A Bit of Optimism - The Wisdom of Anxiety with Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

Anxiety is the crown jewel of human evolution. That’s the professional opinion of neuroscience professor and clinical psychologist Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, who is driving a paradigm shift in how we understand anxiety. The emotion isn’t a sickness or a flaw in human design – it’s an evolved advantage that protects us and strengthens our creative and productive powers. So even though anxiety doesn’t feel good…it can be good to feel anxious.This is… A Bit of Optimism.For more on Dr. Dennis-Tiwary and her work check out: https://www.drtracyphd.com/https://www.harpercollins.com/products/future-tense-tracy-dennis-tiwary?variant=39708426797090 

To say we live in uncertain times is probably the understatement of the decade. And the problem with uncertainty is it makes us anxious. But what if anxiety was actually good for us? That's what Tracy Dennis-Tawari thinks. She's the author of Future Tense, Why Anxiety is Good for You Even Though It Feels Bad. And we talked about how we can leverage our anxiety to build better relationships and better manage all that uncertainty.

This is a bit of optimism. Tracy, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Simon. Excited to be here with you. Somebody sent me a video, a little clip of yours that for an interview you did on Virgin Radio, and you talked about re-understanding anxiety. Given the anxious world that we live in for so many reasons, which I'm sure we'll get into, I really wanted you to join me and I wanted to learn more about how you interpret anxiety because your whole point of view

is that anxiety is not necessarily negative. And I think people believe that anxiety is always negative. And always a disorder or always a malfunction or something's broken. So let's start from the very beginning. Biologically, anthropologically, why do we have anxiety? I think of anxiety as literally the crown jewel of human evolution. Go on. Which no one likes to hear. It's like selling people broccoli. You know, it's like, I like to think optimism is really the crown jewel, but I'll go with anxiety. Go ahead. So if I can start with a few definitions, and I'm, I'm a nerdy academic. So I always love to

start with definitions. First of all, anxiety is an emotion. It's not automatically a disorder. It's not stress. First and foremost, it's an emotion, which means we evolved to have it. A third of Darwin's theory actually is about emotion. He laid out evolutionary theory in a trilogy. It was the origin of the species, the descent of man, and the expression of emotion in man and animals. That was his third book. And I've read it.

It's like you get it and you slog your way through. Thank you for reading it so the rest of us don't have to. I took one for the team on that. But essentially, the idea is that emotions, so many of our emotions evolve to give us information and preparation. And many of them have to feel bad because they have to make us sit up and pay attention. And so anxiety is one of those. So anxiety is the feeling we have when we have nervous apprehension about the uncertain future. Nervous apprehension about the uncertain future. So it's preparing us for uncertainty.

That's exactly right. And we think of it as always threat response system, fight flight. But anxiety makes us into mental time travelers. This is where the jewel in the crown of human evolution comes in. We're using our big prefrontal cortices, right? We're using our big brains to imagine this future that hasn't happened yet in exquisite detail. And in that uncertain future, it's not all bad. So there is potential threat looming, but there's also good that's still possible. So when we're anxious, we're in that space between where we are now and where we want to be. And so that information of uncertainty prepares us to work to avert disaster and to make our dreams and hopes come true. But no one talks about anxiety that way. How I experience anxiety when I label it anxiety is that I have nervous apprehension of the future, but I am projecting what will go wrong,

or I'm playing out a scene as if I've done something wrong, how something unravels. But by the very definition of nervous apprehension, if I'm projecting good, I don't feel anxious. I feel excited. And indeed, anxiety is on the spectrum where excitement is on one end of that spectrum. It's sort of like, you're excited about your upcoming wedding. You're excited about this vacation you're going to take, but there's still uncertainty. Say it's a job interview that you're nervous about. Yes, you're projecting the negative, but unless you were also on some level projecting the

positive, you'd despair. You would be only focusing on that negative. There'd be no reason to still work, to prepare, to persist. That's the difference. And this is why it's different from fear. So fear feels a lot like anxiety, right? And we think of it as fight flight, and we think of it as a threat response. But it's really has nothing to do with the future. Fear is about certain and present danger. So it's the snake about to bite you. You don't doubt that it's about to bite you.

