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Un anxious. Fifty simple truths to help overthinkers feel less stressed and more calm.
Morning, Good morning, How are you feeling? Fantastic?
Good good, good good.
Easier said than done, but it can be done. As somebody who deals with anxiety.
You know what it's It gets harder and harder, but it gets more and more worth it. Yes, I agree, and we just got to change the conversation. And I'm realizing that, like step one, stop talking about anxiety like it's herpies.
Like it's herpies.
Yeah, I have anxiety. She has anxiety. Anxiety is a normal feeling. Anxiety is a signal. It's like hunger. You don't say I'm hungry, what's wrong with me? You say I feel hungry because it's been like eight hours and eight It's the same thing Mel Robins said. Instead of saying I'm anxious, say I feel anxious because I feel anxious because I got bills to pay. I feel anxious because somebody I like hasn't texted me back. I feel
anxious because I drank too many coffees this morning. And it's like knowing the reason allows you to understand the first step instead of looking at ourselves like we're failing because we have this signal and this emotion. Because when we think we're feeling we have anxiety, what do we do. We try to distract, we try to medicate, we try to avoid.
That is water, by the way.
And then the other crazy part is I think once you recognize what's causing the anxiety, you get to determine whether or not you have any control over.
As she realized, you have no control over it.
You like, man, well, what I'm realizing in the last month. This book came out two months ago. I was supposed to be on the show a month ago and everything worked out where things got pushed the month And for this last month, I've been on a really intense journey to reboot my system. So complete sobriety, complete abstinence, complete celibacy. And then all of a sudden, I realized, your relationship with things on the outside will let you know how
much control you have. So really what the issue is. Our anxiety systems is an outdated security system. It was there to protect us in a world that we don't live in no more. So. What happens is like think about your phone. Your phone comes with a bunch of apps on them that aren't useful. They're not useful no more. You may or may not use it. You can't get rid of the calculator app on your phone, whether you
like it or not. All we can do with this our operating system is we can reboot, and we can update. We can update our server. We can update our system. That requires getting it out of our system temporarily. If you eat toss sauce every single day, what happens You need more and more and more just to taste it. You want to reboot your system. What do you gotta do? You gotta get host Saice out of your life. And then maybe after a month you taste it again. That's gonna taste different.
What got you to the point where you said you needed a reboot? What got you there? But like this is time.
My entire life, I've always just been focusing on freedom. I grew up in an activist space, but also I want to be financially free. I don't want to have a day job. I don't want all these things. And then when you start jumping out of these cages, you start realizing the biggest cage you've ever built is the one that you built for yourself. And what we do is we decorate it by you know, negotiating. We decorated by using our intelligence, and we start saying no, no, no,
I'm not a slave to my habits. I'm not a slave to my impulses, like, I just want to enjoy life. I just want to experience the depths of life. And we're just intellectualizing our addiction. So I realized I've hit that point in my life where I was like, oh, the biggest cage is the biggest fences that I'm stuck behind are the ones that I've built. And I realized, like, Okay, the basic story is something on the outside needs to happen for me to feel calm and safe on the inside.
That's the relationship all of this anxiety talk is that simple idea, something on the outside needs to happen for me to feel safe on the inside, whether that's taking a vape, whether that's drinking alcohol, whether that's having sex, whether that's eating in front of the TV, whether that's taking your phone to the toilet, because for people who take their phone to the toilet, try not to take your phone to the toilet. You will have an anxiety attack.
For people, a friend of mine always eats in front of TikTok and I said, try it one time, Try it one time, not to eat with your screen on. They ate half the meal. Because we realize we live in a world in a system that gets very powerful when we're on autopilot, and our autopilot is us outsourcing our stimulation outsoorting or outsourcing our regulation. We're like, yo, I can only feel safe from things on the outside.
I need that just to get to zero. But when you let it all go and you go through this process and it sucks, it sucks, you know what I mean, You aw sucks. Then all of a sudden you realize, oh, I can create this dopamine on the inside. Dopamine from the outside hijacks you. Dopamine from the inside builds you.
What was the most What does an anxiety teck look like?
So anxiety just from a scientific So I want people to understand this conversation is not philosophical. It's not spiritual, it's not moral. This conversation is just psychological and biological, so I'm not here to judge anybody's choices. Anxiety is just adrenaline and cortisol. So what happens is the body doesn't know what's happening. The body just knows things are changing. So when the body gets charged, it's things are danger. That's what we call it fight or flight. But there's
more levels. It's called the polyveagel system. You have freeze, so something intense happens, we just freeze. Someone puts a gun to your face. You've never seen a gun before. You're just gonna freeze. You don't get to choose that. Then this fight or flight, which now has turned into fight or scroll, and then we also have safety. And then the new one that's being introduced right now is fun. Right, So freeze is play dead, fight or flight is runaway or fight fun is I'm gonna make you love me.
So this is a big one, especially for men, because men aren't walking into romantic situations thinking about their safety the way women do. But men have to think about safety and they don't realize when they feel unsafe, which is nervous, they fond, they get extra charming, and now we're performing, right, and we have to recognize that. So it took me fifteen days of not doing all the big stuff to realize that there's a second layer to this, a third layer, of fourth layer you have to keep
going down. So yeah, cool performing for beautiful women. But also like my nephew was just here on the weekend visiting. I started performing for him because I want to be the cool uncle. That's also funny. That's also an anxiety. That's me trying to avoid anxious feelings, right, like the moral of the stories. Feel your feelings and it's going to suck. Put the phone away, eat the meal, feel the burn that's about to come. That burn is adrenaline
and cortisol. That's what you need to protect your kids. That's what you need to get away from danger. But we're getting triggered in moments that aren't physically dangerous anymore.
