Written by Christopher Kelly
Sept. 2, 2016
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Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly and today I'm joined by Tim JP Collins. Hi, Tim.
Tim: Hello. How are you doing?
Christopher: I'm very well. Thank you very much for joining me. I'm very excited to have you.
Tim: Likewise.
Christopher: Thank you. Tim is the curator of the Anxiety Podcast, which I've been enjoying a lot over the past couple of weeks. Tim, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you launched that podcast?
Tim: Yeah, absolutely. When I tell my friends of what I do, friends I haven't heard from for a while, they say, "So, what are you up to now?" I say, "Well, I'm doing this Anxiety Podcast." And they're like, "Well, that doesn't sound very sexy. That's a strange niche to pick." But it's one of those things where I was drawn to it. It kind of chose me. It started out in a bit of an unpleasant way. I kind of started out life in the traditional way, growing up in England, and it was kind of like get a good job, get promoted, make more money, the usual kind of treadmill.
So, I jumped on the treadmill and started increasing the speed and started getting the pay raises and making more money and seemingly making everybody else happy but not really myself. I was kind of feeling the pressure a bit. I got to the stage, after about ten years in that career, where I just felt like I was kind of carrying the world around on my shoulders every day. I had to travel quite a lot for my job. So, I was away from my pressure. I got pressure from my wife. And then on the flipside, I got pressure from my boss saying, "You need to travel more and go and entertain some clients."
Seemingly, like I couldn't keep everybody happy. And then I had what I can only call my M&M moment where I flew -- I was actually flying from Toronto to London. I jumped off a plane. I did my usual party trick which was go out and drink until the early hours of the morning with clients and friends. Then I woke up the next morning, went to do a presentation and got up on the stage, and as I launched into my first sentence or two, I had a panic attack, a serious meltdown. Essentially, I thought I was dying at that time.
It was the first, my first experience of that. I thought I was having a heart attack and started to feel extreme vertigo. I kind of froze on the spot and had to -- I just kind of mumbled excuse me and walked out the room. And that was my first experience with it. Somehow I managed to get through the rest of the day or be it kind of shaking and sweating profusely most of the time. And then my kind of -- The darkness descended and I just felt terrible for a while. That stayed with me for a fear years as I tried to figure out a solution.
Essentially, I kind of highly sensitized my body and now everything set me off, driving to work, sitting in a meeting. I just constantly had to leave the room. I couldn't handle any kind of basic situation. And I went through the traditional approach, which was I went to the doctor, I got some medication, made me feel weird, saw a psychologist, also made me feel weird. And none of these things really helped.
I then eventually started working with a mentor type character. And I said to the mentor, "Can I keep my life the same and recover from anxiety?" And he kind of smiled and said, "I don't think so." He said, "Maybe try the other way around. Start changing your life and kind of see what happens." And that was, I think, the permission I needed to start doing things differently. So, I eventually left my job. I eventually started investing in myself, my physical and mental well-being, and taking care of myself because classic, as I now know, classic for anxiety sufferers is that we basically put everybody's well-being before our own.
And this is a very long winded answer to your simple question, Chris, but part of my calling in all of this was I've always loved helping and supporting people and on side kind of recovered myself after struggling with the traditional system which is typically to throw medication or drugs at people. I just thought I got to do something about this and that's why I started supporting people, coaching people. That's why I started the podcast, to give people another option basically.
Christopher: That's amazing. I really wanted to talk about what didn't work. This was in the UK. So, when you went to the doctor -- So, what is the standard of care when you presented with these types of symptoms?
Tim: I was actually in Canada then. But the UK, from what I understand from clients, is very similar. Well, it's basically you go to the doctor and I went to the doctor and said, "This happened to me." And in very short order and almost kind of embarrassingly easily the doctor spun around in the chair, plucked some antidepressants out of a little basket behind him and handed them to me and said, "Take these and come and see me in a couple of months and we'll talk about whether we need to increase your dosage or change the drug, et cetera."
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They didn't ask me anything about my state of mind or how I felt or my lifestyle of whether I drank ten pots of coffee in the morning or drank a bottle of vodka for lunch. They had no concern about anything apart from "take the meds and you'll be all right." And so after that, I then felt, well, if that's not the solution then clearly I should talk to somebody about it. So, I went and saw a psychologist. The psychologist I saw was a very empathetic person but, again, they haven't suffered themselves so it was like, "Your life looks fine, Tim. You've really got nothing to worry about. You should probably just move on." And for me, that was so not useful. It was unbelievable.
Christopher: I've always wondered what psychologists do. Can you give me any more details?
Tim: Well, typically, they're going to go into some history to try and unravel what got you there in the first place. But the problem for a lot of anxiety sufferers is that it's not a rational thing. We don't know how we got there. All we know is that these neurological pathways are created and then certain things set you off and it's very difficult to fix it with that traditional approach of, "Well, I understand you had some difficulty in your childhood, so maybe you should try not to think about that and things will be fine."
