The Devil You Don’t Know
Don't Worry About Tomorrow
Have you ever wondered how a simple island life could hold the key to managing anxiety in our hectic modern world? Join us as we share our unforgettable experience at the Elm Beach Bar and Suites in Cane Garden Bay, British Virgin Islands, where we met the delightful Elvett and uncovered his intriguing connection to Jimmy Buffett's Cheeseburger in Paradise.
In this episode, we reflect on the emotional impact of Inside Out 2 and how it spurred a deeper conversation about anxiety, "future tripping," and the importance of staying present. Drawing from personal stories and biblical perspectives, we navigate through practical strategies to manage stress, such as digital detox, mindfulness, and meditation, while recounting humorous and heartfelt moments from our island adventures.
Through a blend of personal anecdotes and expert insights, we delve into the pervasive nature of anxiety in the modern world and how the simple act of disconnecting can lead to profound relaxation and well-being. From the nerve-wracking ferry rides in Tortola to discovering the joys of gin in the British Virgin Islands, we share our journey of resilience and mindfulness. Tune in for a refreshing take on overcoming anxiety, with tips on integrating mindfulness practices into your daily routine and stories that inspire you to embrace the present moment and cultivate a more relaxed, fulfilling life.
Please email us at Gettoknowthedevil@gmail.com
Have you ever wondered how a simple island life could hold the key to managing anxiety in our hectic modern world? Join us as we share our unforgettable experience at the Elm Beach Bar and Suites in Cane Garden Bay, British Virgin Islands, where we met the delightful Elvett and uncovered his intriguing connection to Jimmy Buffett's Cheeseburger in Paradise.
In this episode, we reflect on the emotional impact of Inside Out 2 and how it spurred a deeper conversation about anxiety, "future tripping," and the importance of staying present. Drawing from personal stories and biblical perspectives, we navigate through practical strategies to manage stress, such as digital detox, mindfulness, and meditation, while recounting humorous and heartfelt moments from our island adventures.
Through a blend of personal anecdotes and expert insights, we delve into the pervasive nature of anxiety in the modern world and how the simple act of disconnecting can lead to profound relaxation and well-being. From the nerve-wracking ferry rides in Tortola to discovering the joys of gin in the British Virgin Islands, we share our journey of resilience and mindfulness. Tune in for a refreshing take on overcoming anxiety, with tips on integrating mindfulness practices into your daily routine and stories that inspire you to embrace the present moment and cultivate a more relaxed, fulfilling life.
Please email us at Gettoknowthedevil@gmail.com
This is Cleveland.
Lindsay Oakes:And this is Lindsay.
Cleveland Oakes:And this is another episode of the Devil you Don't Know brought to you live, Not really live pre-recorded, but from the British Virgin Islands.
Lindsay Oakes:In the Cane Garden Bay, my favorite place.
Cleveland Oakes:Lindsay's favorite place in the whole world. We actually met a gentleman just yesterday that said that he knew well the place that we're renting. The gentleman, elvette, said that'll let lindsey tell the story because she is a big jimmy buffett fan. But who did elvett say he actually met here in the cane garden bay?
Lindsay Oakes:well, he just gave it away jimmy buffett, who used to sail his big boat right in and write songs and eat cheeseburgers at Stanley's Welcome Bar right next door, which is no longer here after the hurricane, sadly.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, but Elvett actually said that the song Cheeseburger in Paradise was written right here.
Lindsay Oakes:Yes, but Jimmy Buffett also says that if you listen to him, he says he wrote it in Tortola. Yeah, but let's talk about this lovely establishment for a few minutes and Elvett the owner of the establishment. So we are staying in the Cane Garden Bay in the British Virgin Islands. It's a pretty. Even though it's the most populated and Tortola is pretty much the capital of the British Virgin Islands, it is really still underdeveloped.
Cleveland Oakes:Very rustic, I'd like to say.
Lindsay Oakes:There's not much development at all, there's not big hotels, there's not really bustling nightlife. It's pretty sleepy Even in the busy season. It's busy with, maybe, people who are sailing in and out and staying for a week or two, but it's still sleepy most of the time, staying for a week or two, but it's still sleepy most of the time. And Elvette owns this establishment called the Elm Beach Bar, which is famous for its barbecues, I think, three times a week, and they have a band called the Elm Tones who sing a lot of classic rock and people come have dinner, have drinks and they dance and it's right in the sand.
Lindsay Oakes:So he also happens to have this building called the Elm Beach Suites and he has what? Seven apartments here. Yeah, I would say about seven. So seven apartments Now I think six of them are one-bedroom apartments and then there's a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment which he has not finished renovating yet, but every single one of these apartments he's been renovating. So the six one bedroom units are done. We're staying in this beautiful, quaint little unit that I feel like I could live a minimalist life here.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, so. So I just want to stop you for one second and let you finish. So if you hear chickens in the background and you hear a fan, uh, we are. We are really in the countryside.
Lindsay Oakes:So I just want to explain that, except we're at the beach, so we're probably about 30, 40 steps to the ocean.
Cleveland Oakes:Oh yeah.
Lindsay Oakes:And Elvett has been running this business. He bought it in the 90s. He was telling us a story yesterday and he bought it. He was big into sailing and fishing and he used to compete in sailing championships and such and he was telling us that his now his children. He has two children. They both live in the UK now and his son is a businessman who is insistent that Elvett make money renting out these apartments, which Elvett is very much against. So when we arrived yesterday, Cleve, you could say how upset you were.
Cleveland Oakes:Well, I wasn't really upset. I got here and just working in hospitality and in client services and in facilities, you know you get to a place and you just really have certain expectations of how a room should already be set up right, the AC should have already been on, the room should have been aired out, and there's some of those things were not done and immediately I was kind of not completely dissatisfied, but I was. I was a little annoyed. But then we met Elvett and then I recognized and I realized what his process was and I wasn't annoyed anymore because he said that his son is insisting on renting these units out from the UK.
Lindsay Oakes:Insisting on renting these units out from the UK. So Elvett is here on the island operating his bar, which seems to be opened whenever he feels like opening it, maybe twice, three times a week. Maybe We'll see.
Cleveland Oakes:We'll see.
Lindsay Oakes:He did say Sunday they're going to have a big end of the season barbecue with the band.
Lindsay Oakes:So, we'll see if it happens Perhaps. And when we met elvett yesterday, he said that he allowed his son to put two of the units on airbnb. And let's just say this it's not cheap to renovate here because you have to get all of the material imported. So this man has clearly spent a lot of money renovating these beachfront apartments and, by the way, this place is ridiculously affordable, so I'm not even going to elaborate on that anymore. But he said his son put two of them on the Airbnb and it became so wildly popular that his son would now like to put all of them on and he is just not really interested in hosting guests, he said in the establishment that he owns.