There's no question. So fear is is I see the rattlesnake, I feel fear, and my body's telling me either fight it or run away, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's the preparation. Yep. Anxiety is I'm not sure I want to go hiking. There might be a snake. Yes. Or I'm nervous about that job interview. I could bomb it, but I could crush it. And so the preparation from that uncertain information is that I can still work and prepare for that. Whereas if it only is bad, that's going to happen. I'm going to just run. That's the fight flight. So because I feel anxious about going on a hike because there might be a snake,

I'm going to bring a stick. Yep. I'm going to look up how many snakes are cited for that particular hike. I'm going to take rattlesnake antidote. I don't know. But yes, you start to prepare for the negative, but it's still positive enough that you want to do it. My anxiety affords me opportunity to prepare where if I had no anxiety whatsoever, I would walk into a potentially dangerous situation with no preparation and more likely to get attacked by the snake because I took the snaky path versus the unsnaky path because I didn't. That's right. And you didn't use the simulation machine we have. Right.

You know, your mind to be able to say the what if scenarios. I want to talk about attachment as well. Like people who have anxious attachment versus people who have a secure attachment, because we are told that the gold standard is to get to a secure attachment because anxious attachment can drive us crazy. And an example of anxious attachment is I go on a date and I don't hear from them the next day. And immediately I start rolling through my head, all the things I did wrong and everything that I did to break it. And oh my God, I'm a horrible person. And then the next day they text me and say, I had such a lovely time. But versus a secure attachment, which is I go on a date, I don't hear from them and I assume they're just busy.

How is that anxiety helpful? First of all, anxious attachment is already sort of pathologizing, right? And I'm a developmental psychologist as well as a clinical psychologist in training. So I'm really like, that was like mother's milk to me attachment theory. You know, it was like from the beginning. The first thing though, is that the anxious attachment and that is about the uncertainty of the caregiving environment. You can't predict a secure attachment. It's not perfect, but you have a safe base. It's predictable. It's reliable. That is your caregiver that they will give you most of what you need most of the time. An anxious attachment is that you're not sure that's the uncertainty. There's also a

third type of attachment that's avoidant attachment, which is that you just reject the person before they reject you. And so with the anxious, it still is holding at its core this uncertainty where there's still something you want to work towards. You're still in it to win it. So anxious attachment at least gives me the option that it could work. I'm just nervous about it. Whereas avoidant is I'm already convinced of doomsday. So I'm just going to delete you out of my phone, even though I don't actually know the future. So to some degree, the anxiety, the anxious attachment is still to some level holding on hope. 100%. I mean, here's the thing about uncertainty. You have to have the positive possibilities still

on the table because otherwise you've despaired, you've given up. It's only the negative. And all you're prepared to do is to protect yourself. I mean, we think about anxiety. Oh, yes, it's protective. We can wrap our head around that. But what I'm trying to argue for is that anxiety is also deeply productive because the hope is still there somewhere. So if you even look at the biology of anxiety, it's different than the biology of fear. And this is on us scientists because we're humans and we look for what we understand. And we've always looked for, I mean, I've been an anxiety researcher for the better part of 20 years. You look to confirm your biases. And so what we've looked for are differences in

clinically anxious people that have to do with the threat detection and response system with, you know, fight and flight, all the usual suspects. But what we've started to see because people have cast their net wider is that when we're anxious, dopamine increases. What's dopamine? It's not just sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It's not just the feel-good hormone. It's that neurotransmitter that makes our brain work efficiently to pursue positive goals.

