Here is the full transcript of Jesse Giunta Rafeh’s talk titled “How To Deal With Anxiety And Start Living A Happy Life” at TEDxSouthLakeTahoe conference.
In her TEDx talk “How To Deal With Anxiety And Start Living A Happy Life,” psychotherapist Jesse Giunta Rafeh explores the complex nature of anxiety and its impact on the quest for happiness. She challenges the effectiveness of traditional self-improvement questions for those suffering from anxiety, suggesting they can exacerbate feelings of inadequacy. Giunta Rafeh highlights a generational shift in the aspirations of young people, noting their desire for meaningful work and social impact over material possessions.
She emphasizes that our brains are wired for survival, not happiness, leading to a disconnect between modern goals and primal instincts. The talk critiques the ineffectiveness of conventional advice like “think positive” in dealing with anxiety, advocating instead for confronting anxiety with compassion and self-understanding.
Giunta Rafeh suggests self-appreciation exercises as a more effective method to cultivate internal happiness and build resilience against anxiety. Finally, she advocates facing anxiety head-on, using it as a motivator for positive change and personal growth.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Understanding Anxiety and Finding Happiness
What do you want to achieve in your life? What do you need in your life to be happy? These sound like positive, motivating questions, right? In fact, a lot of self-improvement gurus start their sessions by asking questions just like these.
And don’t get me wrong, if you have a specific goal in mind, these work. But if you’re one of the hundreds of millions of people around the world who suffer from anxiety, then just hearing a question like this can make your stomach turn. Happy? I should be happy, but I’m not. What’s wrong with me? Achieve? Oh, no, I haven’t achieved anything. There are so many things I should be doing right now.
If you have anxiety, any question that asks what could be wrong with you will have your anxiety saying, “I’m so glad you asked. Here’s a list of all the things wrong with you.” Get rid of that. That’s why in my psychotherapy practice, I never start sessions with asking questions like these.
The Power of Simplicity in Therapy
I usually start with, “How are you doing?” How is that? And the power of this question lies within its simplicity. For whatever is on the surface, whatever is below will start coming up. And if you’ve run a therapy practice long enough, you start to notice patterns in how people answer these types of questions.
And over the past 15 years, I’ve noticed a generational shift in what young people think they need in their lives in order to be happy. Young people used to come into my office and say things, “You know what I need to be happy, Jesse? A Benz, a house, that new Louis Vuitton bag.”
Now young people come into my office and say things like, “I want to have a job that makes a difference in the world. I want to have an impact on the environment. I want to be a part of ending systemic racism.” This is very different than what you hear about young people in the media, right?
Netflix, watching, Uber, eating, me, me, me, kids. These are not the daydreams of lazy, attention-seeking, entitled people. These are the genuine hopes of a generation that wants to make the world a better place to live in. But what happens when big dreams meet reality?
The Impact of Expectations on Anxiety
Anxiety, low self-worth, panic attacks, and a crippling sense of doom. It turns out big dreams get weighted down by big expectations, external expectations like “I need to have a job that pays the bills and my student loans, oh, and allows me to save $1 million for that deposit on the one-bedroom apartment I want.” And I need to have the perfect relationship. But if I can’t have that, then I need to have the perfect uncoupling.
And I need to work harder than my peers and make time for networking and cultivating hobbies so I have the perfect work-life balance. Oh, and I can’t forget to make time for self-care. And then there are the internal expectations. Like “I got to show up super confident even when I’m breaking down inside.”
I have to be understanding and empathetic and accepting of others even when jealousy bubbles beneath the surface. And I got to be confident, manifesting, fearless, best version of myself every single day. These are all shoulds, and when added together, it can feel like they’re crushing you. But what do all these shoulds have to do with happiness, you might ask?
The Misconception of Happiness and Our Brain
Well, here’s a fun scientific fact about happiness. Our brains are not wired to be happy. They’re wired for survival, to protect us. We feel like we’re these evolved beings because our technology has advanced so far and we’re living in these modern times so far away from caveman times. But the reality is our brains haven’t changed. We hear a noise in the restaurant and we still look behind us to see if there’s a saber-toothed tiger hiding behind the coat rack.
In order to maintain our social standing, we’re still posting our stories on walls. And in order to find mates to increase our survival chances, we still go clubbing. That’s why when we’re working on our big goal to reduce climate change and we’re this close to finishing up our 20-step plan to replant the Amazonian rainforest, what our anxiety is worried about is, “Why is Mike not texting me back?” As 200,000 years ago, it would have been a matter of life and death if caveman Mike didn’t text you back. Cave Mike, he doesn’t matter much anymore.
But we don’t know that. We didn’t get the Mike update. None of us did. Luckily for Mike. But that still begs the question, why when we have access to all these resources, information, and even technology to tackle anxiety, why are anxiety rates rising across the world?
And it’s not because of Mike. It’s because we can see where we want to go on an intellectual level, but we’re still triggered by our survival mind.
The Struggle Between Intellectual Understanding and Emotional Response
We feel anger, frustration, insecurity, jealousy, shame. And we want to jump from that to, “I want to be positive, manifesting, best version of myself.” So we put on the meditation app and listen to the soothing podcast. But we listen to these intellectually. We hear that we need to let go and our brains process that we need to let go, but we don’t get it emotionally.
And then we feel bad that we can’t make the jump. And we think, “What’s wrong with me?” And then we go on Instagram and we’re like, “Clearly everyone else has this figured out. I should have this figured out too.” There’s that should again. And the spiral of anxiety starts once more. Legendary psychoanalyst Karen Horney laid a lot of the modern framework for how we think about anxiety, said that in neuroses, we’re split between a real self and an ideal self.
