I’ve always felt like I had to be better.

But when I think back to all the times I’ve tried to change my life – I’ve always been met with the same insurmountable obstacle.

My own mind.

And it always followed a similar pattern.

I would notice something I didn’t like about my life, become filled with stress and anxiety, bang my head against the wall without making any progress and then finally give up.

Whenever I tried to improve my life – it was always from a place of desperation and stress. 

Like I had to escape my current situation, as if I wasn’t good enough.

But as a result, I was unable to look at my situation objectively. I couldn’t see the bigger picture and was incapable of finding a solution.

I kept banging my head against the wall, repeating the same mistakes over and over again – getting trapped in an eternal cycle of staying the same

I didn’t realize that the stress and anxiety that drove me to change was ironically the very thing that prevented me.

By being too desperate to change – I never did.

The Paradox Of Stress

You can’t solve the big problems in your life because you’re taking them too seriously.

Most people live life in a state of chronic stress and anxiety.

They live in a constant state of trying to get somewhere. Of desperately trying to improve themselves and the world around them.

They always feel like they should be doing something.

But if you observe society you will notice that this mindset doesn’t work.

Because if 90% of people have the desperation and stress to change and 90% of people don’t – being stressed and anxious doesn’t work.

Let me paint you a picture.

When you live life with a constant feeling of wanting to get somewhere, or in other words, being chronically stressed and anxious – you shut down your mind.

When your mind is constantly in panic mode – the other parts of your brain shut down.

You turn off creativity, clear thinking and presence. 

Everything becomes blurry and psychic entropy ensues. Your anticipation of the future soon turns into anxiety and you start to worry because you’re worrying because you’re worrying. 

And in order to escape the vicious circle of anxiety and uncertainty – you latch onto any little piece of clarity you have:

• Your parents advice

• The plan society has for your life

• What your thoughts and emotions tell you

And so… 

You unconsciously conform to escape your self imposed stressful situation. 

This traps you in what I call “the cyclic wheel of staying the same”. Or in other words… 

You start reacting to life. 

Because you can’t think clearly or see your situation objectively — you become incapable of making conscious decisions.

You become bound to follow your thoughts, emotions or any path given to you by society or people around you. All in order to escape your stress and anxiety. And as a result… 

You start living life unconsciously.

You become doomed to act out your decisions of the past because the stress prevents you from seeing the bigger picture.

You become a slave to the programming of your subconscious mind and get trapped in the cyclic wheel of staying the same.

No matter how far ahead you get, money, success or whatever – you’re still trapped in the cycle. 

Because you didn’t choose your own path. 

You adopted one from society, your parents or your subconscious programming to follow. You simply bound yourself to the wheel with golden chains instead of iron chains.

And so we arrive at the ridiculous situation of having your desperation for change ironically be the very thing preventing you from achieving it.

When you surrender to stress – you give up the possibility for true action.

When you surrender to stress — you give up your life.

True Change Is Conscious

You can’t change your life unconsciously.

It requires conscious thought and action from your part.

Something that isn’t possible when your mind is filled with stress and anxiety

Because true change is change you choose to make. 

Not one your parents told you to make, nor society. Neither the school system, nor the government. Not your friends, nor as a reaction to your enemies.

True change stems from the depths of your being. Not from blindly following any path given to you.

Achieving true change and escaping the cyclic wheel of staying the same, requires you to withstand the pulls of stress to become unconscious. 

You need to stand tall in all the situations life throws at you.

When life happens, dreams fall apart and psychic entropy ensues – if you can stay conscious, if you can resist the pull of anxiety and stress – you are in the only position to actually deal with the situation.

Because you’re no longer forced into a narrow perspective, unconsciously trapped in a cycle of acting out your past. 

You’re able to see situations objectively and truly act. You can make decisions not ruled by the voice in your head, but from the depths of your being. 

You become capable of true change.

When you free yourself from always trying to get somewhere, always trying to become someone – you are in the only position to actually do so.

When you’re no longer ruled by your subconscious or conforming to the people around you – you’re finally able to forge the only path that will ever work – your own.

