The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Adam Riley, Unique Tools and Insights for Anxiety Relief and Healing Emotional Suffering

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

Adam Riley, Unique Tools and Insights for Anxiety Relief and Healing Emotional Suffering Healyouranxiety.org

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, the Chris Voss Show.

Your favorite host in the world, of course, so the Chris Voss Show is with you once again today. Two to three shows a day, 10 to 15 a week. What more do you want from me, people? We turn 15 in three more days. People watching this 10 years from now are going to be like, what? So just add 10 years to it, people. Whatever the date is on the YouTube video.

But guys, we are the family that loves you but doesn't judge you at least not as harshly as your dad did that one time that you fell off the swing i don't know i don't know why i'm emotionally scarring people by bringing back their memories but it's there but we're talking about some of the anxieties that people might have about that today and how to resolve uh the fact that your dad didn't really love you when it comes down to it probably left for milk when you're five no i'm just kidding that's a gamer joke that we tell each other in gaming uh but in the meantime these are the jokes we tell so that we can lead you down the pathway of not minding so much the uh plugs which are go to goodreads.com fortress chris foss youtube.com fortress chris

foss linkedin.com fortress chris foss tiktok forward slash ChrisVossTikTok forward slash ChrisVoss1. And gosh darn it, go to iTunes and give us five-star reviews. See how easy and painless that was? Because we set up a diversionary tactic there of some sort of stupid ramble. And then we pitched you the thing. And you were like, I didn't see that coming, Chris. Only after 1,500 shows. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing gentleman on the show. And he's going to help us with some of the different things we have. I'm a little anxious to have him on the show.

So he's an anxiety coach and expert on helping people get through anxiety. So he's going to help me get through my pre-show or my current show or my early show anxiety. I don't know where we're at with that, but we'll find out because he's the guy who diagnoses it. Adam Riley joins us on the show today. He's the coach of Heal Your Anxiety. And we're going to be talking to him about healing anxiety, dealing with our emotional issues, because God knows I have quite a few. I mean, I think we all know that from watching the show, don't we, folks? And we're going to be talking to him welcome to the show adam how are you thank you very much chris uh great to be here happy birthday 15 years well thank you thank you well if we make it by in the next three to four more days you know i might quit by then and just be like i'm out of here i'm not doing this anymore but probably not if i can help

you with your anxiety to get me through the next few days, you might just make it. There you go. There you go. Well, let's see. 15 and then 16. I think it's the 20 that I'm wondering about. Will I still be alive in 20 years? Anyway, whatever.

Moving on. So give us your.com, Adam. So where can we find you on the interwebs? All right. So my.com is actually a.org. There you go. It's healyouranxiety.org. There you go.

And so give us a little bit of a bio on you. Okay, just a brief bio. I'm from New Zealand, originally from New Zealand. I travel a lot. I'm currently in Lisbon. And I've been working with anxiety intensely for the last three years and yeah that's the quick bio is there you know when you say you're working with it you mean you're helping people and and and issues like that yeah I've been I was training with another coach who

was focused on anxiety who I learned from and through my process with him my and my own anxiety I created my own tools which have been proven to be very effective at helping people with anxiety there you go uh so uh give us a 30,000 overview of kind of what you do how you help people and then we'll get us in the deets in a bit okay so the main thing that i uh want to share first with people is something that i've created which is called the anxiety relief protocol it's three simple steps that you can do anywhere anytime and it has shown to really reduce anxiety very very quickly so this is kind of the main thing that I'm giving away for free. And I want to share as far and wide as I can, I believe it should be a household, a household name, one

day. And then beyond that, for people who want to continue with me, I'm creating a group coaching programs to, let's say the anxiety relief protocol is to help you get relief from anxiety. And afterwards to the programs will be to help you heal anxiety completely so that ideally you're not just getting relief from it, but it's gone. There you go. And you know why, well, let's, let's, before we get into some of the other details on why it's important, et cetera, et cetera, let's talk a little bit about your hero's journey what got you here did you do you suffer from some emotional issues and then anxiety and what's your journey through life that taught you how to deal with this and fix it yeah totally great question uh yeah i feel like i've suffered from most kinds of anxiety and really general anxiety worries about the future