Do you feel like we take the word anxiety and it's used too much already? For sure, it's a from what you're saying, it's a natural feeling. Right, I'm about to go on stage. There's thousands of people out there, you get a little anxious, but it's not like a lot of us. I'm sure some people do, but we don't get that anxious where it's like I can't go on stage, just like you get that little feeling and then it's like I gotta go, and then you just
go and do it. But I feel like a lot of times people use the word anxious and anxiety as a such a negative tool. It's like a nasty, naughty word when you talk about it.
Sometimes, as I said, we treat it like it's herpes, Like we treat it like it's a condition, and only some people have it. Some people don't. We give it like my anxiety, like it's like it's an individual problem, anxiety as a society problem.
Somebody.
People do have anxiety disorders where they actually have to take medication.
Absolutely people have anxiety disorders. But the situation with that is if you have an anxiety disorder, if you're bipolar, if you have any mental health issue, there are still things that we can all do to improve how we feel. I'm not saying we're going to cure it. I'm not even saying we can reboot and delete our old system, but we can make choices, simple choices. Get more sleep than you need, treat more water than you need, get more sunlight than you need, and stay away from assholes.
Which is why knowing the word anxiety is good. Like I think knowing knowing the language and knowing what it is you're going through as good because now you can identify it and then you can find cures for it.
So the issue with that is, and it's kind of like the word woke, right, Yeah, that came from Erica Bay dude, right, stay woke and then chattage can't be made. It more popular and it meant something and men be aware and then be self aware, I mean, know what's going on. And now it's been weaponized and changed the other way. Someone's an insult now, right, Oh the woke model. Language changes. That's what happened with mental health. You know,
we're all millennials. We remember back back in the days when you talked about mental health, people thought that meant like insane asylums and stray jackets. Then we got to like, okay, things have been normalized. You don't have to be embarrassed to say that you saw a therapist or something. Now it's gone too far. The other way where we treat
mental health, and we use that language completely incorrectly. We think we have to protect our mental health, like it's some like crystal flower that like if somebody come near, we have to protect our peace or to protect our mental health. Mental health is just like physical health. So what I'm gonna say is, let's the words been used up.
It's been weaponized, just like well, let's use mental fitness because you don't say, when it comes to your physical health, well, I'm not gonna climb these stairs because gravity is gonna make it harder. It's like, no, the only way that you can climb stairs is to keep climbing it. We have machines in the gym just for you to climb stairs when you don't even need to climb stairs. Why to prepare you for the times that you have to. We all here lifting having weights. The heavier the weight,
the more we know, the workout mattered. So then when our friends asked us to move a couch, and again, if you're over thirty, stop asking your friends to help you move a couch, but when you're ready to do it. Because you were voluntarily putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, we don't have that for our mental health. We don't have mental fitness training. We're not voluntarily putting ourselves in uncomfortable mental situations so we get stronger instead of like, I
gotta protect my piece. No, your peace protects you. You don't protect your mental health. Your mental health protects you just like your physical health protects you. You want to be able to pick up your kids, so you go to the gym. You know what I'm say, kids are heavy, gravity keeps holding them down. I wish we lived on
the moon and it'll be lighter. No, you're like, I got to go to the gym, so the longer, for longer and longer I can hold my kids up to the point where I'm going to the gym just so I can open the jar when I'm eighty.
But that's that's an interesting point.
But there's there's other things that going to you know, keeping your your physical health right right, it's not.
Just working out, yep, it's diet yep. So you refrain from certain things.
Yes, therefore you are protecting your physical You're not gonna eat so much process foods.
You're not gonna eat so much sugar.
So what are we doing for mental health the same thing.
I think you should refrain from certain things, Like if you know certain things trigger you, you should refrain from that completely disagree.
If there's something I know that I'm not gonna like and I don't have to be around it and it doesn't affect my daily life, yeah, Like why would you dive into it if I know I'm not gonna like it. I know it's going to make me feel a certain way, and I don't need it in my life.
Absolutely. So for example, if it was an easy day at the gym, it wasn't a good day at the gym, right, It had to had to kind of suck, It had to be a struggle, right. You triggers are what you're supposed to avoid. Ther triggers of the roadmap. Your triggers are showing you where all the work is. But what we've done now is we've created mental health to the point where it's like, I'm just gonna sidestep everything that
makes me feel gross. That gross feeling, that adrenaline and cortisol, that's the body being like I'm in danger when you're not. You know, I'm coming doing this interview. It's a big deal. I get a little bit nervous. The mantra has to be Okay, this feels uncomfortable, but I'm not in danger. Our body thinks we're in danger, right. Instead, what needs to happen is our triggers are what's revealing to us where the work is. When we always talking about being healed,
So think about it physically. If you were eight years old and you fell off your bike and broke your arm, you didn't just experience physical trauma and keep it moving. You went to the hospital, you got your arm fixed up. But as children, we experience mental trauma and kept it moving. As adults we feel the same way. So it's like we have to address that, and that's the way it gets stronger. For example, simple example, I walk by somebody.