This is how you finally escape the ridiculous situation of being a dog wagged by its own tail. 

And of having your future determined by your past.

You will get this sense of play behind everything you do and life itself will become a state of relaxation.

“But if I’m never stressed I won’t get anything done”

If being stressed and anxious got you to where you are now, why would you assume that things will automatically change in the future?

Have some fucking faith in yourself.

If you let go of the hammer you have constantly hovering over your head, you won’t just fall apart.

You will become free.

The Power In The Present Moment

Your life sucks because you live in the future, can’t let go of the past and don’t accept the present.

Let me paint you a picture.

The physical definition of stress is when something wants to be at two places at once. If I pull a rope towards two opposite ends, I create stress in between. The same is true with your mind. 

Mental stress is created when you’re not accepting what is, when your internal conditions don't match your outward demands. In other words, the mind wants to be somewhere it’s not. 

“I want to rest, but I need to work”, “I want a better future, but I’m trapped in the present” – Now I’m stressed.

Stress happens when you’re denying the present moment.

To release your stress & anxiety – you need to accept what is. You need to let go of the future and past (because they don’t exist).

When you bring all your attention and awareness into the now – all concepts of future and past disappear. 

And so does the stress and anxiety about them.

When you’re no longer fighting what is – you patch the mental split created by living in the future or holding onto the past.

There is no imagined future problem that needs solving. 

There is no past version of yourself to uphold.

Just this moment and nothing else.

The Physiology Of Stress

Stress is created by the mind, but it’s perpetuated by the body.

Your perception of reality is what triggers it. But the mechanism exists in your body.

When you fail to accept the present moment and stress and anxiety starts to creep in – your nervous system ramps up.

It shuts down digestion, development and important functions of your brain. It floods your body with adrenaline and makes you ready to move.

Once you’re in a stressful state – your whole body is in panic mode and it becomes almost impossible to think your way out of it.

But there are things you can do to calm down the body which will also influence the mind. 

Everything about health is connected – it’s one of the most complex systems on this planet.

By developing your degree of presence and using the tools we’ll talk about to decrease stress in the body – you can move consciously and calmly through life.

Which doesn’t mean that you’ll just flow through life like a feather in the wind.

But like water, adapting, changing and overcoming any obstacle in order to reach your destination.

When you master the art of flowing through life you become unbreakable.

Like water.

Let’s dive into the tools.

The 5 Dokkodo Of Mastering Stress And Anxiety

These principles build on each other.

The most fundamental ones are the principles that influence the body. 

This is because they will be the most effective ones for the majority of people. 

The higher leverage principles such as presence are probably the most important ones – but they require work. 

You can’t just snap your fingers and remove all past and future. As you’ll come to find, it will take time (which is extremely ironic).

However, the principles for decreasing stress in the body will force your body and mind to calm down which makes them great tools.

So without further we do… 

Dokkodo 1: Breathing

When we become stressed, our bodies often make it worse.

Think of a time you tried to hold a presentation or talk to someone but your body wouldn’t stop shaking.

One of the ways that this happens is with your breathing.

When you become stressed you start breathing more shallowly. This increases carbon dioxide and decreases oxygen in your body (which makes you more stressed).

If you’re not fully breathing, you will become stressed – no matter what.

But by mastering our breathing, we can shut down the stress response and keep it from going out of control.

The best thing would be to always be breathing fully. 

But life happens.

This is where the physiological sigh comes into the picture.

It’s a natural pattern of breathing you and a lot of other animals do to calm down. By doing it deliberately, you activate a calming response throughout the body.

This is how:

1. Take a long and deep inhale through the nose until your lungs are completely full

2. Take another short and forceful inhale nose while your lungs are still full

3. Slowly let go of the air through thinly pressed lips (as if breathing through a small straw)

Why this works:

When you become stressed and start breathing shallowly, the air sacks in your lungs collapse. Because of this, you can’t take up all the oxygen you need.

But when you take that extra forceful inhale after completely filling your lungs you force the collapsed sacks to blow up.

