Shadowing Practice: Stop Letting Anxiety Hold You Back - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Today, anxiety as a disorder, as a diagnosed mental disorder, afflicts about 40 million adults, and that's way more women than men.
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For whatever reason, women are a lot more anxious than men are.
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This seems to most people to be a real scourge, a real problem, something to eliminate if at all possible.
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The job for us to live better is not to eliminate anxiety,
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but rather to manage it to levels that do not obstruct our quality of life,
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but exist to the point that they give us the benefits that they're supposed to give us.
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If anxiety is part of your life that you don't like, let's talk today about how we can make it into something else.
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Anxiety into adventure.
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Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours.
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I'm Arthur Brooks.
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This is a show about love and happiness, the science behind those ideas, tangible ideas that you can actually take from the greatest
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that has been thought and said in research and scholarship and use in your life.
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My job is to translate a lot of the technical material that's out there in terms that non -scientists can use,
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but more importantly, that they can teach as well.
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My ambition as a happiness teacher is to create happiness teachers as well.
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So thank you for sharing these ideas with others.
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Thank you for coming back week after week.
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If you're a veteran of this show, if you're not, welcome.
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I hope you hit the like and subscribe button so
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that the algorithm can send this material to more people who might just need it.
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As always, please do feedback.
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If you have ideas for future shows, you have comments or criticism, especially if you have questions, please write those to officehours at arthurbrooks .com.
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If you'd like more material along these lines, maybe a written little note each week,
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you can get my completely free newsletter that comes out on Friday mornings.
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And you can get
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that by going to arthurbrooks .com slash newsletter for almost 300 ,000 people are actually getting it every single week.
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That's just three to 500 words every week.
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And I throw in a few anecdotes and dad jokes, just for good measure.
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And I hope you enjoy it.
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And do share that with other people as well.
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Right now, you're like
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Neo in the Matrix.
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You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life.
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Or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit.
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It's happening to people all over the world right now.
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You don't want to be productized like this anymore.
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But it's hard.
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Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system.
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Just like heroin, porn, gambling, you've got the cravings, you're addicted.
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You don't like it and I don't either.
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But I can't just tell you to stop doing it, that's hard.
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If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive.
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Here's one.
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Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone?
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If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile.
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It pays you to use less data.
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It gives you an incentive to unplug.
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Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you.
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Use less data, earn money back.
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And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life, and you're going to like how it feels.
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Today, I want to talk about something that is not a source of happiness, typically, but it could be.
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I'm actually talking about anxiety, and I want to talk about how you can see anxiety in your life
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or the lives of other people in an entirely new way, not based on just wishful thinking, but based on the best research.
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And I started thinking about this actually, because of a very personal thing.
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You know, I have three kids, they're in their twenties.
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Not that long ago, obviously they were teenagers and they were angsty as anybody else.
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Now it's in the wind, I'll give you the data in a minute,
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that young adults today, they're suffering from anxiety at higher levels than we've ever seen in the past.
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And it's not just measurement, it's not just diagnosis, it's not just that people are paying attention to it.
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I think it actually really is the case.
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And I'll tell you why I think that is the case.
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And, you know, my kids, like anybody else, were anxious because it's hard being a teenager and a young adult and people in their twenties.
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But a couple of my kids, they solved it or they didn't eliminate it.
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They learned to manage it in a counterintuitive way, perhaps.
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What did they do?
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Well, you have to get a little bit of background here.
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Two of my three kids are U .S.
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Marines.
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I wasn't a Marine.
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I don't actually know what happened.
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I barely made it through a year of the Cub Scouts.
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But when my second son was graduating from high school, he decided that college was not for him, at least temporarily.
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He actually is in college and finishing up and getting great grades now in his 20s.
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But at the time, it wasn't right for him.
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So he went and worked on a farm for a while, and then he realized he wanted something even harder.
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He wanted something that would challenge him even more,
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that would maybe even actually satisfy his need to see the world and understand his own fear
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differently than he had in the past.
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So he joined the Marine Corps.
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He became a scout sniper, which is an elite unit of the Marine Corps.
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Those of you who on Netflix saw the documentary
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Marines, I strongly recommend it because it followed the 31st MU, the Marine Expeditionary Unit to the South Pacific on training exercises.
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My son actually did that as a scout sniper.
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And, you know, doing the infantry training battalion, as well as boot camp, of course, and then this in -doc for the scout sniper platoon,
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it was the hardest thing he ever did.
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And the job itself was really hard and dangerous and, quite frankly, pretty scary sometimes.
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His little sister followed him into the Marines as well.
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She didn't enlist like he did.
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She actually did officer candidate school, which is sort of the boot camp for officers.
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And she's currently a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps after incredibly arduous training as well.
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Now, why did they do it?
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Well, once again, it was to take on parts of their own life that they wanted to confront in a big, hard, strenuous way.
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How do I know?
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They told me, as a matter of fact.
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And here's the funny thing.
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After doing these hard and frankly pretty scary things, I mean, my daughter's still in.
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She's got years left and she's in the middle of it as well.
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I've noticed something about them.
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They went from angsty young adults to people of equanimity it's not just
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that they grew up it's that they
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that they see their lives differently including the source of their old anxiety
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they turned their anxiety into an adventure craziest thing i've ever seen
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and when i saw this happening i thought what's going on what explains this more importantly how can i do
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that how can you do that how can anybody do
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that without joining the marine corps and I've got the answers for you today.
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If anxiety is part of your life that you don't like, let's talk today about how we can make it into something else.
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Anxiety into adventure.
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Now, this isn't a new idea that anxiety can become an adventure.
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On the contrary, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, I've talked about him before on the show, he talked about anxiety in these terms.
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He called it an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition.
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in other words he said you have to turn your anxiety into an adventure now he talked about
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that is the most important thing in life
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but trouble is he didn't say how he just kind of asserted
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that i'm going to tell you how to do it
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because since soren kirkagard in the 19th century was writing
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we actually have a ton of research on shows exactly how we can do it
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and it's incredibly useful
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it turns out to be precisely what my kids did as a matter of fact without actually having to go
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and study the social psychology.
