Dr. John Delony: The Mental Health Crisis Silently Destroying Entrepreneurs | Mental Wealth Series | E2

Mental health is the silent price many entrepreneurs pay for chasing success. Dr. John Delony spent years letting stress and anxiety take a toll on his health, relationships, and personal life. But when the pressure piled on, he finally chose to confront what his body had been signaling all along. Through therapy, radical honesty, and intentional daily habits, he rebuilt life around peace over performance. In this episode of the Mental Wealth Series, Dr. John shares six daily choices entrepreneurs can use to quiet anxiety, beat burnout, and stop outsourcing their self-worth to achievements. In this episode, Hala and Dr. John will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (03:19) Burning Out While Chasing Success (08:31) Masculinity Crisis and the Loneliness Epidemic (15:20) Redefining Anxiety and Mental Health Labels (20:41) The Truth About Mental Health Medications (27:17) How to Become a Safe, Peaceful Presence (32:33) Six Daily Choices for a Non-Anxious Life (48:47) The Importance of Decluttering Your Environment (53:39) Why Real Human Connection Beats AI Therapy (1:00:34) Building an Authentic Personal Brand That Lasts Dr. John Delony is a bestselling author, mental health expert, and host of The Dr. John Delony Show. With two PhDs in counseling and higher education, he has spent over two decades in crisis response and leadership. Now at Ramsey Solutions, John helps people reclaim their mental health, build deep relationships, and live non-anxious lives. Sponsored By: Huel - Get over $50 in savings with the Discovery Bundle from Huel. Use my exclusive code YAP15 for 15% off at huel.com/yap15. Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Quo - Run your business communications the smart way. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/profiting Fabric - Protect your family with term life insurance from Fabric by Gerber Life. Apply today in just minutes at meetfabric.com/profiting ZocDoc - Stop putting off those doctors’ appointments. Find and instantly book a doctor you love today at Zocdoc.com/PROFITING Blinkist - Turn the world’s best nonfiction books into quick 15-minute reads or listens. Grab your free trial plus an exclusive 30% discount at blinkist.com/profiting Remitly - Transfer money internationally with Remitly, with no hidden fees. Use code BUSINESS to get a $100 bonus after you send $300 or more. New customers only. Prolon - Reset and rejuvenate your body with Prolon’s five-day plant-based fasting mimicking program. Go to ProlonLife.com/PROFITING for 15% off sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-Day Program. Resources Mentioned: Dr. John's Podcast, The Dr. John Delony Show: bit.ly/TDJDS-apple Dr. John's Book, Building a Non-Anxious Life: bit.ly/JD-BANAL Dr. John’s YouTube: youtube.com/@TheDrJohnDelonyShow Dr. John’s Website: johndelony.com Dr. John’s Instagram: instagram.com/johndelony YAP E362 with Dr. Caroline Leaf: youngandprofiting.co/MentalWellness Mental Wealth Series E1: youngandprofiting.co/MWS-E1 Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Wellness, Biohacking, Motivation, Manifestation, Brain Health, Life Balance, Self-Healing, Positivity, Happiness, Sleep, Diet

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

• 0:00Hala Taha?

  Today's episode is sponsored in part by Northwest Registered Agent, Whatnot, Mod, and AG1. Northwest Registered Agent gives you the tools and guidance to build a complete business identity. Start using free resources at northwestregisteredagent.com/ yapfree. Whatnot helps sellers grow through live shopping, community, and real-time connections with buyers. Search Whatnot, W-H-A-T-N-O-T, in the App Store, download, and you can start selling right away. Mod connects qualifying patients with licensed medical providers for modafinil to support sustained energy, focus, and alertness throughout the day. Visit mod.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order plus free shipping with promo code PROFITING.

• 0:45Hala Taha?

  See their website for important safety information. AG1 Next Gen supports your nutritional foundation with vitamins, minerals, pre- and probiotics, and superfoods. Go to drinkag1.com/profitting and get a free immune support bundle with your first subscription order. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at youngandprofiting.com/deals.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  I look at anxiety as a good thing. It's an alarm system in your kitchen. Your smoke detector is annoying. It can ruin your evening when it's going off, but it also will save your life.

• 1:19Hala Taha?

  Dr. John Deloney is a bestselling author, a mental health expert, and the host of the Dr. John Deloney Show, where he helps millions navigate anxiety, trauma, and life's toughest situations.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  What are you worth? What's your worth? We answer the question, what are you worth? In our culture with a number. It's insanity.

• 1:38Hala Taha?

  The problem with men not feeling like they can open up, they just want to keep going and going and going.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Men are socialized from the age of two to shut up and just go on to do the next thing. For all of human history, men were able to share who they were, but they did it shoulder to shoulder doing things. Those things have been taken away. Your 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s will be built on the foundation you built at 20 and 30. The mental health community has failed dramatically telling people that mental and emotional health is getting all the right thoughts in the right order. That's false. If I would give 30-year-old entrepreneur who has dreams of success, I would tell him...

• 2:17Hala Taha?

  Hello Yap Gang. Welcome to week two of our four-part Mental Wealth Series, where we're learning how to build successful businesses without living in constant stress and survival mode. Today, we're sitting down with mental health expert Dr. John Deloney to talk about anxiety, burnout, and why your anxiety may actually be a signal from your body that something in your life needs attention. If you haven't yet, head to yapmedia.com/mentalwealth to download your free Mental Wealth Playbook. Your challenge for week two is to complete the Safety Audit worksheet. We're going to find out what a safety audit is in this episode, and the safety audit will help you stop white-knuckling your way through life and start building a more peaceful, grounded business and life. Yap fam, let's dive right

• 3:01Hala Taha?

  into today's conversation and build our mental wealth. John, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  What's up, Hala? Thanks for having me on.

• 3:09Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I'm so excited for this conversation. I feel like the topic of anxiety is so important for entrepreneurs because we're highly anxious people, and there's lots of reasons why entrepreneurs tend to have anxiety or think they have anxiety. So let's take it back to 2010, when you actually realized that you had anxiety and you were quite burnt out. And so it seemed like you were living the perfect life. You know, you had a beautiful family and everything like that, but everything kind of came crashing down for you in 2010. So talk to us about those moments.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  I mean, I think they start really when I was young and trying to figure out what's like, what's, what's my role going to be on this little planet we're on, this little rock we're floating around on? And how can I fulfill my role in my family? How can I make my little mark on the world, right? And I think like all of us, I just did the thing that was in front of me, like go to school and go be successful and then go get married and then do your best to have a kid and then try to make as much money as you can and then get this job title and this job title. Ultimately,

• 4:18Speaker 01

  What started out as small little cracks in the foundation and it became, I tried to solve those things by making more money and getting promoted again and buying something bigger and and just doing the next thing that the world told me was gonna make me okay. And yeah, it didn't end well. It didn't end well. And I guess I'll say this, you and I, all of the people listening, we all know those big stories, the big crashes, right? Like you blow your business up or you cheat on your spouse. Like these, that didn't happen to me. For me, it was in over the last decade, as I've sat with people sitting behind closed doors, especially young

• 4:59Speaker 01

  entrepreneurs trying to figure out what to do next. It's not the big, huge explosion that makes the headlines. It's these quiet young men, these quiet young women, these new dads, these, these, these business owners that have big dreams for themselves that just roast out and nobody ever sees it. They, they just burn from the inside out. And so I had a young baby and I had a wife that I cared about that we had grown a thousand miles apart from each other. And so I had to get well, I had to figure out what's going on while we were still flying down the highway. So I had to change the oil on the car while still moving. And that in and of itself was its own adventure, right? But it started with me getting in a car and driving

• 5:42Speaker 01

  three hours away and sitting with a buddy and saying, he happened to be a physician. I just said, hey, I'm, I'm at the end of my rope, man. And that was the first time I ever opened my mouth and said, hey, I'm not okay. And it's been a long, steady figuring out why that happened and how that happened and what happened to me and what happened to my marriage, what happened to my friends and what happened to our culture. That's led me here.

• 6:07Hala Taha?

  I think you call this white knuckling, right? Kind of just like getting by through life and like just pretending that everything's okay. And it's like very performative, right? You're just like performing instead of really listening to what's going on in your body. Why do you think that so many high achievers and entrepreneurs kind of white knuckle themselves through life like this? And how can you tell if that's what you're doing?

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Our culture has no...

