Claire Booth on Curing Achiever Fever

We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good will. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this

episode is Claire Booth and entrepreneur, author, and speaker. She's the founder and CEO of market research firm Lux Insights, with two decades of experience serving some of the world's most recognized brands. Her book is The Achiever Fever Cure, How I learned to stop striving myself crazy. Hi Claire, Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, thanks for having me. I'm excited to have you on. Your book is called The Achiever Fever Cure, How I learned to stop striving

myself crazy. And we will get into all the details of that shortly, but let's start like we always do, with the parable. There is a grandmother who's talking to her grandson and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at bad at all. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandmother says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. So the first time I heard that parable was the first time I heard your show, and I was listening to it while I was hiking, because I often listened to podcasts while I hike, and I remember hearing that parable and hearing the last line, and it literally stopped me in my tracks, because only a couple of weeks previous had I started to become aware of this voice in my head, this really loud, negative,

incessantly nagging voice in my head. And so when I heard the parable, that was my realization that it's not just me. There's other people that suffer from this and well, and in fact, here's a whole show about it, here's a whole podcast about it, and so as as you know, this podcast has been a huge part of my personal self transformation. So once I became aware of this bad wolf, the first thing I wanted to do was just starve it out. I wanted to I wanted to just watch

it die. But I soon realized it doesn't work that way. Having a good wolf necessarily means that we're going to have a bad wolf. You can't have one without the other.

The concept of good needs the concept of bad um And so what I had to do was learn how to love my bad wolf, which was surprisingly easy because I started to realize how much that bad wolf and those feelings of fear and self doubt and worry had brought me success to that point in my life, And it was only when I learned to start loving and finding the gratitude for my bad wolf that I was able to start developing a relationship with my good wolf.

The bad wolf had been so dominant up until that point that I didn't really have a relationship with my good wolf. So now my relationship with my good wolf basically means keeping my inner house clean. So, for example, when the bad wolf gets fed and it as it will, I just watch the feeding, so I try to step back. I don't try to resist it, I don't try to stop it, I don't necessarily try to talk myself out of it. I just become aware that, oh, this is

happening right now. And as I watch, I become more aware of the words, more aware of the thoughts. That brings me into presence. And once I'm in presence, those feelings of gratitude and love, that kind of higher elevated states starts to emerge from that. Just to take the analogy a little further, I get regular reminders that I have overfed my bad wolf for so long, because sometimes he just kind of barfs up his food, Like when I least expect it just barfs it up. I don't

think we've had that analogy before. So if I try ignore, you know, that kind of pile of puke, right and pretend it doesn't exist, then it really starts to smell awful, and I get myself into this emotional turmoil. UM. And so now what I do is again try to bring myself into presence and UM, give that bad wolf a bit of a compassionate pat on the head and say, oh, yeah, there you are and uh, and either get present or inquire into what prompted, for lack of the better word,

puke in the first place. That's great. That is a new analogy. I'll give you that, and it's a good one. So let's go back a little ways to what got you to the point that you wrote a book called The achiever Fever Cure. Um. It's one I certainly relate with. The achievement has been something that I have seen as both the good and the bad wolf in my own life, and so so I'm very interested in, um, how you

did that. But let's set the stage about what brought you to the point that you sort of embarked on this new journey of even trying to not be an achiever all the time. Right, So, being an achiever has been my identity for as long as I can possibly remember, and as a result, it's brought me all sorts of success in my business and athletics and and um so

I never really thought to question it. What I didn't do was make the tie between being an achiever and these feelings of anxiety and depression and for me insomnia, um and and you experienced that enough that finally I started to see the pattern. And it got to the point where I was about five years into running my business, and you know, everything was going the way I wanted it to go. We were profitable, we were growing twenty percent a year. I was adding great new employees. We

were at in clients each year. You know, everything in my my life seemed good. But I was miserable because all of this was accompanied by this anxiety and beating myself up, and this constant worry and this needing to prove. And uh so, five years in, I had experienced this patterns so many times that I thought I'm gonna be at risk of being a liability to my own company if I don't do something. My employees need a confident, you know, a confident, strong leader. They don't need somebody

