How Anxiety Leads To Greatness ► Explained With Dark Souls

Have you ever felt anxiety? It’s not a very pleasant feeling. Your palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy. There might even be vomit on your sweater already. You feel like you want to throw up and your heart is beating outside of your chest. It’s like you can sense an impending doom coming towards you and it just seems like why does it even need to happen? I can’t remember one time when anxiety has ever been useful for me.

It’s supposed to be like a concern for the future, right? It comes from the fear of potential threats or events that still have yet to come. But the way I feel when I’m anxious, it makes me not even want to do whatever I was going to do anymore. Not even just the scary things, but anything. I get anxiety when I have to talk on the phone, when someone knocks on the door. Even when I talk to NPCs in games, I

Feel the social anxiety. I used to think anxiety is just the most useless feeling ever and I just wish I could get rid of it. But then I played this game called Dark Souls and it made me realize something. You don’t beat anxiety by thinking about it more, you beat it by letting it fuel your desires. I’ve heard a lot of people say that playing Dark Souls makes them anxious and afraid. I know it sounds kind of funny, like

Stressing so bad over a video game, but I kind of used to be the same way, too. When I first started playing, it gave me this feeling of like nervousness and dread. Dark Souls has this unique feeling that I’ve never felt before in any other game. It’s the only series that makes a player feel scared without jump scares or lurking horror. It combines a total lack of concern for your well-being with a dark and bleak world to make you feel tiny and teases

You with just enough hope to keep going. People have said they feel constantly anxious, on the edge of their seat, adrenaline pumping. They jump and physically respond to attacks and get anxious at noises like heavy footsteps. They’ll put off going to an area because they just find it too oppressive and scary, like the catacombs and Blighttown. This game is an anxiety simulator and that’s exactly why I recommend anyone play it who hasn’t already. Because the thing you’re scared

Of is exactly the thing that’s going to shape you. The whole point of these games is the unknown. Every step you take and every new thing you see, you now have it in your mind. And when you die and come back, that stuff is now known to you. Once you’ve beaten the whole game for your first time, if you ever decide to play it again, you’ll be running through the whole place confidently and having a blast. This

Game gave me anxiety my first time playing, too. But then it taught me that even if I die, even if I lose all my souls, and even if the area is scary, there is nothing to be afraid of. When you start to get more familiar with the game, you realize that you were taking dying too seriously. You realize that you don’t actually lose anything when you die. You can always get more souls, and you can always have another try.

Trying too hard to prevent death in the game is the reason you have this anxiety at all. But in Dark Souls, you will die. It’s not an if question. You definitely will die. You just have to realize there’s next to no consequences for dying. You’ll lose all your souls, sure, but that monster isn’t going to come through the screen and kill you, too. You overcome it by doing it. Now that you don’t mind if you die, you’re

Actually free to go explore around and make progress. But now, this is important. In Dark Souls, dying is not the end. But in real life, it is. So when I say it’s okay if you die because you can always have another try, you might be thinking like, I still have anxiety though. Because if I fail, then it’s the end of the world. But Dark Souls doesn’t teach us that it’s okay to die. It teaches us that it’s okay to

Fail. And after you play the game and really feel that to be true inside of you, you quickly abandon the idea that you will win every fight, and instead embrace the idea of failure as a learning experience. It’s a safe, judgment-free simulator where you can try your best, fail, get back up, and try again. But I just want you to ask yourself, why am I anxious? When you get those butterflies in your stomach, why? Is it because you think you’re going to

Die? People are going to laugh at you? Why is this feeling here? What is it for? It doesn’t really make sense from an evolutionary standpoint, because if you were really in danger, like your life was on the line, then it would make sense to feel anxiety. But why does the same feeling arise when nothing is even happening? I think it’s a sign, a sign that requires introspection. And by introspection, I don’t mean that when you feel anxiety, you should think about

It more, what’s making you anxious, because that’ll just make things worse. I know from experience. But I mean, if you can think about the why, then we can actually start to get somewhere. I mean, isn’t it confusing? Like why do we get so nervous when we get a call from a random number on our phone? Why is every small thing made huge in our head? There must be something there inside of you that you might not even know about

Yourself. Some kind of improvement that can be made, because anxiety is rarely random. It’s usually pointing at something you’re avoiding. There must be a way to channel this fear and anxiety and use it as fuel to make yourself better and more capable. I think that if you’re the kind of person that gets anxiety over small things, like just going outside and playing Dark Souls or having to talk to someone, then this is your sign to take things under your

Control. We learn from Dark Souls that it’s okay to fail, but that doesn’t mean that failing is no longer scary. Now we know it’s not going to be the end of the world even if we lose all our souls. It’s actually kind of liberating to lose all your souls, because now you have nothing to lose anymore. Less stress, less anxiety. Now you can operate without that pressure. But it’s still scary to go into a place like

Blighttown, right? That place feels like it’s designed to stress us out. But how does anyone ever get anything done then? You can’t beat the game without going down into Blighttown. So you have to take the first step. You expose yourself to the conditions down there. And then, with enough time spent down there in the place that you didn’t want to go, you become someone who is familiar with Blighttown. You know where stuff is now. You know how to navigate this place, and

You run through it with ease. Now you’ve been shaped into this person who defeated Blighttown. Now you’re even less anxious for that place, because now you’re not on the outside looking at how terrible it looks. You’re actually just in there, and it’s not so bad. That’s how a lot of things in real life are, too. Whenever I have a shift for my job, I always get this feeling of like, I don’t want to go to that stupid place

Again. But then when I actually get there, I remember how it feels to be there, and I realize that actually it was worse in my head. It’s not so bad being here. So expose yourself to that thing that you know you need to do, but are too anxious to do it. Because most likely, once you actually get into it, won’t be as bad as you thought. In the filth it shall be found. Go to the

Place you didn’t want to go and become the person who easily conquers it. And you can see that once you frame it this way, now it’s kind of like you want to go down to that hard place, because you know that once you go through it and conquer it, you’ll become a better and stronger version of yourself. It turns your anxiety into bravery and courage, and a way for you to grow into a better and stronger person. Don’t think that

You’re too scared or weak to do something. You have everything you need to go into that place that you don’t want to go and come out better. Anxiety isn’t a sign that you’re weak. It’s a sign that you’re standing in front of something unknown. And the only way to turn the unknown into the known is to step into it. Dark Souls taught us how dying isn’t the end. And we see the same in real life. Failing isn’t the end,

Either. Most of the things that scare you aren’t monsters. They’re possibilities. And the longer you stare at them and try to reason and figure out the best path take just by looking at them from the outside, the bigger and scarier they look. But as soon as you take a step inside of any one of these possibilities and just take a chance and try your best, you see that it wasn’t that bad the whole time. Just the idea

And decision paralysis was the part giving you the most resistance. Stop trying to eliminate anxiety. Use it to your advantage. Walk into Blighttown. On the other side of that place you don’t want to go, that thing you don’t want to do, is the version of you that doesn’t fear it anymore. I hope that this video can help someone in some way. If you like Dark Souls and self-improvement, I have a new free community that you can

Join. It’s just going to be the link in the description. I also have a new course that it’s like how to fix your life but explained with Dark Souls. So, if that sounds interesting to you, then that’s also going to be a link in the description. No pressure for either of them, just they’re there if it sounds interesting to you, all right? You take care, guys. Don’t you dare go hollow.