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Hi there. Thanks for coming back again today for another listen, where we get to study more ideas for anxiety management. We talked last week about gratitude as an anxiety management strategy. We had our first kindness narrative at the end of the episode. Today we're going to have another kindness narrative at the end, so stay tuned. But today we're going to talk first about, a straight, another strategy, which initially I was rather suspicious of. It took me awhile to get converted to it. But after I was converted to it and practiced it and saw the benefits of it for me personally, I also studied the research, scientific research, which shows that this strategy is widely beneficial, not just for me, but for others. So I want to tell you about it today.
And I'll introduce it first with my personal story like I did last time. Again, I've got to go back to my experience with long COVID because this really was the petri dish where my capacity to manage and master my anxiety was germinated. And so I'm going to go back to there. As we talked about last time, when I was really sick with long COVID, initially it was extremely distressing because it was a new disease. Nobody knew what to do about it. I, I consulted all kinds of medical professionals in various countries and nobody had clear answers for me. And so after several months into my illness, six to eight months into my illness, I finally faced the fact that I was going to be sick no matter what, and I could have sickness and choose positive coping mechanisms, or I could have sickness, with negative coping mechanisms, but sickness was going to be a constant. There were no fast solutions for me. This was going to be a process. It was going to take time, clearly. And so either I could learn to cope with it well or cope with it badly. And over time, I started to realize that coping with it badly was not a good option because as I continually had anxiety with my physical symptoms, it always exacerbated them. When I was upset, when I was panicked, when I was anxious about what was happening to me, physically, my inflammation, my breathing problems, my sleep issues, everything would get worse. Everything would be much more difficult to manage. But if I could learn to calm myself and calm my anxiety, manage my anxiety, my symptoms were more manageable. And I talked last week about how one of the key things that I learned to do was to practice gratitude on a daily basis, even though initially it was something that I really didn't believe in. I thought it was just cheesy. Couldn't actually have a concrete, significant effect for me. But I humbled up enough to try it because I didn't have a lot of options and I started to feel that it really did make a difference for me. And we detailed last time about how there's a lot of research that backs up my experience, that this is not just for me, but this generally benefits people in a variety of situations to have this practice of looking for reasons to feel gratitude.
But the strategy I want to talk about today is something else. So, as I said, six to eight months into my illness, I was extremely sick. I seemed to just be getting continually sicker. There were no clear answers, but I needed to learn how to cope. And so I started to listen to certain wise people on my support group. My support group was a group of other people with long COVID from all over the world, thousands of people who were experiencing symptoms similar to mine. And we were sharing our, our experiments. We were sharing what we had learned. We were sharing support. We were sharing commiseration. One thing that one patient on that support group wrote really struck me to the heart when I read it. And I'm going to read it to you now because it was a key for change for me. This is what he said. This is, was a patient from Ireland. He said, "I've often said that we will recover. That's a given. I've also said, use this to transform. You're in your Chrysalis. We are all being honed into diamonds. And when we come out of this eventually, We will be experiencing Nirvana or heaven on earth. We will never be the same. Changed utterly in all of us for the better." So, can you see why this struck me so much? It was the polar opposite of where I was emotionally at that point. I was basically going back and forth between despair, anger, resistance, panic, anxiety, and anguish. And this colleague of mine was expressing, on the other hand, hope. And not only hope, but a belief that this experience could offer us something priceless. That it could be a catalyst for positive change, that we could be learning and changing in ways that would be ultimately extremely beneficial for us.