Let's say, you know, I walk by somebody and they got a perfume on, and all of a sudden, I get triggered. And first things first, I just want to get away from them. I want to soothe, I want to look at my phone, I want to do something to feel better. Cool. Maybe the next day, after I'm well rested, i'm well hydrated, I get some sleep. Whatever, I'm like, yo, what was that? Let me reflect on that Oh snap, that was my exs that was her smell,
that was her fragrance. That's why I got triggered by that. Then the next step is to go to the store, find that fragrance and voluntarily smell it, put yourself back into that. Instead we're like, all that person's a narcissist, that person's toxic. I gotta stay away from this, this, I gotta stayway from all these things. What that's doing is that's at the expense of our resilience.
I think is situational, right, because I get what you're saying. I understand, and I understand what they're saying too. For instance, this is a real example. I work here, right all right, Interviews give me anxiety like they used to give me. Like I love meeting people and all that, but I never know what I want to ask, you know what I'm saying. So, but I can't just not do it. This is my job, Like, I can't just not do it. So I have to face it head on. And both
of them give me tips. They you know, mentored me with it as well. And I'm getting better at it. I'm not as good as I feel like I want.
To be, or I should be, but it's still I still.
Get anxiety doing interviews, you know, just being as transparent as I can be.
But it doesn't bother me as much as you used to.
But sometimes depending on the person or whatever, I'm like, yo, i'd be like, no, yo, I ain't trying to do this, Lauren Stepman or whatever, you know what I mean, she's the other calls, but I like.
How how would you treat that? Or how would you get an advice?
You're you're illustrating the point. You're illustrating the point perfectly. And in the beginning, because you're new to this, you know, especially in comparison to folks that have been doing it for like over a decade, your body's like, this is new, this is uncomfortable. I don't want to do it. That's generally what the body's saying. The body that make the letther a little tiny almond size part of our brain
is just like, I don't know what this is. It's got to be danger, right, So that's what your body is saying to you. And the only way, and this is the reason that this has to go beyond this book. We can hear these ideas, but the only way the body can actually believe this is through practice. And the only reason you're getting less and less anxious feelings around the interviews is by doing more and more interviews. Now, if you're just like this, don't feel good, I'm never
gonna do it. Let me go find a different job, let me go, you know, do something else. So I don't want to feel this. Now, you're robbing yourself of resilience. Who you're going to be a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. By doing more and more interviews, you're getting your reps in. This is part of your mental fitness that you're doing. This exactly illustrates the point. And I'm not saying take on too
much weight. Just like when you go to the gym, don't take on too much weight, start light, focus on your form. It's the same thing. Ease yourself in, get into it. But it gets to the point where you realize all of these things that we've been avoiding, we've been outsourcing our safety. It were phones through everything, you.
Know, Cause it's like if you follow a listen a site, right, a social media site, all the social media site does nothing but post negativity. And if you say, you know what, I'm gonna leave that alone because my energy problem with that energy that's diet.
That's diet, that's that's sugar. You're realizing I'm outsourcing my dopamine and that's hijacking me.
That's not a bad thing.
That's not a bad thing. And here and here's the thing because I was thinking about that, because I know there was there was a Jay Cole interview where he did two years off social media and then he came back and he was like, oh, it was like I never left right right. It's kind of like eating a salty potato chip. You're like, I ain't had one two years. All of a sudden, perfect example, I haven't been on
social media for a month. Obviously. I went on the Breakfast Club yesterday to look stuff up, and then all of a sudden, I went I fell down the rabbit hole. I found you know, the job is Mine video I saw then I wasn't even on the site anymore. Now I'm watching you know ten times people tried to check Charlotte, and I'm watching this stuff that's not even on the
Breakfast Club, and I got lost in it. I've gotten into autopilot, right, so it's understanding this stuff was still created by the smartest people in the world who were paid by the richest people in the world for the explicit goal of hijacking us and keeping us an autopilot. Now what I realized was like, well, if Ja Cole can't do it, I can't do it. And I realized what Ja Cole didn't do. J Cole took one specific thing and addressed it. We got to do all the things,
all the outside things. We have to astain from all of them until we reboot our system. So it's not like, oh, I'm gonna stop eating this hot sauce, but I'm gonna eat all this hot sauce and my tongue will reset. No, we gotta get rid of all the hot sauce. So it's got to be the phone. It's got to be the porn. It's got to be the vape. It's got to be the hookah, it's got to be the alcohol. It's got to be the foods, it's got to be the people. It's got to be all of it until
the system. This isn't monk life forever. This is doing a reset max ninety days, and then you get to this point where you can go back like where I'm at right now. One of my reps every day is go back on social media and just try to find the prettiest girl and look at her and pay attention to see what it does in my body. One of my boys, Chris, and the story about him in the book, but he, you know, he had to go through He had a lot of issues initially with substances, and he
got sober. And this was happening during like the BlackBerry phase before smartphones was a thing, so he never got on smartphones. And I remember in like twenty eighteen, showing him Instagram for the first time, and him seeing a girl on Instagram was like giving a baby a potato chip. Like his eyes little. He has never seen it before. And then you realize that. But if we go in with that awareness, it's like, all right, listen, I'm not gonna avoid this stuff forever, but I'm gonna first retrain
and rewire my system. Now I can go in and now I'm going and sovereign.
You know, it's interesting what you're talking about.
I remember having a conversation one time in therapy and I was complaining about some stuff that was happening on social media, and my therapist was like, can't you just turn your phone off?
And I was in my mind, I was a little pissed.
