- What's up guys, Mark here.
And it's a, fuck-
Hey, I'm back,
I've got another... bag,
I got a, hey guys, Mark here,
and I'm back with another, uh- fuck
Hey guys, I'm back, I've got a-
We're talking about anxiety.
That was stupid.
God damn it.
Hey guys, Mark here,
and it's... it's a video.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
Shit, this is not going well.
Hey guys.
(clears throat)
Hey guys.
That was dumb.
Okay, breathe.
Relax.
Don't judge yourself.
Whatever, fuck this intro.
I got a video about anxiety, going to give you five
quick ways to help you deal with your anxiety
including one slower, long way to deal with it.
I'm actually going to go fucking deal with it
right now myself.
So catch you after the intro.
(heavy metal music)
About 75 years ago, W.H. Auden,
the famous poet wrote a book called the Age of Anxiety.
Now clearly Auden did not live
in the age of Instagram or Twitter because if he did
he would know that, now is the age of fucking anxiety.
Look, everybody's got anxiety these days, I've got anxiety,
You've got anxiety, the fucking dog's got anxiety.
Everybody's mom's got anxiety like everywhere
you look, anxiety, anxiety, anxiety, we're all freaking out.
It's kind of hard to figure out why sometimes,
as we'll discover the why isn't necessarily so important.
What is important is how you react to the anxiety.
So this video is going to give you five quick
ways that help you deal with anxiety, and then
we're going to discuss a slower way towards the end.
So the first thing to understand about anxiety
or any emotion in general is that our emotions
are inextricably linked to our physiological state.
It's basically just a fancy way of saying of,
you experience your emotions in your body.
And we don't always recognize this.
I mean, sometimes we kind of understand
like you've got butterflies in your stomach
or maybe your arms are a little tingly
or your vision gets a little bit red when you get angry.
But we vastly underestimate how much our physiology
changes when we're feeling certain emotions.
Now here's the catch.
If we experience certain emotions often enough,
or if we experienced them frequently
when we were young, our body, the same way
your body habituates itself to any activity,
whether it's running or jumping or learning a skill,
your body can habituate itself
to experiencing certain emotions.
And so in that way, our emotions kind of develop
like a muscle memory where you can actually
train yourself to feel anxiety frequently
or you can train yourself to feel angry all the time.
People who struggle with a certain emotion, essentially
what they've done without realizing it is that they have
habituated that physiological state as a response
to whatever they experience.
Now, the trick to counteracting that, it's
like counteracting any bad habit.
When that experience comes up in the future, you have to
consciously force yourself to do something different
than you normally do.
So that's like the high level abstract explanation
of why we feel shitty things frequently.
Let's talk about a few things that you can do in the moment
that you're experiencing anxiety, that can help you
relax a little bit.
How can we affect our body, our physical physiological state
to chill the fuck out.
Technique number one,
and this is by far, the most popular is
utilizing breathing techniques.
A lot of people don't realize, but when you're anxious
your breathing changes and you start taking shallower
lighter breaths more frequently, and this has all sorts
of domino effects throughout your body.
And it makes you feel like shit.
And so one of the easiest go-to things you can do when
you start feeling a lot of anxiety is simply
adopting some basic breathing techniques.
Now the most popular one is something known as the four
seven, eight technique.
The four seven, eight techniques, very simple.
You take four seconds breathing,
in hold for seven, breathe out for eight.
It goes kind of like this.
Fuckin ay man, that's some good shit.
The thing about these techniques, I'm going to be honest.
The numbers don't really matter.
I think the four, seven
eight is just kind of like a general rule
of thumb that most people find comfortable.
But the most important about these techniques is
that you're breathing in through your diaphragm.
So basically what that means is when you're breathing in
you get like a big fat Buddha belly going on.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Look at that.
Look at that at shit.
Yeah, oh yeah.
That's good.
One thing I actually learned recently, so I'm here
in New Zealand right now and I took a free diving class.
Free diving is for those of you don't know
is people who scuba dive without fucking scuba gear.
So it's like people would just hold their breath
and swim light 50 meters down.
So I took this class with this guy and he was taking me
through all these breathing techniques to
increase how much oxygen you can hold.
And he taught me breathe in
for five and then breathe out for five.
It's kind of a way to like prep
for like a big breath hold when you go under.
And the funny thing he was telling me is he was like
you actually have to be careful
because by doing these breaths, you relax yourself so much.
It actually kind of like makes you a little bit lazy
and lethargic.
And he even said that it's a nice way to combat insomnia.
