Your Recipe For Anxiety

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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 gonna 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. Today's episode of the show. I'm Dr. Aziz, and today we're gonna be talking about you getting anxious. Now, I know listening to a podcast about you getting anxious might not sound like fun, but trust me, this is going to be fun, or at least extremely valuable, because nobody likes to feel anxious, right? It's a very unpleasant state. Whether it's social anxiety or general anxiety or worry or you're anxious about a certain area of your life, like your work, or if something's going to go a certain way. When you're experiencing that anxiety, it's hard to also feel peaceful present. You'd rarely say when you're in that anxious state, you know, I'm happy right now. You use other words to describe how you are, but probably not happy. It's one of them, right? So it's very important because at the end of the day, most people, you and me, want to feel good, right? We want to feel happy. And the problem with anxiety or other states, I mean, we could just as easily focus this episode on depression or anger episodes or other things, but we'll pick anxiety. Cause I know that's a big one. The problem is we talk about it and perceive it and treat it like it's the weather, and it's just gonna roll in. Whatever the weather's gonna do, the weather's gonna do. It's gonna rain today. It's gonna snow today. It's gonna be sunny today. It's gonna be windy today. And there it comes. Oh, oh, the storm's coming in. Okay, here we go. Hunker down. And then the storm rolls out. And that's how it can feel with anxiety and many other emotions and moods. And it does feel that way because the forces that create those feelings are unconscious. We're not aware of what's happening. However, you actually have quite a bit more influence with your own inner weather patterns. And one of the fastest ways to discover that, and to exercise that influence is going to be to study your recipe. What does that mean? Well, much like when you are making a pie, let's say, or a cake, I don't know, I'm not a big pie guy. But your meal, of whatever type, you're going to put together certain things. And when you put those things together in this right sequence, in the right amounts, you'll get the same delicious pie that you are known for across the land, no doubt. And the same thing is true for your anxiety. If you don't do the same things in the same order at the same amounts, you will experience anxiety just like the pie, consistently, every time. And so what are those things? Well, you can get a lot of freedom just by studying those things. So here's the starting question to discover your recipe. And you could do this. We're going to look at anxiety here, but you could do this for social anxiety specifically. You could do it for worry, you could do it for feeling depressed. What is my recipe? And here is the key question to start to uncover your recipe. What am I doing to create this? Or another way to say that is, how am I creating this? Now, when we ask that question, well, first of all, there can be resistance to asking that question. There's a sputtering, indignant part of us that's like, how dare you? How dare you say that I'm creating this? And that's the part of us that wants to be the victim. And it doesn't want to look at the recipe. It wants it to keep going. And that's a subject for a whole other podcast and other things I've touched on different places, but in different fields, they might call that secondary gain or process or outcome resistance. There's different names for it, but basically humans actually get something out of feeling bad. And as strange as that seems that we do. And so a good question to ask is, what am I getting out of this anxiety? If you ask the question, how am I creating this? And you're like, I'm not creating it, just happens to me. Or you might not say that. You might say, well, it runs in my family. I have anxiety, anxious genes. My mom was anxious. I, it, I have, I have. Insert this diagnosis here and the key, and you can look, I'm not here to tell you otherwise. You can have that. I don't know your life circumstance and your history, and I'm not going to rip anything out of your, your hands or destabilize your, your reality. I mean, you, you know what you have and this is how you want to see it. And you have your own experience. I'm here to offer something. If it's not working, if you can say, yeah, I have this condition, and then you're suffering and it's terrible, and whatever approaches you're trying aren't working that great, maybe something else is possible. Because clinging to that diagnosis and that description of whatever it is that we have provides a couple of things. It provides a sense of certainty. It's terrible, but at least I know a name of what I have. I've seen this all the time. People feel a sense of relief when they get a diagnosis, even if the prognosis is terrible. And the prognosis is just the prediction of how it's gonna go. So it's like it's gonna go. Yeah. Here's, here's the good news. We know what you got. Oh, yeah. Okay, great. Whew. Here's the bad news. What? You're gonna die a terrible, terrible, painful death. Oh. Oh, no. But at least I know what it is, right? And that just shows how we love certainty and we hate uncertainty. And also it gives us a feeling of relief, like, it's not my fault. Because we equate responsibility with fault, right? We learn that when we're kids. You know, whose fault