I'm like, I'm paying you one hundred and fifty dollars an I would hear this type of language. But she's right in a lot of ways, like I don't feel like I have to, you know, subject myself. The abuse are pain just to try to get over something when I could just walk away from.
Right, Yeah, because we're outsourcing our dopamine, and the most potent dopamine is chaos. Right, It's chaos. The social media is chaos. It's the reason the biggest video on the Breakfast Club platform right now is the Birdman. It's chaos, right, It's not going to be a meaningful conversation. It's just we all look at car crashes. We all look at that stuff. It catches our attention.
So if we're inverbally abusive relationships with our smartphones, why would we stay there?
Because I'm just gonna use an extreme example.
If you are in an actual physical abusive relationship, you wouldn't tell that person just stay there and take the hits eventually.
Get over it.
I feel like that is the one positive thing about our phones. It will help people understand why people stay in abusive relationships. Talk to me, because we're in an abusive relationship with our phone and we can't let it go. And the reason why it's a slot machine. Right, it's not always good, but we have unanticipated rewards. It's bad, but when it's good, it feels so good. It's like see trash, I see trash. Oh a cute puppy. Oh,
it was all worth it. That half an hour doing scrolling was worth it, right, same thing being in any abusive relationship. Addiction is wanting more of the thing that almost works. Craving is just a memory of comfort, and that's all we're chasing. All we're chasing is trying to get back down to zero. We're just heightened. Even after this conversation, some of us might instantly just pick up our phones because we don't want to hear the silence.
Because this is where our system has been Our nervous system has been disregulated for so long, and it's not our faults. This world is a dumpster fire. This system was not designed for this world. We were designed to live in communities of like two hundred three hundred people max. We should know the faces of every single person in our lives.
So it sounds like you're saying we should disconnect.
I'm not just disconnect from your phone. Your phone is one of the bosses. We got to disconnect from everything. And if we do it from everything long enough, then we can go back, and we'll go back sovereign. This is the thing, and this is where you start to realize, like Kendrick Lamar energy, because what I realized where I'm at right now is I'm past the substances. Now, I've discovered the enemies, and I'm looking for the spies. And my big spy right now is I chase being chosen
by anybody who has power over my value. So in the beginning's like all right, yeah, cool, I want a validation for pretty girls. Oh, I want people who are in positions of power to make me feel like I matter. But then it became like, all right, my parents came to visit me here, and you know, you know they were clowning you when taking your kids to Wicket. I took my parents to see The Lion King. My parents have never seen a live play, and I'm saying, there, do you like it? Do you like it? Do you
like it. They've never seen a play before. This whole experience is brand new for them. Well, what I clocked was I just want the validation. Then I want to go into my my siblings' chat group and see if they said anything to my sisters so I can get more validation. Right now, I have to figure out, well, what are those leaks. The leaks aren't just I want people to validate me. It's also I fear being misunderstood.
I want people to understand me. And then you realize, like, oh snap, that's like the one thing a guy like Kendrick Lamar doesn't, the one thing we can say. He doesn't care about being understood. He never clarifies anything.
But what's wrong with you wanting that validation from your parents? Like, Yo, you really took us to this is dope?
We never lives.
I'll tell you exactly.
Yeah.
I mean their comments were way more hilarious, which is like, this play has been on for twenty five years. How come the kids are so young? Right, Like they've never seen them play, right, and they probably thought that I paid movie ticket prices to sit up front, like they had no concept of what was happening. It's the simple story. Something on the outside has to happen for me to feel good on the inside. And I know this because all of us do have relationships with things that we
call vices that are not slavery. For me, it's pizza. I like pizza. I don't crave pizza. It me and you have plans to go eat pizza right now. In five minutes before the plan we get to cancel and you gotta be let's get tacos instead. We couldn't get pizza. I would not be emotionally impacted. Right, That's how all of this should be. Like you forget your phone at home, it should feel like all right, cool, no issues exactly,
It's gonna take work. I'm not I'm not. As I said, this is not a moral conversation, not philosophical kids.
Though, I got kids, and then you know I'm not from it. I got a mom that you know what I'm saying.
I got business.
I understand that. I understand that's.
More so to part not even just social media or just I don't know.
I understand.
Listen, I don't know. I don't know if that can apply to everything. I think.
I think what you're saying can apply to some things because like if you say your alcohol abuse or a drug abuse, right you know, you go to rehab, they tell you to stay away from those things, Stay away from those environments.
Don't walk into a bar because it may tempt you. I don't think.
I think if you're recovering alcoholic, you don't go sit in a bar and just hope.
I don't. I don't want to drink anymore.
Absolutely, And I'm not advocating for that, As I said, I'm talking about the day to day, every day people and us exploring because the issue with us is we're living in an autopilot. We don't even know what their addictions are, you know. And there are certain things. So for example, when this is all said and done, there
are certain things that are never coming back. And I and I did this journaling through AI and everything to figure out so I can go back to weed, that's that's not a that's not something that's something that I can have sovereignty over. I can never go back to porn. Porn rewires the brain. I can never go back. I can never go back to multitasking. Okay, so I can never eat in front of his screen ever again. That the non negotiable. I can have a shot out tequila,
I can have sex again, right, but I can't. You know, I could do some hookah, I could, I could eat certain foods, but there's certain things that are never coming back. And that's that's the interesting part about as I said, it's not all right. You know, if you have a longstanding relationship with alcohol go back to the bar. No, not at all. However, you know, as I have a friend who's ten years sober. He can He figured it out, you know, he figured out the situation that works for him.
