How to overcome constant anxiety?

AVAlexander Volchek

Hello, everyone. My name is Alexander Volchek. Here on my YouTube channel, I talk about genuine personal development and scaling up as a person. Recognizing things—the ability to notice this constant state of tension, tension around you, anxiety around you, or panic that seems to come from nowhere—is a very important quality. It's easy to notice things that have an obvious cause. You're walking down the street and a car nearly hits you, for example, and you suddenly tense up. Or you're walking down the street and someone follows you for ten blocks, and you start feeling anxious. Or you see houses burning in Los Angeles every day, and you start feeling anxious that they might not be able to stop it. There are identifiable reasons anxiety arises. But there's also anxiety and tension that arise for no apparent reason, when you start noticing worried thoughts that have no reason behind them. Imagine we're sitting here in a fairly pleasant space, and I start worrying that the weather will be bad, although the weather isn't bad and there's no forecast of bad weather. Or I sit here worrying that something will happen this evening. What will happen?

I don't know. Something will happen. Or I start worrying about the children at school. Or I start worrying that my wife might be driving right now and something might have happened. That's worry with no clear reason to worry, but with some description of what it's about, as in those examples. Then there are cases where there's no description at all. I can simply say I'm anxious. Someone says, “I'm anxious. I'm tense.” You ask, “About what?” They say, “I don't know.” In this case, the person identifies anxiety as a certain quality, a combination of psychophysical states or other states they've learned to associate with anxiety. That's what they call it. Some things are difficult to name at all. Something's happening, and someone asks, “What state are you in?” You say, “I don't even know how to express it.” Many people have lived through that, just saying, “I don't know how to express this state. I don't even know what it is.” These are different types of anxiety. People often ask, “How is this different from stress?” But having anxiety, having tension, doesn't mean a person is in a state of stress.

Here, stress means a state that narrows perception and leaves a person unable to make sound decisions. One of the most important descriptions of stress is a state in which someone isn't aware, and therefore can't make sound decisions. A person can feel bad while remaining fully aware, and that wouldn't be stress overall. They might be in pain, tense, anxious, but it wouldn't be stress. Of course, I'm certainly not the person who defines the terminology. You can always look up the terminology, I suppose, because these distinctions still come from an internal sense of difference. Today, we're separating these concepts not to pass an exam on what stress and anxiety are, but to learn to recognize our own states correctly and, as a result, identify their actual causes. If there's anxiety, and we're saying there are different types, different foundations, different ways to recognize it, what do we do next? The first thing to understand about anxiety, just as with stress—the first thing to do—is look not at how to relieve it, but at what causes the anxiety or tension to arise.

That's fundamentally important. Just as with stress, make the primary task understanding what causes it, rather than resolving the stress itself. Understanding the cause lets you act and make decisions as appropriately as possible. When we talk about anxiety and tension, which are very often quite abstract states and sensations, understanding the cause is essential because the causes can be radically different. It may simply be your current mood. You haven't eaten well today, you've had food poisoning, you've developed a fever, or you had a conflict earlier and are still a little upset. Or the anxiety may be grounded in something concrete. You know your child has traveled somewhere far away alone, somewhere they've never been before. Some anxiety arises automatically. But then the question is: why does one parent become anxious and another not? What's the cause? Someone says, “That's it, the reason is obvious. What if something happens to them?” No, what's the cause? Why does one person worry and another not? Everyone understands that something could happen, but something could happen right now too.

Could a missile come in right now? Theoretically, yes. Could there be an earthquake right now? Theoretically, yes. It's even much more likely here than an earthquake somewhere two hundred kilometers away. The chance of an earthquake here is much greater than elsewhere. The question is whether a person lives with that anxiety or not. Someone lives in worry and anxiety about being fired. Someone lives in worry and anxiety about people thinking badly of them or their work. Someone lives in worry and anxiety that their husband will leave. Someone lives in worry and anxiety that their children will grow up and stop talking to them. Are they experiencing that worry or not? Some people experience these different states, while others never experience them at all. They simply don't. They don't have that experience. Here's an example. I have four children, and many people, once they have children, live in anxiety about how their child will get into a university. They worry their child will do poorly in school. My wife and I, for example, don't have anxiety at home about how our children will get into a university. Does that mean this anxiety won't arise, develop, or exist in the future for me, for my wife, or for both of us?

