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If I were going to tell somebody where to start to be able to feel way better in terms of your anxiety levels, which habits you could put into place that would make the most difference for you as foundational habits, these are the six that I would pick. So that's what I'm gonna tell you about today. There's three physical habits and three mental habits. Hi everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. I told you last week that we were going to be talking about what I consider to be the six pillars of anxiety management. I wanted to talk about this today because up until now we have had 84 episodes of this podcast. So a lot of strategies have been passed, maybe not 84, but close to that. Um, how do you know where to start? And a couple weeks ago we talked about how it's really important to pick strategies that you're attracted to. Don't feel like you have to do every single strategy. But even so, I would say that not all strategies are created equal. If I were going to tell somebody where to start to be able to feel way better in terms of your anxiety levels, which habits you could put into place that would make the most difference for you as foundational habits, these are the six that I would pick, so that's what I'm gonna tell you about today. There's three physical habits and three mental habits, so three of each kind of strategy. The first three, well, I'll talk about the physical ones first.
So before I start, I'll just say that every single one of these strategies we have already talked about before at length, and I will link in the show notes all of the episodes that talk about these strategies individually, because I'm not gonna have time to go into each one and it wouldn't really be productive for me to go into each one at depth. But I just wanna give you an overview because if you are just looking at this pile of 84 episodes that we have done up to this time and you wanna know how to just begin in order to start feeling a whole lot better, I just wanna give you some pointers about where to start.
Okay. So first of all, we're gonna talk about the three physical strategies, and these are important because they will maximize your resources for dealing with stress. So we've talked over and over again about how there's good stress and there's bad stress, or in other words, there's a good response to stress or a bad response to stress. Or maybe better said, there's a healthy response to stress and a not healthy response to stress, right? There's the threat response to stress, which generally is not that healthy unless you're actually running away from a tiger because it it reduces your cognitive powers. But anyway, it's where you, your brain decides that your resources are not enough for your, the demands in your situation. And then there's the healthier way to respond to stress, or the way that actually facilitates your cognitive performance and helps you to meet the stressor. And that's what we call the challenge response. And that's where your brain decides that your resources are enough for your demands. So with these three physical strategies, what we're working on here is that you're making it so that your resources, your physical resources in your brain, in your body, are optimized, and that's gonna make it a whole lot easier for your brain to generate perspectives, to generate stories, where it sees your resources as enough for your demands, and that's where you're gonna be able to have a good response to stress. So these first three strategies are about maximizing your resources, okay?
So the first one is to exercise five days a week. I told you before on the episode that, that we did on exercise, that I had a lot of decades of my life where I was not able to start a consistent exercise routine. Exercise was not that important on my list of things to do and it always ended up, ended up being sort of irregular for me. And I talked about how on, on that episode, if I had known all of the research that I know now, a long time ago, then I would've started the regular exercise routine a long time ago. And I'm not gonna go over all the reasons why exercise is so helpful for anxiety specifically, but I'll just take the top reason. And that is really that exercise, it changes your brain chemistry and it makes certain neurochemicals that are anti-anxiety, it makes them a lot more available in your brain. So besides the fact that it just makes you feel healthier, it changes your brain chemistry. And since I started exercising regularly, which has been about five years now that I've exercised at least five days a week, I can really feel the difference in my anxiety levels. And I can feel the difference in my anxiety levels on days that I exercise and on days that I don't. It just makes a huge difference in my own brain chemistry. So I would say if you're feeling anxious, start there for sure if you don't already have an exercise routine.
The second physical strategy is to go outside every day, and we have had a couple of different episodes on this about how important it is, about what nature does for your brain, how it rests your brain in a way that makes it so that when you come back to civilization, that you're better able to solve problems. You're just better able to do everything that requires focus and concentration and executive control in your brain. But besides that, getting sunlight. We talked last week about how the long rays of sunlight actually impact the mitochondria in your cells or the energy producing part of your cells and optimize that so that all of your cells can produce energy better. Getting sunlight early in the day, getting it in your eyes when the sun is still low on the horizon, helps set your dopamine levels for the day, helps optimize all of your hormone levels for the day. There's just so many benefits of going outside that I can't even list them all right here, but I'm gonna link those in the show notes, the episodes where we've talked about it. It is such a huge help for reducing anxiety in your life and I, as I've said before, I can really tell the difference in my anxiety levels on days when I go outside in a natural setting and have time out there. Usually I try and kill two birds with one stone and I go exercise outside. Then I'm doing two strategies that are really helpful for my anxiety. Okay, so those are, those are the first two.