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But for those of us who are not doing that, the research is going to make life a lot easier and a lot more straightforward.
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Now, let's get a little bit of background on anxiety itself.
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I'm going to define anxiety in a second, but it's a problem.
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Anxiety disorders, a dysregulated kind of anxiety in life, it's actually the most common mental disorder, mental illness in America today.
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That comes from Scott Stossel in an article he wrote in 2014 called Surviving Anxiety.
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I'll put it in the show notes.
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I'll put all this stuff in the show notes as I always do.
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Today, anxiety as a disorder, as a diagnosed mental disorder, afflicts about 40 million adults.
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And that's way more women than men.
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For whatever reason, women are a lot more anxious than men are.
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That actually comes from the Anxiety and Depression Association of America from 2025.
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Okay.
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So that's really recent data.
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This seems to most people to be a real scourge, a real problem, something to eliminate if at all possible.
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But as my kids showed me, that's not the right approach.
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As Kierkegaard argued, for most people, elimination is not the right approach.
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To begin with, and I'll come back and show you this in a minute too, it's not possible.
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You can't eliminate your anxiety, at least permanently.
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That's an exercise in futility.
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So management is the only option, and even better, if you can turn it into something positive.
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If you do, here's my promise as we get to the end of this episode.
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Within healthy boundaries and properly managed, anxiety can become an integral part of your life, something that you actually treasure, something that you're grateful for.
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It can give you greater learning.
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It can raise your performance and it can even make your life more fun and interesting.
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So don't turn off this episode.
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I promise you're going to get a lot of really, really easy tips that you're going to be able to use.
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Now, let's start with the science.
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by defining some terms.
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Now, when people talk about anxiety, there's a lot of terms that get thrown around and they're sort of interchangeable, so they seem, but they're not.
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Terms like anxiety and fear and worry and stress.
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Here's how they're all related.
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Anxiety is an unfocused form of fear.
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Now, fear is an ancient primordial negative basic emotion.
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It has to do with the activation of the amygdala, which sends a signal through the hypothalamus to the pituitary glands,
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which then stimulate the adrenal glands sitting over the kidneys to spit out stress hormones.
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We are evolved to experience fear episodically and intensely.
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Our bodies are made so that something actually is perceived as threat.
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We smell something, we see something, we touch something, we hear something.
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That's a threat.
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That's supposed to stimulate the amygdala.
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And that whole process kicks into gear.
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You run before you ask questions, climb a tree and then figure out whether or not that threat was real.
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That's what it's supposed to be.
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It's supposed to save your life.
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That's what fear is actually for.
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Unfocused fear, that which is kind of chronic and not something we're entirely aware of, something that's at a relatively low but nagging level.
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That's what we think of as anxiety.
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That's one of the best definitions of it.
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It's characterized anxiety, that unfocused fear, that kind of scratching at the amygdala,
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which actually sends a weaker signal through the hypothalamus and the pituitary glands.
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You get a little drip of these stress hormones.
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It actually is characterized by recursive negative thoughts.
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That's a fancy way of saying you worry.
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Recursive negative thoughts are worry.
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So psychologically, anxiety is accompanied by worry. And physiologically, it's accompanied by stress stress is not a psychological phenomenon
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it's a biological phenomenon stress has a lot to do with those stress hormones like epinephrine aka adrenaline
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that's in the near term that gets you pumping right
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that gets you you know sweating and your heart pounding
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or just you're getting the flutter in your stomach chronically at two o 'clock in the afternoon
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when you're experiencing a lot of anxiety
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and those of you who have trouble with anxiety
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you know what i'm talking about three o 'clock in the afternoon
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you're like i'm kind of freaking out i don't know why in that feeling of lightness in your stomach, that's adrenaline.
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That's actually being pumped out of your adrenal glands.
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And over the longer term, what's keeping you in a state of alertness because of anxiety is generally cortisol.
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So if you go to the doctor and you have chronically elevated cortisol levels and it's not letting you sleep, that's what that's all about.
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But they're both coming from the adrenal glands, cortisol from the cortex of the adrenal glands.
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So that's the whole point anxiety is unfocused fear characterized by recursive negative thoughts aka worry
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and physiological manifestations aka stress
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and stress hormones that's how it all hangs together now evolutionary biologists they will suggest
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that fear is absolutely not a glitch in the matrix you do not want to live without fear
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because you'll get you know run over eaten by a tiger attacked by a stranger
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because of a stupid mistake or error in judgment that you make summarily.
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Fear is super important for you.
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But evolutionary biologists will also argue that anxiety itself, that low -grade fear, that unfocused fear, that that's actually evolved as well.
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And it's actually protective because that's part of our alarm system
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when there are kind of chronic low -grade threats that should have no small part of our attention,
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a non -trivial attention that will pay to it, attention to threats.
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It's like there are enemies, maybe pay attention.
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You know, there's somebody over there that I'm not quite sure of that should make you anxious, not afraid.
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There are pathogens out there anxious, but not afraid.
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It's such that you pay attention and take appropriate action.
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So you're taking protective action as opposed to defensive action.
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You see the difference between the two?
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That's why anxiety actually is something that we've evolved and it's something that actually can be protective.
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Now, the problem is that that's normal anxiety, which everybody feels.
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There's not a person on the planet.
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I know that, you know, the chillest people you meet, they experience some amount of anxiety, maybe less than you.
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The trouble is when it actually becomes dysregulated or exaggerated, when it becomes a chronic problem.
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Chronic anxiety is a maladaptation to threats.
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It's kind of like a smoke alarm that's turned up too high.
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And so, you know, you light a match to light a birthday candle on a birthday cake in your apartment
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and suddenly the smoke alarm goes off.
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It just becomes way too sensitive.
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the threshold is too low.
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And there are some people for whom that's the case.
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They're chronically afraid of crime.
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They don't want to go out of their apartment because you never know.
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There's predators every place.
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That depends on the neighborhood, of course.
