Anxiety Explained In A Way That Finally Makes Sense

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Most of the anxiety in our life comes from not doing the thing that we know that we want to be doing, but it also comes from that moment when we are doing the thing that we know we're meant to do, stepping into that bigger room, and we're not feeling it all the way. So, if we're deeply anxious, what happens is our brain becomes more limited, our intellect becomes more limited. We know that kids who live in super intense areas of the world don't learn as much and don't learn as quickly. We know that when people in work forces are deeply anxious for prolonged periods of time, they're not as productive. Anxiety prevents us from doing our best work.

[00:00:39]Even though our brain might tell us, "No, no, I need the anxiety to get the work done."

[00:00:44]It's proven that that's not the case at all.

[00:00:47]And so, sometimes the first thing you have to do with anxiety is deal with the physical part of anxiety. When we're not regulated, which just means when our anxiety is in control, and our nervous system is not fully able to learn and receive, the first thing we've got to do is just regulate the nervous system.

[00:01:05]And the way to do that is enjoyment and getting into your body. You can take a walk in the woods, you can do yoga, you can do gentle stretching, you can get a massage. Anything basically that puts you in your body and puts you in the moment when you're not thinking about other stuff.

[00:01:24]When you are basically paying attention to your body and letting your body regulate itself. You don't even have to try to regulate it because that would be stressful cuz then you'd be sitting there going, "I'm not regulated, but I have to regulate myself." So, it's just as simple as "How do I allow my body to regulate itself?" And you just put it in a great environment with great breath, with great nature, with great massage, with great stretching, and your body will just start to regulate. And without that, it's really, really hard to learn the lessons that you need to learn from anxiety. So, that's often the first thing that you need to do.

[00:02:03]The second thing you need to do is really understand what you're telling yourself you should be doing and what makes you not do it. Things like, "I'm not saying what I want to say. I'm not being who I want to be with my partner.

[00:02:16]I'm not allowing myself to feel the emotions that I need to feel to be happy."

[00:02:21]And so, it's basically knowing that there's something that needs to be done and you're not doing it. And it might not even be entirely conscious at first, but there's always a hint. I'm going to give you a like a crazy example of this.

[00:02:36]I have watched folks who are super high-capacity CEOs, and some of them are entirely stressed out, and some of them are not stressed out. Both of them working 80, 90 hours a week, both of them super passionate about what they do, but one of them seems to have infinite energy and one of them doesn't. And the difference is one of them is constantly telling themselves everything that they should be doing that they're not doing, and the other one is taking action every time one of those things happens. Or they're saying, "That's important, but it's not as important as this, so I'm going to do this."

[00:03:13]Right? And so, I've seen this hundreds of times, and it's why some of the most successful CEOs that I've ever met are always focused on one or two things.

[00:03:22]They know that here's the one piece of leverage that if I push it, everything else will fall into place. Everything else will be easier, or everything else will be irrelevant.

[00:03:33]And so, they're solely focused on these one or two places where they know that they can make a significant difference for everything else that they're doing.

[00:03:42]And when they know that, when they've done that thought process, they're a lot less stressed as compared to somebody who feels like they should be doing everything, and there's no way they can do everything, and they've got to do everything. That doesn't work.

[00:03:54]And so, it's interesting to watch how one one of these CEOs is just getting more and more tired and exhausted, and the other one is not overwhelmed, is not tired, not exhausted, and they're running a bigger company, and they have more decisions to make.

[00:04:11]And so, it's just as as simple as how you are speaking to yourself is what creates anxiety. Now, the deeper psychology of this is some way in which you're not being yourself just creates an everlasting anxiety in your system. If you know you're not saying things that are true, if you know that you're trying to manipulate people instead of being direct with your wants, you know that that you're not being authentic, that's going to create a lot of stress.

[00:04:43]Now, your mind is going to tell you there's a whole bunch of reasons not to do it, and we're going to talk about that at the end of the video when we talk about some of the other emotions that anxiety is hiding. But just for now, the one thing to really take a look at is to say, "Oh, am I scared of the short-term consequences, or am I scared of the long-term consequences?" So, yeah, if I'm going to be myself, I'm going to say something to my mom, and she's going to be upset. That's a short-term consequence. Here's the long-term consequence. I want to say something to my mom, and I'm not going to say it, and therefore, I am going to constantly have a mom who thinks I should be different than how I am. I'm want to say something to my mom, but I'm not going to say it, and so now, every time I'm around my mom, I'm resentful of her because she wants me to be different than who I am. I want to say something to my mom, and I'm not going to say it, and therefore, for the rest of our relationship, I know I'm not being honest with her, and so she doesn't even know who I am. She can't even love me because there's no me there to love.

[00:05:46]There's just this thing that I'm pretending to be in front of her.

