BONUS | If You’re Feeling Anxious Right Now, Listen To This

Feeling anxious lately? In this bonus episode, Ryan and author Chris Guillebeau break down what your anxiety is really trying to tell you, why fighting it makes it worse, and how to finally feel calm without forcing it. 🪙 We are the creators of our anxiety. Which means we can also be the ones to do something about it. Gain a powerful tool in your fight against anxiety and get the Daily Stoic Anxiety Coin https://store.dailystoic.com/products/anxiety-medallion today! https://store.dailystoic.com/ https://store.dailystoic.com/products/anxiety-medallion 🎥 Watch Chris Guillebeau's full episode on The Daily Stoic Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHyEgbTg-BA 📚 Check out Chris Gullebeau’s book Time Anxiety: The Illusion of Urgency and a Better Way to Live https://www.amazon.com/Time-Anxiety-Illusion-Urgency-Better/dp/0593799550 at The Painted Porch:https://www.thepaintedporch.com https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=chris+guillebeau* 📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work":https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast 🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Would you describe yourself as an anxious person?

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00Ryan Holiday?

  What does it look like for you?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think for me, it's this constant sense of questioning.

• 1:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  And I've tried to transition the questioning, at least in terms of questioning myself and questioning every decision, into paying attention and noticing.

• 1:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  That's a little bit different. And something I think is really helpful for people is, if you just kind of like go through your day and just start by paying attention to how you spend your time.

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  You don't have to do anything else. Like, if you just notice, you know, what are you responding to when you have little pockets of free time? How do you spend that time? How do you structure your day with whatever autonomy you have? I think if you do nothing else, then just moving forward, you're going to probably make some better decisions. And the second part is like, what do you want more of? And what do you want less of? And so I have tried to take some of my anxiety, which is always like, it's a physical manifestation. Like, I'm feeling like really, you know, this tightness in my chest. And it's very much in my head, too. I'm just like worried all the time. I'm trying to like, okay, what is going on right now? Now, what do I need? What is happening? What do I need? What can I do? How can I maybe also get out of myself?

• 2:16Speaker 01

  So it's not just like, what do I need for myself? But if I really don't know what to do, then it's like, is there some small thing I can do to be helpful to somebody? And that's actually gonna make me feel better usually, right? Like, hopefully, it's gonna help that person too. But I'm also gonna be like, oh, okay, that's cool. I did something there.

• 2:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, like, have you gotten better at noticing when it's you or the anxiety talking? Do you know what I mean? Like, when you're like, hey, I'm in this. This is not me in my resting state. This is the anxiety state that is feeling this intense or this worried or what? Like, can you notice that?

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got a lot better at understanding cognitive distortions, which I wrote about in this book about like black and white thinking or personalization. Like, if this thing happened, it's not, you know, if some negative thing happened, it's not the end of the world.

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  If I get some criticism, maybe it's actually more about that person's experience than mine, right? Which you know this stuff intellectually, but I kind of had to like delve into it a little bit more to understand it, like to not just understand it, but to internalize it, I think.

• 3:15Ryan Holiday?

  Well, one of the interesting passages where the Stoics talk about anxiety is Marcus realist. He goes, he's by sitting at the end of the day, you know, and he's reflecting in the journal and he goes, you know, today I escaped my anxiety. And so he's, you know, when you have a good day, where you didn't have it. And then, but then he catches himself and he says, actually, no, I discarded it because it's within me. And I think that's something I've tried to get better at. It's like, the airport is not the cause of the anxiety. I'm in the airport bringing the anxiety to it, right? Like, it's not what's happening in the world that's the source of the anxiety. It's my opinions about what's happening in the world. My sense that it should be different, my sense of powerlessness over it.

• 4:00Ryan Holiday?

  Like, I'm, it's not that I'm choosing to be anxious, especially if you tell that to someone who's anxious, that sounds very dismissive. But the, but the point is like, the common variable in all the situations that you are anxious in is you.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:14Ryan Holiday?

  And, and that it's, it's, and so, so what I think Marcus is doing there and what I try to do, and it sounds like you try to do, is you.

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  You take this feeling that you have and then you kind of go, why am I feeling this way? What is the logic of this? Is that actually logical? How is this worked out? And similarly, like you're just kind of, you're almost, the same racing mind that's causing the anxiety can be used to kind of slow it down and detangle the knot that you've twisted yourself into.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you ask, what is the evidence for this?

• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  What is the evidence? And maybe you can come up with something, but most likely it is your projection or something else. And then, once you realize, oh, this is just a thing, then maybe you do still feel that.

