The Dr. John Delony Show - I’m Afraid To Lose Control Again

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

On today’s show, we hear about: - A woman who’s afraid her mental illness will cause her to go back into debt - Choosing freedom from debt - A man who can’t move past his sister’s affair To pre-order John's new book Building a Non-Anxious Life click here. Lyrics of the Day: "I Want to Break Free" - Queen Enter The Ramsey Cash Giveaway for a chance to win $3,000!  https://bit.ly/TDJDSgvwy Let us know what’s going on by leaving a voicemail at 844.693.3291 or visiting johndelony.com/show.  Support Our Sponsors: BetterHelp DreamCloud Hallow Thorne Add products to your cart create an account at checkout Receive 25% off ALL orders Resources: Anxiety Test Own Your Past, Change Your Future Questions for Humans Conversation Cards Redefining Anxiety Quick Read John’s Free Guided Meditation Listen to all The Ramsey Network podcasts anytime, anywhere in our app. Download at: https://apple.co/3eN8jNq These platforms contain content, including information provided by guests, that is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The content is not intended to replace or substitute for any professional medical, counseling, therapeutic, financial, legal, or other advice. The Lampo Group, LLC d/b/a Ramsey Solutions as well as its affiliates and subsidiaries (including their respective employees, agents and representatives) make no representations or warranties concerning the content and expressly disclaim any and all liability concerning the content including any treatment or action taken by any person following the information offered or provided within or through this show. If you have specific concerns or a situation in which you require professional advice, you should consult with an appropriately trained and qualified professional expert and specialist. If you are having a health or mental health emergency, please call 9-1-1 immediately. Learn more about your ad choices. https://www.megaphone.fm/adchoices Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy

Coming up on the Dr. John Deloney Show. My sister was carrying on an affair with another married man. I lost a lot of respect for my sister. I wish my sister would show some remorse for what she did to her family, but it doesn't feel like she is. At least hear her out. I would get on an airplane and go fly and sit with her. What is going on? This is John with the Dr. John Deloney Show, and I'm so, so grateful that you've joined us.

We're talking about mental health, we're talking about your emotional health, your marriage, your parenting, whatever you got going on in your life, your money even. There's more and more discussion across the country about mental health and money. We will talk about whatever's going on

in your life on this show. I'm so grateful that you've joined us. And here's my promise. The show is real people going through real stuff. They call from all over the world. And my promise is I'm not always going to know everything, but I promise I'll tell you the truth and I promise I'll sit with you.

So if you want to be on the show, go to johndeloney.com, D-E-L-O-N-Y, johndeloney.com, slash ask, A-S-K, fill out the form, and it will go to Jenna and Kelly, and they will get it in there, get you lined up for the show. And if you'll take a quick second and just like, subscribe, send this episode to everybody you know, somebody struggling with whatever we're going to talk about today as they come in. I'd love, love, love, love for you to pass the show along. Last thing, housekeeping wise, don't forget my brand new book, Building a Non-Anxious Life is out for presale. You can go to johndeloney.com. We'll send you a whole bunch of stuff. You can download, as soon as you buy it, you can download a talk I gave to several thousand folks on one of the chapters in this book about choosing freedom. Whenever I say that, I always expect like an eagle to go and fly across the room or whatever. It's not what I'm talking about, but building a non-anxious life. Listen, I'll say this

with as much directness and clarity as I can. More people are being medicated for mental health disorders right now than ever before in human history. I've benefited from those medicines, okay? Not anti-medicine. But more people right now are medicated than ever before. More people are under the care of a licensed mental health professional than ever before in human history. I actually am too. I get it. But when we look globally, we look at our local communities, we look at our country, the rates of anxiety and depression are continuing to skyrocket. And so as a mental health guy, as a guy that sees a mental health professional, I have to step back and I have to look at the bigger picture and say,

hey, what we're doing is not working. And it pains me to say that. I went to college for this. I have spent my career doing this. What we're doing at a large scale isn't working. And it pains me to say that. I went to college for this. I have spent my career doing this. What we're doing at a large scale isn't working. Do counselors help? Are you kidding me? Of course they do. Is there times when medication helps? Yes. Do we weigh over prescribed medication? No doubt about it. But is there times it helps? Absolutely. But globally, what we're doing is not working. So we have to go back and re-examine these lives that we're leading that are causing all these things in the first place. And that's the genesis of this book, Building a Non-Anxious Life.