It doesn't. But the fact remains that right now, with four children and the oldest fourteen, we don't have that worry. Some people do. Their child hasn't even been born, and they're already worrying about it. Many people don't have children precisely because they're worried about this. “How will I provide a life for this child? What will happen? How will I earn the money? First I need to save money, then have children.” They're thinking about many things. It's one of the most common situations involving children. A person has certain anxieties. Many people have anxiety. Some people start a business right away, while others say, “I won't start a business until I've built up a lot of savings. Once I've saved a lot, then I'll go into business.” Or someone is told, “You can attend to your own interests during the day.” “I can't attend to my own interests. Once I've saved money, then I will.” Completely different parameters. We were discussing this recently, you and I: someone says, “Morning is the most productive time.”

Usually it's, “Morning is the most productive time, so let's work.” But maybe morning is the most productive time, so you should talk with your wife? Or morning is the most productive time, so you should give it to your children? Or morning is the most productive time, so you should devote it to your health? Or morning is the most productive time, so you should devote it to personal development? Or morning is the most productive time, so you should rest then, replenish yourself even more? What should you do with your mornings? Must you work during your most productive time? Maybe you should work during less productive time so you can restore yourself as fully as possible. Otherwise, you work in your most productive time, work in your half-productive time, work in another half-productive stretch, and then rest when you're a corpse. Working so you can recover. There's a person with a company—Never Die or something. Never Die, I think. What does he do? He works on never dying. He's constantly explaining on Instagram and everywhere else how not to die, how to extend your life. It seems to me he spends more time extending his life than he could extend it by. He's spending half his life now in order to extend his life.

Why spend half your day so you can live a day later on, to extend your own life? Why spend that time? Use that time to live now instead. But he doesn't understand the other connections involved in extending life. There are relationships described in spiritual worlds concerning what happens when a person wants to lengthen their life. They want to lengthen it, but on the other side, schizophrenia or dementia catches up with them more—states related to mental health. A person becomes less intelligent earlier. You're unfolding things in one direction, lengthening them, while in another direction you're constricting the whole. Does the person understand those patterns when this happens? Aren't they driving themselves into anxiety, stress, and worry in the process? When we talk about the causes of anxiety, we need to start looking for them and allow for possibilities. It's very important to allow for the fact that even if you've decided what the cause is, you don't know it completely. Never immediately settle on a cause once and for all, because you have the tendency, as a modern per—

The tendency, as a modern person, to choose a cause for yourself. The causes of deep anxiety and deep worry lie outside your consciousness. They may lie in inherited family patterns, in your upbringing and heredity, in periods of life you lived through but don't even remember, in fleeting events you may not have recognized or noticed. I'm not even talking about spiritual or karmic causes, because they definitely lie outside your awareness of your current life and the appearance of a particular anxiety. An anxiety can accompany someone for their entire life because their spiritual being generates that impulse. If that impulse is being generated, you can do whatever you want, but you won't remove it. Imagine sitting in a cold room. You think, “All right, I've put in a gas heater. I've bought another heater that blows warm air. I've turned the whole ventilation system to heat, lit the fireplace. I've done everything. Put on warm socks, absolutely everything. But the draft keeps blowing just as it did.” You're sitting there, unable to move, having restricted your whole life, and you're still a little cold. You can't do anything.

The moment you do anything, you're chilly. It turns out you only needed to close the door. Just close the door. The first action is to close the door. Leave the door open, and the causes keep being generated endlessly. We're talking about deep, far-reaching causes that are often very difficult to reach. A door is a very clear example, but some causes are so difficult to recognize that it becomes practically impossible within a person's life. More than that, not all causes—not all—can be changed. The first thing a person needs to do is recognize that and understand that there may be deeper causes. People don't want to accept it. They say, “No! Explain it with doors. A door makes sense. What's all this about spiritual worlds and causes I can't see? I want to see everything, know everything, understand everything.” Even if you work out one cause, there's a strong chance that removing one anxiety will generate fifteen others from different directions, as a process that switches on next, as a next step, and that you cannot get rid of at all. Not until you die. You certainly won't get rid of them; they certainly won't disappear. It's like the next action: a person enters a happy relationship with their partner.

