← Office Hours with Arthur Brooks
Office Hours with Arthur Brooks
2 Proven Strategies (and 1 Big Mistake) for Dealing with Anxiety
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40 million Americans suffer from anxiety today, which is a lot. We've never seen anything like that. From 2008 to 2018, that doubled to about 15% of the population. And then during the coronavirus pandemic that came after that, of course, the rate increased again by a third to more than 20%. And it really hasn't gone down. Instead of trying to eliminate the anxiety, what if you leaned into the anxiety and turned it into what it originally was supposed to be? High performance people, they tend to be very anxious and that they use their anxiety as a fuel for their high performance. So what do you do? What do you do about it? Hi, friends. Welcome to office hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas. I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School. I'm also a columnist at the Atlantic, where I write a weekly column on happiness called how to Build a Life. You can read that every Thursday morning@theatlantic.com this is a show about the signs of happiness and how you can use it in your own life and the lives of other people. And today I want to take on a topic that a lot of people are talking about, which is really a source not of happiness, but of unhappiness. And that's anxiety. How can you deal with anxiety? I'm going to give you three ways today. Now, before we start, as always, take a note of the email address for this show. Officehoursarthurbrooks.com feedback, anything you like. We love your comments and we love your suggestions as well. Also, you can leave comments any place that you're seeing this podcast, on Spotify or YouTube or Apple, any place where you like to get your fine podcast. Also, please like and subscribe and share this episode with 1 to 3 million of your closest friends. Appreciate that an awful lot, because we want a happier world. And a happier world is a movement that starts with each one of us. Like and subscribe. Do all the things that you do so that the algorithms and the bots are smiling sweetly on us in this show. Now, I want to start by talking about this subject of anxiety, just with the basic statistics. I don't have to tell you, you know, if you're living in the world, that anxiety is something that people have been talking about an awful lot more than they were before. And you might suspect that more people are feeling anxiety, even being diagnosed with a psychiatric condition that is generalized anxiety, than they have in the past. And you might be scratching your head if you are suffering or other people are suffering. What's up and what can we do? It doesn't feel like things are getting better, do they? Well, I have some suggestions for you today. Things that have been validated in a lot of academic research and have been very useful to my students, a lot of people that I know, and in point of fact, they've helped me to be less anxious in my own life. I'm kind of an anxious guy, as a matter of fact. I mean, this doesn't rise to the level of some sort of medical problem. But look, I'm a terrible sleeper and I can't get the machine off. And in a subsequent episode coming up, I'm going to give you a way to understand what is your emotional profile on whether or not you're going to tend to be an anxious person. That's an episode for another day. But suffice it to say that I want this information for me, too. So I'm going to give you some ideas that work for a lot of people, and I hope they can help change your life. Now, let's start with some basic statistics. And before I do that, let me define what I'm talking about here. What is anxiety? The best definition, for my money, about anxiety is it's a form of unfocused fear. So fear is a phenomenon that is evolved. It's a basic human emotion, a basic negative human emotion that says you have perceived a threat. Fear is the flight mechanism that comes along with that. Now we understand more or less how this works. You register a perceived threat through sight, through vision. This then stimulates a part of your limbic. Limbic system called the amygdala. You've all heard of the amygdala. It's what gives you fight or flight, in this case, flight. This sends a signal, then through the hypothalamus of your brain to your pituitary gland, which then stimulates your adrenal glands, which sit right above your kidneys. And that spits out some stress hormones. One note. Stress and fear and anxiety are not the same thing. Stress is the physiological response to fear. And anxiety, then, is a kind of an unfocused version of this whole thing. So you are built to feel intense, episodic fear. That's the reason that your ancestors passed on their genes. If they couldn't actually feel fear, they wouldn't have run away when they heard a twig snap behind them on the savannah someplace and taken off running. If Your ancestors had said, heard that snap of a twig and say, huh, I bet that's a friend of mine. They wouldn't have lasted very long because it might have been a leopard or something or some sort of a predator. So you run first and ask questions later. You take off before you even know what's going on. That's because of the fear response most of the time in the ancestral environment, however, fear was not present most of the time. There was nothing to be especially fearful of. And so it was intense and