Today we’re talking about worry at work. It’s something I know I struggle with, and I bet you do too. Maybe you’re the type of person who checks and rechecks emails three times before you hit send. You’re terrified. You made a typo, or you’re worried something could be misinterpreted. Maybe you obsess over every interaction with your boss.

You’re analyzing their tone. You’re wondering if that slightly shorter response means you’re in trouble. Maybe you work longer hours than necessary because you’re anxious that if you’re not doing enough or if you don’t over prepare for everything, you’ll be caught off guard, and that feels terrifying. For some of us, if you consider yourself what I call a sensitive striver, someone who feels deeply, thinks thoroughly, holds yourself to almost impossibly high standards, then worry might feel like it’s just your default setting, your brain was built to notice every detail, to anticipate more problems, to protect you from threats.

That sensitivity. It can be a superpower in so many ways, but it can sometimes mean that your mind never really gets to rest. Others of us, we picked up this behavior from our families or our early experiences. Maybe you grew up in an environment where being vigilant felt necessary. Where anticipating other people’s needs was how you protected yourself or the people you loved.

Maybe worry was modeled for you as care, where the people who loved you most, always worried about you the most. Somewhere along the way, you learned that worry equals love. That caring means constantly scanning for what could go wrong. And of course, there’s the environment we’re all operating in. There seems to be so much to second guess in work, in business, in the market every single day.

The economy can feel unpredictable. Job security feels like it’s a thing of the past. Industries are being disrupted faster and faster. Social media means we’re constantly comparing ourselves to other people’s highlight reels. So it’s no wonder so many of us feel like we’re constantly looking over our shoulder.

We’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop. We’re convinced that if we just worry enough, we can somehow prevent the bad things from happening. But here’s what I have learned. Worrying can make you feel like a prisoner. It can trap you in your own head. It can steal your sleep. Rob you of the satisfaction you feel from your accomplishments.

It can prevent you from taking risks that could actually move your career forward. It can make you smaller instead of bigger, reactive instead of strategic, exhausted instead of energized. So when I wanted to explore this topic, really dig into what worry is, why it happens, most importantly, what we can actually do about it.

No one better came to mind than my friend Nick Wignall. I have known Nick for about a decade now, going back to our days on Medium.com, where we were both publishing regularly on the platform. If you have been around since those days, then thank you. What I’ve always appreciated about Nick is that he’s a clinical psychologist, but he takes a very refreshingly, pragmatic and very practical approach to helping people.

He doesn’t just tell you what’s wrong or why you feel the way you feel. He gives you concrete, very simple tools you can actually use. And he has this amazing ability to take what is very complex, these psychological topics that can feel very dense and make them accessible and actionable. He’s interested in giving you strategies you can implement today to start living with more freedom and less mental noise. So enjoy this interview with Nick Wignall. 

 Nick, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. It is really a treat and an honor to have you.

Oh, thanks for having me, Melody. I’m really excited.

Yeah, so I mentioned in my intro, we’ve known each other for years, and we were joking just before we hit record, that you and I could talk for hours and we’re gonna have to rein it in for the purposes of at least this first conversation. But on your website, you say something which I love, which is you say, what’s the most important skill in life?

Is it reading, writing, coding, public speaking, listening, negotiating, money management? No doubt, those are all important, but there’s one skill that’s exponentially more important because it enables you to do all of the others.

The most important skill in life is the ability to manage your mind well.

So why in your opinion, is that the most important thing you can learn, especially when we’re talking about the people who are listening to this show are very career driven, professional forward.

Why is that the most important skill?

Yeah, I feel like it’s, it’s important on a few different levels.

One is just that it’s, it’s important in the sense that it’s kind of underrated. Like a lot of us, when we go through life through school and parents, we kind of, we pick stuff up about what, you know, like, money, like managing your money or negotiation.

Even sometimes we have family members who are certainly like reading, writing, coding things. We can all like learn explicitly in school. But very few of us ever learn explicitly and deliberately how to manage our minds well, our emotions, our thoughts are like all these kinds of things, beliefs about ourselves that come up.

