How to Overcome Anxiety in 2024

Why You Have Anxious Thoughts

Have you ever thought that your thoughts are like trails in the sand?

Your thoughts tend to categorize themselves in groups. And those thinking patterns are like trails on the sand. So when you think, you tend to follow the same thinking patterns again and again, like the wheels of a car being sucked into the same trail on the sand. And often, it’s difficult to get out.

But how can you break the pattern of thinking that creates anxiety if you can’t escape the sand? Some of these thoughts might be terrifying and they might keep you up at night

So, one of the unhelpful things you can do is to give in to one of the torturous thoughts you've been suppressing because, you know, you will be suppressed if you do. That’s when you allow yourself to be dragged into the infinitely possible answers to the question “what if” has. “What if I do this? What will happen then?”, or “what if I hadn’t done this? How would then my life might have turned out?” or “what if they think I’m not enough?”, of thousands of other what ifs.

How Anxiety Systems Work

What happens when we think like that is that the areas of your mind, brain, and psyche that act as alarm systems—that is, the anxiety mechanisms attempting to think things through- are utilizing fiction to do so. And so this line of thinking is tormenting you because it's natural for your brain to constantly look out for unpleasant events to think, well, what if, what if?

And this is where your memory systems play a huge role. I have made another video specifically on memory systems and how they work in relation to stress. I’ll put the link in the description below, and I’ll add it somewhere up here too.

So, what if...what if… That is the purpose of both thinking and remembering. To protect us from future dangers, that is. And if you start thinking about all the negative possibilities of "what if," you'll want to do everything in your power to avoid these ideas when they begin to flood your mind. But all this does is make the mechanisms that are creating those ideas more likely to generate even more of those ideas and scenarios because now the alarm system that generated those ideas in the first place thinks, "well, he's not listening, and he'll be in more danger if he doesn't attend to our warning".

So imagine it as a separate self that lives within you. That’s a good way of thinking about it. You have an alarm system, which is like an entity that lives inside of you. This entity warns you about a possible threat. And if you don’t listen to what it says, it thinks you’re ignoring it. But this entity's only job is to protect you, so it will keep warning you till you listen. This means that it will amplify, increase the intensity with which it’s trying to warn you, and increase the frequency with which it's trying to warn you.

You see how this turns out, the more you ignore it, the more it shouts at you, and the more it tries to warm you, the more anxiety symptoms you manifest.

What is the solution to get out of this spiral? What is there to do?

Well, there’s a 2 step process you can follow to reduce your anxiety levels. The first step is physiological and the second step is psychological. And the reason for that is that anxiety is also both physiological and psychological. This means that you cannot just talk or intellectualise your way out of anxiety because it also has a physical manifestation. Therefore we need to tackle this by using both physical and psychological techniques.

Physiological - A Natural Way To Caml Anxiety

So the first thing we do, step number one, is the physiological technique because the first thing you want is to calm your body down, and this technique is rooted in the biological mechanisms that regulate the stress levels in our body. It’s called a physiological sigh, and it’s basically the way our body has to calm down. Scientifically, the benefits of this sigh were discovered back in the 30s, but more extensive research was conducted by Jack Feldman, a world-famous neuroscientist and an expert in the neurobiology of respiration at UCLA and by Mark Krasnow, a professor of biochemistry at Stanford.

So what is this physiological sigh? When we sleep and the levels of carbon dioxide in our bloodstream rise, we all engage in this breathing rhythm. Or when you see a baby cry, or even when you cry, it’s the pattern our breathing follows in an attempt to calm us down. It’s a set of inhales and exhales that act as a response to distress and it’s essentially a double inhale followed by an extended exhale. So if you bring to your mind the state you are in when you cry, your breathing sounds a bit like this … and that’s a physiological sigh doing its calming work unconsciously. And the reason it works so well and brings you to a relaxed state is that it offloads a lot of carbon dioxide from your lungs all at once. Dr Andrew Huberman talks about this a lot, and he’s done a lot of research in his lab at Stanford and saw that even with 1,2, or 3 sighs of that pattern, people were able to bring down their stress levels really fast.

So you can do this in real-time the next time you feel your anxiety is overwhelming. You find a quiet spot, and you do that physiological sigh. It only takes 3-4 breaths, and you’ll immediately feel the difference. I do it every day as a meditation practice. And this is how you do it: you take one big inhale from the nose, pause for a bit, then sneak a bit more air in the end, which is the crucial part, and then a long exhale through the mouth. That’s it. It’s that simple. You do this 3-4 times when you’re stressed and you’ll feel the difference really fast.

Psychological Way To Calm Anxiety

And now, we move to step number two. The psychological technique. This is not an easy one; at times, it might be frightening. But it’s the only way to get through it. So after you calm yourself down with the breathing technique, you want to voluntarily bring to your mind the scenario that horrifies you and gives you all this anxiety. Try bringing to mind those “what if” scenarios and watch them play out. Try to watch the whole thing and see what comes out, however frightening it may be.

Now, look what happens. As you do that voluntarily, what you’re actually doing is that you’re indicating to that entity within you, that mechanism which warns you, you indicate to it that you are courageous enough, that you have the strength to confront the stressful situation and that alone is therapeutic. You’re showing to that entity, to that alarm system, that you’re there, and you’re paying attention to what it’s trying to tell you, and you’re not running away from it. Now you may have to do this several times and with several scenarios, in order to calm this alarm system down, but once you start doing it you’ll know that you’re confident enough not to run away from the warning, and that entity within you will know it too.

And it may be the case that the anxiety those scenarios evoke is terrifying, and then you may have to do this again and again, but the more you do it, the more confident you will feel about your capacity to face whatever terror those scenarios play out. And that’s what this entity wants to feel. It wants to feel that you’re in control of taking care of it, of taking care of you. That’s when this alarm mechanism, this entity, will stop amplifying its message to you through that sense of anxiety.

So what does this process look like? Well, pick one scenario that makes you anxious and see how it plays out. Maybe you’re anxious about losing your job, maybe you’re anxious about your partner cheating on you, or even worse, you’re anxious about your parent or your child dying. So, what will you do? The real answer is that you don't know. How can any of us know how exactly we will react in a situation like this? It will be devastating. You think it might be the end of the world. And it’s normal to think that, any human being would think that, but that is not helpful. Because you have to go through disasters and tragedies and lose people you love. But you also need to be strong enough for the people who need you. Because if you crumble to pieces if something bad happens to someone you love, then where does this leave the other people who love you?

And these are not easy scenarios to play out, and again they might be terrifying, but you have to think through whatever terrifies you and overwhelms you with anxiety. You play the scenario out, and you see that you might grieve, and you’ll go to the funeral of your loved one, and it will be so dreadful that you don’t even want to think about it. But people live through tragedy. And your determination to live through it and to tolerate those thoughts will not only calm those systems down, but will also show you that there are hidden forces, sometimes darker forces, within you. The one that Carl Jung used to call the shadow, and I’ll make a separate video on that, but those dark forces are the ones that once you integrate them into your conscious self, give you the strength to endure.

And a way to do that is to let your thoughts take you where you don’t want to be taken. But you do that voluntarily. You look into your dark thoughts voluntarily. Until you do that, those alarm systems will amplify their voice till you pay attention. Only by paying attention, you’ll quiet them down. Because then they will know you’re there for them, you’re there, paying attention, and being capable to take care of you.