Because everybody's talking about, I want to be less anxious. I want to be less burned out. I want to be less stressed. What are some tips and some tricks? We're not at tips and tricks anymore. We're past that now. We got to go back to the roots of these issues and solve these challenges. And my promise is if you create a non-anxious life, the anxiety alarms stop ringing. Your body stops trying to get your attention and tell you that you're not safe. Or you have some true mental health disorders. And thank God we live in a time and a place when there's trained professionals

that can help those folks who are really, really struggling. So check it out. Building a non-anxious life. Go to johndeloney.com. You can pick it up for 20 bucks and we'll send you a whole bunch of stuff. I think they're throwing a pony

and a bag of balloons or something. I don't know. Whatever. All right, let's go out to Lauren in Washington, D.C. What's up, Lauren? Hey, Dr. John. How are you? Good.

How are you doing? Thanks for dealing with our technical issues. How are we doing? I'm doing okay. I was calling today because I'm diagnosed with bipolar disorder and have had a lot of issues running up credit cards in the past during manic episodes. But the past two years, I've been episode free, was able to pay off all the debt, and I'm on baby steps four, five, and six now, but there's still this undercurrent of anxiety that I'm going to do that again in the future and ruin my finances again.

So I'm wondering what advice you may have about that. Yeah, you bet. Number one, before we even dig in, what you just said, I hope you know this, it's incredible what you just said I hope you know this it's incredible what you just said it's incredible it's very rare for me to talk to somebody in this

on the phone like this they call into the show who write into the show that they've been diagnosed with bipolar they're living with it and then they go on to pay off all their for years that's amazing it's really really incredible it's a testament to how hard you're working on all this

um bipolar one or two uh two two so um tell me about not the manic phases. Tell me about the dark phases. Well, I've, um, I've had a suicide attempt in the past and usually when it I'm having depression, it can get sometimes when it's really bad, difficult for me to function at work and difficult for me to get out the house and do the things I normally like to do, like hang out with friends and just normal activities that I would usually find fun are draining. Yeah. So for everybody listening, bipolar can be bipolar one or bipolar two. Bipolar two is generally noted as hypomanic, meaning the mania stage, the parts

when everything spins up may not be quite as high as bipolar 1. But it's often partnered with a deeper or a more sinister, if you will, depressive episode. And when people who don't experience depression, Lauren, hear phrases like depressive episode, it just is like, eh, whatever. Can you paint a picture of waking up when you're in the black hole? If you think back to those times, are you on meds now? I am medicated, but very minimally, like much less than what most people with my diagnosis are medicated with. I want to applaud you for that too.

One of the biggest challenges of loving and caring and walking alongside folks who struggle with bipolar is that when they feel well, they feel amazing. And they slowly will stop taking their meds or they'll completely stop taking them. And then they end up right back where they were. And so for you, high five. High five. I mean, you're just like rock star in this thing. Think back to some times before you had everything leveled out. Give us a description of what it feels like to open your eyes in those mornings.

Wow. Well, I wake up and usually the first thing that I'll think of is just that I wish I could go back to sleep. I don't want to do this. Um, just very low energy. Even if I drink coffee, it's just feels like my body is heavier than it usually is. Hard to talk to people. I'm usually more fun to be around and people enjoy hanging out with me. And I can usually tell when I'm in those depressive spaces that people aren't enjoying my presence as much. I've heard it described as feeling like you're trapped inside of a pillow or trapped underwater and people are trying to talk to you and everything's a little bit fuzzy. It's just exhausting. And I just would rather not be trying to listen to what you're saying and hear what you're saying and interact with you.

The lights feel like they're too bright. Everything just feels like too much. And yeah, it's that you used a word i've heard often heavy just like everything feels like i'm just full of sand right yeah and you have worked your butt off to be where you are right now it's incredible so tell me about this anxiety that's haunting you. Well, even though I'm doing pretty good, I think the mania is more what I'm scared of because the depression I've become accustomed to. The mania I really felt outside of myself and acted in ways that I never act when I'm in my normal state of mind. So even though I have, you know, a good emergency fund, um, if I get too excited about something or sometimes it gets to like any sort of happy

emotion, there'll be a thought that comes in later. Like, Oh, well, is this mania? Are you about to have another episode? Are you going to spend all your money again and end up in these horrible situations? You're skiing in the environment all the time because you've lost trust in your body. And you're wondering when, are we going, are we going, are we going? Nope, no, no, nope. That was just too much caffeine. Or, oh, here we go, here we go. Oh, no, that was just because I was annoyed.

And so it's hard to decipher what are, and I hate to use this kind of language, but it's, we just got a short time together, normal feelings, right? Of anger, frustration, excitement, or I'm really jazzed up versus, oh no, my body's spinning up and we're going to spend three or four days or a week or two weeks just running and gunning and running and gunning, right? And so you live in this kind of tension. You don't want to, do you find yourself de-escalating things on purpose? To try to keep your body from- What do you mean by that? If you feel really excited about something

and then all of a sudden you're talking really fast and your friends are laughing really hard and you cut, it's euphoric, right? It feels awesome. And you're going and going.

