Get Out Of Your Head Revolution with Brian Sachetta | Meaningful Revolution Podcast
In this episode of the Meaningful Revolution podcast, host Shawn Buttner interviews mental‑health author and coach Brian Sachetta about the philosophy behind his book Get Out Of Your Head and the decade‑long journey that led him to create the brand. Brian explains that anxiety stems from a feedback loop between the body’s fight‑or‑flight response and over‑thinking, echoing a (mis‑attributed) Einstein quote that problems cannot be solved with the same level of consciousness that created them. He recounts early panic attacks in high school and college that sparked a “call to adventure,” prompting ten years of self‑experimentation—reading, therapy, and systematic A/B‑style testing of coping tactics. This process produced a toolkit of distraction‑based strategies (deep breathing, heavy‑metal music, walking, body‑focused awareness) that he now shares through his books and coaching. Brian distinguishes coaching from therapy, noting his limits (no medication, no deep trauma work) and when to refer clients to licensed therapists. He cites influential figures such as Tony Robbins, Brené Brown, and Aaron Beck, and discusses how their ideas shaped his methodology. The conversation also touches on broader societal anxiety, the impact of constant news and social‑media consumption, and Brian’s personal practice of limiting exposure. He shares a vivid account of an ayahuasca ceremony that surfaced hidden trauma, illustrating the potential of psychedelic integration for deep healing. Finally, Brian argues that having meaningful pursuits creates a higher‑risk, higher‑reward dynamic that can counteract depression, and he provides listeners with his website and Instagram handle for further engagement.
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So what would you say is the main idea or what's the stuff under those words?
Yeah, what's the ethos of get out of your head? One of the things that I like to point at sometimes is this quote that often gets attributed to Albert Einstein. The quote basically says, you cannot solve a problem with the same level of consciousness that created it. So if you think about anxiety, it's okay. There are two places from which it could arise. There is like the fight or flight mechanisms in our bodies. There is also our propensity to chew things over and activate that same fight or flight nervous system. All that architecture. Right. Either one of those things could lead to the other. And I think if we sum it up, the combination of those two forces is basically what we know to be what anxiety is like, the manifestation of overthinking and our body going into overdrive.
So I'd love to start off with the question, what would you call your meaningful revolution?
Yeah, for sure. So my meaningful revolution is helping other people with. With anxiety and depression. Right. Helping them get out of their minds, helping them navigate some of the demons that they face on the mental health front. Right. I don't have necessarily a sexy way to condense that down into just a few words, but that is the revolution, right. Is being able to take some of the things that I've been through in my own past, make sense of those things, and then turn them into lessons that I can then share with other folks on the same front. Because it's, you know, the meaning comes from my own experiences at first. Right. It's to have gone through those things and to have suffered through some of those things. There was a lot of meaning, both positive and negative, in. In that realm. But then also, as I take those experiences, try to make sense of them, and then come up with some insights. There's a lot of meaning in sharing those insights with other folks and just being able to do something good with some of the pain that I've endured in the past.
Right on. I love that. And it gets me curious. Could you explain to our audience here, maybe a time when you were dealing with some of these mental demons as you described, and what was going on and how did you get on the path of creating. Get out of your head. The brand.
Yeah. You know, at the risk of being a little bit repetitive on some other podcast, but it's just. It makes more sense to talk about this entry point because it's the beginning of the journey. Right. Is. And I think some folks can relate to it too, is I was in college and I had actually, I had been on a date that, with a girl that I was seeing and you know, someone that I liked about six months before this. So this was when I was 17, I was in high school and I. It was at an inflection point where it was like, oh, I don't know where this is going. I'd like to find out more. I'm nervous. I like this girl. And long and short. Things went really poorly. She told me off while we were on this date and I ended up having this panic attack in front of her. And it was very unsettling because it was like, first of all, I don't know exactly what this is that I'm experiencing inside of me, right? I would call it nervousness or like extreme nervousness, but I don't know how to get out of it. I don't know how to deal with it. That sort of thing that, that's owned my mind for a little while and it was like the only thing that was going on up upstairs was basically like, how do I avoid another situation like that in the future? How do I get close to somebody that I like and not have that happen yet again? So fast forward to the event that I was about to talk about which was basically, you know, I get off to college and I meet this girl that I like and I, I forget. This is probably, I don't know, maybe like the third time, second time I had hung out with her and so she came over and she was, I guess it was a Friday night, she had been drinking, I had not been drinking. And I always hesitated a little bit telling the story. Cause it's like this is not one of those stories like a me too or anything like that. It's just I was an 18 year old kid and I really liked this girl or I started to like this girl and I just wanted to see where things were going and I was really nervous, right? I was just, I'm just an anxious person in general, especially in the past. I certainly was. And so she's texting me, she said, I'm coming over, whatever and I'm jump into my mind. And I'm like, all I can think about is that previous situation where I had that panic attack six months before that. And I'm like, how is this going to go? And is this going to go just as poorly as that went. And as soon as she gets there, she's like way too aggressive and way too forceful and is just jumps on my lap and is oh my God, you're shaking. What is wrong with you? Swearing at me, calling me all these names or whatever, runs off down the hall. And I mean, I saw her again, but like I chased after her and tried to like, you know, futilely explain myself, but it didn't really work. And so I woke up the next day and I was just so humiliated and so embarrassed. And I don't tell either of those stories to speak poorly of anyone. Right. This is just the experience and the path that I was on, some of the things that I went through. But I tell that story because sometimes it takes enough pain for us to be able to wake up and say, I now need to do something about this. And so I woke up on that Saturday and I said to myself, this is now two of these events in a row. And it's clear that I can't just ignore this. I can't just walk away and be like, I'm fine, everything's fine. I really came, I had a quote unquote come to Jesus moment where I was like, I really need to start figuring out what this is. And it again, not wasn't a clear, clean cut, sexy path, but it was like starting to have conversations with people, going to therapy, reading books, getting as much information about this stuff as I could get my hands on. And then from there, like that was when I was 18 and I didn't publish my first book until I was 28. But that 10 year stretch was all part of the journey and trying to piece this thing together and make sense of it all right.
I think especially I'm, I'm a, I consider myself a card carrying introvert, so having a lot of struggles to just interacting with strangers going into college, like I relate to that anxiety of rejection. Right. And romantically outside just making friends. I also struggled with talking with girls for a while too. But that's pretty. It's great that you're able to have that kind of like call to adventure, that like moment. You're like, I gotta figure this out. Right. And that's the, the driver for the next ten years before you. He released the book. I'm curious on that ten year adventure, right? How did you get to. Oh, I'm getting stuck in my head and I need to get out of it. And creating that brand. How did you shift into that?