And so I think there’s this real opportunity there, um, because it’s so, it’s just not taught explicitly, but in terms of why it like literally matters so much is, my experience from, you know, years of doing therapy and coaching and now doing consulting and kinda the organizational world, is that this is the biggest limiter on people’s potential, is my experience. I work with people every single day who are very bright, very motivated, um, super hardworking people, and they often get stuck. They kinda like hit ceilings in different respects. Almost always, when you kind of pop the hood and look beneath the surface, it’s because they’re having difficulty with one or two areas of their sort of mental and emotional life.

It could be self-doubt and imposter syndrome. I mean, you know all about that. You wrote a whole book on it, right? It could be communication, like assertive communication, learning how to communicate clearly with other people.

Um, but it could just be a more fundamental when big, difficult emotions come up, I don’t really know what to do with them, and I end up doing either what I’ve always done in the past or just what the easiest thing to do in the moment is. And while that’s really understandable, that kind of behavior often ends up sabotaging, our ideals, our goals, our, and even our talents and skills.

So I think especially for the type of audience you talk to a lot, this is the one area I just really wish people would. and I’m sure they are, they’re listening to this podcast by you, that’s why I think it’s the most important because I think people have so much room to to grow and unleash their kind of talents and potential. If they can even just get a little bit better on this skill of what it means to manage your mind well, and I’m sure we’ll talk about different, there’s a lot of aspects to that, but yeah, that’s sort of the, the basic answer.

Yeah, and I wanna get into what it, what it actually, tactically looks like in a moment. But just to underscore what you said, I, I, of course, I couldn’t agree more with you. There’s a reason this is called Psychology at Work. And it’s because you know, and you see this all the time, like you were saying, you work with very driven, high achieving, accomplished people.

You could be the most competent person in the room and have the highest technical or business acumen, but if you can’t get out of your own way, if you can’t manage your emotions, or you’re emotionally hijacked when you have to give a big presentation, you could have the most perfect script in the world, you could have the best skills in the world, but none of that matters if you don’t know how to manage this other piece.

And like you said, we’re not taught this, although I think that’s changing. You have young kids and I, I think there’s so much more of this social, emotional, mental learning now, which is great. I only wish that existed when you and I were younger.

Um, but it can also be very esoteric and it’s intangible. So it can feel harder to learn and teach because it’s not as concrete as presentation skills or something else. So I’m, I’m glad we’re talking about this and that leads to, alright, so then in your opinion, what does it actually mean or look like to manage your mind?

How do you know you’re doing that or not doing that?

On some level, you know, it always, you know, all these questions kind of start with awareness. Like awareness is always step zero, like trying to be aware. So when you think about, I, I like to ask people when you had a difficult time, let’s say in work, in, in a work context, if you, if take me back to that moment and like what was going through your mind at that time?

What was going on? Were you, was there a lot of self-talk? Like were you chattering to yourself in your head? Maybe you were criticizing yourself or worrying about something in the future? Was it, was it more physical? Like you almost just sort of felt paralyzed, like a freeze response, right. Or, or really, really tense.

Or was it kind of primarily like emotional? Did you feel like a lot of, did you feel yourself getting defensive and a lot of this mixture of kind of like shame and anger at the same time?.

If you’re feeling, you know, if you’re feeling shame about yourself or you’re feeling really angry about your, you know, your CEO in the middle of a meeting that’s uncomfortable. To feel that and acknowledge that and just sit with it. So our gut reaction is to scoot over it and just go like, go to what,

what’s the problem I’m trying to solve? Or what do I need to say or, and while that’s very understandable, the problem is it actually sabotages and interferes with our self-awareness.

So we get overwhelmed emotionally. We don’t even know what we’re supposed to be working on because of this habit we all have on a really base level to ignore or move away from whatever’s emotionally uncomfortable.

So the first skill in a lot of ways is like what I think of as sort of emotional curiosity. When you’re upset your default is gonna be to runaway. Like, no, no, no, no. Or like, what can I start working on? Or like, how can I intellectualize and like start thinking more?

As much as possible try to get curious and say like, huh, alright, I’m feeling something big. Like, I wonder what’s going on here. Right. And you can, a, a helpful way to break it down is to think about. I mentioned ’em earlier, but the levels of my body, like, what’s going on with my body? Oh, like my shoulders are in my ears. Clearly I’m pretty tense right now. Right. Or you can go to the, the emotional level, like, what am I feeling?

