Tips To Overcome Anxiety Of A Scheduled Event

00:00:00.000 | All right, well I'm refreshed Jesse, so let's do some questions. What do you think?

00:00:03.520 | Should we start with a call? Is that what we're doing here? Yeah, let's start with a

00:00:05.880 | call. We got a call from Erica and she's gonna talk about anxiety and time block

00:00:12.440 | planning. Hello, my name is Erica. I am a return caller and general asker of

00:00:23.120 | questions. Today my question is regarding anxiety and time block planning. So one

00:00:31.480 | side of me loves to have my schedule set so I don't have to think about it, but

00:00:36.680 | when I get to the day where I have something planned at a certain time, I

00:00:41.080 | get anxiety because there's this other side of me that loves flexibility. I do

00:00:47.240 | like schedule throughout my day some unstructured time, but and once I start

00:00:53.480 | an activity I'm usually happy with doing the activity, but I just get a lot of

00:00:58.480 | inertial pre-event anxiety and just you know a feeling of not wanting to do a

00:01:05.600 | certain thing at the time I have it. So I'll give a good example, like I schedule

00:01:11.680 | a reservation at a restaurant you know like a month in advance or something and

00:01:16.840 | that I'm really excited for, but when the day comes I just don't like feeling

00:01:22.200 | boxed in and having to be at the restaurant at a certain time, but then I

00:01:27.240 | get there and I love it. So do you have any like tips or thoughts on how I might

00:01:35.640 | be able to just get over this I don't know I don't know I don't know the right

00:01:40.960 | term for it I guess pre-inertial anxiety towards a structured schedule event.

00:01:47.880 | All right thank you very much take care bye. Well I mean Erika this is similar to

00:01:54.000 | what we were chatting about at the top of the show about the the resistance I

00:01:59.000 | feel to restarting my full-time block planning system at the beginning of the

00:02:04.000 | fall. You're feeling this but basically on the scale of individual scheduled

00:02:08.360 | events or blocks same underlying mechanisms and is quite normal. Our brain

00:02:14.640 | does not understand by understand I mean has not been evolved over deep history

00:02:22.120 | time to last two to three hundred thousand years where modern homo sapiens

00:02:25.560 | have walked the earth. It has not evolved to work with scheduled events it's not

00:02:32.080 | evolved to work with I am now going to start doing this task because it's drawn

00:02:38.680 | up in a box on a piece of paper. I am now going to head over to a restaurant to

00:02:43.880 | eat because it's in my planner that that's what happens next. That is not how

00:02:49.840 | our motivational loops are evolved to actually function. They're functioning

00:02:53.800 | they're meant to function on much more immediate and clear stimuli. We need more

00:02:59.600 | food we're going for a hunt. This person who's in front of me who I can see so

00:03:05.920 | all of the social networks that take up so much of my neuron neuronal space in

00:03:10.480 | my brain are all fired up and looking at this person in front of me who's a part

00:03:13.800 | of my tribe who's asking for my help. Oh yeah we're gonna go help that person. We

00:03:17.520 | expect these more acute stimuli. The brain does not understand a small box

00:03:22.440 | written one of these or a little green glowing screen box on your screen your

00:03:27.760 | Google calendar for an appointment. It doesn't understand that. So we have some

00:03:32.080 | trouble literally getting the motivational system to put the right

00:03:36.480 | chemicals into our system that gets us up and actually moving. There's something

00:03:40.320 | called the ventral striatum that's involved in this. The neuroscience gets

00:03:43.120 | complicated. Details don't matter. We can we'll get Andrew Huberman on the line if

00:03:47.800 | we really want to get into this but let's just rest assured this is what our

00:03:51.680 | brain does. Different people Erica have different reactions to this mismatch.

00:03:56.960 | Right so some people it's yeah whatever. Yeah you have to just kind of bull rush

00:04:03.920 | into the task then you get going. It's minor. Other people like you Erica the

00:04:08.480 | mismatch triggers anxiety which again chemicals. Anxiety is a physical feeling.

00:04:14.000 | There's a constriction in the chest. There's a difficulty in the breathing.

00:04:18.200 | You can you can do some self scanning and say this is just physical hormonal

00:04:23.600 | chemical driven reaction. The autonomic immune system or nervous system rather

00:04:27.400 | is involved in this. And so for you and a lot of other people this mismatch can

00:04:33.080 | create literal anxiety. The thing we have to do about this put bluntly is sort of

00:04:41.120 | ignore. I mean we can recognize my brain does this just like my knee hurts when a

00:04:48.920 | storm is coming. But beyond recognizing it we still go forward. We still go

00:04:55.000 | forward because let me tell you let's say you get rid of your time block

00:04:58.120 | planning during the day like let's just rock and roll so I don't have to have

00:05:01.240 | the anxiety of having something scheduled. You're opening yourself up to a

00:05:04.160 | much more existential anxiety because you're gonna just ping-pong back and

00:05:08.000 | forth randomly putting out fires not making progress on things are important

00:05:12.040 | forgetting about things having to scramble at the last minute to get

00:05:15.000 | things done. This is not from a physiological perspective or a

00:05:18.680 | psychological perspective a better subjective experience. It's a deeper

00:05:24.640 | existential anxiety you're gonna feel. So you're trading one for the other. Same

00:05:28.760 | thing if you know you don't go to the restaurant. You don't go to the party.