that's constantly beating themselves up. And so there came a point where I just had to hold up my hand and and say enough, I cannot live my life like this anymore. I I can't go days without sleep. There's got to be a better way, right And your business is market research. That's kind of what you do. And one of the things you did is part of this book, is you did some market research quote unquote on other

high achievers, and I did. And one of the things that you found was that this anxiety, depression, insomnia was certainly not limited to you. A matter of fact, it was relatively prevalent in a lot of achievers. It was prevalent. Yeah. Um, So I did a survey of hundreds of other self reported achievers, and one of the questions I asked was, when was the last time you experienced insomnia? Are really

bad sleep? And over a third of the of the achievers that I spoke to or that that did the survey, over a third said they had experienced insomnia that week alone. And then depression, you know, fift within the past six months, and anxiety within the past couple of weeks, it was high. Yeah, yeah, And it's one of those things that I've noticed throughout

my career that achievers don't want to talk about. Right, you wrestle with us if you're leading a company, Right, you don't want to reject anxiety about how the companies

do into your employees. You know, there's been more writing in the last few years about the incidents of depression among entrepreneurs how high it really is, because I think that part of what achievers get into they are seen as achievers, and often that's the image they feel like they need to project, so they don't acknowledge it to themselves,

let alone anyone else. Right, we don't acknowledge it within ourselves because it's so important to us for everyone to see us as strong and powerful and and on top of things and in control of things. Um but the stats and my own experience show that that's not the case at all, So we almost double down on on

trying to prove ourselves. Of my achievers say, they are trying to always prove that they are the strong, confident, powerful being, And the ability to make oneself vulnerable gets further and further us down and we know, based on Burnet Brown and and uh speakers and writers like that, how much strength there is in vulnerability. And this is starting to make its way into business circles now, but it's still I mean, it's still pretty quiet in terms

of people actually doing it right. Absolutely, I think it is still a thing there. So let's talk about achiever fever. What is it? Because, um, you didn't walk off and give up your business. You wrote a book, I mean, so you continued to achieve. What's the difference between achieving and achiever fever. It's a good question. So achiever fever is the dark side of achieving. There's nothing wrong with achieving. There's nothing wrong with having goals and working hard and

wanting to do your best. There's nothing wrong at all with that. Achiever fever is the dark side of achieving. It's when we tie our our happiness, our sense of self worth to our achievements and get away from seeing

an achievement as just another point in time. So when we we put the achievement as the abstule, absolute pinnacle of who we are and thus our happiness and our self worth, that's when we completely lose perspective and we enter into this delusion, the spell of if I'm not working towards my achievement, then there's something very very wrong with me, And it means I'm lazy. It means I'm weak, it means i'm ordinary average, you know, it means I'm it means I'm dying or going backwards. And it's a

real kind of polarity in our thinking. So I continue to achieve in different aspects of my life, but I don't have the fever now like I used to. Yeah, there's so many things I think in what you said there. I think there's the tying of our self worth to what we achieve. You know, this very fundamental am what I do. Right. There's also the idea of I'll be happy when when I achieve this, then I'll be happy. Everything up till then is just me getting to that point.

And what most of us know, if we've had enough years on this earth, is that we get there and we're not really any happier. Maybe we are for a day, a week, depends, you know, three hours, and then we just set the next goal. We just how we get Now it's the next thing, and off we go. It's

this perpetual I'll be happy when kind of thing. And then the other thing that you sort of set in there and you allude to in the book that uh, you know, I'll just I'll bring up is that we can do this with anything if we tend to be achievers. It doesn't tend to only be Oh, I'm achiever at work. But at least for me, it's always been, well, yes, I'm achiever here, and then if I'm going to start playing tennis, I have to be really good at tennis. And you know, if I'm going to meditate, I've really

got to be good at meditating. And it's just everything gets swept up. Right when I'm at my uh let's say, less evolved mindset, it sucks everything in for me. Well, what tends to happen I find, at least in my experience and the people that I talked to, is that we tend to gravitate two things that we are good at so that we can achieve in them. Because you're right, it's not just work, it's not just sports. It's anything else that I put my mind to. I want to,