And on, on that one, my little heuristic for this is really helpful. Um, is. Say it like a 6-year-old. As adults, our tendency is to intellectualize how we feel like, oh, I’m so stressed, I’m so overwhelmed, I’m so. A five-year-old kid would never say I’m overwhelmed. What are they gonna say? They’re gonna say, I’m mad, I’m sad, I’m scared.

Right. Which is really admirable and helpful, I think. It’s something we lose as adults. We, we start intellectual. So ask your, when you’re asking yourself how you feel, say, say it like a 6-year-old, how would 6-year-old me describe how I’m feeling? And just in your own head real quickly, like, yeah, you know what, I’m feeling really angry and a little bit nervous or anxious right now.

Just labeling and identifying what you’re feeling can give you so much. Not only does it help to build more self-awareness long term, but that clarity, and we can get into this more, just getting clear about what’s going on in your own head is actually a powerful way. To kind of calm your nervous system and get a little bit more, um, like healthy, sort of get into a healthier head space.

So that clarity, right? So again, body emotions, but then also thoughts, the kind of cognitive level. So like, what am I talking to myself? Is my, is this self-talk kind of narrator track running? ’cause that thing is running all the time. A lot of times we’re not aware of it. But like, what am I doing? Am I criticizing myself right?

Am I, am I imagining like worst case scenarios in the future? Am I catastrophizing? I. And again, the the point here is not to stop doing those things right now, or to solve them, or to psychoanalyze yourself. It’s just to acknowledge and sort of just label them. Just go like, oh, like I’m doing that thing again.

Where I kind of get down on myself when I’m feeling bad. Huh. Interesting. So I think that’s the first thing, and hopefully this is a little lower pressure than like I gotta solve my big emotional problems right now, is just get the lay of the land. Just get a little bit curious with yourself and ask like, what’s going on with me physically, emotionally, mentally.

I think that is such an awesome foundation to then jump off of, to actually start to do some of the work, which I’m sure we’ll we’ll kind of get into. But hopefully that kind of helps as a getting people oriented.

Absolutely, and I love that it’s so, it is so simple that that’s kind of like this, one minute audit you can take yourself through and you can do that if you’re in a meeting. Right? Nobody has to know you’re doing this. You could do it in your car wherever you are in that moment. And like I said, I love how you, you have a very pragmatic approach to psychology and therapeutic work, and that’s, I’ve always appreciated that about you.

And this is one of those tools that breaks down this just amorphous reaction you can have into something that is very tactical. Okay. Body. And that’s an important point about starting with the physiology because yes, we often go right to the mental and you can’t, you have to address the physiology before you address the psychology, right?

Because your, your nervous system will just be in that fight or flight constantly overriding and, just you will have this loop of, well, we’re in danger, we’re in danger, something’s wrong. It, until you acknowledge that, and like you were saying, it’s almost like you’re dumping the puzzle pieces out on the table and sorting them like, like getting that lay of the land.

And even that is so soothing. You automatically feel more in control of it because you feel like you can just wrap your arms around what’s happening more. So That’s excellent. Um.

Okay. So something you talk a lot about, you coach on, you write a lot about is anxiety, worry, stress. And I wanna dig more into anxiety and worry in particular.

But before we get there, can you break down the difference between those things? ’cause they’re not, we tend to just group them all into the same bucket. Anxiety, worry, stress, but what’s the difference between them?

Such a good question, ’cause I think a lot of people struggle with anxiety generally. a really core level comes from understandably confusing or conflating a lot of similar terms. And frankly, part of this, part of the problem here is like people like you and I, Melody people who should know better, like professionals, are sloppy with their language and don’t make clear distinctions.

So here’s my brief framework. And how I think about these different terms, um, related to anxiety.

So first of all, I, I’m gonna start with stress. To me, stress is a physiological reaction to a perceived threat or danger. So it’s, it’s basically your body’s arousal or fight or flight system gets ratcheted up.

And it could be a tiny bit like you’re a little bit nervous or a little bit excited and your body, like your heart rate goes up, you know, five beats per minute, more than it typically was. You can’t even notice it. But you know, there’s a little bit of stress there. But it could go all the way to like a panic attack where you’re hyperventilating, your chest is tight, you’re sweating, you’re tingling, you know, all that kind of stuff.