I'm also not a believer in rehashing trauma because it makes people relive through it again in a lot of case. So, yeah, it was kind of like some reassurance in terms of what you've got is kind of normal, don't worry about it, here's a breathing technique. Now, what I've subsequently self-educated myself in terms of reading and practicing on myself and then implementing with other people is totally different and way more effective.
Christopher: That's amazing. I've heard this story before. Nobody cares about this problem more than you do. And there's a good chance you'll be the person that solves it. So, what did solve the problem?
Tim: Well, I think, like I said, that first bit of solving it was essentially people want a fix, people wants cures. They want solutions.
Christopher: The solution in a pill, right?
Tim: Yeah, want a solution in a pill. I mean, it's like people who are trying to lose weight or people who are trying to get rich. They just want quick ways to do things. And like with those other things, with anxiety, you are likely -- One of my lines that I always use is stop coping and start changing. And the reason I say that is because I fundamentally believe that the reason that you're displaying or you're showing these symptoms with anxiety is because some part of your life is out of alignment.
And if it continues to be out of alignment, I use this silly analogy with a car because we think of alignment with cars, but if you got kind of bold tires on your car and you don't ever put any [0:07:41] [Indiscernible] in your tires and your suspension is shot, then eventually the steering wheel starts shaking. And you can go out and get a nice fluffy cover and put on your steering wheel, ala take some drugs, but underneath it's still shaking. And that's the way we are as people. You can take medication but if all the medication ran out or you stop taking it, like a lot of people do over time, they want to wean off, they never actually address the underlying issue.
So, it is the classic, as they would say in America, you've put a band aid over something but the splinter is still in you underneath, like you haven't fixed it. So really, the bigger question becomes like where in your life are you out of alignment? Which thing isn't serving you? And almost 99 times out of 100, I speak to people on the phone day in and day out either through people who listen to the podcast or coaching clients, and there's something there. There's some disalignment with a job or relationship or where they live or something in their past or something else.
And as we gradually work on that, along with lifestyle related things, whether it's food, diet, all the basic or fundamentals as I call them, it's a combination of those things coming together which fixes anxiety. And so it ends up being not one thing that cures it but everything cures it. Like everything in your life is part of the solution.
Christopher: This is always the answer. It's so funny. There's all these different problems that people commonly run into and always, I think, the solution is specializing in not specializing. Don't focus on one thing like macronutrients or sleep, although sleep is very important. All of these things are important but it's never one single thing.
Tim: No. I mean, a big part of this is I kind of break into three segments. One is what I call the fundamentals being the diet, exercise, stimulants, what to avoid, what sets you off and that general well-being. It could also include meditation, journaling, some of the holistic approaches. And then in the middle, I work with people on what would normally be termed CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy. So, how do you actually interpret anxiety when it shows up? How do you respond to it? By the way, most people with anxiety, when I meet them, are very resistant to it and they're fighting it. Day in, day out, they're fighting it. And you can feel the tension in their voice. You can see the tension in their bodies.
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And this kind of voice makes people frown a little bit but if you've got anxiety at the moment, anxiety is part of you. And by continuing to reject it, you're actually rejecting a part of yourself. So, one of the words I use, again which raises eyebrows, is embracing it. Because when we move towards it, when we accept it and face it, and essentially pick it up and tuck it under our arms and say, "This is part of me and good or bad is that I'm going to nurture it, I'm going to take care of it and I'm going love it," and by doing that you end up loving yourself a little bit.
And that's part of the healing. Underlying all of this stuff for most people is somewhere we've lost a bit of confidence. We've lost a bit of self-belief. And so, we feel that we deserve to feel often have anxiety. And so that's what we get.
Christopher: And so how do you brace it when you're about to have a panic attack? And if I was to take you back to that moment where you stood up on stage and your throat is going dry and you're starting to sweat, how do you embrace anxiety at that point?
Tim: Yes. So, if it's the first time you've ever had it then, obviously, these tools may not be things that you've already looked up in advance. But I use an acronym. Well, there are a couple of different approaches I use but I use an acronym called LEAN IN. So, LEAN IN stands for look instead of avoiding it essentially. E stands for embrace. A stands for action, meaning make sure you're breathing properly. Make sure your diaphragmatically breathing. N stands for non-resistance, so don't fight it.
I always say anxiety is kind of like a 20-year old Mike Tyson. It'll always be ready to engage you. It's faster, it's stronger. It doesn't need to sleep and you're going to lose essentially. And then the IN part stands for invest in yourself. So, that's start making some steps forward to improve your diet, improve your physical activity and all those sorts of things which we know have just as much if not more impact than medication does. And the N stands for never settle, which means if there's parts of your life where you're settling, again, whether it's relationship or work, then it's going to start to affect you.
