Doing This For 28 Days Could Fix Your Anxiety! The Secret to Stopping Anxiety & Overwhelm (That Actually Works)

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Because here's the uncomfortable truth: most anxiety doesn't come from how much you have to do. It comes from the belief that you're supposed to do it all. And that belief is quietly destroying your peace. Today, I want to share with you what I learned from a powerful book called Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, and why this 28-day philosophy might be the most practical cure for modern overwhelm I've ever seen. Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhom, where I deliver practical business lessons 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. I got a quick favor to ask. If this show has helped you in any way, leave me a quick review. You could do so wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps me and my team reach even more people who need the same no-fluff, practical business advice that you're getting from the show. It only takes a few seconds, but it makes a huge difference. Thanks for being a part of our journey to help others on their journey. This book, Meditations for Mortals, is a follow-up book by Oliver Burkeman of his famous book, Four Thousand Weeks, which I talked about here on the show that absolutely changed my life, so I was so excited to read his next book. I don't like to bury the lead, so let me just give you what Berkman's core message is in this book. You are never going to get on top of your life. You're never going to clear the decks. You're never going to reach that magical moment where everything is handled. And if you're waiting for that moment to feel calm and relaxed, you're going to be anxious forever because the to-do list that you have regenerates just like laundry, just like email, just like dishes, just like problems. The fantasy that one day you'll finally catch up in what will create a magical moment in your life is a fantasy indeed. It's a lie that you keep telling yourself. And once you let that go, something strange happens. You relax. When I was reading the book, I kind of thought of the Dude. You know, the Dude from the movie The Big Lebowski. Let's just put aside the fact that, you know, they paint him as a loser, but he's pretty relaxed and chilled and he seems to be enjoying his life because he's not trying to achieve every single thing on his to-do list. He doesn't even have a to-do list. Now we want to kind of be a better version of the dude, but the point of the example I'm giving you is to have peace in your life, you have to make peace with certain things. We're going to get into more of that later. But what I love about this book is that there's a 20-day concept that goes through this. This book is structured around 28 reflections, one per day. So it's sort of like a 28-day course for you that you can go through. And this book is quite short and it was very easy to read. So why 28 days? Because it's roughly a month. It's about 4 weeks. It's contained. It's doable. And what I love about this book is that Berkman really argues the point that if we live our life like time is infinite, we feel like everything will get done eventually. But it won't because life isn't infinite. It's short. We will die. Now, this is not to be dramatic. It's to be practical. We have about 4,000 weeks total in our life. That's it. You know, we only get a certain amount of days in our life. We don't get any extra time. There's, you know, maybe we could extend it a couple of years here or there. But the point is, is that there is a finite amount of time. And this is deeply intellectual. But also when you absorb this idea, your anxiety starts to lose it's grip on you because you start to realize that, hey, I'm trying so hard to win at life instead of just living life. You're trying to optimize your way into immortality and you start choosing to do more and more just so that you can do more and more. So I want to share with you some of my takeaways from this book that absolutely rocked my world. Takeaway number 1, you can only do a few things well. And this is something I knew intellectually, and this is why I'm a big fan of the concept of focus. I talk about this on the show all the time. But one of the most liberating ideas in this book is that you only get to do a handful of things in your life very well. Not everything, a handful. And this is not tragic. It's actually really freeing because it allows you to clarify what's important to you. Anxiety often comes from thinking, I should be doing this, I should be building that, I should be learning this. I should, you know, look more into this subject or more into this area of life. But when you realize you literally cannot do everything, you stop feeling guilty for not doing everything. That's pretty powerful. You start asking yourself the right questions like, what actually matters to me? What am I willing to ignore? Because ignoring things is not failure, it's focus. It's allowing me to really spend quality time on the things that really are important to me and my life and my values. Everybody's saying like, you know, you can have it all. Do you want to have it all? We don't even stop to think like maybe having it all is not the best thing in the world. Maybe we should just have a few things that we really love. Takeaway number 2, the problem is not your workload. It's your expectations. I really resonated with this because we are drowning in invisible expectations. We think I should be healthier. I should be richer. I should be further along and I should be more productive. I should be