occasional. When it's not that way, when it's actually mild and chronic, that means that it's sort of maladapted. And that's what we call anxiety. When you're sort of afraid, kind of worried, troubled. And it's something that's giving you this little scratch on your amygdala and giving you a little drip of these stress hormones. But chronically so, that's incredibly uncomfortable. You're not going to go run and climb a tree, eat out of the way of the leopard, but you don't like it. And that's what anxiety is. It's this kind of unfocused fear. Things I don't like this, I don't like how this feels. And it turns out that to some extent more people are feeling this, as far as we know, according to the data, than we've ever seen. Now, I'll talk in a minute about why that might be the case or just give you a flavor for why that might be the case. But let me give you some data. To begin with, there's a wonderful book called My Age of Anxiety from Scott Stossel, who's a friend of mine, he's an editor at the Atlantic, where I write, and he has suffered from debilitating anxiety. So not just a little, not just something troubling, something that I would complain about. It's something that's really, really hurt him and made it hard for him to lead a good life. And so he's tried to get it treated and he chronicles that treatment at sometimes hilariously. I mean, go read the book My Age of Anxiety. I'll put it in the notes. But he notes that about 40 million Americans suffer from anxiety today, which is a lot. You've never seen anything like that. From 2008 to 2018, it's especially acute in the growth of anxiety of young adults, the percentage of 18 to 25 year olds diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. So this goes beyond, ah, stressed out to this is a disorder we have to look at this from a healthcare professional that doubled to about 15% of the population from 2008 to 2018, that decade. And then during the coronavirus pandemic that came after that, of course, the rate increased again by a third to more than 20%. And it really hasn't gone down. There's no evidence that we're feeling less anxious, that especially young adults are struggling. It's also especially the case that. That what I would call strivers, young, really talented and ambitious people, they're suffering especially, which is weird. They should have everything figured out. But the truth is that there's a lot of pressure and there's a lot of trouble that people are feeling. And this is actually getting worse. Now, why is this getting worse for people? One, I know what you're thinking. I know one obvious answer to this is the increasing role of social media, the increasing role of screens. And we know that there's a hugely positive correlation between time spent on social media and risk of anxiety. This is especially true for girls and women, that we find that when girls and women, they do a lot of social comparison a lot more than boys do, boys and men do on social media. And the result of that is a lot of agitation, a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety, unfocused fear that comes about. And the problem with this is that this is. According to the American Psychological association, the average American teenager spends about five hours a day on these platforms. So if you tend toward being an anxious person and you're spending five hours a day and like the average American, you're checking your device 205 times a day, this is going to be like a stress machine for you. And that's going to lead you to have this chronic state of dis. Ease, of fear, of anxiety. That's what we see. So that's a very good explanation for it. No doubt there are others. I will dig into this in future episodes. So what do you do? What do you do about it? Now, to begin with, anything I say here is not a substitute for medical treatment. If anxiety in a generalized sense, if anxiety disorder is present in your life, or you think it might be, got to go to the doctor. And this is like anything else. This is not any sort of advice to shun medical care. On the contrary, everything I'm talking about here is a complement to traditional medicine, okay? These are ways that we can help treat ourselves that will make any traditional medicine more effective. But they're not a substitute, they're a complement to that. So that's the first thing I want to get out of the way. Take care of yourself. Go to the doctor if you need to. Now, I've explained the biology of fear to you a minute ago. How it stimulates your stress hormones occasionally episodically and very, very intensely, and how anxiety does that chronically, but, but, but less chronically, but a little bit more mild, which will give you a tremendous amount of misery, by the way. Just because it's more mild doesn't mean that somehow it's okay. On the contrary, if you're getting a little drip of these stress hormones, adrenaline, noradrenaline, cortisol, this is really uncomfortable. You're hyper vigilant. You probably have a little feel, a mild feeling of panic in the afternoons, two or three in the afternoon, there's a. A pit in your stomach. Maybe in the mornings you're so tired from sleeping poorly, you drink too much coffee. And then when the coffee exacerbates the whole problem, you can get into the cycle of these stress hormones. And you've probably seen 100 podcasts talking about that to be sure. What do we need to do about that? Well, sometimes people will say you