How to feel like a kid again (and live without anxiety)
Do you remember the days as a kid when everything was play and life was just effortless and good, without worries and overthinking?
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Do you remember the days as a kid when everything was play and life was just effortless and good, without worries and overthinking?
The beautiful truth is that there is a way to bring this feeling back into our lives.
Last week, I worked on a article and I was stressed out because I really wanted to make it good.
After a while, I stood up and went outside to my garden.
I watched a little snail crawl through some plants. I was present for a few seconds and thought, ‘Wow, everything is good, no need to be stressed.’
I instantly turned around and wanted to walk back inside to continue my work. Then I thought, ‘Wait, what are you doing?
You are still stressed; you can literally feel the stress in your body.
Just wander a few more minutes through the garden; these 5 minutes are better used to calm down than to stress out.’ And this was indeed the case.
After that, I continued working and was much more relaxed and, consequently, more productive.
Our brain is an amazing tool, and having a healthy level of urgency is good because it helps us to focus. But it can get out of hand when we don’t know how to deal with it properly.
The problem with anxiety is that we are mentally either in the past or in the future most of the time; we don’t realize it. When I was stressed while writing a new script, I had the subconscious fear of people disliking my work and, in consequence, rejecting me.
This is half a joke, but the truth is that the most fundamental underlying fear is nearly always the fear of death. Whenever we are anxious, we have something that could be described as an undetailed map.
We have either unresolved issues from our past or uncertainty about the future. You have a lack of understanding of what happened to you or what is going to happen to you, and the obvious solution is to increase our understanding.
And the way we do this is to write. Writing brings the unknown into the known.
Your body computes your average level of stress by calculating something like the proportion of things you don’t understand that have happened to you or will happen to you, to the proportion of things that you do understand.
Whenever you are stressed, there is a high likelihood that you have a bad understanding because you haven’t articulated the situation properly to yourself.
And whenever something is vague and undefinable, the perception of the threat multiplies enormously. You want to understand virtually everything about your life and leave nothing at the table that is in the unknown.
There is a free writing exercise in the Better Human community that will help you conquer your past and your future.
Another highly important aspect I’ve observed in my life is that whenever I’m thinking primarily about myself, I get more anxious. Jordan Peterson once said that we should think about other people nearly all the time, and from my experience, this is a helpful tip.
When I work and I get stressed, I’m always thinking about my success, about people liking my articles, and what others think of my work
It’s always about me. But whenever I flip the coin and remind myself that I do this not just for myself but to help other people out there as well, I am, for some reason, not as stressed anymore.
Isolationist thinking makes us anxious.
And third, health.
Don’t complain about feeling like crap when you eat crappy food, watch crappy things, and lay in your crappy bed. If you treat your body and psyche like they have no reason to respond with kindness, get some sunlight, eat real food, and treat your body properly.
It could be likely the case that you aren’t primarily anxious for psychological reasons but as a secondary consequence of some physiological condition.
I’ve put a highly interesting podcast episode in the bio; it’s an interview with Chris Palmer, a psychiatrist from Harvard who does research on the effect of ketogenic and carnivorous diets on psychological disorders.
They seem to have an unbelievable positive effect on these kinds of things. My personal rule of thumb, which helped me a lot with my general well-being, is to eat a lot of meat and eggs, and then I’m good to go.
Otherwise, go outside right now and take a look at a snail or a flower or whatever.
They will show you that everything is fine. Your nervous system overreacts.
