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How Stoicism Helped Me Stop Fighting Anxiety · The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Stoic Handbook Podcast.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Today is going to be a long form interview, and I will be in the hot seat.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: My friend Nick Stubbs is interviewing me all about my thoughts and experiences with anxiety.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: And he also asks me a few questions about my course Stoic Anxiety Mastery.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: So if you would like to know my unique perspectives on how we should overcome anxiety, the types of anxiety that I've experienced, some of the traps and pitfalls along the path that I've encountered, the images and models that I use to make sense of things like social anxiety and fear.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: And if you'd like to take a deeper dive into my work on anxiety, you can check out the links in the show notes that accompanies this episode.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the first question that I have for you is why did you decide to create Actually, before we get into that, maybe do you want to give like an introduction and explain what stoic anxiety mastery is?
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Stoic anxiety mastery is my attempt to synthesize my favorite ideas in stoicism, cognitive behavioral therapy, and other psychological interventions that I found in my own pursuit of overcoming anxiety into a single course that is not overwhelmingly dense and complicated, that is primarily practical, that attacks anxiety from a bunch of different angles from um from cognitive, so like there's a lot of journaling, contemplation, so there's a lot of visualization, intuitive uh types of meditations, and also some live interactions there that we can that we get into, but also understanding anxiety, because when I was struggling with anxiety, I remember having uh quite intense panic attacks when I was living in Prague in my mid-20s, and no matter how much I was meditating or or sort of just trying to improve myself, I just could not deal with these panic attacks, they were just very, very difficult.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then I started researching into a bunch of ideas about how one overcomes panic attacks, and as soon as I discovered the right technique, I got rid of my panic attacks.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that was just mind-blowing for me because I thought like panic attacks were so deep-rooted, so physiological, there's no way I can just learn something and then overcome panic attacks.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that was when I started to realize, damn, if you have the right knowledge, you can do amazing things with your own with your own mind and and really make strides in minimizing your suffering.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: So stoic anxiety mastery is is my attempt to bring all of my favorite ideas together and share them with other people.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I feel like that's super simple but super important.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: This thing about, you know, when it comes to anxiety specifically, I can speak from my perspective and my path, it really has been a matter of finding the right technique.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and yeah, for a long time I also tried a lot of different things, meditation, um, lots of focus on plant medicines, um, and kind of just unstrategically facing my fears over and over again and never never really finding uh long-lasting permanent results.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, thanks to you, after introducing me to cognitive behavioral therapy, uh, which I've been working on over the past like 12 weeks, yeah, I've been getting better results than I have in my entire healing journey so far.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, which is really interesting and and which is why I feel pretty strongly about this course, because the modalities that it is uh introducing to people are the modalities that I have found to be the most effective for my own anxiety.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um Okay, so the next question is why did you decide to create this course?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so before I get into why I decided to create this course, just want to make a note on what you just shared, Nick, and and yeah, um I'm completely with you.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: I've I've done the same thing where I've just been hammering away at uh different times types of techniques and haven't really gotten anywhere, maybe slight alleviation of of symptoms mildly.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: And the way that that I understand it is that we typically tend to gravitate towards the techniques that feel most natural to us.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: So you could call this confirmation bias.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: We're always trying to find evidence to validate our existing beliefs.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at a lot of people's reading lists, they are typically books that will contain information that they kind of already resonate with and they just want to go deeper into it, right?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: Ask people what their their next ten reads are going to be.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: You'll rarely find completely left field books that you know just come out of nowhere.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: And if if they do uh contain those types of books, great, you know, that's that's learning.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um but the same is is is true for our own personal development.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: If you're someone who's naturally quite interested in Eastern philosophy, you're likely to try and find different meditative techniques to try and overcome your issues.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: And these are very important techniques.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: I've meditated many, many hours, and it's been very useful to sort of calm the mind, help me focus.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: But at the same time, if you're stuck in this in this kind of echo chamber of techniques and you're not able to look outside of it, you might be blocking yourself from the thing that works the most, and that's why having someone who's tried a lot of different things speak to you and point you in different directions can be useful.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: Cognitive behavioral therapy can sound quite unappealing to a lot of us, you know, like what rational thinking, getting into the thoughts, challenging our thoughts?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how did you conceptualize uh cognitive behavioral therapy, which for those listening is a sort of formalized form of stoicism for um modern-day mental illness?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: How did you think about it, Nick, before you started doing it?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: How did did it appeal to you or not so much?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, I actually found it a couple years ago.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I looked at it, and almost immediately I was like, no, this doesn't resonate with me.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: This looks really boring and really long.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and so I decided not to do it.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then it was only, yeah, I mean, after a couple years of a lot of different things happening, and really you being in my life and kind of um helping me realize that you know you can be spiritual and rational at the same time.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um and yeah, also my anxiety kind of getting coming to coming to a head and coming to a peak and really getting pushed to a new level.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: It got to a point where I was like, okay, I'll kind of do anything, and then I came across somebody who um had experienced very similar kinds of anxiety as me, and he had found um that he got amazing results with CBT.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then it was this weird thing of like discovering, you know, I'd resisted CBT, and it's not just CBT, it's like mainstream Western psychology.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um I resisted it for so long, um, and then when I eventually kind of surrendered to it, I realized that if you just search on Google, like how to heal social anxiety, which is the main kind of anxiety that I was suffering with, the first result will be cognitive behavioral therapy, and it's the most research-backed result as well.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: So then it brought up this very interesting question of like, why have I never tried that?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: I've tried like every plant medicine there is, and I've never tried the first result on the Google search page.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: So why do you think that is?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, it's it's a it's a I love your story, and it's it's something that I have also experienced myself.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of us experience.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think I think when you get into the camp of alternative methods of of of healing and personal development, and they do work for you, because uh I know that plant medicine and and meditation and contemplation has massively helped you as it as it has for myself, you tend to then look at uh more accepted forms of uh therapy techniques as maybe too mainstream, maybe they're too formalized, maybe they're created by people who don't get it.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: And to be honest, if you if you were to go and do a CBT course or something like that, um in your doctor's surgery or something, then maybe it wouldn't be that good.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there are definitely examples where it is too formulaic and too step-by-step, and and the person who's administering this this series of techniques is simply there to check in, check out, have you fill out some forms.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: They they don't really deeply care about you.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe they're not emphasizing compassion, um, maybe they're not looking at the deeper truths about reality, which people like you and I are are interested in.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I I also just think it comes from lack of understanding as well.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so if you look at Buddhist techniques, a lot of us are familiar with mindfulness and meditation, and we tend to think that it stops there.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: But if you if you think about it, one of the core teachings in Buddhist in Buddhism is to overcome delusion, hatred, greed, right?
