Dhru Purohit Show - How Chronic Anxiety Shortens Our Lifespan and What to Do About It with Dr. John Delony, Ph.D.

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox and Lifeforce. In the Western world, the term anxiety embodies a lot: disconnection from ourselves and loved ones; living our life for other people; the stress of our jobs, family, finances, and obligations; and the relentless chasing of the American dream. When we don’t make time to work through our anxiety, it leads us down a path of suffering and regret. But it doesn’t have to be this way.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Dr. John Delony to discuss anxiety, where it comes from, and the impact it has on so many of our lives. Dr. John Delony is a bestselling author, mental health expert, and host of The Dr. John Delony Show. He has two PhDs and over two decades of experience in counseling, crisis response, and higher education. He also serves as cohost of The Ramsey Show, where he helps unpack the psychology behind finances. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. John dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): -Examples of how anxiety impacts our lives (0:41 / 0:41) -The relationships between anxiety and the stories we tell ourselves (11:27 / 7:50) -Hitting rock bottom and how it helps rebuild the foundation of our lives (13:11 / 9:48) -Why you can’t outthink an anxious mind (21:46 / 17:55) -The top drivers of anxiety in people’s lives (24:27 / 20:53) -Baby steps for overcoming anxiety (40:45 / 37:15) -Catching negative thoughts before they take over (47:55 / 44:58) -Why we need to consciously lean toward optimism (55:36 / 53:40) -What Dr. John did to fix his home life and relationship with his spouse (1:05:10 / ) -Tips for health, healing, and getting back in touch with your body (1:17:02 / 1:12:30) -The parts of healing that aren’t talked about (1:26:50 / 1:20:48) -Benefits of practicing Maranasati (death meditation) (1:34:47 / 1:30:56) -How faith plays into anxiety (1:43:06 / 1:39:30) Also mentioned in this episode: -Preorder Dr. John’s book, Building a Non-Anxious Life, here. -johndelony.com -The Dr. John Delony Show Right now, new members of ButcherBox will receive New York strip steaks for a year PLUS $20 off your first order. Go to butcherbox.com/DHRU to sign up and use code DHRU. Right now, get 15% off your first purchase of Lifeforce at mylifeforce.com with code DHRU. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You can't beat anxiety by outthinking it. It will defeat you, period. You can't learn enough stuff about the hypothalamus interacts with the amygdala and how it modulates cortisol. You can because anxiety will just move and it will just move because it's not something to figure out. Its job is to keep you safe and it doesn't play fair and it doesn't use facts. It uses feelings and emotions. And those aren't designed to tell you the truth. They're designed to keep you alive.

John, welcome to the podcast. Pleasure to have you here. Thanks, D.P. It's awesome. I want to talk about anxiety and how chronic anxiety eats away at the longevity that so many of us are looking for in our life. Give us a few top line examples because one thing I've seen is that most of us are not present to how anxiety truly impacts our life, especially when it becomes chronic.

Yeah, so let's define it, right? I used to be when I was an academic nerd, I would, you know, push my glasses up my nose and say, you know, anxiety is only a diagnostic. It's a mental health disorder, only can be diagnosed by a clinician, et cetera, et cetera. Over the last four or five years, I've taken a different track. It's the word that we all use to mean burned out, to mean chronically stressed, to mean anxious, to mean grieving sometimes. And so I want to use it in the cultural sense, which is this pervasive chronic, something's coming. Something's happening to us, right? Something's about to happen. And I like to define anxiety.

anxiety as simply as possible. It is just a smoke alarm in your kitchen that detect smoke and says there may be a fire in this house. That's it. Yeah. You write in your book, you say anxiety is not the fire. It's not the fire. It's the smoke alarm. And so when you talk about longevity, we have a culture that tells us to play whack-a-mole with the alarm system.

Climb up in your kitchen, get on a ladder, pull the batteries out, shut it down. Ah, and you're good. And then your house burns down around you, right? So, or we are whack-a-moing, I think it's this, I think it's this, I think it's this, I think it's this. And we end up maybe living longer because we take the right supplements because we have a good relationship with our doctor. But the longer life we have is miserable. And it is one of division and exhaustion and distraction and numbing. And so I like to take a different track when it comes to anxiety.

What if your body's working really well? And what if this chronic rise, I mean this meteoric rise in anxiety culturally, our bodies are working just fine. And they're telling us, hey, we are living a life that our bodies are not designed for. And what if instead of going to war with our bodies, we took a hard look at the lives we've created for ourselves? And we approached a solution, if you will, or a cure to the anxious life that way. Instead of climbing up, pulling the batteries out and saying, sounds off, we're all good.

That's not the solution. Let's make this a little bit more personal. You know, you have a daily show and podcasts. People call in from all over the states, maybe even international. All of the world, yeah. Is there a caller or an example of somebody calling in and thinking their problem was one thing? And through you digging in with the training that you have, you helped them kind of see that maybe there was a different way to look at things. Can I take it one step closer?

Please. So my dad was a homicide detective. in a SWAT hostage negotiator. My mom was a stay-at-home mom who ended up going back to school. My dad was a hard work in a man, put his bulletproof vest on when he went to work, and was going in the worst of the worst situations. And there were seasons when my family didn't have enough money to buy groceries.

And halfway through my childhood, he quit and became a minister at a large church. Very similar situation. We shared one car. My parents shared one car for most of my childhood. We had a modest house in a suburb. a new suburb. And at a young age, I remember pointing at public service and saying, if that's what the public thinks of public servants, that you don't have enough money for groceries, we're going somewhere else. And right when I graduated college, I started chasing titles,

money, prestige, look at me, look at me, look at me, leadership opportunities. And so I ran and I ran and I ran and along the way I accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt trying to look the part. I was in hospitals meeting with hurting kids and families three or four nights a week plus my day job plus hey we need a leader to take over. I got it. I'll do this one. I'll do this one. I'll do this one. And so drew my body quit. It said you're not getting him. I had a new son. My wife was a fancy researcher. My body said I'm out. I'm out. And I was skipping over all the steps. And so I looked back, if I reverse engineer that, I was blaming everybody. I was coming up with all these crazy schemes about what was coming next and you guys need to watch this.

It's their fault. And we need to do this or y'all. And the people around me were slowly beginning to distance himself from me. And I was good at my job. So they kept me on the payroll. But it was this slow pulling apart that my body felt. I knew it. My wife says it was like being married to a taser. She said, I loved you. But it was so hard. to get close to you because you were always crackling, always on. And so there was that moment when my body said, I quit. I'm out. You're not listening to us. We're going to shut the system down. And that was the, it's not supposed to happen to me. Like what physically happened? I got the degree. I got, well, it starts with waking up every night at 2.30 in the morning or 3 in the morning. And if you think of anxiety as an alarm system, your body would be failing you if it let you sleep all night.

if it is detecting something in your environment that's not safe. It would be failing you. Your body would be failing you if it lets you have deep, intimate relations with your romantic partner, with your husband or wife. It would be failing you because it's looking for threats. It's identified. You're just not doing anything about it. You want to be intimate right now?

Right? Your body's at war. And so it started with waking up. Then it started with me propping myself up when I was exhausted with junk and trash and junk and trash food. and then it started with me feeling uncomfortable and my wife having to create some safety for our little baby in our home. So I feel her creating a house inside of our home that's separate from the taser, right? And not because she's crazy, but because she's trying to keep everybody safe. And then I start getting more anxious at work.

So it just slowly pulls apart. And as I'm describing this, I haven't described it this way like this, but it sounds a lot like the life that we all live right now, right? Like this is just the Western way, which is go, go, go, go, go. And it eventually led me to not being able to look at stock tickers. That was one of the things that my body just put a GPS pin in and said, one thing you can't control is world economic issues. And they can take everything from you.

And so, bink, my body identified that as a threat. Then it identified any time my boss would shoot me in an email and say, hey, I need a quick conversation. my body responded as though I was getting fired. That was it. Like there was nothing, my boss is awesome. We're still close friends to this day. But my body went to war. And so I slowly lost my sense of self.

And then over time, it turns into more and more advanced what we would call emotional and mental health issues, man. Deep anxiety, depression. But it starts very, what I would call very normal in our current day. This episode is brought to you by Butcher Box. You know, when I made the decision to include animal foods into my diet after I'd been vegetarian for years, my biggest focus was on quality. I got to say, looking back, I wish I had access to Butcher Box at that time because they

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for 15% off your first life force purchase. what's the relationship between the anxiety that so many people they hear you talking about your story and maybe your story isn't exactly their story but they can still relate to it. What's the relationship between anxiety and the stories that we're constantly telling ourselves about what is happening?

Meaning there's reality and then there's our version of reality or our story. So what's the relationship between that and anxiety? I think we like to think that we live in reality, but we don't, right? Our bodies are responding to stories from our past. Our bodies are responding from stories that our parents put in our minds, that our religious communities put our minds, that our coaches when our little kids put in our minds, and our bodies are storymaking machines in the present.

And so, man, your boss shoot you an email, come see me. You head down this trail. Because you know what happens now. you're powerless. That boss owns you because you owe this much money. You don't have another options. You're stuck in this town. Fill in the blank. You're an abusive marriage that you can't get out of. That boss owns you. And so your body dumps into a worst case scenario. How do we solve worst case scenario? You're going to get fired. We're going to make a plan. You better start coming up with excuses. And you can hear in my voice just right now. It just starts spinning and spinning and spinning.

But our bodies, our minds are constantly spinning up stories to backfill why our bodies feel how they feel. And I think it gets pretty wild. You throw social media on top of that. You throw a 24-hour news cycle on top of that where we're constantly being peppered with narratives that may or may not be true 24-7. And we have a steady library of stories to draw from whenever we feel uncomfortable or whenever we feel exhausted, whenever we feel frustrated or angry or, you know, disconnected from our loved ones, man, there is a story to be told instantly at our fingertips. So I don't know who the quote is attributed to, but there's that quote, you know, rock bottom was the foundation that I rebuilt my life on. You hit rock bottom in this moment.

Can I mention that? Talk about that. This is the part of the story when the guy steals a million dollars and goes to jail and then comes back on his book tour to talk about life now. Or this is like when the guy cheats on his wife and blows up his marriage or whatever. I don't think that's most of us. I don't think Rock Bottom looks like it does in the movies for most of us. Most of us Rock Bottom, I believe, is that quiet life of desperation. It's when you just pull the car into neutral and you say, this is what this is going to be.

This is what my marriage is going to be. This is my granddad's fate. He had a heart attack. My dad had high blood pressure. This is the deck of cards I was dealt. And so I think Rock Bottom, for me, most of us is giving up. It's taking her hand off the gas, our foot off the gas.