• 6:33Speaker 01

  No places no value on the why. Why are you doing this? Like, I wanna, I wanna start a business. Why? I wanna, I wanna be my own boss. Why? Um, I wanna make this many millions of dollars in this amount of time. And I'm haunted, absolutely haunted by that Michael Jordan series. I think it was called The Last Dance on ESPN. When they walked through the Chicago Bulls. I remember Michael Jordan sitting in a hotel room. And, um, the greatest basketball player of all time just, just signed this bajillion dollar contract. He was the, he was the guy, still is the guy. And I remember him looking at the camera, sitting in a hotel room. And they were talking about how he couldn't go out in the lobby and use the bathroom. Uh, because there's too many people out there.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  And he looked at the camera and he said, you don't want this life. And I remember exhaling and saying, yeah, what's all this for? For six pieces of cloth hanging in a gym somewhere? Like, so that people talk about you and your dad? And I was looking at, I remember watching that video and seeing he doesn't have anybody in his life, not on his payroll. And I remember just saying, why? And so our culture does not place any value on the day in and day out lived experience of our human lives. It just has this metric that keeps moving. And here's where I think, like for me, I just dialed all the way down to this. We answer the question, what are you worth in our culture with a number? It's insanity. What are you worth? What's your worth? What's your business worth? What's your net worth?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  And the answer to the question, what are you worth is never a number. It's who do you love and who loves you? Period. And we've just gotten out of order. We're trying to hack our way to this, this, this sensation, this feeling. And so I guess how you know you're there is eventually your body will start to shut you down. And so for me, I had to take chemicals to wake up. I was loaded up on a thousand milligrams of caffeine just to get out the door. And then I had to take chemicals to go to sleep. And then I had to take chemicals to have fun. And then I had to take chemicals to like, when, when you start having to augment your just human existence, basic human ups and downs. That's when your body's telling you, hey, we're, I'm about to, I'm about to shut the door on this whole thing.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  And eventually your body will, will say, I quit, I'm out. And that's burnout.

• 8:53Hala Taha?

  Hmm, wow. And I want to talk about like medication and what you think about that related to anxiety and things like that. But first, let's talk about masculinity and, you know, the problem with men not feeling like they can open up. I feel like this is much more problem with men. And then also like really high achieving women who might be leaning into their masculine energy. Right? We just want to keep, you know, going and going and going and not really listening to ourselves. So talk about that problem and why it's so dangerous.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  I, I mean, I'll, I'll reverse engineer that question. It's dangerous because it'll kill you. It's dangerous because look around at our culture. There's nobody writing blogs other than like Scott Calloway. There's nobody writing blogs on the plight of men. And if you look at the suicide statistics, if you look at the mental health catastrophe that is men, if you look at the loneliness, the joblessness, the, the incarceration rates, men are not thriving. There's a few at the very tip, tip, tip, top. And we like to point at all them and say, look at that. But men are socialized from the age of two to shut up and just go on, do the next thing. And nobody cares about how you feel. Stop whining, stop complaining and just go, go, go, go, go.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  And so all men are, are taught at a very young age, how you feel about a thing, the things going on inside your chest simply do not matter. Nobody cares. And as that message has accelerated through our culture.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  You've seen what I would call catastrophic job loss. Like, technology's taken away jobs that traditionally men have done. And men have also been blamed over the last fifty to a hundred years for every single solitary problem on the planet. And so I think en masse, men have gotten the message, we don't need you, we don't want you, you're a burden to all of us. If you can't sit still in a classroom at the age of six, then we're gonna say something's wrong with your brain, and we're gonna dope you up, and we're gonna blame you for wanting to move, or wanting to go outside, or wanting to have experiences, right? And so I think men in large have gotten the message that the world doesn't want them around. And so there's just been this detachment from the world.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  That we're gonna either stay at home and play video games, or we're gonna start just lighting stuff on fire. And that's what we're seeing all around us. And so I think it's baked into us culturally. And in the past, and for all of human history, men were able to share who they were, but they did it shoulder to shoulder, doing things. And those things have been taken away. And so it's just be quiet, or type on a computer, tell the computer, tell the keyboard, you know, how you feel about something. And those little ecosystems are created. So it's a whole bunch of things happening all at the same time. And I think it's the worst-case scenario for every inhabitant of the planet.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  And then I think for women, they've been told, hey, the only way you can experience joy and success in this world is to interact with the world like men. You gotta drink like a guy, you have to sleep around like a guy, you have to play these boardroom games like men. And there's been a quiet drop-off, that again, I haven't seen, it's rather under-reported of women getting to be CEOs and just saying, This is stupid. Like, what are you, what are y'all doing? Like, I got, I gave up all of my life to play y'all stupid game. And this is what it is. Y'all sit around a table and like, try to out, like, out earn each, this is not a life, right?

• 12:29Speaker 01

  And so I think it's all at the same time, but I think we've all just been given a really ugly script about what success and joy and purpose is. And it's costing us all our very souls.

• 12:41Hala Taha?

  Yeah. As you're talking about this, I'm thinking about like the men in my life. And I've got a lot of like successful entrepreneurial men in my life. And I actually feel like they're quite healthy in the way that they interact, because I do feel like when you're a leader, you lead teams, you often know how to lead yourself, right? And so they are meeting up with their guy friends. They are playing, you know, poker or going golfing or whatever. But I feel like it's this tier of like younger men who are still lost, playing video games, like haven't found themselves or not necessarily successful. And they haven't yet been able to like, get to that like different level of self-awareness. So what advice do you have to the 30-year-old, you know, the average person listening to the show is a 30-year-old male millennial

• 13:25Hala Taha?

  who might not be an entrepreneur yet, but is ambitious? What's your advice to them to make sure they don't like fall into this trap?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  If I could sit down with my 30-year-old self, and I'm 40, I'm 47, I'm an old man now. If I could sit down with my 30-year-old self, I would look him in the eye and say, I know you feel like going all in with my wife and co-creating a world together. I know it feels like you're gonna sacrifice quote, quote unquote, like you time, the things you love, your dreams. I would tell them, you have no idea what's coming when you're knocking on 50, what your life will feel like. I would tell myself, I know you think kids are gonna ruin your life. It's extraordinary. I know you think you're missing out when you're 30. Be quiet and just take on two jobs, three jobs. Keep saying yes to hard projects and new experiences.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  And you, your 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s will be built on the foundation you built at 20 and 30. And so it's, it's, I think we love the Instagram pictures of the guy who's been in the gym for 10 years. We don't love the pictures of the day in and day out. You're exhausted and it's, it was me this morning at 5:45 this morning. The last thing on earth they want to do is go lift weights. But I want to be able to roll around with my grandkids and I have a nine-year-old daughter. I want her to see me running alongside her at her little fourth grade cross-country meet. I could only do that if I'm getting in and putting in the work. And I speak to

• 14:57Speaker 01

  big stages all over the country at big corporate events. When I recently started a few months ago at a local comedy club here, going up and doing 10-minute segments so I can get better at bringing joy to people, being better as a speaker. Like, those hours aren't wasted. But we keep being obsessed with what we think the finish line's gonna feel like, instead of finding the joy in that adventure. I mean, it's so cliche at this point. My 30-year-old self, by the way, would be rolling my eyes at myself right now. It's those long, thankless, midnight hours that you put in, in your 20s and 30s. It's those relationships you invest in that end up ROI-ing in a way that you could not fathom. And you can't see them on

• 15:42Speaker 01

  a spreadsheet.

• 15:43Hala Taha?

  Yeah. And so you gotta get, you gotta get out and do stuff. You can't just be isolating yourself with, you know, computer games or just video games and on the computer and things like that.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  If I would tell, if I would give 30-year-old, like, a 30-year-old entrepreneur who has dreams of success, I would tell them, be in your home as, as, as little as possible. Go be out laughing with people, having coffee with people, having an experience, putting yourself out in weird situations. Take a class. Go dancing. Go, go take jujitsu classes. Go try stand-up. Go put yourself in situations that are gonna make you uncomfortable and where you can be around other people doing their craft. It will lift up every part of your life. And when you're 65, and you're sitting with a group of people who gave their souls to a dollar amount, you will realize, oh, I've got a rich life well-lived.

• 16:38Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I love that. So you've mentioned that you speak on stages and you recently said onstage, or you've said onstage in the past, "I don't have anxiety anymore." So that's a really hopeful statement for a lot of people listening in who feel like anxiety is something that they can never get rid of. And you've said you straight up don't have it anymore. So talk to us at a high level how you did that. And then, of course, we're gonna kind of unravel it and go, go through detail.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Well, I hope I didn't say it that boldly. I, I still get anxious. I guess what I would say is this.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  I think our framing, our discussion on anxiety is out of whack.

