by Robert Duff
YOU NEED TO TAKE A DAMN BREAK. Actually, you need to take several breaks. Actually, you should take several breaks EVERY DAY. I know. Crazy concept, right? One of the annoying things about anxiety is that it almost never occurs in isolation. If you are the type of person to carry a lot of worry, especially about unfinished business, you are also probably the type to feel really guilty when you do things other than those pieces of unfinished business. Guilt is such a shitty thing. As if things weren't hard enough with the anxiety symptoms, guilt just creeps right up in there and makes things exponentially more difficult. I like to call this snowballing. You get worked up and then getting worked up makes you feel bad and then you get more worked up about feeling bad about getting worked up and then.... you get the point.
So yeah, back to the breaks. What if I told you that taking breaks and doing nice things for yourself was not a waste of time? What if I said that they were not counterproductive but actually one of the most productive uses of your time? I... don't have a punchline for that one, but it's the truth. By giving yourself breaks, you are taking the time and investing it in your future self. If you let yourself snowball and reach the point of burnout (a state of pure blah), then any work you do is going to suck anyway. By investing time in yourself, you give yourself a chance to recharge your batteries. I'll talk more about different types of breaks and what you can do to invest in yourself, but the concept is really important. When you relax and recharge, you are gaining strength and clarity. You are enabling yourself to work, make decisions, and just exist more efficiently and effectively in the future.
Well, what kind of breaks? That depends. What recharges your batteries? Some people love going out and getting a drink with their friends to relax and recover energy. For those of you that are introverted in nature, a night out with friends would leave you feeling drained and empty when you get home. Probably not the best choice for your breaks. You gotta do something that fits with you as a person. For me, a big one is playing video games. It seems lazy, but it relaxes me, and as long as I put limits on myself, I feel much better and more refreshed afterward. A few of these chapters were cranked out in like 20 minutes right after a League of Legends game.
Another way you can be nicer to yourself is by replacing some of that asshole language that you use toward yourself in your head. Since I already read my own chapter on cognitions, I know that I can't read your mind, but I can take a pretty educated guess that the things you say to yourself (self-talk) aren't always friendly. Things like, “I'm bad at everything,” “I have terrible luck,” “that was my fault,” or “omg I look so stupid right now.” This negative self-talk is something you probably aren't even aware of, but it eats away at you bit by bit and erodes that self-confidence you need to tackle your anxiety. It's not much use fighting your thoughts. Whatever you do right now... don't think of a purple monkey. I bet you thought of a purple monkey. Fighting against your thoughts is not an effective strategy, so what you can do instead is focus on replacement language. Give yourself some mantras to repeat to yourself throughout the day or when you are actively experiencing symptoms. You can even write them on your bathroom mirror or put them as the wallpaper on your phone. Here's a few you can use:
● I'm allowed to make mistakes
● I'm allowed to feel good sometimes
● Anxiety is my bitch
● I don't like these feelings, but they won't hurt me
● I'm going to be alright
The last thing that I want to mention about taking better care of yourself is some basic stuff. It’s basic stuff you are probably terrible about adhering to, though. This is the part where I tell you that your body is a temple. Well it is! Take care of it. You don't have to do the whole ultra gluten free level 5 vegan juice diet crap, but treat your body well. Don't eat tons of junk food without getting some green in your life every once in a while. Don't drink excessive amounts of alcohol when it's not your birthday. Try to drink more water than you do now, because I'm sure you don't drink enough of it. Sleep is a topic for another book, but resting is really important. Interestingly, sleep is totally vital for learning new skills, which is what I've been bitching at you about this whole time. During sleep, you consolidate new memories, so that you can reach up in there and pull them out when you need to. So get plenty of sleep and keep beating that brain into submission with your new awesome anxiety slaying skills.
Ch. 5 Technology is your Frenemy
The matrix has you. We are all plugged in and as much as we like to think that we use technology as a tool… sometimes it seems that we are the tools and technology is using us. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking love technology. If it weren’t for google drive, e-readers, text messaging, and internet radio, this project would have never seen the light of day. One thing I’ve noticed in my professional training as a therapist is that the older generation of shrinks out there just don’t quite get the influence of technology on modern life and modern mental health. I really think that technology has changed the landscape of anxiety. There are many things that it is great for. You can use technology to really facilitate your domination of anxiety, but it can also feed into that anxiety and the bitch about it is that sometimes those two scenarios look almost identical.
This topic is very personally loaded. Not just in my personal experience, but for my wife, who has been gracious enough to allow me to blab about her in this book. She has issues with anxiety. Sometimes it’s not so bad and she can go about her day and do important things. Other days, she can get thrown into a panic attack as she’s trying to go to sleep and completely unravel within a few minutes. The reason I’m talking about her here is that she is self-employed as a blogger, author, calligrapher, wedding designer etc. Like so many of you out there who are self-employed or just work for modern companies, that means she lives her life on the internet and interfaces with technology for everything.
