Moment 76 - The Number One Cause Of Anxiety Today: Tom Bilyeu

00:03anxiety is really complex so let's start with diet the biggest change that i've made to my anxiety was stopping drinking uh sugar-free monster which i love by the way absolutely love them but there's something right there's something in them that causes my microbiome to get out of whack and i will feel really anxious so i used to have generalized anxiety disorder i couldn't even tell you why I felt anxious. I just did all the time. And finally, I realized there was a component of diet. So I no longer get generalized anxiety. Now I will still get anxious if I'm dealing with something that's really like the stakes are really high and it really matters to me. So I have to, I've had to learn meditation that changed my life in ways that I can't even convey.

00:46So that's been really important, but it is it. And some of it is going to be just the way that I'm wired. I don't have an addictive personality, but I have an obsessive mind. Now my obsessive mind has led to my success because I will think about problems all the time. And so like I'm actually a really slow thinker, but people give me all this credit because I can talk fast, but I talk fast because I've thought about it obsessively for days, weeks, months, years, depending on what thing we're talking about. But that rumination, in fact, I was just talking to a guy that does, he doesn't like the term hypnotherapy, but everybody will understand that idea. So he's really well-versed in hypnosis. And he said, people break into three personality types. And the personality type that struggles the most is the personality type that both experiences the world incredibly emotionally, but then has an analytical mind that ruminates on the emotions. And that's where I'm at. So I experienced the emotional gamut of life and it's incredible. I would never want to not. It's wonderful. Life is a roller coaster of incredible highs and lows and meditation and my belief system allow me to even that out so that

02:03I never get too out of whack in any direction. But I'll loop on ideas. And if it's a negative idea about myself, I'll loop and loop and loop and loop and loop. And so that's why I said at the beginning, what you allow yourself to repeat is really going to determine the quality of your life. And so I have to really get good at interrupting that. So that's why meditation is the key for me to dealing with anxiety. Like as I can feel it ratcheting up, it's really my mind ruminating on all the ways that it could go wrong. And so I have to find a way to insert myself to break that rehearsal of failure and instead force myself to focus on rehearsing success, which it's almost silly, but it really does drop my anxiety to next to nothing. But I have to really forcefully insert myself. Does it always work, that process? There are things that are so high in amplitude that it's like, okay, this is really like stressing me out. But yeah, it always works. I've never been more than 45 minutes away from complete equanimity. Really?

03:03And that's going through things that are where there's hundreds of millions of dollars on the line it's like really really stressful i've experienced anxiety too and i before i'd experienced it i think i experienced it in my mid-20s for the first time when my business got really really difficult and when the stakes got really really high i always thought it was something that others other people experienced i never thought it would be something that would find me and um so my perspective in my this is why i'm so compelled by the concept because it did find me. And I couldn't believe it did. I couldn't believe it when it did, because as I said, I thought it was something that some kind of, you know, maybe chemical disorder. But when I reflect on how many people in our society are feeling anxious these days, it pulls into question, is there something we are just fundamentally doing wrong about the way that we're living our lives?

03:51Yes. And what is that? Diet is the biggest problem. You think it's major? A hundred percent. If you said you can make one change to somebody's life, what change would you make to lower their anxiety? A hundred percent their diet. Now, once that's regulated, it doesn't mean that it goes away. I still have anxiety. But when I think I've reduced it by 70% through diet alone. Now, the remaining 30% is still a pain. So you really do want to address it.

