My 3-Step Protocol for Managing Anxiety

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

College football is back, so Hilton called on me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Ooh, that smells lucky.

Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 555 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

Arthur Brooks (0:30)

Today, anxiety as a disorder, as a diagnosed mental disorder, afflicts about 40 million adults, and that's way more women than men. For whatever reason, women are a lot more anxious than men are. This seems to most people to be a real scourge, a real problem, something to eliminate if at all possible. The job for us to live better is not to eliminate anxiety, but rather to manage it to levels that do not obstruct our quality of life, but exist to the point that they give us the benefits that they're supposed to give us. If anxiety is part of your life that you don't like, let's talk today about how we can make it into something else. Anxiety into adventure.

Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about love and happiness, the science behind those ideas, tangible ideas that you can actually take from the greatest that has been thought and said in research and scholarship, and use in your life. My job is to translate a lot of the technical material that's out there in terms that non-scientists can use, but more importantly, that they can teach as well. My ambition is a happiness teachers to create happiness teachers as well. So thank you for sharing these ideas with others. Thank you for coming back week after week. If you're a veteran of this show, if you're not, welcome. I hope you hit the like and subscribe button so that the algorithm can send this material to more people who might just need it. As always, please do feedback. If you have ideas for future shows, you have comments or criticism, especially if you have questions, please write those to officehours at arthurbrooks.com. If you'd like more material along these lines, maybe a written little note each week, you can get my completely free newsletter that comes out on Friday mornings. You can get that by going to arthurbrooks.com/newsletter for all 300,000 people are actually getting it every single week. That's just three to 500 words every week. I throw in a few anecdotes and dad jokes just for good measure. I hope you enjoy it and do share that with other people as well. Right now, you're like Neo in The Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life, or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore, but it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system. Just like heroin, porn, gambling, you've got the cravings, you're addicted. You don't like it, and I don't either. But I can't just tell you to stop doing it, that's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. Here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile. It pays you to use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you. Use less data, earn money back, and when you do, you'll be living once again in real life, and you're going to like how it feels.

Today, I want to talk about something that is not a source of happiness typically, but it could be.

I'm actually talking about anxiety, and I want to talk about how you can see anxiety in your life or the lives of other people in an entirely new way, not based on just wishful thinking, but based on the best research.

And I started thinking about this, actually, because of a very personal thing. You know, I have three kids, they're in their 20s.

Not that long ago, obviously, they were teenagers and they were angsty as anybody else. Now, it's in the wind, I'll give you the data in a minute, that young adults today, they're suffering from anxiety at higher levels than we've ever seen in the past. And it's not just measurement, it's not just diagnosis, it's not just that people are paying attention to it. I think it actually really is the case. And I'll tell you why I think that is the case. And you know, my kids, like anybody else, were anxious because it's hard being a teenager and a young adult and people in their 20s.