Overcoming anxiety with self-efficacy

The way to overcome anxiety is through self-efficacy, the belief in your ability to achieve specific outcomes.

I think it's misguided to overcome anxiety through mindfulness, meditation, and escapism.

Self-efficacy requires practice and mastery.

Self-efficacy also requires us to evaluate our attachments, and to focus on our ability to build, keep, and rebuild them.

So, to start, let's talk about defenses and escapes in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Escapes: the white and blue belt's focus

Most BJJ practitioners will spend the first 4 years of their practice as a white or blue belt. Most of your sparring sessions in those early belts involve being beaten up.

This is also a time to focus on your escapes; because you're always being put in difficult situations, this is the time to build the skills and confidence to escape them.

There's a certain level of tranquility that comes from your ability to survive anything your opponent throws at you. Once you're unbeatable, it's much easier to focus on your attacks and winning.

I don't know how to be good at BJJ yet – I'm still learning. But a recent situation illustrates this effect:

I've been taking private classes for almost a year now, but for the past few months, I've taken them exclusively. They've helped me tremendously.

When I recently went to a general practice after so many tough private sessions, I felt great tranquility and confidence. None of my training partners, even the top black belts, were as advanced as the instructor I've been training with.

Don't get me wrong – I still got beat by the black belt instructors – just much, much less beat. I knew what was going on. I had earned trust in my ability to deal with whatever they'd throw my way.

As "cry on the dojo; laugh on the battlefield" implies, whether you're laughing now depends a lot on how much crying you did over the past several years – and I've done a lot of crying.

In BJJ, as in life, tranquility depends on your trust in the ability to deal with whatever is thrown your way.

And just pretending you're not getting beat won't work.

The problem with mindfulness, meditation and escapism

I think mindfulness, meditation, and escapism all have their benefits, but trying to manage anxiety through them is misguided.

Anxiety arises from fear of future events, with our body and brain generating these negative feelings as a warning. Mindfulness, meditation, and escapism all aim to address these emotions without tackling the underlying future we fear.

While there are cases where our brain is out of whack and causing fear because it's not parsing reality correctly or due to a huge maladaptation, it's often the case that your anxiety is well founded: yep, it really would suck if you lost your job, your wife, your child, your house, etc. – better be afraid of that!

Often, we really should be anxious because we can't effectively control the future we're attached to.

A great example is the prevalent fear of public speaking. Sure, even the best will always have a bit of nerves; that's normal. But most of us, let's face it, suck at public speaking. We haven't mastered it. We've barely even practiced it. Of course we should be anxious about it.

Being good at valuable things, particularly ones that involve the judgment of other people or competition with them, is really hard. If your attachments require this hard thing, you will be anxious about losing them unless you're really good at it.

Which brings an important dichotomy between impostor syndrome and what I call the impostor in-zone.

Impostor syndrome vs the impostor in-zone

Impostor syndrome is "A psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their accomplishments and has a persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud, despite evident success and external validation."

Some people have impostor syndrome – they believe to be frauds despite the overwhelming external validation of their skills from credible observers and their undoubtedly pristine track record.

But most of us don't have impostor syndrome, but something else I call the impostor in-zone: we're genuinely out of our depth and lacking the mastery necessary to fully control outcomes in the real world. Because controlling the real world to any reasonable extent is friggin' hard.

On the impostor in-zone, we lack confidence .. because we should.

The way to build confidence in our ability to control the world without being delusional is to build mastery.

Mastery allows us to build, destroy, and rebuild things in the real world by applying knowledge, skill, and competency.

So first, know this important clarification: if you don't have overwhelming evidence of your stunning competencies, you don't have impostor syndrome: you're on the impostor in-zone.

Second, if you want out of the impostor in-zone, you'll have to dig yourself out through a lot of hard work by building mastery in that area.

Your anxiety decreases at the rate your mastery increases.

Of course, some outcomes in the real world are so hard to control for mere humans like you and me that they verge, or are, impossible.

So you must choose your attachments carefully.

Choosing your attachments carefully

In Stoicism, "apatheia" is a term that means the absence of passions, by which they mean your undesirable feelings, like anxiety.

Another important tenet of Stoicism, evident in Epictetus's little notebook Enchiridion, is to avoid being attached to any external event since you can't fully control it.

Chapter 1

We are responsible for some things, while there are others for which we cannot be held responsible. The former include our judgement, our impulse, our desire, aversion and our mental faculties in general; the latter include the body, material possessions, our reputation, status – in a word, anything not in our power to control. [..] if you mistake what is naturally inferior for what is sovereign and free, and what is not your business for your own, you’ll meet with disappointment, grief and worry [..]

Epictetus. Discourses and Selected Writings (Penguin Classics) (p. 259). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

In Stoicism, you throw in the towel (or, a Stoic would say, accept reality) and don't attach yourself to any external event because none of them are under your control, and attaching to them will only cause you suffering.

In reality, you're not a Stoic, so you will get attached to external events. So you might as well choose attachments you have some control over and focus on increasing your control through mastery.

Bob Dylan has a famous story about listening to music with a friend and saying, "That's a nice song," to which the friend replies, "You wrote it." It's easy to understand Dylan's detachment from a specific song when you learn he's written over 500 of them — some say 1,000+.

The sheer number of songs, and Bob Dylan's presumed ease of writing more of them, is a critical reason for this detachment to existing songs.

The fearfulness of future events that creates anxiety comes from our presumed difficulty keeping or rebuilding a similar or better future through our skills.

Some future events are just too difficult to control given your current level of mastery. Some events are impossible to control, no matter your level of mastery. All anxiety is telling you is that it's dangerous to get attached to those events because they may occur, and you should prepare accordingly.

In the end, the Stoics were onto something by saying we control negative feelings like anxiety by being attached to things we can control and not being attached to things we can't control.

Build mastery and choose attachments

Often, when you feel bad, your body is telling you there's something wrong that needs to be addressed.

Self-efficacy is your confidence in your ability to act and resolve the problems thrown your way.

Although certain medical conditions can trigger a cascade of anxiety, similar to how an external injection of cortisol and adrenaline would, much of your everyday anxiety serves as a signal that something needs attention. Ignoring this feeling will only prolong the situation and intensify your negative emotions later.

You're often not dealing with impostor syndrome, but instead you're on the impostor in-zone: you don't have all the skills to fully control outcomes in the real world because it's extremely hard to build them, and you haven't yet done the work.

You must focus on your ability to build, keep, or rebuild the attachment you're anxious about. This mastery gives you tranquility about the future – without you being delusional.

So, put this principle into practice to reduce your everyday anxiety:

1 – Clearly define what you're attached to and anxious about: a promotion, a friend liking you, your finances, etc.

2 – Define what the future event you're afraid of is, and analyze how your current skills don't give you confidence about preventing or overcoming its negative consequences when it happens. Maybe it's a bad performance review, your friend stops hanging out with you, you can't pay rent, etc.

3 – Evaluate what skills you could build that would prevent or mitigate that event from happening: Being so good you'd only get a bad review if you have a bad manager, being great company to your friends or having ease of making new friends, plenty of savings and sources of income to prevent financial hardship, etc.

4 – Build the skills that allow you to better control the outcomes you're anxious about. Maybe that's a specialization at work, books and courses on persuasion and inter-relational skills, creating a budget to save money or learning about investments, etc.

By following this process for building your self-efficacy, you'll consistently remove sources of anxiety from your life.

As you become more effective at dealing with the future events you're afraid of, instead of reducing your anxiety by changing your fears, you reduce your anxiety by changing your future.