All right, well I'm refreshed Jesse, so let's do some questions. What do you think? Should we start with a call? Is that what we're doing here? Yeah, let's start with a call. We got a call from Erica and she's gonna talk about anxiety and time block planning. Hello, my name is Erica.

I am a return caller and general asker of questions. Today my question is regarding anxiety and time block planning. So one side of me loves to have my schedule set so I don't have to think about it, but when I get to the day where I have something planned at a certain time, I get anxiety because there's this other side of me that loves flexibility.

I do like schedule throughout my day some unstructured time, but and once I start an activity I'm usually happy with doing the activity, but I just get a lot of inertial pre-event anxiety and just you know a feeling of not wanting to do a certain thing at the time I have it.

So I'll give a good example, like I schedule a reservation at a restaurant you know like a month in advance or something and that I'm really excited for, but when the day comes I just don't like feeling boxed in and having to be at the restaurant at a certain time, but then I get there and I love it.

So do you have any like tips or thoughts on how I might be able to just get over this I don't know I don't know I don't know the right term for it I guess pre-inertial anxiety towards a structured schedule event. All right thank you very much take care bye.

Well I mean Erika this is similar to what we were chatting about at the top of the show about the the resistance I feel to restarting my full-time block planning system at the beginning of the fall. You're feeling this but basically on the scale of individual scheduled events or blocks same underlying mechanisms and is quite normal.

Our brain does not understand by understand I mean has not been evolved over deep history time to last two to three hundred thousand years where modern homo sapiens have walked the earth. It has not evolved to work with scheduled events it's not evolved to work with I am now going to start doing this task because it's drawn up in a box on a piece of paper.

I am now going to head over to a restaurant to eat because it's in my planner that that's what happens next. That is not how our motivational loops are evolved to actually function. They're functioning they're meant to function on much more immediate and clear stimuli. We need more food we're going for a hunt.

This person who's in front of me who I can see so all of the social networks that take up so much of my neuron neuronal space in my brain are all fired up and looking at this person in front of me who's a part of my tribe who's asking for my help.

Oh yeah we're gonna go help that person. We expect these more acute stimuli. The brain does not understand a small box written one of these or a little green glowing screen box on your screen your Google calendar for an appointment. It doesn't understand that. So we have some trouble literally getting the motivational system to put the right chemicals into our system that gets us up and actually moving.

There's something called the ventral striatum that's involved in this. The neuroscience gets complicated. Details don't matter. We can we'll get Andrew Huberman on the line if we really want to get into this but let's just rest assured this is what our brain does. Different people Erica have different reactions to this mismatch.

Right so some people it's yeah whatever. Yeah you have to just kind of bull rush into the task then you get going. It's minor. Other people like you Erica the mismatch triggers anxiety which again chemicals. Anxiety is a physical feeling. There's a constriction in the chest. There's a difficulty in the breathing.

You can you can do some self scanning and say this is just physical hormonal chemical driven reaction. The autonomic immune system or nervous system rather is involved in this. And so for you and a lot of other people this mismatch can create literal anxiety. The thing we have to do about this put bluntly is sort of ignore.

I mean we can recognize my brain does this just like my knee hurts when a storm is coming. But beyond recognizing it we still go forward. We still go forward because let me tell you let's say you get rid of your time block planning during the day like let's just rock and roll so I don't have to have the anxiety of having something scheduled.

You're opening yourself up to a much more existential anxiety because you're gonna just ping-pong back and forth randomly putting out fires not making progress on things are important forgetting about things having to scramble at the last minute to get things done. This is not from a physiological perspective or a psychological perspective a better subjective experience.

It's a deeper existential anxiety you're gonna feel. So you're trading one for the other. Same thing if you know you don't go to the restaurant. You don't go to the party. You're not gonna feel better. You'll get like relief in the moment because you're resolving the mismatch but you're not around friends.

You're not doing interesting things. And you know I get that too Erica. I don't get I don't get anxiety around blocks if it's just work I've put aside. I just get normal resistance. When you throw a there's different aspects sometimes there's social aspects so this might be what you have there might be like a social aspect in there where there's a little bit of social anxiety so that could exaggerate it.

I don't have that so much but I have as I talked about on the show these weird deep-rooted issues with surrounding sleep and so I'll sometimes get this around events if they're at night. Like you know it's I don't know how late it's gonna go and what my sleep and and you know what I've learned to do is say okay thank you brain.

Welcome anxiety. I'm glad you're here. Chemicals. You'll pass soon and I'm gonna go on and keep doing this thing. So that's what I say Erica. It's natural. It's not that you shouldn't find it that interesting in the sense of like it here this comes it'll go and you make the plans that are good.

You execute the plans and find pride in your action and not give so much attention to the physiological. It's gonna do its thing and then Erica you're gonna do your thing. Because more often than not it's gonna be like an enjoyable experience to like going to the party or going to the gym or yeah and that's what game or that's what I'm trying to separate here is like how much how much we're dealing with the the planning mismatch with Erica which is a real thing.

I mean people sometimes anxiety a lot of times just procrastination. It's like really hard for people to get started on things that are just that are planned in some sort of abstract or arbitrary system and there's also social anxiety and she's mentioned both in the call so I'm assuming they're kind of all mixed together.

Yeah I mean social anxiety is its own its own thing which again is completely natural because our brain is so attuned to the sociality that you know a lot of what you know 20th first century like social life is not exactly what our brain expects. It expects like this is my tribe that I am around all day.

Yeah I'm with them all day. It's why I'm miserable when I'm alone but if it's strangers and some people I don't know and it's in like a bar I haven't been to the brain is like I don't know about this. Mm-hmm. Some people care more than others. You have negative social anxiety as far as I can tell.

You love people and you love doing things. Well I'm around a lot of people a lot like in various my other jobs and stuff. Yeah. And yeah I do a lot of things too I guess. That's a spectrum. See like probably for you the way that wiring is set up is you see the the potential opportunity in a novel social environment.

Like oh something cool could happen I could meet someone interesting maybe I'll see something interesting. Yeah. And for other people it will be but what happens if I get there and like I can't find the I can't find the person or like as I as I walk into the as I walk into the room like I'm immediately you know caught catch on fire or whatever it is.

The waiter spills water on me. Yeah. Really. I had a friend we used to joke about that when be anxious about like going to a bar we'd never been at before and we try to one up each other on our predictions for what was going to happen and it would usually end up with like as the door open just three or four people already at a full sprint are just charging you to take you down and to beat you with some sort of like bats or blackjack so that we'd see like how how how exaggerated we could make the story that would you know explain some social anxiety like as soon as you're in the door it's just going to be like fire boys and like immediately or someone with a flamethrower and you know you over the top