How To Overcome Anxiety and Negative Emotions

good morning Dr Peterson you speak a lot about negative emotion as someone who's very prone to negative emotion and borderline neurotic I have fairly severe anxiety problems that are being controlled with ssris currently anyway my question is is there a way to change your temperament if you're prone to negative emotion is the way to fix that permanently well there are ways of modifying it I spoke a little earlier today about the self-authoring programs I would say you could try those that'll help be evidence that writing about your past of unresolved issues in your past let's

say remaining Mysteries reduces the overall level of stress that you carry with you because your body computes your average level of stress by calculating something like the proportion of things you don't understand that have happened to you to the proportion of things that you do understand and you want you want that ratio to be low you want to have understood virtually everything that happened to you so that if this same situation same potentially problematic situation that did you in in the past arises in the future you know how to deal with that so getting your

story straight in relationship to your past is important doing the same in relationship to your future is crucial because that reduces another level of uncertainty like another domain of uncertainty if you're uncertain about where you're going or why that makes you chronically stressed okay so that can help if you do those things you straighten out your story about who you are and where you're going that will lower your Baseline levels of neuroticism now conscientious conduct also decreases neuroticism there's a negative correlation between conscientiousness and eroticism and it looks causal in that more orderly and industrious

people are less suffer less from negative emotion okay and that's probably because they put their environments in order right they they keep they actually Border in their immediate environment so things are neat and orderly around them but they also work hard so that the future is more stable okay so then what else um there's an emergent literature showing that excess concern about the narrow self is associated with self-conscious suffering so for example you can discriminate between people who are depressed depressed and or psychotic and those who are not with about 75 percent accuracy by calculating

the relative number of self-referential pronouns that are used in speech or writing speech or writing of the people involved and the more people concentrate on themselves their narrow selves the more miserable they are and that's buttress by finding showing that in the scales that measure trait neuroticism or negative emotionality self-consciousness is actually a facet of the scale itself which means that acute self-consciousness is so tightly associated with misery that they may be the essentially the same thing so now you can't really escape from that Trap by consciously trying to think less about yourself because if

you start thinking less about thinking about yourself you just end up thinking more about yourself that's not helpful but what you can do this is extremely useful is you can start thinking about how to put other people at ease and what you can do for other people like how you can be of service and paradoxically because that takes the self-conscious stress off you then your negative emotion levels will fall so you know if you find yourself ruminating about yourself and your concerns you can actually learn how to switch your thinking to what you might do

to make the lives of the people around you better and that could be you know your immediate partner for example or your immediate family members or your friends or your business partners or people in the broader community service to others is one of the ways out of negative self-focused emotion you know we have this strange idea in our culture that the more we encourage young people to be concerned about their mental state let's say the more value we're attributing to them and the more good we're going to do them on the mental health side and

that's that couldn't be less true it's actually an anti-truth to over protect people and to have them focus on their own concerns is definitely a pathway to misery now the other thing I would say this is useful too you know something you could try to do is imagine I ask you say why don't you just sit down one day for an hour or maybe across a couple of days and write down all the things that you're afraid of and avoiding that are necessary for you to do to move forward right so these would be things

that you're not doing that you know you need to do in order for you to move to where you want to move and so you need to make a pretty exhaustive list of those then you need to break each of those down you need a strategy and a written strategy would be very helpful you need a a strategy of exposure you know I mean like maybe you're behind on your tax documents let's say you know or there's some other stack of paperwork sitting on your desk that you're not attending to because you're afraid and man

there may be lots of things in your life that you're not attending to because you're afraid and so first of all you want to admit to what those things are and you can ask yourself that then you want to write them down then you want to come up with a strategy for starting to to deal with them you know so like if it's a stack of unpaid bills that you're terrified of and that you've been avoiding for a few months or even worse you're going to be pretty damn afraid to even take a look at

the problem but it'll it almost inevitably be the case that if you take a look at the problem a detailed look the reality will be less terrifying than the Specter that your imagination has conjured forth and maybe the first thing the thing you can do for the first day when you decide to actually turn around and face the dragon let's say is all you'll do is open the file folder without with all your with all the documentation of what you're avoiding in it and just glance through it like for five minutes just to break that

paralysis you know or maybe you have to spend 15 minutes Gathering the dispersed documents that are in whatever the hell passes for your fighting system together so they're all in one place some move forward and so what you want to do is you want to think about what it is that's producing negative emotion in you your doubts and your concerns and then you want to develop a strategy of incremental approach and that that will also fortify you partly because you reduce the number of things that you're afraid of by actually dealing with those things so

they go away you actually solve the problems but also you train yourself to see that you're the sort of person that doesn't have to run from their problems no matter what they are and that deep learning that you are that sort of person is in fact the solution to the problem that you're describing with regards to severe anxiety now the other thing I would say too and I don't know anything about you obviously is you think that your anxiety and perhaps Associated depression is psychological right and you think that the reason the ssris are dealing

with it is because they're having a psychological effect but there are a lot of reasons to be anxious so for example there is good evidence that depression in many cases and and Associated anxiety let's say can be a consequence of inflammatory autoimmune problems lots and you can look that up for yourself the relationship between depression and and immune dysfunction especially inflammation and you know you've got to ask yourself is there something wrong with you that's making you anxious you may be physically ill in some complex way um my daughter and my members of my family

have had a lot of good fortune treating high levels of negative emotion with dietary with dietary alteration it as you may know because it's somewhat well known we only eat meat and there's a huge literature emerging on the utility of ketogenic and carnivorous diets to redress serious physical and psychological disorders so uh my daughter has done a podcast with uh a psychiatrist at Harvard for example at McLean Hospital who's been investigating this quite deeply with regard to schizoaffective disorder which is a very serious near psychotic disorder a very deep problem that looks like it's physically

rather than psychologically grounded and the data on the carnivore diet in relationship to Disease Control is extremely positive now there's not a lot of data yet the studies are hard to do but don't be so sure that the reason that you're miserable is because there's something wrong with you psychologically it could easily be that it's the secondary consequence of some of some physiological illness that's going to be somewhat difficult to specify right because autoimmune problems the sort of autoimmune problems that cause inflammation are difficult to specify so you might want to figure out like do

you have allergies do you have psoriasis do you have any other signs of autoimmune trouble um that that's one way of starting and any other physical illness like symptoms because that can help you triangulate on what might be driving your anxiety but don't assume that it's all psychological because it could well not be you know when I do my well I don't practice clinically now but when I did differential diagnosis to begin with trying to figure out what was wrong with my clients I always started with the assumption that if they were seriously Afflicted on

the psychological side that they may have been ill in some manner that hadn't been diagnosed properly and that's very much worth considering so anyways that's not bad [Music] foreign [Music]