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: So overcoming delusion, delusion.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: So that means not thinking clearly, not understanding things properly, not having a good grip on reality.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: But there are different approaches to overcoming delusion, you know?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: One of them is to continuously practice mindfulness and to see clearer and clearer.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: And another way, which is just as valid, is to look at your thoughts and to examine them and to see if you have any distortions in them.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: And Buddhism is a very rich philosophy or religion, and it has many analytic techniques as well.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just sitting there in silence.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: I know that type of uh style of Buddhism is popular now with meditation retreats and things like that, but analytic meditations, readings, teachings, discussions, uh, these are have all been a part of of Buddhism for a long time.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: And actually Stoicism, some some believe, was actually just a type of Buddhism that that was adopted by the West.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: There are some stories of Buddhist Buddhist monks going to Greece and and some of the the philosophers in Greece at the time being inspired by them.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's also stories of Pyrus, who is a philosopher travelling to the East and learning things.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, why not, right?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Why wouldn't there be travel by Western people and exposure to different types of of Buddhists and and lessons that that would be learned just as it is now?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um there is something fascinating about the Buddhist approach.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I do think that there should exist a philosophy or an approach to living a good life that synthesizes all these different wisdom traditions, and I think that's happening more and more in the modern world.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm a big fan of mixing in Buddhist techniques, which there are some in my meditation course.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's mindfulness, uh, is a prominent one with uh stoic techniques.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I think William B.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: Irvine, who wrote A Guide to the Good Life, compares mindfulness and stoicism like chocolate and coffee.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they just go well together.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: If you if you practice mindfulness with stoicism, it's going to act as a force multiplier to just make the stoic techniques better.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: And also, if you practice stoicism and you you train yourself to think clearer and clearer, and then you also meditate, how is that going to make your time meditating worse and more chaotic?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's not.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so the two things can complement each other.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: Stoicism is primarily focused on the contents of consciousness and sort of getting that garden really well um looked after and making sure everything's orderly in that garden, your mental garden.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: And Buddhism is more about getting the container or the space uh or the understanding um aligned with the true nature of reality.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: So the space and the and the contents within that space.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's how I understand it between Buddhism and Stoicism.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and from what I know, the kinds of anxiety that we suffer from in the West are pretty unique to us, like indigenous cultures, and I think there's something of the Dalai Lama saying that like they they didn't have a translation for something like self-hatred or shame or something like that.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so it would make sense that you know the solution, the antidote to that illness originates from the place that it that people experience it, which is Western culture.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it may sound very vanilla CBT, but really it is it's it's realigning your mind with reality.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's what it's mean for me.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's regulating yourself and noticing the ways in which yeah, your thoughts are distorted, the way you're perceiving reality is distorted and out of alignment with what is, and you know, bringing yourself back into alignment with what is, which is that's as spiritual as it gets for me.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, totally.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the core teachings in my in my work on overcoming anxiety, this is I suppose at the at the foundation of it all, is this desire um or reframing to stop seeing anxiety as an enemy.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's how a lot of us approach it in the West.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: If there's something we don't like, then it becomes an enemy, something that we need to get rid of, cut off, right?
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like this is like the modern Western approach to medicine.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: Something is wrong with you, cut it out, get rid of it.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's a problem.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we feel anxiety, and then we have this resistance, we hate it, we want to get rid of it, we're not happy, and then all that does is it just makes you suffer way more than the anxiety itself is making you suffer.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's this idea in Buddhism.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think the Buddha was asked about how do you deal with pain, and I think he said something like, Do you want to get shot with one arrow or two arrows?
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: So the first arrow is the pain itself, and the second arrow is the story you tell yourself about the pain.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: So sometimes we are going to get shot by an arrow, but let's not get shot by more than one arrow, right?
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like, why double or triple or quadruple the pain that we're experiencing?
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: And the the core teaching that I want to give people through my work is this reframe where we stop seeing anxiety as this enemy to fight and to get rid of, and instead see it as this message that is coming deep deep within ourselves, this alert that is saying, listen to me, look at me, listen to me, I'm trying to help you, I'm trying to help you.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: And if we ignore that and and fight it and have a power struggle with it, the voice will grow stronger from the anxiety, the fight will get more intense, and nobody wins power struggles.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: But if instead we listen to it empathically, we acknowledge it being there, but we also don't let it run the show.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: We also see that it's not actually helping us as much as it thinks that it is.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we thank it and we we tell it that we're gonna do our own thing anyway.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, we become a friend to it.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: Then the anxiety feels hewed, the resistance and the fight and the struggle around the anxiety starts to subside, and then over time that anxiety can start to ease its way out of our system.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so yeah, that's been that that's at the core teaching of my stoic anxiety mastery is just befriending your anxiety, and that's um a deep part of acceptance, which is also uh a really important component of joy, happiness, living a good life.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so maybe if you could use an example from your own life, your own journey with anxiety, um, of a way in which you befriended it and transmuted it from an enemy into an ally.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah, so this type of uh approach is an on-going thing.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of us when we experience anxiety, we realize that it's not some epic, you know, huge battle with the end boss in the video game.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: Even though I I I've told a story that I was attacked at knife point when I was 18, and then a couple of weeks later I was involved in a violent confrontation where a bunch of guys uh jumped me or like kind of circled me and and attacked me in my local town.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: These two things combined together got me very anxious and fearful about confrontation, and then all of those things spiraled, and I started having symptoms of hypochondria, just general worrying, um, social anxiety.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm naturally very introverted anyway, so social anxiety has always been something in the background, but then it became a lot more intense, you know, like someone who's naturally introvert and and withdrawn, they start having quite serious anxiety.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like they're going to be the life and soul of the party, right?
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: So you start becoming more more withdrawn, and and then that makes your anxiety even worse.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I've experienced a lot of different types of of anxiety over many years, and it's the daily struggles that you almost that that almost seem in inconsequential, like the little conversation you've got to have there, the walk to the shop here, and these things are happening day by day.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so there's not like this one epic story of this was the moment I befriended my anxiety.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: However, I say that, but there was one time when I went to Costa Rica, and when I went to Costa Rica, I was really struggling with uh feelings of of hypochondria.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it was very warm there, there was a lot of heat.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I felt separated and cut off from a lot of a lot of things and people and and comforts back home.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I was quite far away from hospitals, and I just started to feel this general discomfort and anxiety creeping up on me.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I was I I was concerned that you know I was gonna have some kind of health issue.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: And as this was happening, someone close to me uh actually passed out and fell almost onto me, right?