04:17And for that, I've had to turn to meditation. I've had to insert myself into my ruminating thoughts and be very thoughtful about that. I've had to adjust my belief system so that I'm not afraid of failure. Like there are a lot of things that I've had to do to get myself to that place. But if I could only make one change, it would be that. now living in the social media era is amazing it's amazing man and it's given so much and i think it's given far more than it takes but you really have to be careful like to give people an idea i have had a lot of success i have a lot of the worldly things that people want and even i can look at somebody's house if people saw my house and then they hear the following statement they will laugh, but I can look at someone's house and be like, yo, that's a house. Right. So, uh, it never ends. Right. So it's like, if I peeked out and I had the best house in the world, I'd be like, yeah, but Elon Musk just built a rocket that can carry 300 people to Mars. Like what have I done? So there's always some other thing. So you just, you've got to be psychotically careful about what you allow yourself to value yourself for, because I value achievement. I think it's

05:24extraordinary. I'm very glad that I have that. It makes me strive. It's pushing me to be a better version of myself. But at the same time, I have to be really careful not to let it damage my sense of self, which it will do very rapidly. And I think we have to agree that there is a North Star for optimizing a human life. And I will say that which reduces suffering and elevates the individual to fulfillment, those would be my two things. Reduce human suffering in yourself and others and elevate your sense of fulfillment in yourself and help other people do the same.

06:00Like that seems to be the cocktail for the most resilient mental state you could hope for. So that even as life goes up and down and you win and lose and people are born and people die, I mean, we're all gonna go through just unrelenting misery from time to time, just is. and the only way to even all of that out is to pursue those two things now once we have that then you start optimizing for lifestyle and beliefs and your thought patterns and all of that stuff i really do feel like if you removed social media you'd remove a tremendous amount of anxiety and obviously everyone's context would get smaller so the comparison part i mean there's various reasons front of mind reasons why i think social media causes people to be anxious One of them is obviously all the feedback we get about our success, our achievements, whatever.

06:51And the other is the feedback we go searching for via comparison. So me looking out at the world, which is now billions of people on my phone, whereas once upon a time, my human design probably, I was probably designed to deal with about 20 or maybe, you know, a small tribe. You could also optimize. Here is the brutal thing. Put out a tweet. like put out a hot take but something you really believe in like that really matters to you and you're moved by it and you feel like you're adding something positive to the world like put out one of those tweets it will not be universally loved i've done that last week and it was 20 pieces yep and it's like in newspapers that is that is emotionally brutal yeah and when you realize that man i just want to like connect i want i want to put something rad out into the world but then people kick you in the face and it makes you want to turtle up. And so it's this weird exercise of like, you have to divorce yourself from what other people think, which is powerful if you can do it, but we're the human animal. And so you can't ever, I think, completely detach. We are, as I like to say, we are both the shout and the echo. So we are what we say, do, and believe, but we're also what

08:04people tell us about the things that we say, do, and believe. And it matters because we're a tribe animal. So it gets real weird. And then you and I are both into web three in a big way. The only thing I know that's going to be more devastating to mental health than web two and social media is web three, but it's also incredible. And it's so life-changing that we have to find a way to mitigate some of the bad, but you're taking all of the things of web two and putting money on top of it. And so now people are really freaking out.

08:33Why is it going to be worse web three? Because it's money. You're playing with people's money. and so now it's not fun and games anymore. It's like people are, they're oftentimes investing more than they should in something and so it will be bad for them because now something that they otherwise could have enjoyed becomes incredibly stressful and for the creators, we're gonna destroy a lot of creators who are just like, yeah, I'm not, I can't, this isn't fun anymore.

09:02Like it was fun, but I've now taken money for this thing. I have obligations. You have to be honest about that. But if like it's not going well, most people are not gonna have the tools that they need to grapple with that, to work through problems, to improve, to get better. Like it's just gonna be really hard. And so when you take the ability for people all over the world to tell you what they think, and then you let them invest money, now it gets crazy real fast.

09:37And we're already seeing projects implode because the creator was maybe an artist who's already wearing their heart on their sleeve and it just doesn't work. And they're not able to deal with that. And then the project, poof, it goes away. And I don't think that most people had ill intent. Of course, there are people that have ill intent, but I don't think most of them do, but they're just, it's a business and they don't know how to run a business.

10:07Thank you.