[00:05:51]So, if you think about the short-term consequence of her being upset and the long-term consequences of all those things, it becomes really apparent what the right move to make is.

[00:06:01]And you'll make the move, and maybe it'll be upsetting, but I guarantee even afterwards, the anxiety will be relieved a little bit because you have been authentic, you've been who you want to be.

[00:06:12]Now, the other part of this is the emotional part of this, which is if you are not allowing yourself to have the emotions that you know are necessary, the grief or the anger or the excitement or the exuberance, then on some level, that's going to create anxiety in your system. You're constantly telling yourself, "No, you can't be who you are." So, this isn't a you can't do what you want to do. This is a can't be who you are. Being is an emotional experience. We feel being. And if you're not allowing yourself to feel the aliveness, the joy, the pain, the suffering, the sorrow, the wonder, the amazement, the exuberance, there's just this natural anxiety. The only reason not to be what I want to be is because somehow I'm going to get in trouble. And if I could get in trouble at any minute, it means I'm constantly under threat. And of course, I'm anxious then. And so, that's one more way in which we're not doing the thing that we know we need to do, and that's what's causing us anxiety. And here's the kind of weird loophole that the mind finds.

[00:07:17]There's this intellectual thing that happens of our negative self-talk just constantly hammering at us over and over and over again, and that creates a lot of stress. Now, as you start clearing your emotions up, the the voice starts slowing down. As you start looking at the voice, it starts slowing down. Now, we have a great podcast on voice in the head that you can look at. We also deal with the voice in the head in the connection course, so you can go there and find it.

[00:07:45]There's lots of ways to deal with it, but this video would be really long if we only did voice in the head stuff. So, just know that the ways that we are creating stress for ourselves are telling ourselves we should do something when we can't do it, not doing the stuff that we know we should be doing, not being who we want to be emotionally, or constantly beating ourselves with the negative self-talk.

[00:08:07]So, those are all the psychological things that happen. And so, to work on any of them starts to relieve the anxiety. But to get out of the anxiety is not a short-term play. It's not a oh, I'm just going to take some deep breaths, and then I'm not going to be anxious again.

[00:08:24]The anxiety is pointing to something.

[00:08:25]It's pointing to the way in which your life is out of alignment. And if you're not willing to do the work to get your life back into alignment, that anxiety is constantly going to be with you to remind you that your life is not in alignment. You're not taking care of yourself.

[00:08:42]You're not, and therefore, you must not be safe. Why on earth would you not take care of yourself unless there's some something that's going to kill you if you don't.

[00:08:52]And that's basically what anxiety is in your system, except for in some cases.

[00:08:57]And this is that thing that we talked about at the beginning of the video about how anxiety sometimes hides another emotion. So, I had a friend who always had problems with stage fright, and every time they got up and spoke, they had all this anxiety.

[00:09:11]And I gave them this like very, very simple little exercise to do. I said, "Hey, next time you get up on stage, I want you to fill the whole room. I want you to feel like you are the entire room."

[00:09:24]That's it. Just put your feeling into the entire room. Luckily, they were somatically very aware. They understood what I was saying. They were like, "Oh, the anxiety's gone. Actually, I was really excited to be up on stage."

[00:09:36]And that's the clue. The clue is that often times, we're anxious when we're actually deeply excited. And the times that that's the case is the times when we are being asked to fill up the room, to go into a new and bigger room, a new job, a new relationship, a new way of being, a new set of friends where we're actually being asked like, "Oh, here is this new bigger way that you can be in the world." And that creates anxiety. At least we think it is, but it's actually not. It's actually excitement.

[00:10:14]And so we think to ourselves, "Oh my gosh, I'm anxious." But if we feel the excitement, the anxiety goes away completely. And there's an easy way to do this. It's literally to like act excited and to say, "I'm excited. I'm excited. I'm excited. I'm excited. I'm excited. I'm excited." like 10 times.

[00:10:30]And you'll notice, literally 10 times of saying it, you'll notice that all that anxiety turns into excitement. So that's the weird piece. There's most of the anxiety in our life comes from not doing the thing that we know that we want to be doing, but it also comes from that moment when we are doing the thing that we know we're meant to do, stepping into that bigger room, and we're not feeling it all the way.

[00:10:55]Those are the two places that anxiety comes in.

[00:10:59]And if you can work on both of those two arenas, over time the anxiety will start to dissipate slowly.

[00:11:06]And then pretty soon you'll notice that you're having this life where you can be so productive and you can do so much and you're not overwhelmed anymore because the overwhelm never was by all the stuff you were doing. The anxiety wasn't from all the stuff that you had to do like your mind is telling [music] you. It came from the fact that you weren't doing the things that you really wanted to be doing [music] and you weren't allowing that big feeling of moving into the next stage of your journey.