Mental Health #1: How I Manage Anxiety (Classic)

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. This week on Founder’s Journal, we're doing things a little differently. We're dropping a mini series focused on mental health. I'll talk about my own battle with anxiety, the effect that social media has on our psyche, and break down my own mental health routines–I call it my mental health stack. That means instead of just one episode, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, this week we're giving you two: a new show that you won't want to miss plus a classic episode you maybe haven't heard before. In today's classic episode, originally released on May 21st, 2021, I talk about managing my own anxiety. Let's hop into it. 

Life with anxiety

I have had anxiety for as long as I can remember. You may be wondering why am I talking about this on a show about building businesses or building your career? Well, there's two reasons. One, this is my journal and it's something that I would a hundred percent write in a physical journal. And two, I've had anxiety about work and my anxiety has affected the quality of my work in the past.

At the end of the day, anxiety impacts all aspects of life, whether it's personal or professional. And when I think back in life, there are moments that I vividly remember that were somewhat traumatic, anxiety-provoking experiences. I can still remember the first anxious thought that I've ever had. It was in elementary school. I was in second grade. I was in the library and I started concentrating on my breath. And then I started anxiously monitoring whether or not I was breathing correctly. And I was doing this for a few minutes. Obviously I was breathing correctly, given breathing is this instinctual thing that we all do without thought. But at the time, that was just what my brain decided to latch on to. And it took me a while to kick the thought of asking myself, am I breathing correctly? And if I stopped thinking about it, am I going to continue breathing correctly? I get it. This may sound strange to you if you haven't experienced anxiety or OCD yourself, but these are the sort of things that my anxious mind, I call the treadmill mind, has picked to obsess about throughout the course of my life. 

What you can take from this episode

So here's how I want the rest of the journal to go. Whether you experience anxiety yourself or you don't, I want you to get something from this episode. If you do experience it, I want you to understand the way it manifests for me. I want you to understand what I've done to harness it. And most importantly, I want you to know you're not alone. If you don't experience it, I want you to get a glimpse of what it feels like and the sheer work that it takes to not have it debilitate those who suffer from it. I think this perspective will make you more aware and more empathetic as you inevitably will work with hundreds of people who suffer from anxiety over the course of your career. Even if you're not diagnosed with anxiety or OCD, which stands for obsessive compulsive disorder, you will also inevitably experience anxiety periodically in your life. It's my hope that the tools I'm about to share with you will help get you through those moments. 

My experience

So let me start by sharing how anxiety manifests for me. There are a few assumptions that I make about my anxiety that allows me to manage it productively. The first assumption is that I am biologically wired to be more anxious than the average person. It's just how my brain works. I cannot fight this. There's no benefit to fighting it. I can't try to get rid of it, but I can learn to harness it. The second assumption: anxiety is a blessing and a curse. I need to respect the positives of my treadmill brain. It makes me creative, productive, proactive, and it allows me to draw connections quickly, but it's that same mind that latches onto sometimes unproductive things, things that create anxiety and make me unhappy. But what I need to do is accept that there are always unintended consequences of the positive things that happen. The third assumption is that managing anxiety is not easy. It's actually really, really hard. It's a part-time job that takes self-awareness, focus, and a lot of hard work to move the needle and quiet it with those assumptions in mind. Here's how I understand and manage my own relationship with anxiety.

The first thing is that I've noticed as I've gotten older and as life has gotten more complex with more responsibilities, my base level of anxiety has just shifted up. It's a fact, without a doubt, my anxiety has increased as there is simply more surface area for my anxious brain to grab onto. And as I reflect on my experience with anxiety throughout my life, I think it follows a 90%, 10% rule: 90% of my anxious thoughts or feelings are driven by 10% of my concerns. Said differently, there are a few things in life that drive the vast majority of my anxiety. And for me, it's three things: My work, my relationship, and my health. What I've observed is that the thing that ties these three themes together is that they are really important to me. Like some of the most important things in my life. And the second piece is they are also ambiguous. And here's what I mean by them being ambiguous. Whether it's me wondering in my head, am I good enough at my job, or am I pushing myself to be uncomfortable in my career so that I can accelerate? Or am I fully healthy without any sort of medical defects? The issue with all of these questions that I just asked is they're super important questions, but they're almost irrelevant questions for me to ask because they're questions that I simply can't answer. And because I can't answer them, my brain chooses to ruminate on them like the treadmill that just runs over and over and over. And it takes a ton of effort to answer these unanswerable questions. 