But stress is a physical, it’s a physiological response to a perceived threat or danger. So I think it’s important to differentiate the physiological part. Then you have the emotional part. I call that anxiety. Fear is another one we can talk about. I think about it is fear is the emotional, reaction to something that is actually dangerous.

So you’re going for a hike and a bear walks out in front of you, you’re in danger. You feel fear. Anxiety is the exact same thing, but it’s in response to something that looks dangerous or seems dangerous, but isn’t actually a threat. And so that’s fear versus anxiety. But the point is those are emotions.

So stress is a bodily reaction. Anxious or panicky or nervous. There’s all sorts of variants or flavors of anxiety. That’s the emotional component. And then there’s the mental or cognitive side, and that’s where worry comes in. Now we have to get a little bit particular here ’cause there’s a few different variants of worry that are, that it might seem a little overly academic to talk about these, but um, it’s actually incredibly practical that you understand these distinctions.

So worry is, first of all, it’s a thought. It’s not an emotion. It’s not a physiological reaction. It’s a thought, right? There are different types of thoughts. Two of the most important types of thoughts are what cognitive psychologists call automatic versus deliberate thoughts. So an automatic thought is just something your brain throws at you.

It just pops into your head. You didn’t choose to have it. It’s like, oh, I forgot to get bananas at the grocery store. You didn’t decide to remember that. You forgot to get bananas. Your brain just reminded you of it for whatever reason. Or this worry about, oh my God, like did so and so think that like I screwed up that presentation.

You didn’t decide to worry about that, that worry popped in your head. So that’s a worry, and that’s a automatic thought. You cannot control that. It’s like dreams. You can’t control your dreams. Your brain decides to have dreams, and you maybe experience them, maybe you don’t. Same with automatic thoughts.

This is real. It’ll come back to control in a second.

Deliberate thoughts are the type of thinking that you control, right? So if I ask you to add, you know, 13 plus 15 in your head. You can go, okay, one in a three, right? One in a five. Add the five in the three, that’s eight. Add the two, the the two ones. That’s 2 28, right?

So you’re deliberately thinking about this math problem. You decided to do it. You could have decided not to do it. The analog with worry is what I call worrying. So I differentiate worry, which is something you can’t control. It’s an automatic thought. Versus worrying. Which can often feel automatic, but is absolutely under your control.

And the way this shows up most often is that a worry pops into your head, oh, Bob thought my presentation was stupid. You couldn’t withdraw that. That just popped in. But then we immediately get into a conversation with that worry. We start elaborating on the initial worry. This is worrying.

And actually, if you struggle with anxiety, most of your anxiety is the result of worrying, not the initial, the initial worry is gonna cause a little bit of anxiety, but the vast majority of the anxiety you’re feeling is caused by that deliberate form of thinking, worrying, which you actually can control. With practice, you can get a lot better at just having the first worry and not getting into a conversation with your worry. Which then leads to all the anxiety.

So that’s why it’s really important. It all comes down to control. ’cause what I often see is people put all their time and energy into trying to not have worries, which is understandable ’cause they make you anxious, right? But that’s all time and energy you don’t have controlling the thing you actually can control, which is your habit, your mental habit of getting into conversations with yourself, with your worries.

And that’s what generates 90% of your anxiety. So if you can get better at noticing that switch from like a worry to now I’m worrying, I’m having a conversation with my worries and then redirecting, putting your attention somewhere else. That that’s like 90% of anxiety right there getting to do that. And this goes back to your initial question about like, why is learning to manage your mind so important?

That’s a perfect example of getting better at learning to manage your own mind. You can see this in people who are very resilient and confident, even in high stress situations. It’s not that they don’t feel anxious or that they don’t have worries pop in their head. They don’t. They wonder if other people are thinking they’re dumb too.

It’s that they’re able to take that. Sort of acknowledge it, but not get lost in it, and then redirect onto what’s productive or meaningful or valuable.

So those are the three, you know, to kind of recap, there’s again, there’s sort of stress, there’s anxiety, and there’s worry. And worry has these two different types. Automatic, a worry. Versus deliberate or intentional worrying. So much of getting better at anxiety comes down to recognizing the difference between those two and getting really good at managing the worrying.

That was a lot, sorry, but uh, I feel like it’s important.

