 All factory cues can be very evocative for particular memories, so you can use it for other memories, but ones with all factory cues are particularly potent. So you want to, you know, kind of evoke some of the best emotions that you've ever experienced in your life, try some joy conditioning. Just go back and think through those emotions and remember those details, particularly those positive emotions. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. And what I love about the deep breathing is that it also brings you into the present moment. Exactly. So a lot of Johnny's anxiety was induced based on what's going to happen this weekend. What's exactly going to happen Saturday when he steps in front of the room? How are the clients going to be interacting and feeling? Much of our anxiety is from not what's happening directly in the moment, but it's what could happen in the future. And with that breathing exercise, I've taught it to our clients. I use it in these moments as we were laughing earlier, just getting a little stress, getting it here in the studio, getting set up. It can induce that anxiety. So when we look at our breathing and we look at this pattern of breath for us to calm down, how long do you suggest we do that to really get that parasympathetic nervous system working at our advantage? Yeah, you know, it can start working in just a couple of rounds of breath. I tend to recommend a boxed breathing technique, which is inhaling on a four count, holding on a four count, exhaling on a four count, and holding at the bottom for a four count. So in a anxious situation, you might be waiting for to go on a podcast, for example, just a few rounds of that can really, you know, quickly bring you back to a calmer place. So yeah, if you do it longer, it'll probably last longer, but try it out. I love these approaches because they're experimental. They work immediately. They're using a part of the nervous system that has evolutionary evolved for just as long as that fight or flight system. And people don't realize how powerful it can be. We talked a little bit, obviously, the title of the book Good Anxiety, Bad. We label things, our emotions as good and bad, and that can often lead us astray. And many of us, because of those labels, will try to avoid certain emotions. We'll try to avoid anger. We'll try to avoid frustration and anxiety. But that actually works against us. That avoidance doesn't actually help, it often compounds the problem. So how can we feel into those emotions if we've been taught that these are bad emotions that we should avoid? Yeah, so that's a great question. And the first important step is to realize that these are not bad emotions. These are normal human emotions, fear, worry, anxiety, anger, and that the most important thing is they teach us things about ourselves, our world, our values. And so the value of turning down the volume on your anxiety, turning down the volume, not kicking out the door, is that it gives you that space to be able to turn in on these uncomfortable emotions. And I found myself making friends with my own anxiety, because I found that it taught me about what I really value. For example, one of my oldest anxieties, I was a very, very shy, awkward wallflower of a young girl and a high school student and college student. So I had a lot of social anxiety. And of course, I'm a professor and a teacher now, so I've learned some skills. But that fear, particularly of social situations, parties, or when I'm meeting new people for the first time, not in a work setting, that social anxiety still comes back. And what I realized is I've always had it, but it's a double-edged sword. Because while it's always hard for me to kind of get comfortable in those situations, what I realized over the pandemic is that by breaching that fear and making those connections, that's what got me through the pandemic. Those social connections, those friends that would come on Zoom calls and meet me for walks, so, so valuable. And I'm fine once we become friends. It's just that fear of, you know, making friends and being vulnerable. But it's like, okay, yes, you're scared, but look at all the wonderful things that come if you do that. So that's one example of what can come from turning in and looking at your emotions in a more objective way. Would you say this is the beginning of our looking at new conditioning of how we're going to be looking at anxiety from fear to joy conditioning? You just mentioned the very favorite part of my whole book, which is this tool of joy conditioning. And I think that I hope that everybody has a change of mindset towards the emotion of anxiety from this book. And so joy conditioning is an example of something that you can do to help counteract fear conditioning that happens automatically when something negative happens. Scary, negative, you know, I think I give the example in the book of I was living in Washington, DC, and my apartment was burgled. And I walked around the corner and I saw my door crowbarred in. And every single time after that, every time I walked around the corner, I had this fear is like, am I going to see the same view again? That's fear conditioning. It lasts a long, long time. And again, it's also protective. So I thought, why, you know, how can we counteract that? And so I used my 25 year understanding of how memory works to come up with the idea of joy conditioning. Joy conditioning is based on how we know our long term memories are stored. It uses a brain structure called the hippocampus. And we know that things like repetition can simply make a memory stronger. So joy conditioning is the practice of going through and finding the juiciest, most funny, most loving memory that you can come up with. And try and find one with an olfactory component with a smell associated with it. You