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But there are a lot of people who have this kind of paranoia
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and they can become agoraphobic as a result of that kind of anxiety.
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They'll have fear of sickness.
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I knew people during the, even when the coronavirus pandemic had largely passed, who insisted on wearing masks outside.
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You decide in your own prudential judgment when you get to wear a mask inside or a plane or something, but people outside wearing them.
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And for a lot of the people that I would talk to, because I'm very sympathetic to that, I'm not critical.
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I'm not laughing at anybody.
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They would say, I just can't get over the fear that I have of this.
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And that's, that's anxiety.
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It's an unfocused fear of a pathogen kind of in the ether that they're worried about.
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People who are afraid of flying.
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That's another thing.
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I mean, it's just like this unfocused fear of something that might happen.
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People were really, really nervous flyers.
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That's kind of this chronic anxiety because of these threats.
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the smoke alarm of your limbic system is turned up a little bit too high.
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That kind of dysregulation can lead to an anxiety disorder, which can significantly interfere with the functioning of your quality of life.
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And in fact, you'll be diagnosed with generalized anxiety
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and anxiety disorder precisely on the basis of whether or not it does interfere with the quality of your life.
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It's not how much anxiety you have, it's how much trouble it causes, as a matter of fact.
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And the people who have been diagnosed, formally diagnosed with this, has been going through the roof.
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From 2008 to 2018, the percentage of 18 to 25 -year -olds, and this is where anxiety is most acute today,
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it's where we see the numbers going up most is with young adults.
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The 18 to 25 -year -olds diagnosed with anxiety disorder, it doubled to about 15%.
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And then during the coronavirus epidemic, it went up by another 5 percentage points to 20%, and it's basically gone up from there.
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And so it's just not going back down.
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Obviously, that's a big problem.
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A couple of references on this.
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One of them is from JAMA Pediatrics, a pretty good overview of this.
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Global prevalence of depressive and anxiety symptoms in children and adolescents during COVID -19.
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So that'll give you the data that I'm talking about here.
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And if you want to go look at it yourself and chart it up, you can do it using these links in the show notes.
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So what's the cause?
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What happened?
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Why is it going up all the time? then you could just say the world's more stressful i suppose
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so but you know i'm actually not persuaded of
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that as somebody trained as a social scientist
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and looking back at history it's actually probably not the case there's something about the way
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that we live today
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and that's something according to most people who are looking into
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this certainly jonathan height at new york university gene twenge at san diego state university
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they would place no small part of blame in the way
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that we're using our brains in the way that we interact with our devices.
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So the intensive use, overuse, misuse of technology has everything to do with this.
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And it sort of makes sense.
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I mean, the rise of social media has been so extreme.
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According to the American Psychological Association, the average American teenager spends about five hours a day on social media platforms. So what?
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I'll put that into the show notes as well so you can see those data. So what?
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The answer is that the risk, literally the risk of an anxiety disorder,
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a diagnosed anxiety disorder rises linearly with the amount of time that a person spends on social media.
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And it's especially true for young adults.
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And I'll put those references in as well.
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Now, why?
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That's really interesting.
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And that's something I've looked at a lot in my own work.
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I answer that with respect to the way that we use our brains when we're using technology.
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The average person, American, checks her or his device 205 times a day.
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which means we're constantly going into these platforms again and again and again and again.
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When we do that, we fall prey to problems of hemispheric lateralization.
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Now, hemispheric lateralization, if you've been watching this show,
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you know it's a fancy way of saying that the two sides of the brain do different things.
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The right hemisphere is about mind -wandering and mystery and meaning and love and happiness and why questions of life.
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That's where most of those things are really adjudicated, the complex things that you can never solve, but you could understand and live with.
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And the left side of the brain is more how to
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and what is the engineering side of your brain is the lists side of your brain.
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That's where you're actually figuring out how to do stuff.
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And that's what's most active when we're bombarding our brains constantly with these computerized algorithms.
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That's mostly what you're using when you're looking at AI,
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for example, or just being fed an algorithm of endless YouTube sharts of information that we didn't ask for.
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So that almost exclusive use of the left hemisphere of the brain is marginalizing the part of our lives
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that we need for love and happiness and mystery and meaning.
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The right hemisphere.
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So guess what?
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When you marginalize that stuff from your life, when you eliminate that from your life, the mind wandering, the meaning making from your life,
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you're going to get stressed out.
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You're going to be anxious.
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You're using your brain wrong.
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That's one reason.
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The second reason that when this shows up a lot in the literature is
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that when people are on social media a lot, they become very anxious because of high levels of social comparison.
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You don't have to spend any time on social media to see a lot of social comparison going on.
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I mean, you have this, she has that.
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She's got a better life than you.
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You're comparing yourself to millions and millions of other people.
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And this is especially deleterious for young women is what's been found.
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And that is extremely anxiety provoking.
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The third reason is because a lot of social media, what it does is that you start to mediate your relationship through screen.
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There's less in -person interaction and eye -to -eye contact, which has strong neurochemical implications to it.
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But the bottom line is it leads to loneliness.
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If you're spending more than an hour a day, give or take, your results may vary, but they probably won't very much.
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And this is based on very interesting experiments in workplaces and among young adults in general,
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that if you're spending more than an hour a day or so on social media,
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each hour you spend is going to make you lonelier than the last, which is really ironic when you think about it, right?
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I'm lonely, so I want some human contact, so I look at social media.
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But that's like eating fast food.
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You know, when you're really hungry, you binge on fast food and your brain says, okay, good calories.
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But immediately your brain registers that your nutrients are insufficient you'll get hungry again really fast
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if you eat fast food because you haven't met your nutrient needs
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and your brain and body know that they're smart but you've met your caloric needs which means you can become
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malnourished and obese simultaneously by eating the wrong kind of food.
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You binge the food that actually meets the, the, the apparent need, but you don't meet the actual need.
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That's like social media.
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Social media is the, is this fast food of social life.
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I'm lonely.
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So I binge on social media and I get lonelier.
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So I binge more and it gets into this vicious cycle.