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: This was like a very strange situation where I was there practicing staying calm and someone close to me passed out and fell uh onto the place where I was sitting.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: They were fine, uh, but they did actually pass out.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: So this really spiked up uh a lot of a lot of the anxiety that I had.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it was almost like uh the way that I interpreted it, as I do in general, is it's framing things as a lesson.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what can this teach me?
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: What why did I need to see this?
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not it's not magical thinking, it's well, this has happened.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: What benefit can I derive from this?
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: As opposed to this has happened, I'm I'm such a victim of this terrible circumstance.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so as the anxiety started to creep up on me, I would have these these flashes of of it's difficult to explain if you haven't had uh anxiety yourself, but I'm sure a lot of us have, where these sort of very intense sort of flashes of images would come up, and with those flashes of of of imagery there would be uh an intense emotion related to it.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: So there could be this intense flash of imagery of you know uh my ha an issue with.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: My heart, or an issue with my circulation, or uh struggling to breathe, or tingly hands, or something small like that, there would be this kind of alarm alarm bell in my body telling me like, This is a problem, this is a problem, this is a problem.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember sitting there and thinking to myself, this is going to be my training on how I transmute anxiety from an enemy to a friend.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so every time I would have this intense flash of anxiety, I practiced saying to the anxiety, thank you, but I'm okay.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then a few minutes would pass, and this flash of anxiety would come again, and I would say, Thank you, I appreciate you, but I I am okay, I am fine.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I did this over and over and over again, and eventually the the anxiety really started to shift, uh and sort of this natural joy started to emerge, and I and and oh over about an hour I started to to see my anxiety as this as this loving helper within me.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um and yeah, so that that that stands out as like a quite a significant example of of a time I practiced this, and that that experience has stuck with me.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: But uh I understand that a lot of us won't won't have experiences like that, and and it's a case of day by day practicing, doing what I just said um throughout the day, you know, when we get anxious, when when this happens to me, just stopping, saying, I appreciate you, I hear you, but as of right now, I I'm not in danger, I'm okay.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: How was your anxiety trying to help you in that situation?
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well, my anxiety was trying to keep me alive, trying to keep me safe.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and that's what anxiety does.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: Anxiety is there to make us survive because you know our biology doesn't really care that much if we are enlightened.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if if it did, then a lot of us would be enlightened.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: Our biology doesn't care that much that we walk down the road with a skip in our step.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: Those are all nice things, but primarily we want to survive, right?
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: Survive and and reproduce.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so if my anxiety has incorrectly decided that I might be in danger, maybe there's some kind of health issue, then it's trying to tell me, hey, hey, wake up, wake up, there's a problem, there's a problem.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, go do something about this, you know.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um and often it's not that helpful to us, right?
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because we're actually okay, and it can be confusing and it can be kind of annoying, right?
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're like a part of you knows you're okay, and then a part of you is terrified that you're not, and there's this this internal resistance and this conflict, and it's a struggle.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: If you knew 100% that you were that you were having some kind of health issue, it would be very simple.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's like just you know, go to the hospital, and that would be fear, right?
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you look down and you were bleeding, that would not be anxiety, that would be fear, right?
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's a problem, go to the hospital, you you could have a problem.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: But if you're sitting there and you're more or less okay, but you might be ill or there might be an issue, this this anticipation of something terrible happening, that's anxiety.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's this what if scenario that's playing out over in your head.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so the anxiety is trying to help me to try and keep me safe.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: And and I appreciate that because on the deepest level, all of these quote-unquote negative emotions that we we try to get rid of serve a very important function.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: If we didn't have them, it's unlikely that we would have gotten this far as a species, you know.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like there there are times when they they overreact, there are times when they you know they lead us down the wrong path, there are times when Yeah, when they just cause pain and and don't do much else, but they they are trying to serve an important function.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you feel if you feel social anxiety, there's something in social anxiety that is useful.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this idea of saving face, working well with others, not doing things that make you get exiled from the group.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: There's something in that that is useful, but then there's there's been some lesson or teaching or trauma that has made that get a little bit out of control, and it no longer really helps you live your best life, right?
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: It might stop you from living the worst life ever, um, but it stops you from living your best life.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so our challenge is to take this this anxiety that is trying to help us um in ways that are suboptimal and to try and and try and work with it and kind of retrain it.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so so it seems to me that the issue is that these like warning systems that are initially helpful, they become overactive, and a lot of people with anxiety they know that their concerns are irrational.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like they're not in agreement with that part of themselves that is overactively worrying, but people don't know how to like reach those parts of themselves and like calm them down.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like they've become disconnected and they're out of control.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um and this points back to what we were saying about the importance of finding the right techniques because there are techniques like CBT that are designed specifically for this purpose, and that's why it's been like pretty miraculous for me discovering this and realizing that anxiety isn't actually just always out of my control, which is how it's always felt.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's felt like there's this part of me that does this really annoying thing, and I can never get it to stop doing that really annoying thing, but actually you can speak to it, and there's a right way to speak to it, and there's a wrong way to speak to it.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um I wanted to know if you tried any other modalities when you were really suffering with anxiety, or if you went straight into stoicism and CVT.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm I'm someone who uh I've been working with High Existence since 2015.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: So it's part of my my work to to research and explore different modalities and to try and live a holistically integrated life, you know?
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Not that's that's the that's the idea.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, I'm I'm interested in anything that can that can help.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, stoic anxiety mastery is not a strict rigid stoicism course, nothing I do is strictly stoicism.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's stoicism is a framework that is useful, and other things are synthesized within that that I've also found useful.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: If I found a technique that was amazing and that helped my anxiety, I wouldn't leave it out of my of my stoic course, right?
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: That wouldn't make any sense.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: It would be sort of hindering people who would who would take it.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I've done um a lot of meditation.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um used a bunch of the various apps from Headspace to Um the Waking Up app, Insight Timer, big fan of InsightTimer.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: I have found concentration-based meditations to be very useful, providing I I sit consistently and I take it seriously, right?