So I saw this quote, I wrote it down. I put it on my wall and I started to think about it. And as I started to think about it, I started to consider, what if the issues that are troubling me right now are not signs of danger? What if the sickness that I am fighting will actually make me stronger, and more resistant and more resilient than before? I started to consider this possibility, I started to look, and be open and curious about what I could possibly gain from this experience. And as I started to look for that, I started to find things. Now those of you who listened to my introductory episode way back in last August know a little bit more about my story. And I talked about how I was sick in tandem with the period when I was doing my doctoral research on anxiety management. And so what I found as I looked for what my illness could possibly be offering me, was a way to leverage my illness to help me to overcome my anxiety. And what my illness gave me was, first of all, as I explained in that introductory episode, it gave me the motivation, the necessity to manage my anxiety. Because I explained, the more anxious that I felt the worse my physical symptoms were, the more unmanageable it all was to deal day after day with this, these physical symptoms I was having. But if I could learn to manage and calm my anxiety, my physical symptoms were less, they were more manageable. They were more bearable. And so the illness, first of all, put that gun to my head and said, you need to learn to manage your anxiety. But it also gave me this unique chance to really experiment with anxiety management strategies and see immediately, get immediate, very clear, very broadcast feedback about whether or not I was doing it effectively, because when I would try a strategy that I had studied, when I try something new out, I could really perceive whether or not it was helping me with my anxiety, because when my anxiety was calmed by the strategy, my physical symptoms would also be calmed in some degree. Of course I was still sick, but it made them less exacerbated. And so it was this projector, it was like a megaphone for my inner emotional state. It helped me to very clearly see what worked, what didn't. It helped me to experiment and adapt strategies until I could actually find ones that were effective. I could find ways of implementing things that were effective. And I knew it right away because my body would tell me. So this is part perhaps the biggest thing that I gained from my illness, was the ability to understand my anxiety, to be conscious of it, and to learn how to manage it. And as I explained on that introductory episode, through this whole process, I was able to go from a person who had previously been bossed around by my anxiety, managed by my anxiety, anxiety was a stable trait of my personality, it was something that I felt most of the time, it was my constant companion, nearly constant companion in some degree or other. Whereas after this whole transformational experience of learning to create new habits, new strategies, new mental maps. I was able to transform mentally, and I no longer am a person bullied by my anxiety. This was a big revolution for me.
Psychologists talk about how there are three different roads that we can go in response to stress and trauma. Stress and trauma can be detrimental and negative. It can be harmful for us. Or it can be neutral. It can basically not affect us much one way or another. Or stress and trauma can be positive. It can have a saluatory effect, a healthy effect on us. And this is what really happened to me when I adopted this perspective of this patient from Ireland, that he shared with me, when I began to be open and curious about what this might be teaching me. Then I was able to take that trauma and have it be something healthy for me in the long run. But I want to talk specifically about what research shows about how finding a sense of meaning in your life, like I did this meaning, that life works for you and not against you, why having this kind of sense of meaning helps you with anxiety. And it really comes down to the fact that this type of sense of meaning will help you to generate challenge appraisals, challenged responses rather than threat responses. We've talked about this many times, we had an whole, a whole episode about different responses to, to stress. Stress can either be appraised as too much for us. The demands are too much for us, we don't have the resources to meet it. And then we'll develop a threat response. And that's where anxiety comes in. Or we can decide that the demands before us are something that we can meet with the resources that we have access to. And that will make us uh, develop a challenge response, and we will rise to the occasion and we will want to meet the stressor. We will have a feeling of pride and excitement rather than anxiety. We will want to approach rather than avoid. And so having the sense of meaning, research shows that it really helps us to have this approach motivation. It helps us to shift from threat response and threat appraisal to challenge response, and challenge appraisal, which is where we can have a beneficial, healthy interaction with our stressor, rather than a detrimental, threat anxiety interaction. And I'm going to talk about at least four different ways that this type of meaning can help us to generate these challenge responses. But first of all, I want to talk about what it is that I mean, when I'm saying a sense of meaning.
There are two different types of meaning that we can talk about. One is we might call it lowercase "m" meaning, and this is meaning where we're just, our brains are just trying to locate patterns, and cause and effect and associations and invariants. So for example, when we expect rain to be wet, when we expect Sunday to follow Saturday. These are different patterns and associations that we might call this lowercase "m" meaning. Our brains are wired to do this. It is absolutely essential for us to recognize patterns in life, in nature in our environment, in our experience in order to navigate, right? In order to be able to expect what might happen if we do x, that we might expect y. So that is our lowercase "m" meaning.
What I'm talking about today is what you might call the capital "M" meaning. The capital "M" meaning has more to do with how you fit the givens of everyday life into a larger context. These are explorations of how the lowercase "m" fits into a larger system of value and meaning. The meaning of life in general, the meaning of your life in particular. The meaning of why a certain bad event happened to you. So this is this capital M meaning, which includes this particular specific meaning, which I illustrated at the beginning, which was introduced to me by my colleague. This ability to acknowledge that you can learn and grow from the necessities and givens of existence and also from the possibilities of life. So this belief that everything in your life, both positive and negative experiences, can be a vehicle for growth.
