#846 - From Chaos to Calm: Unleashing Focus with Anna Mikeda (Mind Engineering)

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Hey guys, welcome to this week's podcast episode and I've got a fantastic guest for you today, all of you high functioning professionals that may feel stress, worry, anxious, maybe even depressed or just distracted. I've got Anna McKeda PERSON. She's a psychologist, but she's got a very interesting slang because she incorporates a lot of new age and different tools and techniquesto help clients achieve more focus, less burnout, less worry, manage stress, and even manage anxiety. So she's got a, I'm really curious about these techniques. And I think for the audience out there, we're all suffering from stress or burnout. And so Anna is the perfect guest for today's show. So Anna PERSON, welcome.

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Well, thank you so much for having me. Yeah.

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And so I always love talking about your paths and journey because that's kind of like very inspiring and it provides groundwork for talking points. So talk about your path to specialization. How did you come into this? And I really love your approaches.You use a lot of different techniques to help professionals. And how did you come by this?

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Well, as far as I know, all people who go into psychology, they have some problems. And they're like, okay, I'm just going to go and just solve them. And that was me as well. I had a lot of questions about human nature when I decided to study psychology. And later, as my private practice progressed, and I was working with a lot of clients, and I started noticing something about me.I started noticing that, you know, even though I was working with clients, I was, you know, doing a lot of things. I was having, like, a very successful, so-to-speak life, you know, doing a lot of things. I was having like a very successful, so to speak life, like digital nomad, all of that. And yet, I was like never really happy. I was never fully calm because there was, I was always like on a bus. There was always like something I had to do, something more. And I started, like, I realized that that's maybe not normal.Like maybe having this feeling of constantly being overwhelmed by life, like maybe that's just not how we're supposed to be. And that's how I realized that at the time, I had high functioning anxiety. And even though I could, you know, I could do things, I could, you know, talk to people, I could be successful. And yet, every day was like a little battle. And I started searching.I started digging. And I was digging for actually a pretty long time because there are a lot of different approaches that talk about anxiety, but none of them, in my opinion, actually solve it. And what does solve it is like a holistic and integral approach that combines several different methods. And so once I had those like checkpoints, a real change happened for me. And I did actually change from feeling like I have to achieve something. I have to be very successful.I have to, you know, like try harder into a state where I actually really just enjoy my work. And I do what I can. I follow my plan. I follow it pretty closely. But once the work is done, you know, it's done and I get on to other things. And I just feel very present. Yeah.

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And so, yeah, this idea of high functioning anxiety. And so one thing I am curious about is where do you think this high functioning anxiety originates? Because here, you know, is it the media? Is it kind of like within? Is it just constantly bombarded with information? Where does high functioning anxiety come from?

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Well, it's a really good question. I love it. I think you are spot on. Media has a lot to do with it. And social media and 30-second reels of somebody having a beautiful life definitely fits into that.But also, so there's another thing that is a little bit deeper. This is where psychology really comes in. Because very often we put demands on ourselves that are, first of all, not realistic. Like, they cannot even be achieved. And secondly, that's not really what we want. It's maybe something that our parents wanted or that society wants or our boss wants it.So we put very high pressure on ourselves. And we start, you know, when the limit, like when the ideal is unreachable and we constantly compare ourselves to this ideal, we start feeling like a little bit angry with our selves because we can't achieve it. And that means because we want to achieve it, so we try harder. And we get even more controlling and even more rigid inside ourselves. And that moves our goaleven further away because all of a sudden we have this inner conflict, this inner fighting happening all the time. And so to put it like very shortly, I think anxiety in itself, and especially high-function anxiety, comes from too much control that we put on our selves. And control comes from too much demands,demands that are either unrealistic or are just not ours. They were given to us. They were told to us and we accepted them. So, and while I'm not saying that we need to let go of control and, you know, like free love, like living without money, just like, you know, babies of children, like, just likehaving nothing to do with life. That's not what I'm saying. Like, we still need, you know, our adult self being able to plan, being able to, you know,

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just be responsible.

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And yet, it's about this balance between trusting yourself to do, you know, what is needed and having very clear, very, yeah, having vision of yourself and what is important to you and why you do what you do, like having, being based on your values instead of on what you think you should do. Yeah.

