3 Practical Tips To Lower Neuroticism And Anxiety

In this talk, I go over three ways to lower neuroticism, anxiety, and emotional reactivity. I start by explaining what neuroticism actually is (from the Big Five personality model), how it shows up as constant worry, irritability, and emotional volatility, and why it creates so much stress — not just for you, but for the people around you.

I also share my own experience. I used to be highly neurotic due to both upbringing and temperament. After years of working on this — through observation, lifestyle changes, and over 5,000 hours of meditation — my baseline anxiety dropped dramatically, and my emotional reactions are nothing like they used to be.

From there, I break this down into three practices: 1. Changing your inner mindset and developing a stronger sense of control over your life. 2. Using meditation to build real emotional stability, calm, and equanimity. 3. Taking more action and reconnecting with purpose, because action kills rumination.

Transcript

Hey this is Ish and in today's talk I'll be going over three different ways you can lower your neuroticism.

Excuse me while my cat goes a bit crazy in the background.

So neuroticism is one of the big five personality type facets.

So in the big five personality type model there is openness,

Conscientiousness,

Extroversion,

Agreeableness,

And neuroticism which is what we're going to focus on in this talk.

And you can also check out my other videos on each of the facets if you want to learn more.

Now neuroticism is basically how predisposed you are to respond to and be affected by negative emotions such as anxiety,

Depression,

Anger,

Hostility.

So someone who is described as highly neurotic would be described as very volatile.

Their emotions go up and down,

They're very reactive,

They freak out really easily.

So obviously being high in this trait can cause you life dissatisfaction and also affect a lot of your relationships negatively.

So we want to learn to reduce this quality within ourselves.

And part of neuroticism is actually hereditary.

So if your family of origin is highly neurotic,

Chances are you have a tendency to also be neurotic too.

And another factor is just also the nurture aspect of things.

So your overall lifestyle,

The people you're dealing with,

The lifestyle influences.

So these all have a factor and effect on your neuroticism.

Now we can speak from experience that I've definitely been someone who was highly neurotic whenever I've taken those big five personality type tests.

I always used to score pretty high.

And I think over time I've actually dropped my neuroticism from a very high standpoint to a very low standpoint.

And actually I've gotten a lot of comments from other people saying you seem very chill,

Very relaxed.

And I can definitely say that due to practicing these specific techniques I'm going to cover in this video,

I've actually taken my neuroticism to a very low level now where my moods and emotions are very stable and I don't get ruffled by things.

Now to tackle neuroticism,

You want to really look at it from different angles.

So for both the inner perspective and also different outer lifestyle choices and behaviors you can make.

So I won't go over the outer behaviors that you can take on because that's pretty self-explanatory.

I'm not going to cover that here.

But all these things like diet,

Nutrition,

Exercise,

All these things have a profound effect on your mood and the stability of your mood.

And you can definitely notice a difference between when you are eating really poorly and not exercising and how that has effect on your mind compared to when you have those things handled.

And then when we look into the inner shifts,

Obviously the thoughts that you habitually think about and your different mindsets and where you put your attention to also has an effect.

But really the first step here is to train your attention to focus on what is going right and what is going well in the environment versus scanning for threats.

Because if you're highly neurotic,

You will tend to look at threats and be stressed out very easily.

It's a constant hyper-vigilance or over-monitoring.

So you want to take control of your attention first and focus on what is good in the environment.

This is where practices like gratitude,

Which I've made other videos on,

And focusing on what is good in your life can really have this shift where your brain will actually focus on what is positive and well,

And this will be a self-reinforcing loop.

Now the first inner shift or exercise that you can take on to change your inner beliefs and attention or where your attention goes is to practice what I call the quote-unquote everything is good exercise or long hair don't care exercise or in my case long beard and don't care exercise.

Now here what you're doing in this exercise is that imagine that you have everything handled in your external environment.

So all your needs are being met and let's actually make it a bit unrealistic and crank it up a hundred percent and let's say you have unlimited money,

Your health is good,

You have all the friends in the world,

If you are single everyone wants to date you,

If you're in a relationship you're in the best relationship ever that's loving,

You have all your basic needs taken care of and you aren't necessarily stressed about anything.