you know, I need to achieve at it. So so much of what was interesting to me previous, but I didn't think I'd be very good at you know, I let it fall by the wayside um and just getting back to what you were talking about earlier, this need to to to set the next goal, because you're right that the elation that comes from achievement can last anywhere from ten seconds to thirty seconds. Throw a bottle of wine in there. It can last in the evening, but

the next day. It's not just setting the next goal. Goal. The goal has got to be a little bit bigger, a little bit faster, a little bit better, because now we're trying to prove ourselves at the next level, and it it brings us into the cycle of craving, right like we crave these achievements because we're convinced that that's what's going to make us happy. And you know that when we get into that craving mindset, we'll never be happy.

You know. It's it's we will never get to where we think we can be, and it's such a limiting mindset.

So when you embarked on this journey, you engaged a guy who is a climbing coach of yours to kind of help you through this journey, and you had a line in there I can't resist reading, which is this is your husband would think I hired the dreaded life coach, code for you can't get your ship together, so pay a bunch of money to someone else who can't get their shipped together, which I thought was really funny, And

I guess in a way, I'm a life coach. So I read it and laughed because I certain I've always disliked that word because I think it has that connotation. But you now use coach is for a lot of your leaders in your business. I do. Every leader in my business now has their own personal coach. And I know um that those conversations that happened between senior staff and coaches are probably just as much personal as they are business. In fact, they're probably more personal than they

are business. And back when I was really suffering with achiever fever, the idea of having a coach, the idea of having someone to help me hold my hand, was something I resisted so strongly because I thought, how do I need somebody to show me how to live my life? Like,

surely I'm better than that. And and now I see the absolute importance of a coach, you know, any professional um for that matter, because we limit ourselves and the questions that we ask ourselves, the stories that we're in, and if we don't have a coach, you know, to question us of poke holes into our stories or show us that we're believing our own stories, you know, we we hold ourselves back. So yeah, on the coaching. So let's talk about some of what you started to do

to deal with your achiever fever. And I feel like one of the first things was you recognized the inner critic or you also called it the judge. The judge. Yeah, And that was one of the first things that my coach helped me to do, was to become aware of this voice that I just accepted on autopilot for so long. I thought of the voice the same way I thought of any appendage on my body. It was just it was just part of me. In fact, it was me. The voice was me. I could not imagine ever uncoupling

those things. And um, So, once my coach had drawn my attention to how loud and dominant this voice was, um, the first thing that I do that I did was name it. And for me, the judge was it just kind of fell out of my mouth. I didn't even have to think too hard about it. And then the next thing I did was actually find an image that described it. And for me, it was just like this gnarled,

blackened tree stump. This, you know, something that had been in a forest fire or something was just bleak and dead. And once I had a name and an image, I was able to move that inner voice from the back of my head right between my eyes where I couldn't not see it, and my awareness of it grew and grew and grew until I learned how to start disrupting it and questioning it. And that was the game changer for me, was realizing that that inner voice lied to me,

not through any fault of its own. You know, it's it's it's evolved to keep us safe and to protect us um. And so it fills us with fear and worry and self doubt um, And so I would just believe whatever that inner critic told me to do on autopilot. And learning that it lied with the game changer for me, and learning how to question it a couple of different

things there. That leads me into a concept you discussed in the book that I'm always so interested in, which is what is this voice that is talking to us all the time, because most of us, if we stop, we noticed like it's just going on on and on.

I was on a silent retreat recently and I just, you know, nothing to do, but here the here the damn thing, right, and I, you know, I walk away just always sort of astounded, like if I had a friend who talked to me not only that negatively, but just that boringly and repetitively and and namely, I'd be like I would I wouldn't like four hours later, I would be like, I am never hanging out with that person again. But that's what we have going on in our head. So let's talk about what that thing is.

You name it the left brain interpreter. Tell us a little bit more about what is this narrative that's happening, right. So that's that's not my name. That's a name that comes from cognitive psychology, the left brain interpreter, And it's the name for that inner narrator that, as you said, just goes on repeat. And I love the way that you explain it, like it's so boring and it says the same thing over and you're like, shut up already.