Lindsay Oakes:That is like a hotel.
Cleveland Oakes:That he probably spent several million renovating. And really looking at Elvett's lack of urgency and lack of anxiety is one of the things that inspired me to really come up with this episode, because Elvett ain't anxious about nothing. My man is. He's like yo if I make money, I make money if I if you know, he actually even talked about the process of how he sold this place wrote a clause to the next person that was like hey, if you can't make money here, I know that I can and I will buy this business back if you fail within five years, he said I will buy this business back for the same price that I sold it to you for.
Lindsay Oakes:And they, they agreed. And he said they lasted three years, yep, and then he bought it back and he's been running it since the nineties.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, he's been running it since the nineties, but no stress, no stress.
Lindsay Oakes:No, this man is not stressed, which leads me to say that I don't really see anybody stressed on this Island. We went out for dinner last night. We went to the Indigo beach house. Don't really see anybody stressed on this island. We went out for dinner last night. We went to the Indigo Beach House, a favorite place of mine, my favorite bar.
Cleveland Oakes:Shout out to Vishal Vishal, who will be in New York shortly and we'll be hosting him.
Lindsay Oakes:But Vishal was at the Indigo. He's the. I guess he's running the place and part owner now. Vishal came from Guyana many, many years ago.
Cleveland Oakes:I shared a picture with you last night of me and Vishal 11 years ago here with some of my friends and with Ali, who we met at the bar, who also has no anxiety coming from Texas because she just works on a sailboat she just works on a sailboat and is like that.
Lindsay Oakes:ish is amazing started to talk about politics in America and realize that, even though we're about what an hour ferry ride to St Thomas, which is US, not anybody in that bar and restaurant last night that was from here or lives here and is from America had any idea about what was going on with the presidential debate, which I found to be so funny and refreshing in a kind of way, right, yeah?
Lindsay Oakes:And I always say what I love about the islands is you come here and people really aren't stressed. The bartenders hang out with the doctors, who hang out with the sanitation workers, who hang out with the doctors, who hang out with the sanitation workers, who hang out with the vagrants, and it's just such a wonderful place because you can just walk around anywhere it's. I mean, we were, I was swimming, you weren't. I was swimming. After dark last night I just walked outside and jumped in the ocean.
Lindsay Oakes:I didn't want to get eaten by a shark at nine o'clock at night in the dark but anyway, that led us to this topic about anxiety, because in America I can't think of one person that I know that doesn't have some level of anxiety.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, and in this episode that is what I want to take a deep dive into the pervasive anxiety in our modern world and one of the things in addition, that, even talking about Elvett and talking about the lack of anxiety here, I actually started thinking about this idea last week when I talked to a colleague of mine who went to go see the movie Inside Out 2, which I hear is very good, and there's a plug for Inside Out 2 if you're listening, and it's really about anxiety and she found herself in the theater very emotional, crying, especially when it got to the part where it's like do you control your anxiety or does your anxiety control you?
Cleveland Oakes:And we had the four of us I have four of the colleagues that we, three other colleagues that we all do the same function in the office that I work on and she actually said, you know, listening to that watching that movie made her realize that she was carrying a lot of anxiety for stuff that she had no control over, at which point I shared with her the scripture in the Bible that said where Jesus said don't worry about anxiety because don't worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will bring its own anxiety.
Lindsay Oakes:It absolutely will. And I think when you talked about anxiety controlling people's lives, right, that just resonated with me, because I do think a lot of people allow all of that thinking and all of that swirling around in the head to impact so much of what they do and to impact their emotions.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, and so in this episode, some of the things I want to talk about Lindsay wants to talk about future tripping. Some of the things I want to talk about Lindsay wants to talk about future tripping. I want to talk about doom scrolling and I want to talk about other bad internet habits that cause us to become anxious. I'm sure if you're in America right now and if you are a Democrat, you know you are nervous as heck because you're looking at all these clips of Joe Biden fumbling and stumbling and bumbling and the party is like, yeah, we're sticking with this guy. And if you're a Republican, you're probably yeah, this is amazing, this is great, but do these things really matter at the end of the day?
Lindsay Oakes:No, they don't. Yeah, and so before we segue into that, let's just talk for a moment about vegan eating here. Go ahead.
Lindsay Oakes:I'm going to tell you what I'm going to eat for the next two weeks which is as much mango and passion fruit and papaya salad dressing that I can have on any kind of mixed green that they will give me, because I have never seen that in America. But when I come here and they're like, oh, it has a mango vinaigrette or a passion fruit vinaigrette, I'm so excited because there's mangoes literally falling from the trees everywhere, we go here.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, that's what I was going to say when we were in Older's Fancy just yesterday in St Thomas. You had that whole wall of mangoes that had fallen off the tree and you had said you were going to take one.
Lindsay Oakes:I didn't want to take it on the ferry. They were very strict. The ferry is run by the. What was it run by? Coast Guard?
Cleveland Oakes:It was run by the Coast Guard.
Lindsay Oakes:I wasn't really interested in trying to bring things across international waters, let's talk about Chad for a moment.
Cleveland Oakes:there, you know, I'm going to just name this guy.
Lindsay Oakes:There was one.
Cleveland Oakes:American. So it's amazing, you know there was this one American family. Well, nine, almost nine years ago, I would say eight years ago this way, and I need things that way. I was totally unprepared for my first experience here in Tortola, where you know where everything is, just like you know easy, like where everything is is everything you know. Um, and I would definitely say that I I remember being in. Where did I pass out at? Was it in? Uh? Is in Ketos.
Cleveland Oakes:I remember being in Ketos having a panic attack and having a panic attack at the lack of structure.
Cleveland Oakes:And you were in the men's room. I was here and I actually fainted, I think, a little bit. I had a little bit of bad alcohol but I actually fainted, or too much alcohol, you mean. Yeah, I had just gotten here but I had actually fainted and then just was like whoa, like what was going on, and I was anxious for the rest of that trip. On subsequent trips, after I learned to relax and learn that it's fine to be in a place without structure, I was like this is amazing. And I think part of what was going on with Chad in the family yesterday is I was like oh, obviously he's never been here before.
Lindsay Oakes:Well, right, we have to take that ferry from St Thomas over here.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah.
Lindsay Oakes:And all of the people that work here on the ferries, and otherwise you just have to behave and do what they say.
