 100% of us have anxiety now and that volume is turned way way up. Too much of anything even a good thing is bad. So the first and one of the things that I tried so hard to do in this book is give every single person who reads this book a whole bunch of tools to be able to turn that anxiety down because that is step one number one in in hard of seeing the goodness of your anxiety. 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 gonna 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. The idea of good anxiety really came about thinking about anxiety from an evolutionary perspective. The emotion of anxiety didn't evolve just to be a big ol anchor around our neck. That's not why things evolve. It evolved to protect us. It evolved to it's actually essential for our survival. So that makes a lot more sense and that really shifts the original kind of thought process and mindset around anxiety. It's not something that you want to sweep under the carpet sweep out the door. It's something that you want to try and leverage so you can be protected so you can kind of help your survival and so I started with that and then started to explore well okay how come nobody these days are feeling protected from their anxiety? We have to start there because I know everybody's thinking that right now and the answer to that is that all of us including myself have the volume on our anxiety turned way up these days. It's shown in all the stats even before, here's my wow stat even before the pandemic did you know that 90% of Americans raised their hands and said I experience anxiety on a daily basis. 90% this was before the pandemic. Clinical levels of anxiety went up by 30% over the pandemic which basically you have to think that 100% of us have anxiety now and that volume is turned way way up too much of anything even a good thing is bad. So the first and one of the things that I tried so hard to do in this book is give every single person who reads this book a whole bunch of tools to be able to turn that anxiety down because that is step one number one in in harnessing the goodness of your anxiety. Well you're here to give us those tools and we're going to get to that in just a minute but one of the questions someone asked and you were saying that too much of a good thing can be a bad thing and one of the reasons that I am I am with you on that 90% is that I think it was about around 2009 the studies were coming out of showing with more leisure time that we have and using our technology to indulge ourselves and be a consumer has given us more time to feel that anxiety and enhance that anxiety do the comparing and contrasting on social media to be slammed with so much news and of course the best news to us that gets us fired up is the most horrible news so we're getting we are we are not only being force fed that news we're searching it out we were just talking about it earlier and so a lot of this is doing this to ourselves and then we're slammed with I feel anxiety I need to rid myself of this which is the wrong procedure that's the way wrong way of looking at it and so having a healthy understanding of what anxiety is why we have it and how we can use it is going to be beneficial to us rather than this idea of I could find a pill I could find something to do I could ignore it'll go away because if you do try to sweep it under I'm sure you can tell us on what is going to happen if we play that game I would just love to ask obviously there are moments in our life where we will feel anxiety you you can't avoid it but what do we know clinically where it's something that we need to seek attention we need to seek help because I think that's really a great starting point for our audience when we know our anxiety is overwhelming and we should probably talk to a professional perfect that that's the perfect question and the answer is that anxiety exists on a very wide spectrum there is clinical levels of anxiety which is a different beast it is a condition where your levels of anxiety are truly debilitating you can't work you can't interact with your world you need to go to a professional a doctor just like you would if you had a broken leg now I did not write the book to treat clinical levels of anxiety that's a really really important point so thank you for bringing that up I wrote it to treat what I call everyday anxiety the lower kind of levels of intensity of anxiety yet that anxiety we know that everybody is feeling we know that it is draining we know that it is effectiveness we know it's affecting sometimes as for you know most of the waking hours in the day because of this social media that is affecting us most of the waking hours of this day and so the approaches that I that I describe not that people with clinical anxiety can't use it but they were designed for people with everyday anxiety and I certainly put myself in that category in fact I outed myself while I was writing the book or I realized I am an anxiety denier or I was an anxiety denier I started writing this book thinking okay I'm a neuroscientist this is an interesting question let me dive in because you know I don't have that much anxiety myself but but let's just dive into it and as I'm doing this research it's like oh my god I I have so much anxiety good thing I'm writing this book because it's really helping me 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 many of us have behaviors and coping mechanisms that allow us to mitigate it and not realize that it's impacting us what are some of those behaviors that our audience might be engaging in that's actually increasing their anxiety and they're not aware well um you know I think a common one is just this this uh reflex we have to sweep it under the rug so I I just always wanted to again going back to myself as my example I wanted to be the upbeat the happy one the energetic one so I can't show anxiety that that is against my brand yet I was feeling these emotions and that's why such a big part of this book is the message that anxiety is part of our normal range of human emotions we were not designed to be 100 happy 100 percent of the time we have all of these emotions and why do we have anxiety we have anxiety because that fear that