How Do I Reduce My Anxiety While Trying to Optimize My Deep Life?

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | - All right, Jesse, I think we have time for one more call

00:00:08.440 | because I'm running late today,

00:00:09.320 | but let's get one more call in.

00:00:10.840 | Who do we have here?

00:00:12.760 | - All right, sounds good.

00:00:13.600 | We got a question, a call about living a deep life.

00:00:17.480 | - There we go.

00:00:18.320 | - Hi Cal, this is Karan.

00:00:21.980 | And I took a break from my 33 jobs

00:00:24.060 | to retreat to a cabin in the woods

00:00:25.760 | and think about who am I?

00:00:27.240 | What is identity and how is it crafted?

00:00:29.520 | And I came up with this heuristic

00:00:30.840 | that I would love your thoughts on.

00:00:32.940 | And I have a question that I put a lot of thought

00:00:35.600 | and research into.

00:00:37.520 | First part of this heuristic that I came up with

00:00:39.600 | is identity.

00:00:40.680 | Who am I and how do I live a deep life?

00:00:43.920 | And I go very descriptive into that area.

00:00:46.360 | Next is philosophy.

00:00:47.720 | Digital minimalism helps back up that identity.

00:00:51.120 | Then we have framework.

00:00:52.680 | We use digital minimalism as that framework

00:00:55.000 | for living a deep life,

00:00:56.400 | but we also have the atomic habits

00:00:59.440 | by James Clear.

00:01:00.560 | And I use that as part of the framework category.

00:01:02.960 | After that we have behavioral techniques

00:01:05.760 | and this is like where like the nitty gritty.

00:01:07.600 | I leave my phone at home and I go for a walk.

00:01:10.800 | I enjoy solitude.

00:01:12.680 | And then we have outcomes,

00:01:14.300 | which is really important because we got to know

00:01:16.420 | how do these behaviors, what outcomes do they have?

00:01:18.720 | I back on how my anxiety goes down.

00:01:20.680 | Now I'm reading Brad Stolberg's book

00:01:22.380 | on this idea of how I wanted to keep improving

00:01:25.040 | and this idea of always trying to optimize everything.

00:01:29.080 | And this is where my question comes in.

00:01:30.920 | 'Cause the last part of my heuristic is feedback.

00:01:34.480 | I wanna make sure I do better at living the deep life.

00:01:36.960 | But this compound 1% interest that you and James talk about

00:01:40.520 | and that this idea that Brad talks about,

00:01:43.360 | it can be like, how do I,

00:01:44.440 | if I keep trying to optimize living a deep life,

00:01:47.180 | how do I get rid of this background of anxiety?

00:01:50.160 | - Well, Karan, I appreciate the thought you put into this.

00:01:55.800 | And let me just preface my response by saying

00:01:57.920 | just the fact that you were putting

00:01:59.420 | this much intentional thought

00:02:00.760 | into how you want to structure your life

00:02:02.960 | is 80% of the battle.

00:02:05.200 | Most people don't do that.

00:02:07.280 | Most people go from one distraction

00:02:10.600 | or moment of chemical pleasure to another

00:02:13.920 | and hope to string along enough of those

00:02:16.920 | to get later on in life.

00:02:18.440 | It's not the way to do it.

00:02:19.880 | You need a plan, you need to be intentional.

00:02:21.800 | The second thing I'm gonna preface it is

00:02:24.080 | these type of plans evolve over time and that's great.

00:02:26.760 | The goal is not to figure out the one true plan

00:02:30.760 | that's absolutely optimal

00:02:32.000 | and then you have it all figured out, then you execute it.

00:02:34.440 | You don't want paralysis by analysis here.

00:02:37.320 | You come up with something, you live with it,

00:02:39.240 | check in twice a year,

00:02:40.560 | checking at your birthday to make changes.

00:02:42.240 | So you wanna make sure

00:02:43.080 | that you're spending a lot of time living life

00:02:44.400 | and not just thinking about how you're gonna live life.

00:02:46.680 | So those are some prefaces.