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You know, this is a very, very suboptimal.
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That's the third reason that overuse of social media and tech would lead to these anxiety problems.
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And then fourth is kind of tangential to it, but it's worth pointing out.
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According to Jonathan Haidt, the average 12 -year -old spends between four and seven minutes a day in nature.
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There's a ton of research out there that shows one of the best ways to lower your anxiety is to go outside, is to touch grass.
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That's the reason they talk about touching grass.
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You're kind of freaked out looking at your device and you're getting out of touch with reality.
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I'm going to go touch grass.
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That means put down your phone and go outside
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and look at a leaf or literally take off your shoes and touch grass.
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And there's a ton of research that shows that it will lower your anxiety and will lower your depression.
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It's good for you to do that, but the lack of nature is something that accompanies the way that we actually use tech today.
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So there's myriad reasons that this is the case that actually explains this pattern,
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this linear and direct correlation between anxiety, diagnosed anxiety, and the amount of time people spend on social media.
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And these effects were exacerbated during the pandemic lockdowns, of course, which is why we saw these explosive increases,
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inflections in generalized anxiety, especially among young adults,
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who are most likely to be locked down at home and looking at screens for more and more and more time.
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Gene Twenge, who I mentioned before, has written about this.
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I'll put it in a 2020 article called the U .S.
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Census Bureau Assessed Prevalence of Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms in 2019 and During the COVID -19 Pandemic.
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That's from a journal called Depression and Anxiety.
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Yes, there's a whole journal dedicated to depression and anxiety.
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This leads to not just discomfort and unhappiness.
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This leads to huge health issues.
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One of the things that we find is that high levels of anxiety, they increase interleukin -6, which is a cytokine protein.
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And that's associated with autoimmune disorders, with cancers, even coronary artery disease, coronary heart disease, as a matter of fact.
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I'll put the notes on that.
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You can learn more about interleukin -6 if you're interested.
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It exists for a reason.
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It has beneficial impacts.
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But when they're chronically high, it has a deleterious impact on the human body.
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You know, we find in some of this research
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that highly anxious people have rates of heart attack comparable to that of cigarette smokers.
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So if you're anxious, definitely don't smoke.
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So all this is bad, obviously obviously.
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And you might be tempted to conclude, as so many people have,
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that in positions of leadership and in sort of the therapy system in this country,
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that anxiety is the enemy and actually should be eliminated.
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I mean, that's something that's actually been proposed to a lot of young people today, people I talk to, my students and others many,
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many times saying, we have to deal with your anxiety, understanding that it's an unvartish terrible in life and it's best to get rid of it.
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Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could live without it entirely?
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And of course, that's not true.
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But even the eliminationist approach that many therapists and school counselors and teachers and leaders are talking about is misguided.
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The job for us to live better is not to eliminate anxiety,
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but rather to manage it to levels that do not obstruct our quality of life,
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but exist to the point that they give us the benefits that they're supposed to give us.
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That's what we want.
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That's the trick.
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What we need to find is the balance in people's lives.
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Now, I suppose for some people's lives is to get more anxiety than they currently have.
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They're too chill, but that's not what I see.
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It's actually to lower it to the point where we're not trying to eliminate it
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and not even seeing it as the enemy, but lowering it in our lives and managing it
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and framing it up in such a way
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that we start to get the benefits from it without the deleterious costs from it.
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We want anxiety at normal levels, which will render it healthy and good.
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Now, is that possible?
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The answer is yes.
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Tons of research shows this as well.
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There's an old saying, often attributed to the Dalai Lama himself, that sleep is the best medicine.
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The older I get and the more I study human happiness, and if I'm being honest, the worse my own sleep tends to get with age,
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the more I know that he was exactly right.
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Here's what the science actually shows.
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Poor sleep doesn't just make you tired, it can actually make you less happy.
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You can't build a meaningful life on frequent chronic broken sleep.
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So, I take my sleep seriously.
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One of the best investments I've made in this area is my Helix mattress.
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What I like about Helix is that they recognize something obvious but important.
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Different people sleep differently.
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Their website has a short quiz that asks about your sleep position, firmness preferences, and other sleep habits.
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Then they match you with one of more than 20 mattress models designed around your specific needs.
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Once that choice is made, the mattress ships directly to your door.
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It's a simple idea, but it's surprisingly rare.
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Start with the person, not the product.
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If you're serious about improving your sleep and your happiness,
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visit helixsleep .com slash brooks for 20 % off site -wide and additional offers.
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Invest in your sleep.
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Everything else works better when you do.
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healthy levels of anxiety are highly protective as i mentioned before for alerting
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you to potential threats keeping your attention on potential threats for example
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if you would eliminate anxiety while you're driving you'd absolutely not be sufficiently alert to dangers
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and traffic but there's interesting research that's obvious
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but there's interesting research as well that shows
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that healthy levels of of anxiety can promote empathy
410
because they raise one's awareness of other people and
411
and as such it it increases levels of self -knowledge that's uh something
412
that scott's docile uh talks about in the article i referred to earlier called surviving anxiety
413
but what i want to talk about here mostly is the benefit
414
that we get by by having an adventure in life
415
that depends on the anxiety in our lives yeah is
416
that possible i want to tell you about a pretty interesting study from the journal of experimental social psychology in 2014.
417
So it's about 12 years old now.
418
In that study, scholars were looking at how a person's anxiety affected a task
419
and how the task affected the state of flow that they were in.
420
So they were performing tasks and they wanted to see if people went into a flow state.
421
Now, most of you know what that is, but I'll remind you, Flow is a book called Flow by Michal Csikszentmihalyi,
422
who is the great social psychologist, now a blessed memory, who taught for many years at the University of Chicago and later at Claremont Graduate University.
423
And she sent me high, wrote about flow as an incredibly pleasurable state where you're kind of in a zone of doing something that's hard,
424
but not too hard, totally engaged.
425
Now, everybody watching us, you've been in a flow state before.
426
Maybe you wish you were more.
427
I mean, everybody wishes they were more.
428
Hours turned to minutes.
