Before we get started, I want to tell you about a little game that the Founders Journal community is playing right now. Currently Founders Journal is sitting right around 350 reviews on the Apple Podcast app.

Now, reviews are the number one thing that drive you up the charts in podcasting. By the end of the month, I want to get us to 500 reviews for Founders Journal on Apple Podcasts.

And so what we're going to do is this, whether it's right now or whether it's after the episode, go to the Apple Podcast app, leave a review for Founders Journal, and if we get to 500 before the end of this month, I'm going to host a Zoom happy hour with my community.

It'll be an amazing opportunity for Founders Journal listeners to meet one another. It'll be a great space for me to answer any questions or talk about really anything that you want to talk about.

So before we get started, go to the Apple Podcast app, leave a review, and let's get to 500 before the end of the month. Now onto the show.

What's up, everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founders Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product.

And today, I'm talking about anxiety. I've had anxiety for as long as I can remember. You may be wondering, why am I talking about this on a show about building businesses? Well, there's two reasons. One, this is my journal, and it's something that I would 100% right about in my journal.

Two, I've both had anxiety about work, and my anxiety has affected the quality of my work in the past. At the end of the day, anxiety impacts all aspects of life, whether it's personal or professional. So with that, let's hop into it.

I've had anxiety for as long as I can remember. And you know, when I think back in life, there are moments that I vividly remember that were somewhat traumatic anxiety-provoking experiences for me. And I vividly remember my first anxious thought that I ever had. It was in elementary school. I can't remember if it was second grade or third grade. But what happened was I was in the library, and I started concentrating on my breath.

And I started anxiously monitoring if I was breathing correctly for a few minutes.

Obviously, I was breathing correctly, given that breathing is this instinctual thing that we all do without thought. But at the time, that was just what my brain decided to latch on to. And it took me a while to kick the thought of asking myself, am I breathing correctly? And if I stopped thinking about it, am I going to continue breathing correctly?

It may sound strange to you if you have an experience anxiety or OCD yourself, but these are the sorts of things that my anxious mind, I call it a treadmill mind, has picked to obsess about throughout the course of my life.

So here's how I want the rest of the journal to go, whether you experience anxiety yourself, or you don't, I want you to get something from this episode. If you do experience it, I want you to understand the way that it manifests for me.

I want you to understand what I've done to harness it. And most importantly, I want you to just know you're not alone. If you don't experience it, I want you to get a glimpse of what it feels like. And the sheer work that it takes to not have it to

facilitate those who suffer from it. I think this perspective will just make you more aware and more empathetic as you inevitably will work with hundreds of people who suffer from anxiety over the course of your career.

But also, even if you're not diagnosed with anxiety or OCD, which stands for obsessive compulsive disorder, you will inevitably experience anxiety periodically in your life.

And the tools that I'm going to share with you, I think you're going to find helpful for those moments, regardless. So let me start by sharing how anxiety manifests for me.

There are a few assumptions that I make about my anxiety that allows me to manage it in a productive way.

The first assumption that I make about my anxiety is that I am biologically wired to be more anxious than the average person.

How my brain works. I cannot fight this. There's no benefit of fighting it. I can't try to get rid of it, but I can learn to harness it. The second assumption, anxiety is a blessing and a curse.

I need to respect the positives of my treadmill brain. It makes me creative, productive, proactive, and it allows me to draw connections quickly.

But it's that same mind that latches onto unproductive things, things that create anxiety and make me unhappy. But what I need to do is accept that there are always unintended consequences of the positive things that happen.

...