Play It Away: A Workaholic's Cure for Anxiety (5 page)

5

My 4-Week Plan For Health And Happiness

Viewing the world through the lens of
Play
allowed me to enjoy life again, but it didn’t heal my anxiety overnight. I still felt tense and worried, and I was out of touch with my friends. But for the first time in more than a year, I had a glimmer of hope. And within one month of viewing my life as
Play
, I was back to my old self.

This section of the book contains every technique I used to heal my anxious mind, control my workaholism, and improve the quality of my life. Everything I’m going to recommend did wonders for my mental, emotional, and physical well being. Practicing these techniques on a regular basis made me happier than I’d felt in years.

Here’s the general outline of my 4-week plan for health and happiness:

  Week 1 - Remove Your Anchors
  Week 2 - Heal Your Mind
  Week 3 - Heal Your Body
  Week 4 - Heal Your World

If you’d like to follow along with my 4-week plan,
I highly recommend that you go one week at a time
. Don’t skip ahead, and don’t try every technique all at once. That kind of drastic alteration to your schedule will fall apart in a matter of days. I know you’re desperate to feel better
right now
, but the plan works best when you go one week at a time.

Also, during weeks 2-4, you don’t have to practice every technique I recommend. You can always pick ONE that sounds like it could really improve your life, give it a shot for seven days, and then assess how you feel at the end. If it’s clearly working, stick with it. If not, try another technique.

Are you ready? It’s time to get your life back.

Week 1

Remove Your Anchors

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

—
A
NTOINE DE
S
AINT-
E
XUPERY

Pretend you’re sitting in a boat in the middle of a lake. You want to paddle to shore, but there’s a problem – your boat has several anchors attached to it. Should you paddle as hard and fast as you can, or should you stop and remove the anchors?

Obviously, you need to remove the anchors before you can start paddling. Otherwise you’re going to work ten times harder than necessary, and you won’t make any real progress. Or worse, you might even sink.

The same principle applies to your anxiety. You need to cast off the emotional weights that are dragging you down before you can lift yourself back up.

In order to heal your anxiety and start viewing your life as Play, you must
Remove Your Anchors
. These are the stressors that continually thrust you into heightened states of emotional strain. It’s very easy to tolerate these sources of stress, day after day, always feeling unhappy. But if you truly want to get back to a healthy state of mind, you must identify and remove your anchors as completely as possible.

***

Before I jump into the specifics of the
Remove Your Anchors
exercise, I want to show you my four heaviest anchors, along with the solutions I implemented to get rid of them. Hopefully, this will increase your awareness of the things that might be weighing you down.

ANCHOR 1: Fear of getting attacked

SOLUTION: Stop reading and watching the news

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.

—
R
OBERT
J
.
S
AWYER

It took me a long time to see it, but
the news
was my single biggest source of anxiety. The websites I was reading each day talked non-stop about crime, corruption, economic breakdown, and the end of the world. As a result, my fear of being attacked spun out of control. I became obsessed with protecting myself from every possible threat to my livelihood. I researched what to do if I was arrested and thrown in jail. I spent hundreds of dollars on food and equipment that I hoped would save me in the event of a disaster.

There was nothing inherently wrong with preparing for an emergency, but obsessing over preposterous apocalyptic scenarios, every single day, for months on end? What an enormous waste of time and energy!

After I did the
Remove Your Anchors
exercise, it finally dawned on me:
my fear of an imaginary future was destroying my ability to enjoy the present.

And what planted those seeds of fear?
The news.

When I made the commitment to cut the news out of my life completely, my anxiety plummeted in less than two weeks. The negative information I removed from my conscious awareness freed me from the confines of other people’s frightening narratives.

I replaced the scary news with positive, joyful, and fun information. For instance, I listened to uplifting songs and standup comedy albums. I watched funny and happy movies. I read fiction books that sparked my imagination (rather than workaholic business books that made me feel productive). It really helped.
⁷

Of course, I didn’t bury my head in the sand. I still talked with my friends, who would inevitably bring up the noteworthy events that took place that week. And I was always surprised to discover that...
I didn’t really miss anything
. I was alive, and the world kept turning. That was about it.

The information you allow into your conscious awareness determines the quality of your life. In other words, you are what you think. If you are subsisting on content that’s unsettling, anxious, and soulless (see: the news, reality shows, horror movies, books written by hateful authors, porn), your mind will become stressed, scared, and cynical. But if you are consuming content that’s joyous and playful, your mind will become happy and loving.

Do not hesitate to cut anxiety-inducing information —especially the news – out of your daily routine completely! If your friends are watching the news in the same room, either change the channel or go do something else. If a scary headline appears in your Facebook feed, don’t click it – block it!

There’s no need to subject yourself to unhealthy unrealities.
⁸
Replace those unsettling thoughts with positive content that will lift you up. Otherwise, you will taint your thoughts, instill fear in your mind, and continually spoil the quality of your life.