Imagine you've married. A happy marriage, a genuinely good person—and ten years later, he dies. You searched a long time for this person, feeling anxious. You found him. And when he dies, your anxiety becomes ten thousand times greater than before. People often say, “I wish I'd never known him. I wish I'd never started this. I wish I'd never entered this relationship. I wish I'd never known this person.” If you don't know, there's nothing, no problem. My wife and I were in Austin, Texas, two weeks ago and went to a Christmas movie. I can't remember the title, but we'll put it here in the YouTube video. I can't remember it now. We'll include it here—a wonderful black-and-white Christmas movie. We were in an old theater built in 1920, or maybe 1917, or some year like that. Maybe 1950. An old movie theater. In the film, there was a man talking with an angel who said it would have been better if none of it had ever happened.

“Still thinking about suicide? You think that'll make everyone happy, do you?” “I don't know. Maybe. Maybe I shouldn't have been born.” “What?” “Why was I ever born?” He's told, “We can easily show you what would happen if you hadn't been born.” They show what happens if he's never born. If he's never born, none of the problems connected with him exist. But everything else happens completely differently. He says, “Could you return me to the problems I had? They're no longer problems for me, because I simply want to be there.” Being there itself is what he needs. That's the whole point. Life itself is what matters—life as it happens. A huge number of relationships between men and women never happen because people fear loss, fear starting them. My mother says, “I really like dogs, but I won't get one because I remember what happened when the dog got sick and died.” “I won't meet a man because things ended the same predictable way with my last three boyfriends. I suffered afterward. I'm not going to suffer like that again.” People fear certain events repeating. They fear the consequences of what happens, even though they often can't even picture those consequences and don't understand them.

But my example wasn't about fear of consequences. That's a different topic, a completely separate one, and we'll look at it separately. I was saying that changing anxiety, or working with its causes, means understanding that there are consequences. That's what lets you work deeply with experiences such as anxiety: not just looking into the causes, but also understanding the consequences that will follow from working with those causes. Understanding what will change and what will really happen. Someone wants to change their attitude toward other people. They change it and realize their wife at home is a very bad person and they can't stay with her anymore. By changing their attitude toward others, they've realized they weren't seeing the truth. When you change your attitude toward people, you also start seeing the other side of their qualities. Or you realize, “I'm no longer going to be in contact with my parents.” That's incredibly difficult to do. You realize they've been using you your whole life. Yet, on the other hand, you seemed to treat everyone well and had developed to a point where you could see more broadly.

As soon as you started seeing more broadly, you understood, “These relationships aren't real. I'm not going to stay in them anymore.” Working with anxiety and worry is primarily connected with changes and the consequences that follow. I'm certainly not discouraging you from doing this. You might ask, “Alexander, are you saying it's better not to work with anxiety or worry?” Of course you should work with them. It's a sound, genuine step in personal development. But recognizing that there are completely different possible consequences, and that you won't be able to foresee all of them, is very important. Working with causes first—everyone wants to ask, “How do I find the cause? I still want to identify the cause. And then how do I find the consequence? How do I find the consequence?” Only you can find, truly understand, and recognize the cause of your anxiety. Even if someone outside points you toward it, they could tell you the cause fifty thousand times and you wouldn't hear it. It's important to know that you need to do this at all: recognize the cause, question the causes that occur to you, dig deeper into them, try to find out more.

I know a great many people—probably most people—who respond like this. You ask, “Why did you just feel anxious?” “It's obvious. A cockroach ran past.” You say, “No, there's something deeper.” “Oh, here you go with your explanations. A cockroach ran past. Even a turkey could see that!” That approach certainly won't help you move very far forward. Looking a little deeper will help. That doesn't mean endlessly digging around in your life. The number of anxieties, worries, and different things happening within a person is countless. There are thousands; they never end. You can't eliminate anxiety by saying, “That's it. My name is Alexander Volchek, and I no longer have anxiety or worries.” As if you'd passed an exam and that was that. Anxiety and worry will cease to exist only when you die. Once you die, your spiritual being will no longer have human anxiety and worry. Human ones. Until then, they will be there. That's one of the fundamental rules to acknowledge about anxiety. One of the rules to recognize right from the start: as I develop and expand as a person, states in which I experience anxiety are always possible.