• 17:14Hala Taha?

  Um.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  I look at anxiety as a good thing. It's it's an alarm system in your kitchen and it's a smoke detector. And so your smoke detector is annoying. It's it can ruin your evening when it's going off, but it also will save your life. And so I think in our culture, we have a we have a story that is if you're uncomfortable or if something is painful, then it must be it must be eradicated. We gotta get rid of it. And so the way I look at anxiety now, when I start to feel anxious is what's my body trying to protect me from? Because it's detected something in the world that's that's not safe. And that's not a bad thing. I don't like it and feel right, but man, so if I did say that on stage, I was probably

• 17:57Speaker 01

  spoke a little too boldly, but I lived a very anxious existence because I outsourced my feelings to a paycheck. I outsourced my feelings and my my health to um business metrics and to achievement metrics and to performing with people instead of being with people, um being over people instead of being with people. And so I don't I don't live that life anymore. And underneath all that, I took a bunch of steps to create a non anxious life so that when I do get anxious, then I know the alarm's that means something's on fire. I'm gonna go deal with the fire. I'm not just gonna climb up in my kitchen and take the batteries out of the alarm and call it good because my house will burn down.

• 18:38Hala Taha?

  Yeah. When you say signals, like what are some of the signals that that that people have when they have anxiety?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  If um if you put your head down on your pillow and your brain takes off and starts racing, if you snap awake at two forty two every morning or at five fifteen every morning and your eyes are wide open and your heart's racing, if people slowly stop wanting to be around you because you're an electric presence, um if you are walking around thinking if they would jest, and I don't care who they is, and I don't care what jest is, but if you've distilled the world down in very simple cause and effects that you think you've got the answers. Those are usually signs that your that your body's trying to get your attention. If you think you have identified the reason the world is falling apart, if the world would just

• 19:26Speaker 01

  listen to you, if you think essential oils will cure cancer, like if you start coming up with these crazy, if you spend more time on conspiracy theories than on trying to be healthy and trying to do the next right thing for your relationships and your job, that's usually sign that your your body's starting to implode on itself.

• 19:45Hala Taha?

  So I recently spoke with Dr. Caroline Leaf.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's a good buddy. I love her.

• 19:49Hala Taha?

  Yeah, she's great.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  She's way, way, way smarter than me. Yeah.

• 19:53Hala Taha?

  She was talking about how it's really dangerous to identify yourself with these mental health conditions. So like, I have anxiety, I have ADHD, and she thinks it's just a really dangerous trend that people are kind of latching on to these identities. And you also say something similar in your book. So talk to us about why it's not that healthy to kind of identify with certain disorders and maybe how that can make us more addicted to these disorders in itself.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's a, it's a, again, I keep talking about this, the curses of our time, but the curse, that's one of the chief curses of our time is that we're identified with, our identity becomes these labels that we're given. You have anxiety, you have depression, you are depressed. It becomes the way we enter into every room. And it becomes our, the lens by which we view the world, and we're told we're broken. And so if your house is on fire, and your smoke detector is going off, nobody would say your house is broken, right? No one would say that. They would say your house is working perfectly. It's on fire. And so I think it's, it's just.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Changing the language. I love that he's an old psychiatrist. He's passed away many years ago, but Dr. Glasser, William Glasser, said he wouldn't let his patients say, I have anxiety, or I am anxious. He would make them say, I am anxietying, or I'm depressing, I'm compulsioning, right? My body is doing these things in an effort to take care of me. Let's get to the bottom of why my body thinks this, this environment I'm in isn't safe, this relationship I'm in isn't safe, this, this, this business I'm running isn't, isn't gonna hold water, right? That's a much healthier way to view the world, instead of viewing ourselves with these labels that are the challenges we have. It's just, it's

• 21:49Speaker 01

  a silly way to do life. But, but also, the other side of it is, none of us, you, you and me are not allowed to go to a party. And when someone says, hey, how's it going? We're not allowed to say, you know what, things are actually going really good. Are, like, my romantic life is going well, my kids are healthy, my job's doing great? Because then we walk away and people go, ugh. The only way we're allowed to enter a room is to say, well, you know, times are tough, or did you see the tweets, or you know what's happening with, AI is gonna take my business. So we're really fighting. We're not allowed to be people of peace, or people of joy, or people of optimism. We have to be people of pessimism and sarcasm. And that's just, that's the, that's the air we all breathe.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  And so we have to, we are stamped with labels that tell us what's wrong with us. I just reject that wholeheartedly.

• 22:39Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I totally agree. I definitely want to get into you with that, but I do want to ask you about medication, because you brought it up earlier. And I had an ex-boyfriend that was on antidepressants for like, 14 years. I didn't find out about it until like, you know, six months into the relationship. He's like addicted to these antidepressants. He was a great guy, but he couldn't get off them. And when I asked him why he got on these antidepressants to begin with, it all happened because he didn't get a promotion once. This guy's like a brilliant guy, top executive at like a Fortune 50 company. And it's because one time, 14 years ago, when he first started his career, he didn't get a promotion. He was upset about it.

• 23:21Hala Taha?

  And then his doctor put him on antidepressants and now he's been stuck on them. And so I always felt so sad for him because that just feels like everybody faces adversity. You've got to figure out how to get over it, you know, and, and build, build that like mental resilience because you can't always be perfect. And now he's just addicted to this medication and can't get off it. So talk to us about how you feel about medication and have you heard similar stories like this?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Sure. So I've got a pretty nuanced view of it.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  I'll, I'll talk globally and then we'll get really specific.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  We've created the loneliest generation in human history ever. And we've also pathologized, we've made wrong or a problem to solve any uncomfortable feeling or any quote unquote, bad feeling. And so I often would have students come into my office and say, I'm depressed. My dad just walked out on my mom and has a whole other life he's, he's, he's had. And I would say, whoa, whoa, whoa. Maybe you're struggling with depression right now, but what you just described to me is sadness. You're sad. We have no, we have no permission to be sad. We have no permission for grief.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  And the human biological being is not designed to experience grief by itself. That's why every major religion for all of human history has, has gatherings that take place. That's why they have this thing called confession in some shape or fashion. It's been co-opted into tell us the bad thing you did. That's not the origin of confession. The origin of confession is, ah, man, you too. Like, here's what happened. And that's all gone. And so when your friend found himself without the promotion, if you're, if you're a crushing, killing executive, you're not allowed to grieve. You're not allowed to say out loud, I really wanted this thing and it didn't happen. You're not allowed to say, I went all in and at this particular moment, I wasn't good enough. Or

• 25:21Speaker 01

  I went all in and they picked somebody else. And so we don't have, like, when that happens, you're supposed to be sad. You're supposed to not want to get out of bed for a few days. You're supposed to just want to go eat junk food. Like, those things in and of itself are part of the human experience. And so, yes, it's easy to run to a doctor. You crank off a series of symptoms and they'll write you a script and you head out the door. And they get your copay and then they bill your insurance for as much as they can get. And your insurance fights them for all that. And in the meantime, you are duct taping over that uncomfortable feeling. And I think that's been a great tragedy.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  On the other side, I ignored anxiety for so long that my alarm system was dysregulated. It didn't work anymore. It was going off all the time. And so I'm also really open that anxiety medication did not cure my anxiety. It did, however, turn the alarms down enough so that I could go talk to a professional, so that I could go sit with a group of guys who are also struggling and say, hey, guys, me too. And so I am a big believer in the right medication for the right moment. And I also think that Instagram, all the, like, man, how often do we hear, that guy's a narcissist. No, that guy's an idiot.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  He's a jerk, right? He's a complete and total, like, just scumbag. We've normalized these diagnostics as insults or discomfort as I've got depression or, man, I'm really worried about the economy, so I have anxiety. And so we just use those words all the time. They're, if you have major depressive disorder, medication will save your life. If you are having a really ugly experience, a sad, grieving moment, if a loved one passes away, if you, if your loved one cheats on you and leaves you, if you get passed over for something that was going to change your life professionally, if you're an entrepreneur

• 27:30Speaker 01

  and your business gets eaten up by AI or your neighbor's business or whatever the thing is.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  I really want people to sit, A, with a, with a community. And sometimes in these days, A, it's just one other person or two other people. And then just give yourself permission to grieve and be sad for a while. And then if you're unable to do the next right thing, then medication can play an important role, but it, it, it in and of itself doesn't quote unquote, "solve the problem." And I think that's the big thing. It helps to be a great bridge to get you from here to there. Um, and so, man, if somebody needs anxiety medication for a season, that's awesome. But the research says that stuff works if you do that and you do these other things. And we have to be honest about, exercise is really powerful.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Sunlight and community and friends and laughter are really powerful. Journaling is incredibly powerful. Like, these things that are not quick fixes, um, but do have life-altering benefits to them. Um, I, I'd much rather see somebody start there, especially if they're under the care of a good counselor, a good therapist who's walking alongside you. There's a whole other side to this. That same, um, medicalization of every uncomfortable feeling, especially in the entrepreneur space, is how we've landed with the madhouse amounts of entrepreneurs who are taking Adderall, Ritalin, right?