Yeah, it's a great question and I want to make sure that I answer it in all the right steps and pieces that I would, that I was hoping to answer it in. You know, you had basically said, you know, it's great that you had this call to adventure and whatnot. Where I saw that going was basically like, it's cool that you have this story that you can. You can package up and be like, this was the moment or whatever it was. And readers can read that story and be like, oh, I connected with it and it was really interesting. But the reality of those situations, whether it's mine or somebody else's, is even though we extract it out and maybe abstract it a little bit, and it comes off as this nicely packaged, like, story in a book, like, that stuff is really painful, right? So it's like it gets a almost glamorized a tiny bit. But if you are the person and it's not, I'm not trying to say have sympathy for me or anything like that, but if somebody else is going through that and then they write about it, it's like, we should keep in mind that they went through a lot of pain in that situation. And even though it sounds sexy or nicely packaged or whatever it is, right? Oh, wow, here we go. We're starting the adventure. That. That is painful. And so why I preface with that is basically just saying that the rest of those 10 years was painful too. And so I think a lot of the times you can't. Obviously, I can't go and write a book and be like, okay, on day one and day two and day three and day four, like, you. You have to sum it up, right? But basically, over the course of those next 10 years, what I decided I need, it's just a product of your experiences and seeing what works and what doesn't, right? And you get a long enough period of time and you encounter enough experiences that fall into the same realm. If we're talking about mental health and anxiety and depression, okay, you go to enough events or situations that provoke your anxiety, you will eventually, like, you'll be able to run some pattern recognition and figure out the common threads. Okay, this worked. This didn't. And so over the course of those 10 years, that was basically what my philosophy was. I don't know if I necessarily started out with that mindset and was like, totally methodical about it, but as you get. As you get more and more like your. I guess the model through which you view these situations in the world expands and you have more data to put into it. You're like, okay, I now understand I need to be on the lookout for these things, or I tend to take these actions. This is what my. What's the right word? My tendencies are, and I'm Starting to see that is not. Those things are not necessarily leading me to the place that I want to. And again, it's not sexy, right? It's absolutely not. Because it's like, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of inputs to be able to then distill them down and be like, here are the common threads. But that was basically the journey that I went on. That was basically what I did, was essentially trying to figure out, okay, I sometimes talk about it from a software development standpoint. Just because that's my professional background, is I tried to at some point look at these situations and apply what people sometimes call a B testing or split testing. So it's like in situation one, I'm going to go and I'm going to apply strategy A. So maybe that's. I'm going to do this thing that I'm scared of. I'm going to engage in deep breathing before I get there. Let's see how that goes. And then I'm going to a similar situation, but we'll call it situation two. And I'm going to apply strategy B. So maybe that is reciting a mantra to myself. Something that sort of makes me feel a little bit more confident in the moment. And as I'm going on this journey and I'm reading different books and I'm listening to books on tape at the time, or cassettes or whatever it was, CDs, I'm picking up and synthesizing these different strategies and then trying to figure out, do these things work for me or do they not? And so if I fast forward all the way down to having written my first book, which is the subtitle, there is a toolkit for Living with and overcoming Anxiety. I was trying to basically not only tell my readers about my own experiences, but I was trying to say, hey, I gave all those tools that you might hear about. I gave them a shot and then I figured out which ones worked for me and which ones didn't. And I'm hoping that because maybe we are of a similar background or way of thinking, that the insights that I drew would be similar to the ones that you are going to draw. And so I can hopefully fast forward your journey a little bit and say, hey, that strategy that they talk about, like, maybe, hey, creative visualization and see yourself on stage, like giving a speech or whatever, don't do that. That's a bad idea when it comes to anxiety. So that long and short, a little rambly, but that is the journey in a nutshell and also the framework and the way that I thought about it in a nutshell, Red arm, I just.
Want to point out, and I appreciate you honoring and pointing out how messy it is because, like, like you said, we were, like, glossing over. It's like I had this moment, 10 years happen, and then I assume everything's good. And we can get to that here in a second, like the aftermath of this journey. But there's a saying in the coaching practice that I do that's called honor the struggle. Sometimes you can't get around to just focusing on everything that's going happy or right or correct. A lot of the growth is sitting with the uncomfortable or painful to find that the way through. Sounds like that was your part of your journey. So that's awesome. And just want to cheer you on for that. So now with all of that looking behind you, do you say, or would you say that you have, like, mastery over your anxiety and depression? Are you still in the middle of the, like, you found a lot of things that work. Are you still doing that work to have a better handle of it? I'm not sure if those are the best words, but you get what I'm saying.
I do get what you're saying. The how I would answer it is, I think I have progressed quite a bit. I understand what my tendencies are. I know some of the strategies that work for me. I know some of the ones that don't. And I can often, I can have almost like a mental model or an algorithm in my mind of. Of like a pattern recognition algorithm to be able to say, oh, I've seen this a million times before. I'm doing that thing that I do all the time. And so that comes with experience. And I think the helpful thing there is that once you have that quote unquote algorithm established within your mind and you know your tendencies, you're like, okay, I've been here before, I can get out of this. And that's really helpful, right, because it gives you some sense of reassurance in terms of, have I attained mastery over these things? Uh, you know, like, how I want to describe this is that it's almost as you get older, I think that life has a way of humbling you a little bit and reminding you that there is almost no such thing as mastery. Right? It's. You can take a bunch of steps on the journey and then you might take a step backwards. And it's not always this. Again, it's not always a sexy, clean cut trajectory. Uh, we are human, right? So it's like at the, if you think about the way that our brains were constructed, it's like they are survival machines. And so that means that anything that could potentially threaten us is going to rev up our sympathetic or fight or flight nervous systems. And so as we get older, we face a bunch of different sorts of struggles or challenges that we didn't face before. And so we have those quote unquote algorithms of, oh, here's my pattern recognition saying I'm doing this thing again. But one of the challenges with that approach is, is the, the fact that as what we face in our own lives changes, then it takes us a little bit to be able to say, oh, yes, I am doing that thing again, but I'm doing it to. In the context of a different situation. And it, you almost have to stop and catch yourself and say, yes, it is a new situation. And I know I haven't dealt with it before, but it is still something that scares me, that revs up my fight or flight nervous system. And for that reason, I have to apply similar, if not the same strategies, even though the context feels a little bit different. So I guess what I would say is long and short is the journey is it never ends. Right. I think again, we're human, we get scared about things. Unfortunately, things happen in our lives that might be negative, and all of a sudden we have to figure out how to deal with those things again. I know I say that I've said this a couple times, but long and short is things have progressed quite a bit and I'm very, I guess I feel good about the quote unquote mastery that I have attained, but I understand that it's a never ending, constant. I wouldn't say struggle, I would say more like a journey. Right. And life has its way of testing you. I wouldn't have written my books if I didn't feel as though I truly believed what I had written and felt as though I had made a lot of progress. Because again, it's the, the goal of those books is to help other people. And if I haven't helped myself first, there's no way that I could help anybody else. But I also want to be honest and just say that, yeah, there are days, right, where I am anxious. There are days that I'm depressed. It's more just understanding that, one, it's normal to feel that way, and two, being able to look back and say, okay, yeah, I am anxious today, but guess what? When I was 18, I was anxious every single minute of the day, and now I get anxious for 20 minutes a week and five years ago it was like I was in a depressive episode for a year. And now I have a bad day every now and then, but it doesn't happen nearly as often as it used to. And so that is serious progress. Right. And I think no matter if it's myself or yourself or somebody that's listening, you have to look at that and be like, I know that we want to rid ourselves entirely of anxiety and depression, but that is still pretty darn good.
Absolutely. And, and I'd say, I guess the word mastery gets thrown out a little bit too loosey goosey. I guess that's the technical term. But what I mean by mastery is when you're confronted with that anxiety, oh, I have your toolkit of, oh, I do this, I do breathing, I do this. And so instead of the master will have anxiety and manage it in a quicker time than someone that doesn't have the tools. So that was just for clarification for the audience. Like, I, I, and I love that you're pointing out that it's not this like Zen, everything's perfect type thing, because that's not human nature in my experience.