But it's called the left brain interpreter, and it evolved, um, you know, over the hundreds of thousands of millennia of years to keep us safe, and it's it is constantly looking for threats. And we live in a world where there's not really a lot of threats anymore, Like, yeah, there's some environmental wackiness going on, and maybe some political wackiness going on, but in terms of real threats, there's not much out there are, so our left brand interpreter

tends to make them up. And if it can't identify any obvious threats, it will find those threats within ourselves or or with other people. So we start to look at other people as as threats and if we can't

find another people will find it in ourselves. There's science that explain how the left brand interpreter works, and a science experiment um that actually proves that this left brain interpreter will tell us lies because it just bases itself off the thoughts that we have, and when we say things like oh, I'm you know, I'm so depressed today everything is just kind of crappy, it just will um narrate our lives back to us with that same theme.

So we're stuck in that vicious circle. Yeah, it's amazing because the studies that you're referring to, among many other are the famous split brain experiments, right. And what it sort of shows is that you know the science more more and and a lot of spiritual traditions tend to say that, you know what, there's not this one self in there. There's actually there's a lot of things going

on in our brain consciously, subconsciously, you know. It's almost to think of it as a bunch of different processes, right, And one of those processes is this left brain narrator who tries to explain everything. That's its primary job. I've also heard it referred to as the press secretary. Right.

It's trying to explain everything. And what some of these split brain studies show, and people who have had their brain essentially split in half to stop them from having seizures, is that one half of the brain will decide to do something. The other half of the brain, that is, the left brain interpreter, has no idea why that side of the brain decided to do it, but it just immediately makes up some crazy reason that it is completely

unaware of. Right. And so it's such an interesting thing to me that that brain is just going along trying to explain lots of stuff that it simply can't explain. It doesn't know, but it has to make a coherent story out of it. It has to like, for example, um, I remember going into my hotel room and I told my team, look, don't call me, don't don't text me. I want to have this private weekend with my partner and uh, you know, just let me know if there's

an absolute emergency. And that I remember getting into my hotel room and looking across the room and seeing the red light on the hotel room phone lit up, and my first thought was like, oh shit, something's happened. You know, there's a cash flow thing, like a client has freaked out, something really bad has happened. And my whole body was consumed with that thought. Right it was, It was totally true.

In that moment, my stomach sees, my hands clenched, my jaw clenched, and I walked over to the desk, feeling that's rests you know, grow and grow and heighten and heighten. And I leaned over the desk and I saw that that red light indicated that the phone was charging, so that nobody had called. But had I not gone over to factually ascertain why that red light was on, I would have stayed in that that that heightened, you know,

fearful state. And so often in our lives we are in that state, and we don't think to actually check factually whether what we believe is actually true. Right. And when you said earlier, you know that left brain interpreter will say I'm so depressed, right, and then off will trigger these things. And I have started to really notice that phenomenon in me. It will say I'm so depressed, or another one that happens, my back hurts so bad, and then from there it'll be like, I don't know

if I can take it? How long can I Everything hurts? I mean, it's just and if I stop and go, well, hang on a second, like, how do I know I'm depressed? Right? How I actually know I'm depressed? Or how do I know my back hurts? What does my back feel like? I almost suddenly realized, particularly with the back, that it doesn't hurt that bad, that there was this automatic sensation that arises, and then all of a sudden, that left brain interpreter takes off. My back hurts so bad, Poor me,

