Experience of Anxiety
My mouth is dry. I can’t think straight. Cold, then too hot, and tired. Not thinking clearly. Chest is tight. Sad and scared. Paralyzed.
And I realize I’m experiencing anxiety.
I feel like calling my parents, which is rare for me. The ole anxiety thing hasn’t visited in a while. But the winds of change are blowing—literally blowing tree pollen, right up my nose. And the whole thing has led to this experience of anxiety.
I admit to the reality of the situation: I am fucking terrified, for no clear reason.
The funny thing about anxiety is there’s a lot that can be done to ameliorate it — but thinking of those things and executing is exceptionally difficult when you’re experiencing anxiety.
Some things:
Alternate Nostril Breathing
Tapping meditation
Vagus Nerve Stimulation
Call a friend
Going to a restaurant and writing, which is what I’m doing now
I’ve been here many times and the waitress knows me.
“Your hair is getting long,” I say.
“I know. I can’t believe how much willpower I have,” she says. “People piss me off and I don’t go home and shave it.”
I burst out laughing, and write down what she said.
“Are you in school or writing about your feelings,” she asks.
“Feelings,” I say, and smile.
“Good for you,” she says, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man do that before.”
I have a lot of feelings. I write what she says, then dive into my drunken noodles with chicken. First, I bless the food to ensure I’m ready to receive it.
Long-form. Anything long form. Whatever you can do that lasts a long time—do that.
Writing
Breathing
Walking
Singing
Hugging
Eating
Music
The same thing over and over because familiarity communicates safety. So too does rhythm and pattern. Write the anxiety away. Breathe it away. Run it away.
Boredom is the opposite of anxiety.
Anxiety is being pulled a million ways all at the same time. Too many tabs open and the dag gone thing starts going haywire. Too much short-form task switching, too many loose ends, too much uncertainty. Combined with a chemical catalyst, like tree pollen or THC, you could be in for a vicious cycle, because decisions made from anxiety tend to yield more anxiety.
I’m getting anxious about this article. It needs to be good! I need to try! I need to do real work that makes money—or else!
Or else what?
There’s a hair in my drunken noodles.
“I don’t like to complain,” I say. “But is this part of the meal?”
“No, that’s a hair,” says Rage.
I’ve already eaten half of it. She brings me a new one plus a takeout box.
“Dust in the Wind” by Kansas comes on. “Just a drop of water in the endless sea.” It’s so true.
Before I came to this restaurant, I tried a voice conversation with ChatGPT about anxiety. It made things worse. While walking on main street, I made eye contact with a guy, and he said, “How are you doin,” and that made things a bit better. Optimize for connection. Like, real connection.
Anxiety means you care.
It means you care a lot about the future. Your life. The world. But sometimes it’s best to optimize for today. Optimize for feeling okay in this moment. Right here, right now. Where are you? Is everything okay?
Okay.
I’m with the guys who are hitting the gym on a rainy Wednesday afternoon.
I’m listening to one of my mentors, Tommy Rosen, chat with Bruce Lipton. What do they bring up? That so many people are feeling anxiety. More people than ever are coming to Tommy, who’ve never experienced anxiety before, saying they’re experiencing it for the first time in their life.
“I’ve heard this from countless people,” says Tommy, “I’ve never been like this before. I’m more anxious than I’ve ever been. I’m up at night, worried.
I think they think there’s something wrong with them.”
“You can’t live in threat,” says Bruce. “The system does not support threat. The system will do whatever to get out of threat. How can I get out? Well, not be here. That’s one way.”
Looking at our world, there’s more than enough to cause pathological anxiety. The AI conversation often sounds like a psyop to increase anxiety. There’s this thing that’s coming and it’s going to change everything! It could destroy humanity! It’s very close, and you need to be ahead of everyone to have first mover advantage!
The world is not in your hands. It’s in God’s hands. It’s. In. God’s. Hands.
What’s in your hands? Probably your phone.
