Train Your Brain To Reduce Your Anxiety | EP 897

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

0:11If you feel like you're not living your most authentic life, not leaning into your purpose, and not living the life that your future self would be extremely proud of, I've written a new book called The Greatness Mindset, and I think you're going to love this. Through powerful stories, science-backed strategies, and step-by-step guidance, The Greatness Mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life to design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality. Make sure to click the link in the description to get your copy today. A lot of our own anxieties have been with us since we were little.

0:44Same anxiety over. They stay for decades. For your lifetime sometimes. I was painfully shy as a young girl. And even into college, I found myself in social situations and wanting to join and not feeling comfortable or even in class. I realized that that has become my superpower as a teacher because I know when I'm standing at the front of the classroom my shyness why is that? because when I'm standing at the front of the classroom there are always those students they say oh I know the answer I know the answer and I know that there's many more that want to talk to me that want to show me what they know want to have that interaction but can't do that and so what do I do?

1:25I make sure that I am there 15 minutes before I stand there I talk to the students before. I stay after class. Anybody that wants to come up for a casual conversation where you don't have to be the one raising your hand. And I didn't even realize it until I wrote this book that that is a superpower of in-class empathy. And I have that particular form of empathy because of my particular form of anxiety, my social anxiety. And so imagine the 90 % of people that have their particular form of anxiety. They know what it feels like. They know what's going through many others of our minds. And what if you turn that around and you do what you do and say, how can I help somebody else in this way that I know I've struggled, but I also know what can help?

2:16Long-term anxiety will have terrible effects on all of the physiological systems that are being activated. So what's happening when you have a stress response? Your heart rate is going up. Your respiration is going up. So long-term effects of anxiety and stress are heart disease. The other thing that's happening when you're in a constant state of stress is that blood is being shunted from your digestive and reproductive systems to your muscles because you're supposed to be running away from the lion and you're sitting there worrying about your taxes instead. And so long-term stress will literally start to first kill off the dendrites of your neurons, the input structures of your brain cells, in two key brain areas.

3:01The hippocampus, critical for long-term memory in the temporal lobe, and the prefrontal cortex, critical for decision-making, focus, and attention. And so, for example, PTSD, if you have PTSD, classic example of long-term stress, your whole temporal lobe gets smaller because you first start to degrade the size of your individual brain cells and then you start to kill them off. One strategy that's easy to understand is how do you create more joy in your life to kind of counteract all of these negative things coming out? One of my favorite ones is called joy conditioning. Joy conditioning is mining your own memory banks for those joyous, funny, pick your favorite positive emotion events in your life and consciously bringing them back up and revivifying them and bringing up those emotions.

3:57And my little trick for that is try and find a memory that you love that has an olfactory component to it, a particular smell associated with it. Why? Because smells are really evocative of memories. It's very easy to bring up everything associated with that memory if it has a smell. And it's really a direct antidote to fear conditioning, which we all experience automatically. My example is my apartment in Washington, D.C. was robbed. And I walked around the corner. My door was the only one around the corner. And I still remember walking around the corner and seeing my door crowbarred open, hanging open when it was supposed to be locked.

4:45Every time I walked around that corner for months and months, I felt that. That is fear conditioning. How do you flip it? To counteract that with something like joy conditioning is, you know, invite friends over, create wonderful memories, wonderful safe events in that same space. It never went away, and I'll tell you why. Because that is a safety mechanism. But we can counteract that very protective mechanism. I want to be wary of areas and situations that were really, really bad for me. You don't want to eliminate it. I don't want to eliminate it. I think about anxiety now and all that worry and anger and all these other things that come with anxiety.

5:27I really think of it as the wind in my sails. That is the little fire under my backside that gets me to do things, gets me excited, gets me to go towards the fear and get through it because I know there's something good on the other side. I think it is very beneficial to learn how to take that fear that is depleting us, it is exhausting us, it's making us look older, and turn that into something that makes you feel better about yourself. It decreases the overall stress in your life. And frankly, it is more practical to say, look, I'm not going to be happy-go-lucky all the time. Nobody's happy-go-lucky all the time.

6:11But I'm going to use that bad stuff. That is inevitably going to come in and I am going to learn from it and I'm going to use it to my best advantage.

6:33Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation. And I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on the School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

7:23Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

7:38Thank you.