• 29:02Speaker 01

  That are finding themselves at capacity biologically. Like, you gotta sleep. You gotta go hang out with people. You can't work on your business 24/7, 365 for 14 years. Your body will say, "I quit." And so, and you start taking amphetamines to amp you up and you're taking speed all day just to get through the next thing, it will help you. No question about it. And it will cost you everything on the back end. And so, when, if you spend your, a, a lot of time around folks who struggle with various forms of addiction, whether it's alcohol or, or Adderall or sex, whatever it is. The dirty secret is those things really work. They're amazing until they take everything from you. And so it's being able to forego the short term benefit of, yeah, it really helps. I got to do this thing and now I get to do this thing with,

• 29:47Speaker 01

  hey, that's going to cost you everything in the end. And so let's get to the bottom of why you're struggling, get to the bottom of capacity and let's build a life over the next 10 or 20 or 30 years. That's sustainable.

• 29:58Hala Taha?

  Yeah, so let's dig deeper on that. I know you talk about becoming a safe person, living a peaceful life. I'm assuming that's what you're talking about when you're saying like, hey, like you can't just be like work, work, work, work, work. You also have to build in some balance. Can you talk to us about what it means to be a safe person in that regard?

• 30:17Speaker 01

  I guess the best example I can give you is just a personal one from my life. My show took off. So you have to understand like for 20 years I was in education and universities. I was a nerd. And so suddenly I didn't have social media or anything when I started doing this. And then all of a sudden it took out, took off out from under me, right? In this wild way, and suddenly I'm all over the place. My big dirty secret after having a top five mental health and wellness show was, and it was mostly on parenting and relationships is my own little daughter wouldn't hug me. She wouldn't be in my presence. I made her unsafe. I've made her feel unsafe. And I remember going in to hug my daughter when she was probably five or six. And she was like, no, she ran off and I just started crying.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  I was sitting at the kitchen table and my wife, who was Dr. Deloney long before me, she's way smarter than me. She said, has it, have you ever considered that her little tiny body, her tiny little five or six year old body has identified you as not safe? And I got pretty upset and I said, I don't yell. I don't hit anybody. I don't swear in front of these kids like I'm a good dad. And she goes, no, no, no, you're the best dad I've ever seen and. You have a nuclear reactor in your chest and we can all feel it. And that was what ultimately drove me to see a therapist here in Nashville and I sat down on her, on her couch and I was like, all right, here we go. And it was six or seven months of really gnarly work. And I ended up telling my wife stuff that happened to me when I was a kid that I had never told a

• 31:47Speaker 01

  single soul on the planet. And I'll never forget, months after that, wrestling around with my son and my daughter came and she's always the protector. She'll come and just swing like a hurricane. She's awesome.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  But I remember the words coming out of my mouth, Josephine, get off me. And then I stopped for a second because I'd never said that sentence before. And I was like, no, no, no, don't get off, don't get off. But now I can't keep her off of me. I'm a human jungle gym for her. And so what I had identified in her as she won't, she can't, she doesn't. I realized, dude, it was me. And what I want all entrepreneurs to know, if you will switch your metric from, I got a crush, crush, crush every second of every minute of every day to, I will become the most sturdy peaceful presence in every room I walk into. Which means my, my personal finances are okay. My personal health is okay. My personal relationships

• 32:44Speaker 01

  are okay. My spiritual life, whatever that looks like is okay. Your ability to work, your ability to earn will be so much greater than being a kinetic, always on the go presence. And so, yeah, for me, it is, I am solving for peace. People gave me such grief on, online when I paid off my mortgage that was at 2.7%. And mathematically, they were right. I could have made 5% in a high-yield savings account.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  But very few people know what it's like to put your head on your pillow and know that nobody can take your house away from you. And that extra edge of peace sends me into the next business meeting and the guy says, who I'm, who I'm negotiating with says, I want this. And I can smile and go, I don't need that because I don't have a house payment. And then they go, all right, we'll make this deal, right? It changes every fiber of your being. So, yeah, for me and my family, I don't solve for ROI anymore. I solve for peace and I solve for, and I work more now than I have ever worked, ever. And I'm busier than I've ever been. But the return on that is infinitely greater.

• 33:53Hala Taha?

  Is getting to this piece related to your six daily choices?

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that I mean, I was really taking all the neuroscience and all the nerd stuff and then my own experience, both coaching, I'm not, I mean, walking alongside people for two decades and my own experience and saying, if I could distill this all down to make it very simple, what are the six, six places I would start to build a non-anxious life?

• 34:15Hala Taha?

  Yeah, let's go through them quick fire style, but first talk to us about like the biology of your body. When you're a safe person and a peaceful person and a non-anxious person versus when you're an anxious person and then we'll go through the six.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the, the biology is if you are constantly cranking through adrenaline all day, every day, right? And we don't have to get too nerdy, but if you are constantly in fight or flight, onto the next deal, onto the next thing, gotta get up, crush it, go like,

• 34:46Speaker 01

  your body can do that for a while. Those chemicals were designed for very tiny, short bursts to keep you from not dying. They were not designed to keep you alive. Here's the best example I can give you. If you pour Drano down your sink because there's a clog, if you do that once every four or five years, it'll eat that clog and it will open up your drain. If you wake up every day and just dump Drano down your drain, it will eat through all of your pipes in your house. And so it's not designed to be the lifeblood that flows through your plumbing system all the time. And so same with the stress hormones, they're not designed to be the, your operating strategy. And then when you run out of those, when you move on to four energy drinks a day and Adderall,

• 35:30Speaker 01

  eh, maybe a little cocaine at night, like when you start buzzing through all these things to keep you going, going, going, the crash just gets bigger and bigger. And I promise everyone listening that crash will come.

• 35:40Hala Taha?

  Okay, so we want to avoid the crash. We want to live by your six daily choices. So I'm going to rattle each one off and then you give me like a 30 second summary and then we'll do like follow ups on specific ones. So let's do choose reality.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, essentially choosing reality, our whole world is based on avoiding reality.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Like, I'll pay that off later. Um, our marriage is fine. That's just how teenagers are. I can eat this now and it'll be fine. I don't have to exercise. I'll just take this pill. Like, everything is about avoiding reality. The problem is your body is always solving for reality. Your body knows that you're lonely and it would be failing you if it let you sleep all night, knowing you don't have anyone to call in the middle of the night if you need something. Your body would be failing you if your romantic partner walked through the front door. Your body knows y'all are 6,000 miles apart from each other, even though you're both sitting on the same couch, you're just both scrolling Instagram on your own devices, right? Um, your body would be failing you if you owe money to investors and you owe

• 36:42Speaker 01

  money to a mortgage and you owe money on a depreciating asset, which is the stupidest thing you can borrow money on, which is a car. It would be failing you if it let you sleep all night, knowing that one wrong turn in the economy and you, they take your house, they take your job, they take your food. Your body would be failing you if it let you sleep all night. And so when I say choose reality, there's something powerful and harrowing for most people to pull out a yellow pad, not an Excel sheet, pull out a yellow pad and write down, who do I owe money to? What is the state of my romantic relationships? Write down two, three, five, seven friends that I could call at 2:00 AM that would show up at my house and say, I got you. If you don't have that, then that's where you're gonna start. You gotta choose reality with how safe is your body?

• 37:28Hala Taha?

