Bill Hader is promoting the second season of Barry, which means we all win because he’s such a great interview. While chatting with Conan the other night, Conan asked Bill about how he handled the anxiety of being on SNL when he was just 27 years old. Bill said transcendental meditation was helpful for it. But he also received some words of wisdom from none other than The Dude himself, Jeff Bridges:
The one guy, Jeff Bridges, he saw me on the show when I was really nervous and he told me a story. He said, ‘you know, when I was in The Iceman Cometh wit Robert Ryan, and every time, before every take he would get nervous.’ And I said, ‘wow, after all these years you still get afraid.’ And he said, ‘yeah, I’d be really afraid if I wasn’t afraid.’ And I was like, oh, that’s interesting. And Jeff Bridges is like, ‘ Yeah, that’s your body, man! Tha, tha, that anxiety, that’s your body, man. Put your arm around it and just get out there, man! Yeah, it’s good’
Bill went on to say that he ran into Jeff later and Jeff remembered telling him that. It does sound like good advice, even if I have no idea how to follow it. I generally fight my anxiety. I love the idea of throwing my arm around it and getting out there because all my anxiety wants right now is to eat. Maybe if Jeff Bridges told me to do it, I could be more productive. Of course, Bill said when he talked to Jeff all those years later, Jeff tried to dissuade him from going home to make his 5 AM call the next day. Instead, Jeff said he should, “go out and do drugs, that’s where all the best stuff is! Get drunk.” So Bill was smart to pick and choose which of Jeff’s advice he heeded.
If you have the opportunity to watch the clip, you are treated to Bill’s actual impression of Jeff, which is really good. Bill’s known for his impressions, of course. But I’m always surprised how quickly he does them. My personal favorite is his Alan Alda impression, which is because I have equal adoration for Alan Alda and Bill Hader.
Photo credit: YouTube and WENN Photos
That’s all well and nice, but this kind of advice feels very “hey thanks, I’m fixed,” to a person with an anxiety disorder. Sounds like Bill grapples with moments of self doubt and anxiety but may not necessarily have a psychological disorder. All that aside, he’s such an interesting and talented man.
Well they’re clearly talking about stage fright, not anxiety disorder, two very different things. Let’s try and see the positive here instead of the knee jerk negative reaction which is so common now
For me, this advice is helpful, because I have some mild anxiety issues, and the idea of “putting my arm around it” and just letting it out there is actually helpful, because part of what makes me anxious is being anxious, if that makes sense. I get a little anxious, and then I start stressing over WHY I’m anxious and WHAT is going on in my head and OMG AM I GOING TO FEEL WORSE AS THE DAY PROGRESSES. So for me, Bridges’ advice is more helpful.
My SIL battles more significant anxiety and OCD issues, and her issues manifest very differently from mine, so this advice would probably just make her feel worse.
Totally! I think this works for mild anxiety.
Exactly. Before I found effective treatment, just trying to embrace my anxiety made me feel several degrees worse. I can see it working for situational anxiety and stage fright though.
One trick to deal with anxiety is to pretend it’s excitement. Your body can’t really tell the difference and as long as you can tell your brain that you’re truly excited, not nervous, it works. I’d like to pretend that’s what Jeff meant, otherwise it’s just kinda pseudobabble.
That legitimately does help. I used to have horrible anxiety attacks when I was a teenager, and someone told me this. I started to notice when my anxiety started to creep in, and I would think about the next thing I was looking forward to (a dance, date, birthday, etc.) and spin it off into excitement about that. Didn’t work 100% of the time, but it worked enough.
What? This is exciting news and something to try!
using imagery to harness anxiety was a tool i learned from a behavioral psychologist. i was in a weird place where i was crippled with anxiety in my current job (related to company culture and manager who targeted me) but wasn’t together enough to find a new job and i needed help to leave my house to go to work. i was on medication but anyone with anxiety knows you can still have panic attacks if you work hard enough….so what i did was acknowledge my anxiety about work for however many minutes on a literal timer. i started at 5 mins and worked down to 1. when the timer stopped, i had to stop ruminating, put it in a drawer and leave the house. the goal was to stop me from spiraling out before the day even started. it really helped physically move me out the door. after a while – i didn’t need the timer. since my issue was centered around this one thing, going to work, the “put your arm around it” style of thinking really helped me deal with it.
That’s really interesting. Glad to hear you found something that worked. I agree that Jeff’s advice was probably specifically about stage fright-type anxiety vs. generalized anxiety. I imagine it’s pretty common among actors.
On the flip side, I have chronic, persistent, generalized anxiety, fairly well controlled at the moment, but speaking in front of crowds was never a specific fear I had. Strangely I’ve always been fine with it, even though I’m a pretty reserved person in general.
Jeff’s is good advice – I’m glad it worked for Bill, and hopefully a version of it helps others too.
But I agree Esmom, that kind of anxiety/nervousness before a performance is a little different, as it’s very common and expected in that situation.
I’ve been dealing with general anxiety for about a year now, after an illness last summer (both the illness AND the medication caused anxiety, yay!) It hits at the most random times (driving to work, at the movies with friends, at home watching tv) and can be really scary.
Hader’s Alda impression is amazing. I felt like he was lip syncing, it was that spot on.
It’s unbelievable!
I know right? He’s humble in interviews but even his Jeff bridges impression was quite good.
Barry is so well done it’s nice to see him getting recognition for how talented he is at so many things
The best advice I got re: anxiety came from a past therapist. It was that every moment of every day, your body is assessing every situation it comes into, and determining a fight or flight response. Most of it is so small, you don’t even think about or notice it. But the bigger things get, the more you notice it. Anxiety is just your fight or flight response, it’s just your body (much to what Jeff said), reacting to the stimuli – and once you KNOW this, you can think about what stimuli your body is reacting to, think about why it’s having either fight or flight, and then try to harness that to accomplish what you want.
I am by no means saying this is a fool-proof, 100% of the time works for everybody. I still cope with anxiety that I can’t manage, but this gives me a tool, and it definitely helps – especially if I can recognize it early enough.
I once read something that said all the great people of history – who lead and won battles or persevered through terrible experiences and hardship, etc…all the golden people – that they just had an innate ability to basically weaponize their fight response and use it to target their focus on accomplishing their task. They were stressed and scared but knew how to *use* that stress to succeed. I think about that a lot, and would love to figure out how to train my brain to think along those lines.
Great advice, @ShazBot! I find the meditation technique of noting helps me deal with mild anxiety and depression throughout the day. If I start feeling anxious, I stop and say (in my head), “Hey, that’s anxiety.” My new step that’s working really well is to sit/stand/do chores while I “sit” with my anxiety and poke around the edges of it to see where it is in my body, and after a few minutes, it seems to dissipate under the scrutiny, like there was nothing there to begin with.
It’s taken me 28 years of dealing with depression and then later anxiety to get to the point where mild feelings don’t overwhelm me, and this method helps more than anything else so far. Still don’t know how to deal with the sudden, major attacks, though!
That’s what I’ve been doing too. Now I’m try to be like “oh, it’s just anxiety, it’ll pass”, and it eventually does. Compared to when it first started happening, and I was thinking I was having a heart attack, or about to pass out, etc.
He is an international treasure. Love him
No other SNL character has ever made me laugh like Stefon.
I was looking for pictures of him and I found this:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/perpetua/which-stefon-club-are-you