But as I, as I said, the first goal is the awarenes this. Like, when I'm doing this, I'm not being like, oh today I went completely sober. I want no. Today I had a league, you know, some pretty girl talk to me on the street, told me my puppy was cute. I got performative. That's data. It's not pass or fail, it's pass or collec data. Because and this is where being nice to yourself is essential. We have to be we have to be vigilant, but we have to be nice to ourselves. We can't beat ourselves up
over this. But the goal here is sovereignty. The goal and Sovereignty is different from freedom, because freedom is I can I can do whatever I want. Sovereignty is I can control who I am right. Because you can be free, you can be financially free and buy seven iPhones and get pissed off when you see something on the internet. You're not You're not sovereign. Sovereign is to be unimpacted by that. It's just gonna take work. It's just like just like your physical fitness. You want to have the
ability to pick up heavy things. Day one at the gym is gonna suck, and then the morning aftert's gonna suck even more. You take two weeks off and you go back again. And what are we doing. We're voluntarily tearing these muscles and letting them heal back. I'm voluntarily tearing out my mental health by doing this stuff. In the next month, I have to do a seventy two hour fast just to figure out what is left. What else am I hiding in here? Because as I said,
the big stuff is easy to discover. It's the little things, the little validation, the little performance. Figuring out what all of this is. And I think this is really important again, And this isn't what you need to do on day one. On day one is just recognize anxiety isn't herpes, Anxiety is in a condition. This book isn't going to solve anxiety. This book is going to solve your despair around anxiety. People feel helpless around anxiety. This book is actually fifty
two chapters, fifty two different options. When you're having anxious feelings. The big idea is feel the feelings when it sucks. Can you sit in a room by yourself quietly? They did that shock test letting people sit in the room quietly and when they want either they could just sit in the room or shock themselves and leave, and most people pick the shock themselves. And this if you want to deal with anxiety, create a life that allows you
to sit in a room and do absolutely nothing. And remember that we're human beings, We're not human doings, and right now we're constantly medicating, avoiding, and distracting ourselves by doing stuff.
Citizen for people who actually have anxiety disorders, there's people who just deal with every day anxiousness.
Well, what I'm going to say is, because as I said, the pendulum and the mental health conversation has gone so far, so many of us are self diagnosing. That's step number one. Step number two is if you have even a diagnosed anxiety disorder, let's just say your body produces extra cortisol and adrenaline, there are still choices and decisions that you can make that will improve how you feel in a day to day life. I agree, And that's the important part.
It's like we're not standing in one spot. We're either heading in one We're either strengthening our sovereignty or strengthening our slavery every single day with the choices that we make irrespective of what our mental health diagnosis is. And the other thing too, with mental health conversations and cultures, we use those words as the end of the story.
That's I agree with that, and see as a president who's been clinically diagnosed with anxiety disorder, one of my things that help me with that a stand away from the function.
But I agree with what you're.
Saying because we talk about it, but then we don't do the healing work. Don't talk about the actual healing of it.
Yeah, Like if you've been diagnosed with a broken arm and then you out there walking and lifting heavy things, that's gonna make you know nobody's arguing that your arm isn't broken. But the choices that you make moving forward are either going to speed up the healing. You can't speed up the healing. Sorry, it's either going to slow down to healing or destroy the healing. Right, we can't really speed up healing. We just have Healing just takes time.
You got to respect the time for it. It's the same thing with these mental health diagnosis that we have, and we.
Don't talk about the healing part of it enough.
We don't.
I think that there's a lot of conversation about you know, what it is people are dealing with, but not how to actually get through it.
Absolutely, so when we have so you have to think about anxiety like an iceberg. You can only see the tip and there's like ninety percent underneath. We have no idea what's happening because we haven't done the work to just revisit it. And that work can easily just be journaling and being like, why did this thing make me feel that way? Versus that stuff makes me feel gross? I don't want because even going to social media, why is social media triggering me? Well, it's letting me know,
you know, other people are doing things. I'm seeing other people's highlight reels. I'm comparing it to my behind the scenes, and that's making me feel less valuable. That's making me feel less seen, that's making me feel all these things. It's just the awareness. The goal here is self awareness and being able to sit and do absolutely nothing if you want to improve how we feel.
Well, it's just always negative. Social media used to be fun all the time.
I used to love to be on. It's just always.
Negative now, and people talk about like, oh, the algorithm, algorithm, algorithm. Nah, it's literally people now that people feel like they have a voice and everybody can be heard, and everybody they attack, They attack it even when it's not warranted, you know what I mean. So it's just I don't even think it's like us what we're seeing, how we're programming.
I think you see it and you put it.
In our face, you know, pause, you see what I mean, They put it in our face a certain amount of times, like a number of times we can actually make that decision to be like, you know, I don't.
I'm not I'm not subscribing.
To this, but let's look at it this way. If you give a kid a full bag of candy every single day, and we say, well, they should just be able to make the decision not to eat all that candy right when they're when they're really young. How long has social media existed? We are children when it comes to social media. This is the candy. This is like the ultimate candy. This, this is the new epidemic. We're in a dopamine epidemic. They flooded the streets with dopamine.