It helps our prefrontal cortex and the other parts of our brain work together seamlessly so that we can get what we want in the world. When we're anxious, oxytocin surges, the social bonding hormone, which makes us reach out for more connection. Now, a lot of what we know is because we equate anxiety, the emotion with an anxiety disorder, we study anxiety only in the context of pathology and we don't look at it on the healthy spectrum. And when we have the wrong mindset and story about anxiety, it sets us up to do those things

that make anxiety worse. Let's get practical now, right? There is a young generation that is coming up that statistically shows higher levels of anxiety than previous generations. statistically shows higher levels of anxiety than previous generations. And we could go through all of the reasons for that, and they are copious and complicated, including things like constant comparison due to social media, a very, very fast changing world, uncertainty in the economy, uncertainty with your own job, mass layoffs are like a normalized thing. Increase in technology,

things like AI and crypto and all these things that we don't really understand. And it's all anxiety producing. And so A, is it true that the younger generation is feeling more anxiety? And B, how does our young generation learn to manage an anxiety and turn that into something positive and affirmative and helpful in their lives? I think young people today have grown up where we're talking about mental health more than ever before. And a decade or so ago, I would have been jumping for joy to say, finally, we're talking

about it. We're destigmatizing. It's okay not to be okay. But here's the problem. destigmatizing. It's okay not to be okay. But here's the problem. The viral content we have about mental health is that it's the absence of emotional discomfort. When you have a struggle with mental health, it means you're broken. It's automatically a disease. We have convinced kids that they're fragile. We have created this mindset, I believe, where kids no longer understand what it means to work towards a positive state of mental health. They're just constantly trying to dodge the disaster, the looming uncertainty that you highlighted in the beginning of their outer world and their inner world. It just feels totally out of control and intractable to them. I have to put my cynical hat on. What you just seem to have described in more scientific sounding terms is that this young generation are snowflakes.

So here, listen, I mean, I do not agree with the term snowflake because of all the negative connotations. And I'll say, I'm a Gen Xer. We love to malign first millennials. Then it was, you know, it's Gen Z, right? And I feel all of that because I feel there are generational differences. But I think that the biggest problem they face is not being a snowflake. It's that they have this combination of a habit of being introspective of themselves and thoughtful of others combined with what we've taught them, which is that they're fragile. And this is where that concept that, you know, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's concept of anti-fragility, I think is the single most important concept in mental health that we can talk about. So something that's fragile is like a china teacup. It breaks, you know, you drop it, it breaks into a million pieces, you can never put

it back together again. Something that's anti-fragile actually gains from uncertainty, from challenge. The comparison that Taleb sometimes makes is in mythology, you know, the phoenix is resilient because anti-fragility isn't just bouncing back, right? It's not just the phoenix is resilient because antifragility isn't just bouncing back, right? It's not just the phoenix bursts into flames and comes back the same way they were to begin with. Antifragility is the hydra. You cut off one head to come back. They actually grow stronger as a result of the challenge. So the immune system is antifragile because unless you throw germs at it and viruses, it will never learn to function. We'll be the boy in the plastic bubble. I argue that emotions are fragile.

Unless we actually allow ourselves to go through them, we will never learn to tolerate them, to regulate them, to use them as the advantages that they are. So I think we've taught our kids that they're fragile and not taught them how to optimize their anti-fragility. What you're talking about is sitting in emotion. So if somebody feels anxiety for any reason, that the desire to suppress, deny, ignore that feeling, or worse, believe that you were broken or weak and try to quote unquote, treat that feeling, but rather to simply feel that feeling and allow yourself to feel that feeling.

