How To Beat Fear And Anxiety | Jordan Peterson | Powerful Life Advice

i've dealt with lots of people who have anxiety disorders you know and one thing about people who have anxiety disorders is they are not mysterious to me it's no problem for me to understand why people have anxiety disorders or why they're depressed or why they have substance use problems the mystery to me is always why people don't have all of those things at once because everybody has a reason to be anxious in fact we have the ultimate reason to be anxious because we know that we're vulnerable and we know that we're going to die and

how you can not be anxious under those circumstances is a great mystery it's a massive mystery and the same thing applies with regards to depression and then the same thing applies to some degree with regards to drug and alcohol abuse because i said last week there's plenty of reasons to drown your consciousness in alcohol that's for sure we could refer to the aforementioned anxiety and depression not least and the sorts of drugs that people are prone to take are chemicals that take the affective edge off the tragedy of life so back to the issue of

fear abraham is self-conscious that's what this commentary says but the thing is is he moves forward despite that he's self-conscious and he knows the danger but he moves forward despite that and that's actually the appropriate response in the face of actual non-naive understanding of what constitutes life like if you're naive and you move forward it's like well what the hell do you know you know there's no courage in naivety because you don't know what there is to stop you you don't know what dangers you might apprehend but to be aware of what it is that

your problem is so to be alert existentially let's say or to be fully self-conscious means that you're perfectly aware of your limitations and how you might be hurt and then to make the decision to move forward into the unknown and the land of the stranger anyways that's the i would say that's one of the secrets to a good life and i can say that really without fear of contradiction i would say because the clinical literature on this is very very very clear what you do with people who are afraid and and to some degree depressed

but certainly anxious is you lay out what they're anxious about first of all in detail what is it that you're afraid of what might happen and then you decompose it into small problems hypothetically manageable problems and then you have the person expose themselves to the thing that they're afraid of and what happens isn't that they get less afraid that isn't what the clinical literature indicates exactly what happens instead is they get braver and that's not the same thing right because if you get less afraid it's like well the world isn't as dangerous as i thought

it was you know silly me if you get braver that's not what happens what happens is yeah the damn world's just as dangerous as i thought or maybe it's even more dangerous than i thought but it turns out that there's something in me that responds to taking that on as a voluntary challenge and grows and thrives as a consequence and there's no doubt about this even the psychophysiological findings are quite clear if you impose a stressor on two groups of people and on one group the stressor is imposed involuntarily and on the other group the

stressor is picked up voluntarily the people who pick up the stressor voluntarily use a whole different psychophysiological system to deal with it they use the system that's associated with approach and challenge and not the system that's associated with defensive aggression and withdrawal and the system that is associated with challenges much more associated with positive emotion and much less associated with negative emotion it's also much less hard on you because the defensive posturing system the prey animal system man when that thing kicks in it's all systems are go for you you know the pedals push down

to the metal and the brakes are on you're using future resources that you could be storing for future time right now in the present to ready yourself for emergency so there's nothing simple or trivial at all about the idea of being called to move forthrightly forward into the strange and the unknown and there's a real adventure that's associated with that right so that's an exciting thing which is part of the reason why people travel and then also to see yourself as the sort of creature that can do that is willing to do that on a

habitual basis is also the right kind of tonic for i hate this word for your self-esteem you know because the self-esteem has nothing to do with feeling good about yourself as i already mentioned there isn't necessarily a reason why a priori you should just feel good about yourself but if you can view yourself acting in a courageous and forthright manner and encountering the world and trying to improve your lot and taking risks you know in a non-naive way well then you have something that you can comfort yourself with at night when you're wondering what the

whole damn point is of your futile and miserable life and that's necessary because it's often the case that you wake up at four in the morning or at least sometimes the case that you wake up at four in the morning when things haven't been going that well and wonder just what the hell the point is of your futile and miserable life you have to have something real to set against that it can't be just rationalizations about how you know you're a valuable person among others even though that's true that's not good enough you need something

that's more realistic to set against that and observing courage in yourself is definitely one of the things that can help you sleep soundly at night when things are destabilized a little bit around you you