Do you find yourself trying to throttle it back because you're scared of your own body? Yeah. Yeah. Yes, definitely. Ugh.

And then you end up, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yes, definitely. Ugh. And then you end up, right? Yeah. Yeah, you end up duct taping over normal life experiences, which are awesome. And there's nothing better than being around a bunch of friends and y'all are all hanging out and everyone starts laughing so hard. Milk's coming out your eyeballs and your nose and everything. Ugh, it's frustrating.

All right. So the good news is you are a unique yet rock star example of somebody who's fought through hell and back, who's working with a medical professional, who's doing what you got to do even when you don't feel like it, and who is working hard to be in tune with your own body. That sets you apart, and I need you to hear me say I'm so proud of you. It's amazing. Okay? What that tells me is you have at least turned the corner on I'm trying to live with Lauren. I'm not going to war with her anymore. Is that fair? Yes. That tells me you love Lauren, which is awesome.

Okay. Yeah, that's good to hear. It's all, I mean, I just want you to drop your shoulders. It's really incredible. And I also know it's frustrating because you're like, I don't like to feel like this all the time though. And if you're telling me I'm doing great and this is great, I don't like that. I want you to lean on it. Okay. It's amazing. Second thing is, here's the not good news. It's going to take time to learn to continue to trust your body. It's just a process of trust, trust, trust, and then you're going to have mishaps. There's gonna be times when your body spins out on you again And you're gonna have to learn to be really graceful with yourself And then here's the important part. You're gonna have to build really strong boundaries What does that look like? I don't have bipolar 2 There has been seasons when I gave up my debit cards to my wife I got rid of the my amazon login because I was out of control

and I could talk to myself all day long. Like, all right, dude, we're just gonna, I just would buy everything. And I would buy stupid, like I would pick up the tab for people I didn't even know. I'd be like, I'm buying that guy's lot. Like it just gets out of, it's almost out of body. Right. It doesn't make any sense. And I don't have bipolar too. I'm not dealing with, you're talking, you're on jet fuel here. So I literally had to give stuff away. Sometimes it was for a month or two. Like I had to just create some significant space. Here's the word I want you to think of, hurdles. What are some ways I can put hurdles between me and these behaviors that I know are going to cause me problems? If you had in manic

phases, if you had a lot of sexual acting out, which is a common thing in both one and two, I might tell you to, I want you to delete all of the phone numbers in your cell phone of folks you have hooked up with before. Just delete all of them. And at least make it hard for yourself to have to, you'd have to go through a bunch of hoops to track it down. And my hope is at some point you have enough cognition to go, oh, or at least I'm going to reach out to somebody and say, hey, I'm trying to do what I can to find people. So if you struggled with binge eating, I would tell you, get all the junk out of the house, right? So I want you to create a whole bunch of hurdles between you and yourself. And it

may be as much as calling the bank and saying, I can only spend this much at a time unless I call you specifically. Will that be a pain on a day-to-day basis? Yeah. But will that keep you from waking up one week and weekend and realizing you just drained all your savings? Yeah. That'd be awesome too. Does that make sense? Yeah. I like the idea of hurdles. Okay. Putting barriers in place to protect. Give me an example of one that you think you could put in your life right now. I think I can call my parents and have them have access to my bank information.

I have that relationship. I can do that with my dad. He would be a good barrier to put in place. I think it'd be pretty amazing if you sat down with your dad. How old are you Lauren? 29. 29. Dude, you're so amazing. I think it would be great if you sat down with your dad and said dad i'm about to be 30 I'm entering into a new phase of adulthood and i'm creating boundaries In my life because this is this is right i'm going to live with this forever And i'm continuing continuing to get healthier and healthier um

But I want some accountability. That's the magic word. Would you? Um be my accountability person when it came to money? And if you have a trusting relationship like that with him, that would be incredible, Lauren. It'd be amazing. And you also have a job to do, and that is to find one or two friends in your life that you could develop that friendship and cultivate that relationship with them over time, that they could be that person for you. Because your dad won't always be there. And I've got a couple of buddies.

My buddy Craig. My buddy Todd. My buddy John. Like those guys are close friends. My buddy Kevin. Like I ask them money questions. I trust them with all I have. And if I'm getting out of control or being ridiculous, those are guys that will step in and

be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing? What are you doing? And so they don't all have access to my checking account, of course. But I do allow them to hold me accountable on these things. So I think it's, it may be your dad, you know what, your dad would probably give you some great perspective to probably provide some great like insights into you said dad. I'd love some accountability if he said hey The bank has this mechanism that if you need to spend more than 1500 bucks at a given time or more than 500 at a given time um, I It requires a second person or a text message and an authorization code or something Put in some barriers for yourself and I want you to know this because you have bipolar 2, that doesn't mean you're insane.

