Anxiety seems to be everywhere right now.
More people are talking about it and feeling it.
And yet, the way most of us try to deal with anxiety often makes it worse.
We ignore it, try to power through it, distract ourselves. or hope it'll just fade away.
But anxiety isn't something you simply must endure.
What if there was a more practical way to approach it?
A way to understand what your brain is actually doing and then use that knowledge to calm anxiety when it shows up.
That's why today's SYSK trending topic is a practical way to approach anxiety.
In my conversation with mental health and wellness expert Dr John Deloney, we explore what anxiety really is, why your brain produces it in the first place, and a few surprisingly simple techniques grounded in psychology and neuroscience that you can use in the moment.
And we'll get to that right after this. the Regency era.
You might know it as the time when Bridgerton takes place or as the time when Jane Austen wrote her books.
The Regency era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals and maybe the worst king in British history.
Vulgar History's new season is all about the Regency era, the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal.
Listen to Vulgar History, Regency era, wherever you get podcasts.
Anxiety is a hot topic right now.
People are anxious.
Kids are anxious.
The whole world is anxious about so many things that might happen.
And not in a good way.
We don't usually worry about great things happening.
We worry about the disaster around the corner.
Why is there so much anxiety?
How can we be less anxious?
Well, the person to discuss that is John Deloney.
He is a mental health and wellness expert and host of his own podcast called The John Deloney Show.
And he's author of a book called Building a Non-Anxious Life.
Hi, John.
Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Excellent.
So first, tell me what anxiety is exactly.
I think in the simplest terms, anxiety is just an alarm system.
And outside of the bell curve medical issues, it's really all it is.
And we've got a culture that tells us if you feel bad or if you feel uncomfortable, then that in and of itself is a problem and should be fixed.
Everybody should be comfortable all the time.
And so, when our bodies feel anxious, when it sounds those alarms, we immediately try to fix the anxiety or stop the anxiety.
And really, it's like taking a magic marker and coloring over your gas gauge on your dashboard.
Like, I don't want to see that light.
Like, okay, but your car is going to run out of gas, right?
So I think we have over-pathologized anxiety.
To sound like a nerd, I think we've made anxiety the enemy and it's really not.
We've created a very, very anxious life for ourselves.
And so I think the question we should all be asking is not why is everybody so anxious and how do we stop?
I think the question is what if our bodies are right?
What if the anxiety is right?
What kind of world have we built and what do we need to do now?
Well, don't you find that a lot of people who get anxious about stuff, that there's this sense that by being anxious about something that's going to happen or might happen, or you imagine might happen, that that's somehow working on the problem?
That anxiety is somehow, even though you know really that that doesn't help the problem, that that's your way of preparing for it, not to parse it out.
I think we ruminate, i think we we spin up and spend a lot of energy on a particular problem that we have no way to solve, and by doing that then our bodies sound the alarms, and so i don't know that anybody chooses anxiousness as though it's helping, but i do.
I personally will spend a ton of time having imaginary conversations with world leaders.
I just had 20 minutes with so-and-so.
I would tell my body doesn't know the difference.
It's off to the races.
It's as though we're having that conversation and it's getting very heated.
And so then it sounds the alarms.
It raises my heart rate.
It dumps cortisol and adrenaline into my body.
It's goes to fight or flight.
It's go time, baby.
Um, that's the, that's the anxiety alarms.
And so yeah, when you start ruminating, when you start worrying about these huge issues, or when you create a light like I'm just going to start buying stuff, I'm gonna start buying stuff.
I'm going to start buying stuff or I'm going to have another drink, another drink.
I'm going to text this person I'm not married to cause she makes me feel alive.
I, All of those behaviors then sound the alarms, right?
But if anxious is what you do, then how do you do something different?
And what do you do different?
I think it's important to live in reality and ask yourself the one scary question is what you're doing working?
Has this ever worked?
Has being anxious ever solved a problem?
Has leaving a party and spending the next two hours Worrying about what you said at the party.
Has that ever helped in taking back anything you said?
Has it ever helped you the following week when you see those people again?
No, it doesn't.
It doesn't solve the problem.
And so I think owning the life I'm leading is setting these alarms off.
Or, in a more straightforward analogy,
The alarm in my kitchen is not the problem.
The fire is the problem.
And so I'm going to begin to look, not to shut off the alarms, but begin looking for the things in my life that are setting the alarms off in the first place.
If you're in your kitchen and you climb up and take the batteries out of the smoke detector, your house is going to still burn down.
