The Dr. Josh Axe Show - How to Build a Strong Identity and Stop Playing the Victim with Dr. John Delony

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

Dr. John Delony exemplifies excellence across mental health, relationships, vulnerability and purpose. As an acclaimed psychologist and savvy speaker, he's built an empire inspiring people to live whole, well lives. In this exclusive interview, Dr. John Delony reveals the power of choosing optimism and creating your own identity. Join them as the expert shares his insights on connections and community, becoming your future self, and the values you'll need to get there.  You'll discover: How to recognize and overcome your limiting beliefs The role vulnerability plays in relationships How to separate your self from your anxiety, depression and trauma How our bodies react to our environment and relationships How modern society has created record disconnection and loneliness The importance of being anchored into something bigger than yourself Let this transparent talk guide your healing. Discover Dr. John Delony's insights on wholeness, hope, and living fully. Want more of The Growth Lab with Dr. Josh Axe? Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Follow Dr. Josh Axe Instagram Twitter Facebook Tik-Tok Follow Dr. John Delony Instagram Twitter Facebook Tik-Tok Youtube Follow Leaders Instagram Twitter Facebook Email Newsletter ------  Links:  Check our Dr. John Delony's NEW Book Building a Non-Anxious Life Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anxiety is just a smoke detector. It's not the problem. It's just letting you know there's fires in your house somewhere. And usually those fires are relational in nature. Your body's detected that you're alone, that your marriage falling apart, that you don't have any friends, that your boss isn't safe. It may be detecting that you're not in control of your own life, the agency we talked about, it may be letting you know that, hey, you have lost autonomy, right?

It's letting you know you're not safe. There's danger somewhere, right? Underneath that is, we have a culture that says, if you feel bad, if you feel anxious, that's the problem to be solved. I disagree with that wholeheartedly. That's like hearing your smoke detector in your kitchen and just racing in there and climbing up on the ladder and pulling the batteries out. You stop the alarm.

Congratulations. And your house burns down around you, which is what's happening to us right now in this culture. Hey, everybody, Dr. Josh Axe here. Welcome to the Growth Lab podcast where each and every week we talk about the science behind how to grow yourself, your health. your wealth and take your career and finances to the next level. Today we've got a guest. I'm really excited about it's Dr. John Deloney and he is a PhD in psychology and we're going to talk about how to overcome limiting beliefs. We're going to talk about how to build a mindset that can overcome anything

and a whole lot more also John actually just wrote a book. We're going to talk about that a little bit today as well but Dr. John, welcome the show. Thanks man. And I think it's important to note my PhDs in counseling, which only matters if you're nerds and it's below the hierarchy of psychologists so there you go I think it's well listen you know I think generally you help people that's right that's a personal problems so it's very very good you know I've been watching you recently on YouTube and just so impressed you know you do part of what you do is a call-in show people calling in with I mean just a number of issues everything from depression to anxiety and numerous mental health issues talk me a little bit about what are some of the fastest growing

health problems across the board that you see and deal with today I So when I first started the show, people would call in and ask about, you know, my husband cheated on me. What do I do? Or I've just got diagnosed with these three things. And I don't know what to do next. And I found myself, because I don't have a radio background, I would ask, why are you calling me? Like, you don't even call your friends. Every person had the exact same answer.

They said, John, I got nobody. And so I think the underlying pathology under a lot of what's going on right now is that we've created the loan. the onlyest generation in human history. And our bodies are spinning off in a thousand different directions. And diagnostically, we're playing whack-a-mole with them. Oh, you got this, you got this, you got this, you got this. And those of us nerds are really impressed with our manuals and our diagnostic guides. But I think the underlying pathology is pretty similar,

which is our bodies are not designed to do life by ourselves. They're not designed to sit two inches apart, but be 2,000 miles away from our spouses. on I'm on my device. She's on hers or what. We've created a world. We just can't do this. And our kids walk in and head to the room, shut the door, and they get on their screens.

And the only interactions we have is on Saturday mornings when some soccer coach is telling us we have to drive nine hours to the travel soccer game for a 14 year old. Like we've just created this insane world. And so I think underlying all of it is, I mean, depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD. I'm really starting to lean towards thinking those are a lot. lot more similar diagnostically underneath all the smoke, then we like to separate them by chapter, right? Or by diagnostic code, right? I think the underlying pathology is becoming clearer and clearer that this poison's coming out of the same well. I want to get into that, but I also want to

say, you mentioned ADHD. I was watching this interview with Jordan Peterson recently, and he was quoted saying, I think ADHD generally speaking, 90-some percent of the time is a rubbish diagnosis. So I agree with them. I think we have tortured a generation of little boys and told them you will sit in this classroom and you will sit in that plastic chair and I will lecture you under a education system. My first PhD is in education. So I grew up in that world where and I remember the studies in grad school when it was like, hey, teachers call on boys more than girls teachers you have to fix that and they went okay and they smashed that pendulum to the other side and there was truth to those studies it was true rambunctious fun wild little boys were the ones that

the teachers called on um and you and i both know anxiety is expressed often in girls they get quiet you know retract right and boys get bananas but we've just beaten down a generation of of little boy i asked i was with a mentor mine a guy that was really one of my psychology professors and my crisis guy he trained me on a crisis response to So we were having dinner. This is about a year ago. And I said, hey, I'm getting a lot of questions about ODD, oppositional defiant disorder with kids.

And I said, is that real? And he looked at me and he said something very instructive. He said, yes. And you've never seen it. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, until you've been in a psych ward and there's six grown men holding down a five-year-old, it's very real. But like the DSM was designed for researcher to talk to,

researcher. So we're both going to study depression. We're all going to make sure we're using the same word for the same thing. Yeah. It's also used to help the mental health profession feel more medicalized so they could get insurance payments. And it does help with treatment plans, right? Yeah. It was never intended to be released at the wild. Wow. So that you can Google what's wrong with my kid and label your kid as a narcissistic hyperactive, like make up the, you know, these over-diagnostic. So it got out of the cage. And now we call each other, he's a narcissist. she's bipolar. And we're just lobbing grenades at each other.

And it's not a helpful way to do life. Yeah. Yeah. One of the interesting things that I started looking at ADD as well is that oftentimes, or ADHD is oftentimes there's personalities associated with it, right? In terms of like, hey, you're more extroverted or you tend to, you know, be more disagreeable, right? There's some of these qualities where, hey, maybe it's a personality, you know. And I think a lot of times you see, you know, it tends to be maybe more creatives.

It could be actors. It could be musicians. It could be people that are actually maybe born to be leaders that maybe get some of those. Well, that's like, so I, if you Google ADHD, my picture's in the Wikipedia page, right? I mean, that's my whole life. Wow. And I used to beg my dad. I begged my father, who was a homicide detective and a SWAT hostage negotiator.

He was a bad dude. I used to beg him for medication as a kid because I knew that I wasn't experiencing the world, like my colleague, my bossmate. Yeah. I knew it. And he always said, no. we're going to figure it out. Wow. And so I, as a grown-up, it's my superpower.

And I have somebody who makes sure I'm where I need to be, right? And I have had to do a lot of work way upstream so that I can show up because my ADHD is a context. It's not an excuse. It gives me a picture, but I still got to show up on time. I'm still going to be present with my wife and my kids. And so it's not an excuse to not show up in the world. Yeah.