You know, Simon, you're anxious today. I am. What are you going to do about it? I think I'm just going to sit in it. Yeah. But it's not that you have to white knuckle through and do nothing, but it's the first step. It has to be the first step. And whether it's you're a worried well person, or if you have an anxiety disorder, which by the way, they exist, they're different from the emotion of anxiety. But yes, the first step- This is like ADHD. Not everybody who's distractible has ADHD. These are real cases that are overdiagnosed. Not everybody who has any feeling of anxiousness or anxiety at any point has any kind of anxiety disorder. You don't. The majority of it is, I would dare say, on a normal spectrum. But we, as soon as I say, oh, you have anxiety, it's like an alarm is going off. You can have anxiety every day intensely, but you will not be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder unless the ways that you're coping with that feeling are getting in the way of living your

life. It's called functional impairment. So if I'm socially anxious, I no longer go to work. I don't see my friends anymore. I'm coping with the social anxiety by dropping out and avoiding. That's when I might be diagnosed, not just having the socially anxious feelings. I might be having those feelings right now, but I can work with them without disrupting my life. So what advice do we give to young people who feel anxiety? Like, okay, so we understand that it's healthy.

We understand that it's not necessarily disorder. What is the protocol? What steps do you recommend for people who feel anxious about life, career, love, whatever it is? So I developed this little framework. It's called the three L's, you know, so I have a nice mnemonic so people can remember it. And what it is, is that anytime you experience anxiety, you have to do three things. You have to listen to it first, which is what we were just talking about it. Then you leverage it and then you let go. So what I mean by listen is that, as you said, the only way out is through. Suppressing it always makes it worse.

And there's skills that you can build. And that's the thing I tell people too, that anxiety is an emotion and you can build skills. Mental health isn't the absence of emotional discomfort. It's the presence of struggle. It's the presence of this messy work of being human. But it's the ability to build skills to work through that. So mental health is not the absence of negative feelings. Mental health is the ability to use those feelings to manage life and manage through.

When you hear mental health, do you actually think about a positive state of wellbeing or do you think about mental illness? Well, I think that's the problem, right? Which is when we talk about like physical health, we think strong and disease-free. And we have conflated that definition when we talk about mental health, we think strong and disease-free. And we have conflated that definition when we talk about mental health, we think strong and anxiety-free. Yeah, it's the wrong goal state.

And it's like there's physical health. I feel like fitness is a good analogy too, because when we're thinking about our fitness, we don't think that there's some perfect shining end goal. We actually know there's a journey and a process and it's allowed to be like, maybe you're starting to run and you're starting to get fit. And now you just run a half a mile, but pretty soon you're building it up and you can talk about your fitness, but we don't think about mental health that way. It's never a process in our mind. And this is the fatal flaw. This is the disease model. This is a great little insight here. And I'm going to do this from now on. I'm going to stop using the term mental health. I'm going to start using the term mental fitness. It speaks to a process, but it also speaks to good days and bad days. When somebody is

engaged in their own physical fitness, to your point, I know when I'm fit. I know when I'm starting to get fit, it's sometimes a little bit of a struggle, but I keep pushing through. I went to the gym yesterday and now I'm in pain today, but I'm going to give myself a day off and then I'm going to do it again. I know to keep pushing through. Yeah. What's the analog for emotions? Why don't we ever do that? Why don't we do that? And I also know when I'm physically fit that I'm actually able to manage difficult things more. So I know that I can lift heavier weight. I know that I can push myself through pain. I know that I can run a longer distance because if I feel the physical pain, I know because I'm fit, I'm not going to actually

damage my body. Mental health is actually doing us a disservice because to all of your point, mental health has its own definition that is actually not the definition we're talking about. We're perpetuating the disease state by calling it mental health. I've spent 20 years trying to, you know, I actually defended my dissertation on September 11th, 2001, the 9-11. And I saw a world in a moment change to one where I knew mental health was going to be the crisis or mental fitness was going to be the crisis. And then I put my head down and I've been a scientist and I've been working on anxiety disorders and emotion regulation and emotional health.

And I looked up just five or six years ago, we have a lot of knowledge. We have a lot of great science. We have great treatments, but are we doing better? No, we're doing worse. And it's not just the world. I believe that the fundamental problem that I've been a part of, it's a mea culpa because I am a mental health specialist.

