👨🏫 Guest Masterclass: Conquering Chronic Anxiety w/ Nick Wignall
Clinical psychologist Nick Wignall explains why fighting anxiety makes it worse. He covers scheduled worry, grounding techniques, and why you should never worry in bed. The core shift: welcome anxiety instead of trying to fix it.
Hello. Hello, Eduardo. Hey, Tessa. Hi, Rachel. Hey, Diana. Hey, Charlotte. Oh, hey, Steve. You again. Hi, James. Hey, Mark. Hey, Michelle. Okay, so we'll give everyone else another two minutes to join. In the meantime, if you like to share what is alive for you in this moment in three words.
Sa.
Start in a minute or so. Meantime, share what is the life for you in three words. Okay, well, welcome, everyone. Let's begin with a little grounding exercise. So get comfy in your seat. Stretch a little bit if you need to. Just take a couple of breaths. Inhale, sigh. One more inhale. And closing down the eyes, let's play with a little awareness exercise. So as I'm talking, bring your awareness to the Zoom Room, to the sound of my voice. Listening. Take your awareness outside of yourself and focusing on the sound of my voice, maybe any sensations in the room, and just notice what that's like. And now switch it so that your awareness is entirely in your own body. You still hear the sound of my voice, but all of your awareness is focused on your interoceptive experience. Your feet on the ground, your butt on the seat, and feel what that's like. And now explore bringing your awareness. So it's like the midway point between the two. So you're still aware of everything that's happening in your body, in your internal experience. And you're also listening and aware and attuned to my voice, to the other people in the Zoom room. Try and find that sweet spot. And from that place, opening up your eyes, coming back into the space, finding connection with other people in the room, seeing the beautiful diversity of people joining us here today. Okay, well, with that, it's letting some people in from the waiting room. Okay, well, welcome, welcome, Nick. It's so great to have you here.
Thanks, Johnny.
So, as by. By way of an introduction, you are a clinical psychologist. You have an amazing newsletter called the Friendly Mind. I believe you also had a podcast as well.
I do.
And as we were just talking about before we jumped on here, you're starting YouTube and you're kind of sharing more of these ideas through the medium of video. What my sense of your work is, you're really an amazing communicator. You are able to articulate some of these pretty challenging and controversial topics in very clear, precise, defined ways. And that, to me, feels like one of your gifts. And I've read a bunch of your essays. We are very aligned on many of these quite controversial topics around anxiety, around emotional intelligence. Maybe we'll go into that. But yeah, how would you. Maybe as an introduction how would you describe the work that you do in the world today?
Well, I, so I started off as a clinical psychologist like you said. I still am one. But I left my, I worked as a therapist primarily with folks who struggle with anxiety, chronic anxiety and insomnia. Those were kind of like my twin focuses. And I, you know, did a little bit of other things, but those were the, those are the big ones. And it didn't take very long doing clinical practice to realize that there, I think there were a lot of insights from the world of clinical psychology and the world of research. And that just seem, it seemed annoying to me that they were kind of locked inside therapy offices. And I think they were, A lot of these insights were just as helpful to a non clinical population. You know, the clinical population, people are really struggling. They're not functioning super well in their daily life and that's, that's one set of folks. But then, you know, all of us have anxiety from time to time. All of us struggle to sleep and have some insomnia. All of us get angry and have trouble with anger. And so I became more and more interested in that segment of the population and sort of applying what we know from the clinical world about understanding how the mind works and how we can work with it in a more healthy, effective way. And like you said, like, I love communicating, I love writing, I love teaching, I'm starting to love video a little bit more. It's been a, it's been a bumpy path. Yeah, mostly I'm, I'm a teacher and I love teaching people and learning from people and talking about emotional health and, and how we can all kind of develop a healthier, kinder relationship with our own minds so that we can be, you know, happier and more effective in whatever that means to us in our life. So that's kind of how I think about what I do, I guess.
Yeah. Beautiful. Well said. Well, for everyone listening, we don't have a fixed agenda for today. We were kind of hoping it would be more of a free flowing dialogue between you and I, but also from you guys in the room. So if, when either of us or Nick is speaking, if you have a question or a curiosity or a reflection, please feel free to either share it in the chat or raise your virtual hand and we'll just invite you up and we'll kind of make this free flowing. But that said, as a jumping off point, we kind of titled this Exploring and Working with Chronic Anxiety. So I think that feels like an interesting place to begin. And so with that in Mind Nick, what is your definition and perspective on anxiety and how do you encourage people, explore and work with it? That is maybe somewhat different from mainstream approaches.
Yeah, so I like, I was a. In. In college as an English major. I love literature. I almost went on to be a professor in in English, but veered off into psychology. But I, I think a lot about and care a lot about words and language and how we talk about and think about our experiences. And I think anxiety is one of those. And so I like to. I like to start with kind of language. And you know, there, there aren't a lot of superficial technical definitions of terms like anxiety versus fear. I mean, you go to a psychology conference and people, you know, experts argue about this stuff endlessly. So there is no dogmatic capital T truth about what these things are. But so I think the way to approach these is, um, we want to be thoughtful about how we think about anxiety instead of just throwing out the term anxiety when you feel a certain way, really think about, well, what do I mean when I say I'm anxious? And what matters is that you are being thoughtful and ideally fairly consistent with the labels, the verbal labels that you give yourself in your experience. So as an example, I like a good distinction to start with is fear versus anxiety. Actually, let's. I would love to throw this back at the audience real quick if you all. What's the difference in your mind between fear and anxiety? Let's use that as a jumping off point and remember that I really don't think there's a right answer, but I'm curious to see how you all are kind of thinking about it and then I'll share kind of how I think about it as a way to dive more into anxiety. So fear versus anxiety.
Yeah. Feel free to share in the chat and also raise your hand as well.
And just come up either way.
Tessa, welcome.
Okay, so I've been thinking about the difference. Like if I'm afraid of something, it's likely in my environment. Like I'm reacting to something that's in my environment. And if I'm feeling anxious, there's nothing immediate for me to be fearful of, but I still feel sensations related to fear.
Yeah, thanks, Tessa. And that's a pretty common one. A lot of people define fear as being about something specific, and then anxiety is more generalized or diffuse. So that's a really common way of thinking about it.
Yeah.
So in the chat, there's some few things Sean said. Anxiety is fear of fear. That's interesting, Sean. Let's get back to that Rebecca said, no difference. Kate sort of got it. Something Tess was talking about, like anxiety being more persistent, that's another dimension versus fear being more acute. So I like that. That's another way of thinking about it. Yep. A couple people have said fear is like, here now, anxiety is future. So that's a. Again, time is another dimension that's interesting to think about. Present versus future. Yeah. So these are all. These are all really interesting. So I think all of these are very valid. And they're interesting in that they help us think more carefully about this experience that we all. That to some extent, we all know and probably struggle with. I think we all struggle a little bit with. With anxiety in one way or another. The way I like to think about it is that anxiety, Fear is a helpful response to something dangerous, potentially dangerous. You know, your brain perceives a danger. It could be out there in the world. It could be inside of you. Right. It could be. It could be anywhere. And fear is what you feel when you are confronted with a danger. I like to think of anxiety as that same system gets activated, but it gets activated in terms of a stimuli that isn't actually dangerous, that your. Your mind sort of perceives as dangerous, but isn't actually dangerous. So just as a simple example, you're. You're out for a hike in the woods and a, you know, bear crawls out in front of you and you get afraid. Right. That is a. That's a uncomfortable sensation, but it's a very healthy, productive, reasonable way to feel when you're confronted with an actual danger. Right. On the other hand, if you are, you know, you're in a meeting at work and you've got an idea and you want to share it, then you start getting nervous and you think like, you know, like, what if. What if people think I'm stupid when I share this?
Right.
Even though you don't have a lot of evidence that that's ever happened before, that would be more like anxiety. It's kind of unproductive. Fear. Fear is designed to keep you safe. Right. And it's an important part of our experience, whereas anxiety tends to be when your brain, and we can talk about how this happened, gets a little confused about what's an actual threat and danger versus what looks and feels like a threat or danger, but isn't actually one. And so I think that's an. A really interesting and very helpful way to distinguish between fear and anxiety. Again, I'm not saying that is the only way to think about it, but I think it's the underlying principle there is to, is to sort of think pragmatically like is this emotional experience. And I think that's key. These are emotional experiences, right? Fear and anxiety. They're very involved with kind of mental phenomena like, like worry or catastrophizing as well as physiological phenomena like adrenaline surging through your veins or increased heart rate or something like that. But there it's this kind of separate but related category which is emotion, our emotions. So anyway, I don't, I don't know if that, that's how I tend to think about and distinguish kind of fear from anxiety. Questions about that before. Before I kind of keep rolling on.
Yeah, I'll just, I'll just share a brief reflection. I was having a conversation with a friend last week and I learned recently that you kind of spoke to the language piece that the origin of the word anxiety comes from a Latin, which means kind of constrict. And my sense of at least one of the ways in which anxiety shows up is as a constriction of the kind of emotional hose pipe that is coming through us. And when we're constricting against another emotion, let's say grief or anger or shame or something, that the resulting almost like tension of that energy that's trying to move creates this experience of generalized anxiety. And I'm curious how that kind of lands in your mental map of what anxiety is or what might be needed at times.