But we take these kids and we say, here's actors, here's musicians, here's politics. here's politicians, here's CEOs, folks who are able to see the big picture and bounce from thing to thing to thing and laser in for a long period of time. Right. We make their idols, ADHD folks, and then we punish them for that spirit

that would lead you to some of these positions, right? And so it's tough. It's real, real tough. And at the same time, I don't want to bag on the education system. We're trying to do what they're trying to do. We've just created a quagmire. It's a mess. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, you know, I have a very, well, you know, similar story in terms of when I was a kid, I got diagnosed with ADHD. They wanted to put me on Ritalin. I kind of wanted. My mom was like, no, I don't want you to get on drugs. And then later on, right before I went into college, you know, wrote me a prescription, gave me Adderall, took it a couple of days and felt like this is really changing me. It's changing my personality.

Stop taking it. But I remember it's the craziest thing, ADHD drugs. I remember being in college. and the number of college students that were taking ADHD drugs that weren't diagnosed with ADHD was unbelievable. The last number I heard was 75%. 3 out of 4.

And I was a dean of students at a law school. It's just sitting with my colleagues across the country. It's terrifying. Wow. And you're talking about the high performers are, and you know what amphetamines due to you. Yeah. I'm terrible.

They're just baking their brains. Yes. And it's a, it's a, and you also know, the hell that is getting off in-fed. I mean, we've just a disaster, right? But you have law students and you've got med students and you've got, you know, doctoral students.

You've got these folks who are our next generation's next leaders. You've got these tech guys who are running 24 or 365. There's going to be a, you can't just smash one side of the teeter totter without the other side coming up. There's going to be a price to pay for it. Yeah. Wow. Let's talk about one of the things I always try and focus on.

And I know you're very similar is that. Yeah, we got dark quick, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, hey, you know, when I look at the medical profession and whether it be counseling, psychology, mainstream medicine, you know, everything has become so, I'm just treating the symptom. I'm going to treat the superficial thing and bandaid this thing. And one of the things I love about what you're all about is let's get to the deepest root cause that's going on right now. So when we talk about issues like, because you said there's a lot of similarities with depression, anxiety, even ADHD. what is that commonality that maybe the overlap between some of those issues and then what's what's really the root cause of some of these things that we can start to uncover um a lot of my thinking on this was originally informed by gobor mathe's work he he was the first one started having these conversations about trauma but ultimately um here's the way i describe it so um let's say you have a garage or a basement and you're making candles in your basement yeah and which we all know

to be true, right? I'm just kidding. But in my basement, I'm repairing motorcycles. And in my wife's basement, she is, I don't know, she's a painter. She's a painter. Yeah. So that's genetics. My genetics have a bunch of flammable things in the basement. Yours are going to smell. It's going to be beautiful when it catches fire. And hers will be pretty flammable, but not explosive. And then all three of our houses catch on fire. We all get dropped in the same class with the same teacher saying if you move I'm kicking you out of here and then if your kid gets kicked out of class you're out of school and both of our parents are working 24-7 365 because rent is so expensive and inflation's crazy and so all of our houses catch on fire that's our

life well mine's going to explode like with a mushroom cloud yours is going to simmer and burn my wife's going to be really bright it's going to be a fire but it's going to burn yourself out quickly and instead of dealing with the fire what we're doing is we're doing is we're going around looking at the end result and saying, oh, this kid's got ADHD and this kid's got this and this kid's got this. I'll always contend that anxiety and depression are on the same trend line. They work recursively together. Right. And you toss in ADHD. You talk in OCD. I think you can distill it down to a body's response to chaos. And Matei would suggest that some of that is in utero, right? If a mom is worried about her next meal, if she's got an abuse

of husband if he left her because she wasn't fun during her pregnancy or she's in a war zone, then that baby is going to just be bathing in cortisol and adrenaline for X number of years. Yeah. I mean, X number of months. And so that's not popular to say because then the first instinct is, oh, it's my fault. That's right. That's not the solution, but I get this. I get the feeling, right?

And so I think it's it's less, let's stop, stop treating people as a, as a diagnostic as a label. Yeah. Stop treating people as a symptom. What if we asked a crazy question? What if we asked this question? What if our bodies are working exactly as they should? And the depression rates and the anxiety rates and the ADHD rates are going through the roof. We didn't all get ADHD at the same time like COVID.

We didn't all get ADHD like our genes didn't all switch overnight. What if we create an environment that our bodies were not designed to live in? We created a nutrition system. We created an education system. We created a two parents always out of the household system. We created a world and our bodies are just ringing off the hook. They're like if you have one kid that has leukemia when they're four. And then your other kid gets to be four.

Your body will have put a GPS pin in that moment. And you will find yourself getting a little more anxious as this other kid gets to the fourth. That's your body working perfect. There's nothing wrong with you. Yeah. It's supposed to be alert for danger about your kid. Yeah. What if our bodies are working perfectly, Josh?

And the world we've created is insane. Well, again, and this, it's a, it's a brilliant idea because it is getting more of that root cause. You know what's interesting is I've studied ancient Asian medicine is that they never gave somebody, you have this diagnosis. They'd say you have this out of balance. Your body's too hot internally or it's too cold.

There's too much movement and there's too long. movement or there's too little movement going on. There's bodies too dry or it's too damp. I mean, they would really look at things and say, listen, you don't have fibromyalgia, you don't have depression. You have an imbalance right now of you're too active or you're not active enough, right?

And so they would really look at those things. It's a very similar thing to what you're saying is that, hey, we need to rebalance your lifestyle. We need to rebalance your environment, and that's really part of the idea. And so, yeah, fibromyalgia is a good one. What if chronic pain is just your body trying to get your attention? And you can go down like a suburban, a row of suburban homes.

They're all going to have different doorbells. Yeah. Right? This one might be fibromyalgia. This one might be anxiety. This one might be headaches. This one might be whatever. It's just your body trying to get your attention.

Yeah. And we have, we call it, that we call it the attention economy. I think that's a very elevated kind way of saying it. I think we have the distraction. Look over here economy. Yeah. An economy designed for one thing, and that is to distract you from what your body's trying to tell you.

I joke often that Netflix even took away this motion. They took it away. Netflix is scanning every website that I go to on my router. They know every website I go to. They know how long I stay there. They know every movie and TV show I watch for how long what I've fast forward to what I pause. They know everything. And so they know me better than I do. And they say, hey, you just sit there. I'm going to start the next season for you of this show. You're going to

want to watch. You don't even have to push play. We're starting it for you. And we just go, all right. I'm in. Right. And then I do this and food shows up at my front door. And I do this and I FaceTime my kid in another town because I'm in a hotel. And that's our life, Josh. And we're like, why am I anxious? Because your body's going, hey, we're headed. for a cliff. That's right. Yeah. So walk me through. If, if, if, if, if, if, if, if you know, if, if you had to go through your process of, hey, we need to find the root cause. We need to start to remedy this situation.

What are some of those steps somebody needs to follow in order to get themselves out of depression, anxiety, you know, having trouble paying attention? So my contention is, um, Kind of like someone coming to a doctor and saying my stomach hurts. I remember back in the days when the early days of the nutrition wars, there was a kind of a sentiment that would come around that I loved. And it was if you go to take your dog to the vet and you say, my dog's stomach hurts.

They're going to say, well, what's your dog been eating? If I go to the doctor and say, hey, my stomach's hurting, they're going to give me a couple of tests. And they're going to give me some medicals, right? So they're not even going to ask, right? And so I want to start from a premise of what if, what if your body's working right? Yeah. Let's look at a couple of things.

Let's look at these six things. And this is just all the neuroscience trying to distill down into a way that somebody who's never read a science book in their life can understand it. Here's just a quick roadmap. You have to start with reality because I can look at my life and say, I've got this car, I've got this size house, I've got this job, but this size. salary, my body knows that my marriage is falling apart. My body knows that my kids don't want to sit at the kitchen table with me. My body knows my boss has been acting kind of dicey. Yeah.