It’s amazing what you can do with the world at your fingertips. Just right now, she was like, “Hey send me a quote from the book to make a graphic out of,” and I was all like, “Yo… there’s a doc in the drive.” Pretty awesome. With the pervasiveness of technology and our lives becoming one with “the cloud” it is sometimes hard to understand where work ends and life begins. When part of your job is keeping up with blogs, does reading them count as a break anymore? Having emails delivered directly to your phone is great, but what about when it is interrupting dinner or stressing you out right before you go to sleep? You gotta get that shit under control before it controls you. Rage against the machine, my friend.
There is no one right answer to the “correct way” to interface with technology, but in general, you want to set yourself up for success. You want to do a little bit of lifestyle min-maxing. Minimize the ways technology can intrusively set you off course or influence your mood and maximize the ways it can facilitate your use of anxiety slaying tools.
Here’s one. Raise your hand if you use your phone as an alarm in the morning. Ok, now raise your hand if the first thing you do after turning the beeping on your phone off is to open your groggy sleep-filled eyes enough to check your email or social media. That’s what I thought. You ever heard of waking up on the wrong side of the bed? Well that’s one great way to do it. If you have a stressful email or see a comments section that is going to screw up your mood for the day, then you just completely sabotaged yourself. What’s the point in doing that, really? Unless you are waiting for an email that contains your schedule for the morning, I’m fairly certain that it can wait until you’ve taken a shower, gotten dressed, and had your coffee. Remember the whole invest in yourself and recharge your batteries thing? Well you’re doing the opposite of that. I dare you to try and remain spritely after waking up to an angry email from a client.
So what can you do about it? This depends a little bit on your job or lifestyle. Definitely do something that fits with your role and the expectations of you. I don’t want you blaming me if you get in trouble at work. There are a lot of w
ays that you can help set yourself up for success in this way, though. Give yourself office hours. Regardless of what your professional or academic life may entail, give yourself personal office hours. Set an auto-responder on your email to anyone that emails you outside those hours, letting them know when you will be able to respond to emails. You can do something similar with social media if you need to get off the grid for a bit by “pinning” a message to the top of your profile. Simple. If you never stop that flow of information, you’re going to start sucking at responding anyway and then no one is happy.
There are a lot of people that I really look up to for their ability to maintain “inbox zero” and avoid killing themselves with email. Tim Ferriss, the author of The Four Hour Workweek, has talked about his technique of checking his email just twice per day. He downloads all of his current emails and then goes offline to a coffee shop or something like that, where he can respond in full to the important emails without the risk of being interrupted by more emails flowing in. This is just one example of one way to manage it, but the point I’m trying to make is that you gotta grab this bull by the horns before one of those horns ends up… somewhere you don’t want it to be.
As the chapter name suggests, technology can definitely be a friend as well. I would be nowhere without all of my gadgets and gizmos. With a little creativity, there are some nifty ways that you can make technology work for you and help you manage your anxiety. Here’s one that I use. Remember the breaks that I talked about in the previous chapter? Well, since you are such a jerk to yourself and it is against your very nature to take the chance to relax and recharge, you can use technology to help you out. Here’s a conversation I often have with Siri (the iPhone voice thingy). “Siri, remind me to take a break today.” “Okay, Robert. When should I remind you?” “Umm… in an hour.” “Alright! Reminder set.” Simple as that. When an hour comes around, I will get my reminder to take a break and even though I may not feel entitled to one, I dare not disobey my robot overlord.
There are also tons of great apps and stuff that you can use to streamline your life and facilitate your quest to a better you. I can’t mention a ton of specific ones, because they are changing every week, but I would have a look around your phone’s app store and see what’s available. There are apps that help you with your deep breathing and give you different guided options depending on your current mood. There are also journaling apps to help you just get it all out. There are extensions for Chrome that will let you block websites that stress you out or limit your access to email within certain hours. You can really go crazy with these. Just remember to not go down the rabbit hole of fake productivity and look for new and cool apps for 4 hours right before you go to bed. Don’t make the solutions part of the problem.
One good way to understand how technology might be interfering with your life or disrupting your mood is to track your activities throughout the day. I don’t mean tracking the general things you do each hour. I mean hardcore, obsessive, annoying tracking of every single thing you do. You really only need to do it for a day, but every time you switch the tab to Facebook or go to that blog of that person you hate, every time you check your work email when you should be enjoying your lunch, you will start to see the effects laid out there for you. It’s pretty scary actually. As I said… the matrix has you.
Ch. 6 The Secret
Secret? Oooo mysterious. This isn’t like the other secret that you’ve been told about in other books where you think happy thoughts and then magically good things start happening to you. This is a bit of a side note, but you should really be careful with that sort of thinking. If you get in the habit of thinking that positive thoughts bring about positive things and negative thoughts bring about negative things, it can get really damn confusing when you realize that the universe is random and bad things can happen while you are thinking your happiest magical pixie dust thoughts. ANYWAYS. My secret is that I haven’t been entirely honest with you so far. Sorry. The secret is that when I talk about slaying anxiety, kicking it in the balls, or any of the other stupid things that I’ve said so far, I don’t mean that you will be able to make it disappear from your life. Just like you can’t make your stupid boss go away forever, you can’t make anxiety suddenly poof away in a cloud of smoke. What you are working towards in your recovery from anxiety issues is not only to help yourself avoid unnecessary anxiety when it’s possible, but also to learn how to better tolerate your anxiety symptoms.