is this? Who's responsible, who did this? And then you're in trouble. And to. Taking responsibility is not about fault and being in trouble. It's about taking ownership of your life. And the concept of total ownership is. And I talk about this in my book the Art of Extraordinary Confidence is, I am responsible for the quality of my life. I am responsible for the quality of my life. I'm not saying that. Now. Some people will take it really far and they'll say through the law of attraction, every single thing that happens to you, you magnetized and you brought about. I don't know, I feel like there's some truth in that. What I see to a certain degree that we tend to bring about what we expect and what we fear and what we manifest through our focus. I definitely have seen that for sure in my life and others. There's a thing called the self fulfilling prophecy, which is very observable and everything. You know, what, what about the vicissitudes of fate in Buddhism? What about, what about truly the weather? Did you bring about the hailstorm that smashed your car? You know, maybe. I don't know. I'm not going to get into that sort of out there esoteric debate because it's, it's interesting, but I don't know if we're ever going to get an answer on that one. But regardless of how or why something came about, I am responsible for how I'm gonna respond to it. Right? That's what responsible means. How am I gonna play it? Right? Maybe the ref makes a bad call. To use an analogy from sports, maybe it's wet on the field. Maybe you got a bad beat, maybe one of your players was sick. Maybe someone dropped a ball and made an unforced error, and that really set you back. Maybe it was good fortune or bad fortune. And now here we are on whatever day you're listening to this, and today it doesn't. Now I get to choose how I'm going to play it. And what most of us doing when we're not taking responsibility, we're playing a victim role, is we're not walking around saying, I'm a victim. I'm a victim. We're saying, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't understand. And then we want to make a case for why the circumstances are making me feel this way. Well, I have to feel this way because this. Well, did you see what happened to my car? The hail hit it. I mean, how am I supposed to feel? Any other way you'd feel that way. How dare you say that I shouldn't feel the way that I feel. You're invalidating me. And now we can. We can hold that story. We can cover ourselves in the blanket of that story and be comfortable and certain, but not free. And you'll do that? I'll do that. We'll do that as humans until we reach a threshold of enough suffering, enough years of pain. And then we'll say, okay, all right. Being right and certain is not getting me happiness, so let me try something different. And then we get really curious. And then we say, okay, how am I creating this? But I often tell people, and they say I have social anxiety. I'll say, okay, sure, sure. What if you don't have it? It's not some sort of foodborne illness that you picked up. What if it's a pattern that you're running actively? So just like, let's just use. Let's use running, for example, or walking. You walk to the mailbox, or you walk to the store, or you walk around the park, right? And then you're also not walking around the park. Sometimes you are sitting on your couch, you're working at your desk. So you don't say, I have walk. That would. That would be a very. That would be someone who's learning English, perhaps, and they're, you know, just putting the verb and the nouns together. Just like if I was learning a different language. I just kind of mangle stuff, right? I have walk and. No, you do it sometimes, and you don't do it sometimes. I have social anxiety. No, you do social anxiety sometimes. You're not doing social anxiety when you're sleeping. Now, look, if you had a foodborne illness that was really making you intensely sick in your intestines, you'd have that whether you were sleeping or waking, inside or outside in your bedroom or in the bathroom. It's just happening, right? But social anxiety will be there, and it won't be now. If you really, really identify with it, which I did, and live it, you might be running that pattern much of your waking day, in which case it feels like you have it all the time. But if you pay closer attention, you realize there's moments like when I was younger and had very intense social anxiety, I. If I was talking or around groups of people, I would feel it. But let's say I was in a lecture hall in college and I'm feeling social anxiety before the class starts, and I'm looking around like, oh, maybe I want to talk to somebody. Oh, I can't talk to them. You know, I'm feeling so much social anxiety, I don't want to raise my hand. But then, you know, 10, 20 minutes into the lecture, I'm taking notes, I'm focused on what the professor is saying, and I'm not feeling anxious in that moment. The social. I'm not running the social anxiety pattern. In other words, I'm not running the recipe for anxiety in that moment. And it comes and goes. So another way to say what I'm describing here, that came to me when I was hiking around Mount Hood, which is where all my great ideas come from, was my suffering is not in the circumstance, it's in how I'm steering. So with that in mind, what is the recipe for anxiety? Now? We've kind of overcome that big obstacle of not wanting to take ownership for our lives, and now we can really see. And then there's a lot of power in that, because even if it feels like the recipe just keeps