And so what is reality? What's the state of things for me? I think that's a place for everybody. You don't go. Be aware. Get a blood test. Yes. Like, how overweight are you?

Like, it's about choosing reality. And you have to know how much our cultures, how swimming upstream that is. A culture does not want you owning reality. It will be comfortable. And those two things are opposing forces, right? So, and by the way, we do this in every other area. You don't just start running a marathon, right? You've got to know how far the distance is.

You've got to know what kind of shape you're in, right? Yeah. And so this isn't weird. So you're going to do, you're going to start, you're going to choose reality. You have to choose connection. And we talked about that earlier. We've just created the loneliest generation of human history. And it's, I mean, we.

started putting cooking oil in our cars and we're wondering why they're sputtering down the road they're designed to run on gas people are designed to run in tribes with people yeah and i'll say this boldly if your body has scanned the environment and you got nobody and by the way you can be crowded in a low i mean you can be lonely in a crowded room yeah you and i've both been there you're sitting at table people i know love me that work for me work with me and i just want to get out of here because y'all don't know what i'm going through right so loneliness isn't about number of people. And loneliness also doesn't account for, I got a million followers on Instagram. That's great data in the front part, in your frontal lobe. That is not soothing that amygdala that knows. You've got nobody to call in the middle of the night.

Yeah. Right. If your body has scanned the environment and you're not, and you don't have people, it would be failing you if it let you sleep all night peacefully. It'd be failing you because you are responsible for your front, your back, the sides, you're responsible for the health of your wife, your kids, your home. It would be failing you if it didn't pop open at 2.30 in the morning.

Yeah. And what do I do? I go to the doctor and say, I keep waking up at 2.30 in the morning. Boom. They hand me a bottle of hypnotics and say, try this. And then I don't sleep for six months. And then I'm super anxious. And I go to my therapist and they want to talk.

Man. Yeah. Right. See, I mean, we just have a solution, a whack-a-mo solution. That's right. And really your body just says, hey, you're all alone. Right. The third one is choosing freedom.

we've outsourced our lives. We outsourced our fantasy life to a bank. Most people in America, a bank tells you what you're going to do tomorrow. Yeah. And that, but my boss is abusive. I don't care. You owe me money, right? But what about, I don't care.

You're going to go to work tomorrow because you have a car payment to make on a depreciating asset, right? You, your mortgage company is going to tell you what to do tomorrow. And we don't even think about it. Are we surround ourselves with clutter and nonsense and chaos and we wonder why we're anxious, right? on a body designed for scarcity. Now we have everything. And everybody doesn't know how to operate in that system.

So choose freedom really comes down to the nerd word is agency or autonomy. When your body knows that you're in the backseat of your own life, it will sound your alarms. Whether that's depression and shuts the whole system down, whether that's anxiety and spins you up. It will try to get your attention because you're not in control of what happens next. The next one is health and healing. And that's where you and I have spent a lot of our career, which is, man, most people take. better care of their new truck than they do their body. Yeah.

Right. And then we get upset that it's not working, right? But we never take care of it. We fill it up with garbage. We don't deal with our weight issue, whatever. And if you haven't dealt with that sexual abuse, your body's dealing with it every day. If you haven't dealt with the fact that your dad left and you're a nine-year-old girl inside of you still asking what was so bad about me that daddy left.

If you haven't dealt with that, it's going to ripple through your. your life. And so you have to choose health and healing. You have to choose. My buddy Sal, the stuff I know, he's out in, uh, in Los Angeles with the mind pump guys. He told me something once in a private conversation. I've struggled with, I've struggled with body dysmorphine my whole life. And he said something that just shook me. He said, dude, you can't hate yourself to better shape. You can't hate your body and think you're gross and go to the gym and try to work that off. He said, that's, that's a jet fuel. You'll, you'll lose your weight. and you will gain it all back because it's not sustainable.

He said, if you go to the gym because you think so highly of yourself that you're worth an hour and you're worth doing really hard stuff so that your body can adapt and get strong, he goes, you'll do that for the rest of your life. And that was just a shift, right? So choosing health and healing and then choosing mindfulness, which we can talk about all day long. And then the most controversial one, I think, was choosing belief. If you go back to the great psychological theories of our time, the whole idea was self actualization.

You get this, you do this, you accomplish this, you surround yourself with this, then you can be the shining beacon on a hill. And if you go back to some of those old ones like Freud and Jung and those guys, we're there, we're actualized. We have everything. And the self was never intended to hold up the universe.

And so I think if you look at evolutionary psychology for all of human history until about 150 years ago, people walked outside of their tent and they fell down on their knees and said, dear God, please rain. My kids die. Yeah. And now we just turn a faucet and water comes out and we got real arrogant. And so when the body knows it's untethered and there's, there's atheists writing about this and then there's faith, theologians writing about this.

We just clipped all the tethers on belief. We just cut all the, all the strings and the balloons are out of the barn. And the only thing left to worship for a being created to worship is ourself and how I feel. And now we're chased her. We just are following a trail of how I feel about things. And I expect you to bend to my feelings and you expect me to bend to your feelings. And that's a recipe for chaos. And so I'm not going to, my family and I are Christian, I'm not going to subscribe that to somebody.

But I will subscribe is if you want to live a non-anxious life, if you want to begin to heal, you have to take a knee to something bigger than you and say with open hands, please help. Yeah. And if you can't get there, your body will always know we're. holding up the universe, and that's a recipe for mental health challenges down the road. What's huge? Well, I mean, what you just said ties so into identity and purpose and a number of things that you decide that too. Yeah. You know, I want to walk through some of the things I took away from what you did that and put it in my own kind of my own. No, it's a lot there. Just

just kind of thrown it all out there. That was good. No, I think that it's getting the root cause. And I think the first thing you mentioned, this is so important is where am I at now? You know, it's like if you were going to, you mentioned losing weight or if you were going to run a marathon, where's my starting point? Like where, and being honest with yourself, you know, I love Desusky and he says something to the extent of like, you know what, like you've got to know where you're at now. And most people have no idea where they are. And so I think that's the first thing is being really open and honest about this is where I'm at.

The next thing you mentioned was connection. This is so big. We're meant to run in community. You know, you've seen this. I mean, there's so many studies on this in terms of, it's like, in terms of like if you want to be successful in your career, get around more disciplined people or in your health or anything. So running with the tribe is just incredibly important. The other thing I had done here was taking personal responsibility and ownership,

realizing you're not a victim, you know, it's about this locus of control. Like, I've got control. I can control the things that at least I can control most, I can at least control myself and my thoughts and my actions. And then, you know, the healing part, I think, you know, getting in these good habits and rhythms, whether it'd be eating healthy, caring for yourself getting to the root of if you have childhood trauma don't shove it under the rug right it's like hey we got we got to we got to get it out let's deal with it let's do what we have to and then i think the belief thing is so important because what people believe in today you know i i i tend to and i'm not the one that came up with this i heard tim Keller talk about this and another guy um um charles taylor who

wrote a book on identity yeah and so he goes through really there's there's three types of identity There's modern, which is all about me and I. There's traditional, which is about the community. And then there's divine, which is about God, right? And it's this sort of idea of like, most people think, like, I need to go and find my identity somewhere. Like, I'm going to go and like, go to the end of the rainbow and see where I can find my identity. My calling as though like the cosmos hit it from you and you got to find it. That's insane.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think one of the things that was a big realization to me is that, is that, our identities are found in our roles and our responsibilities but the meaning we attach to them. So, for instance, if like if your whole identity is based on you and your specialness versus, hey, I'm a child of God. Like, I am connected to God and that's part of my identity. Obviously, there's a big difference between having your feelings about yourself and that sort of thing, anchor your identity versus, you know, an all-loving God, or even something at least in the middle of those two

or better than self is my community. It's not all the weight isn't on you. I think a lot of times people think, well, I want all of this freedom to like, I decide, I'm what, but then it's like, well, all the pressures then on you and then it's kind of like this crushing, crushing thing.