I feel like I am getting a masterclass in a therapy session all in one here, and just so insightful. I had never heard anyone describe worrying that way before, as in being in a conversation with worries. And I don’t know, for some reason that just clicks with me. It feels so much less threatening when you put it that way.

And it, even just that description makes it feel more in your control and like you are capable of managing it. So I’m sure the person listening to this is asking themselves well.

Please tell me how do I develop that level of control? Because it, it doesn’t feel like something I can direct or like a train track I can get off of right now.

So what do you, what do you say when you’re working with clients or you have folks in your program who it, it doesn’t feel optional. How do you develop that capacity?

Yeah, so like any really good question, um, like any skill, there’s no like silver bullet answer. Like, just do this one thing or just do this weird breathing technique. I’m like, oh, I’ll be better. Like, no, it’s not like that, right? If you want to learn to play the piano or shoot free throws really well, or you know, become a whiz on Excel spreadsheets, like it’s gonna take a little bit time.

There’s multiple components to doing it, but it is very doable. Okay, so that’s the way I, what I want people to take away from this is it’s not gonna be, there’s no magic bullet. But it is very doable. Just about anyone can learn to be decent playing a piano or playing guitar or something if you wanna, right.

So doing it, there’s a few things. The first one I would say is, and this one, it’s so easy to overlook this and overrate it, but arguably if you get this one down, everything else gets so much easier, and that is increasing your awareness of that distinction between a worry and worrying and getting faster at catching yourself, making that jump.

Because here’s the thing, the more time you spend worrying, the more anxious you’re gonna get and the more anxious you are, the harder it is to break out. That’s just, you know, it’s just human nature. Like the Dalai Lama is gonna have a hard time getting out of anxiety, once he gets super anxious. It’s just difficult.

So the real kind of ninja move is getting faster, noticing when you’ve jumped into worrying. ’cause if you’ve only gone through one or two worrying cycles, it’s way easier to pull out. So working to build that awareness of, oh, like a worry just popped into my head. I can feel myself want to get into a conversation with it, right?

For whatever reason. But that’s a different thing. And I actually have choice here. I have agency, it’s like internal psychological agency over what I want to do with my attention. So. Practicing, especially in low stake situations. This is another one I, I think this is really important. People, when people think about like, oh, I struggle with anxiety, they immediately think of the the situations where they struggle with like 10, outta 10 anxiety.

Like when I have to, you know, do these presentations for the board of my company and I’m super anxious and I’m like, yeah, like of course that’s really, really stressful. It doesn’t mean you can’t get better at doing those situations, but try to find opportunities that are lower stakes, where you can practice the same skill and build up your confidence and competence with that skill, so then you can get better at the 10 outta 10 situations.

So what I would say to anyone listening to this is look for situations that are like three out of 10 on the anxiety scale and try to get better in those situations. Stretching your worrying early, differentiating a worry from worrying and catch it early and just label it. It’s not even like, what do I do next? Don’t even go there yet.

The first thing is just getting better at noticing and bringing awareness to that jump from a worry to worrying. Okay? That’s the first thing. So look for kind of like low intensity situations where you get a little bit anxious or a little bit nervous, but not crazy, and start there. Practice there.

Okay? So that, that’s the first thing in the moment.

The second one that I think is really important is you want to validate the fact that you are feeling anxious or worrying. Validate iss one of those, like annoying, like therapist speak terms that everyone uses kind of differently. And, um, people make it too esoteric and fluffy and weird.

Validation, at least in my book, is very straightforward. Everybody knows how to do it because we all do it with other people all the time. It’s that, you know, Melody, if you came to me and you’re saying, you know, oh, like, you know, the book just launched and I’m, I’m getting really like, worried about like, are people gonna like it or not?

I’d. Ooh. Yeah, like I can, I can see that’s a big thing. You put a ton of time and energy into the book, like it makes sense that you’d be a little bit worried about how it was gonna be received. I would not say like, well, that’s dumb. Like, why are you worried about that Melody? You would never do that to someone else.

But this is what we do with ourselves all. It’s this crazy double standard where if someone else is anxious, we usually were fairly supportive, with them. We acknowledge we kind of value, yeah, it sort of makes sense that you feel that way with ourselves. We immediately jump on ourselves just like credit, self-criticism, judgment, like, this is crazy. Why are you feeling anxious right now? You should be confident. Like, what’s the matter with you? You know, all this stuff is running through our head.

