2 Proven Strategies (and 1 Big Mistake) for Dealing with Anxiety

Have you ever felt anxious for no clear reason, like a vague alarm going off in your mind? You’re not alone. Anxiety has become one of the fastest-growing ailments in America, affecting more than 40 million adults. Rates among young people have doubled in the past decade, and the pandemic pushed them even higher.

In this episode of Office Hours, I’m tackling the epidemic of anxiety: what it is, why it’s on the rise, and how to work with it instead of against it. Using insights from psychology, evolutionary biology, and my own research, I share how anxiety can become not just manageable, but even leveraged as a performance enhancer. 

In this episode, I cover:

• The definition of anxiety as “unfocused fear” and how to recognize it in your own life

• Why anxiety has exploded among young adults and teens

• Why young women need to reduce their time spent on social media 

• How anxiety functions as an evolutionary alarm system designed to keep us alive

• Practical strategies for managing your anxiety that focus on presence rather than avoidance

• How the culture of pain elimination fueled the opioid crisis and what it teaches us about pain avoidance 

• Wisdom from Kierkegaard on turning your anxiety into performance-enhancing fuel

• If happiness and unhappiness can coexist

We’d love to hear any feedback you have. Please email us at officehours@arthurbrooks.com. And please leave a review on Apple or Spotify. Thanks for listening! 

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Referenced:

• The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life

• Leadership and Happiness course

• How to Build a Life

• How to Worry Less and Be Happier

• Anxiety: An Evolutionary Approach

• My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

• Trends in anxiety among adults in the United States, 2008–2018: Rapid increases among young adults

• Global Prevalence of Depressive and Anxiety Symptoms in Children and Adolescents During COVID-19: A Meta-analysis

• Teens are spending nearly 5 hours daily on social media. Here are the mental health outcomes

• Pain-avoidance versus reward-seeking: an experimental investigation

• Catastrophizing a prognostic factor for outcome in patients with low back pain: a systematic review

• Trends in Opioid Analgesic-Prescribing Rates by Specialty, U.S., 2007-2012

• The Changing Opioid Crisis: development, challenges and opportunities

• Report shows decreases in opioid prescribing, increase in overdoses

•  How to handle anxiety: The effects of reappraisal, acceptance, and suppression strategies on anxious arousal

• The mindful way through depression: Freeing yourself from chronic unhappiness

• Fear of happiness predicts subjective and psychological well-being above the behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and behavioral activation system (BAS) model of personality

• Pain Avoidance and Its Relation to Neural Response to Punishment Characterizes Suicide Attempters with Major Depression Disorder

• Pain, avoidance, and suffering

• Mindfulness-based stress reduction, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, and Zen meditation for depression, anxiety, pain, and psychological distress

• The Effectiveness of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) in Real-World Healthcare Services

• Effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for treating generalized anxiety disorder and the moderating influence of abuse during childhood: A randomized controlled trial

• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

• An Overview of Research on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

• Meaning of Anxiety

• The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

• From Anxiety to Adventure: Kevin Majeres on Reframing Challenges

• Analysis of self-healing of depression by helping others in adolescents from the perspective of constructivism

• Kindness as a Stress Reduction–Health Promotion Intervention: A Review of the Psychobiology of Caring

• Exploring the Effects of Volunteering on the Social, Mental, and Physical Health and Well-being of Volunteers: An Umbrella Review

• “I” and “Me”: The Self in the Context of Consciousness

• Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier