Overcome Anxiety With Stoic Tools

In today's lesson, I begin by sharing the 4 scientific models we use to understand the cause of anxiety. From there I explain the 3 core Stoic interventions for overcoming our anxiety. If you'd like to go deeper and work on your anxiety, I have an Insight Timer course featuring the best Stoic techniques for overcoming anxiety.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Stoic Handbook,

John Brooks speaking.

Today I would like to focus on the topic of anxiety.

Anxiety has been something that has really plagued me for many years.

When I was around 18 years old I was held at a knife point in a moving vehicle and then a few weeks later I was involved in a violent situation in my local town.

And a couple of months later I started to experience symptoms of PTSD,

Intense anxiety,

Panic attacks,

Hyper vigilance and these symptoms persisted for many years and also provided me with the fire to start studying psychology,

Self-improvement and ultimately stoicism.

So anxiety is a topic that's very close to my heart.

I've spent a lot of time studying anxiety and learning to overcome anxiety.

So in this talk I'm going to give you some theoretical frameworks to better understand your anxiety and also some antidotes to curing your anxiety.

But before I get into this I just want to tell you that I've just released a 7-day anxiety melting stoic meditation course in partnership with Insight Timer.

This course is a 7-day course,

Of course you can repeat it as many times as you like and listen to individual meditations as many times as you like.

But this course did take me months to create.

It is something I'm extremely proud of.

It combines modern psychology,

Cognitive behavioral therapy as well as classic ancient stoic techniques.

We have the What If technique from CBT.

We also have the classic view from above and premeditation or adversity meditations all framed to help with anxiety.

So if you experience anxiety of any kind,

Whether that be social anxiety,

Performance anxiety,

Worry about the future,

Butterflies in your stomach,

Anything like this then this meditation course I hope will be truly life changing for you.

If you'd like to access this I'll provide a link to the show notes so you can see it.

You can also just type in John Brooks on Insight Timer and find it.

The course is $20 to access and you get the first day for free or you can subscribe to Insight Timer and you might get a free trial in which case you can listen to the entire course for free.

Now let's talk about anxiety.

So the first idea I want you to realize about anxiety is that it works a lot like a flame.

When we feel anxiety a lot of us try to avoid this flame,

To kind of get rid of this flame that's within us and we do that by trying to shovel sand on top of it,

Try to push it down.

We do it by trying to run away from the feeling.

But the problem is with a fire such as anxiety is that these techniques just prolong the burning,

Prolong the pain.

If you only put a little bit of water on a fire it just makes the fire more angry.

If you blow gently on a fire it will actually make the fire larger.

So the way that we get rid of this flame of anxiety is a counterintuitive approach.

Instead of trying to run away from the flame,

We can't because it's within us,

What we need to do is burn the flame more quickly,

Add even more fuel to the flame until there is no fuel left.

And then what happens when a candle burns through an entire wick,

It goes out.

And so if you take away only one thing from this talk,

The way ultimately that we overcome anxiety is by going into the anxiety,

By making the flame burn quicker until eventually the fuel disappears.

We can do this in psychological ways,

We can also do it in physical ways.

I'm going to be getting into more detail about that in a moment.

First of all let's look at the four modern theories for why we feel anxiety.

These four theories are number one,

Cognitive,

Number two,

Exposure,

Number three,

The hidden emotion model,

And number four,

Biological.

Let's look at each one in turn.

So the first reason why we feel anxiety is cognitive,

And this simply means that we're having thoughts,

Distorted thoughts,

That lead us to feel more anxiety.

So in my own case looking back,

I might be walking down the street at night and I see someone who looks a bit shady standing in the dark,

And I think this person's going to mug me,

This person's going to stab me.

Even though that might have been statistically very unlikely to have happened,

I start telling myself that's going to happen and start feeling more anxiety.

And so there's a lot of techniques in stoicism and in CBT that has us challenge our irrational thinking and then when we can see through the distortions we can then feel better.

So the cognitive model proposes that our thoughts,

Our distorted thoughts,

Lead to our anxious feelings.

The second model,

The second theory is exposure,

And this essentially comes back to this idea that when we avoid things our anxiety grows.

In life we all have certain fears,

We all have certain anxieties,

You can't not have those,

But if you start avoiding those natural anxieties and fears,

They grow much larger and scarier to us.

So say you go on a romantic date and the date doesn't go very well,

Then when it comes time to going on another date you might start to feel anxiety,

Which is completely normal,

But instead of overriding that anxiety and going on a date you instead don't go on the date.