ANCHOR 2: Fear of having a panic attack

SOLUTION: Stop drinking ridiculous amounts of caffeine

The physical sensations that preceded my panic attacks were the jitters (shaking hands, quivering voice) and a rapid resting heart rate. Guess what gave me both of those sensations? Coffee. And wouldn’t you know it, I was drinking 3-4 cups each day, running around like Tweek on
South Park.

I decided to cut coffee out of my diet for a week. Shortly after I removed the caffeine from my bloodstream, I stopped having the jitters. My resting heart rate remained steady. The physical sensations that came with a panic attack were no longer there, and I started calming down.
⁹

A friend of mine experienced something similar. She had horrible anxiety for months but couldn’t figure out what was causing it. One day at work, she noticed that she’d finished three diet sodas in just a few hours. Her body was overloaded with caffeine and aspartame (a poisonous chemical in diet drinks that is 100% legal). As soon as she stopped drinking diet soda, her anxiety disappeared.

Every chemical you’re regularly ingesting is being absorbed in your bloodstream, which is potentially having a HUGE impact on your anxiety. You might be used to consuming stimulants to stay awake (or drinking/smoking to calm down), but if your body keeps freaking out, it’s signaling that something is wrong. This should be obvious, but we tend to overlook the simple answers that are right in front of us.

Cut out any substance you regularly consume that’s correlated with increased feelings of anxiety
. Common culprits include: caffeine, aspartame, refined sugar, alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana. Keep it out of your body for one week.

If you have that substance in your house, throw it away. If the people you spend the most time with are encouraging you to consume it, politely turn them down and do something else. If you have strong cravings for that substance, find a healthy substitute you can consume instead.

After the substance has been out of your system for seven days, you can reassess its toxicity by consuming a typical dose you’re used to taking. If your anxiety symptoms return within one hour of ingestion, you’ve found the culprit. Try to eliminate that substance for good.

ANCHOR 3: Feeling anxious around certain people

SOLUTION: Stop spending time with vampires

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

—
J
IM
R
OHN

My first relationship was in 5th grade. I’d never felt so stressed out in my life. There were all these rules and restrictions I had to obey. I needed to hold my girlfriend’s hand in class. I needed to hang out with her at recess. I needed to call her after school. I couldn’t talk to other girls. The whole ordeal was exhausting.

My mom noticed how unhappy I was, and asked if I’d considered ending the relationship. “I can do that?” I exclaimed, amazed that I wasn’t shackled to my new existence. The next day, I made the break with these immortalized words: “You’re dumped.”

Of course, we were just kids. Neither of us knew what we were doing, so we tortured ourselves by being really serious around each other. Shortly after we broke up, we were able to relax, joke around, and have fun again.

When I was at the peak of my anxiety, I noticed those same feelings from my first relationship kept cropping up around certain people. I felt worried, tense, serious, or angry every time we interacted. But I wasn’t dating any of these people. They were just a whirlwind of stress that I kept getting caught up in.

After I did the
Remove Your Anchors
exercise, I decided to cut the vampires out of my life. I know the term “vampires” sounds like a goofy self-help cliché, but it was a useful label for identifying the people who were fueling my anxiety.

A vampire is someone who drains your energy when you interact with them.
You can recognize a vampire just by recognizing your body’s overwhelmingly negative responses to them. When you get a message from a vampire, your stomach drops. When you’re hanging out with a vampire, you feel tense and angry. When you leave a vampire’s presence, you feel relieved and exhausted. When you run into a vampire in public, your first impulse is to avoid eye contact and hide.

Like all human beings, vampires have redeemable qualities. But their positive traits are heavily outweighed by how weak, afraid, and awful you feel around them. You can never relax or be yourself around a vampire, because you’re too busy trying to avoid their emotional assault. Vampires fuel your anxiety, and at some point, you need to say “Enough.”

When I finally acknowledged how weak and anxious the vampires in my life made me feel, I decided to stop spending time with them. I didn’t explain myself or tell them they were the problem; I just stopped making their happiness my priority and cut off communication. After a few weeks of turning down meetups and ignoring messages, they slowly began to fade away.
¹⁰

While I was ignoring the vampires, I focused on spending more time with people
I genuinely loved being around
. People who were easygoing, upbeat, funny, and loving. Being around positive friends, who didn’t try to control or change my behavior, naturally brought out my authentic playful self. We felt safe and secure around each other because our only priority was just to have fun together. Positive people had the inverse effect of vampires; they
replenished
my energy, and
reduced
my anxiety. The more time I spent around them, the better I felt. It really was that simple.

Anyone who consistently drains your energy and makes youfeel weak is a vampire. Even if they are a longtime friend, a co-worker, a significant other, or a blood relative,
a vampire is still a vampire
. It’s important to acknowledge how awful they make you feel so you can start consciously limiting your time with them. Otherwise, they will keep thrusting you into heightened states of panic, anger, and sadness.