A practical guide to reduce anxiety
Anxiety is what we feel when our mind is trying to accelerate future events. Trying to find out the answers of uncertain matters. A completely ineffective behavior that harms our mental and physical health, relationships and work.
I’ve suffered from an anxious mind all my life. Actually, I come from an anxious family and learn recently that we copy this behavior from our parents. This is the reason why we as adults should work in learning techniques to manage stress in a healthy way and not pass it to our children.
Anxiety is not only unhealthy but also expensive
I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life and I can now identify the multiple mistakes I’ve done because of my anxiety. It’s very expensive and unhealthy, yet an estimated 275 million people suffer from anxiety disorders. That’s around 4% of the global population, with a spread of between 2.5% and 6.5% of population per country (62% are female, 38% are male). And in a Covid world, this number has soared to 25% according to the United Nations.
The last 3 years of my life I managed to reduce my anxiety levels dramatically, by experimenting with different tools and adding them to “my habit system”. This article describes what worked for me.
1. Figure out how to reduce the noise in the mind
Humanity has been trying to calm the mind for thousands of years. There are many different techniques, the details for each of these techniques are out of the scope of this article, but can read more following this link.
In my case I picked a Chanting Meditation. It’s an ancient technique called Trascendental Meditation (TM). which Ray Dalio recommends in Principles: Life and Work. TM is a form of mantra meditation that is quite easy to adopt, that you do in two 20 minute daily sessions (I do them right when I wake up, and before lunch). While this is a big time commitment, I feel like it has paid dividends to my daily happiness, energy, and ability to be present.
One tactic that has worked well to keep my meditation practice consistent is to use a streak tracking timer to track my daily meditations. I use Insight Timer to track the 20 minute sessions, and every time I run the timer Insight Timer will automatically add to my streak of how many days in a row I’ve meditated.
Some benefits of this techniques that I’ve noticed:
- I can do my session anywhere (Uber trip, at home, at work, in a flight, etc)
- I feel calm, focused and in general, equanimity
- I found plenty of scientific research backing what I experienced. Almost 30% reduction in Cortisol (stress hormone) for meditators:
2. Reduce as much as possible the digital stimulus
Behind every Apps and Websites there is a marketing team with engagement goals. For this teams, sending messages and achieving conversion goals (usually users buying something) is crucial.
Every company wants to push mobile and desktop messages and it’s our responsibility as consumers to be aware of this and have defense mechanisms against this. As Naval says, this can easily lead to addiction because these small notifications trigger dopamine in our brains:
Two years ago, I decided to pay attention to the Screen Time metrics that my iPhone offered, and I realized I was spending 7.5 hours a day on my phone. Even worse, I self justified this by saying that some of it was work (email and Slack), even though a large portion wasn’t (YouTube, Twitter, etc). Last year, I finally decided I needed to kick the habit, and that even the work related things could be contained to times when I’m on my laptop without productivity really suffering.
Eliminate browser tab hoarding
I recently came across this Research out of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) which found that 55% of people surveyed had trouble closing tabs, not because they couldn’t find the tiny X to click and close them, but because those tabs contain information they might need or want. That leads 30% of people to report having a “tab hoarding problem.”
To get a better view of how and why we use tabs, CMU researchers followed the browsing habits of 10 people for two weeks. They conducted deep interviews, in which subjects listed off their tabs and explained why they were still open, and what it would take for them to be closed. After that, they conducted online surveys with 103 more people about their tab habits.
The largest common takeaway came down to a phenomenon core to human psychology, and one that sums up my own reluctance to close a tab (and probably yours, too). “People are attached to tabs because they view them as opportunities,” says Kittur. “They’re kind of like opportunities for a better life: gathering more knowledge, getting a better job, becoming enlightened”. People are queuing up these things and hoping to get to them because no one likes to lose out on opportunities.” And when you close a tab that you’ve yet to consume, that opportunity seems lost forever.
I was one of these people, keeping 50 tabs open in my browser just because I felt if I closed them I would loose valuable content. What worked for me was grouping tabs and building the habit of having only one tab visible at any given time, increasing my focus and decreasing my anxiety levels.
Phone Notifications
In many ways, our phones and other devices are adding stress to our lives. Our “stress activation system” (what’s often called our “fight or flight” system) is a very real biological process.
This is where our brains are inclined to look for threats in the surrounding environment, spot them, and then send signals throughout our bodies that we need to prepare for those threats. Getting a stream of upsetting notifications through our phones can activate this response.
“Adrenaline, stress hormones like cortisol, are activated. They make us ready to respond to a threat,” Díaz said. “This overload of information, especially stressful information, basically activates that system more often and keeps it more active.” This threat-response system basically is always on “high alert” with our regular phone check-ins.
“It doesn’t bother shutting off if we are constantly receiving notifications or reading and watching the news, with pings, and dings, and emails,” she said. “We can have a stress reaction to that notification or information and on a physiological level, it can all activate our stress system throughout the day.”
To break a bad habit, I figured out I had to eliminate the visual cue of push notifications and app badges. So this is exactly what I did: as you can see in the image below, I eliminated lots of Apps I was not using, and I declined the push notification privilege to 100% of the remaining apps in my phone.