The third one is the one we talked about last week, which is sleep. Kind of a no no brainer. If you're not sleeping well, you're gonna have a lot more difficulty with anxiety, of course. But we really emphasized last week how it's so important to do the early to bed, early to rise schedule, and how research really shows that this just makes a huge difference in your physical and mental health.
Okay, but when you are not able to do those three physical strategies, and there are times when it's not possible. For example, when I was sick with long COVID for three years, I could not exercise very much and I certainly couldn't sleep very much. Even when you can't access these three physical strategies, you can still work on the three, what I would consider foundational mental strategies. So now I'm gonna talk about those three.
So the first mental strategy is to manage your dopamine budget. And we had a whole couple of episodes where we talked about this. We talked about all the details about the nitty gritty of how it works and also how you can apply it in your life. I talked about how I've, how I have applied it in my life, what a difference it has made for me. But I will just summarize by saying that it's really important to understand that your brain has a finite dopamine budget. Your brain can only produce so much dopamine at once. What is dopamine? It's often referred to as the brain's feel good chemical. It's essential for the brain's reward system, and that is the chemical that is released when we feel pleasure. And nowadays it's really easy to overspend your dopamine budget. In ancient hunter gatherer times, which is when our brains evolved, it wasn't that easy to overspend it because the things that triggered dopamine, dopamine release in our brains were hard to get. Like food, for example. You had to search far and wide, gather nonstop and hunt in order to just have enough food to survive. So it was really important to have this dopamine system that triggered a pleasurable sensation when we ate, because that helped motivate us to do all the work that it was gonna take to be able to eat again and have that pleasurable sensation again. But nowadays, things that trigger dopamine are really easy to get. So instead of having to hunt and gather all day, I can just go to the grocery store and I can buy a whole load of food and I can end up eating way more food than is actually good for my body just because my, my dopamine system feels pleasure when I eat, and it keeps wanting me to eat more, and so I eat more and more. And what happens when we overstimulate our dopamine system is that we end up running our dopamine budget down really low. So as I said, your brain can only produce so much dopamine so fast. There's a limit to the amount of dopamine that your brain can produce in a given period of time. And so if you are engaging in things that trigger the release of that dopamine faster than your brain can produce it, then you are going to be in a situation where your balance in your dopamine account is really super low. And why does this matter? Well, it's because dopamine isn't just involved in feeling these peaks of pleasure, but it's also involved in keeping our baseline levels of mental and physical energy. And when you have overspent your dopamine budget by engaging in too much pleasure triggering activity like social media, like overeating, like eating a whole bunch of chocolate, like shopping, like pornography, like certain types of drugs and other substances, if you spend dopamine quicker than your brain can produce and replenish it, and you continually run your budget down to the red, then you're gonna feel really bad. And one of the consequences of having your dopamine down that low is a perpetual state of anxiety. And you can go back and listen to my dopamine episodes to understand in more detail how this works. But it is so important. Once I started to understand my own dopamine system and how triggering more and more dopamine release in my brain by trying to continually go after things that give me pleasure, how that give would give me diminishing rewards and I would feel more anxiety and more irritability and more insomnia and less ability to, to feel pleasure of any kind. When I really understood how that works, then I was able to manage my dopamine budget much better, and then I just have great baseline levels of wellbeing. I'm able to keep my baseline dopamine levels at a level where I can feel a lot more on top of things. I can feel really great. So this one, I'm calling it a mental strategy because it involves understanding how your dopamine system works, but it's kind of a bridge strategy between mental and physical because it's about taking care of your body and your brain, understanding how it works, and knowing how to be the optimal operator of your system. So that, that was my first mental strategy is managing your dopamine budget.