429
It's like, wow, the whole morning went by.
430
It's so amazing.
431
For some people, it's it's riding bikes
432
you know one of my sons was a was a very
433
uh was a very good cyclist was you know at one point wanted to be a professional cyclist
434
and when he was on his bike i mean the whole world went away
435
because he was in this flow state i have another son who you know he would
436
it's sort of incredible you know what he would what he's able to do
437
when he's talking about deeply philosophical ideas or for that matter doing math he's really kind of a brainy kid
438
And when he's in the zone talking about something that's really complex in this way, time goes away.
439
It's just beautiful to watch, as a matter of fact, because this is where he's supposed to be.
440
This is his happy place, as it were.
441
Anyway, so this article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology for
442
2014 looked at how the role of anxiety in getting people into the flow state when they're doing different tasks.
443
Flow states, they found, were highest in people when they displayed a moderate level of sympathetic arousal and activation of the,
444
and I promise I'll define this, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, the HPA axis.
445
In other words, they were experiencing measurable levels of physiological stress.
446
They were anxious.
447
They felt anxiety.
448
They were not overwhelmed by it, but they actually felt it.
449
They were kind of on the edge of their seats.
450
This is what we're actually trying to get to.
451
You're not freaking out.
452
You don't think a tiger is going to eat you, but you're vigilant.
453
You're trying to do something well.
454
You don't want it to go poorly.
455
You're not super relaxed.
456
When you are in a state of moderate anxiety, you have the highest likelihood of going into a state of flow, which is bliss.
457
That's the way that we actually turn anxiety into an adventure.
458
And that's what we want more of in our life.
459
That's what I want to tell you how to do, because otherwise, why would you keep listening?
460
And by the way, one other piece of research before I go into the how -to.
461
Anxiety has actually been found to be therapeutic even when it's even when it is a little too high.
462
So I mean it's like you're not gonna be able to turn
463
it like a dial like I'm gonna get it just right
464
I'm gonna calibrate my anxiety a lot of times it's gonna be too much
465
but research has shown from the Journal of Positive Psychology that
466
when people actually are experiencing uncomfortable levels of anxiety
467
I mean really uncomfortable
468
they don't like it they find a lot of therapeutic benefits from it usually after the fact
469
it's kind of like a treatment that's not so great
470
But, you know, they'll find, for example, that when they go through a really anxious period in life,
471
that that tends to be quite freeing from limitations.
472
So this is the key thing to think about
473
when inevitably you're you're experiencing a level of anxiety that's higher than you like.
474
You need to reframe this as, yeah, I'm learning something and I'm going to be free from limitations as a result of this,
475
as likely as not.
476
And by the way, that's not just wishful thinking.
477
This is here in this article by Russo Netzer from 2025 positive anxiety, existential authenticity is a pathway to wellbeing.
478
That's from the Journal of Positive Psychology.
479
Once again, in the show notes, go read it.
480
It's good.
481
People after the fact, after uncomfortable anxiety,
482
they tend to have a clear understanding of life's meaning and they're better able to find authentic direction in life.
483
Most people, when these things happen, say that they're grateful for the anxiety that they felt.
484
This doesn't mean that you should be looking for debilitating and dysregulated anxiety.
485
That's too much.
486
What I'm telling you is this isn't your enemy.
487
That's really what we're talking about here.
488
So what do we want?
489
We don't want to get rid of it.
490
We don't want to be afraid of it.
491
We want to manage it, especially such that we're in the zone that we can actually get the flow.
492
And we're not worried about it when it's higher than that.
493
This is the goal that we actually have.
494
How do we do it?
495
How do we make it into our friend?
496
Step one, accept it.
497
Look, anxiety is normal.
498
Look, for the past seven years, I've been teaching at the Harvard Business School.
499
And I tell them usually in the second lecture of my Science of Happiness class,
500
you're studying at Harvard University at the best business school in the world.
501
If you're not stressed out, you need therapy.
502
This is important and it's hard and you're doing it on purpose.
503
But remember, you're doing it on purpose, which means you need to accept it.
504
And all of us are doing things on purpose.
505
Look, you're putting one foot in front of the other.
506
That's great.
507
You're doing something in your life.
508
Everybody who's watching
509
Office Hours actually wants to live a better life.
510
You're involved.
511
I mean, I wish everybody watched
512
Office Hours, but the ones who are most likely to are strivers.
513
And strivers are asking for stress and anxiety, even sometimes fear.
514
Certainly lots of worry.
515
A lot of you are chronic worriers.
516
I hope by the end of this episode, you're like, yeah, I'm worried less about my worry because I'm an accepted.
517
I'm an accepted as a part of the life that I have accepted.
518
You know, it was really helpful for me earlier in my life.
519
I took a job as a CEO, a big Washington institution, policy think tank.
520
And it was at the center of a lot of controversies, actually.
521
And I started getting not just hate mail, somebody's even threats for the very first time.
522
It bummed me out.
523
It stressed me out.
524
It really made me really anxious.
525
And so one day I realized that, look, if I'm going to dish it out as CEO of this organization,
526
saying hard truths as I see them, I got to take it too.
527
This is a cost of doing business and it's well worth it.
528
And that's really what I'm talking about.
529
Accept that anxiety is normal and this is a life that you've chosen.
530
And that's pretty empowering, I have to say.
531
And by the way, trying to eliminate it doesn't work anyway.
532
So you can accept it or you can rail against the moon, which doesn't really work and it's not really helpful.
533
That's step one.
534
And that acceptance this is really important.
535
I would actually put a little mantra together.
536
If you suffer from a lot of anxiety, I don't know what this day is going to bring first thing in the morning.
537
And I know it's going to bring a lot of anxiety, but I've chosen this life.
538
Bring it on.
539
That will help you.
540
It has certainly helped me.
541
Number two, remember that to have an adventure in life, something that's out of the ordinary is exactly what you want.
542
Now remember, anxiety is your alertness to things that are out of the ordinary.
543
Something's not right.
544
Something's not right.
545
Something not right is what you're actually looking for, for adventures in your life.
