How To Deal With Intense Anxiety The Right Way
Written by Ben
Hey Tribe,
Welcome back!
My first semester of university wasn't very fun, despite all the adventures and new opportunities I had.
I was heavily insecure. I had ONE real friend for most of it, I felt like everyone around me judged me by the same tough standards I was judging myself by, and I felt like everyone who cared about getting laid was getting laid but me.
Enter social anxiety.
I channeled that into two things:
Physical exertion
Alcohol
I've already talked a bunch about alcohol, so let's focus on physical exertion for now.
When my social anxiety was at its peak, I didn't see my anxiety as a burden to carry. I saw it as energy to be channeled.
So channel it, I did.
People with anxiety suffer when they see it as a burden, as an evil force that should be numbed.
I did better than that. I saw the truth about anxiety: It's energy that can lead to great things when harnessed properly.
The campus gym was my escape from the stresses of girls ghosting me, angsting over what to say to them when I'd meet them in person, hoping people I'd socialize with saw me as cool, and feeling like I had to perform to be liked.
In the gym, my standards of performance and success were objective, concrete, and completely in my control.
I didn't have to worry about whether the iron I'd rip off the ground thought I was cool.
I didn't have to worry about whether the dumbbells I'd lift would suddenly cut contact with me.
A 300 lb deadlift would always be a 300 lb deadlift.
A 200 lb bench press would always be a 200 lb bench press.
No one could tell me that I couldn't lift what I could lift or that I couldn't hit the levels of fitness I did, because the proof would always be right in front of me.
In my first semester of university, I gained 10-15 lbs of muscle (when I'd already been lifting for 2 years) and set many, many PRs. All while dealing with intense social anxiety.
When I'd lift, run, and kickbox, I'd be fueled by my anxiety, not held back by it. My anxiety was an asset to me in my training.
Whereas I was blind to the social world's intricacies. When a social situation wouldn't go how I wanted it to, I'd panic or be confused. It felt like everyone knew their place and my place in the social world BUT ME. In the social world. my anxiety was a liability.
I didn't understand that I ALREADY HAD the power I wanted, and the means to generate more of it.
I didn't understand that EVERYONE existed in the same uncertainty I did.
I didn't understand that the only things holding me back were my SOCIAL INEXPERIENCE and my FLAWED INTERNAL SCHEMAS, not other people's opinions of me, not my sexual inexperience, and not my looks.
I ended up making up for the lost time of my teenage years. I got the social and sexual experience I'd missed out on before starting university, and those experiences shaped my formerly defective inner schemas into better ones.
If I mentally traveled back to the body of my 18-year-old self knowing what I know now, I wouldn't have befriended the same people I did nor gone for the same girls I did.
The only things I would repeat about my first year of uni are my training and my highly anabolic diet (minus the alcohol). THOSE were on point.
Dr. Foth's prescription for people dealing with anxiety:
(DISCLAIMER: I'm not a medical professional. My only Ph.D is in broscience)
1. Take the anxiety out of your identity
There are two types of people with anxiety:
1. Those who make it their identity. These people never get better because they don't want to. They enjoy the sense of importance that their struggle with anxiety gives them. Giving up anxiety would mean giving up their victim mindset and the "problem" that gives them a sense of self.
2. Those who separate it from their sense of self. These people do get better. They channel their anxiety instead of holding on to it.
You want to be the second type of person, not the first. Do some introspection. Challenge your pre-existing internal models of yourself and the world.
What's really holding you back?
Your feelings?
Or your lack of proper action in becoming a better version of yourself?
2. Don't do therapy
You know what the worst thing you can do when you have a problem is?
SIT AROUND AND TALK ABOUT IT, further validating your pain.
In anxiety's case, sitting and talking about it is the LAST thing you want to do about it. This just reinforces the pain it brings you, instead of directly solving your problem.
Andrew Tate did a great video about why therapy is lame.
Therapy is avoidance of what'll REALLY take care of your anxiety. Not meds, not sitting and talking.
ACTION and PHYSICAL EXERTION kill anxiety. A round of bag work or a heavy deadlift will do more to heal your anxiety than any medication or therapy session will.
Real life is not politically correct. It doesn't care whether your feelings are valid. It doesn't care for your internal state beyond how it affects the outside world.
Look at your anxiety less like a barrier, and more like a call to action. What is it telling you to DO? What is it telling you to ACCOMPLISH?
3. Lift some damn weights, do your cardio
Channel your anxious energy into constructing your body, not into destructive behavior. Being healthier and harder to kill will blunt your anxiety when you aren't training too.
It's hard to focus on your anxiety when you're busy lifting hundreds of pounds, hitting a bag, or sprinting like a madman (or madwoman).
I did this, as I already told you. It's the best possible thing I could have done to deal with my anxiety. And it paid off nicely.
Without exception, everyone I've met who complains about their anxiety DOESN'T FUCKING LIFT and NEVER DOES ANYTHING PHYSICALLY CHALLENGING. You don't want to be like those noodle-armed weaklings who won't survive the apocalypse as anything but C-list sex slaves.
They don't lift because they want to stay in their state of weakness. Their weakness gives them a sense of purpose. Challenging their bodies means challenging their pre-existing models of the world and aligning them closer to its uncomfortable truths.
But power comes from alignment with truth. And one of the world's truths is that strength is a virtue, and weakness is just weakness.
To overcome anxiety, strength is a necessary value to possess. When the anxiety hits, you hit it back twice as hard and make some GAAAAAAINS, both in body and spirit.
A weak body will weaken your mind. A weak mind will weaken your body.
4. Take processed bullshit out of your diet.
Replace it with the clean food your ancestors would eat. Give your body all the nutrients it needs to function optimally, then watch how clear your mind gets and how comfortable you become in your body.
Your body suffers when you put unnatural foods into it. The health liabilities are too many to list here, but extra anxiety is one of them. When you eat man-made foods instead of nature-made foods, your body's hormones get thrown out of balance, shaping it unnaturally and sub-optimally.
You'll also become more physically attractive when you fix your diet like this. Your external body is a reflection of your internal state. You have more power over both of those than you may think.
Limit your diet to meat, animal products, vegetables, fruits, grains, water, and healthy fats. Nothing that nature didn't create.
5. Get sober.
Alcohol and other drugs make your anxiety WORSE. And that includes anti-anxiety drugs. If you're an anxious mess when you're sober, you don't want to make it any worse by being an anxious mess who's drunk and/or high.
Meds for anxiety are overprescribed by therapists who lack a bias for action. They do more harm than good.
In a minority of cases, people do have legitimate anxiety disorders that prevent them from living life normally, and meds are necessary to them. However, plenty of people in the Western world are unnecessarily on meds for anxiety or depression caused by lifestyle factors entirely in their control. The existence of one doesn't invalidate the existence of the other.
6. Befriend people who are mentally healthy.
Holding yourself to certain standards of being is one thing, but uniting with people who hold themselves to those same standards is one of the best things you can do for yourself.
But that's a topic for another newsletter.
Here's to hoping you'll get ahead in your fitness and in the social world like I did.
TTYL,
Ben
Website - Chemistry Method
Website - Personal