But yeah, great clarification you made. And I, I think I, I also want to point out the fact that, like, we need to be able to have that understanding that it's not that Zen. Right. If we think it is, that's just not how life works. Right. And then we're going to make ourselves more upset by saying to ourselves, I thought I had mastery at this point and what's going on? If you are a little bit more accepting of what you can sometimes just let it almost run its course and go through you.
Totally. Yeah, I love that. Let's shift gears a little bit. So the title of your book, get out of your head, as I mentioned, I being an introvert before having people really flippantly say that to me throughout my life, just get outta your head. I imagine it's like when you were just explaining your journey that like, yeah, you can wrap it up in this one concise phrasing, but I'm sure there's a whole bunch of digging we can do there to explain all the work and all the ideas that go behind that. So what would you say is the main idea or what I want to say the main. What's the stuff under that? Those words?
Yeah. What's the ethos of get out of your head essentially is. So there's a million different ways that I could answer this and there's a lot of scenarios or stories that I could bring in to back it up. But one of the things that I like to point at sometimes is this quote that often gets attributed to Albert Einstein. We don't. Who knows whether it's he actually said it or not. But the quote basically says you cannot solve a problem with the same level of consciousness that created it. And so if you think about anxiety, it's okay. There are two places from which it could arise. There is like the fight or flight mechanisms in our body. So that's our heart racing, our blood pumping and all that. There's a very physical component there, right? It's, that's our threat detection system. There is also our propensity to chew things over and activate that same fight or flight nervous system. All, all that architecture, right. Either one of those things could lead to the other. And I think if we sum it up, the combination of those two forces is basically what we know to be the. That's best. Basically what anxiety is like the manifestation of overthinking in our body, going into overdrive and whatnot. And if you were to create your own anxiety, which I, I guess the entry point doesn't matter so much because if you're, if you're revved up, if your heart is racing more than like, more likely than not, you are going to start thinking, thinking a little bit too much. And if you are thinking too much, you are probably going to cause your heart to race and your blood to pump and all that stuff. So let's just say for a second that the entry point into our anxiety we'll just say is our thoughts. And so if you have, for example, a job interview on the calendar a week from now, and all of a sudden you're like, oh, I don't know about that job interview. I don't feel so good about it anymore. And you start ruminating over it and you start chewing it over and you're like, oh, what am I supposed to say? What am I supposed to do? What if I look like an idiot? What if I don't know how to answer the questions? What if all those different things, right, we have then created a problem through our thinking? And why I like to bring that Einstein quote to the table is just to be able to say to ourselves, try your hardest, try your darndest to put yourself in that state of mind where you are ruminating, chewing over, stewing on that job interview. And then from there, try your best to think your way out of the feelings that you have created through your thoughts. Just can't do it, it doesn't happen. So basically what that quote says to me is, okay, we have created this problem through our thinking, which means that the solution to that problem cannot come through thinking. It has to come from some other avenue. And for me, what that stuff is usually is like getting back into your body. Whether it's through going for a walk, doing some deep breathing. Maybe it's, you know, reciting a phrase to yourself that distracts you. It could even be like, hey, go play a video game or something. Right. The main thing is you have to like, you've got this train, like this true train just flying through your brain, right. The thought train. You gotta somehow find a way to stop that in its tracks. And we do that through any number of distraction related means, if that makes sense.
Totally. Yeah. From the work I do as a coach, we talk about how, yeah, basically there's these different interlate related systems in your body. There's an emotional system, there's a logical system, there's the physical system and thinking about your life holistically. I love that phrase. And if you're thinking about your anxiety, you can't out think it. Right. You might need to go connect or distract yourself some other way. Because I was actually going to ask you, how does your physical body relate to your mind and anxiety and depression? Do you have a couple of your favorite distractions that you think really work for you or really work for a broad audience that you could share?
I could talk about some, you know, I think I always. I wouldn't say that I necessarily hesitate, but I do like to say that one of the difficulties about anything in the self help world is that everybody's a little different. Right. So something that works for me might not necessarily work for you or resonate with you, whatever. So I guess the philosophy or sort of the approach that I give. Right. Is I do throw a lot of different ideas at my readers because I know that I need to provide enough that they can distill those. But I'm not going to throw every strategy under the sun at them because I want to have. I want to feel as though I've done some sort of editorial process of saying, hey, I did filter out half of these for you guys because I know that these months generally don't work for most people in terms of distraction related methods. For me, listening to music is huge, big. I enjoy listening to heavy metal. I think that. And that's just one genre that I like. But for me, like heavy metal is, it's. I guess I'M going to use the word distracting, but it's very consuming. Right. Where it's hard to focus on this song with these heavy, deep riffs and then also be in your head at the same time, right? So if you're like jamming out to a song, if you're at your desk, like drumming along to it or whatever, it's hard to hang onto your anxiety at the same time. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it's like a cure all or anything like that, but I do enjoy listening to that kind of music. And I think, I think I like it in general. Like, I just enjoy the medium. But I also feel as though its nature plays well with trying to get ourselves out of our heads a little bit. A couple of the other things that I like to do. So I did mention going for a walk. It's almost okay most of the time. Not all the time, but most of the time that we get in our heads, our bodies are still. And so we have a lot of energy through coursing through us by virtue of the thoughts that we are spinning through our minds. And you can feel this energy. It's not like the energy like all of a sudden like drives you up off the couch and sends you for a walk, but it's. You can feel it. You're like, oh my goodness, I feel terrible. My heart is racing, yada yada, all these different things. It's not always that easy to take that energy and convert it into kinetic energy. But I guess that's what we should do is say to ourselves like, okay, you know, it's rare that I am ruminating while I am running around the neighborhood. And you know, maybe we don't always need to go up and go for a jog or a run or whatever because there's only so many times that we can do that per week or whatever it is. And some of us don't like running, but I think we can all, you know, for. Obviously I want to be cognizant of like handicapped folks that are listening, but it's like most of us can get up and go for a walk and if you can't, it's like, figure out a way, whatever it is, it's basically just figure out a way to get back into your body. If that means, I. I don't know, going. Whether it's getting on an elliptical, getting on a bike, or even just sitting down and trying to do some meditation, because I think most of us have the ability to do that. Obviously we Run the risk of while meditating, like continuing to ruminate, but just figuring out a way to attach to our bodies, put our focus back on our limbs and get. Get that focus away from all the things that are going on in our minds. That's another strategy that I like to partake in music. Going. Going for a walk. We talked about deep breathing. So. So that's another way that you can get back into your body, right? So if you're really focusing on your breath and you're saying, okay, I'm watching the air go into my belly and then I'm watching it depart my belly and I'm watching my stomach inflate and then deflate and so on and so forth. It's just another way to distract ourselves. Right? But also, the funny thing about breathing is there is some good scientific backing of that strategy, which I'm sure in your coaching practice you cover with folks, which is essentially the deeper you breathe and it comes on the exhale is basically you activate your parasympathetic. Parasympathetic nervous system, which is essentially the opposite of your fight or flight nervous system. So it's. People will sometimes call it like the rest and digest system. If we are anxious and our heart. Our hearts are thumping and blood is pumping and whatnot and we do some deep breathing. I know, again, like we talked about, get out of your head. How can that. That. That can sometimes sound a little bit flippant. Sometimes people will say, hey, dude, like, you just gotta breathe. And that can come off as well. And so I'm not trying to put it in that same sort of light, but at the same time, like, breathing really is important. And I know it sounds simple and I know it almost sounds like, mundane or like, too obvious, but it's. I'll tell you, it's. You just go back to it and you're like, wow, okay, I took 10 deep breaths. Number one, activated my parasympathetic nervous system. That helped. Number two, I was focusing on. On my breath and not the scary things in my mind. And so you get this almost multiplied or double effect. And so it's definitely a helpful thing. And I think the reason why I like to talk about some of those strategies is we're all human, right? So it's. If you go all the way back in time, okay, maybe there wasn't heavy metal thousands of years ago, but we were all breathing thousands of years ago, or, you know, the species was, and we were all moving around in the forest or the savannah or wherever, you know, whatever location we were living in. And so it's. If we go back to our roots and we try to connect with some of the things that we used to do it often, not all the time, but often those are good channels or good ways to reconnect with our bodies. Right. Calm ourselves down and whatnot. So I. I do like some of those things from an evolutionary perspective.