And then more and more opportunities come up and you keep avoiding dates and you keep avoiding even socializing with people that you're attracted to and then eventually over time you avoid things so much that even the very notion of ever going on a date is terrifying.

Say you get bitten by a dog,

It's horrible,

You go to the hospital,

You have it treated,

A dog walks by the next day and instead of just being cautious you go inside.

Then you go to a park a week later and you see a dog far away and now you leave the park.

So this natural normal anxiety that you felt because you were bitten by a dog starts to grow and snowball because you're avoiding.

The third model is the hidden emotion model.

This is a very interesting model,

In a nutshell this means that the more nice you are and the more fake you are and the more you suppress your feelings,

Those feelings can come out in anxious ways.

So if there's a difficult conversation you need to have with your partner or boss or children and you're avoiding it and pushing it down,

Again the theme of avoiding,

Those repressed emotions whether that be anger or sadness or grief,

Those can express themselves as anxiety.

The fourth theory for the cause of anxiety is biological.

A lot of people complain about anxiety but they don't have a baseline level of health.

Maybe they have a terrible diet they're under eating,

They're not getting any kind of nutrition.

Maybe they're sleeping five hours a night and that sleep is broken.

Maybe all they do is drink sugary drinks and play video games all day and don't get any fresh air or sunlight.

Maybe this person is sedentary and doesn't get any kind of exercise or movement.

Maybe this person has zero kind of routine or aim in life.

We are biological machines and our biological machine needs to be kept well and healthy and if it's not then anxiety can arise.

I'm not going to be going in depth in the biology of anxiety here but I will just say as a starting point you do want to take care of the basics.

Prioritize your sleep.

Try to go to bed and wake up at similar times every night.

Don't drink caffeine too late into the evening.

Aim for both good length of sleep and good quality of sleep.

Try and eat a balanced healthy diet,

Get some exercise,

Get some movement.

Do the basics for your biological machine just to make sure that it's reasonably healthy.

I like to compare ourselves in this way to having a pet.

If you saw a dog that was never being taken out for a walk,

Never being played with,

Never being petted and the dog was miserable you wouldn't think the dog needed psychotherapy.

You would go well yeah of course the dog isn't getting its basic needs met.

So take care of your basic biological needs.

In terms of the difference between fear and anxiety there is actually a difference in terms of the neurobiology.

Anxiety and fear do use slightly different brain systems.

We know this because a simple phobia can't be treated with anxiolytic drugs but anxieties can.

The way to think about it is anxiety is often more irrational and is more related to risk avoidance.

You're consumed with potential threats,

You're hypervigilant.

Fear on the other hand is more rational and is related to the situation that you're in and if you were to explain to someone exactly what happened they might say well that fear that you felt is a rational response to that situation.

So in terms of examples we could say that seeing a snake in the jungle coming towards you is a reasonable situation in which you may feel fear.

Anxiety would be going to bed in an apartment near the jungle having no evidence at all of a snake being in the room but being unable to sleep because there might be one in the room.

That would be anxiety.

Some examples of anxiety might be chronic worrying,

Specific phobias that you might have,

Performance anxiety,

Public speaking anxiety,

Panic attacks,

Obsessions and compulsions,

PTSD and hypervigilance,

Concerns about your appearance,

Health worries,

Something I used to have a lot and agoraphobia which means fear of going outside.

If you have any of these then my stoic anxiety melting meditation course can help greatly with this.

So in my long multiple year quest of finding out the various treatments to overcome anxiety I must have encountered between 40 and 100 different techniques that are used in therapeutic context but when it boils down to it they're all just variations on a theme and the theme consists of three main types of interventions.

The first one is rational analysis of the fear.

This is where you use reason and you challenge the distortions in your thinking.

In cognitive behavioral therapy you have something called the triple column technique.

This is where you write down the event that happens,

Your feeling about the event,

The unconscious automatic thoughts you're having about the event and then you use a distortion checklist to look at the different thoughts that you're having.

So you might ask am I thinking in all or nothing terms?

Am I fortune telling about the future?

Am I reading people's minds in these thoughts?

Am I catastrophizing these thoughts?

And then you challenge those thoughts and then you rewrite a wiser,

Healthier,

More rational version of events and then you feel better.

You do this regularly until you learn that skill of thinking more reasonably.

The other antidote to anxiety is frame control,

Just using a different perspective.