We are not designed to know as many people as we know. We're not designed to know about all the news happening everywhere all the time. Right. And then this is a system that encourages negativity. It rewards negativity if you post, it's fueled by those And think about it. If you post a picture tomorrow and everyone's just like, oh, you look great, you look great, you look great, and then I just comment, well you don't look all that today. Hey,
that comment will pop up straight to the top. It's gonna get the most replies.
And that'll be the one to make me mad, like how you don't see what everybody else seeing.
That's the one. Yeah, but you probably wild notice that comment more than the other. That's the ones will blend in we we have a negative bias. That's just in us. Why do we have a negative bias? Because we used to live in the wild. We had to assume the worst. You're walking through the forest and you hear a sound, you have to assume if something's going to kill you, because if you're wrong, cool, if you're right, you're in danger.
We have to assume the worst. Smart people, really smart people who were paid by very rich people, understand this, and they've used it to hijack our attention. Our attention and our focus is the most important thing that we have.
And this is my last question about what you said. Going back, you said porn you can never go back to it, right, yeah, but do you still ever desire or crave it?
Okay, so you.
Do as I said. Craving is a memory of comfort, right, right, So that's not going to go as I said. This is not a moral conversation. That's not Porn is right, Porn is wrong. This is just it's a product. It's like sugar. I'm not here to judge sugar, but we know what sugar does. Right. Porn is like sugar for your brain. It rewires your brain. There's science behind us. I'm not making this stuff up. I was on the
pornho podcast. You know, yeah, I have a podcast. I was on it and I had a great conversation with them. That's not it. It's just it's the product, right, It's an addictive product, just like coffee, just like alcohol. These are physically addictive things.
The goal is moth started water and thinking about.
No, but then do it all. I said, I'm not I'm not I'm not there. I'm like stuff. I'm just saying. I'm just saying I'm not you sat I remember you started reminiscent, right, But at the same time, it's like, listen, at the end of the day. The goal here, we're not going to be able to totally overhaul our system. We've had this software for fifty sixty seventy generations as humans right this world we live in two three generations. We're not used to living in cities with millions of people.
So this is this is a situation. So when it comes to stuff like porn, it's like the goal is as I said, it's the same thing with pizza. It's like, yeah, I like pizza. It's cool when I walk by a pizza spot. Right now, I don't completely jones for the pizza. But if someone invites me out, I can enjoy it and I can understand its value, but I don't have to look to it to just get me back to calm. This whole idea. You know, what we're chasing, even with
the porn, is the post nut clarity. That's what we're chasing. We're chasing posts and what is that we have just disregulated a system so much that we finally, through that release, get a little bit of clarity.
What if you look at porn as something that leads to the nut and then once you get absolute clarity.
Well that's you have the clarity. Or you spend enough time away from all this stuff, you can live in the clarity. You can live in that like not no, because we don't call it nut clarity. We call it post nut clarity. After the clarity, you can live in that. That could be your default because think about it, especially for guys, the post nut clarity is the moment you like, I had just been operating on autopilot. I just spent a bunch of money, I said this that, I said
all the things I didn't mean. What is it or after the post nut I like this I want to be around this person I found wifey.
This is so interesting. So what if you take the nut and then rub it on your nipples? You know what?
You know what, let's let's let's let's me know we can talk about that. That's an example of somebody who is continually outsourcing dopamine to the point where it's just they have unlimited resources, they have unlimited power. So it just got wilder and wilder and wilder and wilder.
But I also feel like if he would have been into porn and porn porn hub like that and got his h his nut off watching that, he wouldn't have to do it in person, and there's nobody to tell on.
So Chris Rock said it in Tambourine and I remember this, and he's like, you know, porn is an issue because your porn searches evolved, but you was. You know, it's just like that Joe said today's price, saying yesterday's price, but you was looking up five years ago. Ain't what you're looking up now because it's more choices. But also you need you need it to elevate, you need more hot sauce. There's not one drop anymore.
I get it.
We're outsourcing, that's all it is. And every time we outsource, right, we are we're getting sedated. Right. So going back to the activism, going back to the freedom, we got to realize we don't live in this dystopian nineteen eighty four world with authoritarian governments. We live in the brave new world where they're controlling us to comfort. That's the tool everything.
If you want to get me rid about the authoritarian government.
We're on track. But we got to realize if we don't have internal sovereignty, it doesn't matter.
But like you said, everything is due comfort. Like even like things like this may.
Sound crazy, be like it's the card. We ain't got to go outside.
Absolutely.
Part of my work is I have to pick up all my food. I can't do delivery, No, I have to at least earn the meal. On some level, and the naval Rubby concept, any vice, vice plus convenience equals a weapon. If you got to climb the top of a mountain to get drunk, you gotta earn it. Fine,
we're not doing it. It's been it's been weaponized against us becoming more and more convenient, right, especially with this VC model where it's like they make it convenient and cheap because someone else give them them money to do it. They get us hooked, and then we start paying these crazy prices. These new prices keep coming in, and that's that's nothing new. Back in the days when cell phones first came out, they used to give us two three
months unlimited. Get us used to texting against everything. So then when texting was free after six pm, we were still texting before six pm. Because they created our behaviors, They put a leash on us, They molded our behaviors. This is that lack of sovereignty that I'm talking about. This is why this conversation is so important to me. I'm not here to sell a book. I'm here to at least ring a bell in some people's ears that
can't get unwrung. People who care about being sovereign and care that realized that, hey, I'm either feeding my slavery or I'm feeding my sovereignty.
I love the sovereignty angle. I think that makes a lot of sense, you know, because I think that a lot of people don't have. They don't they don't they don't have.