Yeah, the constriction is interesting because if you think about it, especially on the. It's always useful to be aware of what level of analysis are you thinking of when you're talking about something like anxiety. And if you think kind of physiologically like what's going on under the hood when you're anxious or afraid, it's. It's essentially your fight orf flight system is getting activated. Like that's what, that's what's going on to varying degrees. You know, a full blown panic attack is like you're ratcheted up to a 10 versus mild nervousness is like you're a one, something like that. But if you think about what your body is trying to do with Firefly, it's saying this is like in sci fi movies where you know, the ship goes to battle stations. It's like all the energy gets diverted to staying alive. Like that is all that matters. Right. So your body is literally in various ways constricting its focus. It's saying the only thing that matters now is staying alive. Everything else can wait. And it's not as important. Right. So I think that is. I think fear, anxiety is by definition, by purpose, it is constricting. It's your body. Your body thinks there's a danger.
Right.
It's the system that's designed to go off when you're in danger, to keep you safe. And so it naturally sort of tries to shut out everything else and kind of go blind or something. So I think that. I think that makes a ton of sense. And. And this is a process we can. We can talk about. Sean, I think, alluded to it earlier when he said anxiety is. Or I think he said anxiety is fear of fear, something like that. But we can. That system, that fight or flight system can get set off in response to emotions. Right? We are. We can per. Your mind can perceive a difficult or uncomfortable emotion and treat it as though it's a threat. And then you get anxious about anxiety, anxious about anger, anxious about grief.
Right.
Which tends to kind of compound your emotional experience.
Totally. Totally. And. And kind of along along those lines. In what ways do you see anxiety as almost being like an adaptive response at a certain point in time? Because all of our responses were or are useful in certain contexts. In what contexts do you think we learned that anxiety was actually a way in which we were then able to kind of keep connection or love with our caregivers?
Yeah, it's interesting. I think we. I'm not sure that we learn. It's interesting to think about, do we learn that anxiety itself is functional, or do we learn that anxiety goes along with a lot of other things that happen to be functional? Right. So like you. If you talk to a lot of people who have had difficult upbringings, maybe they had, like, I remember working with folks who had parents with. Who are alcoholics, who had drug problems. Kids at that age, through a very adaptive process, learn to be hypervigilant, to really pay attention to very subtle cues, especially in their caregivers, whether it's like, is today a good day or a not so good day? So they get very attuned to scanning their environment constantly for threats. Right. Which is part of the fight or flight system. And so that. What I would say is that habit of hyper vigilance, of scanning your environment for threats, that is adapt was adaptive at that one point. Right now it's, you know, it's 30 years later and they're still scanning their, you know, their romantic partners, you know, fate, like subtle facial cues. That habit has stuck around and it's producing anxiety.
Right.
So I don't know that the anxiety necessary and maybe the. See, we have to be careful here because there's. When you're scanning your environment for threats, that's a mental activity. That's not anxiety. It's associated with the emotion of anxiety, but it's different, Right. Similarly, the physical arousal you feel when you're getting anxious, right? The adrenaline coursing through your veins, heart rate going up, respiratory rate increasing, that's associated with the emotion of anxiety. And that might be helpful if you literally have to kind of escape danger. Right. Or. Or even if you have to be on your toes mentally. Like, I. I remember talking to a lot of folks who. Their difficult caregivers would get kind of combative and argumentative when they were intoxicated. And so they learned I have to be ready to sort of do verbal judo. Right. And so that activation.
Right.
That fight or flight system activation could have been very helpful. But so I think your. Your overall point is well taken, which is a lot of the habits that are problematic now in our present that are leading to, say, unnecessary amounts of anxiety, they came about, they got established in the past, often for perfectly good, helpful reasons, adaptive reasons. The trick is they never got updated. Right. We never kind of modified or let go of those habits. And so they continue to get stimulated or triggered and then lead to a lot of anxiety and unhelpful behaviors in the present.
Totally. Yeah. Great. Great answer. So should we. Let's take a couple of questions. Trevor. Hey there.
So.
And maybe this is taking in a slightly different direction, but this feeling that.
I will sometimes get of like.
Like ungrounded or unmoored, kind of like existential.
Like, it feels like anxiety to me, but also feels a little bit different than we're talking about.
How.
How do you think about that or how. How do we think about that? Well, on, you know, it's sort of. On what level do you want to think about it? Like, physiologically we can get. During anxiety, we can get this sense of what's called either depersonalization or derealization, where you get kind of like, depersonalization is where you feel sort of outside yourself, right? You yourself feels kind of fuzzy. Derealization is where the world starts to feel a little fuzzy and ambiguous. Those are very natural consequences of physiologically what's going on when our fireflight system revs up, right. You tend to get there. It gets sort of complicated, but essentially your body's prioritizing resources, including oxygen to your extremities, so you can fight or fly, flee. Right. And so some of it is quickly leaving Your midsection and your head, it's getting redistributed. And that sensation of having blood and oxygen quickly coming out of or into different parts of the body can lead to a lot of these physical sensations that are strange or unusual, right? Yeah, those are scary, which then makes you like back in. And if in the past, if they have been paired with, say you have one of those. That sensation and it, for whatever reason at that time, it was paired with some kind of deep existential concern. Right. It's possible then that in the future, anytime those sensations get triggered, the thoughts about that kind of existential worry or anxiety also get triggered. This is basically like a Pavlo, I think, like Pavlov's dog, right. He learns to associate like the ringing of a bell with food. And so just the ringing alone can produce this feeling. So I think this is. Well, let me take a pause there and make sure I'm kind of on the track to answering your question. Does that.
That completely answers the question. Makes me feel better because I understand.
It, which makes it less scary. I don't know if there's any tools to use and at those times, but. Well, I think what part. Part of why this is really important is because a trap I see with anxiety a lot is people, when they feel anxious, they. They read too much meaning into their anxiety. So they think, oh my God, like, I'm getting really anxious. This must mean something really important. What is. This must be about something significant. I have to figure this out. And that mindset often leads to more worry, which produces more anxiety. And it's just kind of you get. You get stuck. Right? So what you want. I think what you want to be when you start to feel anxiety, including this kind of existential sort of fuzzy version of anxiety, before jumping to conclusions about what this means or what it might mean, I think you just want to acknowledge it. And like, almost like the exercise Johnny had us go through at the beginning. Awareness first, like awareness before thinking. If that makes sense. I think in general is a really good heuristic for dealing with anxiety is to first pause and really just try and be aware of and with the anxiety before jumping to conclusions about what it means. Because once you start reading meaning into something, you are going to be off to the races mentally. And it's very. It's going to be very easy to slip into unhelpful worries. Catastrophizing, just generally unhelpful forms of thinking. But if you can pa. If you can really pa, Learn to pause and give yourself Some space. When you're feeling anxiety, what you will often be able to do is realize, hey, like, this is a really uncomfortable feeling. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. I don't even necessarily have to do anything about it. I can just let it be there. And ultimately, this is the most helpful way to respond to any form of anxiety. Because when you start problem solving your anxiety and you start analyzing it, worrying about it, you're often, you are. Your brain interprets that as this thing is a problem, the anxiety is a threat. Either the emotion of anxiety, the physical sensations associated with whatever you. If you treat your anxiety like a problem, your brain increasingly starts to think of it like a problem, which means later on, the next time that anxiety gets triggered, you're going to get even more anxiety about that anxiety. So the key is, the key question, I think when you're feeling anxious is when it comes to my response to my anxiety, what. What do I actually do when I'm feeling anxious? You have to ask yourself, what is this response teaching my brain? And if you tend to fight or flee in the face of anxiety, it understandably sends the message to your brain, hey, this thing is dangerous because we tend to fight and flee things that are dangerous. Right? On the other hand, if you just pause and are willing to be with and even approach the anxiety, that sends the opposite signal to your brain. It does what, what psychologists call safety learning, which is it teaches your brain this thing, however uncomfortable, is safe. It's not a danger, it's not a threat, even though it feels bad, maybe even painful. So ultimately, that, I think that is the way through anxiety is to start to train your brain not to think of anxiety as a threat. Because any sort of chronic or major anxiety is always, always at the bottom is a usually unconscious habit of treating your anxiety and training your brain to think of your anxiety as a threat. And then you get compound anxiety, you get anxiety about anxiety, which tends to lead to all the very problematic versions of anxiety, from panic to sleep anxiety to ocd, all the. All the different kind of flavors of anxiety. So, all right, I'm going to shove there. That's a little bit of a rant.
That was amazing.
Hopefully that's helpful.
Yeah, yeah, that was awesome. Nick, I wanted to just like chime in briefly because this is kind of an important piece. Something that we talk about in the course is this idea of state overstory, which is another way of saying what you just shared of if you're noticing anxiety, come up, explore things that will help you to change your State or hopefully downshift before addressing the mental components. Something that I sometimes. I'm never quite sure how to answer this or, like, where the middle way is, but I feel like, let's say, anxiety is arising in me right now. There's sometimes two paths. One is like, okay, I'm going to do some vu hums and alternate nostalgia breathing and just really downshift my state and it'll reduce and I'll feel better. And I'm training my brain, as you said, that this is not a threat. The other path is to do some form of somatic exploration and actually almost like go deeper into the feeling to some degree and see what maybe what underlying emotions might be. What might this sensation be signposting me to that I can learn about or feel through or integrate. And I'm curious, how do you think of what feels like. Almost like two different approaches. What's, what's. What's your sense there?