I’m not gonna get into why that’s problematic. That should be self-evident, that that’s only gonna make things worse. But the antidote to that is just to validate that like, okay, I’m feeling worried. I’m worrying a little bit. See I caught myself there. I’m feeling anxious. I’m worrying. There’s different things. Um, and even though I don’t like it, even though it feels bad, even though I want to do something else, it’s not great. Like it kind of makes sense on some level that I’m feeling this way. And it’s, it’s okay. Like I’m not, I’m not bad for feeling anxious.

It sounds so dumb when you hear, but getting in the habit of, very briefly, this is the thing. You’re not having a 50 minute therapy session with yourself here. You’re taking five seconds to remind yourself like, yeah, I’m feeling anxious. It makes sense given like what’s going on, the stakes of this situation.

That is such a powerful, in the moment, it’s powerful ’cause it’s like a pressure release valve. A good chunk of that emotional intensity is gonna like, like you, like a balloon that’s popped and smoke, you know?

But more importantly, long term, what you’re doing, something really, really important, which is when you feel anxious or you find yourself worrying, then you immediately start criticizing yourself or trying to get rid of the anxiety. Or you like distract yourself and like run away. You’re teaching your brain that it’s bad to feel anxious, that anxiety is a threat. A danger, which means the next time you feel anxious, you’re gonna get anxious about being anxious. And when you get, when you compound emotions, it gets exponentially more intense, like 10 units of anxiety plus another 10 units of anxiety. It’s not 20, it’s like a hundred units of anxiety, when you compound emotions like that.

So if you can briefly acknowledge like, Hey, I’m starting to, I’m getting into this worrying thing. I’m feeling a little bit anxious. So there you’ve acknowledged, you’ve gotten a little curious about it.

You’ve validated it. You know what, I don’t like this, but it makes sense. It’s not surprising that I’m feeling this way again. That whole thing took what? Like seven seconds. Not long.

When you do that, you are being, you are willing to have the anxiety, you’re approaching your anxiety, and when your brain sees you approach anxiety, it learns the opposite lesson.

This thing’s kinda weird and uncomfortable, but it’s not dangerous. It’s okay. So the next time anxiety crops up, you’re gonna be less anxious in response to your anxiety.

This is the real, like long term if you want to have lower chronic levels of anxiety. This is the key. It’s not about getting rid of your anxiety or coping with your anxiety. It’s about changing your relationship with anxiety.

Anxiety is like a friend who’s giving you advice, right. Now, you may not like the advice. That doesn’t mean they’re a bad person or they’re a bad friend, right? They’re trying to help, even though the advice is uncomfortable. It might even be the case that the advice just isn’t right. It’s just bad advice. People get bad advice all the time. I’ve given bad advice. Melody, you’ve given bad advice before. I’m pretty, pretty confident. Um, it just happens. We’re well intentioned, but we just, you know, some, it’s hard and sometimes we give, so that’s your brain, right? Your emotions are your brain trying to help you. They’re always well intentioned.

But if you treat them like an enemy and try to get rid of them or try to avoid them, or just like, no, no, no, no, no. You know. You’re gonna be create this increasingly antagonistic relationship with yourself that’s gonna lead to much more chronic stress and anxiety and emotional fragility.

So that where all that, remember this all came from validation. It’s a very simple thing, but if you can get in the habit of doing it, it, it transforms your relationship with all of your emotions, but especially anxiety. Which long term is what’s gonna lead not just to relief from anxiety, but to confidence and resilience to being able to have a little anxiety.

’cause we’re all have anxiety, especially if you’re a kind of ambitious, high achieving person, like you’re gonna be in situations where you get anxious.

It’s not about getting rid of the anxiety. It’s being, it’s about being resilient and confident in the face of anxiety. And that comes from having a healthy relationship with anxiety, which come from this very simple habit of validating your anxiety.

Five seconds, not a therapy session. Remember. Really, really simple. So I think those are two really important basic, but super important things you can do. To manage your mind better in the face of anxiety. Differentiate a worry from this mental habit of worrying and getting into comfort. Just notice that difference.