know, thank your grandmother's lemon pie. And just reliving all of those wonderful memories of the who, what, where, when, and why associated with that loving memory. And why do I ask that you have a smell associated with it? Because we know that olfactory cues can be very evocative for particular memories. So you can use it for other memories, but ones with olfactory cues are particularly potent. So you want to, you know, kind of evoke some of the best emotions that you've ever experienced in your life. Try some joy conditioning. Just go back and think through those emotions and remember those details, particularly those positive emotions. And yeah. We drop great content each and every week. And we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. This is exactly why I'm so big on creating ritual in your life for different phases of your day, your morning period, your deep work period, your creative period, where you change the light setting, where you maybe light some incense. Perhaps you put out some symbolism, some visuals that state this is where you are lighting that candle. All of these things have a way of creating an atmosphere or bringing you into an atmosphere to be better at the task at hand. For myself, I'm also a musician, writing, playing music is very important to me. And in the evening when I'm done with work, the atmosphere in my apartment changes to make it more conducive to be in that atmosphere to write. And we're so quick to get rid of things that we've seen that might seem as old fashioned to us as creating ritual, make turning habit into a ritual that changes, that helps change our state. I totally agree with that and I particularly love the idea of ritual because through ritual I was finally after years of trying able to kind of create a meditative practice for myself that really worked. So I tried everything, tried all the guided visualizations and meditations and they worked for a little while but it didn't really draw me back that that's what I really wanted to do until I had the pleasure of going to Bali and I happened to meet this monk who specialized in tea and tea ceremonies and he taught me this tea meditation which is simply a meditation over the brewing and drinking of tea. And every day since that which was six days six years ago I have done it every single morning because for me that ritual first you boil the water then you pour it in the tea then you let it see then you pour the tea then you drink the tea then you start over again. That ritual kind of kept me in meditation when otherwise it was like okay it's been 10 minutes can I get through 12 minutes of meditation and so now it's easily you know 45 minutes if I let it go that long but it's because of the power of ritual. I love that and linking habits is something we've talked a lot about I've actually linked brushing my teeth to box breath so in working with my therapist I would find that sometimes just starting my day I'd get a little over anxious thinking about my inbox and trying to get to all the tasks at hand so it's always helpful if there's something that's already in your life that you're doing without having to think without having to use willpower or motivation to then link another practice like this. We were on our way over here and one of our team members was sharing that his struggles with anxiety happen at night and often keep him up laying awake in bed and he was wondering hey is there anything that I could do if I'm finding myself in this constant state of rumination that's keeping me from getting to sleep and he was sharing that he's tried some breath work and it really hasn't worked so are there strategies that might help some in our audience who are struggling with that rumination and can't get to sleep? Absolutely in fact one of the six major gifts of anxiety that I talk about in good anxiety addresses exactly this point and so I struggled with exactly the same thing I would be just about ready to fall asleep you know I could feel it it's going to feel so good to be asleep and then suddenly oh my god what if that happens what if this happens what if I don't get that raise what if all of these things so that what if list then I'm wide awake and I can't get back to sleep and so the gift of that is that you can turn all of your what ifs that are always based on things that are important to you things going on in your life turn that what if list not that night but the next day into a to-do list so what I do now is that still happens that that worry still comes up but I know that what I'm going to do is is turn that what if into my productivity for the next day and it also helps resolve the anxiety because every time you can take some action to resolve anxiety which evolutionarily was resolved by physically running away or fighting it is a very useful thing so that is a gift of productivity that comes from your own personal form of rumination or what I call in the book the what if list I want to add to that and I love looking to focus that anxiety somewhere productive and as things were coming to a head for me yesterday throughout the evening once I went from my day is done now it's guitar time and I was going to sit down and write and put did everything that I needed to do to get myself in that state I found myself and and I had one of the most productive little sessions I found a part for a song I've been searching for and I and I was I was so present in that moment which I think that led to when I woke up today I was utterly refreshed and excited for the day to begin rather than that anxiety spilling over in today like today would come completely different mood yeah no that's beautiful it's it's so important to kind of jump start yourself out of those phases of anxiety and it could be very powerful to you know switch off even a bad anxiety session