And so, yeah, my rock bottom was, well, it's just the way this is going to be. You're going to constantly be chasing. And it was that little glimmer of hope, this little glimmer of an idea that, you know what I mean, I got a choice here. I can choose something different. And I want something different for my son. I want something different from my marriage. I want something different from me.

And that was the turning point for me. because I've been trying to make enough money for my wife to love me, even though she didn't ask for that. I was trying to make enough money and have enough security so my son would feel safe. Like I didn't growing up. He didn't ask for that. What I was really trying to do was to get somebody to tell me,

John, you got value. And they were, I just couldn't hear it because I was running it so hard, right? And so rock bottom for me was, oh, you don't like you. And I think most of us, if we're honest, we go to the mirror and we don't like what we see, man. We don't like who we are. Rightly or wrongly, we don't like us. And so why in the world would you change the way you eat?

Why would you spend a bunch of money taking care of your car when you hate the car? Why would you put good gas in that car if you hate that car? Why would you put nice tires on that car? Why would you take it to the best mechanic? You won't. It's just a dumb car. And I think we think of ourselves that way. And so for me, Rock Bottom was opening my eyes and being like, no, no, no.

You're worth being loved to. And that's been a constant theme in my own head. That's been a constant theme for my kids, from my wife, and everybody I've interacted with since then was, okay, I don't know where the path is here, but you're worth being loved. God loves you. Your wife loves you.

Your kids love you. Let's go figure this out. What was the pivot point for you or the pivot points that not only helped you start to have a different perspective, but then create a framework that now obviously has led to the show. show this new book that's out. What was the pivot point? And sometimes for some people, it is one point. And then for other people, just like that quiet life of desperation that some people just say, okay, my life is so nuts. I don't know how to handle it right now. So I'm going to live a smaller

version of what I know is possible just so I can make it through the day, which a lot of people can relate to. So was it one point or was it a series of points for you? I love that you asked this here's why. I recently went back to a university to speak to their faculty. It was the university used to work at. And in going, I was preparing my notes and I had some memories that popped up that I had just forgotten about in a strange way. So the pivot point for me was one day I'd sold my house. I thought like a beautiful mind, you know, it was like those cork boards and their string and pictures and everything. I had mapped out what I thought. It was insanity. But I had mapped out in about 2012, 2013-ish, the next housing collapsed, but this was going to be the real big one.

And they were going to have to nationalize housing. I had a whole plant, like, this is all going to go. So I talked to my wife into selling our house, and we moved into a residence hall. So one of the things in my responsibilities of Dina students was I was over all of housing. And so I moved us into a residence hall apartment and literally to watch the world end. Like, I'm not going to be a part of the system when it goes. and I was walking across campus. By this time I was over so much stuff

that I could have not gone to work for a week or two and no one would have known if I just answered my cell phone. I was always all over the place. I was walking to work and I literally stopped and I turned around and went back to the parking lot, got in my wife's car, didn't tell her, didn't tell my boss, didn't tell anybody,

and I drove three hours away to my buddy's office who's a medical doctor. And as the first time I said the words out loud, I'm not okay. That's usually the story that I tell. But in preparing these remarks for this university faculty, I realized it started a year before that. A guy who's, he was a bioethics professor, but he was also a monk. So as soon as school was off, he had head to a

monastery. He always met with a group of students to teach them how to meditate and to teach them how to live in community together. And he just thought we'd lost communal practices. And so he had asked me to join his group a year before. And I was like, y'all are crazy. And I was like, I'll go. And then I went the first night and all these college kids, Mohawks, football players, everybody, they all, he hits one of those Tibetan bells and they all start chanting. And I was like, oh, I'm going to get sacrificed in here. But I went back again and I went back again. And he agreed to meet with me once a week. And then my friend Slade, who was the campus attorney, he was the general counsel. It just happened incidentally. He's like, oh, you work out? I work out every morning at five.

You should meet me there. And then I just started. And then the next day and the next day. And he would always say, what's something you did nice for your wife this week? And sometimes I would do something nice the night before because I knew he was going to ask me. But when I look back now, I had a year of spiritual practice with a guy that kept showing up and kept showing up and kept showing up. When I look back, I had a year of exercise with somebody who asked me, how are you and how are your family? Every week. I mean, five times a week all the time. And if I missed more than once or twice, he'd say, hey, we made at 5. And it was this, all right, I'll be there, I'll be there.

And so when I look back, connection with other people, movement, getting my health right, getting my spiritual life right, these basic practices gave me the foundation to then see the world a little more clearly to say, I need to go get some real help, right? Some more substantive help, if you will. And so that's the full narrative. And I think most of us, as we head into a crisis, we think of that moment, but it really that crisis started a long time ago. Your marriage didn't just implode. It started getting separate, just a tiny little crack. Or your situation at work, you didn't just walk in

everything and you just blow up. It started a while ago, right? Your industry started taking a turn a long time ago. And our recoveries don't usually happen in this big, you know, turn on a die moment. Occasionally they do. And it makes for a great Hollywood story. But for most of us, it starts piece by piece by piece. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. I also appreciate I appreciate you sharing that so much of what you were doing during that time was not just attacking your thoughts on a thought level. I'm hearing you are using your body to quiet the mind to sort of calm the mind. You're working out. You're doing some form of meditation.

You have your spiritual and religious practices that are there. Your friendships, brotherhood, community aspects. I was a manic about my diet back then. I mean, prescriptive, which had some challenges to it, but it was also helpful because it helped me hit the pendulum back from a wheels off approach, right? Yeah, and I think that's so important to talk about because in today's world, we often think like, okay, we're going to solve the problem through the landscape of where the problem is. So so much focus on anxiety, not that it's not beneficial, is primarily on, okay, what do we do to handle our thoughts? And there's not enough conversation. about this fact that anxiety is not just in the brain or just in our mind.

It's in your body. It's in our body. Can you talk more about that? Yeah. I'll just say it as boldly as I can. I got two PhDs. I've sat with the smartest people. You can't beat anxiety by outthinking it.

It will defeat you, period. You can't learn enough stuff about the hypothalamus interacts with the amygdala and how it modulates cortisol. You can't because anxiety will just move and it will just move because it's job. It's not something to figure out. It's a job isn't to be solved. Its job is to keep you safe. And it doesn't play fair and it doesn't use facts.

It uses feelings and emotions. And those aren't designed to tell you the truth. They're designed to keep you alive. And so if you try to solve anxiety with how you feel and you try to solve anxiety with thinking it through, by the way, I think that's one of the curses of the modern mental health. system is that we've been told mental health is just getting all the right thoughts in the right order, then you're going to be okay. And they totally divorce the mind from the body. And I think that's madness, right? That your thoughts don't happen in a vacuum. My thoughts are heavily influenced by the

pizza I had last night or the sleep I didn't get, right? Even so much that if a friend invites me to go watch the fights, and I know if we go watch the fights, he's going to have a whole bunch of chips in K-So, he's going to have a whole bunch of beers and all. And try as I may, I'm going to go and I'm going to eat not well, right? I have to think in the morning you're going to have to be extra careful to be a present dad. You have to be extra careful to be a present husband because you're going to be exhausted. Your blood sugar is still going to try to figure out what day it is and all those modulations, right? So I think it's madness to try to take on anxiety with your thoughts because you can't win.

where you can quiet the alarm systems to begin to look at your ecosystem of your life and say, what if I started putting out these fires, then the smoke stops filling up my kitchen and the alarm shuts itself off. And then it only rings if we need to. And so, yeah, I think, and we have a, I just need to read one more book. I need to read one more book. I need to have one more cup of coffee. I need to figure out, you need to go for a walk, right? You need to call a counselor.

You need to start lifting weights. need to look at your pantry and say, really, right? You need to tell your husband, I'm struggling with our marriage right now. When your kid bust into the house and just runs into their room and slams the door, you need to be honest about like my relationship with my kids is not good. Like that's where you start with the anxiety alarms, not with another nerd article, right? So what are the categories of the big fires that are typically going on in people's lives that have us in a place where we are perpetually on this rat race of anxiety, right? It's not the smoke alarm.

The smoke alarm is telling you that there's a fire, but you're not saying there's not a fire. In fact, you're saying there are fires in some people's lives. There's fires in all of our lives, yeah. What are some examples of those fires, some of those key categories that people are working through? So my goal in writing this book was to distill them down. If I could hand myself and I could hand my buddy who's a law professor and I could hand my 13 year old son the same roadmap, what would that look like?

And if I took everything to still it down into a series of actions. I think we live, you've heard this, we're in the attention economy, right? I think that's a nice way of saying it. I think we're in the distraction economy where if we actually pay attention to the reality that sits before us, that is our lives. How stressed we are, how indebted we are, how exhausted we are, the state of our relationships. It would be chaos. And so, Netflix just cranks up the next show. It just, it doesn't even need us to, like, do this.

To, like, change this. It just starts the next show for you. And it knows you. It knows you better than you do. And so it's like, you're going to like this one, Drew. Just don't even move. And we just go, okay, I just watch. It just starts it, the next one.

Alexa cranks up the music you want to hear in the morning. And your phone can tell you, I mean, your wristwold. watch can tell you how well you slept we outsource everything and we are distracted by everything so i think the the best titled book of all time is vander colks the body keeps the score whether you want to believe it or not as distracted as you are as numbed out as you are your body knows that your marriage is falling apart your body knows that your health is at risk your body knows that you're about to get fired and it will give you that sense of unease it will shut down the the system. It'll spike the system. It'll do what it's going to do to try to get your attention.

The body knows, man. And so I think you have to choose reality. What is the state of my marriage? What's the state of my relationship with my kids and my family? What's the state of my finances? What are the state of my home? My work? These things that matter, the state of my spiritual practice. Where am I in space? The next one is connection. I think we've, I'm sure you've hit on your, this on your show a million times, but we've created the loneliest generation in human history. And our bodies, we are tribal at best and we are not designed to live these isolated, bifurcated lives. And our bodies are, it's killing us. The loneliness is killing us. And so I'll say this as directly as I can. You cannot build a life of longevity,

of mental health, of emotional health, of spiritual health, of physical health, on a platform of loneliness, on a foundation of being alone. You have to have other people. And for millions of people, that might be a therapist. That's the only person they got. Great. You've got to start somewhere. For some people, that might be a local pastor.

For some, it might be your local buddy. Most of us have nobody, and we drown our spouses with all of our stuff. And they can't be our lover and co-earner and co-household manager and also carry all of our stuff, too. That's just too much burden for one person now. ask. I mean, one person to carry. And so you got to choose connection. The third one is freedom. And I don't mean that in the patriotic like peep-poo kind of sense, but I mean like choose freedom.