Right on.
Yeah.
Breathing is such an easy. You mentioned it could be a very flippant thing to say. And one of my favorite mentors often says, common sense isn't common practice. And I really love that phrase because we all know that breathing can help it, and it's just in us innately, I feel. But you never think that when you're revving up that your. Your breath's getting quicker and maybe you're not breathing, doing shallow breaths, which is the physical response to stress, which then tells your brain that you're stressing out physically.
And.
And then I just can cascade out of that. So I love those strategies. I love that they're simple, and I love that they're actionable. And just being mindful of when you read those signals in your body to then, okay, here's a menu of things to try to see if it works for me and get out and do it. So I did want to ask. So you have this toolbox. And I know as a coach, too, there's a fine line between being a coach and being a therapist. And do you have any advice for people they might have really intense anxiety and depression and might need to actually seek more help than they might be able to get from your book? Talking with a human is a lot better than reading strategies, I feel. But because it is a very serious subject too, if you can manage it with a book, that's amazing and great. And if you need extra help, how do you tell the difference between the people that you can help and make a big impact with and people that in service of them, you need, they need some extra oomph?
Yeah. So the first thing that I would say to listeners is, if you need help, you should seek the help that you feel you need. Right. Nobody should ever be ashamed of going to a therapist, getting the support that they need. Because you find a good therapist, it is. It's like worth its weight in gold. At the same time, there are a lot of avenues that are available to us to help us with our healing or to help us with. With our emotions. So I guess it just depends on the order of operations in which somebody comes into contact with me. So Maybe they are struggling with anxiety and they say to themselves, hey, I haven't listened to this podcast yet, so I am ashamed to go seek a therapist. I'm just going to go on Amazon and I'm going to look for a book about anxiety. Maybe they find my book and they say, okay, like, those were good strategies and I like the perspectives, but I need more, right? Maybe that means that they reach out to me and we do some coaching. Maybe from there it's, oh, you still need more than this, so why don't you talk to a therapist? Or, or maybe the reverse order. I. I don't totally know for sure. All I would say that is in terms of the work that I do versus the work that a therapist does, right? Like, I am not a doctor, so I'm not qualified to do, like, medicinal things and, and treat I. My. The way that I pitch my coaching practice is. And again, this kind of comes back to the order of operations is what I want to do with the practice is take the strategies that I have already talked about in my writings and then help the reader or the listener, if it's an audiobook or whatever, apply those things to their own lives. The difficulty in writing a book or a blog post is that I can't write it for Sean. I can't write it for Jessica. I can only write it for a mass audience. And I will give examples in hopes that the reader can connect those examples to things in their own lives. But that's not a given. And so they may come to me and say, that was. That was helpful that you talked about that thing, but I am now dealing with this specific situation, which you didn't cover in your book. And so how do we go about looking at that specific subject? And then we take the same strategies that I cover in the books, in the blogs, and we try to overlay those on those specific situations. One of the difficulties, right, where I would say, I'm trying to get to an answer of the question of, yeah, how do we know coaching versus therapy is. I am probably not with. With a coaching client. It's. It's not in my expertise and it's not something that I would normally do to be like, hey, you know, what happened in your past? And let's unpack some trauma that you've been through and all that stuff that is more traditional therapy, right? I am trying to say, like, situations that you're in today, how can we apply strategies to them that would be helpful? The piece of digging up and helping people cope with trauma and whatnot. Sure, I'd like to do that, but I. I just want to. I want to walk a fine line and make sure that I do what I'm qualified to do, if that makes.
Sense, a hundred percent. And, you know, I walk that line quite often. And the. I love the. The way that I view it is I think therapists and coaches are trying to get the same outcome. But like you mentioned, a therapist will delve into your past and work through traumas, especially traumas and things of that nature to help you make a better decision now to live your life in the future, where a coach will take you, where you're at right now, give you strategies to help you make choices to live your better life in the future. And one of the indicators for me just to share as a peer is if people aren't progressing. Right. That's a quick thing. It's. Oh, like I gave you this long list of strategies. You didn't do one because you were so depressed or anxious. Maybe I'm not the right person for you. That's. But that's one of the very clear things that I'm looking for when I'm working with a client. So I thought I'd just share that with you.
But, yeah, I think that's a good way to sum it up. And then from there it's okay. There's some more digging that needs to be done, and unfortunately, like, I might not be qualified for that sort of thing. So we'll move you on to the next level.
Definitely. Right on. I'm curious then. See the list of questions we got. What were some influential people on this topic that kind of helped you think through how to approach it? I just, I love just figuring out how people get to their methodology or their things.