Everybody I know who is successful has barriers and boundaries and accountability in their life. I don't know anybody who runs reckless. You were talking about the baby steps. That's inside baseball lingo for folks who are trying to get out of debt and following The great dave ramsey's plan Dave still runs expenses by his wife. They hold each other accountable and hey, I want to buy this. We're not buying that I want to buy that we're not buying that they still hold each other accountable still has that still has that Guy's got more money than He's beyond beyond comprehension but he still has accountability

in his life. Um, I still have Lane Norton and Sal DiStefano, and I still got Jordan Sight. I got these guys in my life that I talked to you about nutrition and talked about working out. I need boundaries. I got to get some help. I got to get some wisdom. I got to get some insight. I got to put some things in my house. I can't have gummy candy in the house cause I'll eat all of it all the time. So I just don't have it in there. That's not a function of bipolar one or two. That's a function of being a disciplined person and knowing yourself well enough to know what level of discipline and accountability and hurdles in my life do I need to be successful? The goal isn't to like become so hardcore.

I don't need hurdles. I think that's a waste of time and energy. It's to know which hurdles do I need and where do I need them and what areas of my life and who can I rely on to hold me accountable in those seasons. That to me, that is a cornerstone of a well-lived life. That's why you hear me always talking about connection, connection, connection, connection. You got to make friends. You got to make friends. That's why. You got to have people in your life that call you out.

And for those of us who struggle making friends sometimes, and that might be a counselor, might be a minister, that might be a mentor where you work, but get people in your life. Lauren, I need to say it one more time. I'm so proud of you. I'm so proud of you. You give light and hope to everybody struggling with bipolar. Like, okay, I can get on a medication routine. I can take care of my body. I can get some people in my life. I can start making some decisions. I can pay off my debts. I can make amends and have a relationship with my dad and my family.

Amazing. Amazing. I'm so proud of you, Lauren. You call anytime. I'm here for you. Thanks, everybody. We'll be right back. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. October is the season for wearing costumes. And if you

haven't started planning your costume, seriously, get on it. I'm pretty sure I'm going to go as Brad Pitt because we have the same upper body, but whatever. Look, it's costume season. And if we're being honest, a lot of us hide our true selves behind masks and costumes more often than we want to. We do this at work. We do this in social settings. We do this around our own families. We even do this with ourselves. I have been there multiple times in my life, and it's the worst.

If you feel like you're stuck hiding your true self behind costumes and masks, I want you to consider talking with a therapist. Therapy is a place where you can learn to accept all the parts of yourself, where you can be honest with yourself, and where you can take off the mask and the costumes and learn to live an honest, authentic life. Costumes and masks should be for Halloween parties, not for our emotions and our true selves. If you're considering therapy, I want you to call my friends at BetterHelp. BetterHelp is 100% online therapy. You can talk with your therapist anywhere so it's convenient for just about any schedule.

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All right, we are back. And they're dragging me back to it, good folks. It's time to take a return to Facts Are Your Friends. Let's do it. We've got a, that's a new, look at that new graphic. It looks fantastic, man. I know, it looks awesome. Yeah.

If you're listening to this on podcast, some rad new graphics are behind me. It's awesome. Hey, and for everybody reaching out, this comes out, you know, several weeks after we record it, but we changed the podcast feed photo to more like an old punk rock cover. And man, everybody's reached out. I'm so grateful. Everybody's super positive about it. I love it. I love it. It's finally feeling like more like home, more like me. So that's fantastic. All right. So today we are talking about this. This occurred to me about 10 years ago.

I was working at university. And my students were coming in and coming in and coming in. And this is when, 10 to 15 years ago, is when a shift began to happen inside my dean of students office. My res life offices, when I was sitting with these students who were really struggling. And so many of the struggles came down to financial struggles. Like at the end of the day, I've got ADHD, I've got depression, I've got this, I've got anxiety, I'm struggling with this,

I'm struggling with this, I'm struggling with this. And it would always distill down to, we can't afford to be here. And I realized at the root of that money question was, I'm about to lose all my friends and community. I'm about to get off track and have to leave school. And I don't know what comes next. My mom and dad are hassling me all the time because they can't afford college. They can't afford this place. So that's where, that's the organic nature of this conversation started with me. And at the same time, I was getting my graduate degree. My wife was Dr. Deloney before I was. And so we had six degrees between us. We both had bachelor's degrees and master's degrees and PhDs, and we just paid for