Christopher: Tell me about your diet. I'm really interested in this. I mean, certainly anecdotally I've heard about lots of people that have changed their diet and seen a reduction in their anxiety symptoms. But was that true for you? How were you eating before and how do you eat now?
Tim: Before I found out about the newer options in terms of eating, I ate a fairly traditional bad diet which was bagels for breakfast washed down with lots of coffee, pasta roll, some kind of sandwich for lunch followed by an energy drink in the afternoon to stay awake and then a normal dinner of, again, some potato or pasta base thing with a couple of beers or a glass of wine. Before I was anxious none of those things really bothered me. But then over time it really did start to seem like some of those things were part of the problem.
My first step was to go Paleo. So, I kind of cut out all of the processed stuff, the things in boxes, and I felt better. I felt much better after that. And that was kind of one of the biggest steps. And then from there, we just got really interested in nutrition and food and started reading out more and more about it, came across a guy called Dominic D'Agostino, which, of course, you know and listened to him. I think it was towards the end of last year I listened to him on the Tim Ferriss podcast actually where he got very almost scientific about the ketogenic style diet. And that's when I decided to go all in about seven or eight months ago and switched to a ketogenic way of living.
Essentially, I just wanted to see how good I could feel. Because anxiety is all about how bad you feel. So I've improved my exercise. I've improved my sleep. I've improved my lifestyle, my work, all of the fundamentals. And for me, I just wanted to see if I went that one extra step in terms of fundamentally switching my fuel source from sugar to fat, how would I feel? And the truth is, is that the first day it was a bit rocky in terms of the adaption phase to move in to the ketogenic diet.
Obviously, we know there's important things to maintain like electrolytes. And for somebody like me with a bit of a history of having some low blood pressure, I found that I really had to stay on top of that in terms of making sure my particularly sodium was up to scratch. Otherwise, lightheadedness is an anxious type feeling. So, really cautious about that. But once I got over that hump then it just became effortless. Probably after a month or so into it I just started to find it very easy. From somebody who's always been a bit of a lover of food and have a bit of an emotional relationship with food, I got to the stage where I found myself not needing to eat.
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Now, I don't eat breakfast anymore and I'll have something -- My first meal of the day will be lunch time and then again in the evening kind of a traditional intermittent fasting style of eating. I find it much easier. Now, it's still not necessarily easy because everywhere I go there's no doubt you know people kind of say, "Why don't you eat the cake? Why are you not eating the bread? Why don't you eat the pasta?" And so I do feel like I have to explain myself a lot.
But apart from that, I find that my mental clarity is the best it's ever been in terms of levels of energy. I said this on my podcast the other day but I now almost have to go looking for reasons to be anxious because I just don't have it anymore. I don't feel, it doesn't show up for me anywhere near as much because my foundation which was built on sand is now built on steel and concrete and my equilibrium is so steady that it's very hard to kind of get me off balanced.
Christopher: That's amazing. And have you been measuring blood ketones?
Tim: Yeah, I did for a while. I worked -- We're talking about the Ketogains guys. I worked with Luis for a bit. I started out measuring my blood ketones and checking those a number of times and then after a while, as I looked into the education side, more and more people just said, "Look, if you're eating less than 25 grams of carbs a day," which I do, " then you're in ketosis and it's kind of unnecessary." So, I did during the education phase and now I really just simplify it and I just stick to what I know works well for me which is good quality grass fed and pasteurized meats and nice fish and fresh vegetables and I'm very happy on that.
Christopher: I was wondering if you're going to tell me, "Oh, yeah, my blood ketones dropped below a certain level then I know I'm going to have panic attack," or something like that. But it's obviously a lot less clear cut than that.
Tim: Yeah, it's not that. I'm not that specific about it. But I can tell you that I have had a few -- I've come off the rails a few times and both from a nutrition and alcohol point of view. Because the other thing with -- I'm preaching to the choir -- but the other thing with the ketogenic diet for me is that my alcohol tolerance is terrible.
Christopher: That was going to be my next question. You talked about your relationship with alcohol that led to the anxiety and it's something that I've noticed. I've just got back from the Ancestral Health Symposium in Boulder. It's wonderful because not only is there lots of great information there but I got to surround myself with all these amazing people. And so I didn't have to answer questions about the way that I was eating. People already knew and, in many cases, they eat the same way too.
But, yeah, I had a couple of drinks. I had what I think was just like an over-fermented or different ferment of Kombucha that was 6% alcohol and I was like really small drink and I got -- I was drunk before I'd even finished drinking it and I really didn't feel good. So, you've noticed the same then, that your alcohol tolerance is really low.