546
If you're going to do something that's actually kind of dangerous, if you were doing an extreme sport,
547
you're looking for something that's out of the ordinary and kind of dangerous on purpose.
548
Your version of that is actually what you're doing, fellow strivers.
549
I want something that's not boring.
550
It's probably not, you know, trying to go spearfishing with great white sharks or something,
551
but there's a lot of stuff that actually does feel really dangerous that people are doing.
552
A lot of people are really worried, for example, about first dates and romantic love.
553
And this is one of the things that I've done in conjunction with a dating app that I've been working with.
554
And if you're watching my show, you know exactly what I'm talking about here.
555
I say, see dates not as problems, but as adventures, like new things, new horizons, new things to learn.
556
And here's the problem.
557
Here's why that's hard.
558
Most people treat anxiety as what the Harvard Medical School professor, Kevin Majors, who's a psychiatrist,
559
what he calls adrenaline with a negative frame.
560
So you get the adrenaline and you have a negative frame around the adrenaline.
561
That's how we actually experience anxiety typically.
562
Now people say, okay, I got to get rid of the adrenaline.
563
No, no, no, no, no. You got to change the frame.
564
Adrenaline with a negative frame has two levers.
565
One is to try to lower the level of adrenaline.
566
The other is to try to change the frame from negative to positive.
567
And there's a whole bunch of different ways to do that, to say, you know, this is exciting.
568
I'm learning something.
569
I'm out on a date with somebody and it and it might go really badly, in which case it's going to be funny after the fact.
570
You know, I'm going to have a funny story to tell my friends or,
571
you know, this is exciting because it actually might lead to something really, really good or it might actually lead to me feeling really, really bad.
572
But that's the kind of thing I'm in for right now.
573
Reframing it in that positive way from this is stressful and harmful to this is exciting is something you can absolutely do.
574
And by the way, that kind of reframing is something that people do all the time.
575
This is once again, not wishful thinking.
576
If you say it, it will be true.
577
Lots of research that shows that you can do exactly that.
578
Now to do that, it's important to kind of lean into the source of the anxiety.
579
And this is step three deep in your engagement with the parts of your life
580
that stress you out don't lean out lean in on the contrary
581
you know conflicts in the workplace i'll tell you how to do that in a second
582
conflicts at home these are sources of anxiety for sure worries
583
about your health worries about politics in the state of the world
584
i talk to people about this all the time
585
i mean these are very very common sources of anxiety
586
it feels like yeah i'm just gonna not think about it no that's
587
that i mean sometimes yeah but
588
but in general you're not going to be able to do that
589
if you're trying trying not to think about it guess what you're going to think about right
590
now i tell you don't think about a purple unicorn okay you just thought of it right
591
and the more i say don't think about the purple unicorn the more you're going to think about it which is
592
paradoxical about the way our brains work and so
593
when you're actually trying to lean out from a source of anxiety most likely
594
you're going to be leaning in in the most detrimental or counterproductive way possible.
595
So lean in of your own volition and in a positive way.
596
And here's how you do it.
597
Reframe the things that are stressing you out in a way that makes them into a productive challenge, an exciting challenge, not as a black cloud.
598
For example, if you're having trouble with your marriage, envision yourself engaging in a new and energetic way with your spouse.
599
Think about all the different ways, things that you're going to talk about with confidence and without fear,
600
think about ways that you're actually going to lean into it to solve these problems.
601
That way you'll actually, by the way, it will no longer be abstract.
602
And the more concrete the vision is, the less you'll worry about it because worry is this recursive thought about abstract things.
603
That's how worry actually works.
604
So make it less abstract.
605
It'll be better.
606
If your health is a problem,
607
put together a protocol, a new plan for bettering your health with one of my kids who recently made a move, you know, it was a,
608
it was a really, really stressful move, right?
609
I mean, and she's, by the way, this is my Marine.
610
So she's actually learned how to deal with a lot of anxiety in her life.
611
But the move itself was the first big, huge move by herself, um, across an ocean.
612
And so one of the things that we talked about was, okay, write a list of all the things that actually might go wrong
613
and what you will do literally in each one of these cases, right?
614
Now there's a reason for this.
615
This is basically how you take uncertainty, which is a source of fear that you don't like and turn it into risk.
616
This is what insurance companies do is by saying, okay, in each case, what might it be?
617
And what would I do in each case?
618
It's classic technique, classic cognitive technique.
619
And that really lowered her anxiety about something.
620
And she went forth with confidence to do that.
621
In the case of your health, you say, okay, I'll give you an example.
622
You're really anxious about a test that you've got with the doctor.
623
And it's, it's, you know, you took the test and it's going to come back in a couple of weeks.
624
That's a long time to be in agony about the anxiety.
625
Write down the best case, worst case, and most likely case.
626
Okay, what's the worst case?
627
Some dreaded thing.
628
The most likely case.
629
Something I don't like that I can deal with.
630
The best case is nothing.
631
Let's say for purposes of argument that that's legitimate.
632
Now put kind of probabilities on that.
633
I think it's actually probably realistically a 10 % chance is the worst case.
634
I think it's about a 20 % chance is the best case.
635
Well, that means by process of elimination, it's a 70 % chance is the most likely case.
636
That's most likely.
637
What am I going to do in each case?
638
Write it down.
639
Write it down.
640
And when you do that, what you're doing is that you're deepening in your engagement with it and you're turning it into a task.
641
And it's not an adventure, at least it's something you can manage.
642
Think about rebuilding your career as opposed to worrying about your career.
643
What are the steps that you need to do?
644
Take a constructive local action for a cause you care about in the world.
645
If you're worried about the world, you get my point, lean into it so that you can actually manage it.
646
That's step three.
647
So the big steps again are number one, accept.
648
anxiety as a part of your life.
649
That's the first step in managing it to levels that become beneficial to you.
650
Number two is remember that you're anxious about things that are out of the ordinary,
651
but an out of the ordinary life is actually something that you want.
652
You don't want to be bored in doing the same thing day after day after day.