There are an infinite number of ways we can interpret reality and for a stoic who seeks excellence of character and virtue they judge different perspectives by the consequences that it gives us.

So if thinking about things with a certain frame or a certain perspective helps us to become better people,

Happier and healthier,

Then why not do it?

And so one of my favorite examples of the importance of framing things I got from Sam Harris who said that if you lifted weights in a gym,

The burning sensation in your muscle you might feel,

You could totally love because it would be contextualized by growth and health and striving.

But if you woke up in the middle of the night with the exact same sensation that you feel when you do bicep curls in the gym,

You'd have a complete meltdown and think that you were dying because the context is different,

Even though the actual sensations are identical.

And so we can use different kinds of frame techniques.

We can use the stoic god frame,

Which is something that William B.

Irvine created and he likes to use the frame that there's a stoic god up in the sky looking over us,

Giving us different challenges and enjoys watching us solve those challenges,

Enjoys watching us overcome difficulties.

So we can go through life and every time we get a setback or something triggers our anxiety,

We can start to see it as a challenge from a stoic god and see it more like a video game that we have to kind of overcome and get to the next level.

And the third concept is premeditation or exposure.

So as I said in the anxiety flame metaphor,

The way that we ultimately overcome anxiety and cure it for good is by going into it.

The stoics were big advocates of a technique called premeditation of adversity in which you psychologically expose yourself to the things that you're afraid of repeatedly over time and then practice responding to those things calmly with virtue in your own mind.

This is like stepping out of your comfort zone in your own mind in like a virtual reality because if you think about it,

Your mind has an inbuilt virtual reality simulator.

That's what visualization is.

So you can practice experiencing the things that cause you anxiety and then practice handling those calmly in your own mind's eye.

And if you do this repeatedly and seriously as a contemplation,

It can really,

Really,

Really help lower your anxiety levels.

The technique that I want to share with you now,

And it's something that you can use after listening to this talk,

You can also listen to the actual guided meditation version of this in my insight timer meditation course.

And this is called the what if technique,

Also known as the downward arrow technique.

And the idea of this is that you often don't really know what you're anxious about because whenever you feel this anxiety,

It's quite overwhelming.

You never really go into it too in depth.

And when you start to go into it and you start to face up to it gradually,

It's a type of cognitive exposure.

Not only does the anxiety reduce,

But you actually gain more clarity over the specific triggers for your anxiety.

And so what you do is you write down the anxious thought that you're having on a piece of paper,

You know,

And it could be something like my girlfriend's going to leave me a hundred percent or when I do my presentation in work tomorrow,

Everyone's going to laugh at me,

Right?

You write that down and then you draw an arrow,

A downward arrow,

And you answer the following question.

What if this were true?

What's the worst thing that could happen?

What am I most afraid of?

And you answer that question.

And what happens is a new,

Deeper,

More core anxiety arises.

So in the example of giving a presentation and everyone laughs,

This would mean that I am bad at my job.

Okay.

So that's the new anxiety.

And then you do another downward arrow and you ask yourself the same question again.

What if this were true?

What's the worst thing that could happen?

What am I most afraid of?

Well,

If I'm bad at my job,

Then that means all of the time that I've been spending trying to be good at my job is time wasted.

So I've been wasting time.

You see where this is going.

You start going deeper and deeper and deeper until you eventually find the things that you really care about.

And I encourage everyone to do this as their first step in overcoming their anxiety so that they can start to turn toward the anxious thoughts and also see them more clearly.

If you'd like to use the guided meditation version of this,

You can just go on Inside Timer and you'll have that for free.

I'll provide a link to that in the description.

I hope this was useful and I'll see you on the next episode of the Stoic Handbook podcast.

Reviews

Absolutely helpful. This brought awareness to me. I new and true perspective. Wow.

This was helpful! I am going to take the course about anxiety. Thank you!

Jon, thank you so much for this talk. I’ve been struggling with anxiety for many years now and it’s good to know what I deal with others understand. I’m definitely subscribing to your course on anxiety and pursue the “What If” technique. Timing has a way of bringing things to you when you need them. Thank you for publishing this, my finding of it was right on time. I appreciate it!

Clear, easy to understand, a great start to tackling anxiety. Thank you 🙏😊

Thank you so much
I hope to overcome my anxiety with these guidelines

I liked the last activity, I thought it was more DBT like than CBT. I find CBT is not something that gels well with me, my mind screams BS, as it lists all the reasons as to Why I think, feel, react the way I do to a situation. 😊

Very interesting! Thank you!