I am going to compare our struggles with worry and anxiety to a boxing match. Yes, I am. And to a chess game. To Monopoly, bridge, the ancient adversarial competition of Go, and any of the martial arts. To tennis and poker. How can I dare compare your significant psychological struggles with a board game? Because I believe it is the most pragmatic, efficient way to gain your life back.
All competitions apply strategies: the flexible and fluid broad designs for gaining control over the challenger in order to reach your goal. And all competitions include tactics: the powerful short-term actions used to gain that control or force the challenger to make an undesirable move. You implement your broad strategies by applying tactics moment-by-moment.
In the game of chess, one strong opening strategy is to occupy and control the center of the board, because your pieces tend to be more mobile the closer they are to the center. Tactically speaking, how might you begin implementing that strategy? Start by advancing one or two of your pawns. First, move the pawn in front of either your king or queen. Then develop your knights before their respective bishops, because it’s easier to find a good square on the chessboard for your knights. Don’t move any of your pieces twice. Develop both sides of your board equally. Strategies in chess are not the exact move you make; instead, they are general principles to follow.
In that same way, to win over our needless worries and unhelpful anxiety, it’s best to consider that we are engaged in a mental competition with broad strategies and more precise tactics. You will have lots of options for specific moves within this challenge.
Competitions are structured, with rules and rituals. They are organized to test our skills, our courage, and our cunning. And they can be won. But if you are losing now, how do you start winning? Make-believe is at the heart of all games, and we will absolutely engage our imaginations to accomplish our goals here. You and I must influence your neurology, and we will accomplish this through metaphors for how your neurology operates and how it changes. We begin our make-believe by externalizing and personifying the part of you that generates unhelpful worries and distress, and I’m going to refer to that competitor as Anxiety with a capital A.
A Losing Strategy
You win a competition by applying the best tactics that implement the cleverest set of strategies. I can promise you that if you are troubled by worries and anxieties—whether it’s general worries, panic, phobias, social anxieties, or OCD—Anxiety has been winning this game because it has an ingenious set of strategies. Brilliant, really. (I will explain them to you in detail as we move along.) Anxiety’s best strategy is to convince you to spend most of your energy worrying about how to protect yourself or someone else against harm. It scores points by getting you to worry and then step back instead of step forward into the action.
If you organize your actions around only a defensive strategy, you will continue to lose to this skilled tactician. I assume you are great at playing defense: you can back up, avoid, tense up, worry about the future, and stick with the tried-and-true. But you cannot win a competition by only playing defense. If you are reacting to your symptoms, trying to quiet your worries and attempting to get rid of any threats that show up, you are at a great disadvantage.
You must have an offensive plan that pushes you into the territory of your challenger. (I will explain the method behind this madness soon enough.) And then you must act within that plan, over and over again. That’s a scary thought. And crazy, really. Who in their right mind would want to step into the fire? Here’s that kind of crazy for you: Chris Sharma. In Chapter 13 I’ll tell you how he is one of our many models as a competitor.
To become a winning player, you need a good coach. That’s me. Obviously, I have to prove myself to you, and that’s my intention. I’ll explain the nature of this competition, show you exactly how Anxiety is using worry and distress to beat you now, offer you a clear understanding of the mistakes you are making (and, yes, you are making mistakes, because we all do), unfold the strategies that will give you your life back, and help you engage in the proper tactics within those strategies.
You probably have guessed this already but winning this competition requires that you change. And what should surprise you is that the most important change you must make is at the level of your attitude, not your behavior. Yes, you will change your actions. But the actions you take will be in service of your new attitude. Your job will be to purposely and voluntarily choose to seek out uncertainty and distress. This sounds crazy, because it’s paradoxical. And it will be hard for you, because to move purposefully into unknown territory under Anxiety’s control, you must willingly choose to feel clumsy, awkward, unsure, and afraid. You will know you are aggressing into new, unfamiliar territory when you voluntarily and purposely decide to scare yourself.
To win this competition is hard. But the good news is that it’s not complex. I will coach you on how to face your fears with a simple frame of mind that no longer feeds your anxious worrying and your avoidance.
Do you know you are already competing with Anxiety? Your challenger is winning, and you haven’t even been given the rules. That’s not fair. That’s going to change now. We’ll begin by studying the moves of Anxiety to know your play. But first, a story.