  Hmm. So good. Okay, choose connection.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it goes back to, we've just created the loneliest generation ever and I just said, I mean, your body would be failing you. Think back to, um, you know, 10,000 years ago, if you woke up on the plains of Kansas and your tribe had left you and you're just all by yourself, you're gonna die. You're gonna get, you're gonna eaten by something, you'll die of exposure, you'll die of starvation or whatever. And so we've got built-in biological mechanisms designed to keep us together and we have outsourced all of those. To these digital boxes. And so we are, we have like two mile long text threads from old high school friends that are mostly emojis and funny memes. And we have a whole bunch of networks and we have Zoom conferences with our, our mastermind groups, right? We like,

• 38:17Speaker 01

  whether we want to believe it or not, dude, I had a great conversation last night, great conversation with chat GPT on, I was trying to work through two different therapeutic modalities. And I kept thinking I was on to something. Chat GPT and I had a great conversation. The problem is my body knows that's not connection. That's just transferring information. And so communication is not connection. There's gotta be in person. I know that person. I'm seen by that person. That person knows all my warts and they're gonna still love me anyway. And then we can go, exhale. And now I'm gonna go do, do life well, like rambunctiously, right? Only then can I do that. But if you are lonely, if you don't have four or five people, two or three

• 39:02Speaker 01

  people you can call, your body's gonna sound every alarm it has because you're not safe.

• 39:07Hala Taha?

  Yeah, that is such a huge problem, I feel like for our world right now. It feels like it's getting better. Like, COVID times was worse. Like, it feels like it's getting better, I have to say, but.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  There is a, there is a beautiful rejection happening where more, my son is 15 and I'm watching his friends, like, they walk into our house and, and people say I'm a Luddite and that's fine, like I'm a, live in a cave, but they walk into the house and they all drop their phones in a basket. And like, that's just the, one of the rules of our house is, I don't give, like teenagers, I want them to hang out with each other. And it is, our house has almost become a drug for young people. They'll all pile into the house, drop their phones, and then they go do silly, ridiculous teenager things. And I don't like all the things they're doing. But they're having human experiences and they're literally, their body craves it. And so I get

• 40:00Speaker 01

  texts and phone calls from parents saying, thank you for doing that, for holding the line on those phones. So it's, it's happening, but I think it's because it just feels better to be with somebody than to be scrolling and have all these, these, what I would call pseudo relationships, these digital relationships.

• 40:17Hala Taha?

  Yeah. Okay, next one, choose freedom.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that goes back to asking yourself the hard question, who owns you? And I don't care who you are or how sophisticated your math is. If you owe somebody money, especially a bank or an investor, they decide what you're gonna do tomorrow, not you. Um, if you don't owe anybody anything, then you can walk away from an abusive relationship. You can walk away from a scumbag who's yelling in your face or screaming at you. You can move to go help an aging or ailing sick parent. Um, but if you owe somebody, they decide what you're gonna do tomorrow, not you. And we don't have a psychology for that in our country. It's just, it just seems madness to think that way.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Um, and that's where like for me and my house, we're gonna solve for peace and we're gonna solve for freedom. I don't, I wanna be owned by as few people as possible. Um, and then there are also additionally to that, choose freedom. Um, and we can kind of nerd out in the book a little bit, but clutter. We're not designed for all of the crap we have. It's just, it's, we're not designed for, we're not designed for all the noise that we have. Um, and there's just some very clear, we have so much stuff, so much information, so much data. Data is the new, is a new Xanax, right? Like, I just need to go have another cup of coffee. I just need to look at the numbers and get some order. It's madness, it's madness. And so choosing freedom is about unhooking from all these other voices that are telling you what you have to be doing.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  And then say, as for me, and as for my house, we're gonna decide what the next step is. And the only way you can do that is the hard, ugly work of choosing freedom.

• 41:58Hala Taha?

  I was always wondering, like, what is your connection to Ramsey Solutions? And like, how do you fit into this bucket? And that like instantly snapped for me right now because part of living a peaceful, non-anxious life is making sure you don't owe anybody any money and, and living debt-free and having financial freedom.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  I see, I mean, the, the original way I stumbled into Dave was, um, years ago. I didn't know who he was. I mean, I, I knew he was just a, a guy that sold books and had a radio show, but, um, I got sick of all these different people calling me every day saying, you owe me, you owe me, you owe me. And I got sick of, my wife and I made a great salary. She was a, like a tenure track research professor. I was a senior leader at a university. We made a more money than our parents could have fathomed. And we couldn't breathe, couldn't breathe. And so I came to him out of, out of a series of desperation. And then as I got into the biology of how anxiety works, it's like, oh yeah, your body would be failing you if it let you sleep

• 43:00Speaker 01

  all night. If you're not financially independent, if you're not on your own. And that, hey, here's, here's the reality of that. We don't talk about this enough. I was the dean of students at a law school and the truck I drove was $3,000. My colleagues laughed at me, my students would laugh at me and it was laughable. The car I drove was ridiculous. My wife was a fancy pants, nationally renowned researcher in her little nerd segment that she studied and she drove a used Corolla. Like, we lived in a tiny, tiny house. I remember our mortgage person was one of, the woman who did our mortgage at the bank was one of my wife's college roommates. And she laughed and she's like, what are y'all doing? And I was like, hey, I would rather live

• 43:42Speaker 01

  in a much smaller house in this side of town and get this stupid thing paid off than have this bank always owe me, own me, just for the sake of having a spare bedroom that very few people ever wandered into, right? It was just a trade I made. And then we had to go to the park sometimes and instead of having our own park in our backyard that we couldn't afford. But, and by the way, then we ran into other people and then we met their dogs and then we ended up with dinner parties and it, we ended up having a whole richer life because of that. But we've just created our own cruise ship inside of our own little encapsulated life. And we can't afford it. And our bodies are screaming at us 24/7, 365. And so, yeah, I was, I mean, it's not pretty.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  It took 15 years for us to get there, by the way. It didn't happen overnight.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  But it was just chipping away at it and chipping away at it and chipping away at it. And I tell you what, man, I struggled to get to 10 o'clock before I fall asleep most days. It's just after being on Ambien for years. And so it's just a, it's a, it's a, it's a blessing.

• 44:47Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and this, this ties into choosing health.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  We've just gotten so stupid. We're just dumb. And I say that, like, I'm, this is the pot talking to the kettle here. If you don't sleep and you're not a good, it's, it's, we treat our cars better than our bodies. We do. We change the oil, we get the cars washed and cleaned, we vacuum them out, we take care of them. We just don't take care of our bodies very well. And then we, um, and by the way, I struggle, I've struggled with disordered eating my whole life with body dysmorphia. I go the other way. I work out too much. I'm too restrictive with what I eat. So it's not even about obesity. It's just about this idea that we can just ignore our bodies one way or the other.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  And that still accomplish what we want to accomplish, be the husbands and wives and fathers and community members and citizens that we need to be. And we can't. You can't get mad at your car for breaking down if you don't take care of it. And the same thing applies to our bodies. And so, um, probably the most common questions I get on my show revolve around sexual dysfunction. Revolve around young men and ED, young men and pornography addiction, young men and social media addiction, young men and just rage and anger. And we live in a little sliver of history where there's doctors that'll talk to you. You can go see somebody. It's just, it's the new courage is choosing health, choosing peace and saying, okay,

• 46:12Speaker 01

  I'm in a lot of pain or my body's not working like I wanted to or like it should be at this age. I'm gonna go talk to somebody and that appointment will be awkward. My wife always rolls her eyes and she's like, you don't know awkward appointments, John. But those appointments are gonna be awkward. And, um, I'm gonna go choose hell on the other side of that so that I can show up for who I want to be in my life and in my business.

• 46:34Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I'm gonna ask this question because I don't think it will fit naturally anywhere else. But I know that you often talk about sex shaming and people not really being able to talk about sex and how it's ruining relationships and things like that. Talk to us about, you know, what's going on there?

• 46:50Speaker 01

  I'm wrestling with a hypothesis. Is it okay if I just throw it out here?

• 46:53Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  I think we overuse the word need.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  A lot when it comes to relationships. And when I say to my wife, I need this, I need this. What I'm doing is I am, I've got a cinder block that I'm holding and I'm handing it to her and say, it's your responsibility to make me feel X, Y, or Z with whatever that is. The truth underneath that question is really, here's what I want. And very few people can answer the question, hey, what do you want? Like, if you want $10 million, if that's your answer, okay, what is that gonna get you? Time? Is it gonna get you freedom? Is it gonna get you laughter? Is it gonna get you a prenatal fishing? What do you want? And in the bedroom, what do you want?