Even my buddies who are hardcore scientists, hardcore atheist, and I love them. Our kids play together. They're great people. Even they'll go as far to say, I believe in the birth and life and death and resurrection of nature.

right that i'm going to become part of the soil and a tree's going to grow up yeah but even they are taking a need to i'm part of something way bigger than me yeah if you find yourself out on an island and you are holding up your universe it will crush you and i'm just telling you because i sat with you people who had everything you can't hold it up you're never designed to hold that up and in the weird way when you anchor into something bigger than you you can repel off the edge and do wild crazy ambitious things Yeah. Because you're actually rooted in. If you're free climbing with no rope, you've got to go real, real slow because one wrong move and you're out.

Yeah. But if you're tethered in, man, you can fly off the side of that mountain and be goofy and hit your friend. You can do all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Way crazier mountains if you're anchored in, right? That's good. That's really good. Well, I think identity has become such a big issue today.

And when you look at these confusion about what gender am I. And I mean, there are a number of. of sort of things around identity where I think people are really confused. You know, I've even seen this today when you look at a lot of the, you know, whether it's the LGBT movement or the environmentalism movement, which by the way, I'm as much of an environmentalist as anyone I know, like I own 4,000 acres of certified organic land. Like we've built back carbon. Like I'm like all in on turning this planet into a paradise. Right, right. But, you know, I think a lot of people have taken

replaced worship of God with worship of something else, right? Well, you know, it's David Foster Wallace in that classic, classic, this is water. It's a masterpiece. And if you haven't, it's a small essay. It's a small speech he gave. It's a graduation speech he gave to Kenyon College. And it's such a masterpiece that it's worth reading about a thousand times in your lifetime.

Atheist, English major, brilliant writer, probably the greatest, like, fiction writers of our time. But here's what he said. I don't care you call yourself an atheist. I don't care if you call yourself a person of faith. I don't care who you're following. You are created to worship. And don't lie to yourself. Everybody worship.

What he says is, if you worship beauty, you will never be beautiful enough. And if you worship money, you will never have enough. And if you worship shiny things, there will always be another object you've got to go get. And so I took from that belief is not about grabbing these things.

I think the identity movement come from this cultural notion that you're broken. There's something wrong with you. That you, like, you're the worst thing that ever happened to you. You are the, like, you feel bad because everybody's after you. And so you have to create this scratching and clawing. You have to create this self. And you're going to have to follow it around because it's not anchored to any.

Yeah, that's good. And I think the people in power did that. I think the doctor said, You have this disorder. This is you now. And you're going to always have to do this. You're going to have to always take this. Somebody's going to have to come get you because you're broken forever.

Well, I'm sure you've seen this and I saw this when I was in practice. And so many people, especially when they had more severe conditions, I mean, that condition was their identity. If I were to say, hey, this is the top. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It happens a lot. And it really keeps him from getting well. And we have a culture that I, I, I, the culture is problem-centric.

Like, when you and I shook hands on the front porch, if you had greeted me with, hey, what's up, welcome to this amazing studio space we've got. By the way, my kids are doing amazing at school. I would have thought, and I'd do this for a living, I would have thought, all right, weirdo. Hey, what's up? But if you had well, and you didn't,

but if you had greeted me with, hey, what's up, sorry for all this mess. It's chaotic here. we're moving into this new studios. I'm just, I'm doing, I would have been like, that's my guy. We lead problems first and we have nowhere to say. And I had a friend who was an activist attorney. She were my closest buddies.

And she was in the court, in the courtroom for some really significant cases, right? Some advocacy cases. And then something came up in our culture and I called her. And I was like, all right, I'm with you. Like, I'm all about supporting the people in the margins. I've dedicated my whole career to that. I don't understand this thing. And she said something so powerful.

She said, John, we spent so long fighting for X, Y, and Z that over time our identity shifted from, can we just have be treated like everybody else? It shifted to. We're fighters. That's our identity. And I think that's instructive for politics. Ask somebody what you're for. No one could tell you. They can tell you what they're against.

They can tell you who they all hate together. Yeah. They can't tell you. That's so true. Here's what I really want. Because if you do that, if you sit down and say, I really just want a safe place for my kids to go to school, I really just want there to be less mental health challenges in the country.

I want there to be less obesity in the country. I really want to know that my mother and father, who are elderly now, are going to have enough money to eat. We all want those things. We're all for those things. we just don't have a we don't have a cultural psychology for what are we for so we create identity out of what we're not and I'm not you and because I'm not you I got to go to war and you and I both know enough about psychology that when I declare war my brain decides quickly divides the world up into us and then yeah that's it and now it's war time and so there's something about um taking away labels I'm not I the great is William Glasser the great psychiatrist he he wouldn't let his clients say I have anxiety he's a he was a he was a physician, but he would say, you're anxietyating. They would say, I'm depressing this week. I'm depressing the last six months. And if your wife just passed away, you should be. Your body's working

perfectly. Yeah. If you got other, if your body's found your lonely, if you've been, about to get laid off, you've got all these things, let's talk about those. Because your body's trying to take care of you right now. But it was this very active. This is happening to me. My body's trying to protect me in its own weird way. Let's get to the bottom of that. That's different than you have depression. You know, your viewpoints are such an outlier. I know. I'm here and it's it's very much the way I've gone through my health and medical career in terms of taking it's been it's been an outlier. But I'm really grateful for you. There have been so many friends of mine and people I know that have gone to counselors over the years and I know it's hard breaking. It's hard right. I mean that's my community man.

It's my gang. It's so hard. Yeah. Yeah. In the counseling profession, and by the I'm still tied to the professional this to the national, I mean to the group. right to the state that's my gang there is such a pressure when someone sits down just tell me what's wrong with me it is way way easier to say you have this many behaviors over this period of time you've got this well what's easier for somebody to hear you've got this diagnosis there's something wrong with you or you've got to change your whole environment you're not safe in your marriage. Yeah. And it's like, what am I supposed to do with that? You know what I mean? That's really, really hard. Or your parents struggle with obesity, your, I mean, your grandparents struggle with

obesity, your parents struggle with eating disorders. And now you've got a chaotic mess. No one wants that. Yeah. No. I don't want that. Right. When I was crippled with anxiety, I did not want to hear about my workout program and my need to go make friends. I want to make this dollar amount and I need that promotion, I need you to give me something right now. Yeah. Right. I was all about that. It makes sense.

And it's perfect. It's just a faulty, not true story. You know, anytime we've read any studies on success, it's the same thing every time, delay gratification, you know. And it's like, I think if people really understood that, listen, if you want to be successful at anything, if you want to overcome any health issue, anything, one of the keys is overcoming, you know, this sort of immediate gratification, taking a pill for it, getting some sort of numbing, just numbing out.

could be Netflix, whatever. I mean, it's something, you know. You've seen the diseases of despair literature that the United States, I think we're on your four, maybe five of dying younger. And even you pull the COVID deaths out. Like you're dying younger,

that is madness in the culture with everything. I read on Spotify recently that the number one search term on Spotify is the word sad. Wow. Because people are looking at sad songs. They just want to kind of like... Bade in it.