If you take the map of the last hundred years of mental health diagnostics, I'm going to include prison sentences in there too because there's some there's some great research about men. And their mental health comes out in different ways than women. you can lay the stock market directly over that map and it almost matches. We're the most indebted society ever and we did it to ourselves. And you are insane if you pay cash for a car. You're insane if you pay a house for a cash for a house with the interest rates so low as they were the last few years. Right now they're high, but if you think of it this way,

there's part of your brain that's designed for forward thinking and for problem solving. And a 2.9% APR on a home, that is a good mathematical proposition. That's a good deal. Buying a car and you have no interest for 60 months, that's a good mathematical deal. There's also a part of your brain that's designed to keep you safe. And if that part of your brain knows, Drew says just the wrong sentence on his show and he loses his job. He loses his home. He loses his cars. His kids don't have food. And so if you're heavily indebted and the studies are just now starting to come out slowly but surely about the mental health and emotional toll of owing other people money, the nerd word is agency or autonomy. When the bank tells you what you're going to do tomorrow, when that toxic boss tells you what you're going to do tomorrow, when that abusive husband tells you what you're going to do tomorrow because of economic insecurity because you owe money, your brain can't let you sleep.

It can't. It can't let you be still. it can't let you have peace. It will keep that cortisol buzz above baseline because you are at war. You're not safe. And so there's freedom from finances. There's freedom with your calendar. There's freedom from boundaries.

How many of our friends in-law still tell them what they're going to do for the holidays, right? Regardless whether you can afford it, what the stress level is on your family, how exhausted you all are. And then you're all flying. Y'all get on a plan. You're coming here for Christmas, right? Or for whatever the holidays. And so who is running your life?

And if you can take back agency and take back autonomy, and we can get into some very specifics, but that's another one. And then there's mindfulness, that's awareness. And we've talked about the spiritual practice. And then there's a spiritual practice of belief in. There's health and healing, which you've really led the way on culturally having a conversation about what is physical health and diet and mental health. What do those things look like? And how do you heal there? But if you take those into account, man, if you're actually,

out of whack in any of those areas, your body would be letting you down if it didn't sound the alarms. So the idea and the principle is that when we have these different areas of our life in not harmony, because that makes it sound like they all got to be perfect, but that we have momentum with those. We're on the way towards them. And most of them are things that we'll be working on our entire lives in a good way, right? In a good way. Some might have very specific ones, like specific goals that are there. But when we have momentum towards them, it's a signal to our body and our mind that,

hey, we have agency over our lives. And it creates a buffer between us and this sort of external world that previously we were so in the story of that we couldn't see left, right or center, which caused anxiety in the first place. Is that kind of the concept?

Yeah, I've been a part of a number of SWAT training programs where I'm the bad guy and they come get me. It always ends horribly for me, right? They always like it flashed banged and hogtie, the whole thing. But when you're around those guys going into wild situations and it is intense and there's yelling and codes and guns, the whole thing, there's no anxiety. There's high stress, high tension, high performance, no anxiety. Because they they have full agency. They know exactly what they're doing. They know exactly what their role is. And so anxiety is not about the level of stress. Anxiety is about are you in the backseat or the driver's seat of your own life?

And you can deal with a lot. You can, oh, I have a co-worker named Jade Warshaw. Her and her husband paid off $400,000 a $1,000 to the loans. That's in madness. That's wild. But she says they never had anxiety because they had a plan and they worked that plan for seven years. They stayed in a one-bedroom apartment and they stayed on an air mattress. That's how they chose to do it.

they weren't anxious. It was exhausting. And they worked every job they could. And they put every penny towards getting this digging themselves out of the hole they dug for themselves. But they were never anxious. And that's the difference. There's a difference between discomfort and anxiety. So the moment you get back in the driver's seat of your own life, your body, almost regardless of the issue, goes, all right, Drew's driving again. When you sound the alarms off because he knows what's going on now.

And, man, then you head into the, the only way to heal from anxiety. is through it, is right through the middle of it. And so there's going to be tension and anger and rage and angst and heartache as you solve some of these challenges. But yeah, it's the rest of your life. And by the way, we do that all across the board, right? There's, you can never brush your teeth so great on a Wednesday morning that you're good for the next two weeks.

We've all, we know that. You do it in the morning, you do it in the evening, you do it every day. Forever, right? We know that. Same with, you can never, like, so I can put a cheeseburger in front of you and you just, you're like, I'm going to have a salad. That choice is not going to, like, carry your diet for the next two weeks, right? You made that one choice, great, good for you.

And then you've got to make that choice of the next meal. And then the next meal, and then the next meal, right? So similarly, when you're building a non-anxious life, it's a choice to take a hard path towards healing, not the hard path towards exhaustion and frustration and, and, and, um, and all of the maladies that come with that path. When you picked up the phone and you called your friend, this doctor, I drove to see him. And you drove to see him three hours away.

Yeah, yeah. Right? Yeah. And you let him know that you were coming to him. What did he say to you? I didn't tell him. I busted into his office. And I busted into his office and I walked straight past his receptionist.

And I'll never, I still have it, sir, sir. She was, as I just walked down his probably not hip, a compliant hallway, and I walked straight all the way back to his office. And back then, I was a hyper, hyper guy. And so whenever I walked in, I was always like, let's do this. I was just a loud, moron. And so I busted into his office, and he said, Doloni, what are you doing? And he says to this day, he still gets goosebumps. But I pointed at him and said, hey, there's something wrong in my head, and I don't know what it is.

I'm not okay. and he said my brother sit down let's figure it out and he sat with me for two and a half hours no appointment no nothing and he sat with me and um that was the i mean i'm forever grateful but that was the that was the turning point what did he say what were the things that he helped you get clarity on that started the roadmap of having more awareness and accepting the reality around you because it sounded like partly you know you were in this place where you knew and you had enough awareness to know that you were kind of being driven by all these other stories and motivations in your life that were skewing a little bit of reality.

So one of the things I was struggling with right before I sold my house and moved was I thought my house was falling apart. It had normal. Your marriage. No, my home. My actual home. Okay, got it. So if you look at your home like with the doors, there's those little, sometimes there's a little, they're just settling.

cracks. There's nothing. Just sheet rock and sitting on top of a home that moves a little bit, or it might be in the foundation a little bit. And I was convinced, I was convinced, Drew, my house was falling apart that the whole thing was going to slide off into the street. And I was on a little bit of a hill. And unbeknownst to me, I had contractors over, I had buddies over, had everybody over. And the contractor would, when a Texas contractor won't take your money, they would say, I mean, there's nothing, your house looks great. Your house is great. That's a settling crack me and that's totally normal I can fix that I'm not even going to do that I'm not going to take your money it's great the contractor would leave and I would think they're they don't

see it they're crazy right so you start this these grandiose thoughts of I can see things other people can't because you're trying to backfill a story that you feel in your body that they're wrong that this thing's going to fall down and eventually this house is going to fall down but this whole market is going to fall down everything's coming down right and by the way this was before YouTube really kicked off now I could YouTube this and find somebody who would tell me the story I want to hear. And I think that's where we get these echo chamber worlds that we've created for ourselves. But unbeknownst to me, my wife called a buddy of mine who had just had a new kid. And my buddy calls me. And he said, hey, I want to come down

and you want you to meet my new son. I want to meet your new son. And that's great. His dad was a famous architect in West Texas. So he drove down and I walked him through the house and showed him everything and we walked out to the driveway and I'll never forget he's a banker he's had the same haircut since he was born right just a perfect part shirt tucked in totally opposite of me and he looked at me on my driveway like two texas guys in the texas heat and he said your house is good it's not falling down this is the last time we hear about this conversation you're drowning your wife with this nonsense stop and I didn't know my wife had said I'm worried about my husband I I think he's starting to come on glued.

And, but that was the first time I thought, because I trusted him. That was the first time I thought, maybe it's me. And so when I went and sat down with my buddy who was the doctor, I went with that idea that maybe it's not me. I mean, I'm sorry, maybe it is me. And so some of the key things that my buddy told me was, do you trust me? And he would point, like, I have a medical degree. Do you trust me? And I'd say, yeah.

And he said, your head's not working right right now. and you've let this go in for so long that to use my analogy, this isn't his words, but your smoke detector needs to be recalibrated. It's not working right anymore, right? And we've all been in that hotel room where you turn the water on too hot

and it sets off the alarm or whatever that it was just going off all the time. And so he was the one that used an analogy that I don't think holds, but it held in that moment, which is if you were training for a marathon and you stepped off a curb and you broke your ankle,

nobody would tell you to just keep running through it. Nobody would tell you to stop being such a wimp or a coward. No one would tell you just to pray it away. They would all tell you, stop running. Stop. Let's figure out where the break is. Let's solve for that break. Then let's take a period of time and let your leg heal.

Then let's go to rehab and practice. And then we'll get back on the road. And everyone would be okay with that. And he said, you have a broken leg. It's in your mind right now. We're going to get a squared up. And that analogy in that moment held true. I was like, I'll buy that.

I'll buy that. You know, you're part of the Ramsey group. Yeah, yeah. And Dave Ramsey wrote the intro to this book. It was great. And I've shared with my audience before that, you know, Total Money Makeover was a great book. It completely changed my life. Okay, yeah.

I've shared that with my audience back in the day. And really helped, even with a father who was a chief financial officer of like a health care company and everything. I grew up in a household where that had such good money habits, but in a way also like my, I never learned practically. I don't think my dad had a roadmap. He just thought I would learn through osmosis. Ah, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So even though my dad was an incredible saver, worked really hard, like, you know, debt was something always that he avoided in his life. I never got the 101, 101, 102, you know, the literal basics.

And in the total money makeover plan, like literally like step one is like baby step. Get a thousand bucks. Get a thousand bucks. Yeah. What's the equivalent when it comes to people listening. They're nodding their heads. They're paying attention to you. They're thinking like, this makes a lot of sense.

I get it. Like anxiety is really preventing me from reaching for and seeing through the goals and dreams in my life. Okay, now how do I get started from here? What's baby step number one? That's a good question. I'll come back to an answer, but when all those things I just laid out, right, I think the presenting issue in your life may be a good place to start. And so whatever your focus is

your baby step might be your thing, right? But I think two places all of us can start is, number one, take a quick inventory of the state of your main relationships and your home. What does my home feel like? Is my home feel warm or is my home feel chaotic? Is my home feel is a place where my shoulders drop or is my home a place where my shoulders tints up? That's a good place to start because from there you're going to ask yourself, what's the state of my marriage?