This idealistic meeting has been associated with reduced anxiety. It is something which helps people to transcend their anxiety, even more than concrete goals. Concrete goals can help us to have reduced anxiety. They can help us to transcend our anxiety. They can give us a short term reason to experience distress and approach different stressors. But idealistic meanings, these capital M meanings, these large meaning systems, which organize our experience in a large context are often much better at helping us to transcend anxiety and to create this motivation to approach the stressors.
And so we're going to talk about at least four ways in which this type of capital M, macro meaning, where you can see life as working for you and not against you, how this helps you to generate a challenge response rather than a threat response. How this can be a tool for really shifting you from the anxiety road, where you feel that the demands are too much for you, uh, toward the empowered road, the challenge road, where you feel like you can, you feel excited to approach the stressor and that it has something to offer you and you can benefit from it in some way.
So, first of all, first reason is that this type of sense of macro meaning diminishes your sense of threat because it diminishes your sense of the demands because you begin to see the demands themselves as resources. The demands are not an enemy, but an ally. So it, it actually decreases the degree of situations that you will perceive as stressful. And this happened for me, in my example, because I began to see the illness that I was experiencing, not as an enemy, not as something that was threatening me, but as a resource in and of itself. Something which had something to offer me. Something which could benefit me. It changed from a demand to a resource.
The second way is that it helps us with our goals. We often have goals that can get impeded in some way. And when those goals are impeded, it can be disastrous for a sense of wellbeing. But if we can have this macro meaning, these larger meaning structures, including a sense that life is working for you rather than against you, when you have goals that are impeded, it helps you to be able to shift your focus and adopt more adaptive goals. It helps you to repurpose your goals. And this definitely happened to me. I had all kinds of goals, which were operative at the time that I got sick. I'm in, I'm a musician, a pianist. And when I was sick, all of a sudden I could hardly play the, play the piano anymore, more than just a few minutes a day. I couldn't play the piano. I certainly couldn't perform. There was no way that I would be able to have that stamina to perform on stage, because I couldn't even practice enough to prepare something to a performance level. I couldn't sleep most of the time. And so I was perpetually sleep deprived. I couldn't go on outings with my family or friends. I didn't have the stamina or the wellbeing in order to be able to do that. I couldn't even read because I couldn't remember the beginning of a sentence by the time I got to the end. I couldn't listen to a podcast for that matter. For the same reason. I couldn't make progress, a lot of progress on my dissertation that I was working on at that time, because I had so much inflammation in my brain that was causing all of these short-term memory problems. I couldn't exercise. The list goes on and on and on of the different goals that I had in my life at that point that were blocked, that were impeded. But with this new goal, with the shift toward being able to see my experience as potentially beneficial to me, I was able to repurpose all of these blocked goals. And I was able to get this feeling that I was still moving forward, that I was still progressing, that I was still gaining, that I was still benefiting from my existence. That even though my life had taken a complete detour and I wasn't able to go in any of the directions that I had gone previously, I could still be moving forward because I had that goal of being curious and looking for the ways that my current situation might be helping me, might be benefiting me in the long run.
The third reason is that it helps you to see the demands that you're up against as worthy of your energy and commitment. So this is, it goes back to what we talked about in several episodes ago, where we talked about finding your sense of purpose. And we talked about several studies in which it was examined, subjects were given a hill to look at, and estimate, told to estimate how steep it was. And some of the subjects were given a clear reason, a sense of purpose, a reason to ascend the hill, and others were not. And those who had that sense of purpose estimated, consistently over many different studies, they estimated the hill to be less steep than those who did not have a reason, a clear reason to ascend the hill. So this is an illustration of how having this reason, having a sense of meaning, this capital M meaning, helps you to see the demands that you're up against as something that you should approach, it's worthy of your energy and commitment.
The fourth reason is that having this sense of macro meaning will augment your sense of autonomy and move you away from feeling helpless. Helplessness is something that happens when we feel like our sense of power, our autonomy is blocked by external pressures and constraints. And that we don't have choice or control over our actions. We don't expect our actions to change things around us. When our actions are perceived as just a consequence of external forces then we can end up in this state of learned helplessness, this state of what you might compare to an animal playing dead when it is being attacked by a predator and it can't run away anymore. This is emotional playing dead. If we want instead to increase our sense of autonomy and get out of this living dead state where we are helpless and we cannot change our situation, then we can adopt the sense of macro meaning, because it will increase our sense of autonomy. And so if we can have this belief, this outlook that life works for us rather than against us, then even in those situations like mine, where we feel that everything that we were pursuing has been blocked and we cannot pursue any of those goals that we were working on, we can feel still like we have choice by looking for what our experience can possibly offer us, by being curious about what it is in the environment, in the context that might benefit us in the long run. And that this is an active thing that, which we have to do. We have to be a participant with the experience to look for what it might be giving us, but this will increase our sense of autonomy and move us away from that state of learned helplessness.