That's right. That's our, that's our ethos. That's our ethos is let's sit in the dark. Let's don't look for the light. And delay gratification, man, it sounds all lofty. Nobody goes to the gym and takes all the weight off the bar. Nobody does that. Because you know the only way to get stronger is to put more weight on.

Yeah. Now, when me and my wife lift, I'm a way bigger guy than her. And I'm a bigger person than she is. I'm going to have different weight on the bar. But what it works the same with your nutrition. And this is the pot talking to the, the kettle, man. I'm in day four of like a pretty radical transformation. Let's go. Hard. I love it. It's miserable. Yeah. And it's I know what's on the other side of this. I'm

going to feel better. I'm going to move better. I'm going to look better. All these things. My brain's going to work better. And so there's nothing, zero things good that come quick. People win the lottery go bankrupt. People who lose 100 pounds overnight, their marriages fall apart because it it messed up the equilibrium of their home, right? Nothing good comes from instant. Yeah. We just have to bake that in. Yeah.

It's true. I want to hit on this healing point that you talked about, that fourth step because, you know, it made me think of there, there's this quote by Aristotle. And he, well, this isn't, there's this idea by Aristotle. And he basically says vice feeds vice, virtue feeds virtue. And so when you start doing good things at first, it may not feel like it, but over time you start to crave them. Like, I've sounded sound this with health food.

Like when people start eating healthier, it's like, oh, this doesn't taste as good as what I used to have. But then if I would go and have a Big MacNet, like I know it would be, it would taste fake to me. Like it would not taste good. How do you, what is some of that process of helping somebody heal, do helping somebody do what's good for them, even though even their hormone, dopamine and all kinds of things within their brain or tell them, no, I want you to go back to scrolling all day long. Yeah. for me my natural bent is anxiousness my natural bent is chaos and my natural bent is slothness like just I dream of the day to do nothing and about noon on my nothing day I have a headache I've been slouched around I feel terrible I'm grumpy I snap at my kids I get make it worse my wife's like

what do you want to do I'm like it it is all miserable so I have to get way up river and I've got to put some hurdles in front of me. And I have to unplug feelings. I have, like, we have this weird thing in culture where you have this path, which is, your feelings are the only thing that matter. They are data. They are your truth, which in and of itself, my truth is an insane statement. But, like, you are your feelings.

And then the counter to that is, if you have a feeling, you're a coward, you're weak, suck it up, just start grinding. I don't hear about your stupid feelings. Both of those narratives will kill you. Yeah. Right? They will kill you. So I have to wake up in the morning and know I did not feel like exercising the day.

And I got to go do it anyway. I know if I stayed up late the night before doing media late into the night and I had been traveling two weeks before, I wake up and my seven-year-old daughter comes in the living room with her book on tape singing some song and got a recorder in this hand. I don't want to feel, I don't feel like being nice. Yeah. And I got me the next right thing. So that doesn't matter. And some mornings, like this morning, we were talking off here. I hurt myself the other day doing squats like an idiot.

I was trying to hurry and get through the workout. And I didn't have enough time. And I just did something stupid. This morning, I really felt like getting out of bed and going to lift. And the best, wisest thing for me this morning was to go through a series of mobility and stretching exercise. which make me the Texas high school football player feel like I'm doing nothing and wasting my time, but it's right and it's good, right? So sometimes the greatest act of bravery is go to bed.

Sometimes the greatest act of bravery is go work out even when you're tired. And your mission in life is to get in tune enough with your body that you know. We all, I joke, we all made an agreement. We all know you can't brush your teeth so great on Sunday morning that you don't have to do it again until Wednesday. We all know that, right? So I'm going to brush my teeth twice a day. That's going to help with bad breath. It's going to help with make me a little more kissable to my wife.

It's going to also fend off infection. And then seven months from now, if my wife's like, dude, your breath's bad, then I probably need to go see somebody because that means I have an infection probably. Yeah. And you go deal with that. Yeah. So I'm going to do these things. I'm going to put some hurdles in front of me. I'm going to not borrow money just so I don't, I'm not beholden to a bank.

I am not going to have pornography on my computer. I'm not going to have trash foods in my house. I do. I shouldn't. Right? But I'm not going to do these things. So when the moments arises, I can't even give in to the temptation because it's not here. And so it's just about creating a life that I want to have, not this unintentional, just bring it on all the time.

Yeah. Yeah. That's so good. You know, one of the, I want to switch gears and talk a little about limiting beliefs. You know, this is something that a lot of people, I wouldn't say a lot of people. I'd say everybody deals with limiting beliefs somewhere in their life. It could be, I'm not smart enough. It could be I'm not worthy.

It could be I'm not good at relationships. What are some of your advice and thoughts around what somebody should do to recognize and overcome limiting beliefs? I think there's two strands. One is the stories you were told growing up, the meta stories you were a part of. Over time, those become the stories you tell yourself. You start telling yourself in your own voice. So, hey, shut up, be quiet. I'm trying to watch the game.

It's a very clear message. You're worth less than this group of professional athletes to your dad, which is an important message that you begin to tell yourself over time. I'm not that good, right? I wasn't even good enough from my dad's attention, right? That's a limiting belief that is parked into your nervous system. So that when someone says, hey, I need someone to take this. Can somebody step in on this leadership role?

I'm not raising my hand. I'm terrible at this. Oh, dad, didn't even want to talk to me, right? That's wired in there. Someone sexually abusing your kid. Here's what your worth is. Your worth is utility to me, right?

That will ricochet through your nervous system for the rest of your life, right? Unless you deal with it. So there's limiting belief number one, which is true and honest. I think when we call it limiting belief, sometimes we take that on as a character issue, as a moral issue,

is if you can't overcome it, you're weak. Again, I go back to your body's, pretty good. A lot that gets wired in your nervous system. If it was your job to make sure mom didn't get mad growing up, hey, don't do that. Your mom's going to get mad. Then at nine years old, you know you're responsible for the emotional regulation of the adults in your room. You're probably going to grow up and become a peacekeeper. You're probably going to grow up and become somebody that a boss looks at and is like, she'll do whatever I say. He'll be the guy that works all day Saturday, all day Sunday, because that's been your job. It happens that way.

That's number one. The second one is we live. What's, I call it like the Instagrammy, um, uh, dream big world. Follow your passion.

Yeah. It's madness, Josh. Um, we become passionate about the things that we're good at. And we become good at the things that we do over and over again that we practice. And for most of us, there's the occasional guru who's really intentional about like,

I love this thing so much. For me, whether it's guitar playing, which I've done for 35 years, whether it's exercise, which I've done for 35 years, all these things, it started with somebody telling me, you're going to do this. There's stuff I was made to do. Following my passion as a nine-year-old would have been a disaster, right? But I joined sports teams and we had to exercise. I joined a rock and roll band.

We had to practice, right? And now music's my favorite thing in the world. Exercise is my favorite thing in the world. You know, dad is my favorite thing in the world. But people, it was a part of me growing up. And so in this Instagram, you follow your passion. You just need to think confident. That's not how confidence works.

Confidence works when you have a bunch of little wins. If I went to the hospital tonight, if my wife called the hospital and they admitted me for major depressive disorder, an episode, I was going to hurt myself, right? And they put me in. They'd give me medication sleep. They'd give me nutrition and food. And they would let me sleep and wake up the next day and see the sun came out.

And then we would start a series of little winds. I want you just to get up and take a shower today and then you're right to do that for a few days. Same as PT, right? You're just gonna slow, yes, shoulder surgery, you're just gonna be able to do this. That's right. That's what we're gonna do today.