Tim: Yes. So, the keto thing for me has done a couple of things. One is that after a lifetime -- I'm 38 now and after a lifetime of, again, like loving sweet things, I don't have the desire for them anymore. It's not like I'm restricting myself or holding back. I just don't want to. I'm just not craving it. I don't have to have it. I used to have to have it. And the alcohol thing is the same way. I grew up in England. I used to drink ten pints a night easily and have no problem with that.
And now, it's almost disappointing because it's like as soon as I start sipping the first drink it just doesn't feel good to me. And occasionally, I'm the first one to say I'm trying to think when my last was, probably a few weeks ago, a month ago, I stayed with some friends and they had a nice bottle of chocolate and blackberry infused vodka or something and I drank probably half of it, like half a liter of it. And I woke up the next morning and just felt horrendous. It didn't sit well with me.
It meant that I actually then ate some cookies or some other wheat based things which just isn't in my diet anymore. So, the bloat with the hangover with the not nice bowel movements and all that stuff is just not worth it for me anymore. That's an extreme version. But even in moderate times, even if I just have like three or four glasses of wine, it still doesn't feel good to me. As I say to people, if the downside is worse than the upside then it's just not worth it.
And so a lot of the time now I just find myself passing or just having maybe one cursory drink to appease other people and then just say, "No, I'm fine, thanks." But, yeah, I just -- It's weird because my wife said to me, she said, "You used to drink a lot because you were numbing out your life and now you actually like yourself. You don't feel the need to do it anymore." I think that's probably a good way of summing it up.
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Christopher: That's a really good point I've not thought about. It's absolutely right. I know I'll enjoy having my brain functional.
Tim: Yeah. And then for me it's like when I drank, when I was 25, I drink and I always remembered it was my mantra in my head is that if I could get to noon the next day, if I could get to lunch time and then I kind of be all right. Whereas now, it's a couple of days. If I'm drinking on a Friday night, the weekends are very often, even on Monday I'm still not as sharp as I am without alcohol.
For me, it just becomes a conscious choice of like how many days of my life do I want to waste feeling bad? And I just don't. So, most of the time -- And more recently, for the first time in my life, in the last six months to a year, I've had times where I've been at parties and been 100% sober, which is a totally different experience for me. And actually, I seem to have more engagement with people. At the end of the night I feel good because I can actually still sleep very well and wake up the next day and it's not impacted subsequent days.
The sleep interruption with alcohol, and I don't know if the ketogenic thing kind of make it more extreme, but if I drink now I'm waking up every hour on the hour and rolling around. So, it's not just worth it.
Christopher: Before we leave the subject of diet and ketosis, I want to encourage people listening to sign up for the Keto Summit. I've just about finished all of the expert interviews. I've got 35 people including Dominic D'Agostino that Tim mentioned early. He was phenomenal actually. He presented some data from his lab of blood beta-hydroxybutyrate with exogenous ketone supplementation.
And then Patrick Arnold I interviewed last week as well. It was amazing, absolutely amazing. He showed up for the interview and behind him you can see his factory and it looks just like the later episodes of Breaking Bad. He talks about all kinds of crazy stuff about producing all sorts of supplements but mostly exogenous ketones. That was a super juicy interview and I'm really looking forward to watching that one again. So, come to the show notes for this episode and you'll find the link to sign up for the Keto Summit.
If you've been enjoying my podcast, I'd be very grateful if you signed up because that's the way for me to make money that this podcast does not offer. I'll be very grateful for that. Well, Tim, I really want to talk about your work life and how that's changed and how it relates to anxiety. So, do you think that everybody has to quit their job in order to obtain what you have?
Tim: No, no. It's all, I think, some people who are -- The job isn't the issue. For me, it was the issue just because it was pro travel and pro drinking and those things weren't good for me. But there's a lot of clients I work with where it's absolutely not their job. It just may be coming from somewhere else. So really, it's an individual thing to sit down and say where, which part of my life is out of alignment, which part of my life is causing the stress, and then identifying that and working on that piece.
And so, yeah, for some people they're in absolutely the right job. For a lot of people, they've fallen into a profession or followed a cultural or society-based path and they're in something which doesn't suit them. So, for some people, it is about making massive change and for some people it's just about tidying up, diet, exercise and the fundamental piece. It's really a case by case basis. But for me, I left nothing on the table and said if I'm changing some things then I'm going to potentially change everything and see how that goes.
Christopher: And have you ever said to someone, "Look, your job is so toxic. You really need to leave it if you're ever going to recover from this?"
Tim: Yes.
Christopher: You have? That's really interesting. Do you think we are both very lucky, aren't we, that we both now do work that we could do from anywhere? I got an email from my best friend this morning and he said, "Hey, I'm going to be up at my cabin in the Yosemite next week. Would you like to join us?" And I'm thinking, "Yeah, I would." And there's no reason why I can't do that because as long as you've got an internet connection I can record interviews, do client calls from anywhere, which is phenomenal. So, I enjoy tremendous freedom. But do you find that the stress of entrepreneurialism has contributed to anxiety? So, it might be a double-edged sword.