653
And number three is to lean into the source of the anxiety as opposed to leaning out of it
654
so you can actually organize it in your own mind and think of it.
655
You're more likely to be able to think of it as an adventure as opposed to a curse, a threat, something that you want to eliminate.
656
Now, one last question you might ask.
657
Hey, Arthur, if I take your advice, does it mean I won't mind my anxiety anymore?
658
Am I going to get rid of the unpleasantness of it?
659
I hope I've already covered that.
660
But in a word, the answer is no. In many cases, you're still not going to like it.
661
But back to Kierkegaard.
662
He called anxiety, the dizziness of freedom.
663
Think about that.
664
The dizziness of freedom.
665
You want to be free?
666
Yeah, it's going to cost you.
667
And that's how anxiety kind of feels, as a matter of fact, is the cost of doing the business, of being fully alive.
668
You're always going to have to pay that cost.
669
The question is, how do you decide it's going to feel for you to pay that cost?
670
These are the ideas that come from the literature that have worked in my life, the lives of people near me.
671
And now I hope you can put together a master plan for how they can work in your life too.
672
Let's take a couple of questions before we finish.
673
Anonymous writes in the office hours that are the bricks .com.
674
Um, I struggle with an addiction and I'm a poet.
675
Now, Anonymous is not saying that he or she is literally a poet.
676
For those of you who haven't been on the, listening to the show for very long, poet is a, is an affect profile.
677
It's an emotional profile that we use in my work.
678
That's somebody who has unusually high negative mood or affect and unusually low positive mood or affect.
679
People who are intensely negative in their activity, their limbic system, and their emotions, and unusually weakly positive.
680
The reason they're called poets is because really creative romantic people, they tend to have this poetic kind of melancholic temperament.
681
It's hard, although it is really associated with creativity.
682
So it has gifts.
683
And if you want to know more about that, we'll put in the show notes or we'll put here a place for you to go click,
684
whether it's above or below me, I don't know.
685
You'll click someplace on an earlier episode on the emotional profiles, on the positive affect, negative affect sequence.
686
You can also go to my website, by the way, at orthoburks .com.
687
You can take a test that will tell you your profile, if you're that, that poet, or one of the other three.
688
Back to the question.
689
I'm a poet and I struggle with addiction.
690
The question I continue to struggle with, no matter how productive or healthy or even lucky the day is this.
691
How could my life have meaning when each day feels like a net affective loss?
692
I've been doing the work for a long time, even if not entirely successfully.
693
Is there any solution at all for the poet?
694
There is.
695
And there are a couple of things to think about.
696
I work, I've worked with a lot of poets in my time.
697
Um, literally I've actually worked with literal poets, but I've worked with people with this high negative, low positive affect, um, profile.
698
and basically there are a couple of things to be thinking about now poets
699
they tend to be low in enjoyment
700
and low in enjoyment psychiatrically is often referred to as a
701
condition called anhedonia the inability to experience enjoyment is anhedonia and
702
and one of the things
703
that poets need to do is to get better at enjoying things they often just don't enjoy anything
704
and that means they need to lean into fun.
705
I'll put something in the show notes about how to enjoy leisure in entirely different ways that's based on this.
706
And I'm not going to, that would be a whole show.
707
So I'm not going to go into that now, but do, I'm not honest,
708
please do go to the show notes to look into that about how to,
709
how to spend leisure time in such a way that if enjoyment is hard for you,
710
you can actually enjoy more because that's the macro nutrient of happiness that's usually weakest for poets.
711
So they tend to be very low in enjoyment.
712
Meaning as another macro nutrient of happiness is a different kettle of fish.
713
I often find that poets will say my life feels meaningless, but they actually have incredible gifts for finding meaning.
714
This is really important.
715
This is one of the reasons that poets, well, write poetry as a matter of fact, so they're trying to find meaning.
716
Focus more and more and more on this natural strength, which is meaning.
717
Become excellent in transcendence, for example.
718
I recommend that people who are poetic, that they get much more involved in their spiritual lives, much deeper involved in a sense of personal philosophy.
719
Anonymous, if you have a religion, it's time to triple down on it, because what that will do is it will play to your natural gifts
720
and meaning and accentuate that part of your happiness profile.
721
So learn more to do enjoyment and bring out more the meaning that whether you feel it or not, you're probably naturally good at.
722
So go look at the show notes.
723
I'm going to put some stuff in there for you on that.
724
Annette R.
725
writes also to the website, officehours at arthurbrooks .com.
726
How can you live out your morning and evening protocols when you're not physically healthy?
727
Okay, now Annette is referring also to a prior episode of the show, two episodes of the show, actually, one of the morning protocols.
728
That got millions of views, as a matter of fact, and listens on the platforms.
729
And the evening protocols, and they're very specific.
730
I mean, this is not an optimization thing is how I live a healthier, happier life.
731
And they're pretty rigorous because, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm blessed to have good health.
732
I get up at four 30.
733
I work out from four 45 to five 45.
734
I go to mass every day.
735
My, my diet is super strict.
736
Um, how I use caffeine, how I apply caffeine, what I eat, when, et cetera, et cetera.
737
That's not appropriate to everybody.
738
And here's the answer.
739
My morning protocols are supposed to be illustrative.
740
They're not supposed to be biblical.
741
Nobody should be a fundamentalist about what I'm doing.
742
Not even me, by the way.
743
There are times when I need to relax and, and, and that's hard for me because I'm so rigid about it.
744
And my wife has to be like, you know, you're actually, you're staying in bed.
745
Sorry.
746
And, and it's actually really helpful to me.
747
So Annette, if health is a problem, look at my basic protocols and think how you can adapt them to your circumstances.
748
Number one, get up at the time that actually is as early as possible appropriate to your health.
749
So you're getting your hours.
750
Number two, you're probably not going to be getting down to the gym and lifting heavy.
751
Probably walking is the ambulatory exercise, if that's possible for you, is the way that you'll actually spend your hour.
752
Which, by the way, the hour walk without devices, especially if it's before dawn, is called the Brahma Vohurta in Sanskrit in ancient Vedic wisdom.
