Speaker 1: Every time anxiety or stress takes over, I snap my fingers and the feeling disappears. Yeah, I wish it worked like that, but it doesn't. Oh, wait, come on. I've always struggled with anxious thoughts. So much to the point where I can't be present with anything. I couldn't study. I couldn't enjoy hanging out with friends. I couldn't even take a dump in peace without thinking how screwed I am for this exam. Anxiety had taken control of my life and I needed answers. So let me take you into my mind and share the journey I've gone through with managing my anxiety. What's interesting is that anxiety isn't bad. Some anxiety is actually healthy and means we care about stuff. Like thousands of years ago, people had to worry about being eaten by hyenas or lions. Real life or death shit. Anxiety helps us take precautions so we don't fall prey to those situations. Nowadays, those worries are mostly gone, but our mind didn't get the memo. It's still programmed to be on high alert for danger and so it searches for anything it can worry about in our day-to-day lives. But what could possibly be so dangerous about going to school? So for me, back when I was a dumb space cadet medical student, I had anxiety about falling behind or failing exams, which would crush my chances of matching into a residency program. I was always overthinking about how am I going to impress Dr. Ken? Really, my anxiety made me fearful. Like if I wasn't studying 24-7 or staying late every day after work, then I was going to fail and my life was going to be miserable. Looking back on it now, I realized that stress and anxiety forced me to do things that I would never ever do. It literally blinded me. Like in medical school, we learn about the importance of things like sleep, diet, and exercise for our health. Yet here I was, pulling an all-nighter, studying about sleep deprivation because I was so anxious about my exam. There's this funny saying that doctors make the worst patients and I'm no exception. And in that moment, I started to think deeply about my own anxiety. And I came to some interesting realizations. The first thing I learned about anxiety is that it's always about the future. Something that hadn't happened yet, but might. And you might think, wait a second, that's not true. I have anxiety about things in the past all the time. Yes, but no. I can have anxiety about something that happened in the past. But if I really thought about it, the anxiety is actually about the consequences of what could happen in the future. Like I remember after a day on my surgery rotation, my attending pimped my nuts off and I completely dropped the ball. Basically looked like a complete idiot in front of the entire team. And before I went to bed later that night, I was stuck replaying this thought loop about what had happened. But the anxiety wasn't about that incident. It was about how they might see me as an idiot and failure the next time that we work together in the future. And knowing that led me to understand something else about the inescapable nature of anxiety. It doesn't go away until that situation happens. I'll be anxious about my exam until I take it. I'll be anxious about my application until I hear back about an interview. It doesn't matter how prepared I was. Well, actually that's not true. Let me take that back. It helped if I was a bit more prepared, but it didn't disappear. My anxious mind was always lurking, you know, in the comment section. Right when I thought I felt secure and confident, it'd show up and make me question everything about my reality. About what is life? About who Gone Freaks' mother really is? I thought I was finally starting to make some progress in understanding what my anxious thoughts were about and the pattern of how they came and went. But I also knew I couldn't be the only student who struggled with anxiety. So I had to look into the research. Studies have shown that medical students are some of the most neurotic types of students out there. And it's that neuroticism that causes the most psychological stress and burnout. High levels of neuroticism have been linked to things like experiencing negative emotions or emotional instability, distress, moodiness, irritability. And on top of that, more than 75% of anxiety and depressive disorders are diagnosed before the age of 30. Which means our coming of age years, you know, students, when we figure out what we want to do and how to navigate our life, are super important. Those years can quite literally make or break our mental health. All this reading made me realize that I needed to do more than just sit down and think about my anxiety. So I did what I do best. No, not procrastinate. Well, maybe a little bit. Self-experimentation. First up was to distract myself. Sounds easy enough. I stomped some noobs. Let's go, dude. Let's go. Let's go. I pumped some serious iron. I began One Piece. I learned how to prepare a perfect steak, in theory. It seemed like it was working at first. While I was distracting myself, I wasn't thinking about my anxiety at all. But it was short-lived. The problem was, when I stopped distracting myself, those thoughts just came flooding back. Often even worse than before. My mind was like a pressure valve. I could distract myself from thinking about it, but that meant they were just building up. Not a perfect solution, so I moved on. The runner-up idea was to avoid it completely. If you can't beat it, run from it, right? That's how