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I've been doing a lot of thinking, and one of the things I was thinking about is you think that high-functioning anxiety is because we have all our basic food, all our basic needs met now. We have like clothing before we had to like hunt for food, you know, we had to like carry buckets of water, shelter, you know, all these basic needs that our society has advanced. And so now we have to invent these problems like anxiety or status or, you know,all these things. You think that's a function of more like people are looking for happiness, self-fulfillment, self-actualization. Talk about where that fits in.

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So yeah, to answer this question, we should go back in time. Our evolutionary ancestors who really needed anxiety, because anxiety is like a smaller version of fear. Yeah, it just tells us something is a little bit old and you need to fix it. And sure, for our ancestors, it was very important. And when they had anxiety, they would go and fix it, you know, and then they would go on with their life. And so it would be fine.But as the society progressed and society started putting up those additional requirements on how we should be, on how we have to, you know, be successful, yeah, how we have to have status. And what happened then is that our society in many ways is very neurotic. I'm speaking here mostly about Western society that, you know, values money and status and how many cars you have, how much you make, success, and, you know, all of that things that sure are important, but are not the most important thing.But when we live in that society, we take in its demands as if they're our own. We internalize them. And all of a sudden, you know, we have to prove to ourselves that I'm worthy of love. I'm, you know, good enough to have, you know, high-paying job. Because really, it's not about money. Because money is, it's, yeah, it's important, but money is really more about status.And status is really more about love, surprisingly.

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Because if we have high status, you know, we assume we will be respected and, you know, loved more.

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I mean, it's a mistake. It's something called a cognitive mistake, but we make it all the time and we think if we're more successful, we will be liked by other people more, especially by opposite sex, but not necessarily.And so that creates this whole dynamic when instead of accepting ourselves and just being really cool about how we are and valuing our differences. We have those standards of a successful person that we have to, you know, be like. And we start forcing ourselves, you know, overworking, you know, taking ourselves to the level of burnoutjust to prove that we can actually achieve this, you know, taking ourselves to the level of burnout just to prove that we can actually achieve this, you know, ethereal status. So, bringing this all back to the question. It is about our society, because we have a lot of our needs covered, you know, our society by its nature creates certain standards, you know, to make us enter the rat race. And that's a reason for anxiety. So, yeah.

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Yeah, very beautiful answer. And because, like, you know, I grew up here. You know, I was born here, grew up here. And the more I look at things, I'm like, I'm like, the Western NORP world has it, has it backwards. Because like you go to, you go to places like Europe LOC and people are just more family focused. They're more friendly.They're kinder to nature. And then you step off the plane into like any major city here in the States GPE. And you can feel that, you can feel that rush. It's like, it's like, because people because people you know they step off the plane in los angeles GPE and people are just like mean and screaming it's just crazy it's like i think it's perpetuated by media because they want you to consume more things more food more you know all this stuffand it's just kind of just advertising and uh you know who's thinner who's prettier who's you know all this stuff which brings me to my next next question is the, these integration of techniques. And what's really interesting is I love how you integrate, incorporate, you know, CBT, you got hypnosis, you got chigong. What did this idea come from and why you use so many different techniques from different fields to help your

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clients? So it was my own path. Like all of those techniques helped me, but helped me only in one way. And so by combining them, I think that gives the best result. So if I would kind of fleshed out a little bit my method, it's very important to start with surprisingly coaching, to understand what are your true values. Like, what is really, like, what do you really want? Like, when is your heart most happy?Because that's the state that we want to, you know, achieve in the end. Second part of it is working with the conscious mind, so the psychology. And this is where cognitive behavioral therapy comes in. When we learn to notice different cognitive mistakes that we make, when we think that, for example, a rich person has a really beautiful car, you know, he will be loved more.Yeah, that's not logically true. And yet we think, you know, unconsciously, that that's what's happening. So part of it is working through our thinking mistakes. Part of it of working through our thinking that creates anxiety, because there are certain ways of thinking that is like one-way ticket to anxiety. So you should learn to notice them and kind of learn to flow, not stop them, because stopping themalso gets you in trouble, but learn like navigate them. There is like a special technique. But often, the problem lies deeper with the unconscious mind. Because very often anxiety, remember, anxiety is fear, essentially. People who are more prone to be anxious,

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sometimes they had some episode in their past,