753
And it has special properties for what it does for happiness and health.
754
Number three is, you know, maybe you're not going out and going to a worship service, but what are you doing for meditation?
755
What are you doing for prayer, which almost everybody can do? fourth drinks and drinking
756
and eating in a way that's most appropriate to your health as close to what i talk about as possible
757
but certainly not overlapping that make it your protocol
758
that actually fits you best don't make the perfect the enemy
759
the good okay last question sandy f writes in also to the website um is there value in daydreaming
760
i love it sometimes i daydream by reliving things in my past other times about events
761
i hope to have happen in my future sometimes they're pleasant other times
762
they're not what's the value to them is there any
763
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.
764
Go back to the hemispheric lateralization shows that I've done.
765
When you let your mind wander, which means you can't be looking at something on YouTube or scrolling Instagram.
766
You can't be doing it then because that's distracting you
767
and turning off the parts of your brain that you need to daydream.
768
Now, what are the parts of the brain?
769
They're parts of the default mode network.
770
Go back to the earlier episode and I've talked a lot about the default mode network.
771
I am a huge proponent of boredom.
772
We need to make boredom great again and I don't mean to cast dispersions like the unpleasant boredom thing.
773
I think we need to be more undistracted.
774
So Sandy F that your mind can wander.
775
Your default mode network is responsible for your creativity, your flights of fancy, your,
776
and ultimately the sense of meaning in your life is where you actually come up with these unbidden ideas.
777
Are they always super fun?
778
No, because the meaning of your life has unpleasant things about it.
779
Good.
780
That's all I can say.
781
You need more mind wandering, I recommend that everybody set aside time to be bored,
782
to do things that are boring on purpose so
783
that you can get the default mode network switch on to get the mind wandering that you actually need.
784
Time to sign off.
785
Always please continue to let me know your thoughts at officehours .orthofworks .com.
786
Place comments, you know, where you're watching or listening to this.
787
We read them all, positive or negative.
788
They're super helpful for us.
789
And even if they're negative, Thank you for watching the show.
790
We really, really deeply appreciate it.
791
And if they're positive and you like it, please suggest the show to a couple of million of your closest friends.
792
We want this to spread.
793
This is a movement of happiness teachers, starting with you.
794
So share the love.
795
Leave, um, you know, a review and that's helpful too.
796
Um, give it a thumbs up if you like, um, and follow me on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on any other platforms,
797
on social, I'm on most of them for sure.
798
And you'll get content on those platforms that actually come from me on other podcasts and, and random stuff.
799
Sometimes I just record videos of things I'm thinking of that don't show up on the show at all.
800
And while you're at it, while you're doing stuff, go order
801
The Meaning of Your Life, my latest book.
802
You haven't already.
803
And if you like it, pass it on to somebody you like.
804
Thank you very much.
805
I appreciate it.
806
As always, thank you for joining me for this time.
807
And I'm looking forward to seeing you next week.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Stop Letting Anxiety Hold You Back”. This video has 807 sentences and 9689 words to shadow. The speech runs for 49:37. The speaker talks fast, about 195 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| anxiety noun | /æŋˈzaɪ.əti/ | An unpleasant state of mental uneasiness, nervousness, apprehension and obsession or concern about some uncertain event. |
| happiness noun | /ˈhæpinɪs/ | The emotion of being happy; joy; elation. |
| poet noun | /ˈpoʊ.ət/ | A person who writes poems. |
| anxious adjective | /ˈæŋkʃəs/ | Nervous and worried. |
| adventure noun | /ədˈvɛn.t͡ʃə/ | A feeling of desire for new and exciting things. |
| disorder noun | /dɪsˈɔɹdɚ/ | Absence of order; state of not being arranged in an orderly manner. |
| eliminate verb | /ɪˈlɪm.ɪ.neɪt/ | To completely remove, get rid of, put an end to. |
| lean verb | /ˈliːn/ | To incline, deviate, or bend, from a vertical position; to be in a position thus inclining or deviating. |
| adrenaline noun | /əˈdɹɛnəlɪn/ | Epinephrine, the hormone and neurotransmitter. |
| chronic adjective | /ˈkɹɑ.nɪk/ | Of a problem, that continues over an extended period of time. |
| protocol noun | /ˈpɹoʊtəˌkɑl/ | An amendment to an official treaty. |
| enjoyment noun | /ɪnˈd͡ʒɔɪ.mənt/ | The condition of enjoying anything. |
| wander verb | /ˈwɑndɚ/ | To move without purpose or specified destination; often in search of livelihood. |
| helpful adjective | /ˈhɛlp.fl̩/ | Furnishing help; giving aid; useful. |
| ordinary adjective | /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/ | Having regular jurisdiction; now only used in certain phrases. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| come back verb | To return to a place. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. |
| go up verb | To move upwards. |
| put together verb | To assemble, construct, build, or formulate. |
| stress out verb | To become stressed. |
| turn up verb | To show up; to appear suddenly or unexpectedly. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- You see the difference between the two?
- Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could live without it entirely?
- How do we do it?
- How do we make it into our friend?
- What am I going to do in each case?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | has been going · you've been watching · I've been teaching |
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | If you say it, it will be |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been thought · it's been designed · we've ever seen |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | has been thought · being harvested · be productized |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 276 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/, therapeutic /ˌθɛɹ.əˈpjuː.tɪk/, sympathetic /ˌsɪm.pəˈθɛt.ɪk/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: anxious /ˈæŋkʃəs/, addiction /əˈdɪkˌʃən/, unusually /ʌnˈjuːʒuəli/, beneficial /ˌbɛn.ɪˈfɪʃ.əl/, elimination /ɪlɪmɪˈneɪʃ(ə)n/
- Long words — get the stress right: anxiety /æŋˈzaɪ.əti/, eliminate /ɪˈlɪm.ɪ.neɪt/, adrenaline /əˈdɹɛnəlɪn/, ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/, psychology /saɪˈkɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like anxiety, happiness, poet.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.