of heads health anxiety but my main anxiety has been a social anxiety so anxiety in groups talking to people meeting people and doing this kind of thing and to be honest I still feel a little anxiety doing this kind of thing sure that's normal though that's normal yeah I think it's it's uh somewhat new to me to do this so I still feel some anxiety but I mean compared to a few years ago I would never get on a show like this wow wow so you made quite a journey then yeah when I was uh when I was in school I was disconnected I had to take a year off of school just because I wasn't able to connect with the kids at school so I was really I really had a lot of anxiety I've had anxiety where it just came over me comes out a lot of people who have anxiety will understand it's like just a

wave of anxiety negative thoughts just kind of takes you over and this feels like there's no way out i think like talking about the hero's journey like the one of the main points for me when i had anxiety was really this feeling like i was broken there was something wrong with me and there was no way to fix it. This was really this horrible feeling, not only the anxiety, but the feeling like I was always going to be like that. And it's only been in the last few years since I started to work with this, and I've spent my whole life trying to find solutions. I won't go into the whole story, but through drinking when I was younger, that kind of gave me some relief i went through a very intense spiritual journey did tons of yoga meditation which kind of helped

but really it was when i started studying with this coach that was dealing with anxiety daniel packard started to learn with him and i started to understand what anxiety was. And I found these tools. From when I found these tools and I understood how anxiety works, I really got the sense that it's possible to be free from it. And that was incredible. It was like not only, yeah, it's like I don't have to be like this forever. I'm not fundamentally broken. This is something inside of me.

This is something that's happening to me that I can work on and I can move towards being free from. And every step that I take towards that freedom, like I get a bit of my life back and I enjoy my life a bit more. My relationships are better. I'm just able to enjoy day-to-day life better. My business is better because i'm able to bring this new energy to it there you go so let's lead into that how does like anxiety and being emotionally uh maybe insecure is the right word or unstable how does that impact our lives and why is that a real big issue it seems obvious but i'd love to hear it from you. Well, yeah, that's a great question.

Something that comes to mind for me, there's so many ways. I mean, I guess I could define anxiety first. I have a kind of a specific way that I define it, which is anything, any kind of fear or uncomfortable emotion that is out of proportion to the situation. So we have a calibrated amount of fear, say, even for showing up on the show, it's normal to be a little nervous because that makes me focus and, you know, prepare. Having some fear before crossing the road is good because you want to check both ways. Having some grief after a sad event, you know, somebody passes, that's normal.

But whenever these emotions are out of calibration to the situation, there's much more than is needed, then I would consider this anxiety. This is kind of like a yeah this excess of emotion how does it affect us i mean i can talk a lot about well social anxiety if people are afraid to say no when they mean no, if they're afraid to set boundaries, if they're afraid to tell somebody how they feel about them, if they're afraid to ask for a raise at work, if they are needy.

Neediness is a form of anxiety. So if you are destroying a relationship, neediness is a kind of strategy based on fear, right? It's based on anxiety. And so you can be destroying a relationship by being too needy, codependency, all this kind of thing that's based on anxiety. A very common anxiety is health anxiety. So if you, you know, we all have to face death. We all have to face difficult situations in our health.

And that's hard enough without having a ton of anxiety about it. Most definitely, yeah. Yes. And that can actually impede your recovery or healing that you may have available to you if you actually have anxiety on top of it. That's not to mention depression, which I think is an extreme form of anxiety. Yes. Yeah. Do you find in your research and working with people that some people think depression and anxiety is hereditary

or maybe it comes from patterns learned or trauma as a child yeah so i lean more towards uh the trauma way of looking at it and trauma obviously can be specific intense events or it can just be the thousands of times in your childhood when you didn't get your needs met yeah and and you blamed yourself or you came up with a strategy to um to get your needs met that you've embodied and are now playing out as an adult um so i lean more towards that. The idea of it being hereditary, I mean, I'm not a doctor, but I would say even if you had a predisposition to having anxiety, even if you had a genetic predisposition to having anxiety, I wouldn't focus on that so much just because whatever your predisposition is,