need to eliminate that anxiety. And you'll even be offered some medications for doing so. But here's another way of thinking about it. Instead of trying to eliminate the anxiety, what if you leaned into the anxiety and turned it into what it originally was supposed to be? You're built to be afraid sometimes. It's a physiological mechanism that saves you. You're not built to be anxious all the time. That's a maladaptation to the modern environment. You're made to be fearful sometimes. So what if you could take that anxiety and focus it? Because remember, anxiety is unfocused fear. So take that unfocused fear and focus it. Turn it back into fear, which would then be episodic and most of the time not present. What if you could do that? Good news, you can. But you have to know what you're doing. Now, I'm going to give you a technique right now which is a form of self management. It falls into the category of what we in my business called metacognition, which is simply managing your emotions so they don't manage you using your preformation frontal cortex. This tissue, this bumper of tissue behind your forehead, that's all your conscious reasoning. The executive center, the CEO suite of your head, managing the unruly kids that are your emotions. How do you do that? Well, lots of ways. Journaling is a good way to do that, and prayer is a Good way to do that. And meditation is a good way to do that. And I'm going to give you one of those techniques so that you can metacognitively, in a self managing way, take your troublesome anxiety, turn it into fear, and then leave it where it's supposed to be, which is over there someplace, until it actually becomes something you need to deal with. Okay, here's how you do that. This is a technique that I call the anxiety journal. Now most people don't think about taking their anxieties and just writing them down and talking about the worst possible thing that can happen. On the contrary, people will give you all this advice to just don't, don't ruminate on anything. Let it go, don't think about it. Especially by the way, you know those non anxious people that are so unbelievably annoying around you, Those people who don't worry. Yeah, man, yeah, no, just don't worry about it, man. You know, it's probably not going to happen. It doesn't really matter. You know, just so irritating because that's bad advice for you. Don't try to do that. That's actually unnatural. A bunch of research, by the way, shows that when you tell people to stop thinking about something that's troubling them, they think about it more. Okay? So that person in your life is actually making life worse for you. Here's what to do instead. Think about the five things about which you're suffering some anxiety. Okay? Now you probably haven't done that before and it's going to take some work. So go someplace quiet, take out your notebook and say, I'm troubled right now. I'm troubled about what? What is the thing that's really on my heart? And define it. Let's say that you got kind of a health challenge and you don't know what it is. You went to the doctor and the doctor did a bunch of tests and you haven't been feeling right and you're sort of, you're anxious about what it might be even though you don't know. Well, you know what, don't run away from that. Don't leave it in the sort of the amorphous zone of something might be wrong. Write it down. Write down your worst fear. Write down your paranoid fantasy, what actually it is. Or maybe put it in your phone. But password, protect the file if you do define the actual source of your fear. Okay, so maybe it's like I went to the doctor and something isn't right and actually I'm afraid it's going to be something really bad, like cancer, right? It's probably not, but it might be. So part two is actually not just writing down your worst fear, it's writing down the different scenarios of what it could be. This is nothing, this is something mild, or this is something really bad. And write down what it is. Those are the three scenarios in defense planning in the Department of Defense. That's the analysis they always do. They call it best case, worst case, most likely case. It's a good place to start. You can write down five scenarios if you want, but those three kind of get the job done. Then do something that an insurance company would do, which is it looks at the scenarios and assigns probabilities to them. You don't know, you don't know, but you know, you kind of know. And what you find when you start to get better at this exercise is that the catastrophic thing that was like a phantasm was like a ghost up in the attic bothering you, making weird noises, you know, rattling chains at night and all that, it starts to get a little less bad. Because what you really recognize when you start getting better at this to, to quiet those chains is that the probability of that worst case scenario is actually pretty low. Right? It's actually objectively pretty low. Okay, so let's say I think it's 20% chance that this is nothing. It's just like it's some transient thing. I think it's about a 5% chance that this is something really ghastly. And so therefore it's about. I can't remember what I said the first 20 or 25%. The rest of it is just something not so serious that I can take care of, something I can deal with, something that's kind of the ordinary course of business with health, especially as you're getting older, whatever it happens to be. Assign