Anxiety - Short bites. Episode #4. Take-aways

I'd like to end this discussion the way it began, with a tour de table, which you can use by answering Melissa or just sharing whatever you'd like. One of the premises of this podcast is that there's too much talking and not enough doing, so which is why we've tried to be very practical. So let's pass the mic and tell us what you've heard today that will inspire you to start doing something differently than the way you did it prior to this conversation, or any thought that you want to end the conversation with. And I'm going to start by sharing my own takeaways to give you guys a moment to collect your thoughts. So there's two things that I really found really interesting, more than two things, but two things that I noted. One is, I think it was Yannick when you said things happened. Things doesn't happen to us, things happen, and we create all those stories like if things happens to us. And I think that's really a key differentiation. And it goes really well with this struggle that I had with victimization. When something happens to you and you take it personally, not necessarily because you have a big ego, but just because that's how you were programmed or, you know, based on your past experiences. The second thing is this being human, this idea that the human condition and being human is painful. Not, you know, something— Melissa, you said disaster— but the fact that it's human. And I've always agreed with that. I think so far I've kind of resisted to the idea that it should not be. But I want to try tomorrow, even maybe today, to ponder the idea that what if human condition was difficult. And next time that I do have an attack in my brain with negative thoughts or some negative feelings that I have, I want to be able to recognize them and almost to a point of like I'm giving a badge to myself, like, oh my God, I don't feel good. I'm thinking really things that are scary or whatever it is. And instead of letting them pass, detaching myself from them, and, you know, which I've been doing and looking at the absurdity of life and the fact that I'm gonna die, and, you know, and then that works. This time what I want to do is look at them objectively but with applying some sort of meaning, as this is you being human and good for you, and you're brave, and wow, look at those negative feelings, you know, here's a medal, without entertaining them but just applying a different meaning. And then the third thing is, even though I just said the word meaning, I would like to practice not having any narrative or story or meaning. I would actually— would like to go through life based on experiences and not have so much time— not waste so much time in looking at what I'm doing and trying to understand why and the meaning and the story. And I would like to free myself from that and just do whatever I feel like doing. So that's my takeaways. And thank you so much, everyone, for sharing your thoughts. Why don't we begin with Eric, if that's okay with you?

Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think— I thought this was a really interesting discussion. And I think when we discuss things like mental health, anxiety, depression, sadness, and, you know, all these different things, we're not talking about like a thing, like I can— here's a pen, right? It makes me think a little bit of addiction, right? Addiction we talk about, but when you understand addiction more deeply, you realize it's a syndrome of lots of different things and lots of different things can help. And so I've found it always useful to— and that's why I liked what a lot of what I heard here. I love to be able to put up different lenses and look at the situation or my challenges through a lens. Does that lens help? Does that tell me something that I can use? And if it doesn't, then I go, okay, well, you know, all right, that's not useful for me. And so I, you know, I think there's a lot of useful lenses we discussed today. I really like this idea of— I think I tend sometimes, since I've had it for so long with depression, to just go, it's just this thing over here and I'm just going to get through it. Whereas I think some more exploration, what, what is it? What am I being told here? Is there something I can learn? And I think I did that for a long time too much. And then like as typical, I think I've swung to the other extreme a little bit where I'm like, eh, doesn't mean anything. It's just something that happens, right? And I think maybe moving back towards the middle, and I love the idea of, you know, the subconscious and the conscious interaction, right? Because I often think in the same way, I think that all this stuff is finding a balance. Like we talk about on one hand being mindful, accepting and seeing what comes up. And just letting it be, which is really helpful. But then there are also things that our subconscious just throws up that are decidedly unuseful. And instead of just going, well, there it is again, there are times where questioning it or working with it or reframing it or reprogramming it can be useful. And so I think for me, I find all these things, I find these discussions useful because they help me calibrate my approach a little bit from, okay, this was where I was before, but now maybe I'm over here, I'm going to move back here. And I found this discussion really helpful in giving me some different ways to calibrate.

