Notice, Then Do The Scary Thing
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
After lockdown, Caspar Lee began having panic attacks in ordinary situations, including sitting in a car with his best friend. The protocol he built with a therapist has two halves. The first is noticing: guided meditation taught him to experience feelings and thoughts in his body and to stop taking them as seriously as he used to. The second is graded exposure: deliberately doing things that scare him, without jumping straight into the deep end, on the premise that the thing is far worse in his head than in reality. Around the moment itself he breathes, ladders the worst case down to something survivable, and keeps a small object to fidget with. He accepts nerves rather than trying to stop them, and banks the win afterwards.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Get outside help before self-managing
When the panic attacks appeared out of nowhere during lockdown, Caspar sought therapy and worked through it with a professional, who was the one who recommended meditation.
Watch out He still does not know exactly why it started, so do not wait for a satisfying explanation before acting.
- 2
Build a simple daily meditation habit
He downloaded the Calm app and sits down to a guided meditation rather than trying to construct a practice himself. The point is repetition, not sophistication.
Pro tip Guided sessions remove the decision-making, which matters when the reason you are meditating is that your mind is already busy.
- 3
Notice thoughts instead of obeying them
The core skill he took from meditation is experiencing feelings in the body and thoughts as they are, and not taking them as seriously as he used to.
Watch out Meditating ten times in a week does not fix it. He is explicit that other factors are at play and the benefit accrues over time.
- 4
Breathe and ladder the worst case
Before something difficult he takes time to breathe, accepts that he will feel nervous and cannot stop that, then asks what is the worst that can happen, repeatedly, until the answer bottoms out.
Pro tip He runs the ladder all the way to the absurd end point, which is what defuses it.
- 5
Carry a physical anchor
He keeps a small object he can play with in his hand as a distraction, and had one when he first shook hands with Ali. Invent whatever works for you rather than copying his.
Pro tip A morning run before a stressful commitment does the same job. He ran the morning of this interview to be in good spirits for it.
- 6
Say yes to graded exposure
Deliberately do things that scare you, choosing the version you can survive rather than the deepest end. He had turned down around ten podcast invitations that year before accepting this one because it seemed low-intimidation.
Watch out Avoidance compounds. The car with his best friend became a trigger precisely because every approach to it was avoided.
- 7
Bank the win and repeat
After doing the thing you were nervous about, register that you did it. He describes going home afterwards feeling that he battled through, and says the experience makes him more likely to say yes next time.
Pro tip Also use the contrast: appreciating the days when you feel normal turns the whole thing into something closer to a power.
In the wild
Caspar had been asked onto roughly ten podcasts in a year and refused every one, because his fear was having a panic attack live on a recording. Over the previous eighteen months he had been deliberately doing things that scared him, so when Ali's DM arrived he judged it: a nice host, a low-intimidation setting, a scary but survivable version of the thing. He accepted, was nervous beforehand, and did the two-hour interview anyway. His conclusion during the episode is that having now done it, he will probably do more.
→ A year-long avoidance streak broken, and the barrier to the next podcast lowered.
The trigger that made no sense to him was sitting in a car with his best friend, where nothing was remotely dangerous, yet he could have a panic attack. He describes the pattern as self-reinforcing: every time he approached a car it happened again. Working through therapy, meditation and repeated exposure, he found that the response can be slowly unlearned, and frames confidence generally as practice rather than a starting condition. Not everyone begins able to do everything, and the people who get there did so by repetition.
→ The panic response softened over roughly eighteen months of deliberate practice rather than avoidance.
Common mistakes
Expecting meditation to be the whole fix
Caspar warns against the belief that ten sessions in a week will make everything good. Meditation changed how seriously he took his thoughts, but the improvement came alongside therapy and repeated exposure over time.
Jumping straight into the deep end
His advice is explicitly not to throw yourself at the most terrifying version of the thing. Pick an exposure you can survive, like a friendly podcast, so the attempt produces a win rather than confirmation of the fear.
Trying to eliminate the nerves first
He accepts that he will feel nervous and cannot stop that, then works with it. Waiting to feel calm before acting means never acting, since the calm arrives after the exposure, not before it.
From the transcript
“I learned about experiencing feelings in my body and thoughts and kind of noticing them for what they are and not taking them as seriously…”
“the last kind of year and a half I've just been trying to do things that make me scared”
“that's also my advice is one is meditating but two if something really scares you obviously don't jump right into the deep end but try…”
From the episode
Caspar Lee: How He Built A 10+ Million YouTube Following In His 20s (And Why He Quit)
Caspar Lee