One of the things that really maintains and worsens anxiety symptoms and panic symptoms is the phenomenon of getting worked up about the symptoms themselves. Don’t forget, your brain is a douche sometimes. It’s very easy to let it tell you that you should be angry, upset, or scared about the fact that you are experiencing anxiety.
Don’t get me wrong, anxiety sucks. That’s why you got this book. Anxiety is just a thing though. It’s a storm that you can weather and come out on the other side. If you are in the ocean surfing and you occasionally get rocked by a wave, it’s probably not the best idea to freak out and get super upset. If you did that, you’d thrash around underwater, probably skin your knee on some rock, and then come back up just to get blasted in the face by another wave. A better approach is to endure the wave, stay under the water for a bit until it passes and then try your best to prepare for the next set of waves rolling in.
Anxiety is just like those waves. The better you can learn to tolerate the discomfort of anxiety and recognize it as temporary, the less it will disrupt your life. I’m not trying to tell you to surrender to your anxiety. Not by any means. You’re still here to kick this thing’s ass, but fighting so hard against the anxiety head-on is not the best strategy because it fights back and then things start to snowball and get blown out of proportion.
A large handful of you probably experience socially related anxiety. The thought of going into a crowded place with tons of noise, no clear path through the mob, and no means of escape if you get stressed out probably makes you breathe faster and tighten up in the chest without even being in the situation yet. What happens when you can’t reason away the feelings that arise? What happens when, no matter how hard you breathe, your heart won’t go back to its normal resting rate? Nothing. The answer is that nothing happens. You are in the middle of a bunch of people and you have this internal discomfort that probably no one else even notices or cares about. Humans have a tendency to move away and to avoid the situation, but paradoxically, the best option for you is move toward the stressful thing. This is called exposure.
You can help temper yourself to better withstand anxiety by allowing yourself to gain exposure to the things that cause you anxiety. For some people, the Kool-Aid man method works the best. This is where you just bust through that wall of anxiety and endure what happens on the other side full force (OHHH YEAHHHHH). For many people, this is a bit too much. That’s okay. You don’t have to get there all at once. You can break things up into smaller, more manageable increments, and work toward feeling more and more able to withstand the discomfort of anxiety.
Say you want to run a marathon. You aren’t necessarily going to go out your first day and run a gazillion miles, expecting to be in shape afterward. No, you start out by just getting off your ass and taking a walk. Then you run around the block. Then you run a mile. Then you run 5 miles. So on and so forth. If you want to feel less anxiety when you give presentations at work, in addition to adjusting your thoughts and being good to your body, you can create a system to systematically desensitize yourself that anxiety. In other words, you keep lifting until you’re jacked like Arnold….in an emotional sense.
What this might look like is first imagining yourself standing in front of your peers at work. That’s it. Just imagining. If the thought of that is enough to cause you anxiety, then you are starting in the right place. So here you are sitting in your yoga pants at home imagining this workplace situation and you start sweating your ass off and hyperventilating. Good. You’re at home, nothing bad is going to
happen to you. Try some of those deep breathing exercises while you stay in that situation and then just wait it out. I promise you the discomfort won’t last forever. Move through, not away. Then you do it again and again until you got that scenario on lock. No problem.
Now it’s time to kick it up a notch. Keep imagining that situation and this time actually practicing giving the presentation. Probably a little more stressful? Weather the storm, work through it, then kick it up a notch again. Go to the actual room that you will be giving the presentation in and let that freak you out for a bit. No biggie, though. Weather it, work through it, kick it up a notch. When you get to the day of the presentation, you’re going to think, “Shit, shit, shit! That asshole Robert didn’t give me a way to practice the actual real thing!” Well you’re right and you’re wrong. You probably can’t practice the actual thing exactly how it will occur in real life, but what you have practiced now is the secret that I have been blabbing about this whole time. You have been practicing feeling anxious and kicking ass anyway.
Ch. 7 The A Team (Anxiety Disorders)
So far I have been fairly non-specific regarding the anxiety symptoms that I have described. That’s for good reason. I want you to understand the beast in general before taking a look into its more hardcore forms. In this chapter I am going to describe the anxiety disorders to you. These are psychological disorders that are clinical in nature. I need to stress to you that you should not and really cannot diagnose yourself. Leave that to the professionals… we need jobs too. I know it’s difficult because you are a hypochondriac and can just look up the symptoms, but trust me on this one. You are more than just a checklist. The following disorders are not an exhaustive list, nor are they presented in their pure technical definitions. There are a lot of different criteria for determining these disorders and I really just want you to get the gist of it.