Yeah, Mike, my quick take on that is that both can be. Can be totally helpful and perfectly adaptive if. And this is the. The. I think the kicker is, in. In my experience, the key. The key to responding to and moving on from anxiety. Well, is to. To initially, however briefly, simply acknowledge and validate the uncomfortable feeling of anxiety. Right? So you start feeling anxious, and then. And this could literally take five seconds. You can say to yourself, all right, I'm getting anxious. I don't like this, but it's not bad, right? It's okay for me to feel anxious. Boom. I don't like. What was that? Six seconds, seven seconds. You're just, you're reminding yourself, okay, I'm having. This is a thing. You're labeling it, right. And then you are valid. You're safe validation. Which just means this is valid. It's not bad. You're communicating to your brain this thing is okay, even though it's uncomfortable. Right. So again, that's that approach. Safety, learning. Now you are. I think you are relatively free to move on in whatever direction seems helpful. Right. You. You could literally just get back to whatever it is you were doing. If you were, you know, writing a report for work or something, you get back to that. You could decide, hey, I want to explore this anxiety a little bit more and go into more of a. Yeah. Exploratory curiosity mode about the anxiety. Or you could say, because of this anxiety, I'm feeling pretty worked up and on edge and I want to address my state now. Right. And so I'm going to do some sort of exercise to kind of calm my nervous system. So I think any of those can be perfectly helpful as long as you initially take a brief moment to acknowledge and validate the anxiety. Because you're just, you're telling your brain there, this, it's okay, like it's not a danger and it's. And then your brain won't misinterpret the next behavior as avoidance because remember, if your brain sees you running away from something, it's going to assume that thing's dangerous. But if you first, however briefly turned into it and acknowledged it and validated it, I think you're good essentially. And then you can move on to some other approach.
Yeah.
Does that, I don't know, does that make sense?
No, that's a great answer. I mean, there's an element of, maybe even parts work in there as well, where there's a part of you that is acknowledging that is that another part is feeling anxious and almost giving, providing safety to that before anything else and like you say, validating that this is okay and that whilst anxiety may be present, you are not the anxiety. There is that kind of psychological distance between the two.
I'm, I'm glad you brought that up because I think, you know, my whole approach to anxiety is, I think at the most fundamental level it's relational. Which is, which is to say when you are getting an, when you're feeling anxious, there's, there's no enemy here, there's no pathology here. There's no virus in you. Not nothing is bad or wrong. There's simply a part of you that thinks something is dangerous, that thinks you're in danger and it's trying to help you by, you know, that's how your body knows to help you is to, you know, rev up your fight or flight system a little bit. Right. That's how we evolved to deal with potential threats. And so you want to take this, this attitude of however confused my mind is always trying to help me, it always has my best interests at heart. Even when I'm, you know, in the middle of a full blown panic attack. Right. That is literally your brain thinks it's helping you because if you have to, you know, if you're, if you're about to get mugged in a dark alley one night and you need to get out of there quickly, you are essentially having a panic attack. Your fight or flight system revving up is the exact same as having a panic attack. In one situation, it's helpful. Another situation, when you're like sitting on a plane and not doing anything, it's not helpful and really uncomfortable.
Right.
But in both cases, a part of you is trying to keep you safe and help you. And that remembering that remembering to think about anxiety in terms of relationships is. It's everything. It's why my whole brand and newsletter everything is called the Friendly Mind. Because you want to be friendly with yourself. You want to treat different parts of yourself as you would treat a good friend who's maybe giving you some tough advice. Maybe they're telling you something that ultimately isn't correct. But that doesn't mean they're a bad friend.
Right.
They're just confused. And so you want to treat your anxiety as if it was a good friend who's giving you some not great advice. Right. You don't just ditch your friend or tell them to shut up. Right. You acknowledge them and treat them like a good person. Right. So I think that's.
Yeah.
I just think that's so important is that to always. It's also going back to the language thing. It's why I dislike a lot of our language around anxiety is remarkably anxiety combative.
Yeah.
It's like even just a panic attack. It's like your anxiety is attacking you.
Yeah.
And I get it feels like that sometimes. But maybe if you think about it, maybe we feel like that because our entire kind of culture has been framing anxiety like that for so long. That's how we experience anxiety as this. Yeah. This form of attack. And then all the advice we're given about what to do with anxiety uses very kind of combative language. Like even some. Even things like conquering or even overcoming. And I'm. I do this too. I'm guilty of this too. But I think starting to be more careful about the language we use just with ourself when we're experiencing anxiety. I really think that's the. The road to creating a healthier relationship with our anxiety and being able to work through it in a way that both helps us to not feel so anxious but also long term fosters a better, healthier relationship with that. With that part of us.
Yeah. Such an important point. I love that so much. And one of our previous faculty on nsm, Brett is doing a welcoming fear retreat next week with highlines that I think some people are actually attending. And that frame of welcoming fear or anxiety versus defeating fear anxiety. It's like night and day contrast.
Yeah.
So I think that's such a cool point.
But it is hard because you are. When you get revved up into fight or flight like that is your body. You're being put into this Kind of combative state. But I think that's the challenge is to realize we don't need. This isn't an attack situation.
Right, right.
You don't need to be combative and that's hard.
How can you be in a part of yourself that is able to be curious and loving to that part whilst the activation is also there?
Yes, yes.
This is amazing. I'm going to stop hogging the spotlight for a moment and give invite. Let's Michelle's up next. Hey there Michelle.
Everybody. Okay, so I have a two part question. One is that there's some of us that are hypervigilant by nature. Maybe by early childhood or whatever. So you gave us a good thing to do when the anxiety is present. Is there anything we could do proactively to be maybe less hypersensitive? Hypervigilant less. Maybe increase our tolerance for threat situations. And I ask that because some of the tools we're learning in the course like interoception. I think those of us who have excessive anxiety already are very much aware of our internal state. State. I almost think it's not a healthy thing because we're always checking our internal state to see what's going on. Oh, what's that little feeling in my system? So I don't. I think. Yeah. So I guess that's what I want to know is are there things we could do practically? I think they might be slightly different for other than other types of body awareness. Types of things that might normally calm someone else.
Yeah. So I think the somatic side of it is not my expertise. That's. I would always defer to Johnny on that side. But I do think that is important is. And, and I would make a distinction between I think and Johnny. You can correct me if, if you disagree or if you think there's nuance here. But I think it's possible to do, you know, kind of a semat like you, you can, you can check in with yourself without thinking about how am I doing instead just sort of be in your body. And, and so I, I think there's a nuance there that's important like awareness versus Thought. Thinking kind of a. More. Yes. Sensory approach rather than a cognitive or intellectual approach. And so I think that's. I, I would just say that's an important distinction on the, on the somatic side. Now the other thing that has to like what. Why are we hypervigilant? Why am I chronically hypervigilant? Right. Hypervigilance, I think is pretty fundamentally a. It's It's a cognitive phenomenon. So you are, you're directing your attention all over the place and thinking through threat scenarios. You know, is, is this person thinking this or is this situation going to blow up? Or like what if this, it's this, it's this incessant what if ing essentially. So it, it is, there is a very strong cognitive component to it. And so I think one of the best things you can do and I'm a, I'm a big advocate of practices over coping. Like I think coping skills are incredibly overrated and potentially harmful in terms of like I feel anxious, what do I do now to not feel so anxious anymore? I think that's in a lot of ways the wrong question. The question is what can I do on a regular basis even when I'm not feeling anxious to long term lower my level of worry, anxiety. So when it comes to hyper vigilance, I think it's, it's essentially you're just worrying a lot. Worry is sort of the, the, it's the water you swim in, right? It's your mind's like default state. A a practice and I'll give you the short version of it, but if you, you know, if there's time or we want to get more in depth into it, we can. But this is one of the most helpful practices I've ever found for chronic worry especially and the kind of generalized anxiety that flows through it. And it's called scheduled worry. I'm sure a bunch of you have heard of a ver. Sometimes it's referred to as worry time or making time to. But essentially what you're doing is you're picking a time, a consistent time every single day. And you are, you're worrying on paper. So you, you're literally, you're just transcribing every single worry you can think of from you know, every, something tiny like I forgot to get bananas at the grocery store to nuclear fallout. You know, just like everything, anything and everything that you're worried about. The key is you are not solving anything. You're not thinking about your worries, you're simply transcribing them onto paper. And you do that for a set amount of time every single day, ideally at the same time, okay, after. And you set a timer on your phone for 10, 15 minutes. Somewhere in there is usually the, the sweet spot. When your timer goes off, you stop. Even if you have more worries, you don't keep going right? You stop. But you do this consistently. Remember, this is not a coping strategy. You don't do this when you're anxious or worried, you do this as a regular practice. And, and the reason this works, and this is a big misconception out there, this is not, it's not about catharsis. A lot of coping skills are about, I'm going to express something, an anxiety, a worry, whatever, and temporarily I'm going to feel better because I've sort of gotten it out. That is not what this is about, scheduled worry. The reason this works, if you do it consistently, is it creates a different relationship with worry, chronic worry. The reason chronic worry perpetuates and gets maintained is because we have anxiety about worry. We worry, we feel anxious, and we've learned to do more worrying, more like scanning more hypervigilance in response to our anxiety. So it sounds strange, but with, with generalized anxiety, worry is our default coping mechanism for anxiety, which very temporarily gives us like a sense of control and something to do. And so it kind of works in the super short term. But of course, if you worry a lot, it's just going to generate more anxiety and so you're going to be worse off long run. So this scheduled worry practice, again, the reason it works is because you are deliberately approaching worry. You're showing your brain, hey, this thing that I keep thinking about as an enemy, it's, it's, it's okay, I don't like it, but I'm going to do it regularly. And if you do that enough and remember the key is you're writing them down. You're not thinking about them, you're not solving them, you're not getting in the worries. You're, you're always above them, you're just putting them down. And as soon as you're done, you throw it away. You don't do analysis on it. You don't, you don't start like figuring out how you can solve each of these things. You're putting them down. And when you do this consistently over time, you are slowly but consistently changing your relationship to worry and the anxiety that goes along with it. And this is one of the best ways I've found to sort of let go of that habit of chronic worry and hypervigilance in particular. Okay, sorry, that's a lot. But I'm more than happy to kind of elaborate on that or answer other questions on that.