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, like you don't want to just meditate for the sake of it and show up and sit there and you know, like time is on, okay, it's done, I can take that off.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, no, you don't really want to do that.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: You want to take it seriously.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: You want to always reconnect to why you're doing this, what is your motivation, what is your goal for this sit.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: And in particular, I found longer sits to be useful as well 45 minutes to an hour of concentration-based meditation.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: So you can you can look into that.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Shamata is the is the name.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: So you can read books like The Attention Revolution, that's a really good book, or The Mind Illuminated, both both those books help you uh learn concentration-based meditation.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: And all this does is it just gets you practicing seeing your thoughts as thoughts and then coming back to the object of your of your meditation.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so, whereas you might be lost in thought 80, let's just say you're lost in thought 95% of the day, if you practice meditation, you maybe you start to get lost in thought 70% of the day, right?
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: So you're still like lost in thought a lot, but it it just reduces a little bit, and then you also have a sort of inner refuge where when things do get a bit chaotic, you can you can practice the thing you were practicing on the cushion where you can just come back to the breath and and calm the mind.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: So that's been very useful, and I I recommend meditation.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: In Eschisis, which is my 10-week live stoic boot camp, meditation is something we do every day.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's why meditation is also one of the key parts of stoic anxiety mastery.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but I I tailor the meditations to be specific for anxiety.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: So that's been one thing that's been really useful.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: Journaling has been extremely useful, even just journaling about anything, so sitting down and just writing about what's going on in your life.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: If you think of Marcus Aurelius and his meditations, some believe that the meditations by Marc Aurelius is Marcus attempting to have a dialogue with his deceased mentor, because Marcus's stoic mentor died, and so Marcus is trying to almost imagine what he would say to him and write it out and almost teach himself from the perspective of his mentor, and that's a really good exercise.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, just sit down write your journal and ask, you know, how should I think about this?
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: What is the right approach?
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, that's been that's been really useful for me.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: In Stoic Anxiety Mastery, I provide journal templates, but they're a lot more structured than that and specific uh to certain problems that arise within anxiety.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: I've also experienced uh exposure as well, so going out into difficult social situations.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: I I've struggled with social anxiety a lot and just feeling quite introvert and withdrawn.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things that I I wanted to do was to go out to social situations that would cause me problems, like nightclubs and bars, and talk to different people, um, to interact with groups and to just put myself out there as a social person.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: And when I first started trying to do that, I just could not do it.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: I just could not, I would show up.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um me and my friend, we'd we'd go out and and we'd go out for the same reasons that everyone goes out, we'd just go out, and then at a certain point we'd be like, Oh, let's try and talk to a bunch of people, and we just could not do it, it was too difficult.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: We felt stuck in our head, everyone in the environment looked scary, we felt like the odd ones out, and we would just sort of go home without speaking to anyone, you know.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: We were both trying to improve our confidence, and that happened for months, you know.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um I was not someone who just decided to go and uh speak to people and and I could do it.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: That went on for months and I really struggled with it.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I actually I actually gave up on it.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: I thought this is way too difficult.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: I had all these different excuses in my head as to why I couldn't do this, why it was strange and I was not meant to do it, and there must be other paths.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I paused that one for a while, and then decided that I would pick it back up when I go traveling.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I went travelling solo to Thailand and then Amsterdam, and travelling is a really good form of exposure, just sort of getting out there.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um if you could do it on your own, it's yeah, it's very it's very powerful.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: It was definitely scary to me, um, made me sort of think on my feet, and I started experiencing um social situations that were difficult.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: I remember when I arrived in Thailand, I thought I'm on my own, I I had now have a legit reason to meet people and practice, you know, getting outside of my comfort zone.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I remember looking at the nearest sort of area of nightlife and seeing that it was about a five-minute walk.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then I on Google Maps I was trying to track the walk there to see if I could avoid any alleys because I was still at the time afraid of confrontation and sort of you know, my my trauma was still playing up a little bit, you know, walking the streets at night alone in a new place kind of reactivated some of that that anxiety.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so I I kind of was trying to plan out like how can I get to this this bar and get home in a safe way.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it was difficult.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: And and to overcome your anxiety, you know, there has to be this element of facing your fears, you know, not in a naive, you know, just face your fears, and but it is going to be uncomfortable.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: There's no there's no way you're you're going to be able to completely overcome your anxiety without any discomfort.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: That just that path does not exist.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, because life itself is not comfortable, you know, and living a uh what you would consider to be a good life is also not comfortable, you know.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: The the aim is to kind of be comfortable in the discomfort.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: Voluntary hardship and uh discomfort exercises are a big part of stoicism, which is great.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and yeah, and I remember just having this idea of baby stepping it.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: So the first night that I went out, I just went out, and I my plan was not even to interact with anyone, I just went out to to walk around, explore, then I went back home.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: The next night I decided to go out and to you know maybe just get a drink or or talk to someone close to me and then go back home.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then what happened through this process of baby stepping?
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_01: Two weeks later, if you would have seen me out, I had a bunch of friends and I had a bunch of people that I knew.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember one guy saying to me, who's also a traveler, like, Oh, you're you know, you're living with all these people, and I was like, No, I'm here alone.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: And he was like, How do you know so many people?
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_01: and that's just the process of putting yourself out there and interacting with other people and being yourself, you know, being authentic.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: But to go from, you know, I'm afraid to even go out to the bar to then making a bunch of friends in two weeks shows that your mind can give you a lot of lies and it's not all it doesn't always have your best interest.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: And just because you have social anxiety, that doesn't mean that other people won't find you amazing to hang out with, you know, that's one of the lies that social anxiety can give us is that when we open our mouths, we're gonna be awkward and and uh you know no one's gonna want to hang out with us, but that's just not true, you know.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that type of exposure therapy.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: I've experimented a little bit with different types of plant medicines.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um those those have been useful.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: Primarily, those have been useful because they've been inspiring to me.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like they've when I've experienced experienced it with plant medicines, they've inspired me to stick with my spiritual practice, so you know, stick with my personal development and and um yeah, the the key takeaway from my my plant medicine experiences as has been right, now that this is done, you know, you've gotta you've gotta keep focusing, you've gotta keep reading.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: And actually the stoic handbook, the idea for it came after a plant medicine experience where um I started uh I I had this realization that you know I need to I need to really understand Stoicism, and I started writing notes and diagrams in my my journal, and uh I really just wanted to understand this philosophy.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: I thought that it would be very useful to me, and uh and and yeah, and that's where the idea came from.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then I set set up a website and started putting these these diagrams and teachings online, sort of like my own process of learning and discovery that other people could experience along with me.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um those have been some some some big ones beyond that, just trying to take care of my body, so training.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm I practice Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: I went to my first jiu-jitsu class in 2017.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: I trained for a couple of months, and it was scary.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I at the time I was having fear of confrontation, that's why I went.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I was I I I wanted to go, and I it took me about three months to actually get the courage to go, you know.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: So if the the the person that is speaking to you now, you you might think like, how how did this take him three months to go to his first jiu-jitsu class, right?