Anxiety might be trying to tell you something. What is it trying to tell you? This might sound ridiculous, but you can ask it. And look where it’s pointing you. Remember the fundamentals. Principles, water, breathing, rest, relationships. One thing at a time.
I woke up this morning and slid into feeling anxious before I even got out of bed. Cloudy thinking, nonsense thoughts, pulled a million ways, racing thoughts, desperation.
Then I said to myself, and there’s no other way to put this, I said:
“Maybe you’re just being a fuckin pussy.”
And that was enough to interrupt the pattern, and start to change the frequency. I got out of bed and started doing, one thing at a time. I started with water and a workout: my favorite stretches, Wim Hof breathing, and pushups.
Then I reflected on a conversation I had a few days ago with my mom. I said I’m considering moving to a new city and pursuing a new thing. There was uncertainty and confusion in my voice, clearly worried about the future. I was looking for some kind of guidance or reassurance, or just an “I love you.”
She said, “I trust you’ll figure it out.” Which I’m sure was well-intentioned, but just to be clear, that line didn’t help. It says two things:
1. There’s something wrong to be figured out, and
2. It’s on you to do it
“Hope you figure it out” is the message our culture sends young people regarding many things: relationships, work, health, spirituality, climate, procreation. The data is in, and the new generation hasn’t figured it out. Let me know if you know a young person who has figured it out.
In the afternoon, an uncle, one of my best friends, calls me.
“What are you up to?” I ask.
“I’m driving to a friend’s house,” he says, “who I met 50 years ago. We went to high school together, then we went to Rutgers, then she went to Harvard and I went to MIT. So we went through college together. Anyway, she’s going off a bunch of addictive medications all at once, X and Y. She’s going through hard times. She’s in reaction mode. She accepts her current emotions as fact and have justification.
My message is, just be mindful of the situation. You can watch 'em. You can say, I’m feeling extreme anxiety right now because I’m withdrawing. This too shall pass. I’m trying to bring the message of mindfulness. Acknowledge that you are in a specific situation. A biochemical mental emotional state. Take the whole thing into account. Get the bigger picture.”
Then he tells me he recently experienced an anxious period.
“I went through a bout of anxiety, took gabapentin for a few days, stopped, felt weird for a day, then it went away. They call it episodic anxiety. But doctors don’t recognize that. I went to the doctor and said, I have anxiety. They started prescribing all this shit. Some of it's really toxic. Benzos you can kill you. [they killed his brother]
I tried this gabapentin stuff. Some people take thousands of milligrams, I took 100mg and was loopy for days. All I could do is take one eighth of one. I called the doctor and said it’s making me loopy. He said, Yeah, that’s normal, you have to be on it for six weeks. I said, You mean six weeks so I can get addicted to it? I have to come back every six weeks and pay him to get a new prescription. I said screw that and threw it in the trash.”
“So what happened with the anxiety?”
“Ya know, everyone’s on a spectrum of anxiety. It can be a healthy thing to feel anxiety. It makes you make a change. Healthy to so have some, but if you become incapacitated then you have to get something.
My friend Jerry had chronic anxiety off and on. He just realized, during tree pollen season, life’s gonna suck for a month.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I feel that.”
I took a cold shower and it brought me back into my body and righted my ship. It felt so good, I yelled “Oh yeah baby!”
Last week,
shared an essay about an episode of anxiety. I commented about my experience, and he found it helpful. I decided to write more about anxiety. Fortunately, I got this three-day bout of anxiety to help write this essay.
Life happens and humans make meaning of it. When life gives you anxiety, make something of it. Raise your sail and let the winds of change float you into connection, breath, and clarity.
Anxiety nudged me toward Tommy’s Life Beyond Addiction Virtual Conference. 535 people were on one of the Zoom calls. I raised my virtual hand and asked about creating more in-person experiences and helping the younger generation, for whom, the statistics are not good, to say the least.
Tommy, and his teacher, Guruprem, reinforced my conviction to continue co-hosting annual digital detox long weekends in New Hampshire.