Yeah, it's a great question. I've listened to a lot of voices over time, and I think with some of them, you reach a point where you're like, okay, I got out of that person what I needed to get out of them, or whatever. Because it's like, I'll be. Let's be honest, right? If. If somebody writes like five books about mental health, usually by the fifth book you're like, okay, like, you know, some repeated content or whatever. But I would say on this front, it started with actually. So my brother was big into Tony Robbins in college, and he introduced me to Tony Robbins. And so we went to some of his seminars. And I just loved the fact that he cut through some of the bs, right? And he was like, and this is where I I probably wouldn't want to do this myself, but I respect the fact that Tony did it is he would basically say people would come up to him and be like, dude, you don't have a PhD. You don't have all these advanced degrees. You can't be doing these things. And he's dude, I have a PhD in results. You bring somebody to me who is struggling and I can fix them in 30 minutes. I'm like, wow, that's. I. Especially for, I think for anybody, but especially for a young kid who is a little more gassed up and whatnot, that's a really compelling proposition. I really resonated with his teachings early on. Again went to some of his, I guess you would call them conferences or his live events and then read a couple of his books. And I just love his sort of can do approach. Right. He's very hands on and he's very enthusiastic, very optimistic and whatnot. So I really enjoyed that. As the years went on. I'd say a bunch of different folks in the space, right. I've trying to think of a few off the top of my, my, my mind. I know Brene Brown is one who, she's like a shame researcher but, but all that stuff is tied up into our emotions and our mental health. So I've read a few books by her and listened to a bunch of podcasts with her on them and she's, she's really interesting. Trying to like what's his name? Aaron Beck is someone who's really well renowned in this space and he's done a ton of research and written books and studies and stuff like that. And so I'll, I'll often cite his research in my works. It's somebody who has been around that long and has put forth as many studies and sort of proposals and just overall like he has. It's. What I'm thinking of is like in my second book I talked about Beck's Depression Inventory, which is a way that we can go through a checklist and say, is this person depressed or not? And at the time when he proposed it, it was. You might look at it today and be like, yeah, like, of course, but at the time we didn't know a lot about depression. And I forget exactly when it came out. Maybe it was the 70s or something. But you look at tools like that, you look at pioneers of the industry and you say to yourself, those are the folks that you want to listen to and those are the folks that have a real, a lot of really good ideas. And then you can synthesize those things down, take what work what works for you and maybe mix it with folks, ideas from other folks and come up with your own sort of philosophy. Right. It's like people will sometimes say that there's no such thing as a new invention or everything's already been invented. You basically build a better mousetrap or whatever it is. All these ideas, right? Mental health and I, our emotions and whatnot, people have been writing about for centuries. And so it's. I am probably not going to, let's face it, I'm probably not going to put something forth that is brand new, but I can put a different spin on things that helps rent, helps other folks resonate with the content in a different fashion. Right. Because as the generations change and the trends change, there are going to be new, there needs to be new ways to deliver that content and have it sit with folks in specific ways. And so I would assume that if you like read some of my writings, you can definitely pick up on some of my influences. And it's just interesting to see. I'll sometimes sit down and I'll be like, it's certainly not plagiarism, it's more just oh, I. These couple of sentences that it has a vibe of a specific person and it's. Yeah, I'm almost pulling from all these different sources in my mind. They're all influences. And that's. Yeah, I think bringing it back to music a little bit, you see how one band influences another band and another band and it's okay, a specific kind of riff, a style of music became popular and then people started to use it and whatnot. I don't know, something like that is. That's how I like to talk about that subject a little bit.
Yeah, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. And to go back to the music reference, there's only so many notes, right. And so many sequences of notes. So it's how we are able to combine it and uniquely make it ours that I think is super fun and cool and important for the next generation, as you said. So when it comes to your methodology, what do you think has been the most surprising thing about your journey that you've learned about yourself throughout, through exploring this space?
It's a good question. I think, I think that some of the work that I've done and some of the experiences that I have been through have changed me. Right. I remember being 18 and being like a hard nosed kid and stuck in my ways and at times like not outwardly to other people Like, I've. I think I would like to think that I've always been relatively respectful of people and nice and that sort of thing. But on the inside, looking back, right, and being like, I can't believe I did that, or I. I was that stubborn or whatever it was. And also just looking at other people's situations at that time at 18, and being like, that guy's an idiot. Ah, that guy's a loser, whatever it is. And as you get older and you go through more things, I think you start to have more respect for yourself and what you go through, and then that allows you to have more respect for other people and what they go through and understand that the world is not black and white. And you can't always read one specific situation in one specific kind of way, right? So we all have different lenses through which we view the world. We all have different upbringings, we all have different beliefs. And so the work that I have done has helped me become a little bit more compassionate, right? To say, hey, I can understand that person, or a specific person. What, what, what. Whatever they said, whatever they did, however they acted, could be driven by a bunch of different factors, many of which I cannot understand, or I. I just can't know them, right? Unless I sit down with them and we have a conversation. And there may be some forces that are pulling the strings that they are not even totally aware of. And so the work that I've done, and I guess the surprising piece to me is I look now, I'm 33, I look back at 18, and some of this is just growing up and understanding that the world does not revolve around you. And at 18, you only have so much life experience and you don't actually know that much, even though you think you do. At 33, I now look and I say, I actually, I know some stuff, but I actually. There's a lot of stuff that I don't know, and I understand that. And I also understand, again, that the fact that people have different ways of viewing things, and people have all sorts of challenges that they go through. And so it's like having a little bit more compassion for folks that are going through difficulties and whatnot, and understanding that I might not always be able to recognize or piece together what it is that they're going through, but I can have compassion for that difficulty, that struggle, that battle. And it's almost like the end piece of this rant ends in politics, right? Where it's like, I can understand if somebody has a different belief than I do on A political front. And I can say it's okay to have that disagreement. Right. But in terms of the mental health stuff and whatnot, it's like I can understand that a specific situation triggers somebody in a different fashion than it would for me or for you. And that's okay because it's all a product of people's past experiences and their beliefs and how they view the world and whatnot. And so again, repeating myself. But the surprising thing to me is just how much my work and the things that I like, just the mental health battles, have changed me on that front and opened me up to new ideas and, and help me be a little bit more understanding of things that people go through. Right.
I love that. And I'd summarize that as just being more curious about people's human experience. Cause you've experienced more yourself. So I love that you said something important and this might be an interesting question for you. So you mentioned politics and we talk about anxiety and depression at a personal level. How do you view it bubbling up to a society level? What do you think? Would you say that there's more anxiety and depression out in the world now, today? And what are your thoughts on that? Without leaving the question?
It's. It's a hard, it's a hard question to answer because I don't know for sure what I would say is it. It feels that way, right? It feels like we look around and we have social media in our pockets and we've got these news networks on our TVs, and, and there's a lot of competition out there for people's attention and clicks and eyeballs and that stuff. And in a competitive market, you inevitably have to grab people's attention. Right? And I think we all know that the headlines that grab people's attention are rarely the one of, oh, this guy saved a cat out of a tree. Right? I would love for it to be that way, but unfortunately, I think we know that it's not. And the fact that we are so connected digitally these days, the fact that, you know, we have so much information on our screens, computers, TVs, pockets, excuse me, in our pockets with our smartphones and our smartwatches and all that stuff, I think it gives us the impression that things are, you know, people are more anxious than ever. The world is in a worse place than it's ever been. There's more depression than ever. I. The reason why I'm a little guarded here is I can't know. I also look back like there, there are times where I want to say, oh, man, like, life is hard. It's harder than it's ever been, whatever. And then it's, what if we went back a hundred years in time and it's the Great Depression and World War I had just ended and World War II is coming up and it's. That sounds pretty bad, too. And if I were constantly having to think about being, you know, drafted into the war and whatnot, I'd be pretty darn anxious. And I would think that the whole population or, you know, my cohort, whether it, you know, young men or whatever it is, I think they'd be pretty anxious, too. Long and short is. I don't know how to answer the question. Like, I don't have a definitive answer. All we can do is we can look at the anecdotal evidence of saying, okay, yes on our screens and on our devices and whatnot. It feels as though our apps and our media sources are driving bad emotions, negative emotions, more frequently. And then we can also look at some of the studies that folks have done and the numbers that are published by whether it's the National Institute of Mental Health or something and say, okay, cases of anxiety are on the rise. Cases of depression are on the rise. The. The thing is another sort of surprising piece of. Of my own journey and answering the previous question in a slightly different fashion is as you get older, right, you realize that things are not that simplistic and correlation does not always equal causation and whatnot. And so it's. I think it's easy to say, oh, the numbers are higher. And so, like, definitively speaking, there's way more anxiety, there's way more depression than there's ever been. Don't get me wrong. I would probably assume that is the case. But you also have to then go into the numbers and say, mental health is a little bit more accepted these days. Are people more willing to talk about it? Are they more willing to take a survey and give a yes answer rather than, in the past, there was a no answer. So I just don't know. Again, my hunch would say, yes, there is more of these things out in the world. And it's. The world's a dark and scary place at times. So there is reason for the anxiety. There is reason for the depression. I don't. I just don't know what the true answer is. I don't have all the data in front of me. But I think if we can say one thing, is that there are certainly a lot of folks that are experiencing anxiety. There are certainly A lot of folks that are experiencing depression, and regardless of what those numbers are or whether they're higher or low or lower than they were in the past, we want to help as many of those people as we can. And for me, that's what drives the work that I do.