Lindsay Oakes:Just do what they say it doesn't matter if you want to or you don't agree with it, you just do what they say. And although it seems completely disorganized to you and like it's's not going to work, somehow it works out Right. I called to confirm our rental car because they don't really send emails and, um, they don't take any payments ahead of time and they use a paper calendar. And when I called Shanice, she's like yeah, man, I got you. And I was like but just want to make sure, cause we're coming in on the boat at night. Okay, I got you and I was like Shanice, like it sounds like you're cooking. She's like yeah, man. I said I got you. See you on the fourth. And that was Shanice. And then I was worried about how we were going to get in the room. And what did they say to me?
Cleveland Oakes:The key's in the door. It's just right there.
Lindsay Oakes:Just walk up and the ferry.
Cleveland Oakes:Like. He's like going behind the counter, he's changing tags around the luggage and the luggage and everybody's telling him and as kind as these people are when you push their boundaries, they will let you have. It is as Donna found out several years ago when she was spazzing out. So we had some friends. They came here with us from several years ago and everything here runs at a leisurely pace.
Lindsay Oakes:They left her luggage at the ferry dock and it didn't come till the next boat. She was, like so worried about her luggage, right. So if it's your first time here, you'd be worried about your luggage too, right?
Cleveland Oakes:Yes.
Lindsay Oakes:So this guy is trying to go behind the counter and tell them how to do their job, and all I kept saying was if this guy knew that when you get out on the other side, that it didn't matter the luggage is all going to be literally thrown in a massive pile at the ferry dock and you just it's like a free for all, like go find your suitcase and get out.
Lindsay Oakes:He would have just been like, okay, whatever, but he's sitting there insisting that the other people he was traveling with sort their luggage appropriately. And this is ours and that's theirs. And the lady was finally like you know what? I'm done with you, man, I'm done with you.
Cleveland Oakes:I take the next person and she just left him there. Yeah, she just took us and I knew how to behave.
Lindsay Oakes:So we just gave her our luggage, I didn't argue with her, and the next thing, you know, we came out on the other end and we picked it up out of a giant pile of luggage that was thrown on the floor.
Cleveland Oakes:But that's what I want to talk about. Anxiety for a second, because isn't it crazy that this guy is on the first day of his vacation, right, and he is literally behind a counter switching out luggage tags that, at the end of the day, we can't curse anymore? But don't fudging matter, it did not matter, and I hope, when he got out on the other side and saw how the suitcases were sorted, that it didn't matter. But why are we as Americans, or why is we in this culture? Why are we so anxious? Lindsay, I really want to.
Lindsay Oakes:We are so high strung because people make us high strung. Yeah, Nobody in our culture knows how to relax and we have access to too much. Nobody in our culture knows how to relax and we have access to too much. There's too much programming here. We are okay with the most horrible Wi-Fi that I've had on a vacation in a long time, but you know what I'm not going to do?
Cleveland Oakes:What are you not going to?
Lindsay Oakes:do Ask Elvett about it. No, no, no Because he has no interest in fixing any of the Wi-Fi. No, so occasionally we get, there's 800 wi-fi's listed for this resort resort, right, this little tiny apartment building. Uh, there's one for the bar none of them work. There's a hundred other ones for every room here. None of them work. You could try them all. They all have the same password and you might get lucky once in a while and get on one.
Lindsay Oakes:I'm gonna say it for the third time and none of them work, but it's fine, it's on one this morning and I that I never saw, so I don't know where it came from. It's called Elm Beach 1, 2.4.
Cleveland Oakes:I didn't see that. I didn't see that at all, but it's working today, so that's the one I'm on. And and and for me what I did when we were on Barbados a couple of months ago. I knew that I needed my wifi connection for school and for a couple other things, and so I just paid for the, the international plan, and just put it on my phone.
Lindsay Oakes:So I'm fine, I'm good, I don't care because I don't need any plan, because I don't bring the phone when I walk out of the room, I don't scroll when I'm here and I don't really need to have access to the outside world, and I actually kind of appreciate that. So, but let's talk a little bit about what anxiety is and maybe why the people here don't have it so much.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, so you're an expert at this. So why was Chad?
Lindsay Oakes:I don't know if I'm an expert, but I think what happens is that?
Lindsay Oakes:well, the way that I describe anxiety is it's like an activation of your nervous system. If you think of your nervous system as like an iPhone or a cell phone, right, when you charge the battery to 100%, it has full power. Everything is operating right, and so we. It's constantly right. There's constantly like power coming into it, and so when I think of the nervous system, I think of that like the same thing. If you think of your nervous system as like a battery, it's fully charged, right, because we're taking in all of this programming of how things should be and what if, and we should do things this way and we shouldn't do them that way, and we're constantly fed information by the media that makes us second guess our own instincts, and so our our battery is just jacked up all the time, and I think that that's why we live in this state Right, we're always taking in things that are meant to make us worry more, and so it makes us constantly on edge.
Cleveland Oakes:And we did talk about that in an earlier episode and one of the things and I won't say my coworker by name, but she made me laugh because she said she was in this theater watching Inside Out 2 and did not know that it was deeply about anxiety and profoundly about anxiety. And she was there with all these moms with their kids and she remembers the lady in front of her started like sobbing profusely when it got to a point in the movie where it was hey, does your, do you control your anxiety, or does your anxiety control you? And the little and the woman was with her son and the son was like mommy, why are you crying? And she says you know, the lady says I'm crying because I'm enjoying this movie and I'm learning so much. And then you know, my coworker, who we have a very high, stressful job, said you know what, that she actually took that and started thinking about it and it was like you know what. I'm not going to let my anxiety control me anymore.
Cleveland Oakes:But, lindsay, I want to ask you like what is? I know? One of the things we talked about in the pre-show is one of the things that makes people anxious is they don't live, they don't do what the Bible says, right? They don't, they worry about tomorrow, and I think you called that future tripping. So tell me, tell us, what is future tripping and how does that lead to?
Lindsay Oakes:future tripping to me is anticipating what things will be like, right, whether it's an hour from now, tomorrow, a month from now, two years from now. It's having so much of a focus on the future that you're just not present in the moment and your mind creates these stories, and the problem with them is that you create this sense, this story, this sense of what's going to happen, and you get yourself so worked up but, like 99.99999% of the time, nothing comes to fruition. The way that your head created the story, I would agree with that.