What's the state of my relationship with my kids? What's the state of my finances, right? So you're going to ask that question, how's my home? How secure are we at work? Do I leave the house with a smile on my face when I head into work? Or do I begin tensing up 15 minutes before I walk out the door all the way to work and then I sit in the parking lot for 10 minutes until I have to go in, right? That's number one.

Number two, if you don't know where to start, there's always a place to call somebody and look across the table at them and say, I'm not okay. If you know nowhere else to start, start there. And occasionally, you'll get somebody that says, I'm so sorry, tell me. More than likely, you're going to get somebody who gives you some awful advice. that was stitched into a pillow somewhere or that they read on Instagram somewhere. So if you can wade through that awful advice, the great grief expert David Kessler, he says grief demands a witness. And I think it follows, that sort of ideal follows everywhere.

Our bodies demand somebody, sit in front of you and say, I'm not okay. Do you love me still? And if they stay, they do, right? I think that's why confession is wired into every religious practice known to man. And I think we think confession is tell all the bad things you did. I don't think that was the original idea. The original idea was, do you fully see me and do you still love me? And if the person stayed, then they did.

Right. And so I think that our group body goes, when somebody hears, I'm not okay too. What's going on in your world? And, man, that's a good place to start. I have a weekly men's group that meets up in Los Angeles here in L.A. We live on the west side. And a bunch of my friends for the last like seven years, it's a group of guys. We call it man morning.

We meet every Thursday and we'll pick a different spot here in Los Angeles. We'll go on a hike. We'll go by the beach. We'll walk somewhere, go to a park. Start at 8 a.m. And literally we kick it off. It's about eight of us, 10 of us, depending on the week. And we'll kick it off with a simple question.

We'll say, all right, let's go around the table and like tell me one thing this week that you're celebrating. Because, you know, we all have a tendency, especially as men, to not sort of acknowledge. the celebratory moments in our life, right? We don't pat ourselves on the back. We just go, go, go. Not just men, everybody struggles with this, but I think in particular men deal with that. And the next question is, what are you navigating?

I like that word navigating, and I borrow this from a group that I'm part of called Summit Series. I like that word navigating because I think also stereotypically, men tend to not think about opening up to other people, especially, other men. And there's a lot of nuances and conversations and societal stuff inside of that. So we need a brotherhood. We need a group of people that we can rely on a safe group of people that we can open up to and share. You were sharing how so many people use their partner as

everything. One of my favorite quotes from a friend of mine that's also in your field, Esther Perel, is what we used to get from an entire village. That's right. We now expect from one person in our lives. And they can't carry that way, right? Yeah. So many people have that. So in our group, what are you celebrating, and then what are you navigating? What's sticky in your life? What's a little bit uncomfortable? And a lot of times people don't know that they even feel that way about a topic in their life until they say it out loud. People come in, I've had many of my friends say, okay, I know the question. They think about it a little bit and they're like, I don't know if I really have anything to share this week. I don't know if there's much going on. And then you sit

there and you hear one person's share. You hear another person share. And there's these amazing amazing insights. And these insights are, number one, everybody's going through something. Right. Even the people that you think that have it completely figured out, they're all going through something. And number two, there's always something that we're navigating. The only question is, do we have in that moment just a little bit of courage and vulnerability to be willing to say it out loud so that not only can other people hear it, but that we can hear it ourselves. That's right. And if you think about our friends in the armed forces in the, you know, in the elite units, they would never head off to a mission without eyes in the sky.

Yet we do that every day in our life. And what you just, that group you have, if, dude, if I could wish one thing upon the men in the Western world, it would be that. You have a group of eight men that you meet with once a week just to say, and you? Right. Because, you're letting seven other guys look at your challenges, the things that you're talking about from the 30,000 feet, right? They're able to give you a perspective that you don't have because you're in it right now. Same with women. If women had a group of people that they met with on a regular basis, what a radical shift

that would be because then we don't walk around posturing. Or, like we talked about earlier, I didn't even know I was fighting that. I didn't even know I was super frustrated. But when someone says, my son's been saying this, and I go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My body is almost like, yes, I've been trying to get your attention all week. Your relationship with your son is kind of starting to separate. And I look at it as he's being disrespectful or he needs to just, no, man, he misses his dad, right? And I hear another man say that out loud or I hear my friend at work and she says it out loud.

And my body goes, yeah, me too, right? I butcher this a little bit, but that's the great CS-Lews quote. like what's the definition of friendship? Oh, you two, right? I think that's just so beautiful, man, because you just can rest in that. And then those men, they tell you, I'm not telling you a thing you don't know.

Here's what I'm navigating. And everyone didn't go, oh, dude, I'm out of here. They all, you all lean in. And there's something to be said for, I'm loved for the things I did well this week, and I'm also loved despite the challenges I'm navigating right now.

And you get people that will stick with you through that. That's magic. I wrote this thing on social media like a few years ago. And it just kind of came to me in this kind of moment. And it was some version, I don't have it in front of me, but it was like your brain is like a detective. It's constantly on the hunt to prove you right with what you believe. So if you believe that the world is anxious,

or if you believe that people have it out for you, or if you believe that you always get the short end of the stick, if you believe that nothing is gone right today, your brain is sort of pre-wired to go and look for all those things, right? How do we start to unwind that even on the tiniest level? How do we catch our brain in that moment when it's deep in a story? So the guy I talked about earlier, his name's Randy, the bioethics professor who was also a monk. Yeah.

He gave me his piece of wisdom once. he said the spirit of our age is sarcasm and pessimism and he said sarcasm and pessimism so often present as wisdom as the you know it's all coming down

you know America's going to fail right you know this next election this is it and if we don't get this one this one's over he said that's the spirit of the age and optimism and joy is looked at as insanity if you think well I think we can all pull together everyone's like oh that guy's an idiot

You know, she doesn't know what she's talking about, right? And so I hold that here in my chest, and then it was reading some Martin Seligman work. And if you asked me what the most profound psychological finding the last hundred years for me is, that was Martin Seligman's, there was this idea that some of us were born Eeyors and some of us were born optimists. And him and his team proved that optimism is a learned behavior. which if you ask me, that means optimism is a choice. And so to answer your question, the first thing is I have to believe that I can, over time, change my default setting from.

It's all coming down to, huh, I'm curious as to why my body's responding that way. But we've solved these problems before, and we're going to solve this one too. You can shift that, and your body will default to one of those. And for 99% of us, right now it defaults to end of time, end of time, end of time. So number one, it's belief. I can work and change this. The second thing is, man, it's as crude as a hammer trying to dry wall a house. But for a season, I would walk through my living room and my wife would hear me.

And I would just literally say loud as possible in the house. Nope, I would yell it. Nope, not going to do it. I was stopping those thoughts in their tracks. And then I started quietly asking myself, all right, what was going on in my day that that track got started again, that here we go down the rumination path, or here we go down the imaginary conversation with my boss path, or my imaginary conversation with my spouse path, or whatever, or my kid's teacher.

And why did I start heading down? Sometimes it was because I ate a bunch of junk food. Sometimes it was because I was stressed at work. Sometimes it was fill in the blank, but I began to take control of those behaviors. And over time, a sucker just began to, the default setting just slowly started to turn. and it's been a pretty remarkable transition. What does this look like in real time? I walk in the house and I'll use something so absurd

because my wife is not like this at all, but let's say my wife always left wet towels in the bathroom floor. That's more of a me thing than her thing, but for this example, let's blame her. And there's wet towels on the floor. And finally one night I say, hey, like, it makes me feel less than. It makes me feel disrespectful if I walk in the house

and there's just wet towels all over the place and the bathroom's trashed and whatever. And she says, well, it makes me feel disrespectful and we go through the whole talk. And we come to an agreement and the next afternoon I get home and I walk in the bathroom and boom, wet towels, water everywhere.

Old John would have immediately gone to. She just rubbing it in. She didn't buy into once. I knew it. I knew it and I would create a whole cascade of stories. After years of stopping that nonsense and knowing my wife loves me, and my wife is my best friend and partner, we're going to figure this stuff out.

If I walk in now and see those towels, my default setting is, oh my gosh, we just talked about this last night. What in her day must have gone off the rails that she had to get out this fast? I'm going to pick that up and I'm going to go take care of the dishes too. Right. That's what that looks like in real time. What if I didn't make up imaginary stories about my husband? I didn't make up imaginary stories about my kids.

What if I had a real question I asked them? And otherwise, I lived with, I think we can solve this challenge. Man, you're talking about an entire new path for your mind, your body, your spirit, all of it. And then together, all of us, right? You know, I think one thing that I often think about in this like living a non-anxious life is how important is it for people to turn off the news? What are your thoughts on that? In the traditional sense. Yeah.

I mean, look, they're all publicly traded companies. They have one job. And I don't hate them for it. They have one job. And their job is to make money, which means their job is to sell ads. which means their job is to get your attention long enough to put this commercial in front of you. Their job is not to tell you the truth. Their job is not to give you advice that's going to get through your day and help you live a better life.

Their job is to sell ads. And so if you can watch the news on occasion with that like almost watching Big Brother, like I wonder what's going on in the house kind of thing. I've never watched Big Brother, or Survivor. then sure. But if you're going to the news every day as your source of, as your roadmap for how to do life, it's a constant stream of negativity and spin up and freak out and it's all coming down. Because when you're freaked out, and you know this from neuroscience, when your body goes to

fight or flight, your ability to critically assess a situation is off. Your body doesn't want you critically assessing a situation. It wants you running as fast as you can. And so it's not designed to be like, hey, does my neighbor who has a different political sign in the yard? Do they really want the end of democracy? It doesn't want that. Once you pull it out of your car and looking and seeing it and going, I knew it. And boom, we're off to the races, right?

And so I think we're all served by turning it off. Turn it off. There's a great researcher and I, its name escapes me right now. But we're studying when, you know, when it all goes down, right? What's the best hedge against the grid going down or the food system imploding? And he came back and said, I believe the best hedge is having great relationships with your closest neighbors. And I thought, wow, no stockpile of meat in the deep freezers and this and this and, you know,

non-perishable goods under the house. Really be close with your neighbors. And y'all will get through it together because civilizations have throughout history. Those who aren't, they go to war, right? You know, the opening of the book, Dave Ramsey, one of the things that he highlights that I think a lot of people who tend to think of themselves as trying to lean towards optimism, right? It's this dichotomy that we are living in one of the most prosperous times in society. And yet for a lot of individuals, it feels as if things are going to hell in a handbasket or whatever that quote is. That's it.

That's the quote. Yeah, yeah. And of course, the news can be a part of that. Social media is a new extension, of course, of the news that can be a part of that too. And one thing that I've seen from the happiest people in my life and then also the individuals that feel the most anxious in my life is that, again, when our brain is wired to look for proving a particular point or a belief, we will go and seek that thing out and say, oh, there's the evidence for that thing.

