Pizza, Panic, and Painkillers
You're about to give a speech. Your hands are shaking. Your throat is closing up.
Amy Morin's advice: smell the pizza.
Breathe in through your nose like you're smelling a slice. Hold it. Exhale through your mouth like you're cooling it off.
Sounds ridiculous. Works anyway.
Amy Morin taught me that—and a lot more—during my latest podcast.
Amy is a therapist. She also lives in a sailboat. She’s also written more bestsellers than most people have read.
Now she’s about to release her latest book, The Mental Strength Playbook, out April 28th.
We talked all about it…
And she just gave me some of her BEST tips for managing stress, anxiety, and the 3 AM panic spirals.
People Want Painkillers
Here's the thing about Amy's books up to now—they were all about what NOT to do. Don't dwell. Don't resent. Don't envy. Useful.
But people kept asking her: what do I do? What do I do RIGHT NOW? When my anxiety is screaming and my mortgage is due tomorrow and the market just crashed?
So she wrote the playbook. 50 techniques.
Painkillers, not vitamins—her words.
Vitamins are the slow stuff—eat better, sleep more, manage your stress. Painkillers are the things you can actually do right now, in the moment, when things get hard.
Both have their place.
But when your anxiety is screaming at 3 AM, you don't want a multivitamin. You want the fast-acting stuff.
That's what the playbook is.
Let’s run through a few of my favorites.
Give Your Brain a Bedtime
I asked her about financial anxiety, because that's everywhere right now.
Her answer: Schedule time to worry.
Literally put it on your calendar. 7:00 to 7:15 PM. Worry hard. As hard as you can.
Then get up and do something else.
The research says your brain will actually obey this.
The thing that wakes you up at 3 AM stops feeling like an emergency by the time 7 PM rolls around because your subconscious has been quietly working on it the whole time.
The Stage Fright Trick
I told her about my old technique for stage fright—imagining the nervous version of myself stepping out of my body so I could talk to him like a friend.
She lit up. Said it's a form of psychological distance.
Narrative therapists do something similar. Your anxiety isn't you. It's a separate thing trying to talk you out of doing something.
That’s when she taught me how to smell the pizza.
You can do it during a fight with your spouse and they won't even notice. It signals to your brain that you're not actually hanging off a cliff, so it stops acting like you are.
Why I Keep Losing at Chess
I told her about my chess problem. I know more about chess than I've ever known and I'm winning less.
We diagnosed it together on the podcast—it's a focus thing, an attention thing, possibly a cognitive load thing.
I'm running too many businesses, writing too many articles, juggling too many open loops. Something has to drop and apparently my chess focus is what dropped.
Her solution? Her life is simple for a reason. Sailboat. Books. One thing at a time.
Why Divorce Is Contagious
We talked about commitment. Long marriages.
Why being around committed couples makes you a better partner whether you have willpower or not.
Why being around divorcing friends makes divorce contagious.
You're the average of the five people you spend time with—even in your marriage. Keep that in mind.
Wait to Send the Angry Email
We talked about the long game.
Doing the stupid thing because being the team player matters more than being right. Not panicking when the market dips on your retirement account. Smelling pizza when every fiber of you wants to send the angry email.
Amy's gift is that she takes the soft mushy stuff—anxiety, commitment, mental strength—and turns it into actual moves you can run.
Plays. Like a quarterback flipping through a playbook on the sideline.
The book is out April 28th. Get it.