Thanks, that's fantastic. It's really helpful.
Yeah, I love that as well. And I'll just chime in from the kind of somatic perspective because I think that was part of your question. Michelle was like when you tune in it seems like there's a lot going on and maybe going in further isn't actually helping for this. I think there's an interesting distinction between attention versus awareness. So when you're kind of going inwards, that's typically what we think of as, like, attention. We're, like, attending to what is happening. Let's say our heart is beating more quickly. Awareness is the overall kind of field, both ourselves and around us, that we could notice if we chose to. And there's a series of practices that come from Alexander technique I learned from my friend Michael Ashcroft, which involve playing with that kind of sphere of awareness. And typically when there's hypervigilance or anxiety, let's say that kind of field of awareness is around the head and around the chest and quite kind of close in. And you can like playing with this. You can increase that kind of field of awareness to the sides and particularly lower down. I find that, like, being aware of your legs and your feet on the ground and having the kind of awareness lower down really helps to kind of ground that sense of flighty energy that almost feels like it wants to keep you up here. And so maybe you could even do the pages whilst you're just very aware of, okay, my feet, I'm doing it right now. My feet are on the ground. I feel my awareness is lower down as opposed to right now. I'm up here in my head and I'm speaking quicker, blah, blah, blah. And you can almost play with that and just kind of pendulate up and down and see how that impacts your, your experience and the spaciousness which these sensations have, if that makes sense.
Thank you. That's great. Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Are you good to keep taking questions, Nick? This, this feels absolutely.
Yeah, keep going.
Okay, great. We have a bunch. So. Kate.
Hi, Nick. This has been really, really helpful. They're already getting a lot of insights. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the connection between anxiety and fatigue. I definitely have that adaptive hypervigilance. And while it is, you know, you just spoke about it being a cognitive pattern, I feel like between that and the, like, somatic experience of being on alert, it's exhausting. Like, I'm just spending energy being anxious, and then I'm tired and could you talk a little bit more just about, like, that pattern or that relationship and ways to kind of address that?
Yeah, so you're absolutely right. Like, being that, that, that cognitive activity. And I, I personally, I like to think. I like to distinguish between physical behaviors and mental behaviors, like I think worrying is just as much a behavior as know, kicking a soccer ball. Like they're both behaviors and I think they both lead, contribute to fatigue and eventually exhaustion. So to your point, that is absolutely going to drive exhaustion and fatigue if you are, if you are in the habit of constantly sort of worrying or have this, this general kind of baseline of being pretty worried and, and scanning and, and being hypervigilant. So it's, it's very common and understandable. When I worked with people who had sort of chronic anxiety in a variety of forms, that exhaustion was part of it. But then it creates this vicious cycle when you're, when you're exhausted, it's harder to sort of regulate those anxiety producing thoughts.
Right.
It's harder to step out of worry when you're just, when you're physically exhausted, when you're not sleeping. Well, we haven't talked about sleep yet, but yeah, so, and then it, again, it creates this really, really vicious cycle. So one of the nice things, I'm gonna go back to scheduled worry. What I talked about, one of the benefits of scheduled worry is that not only does it so long term, it, it sort of changes your relationship with worry and anxiety and that's the real big benefit, but a sort of ancillary benefit is that it trains your brain that there is a time for worry during the day. And by definition, other times during the day are not for worry. The, the, the kind of stupid analogy I use for this, that is, it's stupid, but it's memorable is like if you get a new puppy in, you're training a new puppy. They don't, puppies don't come housebroken, right? They will just do their business anywhere and everywhere, including on your living room floor or you know, on the deck outside. And it's pretty annoying, right? That's a little like your brain's tendency to worry just does it indiscriminately everywhere. So how do you train a dog to do its business, you know, in the backyard, but not on the living room floor? You can't yell at it or get in an argument with your dog or like whap it on the nose of the newspaper. Like that doesn't, it doesn't work. They don't understand. You have to train it. And the way, the best way to train it is you train it that you reward it for doing its business in the right place and by, by extension it will learn not to do it in the wrong places. And this is exactly what you do when you're doing scheduled Worry, you are reward, you're giving your worries attention. And to your brain, attention is always rewarding. When you, when you give something attention, you're signaling importance, right? So when you reward your brain for worrying during the right time, during your scheduled worry time, it's learning, okay, great, this is my time to worry. Which means you're going to have an easier time letting go of worries throughout the day and your brain is going to be more likely to actually listen to you, be like, all right, I'll get to it. You know, at 7pm when we do our scheduled worry. So that's the other really big benefit of this scheduled worry practice is that it makes it easier to let go of worries throughout the day because your brain trusts that there is a time where you will acknowledge and take into consideration those worries. But if you think about it, if you just, if every time you, you, you start worrying, you're like, oh no, I can't do this, can't do this. Got to stay focused, gotta stay focused. Can't keep worrying about this. Your brain is like, no, but we have important things we need to tell you. And so the minute you get some like quiet free time, like when you're laying in bed, you know, at 11pm trying to fall asleep, your brain's going to barrage you with worries. But if you've really created and, and the key thing here is like consistency. This has to be a practice. This is not a one off thing, right? This is weeks and weeks of doing this consistently. Your brain will really start to trust you that like, okay, I don't have to worry as much right now because I've got this time for it. So anyway, I don't want to belabor that point and hopefully that analogy isn't too goofy, but I think that's one of the best ways to, to deal with the worry and by, as a result lower that overall level of exhaustion. To get back to your, your initial question, but you have to retrain that tendency to just worry indiscriminately if you want to not have so much of the exhaustion that results for it. And schedule worry is really one of the best ways I found to do that.
Amazing. I imagine this is a very trial and error thing, but I wonder if there is any research or suggestion around times of day that are better for it. Is it advised to do it before bed or is that going to set you off or. Any thoughts on that?
Yeah, good question. I, I have seen it work at almost any point during the day. Like I've had people do it successfully. But far and away the most success I've seen is when people do it in basically early evening. You don't want to do it like you want to give yourself two to three hours before bedtime for it, but it. It seems to be more helpful at the end of the day, or. I don't. I don't have a great explanation for why that. Maybe you've just accumulated more worries throughout the day, and so it's kind of easier to get. And I think it also. It just. It's got this natural feel of, like, I've loaded up worries throughout the day, and, like, at the end of the day, I'm gonna kind of, like, take them out and do a brain dump, and they're all gonna kind of. So I think it just feels more intuitive for people. But it ultimately, just doing it consistently is. Is what matters. I don't think the time of day matters too much, so just whatever works for you. And again, early evening is what I've seen statistically be the most common.
Thank you so much.
Of course.
Awesome. I love that. It reminds me of a friend, Franzi, who does that with her kids for temper tantrums. So they have an allocated time every couple of days where they'll throw a temper tantrum together and welcome it and make that okay. And it's the same thing. They get frustrated. They wait until the next, like, temper tantrum time to do it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I thought is genius. And sounds very similar. Very similar approach.
And just takes a much more playful sort of approach to these things.
Like. Like having fun with it, welcoming it.
Yes. Yes.
Rachel.
Hey, Rachel.
Hi. You kind of touched on this earlier, but I. I'm trying to figure out my question. I guess I'm curious how much, since you've worked with so many people with anxiety, how much it has been expressed because they actually know that they're not in, like, a safe situation. And when. When they're no longer in that safe situation, their anxiety goes away. Because for me, like, I was in a very unsafe situation, and I had the most amount of anxiety I've ever in my whole life. And then when that. When I got out of that, then, like, my anxiety went away. So I'm just curious, like, how much you've, like, seen that with your clients.
