Your Anxiety Is a Smoke Alarm, Not a Broken Brain | Dr. John Delony

Lewis Howes (0:01)

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Welcome back everyone to The School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. We have the inspiring Dr. John Delony in the house. Good to see you, sir. Thank you. Welcome to the show. You are a double PhD and a mental health expert who works with a lot of people who are struggling. People who are hurting, suffering and struggling with things they're aware of or things they're not even aware of, but they know something is stuck inside of them and you help them really understand the anxiety, the suffering and the struggle or the stuckness in them. You help them be aware of it and you help them have steps on how to break free of it. So I'm so excited that you're here. You've got an amazing new book out called Building a Non-Anxious Life. It's available right now. And I'm curious, what do you think is the root of anxiety for people? Is it a societal thing? Is a family history thing? Is it they have too many options? Is it that they have no options in their life? Is it that they have bad self-talk? What is the root of anxiety? And how can we be aware of that so that we're not thinking that we are bad or wrong? But this is actually something that a lot of people deal with.

John Delony (4:38)

So the true honest answer to your question is yes.

Yes. Anxiety is simply a smoke alarm in your kitchen, letting you know that something's on fire.

And it can be, your back bedroom could be on fire, your bathroom could be on fire, your couch could be on fire. It's just letting you know there's smoke in the house. And so I love how you ask that question because if you're anxious, it often means, if you're anxious, it often means your body's working perfectly. It's letting you know. I've identified something in the ecosystem or a number of things that you're not safe, you're not okay. And in our culture, we're so uncomfortable with that alarm system that we race up, we climb up, we pull the batteries out, and it gets quiet, and we go ah. We numb it, distract, we run away from it. And then our house burns down around us. Interesting. And so, there's a new conversation happening in mental health circles, which is, we spend 150 years telling people that their bodies are broken, their minds don't work right. What if their minds are working perfectly? And the world we're constructing around each other is telling our bodies, you're not all right anymore. And so, I think anxiety could be, like Dr. Winnie Suzuki says, it could be a friend. It can be a loud and annoying friend and a crippling friend, but somebody trying to get your attention for the good.