Thank you, Eric. Scott?

Well, I thought this was really interesting, and I learned a lot from all of it. I think I learned that I should probably get therapy from Yannick or Eric, particularly to try to improve my glass half full lens on the world. You know, I was struck, Virginie, by the idea that you want to just, you know, not impose meaning on things. I feel like that's almost an impossibility. We're meaning-making creatures, and as we go, we are always telling ourselves little stories, even if we're not aware of it, to kind of put things in context. But we do have some control over the meaning that we impose on, and that gets to the idea Melissa and Eric, you're just picking up on this paradox that we are sort of machines made of meat, ultimately. We are only ever, at some irreducible level, our bodies. And yet we can use our bodies to exert control over our bodies. I mean, if we believe that we have any free will. And even beyond the idea of free will, can we impose top-down change on those kind of, you know, the subroutines or underlying programs that Melissa was talking about? You know, can we, you know, overwhelm them? And those, you know, for me, the kind of negative self-talk, the schema that everything sucks, I am awful, you know, learning to, through top-down imposition of meaning, and then just through, you imposing new habits of thought to kind of push them down. I also think I was reminded of something that I have been trying to get better at too, that also Virginie Glaenzer, you said earlier about taking ourselves out of ourselves. We are least anxious when we are thinking, or at least for myself, I am least anxious when I'm thinking about other people, when I'm trying to help other people. It's sort of a truism. But putting others before yourself or getting out of your head. I mean, in some ways maybe this is the worst— why therapy is terrible. You're paying someone for the privilege of just talking endlessly about yourself when really the therapeutic thing is to get out and actually help someone else. And this conversation helped me think about that. And then also just think about the importance of— part of my negative thinking, and I think this relates to my depression sometimes and my anxiety, is feeling like I'm a cork floating on the surface of the water. And I think there are two ways that you can adaptively recast that. One is just accepting that I'm a cork floating along and being OK with that. Or trying to take control of agency and saying, I have autonomy. I can make meaning. I can determine the shape of my own life. What's clearly completely maladaptive is to be that cork floating on the water and being unhappy about it. So I either need to be a happy cork or stop being a cork.

Very wise word. Gordon, a few last words?

I don't know about last words, but today at least, very lively, very wonderful discussion, always different perspectives. A couple things, I think Eric is right that the inner life is not like a bunch of tables and chairs that we could define precisely, like the difference between anxiety and depression, as though there were things. I think that That's important to remember. We talked a lot about trying to reframe things. There comes times in life, like I got a friend who's, I think, to get deported after 20 years here, family here, just absolute nuclear weapon. Another one, his friend whose son committed suicide. I've dealt with a lot of illness in my family. There's certain ones, life's not a disaster, but there comes times when it's harder hard to reframe them in some positive way. I mean, so I think we need to recognize that. And so I think that's important. And yeah, and I think what Scott was saying about other people, yeah, I see the important thing in life is holding hands. I mean, Thich Nhat Hanh said, "It's all a matter of holding hands and walking home together," and relationships. And I think the medical model that really underplays that, the importance of that, this kind of the reducing everything to neurochemistry as opposed to relationships. But I mean, my aim is that when I go through those periods, the inexplicable sadness and numbness and everything, is I want to be a loving person. That's my goal in life, be a caring person. I haven't always been that. But to be able to care about people when you just feel like shit, you know, I think that's my criteria. So thanks for a wonderful discussion.

Thank you for sharing, Gordon. Yannick?