calmer. I should be more grateful. Should, should, should, Should, should, should. The shoulds are endless. Berkman introduces a radical idea. What if you stop trying to optimize for your entire existence? What if you aimed for just good enough? That phrase alone can reduce anxiety. Good enough. The fact of the matter is you're not going to be great at everything. It's just a mathematical fact. You just can't have that much time to be great at everything. You can't. So it's okay to be good enough at most things, but a few things you're pretty darn good. You don't need to be perfect. You don't need to be world-class at every single thing you do. You don't have to be Instagram ready every moment in your life. You just need to be good enough so that you look decent on a photo in this example, right? You'd be shocked how much lighter life feels when you aim for just being sufficient instead of spectacular all the time. One of the things I really believe in, and Nicole and I really talk about a lot in our business is the idea that details matter. And a lot of people hear this and they think, oh my gosh, you're probably obsessive compulsive about everything. No, not everything. Just certain things. We choose a few things that are important to us in our business, in our life, and we're very detail-oriented and we're really focused on making sure we are the best as possible in those areas. Everything else outside of those things, we're just pretty mediocre. We're just okay with being okay at that. I'll give you a great example. I love to snowboard. Snowboarding is one of my favorite activities, but I'm not going to obsess about being a world-class snowboarder. You know, I don't even do any jumps or any terrain park stuff because I just want to glide down the mountain. I never go off-piste because it's not worth me getting injured. I just want to just have an enjoyable trip, and it's okay for me to be just good enough to snowboard. I don't need to be great at everything. And once I admitted that, I enjoyed snowboarding a whole lot more. And just in general, when you practice this, you enjoy life a lot more. You just get to live life a little bit more. By the way, if this idea of good enough and being sufficient so that you can be able to move forward in any area of life is an idea that you really resonate with, I'm really working on a really important episode currently called The Ultimate Guide to AI for Normal People. And in that episode, I walk through step by step how to use AI to improve your life, your business, your messaging, how to just be a little bit more efficient and save yourself a little bit more time. You're not going to be an absolute AI wizard. You're not going to be Sam Altman, but you're going to be better, which is good enough. So hit subscribe so you don't miss that episode once it drops. Spring testing is around the corner. Projects are picking up and the push towards the end of the year is officially on. iXcel helps kids stay confident and prepared during this important stretch. What's IXL? 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Life is not a game you win. They're not giving out medals at the end of your life. It's something you participate in. And Berkman really encourages something really radical here. He says, fully enter your life as it actually is, not as it will be once you fix everything. Just enjoy your life as it is right now. This part of your life, the journey. You know, I often think about, you know, I'm getting older and I look back when I was 30, I was young. I was— I had so much energy. Look at— I look at old pictures. My gosh, I've changed. My hair, all this stuff, right? But I know for a fact that when I get to my 50s or 60s, hopefully, you know, God willing, then I'm going to look back at my 40s and say I was young and I never actually enjoyed the moment. I never actually enjoyed my 40s in my 40s or whatever age. And what I realized through this book is that anxiety actually comes from living in a made-up future. You're living in the future, and this is where your anxiety comes from. I'll relax when this happens. I'll feel good when I achieve this. I'm happy when this gets accomplished. But there's always another level. There's always something after that. There's always something after you achieve, always another milestone. If you don't learn to live in the present right now, you will never be present later. You'll never enjoy the present once you finish anything because you didn't enjoy the present when you were trying to finish that thing. And guess what? There's nothing to finish because there's always something to do. There's always something to accomplish. So just enjoy the journey and enjoy the fact that you have something to do. Takeaway number 4: progress over control. Anxiety thrives on control. We want to have control. We want control of outcomes. We want to control timelines. We want certainty. But certainty is not always available. It's actually not available most of the time. What is available, right? Progress. Tiny, small, daily progress. Instead of asking, how do I solve my whole life? Ask yourself, what is one meaningful thing I can move forward today? That's it. One small thing. You want to be fit and healthy. What is one thing you could do to be fit and healthy today? Well, maybe just go for a walk, right? Maybe put on your gym shoes and hit the gym for 30 minutes. I want to be better at business. Maybe it's just one conversation with somebody who's a little bit ahead of you. You want to be more of a with a thought leader. Maybe just read one page of an intriguing book. Have one email conversation with somebody that