Hi. This. It's a great question, Rachel. First of all, it brings up this distinction between helpful versus unhelpful anxiety or fear versus anxiety. You know, in my world, I think of anxiety as unhelpful anxiety, whereas fear is fear. Is, like, helpful. But I think it's a really important. I think people are so eager to just not feel anxious anymore that they will do whatever they can to just stop feeling anxious without considering, hey, like, maybe this anxiety is here for a reason. Like, maybe it's trying to. Anxiety doesn't always have a reason. Like, we talk. Somebody asked. Sometimes anxiety is just a habit, right? You just get in the habit of worrying and you just worry indiscriminately and, like, that's going to produce anxiety. But very often anxiety is. Is trying to tell you something about. And on some level it thinks something is not okay, not safe. It could be. It could be a job that's making you miserable. It could be a bad relationship. It could be. Could be all sorts of things, right? But that is very, like, you do. Don't shoot the messenger. You've all heard this, like, expression, right? Just because a message is uncomfortable and you don't like it doesn't mean you should get rid of the message necessarily. Like, maybe it's a really important message to hear. So I think this is just. It's another reason to. When confronted with anxiety, you really want to pause and just be with it for a while and give it a little bit of space and to try and understand, is this something that I need to take action on? Is this something that I can move on from? Is it something I need to listen to? Is it something I can just sort of acknowledge and say, thanks, but no thanks, and then move on? So I do think that's super important. And in my own experience, I used to joke around with some of my colleagues that, you know, the. The ultimate treatment for any kind of anxiety is assertiveness. And this is obviously a generalization, but so, so often when I worked with people who had a lot of anxiety and kind of persistent chronic anxiety, almost always there was some structural thing in their life that for whatever reason, they couldn't or wouldn't address. And the anxiety was just their brain's way of, like, red light, like, hey, dummy. Like this thing, like, take care of it, right? In its own kind of crude way. But I think. And when I say assertiveness, I just mean, like, you know, taking action on something important in your life even though it's hard or difficult or scary. Right? That's kind of my.
Yeah.
So to your point, a lot of. Especially, like a clinician would call it treatment resistant anxiety, but just in regular terms, it's like, I've done a lot of the things I'm doing, the practices I'm trying the somatic stuff and the psychological stuff and the, and like, not. It's, it works a little bit, but it's still kind of there. Almost always in my experience, what that means is there is some part of your life that is not working and your body, your, your brain, your body knows it on some intuitive level and this is not normal. I'm, I'm not like Mr. Like intuition and like woo woo. But I really believe this, that if you have chronic kind of unrelenting anxiety and you're really, you've done a lot of stuff to work on it and it's really not going away. Something structural in your life is off. And so doing a really careful, thoughtful inventory of that and being. It takes courage. Like you have to be courageous to look at things in your life that there's probably a lot of incentives pointing you toward, oh no, it's fine, it's fine, don't worry about it. But yeah, really think. I'm sorry, I don't want to belabor this point, but I just think it's such an important point. I'm glad you brought it up. Yeah, that, that can absolutely be the case. So.
Yeah, beautiful. I, I spent a long time, I spent a long time working on my anxious attachment when really like the thing was like, just get the out of here. Yeah.
Yeah.
And it, you know, it goes back to again, this. I think it's really important to have a relational approach to like, anxiety isn't good or bad. It's not a thing to be removed or, or something you just take orders from. Right. You need to have that. You treat it like a, like another person. This goes back to the parts work or intern. Someone mentioned internal family systems. It's a, it's like think of it like a person who's, who's telling you something. There is a good chance in a lot of situations they're telling you something really important that you don't want to hear and you need to start listening. Of course, sometimes they're telling you something and it's totally off or totally wrong. And actually then the challenge is to not get too wrapped up into it and to move on. It's hard to know one way or another, but that is the task. You don't want to take orders or totally ignore anxiety. There's this messy middle ground which involves listening to and cultivating a relationship with it. That is hard and it's, it's not. There's no like, sexy, like one, one size fits all answer to this. But I Think ultimately that's the realistic, that's the realistic way of approaching, of approaching anxiety.
Yeah.
Beautiful. Thank you.
You bet. Rachel. Thank you.
This is fun. Okay, John, welcome. Same question or the different question that you asked in the chat?
Yeah, different question. Yeah, this is, this is wonderful.
Yeah.
Then the, the one in the, the chat. Sorry to, yeah. Be distracting you, but I was like, oh, maybe we'll be talking about some of this. Maybe there's structural issues that relate to environment design. I don't know. We haven't gotten to week five yet in the course, but yeah, looking forward to it. But yeah, I guess I actually have a two part question. One is more about just anxiety, kind of my own experience of it. And this probably relates to you, Johnny and to Nick on the somatic kind of top down, bottom up I guess we would call it. Right. So the kind of more somatic side versus the top down side. And the thing, what I've noticed for me, you know, I'm, I'm totally the prototypical, you know, trauma in the home youth, we're homeless when I was a kid, dad with mental illness, blah, all that stuff. And so I, I've seen the, the, the benefits that came from the hyper vigilance, the creativity, the seeing how things are connected, the working fast, you know, all of that. But I also have had like the death clock and the like tick, tick, tick, tick, you know, that just sense of hyper vigilance. So what I found for me and I was curious, like the blend of how you would approach this.
So.
Once I'm able, if my body or if I'm in the right state and I can actually say, oh wait a minute, anxiety. Oh, you're reminding me I'm alive. Oh yeah, I'm activated.
Okay.
Yeah, you used to help me on this other thing. Okay, cool. That's not here right now. What are you trying to tell me right now? That's helpful sometimes, but there are other times where it almost feels like my. I wrote down like it's such a strong friend that it will take over my body and be like I'm not going to. Don't listen to that brain. Don't listen that reframe. Like your body is just pulsing with this anxiety. So I'm curious, like how, how would you recommend the different practices of like the top down versus the somatic, you know, the reframing or the these kind of cognitive versus that somatic depending on what's going on. So it's probably a question for both of you. I don't know who wants to go first?
I'll let, I'll let Nick chime in first and then I'll share some. Yeah.
So the top down versus bottom down is interesting. You know where my head goes with this actually is to sort of in the moment versus regular practice things. And so thinking about, I think from both a somatic and a more cognitive angle, you want to have pra. Regular practices in place that are doing kind of the long term work to create a healthier relationship with, with anxiety. So that could be some sort of somatic practice. It could be, you know, I have a lot of clients who, who are really interested in breath work and, and using that to great effect. For instance, with their, with their anxiety as a regular practice. It could be something cognitive like scheduled worry, like talked about. But then all. But then you want to think about in the moment when I respond to anxiety, like I think it's both right, it's got to be. There's both a top down and a B and a and a bottom up approach. But I, I would imagine both kind of start with this like instead of reacting to anxiety, it's like pausing and bringing a little bit of awareness because I think there are going to be situations when you want to start with a more maybe somatic bottom up approach and there may be going to be situations where it's going to be more helpful to do more kind of cognitive top down work. But I don't know how you're going to know that if you're just impulsively responding to anxiety. Right. Or reacting instead of building this. It's almost like a meta habit of building in a pause when you're feeling anxious where you, you don't go into behavior mode, you don't go into thinking mode, you just go into sort of being mode and being aware and giving yourself space. And I think ultimately what one way I think about this is you're creating just like in any good relationship, you're creating a healthy boundary with your anxiety. Like, just like you don't want to ignore anxiety, you also don't want to get into this, this relationship or anxiety where it's just barking at you and you're just jumping every time it barks like that is really not healthy either. So you want to have boundaries with different parts of yourself, including anxiety. And I think so I think that building in that pause when, when you experience like a sudden kind of surge of anxiety, I think it serves a lot of purposes. But from my perspective, kind of a psychological perspective, I, I like it because it Serves that function of creating some healthy boundaries with your anxiety that I think ideally allows you to decide how to move on in a way that's helpful, given the particulars of whatever circumstance you're in. Right. Because a lot's going to depend on those particulars. All right, sorry, that's a lot. But I'll let Johnny chime in now. That's a little bit helpful.
This is fascinating. Yeah. A few things came to mind. The first is made these two meta points. The first is having a kind of experimental approach. And like Nick was saying, there can be different underlying reasons that that anxiety might be there. Maybe it's structural, maybe it's an immediate thing, maybe it's an emotion. And so having different practices, both top down and bottom up, and seeing what works and what resonates is the overall approach. The second frame, which is similar to what Nick was saying about pausing and welcoming. There's a phrase that Steve March talks about where he's like, don't go in with a change agenda. Often we go in trying to fix the anxiety, to turn it into something else, change it in some way. And that is a form of pushing away in resistance. And so, as Nick was saying, really just being with it with zero change agenda, just fully welcoming. And that in itself can be enough to shift it. The other practices that if you're really with it and you're welcoming it and it's still there, which it may well be the single most effective downshifting practice that I've seen. And this is from working with breathwork clients who sometimes will go very intensely into a sympathetic activation, be kind of like super fight flight. Hyperventilating is. We will take like a heavy stone, like maybe three or four kilograms, and place it on the lower belly, lying down, and have them breathe into that and then let the exhale go. And something about that kind of like that effortless exhale, it kind of discharges the intense arousal energy that's in the system and really rapidly kind of downshifts. And that can just be good for kind of getting some of that, like, energy out and moving. And then the third as well is kind of, as we cover in this week in the course, is if there's sufficient spaciousness, maybe doing a breathwork journey or doing the somatic surfing practice to really curiously track what are the sensations, like, what's the specific thing that I'm experiencing? And as with parts work, like, what might this part want? What might be underneath it? If it could express or move in some way, what would it Do. And again, just like going in with that spirit of curiosity without trying to change or fix it, which is such a fine line. Right. Because it is uncomfortable. And it's like, no, we actually want to get out of this shitty feeling. But that's kind of the. I guess that's where the skill comes in. That's where the practice is. I guess why people call it work because it's not always comfortable.
Yes. Yeah. No, that's really helpful. Yeah. The other question I had was related to what do you do with adult sons that you've kind of passed this on to, even without. So none of the same behaviors that my dad did that I do, but it just. They saw the hyper vigilance and, you know, so my adult son is really struggling with that. Is there any. Anything I can do to help? Other than, of course, work on myself first, but is there anything else that I or my wife could do to help?