I can't stake everything hurts. What am I gonna do? I'm I just I'm like, whoa hold, honest, I'm like, it's really interesting. So let's talk about a big piece for you that you said of dealing with the inner critic. The judge will start to question those thoughts because noticing them is very important, right, Not resisting them is very important, which is tough sometimes but critical, And so is checking them for veracity, right, like actually checking them to see

if they are true. Um, you know, I often think it's it's you know, it makes sense to like allow the thought the emotion to be, not not forcing it away, but then actually take a look at it pretty closely. So talk to me about how that worked for you. Well, I think the first thing is to actually understand that you are believing a thought. You got to identify what

that thought is. And the way that I do that is it will creep up in my body, something will go tight and I will fall out of that ease state, and that's my queue to know that, Okay, I'm I'm believing something. I'm I'm I'm caught with this thought. And often what I used to do was whenever I felt

in that state. Um, I thought, you know, well, this is uncomfortable and I want to be comfortable, so let's go and eat something, or let's go and drink something, or let's fall asleep or watch something on Netflix, anything to have to deal with this thought, which of course never worked at all because I would just take that thought into the eating, of the drinking, the Netflix, and then it would be doubly bad. So by identifying it and writing it down, what I then learned to do

was inquire into it. And the way that I learned to do that was through this woman, Byron Katie, and she has the system of self inquiry called the Work and you can find that online the work dot com. She's very free and open with it. Yeah, there's also a previous episode of US with Byron Katie if listeners, if you want to look for that where I interviewed her son way I couldn't encourage listeners to do. Yeah,

go and find that episode. For sure. I had the privilege of going to UM the Nine Day School, the School for the Work, which is where I learned how to do the work. And just quickly to paraphrase how it works is it's taking that stressful thought asking ourselves is that true? And usually that first response will be yeah, Yeah, of course that's true, because it's just a natural kind of habit, like, yeah, of course I believe what I say.

But then we say, is that absolutely true? And I add to that, in a court of law, can I say that that is true? And usually in that question I can find something just a sliver of a doubt, and that is enough to start shedding some like to let some light in. I think of that Leonard Cohen line, there's a crack in everything that that's how the light gets in. We have to find that crack, and that

question alone helps us identify that crack. And then the third question is, um, how do you react what happens when you believe the thought? Which is a really easy question to answer, right Like, I'm if I'm believing the thought that I've done a bad job on a presentation, I'll think, oh, well, I feel like I didn't try hard enough, and I feel like I'm being judged, and i feel like I'm gonna lose that client, and I feel like really angry with myself, And it's really easy

to answer that question. And then the next question is who would you be without that thought, and that can be a very difficult question to answer because you're so hooked onto that thought. And if it's really difficult to answer, it just shows you how in that thought you are. And when you're in that thought, you can't see anything else. You are completely blinded. So then you answer that question and you realize as you answer it, how at peace and happy and and um, you know, full of joy

you could be if you weren't believing that thought. Now you can't magically like let that thought go. There's no kind of magic that allows you to do that. And so Byron Katie gives us these three turnarounds where we take that thought and flip it to the opposite to the other. And once we start working that thought through different lenses, um, usually we get to a place where it's like that thought is like a complete lie. What

was I thinking? And there has been nothing that I've done the work on thus far that I wasn't able to find some kind of cracking And Byron Katie argues, there's really nothing out there they won't completely dissipate once you do the work on it. Yeah, you were doing interviews for your book, and I think you asked me, what do you think of Byron Katie, and I said, I actually think it's a very useful framework. It's sort of like cognitive behavioral therapy in certain ways. It's a

it's a structured method of of inquiring into our thoughts. Um. My question for you is, sometimes it seems that thought causes emotion, and if it's a thought that's driving, it's nice to unwind the thought. But a lot of other times it seems like emotion just spring out of, you know,

out of something that you can't really identify. Do you have a method of working with when or does that even happen for you where it's like, well, I'm feeling this and I can I'm not even sure I can find a thought for it, or I can see the thought and I know it's not true, and I still

feel terrible. That is something that I'm continuing to learn to do, which is to drop into my body to feel that emotion as opposed to staying up in my head and trying to tackle it through you know, what is the thought, doing the work on it, doing that kind of surgical, precise thinking on it. Learning to identify an emotion requires an ability to just kind of dropped down into one's body. And often we think we've identified that emotion, only to find that there is another emotion

behind it. And for me, whenever I the way that I know I'm an emotional state as I'll feel it in my body, right, I've learned to under stand the difference between mechanical pain, so pain that's come through, uh, you know, if I've if I've worked out too hard that day, or if i haven't eaten properly or you know, that kind of mechanical pain. Most of the pain I