As a result my mobile daily usage went down from 7 hours average to 3.6 hours average !
Muting WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal groups
Instant Messaging Apps are a special category included in the previous section, but it’s worth to mention them, especially WhatsApp. You can mute groups where excess information is coming from. To mute groups, you need to open the group chat, click on the group name, when the information page opens up click on mute notifications and select how long you want to mute it for.
Another change I made to break the habit of replying WhatsApp in real-time: I deactivated the notification badge and push notifications. Some people can be upset because you won’t answer in real time, but the benefit exceeds the cost.
Only participate in any WhatsApp group once a day and not first thing in the morning or last thing at night. You do not wish to start your day feeling anxious or try and go to asleep anxious.
Deleting social media Apps from the phone
As James Clear explains in his book Atomic Habits, eliminating the environment helps us change our behavior. If I don’t see the social media Apps in my phone, I won’t use them at all.
- Delete Gmail App (Use the web version instead. In my article about habits, I explained how this is a good example of how to break bad habits)
- Delete Instagram App (If possible, don’t use it anymore. If you still feel you need to use it, just use the web version)
- Delete Facebook (Same as before)
- Delete LinkedIn App(Same as before)
- Delete Twitter App (Same as before)
Check Email only twice a day
I used to check email and reply in real-time. A really bad habit that I carried with me for 20 years.
I now check my emails only twice per day, at 10 am and 5pm. Breaking this habit reduced my anxiety and didn’t impact my productivity and commitments with my team.
Some changes I made:
- Schedule short reminders in my agenda at 10am and 5pm and close the Gmail tabs in my browser (the reminders help my mind relax, and make sure that I won’t forget to answer my emails every day)
- Delete the Gmail App from my phone
- Close the Gmail tabs in my browser. Just open them when it’s time to check and reply emails and close them again.
- Disable push notifications for new emails
I was inspired in this blog post by Tim Ferris to change this bad habit, and it worked !
3. Realize that living tomorrow is not guaranteed
Confucius, the famous Chinese philosopher wrote a powerful quote that can help us understand that we must be grateful for living the current moment because we will only live once.
This seems obvious, but it’s not. Most of the human population lets the mind obsess about tomorrow, planning and trying to control what will happen (the definition of anxiety).
Accepting that we don’t have control on what will happen is an a-ha moment, it’s progress towards a calmer and less anxious mind.
4. Add gratitude to your daily habits
I got this habit from Justin Kan, the founder of Twitch:
So I decided to research on the topic of Journaling. To my surprise, there is a lot or evidence that practicing gratitude has a real impact in our happiness and reduces anxiety.
Journaling about your feelings is linked to decreased mental distress. In a study, researchers found that those with various medical conditions and anxiety who wrote online for 15 minutes three days a week over a 12-week period had increased feelings of well-being and fewer depressive symptoms after one month. Their mental well-being continued to improve during the 12 weeks of journaling.
So I decided to start my day spending just 5 minutes writing in my 5 minute journal app.
Videos that helped me
Here is a short video in which billionaire Ray Dalio credits his success to 40 minutes of meditation per day. Dalio’s theory:
“Great ideas hit you during meditations because you’re tapping into your subconscious, where your creativity tends to thrive. He compares it to the relaxation you experience while taking a hot shower and letting the creative ideas just come to you”
I was also surprised to learn that The Beatles practiced TM many hears ago. The Beatles visit to India in 1968 to study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi brought the world’s attention to the Transcendental Meditation technique. This recent article in Great Britain’s newspaper, The Telegraph is a look at how the Fab Four were indeed ahead of their time.
My results after implementing this whole system
- The quality of my conversations has increased dramatically. I was used to interrupting people, I couldn’t help it. Now I noticed I wait until the other person finishes, reflect, and respond.
- While working, my focus increased. I was used to “multi tasking”, which of course can’t be achieved by our mind. I now focus in the conversation, take notes and only have 1 tab open at a time in my browser.
- I used to work 12 hours a day, and by 9 pm I was exhausted. Currently I work 6-8 hours per day, but the quality of my output has increased dramatically and I still have energy to workout and play with my kids.
- Sleep has improved: during periods of high anxiety, it was common for me to wake up at 4am. My mind was trying to solve some issue at work while I was sleeping, degrading my sleep quality. I now sleep 7–8 hours without my mind interrupting my sleep!
- While playing a tennis match, it was very common for me to lose a match because I had lost my concentration for long periods of time (>30 minutes). I suddenly realized I was playing in “autopilot mode”, which of course gives the rival a big advantage. This problem disappeared, I feel 100% present and focused and my winning ratio has increased.
- Forgetting where I parked the car after leaving the office was very common for me. This was a clear sign that my mind was not present but always thinking ahead and with a lot of noise. This problem disappeared.
- The average time I spend using my phone used to be 7.5 hours a day and I used to pickup my phone 150 times a day. This numbers went down to 3 hours and 80 pickups a day.
This article is part of a series
This is part of a series of articles about building a “Continuous Improvement System”: a dedication to making small changes and improvements every day, with the expectation that those small improvements will add up to something significant.