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's it's you you can you can definitely transform, you know, that's the key message that I want to give people.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I remember I I never plucked up the courage to go, and then one day I put it on my calendar, right?
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: This has to happen, I have to go.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I was listening to um William B.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: Ovine's Guide to the Good Life on the way there, the audiobook, you know, on the dichotomy of control, or as he calls it, the trichotomy of control.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that just really helped me have this attitude of show up and let whatever happens happen, you know, just show up and don't think about it much beyond that.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I trained for a few months.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: I got an injury, I broke my rib, and that took me out of the game for a couple of years, and then I started back quite seriously in the big January 2019.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I've been training uh quite seriously now for over three years, and that is that has been very uh very potent practice for me.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um but yeah, any kind of it it follows the same principles though of voluntary discomfort.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I just remember driving to the jujits jujitsu gym feeling nervous and you know, oh like this is uncomfortable, but then telling myself, you know, I I really want to do this, this is gonna be really important for me.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: And now I can I can drive to the jujitsu gym and and have not an ounce of of worry, you know, it's it's it's I feel relaxed, it's fine, it's like another place of home to me because I've gained competence.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: Those are some really inspiring stories, John.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for sharing.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um so yeah, I want to ask if exposure, you know, in pretty much all of those stories, exposure was the key.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, if people can just go out and face their fears and kind of dissolve them in that way, then uh what's the need for the cognitive side of things?
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the the CBT, because CBT is not all about exposure, there's a whole nother element to it.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um so what I would say is that if you ca it's a funny thing, right?
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: If you could always go out and face your fears, do you even have anxiety anymore?
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um Because like now you could make the argument that yeah you do, but I mean, is it debilitating anxiety if you can always do the thing that you're afraid of anyway?
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, one of the problems with anxiety is that it keeps us stuck, you know, it actually stops us from living the life that we want to live.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you if you were one of those people that could always face your fears, then to me that would that would be interesting because I would be wondering, well, how is anxiety holding you back then?
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: What often happens with us is that we attempt to face our fears and we fail.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we can't quite do it, or we feel stuck similar to the way that I was going out and I wasn't able to interact with other people.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'd feel stuck, I'd be in my head.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'd have the idea of facing my fears, but I wasn't able to do it.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: Or maybe I would do it and then it wouldn't go so well, and I'd have all these other thoughts that would then make me feel low, make me feel like a failure.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that's one thing is that is that, yeah, facing your fears it can be a very potent medicine because it primarily desensitizes you.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not so much that it it cures the core anxiety, but it desensitizes you to it.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: And if you can desensitize yourself to to anxiety, that can give you some relief.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's no doubt about it.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: That can give you some relief, it can clear your mind a little bit, it can take away some of the momentum of that anxiety.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like when you're in the grip of anxiety, if it's a nine out of ten or a ten out of ten, it's very difficult to do CBT at all in that moment.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: If you expose yourself to the thing that makes you anxious, maybe the anxiety goes to a four out of ten.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: So now you can actually see it, you can think about it, you can distance yourself from it a little bit.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, I've had experiences where I've done a lot of exposure therapy, and eventually I did I did interact with people and I was able to do it, and I gained a lot of competence in it, and I gained a lot of social skills by doing that.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but if I went through periods of Not exposing myself to the things that that would make me anxious.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_01: I just became withdrawn.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: The anxiety might come back a bit, but not necessarily to the same extent that it had before, because you now have new skills.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: But it there was something in it that didn't really address the core, the root of the anxiety.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: So if we go back to the model we discussed earlier of seeing anxiety like a friend, right?
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: So there's this anxious part of you that's trying to tell you that there's a problem, all right, that there's something you need to be worried about.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: By exposing yourself to the things that you're afraid of, what you're doing is you're saying, look, look at me.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's fine.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_01: Here's some proof.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: We're okay.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's no problem.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: So say you're afraid of interacting with other people, right?
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: You have social anxiety.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: The voice of the anxiety is saying, Don't speak to that person, stay small, don't do this, be quiet, don't make a fuss, don't speak too loud, don't be too obnoxious, don't be seen, it's dangerous.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then you go and do it, the anxiety kind of for a moment goes, Wow.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, I was wrong.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, carry on, actually, you know, I'll I'll let you carry on.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: You go do your thing and you go have a have a good time, right?
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_01: You go interact with people.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then the next day the anxiety comes back and and it's like this this voice that just doesn't learn that quickly.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like once again, don't interact with people.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you're like, look, I'm gonna go do it again.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the anxiety goes, Wow, you proved me, you proved me wrong again.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: And if you keep doing this, maybe a month later, the the anxiety is going, you know, is saying to you a bit more quietly, like, I know you've had a really good run the last month where you've been talking to people and you've been safe doing it, but please be careful, and then you go do it again.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: The the voice of the anxiety sort of um can be gets a little bit more on your own side with exposure.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: But if you stop exposing yourself to the thing that you're afraid of, the the voice of the anxiety will grow larger.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so while it is a very important technique and is it it is vital because how can you possibly know you've even overcome your anxiety if you don't face it?
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you have a fear of of dogs, how can you possibly know you've overcome your fear of dogs unless you test it?
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's impossible.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: You otherwise you'd be walking around going, I've done this inner work where I've overcome my fear of dogs, and I haven't seen a dog in 10 years, but I'm confident that I've overcome my fear of dogs.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, how could how how do you know that?
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: The true test is when a dog walks by you.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: Have you overcome your fear of dogs?
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I have.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh great.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: But if if you've done all this inner work and a dog goes near you and you crumble, how can you put you know you haven't overcome that anxiety?