Lindsay Oakes:Right and I, and I think a good, a good point about future tripping. And when I started to really become aware of that was when, um, you know, my oldest had to go into the residential treatment program in high school and I remember thinking about what was going to happen after he finished the program and what were we going to do next. And they kept saying to me don't future trip, like, just be in the moment, do your own work now while he does his own work, and everyone just does their own work. And you kind of have this, what they? Um, there's that woman, Chrissy Positak I think, who has like it's like a parallel process you work on yourself while he works on himself and you work to better that relationship for when he's done in the program. And that's really where I started to learn about future tripping. And then, when, I you know, started getting more into reading and studying psychology and went back for another master's, that was when I started to think like, oh, you know, so much of what we think about never actually happens.
Cleveland Oakes:Oh, so much, so much of it never actually happens, right. One of my clients is a young man that I see always says that the future version of himself has already figured things out. And so because he knows the future version of himself has already figured this out, he doesn't really worry too much about things. It doesn't mean you don't plan Right. It doesn't mean that you don't think about the future. It's just that you don't become mired down about the future that you don't know.
Lindsay Oakes:Well and we talked about it last week Right, we also don't worry that the future we may have a failure. Right, this is the goal, but to get there, there may be a failure that happens on the way, right, so it's also, you know, that's also a level of anxiety that we can eliminate because, yeah, you may fail, but so then you do something different.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, you just try something different. How is future tripping like? Deadly would you say, or how is it really poorly impact mental health? Deadly would you say, or how does it really poorly impact mental health?
Lindsay Oakes:Well, I think it just gets into your head, right? It's so cerebral that you start to have this cyclical thinking, and for people with anxiety, it's all that they can think about and it gets you stuck in a story and then you never, ever take a step to get out of it, because it almost brings this intense fear of what's going to happen on. Right, I have a lot of clients with anxiety, and some of them it's very severe, right. But the thing I tell them is like, if you don't change something, then why would you expect the way that you feel to change?
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, I remember there's used to be a nice bird, by the way.
Cleveland Oakes:Oh, I hear it, I hear it and I think our audience hears it also, because the bird ain't got no anxiety about nothing.
Cleveland Oakes:Um as um, as, as a person who watched a lot of tv, I remember there was a tv show that used to come on in the 70s called the black sheep squadron.
Cleveland Oakes:That was about a fictional well, I think the black sheep squadron. It was the fictional adventures of a real uh squadron of bombers and there was a particular episode where, you know, one guy was worried about dying on a mission and the captain or the head of the company had to tell him he's like, bro, if this is what you are concerned about, if you are future tripping on that, you know what's probably going to happen on the next mission you go out. You're so obsessed about dying you probably will die. And future tripping and I've been guilty of it is inventing a story of something that hasn't happened yet and we don't even know if it will happen. I I've future trips sometimes and invented this whole thing and or thought like a conversation was going to go one way and it turns out that the person that I was thinking about, or the series of events that I had invented in my head, was a fiction and you've told me this many times as a fiction that I made up in my own head, even though it felt real.
Lindsay Oakes:Well, you and I have very different reactions to anxiety. Right, I get like super snippy and moody and emotional and I take it out on you and I think your process is that you have to talk it through a thousand times the same story. You'll keep retelling it and retelling it to try and get it straight in your head, almost like you're trying to convince yourself of something else. Right, so we both have our own way of managing anxiety.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, I want to move on from future tripping to doom scrolling, and I think doom scrolling is what a lot of us are doing, or a lot. I don't do it. Yeah, I don't do it because I just know it's all useless, but I think doom scrolling is what a lot of folks are doing. And if you don't know what doom scrolling is, doom scrolling is this you know, when you go on the Internet and you see, oh, joe Biden is is crazy. Oh, donald Trump has got 34 felony convictions but he's going to be our president. Oh, vladimir Putin says that if you know that these missiles that hit Crimea, that he's going to come back and he's going to hit us.
Lindsay Oakes:Oh, you know I used to have a client that was obsessed with and this is so straight because people I just want to like point this out while you're talking about this who became obsessed with and couldn't stop Googling videos of cave diving, I mean, and it's like right. It just shows that it can manifest in so many different ways, like because she had read something in the news that she worked in media, but she or she was like a producer, director or something. So she had read like something and then it just kind of provoked her to kind of keep looking into this and she was like I can't get it out of my head. It's like a bad train wreck. I can't stop watching Right. So that just reminded me of that. How people take things that they see Right. It's that programming I talked about earlier and they let it control them in such a way.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, and doom scrolling is really prevalent, especially as we look at the times that we're in right now. Right, you can doom scroll on 100 things. You can doom scroll on the on the I'm not even going to call it the war in Gaza, because it's not a war when something is one-sided so we can talk about the massacre in Gaza. We can talk about the stuff that the media does not focus on, which is a lot of the massacres and civil wars that are going on in Africa.
Cleveland Oakes:There is, like so much going on in the world that you can doom scroll on, but it goes back to what Dr Covey talks about in the seven habits of highly effective people, when he talks about in the seven habits of highly effective people, when he talks about the circle of influence and the circle of concern. You can't impact anything that you are concerned about, right, but you can impact the things that you can actually influence. And, linz, what are some things in your life, as you, as a, as a, as, as, as somebody who is now, like you know, on their way to full licensure Congratulations once again what are some things that a person can do to actually work on actual, real things in their life that make a difference?
Lindsay Oakes:Stop the scrolling. I don't scroll. I also don't watch the news, right? If you know that something is producing anxiety for you or causing you to feel uncomfortable, stop doing it. Stop doing it is number one, right? I don't? You know, I really don't watch TV very much at all. And you'll say to me sometimes oh my God, did you see such and such happened? And I'm like nope, and what do I tell you?
Cleveland Oakes:Don't tell me, don't tell you, you don't even want to know.
Lindsay Oakes:No, I don't want to know, because my brain doesn't need anything else. Right, I am actually very happy to live in like a mild state of oblivion. Right, I know that there's dangerous things in the world. I know that things can happen at any time. I know that we're not ever guaranteed the next second or minute of our life, but I don't need to watch things that are going to consume my thoughts and make me anxious.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, the amazing thing about coming someplace like this we're in Tortola, where you, you, you come to the Elm Street apartments and there's like 10 different internet connections and only one of them work is that we are totally disconnected from all of the nonsense that is happening in the world, that we that would cause us concern, but we can't actually do anything about it. And I'm going to repeat that for you guys again you can't actually do anything about it. You can't actually control who's on the Supreme Court. You can't actually control what's going on with abortion.
Lindsay Oakes:You can't actually control if somebody is gun control Right, you can't control something that your child is going to do, right. I'm a lot in a lot of parenting groups because we've had some struggles with, especially with, one of the children although you know it could be a couple but we've had, right, and I have been in this state of panic about it. And then I just said you know what this is like. It doesn't matter, right, because you can give somebody all the tools, but you can't control what they're going to do and if they're going to use them, right. And so you have to stop taking on other people's experiences as panic inducing for yourself.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, and I want to talk about that. That's a good point, especially when it comes to family, right, because I think one of the biggest things that causes anxiety because we're talking about in the digital age. But I want to talk about families for one second. There are things that happen in your family that you won't be able to control. We have, we between us, we have seven kids.
