The Antidote to Anxiety

The Yes Theory Podcast

Yes Theory

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.8 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2020

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Pandemics and vast uncertainty aside, life is hard. And for whatever reason, it seems to be getting harder. Studies have shown that the average kid today experiences more anxiety than the average psychiatric patient in the 1950s. It feels like there’s this undercurrent of anxiety to everything we do. But instead of dealing with it, we fill our calendars with back-to-back appointments and our lives with endless distractions. We do everything we can to avoid having that anxiety bubble up. But what if we didn’t? What if we stopped trying to numb and distract? What would it look like to just accept anxiety as a fact of life and deal with it head on? That’s what we’re getting after in this episode. Along the way, Matt shares the intimate details of how he’s grappled with anxiety through the years and Ammar discusses his inability to meditate. Most importantly, Andy Puddicombe, the former monk and co-founder of the meditation app Headspace, stops by to help us to identify ways to cultivate a more mindful approach to life, deal with emotions as they come, and find more presence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Unlike Thomas who had big plans for 2020, I set out with just one.
0:06.0	This would be the year that I cured my anxiety, once and for all.
0:11.0	It was my only resolution. For a long time I had been constantly living in the past clinging to memories of when I last felt normal.
0:20.0	So when the new year rang in I decided there was no better time to figure out how to live in the present.
0:26.5	I committed to spending lots of time alone in therapy, off social media, meditating, exercising, trying to clear my head, and weed out what was keeping me
0:35.1	up at night all these years.
0:37.1	I'm sure you can guess how that turned out.
0:43.0	COVID-19 coronavirus.
0:45.0	Pandemic, the global pandemic.
0:47.0	Coronavirus.
0:48.0	COVID-19, the virus.
0:49.0	Maybe I should have known better.
0:51.0	I had tried to cure my anxiety before and if I'd succeeded the first time
0:54.9	we wouldn't be having this conversation. I was 19 kind of floating through my life
1:00.0	until one day I hit a breaking point one of those moments of clarity that punctuates your life into before and and after.
1:09.4	I had just finished my first year in college where I wish I was kidding. I had only attended class 10 times that whole year. My parents and teachers made sure that I knew that they were really disappointed in me. But even with all the pressure, the time I spent
1:25.7	alone was actually the worst. I had a constant hum of anxiety, kind of like the static you
1:31.6	hear on a radio station. It was just always there below
1:35.4	whatever music's playing. So I became the king of distraction. Anything you
1:41.6	could think of I'd find to fill every waking hour watching TV
1:46.3	Dating drinking gaming maybe doing homework once or twice but mainly I was partying.
1:54.4	And on August 13, 2011, I was doing just that.
	...

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