10 Things I Had to Give Up to Heal My Anxiety
“Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”- Bruce Lee
To achieve something great, it is more important to focus on what you need to take away rather than what you need to add. Although there is a certain fetishization with productivity in modern society, I believe adding habits is a form of procrastination.
If you are anything like I used to be, you tend to overcommit. Similar to a dog walking through a pet store, I was always chasing every new scent that crossed the precipice of my nose, never going deep on a single goal, in fear of what I may be missing out on if I did.
Even though anxiety was clearly causing 80% of my negative outcomes in life, I kept telling myself that if I just achieved an external goal, my anxiety would be healed as a derivative. If you have ever tried this method, then you know how it turned out for me.
I got everything I went after. A job at a startup. A promotion. A business on the side. Lost 15 lbs. The list of achievements went on and on as my anxiety sat on the back burner, waiting to be miraculously healed through association.
Two Rabbits = No Rabbits
“He who chases two rabbits, catches none.” — Confucius
I distinctly remember the day when I finally had enough of this shotgun approach. I was getting ready to head on a trip out of the country on a little journey, and I was feeling anxious about it. My anxiety level was a 6/10, which a year prior I would have been ecstatic about, but a level that was still detracting too much energy and happiness from my life.
During a run the week before the trip, the frustration finally built up to the point where I couldn’t continue running. I remember stopping and being completely frustrated. I had come so far in my healing, but it was still taking away from my life. I had come to my tipping point. I was done with my half-assed attempts to heal myself.
Anxiety had always been an adjacent goal. One that never took center stage. When I hit the tipping point on that run, I realized that if I was ever going to achieve any external success, I had to first achieve internal healing.
From that moment forward, I became a military strategist, planning my moves according to a constant focus on a single goal, victory. For me, victory was healing my anxiety. And after a couple of months, I won.
You can achieve almost anything in life if you militantly prioritize. You can’t be an author, businessman, marathoner, adventurist, and politician all this year, but you may be able to be all of those things in a decade or two.
Realize that the real opportunity cost is not committing. When you haphazardly go after things in life, and I am as guilty as the next guy, you fail to achieve anything of great stature. As Confucius said, “He who chases two rabbits, catches none,”
What follows are the things that I had to give up to heal. Some I have reintroduced into my life because they add value, but I have left most out. You can see tremendous results by adjusting the knobs in your life. Here are the knobs that I adjusted.
10 Things I Had to Give Up to Heal My Anxiety
1. Friends
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect” — Mark Twain
I’m often asked by readers, what is the most important aspect to focus on to alleviate my anxiety?
My answer is always the same: Relationships.
I’m not positive if you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with, but I am confident that if your lifestyle does not add to your healing, it will subtract from it.
For me, the people I was spending my time with were not conducive to my healing. Not that I don’t love my friends, I do. But they were not on the same path I was, and I needed to eject myself to heal myself.
So I went to the extreme and moved to an entirely different city where I knew almost no one. I spent the first 90 days there focusing solely on myself and my growth.
Now that may sound selfish or insincere, but if I had never made that leap, I would not be sitting here writing this article. I thoroughly believe that success in life, however you define it, is the result of how many tough conversations you are willing to have.
There is no harder discussion than telling a friend or a group of friends that you no longer want to have a relationship with them. But, at the same time, there may not be anything more important in life than being true to yourself and finding your tribe.
You may hate this answer. You may think I am a dick for saying it. Or you may say that you could never leave “your boys.”
And my response is this, how much is your life worth?
It is okay to act selfishly in the short term for long term health and well-being. Don’t be cynical but understand that no one else is going to take care of you. You need to take care of yourself.
Stop thinking about what you have “invested.”
Relationships are essential to your growth and healing. Leaving one, whether intimate or not, is hard. You will feel bad. But understand that you are making this decision in the short-term for your long-term health.
Later on, after you healed yourself, reassess the relationships by slowly dipping yourself back into them. But you will often find that when you step away for a bit and focus on developing relationships with people that more closely align with your value, you will not miss the old way of life.
Have the hard conversations.
2. Alcohol
“A wise man will be master of his mind, A fool will be its slave” — Publilius Syrus
Alcohol is not inherently dangerous, and I have reintroduced it back into my life, albeit at a much smaller volume, but if you want to take back control of your life, it is not helping you. It is hindering you. Self-medicating, at whatever level, is dangerous and will leave you much worse off. Alcohol specifically is a depressant, and the hangovers will cause anxiety like no other.
I gave up alcohol for a full ninety days at the onset of my journey. It was an eye-opening experience, realizing just how much of my social and professional life revolved around the liquid. What was even more interesting was the responses I got from people when I told them I wasn’t drinking.
“Really? Come on man, just have one.”
People were so offended, believing I was making some declaration against their lifestyle, which I wasn’t. I was simply being intentional about mine.
If you need a couple of beers to feel sociable, or if you struggle to talk to colleagues without some liquid courage, you should think long and hard about whether you want this dependence in your life. Depending on a substance to give you a result will lower the agency you have over your life.
Everything in moderation, but if you can’t remember the last time you went thirty days without a drink, maybe it’s worth an experiment. At the very least, you may lose some weight!
Continue reading here: 23 Things Everyone Can Do To Create A Life-changing Morning Routine
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