feel is emotional. So when my toes curl up when I'm in traffic, or you know, my lower back starts to hurt if I think that somebody's not listening to me or whatever the cases, um, and I'll drop into that and really just kind of be with that pain and see what emotion comes up in my chest. And I've learned not to take that first emotion you know, I'll be able to identify it, but I've I've come to understand there's usually an emotion underneath that, and for me,

the emotion underneath that tends to be fear mhm. And once I've identified that as fear, then I can say, well, what is it that I'm fearful of, and then I can do the work on it. As you learned the work, you also learned about cognitive biases. And there is We've talked on the show a bunch about them, but there's one I don't know that we've talked about before. So I wanted to touch it, and it was the power of the default. Tell me what that is. So the

power of the default. The way that I know cognitive biases is through my work and market research, you know, twenty years like my the past two decades of my career is trying to understand human behavior, which is really ironic when you think about it, because here I am with two decades of experience and I can't understand my own behavior. But anyway I can now at least um. But remembering that uh, people's brain activity is not based

on rational thought. It's based on all sorts of weird filters and norms and and um and cognitive biases and so this particular bias, and there's hundreds of them, but this particular bias. The power of the default is when we default back to behavior or habits that are just so ingrained we don't think to question them. So for example, UM, my default thought was wine will take my pain away. Wine at the end of the day after a long day of work is gonna make me feel better. That's

its job in life. And so getting home and grabbing that glass of wine, um, which would have been fine if it had just been one glass, but often, you know, you have dinner and that becomes to wine two glasses, and then oh well, we may as well finish this bottle off so it doesn't go bad. And whatever else you want to tell yourself. That was just that was

my routine. Um. And once I started to understand the power of the default, I looked at different aspects of my life and thought, what behavior and my defaulting to that don't really work for me anymore. And back then, UM, I didn't see wine as something that was distracting me from dealing with painful thoughts. I saw it as something

that was giving me extra calories. So that was the key reason, you know, a few years ago, why I identified wine as a default behavior that I wanted to change and so rather them then rip all the wine out of my fridge and force myself to drink tap water.

When I got home, I put new beverages into the fridge, so you know, kombucha or diet sodas or or um you know, Stevia based type stuff, So that I knew that my natural bias was to put my hand into the fridge because it was usually white wine that I drank put my hand on the fridge, but this time I just grabbed something else other than wine. UM. But it wasn't until I understood the power of the default that I was able to see that that was just default behavior, it wasn't truth. And and now I don't

I don't drink at all. Actually now I stopped in December, which is just kind of a new interesting practice for me, and when I'm still learning about UM. But I realized now that not drinking is helping keep me in that awareness, you know, it like just just taking myself out of the awareness for this simple you know, for the for the hangover that it often leads to, or saying something really stupid to somebody. It's just not worth it. I'll

take the awareness. Thanks. So it's just something I'm playing with. I don't know if it's a forever thing, but it's working for me right now. So it's been about seven months then, so that's not a it's not a short period of time to do it by any straight It's not. No, it's not. It's funny. I noticed the other day there's a book called Sober Curious. It's not just me. Yeah, no, it's not. It's not. Yeah, yeah, I I know more and more. I'm not a millennial im gen X, but

I know more and more millennials. I think the numbers among millennials are um uh, you know, not not drinking or wanting to see what life is like without alcohol. It's it's becoming a thing. I think we've grown up with a narrative that says like, well, if you're alcoholic, you need to stop. But if you're not alcoholics, so what right? And I think that this speaks to a growing awareness, which is a good awareness that there are

certainly stages along the way. And we've had Catherine Gray on a couple of times, and she wrote a book I cannot remember the name of it, The Surprising Joy of being Sober, perhaps something like that you should read it, you would love it. Um. But she says, here's a simple question, would your life be better if you weren't drinking. That's it. You don't have to get into and do I have a problem? Am I drinking too much? Would

your life be better if you weren't? And And I thought that was such a powerful way of just sort of looking at that thing very simply without any of the cultural baggage that comes with addiction and sobriety and abstinence and all of that stuff. Yeah, there seems that

seems a very useful question. I was just talking about it this weekend with friends of mine, and we were talking about how drinking and talking is just default adult behavior when you get together, Like what else do you do besides have a glass of wine in your hand and talk? Like we never did that as kids, you know, kids sitting around with a glass of kool aid and just shooting the ship like no, And so what would we be doing if we didn't alcohol in our hands?