People know what that is absolutely, you know, it's not freedom. It's it's inner control, it's inner command. It's the ability to own your decision. Right now, we're reacting. That's that's what a lot of anxious feelings do. Someone cuts us off, we smash on the horn someone you know that whole Dave Chappelle's kit. When keeping it real goes wrong, that's
people reacting, going into autopilot. A lot of that autopilot came from how you grew up when you were a kid, right you didn't You created software, you created mechanisms, You created your own algorithm, and we never updated it. So maybe you grew up in the neighborhood where you had to you had a hairpin trigger, you had to second, someone stepped on your toes, you had to defend yourself.
And then you grow up and you're in a situation where those dangers, physical dangers aren't there, but the body cell gets triggered the same way. And maybe now it's disrespect or what have you. All I'm saying is and that's the amygdala. You gotta realize. We have a prefereral cortex, which is your logical brain. You have the amygdala, which is your survival brain. The amygdala is eleven times faster,
which means we will always we will always react. I'm not advocating and promoting some I'm zen I meditate on top of a mountain. I don't get mad. No, I just clock it quicker.
Well, were you sovereign when you were naked and anxious in Germany?
No? No, that was That's a perfect example. My homeboy lives in Germany. He's my oldest friend. I've known him since we were four years old. And I hurt my sho This is right after twenty nine things, right after doing the Breakfast Club for the first time, and I'm doing a tour in England and I took my parents cheap luggage. You know they pay sixty bucks for like eleven pieces. I didn't know back then, so I just grabbed the cheap luggage, go and one of the wheels brakes.
Then I'm going to the London Tube with a broken wheel and I injured my shoulder. After the tour, I visit my friend in Berlin and I haven't seen him in a while. He grew up in Canada with me, and he's like, yo, I'm gonna take it to the spa and I'm like candles massage that sounds perfect. We're on the bus because he don't drive, and we're headed to the spa and I'm like, you know, it's gonna be really good for this spa. I'm gona take it edible, so I eat it edible. I'm it's gonna feel perfect.
And then he goes, man, I'm so proud of you. You're so open minded. None of the other guys in our crew would ever do this. And I was like, what are you What are you talking about?
Do what?
He's like, you know, the naked part, And I was like, yeah, yeah, you're naked in a massage, but they'll put a blanket over you or something.
He's like, no, no.
When we're in the steam room together, I'm like, that's not a spot, that's a sauna, and he's like, oh man, I mixed up the words. So at this point we're going an all knew sauna in Germany and I already popped the edible.
And you didn't know.
You didn't even expect this.
No, I was expecting a massage. I just thought I hurt my shoulder. So then it was obviously the anxiety jumps up. I'm gonna be naked in Europe it's probably normal for them, it's not normal for me. I'm gonna be naked in front of my friend. I had never done this before. And then you start to realize when you so, now you're in reaction bote and now you're scared, and plus the edibles hitting, it's making it even worse. First thing that I did was I expressed it. I
just used word. I'm like, look, man, I didn't realize what this was. And you kind of you could have put me in a case by complimenting me and saying I'm open minded and I want to live up to that. But I'm scared, and he's like, you're scared. I'm scared too, And then we realized we're not even scared about being naked. We're scared about being judged right. And then when we get there, you realize, oh, I thought it's gonna be like everyone's normal. Everybody thinks this is normal. I'm the
only person feeling awkward. I could tell everybody, like a lot of this, everybody is feeling awkward, and that collective vulnerability made it a little bit easier. But just like your interviews, the longer I stayed, the more comfortable I got listen, I'm ready for Charlotte.
I'm ready.
I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready already.
Sounds like he was trying to take the friendship to another level.
It flirting, but it did. I I've known him since we were four, and it did. Being naked with your friend will do that. Being vulnerable, it's vulnerable. We measure friendships in terms of length. You got a measure relationship.
Damn, So y'all had in the sauna to be like, that's my friend, that's my friend right there.
That's not really, he's not.
I was ready for it. I was ready for it. It's okay. I was ready for it. And look, you're not wrong. At the end of the day. You're not wrong. At the end of the day. It's still about being vulnerable. Relationships only growth through being vulnerable, and being vulnerable is being naked, either being naked with your body or you're being naked with your feelings.
Honest question, All questions are honest.
But when you were in the sauna, boy, and you looked around and you realize, like, I'm bigger than a lot of guys, and he did that make you feel more comfortable?
How do you know he was bigger.
He could have been smaller because you can see you got eyes, but he could have been smaller.
Tough, but well, because obviously he just said he wasn't scared about being naked, he was scared about being judged.
So we know he got listen, no.
Your boys size eleven and a half. I'm okay, we're fine, We're fine. Look like that. You know. What it is with insecurities is like like, for example, if somebody has a certain height, they don't think about their height. People who lack them to have an insecurity not judge it. And again, I can't judge somebody for the genetic lottery they want, so like that's not much of an issue.
But I think for me it was more along the lines of, like, I didn't want to get caught staring by somebody, you know, if you see a woman or whatever.
And then ah, so it's men and women in the sauna, no men.
Women, And then once I got comfortable, then they just threw in the next mix kids. There were full nuclear families there. I didn't know any of this.
This is this cultural like.