Tim: Yeah. I mean, I don't, for instance, recommend that everybody [0:24:18] [Indiscernible] and start trying to do a coaching business because there's much easier ways to make money, frankly. There's much easier ways to make money. For me, I was making a lot more money before and I probably could have taken a modest step down and just still be in IT sales but work from home, so cut a lot of stress that way. I actually went into real estate in between and started investing in real estate which is another good passive income thing.
But I really wanted to do something which had meaning and actually made a difference. And this work does that for me. Insane that it has created its own amount of stress for me in the kind of formative stages because there are no guarantees of income.
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I mean, as you know, from the podcast is really about getting the word out there. It's not a cash machine on its own. It just allows us to have a platform to talk to people and connect with people.
Yeah. So, I think having belief in myself -- It's interesting. I've never really been asked that question before but I think the podcast and the coaching business and the entrepreneurship in conjunction with my recovery, those two things kind of working in together and having some very quality people around me that have just said, "You're on to something. Stick with it," when I wasn't getting any phone calls and when nobody was listening as much.
Now that I am getting phone calls and people are listening I can look back and say, yeah, not necessarily that I deserve it but I feel like I've continued to keep my head down for long enough that I just feel grateful that things have worked out. I always go back to -- and maybe you can link this in the show notes -- but one of my favorite articles on this topic written by James Altucher is called The Ultimate Guide to Reinventing Yourself. And if you Google The Ultimate Guide to Reinventing Yourself, it will show up.
He essentially talks about the fact that in order to, from an entrepreneurship point of view, in order to get any way, you kind of need to commit to it for five years. So, it's like year one you're kind of like scrambling around in the dark. Year two, you start making a bit of money. Year three, you can earn a living. Year four, you're making above average. And, year five, you'll be an expert. You'll be in the top 5%. And in conjunction with that, you got to read books. You got to attend seminars. You got to live it essentially.
So, anyway, I feel like I'm on that path and I feel like I'm on track. But, yes, it does create its own set of stresses. But then the flipside is if you can stick to it and you can have a niche and have a focus and keep innovating and being creative, then it does give you tremendous freedom such as what I'm doing right now.
Christopher: That's exactly what Ken Ford said to me. But with this freedom comes tremendous responsibility, unfortunately.
Tim: Yes. It's like it would be much easier for me to wake up in the morning and go to work instead of wake up in the morning, try and figure out how do I find the right kind of people to interview on the podcast and what do I talk about when it's just me doing solo episodes, and write in show notes. More recently, for instance, I was living on the West Coast of Canada and then we decided we wanted to travel a bit. So now we have no fixed abode. I'm actually currently staying with my parents. I've moved back home, which is very cost efficient but not without its challenges with three kids.
But, yeah, some people think, "Oh, you're really lucky doing the podcast." Well, the other day, I sat in my rental car recording a solo episode into my laptop because the kids and the family we're all in the house and I had nowhere else to go. And it was a boiling hot day. I couldn't run the car. So, I'm sweating in a car recording the podcast. And afterwards I kind of -- After I finished it, I was just like, yeah, some days it's just going to be a challenge.
Christopher: Are you what I would call a digital nomad?
Tim: I suppose I am. I'm doing it on the fly. That's an example. The other day I was in a hotel room, again, with the kids and we were on the way to England. I went down to reception and said, "I'm a podcaster. Is there any way you can give me this really quiet because I need to record a podcast?" And they were very accommodating and they gave me this really nice conference room and the guy said, "Take as long as you like." So, yeah, I'm just figuring out on the go essentially.
Christopher: And how do your kids respond to this? Do they travel well?
Tim: Yeah. I think, and to start with, I have three boys. There's a certain amount of you need to kind of get them out every so often otherwise they get a bit of cabin fever. But, yeah, they know what I do. They understand that there's times when they need to be quiet if I've got to record something. But typically, my wife is massively supportive and she'll say, "All right, we're going to the park," or, "We're going to go and go out for coffee or go out for lunch or something," and I'll fit my calls around that. Yeah, it's kind of a family effort and it has to be. They know what I do and they know that I help people and I think that gives them some vested interest in supporting me.
Christopher: That's amazing. Recently, I came across this movie that I would highly recommend to everyone. It's by two guys that call themselves the Minimalist. I'll link to this in the show notes. I'm actually going to be interviewing one of them in the podcast coming up soon. And I noticed that on your website you talk about getting rid of material possessions that were weighing you down mentally. So, can you talk a little bit about that?