We have created the wrong mindset in people. Why mindset? Because mindset is what we believe and perceive and then accordingly how we respond. So when we see anxiety, we believe either that it's a disease or that it's a character flaw, like it's a weakness. And what do you do with those two mindsets? You avoid, you eradicate, you destroy. You don't build. This is why I'm switching to mental fitness because this is a communication problem that we have to reset all of society's conversation about this. A bunch of years ago, I was watching the Olympics. And I noticed that all of the reporters always asked all of the athletes the same question, which is, are you nervous or were you nervous?

And all of the athletes answered the question the exact same way. No, I'm excited. No, I was excited. And I realized the characteristics of nervousness are clammy hands, your heart starts pounding, you start envisioning the future. The characteristics of excitement are clammy hands, your heart starts pounding, you start envisioning the future. But the reason the journalists were asking, are you nervous, is because they would be nervous. Where these elite

athletes had learned the mindset and learned to interpret that anxiety as excitement. Elite athletes, any athlete, honestly, I think who performs and finds that flow, right? Any performer, any artist, any actor, my husband produces on Broadway and he works with musical theater. You talk to any musical theater artist and you tell them, oh, what's anxiety like in your life? They're like, well, you know, anxiety is not great, but if I don't feel anxious, if I'm not throwing up in the bathroom before a lot of my gigs, something's wrong. And what you learn to do as a creative is you learn to channel. Now, I'm not saying you have to go into panic mode. And I don't think people are when they're talking about this. What they've done is they're inhabiting that space

where creativity is. It's where you are now and where you want to be. Uncertainty. That's where anxiety is too. When I realized this little insight by watching the Olympics, I decided to test it. I was on a plane and we started to experience some really bad turbulence. And immediately I felt nervous. And I actually said out loud to myself, this is exciting. And I was totally fine. I was totally fine. I even had a weird little smile on my face because I started to appreciate and enjoy the ride that I was on. And the feelings were still there, but my interpretation of those feelings. And so I've used that in my career. If I have something that's anxiety producing that is making me nervous, quote unquote, I will say to myself, this is exciting and I'm better prepared for what I'm

about to do. I'm not suppressing the emotion or denying the emotion. I'm reinterpreting the emotion or to use your language, I'm leveraging the anxiety for good. And so your insight about mindset, I learned how quickly and how easily we can flip it. It's not some long practice that requires 10 years of sitting on a mountain and meditating. It's literally something I can say to myself. It's a habit of thought. And like any habit, we can learn new ones. I mean, there's an excellent science of mindset resets, of mindset intervention that shows

that these are brief, as you're mentioning, they're brief interventions. You can use them just daily. It's not rocket science. And they have a really powerful positive impact. You've probably heard some of the first studies that were done where Jameson and colleagues that came out of Harvard, where they brought socially anxious people into the lab and then had them do one of the hardest things they can do, which is to give a public speech without time for preparation in front of a panel of judges. And they did a brief mindset reset with half of these patients. These were people with social anxiety disorder. They said, listen, you're going to feel terrible. You're going to sweat. Your heart's going to race. But that's not you getting ready to panic. That's you getting ready to perform at your peak. And here's some evidence about it. And here's what

Darwin said. And, you know, just 15, 20, 30 minutes tops. And then they went into this really hard thing. And those people who received the mindset reset, they performed better, they were more confident, they had lower blood pressure and lower heart rates. So their biology followed suit to their beliefs. So I really think that with ourselves, with our kids, whether we're going on a plane or whatever, we can do these little mindset resets and it will have a profound positive impact on our ability to actually think about how we can leverage anxiety, leverage these feelings for the better. I want to go back to another practical case. We know that we can deal with good news.

