A Word of Caution Before You Continue

 

I’m not a medical professional and what I’m about to tell you are 100% my own thoughts and experiences.  Although my intention is to provide you with the best experience long term in mitigating your anxiety, there are no guarantees that what I’m suggesting will bring you relief or even not cause you any further harm.  If you’re unsure, consult a medical professional (although that may not be the most optimal choice, more on that later in my article.)

 

By continuing to read this article, you agree to take 100% responsibility for the outcomes it brings to your anxiety and overall health, whether positive or negative.  Read my disclaimer if you’re unsure.

 

Why Doctors *Understandably* May Not Always Have Your Best Interests in Mind

 

Suppose you go to a doctor and he discovers you have a medical condition.  It’s negatively affecting your life but it’s not life threatening (yet.)  There exists treatment for this condition and it’s not had a great track record of success.  In fact, the treatment has made patients, on average, worse off in the long run than leaving the condition untreated.  But the doctor still prescribes the treatment since it’s had the best track record in modern medicine.

 

Why?  Because if the doctor recommends taking no action and your condition ends up worsening, then he will be in legal trouble and may even lose his medical license!  Sometimes, the best course, on average, might be to do nothing; however, humans are not necessarily conditioned from an early age to believe that inaction is always the best choice.  (Farnam Street has a piece detailing this phenomenon, the bias for action, and how it contributes to iatrogenics.)

 

Suppose the probability of you getting better without treatment is 80% and the probability of you getting better with treatment is 60%.  Even though probabilistically, you’re better off foregoing treatment, there’s still a 30% chance that you’ll be worse off and the doctor will be in serious trouble.  So it makes sense from your doctor’s perspective that he should offer you treatment (mostly to save his ass from a low probability of getting sued) rather than suggest to you the best overall solution: doing nothing.

 

Iatrogenesis, the adverse effects brought about by healthcare professionals, is very real and often the result of medical intervention when no intervention would have been a better option overall.  So keep that in mind if your doctor prescribes you anti-anxiety medications; it doesn’t mean you’re gonna be better off with them.  Do you want to become addicted to prescription anxiety meds and spend a large chunk of your income on them for the foreseeable future or suffer severe withdrawal symptoms if you fail to take them?  Best-selling author and blogger Charlie Hoehn wrote a very chilling piece about how he nearly fell into this trap in the intro to his book, Play it Away.

 

Still not convinced?  Here’s a very detailed article explaining Iatrogenesis and giving further real examples in the real world.  Plenty of honest and ethical doctors prescribe action because they’re under the dogma that taking some action is always better than no action, even without the added stress of potential legal action.  (And keep in mind that this is in a perfect world where all doctors are *trying* to act in our own best interest and not trying to stay out of legal trouble or prescribing unnecessary procedures or drugs to boost their earnings.)

 

Now please don’t take this to mean to distrust doctors in general.  In most cases, heeding your doctor’s recommendations is the best course of action, especially if your life is on the line (say, with a heart attack.)  But be willing to maintain a healthy level of skepticism rather than accept every single recommendation and treatment your doctor prescribes for anxiety without question.

 

The examples and explanations I’ve offered above are a bit simplistic but they serve mainly to introduce the concept of iatrogenics.  For a more in depth understanding, I invite you to read this highly dense piece from Nassim Taleb’s Facebook page.

 

Work on Your Inner Game First

 

Anxiety can be caused physical (biochemical) factors as well as psychological factors or a combination of both.  No two people suffering from anxiety are suffering due to the exact same combination of factors.  But paradoxically, the easier way in mitigating your anxiety over the long run is to fix your inner game (your mindset and psychology.)

 

Fundamentally, most problems are solved more effectively by going after the root cause rather than fighting the obvious but undesirable symptoms or outcomes.  This is no different when it comes to anxiety: if the cause of your anxiety is psychological, then does it make more sense to suppress the physical symptoms or to go after the psychological causes?  A lot of times (but not always), anxiety is a way for your subconscious to tell you to beware of a problem looming in your future.  What’s gonna make you feel better in the long run: shooting the messenger by suppressing the anxiety with drugs or dealing with the problem in the first place?

 

“But my psychological problems are complicated!  There’s no way you can understand or help me!  I need to see a therapist or take my meds!”  OK, I understand and the psychological problems causing your anxiety may be beyond the scope of this article.  But I’d like you to try this low hanging fruit fix first in the other section.

 

The Low Hanging Fruit in Anxiety

 

First, dig deep into what’s causing your anxiety.  Ask yourself “why?” repeatedly a few times until you arrive at a problem that can’t be simplified any further.  Now take out a piece of paper and write this item down (or do it digitally.)  Repeat this process with everything you might suspect could be causing your anxiety.

 

Now to through your list and for each item, ask yourself “Is this something that I can reasonably expect to control?”

 

Yes, this is something within my control.

 

If yes, then channel your anxiety towards taking action to resolve the issue!  Do something that’ll bring yourself closer to a solution NOW (i.e. make that important phone call, write that email, do some initial Googling for that proposal you’ve been putting off, etc.)  You don’t need to fix that problem right away if it’s not convenient or if you don’t have the time but at least take the first step NOW.  Minimize this window and do something NOW!  Then once you’re done, come back and keep reading this article.  (If taking action makes you feel better and builds your momentum, then feel free to go to the next step.)

 

No, this is something that’s not within my control.

 

If this is the case, then I got good and bad news for you.

 

• Bad news: I probably won’t be able to offer any advice to fix your problem either.
• Good news: If you can’t control the outcome, then you can just forget about it and let it go.