those notional probabilities that you probably know more than you think. You have a lot of information under your belt because you've been alive for a little while. It doesn't mean you're exactly right, but that leads to the next thing to do, which is to describe in your journalist strategies in each case, what am I actually going to do in each one of these cases? Well, if it's nothing, nothing. If it's the little thing, it's this. And if it's the worst thing, here's what I'm going to do. And write down what you would do literally in the worst case scenario. Now what are you doing? You are preparing for something that's actually scary. This will physiologically move you into the zone very temporarily of fear instead of anxiety, by focusing the anxiety itself. Then guess what? You'll put that thing away and it won't trouble you nearly as much until it does again. Then you'll take it out and look at it. Go on to the next four things that are bothering you in order of trouble. Go down the list and what you're going to find is when you do this five times, and then you look at it once every day or two, whenever these things are bothering you, you're going to get better and better and better at dealing with your anxiety. Not by running away from it, not by trying to eliminate it, but by trying to find focus it. That's the anxiety journal exercise. It's a well documented technique. I strongly recommend it to my students. I use it myself and I recommend it to you. And you know what else? It's really bracing. It really feels awesome. It really feels like you're a courageous person when you're doing this because you're able to state, look, this is bothering me, but I have an idea how likely it is. And even if it happens, I know what I'm going to do. And it gives you kind of an empowerment to it. Not like you're just running away from something, but you're leaning into it. And the reason it feels better is because that's the way your brain and body are supposed to work. That's number one. That's the first way to deal with anxiety. Now the second thing I want to talk about with dealing with anxiety is actually anti advice. Here's how not to deal with anxiety. Try to get rid of it. I strongly recommend that you think again about all the advice you've probably gotten in your life about the idea that something's wrong with you. If you're feeling anxious, I say to my students, you know, they're getting their master's degrees at Harvard University. I say, look, if you're not feeling some sadness and anxiety studying at Harvard, then you need therapy. It's normal. It's a normal part of life. Remember, all of your emotions exist for a reason. They can be dysregulated, they can be exaggerated. Don't get me wrong, they can become a medical problem. They can obstruct your quality of life. Absolutely. But the presence of aversive emotions, it's literally the most common thing in life. It's the most normal part of life. People who don't feel negative emotions are in terrific danger, as a matter of fact. But we have A problem philosophically in modern life. It's kind of the opposite of the hippie culture. You know, back in the 60s, they used to say, if it feels good, do it. Kind of the Berkeley Summer of Love. A lot of people got really screwed up with that. A lot of people kind of messed up their lives taking a lot of drugs and a lot of problems, quite frankly. Because the truth is you need to be self governing. If it feels good, sometimes you shouldn't do it. But the opposite of that is equally bad. We have kind of the opposite of the Summer of Love. We have the Summer of Fear. I don't know if you're watching this during the summertime, but you get my point. And that motto is if it feels bad, make it stop. Right? If something's making me feel crummy, sad and anxious, it's evidence that I'm messed up. I'm broken, I've got a pathology. Well, no, that's not right, as a matter of fact. And the fruit of that kind of thinking is kind of an eliminationist strategy for any kind of pain. Let me talk to you about what happens when you simply try to eliminate your anxiety or your sadness or any other aversive emotions or even physical sensations that you have. And that actually gets into an area of biology that's been explored under a model called the fear avoidance model of pain. Most people aren't afraid of pain. They're afraid of how they'll feel. They're afraid of their feelings more than they're afraid of pain itself. It's kind of a funny distinction, but I find this in my work all the time, that people aren't really worried about a bad thing happening. They're worried about how they'll feel if a bad thing happens. I'll talk to my students, they'll say, man, I'm really worried about getting a job. I'm saying, really? You think you're going to be on the street and starve? No, of course not. So what are you really afraid of? And when they drill down, it's like, I'm afraid of how I'm going to feel about myself if I don't get a job. I'm going to feel like a, you know, kind of a loser. And they're afraid of their emotions. Weird to be afraid of your emotions, right? But we are all the time. And that's what pain is. They're not afraid of the physical sensation, they're afraid of their emotions. If they have a physical sensation and they try to avoid the fear of pain, they're trying to get rid of that particular fear. What the research clearly finds is that when people fear physical pain, they tend to become