Yeah, I agree with the hypothesis and guess, and I respect the nuance that this could. There are too many variables to play. Everyone wants the magic bullet. But it's not Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram that's caused our Twitter or name your app. The question I had while you were talking about the news and social media and stuff, did you ever try, as one of your strategies to not do that stuff, and how did that impact your anxiety and depression or.
Yeah, so I, I haven't watched the news mostly my entire life. It's just something that I've, I remember from a young age. Like, my grandfather loved the news and he would, he'd be eating his dinner, sitting in front of the tv, watching the news, and I, I. All I can remember is like, being so anxious, like, when the news would come on that I would freak out and be like, mom, like, I got, I can't watch this. Can we turn off the tv or whatever. And she'd be like, just go in the other room. Like, you'll be fine, whatever. So from a young age, like, I, I knew that I didn't want to watch the news, and I still don't. And there's a lot of folks that I listened to. I remember I was listening to a. A podcast by Peter Diamandis. He's been like, the life extension and space research fields, and he su super smart guy, and he was like, if you want to do a really good thing for yourself and your mental health, just never watch the news again. And it was nice to hear that. A little bit of validation of, okay, like, I never thought I was crazy because the news is crazy, but it was just nice to hear that folks that are high achievers and doing really cool things out in the world are like, yeah, you really shouldn't be watching that stuff. And again, like, there is nuance where it's like, in the middle of a global pandemic, you might want to hear some of what's going on or whatever. My take on it, though, is that if something is important enough, everybody else watches the news and they'll let me know about it. And then on, on the social media front, like, I'd be lying if I said that I don't go on social media. I try to Limit it for sure. And one thing that I talked about in my second book, so that, that, that second book was on depression. There was a chapter where I said the general theme was, pretty much anything in your life could potentially trigger you and trigger your depression. And it's not a. I'm not trying to tell people to, like, bunker up in their safe space or whatever, because that's like, that's just not gonna be helpful in the long run. But you do need to try to construct your life and the world around you in a way that does not trigger you as often. It's, again, it's not a coddling kind of thing. It's more like, why would you willingly send yourself, you know, into the proverbial abyss if you don't need to? So it's the same thing as, you know, I don't watch the news because I know that it would probably trigger me. So on the social media front, it's like, as soon as people start saying stuff that I don't like or that scares me or whatever on Twitter, boom, hit em with the unfollow. And it's, maybe I like those people and I'm friends with them and I wanna stay friends with them. But, okay, so maybe the mute button. I don't know. But I have, I think, everybody who deals with anxiety and depression enough eventually going back to the beginning of the podcast and talking about the pain. Right? You eventually experience enough pain that you say, I am putting this first. It's sure, I, I'd love to, I'd love to know what, you know, friend X, Y, Z is saying on whatever social media app. And then that way I can stay on little bit more cued into the conversation and have things to talk about when we get together. And this is, I mean, I'm literally making this up. There's. I don't, like on Twitter. I follow, like, just sports, really. But even, like, even if it's, oh, yeah, I, I unfollowed a sports network because they were talking about things that I don't like. And now I, okay, maybe I missed out on a couple things. It's like, again, I know the pain that the, you know, the mental health side of things can cause me. And I think a lot of folks get to that point and you eventually say to yourself, I need to put this stuff first. I need to prioritize my emotional wellbeing. And if I'm not doing that, you know, what's the upside? What's the downside? I think they're. The upside is Very low. The downside's pretty high. So, yeah, excellent. Yeah, fantastic.
I love that response. So looking at time and thinking about wrapping up, I got two more questions for you.
Right, Cool. I got time. Cool.
The first question I wanted to ask you, is there something that you could share about depression anxiety on this podcast that you haven't done in other media before? I love asking guests this question, so take your time.
This is such a tough one. I'm going to try to rephrase the question a little bit and say, is there a topic that I have not discussed on podcasts as frequently as some of the others? Because I know that, like, I, you know, and I have a list on the side of my computer. It's. And I go back to the same places. It's okay. Breathing and this and that. So let me see if I can pull one out on the depression side that I don't necessarily talk about as much.
Okay.
I think one thing that could be interesting, and I know that we covered this in a Skim the surface here in saying that as a coach, it is hard to unpack trauma with folks and talk about trauma. We're not really qualified to do that sort of thing. And I will preface this conversation in saying that in my second book on depression, I also skim the surface here and just say, in a nutshell, this is how trauma affects us, and then this is what it can do for us if we work through that. But I give the invitation to the reader to say, if you're curious to learn more, talk to your therapist about this sort of thing. But one thing that I. I have not, probably not talked about in that much detail before, that is the notion that there are often forces that are, like, pulling the strings in our minds that we do not totally understand or realize. Right. It's almost, I guess, off in the shadows. We have our demons and things that are changing our behavior, influencing our behavior in ways that we don't totally comprehend. And so one. One story that I would like to give. There's a lot in the mental health space. And let me just preface this by saying, like, when it comes to psychedelic drugs, like, you know, the. The concept of psychedelic drugs, the conversation around it is growing and people are, you know, more excited about what about it and whatnot. And there are scientific studies that are going on. You've got the maps, work and whatnot. Just because the conversation is growing and whatnot, I think everybody still needs to understand that these drugs are all pretty much illegal. This is not me saying go out and do these things. But if you were curious about them, there are some states where, for example, psychedelic mushrooms are decriminalized. So you. You could potentially. Right, if you wanted to, you could go to Oregon. I think maybe you could go to Colorado and go to a facility and try these things out. But I. I went to a facility in Florida last year where they specialize in ayahuasca ceremonies. And so if folks don't know ayahuasca is a specific kind of psychedelic, the chemical compound in it is called dmt. I forget exactly. If I said, you know, what it stood for, I would mess it up. So I'm not going to say it. If you want to look it up, you can. It's a tea or a brew that you drink, and it basically, you know, once it takes over, you have these sort of hallucinations. And people will say that the hallucinations pretty much always go for what is dark first. Like your fears, the things that scare you, your traumas and whatnot. And on a different show, I could probably go through my entire experience and talk about what that was like. But one thing that was so interesting to me was so after you have your ceremonies, so, like, you basically do two of them. You do one Friday night, you do one Saturday night, you can pay to do another one Saturday day at this particular facility. But so on Saturday day and then Sunday day, you do these breakout sessions, and you basically, they call them integration, but you really just talk to your fellow cabin mates about your experience. And so there was this one woman who had talked about how, you know, she was abused as a child. And her experience on, you know, during the ceremony was that. So she knew that she, on some level, she knew that she always resented her mother for most of her life because she felt as though her mother did not protect her from being abused as a child. And so she's. As soon as this thing started to kick in, sure colors, and you go through these weird sequences and whatnot, but when the real meat of the journey kicked in, she was like, the first two people I saw were my abuser and my mother. And what it does is it the drug, essentially, again, it. It faces you. It forces you to face or confront your demon, so to speak. And the tough thing is, like, you don't want to. You really don't. And I'm not even saying, like, on DMT or whatever it is you don't want to. Like, in general, we don't. Right. There's a reason these things are way off in the shadows is because we Suppress them. They're too painful to deal with. And people go. And I went to this ceremony because it was like, okay, what am I not dealing with? That. That if I dug up, could be helpful