And you can see this certain quality in a lot of hyper successful celebrities and you know a-listers and billionaires and people that just have all their needs met they kind of walk around in the world with ease and obviously a lot of us aren't billionaires or successful celebrities and all that but we can take this certain mindset that they have where everything is okay because they know they can handle whatever comes their way whether it's some kind of stress or issue because they have all the resources at their disposal and as a result of you know having this mindset you won't be ruffled by things all around you because you know that you can take care of it so as a result you just walk through the world with ease everything's good i don't have to worry about anything and obviously this may seem very fake at first when you're practicing this because if you're highly reactive everything will set you off but you can think to yourself okay what if i had everything i need would i really worry about this specific issue as much and most likely answer is no so very minor things that may have set you off you can easily let go of that you can also think of it as if you're completely carefree and relaxed would i really care about this specific issue answer is probably not now what is interesting is that you can actually get to the same level of carefreeness of not being affected by things if you also have a very strong meditation practice and i really talk about meditation like all the time because it is so useful for this aspect when you have a very sturdy and strong meditation practice you are also unaffected by things because you know that whatever happens you can handle it and this is the making the shift from going from external where you need everything in the environment to be perfect and then you'll be okay to have making the inner shift and this is where the real i guess power comes in because you're internally validated from within and you're internally strong rather than wanting everything in your environment to be perfect and this is i guess one downside of the first technique is that it's great to practice it but eventually you want to shift to having your meditation practice catch up to having everything in life all good because obviously we can't control everything in the world that's you know the tenants of all the spiritual practices is that you know things will go wrong and this is what you'll actually see a lot of celebrities and people who have it quote unquote made in the external world where they have everything all the resources they oftentimes go crazy when they don't get what they want and resort to a lot of diva behaviors so this is where we want to again introduce the second technique now of having a very strong meditation practice and i can personally tell you from you know having thousands of hours of log meditation practice this is the number one thing you can do to lower your neuroticism levels you can definitely see a drastic reduction in anxiety of fear of depression all these things through practicing meditation a lot of the anger anxiety maybe grasping at things attachments reactivity all these qualities specifically go down and you can actually practically notice this when you are anxious distressed notice how your mind feels then meditate and after your meditation notice how all these specific qualities or states of mind actually reduce in its intensity and you feel peace joy equanimity that replace these qualities and they may not be a lot if you're first starting your meditation practice but over time these qualities of inner stability of joy of peace of letting things go actually become more of a permanent fixture in your physiology and how you interact with the world and it's just my personal opinion i do feel that a lot of people don't meditate enough i think that if you're highly neurotic you should do at least an hour of meditation if not more when i was going through a lot in my life and i was highly neurotic stressed and depressed i was doing up to four or five hours a day but obviously that may not be applicable in your certain lifestyle or situation but i would recommend really taking the practice very seriously and meditating a lot because this is the this is can this is what can have a dramatic effect on your neuroticism levels one more caveat here is that things from your subconscious does come up in your meditation so if you have gone through a lot of traumatic and stressful things and it will come up so you do again want to be careful on this and ease off if these things happen and go talk to a monk or a teacher that can guide you on these qualities but meditation is definitely a practice you want to implement every single day and you know no excuses if you're highly neurotic now the third technique is to take more action and reconnect with your passions and purpose for being on this earth so one of the classic tenets of self-development is that action kills worry or rumination so oftentimes when people gossip or they have a lot of drama in their lives and they're you know paranoid whatever it is uh they simply don't have enough going on so they just gossip and ruminate about the same things but when you are focused on your passion for being and purpose on for being on this earth and you'll find that the volume knob of this inner chaos or neuroticism actually goes down you turn the dial down and by being completely busy you'll actually shut off the thinking mind in addition to your mind silencing you also have this emptied out feeling when you do contribute in the world so what i mean by this is that when you're focused on uh committing to a path in the world and you're actually giving it your all you'll have this nice emptied out feeling of knowing that you've given in the world and there's a certain letting go aspect of that through both hard work and knowing that you've contributed and this gets rid of again the chaos and neuroticism but also makes you feel a bit more peace as well now as you continue to take action towards your passions and your purpose and in the world like i mentioned the volume knob of your neuroticism goes down and those loud thoughts but in addition as you continue to do this your momentum starts to increase more and what you'll find is that you simply start to care less about very trivial things that used to bother you and this is because you've traded your very petty problems for bigger problems so as a result of this you start to get swayed by less you become more unreactive now if you combine both taking action in the world of contributing of feeling emptied out with your meditation practice what happens is you become incredibly sturdy from within and unreactive and you'll find that as different things happen in your life things that may not even go well you are sturdy and you become unmoved by things and this is basically a characteristic of very low neuroticism where you have the stability of your mood where you're unswayed by things all around you and from internally as well so now uh just to recap of the three techniques that we learned in this video the first exercise you can do is the quote everything is good exercise or long beard don't care long hair don't care where you have a relaxed attitude about yourself because you know that you can handle whatever comes your way because you just as an exercise you have everything that you want so again this is just an exercise you can do but this hopefully will lead you to the next exercise or technique which is meditation and i recommend a daily meditation practice for everyone the third technique is to take more action and reconnect with your purpose and passions for being in the world now the commonality between these three techniques is that you're increasing your locus of control so again this is simply you focus on what you can control and what you can do and you focus on that and whatever is outside your area of influence you simply just don't give it much thought and this way you become very sturdy from within and you're becoming more proactive rather than reactive so i'll leave you with a quote from an ancient stoic named epictetus and he basically talks about having a very high level of internal control which kind of sums up these techniques and he said that happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle some things are within your control and some things are not so i'll leave you with that thank you

Reviews

Thank you so much. Very helpful and uplifting.