And so limiting beliefs, often you don't overcome them by just chanting in the mirror. You overcome limiting beliefs by, I'm gonna get up every day at six o'clock for the sake of getting up at six o'clock. I'm just gonna do that. If you can't trust yourself, of course your body's going to not believe you when you say, I'm going to lose weight.

I'm going to do these things. If you're not accountable to you. So overcoming limiting beliefs is dealing with these stories that you bathed in. If you grew up in a Christian home and your parents told you, God's watching you. And he's perfect and you're not. And if you screw up one time, he's going to torture you for eternity. Good God. No wonder you can't sit still in church, right?

Now, you come to this like, you've got to pull the thread on those stories because they're baked into your nervous system and you have to begin a series of little wins nobody's going to come out of the gate and get a PhD in psychology that's just how that works it takes years to do that you can though start start practicing listening and just saying thank you for sharing that you can start you can start watching people as they interact you can start these little bitty things over time um my boss is able to give away millions of dollars a year he's an uber generous guy i can't but I can tip the waiter a hundred bucks when I hear him whisper into another waiter like, hey, dude, I think I'm going to be able to make rent this month.

I can say, I got that. I'm practicing. Yeah, that's so good. That's how you overcome limiting beliefs by getting in the game and doing a bunch of little things, which you can do over time, you're going to see, oh, I walked a whole marathon inch by inch, and you're going to get in better shape and be able to move faster and faster than the next marathon will be quicker, and the next marathon will be quicker. And pretty soon, these limiting beliefs, they're not what they once were.

And I'll say this, you and I both know, there is no finish line. Yeah. You can be like, I'm going to start a business. I need to make $10 million in revenue. You go with you. So you'll make $10 million in revenue and you'll have both hands on the bathroom mirror. I mean on the bathroom counter, look at yourself in the mirror and it won't be enough. Yeah.

And your body will, it'll readjust for that limitation and be like, oh, that guy's got $25 million. You're just going to quit. Yeah. No, no, I'm going to get that too. Right. There's never enough. Right. It just keeps moving.

I mean, so I think maybe a third one is having a good finish line. That's good. I mean, I think this is really good because those little wins, they add up. They build confidence you're saying. They help with these limiting beliefs. And, you know, I want to also talk about, you and I first started talking about mindset. One of the things I know, I've heard you say, I've read in your biography is you've had some challenges in life. You've dealt with things like ADHD.

You've dealt with things like anxiety. I shared with you before we started. I had a spinal infection and wasn't able to walk for a. year lost 30 pounds was not able to play and hold my baby girl like he lost money all those things happened and it was a really hard time but there were certain things that I was able to start doing shifting my mindset because I got to the point where I'd never felt the emotion of despair before and I'd felt despair absolutely I'd felt some hopelessness and I thought you know what this is not good for me to live in this state I know that I've got to make a mind shift here of believing and hoping for the

best outcome. Because we've both read the studies about the placebo effect and the nocebo effect and how powerful the mind works in healing. Like we've read about athletes who are told you will never walk or you will never play again. In two years later, all of a sudden they're scoring the game winning touchdown or so would you walk me through a little bit? How does somebody build up a resilient mindset? A mindset around hope and grit and grit and just, you know, build a more positive mindset in order to overcome trials and tribulation. in their life. It talks about what you were talking about early.

I love the way you just mentioned, my baby girl, my wife, my exercise, my business, my spiritual and mental health. Like all those things got real dark when I was laid up in bed for a year.

And the other side of that is you had done the work for your entire life to become a guy that some woman looked at and said, I'm going to hitch myself to that dude forever. Let's make a person together. We've got enough financial security that if I go down a year, we don't starve. So you created this resilient world.

Then you got hit by a bus, right? And your bus in your case was a spinal infection. You gave yourself permission to have a season of black wholeness. Your body did what it was supposed to do because you're a hard charging guy. You're a smart guy. You love caring for people. You love helping. You're an entrepreneur.

You want to save the planet. You want to do all these great things. And all that went away. your body did the right thing because that's too much. That's too much to just like wade through, right? While you're laid up in bed and it's dark and your wife's asleep and your daughter's asleep and just the hounds are chasing you, right? Those thought hounds are just going. And so your body does what it's supposed to do.

It draws the shades. Like I'm going to bring the temperature down inside this body for our season and we're just going to breathe. We're going to feel through this. And then the sun comes out. Yeah. And because you'd put the work in up here, you'd have that. that resilience to draw on, you know the roadmap for healing. You've sat with too many people.

You know the roadmap for entrepreneurship. So it's already baked in. What most of us do is we wait until the bad thing happens. And then we're like, I need to be resilient. Well, bro, that workout was done a long time ago, right? Many people wait until the bad thing happens. They realize they're not resilient. And that starts them on their journey to, oh, I need to exercise.

I thought I wanted to exercise for abs. I'm exercising so I can roll around on the floor with my grandkids, right? I'm doing these things. I'm going to not borrow money again because I was leveraged a lot in 2009 and it all went away. I'm going to change how I do money so that when the next thing falls, I'm going to have a checkbook. I'm going to start buying people's houses this next time, right? And so if you can decide I'm going to build these things, I'm going to build connection, I'm going to build a steady dose of reality in my life.

I'm going to have a group of men that I trust and I live in the same neighborhood. We're not just all on a text thread from high school. It's still going. But like, we're going to actually get together and be like, how's your marriage, dude? And we're going to do that. Then when you get hit in the mouth, you're going to be unconscious for a while. And then you're going to get up and go, I got a path out. Even if your path is, I can't even move.

I can't even move. The great Brayne Brown says, what you go looking for in the world, you are sure to find. And so if you ask me what the most significant finding of psychological finding, if you ask any mental health nerd, they're going to give you a different one. Mine is this. It's the work of Martin Seligman. We believed for eons that some people are born Eeyore. Some people are born like, all right. And some people are born like super positive.

What he proved empirically is that's not true, that optimism and pessimism are learned behaviors. Wow. Which means optimism and pessimism are a choice. I choose one of those default settings. What does that look like in real life? That dude cuts me off in traffic when I'm trying. driving and it's in like some modded up Honda Civic and he's got one of those like I don't know what house music is coming out he cuts me off my daughter's in the car and I grab that steering wheel

and I just start laying into him by the way he can't hear me this affects him in no way but I start launching in him yeah guy stupid millennials just trying to whatever doing drugs or he cuts me off. I grabbed the steering wheel and I immediately let go. And I nod my head and say, dear God, please help that guy get to the hospital for his wife dies. I get to pick that story. Wow. It doesn't affect him at all. It only affects me. I can give myself a stroke and a heart attack and feel powerful for a second and die sooner. I can model for my kid, what, how adults should act. And I can lead my body towards a path of empathy and kindness and not bathing cortisol for the the rest of the day. I get to pick that path. Those are all choices you make.

upstream so that when somebody mouths off at your daughter at the mall, I've practiced and I've practiced and I've practiced and I've practiced and I can pick my daughter up and say, it's time for us to go and I can walk out and be under control, right? There's a great, I've had opportunity to do a couple of events with Jocko and he's behind closed doors. Jocko is every bit Jocko. I kind of my my shtick is behind all of the everything, these billion, have or these these go get them these professional athletes at the end of the day he's just a dad like me yeah and it's about 30 minutes in with jacono's like oh we're different you're different than me you've worked 30 years to to sand that part of you off so that you can go do this this mission right

um i'll never forget an interview he gave he's a world-class jutsu guy world class he's a multi-year combat navy seal plus he trains like he is a gangster of gangster yeah and some of Somebody said, if you're walking down the street and you're with your wife and your daughters and that some guy like got in your face, what would you do? He was like, well, I'd reach over and grab my wife's hand and we'd walk across the street and get on that sidewalk. And the guy looked at him kind of funny and he's like, you wouldn't defend your wife's honor? And here's was his answer.