you can't change that but i do believe that focusing for example doing the anxiety relief protocol uh you can heal a lot of your anxiety even yeah just being predisposed to something doesn't mean you have to have it yeah and i focus more on that space than on the predisposition just because i would prefer to focus on something i can do something about that's true that's true because a lot of people and we're really bad as human beings on on actualizing what's what's going to happen you know the future you know we worry about so much stuff that never happens i think

there's a few different um scholars or or stoics and stuff that have said you know people worry 90 percent of us i am about stuff that isn't even that will never happen you know we we worry we'll think of all these crazy scenarios and and then and then some things are going to happen you know i mean we're all going to die. We're all given a death sentence. I was just listening to, I think, David Goggin's book. And, you know, there are certain finite elements to our life, death and taxes. You know, as someone famously said hundreds of years ago, it still seems true. And so, you know, and you can worry about all you want.

But, you know, there's an old line, one of my favorite lines from the movie, uh, no country full of men is you can't stop what's coming. That's vanity. And, uh, uh, and so there are some things you, you just need to say, Hey, um, you know, uh, let's not blow up everything into a bigger thing than it is. Let's process what's going on in the present right now. And if we want to change the future, how we can change it through being present. And I don't know what your thoughts are on that. Yeah, what comes to me is, you know, the thing with anxiety is that it's not logical, right? These things are all true. And they're like an idea of where we can get to.

You know, we can get to that place where we're like, you know, okay, everyone's going to die, I'm going to die. That's, you know, that's going to happen. So just accepting that, that's kind of an ideal, right, that we want to get to anxiety really is like not something that people can just do but like can just get out of you can't just choose not to have anxiety and you can't just you can definitely uh move towards and these ideals right it's good to to hold these kinds of truths because i would even say that that's kind of it like the the anxiety is not true you know like the anxiety

is all of these whatever it is it's it's an augmentation of the truth there may be some truth in it like for example the worries that you said you truth there may be some truth in it like for example the worries that you said you know there may be some foundation to some of those worries but it's just expanded and your reaction is way out of proportion to it so in many cases like you're saying it's not true it's kind of some fantasies that we're kind of embellishing in our head and then we're worrying about something that that may has high likelihood of maybe never uh uh happening and uh yeah and so we're just we're just spinning our spinning our wheels spending our time being afraid of of some fantasy we've cooked up in our head instead of focusing on reality yes and now if you want i can give you uh maybe the most powerful one of the most powerful each one

works differently but one of the steps of the protocol of how to actually how you deal with this right and that is so you have all these worries these fantastic worries that are out of proportion proportion to reality and the the kind of main mistake that people do when they have anxiety is to try and figure that out try and use their logical mind to problem solve and to realize what's true and not true etc and you're trying to do kind of these complicated things, problem-solving things, which would be fine except it's very hard to do when you have anxiety because the fear response is activated, your amygdala is activated, and your rational mind is actually minimized. So trying to problem-solve is not a first step for when you have anxiety. It's not a first step.

But if you were, you have all these thoughts coming at you. If you were to listen, just listen and keep listening and listening and listening. You don't have to agree or disagree. You don't have to do anything with the information you can just listen listen and listen and what happens is you actually start to absorb that information even if you don't have to do anything about it you don't have to understand it doesn't have to be true you just want this is one of the steps you just listen listen listen and this will actually remove pull out the energy from it so this energy that's kind of out of control will just start to

calm down on its own and i recommend anyone listening yourself anytime you feel any kind of anxiety try just listening especially if there's a lot of thoughts right because it can't be physical experience but if there's a lot of thoughts try just listening, especially if there's a lot of thoughts, right? Because it can be a physical experience. But if there's a lot of thoughts, try just listening, listening, listening. Do you try and disconnect yourself from the emotion in that point of listening where you just try and maybe act like it's maybe a movie screen, it's away from you, and you're kind of seeing what's going on, but you're not letting it overtake you emotionally how does that work so personally i don't do that