This lets more oxygen enter your body and slows your heart rate down.

The other point is the outbreath.

Let’s review a little bit of mechanism. Understanding this will make you much more equipped to use breathing for decreasing (or increasing) stress. Trust me.

When you breathe in, your diaphragma (the breathing muscle in your stomach) moves down. This lets your heart expand. But because there is now more volume for the blood to flow through, the blood flow slows down. 

To compensate for this, the heart starts beating faster. You become more alert, stressed and on edge.

The opposite is true when you breathe out. When you breathe out, your diaphragm moves up which compresses the heart. Because there is now less volume for the blood to flow through the blood flow becomes faster. 

To compensate for this your heart rate slows down, making you calmer, more serene and peaceful.

This is intuitive as well. 

It’s the sigh of relief; “Puuh…”

This is why breathing techniques for ramping up involve longer inhales than outhales (think of the ‘Wim Hof technique’)

This is why most breathing techniques for calming down involve longer outhales than inhales.

The long outbreath in the physiological sigh compensates for the long inbreath and takes advantage of the increased calming effect.

The physiological sigh is a tool you can use wherever you are, whenever you feel like it.

It forces your body into a calm state which is an invaluable tool.

It allows you to not fall into the consciousness that stress brings about and gives you the clarity to act.

Use it as much as you want (but 3 repetitions is usually enough).

Dokkodo 2: Increasing The Stress Threshold

Whatever you do, stressors will always be there.

There will always be urgent things to do, uncomfortable conversations to have and things you are afraid of to face.

Completely letting go of stress is difficult.

When your body gets flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, your brain starts firing against your will.

Emotions, thoughts and feelings all penetrate your consciousness. To put it another way, your mind will go crazy.

It’s as if the horse you were riding has suddenly turned into a wild bull.

By practicing being present and controlling your mind you can begin to calm it down. But why not make the horse you’re riding tolerate higher levels of stress? This way, your mind won’t turn against you – and you won’t have to calm it down.

The key to this is learning to tolerate higher levels of adrenaline in your body.

A few ways to do this:

• Sauna

• Cold showers

• Intense exercise

• Cyclic hyperventilation

When you put yourself into a stressful situation, sauna, cold plunge, intense exercise – but manage to keep a calm mind – your body becomes more resilient to adrenaline and stress.

You can do this by dissociating from your body, distracting yourself or telling yourself that what you’re doing is good for you.

It doesn’t matter as much how you do it, just that you try to keep a calm mind.

By doing one of these practices about once a day you begin to build up a tolerance to adrenaline and increase your stress tolerance.

When life throws stuff at you (as it usually does), you won’t fall into unconsciousness. 

You’re able to see the situation clearly and truly act.

Dokkodo 3: Fighting Stress With Stress

“Do the thing, and you will have the power” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

When you’re stressed, the solution is often counterintuitive.

Get even more stressed.

Throw yourself into the fire of your anxiety and muster the strength to endure it. 

Don’t try to swim against the current – embrace it and gain its power.

Sometimes the stress you feel is too strong for you to let go of (at least without a lot of practice).

Sometimes the easiest way of avoiding the fire is to go through it (I love mixing metaphors that don’t make any sense).

But this is an important point.

When you choose to go through the stress consciously, you gain its power. After you’ve gone through it – you’re like a sword hardened by the fire.

This has to do with the previous point of stress tolerance. You become used to higher levels of adrenaline in your body and the stress doesn’t face you anymore. It doesn’t make you unconscious and so you can actually use the energy stress creates. 

Because adrenaline is what mental energy is (as we talked about in the letter on “how to get more energy”)

But there is another point that I still have trouble getting my head around.

Facing your fears, anxiety and stress – changes you on a fundamental level.

It changes you down below the cellular level.

It changes how your genes code for proteins.

The changes are so strong that they can be passed down to your children (This is called epigenetics if you’re interested).

This is the scientific definition of courage.

And it begs the question, if you faced every single fear you ever had:

• If you started the business you were terrified of building

• If you talked to every person you were afraid of approaching

• If you thrusted yourself into the unknown at every given moment

Who would you be?