can help you in whatever you're trying to achieve. See, I even— I'm saying achieve is embedded in my language. But listen, you're just trying to do one thing, one thing to feel like you're making progress. Momentum is the antidote to overwhelm. When you feel you're making progress, overwhelm is kind of hard to experience. You're not in total control. You never are. I mean, if you have any experience with the elderly, you know, my mom was a dietitian and she worked at a nursing home and I remember visiting her at work and doing some volunteer work and seeing a lot of elderly people who are in their 80s and 90s and 100 even. And you start to realize that, hey, this is going to be my destination one day where I will not have a lot of control of even my own faculties as a human being, right? Things that I used to rely on, whether it's my mobility, whether it's my cognitive ability, whatever it might be. So like this idea that I can control everything at any time all my life, you're not in control, right? Stop pretending you are. What you can do is you can just make an effort, make an effort to make progress. Takeaway number 5: you don't need to feel ready. This one is subtle, but it's actually pretty huge. We often wait to feel less anxious before we act, but Oliver Burkeman in his book says we act while anxious. Okay, this is what we need to do. We need to act while we feel anxious. You act while while you feel imperfect. You act while you feel uncertain. Waiting for emotional clarity before taking action keeps you stuck, and you're going to be waiting forever. The secret is to shrink the frame. What do I mean by that? Shrink the frame. You don't need to fix your whole future, your whole life. You just need to fix one little thing of your life today, right? Just today, right? I gave the health example. You want to be in the best shape of your life and healthy and trim and six-pack. Great. Fantastic. That's the goal. Maybe that's something you want to do, but what can you do today? Well, today I can go to the gym, do some sit-ups. That's all you can really have control over, what you do today. So why do I love this book? Why do the 28 days actually work, this format in the book? Well, you stop future tripping. It's kind of meta, like you stop worrying about the future of your life and just work day by day in each day of the 28 days. On just improving your mindset when it comes to this whole battle with you trying to do everything in life. Stop over-optimizing. I am a big optimizer, try to do so many things at once. I even just caught myself while I was, you know, getting ready for recording this episode. I'm juggling 5 or 6 things I'm trying to do today. And when you over-optimize, you often, you know, make mistakes and you don't actually operate from a really strong area or place of creativity and clarity. So it's better for you not to try to do so much and over-optimize everything in your life. Just be selective. So I can say for sure, after I've read this book, went through the 28 days, my anxiety dropped. Not because life just got easier all of a sudden, but because I stopped fighting reality. I started to realize that I was fighting against myself. Most anxiety I find comes from one of three places: trying to do too much, comparing your timeline to others, comparing your chapter 2 to somebody else's chapter 27, believing you're behind. And that kind of ties in. Berkman's philosophy in this book really dismantles all three of these. You can't do everything. Your timeline is yours. You have your own timeline, and you're not behind. You're just alive. You're just a human being alive in this world. And life is finite. You have to come to terms with that, which means it's precious, which means it's something really special that you need to treat carefully and not anxiously. So this is how you can apply this starting tomorrow. Number 1, buy this book, Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. Number 2, in this book, you're going to realize you're going to choose one meaningful focus area. You're going to accept that you can't do everything and you will ignore all the other things that you're not focusing on at the moment. Do one small deliberate action daily to make progress. Stop trying to clear your entire life and never have a to-do ever, and just practice being good enough. At the end of the 28 days and going through this book, you will feel calmer. I'm telling you, not because you hacked your brain or you now you're an enlightened monk, but because you stopped fighting yourself. You started to realize reality. Before I go, I wanna leave you with this. You are not behind. You're not broken. You're not inefficient. You're human. And humans have limits. Accepting limits is not weakness. It's actually freedom. So claim your freedom. If this episode helped you breathe a little lighter, a little easier, and just made you think a little bit differently and you want to know what's next, you're like, okay, Omar, this was good and I'm definitely going to buy the book and I'm going to implement what you talked about. But let's get back to business. How do I grow a business or start a new business idea? Well, I've tried 20 business ideas in my career and only 3 actually made me rich. If you want to learn more about what those ideas were, then go ahead and go back to our back catalog. Go to our previous episodes on whatever app you're using to consume this episode, and you'll see that episode explains what works, what doesn't, based on real evidence and my own experience. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode. 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