 

I know what you’re thinking with the latter point:  “Something terrible’s gonna happen to me because of it.”  OK, but if you genuinely believe you can’t do anything about it now, then there’s really no use worrying about, by definition.  Worrying isn’t gonna change the outcome so just forget about it, enjoy the present, and bear with the negative consequences when they come up.

 

In fact, worrying about things you cannot control will rob you of the energy you need to deal with the problems you do have control over.  So the only thing you can do now is to take your anxiety and put the energy of your racing heart and mind towards crafting a solution to a problem that you do have some level of control over!

 

Yes, I know that letting go of things you have no control over is easier said than done.  But here’s an article on an exercise that will give you a new perspective and allow you to channel your limited energy and attention to only the problems you can influence:

 

The Circle of Control

 

If you’ve got anxiety and you were to only read ONE article I’ve linked to here, please read the Circle of Control!

 

So When Should You Take Anxiety Medication?

 

If you’ve put an honest effort towards the previous exercise, the Circle of Control, and it’s not helping you sufficiently, then you might want to consider Anxiety Medication.  It’s not ideal but at least you’ve tried to reduce your anxiety the easy way without meds and you’ve probably noticed your overall anxiety go down as a result.  Some other situations where you may still want to consider being medicated for anxiety:

 

• If it’s so severe it’s interfering with your daily life.
• If it’s negatively affecting your work, productivity, or your physical health.
• If it’s negatively affecting your family and those around you.
• If you’re genetically prone to anxiety.

 

If you don’t like the idea of taking medications in general, you can still try decaffeinated green teas which naturally contain L-Theanine which reduces your anxiety without the jitters of caffeine or the drowsiness and addictive tendency of many prescription anxiety medicines.

 

My Story

 

Long story short: having been raised by immigrant parents (like these as described by Amy Chua) who pushed me very hard to achieve academically at the expense of everything else, I gradually developed anxiety in high school.  (My dad also constantly suffered from anxiety so I’m not sure if it’s genetic or a learned behavior or both.)  Anyways, I was at my breaking point by the time I entered grad school, so I tried Kava Kava out of desperation (which was in vogue back in the mid 2000s) despite its health risks.  Kava Kava didn’t do much for my anxiety so I moved on to the next over the counter remedy: L-Theanine.

 

I was pretty skeptical about taking an unknown medicine for my anxiety but I quickly found out that L-Theanine naturally occurs in green tea which I’ve drank for all of my life.  To keep the caffeine in green tea from counteracting the calming effects of L-Theanine, I decided to test the waters with decaffeinated green teas.  The decaffeinated teas worked quite well so I moved on with over the counter L-Theanine which I ordered online and in health food stores.

 

This was around 2007.  In about a year, I would be downing L-Theanine pills like it was Vitamin C.  At the peak of my use, I was taking L-Theanine powder by the spoonful whenever I woke up in a panic in the middle of the night.

 

At first, I thought I was getting addicted to L-Theanine and required progressively larger doses to achieve the same desired effect, much like a coffee drinker would experience drinking caffeinated beverages on a regular basis.  Much of the medical literature I read on L-Theanine claimed this substance is not addictive, right?  As I dug deeper, I found that although L-Theanine itself wasn’t very addictive, it did produce small amounts of dopamine; and dopamine, despite being produced by the body, was highly addictive.  Not to mention, I was laser focused on shutting down my anxiety instead of asking myself why I was feeling so much anxiety in the first place.

 

In early 2014, I read a book and an article which changed my life forever, especially my inner game.  I first encountered Mr. Money Mustache’s exercise with the Circle of Control which introduced a fresh perspective to letting go of the problems I have no control over.  Through the Circle of Control, I was also introduced to the ancient philosophy of Stoicism,  While learning about Stoicism, I came across Ryan Holiday’s new book The Obstacle is the Way which gave me a modern interpretation of Stoicism and practical ways of using this ancient philosophy to turn one’s demons or obstacles into real advantages.

 

Almost overnight, my anxiety plummeted.  I learned to effectively let go of the stuff that I didn’t have any control over and was able to focus my attention on the things I actually did have control over.  And by focusing my attention on action, I didn’t have much time left to worry anymore.  I felt like a normal person for the first time my life!  My anxiety didn’t go away completely and I still rely on L-Theanine in smaller doses but nowadays, I always make sure to optimize my inner game by letting go of the problems that I cannot control first before letting the meds to finish the job rather than relying 100% on the meds.

 

Final Thoughts and Your Assignment

 

Like I’ve mentioned earlier in the article, L-Theanine is very beneficial and relatively safe in treating Anxiety but you can’t rely on it entirely to magically make your anxiety disappear.  You need to put forth a reasonable amount of effort towards getting the anxiety out of your head first and then use L-Theanine if you still find yourself with some anxiety left.  So try the following exercise to accomplish this:

 

Sit down and list everything that’s causing you to worry right now.  Block out 10, 15, 30, or whatever # of minutes without distraction if necessary.  Once you have the list down, go through and circle everything you don’t have control over.  Then draw 2 circles like Mr. Money Mustache did and copy the things you have control over in the inner circle and the things you don’t control in the outer circle.  Then scribble out the outer circle with the things you can’t control.  What you have left over are the things you have control over that are causing you anxiety.  THOSE are what you should be focusing on from now on.

 

While this may not entirely rid you of your anxiety, it most likely would have turned the volume down on it substantially.  At this point, you can feel free to use L-Theanine to finish the job.