them straight through. And I realized I could use my student loan money to pay rent. I used them as like a consolidation loan. And I put all my truck and my credit cards, I put everything in this big bucket and I looked up all of a sudden and we owed six figures. We owed a hundred some thousand dollars into the government, right? In student loans. And then my wife and I both got fancy jobs. So we had to get new cars. And so I bought two cars. I had an F-150 on payments and I had got my wife a RAV4 on payments. And by the way, we've never been cool car people. Those cars for us were like, whoa, because we don't care. And then of course we had to buy a new house. So we bought a house. And when I traced the timeline back, when I backed out 30,000 feet from what I would call when I just fell apart, I had a lot of anxiety, a lot. And I had some trauma I hadn't dealt with. I had some relationship

issues I hadn't dealt with. I had some major issues where trust was broken in my life in some powerful ways that I was still wrestling with. But when I drilled down to the neurophysiology, what was my brain trying to tell me? Screaming at the top of its lungs, trying to get my attention. Sounding those anxiety alarms. My heart is racing. It's my body knew, hey, you owe 110 or 106, whatever,

$110,000 in educational expenses that you can never discharge with bankruptcy. You are stuck. You will pay these off forever. Five to six to 700 bucks a month. Hey, you owe on these depreciating assets. You owe $10,000 on this one and 20,000 or 17,000 on this one. You can't even afford a house. Oh, you just bought a house. That's another 160,000. So we owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. And lose your job. All those things were starting. And my body knew, hey, Deloney, you're kind of a loud mouth. And if you say the wrong thing, you're going to get fired. If you get fired, your family loses their house. They lose their cars. Y'all won't be able to eat. You have a new son now. You have a kid. Everything changes. And so my body knew, my prefrontal cortex, if you will, my PFC,

I'll simplify it. It knew, hey, I got a good deal on the APR on this. My interest rate on my house was pretty low. My interest rate on my student loans was pretty high, but it just globally was pretty low. My interest rate on my cars wasn't bad. So my brain, my thinking brain knew I got some good deals on this stuff. But for simplicity's sake, my amygdala, the part of my brain that is sounding the alarms, that is always scanning the environment all of the time to let me know I'm not safe. Right? You ever walk into a room and you just know, whoa, I need to get out of here. Or a guy walks into a room and you just know your body knows that guy's not safe That guy's not okay or

um, you grew up in an abusive household and then another guy comes swaggering into some part of your in and you just your body's like Get out now like That was ringing off the hook for me all the time. And when your alarms are going off and you don't know what they're, what they're from, like why they're going off, it comes out as anger. It comes out as blame. Well, if you would just pick everything up, well, if you would just do this, if those people, whoever those people happen to be, if they would just fill in

the blank, I don't care what they're, I don't care what you're going to say. If that, if that, if that political party would, all of those feelings are your body trying to get your attention. And because we have the media industrial complex that we have now, always just spoon feeding us stories as to why our bodies feel that way over and over. It's because of this, it's because of this, it's because of this. I was talking to one of my close buddies, Dr. Lane Norton the other day. The number of insane, insane things people reach out to him for, for weight loss ideas and how to get in shape, how to lose body fat. It will boggle your mind. People will do anything to not just

eat less than they need or eat exactly what they need, control their calories and exercise. People, they'll go to the ends of the earth. Similarly, we will blame, we will point fingers, we will create new things. We will get really, really busy. We will drink. We will just Netflix ourselves to death. We will like hide behind academic journals, which is what I did for years and years and years. We will do anything and our body is screaming at us and screaming at us and screaming at us. And so one of the keys here, and I don't want this to sound like a long book pitch. This is me just trying to teach a little bit. One of the keys that I write about in building a non-interest life, one of the choices we have to make on a daily basis, on a monthly

basis, on a weekly basis, on an annual basis, on a life basis, is this idea of choosing freedom. And I need you to hear me say, if you don't owe anybody any money, your body goes, you can get fired and they're not going to take away your house. You can get fired and they're not going to take away your cars. You work for yourself and business can slow to a crawl and it's annoying. It's not catastrophic. And you've heard me say over and over the title of the great Bessel van der Kolk's book, the body keeps the score, but the body keeps the score. And no matter how good you think, I'm not going to pay off my mortgage because it's at a 3% rate and I can invest the rest over here. Cool. Go do those mathematical gymnastics. Do a bunch of cartwheels with your calculators and make yourself feel good.