for me. And it's a lot of people that go there are curious to do that painful work, even though it is very difficult, right? And so this person who was in one of my groups, she was saying that as soon as she saw her two, her mom and her abuser, she was like, oh, no, no, we can't do this. We can't go there. And people will talk about during a psychedelic experience, like a bad trip or whatever it is, there's all kinds of different bad trips and ways that you could experience negative emotions. But on ayahuasca, one of the main ways that you have a bad trip is the pain comes up and you resist it and you essentially cycle through it. Like, it's almost as if the drug and your brain will not allow you to not proceed. And if you hold on as tight as you can, like, you're in for an absolutely misery of a three or four hour journey. And so she said, like, eventually it was very difficult for her, but eventually, like, enough evolved during her experience where she was like, okay, I am willing to unpack this, to dig this up a little bit and see what's going on. And during an ayahuasca ceremony, if folks are curious, there is a. There is on Netflix. There's a show called Unwell. And I believe, I don't know which episode it is, but it's a short series. There's a specific episode about this place in Florida that does the ayahuasca ceremony. So you could learn a little bit more about people's specific journeys or kind of get a better breakdown of what it's all like. But this woman, she is, eventually she's confronting her mother and her abuser and whatnot. And she's, you know, I really don't want to deal with this or whatever, but, like, it's starting to evolve and I'm a little bit more willing to unpack this and whatnot. And so I feel like I may have missed a piece. But anyway, I'll keep going. Is eventually she got to the point where she was, okay, now I'm sorry, and now I'm remembering what I was trying to say. So if, you know, if you watch a documentary, I can even tell it to you a little bit. But basically. So when you talk, like when people talk about doing an ayahuasca ceremony, one of the things that comes up a lot is the notion of purging. So purging is any kind of emotional release via the body. So it could be that you crack your knuckles, it could be that you burp, that you pass gas. It could also be that, you know, you vomit. And that is what most people are familiar with when the association of purging. A lot of people go right to okay, vomiting, right? And so she was like, I saw my mom, I saw my abuser. And we started to work through this and she was like, I started to see that it wasn't necessarily my mom's fault that this happened. And she's, I eventually worked through this stuff to say, I am going to forgive my mom for the fact that this happened. I'm going to forgive myself for the fact that this happened. And she's, I eventually got to the point where I was like, I gave, I forgave the person who did all these terrible things to me. I forgave that person. And she was like, as soon as that happened, I purged all of that out of my body. And, and at least in that moment, like, I, I, I don't have her phone number. I'm not, I, and I, and, and if I did, I, I don't know if I'd necessarily divulge what we talked about or whatever. But so I, I haven't done a follow up to be like, hey, how are you feeling a year later or whatever it is. But then that next day she was glowing and it was fascinating. It was like, okay, at the very least, like, I'm not trying to turn this into a scientific thing. This is more just an emotional thing and who knows what the long term effects. And again, not condoning any of this stuff, but it's just fun to talk about, fascinating to talk about where it was like that next day you could see that the weight had been lifted because she talked the day before and it was like, oh, she just seems down on her luck and whatnot, but we don't really know why. And then the next day she's like, I feel so much better. A weight has totally been lifted off of my shoulders. To be honest. Like, I hadn't even thought about this stuff in years because I suppressed it so much. And so circling back to the beginning of my answer, I know this has been a long one, was in, in my second book, I talked about like the power of working through and unpacking trauma and addressing those shadow, like forces that lurk in the distance or in the recesses of our minds. Is okay, so maybe we don't necessarily have something as intense as being abused as a child or some. Something in that vein. It could be that we went through a relationship and things didn't go. Didn't work out, and we were heartbroken and it was really painful. And because of that heartbreak, we decided to. That we were not going to pursue romantic interests anymore. And I guess one of the things that I like to talk about on this subject is like, the notion of trauma. There's lowercase T, trauma, there's uppercase T, trauma. There's not really like a defined definition of okay. You know, is trauma like you saw a dead body or it's basically whatever causes whatever happens to you that causes your mind to not know how to function. Right. And so that could be anything. If you have that sort of response to whatever the stimulus is, you could potentially classify that or your, you know, your therapist could potentially classify that as trauma. And so it's like the general concept I wanted to get across with this chapter in the book, which has nothing to do with the ayahuasca ceremony, was just the notion that there are probably forces in our lives that are lurking in the shadows and in the background, and maybe those things are preventing us from getting past our depression or making moves in our lives that are necessary for us to advance. And sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes unpacking that trauma can be a really good thing for us in the long term because it'll be painful at first, but it can then allow us to advance. Right. And so that was the. In general, that was what I was going for with that chapter, but then also this large answer here. So that's all I have to say on that front.
Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing that. And it is super fascinating if you are. If you're listening and are interested. Michael Pollan did a really good book called how to Change youe Mind, where he talks about a lot of the research going on and how important it is to have a guide if you choose to use these illicit substances, which we're not condoning here on the Meaningful Revolution podcast because it's illegal, but it's super fascinating. I think Tim Ferriss also has a couple of things that he's talked about on his podcast or blog. So worth scoping it out if you're interested. Okay. The other question I wanted to ask you before we got off is since this is called the Meaningful Revolution and it's to help people have meaningful pursuits, I was curious. Having worked with a lot of folks and done the Work yourself. Do you think there's a relationship to having a meaningful pursuit in your life and anxiety and depression? And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Yeah. This is a great question. I probably will be a little long in my answer. And there's a lot of different crevices that we could go into. Cool. So if you don't have any meaningful pursuits in your life over the course of time, it might not be tomorrow, it might not be a month from now. I think it's inevitable that you will encounter some sort of melancholy, let's call it. Right. It might not necessarily be major depressive disorder, but probably if you do not have that, like, spark of life or zest inspiration in your life, I think it's inevitable that you will struggle to get out of bed each morning. Right. You have to have something that compels you to go do what you do. And so, short answer there is yes, you need to have things that you're passionate about in order to avoid. I would say probably, probably depression. But even if we say it a little bit lighter, just overall negative feelings, darkness, that sort of thing, the inter. The why, you know, one of the crevices here that I want to talk about, nuances, whatever. And maybe the answer is not as long as I originally anticipated. But the tricky thing about having passionate pursuits and all that is that there's. It's. I'm gonna say it's like a seesaw of anxiety, but I don't know for sure is. Okay, so on the one hand, if you are constantly not doing what you want to be doing in your life and you don't have these passionate pursuits, how. I know I just talked about the depression piece, but. But how it probably goes, right, is like, you are probably uptight, uneasy, anxious, because you're like, oh, my life is passing by, and I'm not doing these things that I want to do, and I'm nervous and, oh, geez, like, just some manifestation of regret, right? Over the course of time, that fear, if we do not pay attention to it, eventually falls into the background of, okay, I am not. I'm not going to pursue those things. And so I'm retreating into this sense of helplessness, of hopelessness, AKA depression. So repeating what I said at the beginning of my answer, but the reason why is like, you'll see in a second. So the seesaw sort of anxiety is if I don't pursue what I want to pursue, then I might experience anxiety, I might experience depression. Then I should just go experience. I should go Pursue what I want to pursue. Here's the difficult part is if you're going after the things that you want to go