hyper vigilant and they make efforts to elude it. And a lot of this literature comes from the medical world. There's a journal called, literally called Pain. The great thing about academia is that there's a journal on literally everything and it's a good journal to boot. And this is a journal that talks about how people deal with pain. And there's a very interesting article. I'll leave it in the show notes from 2015 titled Pain Avoidance versus Reward An Experimental Investigation into Chronic Pain. And what it finds is it's looking at back pain. You know, this is the case study they're looking at is back pain. And they find when people try to eliminate their back pain because they're afraid of feeling this back pain, what they tend to do is they get into a pattern of disuse. And that worsens the discomfort. Because the worst thing you can do when your back hurts is not move around. It gets stiff and back pain actually gets worse. And you do that for a long period of time, it can become quite catastrophic for you. The bottom line is when it comes to physical pain, when you try to eliminate it or avoid it completely, it's going to get worse. It's not just a hypothesis, it's a well understood fact. As a matter of fact, this idea of pain elimination, of physical pain elimination has been completely catastrophic in many parts of American society. This arguably is one of the biggest reasons for the opiate crisis that we've had in the United States and many countries around the world. There was an explosion of pain elimination using opioid drugs, which led to over prescription abuse, an epidemic of addiction. As a matter of fact, the rise of opioid prescriptions and subsequent addiction might be thought of as the worst thing about pain elimination that's ever happened in American society. Because science found a way to eliminate pain which created a whole lot more pain. Nothing weird about that, by the way. We do this all the time when we try to eliminate something and make it much, much worse. One of the things that people hate the most is boredom, for example. So we created anti boredom devices. What are they? That's that thing in your pocket that you look at while you're waiting for a light to change because you're so worried about becoming bored that you'll look at that thing. And it winds up creating all sorts of other problems that we're even talking about here, such as anxiety. So when we try to eliminate something we don't like. We often make it worse. We very often make it worse. And that's certainly the case when it comes to physical pain. Back to mental pain. And especially in the case of anxiety, mental suffering has an avoidance cycle just like physical pain. We fear mental pain. We're afraid of being anxious, we're afraid of being sad, and we're afraid of being broken, having something wrong with us, as a matter of fact. And so the result of it is that we try to eliminate or anxiety. And that means pushing away the discomfort that we have, the mental discomfort that we have. And guess what that means. That means that making it chronic. That means a chronic, unfocused fear, which is the opposite of the advice I just gave you for the anxiety journal of leaning into it, of facing it with courage and saying, yeah, yeah, I can deal with this. Bring it on. Which is what that first exercise was really all about. There's a pretty interesting 2009 study that shows that when people are instructed to suppress anxious behaviors, they felt their anxiety increased. So once again, you will rebel when you try to. The anxiety that people feel is, in a sense, an early warning system. Why would evolution allow this to persist? And the answer is, because when you feel that creeping sensation of fear in an unfocused way, it means there might be a threat below your level of perception. So it's actually worth feeling when you try to suppress it. Your body and your brain are instinctively going to say, if you're trying to suppress this thing, I'm really suspicious now. It's going to come on much, much stronger. There's a 2024 study in the Journal of Happiness Studies, which is really the best journal in my field, that talks about when people believe that the absence of mental pain is equivalent to happiness, they get much unhappier. Okay, so this is a side note, but it's related to what we're talking about here. If you believe that you need to get rid of your anxiety, get rid of your sadness, get rid of your negative emotions to become happier, you will become unhappier. That's the bottom line. It's the same idea of pain elimination. The same idea. So stop doing that. Any attempt to avoid negative experiences is going to lead to more unhappiness as well. Here's a case in point. I see this all the time. People are really afraid, and they're really anxious about their romantic lives. What are they afraid of? They're afraid of rejection. And if you've never dated, then rejection might seem really, really scary to you. And it's especially the case when in the modern environment where there's weirdly, for some people, it's harder to date. Some people find the apps just not accommodating to meeting people. As a matter of fact, dating has gotten really, really wonky in the technological age. And so I meet a lot of people, a lot of students have come to me, and they're 27, 28 years old. They never date. Some of them have never. And the reason is because they're afraid of rejection is how that works. The