You know, where my mind goes is to. And I don't know how directly helpful this will be to your. To your son, but I suspect it will be indirectly. But just to remember that the. These mental habits, like. Like hypervigilance, for instance, or even worrying, they. They're often driven in large part by our early childhood experiences, but they can often be driven just by temperament and frankly, genetics. Like some people are just wired to be. To be. This is a little bit simplistic, but some people are just worriers by nature, and some people are just kind of like, whistle as you go. Like, happy, go lucky. And neither of those is good or bad. They are. If you do that at a population level, on, like, an evolutionary level, if you've got a. Like a tribe, you want both in your tribe. You don't want an entire tribe made up of, like, Winnie the Pooh just, like, whistling around, like, super happy, go lucky all the time, that tribe is gone. Like, you are dead on your end. You're not gonna survive. If everyone are, like, just really tightly wound, like, ready to go to battle. Like, that's. That. That tribe is not going to survive. So I. I think there. There is an element of acceptance and really, even potentially gratitude for this is. This is who. There's an element of this. This is just who I am. It's easy to start to vilify that element. I'm the kind of person who worries a lot. Like, I'm pretty high on the conscientiousness scale. There's a lot of. There's downsides to that. If I let that go too far. Right. There's a lot of really good things that come from that that maybe I don't acknowledge very often or take a lot of time to appreciate, but these so, so often the cognitive habits, at least underlying anxiety are double edged swords. And we, a lot of, I'm sure a lot of us on this call were kind of problem solvers by nature. We want to fix like Jonathan, we want to fix stuff and so we, you know, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Like when you're really good at problem solving, everything looks like a problem. But really there are a lot of things that are, yeah, a lot of benefits that come from these things. So I think that's something, you know, you just like telling your, you're not just gonna tell your son, oh, be grateful for, you know, there's good things that come from. I wouldn't recommend that. But I think that attitude, you know, showing, I think you can do that in kind of a subtle, more indirect, slow way. And I think helping him to come, to be more accepting, to work on what he can work on, but also to be more accepting and okay with these parts of us that are just, just different. Oh yeah, someone put piglet in the chat. That's, that's right.
Like.
Well, a lot of us have a little bit of piglet in us. So anyway, I'm curious, Johnny too, if you have, if you have thoughts on that. But that's where my head goes.
Yeah, I mean, I think you covered a lot of it, I would say, I mean, in the same way that like you are learning to relate to your internal parts, the internal part that gets anxious in that kind of loving, curious way, kind of applying that also to your kid as well. So if he does get anxious, then also checking yourself and checking that there's no part of you that wants to change him in that way and helping him to also welcome that part of himself that experiences anxiety and to whatever degree possible, get curious about it. Ask what might. If this was trying to tell you something, what might it be telling? And just going in with that sense of curiosity plus experiment and then going back to curiosity and experiment and welcoming everything along the way. And as Nick was saying, this is a part of his brain nervous system that is giving him potentially helpful feedback in some way. But yeah, the, the frame of like, like this is welcome and you are fully welcome in this, and this is welcome in this household, in this family is I think, the most powerful starting point.
Love that. Thank you both. Yeah.
Questions. Thank you, John.
Oh, I want to do one more Gloss Johnny on this idea of this, this word fixing I think is really important that we brought this up because to a large extent for most people fixing, you think of it as a helpful thing. Your brain codes that as problem, potentially danger. When you approach something with a fix it mindset, what your brain is hearing from again for most of us is this thing is a problem and, or even potentially dangerous. Now if that thing actually is a problem or is a danger, great. Like you want your brain to be sensitive to true dangers. But if you're applying a fix it mindset to something that feels like a problem but isn't a problem, like an emotion, for instance, like anxiety, Right. Or even like thoughts, like a worry.
Right.
If you're trying to fix your worry or fix your anxiety, no matter how successful you might feel in the moment when you apply some coping skills, what are you doing long term? Are you teaching your brain that anxiety is bad, that it's a problem, that it's dangerous? Because if you are again, no matter how, how much relief you get in the short term, you're setting yourself up for more long term pain. If you're reinforcing this unhelpful belief, that uncomfortable mental phenomenon like, like emotions or, or not just mental phenomena like body sensations or thoughts or whatever. If you're reinforcing the idea that those are dangerous by trying to fix them. Right. Long term, that's, that's a lot of why so much anxiety stays chronic despite feeling like we get short term wins because we learned some new technique or something. If the motivation and the attitude suggests that this thing is dangerous. Yeah, yourself you're set yourself up for a hard time long term. So I think again that we keep going back to language. Right. But be really careful of trying to fix this kind of stuff. And instead like John, you talked about like curiosity. Much better, right. Curiosity welcoming. That's why we want to, we want to treat our anxiety more like a person than like a problem.
Yeah. And on that, on that note, I mean where I think I learned this lesson most painfully was in intimate relationship when, you know, my wife and I have these check ins and there were times where like that anxiety might come up and kind of there would be story and there'd be like problems that I could, you know, technically like I can solve this thing. And if I went straight into that mode when there was still that level of emotional activation, it was shut down. It turned into this like kind of combativeness as opposed to like being with all the sensations and emotions and as you say, like, we keep on reiterating this welcoming, validating, like. Like, oh, you're anxious right now, and just being with that, and that's great. And then once the system settles, and as you say, the brain is like. The nervous system is like, okay, it's safe to feel this way. Then it's like, ah, there's like a relaxing and in that spaciousness you can address from a more intellectual place of like. And here are the next three steps that we can do to actually, to kind of take action on this, but starting from that place while the emotion is there and before it's been kind of seen and validated. Like, you say it's like, okay, this isn't welcome. And then more resistance comes up. And I think it's exactly the same whether it's with a friend, a loved one, a partner, or internally, it's kind of the same dynamic as a play.
Yeah. And you said you can approach it from a more intellectual place. And I would also add, when you have a healthier relationship with your anxiety or with any kind of big, problematic, difficult emotion, um, you can. As you start to change that relationship with that emotion, you can approach a difficult situation with a more emotionally holistic sort of framework. Because a lot of what happens is with anxiety, when you struggle with chronic anxiety, anxiety becomes like the. The dominant emotion, and it ends up sort of bullying out other emotions that are part of your experience but have become very relatively quiet because anxiety is so loud. Right. So by. By again, kind of setting healthier boundaries with that anxiety and. And allowing anxiety to settle into a smaller place. What you're also doing is giving space for other parts of your emotional experience, which may be way more helpful. Like when I. That situation you described with your wife.
When.
When my wife is struggling emotionally or anxious, my immediate reaction is anxiety. Oh, my God. Like, you know, she's suffering. She's having a hard time. What do I do? Solve. Yeah, solve the problem.
Right.
Go, go, go. But actually, if I can allow that anxiety kind of sink a little bit by welcoming it, paradoxically welcoming it, letting you sink something like. Like sadness or pity might show up a little bit more, which turns out to be a way more helpful emotion in this situation where I need to be compassionate and with someone else. If I can remember what it was like to feel sad, like she's feeling sad, that's going to be a much more productive mindset to actually be with her and potentially help, rather than coming at it from this anxiety, like being the train conductor. That's not helpful in that situation so giving room for the full choir of sort of emotional voices.
Yeah, I totally agree. And only emotions like joy get to come out when everything else is kind of welcome. I wanted to touch on briefly, you mentioned it's important to set boundaries with anxiety. Could you speak to how to do that in a skillful way without also rejecting it? How do you set a loving boundary with anxiety as opposed to just no, you're not welcome right now? What's the line there?
On the most basic level, I think it is when we get a sudden surge of anxiety, I think our default reaction is either to run away or fight. It's either like, no, no, no, no, no, like I'm getting out of here, distract myself, whatever, or I got to get rid of this thing, whip out my coping skill tool belt and just like whack it in submission, whatever. That looks like both of those pretty unhelpful as we talked about. Instead, if you can pause and listen to the anxiety, what that does, you're not impulsively taking orders on it from it. So you're, you're sort of, you're creating the space, you're teaching your brain. Just because my anxiety like yells doesn't mean I have to hop and go do something. So that's, that's a big part of the boundary setting, right? So the pause and the, you know, listening to your emotions, I, I often say, and people, a lot of people grounded that don't like this, but I'll say you should always listen to your emotions, but you should never trust them. In other words, you should never just take orders from your emotions. You should be curious about them, you should welcome them, you should listen to them, right? But if you're just impulsively reacting to them, that's going to turn into a really toxic relationship eventually. Like with any relationship in your life, if you just literally constantly take orders from someone, like that's not going to go well in the long run. Just like if you constantly avoid someone and want to have a healthy relationship, like that's not going to go super well either. So I think the most important boundary is this. Like stop and listen. Just listen. Like you don't have to do anything right away. And again, I would imagine especially for people in on this call, like I would think a lot of us are doers, right? And there's so many great things that come from being a doer, an action oriented person, a creative person, a problem solver. Like it's so helpful in so many areas of our life. But when it comes to interpersonal situations, whether it's with another person, you know, an external person or a part of us that do. Mindset is really unhelpful a lot of the time. So if you can pause and just be. I think that's the most important boundary. That's the, like. That's 90% of it right there. Is practicing giving yourself space and not just immediately reacting one way or the other. I think that's the boundary right there.
The space between stimulus and response.
Yep. But it's so. And it. You know, it sounds simple, but, like, it's so hard, especially in. Or it might be relatively simple in certain situations, but there are certain things that are just. Certain people. Certain situations that are so triggering.