Right. Now I know we actually are. It's this person's fault. It's this group's fault. And we tend to not want to have agency or focus on the things that we want to. And there's some part of that that feels comfortable to the ego. Right. There's the there's the ego inside of us that wants to make things wrong. It wants to make the red light wrong for being read that long. Because if the world is wrong, then the hope is by default. at least I'm pointing to the fact that I'm a little bit more right. Where do you think that that energy, where does that void, where does that sort of hungry ghost that's in some of us that is looking for that negativity? You know, I believe that people are born pure. And yet some people feel like, there's that thing inside of me. There's that void that is constantly wanting to make others and people and situations. wrong and escalating things.

Where does that come from? I mean, there's a whole bunch of places it comes from. I think one of the big ones is we had a generation of parents come home from World War II and got to work and they took their hurt and their PTSD and their challenges and they channeled all that into

we're going to build and accomplish. And they handed that baton off to another generation who saw that work ethic and saw that opportunity and just laid out in front of them and they went hard at it. And those marriages fell apart. And they got the big house and the big cars and they felt hollow too. And then there's a generation of kids who don't buy it. And they're looking around and all of these flashy, shiny things didn't fill us up.

It didn't work. If you look back at all the great psychological theories, many of them, especially the beginning, pointed to this notion of self-actualization. If you read some of Jung's work, we're here. We have it all. We have everything. And we have to come to terms what the self was never meant to be the center of the universe and hold it up. And so we've asked the self to do something you can't do. And the second big one is we grew up in these homes where it was our job.

When our parents were working as hard as they could, it was the kid's job to rent. regulate the emotions of the adults in their household. How many times have you seen on TV shows or heard from your friends? Hey, don't say that. Dad's going to get mad. You better not do that. Or mom's going to get really upset. You know, that sets Mom off.

You hear that when you're four? It becomes your job as a four-year-old to make sure mom and dads act appropriately. That is a burden no four-year-old can bear. And they become 10-year-olds, and they become 20-year-old. And pretty soon, they're holding up their bosses. They're holding up their neighbors. They're holding up their politicians. You abandoned me by voting for the...

And then it becomes us versus the world. And I can't carry anymore. So the other day I got pulled over, Drew, I was going way too fast. Like how fast? A lot. I got pulled over. I was at the end of a five-hour trip and I was tired and I did. I was hammering it.

I wouldn't pay attention. And I got pulled over. And I literally smiled. And the police officer came. came and I smiled and I handed him my stuff. There's nothing. Hey man. And I hand it to him. And he kind of looked at me and took it and I said, I was going way too fast. That wasn't the, it wasn't his fault. He's doing his job, keeping the road safe. He wasn't the speed limits. I was me. I did that. And I'm okay with that. My wife loves me. My kids love me. My kids are

healthy. Like I'm, I'm not trying to hold up the world. And when you're not trying to hold up the world, you can make space for, hey, I might be wrong. When I don't have to put this image up. I'm not having to get the song just right or everybody runs out. No, I was driving too fast. That was on me. Right. I love how you said that. It wasn't the red light's fault. You ran the red light and there's a consequence to it and that's okay. We don't like consequences in our culture. We don't like them. We have been able to postpone and punt reality through government borrowing through water that just magically pumps out of the ground from our ability to just move. I had one psychology professor of mine said, what would happen in our communities

if you could never move? What conversations would you have? What would you do at your local church? What would you do at your local restaurant? How would you tip at your local restaurant? If you could never move out of your city. You could never move from your home. That's just where you lived, right? And so we've got all these different pieces and we've created these little insular bubbles. I can't hold my parents up anymore. I can't hold up the world anymore. I'm tired. I don't have the skill set anymore. I'm out. I'm tired of getting judge. I'm tired of getting hated. I'm tired of not being enough for anybody.

The world's going to bend to me. And when you start worshipping yourself, then you end up worshipping how you feel. And when you worship how you feel, and you pathologize life. You pathologize sadness and heartbreak and loss. And you're supposed to be sad if your mom passes away. You're supposed to be heartbroken if your boss says,

hey, I think we have to cut your wing of our division, right? You're supposed to. That's life. That's good. It's holy. It's right. But we try to cut it out and pretend it's not real. And then you start getting down a path of creating your own truth and you expect the world to bend to you.

And then you're sitting at that stoplight and you just run it and you get pulled over. And you get mad at the police officer. That was on you. Right. So I think it's all those things, all in this one big, mushy mess. That's what I start the whole book with, dude, you've got to choose reality. You can borrow your way all day long. Math is math.

there's an accounting to be paid at some point. You can eat what you want right now. You will pay the piper. You can isolate yourself, play video games, watch Netflix, just spend all your time on your spin class and on your this class and then you're this class and on you're this class. There will be a price to be paid. And so it's coming back and owning reality, choosing reality. Here's my life right now.

Here's the truth. And let's start here. You know, I was looking at some of the accounts that you follow on Instagram because I learn a lot about people by like, hey, who do you, who do you follow? You know, who are the common things? Who are some people that I might have seen? And I saw that one of the groups. I'll, I'll posit this because I'm interested to hear this question. I intentionally also, I follow people that I like and that I've got relationship with, but I also intentionally

follow people I disagree with. Yeah. I think that's very healthy. I like to see, yeah, make sure my ecosystem is balanced, right? Totally, totally. I do a lot of that on Twitter. I follow all sorts of people that have all sorts of different thoughts. I want to hear the full debate on all things. One of the groups that I saw that, you were following on on Instagram was uh John and Julie Gottman the Gobman Institute. Yeah. Yeah. They're the goats, man. The goats. The greatest whole time. They've been on this podcast before. Had they really? I've been, I've been a big fan of them. Yeah. One of the things that they talk about is that when it comes to connection primarily in, you know, these relationships, these intimate

relationships, our spouse, our boyfriend, our partner, you know, especially these committed long-term relationships. So much of what prevents connection. And, you know, And so much of what creates disconnection is unresolved resentment. Unresolved resentment that hasn't been voiced but also has this other side of the coin, which is how did I contribute to that? How did I play a part in that? When you were having this awareness moment, driving to your friend, barging into his office and getting a reality check of what was going on in your world,

How did you reestablish connection in your own home? Some of the behaviors you were saying, selling the house, constantly making your wife feel that something was worried about you by checking on the foundation and maybe a whole host of other things, seems like it was driving some sense of disconnection. Because again, that disconnection was a byproduct of the anxiety that was going on in your life. How did you reestablish? And I think that's the reason that I'm also interested

is that when I said, you know, what's baby step number one? You said, okay, before we go out into the rest of the world, we need to fix our own home. Yeah. So how did you do that within your own home? It was real hard because when you choose reality, you have to choose, here's the state of things. And it was a slow peeling back of the onion.

Like, my wife had had to create her own safe cocoon where she had friends. she reached out to and she kept her feelings quiet because I would lecture her for two hours on the state of things or she didn't want to sit down and have meandering Saturday morning conversations with me over coffee while our son played in the floor because I wasn't a good conversation partner because I did a lot of lecturing and preaching all the time. She didn't want to go to dinner events with me because I would always take over and be like, this is why the keto diet is the greatest diet and you shouldn't eat that. I was that guy man. And so um,

it took a long time and it took a couple of are we going to keep doing this like hard moments of we need to sit across the table and be adults and say are we going to stay married is this our path and and if we are and this is from the great ester per ral four or five you know most adults will have four or five great loves in their lifetime and if they work really hard it can be with the same person and it was okay I'm new I'm new I'm I'm new. You're new. Are we willing to go create a new marriage now? And it was hard. It was really hard. And so I think that's where we get the Rocky montage movie moment wrong in these kind of, I'm going to change my life. I'm going to build an unencious life. I'm going to start with choosing reality. I'm going to start with choosing to say something out loud to my friend. I'm not okay. God tell me what's going on. My husband's abusing me. Right. It's out and now you've got to deal with that. Or I've got a secret credit card.

I've run up $80,000. My husband doesn't know. I just said it out loud. I cheated on my husband. I hit my kid. Like whatever you're holing in there, that's just the beginning, man. The waterfall starts.

And so, dude, there's a lot of counseling. It was a lot of commitment to coming up with ways that we talk to one another. I'll tell you one of the magic moments, one of the magic statements that has radically changed my household is my commitment to not solve my wife as though she's a puzzle

or not try to fix her as though she's a car engine but instead we ask ourselves we ask each other this question every day. It's the best way I can love you today and what is your picture for what this thing looks like that we're about to do? What's your picture of it? I can take a quick diversion on that one if you want because I think that's instructive.

Yeah, please. It comes from the great Bernie Brown, but it's this idea that the joke I tell as my wife comes in and says, hey, this Friday night, you and me are going to go on the hottest date of our lives, and she walks away. And, dude, I'm off to the races. I want to know, like, Monday, I'm like, where are we going? Tuesday, I'm like, what am I going to be wearing? And for how long? And Wednesday, I'm like, how are we going to land a helicopter on the yard and take us to this romantic rendezvous?

and do I have my passport ready. And Friday rolls around and I go home from work. I shower. I put on a suit and I walk out. She's walking out. She's wearing a t-shirt and running shorts. And I'm like, what are you doing? She says, what are you doing?

And I say, you said, we're going on the hottest date of my life. And she said, yes, burritos are seven for a dollar down at Taco House. I love tacos. She loves burritos. But when she said the phrase, hot date, I had a picture. And she had a picture. and we both just talked right past each other. And so when couples say when a wife finally gets the courage to say to her stoic,

not really present husband, I need some help around here. Please, I'm drowning. He sees help as, maybe. All right, as soon as the game's over, and as soon as Saturday afternoon comes around, and as soon as all, what do you need? And for her, help means when you get home, Can you turn your phone off and see me and hear me? Can you just scan the room to see if the dishes need help?

Because if they're still in the sink, you know I've had a day from hell with the kids, right? And so they're talking past each other. And in most kitchen situations, not all. If she sat down and said, here's what I need from you and spell that out. It's not romantic and it's not Hollywood, but it's reality. It's honest. It gives him a chance to say, I'm not doing that. or absolutely.

And so in my house, what's your picture? We're going to visit your mom. What's your picture of that look like? Because I want to get there and get out of the truck and go fishing immediately and come back in when it's time for bed. Your picture is you want me to sit on the couch and laugh and tell stories. What's our picture for this trip look like? What is our picture for this date?