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so there has to be this sort of testing mechanism in place, and exposure is a really good test of that.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it and desensitizes you as well.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_01: But if we go back to the model of the anxiety being like a friend that's trying to tell you something, when you expose yourself, you quieten down the friend, you gain some trust in that friend.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: But what you also need to do is teach that friend on a deeper level, almost like take that friend to school.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's why we use a bunch of other techniques like the cognitive method in CBT.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: We it's essentially like learning ways to communicate with our friend, you know.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: So instead of just showing them that we're okay, we are now learning the skills of interacting with them, communicating with them, which is something you you mentioned earlier, Nick.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: So we have this anxious subpersonality.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: We can show them things, which is exposure, but we also need to talk to them.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: So they're screaming and shouting at you, saying, you know, nobody will ever like you, don't speak to anyone.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: We can go, hang on a second.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh let's talk about that for a moment.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then through that dialogue with the anxious part of yourself, which is CBT, you know, and that's included in the triple column technique, which I'm a huge fan of in stoic anxiety mastery, you can actually get that anxious part of yourself to go, oh, okay, yeah, maybe you're right, without even needing to expose yourself.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: So that when you do then do some exposure, which means just facing your fears a little bit or your anxieties, it's it's quieter from the beginning.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: The voice of the anxiety is quieter from the beginning.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the way they frame it is that you use the rational statements to communicate with that part of yourself, just so that you can keep your brain open enough so that it gives you that space to enter that situation that you fear without being completely contracted.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you are, you know, at the whim of those thoughts, and if you're a victim of those thoughts, they can get you to the point where you enter that situation and you've lost before you've even begun, you know, with social anxiety.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: You can enter and like you totally withdrawn before you even enter, and that's not really the kind of exposure that that's gonna help you.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_00: I guess you could do that over and over again and desensitize yourself from, but it's gonna be a much faster and smoother process if you can actually enter that social situation instead of feeling like oh no, you know, I'm gonna mess this up, I'm gonna be terribly awkward.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, you're going in with this attitude of, well, you know, I've been working on myself a little bit.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: I may feel a little less anxious than I did before.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: That is a whole different kind of energy to enter with.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so um for people that are thinking about doing this course, I wanted to ask you if you could if you could tell us what a day in your life was like when you were at the peak of your anxiety, and then compare that to a day in the life of John Brooks now.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um Yeah, so there anxiety can can interact with the environment or the circumstances in which you find yourself, and I I can think of two uh sort of phases where the anxiety was stronger, you know.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're if you're not doing much in your life and you don't have many triggers, your anxiety is not likely to be that active.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: But then if you if you're in a different kind of situation and your anxiety gets triggered, you could be a lot more anxious, right?
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just the exposure to these triggers that is activating your anxiety.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I'm thinking back to when I was in university.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_01: I I was in my early twenties, and most you know, most of my life has been just you know very you know very nice, you know, just you know, great parents, great, great family, um nice education, always been interested in art and history and film, and I was studying filmmaking in in university and I was living in a student house with four other guys, and I had this downstairs bedroom, and this downstairs bedroom had a had a had essentially like a back door built into the room, like a glass back door.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: So my downstairs bedroom had a glass door uh in it, and I was living in a city, and the city was pretty safe, but you would sometimes hear stories about muggings and things like that, but it was primarily pretty safe.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: But I was experiencing a lot of anxiety because this was a year or two after this attack that I went through, and I had a girlfriend at the time, um the first year of university was going pretty well, but then something triggered the anxiety again and decided to come back.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I heard a story about someone that was held at a knife point, and this sort of immediately brought the anxiety back.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: And this is also bringing uh an important point that relapses are a natural part of overcoming anxiety.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_01: You might feel like you've overcome it quite well for a bit of time, and then something can can re trigger it, and so it is uh a continu a continued work, you know.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: We have to keep showing up to it.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_01: So this uh this was going on, and I started having these vivid images of people, dark hooded men coming into my room and breaking in, you know, with weapons, and and these images were very intense, you know, and and I I could not be comfortable falling asleep when it was when it was dark.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I remember s I was staying up until the morning light before I would drop off to sleep.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd go to bed and then I would stay up sometimes to maybe like five or six in the morning, and then go to sleep.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: So this shows how anxiety can actually cause a lot of other problems in our lives, right?
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_01: So my sleep cycle started to become a bit strange.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: So getting up, I mean I was living with a bunch of students, a lot of us were waking up late and going to bed late.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, going to bed until it turned light and then sleeping till late clearly is not a is not a good move for your circadian rhythm.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's what I started to do.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember my girlfriend at the time lived a street behind me.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um literally one street, you know, just a two-minute walk.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember I was so on edge about getting attacked that I that I just had to like really, you know, g go there quickly and I was just very I was scanning the environment for like anything.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: I I essentially when I was going to her house, I was almost mentally preparing myself to for battle, right?
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: Which is you know, physically like there's something terrible could happen now on this walk there.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um even going out to the cinema and go going out to streets, there'd be moments where people would be talking to me and I would blank and I'd have tunnel vision and I would just be scanning the environment for threat.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um that would be really, really difficult.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: If I was in in university and it was daytime, I I'd probably seem completely fine, you know, like no issue at all because the anxiety wasn't being triggered there.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_01: But in certain social situations, I just would not speak.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'd be in like social groups and just wouldn't say anything and would feel I'd start to have this like internal thought loop in my mind where I just knew that I should speak, knew that I was being awkward, but I just couldn't find anything to say, and it was just and I was aware of it, then I started to get more and more in my head and more and more self-conscious.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, like if you imagine like day in, day out this kind of thing happening, then you know, like other problems start to arise, you know, like me, like I think I gained weight, um, my relationship started to to crumble as a result of all of this kind of thing, you're no longer that fun to be around, and so yeah, anxiety could be a major problem for for us, and that's why I'm I'm really passionate about helping people overcome it.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then if you if you look at my life now, um uh my life as of this moment.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I have a three-year-old, three and a half-year-old son, and yeah, it's a case of get up with him in the morning, um make him breakfast, get him changed, get myself changed, go out to a park for a couple of hours, um look after him, he's running around talking to everyone, um parents and children, and I'm sort of following him around.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um Then I take him to school.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_01: When he goes to school, I'll go to the gym, I'll do some work, and then I'll pick him up from school.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_01: This is uh on a day that I would have him, and then I'd come back home, we might go in the garden, potter around, talk to the neighbours, and then if my dad is able to, my dad could could like look after him for a bit.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: I could go to get in the car, go to Juju Tsu, um, spend an hour grappling with other people, you know, like attempting to Juju 2 is sort of like wrestling but with submission holes, so you know, joint locks and re-naked strangles and things, sort of like in the UFC.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um do that, get a really good workout, speak to my friends, come back home, put Oliver to bed, and do some work, and then what what does work mean?
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I've recently um just done a month of of teaching to a group of people in a high existence space called a dojo, where I was teaching people how to overcome their inner critic on live calls.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_01: So what you've got essentially is you now I l I live a life where my days are just very busy but very peaceful.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not anxious, I'm I um I have regular exposure to to confrontation and in a controlled setting with martial arts.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm out and about a lot of the day interacting with other people.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, life is life is meaningful and and nice, essentially.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful to hear.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds like a good day.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so yeah, I kind of asked you this at the beginning of the podcast, but we didn't go into it.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_00: Who did you design this course for?