What what would these social occasions look like? Just an interesting thought experiment. Well, as somebody who doesn't drink for very important reasons, I'm happy to see more adults not drinking because it is sort of the default behavior, and you just, you know, sometimes you feel like I'm just the odd person out here all the time. But and that's why finding people that are also uh sober is really helpful if you're trying not to drink all the time. Anyway,

that was a slight distraction. So I want to get back to the concept of worry. And I'm just gonna read something you wrote because I thought this was so good and I just experienced it. This feeling of worry had been my normal for so long that I would even worry about worrying on vacations. I would worry about how much time I had left, anxious to make the remaining days worry free. Then I would recognize that, being consumed by the worry, I wouldn't enjoy the actual vacation.

Then I would worry about not enjoying it, and then worry about worrying about not enjoying it, which makes me laugh. I was recently on vacation. I get myself into the like how many days left, how many days left? How soon you know, and the same thing, I'm like, Oh, the vacation's half over. So I start worrying about the vacation being half I mean, that's that's no good. I just had a wonderful vacation anyway, Um, I just thought that was so instructive of the way worry works. It

just consumes us. It consumed me um. And so that was not something that happened on every second vacation. That was something that happened on every vacation. You know. I left the house and within two hours, you know, my first thought was like, did I turn the stove off? Did I turn the stove off? Oh? Great, I'm worrying already about this vacation. Oh. I thought, this is gonna be a different vacation. And then I, you know, kind

of go down into that vicious spirals. And then I'd wake up and I'd be happy because I was on vacation, and then I would search my mind for like, oh, wait a second, I'm missing something. There's something I should be worried right that, Yes, I only have four more days left. And then it would kick back in and yeah, it was exhausting. What are some of your tools for working with worry worry? I think of all the things that I've learned to do, not worrying is a big one.

And I mean if I added up all the hours of my life that I that I used to worry, I who knows how many it would be like way too many to even look at. UM. And worry is something that I have let go of because um, and I don't mean a d percent. But let's say if I was a warrior a hundred percent of the time, I'm a warrior maybe maybe five percent of the time. Now it is achievement. Wait a second, I couldn't resist

And this isn't um. This is something that's kind of developed itself because I'm used to pulling myself back to being present and I have a number of ways of doing that. And whenever I see whenever I catch myself veering into that worry stage, I my first thought is, there's nothing I can do about that, because I don't have any control over any of that. All I can control is what is how I react to what's in front of me right here, right now. And that thought

is enough for me to let the worry go. So it's no longer, and it's it's hours of my life. Hours of my life that I get back, both when I'm asleep or trying to get to sleep and during my day that I can now pour into things that I find really fulfilling and inspiring and engaging. UM. You know, So when people ask me, if I lose my achiever fever, does that mean I won't perform anymore? Does that mean

I'll lose my lose my competitive spirit. And the only thing that we lose when we lose our achiever fever is worry, self doubt and fear, and losing that worry has allowed me to gain so much more. Yep, that's wonderful. Well, we are at time here all of a sudden, um, so you and I are going to continue a conversation

in the post show conversation. I think we'll talk about some more of the practices that you did, and uh, we'll explore a line that I loved, which is I could see these things as irritating or I could see them as practice. And that's a wonderful line. So we're gonna explore that in the post show conversation. Listeners if you are interested in getting those, as well as a weekly mini episode and other bonuses, go to one you Feed dot net slash support. Well, Claire, thank you so

much for coming on the show. It was a pleasure. It was a pleasure to have you on and talk to you. I really enjoyed the book. I got to give a blurb for it, which was kind of fun. So I'm happy to have happy you have gotten us to finally have this conversation. So thank you, thank you all right bye m. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed

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