Moment 76 - The Number One Cause Of Anxiety Today: Tom Bilyeu

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. In this moment, Tom Bilyeu walks us through how his struggles with anxiety have actually brought him to a place where he enjoys life to the fullest. He walks us through how he breaks his 'rehearsal of failure' and the worries that plague his head through meditation. Sometimes it takes issues in our life for us to see our position in most perspective. For Tom, his mental health battles are what made him sort out his diet, and get into a clear space in his own mind about what mattered to him. And when you have clarity, you can take action. When you take action, things change for the better. Listen to the full episode here -https://g2ul0.app.link/8alYCXxbxtb Tom: https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/?hl=en https://twitter.com/TomBilyeu?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Anxiety is really complex, so let's start with diet. The biggest change that I've made to my anxiety was stopping drinking Sugar Free Monster, which I love, by the way, absolutely love them. But there's something, right, there's something in them that causes my microbiome to get out of whack and I will feel really anxious. So I used to have generalized anxiety disorder. I couldn't even tell you why I felt anxious. I just did, all the time. And finally, I realized there was a component of diet, so I no longer get generalized anxiety. Now, I will still get anxious if I'm dealing with something that's really like, the stakes are really high and it really matters to me. So I have to, I've had to learn meditation that changed my life in ways that I can't even convey. So that's been really important.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  But it is, it, and some of it is gonna be just the way that I'm wired. I have, I don't have an addictive personality, but I have an obsessive mind. Now, my obsessive mind has led to my success because I will think about problems all the time. And so, like, I'm actually a really slow thinker, but people give me all this credit because I can talk fast. But I talk fast because I've thought about it obsessively for days, weeks, months, years, depending on what thing we're talking about. But that rumination, in fact, I was just talking to a guy that does, he doesn't like the term hypnotherapy, but everybody will understand that idea. So he's really well-versed in hypnosis.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  And he said, "People break into three personality types, and the personality type that struggles the most is the personality type that both experiences the world incredibly emotionally, but then has an analytical mind that ruminates on the emotions." And that's where I'm at. So I experienced the emotional gamut of life and it's incredible. I would never want to not. It's wonderful. Life is, is a roller coaster of incredible highs and lows. And meditation and my belief system allow me to even that out, so that I never get too out of whack in any direction.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  But I'll loop on ideas. And if it's a negative idea about myself, I'll loop and loop and loop and loop and loop. And so that's why I said at the beginning, what you allow yourself to repeat is really going to determine the quality of your life. And so I have to really get good at interrupting that. So that's why meditation is the key for me to dealing with anxiety. Like, as I can feel it ratcheting up, it's really my mind ruminating on all the ways that it could go wrong. And so I have to find a way to insert myself, to break that rehearsal of failure and instead force myself to focus on rehearsing success, which is almost silly, but it really does drop my anxiety to next to nothing. But I have to really forcefully insert myself.

• 2:48Steven Bartlett?

  Does it always work, that process?

• 2:51Speaker 00

  There are things that are so high in amplitude that it's like, okay, this is really stressing me out. But yeah, it always works. I've never been more than 45 minutes away from complete equanimity.

• 3:02Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 3:04Speaker 00

  And that's going through things that are where there's hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. It's like really, really stressful.

• 3:11Steven Bartlett?

  I've experienced anxiety too. And I, before I'd experienced it, I think I experienced it in my mid twenties for the first time, when my business got really, really difficult and when the stakes got really, really high, I always thought it was something that other people experienced. I never thought it would be something that would find me. And so my perspective in my, this is why I'm so compelled by the concept, because it did find me. And I couldn't believe it did. I couldn't believe it when it did, because as I said, I thought it was something that, some kind of, you know, maybe chemical disorder. But when I reflect on how many people in our society are feeling anxious these days, it pulls into question, is there something we are just fundamentally doing wrong about the way that we're living our lives?

• 3:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:52Steven Bartlett?

  And what is that?

• 3:53Speaker 00

  Diet is the biggest problem.

• 3:54Steven Bartlett?

  You think it's?