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_00: Did you have anyone in mind, or is it just for everyone and anyone who has any kind of anxiety?
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's a lot of wisdom when it comes to marketing, and that wisdom says that you should try and find a group of people with a particular kind of problem and then create something that they want.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_01: And while I do think that's good advice for certain people, that has never been something I've done intentionally.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: So, what I tend to do with the work that I create is I create the kind of work that I wish I myself had had years ago.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so I always ask myself, well, what do I think is either missing right now that I would like, or what was missing for me a few years ago when I was going through this process, and then I I asked myself, how can I create that thing?
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_01: So that's where this came from.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_01: Is I'm I'm essentially creating the course that I wish I had when I was struggling with anxiety.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it in a broad sense, I'm also creating the kind of course that I would be able to recommend to my loved ones as well.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that's the secondary intention behind creating this course.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: You Nick, uh, good friend, colleague, this is the kind of course that I would be proud to show you, you know, if you're struggling with any kind of anxiety, like please check it out.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: I hope there's something useful in here for you.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, family members, friends.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_01: So that's who the course is created for.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to get more specific with the kinds of struggles, if the course is created even for people who aren't experiencing anxiety but want to get a deeper sense of their own psychology.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because even if you don't consider yourself to be someone who has an anxiety disorder, say you consider yourself to be relatively grounded, if you are going to live an interesting, rich life, there definitely will be times where you experience anxiety.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_01: There'll be times when you have to lean into your fears a little bit, step outside of your comfort zone, do things that you know dare to be great, as they say.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_01: And when you do these things and you expand and you stop trying to play it small, anxiety and fear will often come.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_01: There's also fear and anxiety that can come from doing your best creative work, you know, staring at the blank page and then facing the inner critic.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what is the inner critic saying about you?
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: There's fear and anxiety about major life decisions.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: So this course is for anyone who is going through any kind of anxiety and wants to overcome it in a step-by-step systematic fashion that uses the integration of modern psychotherapy plus stoicism.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_01: But it's also for anyone who's just interested in psychology as well, because I'm sure that there will be a lot of people that really love this course and they wouldn't necessarily say that they are really struggling with anxiety, but maybe there'll be something that happens a year down the line and then they'll draw back on some of the teachings in this course.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: When I ran a schisis, which is my 10-week stoic boot camp experience, my live experience, I was working with someone in the last round of askis, and they didn't seem to be struggling with anxiety at all.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_01: But then halfway through the program, they there came this situation where their parents were uh not able to travel, and they had elderly parents, and there was the COVID situation happening, and suddenly life thrust upon them this very difficult situation where they had elderly parents who were in a situation where they didn't have the best support during COVID and they couldn't travel and there were visa restrictions, and now this new type of anxiety that didn't exist when they started the program started to creep in, and then the tools that I teach in Stoic Anxiety Mastery became very useful for them.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so this points to the difference that you introduced me to between CBT and Stoicism.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_00: CBT as basically a therapeutic healing modality and stoicism as a preventative medicine.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this is this is a framework that I adopted from Donald Robertson, who's one of my favorite Stoicism writers.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_01: And Donald Robertson has been studying Stoicism for you know 25 plus years, but has also been a cognitive behavioral therapist and has even taught other therapists how to practice cognitive behavioral therapy.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_01: So he's very high-level with both CBT and Stoicism, and so he's he's the person to ask, well, what is the difference, what is the distinction?
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the way that he put it, and I really like it, is that CBT is when you have a specific problem and you need a specific type of medicine, a series of steps to systematically overcome that particular problem.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_01: Stoicism is a philosophy of life.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't mean stoicism can't be used as a therapy, it doesn't mean stoicism can't be adapted and modified to be a really powerful medicine for a specific problem, and that's essentially what I'm what I'm doing with stoic anxiety mastery.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_01: But Stoicism is a lot more comprehensive.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_01: CBT doesn't really tell you how to live a good life, whereas Stoicism attempts to do that.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why I really like the combination of the two.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_01: Stoicism is a framework for living the good life.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, how do you deal with how do you deal with difficult relationships?
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_01: How do you deal with fame and status?
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_01: How do you deal with temptation?
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_01: How do you deal with fear in a in a sort of general sense, you know, the fear of death as well as everyday anxieties?
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_01: CBT is a type of stoicism that's been filtered so that you can approach it with whenever I'm in a social situation, I have debilitating anxiety and I feel withdrawn and I don't know what to do.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_01: In that situation, CBT can be really useful.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_01: But I think even more powerful is when you combine the holistic nature of stoicism with CBT.
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I was fortunate enough to interview Jules Evans for the High Existence podcast before.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_01: And Jules wrote a book on Stoicism called Philosophy for Life, and he had really problematic social anxiety, and he did a CBT course, but he also studied Stoicism in a general sense at the same time.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_01: And as he was practicing uh overcoming his social anxiety, he was interleaving stoic wisdom with the more systematic aspects of CBT, and to me that just makes a lot of sense, you know.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, one of the things that I believe when it comes to tackling anxiety is to use every weapon at your disposal and to attack it from all angles, um, and that's something that I that I think will work consistently for many people because if I tell you this one single technique will cure your anxiety, it might actually not.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_01: But if I offer you six, seven techniques and I tell you to try them all and then see what works for you, and then create a custom program that integrates those techniques to then work on your anxiety, that has a much higher likelihood of success.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_00: So can you take us on a walkthrough of the course?
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, share what's included, what will people actually go through when they buy this course?
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so the the course originated because I created a seven-day anxiety melting stoic meditation course on Insight Timer.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_01: I spent a lot of time crafting this course.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's about 50% theory and 50% contemplation, in that each session, each meditation session starts with some theory and then the second half is a is a practice.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_01: And at the moment, the course has been listened to by over 3,500 students, and it has a 4.8 out of 5 rating on Insight Timer.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_01: So it's been very successful, and people have found it very potent and useful.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_01: But at the same time, I don't think that a seven-day meditation course alone is enough to really help someone overcome anxiety in the deeper sense.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so my my mission since creating that course has been to expand upon it.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that was the idea behind creating Stoic Anxiety Mastery.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_01: So there are four general components of it.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_01: The first component is theory.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_01: How is it different from depression?
• 1:08:07
  SPEAKER_01: What is the difference between fear and anxiety?
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_01: What are the main causes of anxiety?