Your brain knows we owe $300,000 on this mortgage and we're not safe. There's a reason why all throughout human history, tribes and family lineages, when they got property, it was passed down for generations. I'll never forget a conversation I had with a sociologist from Romania. We were sitting by each other in a climate science meeting, and we were talking about soil and stuff like that in the United States, and she leaned over to me and she said, I will never understand the U.S.'s relationship to its soil. And I thought she was talking about, you know, the poison we spray on our foods and all that. She wasn't. She said in her home country,

you had to prove lineage to buy land. It was that precious. You can't just sell it to anybody you want to from any other country. You can't just give that away. That's so precious. That's what keeps us safe because it's ours. Our bodies are able to go, when all else fails, I can go home. And when you owe money to somebody, your body knows. And if we want to take the the choose freedom argument one step further

How many of you your your in-laws are still telling you what you're going to do for the holidays? How many of you still have friends that are like, oh my gosh, are you seriously going to wear that? We're going out on Wednesday and you don't want to go you're tired. You miss your husband. You miss your wife You want to see your kids actually? But you go anyway because you outsource that how many of you work at a toxic workplace i know millions of you do because i hear from you my friend kent colin hears from you all over the country every month monday your heart beat your heart rate your bpm just goes up 10 beats because it's like oh here we go man

i gotta go into this awful place. When you outsource your joy, when you outsource your life, when you outsource how you feel, when you outsource your thoughts, your body keeps the score. Or how many of you, your lives are dictated by what the soccer coach says your practice schedule is gonna be? How many of you are, your lives are dictated by what your pastor says your church schedule and your evening schedule and your weekend schedule, like they run your calendar for you?

How many of you are so up to your eyeballs in school activities and karate and horseback riding that your calendar is so chaotic. You're not free. And so one of these core chapters in this book, one of these choices we have to make is I got to choose freedom. I have to look at places in my life where I am hooked and I have to consciously do the work to unhook myself. That might mean I got to spend five years working three jobs so that I owe nobody anything. That might mean I'm going to owe nobody anything so that I can quit this job that is killing me and go do something else. I'm going to sit down with my wife and I'm going to,

we're going to clear our calendar. We're going to start to finish, or I'm single. I'm going to get with three or four of my friends, one or two of my friends. We're going to go through our calendar, start to finish. What do I have to do? What do I want to do? And then we're going to backfill the rest. And that may mean looking at your kids and saying, hey, this year, we're stopping the madness. We're just going to do one thing. You can play soccer. You can do violin. You can do piano. We're going to do one thing. Or you can do one instrument soccer you can do violin you can do piano we're gonna do one thing Or you can do one instrument and you can do one activity. That's it But we're gonna save the money. We're gonna save our life

Hear me say this a cornerstone of building a non-anxious life Is choosing freedom? And I don't mean that in the political sense. I don't mean that in the, um, I don't know, dramatic sense. I mean, literally. And I was in Costa Rica recently, and I'll leave you with this. My son and I were walking down, down, down this sidewalk in this really busy street. Um, and people were bustling and going and going and bustling. And there's a lot of motorcycles driving by. And he said,

dad, this just feels different here. I was like, yeah, you're right, man. And I thought it was cause, cause we were on a trip and all that.

And then I said, you know what, Hank, everyone we've talked to is so insanely proud to live here. They're so insanely proud of their community. And where we were staying was at the base of a giant volcano that's active. It's erupted within the last however many years. And I would ask folks, just from the folks who were, you know, carrying bags to the folks who were like the leaders and the

restauranteurs, like, what happens if that thing goes off? And they were like, well, this is over. It was just this, and I was like, yeah, but they had completely unhooked from this obsession with, we have to control everything all the time. Everything's but It was just hey right now we live in beauty I don't know anybody anything Our our cultural ethos is kindness and hospitality. Everybody's welcome Um, we're not gonna fight you We are just gonna be at peace and if you need some fruit off my tree you can come grab it

Every community, uh every every little neighborhood every community every little town had four things had a church a bar A school and a soccer field and I thought man that may be maybe that may be the key to life But I tell you all that to say I met with people who had very very very little Who sat at the base of a big volcano that can go off at any time? And they were completely free. They had chosen freedom. They had chosen to let go of the wheel. They didn't know anybody thing. They weren't beholden to. And so if you want to live a non-anxious life, I want you to look around your life. I want you to look around your relationships. Where are you not free? Write those things down. Be specific. I owe a whole

bunch of money. I live in an unsafe neighborhood. I'm in an unsafe, scary marriage, and I'm not free to say what I think, to let my needs be heard. I'm not free to walk about my house. Where are you not free? And if you've got a group of friends or a partner who will sit with you and kind of unpack those, awesome. If you don't, find a minister, find a counselor, find somebody in your life you can sit down and talk to. Call my friends at BetterHelp. Reach out to somebody and say, I'm not safe. I'm not free.

