What Is Your Anxiety Costing You?

"You worry. You get stressed. You want to get there early. You want it to go well. You don’t want anything bad to happen—to your loved ones, to you, to anyone. In the tunnel vision of your anxiety, these are all the things you can think about."There's never been a more stressful year in any of our lifetimes. On today's Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan outlines the costs of that stress and anxiety, and tells us how to handle it. Sign up for Daily Stoic's Slay Your Stress challenge: http://dailystoic.com/stress***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  What is your anxiety costing you? You worry, you get stressed, you want to get there early, you want it to go well. You don't want anything bad to happen to your loved ones, to you, to anyone. In the tunnel vision of your anxiety, these are all the things that you can think about. They consume you, they change you, they overwhelm you. But can you, right now, in the calm of morning, when you are not anxious, take a minute to step back, think about what your anxiety costs you, think about it honestly and painfully, think of the arguments it's created, think of the dead time it left you with at the airport, think of the things it made you say no to, the things that might have been so much fun, think of the reputation it gave you, think of the damage it has done to your relationships,

• 1:14Ryan Holiday?

  to your self-confidence, to your ability to enjoy life. One of the most wonderful passages in meditations is where Marcus Aurelius looks at his own troubles with worry and fear and says, "Today I escaped my anxiety, or rather, I discarded it, for it is within me." Your anxiety is within you. Worse, it is eating at you and harming you. It does not make your life better. No, it comes at the expense of life, which is why we must, as best we can, let it go, not let it control us, not let it take from us the things that we can never get back. And if you struggle with stress and anxiety, as I do, as Marcus did, invite you to check out our Daily Stoic Slay, Your Stress Challenge. It's 12 days of Stoic-inspired

• 1:58Ryan Holiday?

  exercises to help you manage the stress and anxiety, not just that's going on in the world right now with this pandemic, but I think for all time. These are real strategies you can build into your life that have helped some of the greatest men and women. Greats of history manage, I think, times and situations that are even more stressful than what we're in right now. Check that out at dailystoic.com/stress, or if you're a Daily Stoic Life member, remember you get our challenges for free. You can check that out, dailystoiclife.com.