Tim: Yeah, absolutely. So, in addition to being digital nomad, as you said, I'm a bit of a minimalist as well. I suppose they kind of go hand in hand. But one of the things that I found was the biggest source of anxiety for me was having a lot of material stuff be it a house or a couple of cars or membership to different things, lawnmowers and just all this.
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I think there's just as much overhead that people have with physical things as they do with emotional and mental things. I feel like I say this all the time. But one of my favorite quotes from the movie Fight Club is "what you own owns you." And so, for people who have houses full of belongings and things to take care of and things to maintain, it just kind of ties you down and it takes away your freedom.
I think there's another quote from Fight Club which is like "only once you've lost everything that you're actually free to do whatever you want." Again, that's something else which I really embraced. And when I sit down and journal in the morning and write down what I'm grateful for, it's not that I'm grateful for the BMW I used to own or some material things. It's that I'm grateful for the health of my family. I'm typically grateful for the cup of tea I'm drinking or the view I'm looking at or the fact that I feel good and I'm healthy and I'm not having panic attacks on a daily basis anymore.
That's what I'm grateful for. And that doesn't include any of the material wealth or stuff I had in the past. So, as part of our changing situation very recently, before we started traveling we sold everything. We don't have anything anymore. We got rid of our house. We got rid of all our belongings. We either sold them or gave them away. We did maintain probably half a dozen boxes of keepsakes I'll say like Christmas decorations and pictures which we stored in our friend's house. But apart from that, we said to our kids, "You get one suitcase each and one backpack, same for my wife and I, and that's what we've got."
It's kind of interesting and exciting because when they want stuff or when we want stuff, it's like, "Well, will this fit in our bag?" And if it doesn't, are you going to displace something so that you can have it?" Yeah, I love the concept of minimalism and I think it ties in very closely to anxiety from the point of view of all of the things which are actually very meaningful to us have nothing to do with external things.
Christopher: That's really interesting to me. So, everything I hear on the podcast is stuff that you talk about with your clients. You have clients that come to you that have super cluttered lives, houses full of stuff and things in storage and things they don't care about but still have responsibility to maintain and all of that.
Tim: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, people are drawn to me for different reasons, from my story. So, some of the people I work with are executives in businesses, some people it's the minimalism piece, and some people it's just good old anxiety. I talk about all of this stuff because it's just my life. It's just what interests me. I love talking about nutrition and exercise. I love talking about having, getting rid of stuff to actually have more, to have more quality time.
And as I mentioned before, another favorite quote of mine from a German sailor I met once, his name was Irwin, and his quote was: I don't have any plans and I'm sticking to them. And this guy was a guy who I met in a little island off the west coast of Canada and he had a yacht. He had previously owned a house and trappings and businesses and stuff and sold it all and just lived on a yacht. And he traveled from Vancouver and he'd go down to Mexico then he'd go over to Hawaii.
That was his life. That's all he did. He kind of opened me up to some of this and I only spoke to this guy once for about an hour. He said that a lot of people he'd come across would say, "I really want to do what you do. How do you do it? It's amazing." And they were inspired. And he said, "It's easy. Just sell everything you own. Maybe if you've got some money left from that then buy a boat with it or buy some way of traveling or invest it so you have some little stream of income. And then do whatever you want."
And people are like, "I couldn't do that. I couldn't sell everything I own. How could I possibly get rid of my house or my car and leave my job?" And so interesting that we're always enamored as a society with the guy who lives in a van and travels around North America or wherever and thinks that that's amazing, but the amount of people that are actually prepare to do that, which again, is fear-based is very few and far between. But I think there's certainly happy mediums where you can say, "Look, maybe you don't need multiple holiday homes or maybe you don't need the extra car and there's ways to simplify your life."
Christopher: Yeah. And I think it's important to mention, and like I say, we'll get into this in more detail in the future podcast, that it's not just about just getting rid of all of your stuff. It's about getting rid of the stuff that you don't care about. So, I have a friend, I posted the link to the movie on Facebook, and he said, "Do you think I should get rid of my 36 chairs?" And I know what he's like. He's like a guy that collects and restores things and then sells them on. And they're beautiful things. And he loves them all. They're functional and they don't stay in his life forever. It's not just about getting rid of all of your stuff. It's just about getting rid of the stuff that you don't need or care about.
Tim: I mean, we all do it. It's classic. People move house and they put boxes in the basement and storage and then they go to move again and they're like, "Oh, I wonder what's in these boxes. I haven't looked in them for five years." It's just stuff that you don't care about or you bought other things to replace them.
[0:35:02]
I think that's actually -- One of the biggest dangers is a lot of people do the de-cluttering process where they just go relentlessly get rid of stuff. And then if they stay in a big enough space for a long enough time they'll gradually fill it up again because we're constantly being sold to and advertised to. So, yeah, you kind of fill the void. It's very difficult not to. You have to push back.