00:02:48.800 | All right, now let me start with your last point

00:02:50.640 | about beating back the background anxiety

00:02:54.320 | so that you can live a deep life.

00:02:56.380 | These are unrelated.

00:02:58.000 | Anxiety will do what anxiety does.

00:03:00.960 | You will feel anxiety sometimes, other times you won't.

00:03:03.240 | There will be periods where it's heavier,

00:03:04.400 | there'll be periods where it is not heavier.

00:03:06.640 | Your goal is not to make that go away.

00:03:08.760 | Your goal is to live a deep life

00:03:10.120 | even though you live in a world

00:03:11.560 | in which you sometimes feel

00:03:13.720 | the physical symptoms of anxiety.

00:03:15.400 | Constriction of the chest,

00:03:18.120 | a little bit difficulty of breathing.

00:03:19.480 | There's very specific physical symptoms.

00:03:20.920 | That comes and goes.

00:03:22.200 | Great, what's next?

00:03:23.180 | How do I still build a deep life?

00:03:24.240 | I don't want you to think about banishing

00:03:28.240 | that which you cannot fully control from your life

00:03:30.400 | as a precondition for it being good,

00:03:32.760 | for it being enjoyable.

00:03:33.960 | I'm gonna recommend the book here.

00:03:36.940 | So there are, I don't know how much you know

00:03:40.000 | about modern psychotherapy,

00:03:42.880 | but there's, roughly speaking,

00:03:44.840 | people think about there being three waves

00:03:46.780 | of modern psychotherapy.

00:03:48.920 | You have the first wave where you have talk therapy,

00:03:51.320 | which sort of came originally out of Freudian modalities.

00:03:54.400 | Let's talk things through

00:03:55.640 | and try to understand the source of issues.

00:03:58.560 | Largely, this was non-evidence-based therapy modalities.

00:04:02.240 | Then the second wave really is

00:04:04.000 | like cognitive behavioral therapy.

00:04:05.960 | And this was one of the first major approaches

00:04:09.480 | to issues like anxiety

00:04:10.880 | in which they were using studies and evidence

00:04:13.400 | and saying this type of thing worked.

00:04:14.720 | In the core book, the canonical public-facing book

00:04:18.160 | in second wave psychotherapy is feeling good.

00:04:21.580 | And I believe this came out,

00:04:23.260 | so the '70s or '80s,

00:04:24.460 | and it introduced cognitive behavioral therapy

00:04:26.460 | to a larger group.

00:04:28.920 | Third wave psychotherapies is built more around

00:04:33.820 | what is sometimes called acceptance commitment therapy

00:04:36.980 | or ACT, A-C-T.

00:04:38.260 | There's some other things in there,

00:04:39.480 | but it pulls more from some Eastern philosophies as well.

00:04:42.420 | This is where I wanna turn your attention,

00:04:44.140 | and I wanna turn your attention to a book

00:04:46.340 | that popularizes ACT,

00:04:49.260 | and that is the book, I believe it is called

00:04:51.620 | The Happiness Trap.

00:04:53.300 | Actually, Jesse, can you look that up

00:04:54.580 | and tell me what the author's name is?

00:04:56.940 | I wanna make sure I got that name right.

00:04:58.340 | But it's a book that introduces acceptance commitment therapy

00:05:02.840 | to a broader audience.

00:05:04.420 | And this is a evidence-based methodology.

00:05:08.780 | It's something that's studied pretty well,

00:05:10.660 | and I like it a lot.

00:05:12.380 | I think it's what I wanna preach to you right now.

00:05:17.180 | Because at the core,

00:05:19.020 | I can tell you what's at the core of acceptance,

00:05:20.580 | if you'll excuse this digression into psychotherapy,

00:05:24.780 | but at the core of this is this notion that,

00:05:29.340 | oh, we have a name here?

00:05:30.280 | Yeah, Russ Harris, that's right.

00:05:31.540 | And it is The Happiness Trap, Jesse, did I get that right?

00:05:33.460 | - Yep. - That's right.