The more awareness you bring to that process, the quicker you’ll be able to pull out of it.

And then build this habit of validating the anxiety. It’s okay. It makes sense that I’m feeling this way, even though I don’t like it.

Okay, this

end end of soapbox rant.

Yeah, this is, this is gold. I’m just like absorbing this all in. And um, I also appreciate how, yes, I think especially as high achievers, especially, you know, the people I talk to are sensitive strivers. We get into this very black and white thinking that the more successful I am, then therefore I should have less negative emotion. Because I should be more confident, and confident people have less negative emotion. And so I appreciate that you are encouraging us to embrace this gray area where there is so much, and there is so much you, especially the higher you rise, the more difficult situations you’re going to face, and you need to increase your capacity to be with and change your relationship with the, whatever, negative, whatever you wanna call ’em, the negative feelings, the worries, worrying that arises when it comes up. And so this is all gold.

Um, as we’re, I wanna be conscious of your time today, ’cause you’ve already been so generous with your insight and your knowledge.

You had this great article and if anybody is listening, you need to sign up for Nick’s newsletters. He is such a prolific writer and they are all so tactical and useful.

And going back to how worrying can cause anxiety, you had a really interesting article that was about the different sneaky causes for anxiety.

So could you talk to us about what else can cause anxiety?

‘Cause I think, you know, we, we’ve talked about a lot of them today. You know, you’re given a high stakes presentation or, and we often hear things like you need to eat better, sleep better. We all know that.

But what are some of these subtle things we may be overlooking that are, that are contributing to this cycle?

Sure. So there’s so many things here. Um, also one more distinction for me, Captain Distinction over here. What I would say I would throw out here is for something for people to kind of reflect on, um, and maybe it’s a little bit challenging for the way you think about emotions and, and anxiety in particular, but

Mm-hmm.

I think there’s a good case to be made that the only direct cause of anxiety is worry. You cannot feel the emotion of anxiety without worry. You can get stressed. You can feel stressed. You can have a, a re, a stress reflex. Your sympathetic nervous system can activate, right without your cognitive kind of that filter. But to feel the emotion of anxiety, you actually need some thinking and storytelling.

 So it’s not the trigger, the event that causes anxiety. It’s not the big presentation. It’s the story you’re telling yourself about what it means about what’s gonna happen as a result, whatever. So I think it’s really important to acknowledge that while worry, worry is the only direct cause of anxiety, and there are a ton of things though that can increase your sort of vulnerability. Worrying more and therefore feeling more anxious.

Everything from, like you said, like from your diet to your sleep, to your genetics, to the way you were raised to like all medications you’re taking, like all sorts of stuff. So and all, and all those we know are are really important, right, um, but a really kind of underrated aspect of what kind of contributes to anxiety.

Big picture, I think is our social life. We think about, like, increasingly we’re aware of like the physical stuff. Like what’s my diet, what’s my sleep like? Like even like regulating my nervous system better. Breathing, breath work, all that kind of stuff. I think what people don’t appreciate is that there is a really strong social component to anxiety, specifically the idea of boundaries.

Okay? So when you, what I see over and over and over again is that people who struggle to communicate assertively to ask for what they want to express themselves honestly, to say no to what they don’t want. There’s an incredibly strong connection between struggles with assertiveness and anxiety. If, and if you think about it, boundaries are one form of assertiveness.

If you can’t say no to taking on other people’s stuff. You are gonna get overwhelmed by stuff. You might, it might be tasks, right? You got people giving you stuff to do. It might be other people’s expectations, right? It could be activities, just running around constantly doing all sorts of stuff, right?

That sort holding people’s like expectations of you thinking they’re super important. Running around doing stuff all the time, for other people.

The inability to say no is one of the biggest like underrated causes of chronic anxiety.

So it’s really where, and we can get into like specifics, but I think the more important thing is just to reflect on in your life, if you struggle with anxiety, maybe it’s just anxiety at work or maybe it’s just anxiety with your family or like wherever anxiety shows up for you.

One really good reframe on anxiety is to say like, what is this anxiety symptomatic of in terms of my relationships and how I communicate in my relationships? Is there could anxiety be my brain like a good friend telling me like, you need some boundaries. Like you need more space between you and other people in the world.