So a need in the strictest sense is like food or water, something that you're going to die if you don't have it, you need it to survive physically. But there are other types of needs which are demonstrated by the fact that we will be unhealthy without them, or distressed without them and we will be well if we have them. And this need for macro meaning, this sense that life is working for us and not against us, is one of these needs. And it's demonstrated by the fact that research shows that increased meaning in life, with the capital M, is associated with lower levels of many different unhealthy variables. So the more meaning you have in your life, the less you're going to have these certain variables, like thoughts of suicide, feelings of loneliness, smoking, using alcohol, depressive symptoms and stress. So for that reason, it is a need that we have, because we will not necessarily cease living if we don't have a sense of capital M meaning, but if it's continuously missing, we will be in an adversive state. As I said, associated with many of these unhealthy variables, unhealthy coping mechanisms that people end up in when they don't have this strategy to support them, to help them to benefit from the stress and the trauma.
So that's what I want to suggest for you to consider. It may not be natural. It may not be easy for you to cultivate this outlook. It was difficult for me, for sure. Not only because my default state prior to this was anxiety, but also because this was exacerbated by my illness, an unknown illness with no cure. And so I was in a state of high alert, high panic, high anxiety, and it was really difficult to cultivate a new perspective, a new outlook on this experience as potentially beneficial. But I did it in tandem with the gratitude paragraph that I talked about last week. I had the gratitude notebook where I'd write the gratitude paragraph. And I would not only look for physical things that were present in my life, different relationships and different physical, um, positives in my life, but I was also looking for things that I was learning. Things that I was gaining, things that I was benefiting from this experience. And so it was an exercise in trying to look, trying to identify ways in which this experience was benefiting me. And this was really the catalyst for me to be able to explore all of the research and experimentation, which led to me, as I said, being able to finally have a new relationship with anxiety where I was its master, rather than it mastering me. But this stemmed from this consistent practice and trying to believe that what I was experiencing could be beneficial rather than harmful for me. So I'd like you to encourage you to do that.
Stay tuned now for your painless. Gratitude exercise. Remember from last time how beneficial gratitude can be for you, even though you might feel like it's cheesy, even though you don't, you might not feel totally convinced. Lean on that research that we talked about, about how beneficial it is for you and for everyone. And even just a weekly practice like this one that I'm providing for you right now can offer you benefits. Feel free to expand on this and your personal life to expand on it to the point where it's a daily practice, if you want to. But just for starters, I am helping you with this weekly gratitude practice. All you got to do is listen. If you want to go the extra mile, you can contribute your own kindness narrative in which you will express gratitude for someone who was kind to you, and you can share it with all of us listeners. That will be an act of generosity, helping all of us with our gratitude practice. But that's it for now. Just hang tight and listen to this, this kindness narrative to help you with your gratitude practice.

When we were trying to get our first house, we were building it and didn't have any extra money. I had to borrow money from my widowed mother and my wife had to borrow money from her parents to acquire the lot and build the house that we wanted. So we were not long on cash, but had time and had some help and family actually putting some of the construction together.
But what unexpected was when we were trying to put the ceiling on the house. Our ceiling is, it's open beams. And then we had to put two by six tongue and groove on top of those up on those beams. And it was, it was tricky because you had to pound those two by six tongue and groove in to fit with each other tightly.
And one day, my colleague, who also taught with me at the university, came over with his sledgehammer and his work apron on, and it was a nice spring day, and he said, well, let's, let's put some tongue and groove on this. And see he would swing his sledgehammer and pound the tongue and groove into place putting a another tongue and groove on top So it wouldn't damage the tongue and groove if he was pounding in place. Anyway, he did our whole ceiling of the entire house, which is a pretty good size middle class house. But he did the whole thing and Never asked for anything.
He just was a friend and saw that we needed help and I'll never forget his help and always be grateful for it.