The Anxiety Trap: Why Fighting Makes It Worse
About this episode
For most of my adult life I had a low-level hypervigilance running in the background. I tried to fight it with books, breathwork, control techniques, willpower. The harder I fought, the worse it got.
In this episode I share the breakthrough that came when I stopped fighting and started welcoming. It is a Stoic and Nietzschean reframe called amor fati, the love of fate, and it changed my relationship with anxiety.
We get into the two layers of suffering and why fighting anxiety creates the second one, what Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus understood about welcoming difficulty, why Nietzsche called amor fati the formula for greatness, the Stoic idea of indifferents and why anxiety is not bad in itself, and a daily practice for treating anxiety as a training partner rather than an enemy.
Watch the video version: youtu.be/cY4AMcWhSko
Sources: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Hays); Epictetus, Discourses and Enchiridion (Hard); Nietzsche, The Gay Science; Donald Robertson, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor.
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