I want to talk to you today about a small practice that can help you to break out of those times when you feel like you're stuck in a cycle of anxiety.
We've talked before about how anxiety isn't necessarily a bad thing.
It's a natural,
Normal human emotion.
But there are times when it is adaptive,
And there are times when it is not adaptive.
There are times when it is helpful and when it is not helpful.
Times when it serves you and times when it doesn't serve you.
If you're someone that feels like you're in anxiety most of the time,
Then you have crossed over that line to where you are in anxiety more of the time probably than it is adaptive for you.
We've been studying what emotion science has discovered over the past 20 years about how emotions are generated,
How to regulate emotions,
How to change them when they're not serving you,
How this is done,
How it works in the brain.
And the bad news is that there is no quick fix for anxiety.
There's no quick little thing where you can snap your fingers and you can snap out of it.
And this is because,
As we've talked about from the beginning,
Your emotions are not created by your situation.
Your emotions are created by your interaction with your situation.
They're created by your brain's appraisal of the situation.
So if you're somebody who tends to get stuck in anxiety most of the time,
Then that means that your brain has a habit of relating to the world in a certain way.
It has a habit of seeing your demands in your life as too much for your resources.
And so,
If you want to get out of this habitual way of seeing the world,
You are going to have to create new mental habits.
Maybe it's not something you can do from one day to the next.
Maybe it's not something you can snap your fingers and already be good at.
It's something you have to practice.
But I want to teach you today a little practice that you can do.
It's not that hard.
It may seem like not that big of a deal.
But if you really do it,
It can help change the habitual way that your brain sees the world and the way that you relate to your life.
And I want to introduce this strategy by telling you a little story about a friend of mine who is a surfer.
There was one day when he went out surfing in the ocean and it was a pretty crazy day as far as the waves go.
And he was surfing and then.
.
.
It got to a point where there was a wave came and it was a huge wave and it It came and it smashed him and then it pinned him down to the ocean floor.
And it held him there and he couldn't get up.
He couldn't move.
It was.
Holding him down there on the bottom.
And it held him for a long time.
And he said that he remembers thinking,
Wow,
Maybe this is it.
This is how my life ends.
Luckily,
He was able to finally get free of the wave,
Come up,
Gasp for air,
Get away to get to the beach,
And he survived that situation.
But he described his experience after that incident as something really amazing.
While the experience was happening,
He was pretty sure that this was the end.
And the fact that he got out of it.
And got back to land.
Once he was there,
He felt just amazed at the fact that he had made it.
He said that for a long time after this experience,
He would wake up every day and just feel absolutely in awe at the fact that he was alive and everything around him seemed incredibly beautiful and amazing.
So I think he would describe this feeling that he had,
This emotion that he had after this close call,
As really on the opposite end of the spectrum from anxiety,
Living in gratitude and awe and wonder at the fact that you're alive.
And I think all of us,
Each one of us,
If we happen to have an experience like that today.
If we each one of us went out in the ocean and had that experience of being pinned down on the ocean floor and thinking we weren't going to make it and then.
Somehow coming up and getting back to shore,
That we would have this same emotion that he was having of awe and gratitude.
But the thing is,
You don't have to have that surfer experience in order to cultivate this emotion.
We all have.
In reality,
We are always living one close call after another.
There are a lot of known close calls that we've had in our lives and a lot of unknown close calls of times when we almost didn't make it,
But we might not even be aware of it.
I gave myself a little exercise in regards to this and I told myself,
I'm going to sit down and I'm going to list 10 close calls that I know that I've had in my life,
Even though there's probably a whole bunch more that I don't even know about.
It's funny,
When I sat down to do it,
It was kind of hard to think of them.
I think our brains,
A lot of times,
Don't like to cling to these close calls in our heads.
Because we like to feel,
On some level,
Like we're James Bond.
Like we can escape from every scrape and we're invincible.
But in reality,
We're not indestructible.
In reality,
It's actually really amazing.
That we're here.
So I sat down and I started to list these 10 close calls.
One I've talked about before on the podcast,
It was when I was really sick with lung COVID and I wasn't,
I really didn't know if I was gonna make it.
But I thought of nine others as well.
A time when I was hiking into this national park to meet some friends and they had gone earlier and they'd gone a different way and I was coming in by myself on this other route that I wasn't familiar with and I ended up It was a really sketchy route and I got kinda off.
Trail at one point,
And there were several places where if my foot had slipped in just the wrong way at that moment,
I could have fallen a really long way,
And I could have not made it,
And I would have been all alone.
I thought about another time when our family was on a trip and we had terrible car trouble.
Suddenly in the middle of the trip and our clutch went out and we were on this really narrow mountain winding road and if a truck had been coming in the other direction at just the right moment,
It could have been really bad.
We could have had a really bad accident,
But we were able to get off that mountain and get to a mechanic.
Another time I was on a hike with a friend and we were trying to take a shortcut down from the peak and there was this big glacier that we could kind of like scoot down on our bottoms,
And that would shave off having to go on,
You know,
Quite a bit of trail.
And so we decided to take the shortcut.
But I got going down this glacier,
And I ended up going really,
Really fast.
And I got kind of going out of control.
And I couldn't stop myself.
And I could see at the bottom,
The bottom of a glacier was coming up.
Below me and there were these big jagged rocks at the bottom and I could just see myself running into these rocks.
Somehow,
I don't even know how,
I was able to stop myself on this snow and ice before I got to those rocks.