Lindsay Oakes:love them all, I love all so much that they do that we can't control Can't control right?
Cleveland Oakes:Love. All my sons the ones that were in the room that when, the ones I was in the room when they got made and the ones that weren't and two of them are brothers are kindred spirits, even though they have a completely different set of biological parents. And both of these guys, if it was really if we let us drive us off the edge, they would drive us off the edge. But there are strategies that we've come to put in place as parents to recognize that these young men, who are adults and are of adult age and are making adult decisions, that they have to work it out for themselves.
Cleveland Oakes:Philippians 2.12 says each one of us is responsible for our own. It says work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. It doesn't say let your mom and dad work it out. It doesn't say let your wife work it out or your husband work it out or your cousin work it out. It says each of us must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, which means that figuring out your situation is hard and it means that you definitely can't just do great, be great If you could listen to a podcast like this and be like all is all is worried or all is well in the world, but it's not.
Cleveland Oakes:That's not how it works. You have to work toward it, and with our two sons, you know we could sit here and we could worry about them all day long. But we do have to understand that they need to put the work in to fix themselves Right. We can be support, but we can't be anxious about folks that are grown and are making decisions that are impacting them. They, those people, have to be worried about themselves first and foremost.
Lindsay Oakes:Yeah, absolutely, and I was just reading an interview with Gabor Mate, who and he was saying that, right, that it's these things like anxiety and all these issues, start to occur when we lose our connection with ourselves, right? So it's like you have to know to your point, right, that what your path is is valid for you, right? And? And if that's, if that's how it is right, then you have to respond to that, based on what your feelings are and what happens with you.
Cleveland Oakes:And then, besides doom scrolling or worrying about family or worrying about adult children and worrying about, like all these other situations, a lot of the things that also cause bad, that cause anxiety or other bad habits are check, constantly checking social media, news addiction and constantly checking for connectivity. I'm sure Chad is somewhere in his hotel right now Like oh my God, oh my God, I can't connect. And one of the things that's great about about coming to the Caribbean, about coming to a place that's rustic, like Tortola- is where the owner doesn't really care if you can access the world or not is this forced disconnect from the world?
Cleveland Oakes:Like I, absolutely have no idea what's going on in America right now no. I really don't care, cause it could be burning down for all I care. This is one of the you know, like I think Lindsay said when we went to Barbados a couple of months ago, that the best version of myself was one which I did not take.
Lindsay Oakes:I love vacation.
Cleveland Oakes:I did not take vacation, because what did I not have with me? Your work devices neither, none of them.
Lindsay Oakes:And you were so relaxed. And here yesterday I could feel you getting on edge again, even though you shouldn't. You were getting on edge again, even though you shouldn't. You were getting on edge because we're taking a ferry to Anagata on Monday.
Cleveland Oakes:Oh no, we're good though now.
Lindsay Oakes:And you were so anxious about this ferry because there's no tickets in advance and you just got to show up 30 minutes. Hop on a boat with people's groceries. Chad would die, Chad would die.
Cleveland Oakes:Listen. I want to ask you guys because I'm having a conversation with the audience. Lindsay described the ferry situation out here. So if you are from America, if you are from New York city, if you are from Los Angeles, if you are from Miami, if you are from Chicago there, is anywhere in America there is a timeline.
Cleveland Oakes:I think there's some places in the in the country in the Midwest that probably run on Island time also, but it is literally like here, man, just show up it. Just I was like where's the ferry to Antigua? Just show up with your money in your hand. I was like can I buy my ticket beforehand? No, you cannot.
Lindsay Oakes:Yeah, and well it's, it's. The situation is literally that you just show up at the dock and yesterday the boat from. So we stayed in St Thomas for one night and when we got to the ferry dock the only thing that was going on yesterday were two ferries the whole day to Tortola, one at nine and one at four. And then it said the St Croix ferry was canceled. And you were like, but what if you're going to St Croix? I was like you're just not going today.
Cleveland Oakes:Hey man, you know what? You're not going to do it. You're not going to St Croix.
Lindsay Oakes:Yeah, and the thing is right. It's like and then we're going to go to Anagata and Anagata is very much like show up on the dock and catch the boat. And you're like, what? No, I need a ticket. And I'm like, no, they don't do it here. So until you called the ferry and verified that you should just show up with cash on monday morning with an overnight bag, you were so anxious yesterday.
Cleveland Oakes:I was anxious because you like things planned and regimented, but right, forcing myself into the situation and hopefully, hopefully, chad can take that stick out of his butt somewhere during this vacation, but forcing me because I was like Chad. You know, I was like Chad eight years ago and now that I've become more familiar with how it real, how things work down here and that things, you know, things get done despite the lack of urgency. And that's what I really would like to say is the people in these communities, the people in these neighborhoods and in these have the spirit of resilience. They ain't worried about all the dumb extra stuff that we're worried about. They're not worried about trans identity, they're not worried about LGBTQ, they're not worried about Black Lives Matter.
Lindsay Oakes:Honestly, they're not even worried about making a buck with their beautiful rental 45 or 50 steps to the ocean.
Cleveland Oakes:They're not worried about Blue Lives Matter they're not worried about. They're just worried about their everyday existence and getting along with their neighbor and having genuine I think, just being at peace. Yeah.
Lindsay Oakes:Right, just being at peace with themselves and just all they are is grateful for where they live and what they do have. And it's not much, because we went to the grocery store yesterday and I told you I don't know how anybody could even be overweight here, because it was we had like two bags of groceries for two hundred dollars. Ok, and they'll probably be gone tomorrow.
Cleveland Oakes:Box of cereal Seventeen dollars.
Lindsay Oakes:Well, we didn't get that. We didn't get that. I actually want to bring your attention to something else that I had been reading and it said under certain circumstances, there should be fear and anxiety, right Like if you're under threat. If you're under threat though Right.
Lindsay Oakes:But when you have anxiety and there's no immediate threat, it's really. It's not a response to anything internal, it's an embedded anxiety that we develop as children. Yeah Right, we develop as children, yeah Right. And so Gabor Mate would say in a society that makes people more isolated, where social contact is really replaced by the internet, right Like, people have less opportunity for meaningful connections and belonging.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, I want you to repeat that where social contact has been replaced by the internet.
