返回旧版
Understanding Stress and Anxiety
第 181 集 · EchoLingo 视频精听
Anxiety
and
stress
are
interesting
.
00:00
-00:00
1x
影子跟读
语法分析
阅读模式
更多
Anxiety and stress are interesting.
They're very related.
If you look at an iron beam, an iron beam is under stress,
it's because it's being bent in two different
directions at the same time.
So when your mind is under stress, it's because it has two conflicting desires at once.
So, for example, you
want to be liked, but you want to do something selfish, and you can't reconcile the two.
And so, you are under stress.
You want to do something for somebody else.
You want to do something for yourself.
You don't want to go to work, but you want to make money.
So, you are under stress.
So, you have two conflicting desires,
and I think one of the ways to get through stress is to acknowledge that,
oh, I actually have two conflicting desires,
and either I need to resolve it, I need to pick one, and then
be okay losing the other,
or I will decide later, but at least just being aware of why your stress can
help alleviate a lot of stress.
And then anxiety I think is sort of this pervasive,
unidentifiable stress where you're just kind of stressed out all the
time and you're not even sure why.
And you can't even identify the underlying problem.
And the reason for that is because you have so many
unresolved problems, unresolved stress points that have piled up in
your life that you can no longer identify what the problems are.
There's this mountain of garbage
in your mind, and it's a little bit of it poking out the top like an iceberg, and that's anxiety.
But underneath, there's a lot of unresolved things.
And so you just need to kind of go through very carefully every time you're anxious.
Like, okay, why am I anxious this time?
I don't know why.
Oh, well, let me sit here and just think about it.
Let me write down what the possible causes could be.
Let me meditate on it. Let me journal.
Let me talk to a therapist.
Let me talk to my friends.
Let me just kind of see like when does that stress go away?
If you can kind of identify and unravel and resolve these issues,
then I think that helps get rid of anxiety. A
Lot of the anxiety is piled up because we move through life too quickly,
not observing our own reactions to
things. We don't resolve them.
So this goes counter to what I was saying earlier about not reflecting too much on things.
But you reflect on the problems to observe them and solve them.
You don't reflect on them to feel better about yourself.
Well, if you're doing it to just feel better about yourself, that could be strengthening your personality and your ego
and could be creating a more fragile personality.
You know, one big anxiety resolve for me is just
ruminating on death.
I think that's a good one. You're gonna die.
It's all going to zero.
You cannot take anything with you.
And I know this is tight.
And I know that we don't spend enough time thinking about the big questions.
We kind of give up on them when we're very, very young.
You know, a little child might ask the big questions like, why are we here?
What's it like being alive?
What is it all about? You know, is there Santa Claus? Is there God?
But then as adults, we're taught not to think about these things.
We're giving up on them.
But I think the big questions are the big questions for good reasons. And
if you can keep the idea in front of you at all times that
you're going to die and that
everything goes literally to zero, what's your distress about?
Yeah, for better or worse, life is very short.
How should people deal with its briefness?
Enjoy it.
Make the best of it.
It's even briefer than that. Each moment just disappears. It's gone.
There's only a present moment and it's gone instantly.
So if you're not there for it,
if you're stressed out or you're anxious or you're thinking about something else, you
missed it.
So any moment when you're not in that moment, you are dead to that moment.
you might as well be dead because your mind is off doing something else or you know
living in some imagined
reality that is just a very poor substitute for the actual reality.
So one of my recent realizations was what is wasted time?
What is a waste of time?
So I don't like to waste time, but what is wasted time?
And everything is wasted time and a sense because nothing matters in the ultimate.
But in each moment, the thing matters.
In each moment, this is the only thing that matters, actually,
what's happening in front of you literally has all
the meaning in the world.
So what matters is just being present for the thing.
So if you're doing something that you want to do, and you're fully there for it,
then it's not wasted time.
If you don't want to do it, and your mind is running away from it,
and you're reacting against it, and you're wishing you were somewhere else,
and you're thinking about some other thing,
or you're anticipating some future thing, or regretting
some past thing, or being fearful of something, Then that's wasted time.
That's time that's being wasted.
When you're not actually present for the reality in front of you.
So my definition of wasted time, yes, I do want some material things in life.
And I, you know, there are things that have more value than others within this life.
But this life is very short and bounded.
So the true wasted time is a time that you are not present for when
you are not there for it.
When you are not
doing the thing you want to do to the best of a capability such that you're immersed.
And if you're not immersed in this moment, then you're wasting your time.
People get worried about dying and no longer being here,
but they don't realize that so much of their life has
been not being here in any case. That's right.
And I think people crave being here for it.
And when you're here for it, you're actually not thinking about yourself.
You're more immersed in the thing, the moment, the task at hand.
We don't want peace of mind.
We want peace for our mind. That's right.
Yeah, the mind is what can eat you alive if you let it.
And there's more to you than the mind. How so?
Well, I mean, it's very, I
don't want to disassemble the body.
So speak it right.
Because please go on. Yeah, at the end of the day, like
everything arises within your consciousness, right?