00:05:34.600 | You're not gonna feel better. You'll get like relief in the moment because you're

00:05:38.520 | resolving the mismatch but you're not around friends. You're not doing

00:05:40.720 | interesting things. And you know I get that too Erica. I don't get I don't get

00:05:44.760 | anxiety around blocks if it's just work I've put aside. I just get normal

00:05:50.160 | resistance. When you throw a there's different aspects sometimes there's

00:05:54.400 | social aspects so this might be what you have there might be like a social aspect

00:05:57.720 | in there where there's a little bit of social anxiety so that could exaggerate

00:06:00.560 | it. I don't have that so much but I have as I talked about on the show these

00:06:04.640 | weird deep-rooted issues with surrounding sleep and so I'll sometimes

00:06:10.200 | get this around events if they're at night. Like you know it's I don't know

00:06:14.560 | how late it's gonna go and what my sleep and and you know what I've learned to do

00:06:18.040 | is say okay thank you brain. Welcome anxiety. I'm glad you're here.

00:06:22.040 | Chemicals. You'll pass soon and I'm gonna go on and keep doing this thing. So

00:06:26.840 | that's what I say Erica. It's natural. It's not that you shouldn't find it that

00:06:31.280 | interesting in the sense of like it here this comes it'll go and you make the

00:06:35.280 | plans that are good. You execute the plans and find pride in your action and

00:06:39.440 | not give so much attention to the physiological. It's gonna do its thing

00:06:43.480 | and then Erica you're gonna do your thing. Because more often than not it's

00:06:47.720 | gonna be like an enjoyable experience to like going to the party or going to the

00:06:51.080 | gym or yeah and that's what game or that's what I'm trying to separate here

00:06:54.400 | is like how much how much we're dealing with the the planning mismatch with

00:06:58.680 | Erica which is a real thing. I mean people sometimes anxiety a lot of times

00:07:02.280 | just procrastination. It's like really hard for people to get started on things

00:07:06.280 | that are just that are planned in some sort of abstract or arbitrary system and

00:07:09.440 | there's also social anxiety and she's mentioned both in the call so I'm

00:07:15.200 | assuming they're kind of all mixed together. Yeah I mean social anxiety is

00:07:19.200 | its own its own thing which again is completely natural because our brain is

00:07:22.400 | so attuned to the sociality that you know a lot of what you know 20th first

00:07:27.760 | century like social life is not exactly what our brain expects. It expects like

00:07:31.800 | this is my tribe that I am around all day. Yeah I'm with them all day. It's why

00:07:36.760 | I'm miserable when I'm alone but if it's strangers and some people I don't know

00:07:41.120 | and it's in like a bar I haven't been to the brain is like I don't know about

00:07:45.640 | this. Mm-hmm. Some people care more than others. You have negative social anxiety

00:07:50.240 | as far as I can tell. You love people and you love doing things. Well I'm around a

00:07:54.480 | lot of people a lot like in various my other jobs and stuff. Yeah. And yeah I do

00:08:00.520 | a lot of things too I guess. That's a spectrum. See like probably for you the

00:08:05.440 | way that wiring is set up is you see the the potential opportunity in a novel

00:08:11.680 | social environment. Like oh something cool could happen I could meet someone

00:08:14.680 | interesting maybe I'll see something interesting. Yeah. And for other people it

00:08:17.800 | will be but what happens if I get there and like I can't find the I can't find

00:08:23.160 | the person or like as I as I walk into the as I walk into the room like I'm

00:08:28.040 | immediately you know caught catch on fire or whatever it is. The waiter spills

00:08:32.720 | water on me. Yeah. Really. I had a friend we used to joke about that when be

00:08:37.880 | anxious about like going to a bar we'd never been at before and we try to one

00:08:41.440 | up each other on our predictions for what was going to happen and it would

00:08:45.600 | usually end up with like as the door open just three or four people already

00:08:50.360 | at a full sprint are just charging you to take you down and to beat you with

00:08:55.240 | some sort of like bats or blackjack so that we'd see like how how how

00:08:59.360 | exaggerated we could make the story that would you know explain some social

00:09:03.960 | anxiety like as soon as you're in the door it's just going to be like fire boys

00:09:06.920 | and like immediately or someone with a flamethrower and you know you over the

00:09:11.120 | top

00:09:13.240 | [Music]

Tips To Overcome Anxiety Of A Scheduled Event

Chapters