i'm i'm not speaking against it like i'm sure there's other modalities that um may do that and if that works for somebody great personally um my belief with the thoughts and emotions, because I believe anxiety comes from trauma, meaning stored patterns of thoughts and emotions that are stored somewhere in our system. They're not activated, so they're triggered. the way to get free of these thoughts and emotions is for these thoughts and emotions to go to their natural resolution which means for a feeling it's to be felt and for a thought I believe it's actually to be heard so I already talked about listening so the natural that basically these feelings were not felt at some point they were repressed so they were stored and by feeling them that by allowing yourself to feel them and allowing them to run through the system and kind of holding space for them as long as you can you know if it gets too much yeah maybe you want to do something to if to um kind of

you you can you can definitely avoid you know what i'm talking about is the opposite of avoiding you could avoid if it feels like it's too much but if you can hold space for allow yourself to feel it allow yourself to feel the emotions be okay with it and listen to the thoughts like these thoughts and emotions are actually resolving releasing so rather than everything that you've that most people have been doing that has been kind of repressing avoiding etc which means that they don't process so yeah this is this is how to really both relieve the anxiety in the moment, but also to get free from that much trauma from your system so that over time you have less anxiety.

There you go. That makes all the difference in the world. And being able to process and how you approach it, it sounds like, is the real big deal. And is maybe half the battle understanding that, okay, I'm having anxiety at this point and identifying the problem. And then from there, being able to, you know, utilize it. Because a lot of times, sometimes we go through anxiety, at least I do from my personal experience. Sometimes you don't realize you're in it until you're really deep in it you're like oh crap you know and maybe some

people don't even realize they're in a state of anxiety that's true absolutely absolutely yes the ability to identify is half the battle yeah the other half is what do you do when you identify it but the truth is like uh you know anytime you're activated anytime your emotional system is activated it could be something someone said or you know someone a message someone didn't send or uh just any situation where you're activated that is anxiety anxiety. This is why I actually believe, you know, just everybody has some form of anxiety. The people who say they have anxiety, it's because it's really starting to have a serious negative effect

on their life. But most people can live their lives, they more or less know how to manage these emotions. But it's good to see that these things are the same. You know, they're just on a scale of how strong they are and also the the ability to recognize smaller levels of anxiety is a great training ground for when you have a higher amount of anxiety. So, for example, learning the protocol and learning to apply it in your life, it's hard to remember anything when you have, you know, I measure anxiety from 1 to 10.

So when you have 10 being high, 10 being a panic attack, when you have 8, 9, 10 out of 10 anxiety, it's hard to remember anything. But if you train on the little times that a little bit of anxiety comes and you learn to do the protocol and you start to feel your anxiety drop, because it will generally drop in the moment when you do it, then you're training yourself, like practicing so that when you have that bigger, happens that's a big thing you know we all got we all have these things in our lives every so often that are a shock that you know but will bring up a lot of anxiety so you'll have more of a chance that you remember what to do

that makes sense there you go i mean knowing is half the battle as they say uh where if you understand what's going on with you rather than just kind of lost in a hurricane of emotion and thought. So how do people work with you? Do you work with men, women, both? What is your specialty in working with people? And what are you usually looking for to help people with? Yeah, so at the moment, my program, like I'm creating a one-month program that's really open for anybody and open for any kind of anxiety. I will specify later on and work with specific kinds of anxiety,

but actually just because this protocol as i've seen so far really i say if your anxiety is thoughts and emotions this will help so which you know all anxiety is thoughts and emotions and and this really focuses on the fact that you're having anxiety rather than what your anxiety is about. So it's really this first step. I also call it essential first aid for anxiety. So at the moment, I'm really open to anybody in this first program that I'm creating, that I've created. And later on, I will make specific programs for each different kind of anxiety as well.