You are enmeshed with other people and you need a little healthy white space independence from other people. Very often that’s what your anxiety is trying to tell you. It’s not, it’s not a virus. It’s, it’s not like a pathology that you need to get rid of or cure. It’s a message. And just like the old saying goes, like, don’t shoot the messenger.

It’s not the me it’s not the messenger. You don’t like the message. It doesn’t mean the messenger is wrong, right?

So ask yourself, what is my anxiety trying to tell me? And very specifically, are there are, are there places in my life where I need to be able to set and enforce better boundaries? We could go, there’s a whole thing we go into about like how to set boundaries, and you and I have talked about that before and there’s a lot, we both talk about that a lot, but I think a lot of people don’t necessarily make that connection between chronic difficulty setting and maintaining good boundaries and chronic anxiety.

That’s one of the, like, that’s like a super highway between those two things. So if you can get even a little bit better, right at identifying where in my life do I need to firm up my boundaries? Get, get practice saying no to things, whether that’s my spouse or my manager, even my CEO at work may, maybe, maybe my direct reports.

A lot of people have harder time saying no to people, sort of quote unquote under them than they do over them. Um, but boundaries, I’m not gonna belabor this point, but use anxiety as a cue to reflect on boundaries and relationships in your life.

Yeah, I, I absolutely love this, and you, in my first book, Trust Yourself, and actually in the second book too, in Managing Up, I talk about how you can use your feelings as a guide to where you need to set boundaries. Resentment in particular, is usually the big biggest red flashing signal that you have, you feel taken advantage of.

You’ve let something go on for too long without speaking up about it, and that is, it’s sort of like your emotional system flaring to bring your attention to that. And what I love about this too, that I just wanna encourage people to think about is you, you are talking about tangible boundaries. So you’re not saying no enough in terms of, uh, you may be letting people book over your lunchtime, right? Or book, uh, after hours meetings. Like the very tactical way we think of boundaries.

But there’s also internal boundaries. And I’m thinking about this in terms of how much, how much do I let somebody else’s even imagined opinion of me affect how anxious I get. Oh, oh, what will they, what will they think? Or uh, should I say it this way or that way? Because if I say it this way, then maybe they’re less likely to get mad. And that’s, porous boundaries there too, because you don’t have, when you do that, you’re not operating from this kind of internal compass about what you think is right or wrong, or the values you wanna have in this situation, or what’s most important about how you show up.

You’re just fixated on the imagined, uh, reaction of somebody else. Would you say that’s accurate too? That can be like tangible and intangible

I’m so glad you brought this back. ’cause it, it really brings everything kind of full circle to what we started talking about with this, like, this distinction between a worry and worrying, right? That is a perfect example of where you can set an internal boundary. Often to your point, Melody a this a worry about like, what’s Bob gonna think of my presentation?

Right? That’s a manifestation of you holding on like Bob’s, like live and rent free in your head, right? And, and you are, and here’s the thing. It’s, it, maybe it’s justified. Like we don’t wanna get too into blaming Bob. There’s not a whole lot we can do about Bob specifically, but what you can always do is not get into a conversation with your imagined like opinion of what Bob thinks.

You always have control over that, right? And so really you’re, you’re sort of setting a boundary with Bob, but really you’re setting a boundary with yourself. And like whether you want to even have a conversation about what Bob thinks of you or not. So I, I love this. It’s a great boun, external boundaries, super important, but those internal boundaries also really, really important when it comes to anxiety, kind of big picture and, um, yeah, and, and creating this healthier, more dynamic relationship with anxiety. So that we can feel anxiety, and not be like a prisoner to it and get lost in it and move through it and keep going with what really matters to us. Because I think that’s really what it’s all about.

Nick, this has been brilliant, and we’re just barely scratching the surface of so much of the insight you have to share. So where is the best place to send people to connect with you further and learn from you?

Sure. Um, the best place I have a newsletter, just go to Nick Wignall, N-I-C-K-W-I-G-N-A-L-L.com. Um, a newsletter you can sign up for and I send out, um, yeah, essays every week. Anxiety is a big topic. I talk about confidence, self-doubt, stuff like that. Um, and yeah, I’d love to see you on the newsletter. Feel free to say hi.

Um, yeah, thanks Melody.

Thanks for being here.