• 47:43Speaker 01

  And what do you want to try? What do you think would be fun? Where is play? Where is joy? Where is laughter? And our culture so idolizes sex that every encounter has to be the Super Bowl and fireworks. I think it's the great Esther Perel that says, most of the time, most meals are like, you open the fridge and see what's in there, right? And we somehow say, well, then that's bad when it comes to sex. When that's bad when it comes to intimacy. Sometimes you just make out and fall asleep. Sometimes you got nine minutes and like, are you in? I'm it, right? Yet they all have to be this big extravagant. And I think that's this performative side of things. And so if I can't talk to the person that I've made humans with,

• 48:28Speaker 01

  my wife and I have created people together. If we can't talk about our money, if we can't talk about, hey, I have a dream for X, Y, or Z. I have a picture of what our life could look like. If I can't talk about sex with her, then my relationship is not nearly as strong as I wanna believe it is. And so I think it's A, getting the courage to ask myself, hey, what do I want? And why do I want those things? And then having the courage to look at somebody that I care about and say, hey, I'm putting this on the table and that requires people to choose curiosity over judgment, right? To ask the question, wow, why do you want that versus that's sick or you're gross? There's something like, let's, let's engage in a playful, thoughtful, deep conversation

• 49:13Speaker 01

  that's curious based instead of judgment based. And then we can begin to explore somebody's thing. And it really takes all of the drama out of sex. It really does.

• 49:23Hala Taha?

  Yeah. Okay, let's go through the last two. So choose mindfulness and choose belief.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Choosing mindfulness, mindful is just turned into this whole, it's a whole thing. Michael Easter has written about it. If you haven't had him on your show, you should. He's, he wrote, he's the, he's the best, one of the greatest guys behind closed doors you could find. He just wrote a great piece on mindfulness. Here's, here's how I'll describe it. It's not an old man on a cloud with essential oils. It's mindfulness is simply the gap between stimulus and response. What just happened and what are you going to do next? Ryan Holiday talks a lot about that in his work. Like this just happened. What are you going to do? And that is a thing you practice extending that space between that guy just cut you off in traffic. You just got a bad report. Your ex boyfriend just

• 50:10Speaker 01

  got passed over for, for the, for the promotion. What are you gonna do next? And I, it never occurred to me that my reactivity was a thing I could practice and that a thing I had control over, over time. And so being mindful is exhaling. Um, one of my former students, a great friend of mine, Jefferson Fisher says, go first, lead with your breath, right? Like, so this thing just happened. Instead of speaking, instead of reacting, I'm going to exhale and then say, okay, what am I going to do now? That's mindfulness, right? And the last one was choose belief. Um, this has become unpopular to talk about, although strangely, there's been a wild resurgence over the last two or three years.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  For all of human history, people walked out of their caves or out of their tents, and they looked up to the sky and said, "Dear God," or "Dear gods," or "Dear whatever, please reign, or my family's gonna die." And in the last century or so, we've been able to run water into every room in our house. We've been able to push a button, and some little guy in skinny jeans will roll up here with a sandwich and say, "Here you go, sir," right? We've gotten so arrogant about our role in the cosmos. And we are biologically wired for belief. And even the great David Foster Wallace, who's an atheist, he's openly atheist. He wrote about every act, every person worships something.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  And so, if you don't regularly take a knee to something bigger than you, my family and I are Christian, I'm not even gonna tell everybody that's what you gotta do. But you gotta take a knee to something bigger than you and say, "Please, help." And if you don't do that on a regular basis, your body cannot carry the weight of the cosmos. It can't carry the weight of the self. We are self-actualized, and we're finding out the self can't hold, right? And so, you have to submit to something bigger than you. And if you can't do that, here's my promise to you. You will find yourself in submission at some point, whether it's in an AA group, whether it's in divorce court, whether it's in a hospital, you will submit at some point.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  And so, practice that on a daily basis, and it begins to minimize or push off those moments that you can't control.

• 52:30Hala Taha?

  Yeah. So, I want to follow up on choose belief. So, you called out how churches sometimes weaponize scripture, like be anxious for nothing against people in pain.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Oh, they abuse it like crazy.

• 52:42Hala Taha?

  Talk to us about that.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  I think people have always used scripture and faith and their version of God to try to control people. I think that's always been that way. And the way I look at it is,

• 52:58Speaker 01

  You can drink too much water to the point that it'll kill you. And that doesn't mean water's a bad thing. That means that application of drinking water was not the right dose, right? Was not the right application for it. And so, yeah, man, it's backing all the way out and saying, if this person is giving me wisdom and they're walking alongside me. And when it comes to people weaponizing scripture, the fruits of the spirit, what are the fruits on that tree? Is that person patient? Is that person kind? Is that person joyful? If they're not, then that tree isn't bearing fruit. And so if people are beating you over the head with that type of messaging, then it's it's usually not from the core essential teaching.

• 53:39Hala Taha?

  Before you were bringing up the fact that we need to have like a decluttered environment, and I kind of want to circle back to just some like more general things that we need to be aware of. So you talked about decluttering our environment. Why is that so important to kind of just like simplify our life if we want to live a non-anxious life?

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Okay, so can I tell you, like, this is a silly thing that happened to me.

• 54:00Hala Taha?

  Yeah, yeah, of course.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  There's a great friend of mine, her name's Dawn Madsen, and she has a YouTube channel called The Minimal Mom. She's brilliant, very kind, wonderful. So we were talking and she, she said this, she said, John, every object in your home is having a conversation with you all the time. And I was like, that's the stupidest woo woo thing I've ever, like, I laughed, she laughed, and I was like, whatever. So I got home from that trip and I walked into my, into my house and in the, in the basement, I've created like a little, I don't call it a man cave, but it's kind of where my wife has said, this is where all your chaos can live. It's where all my hunting stuff is, all my guitars are, all my books are, everything.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  And so I just stood there quietly and I was like, okay, start talking things and... Then I sat there and then I sat there and then I started pretending and then I got all choked up after about 30 minutes. Cause if I listen carefully, those guitars were saying, are you just not going to play them anymore? Remember you were cool? Remember you had dreams? Remember you wrote songs? And the hunting gear was like, does this make you feel tough? Is this what this is? And the books on the shelf are like, hey, uh, are you never going to read us? You're just going to be stupid forever? Or hey, you've already read us. Are we up here just so in case somebody comes over and they'll think you're smart? And then I went upstairs and I got kinda, I was kinda getting heavy. And then the dishes in the sink were like, you're just going to walk by?

• 55:26Speaker 01

  You're going to be that husband that doesn't help out around the house? And I started realizing everything in my house is trying to talk to me. The clothes, oh, are you ever going to get back in shape so you can wear us again? Are you just going to keep us in here for decoration while there's people on, in your neighborhood that don't have enough clothes? Like everything was barking at me all the time. And that started a profound conversation with me and my wife and some of my closer friends about, I don't need all this stuff. And I'm letting this stuff try to tell my story about what I'm worth and what value I have. And I have imaginary conversations with this stuff and it talks back. I have stuff in my house that's supposed to tell the world when they come visit, here's who this guy is.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  And instead of letting my kindness and my hospitality and my generosity speak for me, I was trying to get that bookshelf to speak for me and that whatever. So it was a powerful, powerful, humbling experience of how much I had outsourced my, in the same way we talked about earlier, we outsource our net worth to our mental health diagnostics. I was also meant, I was outsourcing my worth to what brand guitar I had on the wall and what bow and arrow I had on the wall and what books I have in my house and what clothes I have on. And I realized how hollow and shallow that is. I've never, I spent most of my career in working with crisis stuff. I've never met with somebody who just lost a child and they said, hey, you want to go look at the car out front?

• 56:52Speaker 01

  I've never sat with somebody who just lost a parent and they were like, yeah, but man, you should see their 401k. I've never heard that.

• 56:59Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  I have heard people say, I'll give away everything for five more minutes just so I can say that one thing I need to say. I've heard that.

• 57:05Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  And so it was just a reframe of if you are surrounded by all these voices all the time, your body will sound every alarm it has. And so it's just beginning to declutter that nonsense and get out of your head.

• 57:17Hala Taha?

  Mm hmm. It feels like that choose reality part of your six choices, like choosing reality is like mental, right? Like taking like a mental inventory of everything going on and all the things that are talking to you. And then you also need to look at your physical environment and, and kind of try to declutter that as well. That's at, at least that's what I think of when you, when you were explaining.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the, I think that to me is the, Dr. Aymans talked about the failure of distilling the human experience down into symptom clusters that we're going to look back in a hundred years and be ashamed of ourselves at how we pathologize the human experience. We give everybody a label. I also want to add to that. I think this is my community, the mental health community has failed dramatically, telling people that mental and emotional health is getting all the right thoughts in the right order. That's false. You have to go take action. You have to go do things. Your physical environment matters. Your relationships matter. Your financial situation. I went through all of grad school,

• 58:19Speaker 01

  two PhDs I have, zero classes, none on the effects of financial stress and human flourishing. I never had that course. I didn't even have a class on that. Much less a course on that. And then to see in my work with Dave Ramsey, to see the impact owing people money has on your relationships, on your soul, on your mental and emotional health. It's, it's a huge miss. And so yes, part of being well is writing things down and getting them out of your head, the, the mental thought, the thinking part of it. But a huge part of it is your relationships and your actions. What are you going to go do?