Christopher: Talk to me about how you handle social media and email because I feel like those things are probably the greatest sources of anxiety in my life, keeping up with email and notification hell, all these different social media platforms all want to ping at you every time something happens. And it seems like they're getting ever more promiscuous with the notifications. I just can't keep up with all the things that Facebook wants to notify me about now. So, how do you handle those things?
Tim: So, I mean, I kind of keep fairly simple in terms of batch processing. So, there's just times in a day when I'll log on and do my -- I've recently used some tools to post on my behalf in terms of reposting podcast episodes and stuff like that. But, yeah, there's time in the day when I'll purposefully go on and have a look at my Facebook notifications, for instance, or the messages. And the rest of the time I'll just turn that off. A lot of this is really taking back control. And as I talked to you at the moment, my iPhone is actually powered down next to me.
That's another distinction I make with people who say, "Well, it's on airplane mode." But airplane modes flick off in a split second and then you're back in business. I encourage people to actually power it down and put it somewhere else and get an old fashioned alarm clock in your bedroom and don't say, "Well, I have to have my iPhone there because my alarm is on it." And then you wake up, roll over, read your email and you're off straight into--
Christopher: Off to the races.
Tim: You're off to the races and you're straight into notifications and emails. I get it. I'm excited when I get an email from a listener or a potential client or a client asking questions or wanting to engage. That kind of gets me going. But I don't want to live my life around those moments. I think the key thing is just to, for me, is to pick and choose when I'm going to engage and for how long and then I'll start to power things down and switch them off and that means that people can't get hold of me.
One of the first things I do with clients is to recommend they do a daily walk and to not take a phone. It's amazing. And this is only going to get worse for a time but it's amazing how many people haven't been out there house without a cell phone and walked in nature for a long time.
Christopher: That's one of the cards in our deck. We have this huge deck of cards that we play with people and that is one of the cards. I think actually many of the things that you talked about are cards on my deck. But, yeah, that's an amazing strategy that I think I could probably benefit from myself more often. I'm looking outside my window now and the sun is just rising up through the redwood trees and it's actually beautiful and I haven't been outside yet and that's bad, isn't it?
Tim: Yeah. I mean, first thing is to drink half a glass of water and then just go outside and then just listen. There's so many things that you can hear in terms of birds and wind and noise and I have my best ideas when it's just me and my little blue notebook. And so, yeah, just try to find times in your life when it's just you. If you ride mountain bikes or ski or lift weights, then maybe don't take your iPhone and plug in music and distract yourself the whole time. Maybe just listen to silence or listen to other people.
I mean, I take my journal when I go to the gym and in between sets I'll write down ideas I've got and quotes that I thought up and I can't find that time anywhere else when I've got a bit of peace and quiet. So, that should be sacred to us. And another thing which I got from somebody else is when you get in your car don't turn the radio on. Don't instinctively put the news on which is a whole another topic. But don't immediately distract yourself, of course, unless you're listening to my podcast or Chris's, in which case you can definitely do that. But, yeah, there's a lot of people out there. You haven't sat in a car in silence for a long time, driven in silence and just have your thoughts and nothing else.
Christopher: Yeah. I find people can't do that anymore. Like when you sat in the waiting room, people find it impossible just to sit and stare at the wall or whatever. It's just like you've got to have something to distract you from your own thoughts. I think that's telling us something somewhere.
Tim: Yeah. And the other part it allows you to do is to have more people engagement. And the big part of overcoming anxiety, a big part of rebuilding your confidence is to engage with other human beings more often. So, I always say to my clients, like when you go to the supermarket, when you're at the gym, when you're at the shop, wherever you are, be the first person to say hello.
[0:40:01]
Be the first person to initiate a conversation with the person serving you behind the counter and then ask them how their day is and practice that engagement and kind of lifting other people up. Because a lot of time, today you look out there and people are buried in their phones while the person is serving them and there's just no interaction. So, one of the big things with anxiety is that we're worried about when somebody is going to ask me a difficult question or what they're going to say or how I will respond?
Well, my answer to that is you be the person who sets the pace then. Start the conversation. Be more in control. And that practice will allow you to recognize that you're a competent communicator that people love talking actually and they love engagement and they love your smile and, yeah, the more of that you do, the more you'll rebuild your own confidence.
Christopher: You mentioned the news there. It's one of the things that I found to be extremely beneficial to cut out of my life completely. I used to have this slightly unhealthy relationship with the news when I first moved to the US. I would listen constantly to the BBC World Service. And so I'd listen to the same news three or four times during the day and then I would try and use it to get to sleep at night which was ludicrous.
Tim: Good luck with that.