So that's today's facts of your friends. That's one of six of the choices you can make. Pick up Building a Non-Anxious Life. Go to johndeloyne.com, pick it up. But even if you don't buy the book, that's fine. I want this for you. I can't want it more than you do, but I really want it for you. I want you to choose freedom. Choose peace. We'll be right back. I'm so proud that Thorne Supplements, my favorite supplements on the planet,

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There's so, so much garbage out in the marketplace. And other than my admitted gummy candy problem, I'm pretty freakish about what I put in my body. And that's why I trust my health and the health of my family with Thorne. Personally, I've been taking Thorne supplements for years and years, way before I was on the internets with these shows. And my wife and kids have been taking them as well. And here's what I take every single day. I take the super EPA fish oil, the methylated B vitamins, creatine, phosphatidylserine, and more. I take Thorne for specific physiologic needs for me to keep my body and mind optimized and for

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My family trusts Thorne. And you can trust Thorne too. All right, we are back. Let's go out to Cleveland, Ohio and talk to the great and powerful John. What in the world is up, John? How we doing? Oh, man, I guess we're doing this, aren't we?

Let's do this, man. Let's do it. What's up, brother? How are you? I'm doing pretty good. Awesome. I guess a little nervous to be talking to you here, but I guess we just get into it. Hey, swan dive. No, don't swan dive.

You might hit your head on the bottom. Let's cannonball. Cannonball is what the great Tavon Dillard says. Let's do it. Well, I'll start with my question and then maybe give you some context to put the question around. So the question is, how do I reconcile with my sister? Um, I don't reconcile, you know, it's a really good word there, but the, the context of it is that my, uh, a year ago now, yeah, probably a little more than a year ago now,

it came out that my sister was carrying on an affair with another married man. And my brother-in-law found out about it. And it ended up, their marriage ended in divorce recently. And, man, I just, I lost a lot of respect for my sister. And I've honestly, I've lost a lot of respect for my parents through this whole thing. And I wish it was something that I could, you know, just kind of ignore and just kind of go about my business. So you guys do what you want to do. But, you know, our family is pretty close.

And, you know, we got actually a family vacation coming up in a couple of weeks that my brother-in-law was not invited to. And I guess sides have been drawn to this whole thing. And I feel like I'm pretty firmly behind my brother-in-law because to me, like, this all happened to him. He didn't choose for any of this. And it really infuriates me that my parents seem to have taken my sister's side through all this and i think that the um my my parents are very very concerned about maintaining a relationship with their daughter and with their grandkids and to me that's like i don't know i wish my i wish my sister would show some remorse for what she did to her family

but it doesn't feel like she is have you talked to your sister John? have you talked to her? it's like a private conversation I think all of this is on pause until you do that and this is a big enough deal that

I would get on an airplane and go fly and sit with her. He says, go to coffee. This is a big enough deal where I would go visit and at least hear her out. Because what you're doing right now is you are, you've heard one side of the story from brother-in-law. Yeah. I can tell you after dealing with this forever, there's never, never just one side. There's always another side to it. Two, ostracization. That's probably not the right,

I'm not saying that the right way. Cutting people off almost never leads to behavior change. And there's a difference between I love you. I love you. I'm always going to be your brother. I'm not going to go on vacation with you, but I will always love you. And when they say, well, if you're going to love me, then you have to do everything that I say. No, I don't. No, I don't. I'm going to draw some boundaries.

But I think you can only do that after you've done the loving adult grown-up plus we're brother and sister thing, which is I'm going to go meet with you in person and say, like, what happened, man? And you can walk away from those interactions knowing with a pretty good sense of what comes next. And it might be, hey, sister,

I'm not comfortable bringing my family around some strange new guy who's married to somebody else. I'm not comfortable with that. And what you have to balance is you had this picture of one big happy family and somebody else blew it up and you're pissed at them for blowing up your life, which is fair. But be careful that doesn't lead into you just throwing grenades and rocks at people because you're going to be throwing grenades and rocks at them, but you're the one that's going to absorb those explosions. Um, you can't hold

your family. Like you can't hold your family together. It's been blown up. And so now we have to create something new. Does that, does that make sense? Yeah. Let me, let me throw another wrinkle at you. Okay. She, my sister, only communicates through written. And that's kind of something that has made me angry because, I guess not a piece of it, because she communicates everything through email, Facebook posts, or text messages. And that's something that I'm like, if you want to talk to me, come talk to me. Or if somebody wants to say, talk to me. I can't do this whole email. Except you're the one with the problem.

Yeah. So it needs to go the other way. I think you're 100% right. I would not communicate to somebody electronically like that. I wouldn't do that. And so if somebody says, this is my new boundary, I will only talk via Facebook and text message. That's a new thing that's come out

in the last few years, by the way. These strange family boundaries, like I only feel safe texting. Okay, that's fine. But when you say that, you are opting out of relationship with me at this time. Because I only talk in person to the people I love. Of course, I send funny text messages back and forth.