Yeah.
Which is just another way of saying, like, so likely to make me impulsive. Do something.
Right. And there's almost. I think one of the most helpful metrics in this course and in this work is what is the half life of your reactivity? Maybe when you begin, it's like something happens, and then two days later, you're like, oh, shit. And you've still been praised. And then maybe it's one day, then maybe it's four hours. And then over time, the more that you engage with this, the more the brain learns. It's like 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 2 minutes. And then maybe in the moment, if it's not a big one, and like you say, not beating yourself up if you get caught in that reactive loop, just being like, okay, let's come back from there. Yeah, this is beautiful. There was a question in the chat as well about the relationship between CO2 and anxiety, which I wanted to briefly touch on. There's some great work by Patrick McEwen in the Oxygen Advantage, and he basically shows there's a very high correlation between someone's CO2 tolerance versus their propensity to experience anxiety. And I'm curious if you've explored this as well, Nick, but I know that by doing, like, basic breath holds and practicing nose breathing and building up that CO2 tolerance kind of in a very titrated way, it increases our capacity to be with anxiety, basically, as it arises. And often people that get anxiety all the time, they also have a very low CO2 tolerance. So that's another practical thing that I think people can play with. I did a freediving trading, which is like, a really fun way of practicing that and improving that, I think.
So I'm not an expert in this area at all. My quick, kind of mechanistic theory for why this might be working. Why would CO2 tolerance improve anxiety? It's my experience that so much of anxiety. People don't realize it, but so much of anxiety comes from a. An unhelpful or inaccurate interpretation of a body state. It's often very, very subtle. But it's like I. It's basically some formula of I feel weird, something must be wrong, and then you're just like, off to the races with anxiety. And so I. I would expect that training, you know, just like with exercise and what. Psychologically, what's so helpful about exercise, I think a lot of ways is you're training yourself to normalize discomfort. Like it. No, like I can run and it's uncomfortable and like, you know, or I can lift weights and it. But just because it feels bad doesn't mean it is bad.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think with that, like with freediving or like, I think what you're probably. There's a whole other set of like, internal experiences that you are sort of trained. You're helping your brain see these things are uncomfortable but not necessarily dangerous. Right.
That's. That's definitely part of it as well. There is. I mean, if you just breathe in, like straight CO2, people have instant panic attacks. Like, there is this.
Yeah.
Very fast reflex. The other thing, there were two things in my mind. One, I want to briefly touch on sleep. I'm aware of time. There's been a few questions in the chat around sleep that I think would be great to touch on. The other point, just to mention on that briefly. Like, the uncomfortable body sensations that people experience are very often in the clients that I've worked with, one on one. Grief or anger, like, those are the two most common things. And I've seen that when people learn to welcome, be with, feel and express particular, often it's grief or anger, usually not both. Then the anxiety tends to just dissipate a lot as well. So that's just something that I've seen anecdotally that might be worth considering. Okay. So, Jonathan, you had a question about sleep. So I'm going to invite you, Invite you up here. Hey there.
Hi. This has been great, plus one. And really appreciate a lot of these things, but for time, I'm gonna skip the details. Just really appreciating it.
Thank you.
So over here, you know, anxiety is one of my oldest companions. And I'm one of those people that if it gets away from me at its most extreme, there's an. There's a pretty extreme insomnia that goes with it. So in the worst bouts, in my Life. I, I, we'd be talking about like a three week period where I may be sleep, sleeping like eight to ten hours a week. Which, you know, that's a pretty extreme case as I understand it.
It's not, not too common.
There's some progress. One part of it is kind of what you were talking about. Like I have a personality, I have DNA, I, I have a history. And there's actually some helpfulness and just accepting like, okay, I'm in this cycle. I've been in one of these cycles before. Like this will end.
I don't know when.
Yeah.
But it's pretty shitty. And so what I am curious about is it sounds like this is an area of like deep study and focus for you. Is, is there anything, you know, that I don't know that would be useful for me to know around those moments where my brain is like, I kind of think of it almost like, you know, it normally spins like this and the axis has moved, it's just wobbly off center. Until I get that access back, it's only going to be wobbly off center and then it kind of, I mean, I know, you know, the reinforcement of like good sleep and how anxiety is going to amplify with lack of sleep, but.
Yeah.
Any thoughts on how to work with that?
Do you feel like in those periods of, of intense insomnia is the, the spinning, the overthinking in whatever form is. Does that tend to be about other things like work or some other like, or is it about sleep and not sleeping and having insomnia and. You see what I mean?
Like fundamentally it'll be about something else. There will become some sleep anxiety eventually, but what triggers it? And it takes a while for that to kick in. What's happened that took me off access is.
Worry about work would be a core one. Yeah. And then that triggers the worry about sleep and not sleeping and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
So I think that, I don't know if you do it, but the, again, the, whenever I work with folks who have insomnia that is pretty driven by some form of overthinking. The worry usually is, the scheduled worry is huge. Like that that's really, really helpful if you can do it consistently and even doing it preventatively. So that's the thing. If you already find yourself in one of these stressful periods and then you start doing like the lag, it's going to take a while if you're not doing it consistently. But if you're doing it as a prophylactic Essentially, it could help buffer you from when you do get slammed by one of those periods. It will sort of. It's like a shock absorber. Like, it will absorb some of that shock and you might not end up spinning quite as much.
Yeah, I've done worry time, but it's. To your point. It's always been reactive after this has kicked off. I will say one of the things I appreciated about it most is how boring it eventually gets super valuable. You know, the 800th time I'm writing about how I'm going to end up, you know, alone and homeless under a bridge. It actually gets hard to write because it's like, God damn, I've had to write this every day for several weeks. But thank you.
That's.
That's a really helpful. That alone is really helpful to think about. Like, these things need to be practiced. And. Yeah, I'm even interpreting that. Sort of anchored in the body well.
Before you need them. Yeah. The other one I will just throw at you is I have this little slightly cheeky saying, but I think it underlies a more important truth, which is never worry in bed. I say that people are like, but. But what it gets at is it's very. It's.
It's.
And I, like, I've had insomnia. Like, insomnia is. It might be the worst. Like severance. I have the. The misery that goes with it. It is awful. I'm preaching the choir here. But. So it's very hard when you're running on fumes. You haven't slept at all, you're in bed, you start worrying. The idea of like getting out of bed or even just doing anything else, you're just so exhausted that it's like. So your mind, that's like all you have the energy to do. But. But being extremely strict, as strict as you can with yourself about not worrying or doing. And really worry is just when it comes to sleep. Worry is a subset of effort. If you are doing anything effortful in bed, you are associating your bed with effort and worry and thinking and trying to. Which leads to arousal. Right. Which directly inhibits relaxation and sleep. So having some sort of. I like to have a. I call it the midnight plan. The midnight plan is like when I am awake in bed, I wake up in the middle. I don't fall back asleep. I start worrying. What do I do? And the key thing is, it's an algorithm. There is no decision making. There is just when I wake up and I can't go back to sleep after five or ten minutes. Right. I get up and go do a puzzle or I lay. I put in my favorite, like, audiobook or podcast or whatever. There is zero decision making. It's not like, what should I do? It's, nope, this is what I do. I just know. So anyway, it's. It's complicated, but the principle of you really want to be careful about, like, being in bed and worrying and overthinking.
Yeah.
Because the more you do that, you are again. You're. It's all back to Pavlovsky. You're associating your bed with worry so that it will eventually become a trigger for worry, even if you're not worried.
That's super. Yeah. I mean, I'm a little distracted noticing my mind does it in the positive way, too. Like, I slept three hours last night.
Because I was pumped.
I wasn't anxious.
Yeah.
I was psyched.
But my mind's like, let's wake up and think about that. But thank you. Because I will sometimes think about what might I do if I wake up in the middle of the night. I feel the difference in what you're saying of, like, no, no, no, like, already got made. You're just going to run the program.
If it is needed.
Thank you.
Yeah. Yeah. That's good luck. I feel you, man.
For anyone else going through this, for what it's worth, often what it is is the thing you alluded to before, which is like, there's something that some I'm not listening to and some part of me is getting increasingly more insistent. And until I face it, it's like, all right, man. Like, if this is what it's going to take, I'm taking away sleep now. Like, you gotta look at this. So I very much learned, like, the only way out is through approach. But I'm not always so smart and quick.
Sometimes it takes a little while. All right.
Thank you.
Yeah, you bet. Jonathan.
Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for that. Well, that feels like a beautiful place to begin to close. There's a couple more questions that we. Do you have like an extra five minutes?
I've got time for sure.
Okay, great. So then if you guys are down, then let's. Let's hit these last two and then we'll wrap up at the end.
I'll try and be succinct too.
Okay. Oh, welcome. Hey. Okay. I wasn't prepared for that. I thought we are out of time, but that's great.
Thank you.
Your anxiety.
Yeah, thank you.
So you've spoke about existential fear before, and I've really like dived very deep into working with parts. And I have a part that is very probably pre verbal maybe. And I feel that it holds like an existent existential fear. And I'm trying to see how can I rewire that? Because sometimes I collapse into like dosage shutdown just from like seeing something that is not a real threat at all. So I'm trying to understand like, what can I do to unwind this feel. Usually it's a fear of dying. It's like really not related to anything that is happening in the world.