So if you have trouble falling asleep
or if your mind is racing in bed
you can implement these breathing techniques to
help you chill out in bed.
I actually tried it about a week ago.
It was fucking amazing.
Big thing is big breath through the diaphragm
hold it for a few seconds.
Breathe out very slowly.
When you slow down your breath
and you utilize your entire lung
it gets better blood flow around your body.
It helps your body chill the fuck out,
not freak out all the time.
And you know, life will go on.
The last thing I should note about the breathing techniques
is that in a small minority of people,
probably less than 1%,
these breathing techniques can make you feel more anxiety.
They can make you feel worse.
So obviously if it starts making you feel bad,
don't fucking do it.
Do something else.
As always, the thing that works for me is not necessarily
going to work for you and vice versa.
So when it comes to all this stuff, you just have to try
out different techniques and see, see how it goes.
So technique number two, and this actually ties in very much
to that Buddha belly breathing through the diaphragm.
Oh yeah...
(laughs)
is meditation.
So if you haven't meditated before,
there's a bazillion videos
on YouTube that will teach you how to do it for free.
You know, people get all worked up like, oh
what's the best form of meditation?
Like how do I, what's the right technique, blah, blah, blah.
There's no wrong way to start.
You know, like once you get going, once you've done it
for a few weeks or you start doing it every day
then you can start looking
at different schools and different practices
and different techniques and whatever.
But it's like,
if you're just starting just fucking do it for five minutes.
It doesn't matter what type,
doesn't matter who's guiding you,
what the video is, where they're from, whatever.
Any medita6tion is going to be better than none.
Now, obviously meditation is great for relaxation.
A big reason for that is the breathing
that we just talked about.
A big part of meditation is having slow,
controlled breathing.
But the other beneficial part
of meditation is developing the ability to
watch your thoughts and feelings without reacting to them.
When we're going about our daily lives
when we start freaking out
or getting upset about something, we just instantly react.
You know, it's just like a knee jerk, like, boom, we go
and then it's not until after we've done a bunch
of heinous shit that we look back and say like, hmm
maybe that was a bad idea.
The beauty of meditation is
that it starts developing a separation
between the thing that happens
and your experience of it, your awareness of it.
You start realizing how to be like,
hmm I've got some fucked up thoughts in my head,
but I don't have to act on them.
Or I'm feeling really angry right now,
but I don't have to do anything about it.
Meditation is it's essentially just a practice
of letting things be.
And it's a beautiful thing once you get good at it,
because it has this incredible ability to kind
of infiltrate all these different areas of your life
you become less judgmental and biased at work.
You become more relaxed at home.
You become more accepting and more patient
in your relationships.
It's a wonderful thing.
So check it out if you've never done it.
Quick technique number three.
Talk to somebody.
I know, I know, it's like so obvious and lame,
but let's get serious for a second.
Human physiology is such that we rely upon one another to
stabilize ourselves.
Now that sounds a little bit crazy, but it's,
it's actually true.
Imagine like you're like a boat on the sea,
and the storm comes, you know, if you've got ropes tied
to other boats, you're not gonna like tip over as easily.
That was kind of a shitty metaphor,
but let's just go with it.
And if you've got connections to a lot of different boats
not only do you stabilize each other,
the storm can bring you closer together.
Right?
Is this working?
See when we're isolated, when we're alone
we have this funny tendency to like amplify things
that are going on in our heads.
We've all done it.
You know, let's say you are at the coffee shop
and you say something like, the barista's kind of cute
and you like try to make a joke, but it's not really
a funny joke, and there's like this awkward moment
where you just kind of look at each other and nobody laughs.
And then like you leave and go on about your life.
And you're walking on you're like-
stupid, stupid, stupid.
What the fuck am I saying?
Whenever we feel something that goes unexpressed,
our mind has a tendency to just keep looping it.
And every time it loops it, it grows, it expands.
It starts to dominate more of our mind space.
The irony is that if you could actually like go back
to that barista and be like,
hey that was kind of a lame joke right?
They'd be like, huh yeah,
but hey you tried, you know, whatever.
Like, then you're like, oh it's cool nobody cares.
There's something about speaking to other human beings
and sharing a little bit
of that amplified emotion that's going on inside your head
that the other human beings like, oh, well, yeah.
I mean, I felt that way last Tuesday,
but it's not a big deal.
And then you actually feel like it's not a big deal.
So don't underestimate the power of just picking
up the phone and, I don't know,
talking to somebody technique.
