Finding Your Why - The First Step to Dealing With Anxiety - Anxiety Course Day 1/30

but why are you here why did you click on this video or sign up for this course now if you're in the paid course take a minute in your workbook and write down your goals for the course if you're on YouTube write down your goals in the comments section now I'm not going to waste your time I'm not going to teach you how to cope with anxiety I'm gonna ask you to take radical responsibility for your anxiety so that means I'm gonna ask you to change the things that you can change but I'll teach you

the skills to do that so let's start with a story in this video you'll learn why many attempts to reduce anxiety or manage stress backfire and what to do instead [Music] now many people just want their anxiety to go away they just don't want to feel it they they imagine that if they didn't feel anxious their lives would be so much better and so they set that as their goal they their goal is my goal is to not feel so anxious but when your goal is to feel less of something you essentially have to cut

something out of your life and the problem with that is that your world shrinks and then as it becomes more miserable then your anxiety actually grows now let me give you an example researchers wanted to explore how anxiety impacted people so they decided to interview a group of 8th graders who were in the process of auditioning for plays and trying out for sports teams and of running for school counselor and the researchers asked the kids to rate their anxiety on a scale from zero to ten and about half of the kids said oh I am

really nervous and they rated their anxiety at a seven and eight or a nine and of these nervous kids some of the kids auditioned and some of them didn't now in the follow-up researchers asked the kids who tried out anyway they said you were really nervous why did you try out and the general response was auditioning was the only way to get into the play I had to face my anxiety in order to accomplish my goals and then they asked the group of kids that had high anxiety and didn't try out they asked them the

same question and they answered I didn't try out because that was the only way I could make my anxiety go away the only way to make your anxiety go away completely is to avoid the things you care about in life now just like those kids who decided not to audition if your only goal is to feel less to feel less sad to feel less stress then you'll end up shrinking your life away now I told you that this course is about your relationship with anxiety now sometimes when we have to interact with a difficult person

like a family member or a co-worker all we want is for that person to go away we don't want to have to deal with the discomfort of interacting with them so we avoid them or we fantasize about quitting our job or divorcing a spouse right and with some people we can cut them out of our lives but if our only tool in relationships is to separate from difficult people we're going to end up very lonely because all close relationships have difficulties instead in real close relationships we learn new skills we learn how to communicate clearly

how to set healthy boundaries how to ask for what you need how to problem solve assertively right when you learn how to do this the difficult person won't bother you so much and you can get all the joy that healthy relationships bring so instead in this course I'm going to teach you how to get better at feeling I mean yes your anxiety probably will decrease but way more importantly the goal of this course is to make your life awesome again to fill your life with the things you care about the people and the experiences that

you've cut out the dreams and the accomplishments that you're afraid to try and to bring richness and joy back to your day instead of worry and fear so what was the difference between those two groups of kids they both had high anxiety but one of them decided that their goal was worth it to face anxiety and the other set decided that the thing they wanted most was for their anxiety to go away the difference was not the level of anxiety but how the kids related to their anxiety now with those kids when the next audition

came around which group do you think was more anxious which one felt better about themselves which set felt more confident which set of kids decided to audition again most likely the group that tried it the group that faced their anxiety but motivation matters when facing anxiety so here's the thing that most people don't understand about anxiety when your main goal is to make your anxiety go away you believe it's the anxiety that's ruining your life and you imagine that if your anxiety went away then you'd be happy and while anxiety can be really uncomfortable it's

not actually the anxiety that's ruined in your life it's your attempts to escape anxiety that are actually decreasing your quality of life don't believe me let's look at some common examples social anxiety you stop going to parties because you don't want to feel anxious there you constantly worry about what you said in an attempt to figure out the perfect thing to say so that you don't have to feel anxious when you say the wrong thing so then you begin to worry and feel lonely all the time okay someone with OCD they fear that they've touched

something with germs and this thought makes them anxious so they engage in a behavior like hand washing to make that feeling go away but the feeling comes back so they wash their hands a hundred times to try to make that feeling go away but even though their skin is raw the feeling comes back then they just avoid going outside to avoid feeling anxious about touching something and before long the quality of life has gone way down now sometimes the way we attempt to avoid anxiety aren't nearly as obvious we may seek constant reassurance from our

spouse to avoid feeling anxious about whether they love us or we may constantly worry to try to prevent ourselves from feeling disappointed if something bad does happen yes you'll learn a lot more about worry later but you do it you worry to avoid anxiety and worry also fuels anxiety another way is we may convince ourselves that we're worthless and broken so that we don't have to risk uncertainty and the anxiety of trying and failing so how has anxiety impacted your life take the time to fill out your workbook what have you cut out of your

life due to anxiety um what situations people experiences opportunities have you lost due to trying to not feel anxiety for many people anxiety has robbed them of Joy or more accurately how they interact with their anxiety has robbed them of Joy they feel sick and worried when they should be relaxing or it's made it hard for them to do their job or succeed in school or they withdraw from friends or stop going places in this course I'm going to teach you a bunch of skills to decrease your anxiety to better understand your anxiety to change

how you think and feel about anxiety and how to make space for and tolerate anxiety but the goal of this course isn't just to make your anxiety go away trying to not feel something is what's called dead people goals the only people who don't feel any anxiety are people who are dead so to do that work to get better at feeling which will sometimes be uncomfortable you're going to need something you care about more more than just making anxiety go away so in this course I'm going to be asking you to do hard things so

that's why I need you to get really clear on what is your why what kind of Life do you want to be living now I'm not going to ask you to just suck it up to just deal with anxiety I'm going to teach you a bunch of skills to lower your anxiety but if your only goal is to just feel less anxiety I can tell you where that will lead you to a life that is constantly getting smaller the only way to feel less is to cut the things you care about out of your life

you avoid performing and then you avoid going places and then you avoid acquaintances and you procrastinate schoolwork or you break up with your partner and your life gets smaller and smaller and smaller and you know what you're left with depression and anxiety now when I painted that picture did you feel like that sense of hopelessness of like that dread and that like cold shutdown like is your goal in life really about not feeling the Paradox of anxiety is that the more we try to make it go away the more messages we send to our brain

that this anxiety thing is really important and your brain actually makes it louder it increases the neurons around anxiety and it makes you more anxious so if we want to change our relationship with anxiety we need to focus on what we do want not what we're trying to avoid so what happens if you imagine being able to do the things you love like write about that what if you imagine being around the people you love boldly chasing your dreams traveling the world loving intensely dancing wildly speaking your truth and living your life what does it

feel like if you imagine that does it feel a little light do you feel a little bit of excitement and it's not unlikely that you feel a little twinge of worry or anxiety so what is it what is the life you dream of this life is gonna include joy and excitement and a little bit of discomfort so I want you to do a visualization exercise what makes you feel alive you can write about this or you can sit and imagine it for five minutes what lights you up how does this feel in your heart in

your legs and your stomach in your chest and your head right in detail about what you would do on a day where anxiety no longer controls you where your choices had nothing to do with your feelings of anxiety what kind of person do you want to be what do you want your life to be about what character traits do you admire in others spend a lot of time on this we're gonna come back to it and if you're in the full course there's a space in your workbook to explore this further okay [Music] it's day

one from my 30-day anxiety skills course you can check out the whole thing on my website links in the description below thanks for watching and take care foreign [Music]