There you go. And you work with men and women, correct? Yes. There you go. And anxiety was something, well, I'll tell a story about anxiety. When I started my first company, I think I always had anxiety, had ADHD. And in my teens, i would check the door like 30 times a night right i would be one of those high things where did i check the door

you're like no i know check there but wait did you check the door was that last thing or this thing and you know check the door locks again there were different things that i would do um to uh that were high anxiety that were anxiety ad ADHD sort of stuff. And I went through my life not really getting that fixed. Then when I started my first company in the year and a half later, I started my second company, I started really crashing with ADHD. And I was destroying office equipment when I would lose my temper. I was being very destructive and reacting

very poorly. And I remember one day I went in to, and this is back in the days when nobody knew what anxiety was or seemed to know what anxiety was, or very few people did in the 90s, I suppose. And I remember going into the ER one day and I'm like, I don't know what's wrong with me. My head hurts, my chest hurts, everything hurts. i'm going through these panic attacks and i don't think anybody knew what panic attacks were other than doctors and the gal said to me she goes she goes uh yeah you're suffering from anxiety and i went uh yeah and i also suffer from fear happiness loathing uh you know excitedness like what the fuck you're telling me i feel an emotion like i'm suffering that she's like whoa i was about to rip her head off and

because i was i was jacked up on anxiety and she's like whoa no hold on uh anxieties this is a you need to like see a psychiatrist get some help and probably get on some drugs and and blah blah blah and and uh eventually i did but a lot of people don't realize they're in that state you know psychiatrist, get some help, and probably get on some drugs, and blah, blah, blah, and eventually I did, but a lot of people don't realize they're in that state, you know, no one teaches this in school, they really should have a, like, a good psychology class that goes, you know, they should put everything away to psychology class, and be like, hi, you're 16, okay, here's your fucked up problem, fix it, have fun, bye, here's your problem, I. Fix it. Have fun. Bye. Here's your problem.

I don't know. Maybe I should go visit schools and do that. I could probably do that. Or tell kids what their problem is. Yeah, I think I do that on Modern Warfare 2 and gaming. So there you go. But that was my journey to find out that I had anxiety. And over life, there's been two times in my life where i've had to go back to medication to get back present and get back in frame uh usually and usually over depression or something like you

know i don't know i they ran a snickers bar at the candy store something you know we've all been there right that or they're at your favorite flavor of uh doritos um so you know there's there is cause for depression and people go through that sometimes chemically, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So, so what's the best way for people to reach out to you and do business with you or get to know you better or talk about maybe how you could coach them and help them do what they need to do? Yeah, sure. So I have my website, which is healyouranxiety.org. It's a basic website. I'm kind of just getting started with online stuff. I have a free giveaway. That's really the main thing that I can suggest people to do, the anxiety relief protocol. I have a free training that goes into

the three steps, deeply into the three steps and also gives people tools for them to be able to implement that in their life right away. I give a guided practice. So for example, if somebody had anxiety, they could go in and just even take that and go through it and follow it. And it would likely reduce their anxiety on the spot in a few minutes. There you go. Well, that's definitely important. And, you know, if you know somebody who's suffering from depression and anxiety and overthinking, and, you know, if you're reaching a point where your thoughts are overloading your system and you can't perform know if you're reaching a point where your your thoughts are overloading your system and you you can't perform tasks and you're just you're just sitting up in the fetal

position on your floor you know some you're you're walking in the room some room all the time going why am i here yeah it might be too much going on and uh there's a certain point where you can overload the brain the brain just can't handle it. And about the way I resolved it, it's just kind of frontal lobotomy scheduled for next week. So I'll just be happy and drooling on the side. So, yeah, I'll just be sitting there going, eh, with my frontal lobotomy. So, Adam, tell people where they can find you on the interwebs

and get to know you better. Yeah, so, again, I just have the website at the moment, Heal Your Anxiety. That's what I've got. There you go. Yeah. There you go. Yeah.

Thanks for coming on, Adam. People need to reach out to you so they can check out your anxiety relief protocol, three simple steps you can do anytime, anywhere to get immediate relief from anxiety thanks for coming on and we really appreciate it thank you man thank you very much for having me it's been a pleasure there you go and hopefully we've helped a lot of people and we'll let you help a lot of people here in the future thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe

and we'll see you guys next time and that's