If it takes me beating up a scrub on the street to show my wife that I honor her, I have failed her in every way. And I was like, who, right? And he said, only a few people on planet Earth can defeat me in hand-to-hand combat, and they do that for a living, which would be an awesome sentence if I could say. I'll never utter that sentence. It would be cool, but there was this idea, like, I got nothing to prove. I got nothing to prove to you.

I'm not going to jail for you. I'm not going to risk your friend being in a, in a bush over there with a bottle, hit me with the head when I'm trying to, I'm not going to risk any of that. Yeah. I'm not going to risk a stupid gamble on investing in something I don't know anything about with borrowed money and trying to leverage the gap. I'm not going to do any of those things. I'm going to practice resilience because the storm's common.

They're common. It's common. I'm going to practice it. So when it hits, then I'm going to have my season of darkness. And then I'm going to be able to look and find the light because I've spent my whole life looking for the light. So Seligman says, practice optimism. Practice it. Like your body does this when it sees the stock market.

Ask yourself, what if it all works out? The presidential candidate that you hate gets elected, at least go. I hate that dude what if he does a good job just maybe maybe what if he does a good job you begin to practice it and over time

your body adjust that default setting from it's all coming down to hey this may work out of my favor and those are the guys that you and I run with they don't think you know hey we got to we got to solve a million dollar problem there's always that guy in the room

it's like I gotta start looking for other jobs and there's always one dude it's like dude we're all gonna get rich right and I'm like what that guy well he's done that 50 million times in his life for that moment, right? That's resilience, man. You can't monitor your way to confidence and reliance, self-reliance and resilience. That's something you practice over time. Well, there's a lot of powerful ideas here. One of those is it's like this

an ounce of prevention is worth a pound to cure. You know, all day long, yeah. Yeah, it's like, you know, starting before you get in the difficult situation, building up your mindset, building up a mindset of hope and positivity is so important. The other thing, I think that's just so critical as you're saying it's a choice the research shows life shows it's a choice and so you can choose to live with hope and you can or you can choose to live with negativity and as you said with brine brine brown it's it's this idea of you become what you meditate on it if you know and i was in this situation where when i i had this i met with this infectious disease doctor and he said hey you may be essentially debilitated for the rest of your life and so part of me went to i could go online and

read about will I be debilitated the rest of my life or I could go online and no matter what just read about all the people who had it who overcame the odds and really to choose to focus on there and know you know what no matter what I'll be walking again I'll be running again in fact I'll be better than I was before and what a story I'll tell that's right and you've I know we've all all the people in the leadership business space have heard this narrative but baseball players when they were in a slump used to go watch the tape of them in the slump like what's wrong with my swing and what they realized was it was highly self-reinforcing. They got worse. Wow. And now the, like the wisdom now is when you're in a slump, we're going to go watch you when you were on a tear. What about your mechanics in

this season are different than they are right now? We're going to reinforce it over and over and over. We are, I love that. We are what we meditate on. And I think it's important, dude, just to call it out. I don't think we're broken or weak. That's so countercultural. It is. Yeah. I've sat with women whose babies are dead in that next room. That was part of my job. I've sat. I've hugged husbands who are hugging me so tight because their wife passed away. Every one of those conversations, I've sat with kids who are on the margins of whatever

community they were a part of. They were the wrong color in the wrong community, whatever the thing is. I hear those stories. We weep together. I'm just overcome with emotion with them. We sit and we always land on the same question. And the question is, what are we going to? to do now? All of us end up in that spot. What are we going to do now? You open your eyes after

four weeks of black hole. Is this really happening to me? I'm Josh freaking axe and I can't get out of my bed. Is this happening? And then what am I going to do now? Am I going to go down every story that the media ecosystem is going to feed me, tell me that I will never be enough? Or am I going to find those six people that pulled it off? And here's the deal. You may not pull it off. One of my favorite psychology quotes of all time is the great Amos Tversky. He was Daniel Kahneman's research partner. Oh, yeah. And Daniel Kahnman won the Nobel, like he's Nobel Prize he's savant.

But Tversky says pessimism, I'm butchering it, but pessimism is stupid. Because if what you were thinking about comes true, you experience it twice. Why not focus on the best possible outcome, do what you can to make that thing come true. And if it doesn't, be sad when it happens. We just spend our whole lives hedging. How many people have you met with over the years just waiting for the other shoe to drop? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

What you end up doing is you cash out all the joy you had in this beautiful season because the shoe's always going to drop. It's always, your mom's always going to call and Sam's, I got cancer. Your kid's school's going to call and say your kid's going to jail. Like, that's going to happen. That's our life. And we miss out all the good stuff waiting for the bad thing. And here we are. That's so good.

You know, there's a quote I love by the psychologist, C.J. Young, and he says, a good life and a bad life is determined by how well you walk through the fire. You know, it's that idea of like, are you walking through with this hope and this grit and this gratitude? Are you walking through it with pessimism and negativity and just hopelessness? And, you know, part of how you just walk through your entire life, which way determines what type of life you're going to have? And the common pushback culturally to that sentiment is, but you don't know what I've been through. And you're right.

I don't. I don't. And I've sat with enough people over the years to know on the fortunate list, I'm really high at the top. And I've sat with a bunch of people who've lost everything enough to know. Having a comparison game, trying to have the tragedy Olympics is a waste of time. You hurt. I hurt, we hurt, she hurts, he hurts, it's awful.

And what are we going to do now? Right? That's where we all in it. We all end up that same question. Are you going to hate? You're going to find a group to rally around and you all hate the same people together? You can do that. You're going to end up with a pile of bodies, yours included.

Can you just have toxic positivity and just pretend none of this is real? It's all good. Your body's keeping the score. Your body knows. It's going to shut you down. Right. And you think it starts with anxiety and it ends up with the ability. chronic pain. I can't get out of bed. And the pain is real because your body has said,

you're not listening. I quit or I'm out, right? It'll get your attention or you can choose reality. And in my case, I had to go see a counselor. I had to see somebody. And I went through a couple before I found an incredible one here in Nashville. I had to regularly have friends, men in my life that I trust. I have experts that I call and I don't know the answer, right? I run a mental health show. I don't know 90% of what I get called on, but I know somebody who does, I'm not too proud to call. I asked my wife, how can I love you today? I don't say, this is oh, I'm going to.

I ask her, how can I love you today? And I tell my kids, I'm sorry. I was wrong. I shouldn't have said that. I said that. I came out wrong. I was mad at my boss and I took it out on you and that was wrong. It's just walking through life with your hands open, right?

Yeah. So that when the moment comes, I can seize it, right? Yeah. That's so good. Just a different posture. Yeah. Yeah. Well, love it.

We've talked about a lot today. I've been over the place, man. I mean, it's been really good. I want to last few things. I do have a couple of questions I want to close with before we do that, though. We can talk about anything you want to. I love you. Yeah, I want to talk about your book.