This is I don't know how they're doing it in Germany. At the end of the day, I thought I was getting a massaged instead of just a bunch of sauna rooms and coal plunges. And I don't know why people couldn't wear clothes. And in the beginning, I was just like, all right, I'm in I'm in a different country. This is their stuff. But as I said, I did not feel like most of the people in that room were
comfortable either, didn't feel normalized right. So it wasn't like if somebody lived in a culture where like, you know, men walk around topless and then all of a sudden they come to the beach and they feel weird. No, this I felt like everybody felt kind of of But yeah, once I got comfortable with all the adult stuff, then I remember going outside where there's a pool area and then you seeing kids running around. I was like, oh no, this is this is a whole different level. I'm not
even trying to get used to this. And it was, but as you said, like it's incrementally making yourself uncomfortable and to seeing and then being like, all right, the longer I'm in it, the more my body realizes. And this has been my mantra for this whole last thirty days, which is this sucks. But I'm not in danger. Yeah, if you don't take your phone to the toilet after this conversation and you start to feel the general and cortisol rise, just say that this sucks, but I'm not
in danger. Because we get antsy, we grab our phones, we do all this stuff because our bodies don't know. Our bodies think we're in danger. And again, this is a pre prehistoric software, prehistoric security system that's not designed for the world that we're in. And that's why we can't rely on it, because our body's also going to be like, well, if it's familiar, it's safe. That's why it keeps bringing in certain people that we shouldn't be seen anymore because they're familiar.
Yeah, you know one thing that's worked for me And Sarah Jax Roberts said this is a while ago, and she actually said it here on the Bertha's Club. She said, you know, anxiety can be a good thing because whenever you're doing something new, you're going to feel a certain level of anxiety. But to your point you made earlier is you have to tell yourself, oh, I've never done this before. This is a new space, this is a
new place, These are new people. You know, so of course you're going to feel some level of anxiousness.
Exactly. Anxiety is it's not her pees, it's not the enemy, it's the signal. It's just as important as hunger. If we didn't have hunger, we would start to this. We need to know when it's time to put some calories into us anxiety when it's correct, and this is where we got to start doing some of the rebooting. It'll let you know, Okay, well think about it. To be courageous means you have to feel fear. If you're not feeling fair while you're doing it, you're not being brave. Right.
To be resilience means doing it despite the anxiety. Resilience is gonna feel like I don't want to do this, I don't want to be here, I don't want to do this. Right, it's that nervousness, right, that's the only way you know you're hitting the edge. And that's how you know what your growth is. Because our growth is only outside of our comfort zone. Our comfort zones are prisons. The way we look at it right now is that we go to our comfort zone to stay safe from
all the scary things outside. At best, our comfort zones to just be a recharge station. That's not where we should be living. It should be where we go to recharge if we got too much injured, to too many injuries from an experience, like all right, let me go back to my comfort zone, let me recharge, let me get right back out there. And we know it, especially all y'all are parents, that's what you do with your kids. Come back, let me make you feel safe. I'll push
you right back out, you know, do it. And then when you get overwhelmed again and come back, and now we'll go even further. Now we're going the same thing with life. It's the exact same thing with that's how we build our resilience. That's our mental fitness, and our mental fitness improves our mental health, and our mental health protects us. We don't need to protect our mental health.
Well, Unanxious is out poet, humble the poet. Make sure you pick it up. Fifty simple truths to help overthinkers feel less stressed and more calm. And thank you for joining us.
Appreciate it, and.
Thank you so much for having me as always someone someone's posting from me on social media right now. So it's at humble the poet, but for real, please to start your jounia for me. This is really important because, as I said, like, what I realized is I've been improving in this space is that it doesn't matter if I'm just doing it. We need If everybody improved their relationship with their emotions, this world would get so much better, This world will get safer, this world will get less divided.
And then you realize all of this is what people are exploiting to control us. This is really what people are exploring to control us. CA. I just tell a real quick story because I think this is really important. So what inspired this was two years I was receiving random text messages and emails death threats. And then these death threats I was getting like they were naming my exes, they were putting up my address, they were saying the didn't kill my dog, they were naming other friends of mine.
Super racist, super all of this stuff. And in the beginning freeze, I avoided it. I just didn't look at it and I was just say, all right, cool, you know, I'm figuring out who this is and punch them in the face or whatever. And then they kept escalating and I was like, all right, cool, I'm gonna give these greenshots to the police. And within a month they found out who did it. And then you realize, like, not addressing it made it worse than actually addressing it, And
I think that's the important part. And then the part with that is when when an announcement was made on the news about it, they didn't use my name, they didn't use that person's name. They just said, you know, hate crime against somebody in the South Asian community. All the comments, because I'm Canadian, right, so this is Canadian news, all the comments were like, what's wrong with hating all these Indians? They're taking over our country? What's wrong with that?
Canada first? And you're like, this is where we're at. Where everybody looks at this and you know, because they're telling their story when they see that. And for me, it was less about the experience that happened to me and more about seeing how the world reacts to this, right, And I'm like, Okay, so I gotta I gotta be on this mission to help people improve how they feel. That's the only way this world is going to get better,
because it's not. This world is not designed for the way that we're built, so we got to redesign ourselves to deal with this world.
You have it, ladies and gentlemen, humble the Poet. Yes, sir, appreciate you for joining us. Appreciate you all for having me, Me and you naked.
Germany. Ain't gonna go to Germany.
No, No, you don't be vulnerable with me. That's it, that is solidify, it's double the poet. It's the breakfast Club. Good morning, wake that ass up in the morning. The Breakfast Club,