Public speaking can cause an amazing amount of negative stress for most people. It scares a lot of people half to death – literally. Then again, public speaking cannot be considered bad stress in and of itself, because while some people are afraid of public speaking and will suffer miserably throughout the entire experience, many others thoroughly enjoy speaking in public and see it as an opportunity to entertain, teach, and motivate.
To get to the root of stress, however, you must reprogram the way you look at it. One way to do this is to make sure to separate anxiety issues from authority issues.
“Anxiety issues” are the every day troubles such as world events, news, professional sports team performance, other people’s troubles, and pending personal crisis. Anxiety issues are problems in which you have no direct control over their outcome, yet you nonetheless allow them to create chaos, worry, stress, and a lot of lost time in your own life.
I have a friend who always says, “Worrying works, 99% of the things I worry about never actually happen“
The truth is, however, that worrying is the most useless activity on the planet. Worrying or fearing the outcome of the trials and events of the world, other people’s lives, or even in your life does nothing to affect the eventual results. Worrying does nothing except cause pain in what are the precious few minutes of your life. Worrying really doesn’t work.
On the other hand, authority issues are the challenges you can do something about. These are the problems concerning the need for more discipline, more learning, more practicing, better scheduling, improved preparation, etc. While in some cases there are people and situations you have some direct control over, typically authority issues only concern yourself. Your actions and reactions are usually the only ones that you can truly totally influence.
If you recognize something as an “authority issue,” then you can create a strategy and start actively creating a solution. However, if you recognize something as an “anxiety issue,” worrying is useless and can create nothing but damaging stress and diminished time.
For your information; there are many supplements that ease stress and mitigate it’s dangerous effects. CBDs, L-threonine, L-theanine, Valerian Root, and Lavendar are nutrients that all calm anxiety, decrease the damaging impact of stress on the central nervous system, improve focus, reduce inflammation, and have been proven to help with sleep.
“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.” – Matthew 6:24
By Dr. Ben Lerner
2X New York Times Best-Selling author and former Olympic Team Chiropractor, nutritionist, and strength and conditioning trainer.
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