happening because of those unconscious forces, you. You're able to also observe and say, wow, I keep doing this thing. I don't even know why I'm doing this thing. Or maybe I even do know why, but I can't stop. Wow, that's fascinating. And that is progress, because now you're observing the Patterns as they're happening instead of just being totally driven by them unconsciously. So you start to watch now, what are some of the components of this recipe? You know, we got that pie metaphor I was using earlier. What are the ingredients? Is there flour? Is there butter? And what are the key ingredients? And what order do you put them in? What do you notice when you're creating, when you're doing anxiety? And we could pick social anxiety or just general worry or general anxiety. What are some of the things that you do? So what do you mean, like, with my hands? Well, no, let's pick a couple key areas. There's going to be what you're doing. The biggest area is probably with your mind. Right. What are you doing with the thoughts in your head, with your focus? And we could get more granular here in a minute, and we will. But let's look at the mind also. What are you doing with your body? And that includes your physical body, like your posture, your breathing, as well as your energy. Those are the two big ones that I would focus on. And then we could look at actions, too. Absolutely. But actions are often coming out of what we're doing with our body and our mind. You might say, what about my feelings? Well, yeah, we could look at that, too. Usually the feelings are emerging from our thinking and our body and our behaviors, and then we can choose how we respond to those as well. But let's, let's. Let's observe. And we're not necessarily going to uncover the whole thing here in this episode, but I'm hopefully going to inspire you to reflect on this later. It might even be your action step coming up and get curious about how. What am I doing? So we're not gonna. I can't even completely tell you your recipe because they're gonna be all slightly different, But I can tell you some key things I've seen in myself and clients when we're practicing anxiety and think of it like that. What are you practicing? You know, my son's wanting to learn more basketball these days, and we just went to his first practice on last Friday, which was fun. I really, really enjoyed that. I'll have another feature episode about interacting with people in the modern era. Other parents of kids. Everyone was glued to their cell phones. It was crazy. It's crazy. It's like the only dad. It was like, can I play, too? And I could. The coach was, like, very thankful for it. It was awesome. Anyway, he, you know, was teaching him dribbling and other layups, all this basic stuff. And at one Point he had him start taking free throws. And these are little kids or fourth graders, right? So they have to really launch their bodies to. To make it from the free throw line. And he's like, as you get older, you'll be able to shoot it with basically just your arms and a little bounce in your knees without having to jump your body up. And he said it's, if you really want to play basketball, like, this is something you end up really wanting to do more of. You're going to want to take 100 of these shots a day. 100 a day, 100 free throws. And that's not even like professional level training, Right. You know, pro players are crazy from, like the age of 10. They're shooting 400 shots a day or some bananas information like that. But, you know, just to play, play in high school, whatever he wants to do, right? 100 shots a day. That means you're practicing. So when we're running a recipe, we're practicing anxiety. What are you practicing? And that's a good way to think about it. Like, what am I practicing right now? What am I training in myself right now? Here are a couple of the things that are part of the recipe that I've seen. One is a focus on something in the future. Well, first of all, that can already trip you out, right? Because what are you gonna do? And it could be something bad happening in the future. They're not gonna like me. It's not gonna go well. I'm gonna get pain. Basically, it all comes down to pain, right? I'm gonna experience some sort of pain in the future. And if you really want it to be extra, Extra anxiety, you want a little extra. What was that chef from back in the day? Oh, my gosh. Enberl. En Merle. What was his name? Emeril. Am I. Is this ringing any bells for you? I. I did not watch cooking shows, I guess, ever in my life. But there was a guy who was famous, Chef Emeril, and his claim to fame, his catchphrase, which took on outside the coaching or outside the cooking world, which is why I know it is. It's time to knock it up a notch. Bam. And he, like, put some spices on, I think. So if you wanted to knock it up a notch, then not only do you focus on the future, but. But you focus on something that is out of your control, but you, quote, need it to go a certain way or else, you know what I'm talking about. Oh, my goodness. Right? I need my boss to choose this. I need this potential Client to sign up. I need this dating potential to respond to me. I need these people to like me. And it's even worse if you perceive you date, don't have control, but you perceive that you do have control, and then your mind goes on HyperDrive on the 75 potential iterations of what you could, should, should have, probably would need to do in order to get this thing out of your control to go the way that you want. And trust me, I've run this one for a long time in my