whole point of this is that in fear of unhappiness, that would come from the feeling of rejection, they increase their anxiety about the phenomenon. They don't do it, and they become unhappier with their lives as a result because they feel isolated, because they feel lonely, as a matter of fact. So you see what I'm saying here. The eliminationist philosophy is not the way to deal with this. It's leaning in, which was my first piece of advice. My second piece of advice is don't lean out. One more piece of advice. What should you do instead of leaning out? And the answer is, of course, acceptance. There's a bunch of different psychological techniques for doing so. One is called mindfulness based cognitive therapy. Mbct I'll put something in the references to this where you accept your distress as painful, but not catastrophic and not impossible to lessen. If you're anxious about something and say, yeah, I mean, I've got fear about something like this and I don't like it, but it's probably not catastrophic. And even if it is pretty catastrophic, there's something I can do about this. This is related to the Buddhist concept of suffering being resistance multiplied by pain. Resistance times pain. Now think about that a little bit. Suffering will go up with pain, of course, but even more, it'll go up with resistance. The more you resist pain, the suffering, the higher the suffering is actually going to become. That's the idea behind mindfulness based cognitive therapy. Acceptance, acceptance. But don't accept the idea. There's nothing you can do about it. I'm giving you ideas on what you can do about it right here. I gave you one before the anxiety journal. I'm going to give you another one here in a second. The second that's related to this is called acceptance and commitment therapy. Act not the test to get into college. Acceptance and commitment therapy is a focus on living a valued life despite pain. In other words, accepting. I've got a lot of pain, but I'm going to also focus on the parts of my life that are not pain. That's hard to do sometimes, but you can get better at it. Again, look at the show notes to figure out how you can fight your negativity bias. You absolutely can do that. That's been extremely effective technique. So those are two mindfulness based kind of techniques that can help you along the way. Here's a second thing to do, a second proactive thing to do. So the first thing was an anxiety journal. The second thing was to not try to eliminate pain. The third thing is to think. This is going to be really weird for you. I know, is to think of. To go from acceptance into actually thinking of your anxiety as an adventure. Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th century Danish philosopher, what a nut. But read him. I mean, wow, he talked about anxiety in his own life. He was a really anxious guy as, quote, an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition. He talked about it as the most important thing. Now, okay, fine. All right. He was a Danish philosopher, you know, so who knows if his ideas are right for you. What he was recognizing is that high performance people, they tend to be very anxious and that they use their anxiety as a fuel for their high performance. Now, okay, theory, right? Turns out that's a fact. That's an absolute fact. There's tons of interesting research that shows that to be the case. There's work from my colleague at the Harvard Medical School, Dr. Kevin Majors. He's a psychiatrist who's done work on redefining anxiety as adrenaline with a negative frame and turning it into a positive frame. So he works with his patients who are high performers, right? I mean, this is going. And look, if you're watching office hours, it means almost certainly that you're a high performer, you want to have a better life, and you're doing the work to get a better life. That if you're thinking of your stress, which is adrenaline, that's the stress response, the physiological response that accompanies either fear or anxiety. The, the unfocused version of fear that if you put a negative frame on it, like, I'm screwed up, this is a problem, I'm broken. And the whole thing, it's not going to help you. But if you say basically something cool is going on here, this is an opportunity to do something hard, this is actually kind of exciting. And you expose yourself to thinking that way again and again and again, you get a lot better at it. Kevin Majors shows that you can get better at it. You can use adrenaline, even when it comes from things that are perceived to be a threat, initially as a performance enhancing hormone. But you have to reframe is the way that that works. So here's how to do that. Next time you're really stressed out and perhaps when you're putting together your anxiety journal, don't just leave it at what would I do if something bad happened? Say, how can I see this as performance enhancing? How can I see this actually as an adventure? How can I see this as an opportunity to learn and grow? Put that last line in the anxiety journal and I promise you you're going to start to see things differently. It's hard. I got it. It's not natural necessarily, but you will benefit a lot if you do that. Okay, I hope this has been helpful. 