00:05:35.140 | So at the core of acceptance commitment therapy

00:05:36.620 | is they look back at cognitive behavioral therapy,

00:05:39.740 | and cognitive behavioral therapy

00:05:40.940 | directly addresses ruminations.

00:05:42.740 | Ruminations, these insistent, hard-to-control conversations

00:05:46.220 | you have with yourself in your head

00:05:48.340 | are at the core of both major anxiety

00:05:50.620 | and depressive disorders.

00:05:52.960 | Because if you're obsessively worried about,

00:05:55.300 | so you have these talks, these conversations in your head

00:05:57.300 | about bad things that could happen, it's anxiety.

00:05:59.940 | And if you have these hard-to-control, consistent voices,

00:06:03.700 | conversations in your head about what you've done that's bad

00:06:06.320 | and why you suck, that's the foundation for depression.

00:06:11.140 | So it's the same thing as the voices.

00:06:12.380 | And cognitive behavioral therapy,

00:06:13.820 | again, if you'll excuse the lecture here,

00:06:15.620 | focused on directly confronting ruminations.

00:06:18.980 | And so you would say, wait a second,

00:06:21.860 | this is the thing I keep talking about.

00:06:23.820 | Let me actually point out the ways

00:06:26.940 | in which that thinking is distorted,

00:06:28.780 | because often in anxiety and in depression

00:06:30.980 | is very distorted thinking.

00:06:32.100 | There's names for the distortion.

00:06:33.580 | This is black and white thinking.

00:06:35.560 | This is predicting the future.

00:06:37.620 | And you call it out and you push back at it and say,

00:06:39.900 | this is the problem with this rumination.

00:06:41.340 | And over time, that can actually diminish the power

00:06:44.180 | of that rumination to keep cycling faster and faster.

00:06:46.540 | And this can be quite effective for a lot of things.

00:06:49.780 | In fact, I used this quite successfully,

00:06:51.380 | if you want a personal story,

00:06:53.460 | when I was first having bad insomnia problems

00:06:58.460 | early in grad school.

00:07:00.180 | And there's a whole backstory to that,

00:07:01.900 | but basically there's very little

00:07:03.260 | I get anxious about in my life,

00:07:04.700 | even as I do pretty ambitious, big things

00:07:07.220 | that should be scary.

00:07:08.460 | And my theory has always been,

00:07:10.100 | all these things I'm doing that should be really anxious,

00:07:12.540 | anxiety producing, all that anxiety just got funneled

00:07:14.700 | into this random weird thing,

00:07:15.940 | which was I got very anxious about sleep

00:07:17.700 | and I felt physical anxiety every single day.

00:07:19.940 | I was sleeping, but the anxiety about not sleeping

00:07:22.860 | was every single day.

00:07:23.700 | And I read "Feeling Good."

00:07:24.860 | I read the book about cognitive behavioral therapy.

00:07:27.700 | And this was a case where that worked really well,

00:07:29.620 | because the ruminations that were creating this anxiety

00:07:33.740 | about not sleeping were disordered.

00:07:36.480 | They were clearly exaggerating.

00:07:38.540 | And I could call out the distortions.

00:07:41.540 | And I had a system where I said twice a day,

00:07:44.740 | in the morning and in the evening,

00:07:47.620 | I'm gonna address these thoughts

00:07:49.620 | and point out the distortions, but not in between.

00:07:51.380 | And in between, my mind's like,

00:07:52.940 | let's think about sleep and why we're worried.

00:07:54.660 | I would say, I thought about this,

00:07:55.860 | went through it in the morning and wasn't that impressed,

00:07:57.740 | and I'll do it again in the evening.

00:07:59.080 | So just wait till then,

00:08:00.740 | and then we'll get back to it in the evening.

00:08:02.700 | And that actually worked.

00:08:04.320 | And the day-to-day anxiety,

00:08:05.260 | and for this particular anxiety, it took a long time,

00:08:08.100 | but it went away, it was very effective.

00:08:10.220 | ACT came along and said,

00:08:11.660 | there's certain things for which that doesn't work.