Lindsay Oakes:Yeah, and so we have no real opportunity for real, meaningful connection, right? And so then we end up with anxiety, and it's really what he says is it's a cry for help to look at your childhood patterns and parts of yourself, because there's a reason like it's a cry for connection, real connection, right? Because if you think about all the doom scrolling you're talking about, there's no connection there, right? And you and I talked about this last week too. What do you and I do? Often together we get away very frequently to reconnect with each other, to get off of the work devices, to take time off, to talk to each other. And what's a question that we regularly ask each other? How is your mental health? How are you feeling in the marriage? Is there anything that we can do to support each other better? Right, those are three things that we regularly ask ourselves.
Cleveland Oakes:And I want to ask you I know cause I had to write a whole paper about it in undergrad about fear and anxiety. But how is fear different in anxiety, and how is fear beneficial, Whereas anxiety is not beneficial at all?
Lindsay Oakes:Well, I think fear is the anxiety that he's talking about here. Right, when he says that some there should be some fear and anxiety, like when there's an immediate threat. Right, if you're in a building and someone comes in with a firearm, sure you should be afraid and you'll probably be anxious. Right, if you are in a situation that you can't get out of, right, then that's where it serves you, that's where your nervous system gives you that fight or flight response. The problem with us is that we constantly live in a state of fight, flight or freeze. Right, mine is flight, yours is fight.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, oh yeah, mine is definitely fight, right. And what do you? What do I do?
Lindsay Oakes:when you fight, I, I flight, you flight, yeah, right, I'm gone yeah.
Cleveland Oakes:But I've had situations out in the street where, like my, my, my, my and I've caught people off guard because they were like, oh, you're actually going to fight, I'm going to fight, but that's not necessarily a good Right. And so, but like to Mate's point, like we saw that black bear in a couple of weeks ago in the Catskills, right, you know it's good to have fear if you see a black bear that is in your presence, because fear is going to motivate you to run. Well, you shouldn't run, yeah, but fear is going to motivate you to run.
Cleveland Oakes:Well, you shouldn't run, yeah, but fear is going to motivate you.
Lindsay Oakes:But don't worry, after we saw the bear, I Googled what you should do. Should you see it close up, I'm prepared now.
Cleveland Oakes:Now you're prepared, but fear is, in that case, where you're actually in danger. Fear is beneficial because fear will now help you extract yourself from the danger. Anxiety, on the other hand, is useless. You know, if Joe Biden gets reelected, you know as president and he's a bumbling old man you can't change that. If you're anxious about Donald Trump becoming elected and he is a pure villain, you can't change that. These are things that you cannot change.
Cleveland Oakes:We cannot change certain things that are going on in the world. We can like once again. We can change the things that are going on in the world. We can like once again. We can change the things that are going on in our lives. We can change the relationship that we have with our spouses, with our loved ones, with our children. But what is going on in the greater world? The things that you are anxious about, are tomorrow and tomorrow. You can do nothing about. Right. You can prepare for tomorrow today by being mindful today, and that's what I want to talk about in our next segment. Lindsay is about mindfulness and meditation, which we talk about often. But how can you use mindfulness and meditation to overcome anxiety?
Lindsay Oakes:Well, it brings you into the present moment, it gets you out of that future tripping, right, and I think you're going to be so proud of me here, right? What does Jesus say? When you know the truth, the truth will set you free, right? And so it's like, when you get to know yourself and truly know who you are, then you stop looking at all of these things to feed that anxiety, because you're kind of tired of it being there and allowing it to control your choices, right, and then, in addition, you start to enhance your relationships.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, One of the things that Jonathan Haidt talks about and that's definitely a book that I would recommend to all you guys in his book the Anxious Generation is the fact that a lot of people do not know who they are right. One of the things he talks about is cancel culture, and a lot of you might disagree about cancel culture, but my own professor in school is when you adhere to cancel culture, you are letting someone else tell you what your virtues are right. You are letting someone else tell you hey, don't listen to R Kelly, hey, don't listen to Michael Jackson, hey, don't listen, Don't watch another movie by Harvey Weinstein, Even though, hey, these guys did do questionable and horrible things. You are literally letting someone else tell you what your virtues are. Jonathan Haidt talks about cancel culture and the extent that folks are doing it because, to Lindsay's point, they don't know who they are or what they are.
Lindsay Oakes:You have to connect with yourself and that is exactly what mindfulness work, meditation work, does. And I also don't want to discount, because some people aren't ready for that kind of internal exploration. And for my clients who aren't, I always say to them go for a walk, lift weights, jog, do something that's going to drain that nervous system. And on a completely side note here, a complete side note, I just want to tell you that some of the furniture in this place is actually nicer than our furniture at home.
Lindsay Oakes:I was wondering what you're looking at that desk. It's really nice and I was like look at this nice coffee table I'm at.
Cleveland Oakes:It's so nice. Well, since you want to replace all this stuff in the living room anyway, I would tell you, do what we do at work. When I have Dom come out, go underneath of it, take a picture of the tag and just buy it, cause that's what we do in the office.
Lindsay Oakes:So anyway, let's go back to talking about this and go ahead.
Cleveland Oakes:You were saying yeah, no, I was just saying it's like these are all things that you really can't do anything about, right, and it's like it is. It is important to use and I want you to talk on it, because it's something that you talk to me about every day, even here yesterday was like I don't want to meditate, I don't want to be mindful and talk about why meditation and mindfulness are important when combating anxiety Because it connects you to yourself.
Lindsay Oakes:When you know who you are, you don't have to look outside of yourself for things, yeah Right. And so when you're constantly going outside of yourself, you are, you know, kind of bringing in this fear and terror and it's just arising in you. But why, like? Why? That's why I say to you like don't worry, like I think sometimes that my level of like oblivion is frustrating to you.
Cleveland Oakes:Would you agree? No, it's not frustrating. I wish I was able to emulate it, because, even though I say about the and it's unfortunate because I work in media right, and because I work in media the screens are on all the time. I am, even when I am trying very, very hard not to pay attention to what is going on, I am forced to pay attention to what is going on because that's, that's my job.
Lindsay Oakes:Right, but you stressed so much yesterday and it's just like and what did the lady tell you on the phone? The same thing I said show up at the dock with cash. You had to get the same memo from 15 people before you could relax, and I think you probably had to have a few glasses of gin too before you could just settle in and relax and like the thing is, to me it's just like whatever man we're in the islands, I'm just going to show up, I'm going to do what they tell me to do. And I'm just going to show up. I'm going to do what they tell me to do.