the saying goes. I stopped studying. I stopped asking questions. I stopped trying to kiss ass. That seemed to work for a couple days. But just like with the distraction idea, this again only ended up making my anxiety worse. Because in addition to having the anxiety I had before about those things, now I also had the anxiety about being aloof or insecure and that I was being a huge pussy. Avoiding my anxiety triggers completely contradicted what I had to do in order to achieve my goals. Like I can't not study for my exams or not go to work. That was not going to help me become a doctor. I don't know what I was expecting with that plan. Like when do we ever hear in movies, yeah, the best way to tackle your problems is to just run away from them. Which led me to my final proposed solution. Fight it. Every time my lurking anxiety made its way to the front of my mind, I put on my mean face, I squared up and gave it a big old punch to the ear. Motherfucker. You hit me in the ear. I shut it down. And guess what? Yeah, it didn't work either. Because in a fight, there's usually opposition. And my anxiety packed a way bigger punch than the one that I threw. Fighting against my anxiety only caused me more anxiety because regardless of how much I tried to suppress it or power through it, it always came back stronger. And that frustration would snowball and build on itself. I was already stressing out about school. And now I was also feeling stressed about failing to control my stress about school. It was stress stacking on stress. At this point, I was feeling pretty defeated. I know I'm an overthinker, but this was insane. How do we overcome this endless onslaught of anxiety and stress even when we think we understand what we're anxious about? So I was struggling one day at work when one of the psych residents I worked with pulled me aside and asked if I was okay. And I just broke down. I basically trauma dumped everything that I was going through, how I felt about school, the pressure I felt from my parents, my peers, even myself just to keep going and keep pushing, the fear of failure and the fear of ending up miserable. And I'll never forget the look that she gave me. It was sad, hopeful, and comforting all at the same time. She went on to tell me that almost everyone feels this type of way about some aspect of their life. But then she dropped this pearl that truly resonated with me and shifted my entire approach to managing anxiety. Don't forget to be grateful for what you've done. I sat with that line for a long time trying to make sense of it. And I realized that I was approaching my anxiety from the wrong angle. What we need to do is get comfortable being uncomfortable and sit with our anxiety. And a way that we can do that is by being grateful to ourselves. A lot of times we know how to treat other people. We're empaths, you know, who can place ourselves in the shoes of others to understand how to comfort our friends and family members when they're in a time of need. But for some strange reason, we often don't know how to be empathetic to ourselves. We don't treat ourselves like we do our six-year-old brother. But if we do, we're then able to redirect that anxiety and then appreciate all the progress that we've made. So after pondering over this, I began applying different mental models into my life to practice sitting with anxiety. And I broke it all down into a simple two-step process anytime anxiety arises. Step one is to remember that every reaction to anxiety is a choice. Regardless of what our anxiety is about or how it makes us feel, we need to remember that we have a choice about how we want to respond to it. No matter how badly I freak out about my upcoming exams or worry about looking dumb in front of my attending, I just have to catch myself before I act and remember that I'm in control and I have a choice to make. I can act impulsively out of fear and do something stupid or I can choose to sit with it. And step two, choose gratitude. Choose to be appreciative of how much you've learned, how much you've grown, and how far you've come. Big exams will always cause me anxiety, but I should choose to be grateful for how much work I've already put in studying. I should choose to be grateful for the fact that I'm even thinking about my anxiety the way that I am, you know, for proactively looking for solutions to better manage my emotions. Being grateful allows us to self-reflect on the facts, the tangible evidence that we're not eternally screwed like our anxiety wants us to believe. That's what's been working for me to calm down my nerves. I found that by choosing gratitude, I was able to sit with my anxiety much better. Being grateful would help dissolve my anxiety so that I could get out of my own head and regain control over my mind. I think we need to reframe how we think about anxiety. It's not a handicap. It's just our brain's way of protecting us from making dangerous and dumb decisions. We just have to remember that we're always going to encounter stress throughout our lives, but at the end of the day, we always have a choice. We can choose to implode and make an impulsive emotional decision based on fear, or we can choose to accept that our mind doesn't always know what's best. And one of the best approaches is to learn to sit with our anxiety and choose to be better. So let me know, what do you guys do to deal with your anxiety? And if you try out this method, let us know if it worked for you.