You don't need to be afraid of anxiety. That's one of the differences between anxiety and stress. They're different approaches altogether. Stress can result from anxiety arising. But anxiety can be present without stress. I simply feel a certain state of anxiety. I simply feel certain worries. The causes may differ. I might feel worried because I sense that bad things will happen in the world tomorrow. I sense the weather is going to change, and my physical body reacts that way. Scientifically proven. By the way, that's a scientifically proven fact. People often say, “Oh, my head hurts.” Check the atmospheric pressure, for example; perhaps the weather is changing. But I suggest looking a little deeper. Every person is constantly picking up on a great many things. Even as you watch this video, words account for twenty percent of the effect on you, while eighty percent comes from other characteristics, other qualities, and entirely different energies. So when we talk about the causes of anxiety, how it arises, we need to understand that one cause is the state of your perception of the space around you, what you really perceive. There's a big difference between knowing that under this shelf here—

That there's a snake under this shelf, and seeing the snake. There's a big difference between knowing there's a tiger down there that can jump up here, and having no idea at all that there's a tiger there. A huge difference. Do you know about the snake or not? Do you know about the tiger or not? Do you know you'll be divorced a year from now or not? Do you know you'll be fired a year from now or not? Do you know your income will never grow in your life? Or do you know it will grow regardless, even if you don't work, that it'll just fall into your lap—you open the door and there's a gold bar lying there. Endlessly. Do you know you'll die in a year, or don't you? There's a big difference. That knowledge is deeply connected with recognizing things and with perception. With perception. It isn't necessarily a thought process. More precisely, in most cases it isn't a thought process. It's a vast range of sensations around you that you have to learn about separately. These are separate practices, videos. I talk about many different things, and they're separate things you need to experience entirely separately, independently.

Now let's look at what to do. Someone goes to bed at night thinking about work. They wake up in the morning anxious about their health. They go on vacation and think about work. They go away to rest and think about the husband or wife they've left at home, what their spouse thinks about them resting, and they're anxious all the time. Their child goes somewhere, and they're anxious. Their child goes to school, and they're anxious. Anxiety every day. What do you do with it? What do you do about things like that? First, find the cause. Let's go back again. The simplest action is still to look at the cause. “I've gone on vacation, and I'm worried about work.” What's the cause? An understandable cause: I won't get my bonus. Or the company won't achieve the result it needs, and I'll be fired. Or my boss is categorically opposed to vacations. Or I didn't get this vacation approved. Or my colleagues will think badly of me for taking it. Or I need to show my husband, my wife, or the friends I'm vacationing with that I'm a workaholic, always working. You need to understand the cause.

Or the cause is something completely different that you can't even recognize. You tell yourself, “I don't want any of that, but for some reason I'm still worrying about this damn work. What am I supposed to do?” Working with anxiety, deep anxiety such as anxiety on vacation—for the most part, I've never had anxiety on vacation, because I made rest itself important. Being in a state of rest every day mattered to me, instead of waiting for a vacation to rest. When I went away, it wasn't some unique, exclusive event. If I wanted to work, I worked. If I didn't, I didn't. My focus shifted, shifted in an entirely different way, because I know you need to rest during the day. If I know I need to have rest during the day, I'm much better prepared not to think about work, because every day I need to enter a state where I'm not thinking about work. I'm walking with my children and understanding that I need to be with them, not thinking about work.

Here's the question: if I've gone on vacation and think I need to work because of my bonus, does that mean I also need to think about my bonus when I'm walking with my children? Maybe I should be with my children not because of a bonus, but turn the whole picture around and say, “All right, that anxiety doesn't matter to me. I want to be with my children because being here with them, right now, is so important for my own development and for their happiness.” In this case, the bonus has nothing to do with it. Work has nothing to do with it. That's a separate matter, a separate situation. When you get into it, you don't understand: “How do I connect the bonus and work? I need a bonus, so I need to work. Do I? I do. I also need to be with my child. I simply want to be with my child. I want to learn simply to be with my child. I also want to spend time with my child for the child's sake. And I want to spend time for the child for some other reason…” Start looking into it and seeing what's really happening.