Okay. The anxious life. And I think for so many people, they live in a state of anxiousness. We live in a state of, you know, you know, I'm worried about this thing going on. in my life or uh and as you mentioned like i think the anxious life even your book it's not it's not just about being anxious it's about any negative emotion you might be experiencing and how to overcome them but walk me through a few what is some what are some of the core principles and takeaways from from your new book um so the idea is um anxiety is just a smoke detector that's like

the chief metaphor in the book it's just a smoke detector it's not the problem it's just let you know there's fires in your house somewhere. And usually those fires are relational in nature. Your body's detected that you're alone, that your marriage falling apart, that you don't have any friends, that your boss isn't safe. It may be detecting that you're not in control of your own life,

the agency we talked about, it may be letting you know that, hey, you have lost autonomy, right? It's letting you know you're not safe. There's danger somewhere, right? And underneath that is, We have a culture that says, if you feel bad, if you feel anxious, that's the problem to be solved.

I disagree with that wholeheartedly. That's like hearing your smoke detector in your kitchen and just racing in there and climbing up on the ladder and pulling the batteries out. You stop the alarm. Congratulations. And your house burns down around you, which is what's happening to us right now in this culture. Instead, I want to hear the alarm in the other room. And I'm going to get up and I'm going to go to the alarm. I'm going to go at the alarm into it.

Um, you know as well as like the, the neuroscience of anxiety, if your body identifies a threat and can amp you up to avoid that threat, it wins. It got exactly what it wanted. Yeah. So it reinforces. It makes it stronger. And so if you get anxious when your wife drives up and you grab another drink, your body goes, yes, we avoided the threat. And you're going to want to drink more and you're going to want another drink. And if you go to rage and your kids loud because they're acting like a seven-year-old because they're seven and you go to it feels powerful and good, but you didn't have to deal with the fact that I don't know how to connect with my seven-year-old.

Your body wallpapered over that shame with anger and it felt good and it puts a GPS pin in that and it will go to it every time. Right. So the only way to heal from anxiety is to head into it and I don't want to live in a house without a smoke detector. That's stupid, right? I don't want to not be anxious. I want to create a life. I want to build a non-anxious life so that when the alarms go off, I hear them. I'm present.

I've got a world that is resilient, an anti-fragile world, if you will. And I can go to the alarm and see what the deal is. Now when my marriage gets sideways, I've been married 21 years to an amazing woman. And it still gets sideways. Now, instead of having four months of me pouting and frustrated, she can't read my mind, she doesn't care, respect me. now on day one, I can say, I think we've got a gap. I think we're going separate directions.

This may not be the day to talk about it, but I want you know that I see it and I feel it and I love you. I'm all the same team. And if I've done something, let's talk about it. If I haven't done something and it's just happening, let's talk about it. That's a totally different proposition. Yeah, going to the storms, man. Yeah, that's so good.

You mentioned earlier, you've had great opportunities as I have to be around some really just incredible people. And, you know, for you, Dave Ramsey, and Jacco Willing. What is the best piece of advice you've ever received? The best piece of advice I've ever received. Ooh, I got it. Can you tell you what I do? Yeah.

Can I tell you a little story around it? Yeah. So I worked in higher ed for 20 years, all 17, 18 years. I was dean of students and I was a professor just an all-round nerds nerd, right? And the currency with those jobs is first and last out. And especially as I had huge teams, I had hundreds of people reporting. to me like you got to be the first end so when everyone's coming in they see you and you got to wait till everybody's gone to be lost out right it was butts in seats equaled competency right

and then I went to work for Dave Ramsey butillionaire runs this big company um I'm sitting in my desk about two months in and he has a late media hit at about seven at night and so I'm in there reading I'm reading journal articles out of nature right just a total nerd And he pops his head in. He goes, what are you doing here? Everything's buddy's gone. But seven o'clock was an early evening for me. My family did dinner by themselves a lot.

And I was like, oh, I'm catching up on this latest mumbo-jumbo research article. And he walked in and he looked at it and he said, go home. I as a boss used to tell my people that all said, you need to go home. And they would know, that's cool. But you also gave me a report to do today, today, this is due tomorrow. So cool, I'll go home when I get done with what you told me to do today. And I said, I will, I will. And then he kind of turned.

He kind of got in my line, my eye line. And he said, go home. And here's the piece of advice. He said, if you're no good there, you will be no good here. Go home and be present with your wife and your kids. And I realized in that second, I don't know how to do that. Dude, I'm 40. I did not know how to do that.

I did not know how to be a dad from 5 p.m. until 8 p.m. I knew how to waltz in at 7.45, eat dinner standing up and be the fun, cool dad. Or the, I heard you didn't turn an assignment, dad. I did not know how to be the 6 o'clock grumpy kids, tired wife, kicking a soccer ball, bored out of my mind, dad. I didn't know how to do that. And so the last several years has been an exercise in, hey, if you're going to have a parenting show, maybe you should learn how to be a parent in your own house. I've had to learn a set of skills I didn't have.

I wasn't a jerk. I wasn't a bad dad. I didn't know how to do it. So I had some skills I had to learn. But it started with if you're no good there, you're no good here. For every entrepreneur, every business person, if your relationships aren't whole, you will crash and burn. Or you'll win and you'll look around and there'll be nobody. I remember getting the first time I hit number one bestseller list and the head of publishing handed me a cell phone.

We were in a car on a book tour. He handed me the phone and it said, had the book title. I said, number one. I was like, oh, that's great. Dave calls me instantly, like right there, calls the phone. And that's just who he is. And he's like, oh, congratulations. So he cheers.

I call my wife. And she's like, all right. And then I call my mom. And dude, Josh, I've got some of the greatest friends on planet Earth. The best writer-dye guys. But in the course of writing the book and then getting the book out and then getting on book tour, it had been six months since I talked to a lot of them. I went back to the hotel. And I sat there.

And had nobody to call. I had nobody. And I realized, oh, this is how, I just remember thinking, oh, this is how this happens. This is how this happens. I got a number one book and I got nobody to celebrate it with. Congratulations, John. Way to go. You win.

And I didn't win anything, right? And so you're either going to crash and burn or you're going to get there and you're going to be all by yourself. And then there's just going to be you and your little golf clap. And so if you're no good there, you'll be no good here. Invest there so that you can come solve some of the world's vexing problems. that we all need right now. Yeah. Yeah, that's good.

That's the best advice. That's great. I'll top my head. It's really good. What's your final piece of advice for anybody who's watching this who's saying, hey, I'm struggling with some things, but I want to break free. The final piece of wisdom, I would say, and I like people to imagine, like we're sitting across the table eating nachos.

Like, we're just hanging out. Is you're probably not broken. Your body's probably working exactly as it should. Maybe not. Maybe there's like an acute pathology that you need to go get taken care of. And thank God you live in the United States. It's the greatest acute pathology help in the world. But you're probably not broken.

Probably your body's working exactly as it should. What if we were aware and curious and we started an adventure to figure out, why is my body trying to protect me like that? And that's the piece of advice. You're worth being well and you're worth being loved. You're probably not broken. Let's start there. That's good. Yeah, it's so good.

Thanks, man. Well, thanks for sharing your wisdom today. Dude, thanks for hanging out. And I love it. This is great. I love talking, you know, I love talking psychology. I love talking about how people can experience a breakthrough. I want to encourage you everybody to check out Dr. John's podcast.

You can just, if you go to YouTube, just search Dr. John DeLoney. You'll find him on there. And one of the things I love about his show is a lot of it's a call-in show. It's all calling. Yeah, it's all calling. So you can call in, do his show. Ask him your questions if you have questions for him there as well. And again, really grateful for him coming on today.

I want to say, hey, thanks everybody for watching another episode of The Growth Lab, where we cover the science behind How to Grow. Hey, if you're not subscribed, make sure to subscribe here to the channel. Thanks so much for your comments. Thanks so much for the shares. Thank you so much for being part of the community here. And praying you guys have a blessed week. Thanks for watching.