You're just not going to hear the alarm system.
You haven't solved the problem, right?
Okay, but what is it you do instead?
A, you decide, or number one, you decide, I'm going to stop going to war with my body.
I am not the enemy of me.
I'm going to start assuming my body's right when it gets my attention.
And then I'm going to begin working through a series of daily choices, not to deal with the anxiety but to deal with the life part, to make a life that my body isn't constantly feeling unsafe in.
And that can be as simple as choosing connection.
Like, I'm gonna choose to not do my life by myself.
It's gonna be awkward and weird and uncomfortable, but I have to have people in my life.
Or if my body knows I'm alone, it's gonna sound the alarms.
Okay, I can do that one.
I may need to go see a counselor for some historical stuff that I need to deal with, or I'm going to go see a doctor and finally deal with that weight, because my body's been sounding the alarms that we're not safe, we're not safe, we're not safe.
Those are some of the easy ones.
Some of the harder ones are, I'm going to choose freedom.
I am going to choose to not let a bank or a mortgage company tell me what I'm going to do.
And that means I'm going to start on a 10.
It took me and my wife 15 years to pay off our student loans, to pay off our car notes, to pay off the credit cards and to get into a place where Visa does not tell our family what we do every day.
I do.
My wife does.
And if your body knows that, hey, man, if you get fired, they're going to take your house.
They're going to take your food.
They're going to take your cars.
If your body knows that, it would be failing you if it wasn't anxious because you're not safe.
And so I'm going to begin working through, I'm going to get rid of clutter in my house.
I'm going to clear my calendar and stop letting my nine-year-old soccer coach tell our family what we're going to do for the next 14 years with the Saturdays and Sundays.
Because they're not going to run my life.
I'm going to choose to be free.
I'm going to choose reality.
I'm going to choose to have hard conversations with my wife, with my kids, with my neighborhood, with my kids' school.
I am going to live in the present and not be distracted all the time.
I'm going to choose to believe in something bigger than myself, because my body can't hold up everything.
It never was designed to.
And so I'm going to start working on these parts of my life.
I'm going to make these choices on a regular basis.
I'm going to choose exercise.
I'm going to choose to stop mainlining candy, which is one of my great challenges.
I'm going to choose to deal with my alcohol.
I'm going to choose to deal with my marriage.
I'm going to do these things so that my body isn't constantly going hey, we're not safe, we're not safe, we're not safe.
And in so doing I'm going to Give myself peace so that when your cousin dies, when your mom gets cancer, when the economy collapses, you can head right into those issues.
You can go be sad.
You can go mourn your job, and it's going to be annoying and heartbreaking, not catastrophic.
That's what I'm going to solve for.
And so I think sometimes, when people start to think the way you just described, which sounds great, as soon as there's a setback, as soon as they fail, it's anxiety time again, because now they're anxious, because they can't do it.
They failed.
The worst part about the last 25 years of work for me, sitting with people who have lost everything.
They've lost a child.
They've lost their home.
They've lost everything.
Watching them on the back end come back and our culture talks a lot about post-traumatic stress but does a very poor job of talking about the other side of that teeter-totter, which is post-traumatic growth.
People who go through hell and continue to chase that tiny little pin light that turns into a candlelight, that turns into a spotlight, that turns into the Sun.
They keep walking forward and they gather people and they gather resources and they change their behavior and they change their family tree.
So instead of saying, when I feel anxiousness, it's my body telling me, once again, you failed.
That's not your body.
That's culture.
Your body's just saying, we're not safe.
You can smile and go, you're right.
I got knocked down again.
Oh, man, this sucks.
I'm going to get back up.
And I'm going to get back up.
And on those days I can't get back up.
I've got a couple of people in my corner that can reach down and pull me up.
And it's about getting back up and about getting back up.
But anxiety will never tell you that it's over.
Don't you find that there are people, though, who just – anxiety is their fuel.
And it always has been, that that's kind of –
That if you were to take that away from them, if they were to change their life, so there was no anxiety, like they almost wouldn't know what to do, because that's always been their fuel.
Yeah, me and you nailed it.
It's not only a fuel, it's an identity.
I can't go to that party because I have social anxiety as though it's like a cancer.
It's something that is upon you like a blanket or a jacket.
I have this.
I can't.
I just do.
I've got five toes and I have anxiety.
Instead of looking at it through a lens of anxiety.
And other people sounds my body's alarms.
Hey, I wonder why that is.
Oh, maybe it's because of some childhood abuse, or maybe it's because I got made fun of as a kid or I got left out as a kid.