We know that we can actually deal with bad news. What is a killer for human beings is uncertainty. It used to be that you had total stability if you worked in a large corporate job. The entrepreneurial world was the craziness and the corporate job was the stability. But now because of the social acceptance and the overuse of mass layoffs, you can work however long for a company, give your blood, sweat, and tears, and be a good employee, and just lose your job with no notice. And then if you want to add in AI and robotics and all of that, all it does is produce so much uncertainty that it's debilitating to come to work every day. How does one manage when the

uncertainty is real, where we're not just dealing with bad events? Here's where I think this concept of anti-fragility is really useful. The first thing I can say is suppressing that anxiety, that natural anxiety, that's not the solution as much as it sucks for people today. So if that's not going to work, what do you do? You have to prepare. And so one way that you can do that, if anti-fragility is about growing stronger from uncertainty, what creates an anti-fragile person? You have to be willing to take chances. You have to practice doing something new. Here's what's really important, I think, is you have to make a break with perfectionism and embrace what's been called, and I really love this term, excellence-ism.

Excellence-ism is that you can never achieve flawlessness. So you go for excellent. And the way you do that is you actually lean into the mistakes, learn from them. You don't beat yourself up. And you know that making mistakes is on the way to excellent. You lean into those failures and you learn.

Successes, you celebrate them. You see, what do you do right? Do it again. And this is about mindset too. It's like being an improv artist, right? Like there's that concept, yes and. When you're on the stage and you're just flowing with each other, you have to say yes to whatever the person hands you. And then you spin it forward. And I think fortunately or unfortunately, the reality is that that's what kids have to work on today. So I think that the thing that we have to add to that list is service. I talk about this all the time, which is there's an entire section of the bookshop called self-help, and there is no section

of the bookshop called help others. And while the self-help industry is thriving, I think that we need to build an industry called Help Others. And I think the best way to manage one's own anxiety is to help somebody who's struggling with the same thing. And the way to manage uncertainty, because the uncertainty is not going away, but what you do create is the certainty of relationship, the certainty of community, the certainty of a circle of safety, the absolute confidence that no matter how long this takes, the person to the left of me and the person to the right of me will be there for me no matter what. And they are absolutely certain that I will be there for them. And that work that we don't do of shoring up the way other people

feel about us in their lives, I think is the essential work. And I think if you go into a workforce, I can safely assume that if one person's anxious about the uncertainty, another person is anxious about the uncertainty. And usually the way that we deal with it, the communication is we affirm each other's anxiety or we affirm each other's like, yeah, they should be treating you better. Yeah, you should be doing this or yeah, you're like, I think it just spirals the anxiety. And you do need a mental health day. Again, for the fifth time. As opposed to saying, hey, look, we have some control of this, but we have less control of it than I think we do. But what if we work together to manage through this? And I'm pretty sure that

if we take care of each other, we'll come through this stronger than we went in. And anybody who thinks that they can manage through uncertainty by themselves is living a lie because human beings just aren't that good and aren't that strong. And by the way, we're social animals. And you use the example of improv, the yes and. And the very, very, very important thing about improv is you're doing it with someone else. And that other person is not trying to win in the scenario.

They're trying to help you succeed in the scenario. The secret to great improv is that I'm trying to actually make you successful. Yes, but is I'm right, you're wrong. Yes, and is we can both move through this together. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more, which is why it's so beautiful to me that when we're anxious, it actually increases oxytocin. It's like fractal beauty within itself. It contains this solution. The best thing we have to draw on our social connection to alleviate this feeling and do something. Shared hardship and shared struggle increase oxytocin, to your point, which means for a

generation that is not only suffering more anxiety than previous generations, but also struggle with forming deep, meaningful relationships. And to everything that you study and everything that you stand for, that feeling anxiety may be one of the single best ways to form the connections that they so desperately need to manage the anxiety. It's a virtuous circle. If you accept that anxiety is necessary and that everyone is born anxious and that its job is to help us make our lives better. So that's where the mindset has to come first. We see in the tests that the body produces the increased levels of oxytocin in periods of anxiety,

