Anxiety nearly took my life.
I became so nervous I couldn’t sit in a meeting room with the door shut. This became my worst nightmare. My hands would shake constantly.
It was such an embarrassing way to live.
Now my anxiety is cured the answers seem obvious. So many people struggle with anxiety and they don’t have to. But no one writes about anxiety because it’s uns*xy and people would rather pretend they don’t have it.
The controversial idea that could get me cancelled
Therapists love to assign labels. They validate us.
But what if all the freaking labels are messing us up? What if every time you feel discomfort, instead of assigning a label to it & thinking it’s wrong, you just sit with it?
A little bit of anxiety is normal.
What’s nearly impossible to know is what threshold of anxiety qualifies you to be assigned a label and given drugs. I found labels made everything worse.
The more I told myself I was an anxiety sufferer the more anxious I became.
A top 1% neuroscientist explains this bizarre phenomenon
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains anxiety in her book 7 ½ Lessons About the Brain from a radically different perspective:
“Panicking is your brain calling you out—you didn’t put in the work, the practice, the preparation.
You didn’t form the experience for your brain to later use as a reference point. Without that reference point, it’s like “swimming in a sea of uncertainty.”
When you have dreams & goals and don’t act on them, your brain stops trusting you.
It knows when you make a commitment that you’re lying. Past evidence shows your brain who you really are. So your brain acts as if you’re a liar before you’ve even started, which hijacks the outcomes you can create.
If you keep living out of alignment with who you are, you keep becoming more anxious.
This is what happened to me. At my lowest point, I was unemployed. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I had to borrow money from people. I didn’t even have the mental strength to fly on a plane because my brain told me the aircraft would crash.
The more I stood still the greater the anxiety became.
A lack of action increased my financial stress to the point I would have likely become homeless. I was forced to change, to find a way. Through some miracle, I found Tony Robbins’ audio tapes and got myself out. The one that helped the most was Unlimited Power.
When I had to do a job interview, I’d just pump Tony Robbins’ voice right up until I walked into the meeting room, so it would drown out my own anxious voice. After a while, it was Tony’s voice doing the talking, not mine.
Your level of anxiety is directly proportional to the action you take toward your goals.
Anxiety is the gap between what you are doing and what you think you should be doing – Orange Book
The quiet destructive pattern anxiety causes
The traditional motivator to cure anxiety is that it doesn’t feel good. Not bad.
But for me, the reason I had to fix my anxiety was because it destroyed my creative ability. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t produce music. I couldn’t play drums anymore.
When you’ve lost all your creativity you feel dead inside.
You no longer have joy. Your life has less meaning and fulfillment. Anxiety hurt me in business too. I couldn’t think big picture or motivate my team to hit a goal. And my head could no longer come up with ideas or connect random ideas together. This stripped me of my entrepreneurial genius.
Anxiety and creativity don’t work together.
Writer Jay Alto once said:
“Anxiety is just wasted imagination.”
That’s how I felt. Instead of using my imagination to create businesses, write plays, dream up movie ideas, or write fiction books… I was wasting it on imagining all these dire outcomes that never happened.
A simple way to gain control back of your life
Anxiety makes your life out of control.
The way to conquer anxiety is to just focus on what you can control. This reduces stress and helps you show up with the right mindset.
When I did job interviews as an unemployed loser who couldn’t catch a break, the turning point happened when I said to myself, “All I can control is how I show up – if I get the job or not, that’s all that matters.”
Stressing about what you can’t control drains your energy and turns you into a wannabe fortune-teller in a gold wig who thinks they can predict the future.
Anxiety protects you from rejection which can ruin your life
“I hope that made sense”
“I’m fine either way”
“Anyways, sorry I’m rambling a bit”
“Just a thought, whatevs”
— little anxiety-fueled gifts I like to send along in an attempt to shield myself from rejection
- ADHD Jesse
Skepticism is a virus.
Our brain tells us every opportunity is a scam or we can’t achieve what other perfectly normal people can do. This seems like logic or a misplaced sense of intelligence. But it’s just a form of protection to shield us from anxiety.
After my first failed business, I spent years not trying again. I told myself all sorts of lies about running a business.
I even convinced myself entrepreneurship caused mental illness and could only lead to anxiety. That was me protecting myself from the very thing that had caused so much pain in my life. But pain is temporary and so are open wounds. They heal.
You can’t let one rejection turn into a form of anxiety that stops you from trying.
Anxiety is a sign of not enough action
I don’t normally turn to gym buff gods like Alex Hormozi, but this line from him is gold: “You’re nervous because you’re underprepared. Hard to be nervous when you’ve actually done the same thing the same way 100 times in a row.”
Action alleviates anxiety.
I used to be anxious presenting workshops or doing podcasts. But now I’ve done thousands of them, it doesn’t create anxiety anymore. It’s muscle memory. If I’m doing something for the first time, I find it’s best just to over-prepare.