• 58:56Hala Taha?

  I want to close out this interview talking about relationships, right? Connection and all these great ideas that you have about connection. So let's start with you were you're talking about chat GPT. And I talk to chat GPT all the time. It's like my assistant. I stopped going to my therapist and I talked to chat GPT as my therapist now. And I actually think it's more effective personally. But you were mentioning how you don't feel like like your body knows it's not a real relationship. So talk to us about like what you like your vision of AI and how it's going to impact our relationships and connection.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  I I mean, it. One, since the overlords are listening, I love AI. It's the best.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  I think a conversation with chat GPT is emotional pornography. It look, you can see it. And you can experience it. But it is different than being with somebody in a room with the door shut and that awkwardness and the temperatures and the feeling that that human connection you have. And so, yes, and I think it's a challenge for mental health professionals to overcome. If mental health professionals have distilled down therapy into a series of advice transactions, then chat GPT is going to take that job.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  I'll I'll give you this, this, this is awesome. Uh, my therapist here in town, she's older than me by a decade or two. She's an oracle, very wise. And she said this one day, and it was unmooring for me. She, I I'm telling you how I think she golf clapped me. That's how I remember it, but I can't imagine a therapist golf clapping a client, right?

• 1:00:35Hala Taha?

  What does golf classic mean? I don't.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Just going like wow, like with an answer. And she said, I've been wondering, and I'm right. You, John, are smarter than me. And I started laughing and she started laughing and she goes, no, but seriously. You've read more than I've read. You have an answer for every question I have. And she said, so next time you come to come to therapy. We're going to sit. And we're going to look at each other. And we're going to breathe. And I started laughing and I said, well, since I'm so smart, I know that's not what therapy is. Therapy is talking um back and forth. And she said, oh, John, you have an answer for everything. But you can't sit in my presence and be OK with you.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  And that is why at this point, I am not concerned about chat GPT taking over the human experience. It will give us some great answers. And I think mental health professionals have sold out to a degree to the right framework and the right six steps and the right, and here I am writing a book with the six steps, right? But like to what's the advice? Instead of one of the most profound mental and emotional health moments of my life was when my wife was having her third miscarriage in as many months, I mean, in many years. And it was an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured and she was in emergency surgery to save her life and a cowboy from west, I was in west Texas. A big, tall, six foot three cowboy walked in with his hat on and his boots and he sat

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  next to me as a friend of mine. He said, no words. We nodded to each other. I don't even know how he knew I was in this, in this 12 by 12 room, all by myself in a hospital waiting room. He came and sat by me, said, no words. And then when the doctor came in and said, we've lost the baby, but your wife's okay. I looked at him and he started crying tears that I didn't have yet. And that was the first time I was sitting by a guy who knew me, who loved me and was with me, not at me. And if you're with a therapist who is at you with their advice and their you need to's and their why don't have it use, chat GPT is going to do better than that all day long. Chat GPT can't sit with you. Chat GPT is not going to cry with you at your funeral.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  And so that's where you can get advice, great, but will somebody just sit with you? And that's what we don't have as a culture anymore. And it took this buddy of mine who's a cowboy. And by the way, that's not the only experience. I've had friends who show up and just will say, I'm here. I got an old casserole and a half bottle of wine and I'm, I'll, I'll sit with you until, until the sun comes up. That's the human experience and entrepreneurs have, they've got their mastermind groups and their bros and they're like, check in buddy. You have some guys that just come over and sit with you. If you don't have that, you gotta invest the time and the energy to get that. And by the way, you can't just, you can't put a classified ads for that or you can't like, there's not an app for that.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  There's just showing up, showing up and showing up and showing up.

• 1:03:35Hala Taha?

  Yeah. Any, any like just advice for, for people in terms of like making more meaningful relationships that aren't transactional?

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  The two big ones I'll tell you is to have friends who do things that you don't do. That guy is a middle school English professor, he's a writing professor, a teacher, and he also is a children's author. One of my best friends on the planet is a banker. Literally, the guy who's the executor of my will is an executive at a bank. I work for Dave Ramsey. His whole job is selling people debt, and my whole job is telling people to not take on debt, right? So, and he is my closest friend on the planet. Another close friend I have sells insurance. Another close friend I have works in HVAC. So when we get together, it's not this cyclone of recursive conversation about the same topics and the same ecosystems and the same articles.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  We sit down and have a drink. We sit down and watch the fights. We sit down and go hunting. We sit down and do whatever. And we're talking about different things so we can have a broad human experience. And so for young entrepreneurs, find people who do jobs that you don't do, that are doing things with their life that is different than you, that you disagree with. Find those people because that's the key to a rich life. Don't just, don't own a Mexican food restaurant and just only hang out with people who own Mexican food restaurants. You're gonna all end up making the same meal, right? And then if there's ever a shortage on queso, you're all going out of business. Learn how to make other things, right? And that's number one. And the second one is, go first and be awkward. Just invite people to a thing.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  And if you're an entrepreneur who's had a little bit of success, one of my rules now

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  is I've been blessed over the last few years with the businesses that I'm a part of have done well. It's been a good couple of years. Won't be like this forever, but I'm in a little snapshot. So when I'm going to a punk rock show, I always buy one or two extra tickets. And I invite a couple of people to go with me. And if they don't pay me back, I don't ever ask to Venmo me money. If they do, awesome, that's great. But I'd much rather be eighty five and have gone to a cool punk rock show with some buddies than to have gone be eighty five and have gone to a show by myself that I didn't share that with because they didn't have fifty bucks. And so it is go first, be weird and just trust if somebody can't do something, maybe they've got stuff going on in their life and it does nothing to do with you. Have people over to your house.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  Go do your weird things, go fishing, go bowling, I don't know what people do these days. But go do those things and get off the stupid screens and go have shared experiences in real life.

• 1:06:20Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Instead of playing Fortnite, go play paintball. Instead of playing duck hunt on the computer, I don't know, that just showed how old I am. Go actual hunting, right? Like go do stuff and

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  you're more likely to get hurt, you're more likely to have your heart broken, you're more likely to be made fun of, all that stuff's true and you're also more likely to have a life worth having lived.

• 1:06:41Hala Taha?

  I gotta ask you this question before you go. So you've built this incredible brand. You are a creator entrepreneur, you've got an amazing podcast, you've got books, you've got, you know, millions of followers across IG and YouTube. A lot of people's dream right now is to become a creator entrepreneur like you and you like basically have owned this category or you're you're a thought leader in the category of anxiety and mental health. Talk to us about like just, you know, some guidance of somebody who wants to become a creator entrepreneur, to build a personal brand like you and who wants to kind of be dominant in in a certain category, walk them through that.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Oof, how honest can I be? Can I be super honest?

• 1:07:20Hala Taha?