after, guess what you're going to face. You're going to face anxiety. It's inevitable. It's okay. Like, I want to start a company, I'm passionate about that. The business world is a challenging world, right? You're going to. You're going to face competition, you're going to face ups and downs and upheaval and stuff like that. And along the course of that journey and all those different things, you encounter, bang, anxiety in your face, right? How am I going to pay my bills? How am I going to keep my employees? How am I going to pay their salaries and all that stuff? How am I going to keep this business afloat? And so whatever the pursuit is, I could give a bunch more examples, right? But like, for me, right, it's like, I'm a single dude. I talk a lot about anxiety on the intimate relationship front. And so I know that going out and trying to find a partner is something that's really meaningful for me, and it's a passionate pursuit for me. But I also know that anxiety comes when, with that territory, I am willing to push through that anxiety. And I know that it is par for the course, but it's still there, right? And so it's not necessarily as easy as saying, oh, I'm just gonna go do the things I wanna do because I wanna do them and it's fine, right? You very, you may very well encounter some kind of fear. And so the, the issue with this seesaw, right, is that I think a lot of people, maybe at first, they say, I'm just going to pursue what I wanna pursue, and that's going to be fun for me, and it's going to be the ride of a lifetime, whatever it is, right? And then without realizing what is coming their way, all of a sudden, there's a lot of anxiety associated with that. And so maybe not on a conscious level, but on some level they may say to themselves, oh, that's a little too much. Let me step back and let me do something else. Or let's just forget about the passions for a little bit. And then that seesaw tips the other way. And all of a sudden it's like back to the, hey, my life is flashing by before my eyes, or I'm afraid that I'm not accomplishing what do I want to accomplish? Some basis or manifestation of regret. And so I think the issue that I see is that if you go down both paths, you. And maybe this isn't an issue. Maybe there's a potential cause or a potential emergence of a solution is that you go down both paths. I think you eventually see that anxiety awaits you on either one. And so you have to say to yourself, if that's the case, if I'm going to experience anxiety, and that's the downside, what is the upside in both scenarios? In the case of not pursuing your passions, maybe it's a little bit of comfort, I don't know. But obviously you're not going and doing that thing that you're passionate about. So the upside is at the very least reduced in scope. If you're doing the things that you're passionate about, probably the anxiety, the propensity or the possibility of anxiety is probably higher. The potential there, right? But also the upside, the potential upside is also much higher. And so I guess you get to this point where you say to yourself, do I want some of the comfort with the risk of eventually falling into the regret and depression framework, or am I willing to confront the difficulty of doing the things that I wanting to want to do, knowing full that, like, I'm not trying to glamorize this, right? Doing that is hard, but am I willing to put myself out there and face that so that I can then do the things that I actually want to do and cultivate some really positive emotions, whether it's fulfillment, excitement, whatever by virtue of doing that for me, I feel as though I've had some experience. What I'm talking about. I have. I feel like I have some real life experience with this. And it's one of the reasons I, I write my books and I run my brand and stuff like that. It's not easy. It doesn't at the moment, it doesn't really make a lot of money, but I'm willing to pursue that because I want to. And so I think we all have to sit down and ask ourselves this question of which upside and which downside combination do I want? And I would suggest, but it's up to everybody is in the long run, you want the scarier one with the higher upside. Because in the very long run, if you choose the other path, I mean, if you fall into a state of helplessness and hopelessness and then you find yourself in major depressive disorder, that is hell, that is a nightmare. So I don't know, a little bit ranty, but that's what I have to say about that one.
I love that idea. And I often talk about how if you have Two paths, essentially, what you're saying, and there's going to be hardship on both. You might as well spend your energy on the shot of change, on the shot of transformation, on the shot of doing something that fulfills you even if you don't accomplish it. The act that you tried and you don't have that regret is so much more powerful than playing it safe for that little bit of short term comfort. But over the long term, then you're like, what did I do with my life? The people that are like, what happened? I'm like, I was young and now I'm old and I didn't do the things that I wanted to do with my life and I can't. I don't have the chance now to switch it. That's a terrible nightmare scenario. And you will never regret taking the shot at. Maybe I asked that person out and it didn't work out, but at least it helped me put that chapter aside to pursue the next thing. So I love that. I love that. With that said, Brian, it's been an honor having you on the podcast. I really enjoyed our discussion for the audience, what's the best way for them to follow up with you or check out your books?
Yeah, just go to getout of your head dot com. So that's all one word, no dashes, no spaces in that URL. I've got my blog up there, I've got my books up there, links out to Amazon and whatnot. So best place to find me is there. If you want to connect on social media for the books and the brand, I tend to use Instagram. The handle is get out of your head. All one word there as well. I always like to say on these podcasts, right if, please reach out if you want to reach out. Having meaningful, deep conversations with folks on this subject is one of the benefits of, of walking this path. Right. It's part of that meaning is, is helping people in their lives. And it's like, even if I can't necessarily get you the thing that you necessarily need at this moment, whether, like maybe going back earlier in the conversation, it's saying, hey, maybe you need some therapy at this juncture, still being able to make that distinction and then help that person on their way is another avenue for cultivating that meaning. Please reach out if you want to reach out. And also if you are listening and you are going through anxiety and depression, please just know that Sean and I, we understand that our hearts go out to you and we hope that it resolves itself soon and that you Keep fighting because you're not alone.
We are cheering you on. Definitely. That's a great way to end this episode of the Meaningful Revolution. Thank you again, Brian.
Awesome. Thanks, Sean.
In everyone's journey to find meaning, there's usually one moment where they make a decision to act. It's that point when you encounter a poor product or a piece of music or something else in your life that you love and you decide that you can do it better and you go about creating better. It's that point in your life when you look around and wonder, how did I get here? How life gets so boring or stressful or just not how you imagined. And so you decide it's time to figure out how to change that. Or it's that feeling that you could be working on something that's more fulfilling, more in service to others and more exciting. And so you decide it's time to figure out how to have more of that in your life. And in each of these scenarios, there's this call to adventure, a call to call from your heart to change and the decision to act. So I'm Sean Butner and I help people heed their call from their hearts to change. As a certified high performance coach, I guide people through a science based process to help them live their life more aligned to their aspirations and dreams. And maybe that's you. And if it is, maybe your time is now to work with the coach to help you follow your call to adventure. So if so, you can apply for a free one hour strategy session with me at www.seanbutner.com coaching or check the link below. In there we will spend one hour building your high performance plan. We'll talk about what your call to adventure is, that decision that you've made or want to make and then the plan to make it happen and realize it. And so I've helped people start businesses. I've helped people change careers. I've helped people change how they feel about their lives through this process called high performance coaching. I know it can help you. I love coaching. I love the people that I'm able to serve with it. And I hope that's you. So check that link below wherever you're listening to or watching this episode of the Meaningful Revolution podcast. Enjoy throughout rest of the episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Brian about anxiety and depression. I hope you took a lot of notes and if you would share this episode with free friends who might find this helpful. It helps us at the podcast, keeps us going and gets the good word out. So we need a little bit more positivity out there. So please help us out with that and see you in the next episode of the Meaningful Revolution podcast.