life. And basically all you get is you think you're gonna control reality. You're not. You're not. Trust me, it's not gonna work. It doesn't work. You don't make a good pie with this recipe. You make a terrible, terrible tasting pie. You bammed it up with smoked paprika instead of cinnamon and sweet sugars. Tastes awful. And all you get is a stomachache or irritable bowel syndrome or worse, digestive problems or migraines or anxiety or tension or back pain. That's a key part of the recipe. Another key part of the recipe is I need. That means I need something to go a certain way. It's not saying you have a preference. Of course you'd prefer the person you go on a date with that you like to respond to. You, of course you'd prefer that person said, yes. Of course you'd prefer the presentation to go well and have. Have everyone like, oh, brilliant ideas, you're so smart, what a great team player you are. Of course you want that, right? We all do. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's. I need that with gritted teeth or else. Dot, dot, dot. And the or else is usually un. It's not articulated. It's kind of a vague cliff. It's like, I don't want, I don't want to look in there. And one. Actually, there's a. This is a very powerful form of training to resolve anxiety is actually to go into that or else on purpose, consciously, slowly, with breathing and observing and talking and flushing it out. What would happen? What would happen? Because we realized that ultimately you'd be able to handle it. And that's where the anxiety starts to ease up. But that's a, That's a topic perhaps for a different show. Because right now we're looking at the recipe, so we're looking at the future. We're looking at things we can't control. We're looking at that attachment. I need it to go a certain way. This is the mind. This is the stories we could tell ourselves. What might you be doing with your body? Holding your breath, breathing, shallow constriction in all kinds of. You can go throughout half the day, maybe even the whole day. I not even notice that you're ragged in your breathing. You're. You're tight in your body. Your jaw, my jaw might not be hard clenched with your teeth grinding, although at night your teeth might grind, which is another interesting symptom of all this stuff. But you might just be tight in your jaw. You're saying you're not breathing. I mean, you're obviously breathing if you're listening to this and you're functioning throughout the day, but it's shallow, it's short, and it's producing more and more cortisol and stress hormones. Your posture, your shoulders are kind of slumped and you're almost like guarding your chest. And from an energetic perspective, your system is probably very, very internal and, and it doesn't. It's not aware of much outside of it. And you're trying to like draw energy from within the system as opposed to being more porous with life and, and letting things come to you and letting yourself feel that you are actually much bigger than your body in your energy field. You're connected to all kinds of things. So we're like kind of tight and everything's in here and needs to be fixed and resolved now. So I'm giving some potentials here. And here's what I want you to practice for your action step. Time for action. Action. Action. I invite you to really flesh out your recipe for a certain anxiety. And you could just put anxiety in general, but maybe it's social anxiety or maybe it's, you have a worry pattern that really gets you or a money anxiety that gets you a lot. Like, what's the one that keeps you up at night? What's the one that gives you the stomachache? What's the one that really upsets you or makes you feel just oscillating between really anxious and then really just upset and down and depressed because you're so anxious. And then you get back on the anxiety horse. You know that crazy loop, which one is that for you? And just pick one and then start asking yourself, what's the recipe? And then study it. Take a few notes in your phone about it. My recipe for. And then just start to say, what is it? What is the recipe? What am I doing? How am I creating this? How am I doing this? And you'll add to it over time. Oh, I do that. Oh, wow. I do that with my body. And then here's the profound gift of this. Not just as you uncover the recipe, you'll start to gain more freedom automatically, but you'll also, when this thing is occurring, instead of meeting it with just panic resistance. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. When's it gonna go? When's this storm gonna let up? You know, hug, hide in the closet, flight, fight, freaking out. Instead, you can get really curious and say, wait a minute, wait a minute. How am I creating this? And all of a sudden, you activate curiosity, or even better, fascination. And now you're starting to dilute that pattern, which is, you know, anxiety is a danger, is threat, is helplessness in our systems. Now you're diluting that with fascination and curiosity, which is actually a whole different part of your mind, of your consciousness. It's an observer. It's intelligence, it's options. And now you're diluting that helpless feeling with this higher capability. And that's going to benefit you over time greatly as well. So thanks for being with me today. I'm so curious about your recipe, and I hope this serves you on your path to living with more freedom from anxiety and more confidence. 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 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 socialconfidencecenter.com.

Sam.