00:08:14.100 | Because what if the thing that you're anxious about,

00:08:17.940 | what if the story there is accurate?

00:08:20.940 | What if it's not distorted?

00:08:22.220 | And the key thing that really,

00:08:23.740 | the key thing that led to the divergence of ACT,

00:08:27.780 | my understanding of ACT from cognitive behavioral therapy,

00:08:30.540 | were panic attacks.

00:08:31.640 | So even with panic attacks,

00:08:33.580 | you get a rising sense of panic,

00:08:35.860 | leads to a place where you kind of tip over an edge

00:08:38.060 | and have your heart goes, it feels like a heart attack,

00:08:41.300 | you can become faint,

00:08:43.120 | and it could be like a really just disturbing public thing.

00:08:48.020 | And what the ACT people pointed out was,

00:08:50.620 | that's not a, if you're anxious about that happening,

00:08:53.620 | you're gonna go on stage,

00:08:54.460 | you're anxious about that happening,

00:08:55.280 | it's not a distorted thought.

00:08:56.580 | Like it really could happen.

00:08:57.780 | And maybe this has been happening to you quite a bit.

00:09:00.700 | So you can't look at yourself and convince yourself,

00:09:03.300 | oh, it's just distorted,

00:09:04.640 | of course you're not gonna have a panic attack.

00:09:06.020 | I just had three, I very well could.

00:09:08.140 | So cognitive behavioral therapy didn't work as well

00:09:10.460 | for panic attacks.

00:09:11.620 | And so acceptance commitment therapy was about,

00:09:13.540 | okay, you're not trying to challenge the thought,

00:09:17.180 | you make space for the thought,

00:09:18.800 | but instead of getting into it,

00:09:21.000 | like let's really get into it,

00:09:22.140 | you say, despite that,

00:09:25.140 | I'm gonna go commit to doing something

00:09:26.620 | that's value-driven.

00:09:28.140 | Because what matters is living true to your values.

00:09:30.660 | Like that's ultimately what matters,

00:09:31.800 | I'm gonna commit to do that,

00:09:32.840 | even though something bad could happen.

00:09:34.980 | And ACT is all about,

00:09:36.580 | and you'll read this in "The Happiness Trap",

00:09:39.380 | you're able to separate from the feeling of anxiety.

00:09:43.080 | It's there, it's the Eastern part of it.

00:09:46.060 | But it's just a sensation, it's just physical.

00:09:48.260 | Great, I'm feeling that, it's like my knee hurts.

00:09:50.100 | Great, what's next?

00:09:51.460 | And you learn to separate from the part of your mind

00:09:53.380 | that wants to tell the stories.

00:09:54.260 | We gotta think about this,

00:09:55.300 | but what if there's a panic attack?

00:09:56.620 | And what if this happens?

00:09:57.500 | And what if this or that happens?

00:10:00.260 | And you say, I see that story there,

00:10:02.260 | and I'm not mad at that part of my mind,

00:10:03.860 | and it's like a character and I give it a name,

00:10:05.620 | and maybe this is the patron of panic attacks.

00:10:08.900 | And I'm not mad at that person, that character in my mind,

00:10:11.700 | but I'm not gonna get into it with them.

00:10:13.740 | What I'm gonna do is this thing right here,

00:10:15.140 | because it's important to me,

00:10:16.020 | and I wanna live true to my values,

00:10:18.180 | regardless of what happens.

00:10:19.540 | And so you go do it anyways.

00:10:22.080 | And so when they would deal with people

00:10:23.180 | with severe anxiety, they'd say,

00:10:24.420 | you go to the party anyways,

00:10:25.700 | and you give the talk anyways, and you do whatever.

00:10:27.620 | And I like that.

00:10:28.860 | And I would say this is a very long way around

00:10:31.740 | the saying, the deep life is about living

00:10:35.700 | in a value-driven way, despite everything else that happens.

00:10:39.680 | Not about creating a life that these specific

00:10:42.940 | good things happen and there is no bad.

00:10:44.940 | That's called the fantasy life.

00:10:47.380 | That's not a life that you're gonna achieve.

