painful. It is in the circumstance. It is not in the circumstance. It is in the way that you are steering. It is in your perspective of the circumstance. It is your relationship with the circumstance. Someone could be left in a dating experience and feel joy. They could feel relief, they could feel excitement about new possibility. They could feel depressed, they could feel worthless. They could want to kill themselves. They could feel desperate. They could attack the other person. They could do a million. I mean, humans do a billion different things. What's going on there? Well, it's the same circumstance. It is how I'm being with it. How am I steering this? And the first thing is you just want to get really curious. You want to uncover your recipe for suffering, for struggling. And here's the cool thing, it's going to be generally the same almost every time. I was doing this with a client recently and, you know, he was feeling really pressured and really stressed in his life, and we started to look at his recipe and sure enough, it was like, I got to get this done, that done that done that, done everything perfectly, no mistakes. It's like, huh, you feel like you gotta get everything done, no mistakes. You feel that at work? Yeah. You feel that in your health? Yeah. You feel that in your relationships? Yeah. Feel that as a parent? Yeah. Feel as a husband? Yeah. Okay. And how do you feel inside? Pretty terrible, right? Yeah. So that's the good news is the recipe's pretty formulaic and we just keep running the same thing. Gotta do more, not enough. Or we tell ourselves the same story again and again. Danger looming around the corner, death in ruin, days out. Alert, alert, alert. So you can tell yourself that no matter what's going on in different areas of your life, and sure enough, you're anxious all the time. So we want to get curious about that. We want to see it. We want to uncover It. We want to discover it, and we want to have this sense of, like, wonder and awe and almost humbleness. Just like, wow, wow, look at you go. Look at this pattern. This is amazing. This is amazing how much it keeps coming back. It's amazing how much momentum there is to this. Like, I. Wow. And I find that curiosity and that humbleness, it just. It combats the angry defiance, frustration. Gotta get rid of this. This is unacceptable. It just allows a lot more. So, well, then what? Then we want to acknowledge whatever patterns we're discovering and name them, call ourselves out. Even better, call yourself out to somebody else. This is where it starts to change really fast. You tell a friend, tell your partner, tell someone in your life that you're close with. Like, hey, I notice I'm doing this thing where every time I think about this in my work, I put this pressure on myself just to name it, just to put it out there. And that acknowledgement really starts to shift things. And acknowledge it to yourself, too. Like, I'm doing that thing. I'm putting that pressure on myself. Wow. Huh? And then you want to look at, like, what's sometimes, like, okay, I got to stop that. I got to never do that again. Like, well, there's a lot of momentum to that pattern. I don't know if patterns change that way. I think they're a bit more. We kind of have to navigate our way through and out of them rather than just trying to bulldoze to build the wall down because it just reforms. We do it again a day later, an hour later, a week later, a stressor later. So how can we, in a more nuanced way, be with it? Well, we find that, okay, let's say I'm being really pressuring myself to get more done. Or let's say I'm telling myself it's never going to work out and no one's ever going to want to be with me. Okay. I've seen. I've discovered a lot of the source of the suffering here. Okay, well, let's start by really acknowledging that it seems like it's never going to change. Seems like I'm never going to be with somebody. Seems like it's impossible. And you might say, well, dad, that sounds really depressing, man, that's just going to make me feel worse. Well, actually, look, I'm not saying it is. I'm a failure. It's impossible. I'm a loser. I'm saying it seems like. And I might even put my hands, you know, on my chest or on the place that Feels tight and breathe in to say, yeah. Sometimes it seems like it's not gonna change. Or, you know, in the case of, like, it's all, you know, something bad's gonna happen in the future and you're anxious, like, yeah, it seems like it's just danger everywhere ahead. Seems like you can't let your guard down. Seems like you can't just relax and enjoy this moment. Seems like right. And you're just being with it. And you want to integrate this into your life. It doesn't mean that you have to nine hours of this a day or something like that. You just be with it for a few minutes. You know, 10 minutes in the morning, five minutes later in the day, 20 minutes in the evening. Just like little bursts of time here and there. And look, I mean, you say, I don't have the time, I'm too busy. No, you're filling your life so you don't have to feel feelings. You're running ahead of this stuff like you're running in front of a tidal wave. And I know, I know if you're in this day and age, you are doing all kinds of stuff that's eating up time, mostly on your smartphone, doing all kinds of shit on there, dinking around, pressing buttons, scrolling, flipping, looking at email. Whatever we're doing on there, most of it is to get away from what we're feeling in the moment. And we want to increase our capacity to feel. Instead of trying to feel only good and get away from all the bad stuff, just increase your capacity to feel more. And what ends up happening is you start to be able to navigate these things much more swiftly and smoothly. And something really powerful shifts. When it's not like, okay, I navigate this to get rid of this feeling, get back to feeling good. It's just kind of like, okay, here's this feeling right now. That's what's happening on a Tuesday. That's what's happening Wednesday at 4pm Okay, I can roll with that. Oh, now there's a different feeling. Okay, now. Okay, great. And the more you study these patterns, the more you can start to say, wow, there's gotta be a different way. Huh? There's gotta be a different way. It's gotta be a better way. I bet there's a better way. I think I'm finding. I think I'm test something out here. I wonder if I change this. I wonder if I told myself that instead. I wonder if I provided a greater sense of encouragement to myself or if I had a plan about how to handle things. If they did go south or whatever it is, you start to discover what's needed from this place. It's really amazing. I can't tell you how many times I've maybe been in a. Maybe I just felt really stressed for some. I'm really anxious, right? And I'm trying to fix it. I'm trying to get empowered. I'm trying to make changes, and I just do this. I slow down, I feel. I put my hands right where it's the most tight. I breathe and I say, yeah. Sometimes it seems so helpless. Seems like there's way too much to do and I'll never get to it all. Yeah, sometimes it seems that way, huh? And I'll just do that and I'll breathe, put my hands in different places in my body. And in like six or seven minutes or something, I'm like, yeah, okay, I'm gonna go take some action now. You know, no effort, no pushing, no trying to blast through or fight it. It's just like surrender. And then, boom, it shifts. So there's so many ways here to navigate this. Let me give you a quick action step to work on this with. Time for Action. Action, action. Your action step here is very simple. It's going to be to practice what you learn in this episode so you know you can go through and listen to the episode and practice along as you do it. You can set aside five minutes or 10 minutes on a timer and just be with it. Also, check out notnicebook.com at the bottom of that page there. There's an audio there called the Peace Process where I'm guiding through a mindfulness of feeling and being with what you're experiencing so you can follow along with that. It's about 20 minutes or so, but just really practice this because if you. If you integrate this into your life more and more, you will just be so much more functional, much more effective, emotionally healthy and resilient. To be able to then take on more risk or do more things or create things and put yourself out there in bigger ways because you have a stronger foundation. So hope this serves you. Thanks for being with me today. Until we speak again. May have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.

Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness. And increasing confidence. Go to social confidence center.