So the real question is what do I do with this? What do I do knowing that I am an anxious person, knowing that I get anxiety around things that matter a lot to me, but oftentimes aren't answerable, like work, relationship and health. How do I manage that? The answer is it's not my choice that my brain runs on a treadmill at 10 miles an hour, 24 hours a day, but I can choose how I conceptualize my experience and how I live with it in a productive and healthy way. That's why over the last several years, probably since I started working with a therapist in college, I've taken it upon myself to understand how my brain works, to draw connections between all of my different anxieties, and to create something I like to call my mental health stack. It helps strengthen my brain in the same way that anyone tries to strengthen their body when they go to the gym. 

How I think about mental health

The way I think about the mental health stack is you have a productivity stack, right? It's all of the things you do, like write in a journal or practice the Pomodoro method, or use the Freedom app on your computer to make you a better worker. You have a physical health stack, meaning the combination of exercise and diet that you do to feel your best physical self. My mental health stack is the same exact thing for strengthening my mind. And my mental health stack is as follows: I have daily habits and I have non-daily habits. My daily habits are exercise, diet, sleep, medication. Then I have non-daily habits, which include therapy and mindfulness, and I'd even put executive coaching in there. And how I think about my mental health stack is that all of these things that I just mentioned, they work together in order to both lower my average feeling of anxiety, kind of my base level anxiety, lowering it from let's call it a five out of 10 to a three out of 10. And then what this stack also does is it lowers the variability of the anxiety or the peaks of the anxiety. So when something like my work or my relationship or my health is particularly nagging at me, I find that this combination of things like exercise, sleep, and diet bring down the peak level of anxiety and those three things I just mentioned are the most important drivers of my anxiety in the present. So when I think about if I feel anxious today, or if my base level of anxiety is high today, if the answer is yes, generally, it's because I've messed up one of three important things, I call it the trifecta: sleep, exercise, or diet. And then I find things like therapy, mindfulness, and executive coaching, they are really important tools that help me navigate anxiety once it's already happening. So I view exercise, sleep, and diet as preventative therapy, mindfulness and executive coaching are ways that soften the peaks of anxiety once I'm feeling it. And as I reflect on what I'm saying right now, this experience of sharing my own relationship with anxiety, it's making me think about what are things that I can do moving forward to be more effective and manage my own anxiety in an even more productive way? And there are three things that come to mind. 

How to better manage anxiety

The first is that I tend to be reactive, not proactive, when it comes to my mental health practices. So whether it be mindfulness or therapy, my instinct is to partake in them when anxiety is heightened, but in my opinion, this is exactly the wrong approach. That's like if I chose to work out only when I felt out of shape, not when I was in shape and just trying to maintain myself. Maintenance and being proactive is such an important part of the mental health practice. The second is I need to practice having greater self-awareness around the things that truly drive my anxiety. So as I walked you through my mental wellness stack, I know that this stack is a combination of like seven things, right? That all work together to lower my base level of anxiety.

But what I haven't been in tune enough to is with these seven or eight things, what are the mental health practices that actually move the needle for my mental health? Is it my medication? Is it my gym practice? Is it my diet? Is it practicing gratitude and meditation? I don't know what the biggest contributors are and which things actually can be taken out of my mental health stack altogether. And the third and final thing that I reflected on is I need to learn to accept my anxiety versus resist it. This is something that I've experienced for such a long time, and I know others do as well. One of the worst things that an anxious mind can do is to ruminate about why they feel anxious and then think about only if they didn't feel anxious, how much happier they'd be. I need to trust my process for quieting my anxiety. I need to trust this stack that I've built up over time and in doing so, that will allow me to actually love my life and be happy, even in the face of being anxious. 

I want to hear from you

You see anxiety and happiness or anxiety and fulfillment–they don't have to be mutually exclusive. And the only way to have that happiness is to learn to sit in anxiety, but not have it make you feel a certain way. And that is my experience with anxiety. Now, whether you've experienced anxiety yourself or not, I hope that this episode has acted as education for you just to understand how powerful the mind is, what managing anxiety looks like for so many people, and the amount of work that it takes to maintain a constructive relationship with your anxiety. As you can tell, I am super open about my anxiety and my relationship with it. So if you ever want someone to talk to, or you're curious to learn more about it, please don't hesitate to email me at alex@morningbrew.com and as always, thank you so much for listening to Founder’s Journal.