My sister texted me last night because Astro's got Verlander back. That's all great. But when it comes to substantive things, we talk on the phone. We go, we talk in person. We don't do long. I don't do, in fact, one of my mentors,

Michael Sean Rock, man, one of the awesomest guys in the world. He always, he had like a piece of tape on his, on his computer. And if the email was too long, he just, he wouldn't even read it. He would just reply like, Hey, set up a meeting. Like I'm not, I'm not going to do all of this in email. I'm just going to, I'm just going to do it in person. And so I think it's fair to say if she chooses that, I think it's fair to say, if she chooses that, I think it's fair to text her back and say, I want to come visit you and talk with you and take you to coffee. Would you meet with me? And if she says, I only am going to do this via Facebook or whatever, you can write her back and say, this is too big of a deal to continue this exchange.

When you're ready to talk in person, I can't wait and i'll be there and let that be the end of it because she's drawing this weird boundary and you've gotten pissed that she drew a boundary that's fine i wouldn't spend one second energy being upset with her i would just draw my own boundary back okay is that like that is it like so and I hope you hear me say this, and I'm not trying to be dismissive. I understand how bad this hurts. It messes up everything. But also, I just wouldn't give all this energy and angst into energy and angst. Like, I want to hear what you have to say.

And if you don't want to talk to me, then you're opting out of a relationship with me. That breaks my heart. It makes me sad. It kind of confirms what I was thinking anyway about your character. But man, you're going through some stuff. Cool. Hey, mom and dad, everybody.

We're going to, my family, we're going to opt out of the family vacation this year. I appreciate you guys. It's just, everything's pretty hot. Sister doesn't even want to talk in person. We're going to opt out. We're going to do our own thing this year. We love you guys.

And we look forward to getting back together next year. That's that. That'd be some, I guess, sacrifice. One of the reasons why I was kind of swallowing my pride or whatever it is, just going along with it, go to the family vacations, because I've got two kids,

and my kids and her kids really only see each other once a year at these vacations because I've got two kids and my kids and her kids really only see each other once a year at these vacations. So I've always kind of, okay, let's go because the cousins need to have a relationship with each other,

at least in my opinion. I 100% agree, but if she's opting out of relationship with you guys, there's not a lot you can do. Yeah, that's true. Because you end up compromising your value.

So yes, in a perfect world cousins are all linked up it's the way it should be but if somebody opts out of that relationship if somebody's not trustworthy if somebody doesn't tell the truth if somebody will only connect via

I can't I'm not going to compromise my values and the values of my family to prop up this picture of what I want to be true. It's just, it's heartbreaking. And it's really hard in the fog and in the smoke of a raging fire to understand that it will burn out. So this one summer that you might have to miss on the family vacation, the cousins will get together. This isn't going to be a forever thing. They'll get together. They'll have tons of fun. It'll be a blast. They will get together. Maybe not this

year. That's fine. But let's don't burn everything to the ground trying to prop up a picture that's been burned down pictures gone, man Things are going to be different And my hope is let's let the adults um Let's let the adults be adults and let's dig into this thing and figure it out together I'm proud of you, man. I hate this for you. I hate this for you, but let's get on the phone and it's worth, it's worth the Southwest flight, man. If you, if you don't live in the same neighborhood,

if you live in the same neighborhood, dude, I'd try to get together tonight, but it's worth the flight to sit down with your sister face to face and say, Hey, I miss you. Are you okay? What happened? And she tells you, nah, I just cheated on my husband with a married dude. YOLO one life to live, whatever you can say. Hey, that's that's just I love you. You're my sister. That's not something i'm going to be a part of I can't be a part of that. I don't want my kids around that

Um, and I want more for you and I love my brother-in-law. So he's gonna stay my friend and um If you choose to walk away that you can choose to do that. And then you can make those boundary judgments, right? But let's don't throw rocks until we've had a chance to sit at a table with somebody. And by the way, that goes for all of us. I'm talking to myself here. This is me talking to the man in the mirror. Let's have a conversation first before we throw any rock.

We'll be right back. Hey, what's up? Deloney here. Listen, you and me and everybody else on the planet has felt anxious or burned out or chronically stressed at some point. In my new book, Building a Non-Anxious Life, you'll learn the six daily choices that you can make

to get rid of your anxious feelings and be able to better respond to whatever life throws at you so you can build a more peaceful, non-anxious life. Get your copy today at johndeloney.com. All right, we're back as we wrap up today's show from the great and powerful queen. The song is I Want to Break Free. I want to break free from your lies. You're so self-satisfied. I don't need you. I've got to break free God knows I want to break free. I've fallen in love for the first time and this time I know it's for real God knows i've fallen in love. It's strange, but it's true. I can't get over you

The way you love me like you do but I have to be sure when I walk out the door Ah, I want to be sure when I walk out the door, I want to be free. I want to break free. Is this you saying you want to quit the show, Jenna? I understand. I understand. Strange way to quit your job,

but well played, millennial. She just quiet quit, in case you're wondering. Love you guys. Stay in school. Don't do drugs. Bye.