#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety

Modern Wisdom

Chris Williamson

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 4.6K Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2025

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Martha Beck is a sociologist, life coach, and an author. Why is anxiety so widespread today? It feels like nearly everyone is struggling with it in some form, but where does it come from, and what are the most effective ways to manage it or overcome it completely? Expect to learn why anxiety always lies, what most people misunderstand about how anxiety works, the true tension between anxiety and creativity and the role creativity plays in anxiety expression, how to overcome your negative inner voice, why most people get stuck when undergoing a personal transformation, how to become your trust and most authentic self, how to overcome trauma and resentment and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a 20% discount & free shipping on Manscaped’s shavers at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM20) Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You say anxiety always lies, always. Why? I say that at the end of the book.
0:07.6	Spoiler alert. Sorry about that. Boom. Come out with the biggest. Now, here's the thing.
0:13.0	We have brains that are very prone to anxiety and we have a culture that magnifies our proneness to anxiety.
0:20.4	But anxiety, unlike fear, which is a very, a response,
0:24.6	a visceral response to a danger that is present in the physical moment. There's a surge of
0:30.6	adrenaline, a surge of activity, and then boom, it's gone. Anxiety comes from the way we
0:36.0	perseverate and tell stories to ourselves in our heads about the things that may or may not happen.
0:41.5	As Mark Twain said, I'm an old man and I have lived through many troubles, but most of them never happened.
0:47.3	So anxiety is like being haunted.
0:51.0	And if you sit with it, you will see that it is never with you in the room. It is never in a form
0:58.8	that you can address in the present. It's always saying about things about something that
1:04.7	is something that's happening somewhere else, somewhere on the line of time. And for that reason,
1:09.8	it's never real. It's that reason, it's never real.
1:13.3	It's never present and it's never true.
1:24.9	This interesting cocktail between our brain's predisposition and our modern society's reinforcement of that, I suppose.
1:29.8	Yeah, I... It's an interesting one talking about anxiety, because it's become so pattern-matched. People have used, I feel uncertain or I am worried,
1:36.7	and the term has sort of concept creeped itself out to encompass all of this. So I wonder,
1:41.9	I wonder how much of it is people giving a name which
1:46.2	sounds way more pathological to something which is a normal part of the human experience,
1:50.5	you know? Well, there is that. No question. We are like over-diagnosing ourselves and
1:56.3	over-assigning diagnoses to everything that happens. But it's also true that even like the
2:00.8	World Health
	...

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