“The fact that you’re even asking this question,” said Tommy, “Indicates that you are a leader, who can hold a frequency for others.”
“I believe, for me, the digital devices are the final frontier of my recovery,” said Guruprem.
“The solution is not AI or VR,” says Tommy. “It’s going out and reconnecting with this planet. The body, the breath, looking in someones eyes.”
On the topic of anxiety, “Who hasn’t gone through that?” said Guruprem. “The valley of that. Oftentimes it comes down to breath and faith. Faith you’ll be okay, then listening and moving with the breath.”
“As the breath, so the mind. And as the mind, so the breath,” said Kia Miller, Tommy’s wife, “Trying to stop the mind with the mind is like blowing into a hurricane. How we can stop the mind, is to shift to the breath, because the mind will follow the breath. What we find when we’re anxious, what we find when we’re caught in repetitive, addictive thoughts, is that we lose connection to our breath, and our whole body tightens, and we start to go into stress mode. If we start to lengthen our breath, particularly our exhales, that starts to shift the way the nervous system is tuned. It slows the brain wave state down.
The most powerful tools we have to shift our systems is the breath and our attention. Breath and attention working together, deepening the breath, lengthening the exhales, and staying focused on the breath. Just one minute of absolute focus starts to change things. It may not be easy to begin with, you may only get through 1, 2 or 3 breaths and your mind is off. But you can keep bringing it back and in that way you start to re-wire your brain, you start to heal your brain.
When caught in addictive overthinking, we create a lot of fracturing in the neurology of the brain, and the brain-heart coherence. When we create this continuity of attention, focusing on the breath, lengthening the exhale, it starts to create supportive patterns that help you stay in the present moment.”
Focused slow breathing, even while doing, slows down the thoughts. It reduces quantity of thoughts and increases quality. I’d rather have a few high-quality thoughts than a shit ton of low-quality ones.
I’m bullish on trading thoughts for breaths.
I have decided I'm going to breathe consciously from the moment I wake up til forever. When I write, talk, eat, scroll my phone, in the shower, at a party.
In the words of Churchill, “We shall breathe in France, we shall breathe on the seas and oceans, we shall breathe on the beaches, we shall breathe on the landing grounds. We shall never surrender.”
Music
Congratulations! You made it to the end! Hit the heart to let me know you made it (:
Thanks guys. Have a great rest of your day.
Porch fest in Boston:
Bonus song
Great article Chris. Your writing is exceptional. Your story of how your internal landscape changed from your trading days to now is really interesting. I wonder how anxiety will shift us into the practices you talk about here - connection, meditation, breathing. I had to start doing these too when I started my first biz. I can't even quit the meditation practice or else the anxiety will eat me alive. I suppose it's super normal. Thanks for voicing it out loud Chris - and by the way, when you host that retreat in New Hampshire, I'm there!
I wish I was close enough to simply sit with you. I’d explain the theory of anxiety I have worked with for 3 decades. And what has helped me.
Sensitive people experience anxiety. People with low serotonin experience anxiety.
I’ll tell you a true statement.. it doesn’t matter how you label it, but it’s how you respond to it.
Anxiety’s origin is from our need to be hyper vigilant when walking outside, looking for lions and panthers. The truth about what triggers it is something you Can figure out. When we first feel the symptoms coming on, we need to ask ourselves is this a “real” threat or a perceived one. A person has about two minutes prior to a full blown panic attack to make this distinction. If it is perceived, and you are safe, then the fastest way to calm the body is slow rhythmic breathing. Breathe in to the count of three, breathe out to the count of three. Feel the breath. You are safe. Remind your body that this is a false alarm, and it can stand down from sounding the alarm. Continue the breathing, and simultaneously use your five senses to get back into the present moment. Sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. With practice, you can master this technique within a week.
There are some people who walk with a constant low level anxiety because they are sensitive to everything around them. It’s not a fault, it’s a super power. You Can calm your body during a false alarm.