The Tyranny of the Shoulds
And our constant struggle to live up to this ideal self takes us further and further away from happiness. This is what she calls the tyranny of the shoulds. Is it any wonder why people are crippling under the weight of their shoulds? Is it any wonder why multiple studies are reporting huge increases in people seeking mental health treatment for anxiety? The pandemic has laid bare how unattainable our external expectations are of us.
Keep working full time, switch to working from home, switch to homeschooling your children, and don’t forget to learn a new skill, all the while facing a collective global trauma that hasn’t seen a precedent in over a hundred years. And even worse, our internal shoulds have been amplified. “I should have been more prepared for this unprecedented global event. I should have been more productive.”
Why have I not taken over the world from my new kitchen slash office? We’ve ended up with an even bigger gap than we had before all this between the goals we set for ourselves and where we are right here, right now. The gap is huge. The bridge is missing and we don’t know how to build it.
Embracing Anxiety as a Tool for Positive Change
This all sounds a bit grim, I know, but here’s why knowing this is actually good news. When we know that our brains are not wired to be happy, we can immediately dismiss all the bad advice we get about anxiety and happiness. People say, “Be happy because happiness is a choice.” Not true.
People say, “Don’t be stressed, just let it go.” Not true. You can’t just let it go. The patron saint of letting it go. When she sang this song, she locked herself in a castle and didn’t speak to anyone for half the film. Letting go is not a song and dance number. People say, “Think positive,” and thinking positive could be a step in the right direction, but it backfires when we’re trying to jump from anxiousness to that positive affirmation we’re trying to embody.
Confronting Anxiety with Compassion and Understanding
A client recently came into my office after having read a blog about affirmations and she said, “Jesse, I’ve been saying my affirmations every day. I don’t feel more beautiful. I don’t feel more confident. I don’t feel more at ease about money. And my relationship still sucks. And now, on top of all that, I feel like I’m failing in affirmations. Is there an affirmation for saying better affirmations?” So what should we do instead?
Face the anxiety head-on and meet it with compassion and love. We’re trying so hard to be emotionally evolved that we forgot to just give ourselves permission to feel what we feel. Anxiety isn’t the bad guy. It’s a signal that we need to make a change in our lives. It can give us awareness to do something different, awareness to work on ourselves, awareness to create change.
Anxiety can be an indicator in a relationship that something is off. It can be a ping, “Here are some messages you received in your childhood that you still need to work through.” It can be that feeling that I felt in the pit of my stomach around giving this talk that motivated me to work on it every day and ask for help when I got stuck. Therapists are trained to listen.
Using Anxiety as a Motivator for Positive Action
It’s usually you the one that does the talking. Noting anxiety has the potential to create momentum. Anxiety can be a motivator to take action, to make things better for the future. The time when anxiety backfires is when we deny or judge it.
When we deny anxiety, it tends to grow like a wildfire until we’re frozen with fear and can’t make any progress. When we judge ourselves for having a specific feeling, that’s when we’re in the should spiral. It goes something like, “It’s so stupid I’m having feelings about this, why can’t I just get over it?” Versus, “It’s okay that I’m scared, this is what I do with myself, it’s okay that I’m scared and then I ask myself, what do I need, go for a walk, go to the gym, what do I need? Go for a walk, call a friend, make progress on the thing that’s making me anxious.”
Or as my client came to the rocking decision, “I know, I’ll volunteer at my local candidate’s office.” When we give ourselves compassion and love, that’s when we start to have a better understanding of ourselves and that’s when we can start using anxiety to our benefit. So how do we start building that bridge towards a happier life? Gratitude is a great practice and I highly recommend it, but it focuses on the external.
Fostering Internal Happiness through Self-Appreciation
You’re grateful for things outside of yourself in order to be happy. So if your only way of dealing with anxiety is gratitude journaling, then essentially you’re placing your happiness on the whim of events outside of your control. Because it’s not gratitude that eliminates anxiety, but compassion. We need to focus on the things inside of ourselves in order to be happy.
And we can do this through self-appreciation exercises. So instead of asking yourself, “What are three things that I feel grateful for today,” you ask yourself, “What are three things that I did today that I feel good about?” And you can say things like, “I feel good that I opened the door for the elderly man trying to walk into the store. I feel good that I made a homemade lunch. I feel good that I helped my friend with a problem. I feel good that I took time to take a walk. I feel good that I’m watching a TED Talk right now.” You focus on the things within your power and within your control.
You’re cultivating self-love. Because the better we feel about ourselves, the more empowered and confident we become. And that’s when we’re using anxiety in a productive way. When’s the best time to do this? Anytime. Although I recommend to my clients that they do it at the end of the day. That way it gets ingrained in the unconscious mind.
Changing Neural Pathways through Self-Appreciation
This actually changes the neural pathways. So the next time caveman Mike doesn’t text you back, over time, instead of your brain seeking external validation, it will go to self-appreciation. Because you are now cultivating the validation from within. As for Mike, it won’t stop him from not texting you. But it will stop you from caring.
So my hope for this talk is that instead of running from anxiety, or masking it, or trying to beat it into submission, is that you actually deal with it. Practicing self-appreciation allows you to see more and more of who you are, and who you have the potential to be. But whether it’s through my self-appreciation practice, or finding a therapist, or just admitting it to a friend, you know “I’m not abnormal for feeling this.”
I can face it. I can create change. And my sincere hope is that if you walk this path long enough, the next time you think of your list, it will be a list of all the things that you love that you did. Thank you.