If You Struggle With Anxiety, Listen To This | Dr. Wendy Suzuki EP 747

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11One of the experiments that I did in my lab this last year was trying to find the easiest, shortest intervention that we can do with students that would decrease their very high levels of anxiety. What was that? And so we tested many things just to walk outside, chair yoga, all these things they can do online. This was all virtual. But one of the things that was very effective that I was so excited about is a mindful conversation. We didn't go deep. We didn't want to have them reveal some, you know, deep, dark secret. But what we did is my student researchers had a script. They shared a real story about a favorite vacation, why it was favorite.

0:56It was real. They were really trying to share this experience with them. and then invited the student who they didn't know, who was our experimentee, to share the same thing. And in that year where everything was virtual and it was, you know, professors just said, okay, now learn these five chapters, go ahead, go do it. And to have somebody there listening to their story, listening deeply and asking real questions because they were answering, it was only 10 minutes, completely decreased their anxiety. Really? By them sharing and someone listening or by them also listening to someone else's story?

1:32You know, I think it was really the sharing and have somebody else listening because the first part, my students always went first. They didn't know what exactly was going to happen. So that was just to lay the groundwork. I think the interaction and the good feelings started to develop when they started to open up sharing this story and seeing, oh my God, somebody is really listening to me. They're asking me a question about this event that meant something to them. And that just shows how powerful social interactions are. Interesting. The week that I was about to dive in and start writing the real chapters of this book, Good Anxiety, and that was when my younger brother passed away completely unexpected.

2:26Younger brother. My younger brother. Just three months after our father had passed away. So we were just healing, still raw, from losing my father, our father. And then he had an unexpected heart attack. Really? And so first, just that pain and grief that I was experiencing is not the same as anxiety. It shares some of those negative emotions. This was just loss, grief, sadness. Grief, sadness. It was so painful. Like, how could this happen? It feels like a different reality. Everything looked the same, but it just felt so different. And it forced me to explore these feelings that I'd had inklings of in the past, but never to this extent and kind of in this wave of first my dad and then my brother.

3:23And I slowly came back from it. And I used some of the tools that I talk about in the book that were already in place for me. Morning meditation. So I do a morning tea meditation, a meditation over brewing and drinking tea. For me, that was the magic bullet for meditation because there's a sequence for brewing tea. You boil the water, you put it in the tea leaves, you let it seep, and then you pour it out and then you drink it. And that kind of sequence kept my meditation going. I always had something to do. I was waiting for the tea to brew. I get to drink the tea now. I get to be mindful about how does the tea feel, how hot is it, how does it taste.

4:05I really came to appreciate that there is this moment. And yes, everything on the outside of my meditation feels like it's different. But this moment still feels like every other moment that I enjoyed my tea meditation. So that helped me come back to, I am alive. I'm so lucky to be alive. and perspective yeah so lucky to have the family that's still with me yes and it was really one day I was doing my workout it's a video workout and the trainer said it was a hard workout and she said you know in working out with great pain comes great wisdom and I was like oh my god that is what I need to hear, not just for working out.

4:57I have just gone through the worst pain in my whole life. And I do have more wisdom because anxiety is an everyday kind of pain and suffering that we all go through. And what if that leads to wisdom? What does that look like? And I needed as much wisdom and power that I needed. And so the book became searching for the power and the wisdom in everyday anxiety. It never would have been that if I hadn't had this event happen.

5:48link in the description and it'll take you to the full episode of my other show, The School of Greatness. Make sure to come back tomorrow for another episode of The Daily Motivation Show.