Well, there’s only one way to find out. 

And do you have anything better to do than to actualize your potential?

Dokkodo 4: Meditation

You’re stressed and anxious because you identify with your thoughts.

Let me paint you a picture.

You are not your thoughts, they’re more like air pockets that bubble up from the surface of your subconscious.

But when you make the mistake of thinking they’re you, all sorts of things happen.

You become bound to act out whatever they tell you because you think they’re you. In other words, you become unconscious.

You can’t see your situation objectively or make original decisions and so you end up never being able to truly change. 

You end up ruled by the programming of your subconscious.

But if for a change, you were to watch the coming and going of your thoughts as something as natural as the weather – you would escape the vicious circle.

The climber doesn’t think he is the rain, and so he doesn’t throw himself down the mountain.

In exactly the same way, when you learn to detach from your thoughts you become able to act on your own.

Thoughts can’t exist in the present. This might be difficult to grasp, but think about it.

Your thoughts are always about some imagined future or highlighting of the past. They are never about what is happening right now.

You can’t think and be in the present moment at the same time.

This is why meditation is crucial. 

It creates a separation between you and your thoughts so that you can distinguish them, not as yourself – but simply your mind having a field day.

There are 3 levels of meditation:

1. Listening

2. Detachment

3. Listening of awareness

Level 1 and 2 will come naturally.

Level 3 will take some work.

Let’s dive in.

1. Listening

The easiest way to get into a meditative state is to just listen.

Close your eyes and listen to the general hum and buzz of the world as if you were listening to music.

Don’t try to judge the sounds. There are no right or wrong sounds, only the silent melody of the universe (the uni-verse being one song).

As you begin to listen to all that is going on around you, you will be able to begin to do the same with the noise going on inside your head.

Listen to the thoughts and emotions bubbling up inside your consciousness.

Don’t try to control them.

Because that will only make it worse. As Alan Watts says, “it’s like trying to smooth the water with a flat iron”.

2. Detachment

Once you’ve gotten used to listening to your thoughts, you can begin to let them go.

Once you notice a thought, you validate it but then let it go.

This is the most common form of meditation.

If you were to follow a guided meditation on youtube, this is what you’d be told.

This level will take some work but is not ridiculously difficult.

The same cannot be said for the final level.

3. Listening of awareness

This is where things start to get a little loose.

It’s difficult to explain it in words as I don’t even know if I’ve reached it myself.

But the final level of meditation is becoming aware of awareness itself.

The first two levels are about watching your thoughts and emotions.

But it begs the question, who is this watcher?

Can you watch that one?

Awareness of awareness is going double meta. It’s beginning to uncover the true answer to the most fascinating question in existence; “who am I”?

Though you should still aspire to reach this level, level 1 and 2 will do fine in the context of what we’re talking about.

Of entering the represent moment, dissolving thought, emotion and in so doing, stress and anxiety.

But keep in mind that there is a level beyond that. A mysterious and deluded one, but a possibility nonetheless.

Dokkodo 5: Presence

The goal of meditation is to enter the present.

It’s a boat you use to cross the river of your mind and into the present.

But once people get to the other side, they keep carrying the boat.

Meditation is a tool to enter the present, but it’s not something you maintain once you’re there.

The goal is simply to be – to exist.

The goal is to be completely there.

To still hear the buzz of your mind telling you that you should be doing something, that you should be here and there – but not care for it. 

To simply observe it, and laugh at it.

Think about what we call an insane person. We usually say something like; “he’s not all there”.

Well try to imagine a person that’s all there.

That is what you are aiming for.

But it will require you to master all the previous principles.

It will take time, but when you get there you will for the lack of a better word – block your potential.

You will become capable of true action.

Of not letting stress and anxiety pull you down below your consciousness and trap you in an eternal cycle of staying the same.

And you will have escaped the ridiculous situation of being a dog wagged by its own tail.

That’s all for this one.

Read through the previous letter if you want more like this.

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And enjoy the rest of your week.

-Simon