What is our picture for the first day of school? And we just align our pictures and words. And I tell you what, man, it has been magic. And then instead of saying, to get your squat workout done this week I don't ask that question it's more of how can I love you today I need to get my squat workout in

and so I'm going to need some help with the kids getting ready for school got it right so how can I love you today and man you you make those two questions a regular practice in your home you'll have to deal with some uncomfortable truths no question but it will help align the people in the house powerful I love that on a practical note have you found it helpful as we go through different life stages,

do you and your wife on a practical level, separate from your faith and religious group and different communities that you guys are part of, do you have, as a recently married man, right? I'm asking for advice. You just got married? About two years. All right, man.

Congratulations. Do you have some regular cadence of checking in with a third party, a counselor, a marriage therapist, or anything like that that you guys do that works for you? We have an annual, I call it the strategic planning retreat, which I had a mentor who was the dean of a Bible college once. It was a mentor who's a friend who said, man, why in the world we strategically plan our businesses but not our homes, our marriages, and our friends. And so we, once a year, we go away and what's the state of things? How are you?

Here's our goals that we had last year for our family. Their financial goals. What's the state of our relationship with our kids? do we still like the trajectory that we're on? Do we want to move? What do we want to do? We have that on a regular basis. When it comes to actually going to seek therapy or something like that at this point where I'm 21 years in. So no, but we both know each other well enough to know. My wife came to me about seven or eight months ago and she said, it's time for you to go see somebody for real. I don't know what that means, but you're not all right. And she was right. And I went and sat with a hard trauma counselor and circled back.

And so her and I have been through this enough that we can have the language and the tools to talk together. And we have really a secrets free marriage. So when it comes to those kind of things, we don't have a regular practice of going to see a third party, if you will. But we're pretty open with our challenges. And we do have regular check-in practices. And that all the way down to every week we get together, even if it's just a few minutes. What's budget? Do we have anything?

And I've learned a new kind of foreplay in my house is going through the calendar. under together, right? Just making sure we're all mapped out for the week, right? And so checking in every Sunday night, checking in, we take long walks on Saturdays, and then once or twice a year, checking in and saying, let's do a deep dive into where we are, what are the metrics, how are you feeling, how am I feeling? What's our blood test telling us, you know, like all of it? And let's really line up where we're headed. You know, so much of your show is like people calling in and then talking to you about the honest challenges that they're going through, right? You have a great production team that helps source all these things.

And then you helping them get a little bit of a reality check and supporting them down the journey of practical steps of where to go. And then every so often some of those people, you're getting a chance to hear from them and seeing what happened in their life, right? Because you only know so much on this first phone call. And I think those powerful testimonials are a great reminder of what's possible. because even recently you had this video where you were talking about a lot of people have this narrative that is it too late for me is it too late i've been doing this habit for so long i've been mismanaging my money which has been creating so much anxiety in my life i have neglected my relationship it's been so many years i can't possibly turn it around now if there's anybody listening today and feels like this anxiety thing is so baked in and sure it might have worked for everybody else that's out there. Yeah. But it's too late for me.

What do you want to say to that individual? It's not true. Yeah. You can. You can. And I think it's important to look at the culture of disempowerment that we have. Nobody makes any money if they look in it and says, I believe in you. They make money when they look at you and say, you're broken and screwed up and messed up.

I've got the solution. Get out your checkbook and I'll give it to you. And so I in many ways I mean that starts the whole conversation we had I don't think our bodies are broken I think that our diet has messed us up I think the Western world has made us insane but I think our body's trying to get our attention

in pretty profound ways and so if I sit down with somebody and say I don't think you're I think you're not broken I think your body's hurting and I think you are too and I believe in you I think you can

and more importantly than just a rah-rah here's my pom-poms and I'll shake them for you. Here's a roadmap. I think that's the missing point is here's a path. And I'm believing you. I want to run through a few more of these categories. We didn't touch too much on. And your advice to people earlier was, of course, again, starting in your own home,

but also what is the most pressing kind of think about what's not going well for you? What's top of mind? What's pressing? And then how does that maybe overlay on top of the main categories you wrote about, right? So you might have a tip, an insight, a pathway that could be its own individual first step for some of these areas, or at least something strong to have somebody consider, right? So we talked about connection, right? I'm going to jump around a little bit. Yeah, do it. Because this is a health and wellness podcast. Let's talk about health and healing. Okay. Right? It sounds like you've been in

that world for a while. You were the guy screaming about keto or other diets or whatever it might be. Yeah. What is, if somebody really feels like that's the area for me, that's the area that I really feel like I'm struggling and I have a lot of anxiety. Could be people have body anxiety. Could be people feel that anxiousness of, oh, my best friend's wedding is coming up and I've neglected my body and I don't feel good in my body. I don't feel healthy in my body. I don't feel strong in my body. It could be somebody feeling like they're older and they've lived the life.

life of, you know, eating all the stuff that people told them to eat on commercials and TV, right? What are some couple things that you want to share for folks on the health and healing path? I think, I'm confident you've covered this on your show. I think we've lost perspective of what, quote, unquote, feeling good even feels like. I don't think we actually know what that feels like anymore because we eat so much garbage and we are so, we cut our sleep so short and we're so amped up all the time with all the stimulants that we put in our bodies. And then we have to cash out the stimulants with some sort of hypnotic at nighttime. And then we just get in that loop-de-loop.

And so I think many of us have lost touch with what our bodies are trying to tell us. The second thing is, is if you are in that lack of sleep, prop up with caffeine, pop up with caffeine, then add sugar, prop up with, and you're in that loop-de-loop, your body's got some natural consequences that'll give you. It's hard to see reality with any sort of clarity when you're in that. I mean, you know this, like from just the work in the hospitals. If you go into a hospital in some sort of mental distress, they're going to give you nourishment, they're going to give you sleep.

And then the sun comes out, and then they can get some actual, like they can actually do a full assessment on you. But when you're asleep and you're malnourished, man, you're a mess, right? Rightfully so, rightfully so. And so I think looking at health and healing, and by the way, health and healing is food, it's exercise, it's all those things, but it's also, if you have not dealt with childhood sexual abuse, your body will continue to solve for that forever. If you grew up in deep abject poverty and you are trying to achieve and earn some magic number in your head that's going to make that go away, you'll never catch it. your body will just keep moving that finish line because its goal isn't homeostasis, its goal is not that, right?

We're never going back there. So I'm going to keep moving. Are you, 5 million? We'll go 10. You'll get 10 million dollars. We're going to go 20. You're never going to be enough if you judge safety by number, right? And so health and healing is looking at the true state.

What is the state of my physical health? I can, I know nobody. professional athletes especially. And funny, I say that, but professional athletes are the ones that seem to know. I don't know anybody that can do this without a coach and without somebody guiding you with some sort of practice, whether that's the person I reach out to,

Gus Vickory helps me with my blood test. You may even know Gus. Dr. Vickory helps me with my blood test. He walks through all of the, here's how these supplements are factoring into your blood test. Here's where your genetics came into play. Here's a program for you. and the folks I use to help me with weightlifting program and protocols.

I know a lot and I can read it online, but I need a coach. I need someone to walk alongside me. And so being able to call somebody and say, I need some help, right? Or do I have a PhD in counseling? And I have a counselor that I've probably bought a lakehouse with how much I've paid her. And she's amazing. And it's worth every penny because I'm able to say, I feel like this, this and this.

And she's able to hold up a mirror and say, let's work through it. And so I think health and healing is it's almost taken a knee to you've tried your ways and your body's trying to get your attention. You're not okay. Let's be honest about that. Let's go get the metrics that we need and let's go get some actual proven plans to get out of this mess. You hinted out your wife told you about, you know, just this was a few months ago, right? You were saying less than a year ago and said, you got to talk to somebody.

Are you in a place right now where you're publicly sharing more about that of what you were working on, what you and then what actually helped you through that process? Yeah, I mean, ultimately, my big dirty secret was I had, my daughter was four and five and six and then seven. My seven-year-old little girl,

perfectly healthy, perfectly, within all the bell curves and all that, she wouldn't hug me. It was a game, it was kind of funny, kind of not funny, but it was year one

and then year two, then it just kept going. and it was getting more progressive, and it was getting more, dad, stop. And if you know me in my house, I never yell in my home. I'm quiet. My friends who come over are disappointed because I'm kind of a nerd. I go to bed early. I like to read my books.

I'm just a dork, right? Or sit down in my basement and play my guitar. And so on stage, I'm loud and running around in my home. It's just kind of a placid place. And there was something not right, and I knew it. And here I was with this show, teaching people about, mental and emotional health and about relationships and parenting and then I go home and my own daughter won't hug me and it was my wife that said hey you're always talking about neuroception

and this this this this scanning that's going on 24-7 365 what if her little body has identified you is not safe and I was like well it's not safe about me I tell her every single day that she's beautiful and that she is brilliant and that she is strong and she can do anything and she goes yeah I'm not talking about the words. And then she pointed up my chest. She said, I'm talking about that nuclear reactor that still sits in there. That still says you're looking for a fight. And that was the first time I called the trauma counselor and I walked in and said,

I just got to, we got to just do this. And so I talked about some stuff that I had never told anyone in my whole life ever from when I was a kid. Never told anybody. Not even my wife, who we'd been married 21 years at the time. And we started body work and a whole much of modality. that I didn't even, I'd heard about them and read about them. I'd never experienced them.

And then about, I was telling some guys a little while ago, about four, maybe three or four weeks ago, a sentence came out of my mouth I couldn't have imagined. And I said the words, and I quote, hey, will you get off of me? Because I've turned into a jungle gym for my daughter. And that reactor, that nuclear reactor, that anxious presence that was always there,

always always on solving for problems that were 30 and 40 years old always on right and so now I've got a girl who she's still a human hurricane she's still chaotic and she's still sassy as I'll get out which I love but she also says hey dad you come read me a book hey dad you color with me hey dad you play dominoes with me I'm going to destroy you dad but we play dominoes right that's a that's a turn and I think often we that kids absorb tension in their homes. So many parents call me and they say, hey, my kids struggling with anxiety. And the first thing I say is,

how are you? What's the state of your marriage? What's the state of your home? Because your kid just absorbs that. Is your kid being bullied at school? It's your school a safe place because your kid's absorbing that, the tension from the adults in their life.

And it never occurred to me. That was me. I was making the money. I had a nice house. I had all the stuff. My kids were clothed and fed. I had all the metrics. but her sweet little body said that guy's not okay.

And so that was on me to do that work. That wasn't on me to blame her. And so that's the other side of what healing looks like, right? Did everything magically go away? No. Do we have problems in my house for sure? But it was worth that word. Powerful.