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  You know, but you can also be aware, okay, I've been here before.

• 5:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Right? I've been here before, this is going to pass. Right? Am I doing more or less the right things? Right? Am I, you know, like, I may not be-

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  More often than not.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Right? Am I working towards something that I believe in, that is important to me? Do I feel like I'm being true to myself? And these sound like these-

• 5:20Ryan Holiday?

  Have I done everything I can do?

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like, if you're, you're like, hey, I want this to go well. Well, have you done everything you can do?

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  You know? And then if the answer is yes, then you got to chill out.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Right. And if the answer is no, maybe there's something specific that you can do, right? And that helps too, I think, because often it's this overwhelming generality.

• 5:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  And so if we say, oh, here's actually three things I can do that might create a better outcome. I don't know for sure, but I'm, you know, if I do these three things, then I've done my part.

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  So, yeah, getting specific has really been very helpful.

• 5:53Ryan Holiday?

  Another question I like is like, would that really be so bad?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  Like, what?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  What's the worst that can happen?

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, exactly. Right? Because, because often you just have this vague existential doom that you haven't put up for review and evaluated. And it's like, you know, it actually, what would happen is they would laugh at you or actually-

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Or no one would care.

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  Figure it out.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  No one would care, probably more likely.

• 6:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, exactly.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  People are judging me, people are judging me, but actually, most of the time, they don't care.

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  So when the Stoics talk about how some things are in our control, some things are not in our control. What they're saying is, well, focus on what you control about this situation. Reminding yourself that, hey, just feeling anxiety, emoting about the problem, biting your nails about it, talking about it incessantly to people, it's not making it any more or less likely to happen. So try to put that energy to constructive use. Try to think about, okay, here's what I'm gonna do. Here's what I can do. Here are ways that I can influence this situation, or at least prepare myself to be resilient, or endure, or bounce back from it if it does happen. Put yourself to constructive use. Put yourself working on something that makes a difference. Just make sure you're not confusing spending mental bandwidth and energy and torturing yourself emotionally.

• 7:13Ryan Holiday?

  Don't confuse that with making a positive difference.

• 7:21Ryan Holiday?

  There's a story about Klianthe, who's one of the ancient Stoics, and he's walking through Athens one day, and he sees this man talking to himself. You know, the way that we all do it, like, what's wrong with you? You idiot, how could you be so stupid? You know, that sort of negative self-talk that sometimes when we get so frustrated, so disappointed in ourselves, we can't help but break out into. And Klianthe stops and he interrupts the man, and he says, hey, I just want you to know you're not talking to a bad person. What an amazing interruption. What a great kindness to do a stranger. I think we can imagine somebody doing that for us. The next time we get really riled up, the next time we get really upset with ourselves, just to remind ourselves, you're not talking to a bad person. You're talking to you. You're not talking to a bad person.

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

  "Life is difficult enough. It's hard enough. You shouldn't suffer imagined troubles," Seneca says. That means don't borrow suffering. Don't get scared, worried, annoyed, anxious in advance of something that may or may not happen. That doesn't mean you're naive. You think everything's gonna go your way. You do have a plan for the worst-case scenario, but that's different than torturing yourself in anticipation of something that perhaps the odds are only 50/50 of actually even happening.

• 8:39Ryan Holiday?

  What people say, what people do, the things that happen, these things can't upset you. Only your opinion about those things can upset you. The events are objective. It's what we make up about them. It's the story we tell ourselves about them. It's that we say we've been insulted, or offended, or transgressed against, or harmed. That's the problem. It's not things that upset us, Epictetus said. It's our opinion about things.

• 9:11Ryan Holiday?

  Look, it's a bad use of your creativity. The time you're spending imagining what might happen, the conversations you're making up in your head, the things that you think people are thinking about you. This is a bad way to deploy your creativity. You're using it to make yourself miserable. You're imagining these terrible scenarios. Notice you're never imagining things going well, people liking you. You're putting your imagination to work on your anxiety, on your self-consciousness, on your doubt. And it's just not a good use of it. The Stoics would say our mind is this incredibly powerful thing. How are you going to deploy it? How are you going to use it? Are you going to use it to torture yourself? Or are you going to use it to move yourself forward, to solve problems, or create them?

• 9:56Ryan Holiday?

  No amount of philosophy, Seneca says, takes away our natural feelings or inclinations. Is this in my control? Or is this not in my control? Is this up to me or not up to me? That's the essence of Stoic philosophy. Marcus really says that you have to remember that thing is not causing us anxiety. We are causing the anxiety in ourselves. It's within us, which means that we can let it go.

• 10:21Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.