While a lot of people experience anxiety, not everyone experiences it the same way. For some people, for example, stressful thoughts have a way of piling up at night... which is not only an unpleasant experience, but can have an impact on one's sleep. One individual who can relate to this is Chris Evans, but he has developed a personal method for suppressing and combating his negative thoughts as they arise when his head hits the pillow.
The actor/filmmaker is the guest on the latest episode of the podcast You Made It Weird With Pete Holmes, and in their conversation together Evans opens up about how he personally deals with anxiety. He explains that he is a person who tends to be plagued by stressful thoughts at night, but that he has found a way to train himself to halt them: it boils down to convincing himself that there is nothing he can do about his problems at night and view sleep as a "little vacation." In his words:
One of the things that I always do, because my anxiety kicks up at night – daytime, I feel great. I can wake up, I'm a morning guy. When I go to bed... what I would do is just kind of say, 'You know, Chris, we're lying in bed. Look, there's nothing we can do right now. There's nothing to be done about this. There's no actual action I can take. So we'll go on a little vacation. All these problems will be here tomorrow morning.'
It probably goes without saying that the best way to resolve anxiety is by directly addressing the things that are causing it... but if it's past midnight and you have to get up early the next morning, there is nothing productive that can come from obsessively worrying. Chris Evans says that recognizing the realities of your stressful thoughts can help you put them aside.
The Captain America star adds that this can be the first step toward annihilating anxiety, as incremental pushing away of the negativity eventually frees one of it. Says Evans,
It's just a matter of saying, 'You know what, let's just go on a little vacation from these thoughts just for a minute. Just for a minute.' And then just keep extending that minute. And before you know it, that's who you are. That's like, when those thoughts quiet down. We're not our thoughts, are we? Our thoughts are just like fucking noise in our head, and nine times out of ten, it's not helpful. Just practicing talking your brain into the practice of being quiet, you'll start to inevitably realize, 'This is effective.'
You can watch Chris Evans discuss his methods for dealing with anxiety in the clip from the You Made It Weird With Pete Holmes podcast below:
Having stepped away from the MCU following Avengers: Endgame, Chris Evans hasn't started the 2020s as the ubiquitous big screen presence he was in the 2010s, but he has been a part of some standout streaming movies in the last couple of years (namely Don't Look Up and The Gray Man for Netflix, and Apple TV+'s Ghosted), and he voiced Buzz Lightyear in Pixar's Lightyear in 2022. He also stars in the Apple limited streaming series Defending Jacob with Jaeden Martell.
Looking ahead, Evans has completed production on the Christmas action comedy Red One co-starring Dwayne Johnson, and later this year we'll see him featured opposite Emily Blunt in director David Yates' crime drama Pain Hustlers (due out on October 27). He regularly has fun and exciting new projects on the horizon, so stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for updates about his upcoming movies.