Technique number four, it's called negative visualizations.
This is a thing that comes from stoicism.
It's, it's gonna sound kind of fucked up
and counter-intuitive,
but it's basically just imagine the worst case scenario.
Imagine that anything that can go wrong is gonna
fucking go wrong,
and it's going to go wrong in a spectacular fashion.
Now that's the easy part,
because you know, anybody who's anxious,
you kind of do that anyway.
Here's the hard part.
Imagine how everything can go wrong
and then imagine how you can be okay with it.
Now that's the hard part,
that requires a little bit of creativity.
Because now you have to think like not only like,
okay, maybe my girlfriend will leave me,
but then you got to think, how would I be okay
if my girlfriend left me?
And that forces you to like think
two or three chess moves ahead on the board.
And generally what happens is you start discovering things.
You realize, you know what, I'm all right.
I'm a cool guy.
I can meet other people.
And then that makes you feel better.
You feel less insecure.
You feel less needy, like less clingy,
less creepy stocky boyfriend-ish type person.
And this applies, you know, this could apply to anything.
I used to run into this all the time.
When I started writing and posting online
I'd write something and I'm like, man, am I an idiot?
Like, are people going to hate this shit?
And then I would think to myself,
okay what's the worst thing that can happen
if I just wrote a horrible thing?
Well, yeah, I get like 200 hate comments or whatever.
It doesn't really change my life much, does it?
Life goes on.
Can always get on an edit the fucking thing.
Eventually when you start thinking that way, it gets easier.
And this is very counterintuitive
because we're always told to think positive,
but thinking positive actually makes the anxiety worse
because it raises your expectations.
Instead of saying, hey people might hate this video
but I'll live with it.
Now I'm saying this is going to be the best fucking
video ever it's gonna go viral
and get 8 million billion hits.
I'm gonna be the biggest thing since fucking Pewdiepie.
Now that like my standards are up here.
So high, the camera can't even see it.
Now, anything I do is going to feel like failure.
And so it's just going to ramp
up my anxiety and my insecurity more and more and more.
So the negative visualization has this
like paradoxical effect of bringing us down to earth
and lowering our expectations so that we can actually behave
and work more freely and do better shit.
That's awesome.
All right, technique number five.
And this is personally my favorite.
If you're feeling really worked up and really stressed
out over something, I recommend hosting a tequila orgy.
You know, you just get a bunch of like really hot people
in a room, start pouring tequila on each other.
(beep)
Do we have any B roll for this?
I don't think we can have B roll for this.
You get the idea.
Depending on where you are, it might be expensive.
Anyway, let's move on.
So those are the five fast
and easy ways of getting rid of anxiety.
Here's the one slow and a totally un-fun way
of getting rid of anxiety, which is, well, you know what,
let's just, let's make this the harsh truth of the day.
(intense music)
You don't get rid of anxiety.
You just get better at dealing with it.
There's all sorts of fascinating studies
with anxiety and high performers.
And what researchers found is
that actually people who perform extremely well
under pressure are not any less anxious
than people who perform poorly under pressure.
The only thing that differentiates them is
that people who perform well have more confidence
and beliefs in themselves.
So it's like the difference
between Michael Jordan taking the game winner shot
and me taking the game winning shot is Michael
Jordan knows he's really good
at taking game winning shots and I'm well, I'm me.
So we, we know how that's going to go.
So the way to battle anxiety in the long run
it's not the try to feel less anxious.
It's not to try to control your emotions
or get rid of your emotions.
It's to improve yourself.
It's to get better at stuff, get better at life.
Get better with people.
Get better at your job.
Get better at handling conflict.
Get better at handling disappointment.
Get better at failing at things,
being rejected by people.
As you get better at those things,
the anxiety it is still there,
it just ceases to matter.
I mean I still get nervous every time
I fucking turn this thing on.
I still get nervous, when I talk to somebody new
or I get in front of a crowd to give a speech.
That voice is there in my head,
it's just not as loud as it used to be.
It used to be deafening.
It used to be the only thing I could hear.
Now it's just this like obnoxious thing in the background.
So the anxiety never really goes away.
You just build better stuff on top of it.
So that about wraps it up.
Good luck getting your shit together.
Let me know if you have a tequila orgy.
You know where to find me.
And uh, stop freaking out dude,
it's gonna be fine.
Like and subscribe,
make your life a hundred times better.
No, it probably won't but it's a cool channel.
So like and subscribe... to...
because I'm anxious.
Till next time, Manson out.
(intense music)