You got nowhere else to experience it. Sorry.
You've got nowhere else to experience it.
And that consciousness is
relatively static in a sense that it's been exactly the same for the moment you were born
to the moment you die.
And everything that you experience from your body, from your mind, to the world, to everything is within that consciousness.
And that thing, that base layer of being, and this is what the Buddhist will tell you,
is the real thing.
Everything that comes and goes in the middle, including your mind, including your body is unreal.
And trying to
find stability in those transient things is your castle that you're building on sand that's going to crumble.
Life is going to play out the way it's going to play out.
There will be some good and some bad.
Most of it is actually just up to your interpretation.
You're born, you have a set of sensory experiences, and then you die.
How you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you and different people interpret them in different ways.
Yeah, I see a whole line about two people walking down the street.
They're having the exact same experience.
One is happy, one is sad, right?
It's a narrative in their heads.
It's how they choose to interpret.
So I think when I
said that it was a long time ago, I was talking more about having positive interpretations
and negative interpretations, but these days I think it's better just not to have any interpretations
and to just allow things
to be.
You're still going to have interpretations.
You can't stop it.
And nor should you try.
But even having an interpretation is just a thing you can leave alone.
Yeah, I really want to try and just dig in a little more to the
best way to remind people that
they should value that time.
just how brief it is, and the time that you spend ruminating, being distracted, with fears of the past and regrets.
Well, I don't want to tell anybody how to live their life.
I would just say that to the extent that you want to improve your quality of life,
the easiest and best
way to do that is to observe your own mind and your own thoughts and be a little,
not necessarily critical,
but be observing of yourself more objectively.
And then you kind of realize your own loops and patterns. It takes time.
It's not overnight. It's not instantaneous.
You mean letting go is not a one-time event? Yeah, and there's
letting go is not necessarily even the right answer.
Like, yes,
if you're trying to be an enlightened being and, you know,
you want to live like a god and
everything's gonna be perfect and be a Buddha, sure you can let go.
But I think in practice, it's actually quite hard to do.
I think I would say that
you're going to find a lot of fulfillment out of life by just doing what
you want to do and genuinely exploring what it is that you want
rather than doing what other people expect you
to do or society expects you to do or what you might just think should be done by default.
I think most
older successful people will tell you that their life was best when they lived unapologetically on their own terms.
Be selfish. Holistic selfish. Exactly. Exactly.
We can clip that little bit.
I'm telling you that that's selfish. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just keep running it back, guys. Great.
I had this insight or a question, I guess,
how much do you think that we should trust the voice in
our heads?
Because half of wisdom
suggests that you rely on your sort of bottom-up intuition, and then half of it has to
be sort of top down rational as possible.
How do you navigate the tension between
head and gut in this way?
I think the gut is what decides.
The head is kind of what rationalizes it afterwards.
The gut is the ultimate decision maker.
And what is the gut? The gut is refined judgment. It's taste. Aggregated.
And it could be aggregated through evolution.
in your genes, in your DNA, or it could be aggregated through your experiences and what you've thought through.
The mind is good at solving new problems
and new problems in the external world that have defined edges, beginnings and ends and objectives.
what the mind is actually really bad at is making hard decisions.
So when you have a hard decision to make,
I find it's better to, yes, you ruminate on it, you think
through all the pros and cons, but then you sleep on it,
you wait a couple of days, you wait until
the gut answer appears with conviction and it feels right.
And when you're younger, it takes longer because you just don't have as much experience.
And when you're older, it can happen much faster, which is why
you have less time to Yeah, and all people
are more set in their way as a consequence, right?
They know what they want.
They know what they don't want.
So it takes time to develop your gut instinct and judgment.
But once you've developed them, don't trust anything else because you can't go against your gut.
It'll bite you in the end.
Usually in relationships that fail, you can look back and say,
Oh, actually,
I knew it was going to fail because
of this reason, but I kind of went ahead anyway because I wanted it to be this way, right?
I wanted this person.
to be a different way than they are.
I wanted to get a different thing out of it than I knew I was going to get,
but I just
wanted it.
So sometimes desire will override your judgment and then track you.
I wishful thinking it traps you into a pathway that just chooses time.
As you get older, one thing that becomes harder to ignore is your testosterone levels.
They impact everything from your energy, your mood, and how well you recover.
However, there are science-backed supplements like Tongkat that support testosterone, strength, and recovery,
and that is why I'm such a huge
fan of Momentous' product because they make the only NSF certified Tongkat Ali on the planet.
That means it's so rigorously tested that
even Olympic athletes can use it. That's why I partnered with them, because they
make the most carefully tested, highest-quality supplements on Earth.
Tongkat Ali is a huge part of my brain, body, and sleep stack,
which makes a big impact on my cognition, my strength,
and my recovery.
And if you're still unsure, Momentous offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.
So you can buy it and try it for 29 days.
If you don't love it, they'll give you your money back.
Plus, they ship internationally.
Right now, you can get
35% off your subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below,
are heading to
livemomentus.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom checkout.
That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-S.com slash modern wisdom. A modern wisdom. A checkout.