How to end Anxiety (a fairly rational person’s no BS guide)

This may be a case of “those who can’t do, teach” – because despite having spent time living as a Zen monk, years studying happiness, and 1,000s of hours teaching about happiness – I admit I spend a fair bit of time worrying.

Some of that is because I made the following brilliant life decision: I get nervous public speaking and I don’t love managing ambiguous projects, so why don’t I become a professional speaker managing my own startup business.

Some of it may also stem from the fact that the world is seemingly — to use the proper geopolitical terminology — totally F’d. Politicians on all sides are corrupt (what happened to that Epstein list again?), forever wars funded by big lobbies are inevitable, and we’re watching a two-horse race between AI and climate change… Which will destroy society first?

It often feels outrageous and hopeless viz. outrageously hopeless.

So, I decided to try and capture my thoughts in the most straight-to-the-point way possible. Here’s how to stop worrying with four practices…

1. Your worrying doesn’t actually make sense.

Hear me out on this.

We can turn to a bit of Buddhist wisdom, as interestingly, this logic experiment is from a monk from 1000s of years ago named Shantideva.

If your problem has a solution, why worry?

If your problem doesn’t have a solution, why worry?

Okay I can hear you yelling at me through my computer! Wait…

As I write this there’s some guy a few rows behind me throwing a tantrum because there’s only two breakfast options on this flight and he doesn’t like it. Imagine that. American airlines, a massive global corporation, didn’t contact this one passenger ahead of time to make sure they had alternative breakfast options in place to meet his standards.

Get a freaking life! Imagine how this guy felt in 7^th grade when he learned that the sun and planets don’t revolve around the earth. But anyway, let’s play this out.

If there is another breakfast option then great, why worry? Order that.

If there is no other breakfast option on the plane, then there’s nothing you can do. So why worry?

As I roast this poor hungry fellow I realize, I’m him 70% of the time. I’m worried about getting more readers, getting more speaking gigs, managing my assistant, etc.

If there’s a solution to my marketing and managing problems then why worry? They’re going to work out. If there’s not, then I’ll do something else, so why worry?

Here’s a caveat – if worrying will help you to take practical action to resolve a problem then it is quite useful. But in that case quit worrying and just do the damn action step.

My point is this is simple, but not easy. It is as simple as realizing there is never a truly rational justification for causing yourself to suffer with anxiety and worry. Because if everything is going to be fine, then why worry? And if everything is not going to be ok and you can’t do anything about it, then why worry?

That said I can see a skeptic arguing against my caveat: anxiety if it’s about something important can be useful. And to that I say sure, that takes us to #2.

2. Do something about it.

Your anxiety might be some painfully obvious thing that needs to be done screaming at you in the form of an emotional sensation to get off your butt and do something.

Example – I was pretty darn anxious the month leading up to my TEDx talk. That was my mind and body telling me, “hey Jackson it would probably be a good idea to figure out what the heck you’re going to say and get really good at saying it in under 15 minutes over the next few weeks.”

Thank you, anxiety.

A common example is you are anxious because you feel like you have so many things going on, things to remember, and commitments. Have you tried organizing all this stuff into a proper list and calendar? Are you actually setting aside time to be productive and get your important stuff done instead of just tread water task managing?

In this case, anxiety may be telling you that you do not have an adequate system to manage your commitments. So fix that. (I can help but the Ivy Lee method is a good start).

Anxiety can be a great source of motivation for preparing, getting organized, or otherwise taking action, and conversely those can be a great relief for anxiety.

3. Take the cosmic perspective.

I don’t mean to sound too “woo-woo” here (as I set myself up to say something extremely “woo-woo”). But 500 years ago, what was where you are now? 500 years from now, what will be there? Contemplate that.

Carl Sagan said it well…

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Does that perspective make you feel differently about your problems, worries, and frustrations?

It should!

There’s one level to this where if you’re like me, you should immediately feel like smacking yourself on the head and saying “golly, I have been blowing it.” The stuff I let get me anxious is comically trivial when compared to even mild problems people face.

You start thinking about the genocide in the Middle East, civilizations rising and falling, and entire stars collapsing into themselves and evaporating a solar system. And it’s like okay, maybe this email I forgot to reply to is not actually the most consequential thing ever.

The second level — I get there are genuine things like a cancer diagnosis or figuring out how to feed your family. That is reasonable anxiety. I am not trying to say your problems aren’t hard or valid. But for your sake of minimizing your own suffering, I’d encourage you to think of the cosmic perspective.

If you consider even your life and death in the cosmic perspective – again that scale of entire civilizations rising and falling, planets evolving, and galaxies going from stardust and back to it. At least for me, it makes this whole lived experience of being a bit lighter. And I’m less fearful and less attached to this life that I call mine.

Okay that got dramatic. My point is quit worrying so much about checking your freaking email because we’re all going to die.

4. Try exposure therapy.

Let’s return to the realm of the immensely practical here.

If you drink coffee every day what will happen?

If you run 5 miles every day what will happen?

If you train to become a snake handler every day what will happen?

If you answered that you will get used to the coffee, the running, and the handling of snakes then congratulations – you are not a total bozo.

We build up a tolerance to all the stimuli in our experience. So, paradoxically, if you want less anxiety then you need to lean into anxiety.

The more you seek the uncomfortable the more you will become comfortable. It’s about feeling the anxiety, fear, or worry and going forward anyway.

The snake example is a good one. Imagine your biggest fear: public speaking, spiders, talking to potential dates, selling, body image.

Now I’m going to pay you $100,000 to do this challenge for the next 50 days. You have to do a 10-minute TED talk in a public forum, hold a non-venomous spider, ask someone out, sell something, or walk around shirtless every day for the next 50 days.

I guarantee you that (A) it would be a terrible downright lousy two months and (B) that by the end you would have literally zero anxiety around this thing.

So, give that a shot in your own way. And sorry I used that $100k on the last reader.

There you have my complete guide. First, don’t trick yourself into rationalizing your own anxiety – suffering isn’t worth it. Use anxiety to trigger appropriate action if needed: preparation and thoughtful work are often the antidote to anxiety. Take the cosmic perspective on your worries. And practice exposure therapy.

Your happiness nerd,

Jackson