Transcription
Fascinating research on anxiety that shows that if you're someone in life whose life is happening to you, like you wake up one day and then like your boss wants you to come in for work, you have to pay rent at the end of the month and like you're logging on to Tinder and people aren't responding to you. Life is controlling the direction that you move. People feel overwhelmed by this and they want freedom. They want control.
What they end up doing is they they they wish that they didn't have these things. So they run away from these problems. So passive challenges or challenges that life imposes upon you that you didn't sign up for.
Then there's something really fascinating which is your sense of control in life does not correlate just with the passive challenges. It correlates with the ratio of passive challenges to active challenges. Active challenges are things that you choose to do that are difficult.
So this is really fascinating. But if you're getting bodied by life in three different directions, the solution to that is not run away from those problems. It's actually to wake up and start to push yourself in a particular direction. I want to do this instead. If you want to learn how to like read uh you know learn philosophy, you know, start studying philosophical texts is you start to take on more which is very counterintuitive because when most people feel feel overwhelmed, they don't feel like they can do more. The exact solution is to take on more active challenges.
Then you have some sense of control in life. And once your ratio of active challenges to passive challenges is more evened out, this does something really cool. It gives you a sense that I'm no longer out of control. Once you feel like you're no longer out of control, this is the really cool thing, then your capacity to deal with the stuff that life throws at you actually improves.