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
Chapter 1: Why does Martha Beck say anxiety always lies?
You say anxiety always lies. Always. Why?
I say that at the end of the book.
Spoiler alert. Sorry about that.
Boom! Come at me with the biggest... Now, here's the thing. We have brains that are very prone to anxiety and we have a culture that magnifies our proneness to anxiety. But anxiety, unlike fear, which is a visceral response to a danger that is present in the physical moment, there's a surge of adrenaline, a surge of activity, and then boom, it's gone.
Anxiety comes from the way we perseverate and tell stories to ourselves in our heads about the things that may or may not happen. As Mark Twain said, I'm an old man and I have lived through many troubles, but most of them never happened. So anxiety is like being haunted. And if you sit with it, you will see that it is never with you in the room.
It is never in a form that you can address in the present. It's always saying things about something that's happening somewhere else, somewhere on the line of time. And for that reason, it's never real. It's never present, and it's never true.
This interesting... cocktail between our brain's predisposition and our modern society's reinforcement of that i suppose 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. And the term has sort of concept creeped itself out to encompass all of this.
I wonder how much of it is people giving a name which sounds way more pathological to something which is a normal part of the human experience, you know?
Well, there is that. No question. We are like over-diagnosing ourselves and over-assigning diagnoses to everything that happens. But it's also true that even the World Health Organization, looking with fairly objective tests, as objective as you can get, has shown a dramatic rise in the number of people who are suffering crippling clinical levels of anxiety and
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Chapter 2: What causes the rise in anxiety in modern society?
And then...
Yeah, and I didn't give you what you very reasonably asked for, which is a practice. You get to the point where loving kindness becomes the way you think. But at first, I would give it... If you can do it for 10 minutes a day, three times every day, like morning, noon, and night, I think that would give you a really strong...
contrasting experience of what the rest of your day is like versus the time that you're doing the loving kindness. That's a great motivator to lengthen those and then string them together because you can do it while you're doing anything else. It doesn't take extra time from your day. It's just a change of perspective. And it doesn't actually turn down the volume. It doesn't
smother or reduce your anxiety. It befriends it. Always think of your anxiety as an animal because that is literally what it is. In our culture, we treat an anxious brain as though it's a broken machine. That's how we treat our bodies. But it's not a broken machine. It's a
Everyone I've ever met, if you found a really bedraggled, scared, shivering puppy or horse or whatever, and it was very afraid, and you decided to calm it, You know how. Like we learn all these advanced therapies and stuff, but all of us are born knowing how to calm a frightened animal. And Chris Voss just made it a profession, right?
So like, what would you do if you found a grungy little puppy that was terrified and you decided it was on your doorstep and you decided to like take pity on it? How would you approach it?
Slowly, softly, gently.
Yep. Yep. You can go like that into the energy that changes anxiety into calm. And it's not turning down the volume. It's more like satisfying a thirst. The anxious part of us is desperate to be told it can take a break. It can take a rest. Yeah. And then there's this huge, huge sense of relief when it starts to let go.
And then you can start to move from initial sensation going into fear, which is the left hemisphere reaction, to an amygdala reaction that moves you toward curiosity. That's the first step that is really going to take you away from anxiety completely. And it's closely linked. It's like, have you ever rubbernecked at an accident site you drive by?
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