3 Ways to Deal with your anxiety. Again, this is a complement to anything else that you would be doing with the medical system, but it is really something that should enhance anything else that you're doing for your own treatment. It's been super helpful to me. It's been helpful to a lot of other people. It's just what I routinely recommend to my students and I offer it up to you with love. A couple of questions I want to talk a couple of two questions that I've got here. One from Lisa Spice. It's an interesting question. Do you think modern Western culture leans too much towards self focus at the expense of service, connection and faith? I think human beings lean too much towards self focus and in so doing we miss a ton of opportunities to actually to get relief from a lot of our problems. There's a ton of research out there that shows that you will get relief from your ordinary travails, including your anxiety. We've talked about here. If you go focus on other people, go help other people that actually need you, lift up other people. If you take the focus off yourself. This is what William James, the psychologist, the father of modern psychology. I've talked about him in past episodes. He calls the eye self looking outward as opposed to the me self looking in at yourself. If you can take the focus off me and put it on the I self looking outward by serving other people, you'll get so much relief. Absolutely. When I look at what's, you know, all the content on the Internet, me, me, me, me, my supplements, my workout, you know, all the things about my life that are going to gratify me even more. We need way more focus on, I should say less on self care, more on other care. Absolutely. Lisa, you got it right. Second question from Nivray Yasel. Hope I got that right. You wrote in your book Build a Life youe Want. That's a book that I published in 2023, co authored with Oprah Winfrey, that happiness and happiness can coexist. I want to embody that belief, says Navrier, but it's hard when everything looks dark. How do you teach this? How do you get better at it? Well, the truth. Truth of the matter is that negative emotions, they capture your attention a lot more than positive emotions. So the feelings associated with unhappiness are a lot more intense. You have more positive emotions for more of the day, but they're at a lower idle than your negative emotions. And the reason for that is because negative emotions, they save your life. Positive emotions are nice to have. If you're at a party and somebody's smiling sweetly at you from across the room, it's nice. But if they're frowning angrily with you, take note. It could be a big problem for you when you get out on the street. And that's what our ancestors figured out if they were going to pass on their genes. You know, that we're not naturally grateful, we're naturally resentful. I mean, it's me too, man. I mean, I teach this stuff and I'm naturally a negative person. I found myself a couple of weeks ago literally saying to somebody, you know, first class in United Airlines has really gone downhill. Seriously? Yeah. No, I mean, it's like. And that resentment is kind of baked in to the human limbic system, to be sure. What that means is that we have to be conscious of that. We have to be conscious of the fact that negativity is taking precedence because it's a maladapted form of. Of survival is what we have. And when you take account of that, when you actually think about that, when you say to yourself, I'm feeling a whole lot of negativity, a whole lot of negative emotions right now, then you can manually bring in more positive emotions. When you're feeling resentment, you can take out your pencil and write down a list of things you're grateful for. This will enhance the amplitude of the positive emotions that are not coming naturally and that are being crowded out by the negative. You're in charge, but you actually have to have the knowledge and engage in some of these habits. So that's what I do when I'm feeling really negative. I get out my pencil and I write down things for which I'm feeling really positive. I say the love of my family and all the good fortune that I have. And yeah, the tray table here in the United Airlines is broken and the Internet isn't working. I can live with it. It's usually how I think about it. Hope that's helpful, but keep the questions coming. Friends love it. We've come to the end of our time together. Let me sign off by recommending once again the book that I've written, the Happiness Insights on Life and Work. Go pick up a copy today. This is a book that includes 33 essays that I've written over the past five years in the Atlantic. I write every week in the Atlantic, so there's been hundreds of essays, but these are 33 of the most popular about life and work. So pick up a copy of that for yourself and maybe a second copy to give to somebody who might not might need it or somebody you want I might give it to for the holidays. Let me know your thoughts@officehoursothorbrooks.com that's the email address for the show. Like and subscribe, Spotify, YouTube, Apple and leave a comment. I promise I'll read it and if it's negative, I'll go complain about it to my wife and she'll say it's not a big deal. That's good for you to hear these things. And she'll give me happiness advice, follow me on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on all the other platforms, and be part of the community. Remember, we got to do this together. Together with knowledge and with a good heart, we can create a happiness movement. I need you in the movement with me. Until next week. See you on office hours.