The second really important mental strategy habit that I think is really, really helpful for managing anxiety on a daily basis is to engage in daily meditation or prayer. And I, I'm giving one or the other option because some of you may be religious, some of may, you may not be religious. For those of you who are not religious, look into meditation. I get, I did an episode where I talked about how you can learn to do mindfulness meditation. I have my own way of doing meditation and prayer, which is kind of a hybrid between the two, prayer and meditation. And this is essential for me in being able to feel like I can handle stuff every day because I need to be able to connect to something bigger than myself every day. And there's a lot of studies that talk about how important it is to connect to something outside of yourself, connect to something bigger than yourself, and how this contributes to wellbeing. When you are engaged in mindfulness meditation, you are trying to be aware of everything that is present in this present moment. All of the sounds, all of the sights, all of the smells, all of the stimulus that is outside of you in this world that you are sensing. And so you become connected to the present, which is much bigger than just yourself. And there's just something so helpful about connecting to something bigger than yourself in being able to get a different perspective on your problems. And returning to that idea of how anxiety comes from your brain thinking that your resources are not up to your demands. Well, when you can connect to something bigger than yourself, then you start to see your demands in a totally different way. They start to look like a smaller a lot of times. You start to be able to distinguish which things are important and which things are not in the demands that you were facing, and also to be able to see resources that are outside of you that you have access to. So that's why meditation slash prayer is my second must mental strategy.
The third one, and this one is maybe one of the most important ones, which we have talked about many times in many different ways on this podcast, is cultivating a sense of meaning and purpose. And I mentioned last week how during the time when I had long COVID and I couldn't really sleep, one of the alternate anxiety management strategies strategies that I worked on was finding a sense of purpose and meaning in my life, and that this really just made such a huge difference in making me able to manage getting through those three years of extreme difficulty. But finding your sense of purpose, we've talked about this a lot, gives you higher life satisfaction and better overall wellbeing. It just gives you better mental and physical health. It makes people happier and less anxious. It makes you better able to manage stress because it helps you to be able to know how to use your time and your energy. It helps you to know what to choose in really difficult situations because you already know what's most important to you in the long term. And when you have this sense of purpose, it makes it a lot easier to persist in the face of difficulty and challenge and pain. So we, we've talked about how when you seek happiness for its own sake, you won't find it. Looking for happiness doesn't work. But when you look for purpose and meaning in your life, studies show that happiness comes as a byproduct. And part of that happiness package, part of what comes, is reduced anxiety along with all of these other physical and mental health benefits. So I'm gonna link, there's probably something like six different episodes where we've talked about how to find a sense of purpose in different ways that you can do it. I'll link all of those in the show notes as well.
But I just wanted to give you this overview so that you have an idea of what I would consider the most important places to start, the six most important anxiety management strategies if you are just needing to know where to begin. If you have the habit of exercising, of sleeping well, of going outside, your body and brain are already gonna be optimized for managing your anxiety. And if you have an understanding of how to manage your dopamine budget and you're doing that, then you're not going to be suffering from the consequences of addiction to substances and behaviors that deplete your dopamine budget and put you in anxiety. This is especially crucial in our time when there's so many addictive things around that are depleting our dopamine budgets and keeping us down in a spot where we just feel really bad most of the time. So managing your dopamine budget. Having a habit of daily meditation or prayer where you connect to something larger than yourself, outside of yourself. And cultivating your sense of purpose and how this acts as an anchor for your life and also as a compass to help you to know where to go when things are hard, when you, when you don't quite know which direction to go, having this sense of purpose gives you the answer that you need, to know which direction you want to go, what is it gonna be most important to you.
So think about these six pillars. Think about which one you haven't figured out how to implement yet. Hopefully I've convinced you of how valuable they would be for you and start working on one. Then once you have these in place, everything else built on top of that becomes so much more natural, so much easier, and in some cases, even just automatic.
But there's my recommendation for you this week, and we'll see you next time.