The Paradox of Anxiety
An illustrative story…
It was early fall in Kyiv, I was strolling by Taras Shevchenko park when a beautiful silver Maserati caught my eye. The capital of Ukraine (where I once lived) oddly has the highest concentrations of high-end performance luxury cars that I’ve seen.
It parked just ahead of me and a muscular, middle-aged driver wearing stylish athletic gear got out. I thought to myself…
I should approach him and compliment his car.
But of course, a bunch of reasons jumped to mind why that was a terrible idea…
You have no idea who the hell this guy is! In a city and a country like this with a car like that he might be a real mobster. You’re just a solo tourist here. You’re in no position to be taking risks! You’ll probably annoy him. Just mind your own business! This is not a country where people appreciate strangers starting conversations with them. He might not even speak English.
I pushed those thoughts aside and just started walking toward the guy. I clearly enunciated in English
“Excuse me. You have a beautiful car.”
(I did speak enough Russian to say this but I’ve learned doing at least five hundred cold approaches that unless you speak a language fluently, just go with English). The guy smiled just slightly and responded in a thick Slavic accent
Thank you. It’s new.
We chatted for a few minutes there about cars before heading our separate ways and he told me he was “a dentist” (a likely story!)
The paradox of anxiety
We tend to think of anxiety as a problem of wimpy people. We hear “anxiety” and we think of…
- The lady who just locks up when she has to speak publicly in a meeting.
- The college graduate paralyzed by nervousness before a big job interview.
- The shy guy who is afraid to introduce himself to the pretty girl he fancies.
- The grumpy old man who watches too much television and is always angry and fretting about politics.
But these are not the only manifestations of anxiety — it is also an inevitable side effect of ambition. In fact, I would suggest that if you don’t suffer from a little anxiety you are not really ambitious.
Risk and reward are inextricably entangled, meaningful accomplishment entails danger and true brilliance requires getting rid of the safety net. If you are doing something that really matters there will be a very real chance of failure and this naturally produces anxiety. If failure in the pursuit to that which you dedicate yourself is not a weighty enough possibility that it’s disturbed your sleep in recent memory, then what you’re pursuing is insufficiently ambitious (elite sleep hackers excepted). You may have some great redeeming qualities but if you’re not at least moderately apprehensive about your future, you are not ambitious.
Entrepreneurs and business people are infamous for how they self-medicate and handle their anxiety…
- Booze and marijuana
- Cocaine and hard drugs
- Medication and pharmaceuticals
- Sex addiction
- Obsessive and excessive exercise
- Doing frequent “plant medicine” ceremonies or microdosing LSD at the office
So you might conclude…
Anxiety is just part of the deal. If you want to do something that matters in the world anxiety and stress will be your companions.
And if you were living at any other time in history that sentiment would be spot on — the cold undeniable reality of the human condition (especially for men). But you are more fortunate than you know to be living in the current year and it’s not really true anymore, I’ll explain why but first let’s talk about…
FEAR
I don’t subscribe to the idea that fear is something to be disregarded. In fact, I think this is one of the stupider self-help platitudes that has permeated pop psychology and mainstream consciousness. Perhaps some well-meaning guru convinced you that fear is just…
False
Evidence
Appearing
Real
This is true some of the time but a lot of times fear is a useful reaction to very real evidence and many people make bad decisions because they disregard it. This acronym is such a convincing absolute generalization that I’ll encourage you to throw it out of your vocabulary and internal narrative. So what is a more rational response to fear?
Embrace acute fear arbitrarily.
Biohack general fear categorically.
I’ll elaborate and illustrate…
Embrace acute fear arbitrarily
Often visceral fear is the compass that we can use to navigate to success. The more guttural the fear we have about something that we intellectually know is not deserving of avoidance the more we should lean into THAT fear.
Often your powerful subconscious mind will notify you of opportunities with a heuristic gut reaction; tension in the chest and gut, increased heartbeat, and raised blood pressure — you know exactly what I’m talking about. The confusing thing is that this feels like fear but it’s actually an opportunity signal.
You’ll hear successful people talk about how they just follow their instincts which can be supremely frustrating to hear if you have met with failure in the past and perhaps have some scars as a result of just following your instincts or impulsive decision-making. The good news is that you can develop much more keen and helpful gut instincts by arbitrarily pursuing the things that stimulate a heuristic reaction. I’m not encouraging you to do things that you know are dangerous but if you get an acute heuristic reaction to something that you logically know is not actually dangerous — like talking to the Ukrainian guy with the Maserati — that’s your sign! I did a video about this topic a few years ago about how to habituate heuristic decision-making…
Biohack general fear categorically
The side effect of ambition, doing things because they are hard and a lifestyle of pursuing challenges, is low-level chronic anxiety — a background hum of stress and worry.
But in modernity, unless you’re living in a war zone or struggling with a chronic illness that immediately threatens your life, there is no good reason for you to suffer from that anxiety when there are so many options for hacking your stress management…
- Daily meditation or mindfulness practice.
- Listening to soothing, mood-enhancing binaural beats.
- Sleep hacking.
- Exercise or weightlifting.
- Breathwork and Taoist techniques.
- Taking cold showers.
- Yoga, martial arts, or some flow-state-inducing activity like surfing.
And of course, there are anxiolytic drugs and supplements that people use to deal with anxiety but the problem with almost all of them is that they often blunt performance or retard cognition. 500 milligrams of Phenibut will work marvelously to clear your head of worries in about half an hour but it will have a negative effect on your ability to do intellectual work. Luckily there are a handful of Nootropics at the intersection of enhancing performance and assuaging anxiety. I’ll list them here in descending order of effectiveness, potency, and efficacy…
- Nicotine — I consistently get my highest HRV coherence scores on it surprisingly.
- Rhodiola
- Panax Ginseng
- Ashwaghanda
- L-Theanine
- Aniracetam
- Kratom — I list this last because while it is very effective for some people’s chronic anxiety, it does have a dark side for some. Some of the science indicates it may have a negative effect on cognition.
Additionally, there’s some biohacking hardware that has a stress-relieving effect in my experience. Notably, HRV training devices that give you near-immediate biofeedback on your state.
Along with the two Infopathy devices; the strap-on PEMF Hummer that I use to entrain my brain waves and IC Pad that I use to download into water anxiolytic infoceutical drugs.
So the wise Biohacker has a complex relationship with anxiety, they…
- Take on ambitious projects with a modicum of risk that will stimulate anxiety
- Arbitrarily pursue things that viscerally scare them but are logically benign
- And habituate stress management using a variety of Biohacking tools and supplements