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in their childhood, when they were scared or just traumatized. And that experience needs to be relived and healed. And that is difficult to do on the conscious level. We need to tap into the unconscious level and that is pretty easy to do with guided meditation and very light hypnosis. So that's kind of working on your psyche, on your psychology.Then the last element is working with just like your routine, your day routine, how much social media you consume a day, what is your food, how many hours of sleep do you get? Because all of that is crucial for healthy balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. So of stress and relaxation. So, and I found that meditation, mindfulness, and Chigoum, which is Chinese NORP energy work exercises, they help a lot to teach you how to calm your mind.So your mind doesn't jump from one thing to another, doesn't try to, you know, to do like three things at once, that your mind is present, that it can focus and it has clarity. So it sees, it has like correct vision. It sees what is really in front of him instead of his own jumble of thoughts. So that's basically my approach in a nutshell.

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Speaker 01036.16s - 1064.62s

Yeah, I love that. And I can, you know, just from your, you know, from your, you know, your personal aura and your vibe is very, very flow and able to, you know, one thing that you bring back is, what I love is here in the, again, again, I kind of use the West LOC as kind of the escapego, but, you know, you were talking about one that came to my mind is, you know, like money is a, it's a number,

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and it's, usually it's paper and ink.

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So it's just kind of just an idea. It's how we store value, how we transfer value, how we exchange, you know, goods and services. And then, but then here we use it for, uh, the wrong reasons. We use it for it needs to greed and, um, you know, use again, we try to use it to, um, exert status over others and we know, we use it for wrong things, you know use again we try to use it to exert status over others and we know we use it for wrong things you know but there's a lot of things that we can do for it so and then the the question is this impact of meditation because um i really um recently kind of uh really uh it's really powerful because it you can just calm yourself and so talk about um you knowthat's like a core component and um how does uh how do you help professionals manage stress and enhance cognitive function amidst like for example like how can a tech executive um where his company is collapsing or you know all this stuff and he can basically use meditation, focus, and pull his company out. His, him or her, sorry.

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Well, let's talk about mindfulness. So mindfulness consists of three main things, as defined by one of the famous mindfulness teachers, Shinzen-Young PERSON. So he talks that mindfulness is a combination of concentration, clarity, and equanimity, or serenity, in other words. So if we take this example of this CEO who has a company going downand unpleasant things happening in his life. Mindfulness can help him, well, first of all, stay concentrated on the task in front of him. So not like a jump. Okay, I also need to do this. I also need to do this. But really, one step at a time, clarity will be able to help him see things clearly.So not to make illusions, not to make mistakes,

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not to overthink things as well.

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And equanimity, this is like the most important one, serenity for this particular case, because it teaches not to be either attached to something. So it teaches us not to try to hold on to something forever or on the opposite scale to push something away. Like, I don't want this, this has, this should never happen.Because just as Stoics PERSON used to say, like, we can control only so much. We can control our reactions with the outer world. That's beyond most times out of our control. So serenity really helps to, cultivating qualities of serenity really helps to accept that even though failing company is not ideal, but, you know, that's the way the world is now. you know, that's the way the world is now.And not, you know, blame or, like not eat yourself about it. Just allow this to be part of the experience and pleasant part, but still, you know, it's still possible to live through this. And serenity really gives this ability to step back from something, breathe out, and then continue doing whatever you have to do to save the company. But just without the feeling like that, you know, so it's more chill, more, it's like, okay,one step at a time.

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I love that. And the other thing is, you know, kind of, you know, I tend to blow things out of proportion and make stories and prejudge and, you know, that, but I love this idea where you just basically bring it back into focus and you're, and you know, focus on, and it's usually you work your way through it. So I love that. How can people reach out to you and find more about you, your unique approach and, you know, kind of take it in and, you know, reach out to you and work with you.

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Well, I have LinkedIn ORG. I have YouTube ORG where I regularly post guided meditations and just some information about how to remain cool and balanced. Of course, I have Instagram ORG. So one of those channels, people can reach me. Excellent.

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Audience, let's thank Anna PERSON for coming on and sharing her approach and be sure to give her socials a like and follow and, you know, reach out to her, work with her if it fits your, resonates with you. And with that, thanks so much for coming on.

Speaker 11347.74s - 1348.78s

It was my pleasure. Thank you.