Only two competitors remain at the final table in the eleventh hour of gameplay: twenty-two-year-old Welsh poker sensation John Tabatabai, the current chip leader, and this new Norwegian girl whom no one was betting on earlier in the day.
The main floor of the casino is teeming with tourists, but it’s standing room only here in the disco room at the Casino at the Empire in central London. The TV lights are blinding, the roving cameras are an added distraction, and media members mill about. They must sense an imminent victory. By now the blinds are a steep £15,000/£30,000. At stake are one million pounds and, almost more gratifying, a coveted World Series of Poker bracelet.
Two months prior, “Annette_15” was playing online almost exclusively. She’s played thousands of Internet poker tournaments, winning more than twenty-three major online tournaments and earning just shy of $850,000. But today, on the eighth day of the World Series of Poker Europe inaugural event, Annette Obrestad is live and in the flesh, the calm and collected mystery girl at the final table.
Obrestad is holding pocket sevens, and John Tabatabai has a five of spades and a six of diamonds. Annette raises to £100,000. Tabatabai calls. The place reeks of men’s cologne; the air buzzes with electricity. After the flop, Obrestad has three of a kind, and Tabatabai has two pair. Obrestad bets £250,000, Tabatabai raises to £750,000, and Obrestad responds, “I’m all in.”
The seated onlookers, unable to contain themselves, stand in unison. Tabatabai removes his glasses. “I call,” he says, smiling but visibly uneasy. Both final table competitors are all in. The winner will be decided in the next two cards. The World Series of Poker will all be over in a matter of seconds.
The “15” in Obrestad’s username signifies when she started playing Internet poker. Annette_15 was a high school teenager with an online gaming presence, winning free tournaments while learning patience and stamina. In the summer of 2007, Obrestad won a 180-person sit-and-go online tournament and asserts that she looked at her cards only once during the event. She’ll often play this way, with her cards hidden, which forces her to put 100 percent of her attention on the other players at the table.
An integral part of the game of poker is studying each of your challengers, and Annette Obrestad is a scholar of observation. Whether or not she’s involved in a particular hand, she scans the table, reads intentions, and picks up what to the layperson is completely indiscernible. Not unlike a skilled chess player, when Obrestad is on top of her game, she considers every possible play in every unique scenario. She knows which hands are typically played and which are not. She weighs small bets versus big bets and deliberates on the meaning behind every action, every raise, every fold. Predicting your competitors’ moves is near impossible, but if you can identify their trademarks and tendencies—aggressive or timid, raising or calling, playing too many hands or not enough—you can use this information against them. This is where the game is played for those who truly know how to play it.
Obrestad learned the game at the keyboard, battling a sea of faceless virtual opponents. She assesses her opponents before the first card is even dealt. “People give away ‘tells’ way too often,” she says. “If you’re good at picking up that stuff, you can win so many more pots.” It’s this attitude that gives Obrestad a reputation as an aggressive player. Watching her compete one-on-one against veterans like Phil Hellmuth, wearing her thick black sunglasses that mask her eyes, Obrestad’s confidence and stillness is almost unsettling. She’s not mugging for the camera. She’s not visiting players at other tables, shaking hands, making friends. She’s too busy reading her competitors’ cues and anticipating their next moves. That’s not aggression; that’s careful attention.
Right now it’s roughly a quarter past midnight. Obrestad clasps her hands together and bows her head, the same thick black glasses concealing her emotions. The turn is the two of spades. Obrestad still has the lead. This corner of the casino is silent. The entire room is on its feet. The river is the queen of hearts. Obrestad cracks a smile—the first “tell” she’s let slip in the last eleven hours. As stacks are counted and the winner is determined, Obrestad sits back in her chair, her eyes welling with the realization that she is now the youngest competitor and the first female player to win a World Series of Poker bracelet. The poker world has crowned a new champion. Her name is Annette Obrestad, and tomorrow is her nineteenth birthday.
Anxiety is the cleverest of challengers. Why? Because it studies our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities, our needs. It captures our natural responses to threat, exaggerates them, and turns them against us. It hijacks any softness in our personality traits. It feeds us false information, conveying that certain activities are more threatening than they actually are. And it creates a set of beliefs that causes us to back away to safety instead of step forward into the face of threat. Your challenger is looking to exploit any vulnerability you might have within these domains.
Using Annette as our model, we are going to study these moves of Anxiety so we can create a winning set of strategies. Are you game?