Who knows why?
But for some reason, my body's identified groups of people as unsafe.
So when I head in I'm going to put my hand on my chest and say I know you feel unsafe, but I'm good here.
I'm good here.
Or maybe I need to not tell that joke because it's not that funny.
But yes, countless, millions of people have taken anxiety as an identity.
It's a way to operate through the world.
And yes, when you go deal with it, I remember my therapist asked me an amazing question.
She said, how are you feeling?
This is after we've done some really intense work over a long period of time.
And I said, I don't know how to describe what I'm feeling.
The only word that keeps coming to mind is depressed, but I'm not depressed.
Things are great.
I feel fine.
I just feel low.
And she smiled really big.
And she said, this, John, is what normal feels like.
And I had just been spun up for so long.
It became, quote unquote, who I was.
I was the energy guy.
I was always the, oh, yeah, but it could all come down.
And the, oh, yeah, what about this?
I was always that guy.
And so what I've had to do is practice not being that guy.
Because that guy has heart attacks and strokes and dies young and eventually burns out all the people around him.
I don't want to be that guy.
We're talking about anxiety, and my guest is John Deloney.
He is author of a book called Building a Non-Anxious Life.
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So John, would you agree that maybe part of the problem so many people are dealing with anxiety-related issues is because kids aren't really taught to handle anxiety when they're kids?
They're protected from it.
Without meaning to, when my son got a hit in Little League, I cheered really loud.
And when he struck out, I just didn't say anything.
I didn't want to be like, oh, we hit the ball in our field.
I'm just going to be cool.
I also didn't want to be one of those dads who, when their kid strikes out, they're like that's all right.
Because it's not all right.
You struck out.
It stinks.
Without realizing it over time, I was teaching my son's nervous system the way to dad's heart.
You will score this run, you will get this grade, you will cross this finish line.
Anxiety is if you don't get this, we're done, you're a loser.
Dad doesn't call mom.
He gets embarrassed, right.
Those are things that a body can't handle.
So my son went to take some tests we're going to move some schools and he had to go take some tests on saturday the other day and I literally held his face and he's like dad he's, he's almost 14.
He's like, dad, and he's humongous or eye to eye.
And I said, listen, these tests are really important.
And if you fail them, you're probably not going to this school.
And I laughed like that.
And I said and there's not a test you can take where I won't hug you when you walk out the door period.
Do I love you?
Yes, sir.
Am I going to love you regardless of the scores?
Yes, sir.
Do I believe in you?
Yes, sir.
Am I going to laugh at you if you fail this?
And he cracked up and he goes, yes, sir.
Right.
But it was me just reiterating.
This is huge and it's got big implications.
It's got big real world implications.
And you ain't going to lose me over it.
And so now he can focus just on the task part of it.
Does that make sense?
Does that ring true with you?
Yeah, I think so.
I get it.
And I understand your advice about dealing with the things in life that cause the anxiety, rather than dealing with the anxiety.
But you can't deal with everything that causes anxiety because things happen.
Things come up in life that you can't plan for.
Things happen.
Always.
Always.
Yeah, but it always happens.
And if you're not ready for it, we just got hit with, oh, you need a new roof.
Oh, man.
You know how expensive a new roof is?
Oh, I just got one.
Yeah.
I just got one.
I grew up in a home where money was, my dad was a policeman.
And there were some harrowing years financially.
Three kids.
And we didn't have a lot.
We shared a family car.
He had a police cruiser.
And we all wore hemidong.
It was tough sledding.
I remember when I was married in the first five or ten years of my life, when I'd racked up so much freaking student loan debt and house debt and all that walking around the house at night with my hands in my hair and my wife was dead asleep because she didn't know how bad it was financially.
The roof repair is coming.
I can prepare for it so it's annoying or I can not prepare for it and it costs me everything.
But yeah, life's always going to be throwing punches, man.
That's the state of things.
Here's the example I wrote about in the book.
It was out of nowhere.
My cousin died.
He's about 10 years older than me.
And, man, it was devastating for the whole family.
It was out of nowhere.
Because 15 years ago, my wife and I put a stake in the ground and said no more.
We had money to go to the funeral and to get some flights and to grab a hotel room.
And so here's what that non-anxious life, here's what it bought us.
It bought us the ability to be really, really sad and to grieve without other worries.
And that's the gift we're looking for here.
Not that people aren't going to pass away.
The thing is, is that when life comes, can you exhale and go, here we go?