Very often, being with your child creates stress, and panic about work follows automatically as a consequence. You always need to look a little more broadly at the whole picture. It's highly individual. Again, some people can't relax, and it isn't because they're worried about work. Some people work until midnight every day, starting in the morning, fifteen or sixteen hours a day. Not because the work requires it. I often give this example: in various businesses of mine, there would usually be women in finance who worked until ten or eleven at night. I remember constantly sending them home. I'd come in and say, “Go home.” Why? I understood they were spending time at work because it had become the only life they had. That's why they stayed at work. At some point I'd say, “Listen, that's enough. Take a little rest.” Though it isn't clear whether you should do that, because there are so many causes and consequences involved. Someone spends time at work not for the work, not for a bonus, not for the boss, but simply because it's their way of life. Then they go away to rest. You just asked me about this, saying that working instead of resting on vacation is typical, especially for entrepreneurs and freelancers. You emphasized them in particular.

My reaction was, “No, no!” Because there are different causes. Some people can't relax on vacation when they go away because they don't know how to relax in general. They have no other life. The only thing they have is work. Work is the only thing, and they can't give it up. They simply can't give it up at all. Other people can't relax because they know they won't earn money and will go bankrupt, or won't buy something for themselves. Some people don't rest because they won't be able to pay for their child's school. Others don't rest because they won't be able to buy a Chanel bag next month. The point is that saving for a Chanel bag and paying for your children's schooling are exactly the same kind of situation in terms of not resting. These reasons can exist at the same time in different people. Someone else doesn't rest because their husband is also away on a business trip and says, “What, you're resting again? I have to work. I've got calls coming in.” There are so many situations like that.

I know many women who work not because they want to, but because society or their husband tells them they should. The husband constantly says, “You have to work.” He doesn't create a sense of security at home that it's possible not to work. I have a close female friend who says, “If it were up to me, I'd never go anywhere near any of it.” That triggers stress for the person. My wife doesn't have that stress. She says, “I don't want to work. Period.” I say, “But what about having a profession?” She says, “What? I don't need that. I don't need it. I don't even have any worries about it.” Someone else does. It's important to understand the cause. First, believe that people without worries exist. There are entrepreneurs who go away and relax easily—click, everything's shut off. Someone says, “Well, their business must be doing fine.” Not necessarily. I'm a personal example, a clear example of someone who, throughout my life, has gone on vacation and turned off my phone in ninety-nine percent of cases, even when there were problems in the business.

Because there's a business, and it always has problems. Some businesses always have problems. Or there are businesses with the same income, the same everything. Some people experience it as a problem; others don't. I'm with my partners, for example, or I'm an employee, or whatever the situation is, and I feel there's a problem all the time. Or it's my business and I don't work there at all, but I feel it's a problem. There's simply a problem all the time. You meet, and there's always some shortage, revenue falling short, everyone unhappy all the time, a problem all the time. If there's a problem all the time, does that mean my whole life will always be a problem? Or not? This brings us to very complex circumstances: anxiety and worry very often arise from causes or circumstances a person can't understand at all. Some people worry about money when they earn a hundred dollars a month. Others worry about money when they have five billion dollars in their account. Some don't worry while earning a hundred dollars a month, with no savings, nothing at all.

Others don't worry about money at all when they simply have it. But some people worry intensely because they have it. At that point, the person misreads the situation. They say, “I'll earn a million dollars and go live in Thailand.” They've already decided they'll change where they live, that the reason they're here is that they haven't earned the money. They say that once they earn it, they'll have an opportunity to experience a happy moment, or some other opportunity. They start doing a great many completely misguided things without understanding the cause as a whole. It's important to look at the cause. Why did this worry arise in me at all?

Why did this anxiety arise in me at all? What is it connected with? What causes a particular idea to arise? This is where we need to examine anxiety. Anxiety is an interesting phenomenon that's often hard to recognize as anxiety. Thoughts about a particular subject appear. They may be anxious thoughts, or they may not. Suppose I start sensing that something bad will happen tomorrow. Someone will die, for example. That may make me anxious, and the anxiety may put me into a state of stress—or it may not make me anxious. I simply know someone will die tomorrow, and there's no anxiety. A great many people can recognize things that don't cause anxiety. A great many people can recognize only things that do cause anxiety. You need to become more and more able to notice all these circumstances. While you're thinking about the next question, I'll get my laptop charger. All right. Olya?