Yes, lots of super interesting points. I want to thank everybody here for just like making me think about certain relationships and how things connect. A couple of things that I would like to pick out is thanks, Erik, for depression hates a moving target. I think I'm gonna cite that often. And it's kind of— it's It's related to what you said, Virginie, in terms of, well, I just wanna experience the moment and not make so much sense of things. And I think it was Jason Silva who once said that the only cure for existential anxiety are flow states and being so engaged and so in the moment, so challenged by what's happening in the moment that we simply don't have time to sit in our human condition and, you know, feel the anxiety of just sitting in the void and tuning into the subtle anxiety that sits underneath. You know, some anxiety hits us in the face, and this is where at the extreme, more extreme end of the spectrum, we sit there and we're in a deep depression. But I think for most of the people, most of the time, it's not like that. You know, the depression kind of is in the subtext, and we can very consciously and positively distract ourselves by tuning into what's happening in the moment and really engaging all of our senses, it still remains a distraction. It can help to some degree, but there's certainly an area where life is just horrible and we're suffering. And the question that still comes up for me a lot is, where does coaching end and therapy begin? And that's a very complex question, and I think there's no one answer to that. But at what point do we need to intervene with medication to help us, and what kind of anxiety and depression can we actually help tackle with tools that don't need medication, that we can access with certain forms of therapy or even coaching. And that will remain a point that I think about, so thank you for that.

Very well, very well said, the limits between therapy and What was the other one you said? Therapy and coaching. Yeah. Melissa.

Well, I just want to thank everybody for sharing their personal experiences.

Oh, sorry, that was my microphone.

You know, when I was thinking about what— it's funny because actually Gordon and I asked Virginie to do this and to do existentialism, and I actually gave couple of the names here. Like Scott, you're my pick.

And, and I think you gave me Yannick too.

Yeah, I think I did actually. And, and so I was actually, you know, this, this topic is very, very important to me and I spend a lot of hours of the day going over all these concepts and I do very abstractly use them, and also very, very, very subjectively use them. So in a way, they're both inaccessibly abstract and also so personal that maybe it only applies to me. And I think that's, again, one of the paradoxes of humanity is that we like to take our own experiences and assume that other people are experiencing the same thing in the very same way that we're experiencing it. And the one thing that occurred to me is that in the explanation of depression being, um, you know, a serotonin mishap in the brain, I thought, wouldn't it be just lovely if everybody's depression had one reason? Everybody's in the entire world. Wouldn't it be lovely? And that's what we would all hope for is that there's only one answer. There's one solution. If we can just give, you know, enough studies to prove that this is the decisive factor. And so I didn't want to come into this audio with any of my own explanations of anxiety or depression, particularly because I didn't want to steamroll over other people's narratives. In other words, I didn't want to say, well, this is the way that depression is supposed to be felt, and this is the way that anxiety is is supposed to be dealt with because I think it is honestly one of the most subjective things that it just individually is felt, experienced, made sense of, suffered through individually. And so yes, I have so many answers of how I deal with depression and how I deal with anxiety and all the other amount of emotions that go through my existence, but I just, wanted to make it clear that everybody else's experiences are, you know, king in their lives. You know, that we have our narrative is the most significant thing in our lives. We look for confirmation of our narratives. So if anybody goes to Janik, it's because they already kind of have that idea that, you know, that— I mean, positive psychology has a very specific slant. If anybody goes straight for the medication, that's because they already had this idea you know, so we seek out solutions that reaffirm the narratives that we're already telling ourselves. And so I really want everybody to get the help that they need in the way that they need and to understand themselves the way that makes sense to them and not impose, you know, even if a solution works for me, very much works, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the solution for everybody. So I just wanted to say thanks for everybody sharing their experiences and their own techniques and etc. It's really, really useful to have a wide variety of perspectives on mental health instead of one answer.

Yeah, and thank you for this openness and this call to personal freedom. And I think 2020 is going to be an interesting year where really it comes down to becoming individual conscious self-authoring people and, you know, make the right choices for ourselves instead of asking other people, what should I be doing? And maybe that's the, the anxiety also is to make the right choices, to make choices in general. Thank you very much everyone for joining and for sharing your perspective. That was really, really insightful. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for hosting.

Thank you.

Thank you. It was a pleasure to meet you all.