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_01: What are some ideas outside of stoicism that are important for us to understand if we want to overcome our anxiety?
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_01: Also, let's look at some stoic antidotes and attitudes towards anxiety.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_01: So there are a few video modules at the beginning, that's part one.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_01: And the purpose of these modules is that when you understand how something works, like the how and the why, then when it comes time to practicing a guided meditation or reflection, you understand why that meditation works.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so my goal for anyone approaching this is not to just follow the guided meditations and to think, well, okay, they either work or they don't.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_01: My end goal for people is that they can listen to a guided meditation, practice with it, and then eventually craft their own guided meditations or craft their own visualizations specific to their unique situations because they understand the mechanisms of the anxiety interventions and approaches to anxiety according to the Stoics that they listen to in part one.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_01: So the theory is really important, and I got this from martial arts.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_01: You can mindlessly drill a move, like a jujitsu move, right?
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_01: You mindlessly drill a fancy technique over and over and over again.
• 1:09:29
  SPEAKER_01: But what if you haven't spent time learning the proper mechanics of that move?
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_01: Why exactly does this move work?
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_01: What are the features of this move that make it successful?
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_01: When you're in a difficult match and then you're about to do that move, all you have is the mindless repetition in your body.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_01: What if your opponent does something and adds a certain type of resistance that stops you in your tracks?
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know the principles of the move well enough so that you can adapt according to that?
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so like understanding why a technique works is really important.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it also just helps us learn and integrate that better.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the first part.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_01: The second part then is the seven-part meditation series, which will be very different after you've listened to the theory side of the course.
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_01: The third part is going to be a series of journal exercises.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a big fan of Notion, and so I've crafted uh a few Notion templates, and there are seven in total.
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them are pure stoic techniques, other ones are very potent cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, like the triple column technique, which is something that I recommend to people all the time.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we have morning and evening reflections, updated ones that have never been published anywhere else, and we have the classic FIA pyramid exercise.
• 1:10:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so the journal templates, even though you could technically do them, you know, one per day, they are their own almost subsection of the course where you can go through the journal templates and then start to create your own psychological writing exercise where you single out individual exercises and make a course to do based on those exercises that work best for you.
• 1:11:16
  SPEAKER_01: So the Fear Pyramid, for example, which I won't go into too in into too much depth because I have a whole walkthrough of that in the course.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_01: That that could be a month project or a two-week project in and of itself that could be highly transformational.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm a huge fan of journaling and especially stoic journaling.
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then the fourth part is a time-limited section of the course.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_01: So for the first week that this course is live, I'm going to be opening up the doors for live workshop participation.
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_01: So if you decide to join Stoic Anxiety Mastery within the first week that it's launched, you'll get access to three live workshops that won't be accessible after the first week that Stoic Anxiety Mastery goes live.
• 1:12:02
  SPEAKER_01: These are going to be two-hour workshops on one of them is how to heal trauma.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really important one.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_01: And also that includes the stoic perspective on time and the future and the past.
• 1:12:15
  SPEAKER_01: The second one is going to be on how to get out of a negative thought loop or a downward spiral.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you've ever had that experience of your mind starts to have negative thoughts, and then you start to feel withdrawn, and then you can't get out of it, and then you just feel like you need to run away from the situation.
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's a that's something that I experienced a lot when I had severe anxiety, and that's something I want to be talking about.
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then the the third one, and this is something that I'm very passionate about, is social confidence.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_01: So while I do think it's a really good goal to go from say a minus three state with anxiety to a zero, which means to be free of anxiety, I'm also passionate about going even further and building core confidence in all situations.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, that would include things like being able to make friends easily, being able to step outside of your comfort zone socially, being able to teach, talk to groups and things like that, and that will be the third workshop.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_01: And this is gonna be a section where I'm open to live interaction and question and answer.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, so this is this is going to be a very important part of Stoic Anxiety Mastery, but it's only gonna be accessible for one week.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I would just like to share for anyone who may be feeling on the fence about whether or not to get this course, that I've spent basically the last seven or eight years of my life with the prime objective of healing my anxiety, and I have looked at so many different modalities.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_00: And this course is the one course that I would recommend to anyone who is dealing with anxiety.
• 1:14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um I've gone through this course, I'm gonna go through it again.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_00: I can't wait for the live sessions.
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_00: It really is one of the strongest antidotes to anxiety that hits every single base and can really be applied to any kind of anxiety.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it's like a shallow general sense of anxiety, or if you have a specific kind of neuroses, or if it's you know social anxiety that runs deep.
• 1:14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um this course gives you a toolkit and it walks you through how to really use each tool um in a way that will really, you know, give you what you need to heal your anxiety.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I just wanted to express my confidence in in this course and my gratitude to you, John, really for creating this course and letting me be a part of it.
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um where can people find it?
• 1:15:00
  SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate that, Nick, and you've been a very important um component of the creation of this course.
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_01: So having someone who's experienced with anxiety, like yourself, who's done a lot of work on it, to share this course with them and to get their feedback is is is yeah, it's amazing.
• 1:15:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh it's very valuable.
• 1:15:21
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I appreciate that.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um just want to say as well that for the first week that this course is gonna be launched, there's gonna be a$200 discount as well.
• 1:15:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the course is reasonably priced.
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_01: And if it doesn't click with you, say you decide to try it out and it just doesn't work for you, then I'm totally open to doing a 30-day refund as well.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it's very low risk.
• 1:15:44
  SPEAKER_01: In terms of how you can find the course, you can there are a few different places you can do it.
• 1:15:51
  SPEAKER_01: You can visit the domain name stoicanxietymastery.card.co.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Card is spelled C-A-R-R-D.co.
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_01: If you're listening to this in a podcast, the link will be in the show notes.
• 1:16:04
  SPEAKER_01: So just go and find the wherever you're listening to this, the the show notes, but also on the main website, stoichandbook.co, there'll be um a post for this, and there'll also be something in the navigation bar saying courses or stoic anxiety mastery course.
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_01: So there are a few different places to find it, but if you just uh look at the show notes, you'll get a link to it.
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um and yeah, also if if you're a fan of this podcast and you're not signed up to the email list, stoichambook.co, this is the place where I send my stoic breakdowns where I share illustrated quote breakdowns um on some of my favorite chapters of the Ink Iridian.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, recommend uh staying up to date with everything there too.
• 1:16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 1:16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, John.
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Is there anything else that you want to say?
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh no, thank you for the for the great questions.
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh really enjoyed talking to you and yeah, it was it was an honor to be on the other side of the uh of the podcast table.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Nick.