• 3:54Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. If you were, if you said you can have, you can make one change to somebody's life, what change would you make to lower their anxiety? A hundred percent their diet. Now, once that's regulated, it doesn't mean that it goes away. I still have anxiety. But when I think I've reduced it by 70% through diet alone. Now, the remaining 30% is still a pain, so you really do want to address it. And for that, I've had to turn to meditation. I've had to insert myself into my ruminating thoughts and be very thoughtful about that. I've had to adjust my belief system so that I'm not afraid of failure. Like, there are a lot of things that I've had to do to get myself to that place. But if I could only make one change, it would be that. Now. Living in the social media era is amazing.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  It's amazing, man, and it's given so much. And I think it's given far more than it takes. But you really have to be careful. Like, to give people an idea, I have had a lot of success. I have a lot of the worldly things that people want. And even I can look at somebody's house. If people saw my house and then they hear the following statement, they will laugh. But I can look at someone's house and be like, yo, that's a house, right? So it never ends, right? So it's like if I peeked out and I had the best house in the world, they'd be like, yeah, but Elon Musk just built a rocket that can carry 300 people to Mars. Like, what have I done? So there's always some other thing. So you've got to be psychotically careful about what you allow yourself to value yourself for, because I value achievement. I think it's extraordinary.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  I'm very glad that I have that. It makes me strive. It's pushing me to be a better version of myself. But at the same time, I have to be really careful not to let it damage my sense of self, which it will do very rapidly. And I think we have to agree that there is a north star. And for optimizing a human life, and I will say that which reduces suffering and elevates the individual to fulfillment, those would be my two things. Reduce human suffering in yourself and others, and elevate your sense of fulfillment in yourself and help other people do the same. Like, that seems to be the cocktail for the most resilient mental state you could hope

• 6:06Speaker 00

  for, so that even as life goes up and down, and you win and lose, and people are born and people die, I mean, we're all gonna go through just unrelenting misery from time to time, it just is. And the only way to even all of that out is to pursue those two things. Now, once we have that, then you start optimizing for lifestyle and beliefs and your thought patterns and all of that stuff.

• 6:32Steven Bartlett?

  I really do feel like if you removed social media, you'd remove a tremendous amount of anxiety. And obviously, everyone's context would get smaller. So the comparison part, I mean, there's various reasons, front of mind reasons why I think social media causes people to be anxious. One of them is obviously all the feedback we get about our success, our achievements, whatever. And the other is the feedback we go searching for via comparison. So me looking out at the world, which is now billions of people on my phone, whereas once upon a time, my human design probably, I was probably designed to deal with about 20 or maybe, you know, a small tribe.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  You could also optimize. Here, here is the brutal thing. Put out a tweet, like put out a hot take, but something you really believe in, like that really matters to you and you're moved by it. And you feel like you're adding something positive to the world. Like, put out one of those tweets. It will not be universally loved.

• 7:26Steven Bartlett?

  I've done that last week and it was torn to pieces.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 7:29Steven Bartlett?

  And it was like in newspapers.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  That is, that is emotionally brutal.

• 7:34Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  And when you realize that, man, I just want to like connect. I want, I want to put something rad out into the world. But then people kick you in the face and it makes you want to turtle up. And so it's this weird exercise of like, you have to divorce yourself from what other people think, which is powerful if you can do it, but we're the human animal. And so you can't ever, I think, completely detach. We are, as I like to say, we are both the shout and the echo. So we are what we say, do and believe. But we're also what people tell us about the things that we say, do and believe. And it matters because we're a tribe animal. So yeah, it gets real weird. And then you and I are both into web three in a big way. The only thing I know that's going to be more devastating to mental health

• 8:18Speaker 00

  than web two and social media is web three. But it's also incredible and it's so life changing that we have to find a way to mitigate some of the bad. But you're taking all of the things of web two and putting money on top of it. And so now people are really freaking out. Why is it gonna be worse Web3? Because it's money. You're playing with people's money. And so now it's not fun and games anymore. It's like people are, they're oftentimes investing more than they should in something. And so it will be bad for them because now something that they otherwise could have enjoyed becomes incredibly stressful. And for the creators, we're gonna destroy a lot of creators who are just like, yeah, I'm not, I can't, this isn't fun anymore.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  Like, it was fun, but I've now taken money for this thing. I have obligations. You have to be honest about that. But if, like, it's not going well, most people are not gonna have the, the tools that they need to grapple with that, to work through problems, to improve, to get better. Like, it's just gonna be really hard. And so when you take the, the ability for people all over the world to tell you what they think, and then you let them invest money, now it gets, it gets crazy real fast. And we're already seeing projects implode because the creator was maybe an artist who's already wearing their heart on their sleeve. And it just doesn't work.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  And they're not able to deal with that. And then the project, poof, it goes away. And I don't think that most people had ill intent. Of course, there are people that have ill intent. But I don't think most of them do. But they're just, it's a business and they don't know how to run a business.