but you have to leverage that. You can't just have oxytocin. The body is saying to us, hey, that anxiety you feel, I'm going to give you a bunch of dopamine because I want you to be focused on finding a solution. I want you to manage through this. So go. Don't avoid. I want you to go through it. That's why I'm going to give you the dopamine. Oh, and by the way, I'm going to give you oxytocin because I really want you to help somebody else as you go through this and let them help you as you go through it. It's the wisdom of anxiety. And we have completely cut ourselves off at the knees from benefiting from it. We talk about social media and how dangerous it is to our youth. Here's where I think it's most dangerous.

to our youth, here's where I think it's most dangerous. It is cutting off our kids' ability to go deep, connect with real community and purpose, which is what you need to leverage anxiety for. You need to actually have a sense that there's something greater than yourself. You don't just stay on the shallows and flip from one idea to another and judge yourself like a brand that's only valued by how many clicks and likes and follows you get. So we're actually stopping kids from gaining these tools to actually hitch anxiety and discomfort to purpose and connection. That's what we have to fix. And by avoiding, suppressing, ignoring, denying, or diagnosing anxiety as a disease every time, to your point, all that's doing is exaggerating the negative sides of the anxiety that actually will result

in some sort of disorder at some point. I think the work that you're doing to help promote mental fitness and for people to realize that anxiety is the muscle pain after the first day at the gym is some of the most valuable work in the world. Because I think other people are profiting off of snake oil to help you avoid your anxiety or help you beat your anxiety. You know, I think a lot of it's unintentional, but I think you're right. There are snake oil salespeople out there. And what I love about what you're saying here too, snake oil salespeople out there. And what I love about what you're saying here too, is the self-help culture keeps us focused on ourselves, not on giving back, not on something greater than ourselves. And I just love that focus. There's a beautiful book that

Dacher Keltner just wrote about awe. And he talks about this transformative power of connecting with the vastness around you. And when he did research on this, one of the biggest sources of awe, it's not just, it is nature. It's all the beauty. It's all those things. It's the greatness of others. It's their humility. It's their bravery. It's their selflessness. That's what gives us our most powerful sense of awe. And awe can help us break all these shackles of this sort of navel gazing, self-pathologizing, cut ourselves off at the knees instead of doing the messy, messy, hard, but beautiful work of being human. And so I think we need to give our kids more awe and we need to give them the gift of anxiety. We need to give

ourselves that gift. Here's my conclusion. A, it's no longer mental health, it's mental fitness. You're never gonna be at the end. It's a constant game, just like physical fitnesses or you're in it for the infinite game. But to normalize anxiety as just a feeling, like, how are you today? I'm feeling a little sad today. Oh, don't worry about it, I got you.

You know, how are you today? You know, I'm feeling a little sad today. Oh, don't worry about it. I got you. How are you today? I'm feeling a little anxious today. I'm there with you. Tell me what's making you anxious. I got you. You're not alone. I think when we start to feel anxiety to call a friend and say, can I talk to you? I'm feeling a little anxious today. Can I talk it through with you? Which is how we deal with feelings. It's how you deal with happy, sad, angry. You talk through your feelings with another person and you realize that that community and that relationship is the thing. At the end, you can just say, boy, I feel better. Thanks for being there for me. Because someone abided with you. They abided, which means they're curious, open, and they're not making it try to go away.

What I've learned from you today is that anxiety is our body's mechanism to get us to help each other. Beautiful. Tracy, what an absolute joy. I've learned so much. I'm so grateful you came on. Thank you so, so much. And please, your work must thrive because we need it. thrive because we need it. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to learn more about the topic you just heard, please check out the Optimism Library at simonsenik.com, where you can get access to more than 35 undemanded classes about leadership, culture, purpose, and more. Until then, take care of yourself. Take care of each other.