worry is saying hey this is important to you pay attention to this and um that is very important you you get scared if you're you know going to teach a big you know uh course with thousands of people waiting to hear what you're going to tell them um and and you get a little bit nervous because that is an important consideration that is a useful emotion if you were at the same level of you know activation as you are watching netflix on your couch you would not give a very good presentation so it is essential that is why it's essential I can laugh about the the point you are making about speaking in front of a lot of people and for myself when I feel the most anxiety it is usually doing we were talking about this yesterday it's usually during weeks of a program that we are running at the art of charm and this weekend we have a weekend boot camp that is happening here in Las Vegas and with everything that I needed to get done throughout the week I could feel the stress the anxiety just working itself up to where at a fever pitch yesterday where I was in a snappy not in a tolerable mood for anyone to deal with and this morning knowing that he was pulling in we had a big day I felt great because we're in we're in procession we're in we're moving into uh program time and so it started and now it's like everything else that I was worried about I'm not going to worry about that now I'm just focused on making the most incredible experience for ourselves and our clients for this weekend and that put me in a place to feel much better about what is going on now that is a great tool to use remember why you're doing this that anxiety is telling you you love giving these these presentations I could just tell and and um we get worried and worked up because we want it to be so good you could focus more on you know I'm doing this because this is my passion this is my dream and and all of this work is going to be so that I could have these great interactions with the people or whatever whatever that activity is um I often remind myself of that because it's not just you and I that have these feelings of worry and and fear and snappiness that comes when when things start to get overwhelming which they're doing now um every other day and I know many of us in the current state especially are so focused on work it feels like work is 24 seven three six five and that causes a lot of anxiety and the breakdown in communication we used to be able to go into the office and see our boss relate to one another in a more physical space and now many of our clients are coming to us feeling increased anxiety because they don't know what their boss thinks about their performance they don't know how they're fitting in in the team and there's this interpersonal dynamic to anxiety that we're seeing rising in our clients so what role do relationships have on our anxiety levels yeah relationships have a huge effect on your anxiety level so of course the better the relationship the more open uh the more communicative the better and the more just zoom like where it's just transactional okay let's come on let's get our stuff done and leave it's like what happened was that good was that good enough um it it can uh exacerbate our anxiety so I think that's a wonderful um wonderful reminder to all of the bosses the supervisors the managers to remind you and I remind myself I manage lots of students lots of interns um that that it's up to you to remind others that you know we're here we're a team we're doing it together and to check in I I actually before every lab meeting before every intern meeting we do um a two-minute meditation together to bring everybody into that space it's only two minutes we would have waited two minutes just for everybody to get there in the first place and it's a reminder that we are we are human we're there together we're there for a purpose and um it's really helped especially I never used to do this when we weren't on zoom but I will continue when we get off soon hopefully yeah for many of us it's that lack of communication that is anxiety inducing we don't know where we stand we don't know how people feel about us and of course we're trying our best to do our tasks and go about our day-to-day but that anxiety does get to a fever pitch so for Johnny yesterday he was snappy I was feeling it and it was starting to impact us and and let's talk about some strategies when you now have a gauge and you start to recognize in yourself that this anxiety is not only impacting me but it's impacting my co-workers my spouse my friends how do we start to mitigate that so let me use Johnny's example from yesterday so you had anxiety uh that was uh um kind of stimulating your underlying physiological stress response and this is what happens when you go into stress it is activating that fight or flight response and what is happening in your body is that your heart rate is going up your respiration is going up blood is being shunted from your digestion and reproductive systems to your muscles because that is the evolutionary kind of response so that you can either fight whoever's coming at you or run away and um and you have these you know heightened feelings of of fear and anxiety and so how do we do that so here is what everybody should know but very few people do did you know that there is a equal and opposite part of your nervous system that is devoted to de-stressing you that was the fight or flight did you know about the rest and digest part of your nervous system it's called the parasympathetic nervous system and it is naturally deployed after a stressful event to try and get you back down of course if the stressful things are still coming at you you don't come down for a long time so everybody should be asking how do I activate that what how do I do that and the best way to activate that is to breathe deeply because the parasympathetic system decreases your respiration rate decreases your heart rate and actually shunts blood from your muscles to your digestion and reproductive organs and so the the best and most conscious way you have to start to control that and activate that is deep slow breath not surprising but the most ancient form of meditation relaxation is deep breathing