00:10:51.060 | No one achieves that life.

00:10:52.180 | We all have our issues.

00:10:53.860 | I had to deal with the anxiety with the sleep thing.

00:10:55.820 | I don't have, I have not classic panic attacks,

00:10:58.340 | but I've gone through, I have weird stuff happens to me

00:11:01.980 | I have whatever, autonomic nervous system,

00:11:06.900 | panic attack style reactions.

00:11:08.420 | I've had this all the time.

00:11:09.820 | Faint, I'll have like a severe sort of,

00:11:16.020 | I'll get lightheaded and like my whole body

00:11:18.680 | will break out in sweat.

00:11:19.660 | Like, look, man, I've been through all this stuff.

00:11:22.960 | And you wanna talk about high stakes.

00:11:24.140 | How about like, okay, you're about to go on air

00:11:26.180 | on this network, or you're on stage in front of like

00:11:30.180 | a huge number of people, or you're here sitting

00:11:32.820 | next to the Dean.

00:11:34.380 | And so I've gone, so we all have this stuff we go through.

00:11:37.780 | And because the point is, our goal is not to avoid

00:11:40.260 | bad things from happening, avoid bad sensations

00:11:42.100 | and have only good things happen to us.

00:11:43.720 | The goal is to live deeply, to live true to your values

00:11:46.380 | despite it, it's the ACT mindset.

00:11:48.100 | It's the mindset that Russ Harris talks about

00:11:50.660 | in "The Happiness Trap".

00:11:52.300 | So that's the piece I really, Karan,

00:11:55.340 | wanted the focus on here.

00:11:57.340 | Is focus on what you can control

00:11:58.660 | in building this good life.

00:12:00.060 | The stuff you can't control will come and go.

00:12:03.700 | It'll do what it does.

00:12:05.260 | Whatever, and you can't, a lot of that you can't control.

00:12:08.980 | Be happy when it's, hey, I'm not feeling this thing

00:12:11.580 | I don't like, great, I'm happy.

00:12:13.860 | But when it's there, don't be devastated.

00:12:15.780 | Be like, crap, but I'm still doing this thing

00:12:17.060 | I really find important.

00:12:18.780 | So I think that's good.

00:12:19.620 | Now onto your framework.

00:12:20.580 | I mean, look, I nerd out on this stuff all the time.

00:12:23.420 | So yes, I like what you're doing here.

00:12:26.780 | You're building out a system of different layers.

00:12:29.500 | You're thinking things through.

00:12:30.420 | I think of what you're doing

00:12:31.260 | as called a personal operating system

00:12:32.900 | that has these different stack layers that meet together.

00:12:35.460 | My only word of warning would be,

00:12:37.260 | make sure that the fiddling of the knobs

00:12:40.220 | doesn't take over the actual living.

00:12:42.660 | In the end, you actually, life is hard and complicated

00:12:45.580 | and some days you're anxious and some days you get sick

00:12:47.940 | and you're out of commission for two weeks

00:12:49.540 | and you can't follow your system.

00:12:50.580 | And you wanna make sure that in the end,

00:12:52.580 | you're present and have gratitude

00:12:55.260 | and you're doing interesting things

00:12:56.340 | and enjoying good moments

00:12:57.420 | and that you're not spending all your time

00:12:58.500 | thinking about your system.

00:12:59.420 | But I'm glad you're thinking about it.

00:13:01.100 | I like your heuristics, try them.

00:13:03.020 | If they don't work, change them.

00:13:04.700 | Feel free to simplify them if you feel stressed

00:13:06.740 | by just the complexity of your system.

00:13:08.300 | I think that's all fine.

00:13:09.540 | But let's go back to this original point

00:13:11.420 | is the goal of the deep life here is not to avoid the bad.

00:13:16.060 | It is to live good

00:13:17.500 | even when the inevitable bad comes and goes.

00:13:21.020 | (upbeat music)

00:13:24.580 | (upbeat music)

00:13:27.160 | (upbeat music)

How Do I Reduce My Anxiety While Trying to Optimize My Deep Life?

Chapters