Christopher: Yeah. Good luck with that. And now I've cut the news out of my life completely. People say things to me and I have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. When this stuff appears in my Facebook newsfeed I hide it and I find that Facebook, you can actually train your dragon. If you keep hiding that stuff enough, it will go away. I'm just wondering, what is your relationship with the news now and do you tell your clients to stop listening or watching it?
Tim: Yeah. It's a similar thread to yours. Mine actually goes way back to childhood. When I was a kid growing up -- and my dad still does this now. He watches the news every night. I don't know whether it's the 9 o'clock news or the 10 o'clock news. In England, it has a specific theme tune. To me, listening to that noise indicated it was, A, time for me to go to bed and, B, that there was going to be headline after headline of plane crash or explosion or atrocity. And I was just like, "Oh my god, who wants to listen to that?"
Christopher: Right before you go to bed.
Tim: Yeah, right before you go to bed. Bedtime, Tim. And then all these bad news come on and I'm like, "That's not good." So, yeah, I just cut it out completely. I believe in the fact that if something is significant enough you're going to know about it because there's so many ways of getting information to you. It's not like there's going to be some desperate zombie apocalypse that you're not going to find out about. You're going to know about it.
And I just think it's massively negative program. Like at the moment, the Olympics is on and I'd been watching the Olympics and it switches channels and they'll try and sneak some news in there and I just turn it off when the news comes on. If they kind of try to make you watch it, I'll just put it on mute or just turn the TV off for a bit and go and do something else. But, yeah, I don't consume any news. I don't recommend my clients to.
We're lucky these days in some regards that we have ways to consume media whether it's movies or TV shows which don't include advertising or the news, that you don't have to have it anymore. You can pay a very small amount of money to avoid all of that stuff. So, yeah, it's just something I don't like. It took me until I had anxiety to recognize why that was another thing that kind of set me off. So, I just kind of edit it out and feel a lot better for it.
Christopher: Same here. I think with all these things, do you agree that it's probably better to take an approach where you just cut them all out of your life and then see if the anxiety goes away and then reintroduce them once you're not suffering from any problems and see which of the things that were causing the problem in the first place rather than trying them one at a time? As an engineer, you think the best approach would be to try these things. "Okay, let's just try not watching the news and see if your panic attacks stop." And six months later, "No, I'm still having panic attacks. What else have you got for me?" And you try the next thing.
From an engineering perspective, that might make sense. But when you're suffering from something really horrible like a panic attack, you just want it to stop. You just want to do everything in your power. So I'm just wondering, is that the sort of approach that you take or you're more of the engineering approach?
Tim: Yeah, I'm a bit more extreme in my approach. It's like extreme in goodness, extreme in things that are going to be useful to you. It's not like drinking a glass of water, meditating, going for a walk, journaling, not watching the news. Again, it's going to upset anybody. It's kind of like from a nutrition point of view you can get a very clean diet and then if you're desperate to have the occasional bun or yoghurt then you could slowly introduce gluten and dairy and see how it affects you.
So, yeah, for me, it's about making changes which we know are going to be beneficial. Over time if you want to tinker with it and start reintroducing the news and see how you feel with that then be my guest. But most of the time people are just extremely happy to not feel that way anymore and they see the benefits of things like out of news like -- I'm just not interested at all in the presidential debate. I really don't follow it.
[0:45:09]
I wasn't interested at all in the BRexit thing in the UK. I didn't follow it. Because it's totally out of my control and some people love those kinds of debates but for me, I can have much more impact on my family, on the people I work with and myself than I can in any of those topics. So, I just avoid them.
Christopher: I'm with you 100%. I absolutely have no idea what's happening in the presidential election and I intend to keep it that way all the way through to next year.
Tim: Yeah.
Christopher: Well, Tim this has been fantastic. And for people listening, this is actually the first of our two-part series. I'm going to do another interview with Tim on his podcast and I'm going to talk about how biology defines behavior and how some of the testing can help you reveal what's going on inside your body and how there is a strong connection between inflammation and anxiety. And that's quite an evidence-based approach. There's several good review papers that discuss this relationship between inflammation and anxiety.
So, I will encourage you to check the show notes or maybe just go straight to Tim JP Collin's podcast and check out that interview and all the other episodes. You've got over 100 now, which is a fantastic achievement. How long has the podcast been going now?
Tim: Just about a year.
Christopher: Wow, that's amazing. You've been busy.
Tim: Cranking them out, yeah.
Christopher: I think that's excellent. It's excellent. So, timjpcollins.com. Is there anything else you'd want people to know about, Tim?
Tim: No, just have a look at the anxiety podcast. So, yeah, timjpcollins.com or just anxietypodcast.com. It goes to the same place. If you want to be friends on social media then I am timjpcollins on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera. Yeah, if you want to connect that way, I would be delighted to interact with people and answer any questions they have.
Christopher: Well, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.
Tim: Thank you, Chris.
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