So that was another one I thought of.
I thought of two different incidents on different hikes where I almost stepped on a really poisonous snake.
One was a rattler that just happened to I just happened to see in time and I didn't step on it.
Another was a really poisonous snake in Brazil that my family was in.
On a hike and we came upon it.
It was a huge one,
But it had just.
.
.
Instance before we got there,
It had just caught and killed a mouse and it was trying to swallow it.
And so it was in the process of swallowing this mouse and it was kind of immobilized.
But if we had come upon it just a few minutes earlier,
Before it had caught that mouse,
It would have been in hunting mode and it probably would have bitten one of us.
Because we came upon it just kind of around the corner and we couldn't see it ahead of time.
Anyhow,
That was another close call.
There was another time when I was on a vacation with my family in Canada and it was an area with a lot of bears and we had a lot of close calls with these bears.
They ended up getting into our things that were near where we were camping and ripping them apart and things like that.
Anyway,
We didn't end up having any bad run-ins with the bears,
But there were a lot of situations looking back on it where we could have come upon them in the wrong moment and it could have been really bad.
And another one I thought of was,
You know,
One of the childbirths of my kids.
I probably wouldn't have made it without modern medicine.
It was just the type of situation where women used to die and their children used to die,
But luckily we did have good medical care and I didn't die.
Probably sound kind of dramatic,
A lot of those,
But then I thought of two that are maybe a little bit more commonplace.
One was times when flights have been cancelled of mine.
Know,
Where we're waiting on the runway for an hour,
An hour and a half,
And then they say,
We're sorry,
We just realized that there's a technical problem with the plane,
There's a part that needs to be replaced,
We need to get you off and get you on another plane.
But what if they hadn't discovered that technical problem in time?
And what if we had taken off and we'd had some crisis in the air?
And then one last one,
Number 10,
You know this is.
.
.
Probably something most of us can relate to.
I remember being on a road trip at one point and I'm on a really fast moving highway with a lot of traffic.
There's a freeway with the lanes going my direction on one side,
Then a small barrier,
And then the lanes going the other direction on the other side and lots of traffic on both sides going really fast.
And I remember At one point,
I wasn't driving,
But I looked over at the lanes going the opposite direction on the other side of the barrier.
And just at the moment that I looked over,
There was a huge explosive collision between a car and a truck right at that moment.
I saw it and it was gone in a minute because we were going fast the other direction and it was behind us all of a sudden.
But it just made me realize,
Oh my goodness,
I could have not made it.
On this trip in the car.
So those are 10 different close calls that I thought of for myself,
Different ways that I could have not been alive today.
So when I do this exercise and I really think about all of the things that could have happened that could have made it so that I could not have survived to this day,
And I look at myself and say,
Wow,
I am alive,
Then I start to feel some of that feeling that my friend described from his surfing incident,
This awe and amazement and gratitude at the fact that I'm here and I start to feel the opposite of anxiety.
So instead of being stuck in that loop of worrying about my demands and how my resource is going to measure up to it,
Instead all of a sudden my mind is expanded to see all these times when the demands of life should have totally overwhelmed my resources,
But they didn't.
And isn't that amazing that I'm still here?
Isn't it amazing that I get to be alive for even a minute?
So it helps me feel that the fact that I am here should not be taken for granted.
It helps me switch out of anxiety and into gratitude.
And when you are in gratitude,
As I said,
It's really on that opposite spectrum almost from anxiety.
You can't really be in a huge anxiety crisis if you are feeling a lot of gratitude.
Coexist that well,
The two emotions.
So this may seem like a little bit of a cheesy exercise,
But I'd encourage you to do it.
I'd encourage you to sit down and try and think of 10 close calls in your life.
Again,
This might seem kind of silly,
But as I was talking about in the beginning,
Being able to change your habitual way of seeing the world means creating new mental habits.
There is no quick fix for anxiety.
You do need to develop new mental habits,
But the good news is they can be developed.
And it's not actually that terribly hard.
It just takes consistency.
Just like I used to tell my beginning,
Beginning piano students.
Look at these little kids that,
You know,
They have so much else going on in their lives and maybe they don't feel like piano is a big priority.
I just told their parents,
Just have them practice at least 30 minutes a day,
Five days a week.
And this will at least give them the baseline that they need to be able to advance and acquire skills and build on those skills that they acquire.
So the same thing when you're trying to change your habitual way that your brain sees your demands and your resources.
You don't need to do some overwhelming amount of work.
You just need to work on it consistently.
Little things every day.
Little practices that can help you.
Train your brain to start to see things that it's not used to noticing.
And this is one little exercise that can help your brain to start to see your experiences and your life in a different way,
To view your demands and your resources in a different way.
To be able to reframe.
From being in threat to recognizing,
Wow,
Look at all the ways that I have avoided threat.
Look at all the ways that my resources have taken me out of situations of extreme mortal danger,
How I've survived.
You know,
You could make your list of 10 close calls that you've had in your life and put it on your bathroom mirror so that when you wake up in the morning and you have that anxious feeling,
Your brain is brought back to remembering that,
Wow,
It's actually,
Even with everything that I'm facing right now,
It's actually really amazing that I'm here at all.
Isn't it amazing that I survived all of these 10 times when I could have not survived?
And yet,
Here I am.
What am I going to do with this wonderful life that I have?
That's my suggestion for you today.
Try it out.
I think it might help you.
Thanks for tuning in.