Cleveland Oakes:And I'm just going to go with the flow. Speaking of speaking of gin, I'm going to stop and do a quick commercial for Bombay Sapphire Bramble, which is blackberry and raspberry gin.
Lindsay Oakes:It's not even really probably good. I don't know, I don't drink it.
Cleveland Oakes:No, it was good it was. It's not as good as the Condessa that you had.
Lindsay Oakes:Remember that nice and orange blossom?
Cleveland Oakes:oh, that was that was really good. Gin is. You know, being in the british virgin, I'm being in the british islands, uh, even in being in barbados, I've come to have an appreciation for gin, because the, the brits, love their gin and it's actually pretty good actually make some here. You didn't pick that one up, though I saw that they make a bvi gin, oh you know, when we go back to the store, because I'm almost half, I'm like three quarters. Well, I am like got a quarter of that blackberry bramble left.
Lindsay Oakes:Not me. I'm drinking club soda.
Cleveland Oakes:Well, I'm drinking it with club soda a little bit, but it's helping me and I'm swimming, but it is at midnight swims, I'm about to go out soon too, even though it's raining today.
Cleveland Oakes:Midnight swims with the sharks, but, but it really no sharks there. I know there's no sharks, I'm just being a neurotic New Yorker, but really these things are important, right, and one of the things I've sat with clients especially those clients that get caught up on on social media and what's going on in the news is do a digital detox, and I would definitely say for the next 14 days, we are definitely going to be doing a digital detox because it takes, it is a Herculean effort to get online here where we're at, in the, in the, in the country doesn't matter to me because I don't really need any of my devices.
Lindsay Oakes:I am just happy to sit outside. I read the bvi welcome magazine yesterday. I listened to the chickens. We opened up the little apartment here. The fans are spinning doors just lay here all day.
Cleveland Oakes:But why? Why is digital detox important?
Lindsay Oakes:Well, because you need to stop feeding your brain with all of this stuff that's causing the anxiety. Right, and I'm I'm going to take it a step further and say that if, if you know, when Gabor Mate because I do really value a lot of what he says, obviously because I'm in his training and he has very interesting opinions on mental health that I think a lot of people I'm actually surprised there's not more controversy about what he says. But I'm gonna just take it a step further and say that, like you do that because you're lacking some connection from your childhood self, right, and so in childhood you learned, probably to escape to, you know, from a negative or toxic environment, right, and I'm not saying parents are bad, and I say this to most of my clients because they're always like, well, I don't want you to think my mom is bad and I'm like I don't think that you know people are bad. I think that people behave as their behavior as a result of what they've learned, right, and how they've learned to be as people and what their adaptive strategies were and their coping mechanisms were to get through life.
Lindsay Oakes:And so you know, I think that a lot of this anxiety is from that lack of attachment. I know for myself, I know what all of my struggles and challenges are, and I know them now as an adult. I don't need to, you know, go into them here, but I know how they've impacted me and I mean, you've also seen me at a point in my life where my anxiety was severe. And then I, when I started to take on daily meditation, you noticed immediately, right Even last week. What did you say to me? Like I don't yell anymore. Ever I don't get to that level of activation.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I try to do that somatic piece right, which I actually talked to a great trainer in Florida the other day, and me and him are going to definitely keep up a really good relationship.
Lindsay Oakes:Whereas you know when you're feeling that anxiety in your body, can you recognize it? You should recognize it, but I don't think people know how to recognize it, and I always talk to my clients about that, right? Is that the somatic piece? Right, we're so disconnected from our ourselves that our mind is what works, but we don't recognize the physical or the somatic symptoms. Yeah, and the somatic symptoms come in much earlier than the thinking piece. Right, Think about it. If you're in a system, in a place, right, and there's a threat, what does your system do? What does your system do? You get immediately, right, your heart starts racing or you have some kind of somatic reaction to a scenario. You start sweating. You, you know whatever that you know. Everybody has different symptoms of anxiety, right, and there's a lot of them, right, but it's you know, it's often it happens because you know your brain is going and you have a disconnect from the body.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, yeah, that's really important. As we're coming up to the end of this, I want to see if you have any personal anecdotes or any personal reflections on anxiety, managing anxiety in your own life or a situation that you know turned out that you were very anxious about that, that you, that you spun in a different direction.
Lindsay Oakes:I mean I'm sure in the past I have I can't think of any pretty recently, but I've kind of been on this journey of yoga and meditation, breathing for probably 10 years now, right, maybe a little longer where I used to have that anxiety pretty severely. Now I'm aware, and I think, just because I've done that work with the breath and I've started to recognize some of the patterns I noticed personally in my life, when I start to get agitated I immediately recognize the physical symptoms in my body my neck is tight, my shoulders are tight, I'm scrunched up, I have all this kind of physical discomfort and I just feel agitated, like I want to yell at somebody. And that for me is my cue to take five or 10 minutes between appointments or wherever it is and to just oh yeah, he ain't anxious about nothing, nope.
Lindsay Oakes:Um, but that's my cue to sit and take 10 minutes to stretch, do some neck circles, you know, do a few yoga poses and to just sit and find my breath and, you know, really kind of bring the breath into the tension and ease the tension and that really works for me.
Lindsay Oakes:But it's just about finding that somatic piece first, and I even I even have a client as young as 12 that I talked to that, to her about. That is, and I think to myself, if this girl, right at 12 years old, can like learn to, right now, at 12, right, to kind of sense those experiences in her body when they're coming up, before she starts getting into the cyclical thinking like she's going to be a powerhouse, because I mean, imagine having these tools at 12 years old, right, and her mom said she's like amazing, she's not crying anymore. After just three sessions she doesn't cry so much anymore and the mother, you know, stays close in the background, probably because she doesn't want the kid to say anything about her, you know but, the client is very open and she's so lovely and you know, and she and she's starting to recognize what happens to her.
Lindsay Oakes:Yeah, right, yeah.
Cleveland Oakes:One of a story that I can also share on this personal anecdote and I might have shared it before yeah Right, yeah, opportunity. Who used to be a police officer, but had an opportunity at one point in his life, before he was a police officer, where he wanted to be a firefighter, and it was something that was a big dream of his. It was something that he wanted his whole life. He took the firefighter exam, he passed it, he was assigned to a firehouse and the week before he was supposed to start he failed, like a minor requirement, and was not able to start the job. And he remembers being so anxious and so upset and so devastated about it.
Cleveland Oakes:And then, a week later, 9-11 happened and everyone in that firehouse that he was supposed to have worked at died, and he said that he never felt so relieved and so guilty at the same time. But the lesson that he learned after that was never to be worried about anything, because he could imagine what would have happened if he would have gotten that job, if he would have been assigned to that firehouse right. He would have been dead, along with a lot of those other brave souls that died also. And so what the lesson that he learned without even knowing. The scripture is in the Bible is do not be worried about tomorrow, because tomorrow will bring its own anxiety, because you never know what's going to happen.