Because you're good to go.
It sounds though, like as wonderful as it is to be where you are, that getting there is a monumental task, and where would you even suggest i begin?
I think for 999 of us, the place you start is choosing reality.
What is the state of your marriage?
What is the state of your relationship with your kids, Since kids absorb tension in the home and in their environments?
What is our environment saying to our kids?
How are our kids doing?
What's the state of our finances?
Who do we owe money to?
Let's write them all down on a piece of paper, all of them.
What's the state of my relationship with my mom and my dad in their elderly years?
It's choosing reality.
And for some of us, like me, it was I owed hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I'd created a world that I guaranteed that my family was going to be in a mess.
Guaranteed it.
For some people, it's putting their face in their hands and realizing your marriage has been over for a long time.
Some of it is I've got to be honest with my kids.
I've got to be honest about my job is killing me.
And others is, man, we're actually doing really, really well right now.
Let's start having people over.
Right.
And so I think, for everybody starting with choosing reality, what is the state of things for you, is a great place to start.
What do you recommend for someone who is prone to anxiety and something unexpected happens and you go into your anxiety mode?
What do you recommend people do?
One of the things that i was trained for when i was doing crisis response stuff is, whenever ever possible, walk from your place of notification to the actual place where there's a a scenario going on, meaning if i'm in my dean of students office and somebody comes sprinting into the room and goes i need you now, somebody's about to kill themselves, which happened more than once.
If I get up and go, oh my gosh, and I flip my desk over and sprint out of the room running as fast as I can down the hall my tie flying behind me, I bring a whole world of my chaos to an already chaotic situation.
But if I can walk or at very least sort of trot down there and I exhale upon entering the room, the worst case outcome here is that they're no longer with us and we're gonna have to sit in.
That it's gonna be a tragedy, but most of us believe that if this thing happens, all of our life is over.
It's not, it's not, and you can only experience that after you've sat in those rooms time and time again, and so the greatest gift I can give, I'm gonna bring peace to this situation, and if it happens, Most of us are still going to be here and the sun's going to come up.
And is it going to be hard and awful and we have to grieve?
No doubt about it.
But the sun's going to come up.
And it's hard to see that on this side of a tragedy or this side of a thing that we're worrying about.
If I turn in this report and the boss hates it, I'm going to get fired.
And your body responds as though the end of time is now.
But it's not going to be.
You're going to get fired.
Things might get tough.
You might have to move back home.
You might have to have a really hard conversation with your wife or your kids or your husband.
Then we're going to go get another job.
And it's going to be different.
Our life's going to look different.
But we're going to head that way.
So a lot of the worry is this buildup that we're about to fall off a cliff.
And very, very rarely does that cliff actually exist.
Well, I like your analogy that you used in the beginning, that when people who are anxious have problems, the anxiety isn't the problem.
It's the alarm system.
It's the fire alarm.
But the problem is the fire and that we need to look at the fire and not so much the alarm.
Let's just look at the data, man.
More people than ever before in human history are under the care of a mental health professional right now.
Right now, more people are taking psychotropic medications drugs for anxiety depression OCD, ADHD than ever before in human history.
And the numbers are going through the roof.
When they discovered penicillin, in short order, deaths from infection fell off a map.
It solved that problem for the time being.
And so we have to be honest.
Me as a mental health guy, this is my world.
These are my gang.
I have to look and say, what if what we're doing is not working?
What now?
And maybe it's these people were never, quote unquote, broken or pathological or malfunctioning to begin with.
Maybe their bodies are working perfectly.
And the real question we have to ask is what kind of world have we created that the human body can't live in?
That to me seems like a much more instructive question than continually telling people well, you're broken.
Well, something wrong with you.
I'll fix it.
I'll fix it.
I'll fix it.
Just give me $175 plus $50 copay.
Just keep taking this pill the rest of your life and we'll manage it.
Right.
And we'll keep having to increase the dosage.
At some point we have to say, whoa, this isn't solving the issue.
We need to take a 30,000 foot view of this thing.
And that to me is a scarier question.
It's a harder question.
And man, it's a way more empowering question.
Well, you certainly have a different take on anxiety and what to do about it.
That I think everybody needs to hear.
I've been speaking with John Deloney.
He is a mental health and wellness expert.
He's the host of his own podcast called The John Deloney Show.
And he's author of a book called Building a Non-Anxious Life.
And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes.
Thanks, John.
Thanks for coming on and talking about this.
And that wraps up this SYSK Trending episode.
I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening.