Even if the result sucks, at least I know I did everything I could from my end.
Instead of overthinking and trying to plan everything out, try taking more action toward your goals to reduce anxiety and show yourself what’s possible.
Anxiety tells you everyone is watching your every move
We think if we fail people will care.
Friends, family, or work colleagues spend hours discussing you and your failures behind closed doors while eating popcorn and sipping red wine.
Wrong.
Nobody gives a f*ck about you. They’re too busy worrying about themselves. Anxiety tells you everyone is going to laugh at you when in reality nobody will even notice if your entire life falls apart.
I’ll never forget a close relative of mine. I used to go to church with her every Sunday as a child. She knew everyone. She had thousands of friends. Around Christmas time her house was covered in cards.
One evening she died in her sleep.
The funeral was a few days later. I went along. 10 people showed up to her funeral. They summed up her entire life in 8 PowerPoint slides and a 45-minute service. I was her closest relative. I think of her once or twice a year.
That’s how insignificant the average person’s life is.
It should remind you that “nobody gives a sh*t,” therefore you can try a million things, fail, and it doesn’t matter, amigo.
How to completely cure yourself of anxiety (in one day)
Big promise, I know.
How do you stop being controlled by anxiety?
How do you stop letting negative feelings force you to stop everything?
How do you use anxiety as a form of positive drug?
Answer: You learn to question everything. You must assume you know nothing. You must never accept a diagnosis or blindly follow what mainstream society says about anxiety (or anything for that matter).
When I started to question my own anxiety, there were gaps everywhere. I got anxious during some romantic dates but not others. I got anxious when the boss wanted a meeting with me, sometimes, but not always.
I realized there were no absolutes with anxiety. That led me to believe that if I’m only anxious some of the time, what’s happening during the times when I’m not anxious?
I started to see patterns. And once you can see behind the veil that’s been placed across your view of reality, everything begins to change.
What I’m about to lay out is not guaranteed to work for 100% of people, but it’ll get you closer than anything else you may have tried.
1. Stop using labels
I don’t care what the therapist says. Don’t label yourself anxious or tell people you suffer from mental illness. This will only hurt you and sabotage every good thing that could happen in your life.
2. Focus on taking small steps in the right direction
Big changes rarely happen.
And they’ll scare the sh*t out of you and force you to procrastinate. The thought of change can itself induce more anxiety which we don’t want.
Here’s a hack from Dan Koe that I use every day:
The best way to reduce the anxiety of a big task is to start with the smallest possible action. If you can stick with it for 5 minutes, most of your worries vanish.
In each area of life that is causing you anxiety, your goal is to just take one small step in the right direction. If you're scared of a meeting, your 5-minute action is just opening the calendar and writing the first bullet point of the agenda.
If you take small steps, within 24 hours, you will instantly feel less anxious because you’re now on the path of action. And that path rewires your brain to start trusting you again to do what you say you’re going to do.
3. Create a mission like an army general
A lot of anxiety is just time spent idle or being bored.
It’s hard to find time to be anxious when you’re spending it building a mission that helps others. So much of anxiety is just selfishness. It’s me, me, me to the point of insanity.
A mission helps you transcend into selflessness.
Spend the next few hours deciding what your mission will be. It likely is found at the cross-section of your passions, skills, experience, and books you like to read.
The mission doesn’t need to be perfect, and it will 100% evolve as you do. But it’s a starting point and will get you out of the insanity of your head.
Start with this question: What am I 10 steps ahead in that I could help the average person with?
4. Turn the mission into goals
A mission without actions is just a p0rn fantasy.
You don’t want to be a hopeless dreamer and become a starving artist with a dream and nothing to show for it.
In the next 24 hours, list down all the goals you would need to achieve to make your mission a reality. Under each goal list all the actions required. Then make sure each goal has at least one small action you can take in the next 24 hours.
5. Backup the mission with a simple-stupid operating system
Most goals never happen because they’re not habits.
They’re not predictable or repeatable. Turn your goals into an operating system – a list of standard actions you will take every day. Tie that operating system to a set of personal KPIs (ways to track the inputs that determine the outputs).
For example, I have an operating system for writing. I know if I write every day on social media and publish one newsletter a week, I’ll achieve my goal of building an audience. It’s hard to fail with this system, and it’s kept me going for 12 years without ever missing a single day.
Don’t overcomplicate it. A system can just be a series of checkboxes in a spreadsheet.
Destroy your anxiety with actions that prove who you are
The difference between what you say and do equals your level of anxiety.
If you want to change who you are, you first need to change your level of action. Action reinforces your identity. And tells you and the world where you are and where you’re heading.
Curing anxiety feels incredible, and it’s entirely possible. Now that you know where anxiety comes from, there’s just one decision left to make: Are you willing to change?