Lindsay Oakes:I said that earlier right, you don't even know if next, if the next hour is going to be meant to be for you, right? So it's like, why spend all of your time worrying? Right, get present. And for me, the answer is the meditation, the mindfulness, the breathing. That's what brings me into the present moment. That and the biggest other thing that I do is I'm just like OK, right, when you're upset about something and you're huffing, puffing at home, what do I say to you? Ok, and I do that. When colleagues start to complain about things and complain and complain, I'm like OK, I just I. You know, I made a choice not to be aggravated.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah.
Lindsay Oakes:I don't want to be aggravated, so why do I need to get overly involved in something that doesn't really involve me?
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, and even look at today. Right, today is not a sunny day. It's the second rainy day. We had a great day in in um, in st thomas. The other day we took a long pool nap, yeah, um. But the last two days have been rainy, but we were like, hey, let's do, let's spin this I took a late night swim in the ocean, and now it's it's raining again.
Lindsay Oakes:Today it's two days in a row of rain, but it's beautiful though, well, and we also go on vacation so frequently that I'm like it's fine and it's nice.
Cleveland Oakes:It not going to be the last time we're here, but it's nice to sit here in the room with the doors open and appreciate what we do have the island smells like people are burning their leaves and overgrowth and whatever, and you can hear the people talking and you hear the animals.
Lindsay Oakes:We walked to the supermarket this morning and there was a goat oh yeah, it was a goat just chilling, making sounds at us, remember, and there was a goat.
Cleveland Oakes:Oh yeah, it was a goat just chilling, making sounds at us, remember, bye. Don't you realize how good you got it?
Lindsay Oakes:But you know, all we're going to do today is like we can just take a towel, walk down. We can probably leave the towel here at the bar, because you know they're not operating today.
Cleveland Oakes:No, I don't think anybody's. I don't think anybody's working today.
Lindsay Oakes:It won't get wet and we can just jump in the ocean and come back out and walk up and it's it is what it is. I mean, I can't control the weather, so why am I going to get upset about it?
Cleveland Oakes:What I want to do is say is and I want to thank you and appreciate you for and you know I often make this joke in the car that you know what? Because Lindsay is a champion Backseat.
Cleveland Oakes:I'm the best I have, like a gold medal, champion, backseat driver and somebody's driving unsafely, I would, I always say, hey, you know what they need? They need a Lindsay in their car. That's the truth. But in this case I actually want to thank you right, because what you've helped me accomplish and achieve, um, is learning to let stuff go like learning to be far less anxious, and there's a time that I would have never sat here with the door open and all the windows open, or even been cool being the only person like we are the only, literally the only people staying in this establishment this week. There is no one else.
Lindsay Oakes:There is no one else. No, I mean, I haven't really. Last night we were out to dinner with all locals.
Cleveland Oakes:I think, yeah, and everybody here. This is not really the high tourist season. It was a bad day. Even though a cruise boat came in the town, none of them showed up here because the beaches it just was a cloudy day. Nobody really got out for the excursions, but that was something that I would have been anxious about. I would have been anxious to be the only person in the Elm Apartments and all the restaurants and bars closed. Now I come here and you know what I'm thankful, because it helps me get all the anxiety. I'm not thinking about work, I'm not thinking about what's going on in America, I'm not thinking about anything else except for my lovely wife, the chicken and the roosters and the geckos that are running across the road, and maybe there's also really no nothing happening that should have you in a state of fear and anxiety.
Lindsay Oakes:Right, there is no imminent danger here.
Cleveland Oakes:Yeah, yeah. So so for lens. As we close up, I want you to know do you have any words of encouragement or any advice for any of our listeners out there who are struggling with anxiety?
Lindsay Oakes:Find a practice that works for you, whatever it may be. But I also another thing, on top of like saying exercise, weightlifting, meditation, yoga, mindfulness. Also, sometimes just speaking your anxiety aloud to people kind of makes you realize that it's kind of humorous sometimes and it really kind of sounds outlandish. I tell all my clients that just tell somebody that you feel anxious, because 99% of the time they've also felt anxious and if you say it out loud they're going to be able to like, be like oh, I've felt that too, that's normal, right, or oh, you know what? That's not something to worry about. Let me tell you about mine. Right, and it's just again right. It comes down to that reconnection connecting with other people, connecting with yourself, but not connecting with you know, the media, yeah.
Cleveland Oakes:And what you said is funny because a lot of times I sit down with clients who are anxious about stuff and I let them talk about their anxieties and as they're saying it to me, they're like, oh that's, that's kind of a dumb thing to be anxious about and I'll be like what Jesus used to say is well, you yourself have said it. But then be like, well, let's unpack why you were anxious about that. But I would agree with that. Also, in addition to what Lindsay said, there are some books that you can read the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle I've read it, which is a great book. Dare, the New Way to End Anxiety and Stop Panic Attacks, by Barry McDonough.
Cleveland Oakes:There's also some apps that you can use. I know one of the ones that come for free at work is the Calm app that I have, headspace and websites. There are websites. There's the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, which you can find them at ADAAorg at nimhnihgov, and there are hotlines that you can call, especially if you're feeling suicidal, which is the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. And there's the crisis text line where you can text HOME, h-o-m-e to 741741.
Lindsay Oakes:And on that note we're going to wrap up, because I don't like rum, but I'm going to take you down the street to this rum distillery that we can walk to. That's supposed to just be like really beautiful and historic.
Cleveland Oakes:Should I take off my shorty shorts and put on something more appropriate?
Lindsay Oakes:Well, I don't think you should ever wear those in public. Remember when you wore them in front of my mother? Oh, my God.
Cleveland Oakes:She was like do you have on clothes? I got some looks in the supermarket, which I think. Why is the groceries only came out to twenty dollars today?
Lindsay Oakes:Because I feel like we got we bought like two things, yeah, but I feel like it was more than twenty dollars worth of stuff that we got, so but yes, I do think those are not appropriate. Those are appropriate only, appropriate only for the bedroom, and I'll leave it there, or working out in the gym. No, they're not even appropriate for the living room. I've heard about the incidents that occur.
Cleveland Oakes:Oh, there have been some incidents and I've been pretty popular On that note. This has been another episode of the Devil. You Don't Know, this has been Cleveland.
Lindsay Oakes:And Lindsay.
Cleveland Oakes:And we will see you next time. Thank you.