I mean, one of the beautiful things, I mean, there's so much beautiful things that are going on right now today and age, but there's so many people that are talking about trauma. there's much more awareness over it where really that dialogue wasn't happening and then there's all these new modalities it's new research that's happening about different ways to sort of help that like you were talking about the book the body keeps score to let our body know that things are okay we don't have to hold on to this anymore but that takes confronting and addressing some of the past otherwise it will just perpetuate and stay inside of the body and

what I didn't realize I knew it this academically in fact I've taught on this I just didn't realize it in like the mirror is oh this is how this gets past your home becomes an anxious place and your kids are going to grow up and reproduce an anxious place and that's

I'm creating anxiousness in my home because I have to go address this stuff I got to go do it if you're somebody who's cheated on their spouse and you've buried it and there's that gap between you and your spouse and you feel it and they feel it and it's just moving on that will show up somewhere right it will return it will resurrect at some point and so there's something to be said for I'm drawing a line in the sand I'm worth being well you're worth being well our home is worth warmth and peace whatever that means that might mean we have to

move out of Los Angeles and move to Kansas where we can afford to live and afford to go to a safe school We had this dream. It's not going to happen. Co-hosting the Ramsey Show, people will call, like, I'm a writer, and I live in Manhattan, and I'm doing this thing, and I'm going to make $20,000 a year. And there's just an exhale. And it's like maybe now it's the time, right? And we have all, like you were saying, we have all these advancements, but we can't deny reality.

Like, you can't have that dream and that geographical location and peace. You've got to pick one, right? Or maybe you've got to pick two. And that's hard for us. We don't want, we don't like to bend a reality these days. Well, I appreciate you sharing that. Yeah, no. Thank you for opening up.

I think the more of that people see different individuals that look all sorts of different ways, talking about how they were working through some aspect of trauma that even you being in the space and teaching this and we all have a blind spot. We all have something that maybe we didn't notice. And let me say this too. This is an un-talked about part of healing. our family systems, our work systems, our internal systems crave homeostasis, right? The way things were, the way things have always been.

And so I literally tracked. My heart rate variability has gone up significantly. My heart rate throughout the day has fallen off of that. My body is not at war. And my wife was married to a guy for 21 years. That was. and so the teeter-totter in the home gets hit hard and now her body is craving this safe guy

who has not been safe for 20 years and again you know what I mean by safe like I'm not a murder or an abusive but this I she gets peace this way and this way and this way and this way and now she's on her journey like I've got to relearn how to exist in this new ecosystem and we hear this all the time somebody loses a whole bunch of weight

and it's their spouse that starts showing up with a bunch of food. And their spouse that's like, hey, let's go out. You don't need to cook. Let's go do it. And it's implicit. It's unconscious, but the system must pull you back to what it knows, even if what it knows is killing you. And so there's this consciousness like, I have to know I'm changing the whole architecture of our marriage when I go to counseling. I have to know, and you have to be on the same page with me, I'm going to lose 40 pounds.

I'm going to do this. I'm going to work hard. do it the right way and our whole home is going to change i'm going to get more confident i'm going to walk different i'm going to feel better and you've only known me with back aches and knee pain and i'm going to we're going to do different things and that's going to make you feel weird because i used to be your thing and now it's going to be us the whole dynamic changes and so going back to the ester perrille we have to decide we're going to have a new marriage now and we're going to have to construct it from the floor up and my wife and i now we do it on on a regular basis we've never been

married, we've never been in love and married with an eighth grader and a second grader. It's new. So we've got to build a new marriage. It's new. And then next year, we're going to have a high schooler and a third grader for crying out loud. We've never been married with a high schooler. Marriage gets control, alt delete. We're going to build something cool. And that's going to wrap around that new foundation, right? The cheese keeps getting moved. That's awesome. We get to build something new. And if that's exhausting, buckle up, man, because you get to pick. You want the hard path of of building something new, or do you want the hard path of trying to keep everything the same when things have changed?

So they're both hard. You get to pick which one. Well said. A few more that we want to touch on. Yeah. You mentioned this monk, and he was the one that kind of took you under his wing, right? And taught you a little bit about mindfulness. What does that look like in the context of building a non-anxious life?

So when I say the word mindfulness, when I hear it, I can't help myself, but roll my eyes. It's kind of become trite, and I just imagine this long, bearded dude on a cloud, like in the lotus position, you know. When I say the word mindfulness, I really like to distill it down into two words, awareness and curiosity. Those two words. If I could hand every person on planet earth awareness and curiosity within 30 days, the world would look very different. Because it takes you slowly out of reaction. It takes you slowly out of blame and outsource it. your life and you got to own it. Why's my body reacting to that guy that way? I love him.

What's that receipt I found? Oh no, right? They got to own that versus just getting mad all the time or that guy cuts you off in traffic and you've, we've heard this story a lot, but the guy cut you off in traffic and you instantly grab that wheel and start yelling. These guys, stupid millennial listening to your dumb house music, you're trying to kill us all. Or that guy cut you in traffic and you exhale and you whisper a prayer dear God I hope he gets to the hospital for his wife dies I get to pick which story one of those stories is going to give me an aneurism and one of these stories is going to give me empathy and compassion and bring my heart rate down I get to pick that one of these feels powerful and one of these feels vulnerable and kind of weak

and one of these is the path to longevity and one of these is the path to a miserable existence of anger and anger and rage and hitting the thumbs down and constantly being spun up all the time. And so when I think of mindfulness, it's from the great Judd Brewer's work, just how can we extend the gap between what you feel and what you do next, that gap between stimulus and response.

How can we push it and push it and push it and push it? Just catch yourself once as you're grabbing a handful of cookies and then just ask, do I actually want this cookie? And the second one is, why am I grabbing these cookies? Am I hungry? If you're hungry, create, knock them out. For me, almost always, when I grab candy, it's either I'm exhausted, I'm grabbing

candy because I just got into an issue with a relationship of some sort, almost all the time. And so that's just, that's mindfulness. It's just that gap. And if you can create that gap, man, you can do anything. You teach your kids to create that gap. You can do almost anything. You have this great Instagram post. I think it was a few weeks ago, and you said it was like, I'm paraphrasing here,

but it's like one way of like practicing mindfulness is realizing like in this moment do I need to say something. Yeah. Say nothing. Do I really need to be chiming in right now? Or do I just need to like sit for a second and just kind of listen? Just stop talking. Just stop talking and just kind of be present to what's being said. Yeah.

That's that old fight club line. We, we don't listen. We just wait for our turn to speak. And how different would the world be if I actually listen to what you're saying? I'd speak a lot less. But I think we think we think so little of ourselves, right? I think boundaries are the reverse golden rule, right? And doing to others as you would have them doing to you.

That made sense until about 25 to 30 years ago. And I think it's flipped. And Drew, we talk to ourselves in ways that we would never let somebody talk to that woman who bags our groceries. We would never accept that. We would never accept that. Somebody talked to our kid that way, the way we talk to ourselves. be in jail, right? We don't like ourselves, man. And we don't think we're worthy of sticking up for.

We don't think we're worthy of making changes. We just don't. We don't like ourselves, man. And so I have to always have an answer because if I don't have an answer, if I don't have a comeback, if I don't have a story that's like, oh yeah, that happened to you. Well, one time for me, if I don't have that, then I'm nothing. I'm not even worth the chair I'm sitting in. And that's, that's the crux, right? That's the part that I can. call bullcrap line you are worth the chair you're sitting on and i think especially with men um again i'm over generalizing this and over stereotyping it but men have been so conditioned that you only have value through utility and most of um our wives want us they don't want our advice they don't want our

lectures they just want us to sit by them and most men are so uncomfortable in that space because they feel useless. And if they could understand their utility as their presence, you have value just because you're you and you're here next to this person you said, I do forever, man, that's peace. We just don't have that. You know, in the Buddhist tradition, there's this meditation that is meditating on your death. And there's even a term,

for it, but I forgot. Memental more. Yeah. Yeah. And people hear it initially and they think, and it's so morbid. And yet there's this powerful thing that happens, which is, imagine I'm in this state of anxiety. And some people listening today feel like, you know what? Yeah, I'm living the opposite of a non-anxious life. Yeah. Yeah. And for a second, think, like, okay, close your eyes and sort of imagine like, okay, imagine that like one year out, five years out, ten years out, regardless of your age, and you keep on fast forwarding, kind of you're seeing your life in detail up until really your deathbed. You know, what does your deathbed look like if you are riddled with anxiety from the time that

you are now, whatever age you are, all the way up until the end? And really for a second, you feel it. You know, in this meditation, you're truly like you're imagining, what is the room smell like? What is, who am I surrounded with? Who am I not surrounded with? what do I feel like I didn't accomplish? What risks did I not take?

It's this beautiful book. One of my favorite books that I recommend to people. This is my top, one of my top favorite books on this podcast was, The Five Regrets of the Dying. Are you familiar with this book? No. It's a palliative care nurse from Australia.

Her name is Brani Ware. Okay. And she was taking care of people in hospice, you know, people who literally have days, maybe a week or two left on this planet. And as she would go around and sit with these individuals, there was a beautiful, almost vulnerability that would show up in these individuals' lives,

especially because many of them weren't surrounded by a ton of people. And yet this nurse is there being present with them and saying, trying to make them feel comfortable and saying, what can I do for you? And in a way, they just wanted to be seen and they wanted to be heard for just a moment. And slowly by slowly,

they all, as she started, they would start telling her their top regrets. And she started making a list. Like literally like we see those tick marks in jail and people use these cross marks to see how long they've been around. She said, okay, wow,

this person's regretting the fact that they were living the life that somebody else wanted them to live and not the life that they wanted to live. That's choosing freedom, right? Yeah. Choosing freedom. This other person,

was regretting that they didn't feel that they kept up with the golden relationship in their life, the golden relationships in their life. Choose connection. Choose connection. And it continued. You know, these different five regrets that were there. Letting friendships go, not speaking up,

spending more time on work and not leaving enough room for the people that they wanted to spend time with, right? Coming back to connection. It's a beautiful. book. Check it out. It sort of maps out perfectly to what you have. I wish I found that before I banged my head against the wall for a year. Well, the reason I brought it out is that I actually think that that is in this, we take our anxiety so seriously. And it is so serious for so many of us

who are really feel like it's the only thing that we can see. And kind of combining some of your work and just a little bit of my own readings like this book, Ronnie, I almost feel like such a powerful exercise would be that, okay, let's really fully meditate on that. If you feel your anxiety is running your life, let's go as deep into that as possible. But project it out and see it a decade from now, 20 years from now, 50 years from now, however long, whenever you think that you're going to be there. And what does that feel like? Can you fully feel the regrets of living and anxiety-ridden life? and now ask yourself, what did you sacrifice?