Yeah. So there's a, there's a few ways you can go with this. One of the most helpful things I found with, with existential anxiety and fear of dying in particular is like, like so many approaches to helping with anxiety. It involves exposure or approach confronting the thing that is scary rather than running away from it or avoiding it. So what I've noticed is when people have a lot of existential concerns, often what they don't have enough of in their life is an outlet to actually think about and process and discuss existential issues. So a lot of the best therapists I know who work on existential anxiety, they're. They're almost not even therapists. They're not, they, they're almost just like philosophers. And they will work with people to discuss and think about and really process existential issues, talking about death and what death means and where, you know, where our beliefs and, and mindsets around death come from. And so one way to look at it is that existential anxiety, particular existential anxiety attacks. It's like your brain saying, we, like, we need to, we need to think more about this. Like it's not a problem to be gotten rid of. It's something that needs to be addressed in a, in a different way or addressed more or something like that. So that would be, that would be my first. And it doesn't have to be professionally. Necessarily. It might be a, you know, a group of friends or a book club or something, you know, but. But finding ways to lean into these existential concerns more, not less, actually, not at the moment of having an existential anxiety attack. Right. That's probably not a great time to do it. But when you're feeling good, actually, then lean into these. Like, what, what is my brain trying to tell me? It's trying to tell me something. Right. Can I get curious about what that might be? Can I start to explore that somehow? Maybe it's just a good friend, maybe it's. Again, maybe it's a group, maybe it is existential therapy or some kind of professional coaching conte, something like that. But that's what I have seen to be most helpful for existential anxiety.
Great. Okay.
Thank you. Interesting. Yeah, you're very welcome.
Thank you. Or just in case it's interesting, I've done some philosophical counseling with a guy called Andrew Taggart who really explores this stuff in a deep way. So that might be something to check out. Oh, sorry, I just placed a link in the chat as well. Hey Ben.
Hey Johnny. Hey Nick.
Hey Ben.
Great session. Wow, like so many life changing stuff. I have like three pages of notes there. Very excited. I was curious to get your feedback on an experiment I'm kind of thinking of running that kind of intuitively kind of makes sense to me, but also could be a bad idea. And it kind of comes from as I think as I've gotten older and had more experiences with kind of panic or anxiety, I definitely noticed myself associating fast heart rate with anxiety. And now something I didn't have, I think when I was younger is when I do intense exercise, okay, go do some sprints. I sit down and I'm feeling that my default is, oh, this is anxiety. But I know it's not and it's not as high as, you know, actual anxiety at all. But it kind of feels a little bit like that. And I also kind of known from like habits and stuff that kind of getting cycles in of exposure is really helpful. And I kind of feel like what is a problem for me with places that I really get about anxiety speaking or whatever is that the really important occasions are so far apart you almost don't have enough time to get exposure, to really get used to it. So the experiment I've been kind of thinking of doing is, was kind of two parts, but one is doing a bunch of intense exercise. No, hold 30 seconds, really intense, get heart rate going really fast, sit down, be with it and repeat that 50 times or something or 30 times and just sort of sit there. And then the evolution of that would be if I have a big talk coming up, sort of do 30 seconds of sprints, get my heart really fast, start doing, practicing the talk and try to get myself like associating oh, my heart's really going fast and then practice calming down in the moment. That was the idea, the con I could see as I may associate doing the talk with having a fast heart rate. Right. And that could be counterproductive to actually having a successful presentation. And so I'm curious about all of that. Is that a good idea any of this a bad idea. What do you think.
Johnny? You want to go?
I'll defer to you to begin with. Yeah.
I don't, I mean, I'm a pragmatist at heart. So like I'm kind of, unless it is really batshit crazy. Like I'm, I'm definitely always game for experiments. Like, I think it rarely is, is an experiment going to be totally catastrophic. And it sounds a lot like what's called interoceptive exposure therapy, which is exactly what you're describing, where it's like most people who have panic in particular, it's not the situation itself that that really causes the panic. It's the, it's the catastrophizing about the interoceptions about the, the physical sensations. Right. So if you can practice having those things and not catastrophize them. Right. That's, that's good stuff. Right. So if you can. I definitely don't think it's hard to think of any kind of super downside to, to doing more exercise, including more intense levels of exercise. One thing I would be careful, though. You mentioned something like, like getting myself worked up and then practicing relaxing. I, my. I, I think you want to be careful there of this mindset of in order to perform well, I need to feel relaxed, I need to get rid of anxiety. I think the mindset you want to go into it with is I can perform well despite being anxious. I'm willing to be anxious and do the thing anyway, no matter what the level. Like, once you start putting ifs and contingencies on your anxiety, your, your brain is going to start going into like, like he's nervous, he thinks this is danger, you know, so it's this full attitude of willingness. Like, whatever I'm experiencing, I'm willing to have it and do the thing anyway, whether that's giving a talk or whatever it is.
Yeah. So in that experiment, let's say I do the 30 second sprints, my heart's pounding, I sit down. Okay, let's say, yeah, so I'm not trying to calm down and I could say to myself, okay, be with it. But I also find after the two seconds of saying that, my mind's gonna say, okay, now think or focus on the thing. How would you, for the 30 seconds, let's say, of kind of being there? Is there some mantra or like, what would you do? I thought in my head if I didn't have a thing, it would, you.
Know, I think you want to do whatever it is you're planning on doing so like you could, you could literally hop on the treadmill, get your heart rate super high and then try and give a talk for 20 minutes.
Okay, I just do the thing that way.
Right? Or, or maybe, or just, you know, you would plan to, you know, go answer emails or you know, like have a conversation with your partner or like whatever it is. But like the, the idea is not that like, okay, now I've gotten revved up, I'm with it, I've acknowledged it. Now I need to do something to like, no, I can just get on with life being fully willing to feel that it's not. I need to like stop everything. You don't want to get in this mindset where everything is about anxiety. That just tends to reinforce it. Right? You, the, the ultimate goal is you want to be able to live your life regardless of how much anxiety you're happening to feel or not. And ironically, the better you get at doing that, the less overall anxiety you tend to have. But that can't be your goal. If your goal is to have less anxiety, you're treating it as a threat and you're going to have more anxiety. But if you're willing to have anxiety and get on with your life anyway, your brain increasingly downregulates, thinks of it as a, as safe if uncomfortable and not a threat. And so you end up having less of it in the long run anyway. Johnny, I'll let you, let you jump in there.
Yeah, I love what you said. I have one small kind of thing to add on to that, which is it comes from this idea. There's a book called Existential Kink, which is a whole separate kind of topic. But the idea is like really fucking enjoying the sensations that we typically avoid. And like you say, kind of creating situations where that comes up and then being like, exactly as Nick said, not only am I willing to feel this, but I'm going to really enjoy this. I'm going to enjoy the kinkiness of this intense anxiety and really training yourself to relish in it in a kind of fucked up way. And something about that is, is pretty transformative actually for all emotions. But it sounds like it'd be very relevant in this case as well. So you've done the sprints, you're with the sensations and how much can you enjoy that anxious kind of palpitations? That would be the experiment to run.
Cool, thanks guys, that was great. Thank you.
Thank you, Ben.
Yeah, you bet.
Okay. Well, Nick, it's been amazing. So, so helpful. Packed with insights, ideas from the chat it seems like everyone had a great session. Where would be the best place for people to learn more about your writing, your YouTube, you have courses. What's the best place for people to learn more?
So I think my Ivor weekly newsletter is called the Friendly Mind. So if you just go to the Friendly Mind.com you can sign up, it's free, whatever. And that's. I put all my stuff goes there. It's kind of the hub. So if you're interested in videos, I do that. If my, my courses, you can find them there. My essays, articles, all sorts of stuff. So yeah, I think that's, that's the best place to go if you want to, if you want to learn more. And I would love to have you aboard if all of you, if you're, any of you are interested. But yeah, Johnny, I just want to say thanks so much. It's been, it's been a pleasure. It's been super fun, interesting, really great questions. I'm really impressed. A lot of great, A lot of great nuance and love the way people are thinking about things. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. Very like welcoming, positive space.
Not always on these great, great questions, you guys. All right, Nick, if you were to leave everyone with one parting experiment to try to explore with their anxiety, based on everything we've talked about, what would that be?
There's still saying that I have that. I think it's super powerful and it goes, just because it feels bad doesn't mean it is bad. And I think playing with that saying in different situations, especially different situations where you're feeling certainly anxiety, but even you know, could be discomfort while you're falling asleep or it could be anger or grief or, you know, I think so many of our emotional struggles boil down to this very simple but understandable confusion where we, we assume that because something feels uncomfortable or painful, it is bad or dangerous. And then immediately we just start going into problem solving mode and fixing, trying to get rid of whatever. And then that, as we've talked about, that's just kind of compounds. So I would, I would encourage you to play with this idea of in all sorts of areas of your life. It could be, maybe it's somewhat, maybe it's a, a child or a partner's experience. Again, just because it feels bad doesn't mean it is bad. It's a really powerful, I think lens to shift how you think about and experience a lot of parts in our life. And it's often the first step to building kind of a healthier, more productive relationship with all the parts of our experience, not just the ones we like.
Beautifully said. Well, we will wrap today's session with that. Thank you for staying over, everyone. If you guys would like to unmute and say thank you so much, Nick. That was frigging awesome. Thank you, Nick.
Thanks, Nick, so much, Nick.
See you on Friday. Have a great week, guys.
Bye.
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