  Be so honest, come on.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  All right, all right.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  This and you live in this world too, and so you'll know what I'm talking about. I think the great.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  The super challenge, the highest challenge of content creators is people trying to create content without truly knowing what they're talking about. And I came out of nowhere, and I know that, like, media-wise, I had no, my whole life was based around, I don't want to be on the internet, and now here I am, like, what an idiot. But it was 20 years of meeting with people behind closed doors and going to funeral homes and going to psych wards and sitting with people that now allows me to have my show where I sit with hurting people. And a close buddy of mine, Lane Norton, who's like a PhD in nutrition, he's a world champion body, like, he's, he called me after I wrote my first book, and I had a little thing about

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  nutrition in there, and he said, hey, quick note, you're wrong, you're incorrect, you got out over your skis on this one. And he's totally right. And so it was a commitment from that point forward, I'm only going to talk about things that I know. And that's number one. So if you want to be a content creator and entrepreneurship, go start businesses. Go do stuff so that you have true, real experiences. And I think the, I think the wisdom stool has three legs on it. One, have you done this thing? Two, do you have real, and I hate to say this, do you have real academic knowledge? Do you know what you're talking about? Most content creators in your and I world, you're in my world, they have an experience

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  and they want to tell everybody about that experience. And listen, the number of people who write in to me and they're like, hey, I cheated on my wife nine times, but we decided to work it out, and now we have a course on how to be married. I'm like, dude, you're the last person that needs to tell people how to be married, right? You have an experience, you started a business, right? That doesn't make you an expert in entrepreneurship, that makes you an expert on your one thing that you did. Awesome, congratulations. If you want to tell people about your experience doing that, fantastic.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  But until you've walked, started a bunch of businesses, or spent time with a whole bunch of business leaders, and listened to them weep, and listened to them win and still not be full, and listened to them lose, then you have to know what you're talking about. And then the third one is, I think it really is helpful to have a lived experience. We've all had professors that teach you how to do real estate, and you're like, hey, why don't you have real estate? Right? Like, you've never done this thing. And so having a lived experience helps. So that's number one. Like, know what you're talking about. The other thing, this comes from my wife, and it's the single wisest piece of wisdom I received. I was at a university here in Nashville. It was my dream job. It was gonna set our family up for life. And she comes from a house of schoolteachers, and my dad was a policeman, and then a minister, and then back to being a policeman.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  So we had nothing, neither of us. I mean, we had everything we needed, but we did not come from stuff.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  And then I was like, hey, I'm gonna quit all of this, and partner up with Dave Ramsey, and start being in media. And she's like, oh, jeez. So here's the piece of wisdom she gave me. And it was, it's proven so wise. She said, if you create an avatar, if you create some version, like, I'm gonna be the funny guy, or the bro guy, or the... If you create some version of yourself, eventually that will run out of gas. The energy to keep up that persona, or that facade, or that thing, will exhaust you to the point that you're not able to keep it up. And then I responded with, yeah, I'm gonna just be me, bro. I'm gonna be me and authentic, and whatever. I used all the nerd words.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  And then she looked at me, and she said, hold on, though. You're weird. And I was like, what do you mean? And she said, you're a Texan who's got a lot of tattoos, you have a counseling degree, you hunt, and you drive a Prius, and you go to Sunday school, and you've been to Pantera shows all, like, for years, and you're like, you're into heavy metal and punk rock music. She goes, you're a weird guy. And she said, you're gonna have to go all in on you, and if it doesn't work, you're gonna have to go to bed at night knowing, America doesn't like me. And I just got, I got real quiet and she looked at me and said, I'll always love you. Your kids like you, your friends like you, but you're gonna have to go to bed at night knowing they didn't like me. And that was the wisest piece of information.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  And so I just on my shows, I dress like a dress and I'm not polished because I don't, that's not, I'm not a polished guy and I don't hate anybody. And so everybody's welcome on my show and I know that makes all different people uncomfortable. But that's just how I am in real life. Everyone's welcome at the Delony House and everyone knows that, right? And so you have to just double down on being fully you. And people meet me and they meet Dave Ramsey and they're like, how are you guys friends? Right? Like, y'all are so different. But if you distill way, way, way, way down, we both want to help folks and we're both people of the same faith. But if you distill it down, sometimes he thinks helping people would be to really get after them. And sometimes I think helping people would be to hug them.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  But that core, like, that's just, I'm gonna be this fully myself as I can be here. And if it works, awesome. And if it doesn't, I'm gonna go to bed at night knowing I didn't, I didn't put out a false image of myself. And so know what you're talking about and don't be afraid to go be your full, wacky, weird self. And then maybe, just maybe, it'll set off and work.

• 1:12:56Hala Taha?

  Such good advice. And I have to say, like, I've interviewed a lot of people from Ramsey, Dave Ramsey, Ken Coleman, now you. I'm so happy that I had you on the show. And you guys all really do want to help people. Like, you guys just seem like you have such a great mission and business in general. And I just really love having you guys on the show.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  I appreciate it. It's, it's the ethos of this company that, and I have the luxury of seeing Dave at 2:00 AM with a ball cap on in the basement of a hotel. And I see how, how he tips people when there's no cameras on. And I see how he takes care of people in the hospital that never makes the news. Like, and so it's just the ethos of Dave, it's ethos of this company. You gotta be about helping other people.

• 1:13:40Hala Taha?

  This has been such an awesome interview. I end my interview with two questions that I ask all of my guests. So the first one is, what is one actionable thing our young improfitters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Call a friend or a, a, a person and say these words. Hey, can we get together? I'm not doing okay.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  And then go tell the truth.

• 1:14:03Hala Taha?

  Why do we need to be truth tellers if we want to live a peaceful life?

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Uh, when I used to teach graduate classes for therapists, I'd always tell them, "Rule number one, your clients will lie to you." And, um, they won't tell you the full picture. And I think we just don't have any place in our world where we can tell the truth. And if you go see a doctor, if you go see a therapist, if you have a close best friend, if you've got a spouse, you have to be able to say, "Here's the truth." And, um, I think we're dying from that. I mean, we're gaslit on our news, we're gaslit on it. We're, we're just, our whole culture's built around, "Look over here, look over here." And so being able to just call someone and say, "Here's the truth," um, is a freeing, freeing, freeing thing.

• 1:14:44Hala Taha?

  Okay, last question is, what is your secret to profiting in life beyond just bank accounts?

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Oh, man, I, it goes back to, um, if somebody asked me the question on my deathbed, "What are you worth?" I'm gonna tell them, "I'm worth my wife, I'm worth my faith, and I'm worth these experiences I had with these buddies."

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  And underneath that is, that old, it's an old Zig Ziglar quote that Dave quotes around the office all the time. "If you help enough people, money will, you'll never worry about money." If you go help people. And so, um, if your business, if you're entrepreneur, the business you're creating, if it profits on other people's losing,

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  your business will fail, period. It's when, it's when Blockbuster put in their revenue line, um, late fees, when they started banking on their customers having penalties, that's the end of their business. And so if your, if your business is about helping somebody have a better life, a more efficient life, a meeting a need in their world, your business will do well. And so I want that question at the end, "What, what, what are you worth?" To be relational and, and then at the end of that, I want to be able to say, "I was about helping people and I didn't have to worry about money."

• 1:16:04Hala Taha?

  John, this has been so great. Thank you for spending so much time with me. Where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Um, I'm, I'm on the internet, @JohnDeloney, um, the social stuff. And you can go to johndelony.com, I guess, for the... For the other nerd stuff. I'm terrible with the internets. I still don't fully know how they all work.

• 1:16:21Hala Taha?

  You're like, come find me. We'll put all your links in your show notes.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  YouTube, Dr. John Deloney Show. You can find it everywhere. Yeah.

• 1:16:26Hala Taha?

  Yeah, you've got an amazing podcast. Awesome. We'll stick all those links in the show notes, John. Thank you again for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  Thank you for your hospitality. I'm really, really grateful.

• 1:16:36Hala Taha?

  This conversation couldn't have come at a better time. What Dr. John Deloney makes so clear is that anxiety is not always something to suppress or push through. For entrepreneurs, anxiety is often a signal, your body's way of telling you that something in your life or business feels unsafe, unsustainable, or out of alignment. And if you keep white knuckling your way through stress, eventually your body will force you to pay attention. So here's what I want you to do, Yap Gang. Go to yapmedia.com/mentalwealth and open the Safety Audit Worksheet. That's yapmedia.com/mentalwealth to get your Safety Audit Worksheet. Then I want you to block 20 minutes on your calendar today. Not this weekend, not someday, today. Do it.

• 1:17:16Hala Taha?

  Sit down with a pen, write out the specific areas where your nervous system does not feel safe right now. Ask yourself, where am I constantly on edge? What am I avoiding? What am I using to numb out? What is draining me the most? And then choose one real action to take in the next 24 hours. You may want to text a friend and say, I'm not doing great and I need to talk. You might move a non-essential meeting off your calendar, or set a hard stop for work tonight, or delete an app that keeps you spiraling. Book your doctor's appointment, whatever it is. Go for a walk. Pick one thing that would make your body feel even 5% safer this week and just do it, Yap fam. And once you do that, notice what changes. Notice what happens to your body when you stop ignoring the signal and start responding to the signal instead.

• 1:18:01Hala Taha?

  Because once you create a little more safety in your life, you can start to see the deeper mental patterns that have been driving your stress all along. Don't miss Week 3 because we're diving into the inner critics and cognitive traps that hold high achievers back with performance psychology expert, Shadé Zare. So take the challenge, Yap fam. Do the worksheet, yapmedia.com/mentalwealth to download that, and I'll see you in the next episode.