So I don't, I probably need to do, I probably need to do a better job of talking about this. So after I went to meet with that, with my buddy, who was the medical doctor, my wife and I took a $70,000 household income pay cut. She quit her research professor job. And to this day, I still hold some, like in my chest. We moved to another city,

and I took a job as the dean of state, students at a law school. And it was a smaller group of students to work with. And, but it was for me to get well. And she took a part-time job as a teacher at a local school. So she went from Dr. Deloney to, hey, miss, right? Like this. And to be with the kids a little bit more. In addition to that, one of my undergraduate psychology professors invited me to join him on a crisis team. We worked with the police department. And what we did was we got called. I called out and I would just get a text message on my phone that would say 1087 and an address. And 1087 was the police code for someone had died.

It could be a 4-year-old, it could be a 24-year-old, it could be a 98-year-old. And you roll up to that house. And Drew, over the course of several years, I had that moment, cleaning up scenes, hugging moms and telling them that their kid had died, trying to get a room, like a body move before a husband got home because he was going to go bananas. because he was so worried. And it was this moment of this constant healing, if you will. Oh, this ends. This ends.

And it can end like that. It can end with a whole family meeting in a front yard hugging. It can end with a police officer and some crisis guy cleaning up, you know, blood off of a wall before a mom gets home. It can end. Oh, you've got some agency in here, John. You get to decide to some shape, form, you can't decide if a meteor comes, right? I mean, that can't happen. You can't decide if the world implodes and whatever.

If AI takes over and kills us all, you. I can't decide that. But up until that point, I'm going to do the best I can for when this thing ends. Here's what I want that to look like. And you're right. That's a powerful, it's a powerful meditation. It's a powerful reminder. Yeah.

I'm glad you brought that up because I hadn't really put two and two together there, but I think that was a powerful part of my healing adventure was just showing up night after night after night after night. Like, oh, this ends. This ends for all of us. And it can end like this. It can end like that. And as I was going through your book, I really felt like really what you're trying to help everybody do is you're trying to help them. You know, anxiousness in itself is getting rid of it is not the end goal.

No, I don't want to live a house without a smoke detector, man. I don't want it there. Yeah. It's really what matters to you and how do we live a life where we don't end up in that regret, that we're stuck in it, that it prevents us from starting that business, that it prevents us from saying I'm sorry to somebody in our life, that it prevents us from telling somebody that we love them and that we want to heal and we want to repair, that it prevents us from anything else.

What matters to you? What are your goals and dreams? Well, guess what? Anxiety is getting in the way. Let's, it's getting in the way if we let it be the only thing. Right. Right. And don't listen to it and what it's trying to tell us.

But it doesn't have to be that way. If we run from it, one of the neat things about the neurobiology of anxiety is, if you're anxious about something and you avoid it, it gets stronger. Yeah. It reinforces itself. Hey, that worked body. That kept us safe. We didn't die.

Let's do that alarm. Let's do that one louder. Hey, Drew's wife just came home and he hid. He went in his room and shut the door. And then went in the bathroom and sat on the toilet and looked at his phone for 45 minutes and gave himself some numbing time. That worked. Okay, let's do that again. And we're going to do it for 50 minutes, right?

The only way through it is through it. And there's something powerful about once you go through it, it's a lot of it's smoke. And a lot of it's just, when it waves away, like, oh, there's the fire. I can do with that. Before we wrap up here and thank you so much for your time. This has been fantastic. I really appreciate the conversation. Do you want to touch on belief? I know you have a lot of thoughts about how belief plays into anxiety. Obviously, you know, just like you have a wide audience, it comes from all different sorts of traditions, spiritual

traditions, other things. I'd love to hear your thoughts on belief in the context of, you know, both people who have a particular faith and also people who might be looking for some sense of structure, but don't come from a particular type of organized faith. Yeah, this was the hardest chapter of right because I didn't want to put it in there. Faith for me is something that's very, very private and always has been. And faith is something my wife and I, we will argue and lovingly bicker. Like, I think this, well, I think this, we'll read it. So that's the home I come from.

And yet I kept looking at, as we talked a little bit earlier, these psychological theories that we've been told that the cornerstone, like the epicenter of the well life is the self-actualized you. You're the center. And then it was Esther Perraal's work. It was several others' work that started painting this broader picture of we're in a big mess because we as a culture pulled all the threads of a core story that we all were a part of. And that core story is we all go outside of our tent and look to the sky and fall down on our knees and say, Dear God or gods or cosmos, please rain, because if you don't rain, we die. Please.

There was a submission. And that's been a part of our human civilization since the beginning. And then a couple hundred years ago, we figured out how to ship avocados from Guatemala and have them land in Seattle in the middle of the winter and we figured out how to, you know, turn a faucet and water shoots up from the ground. And we figured out, you don't even have to be in the same room to talk. We'll just put it on a little device and you can just stare to, we solved all these problems. And in so doing, we've got very arrogant. And we've begun to worship the scientific method.

If it's not randomized and controlled and double-blinded, it's not real. It does not count. and yet there is a yearning, a shadow, an echo of voices that say there's something bigger than this. And there's that pullback. And so it was me looking at the scientific data. It was me looking at the theological data and saying, truth is, if you were trying to prop up the universe with your own thinking and your own spin class and your own yoga practice and your own dietary religious practice, it will fall down upon you.

And then ultimately it was about a decade ago when I stumbled on that famous This is Water by David Foster Wallace. And there's that just beautiful piece, we are made to worship. Human beings are made to worship and you will worship something. There's no such thing as an atheist. You may not worship God, but you'll worship your beauty or you'll worship your bank account or you'll worship your cars or you'll worship your marriage. You'll worship something. And he goes on to say, if you worship your bank account, you'll never have enough. And if you worship your body, you'll never be beautiful enough and on and on and on.

And so there was this real sense that we have to lose that arrogance. We're not the center of the universe. We're not apart from nature or not above nature. We're not the authors of the cosmos, man. And I have to, as a part of a non-anxious life, I have to take a knee and say, please love me. Please be with me. And if I can open my hands in that way,

think what I wrote about in the book was I told a story about how Dave Ramsey peer pressured me and a couple of our co-workers into skydiving with him. And I'm so terrified of heights. I don't like to take the second floor stairs. Like I hate. I'm so scared of heights. And I had a couple of colleagues say, I'm out. I'm out. And I was like, I'm going to do it.

And the moment I hit it, I was sick for weeks. But belief is not grabbing something tighter. and go into a love that's bigger than you, into a presence that's bigger than you. I'm a Christian guy. That's how our family's bound. But I've been a researcher. I've been a nerd at universities for years. I got friends all over the place.

And I got atheist friends who believe deeply in the birth and life and death and resurrection cycle of nature. And you become part of the earth again and the trees grow to that. I mean, whatever it is, you have to submit to something bigger than yourself. And you have to let the reins go. And I think globally we pulled the thread on none of that's surreal. That's all fantasy. It's all fairy tale. You can't you can't randomize control, study that.

It's not real. And you don't even need it because just hit a button on your cell phone and food will show up on your frontboard to your get. And I think we're all realizing as Dave to loop all the way back around as Dave wrote, we have everything. And we've gone mad. And so there's something about resting in a love that's way bigger than us. Thank you for that. John, this has been great, man. This has been fantastic.

I want to get a chance to one, first of all, shout out the book. It's out. Publication date is October 3rd. October 3rd. Building a non-anxious life. People can get it online. I think you're doing a whole pre-order campaign as well right now, right? Yeah.

If the show goes up before, then I'll, you know, as an author, you know, like pre-ordering is, it helps everybody. It helps the publisher. It helps everybody. So if you pre-order, I'll bribe you with a whole bunch of stuff. if you go to John Deloney.com and buy it. But if you buy it, October 3rd and beyond, it'll be in every store and all over the place. Here's a question that I love to ask guests sometimes. Often there's people that are listening to this podcast who are like, I'm nodding my head.

I'm like with this gentleman. Like I'm here. And I think, okay, great. Like, I got all this stuff. I may not need the book. But I also put into it. And there's plenty of people that get the book anyway. But who, if you're listening today and you're nodding your head and you're

green. Who should you buy this book for in your life? Like you're practicing it. You're living it. Yeah. Right? You're in it. And yet still, you look around. This world is crazy, anxious. We all know somebody who's struggling and they actually just don't have the steps. They don't know the right process. Who could this book be good for in people's lives? I love that question. I was recently talking to a room full of business owners, a couple thousand business owners. And I told them, the last stat I read that if you don't burn out and chronic stress and clinical anxiety into the same bucket, that you're talking about half of America, half of the United States. And so I divided the room up and I said, that's y'all. That's this half. And then I went to the other half of the

room and I said, and y'all are married to them, right? So it's in our homes. It's in everywhere. So if you're sitting there listening to this thinking, this is not me at all. I just don't have the struggles. That's fantastic. I guarantee you somebody you love them. us. And sometimes handing somebody a book about anxiety might not be the best way to show them you love them. But letting you mail it to them in monotonously. Yeah. Yeah, I can just imagine a bunch of husbands being like, honey, you need this one, right? Or a bunch of wives getting that for their partners. There's something to be said for coming home and I'm anxious and I see that the person I love is reading this book on their nightstand. And I say, hey, what's that? And that starts a pretty

beautiful question. So honestly, I wrote it so that my neuroscience friends would go, all right, he knows what he's talking about. And so that my 13-year-old could read it. And that was my, that was my attempt to have a conversation, hard conversation, and I don't think we're having. Yeah. Well, and it's a how-to guy too, by the way. It's, it's, I'm kind of done with the academic, like, let's think about this deep. Like, I need a plan, man. I need a plan. My life's too short, and I got a seven-year-old. I need a plan. And so that's what this book is. Well, you're helping us have the conversation. I just want to say, I appreciate you, appreciate the work that you do. You're changing the lives of so many people that are out there. And this book is just another

step in that right direction. So thank you for coming on the podcast and sharing with us. People can follow your podcast. We have the link in the show notes. Only after the Drew Pruitt show, then you can, if you got time left. And hey, for real, thank you for your hospitality. And you are constantly having conversations on this show that aren't being had in public spaces. And so thank you for doing that. You give people a an opportunity to hear another side of the story that they're not getting at their traditional pharmacist, at their traditional doctor's office, at their traditional mental health practitioner. And so, man, when it comes to practical tips on changing the world, you're doing a lot.

I'm grateful for you. Appreciate it, brother. Thank you, brother. Thank you. Everybody pick up the book. We have the link of the show notes. John, appreciate you, brother. Thanks, man.

Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. Share with a friend who would benefit from listening.

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