podcast

Hi everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I know that for a lot of people, anxiety's really high right now. Anxiety happens when we have a sense of uncontrollability, a sense of helplessness. So for a lot of people right now in the world and especially in the United States, it feels like things are outta control. People feel helpless. They don't know what to do. They don't know how to get the results and the outcomes that they want. And so anxiety is just running rampant. We're seeing all kinds of things happen that we never imagined happening before. It seems like different protections and safety nets are breaking down that we thought were there. How can we deal with this situation that we have right now? Well, think about this definition of the, of anxiety, how it's related to a sense of uncontrollability and helplessness. We've talked about this before. When we focus on the things that we can't control, that we really can't influence, that is where our anxiety is gonna go wild. It's just gonna run wild. If we want to have a chance to get our anxiety under control, to move out of threat and into challenge, move out of the state of anxiety and into a state where we can actually rise to meet the problems that we face with creativity, with energy, with enhanced performance, then we need to focus on getting into the arena where we have control. There are a lot of things that we don't have control over right now, but there are some things that we still can control where we do have choice. Let's focus on our arena of choice.
What if I were to tell you that there is a practice that you could do every day that doesn't need to take more than three minutes a day, and it would give you the following: it would increase the positive emotions in your life. It would increase your sense of life satisfaction overall. It will enhance your resilience in the face of stress. It will re, it will reduce your ruminating thoughts. It will reduce your depression. It will enhance your social connection. It will broaden your scope of attention. It will enhance your creativity. It will enhance your interest in life. Couldn't we all use all of those things right now? I'm not just claiming these things. These things have been shown in research. A small practice you can do every day that can give you all of these benefits. This practice is the practice of savoring. What is savoring? Savoring is being able to pay attention to attend to, and enhance the positive experiences in our lives. Now wait a minute, you might say. That is not what I need right now. Are you trying to tell me that I need to just force myself to be happy in the middle of all of this chaos and all of this threat that I'm experiencing right now? That's not what I'm telling you. I'm telling you that if you can do this practice, then you will, it will help you to get out of a threat response and into a challenge response. The threat response we've talked about, that's one of the possible responses to stress. That's where you feel like the demands in the situation are way too much for your resources. That's why we're feeling anxiety right now, 'cause we feel like things are outta control. We don't have control over things. We're helpless. We can't get the results or the outcomes that we feel like we desire. And so the demands seem way too much for our resources. This little practice will help boost your resources, and so it will change the way that your brain sees the balance of your resources and demands that we've talked about so many times. And when your brain can see that you have the resources to meet the demands that you face, then you switch from a threat response into a challenge response. And the challenge response gives you all kinds of bodily, re, re resources from hormones to autonomic responses that help you to have enhanced cognitive abilities, greater creativity, be able to solve your problems better. It helps get your brain away from focusing exclusively on the demands in your situation. I don't know how many of you have seen those where's Waldo books? These are picture books for kids that don't really have any words. The pages are full of objects, cars, trucks, trees, animals, birds. But there's also a little guy somewhere on the page called Waldo, and you have to find Waldo in every page. Well, if we compare Waldo to the threatening information in your life, your brain gets focused on just seeing Waldo in the picture and it can't see all of the other things that are happening that are present in your life that would actually act as resources to help you with your problem. This practice of savoring helps you to stop focusing just on the threat, stop focusing just on Waldo, and see some of the other things that are already present in your situation that can help you with your problems, help you get out of threat and into challenge. Don't we all need more positive emotions right now? Don't we all need better resilience in the face of stress? Don't we all need reduced depression and reduced rumination and enhanced social connection and enhanced creativity? Enhanced problem solving, enhanced interest in our lives?
Okay, so. I just wanted to introduce it that way because otherwise it's gonna seem like a ridiculous thing that has nothing to do with your needs right now. But let me tell you how easy this practice can be, this little practice that you have complete control over, much different from many of many other things in your life right now. So here's the first part of it. You pick one thing in your day to savor. One moment to intentionally detect something positive, some stimulus that's positive, something slightly pleasant. So this might be the warm water in your shower. This might be feeling sunlight on your skin. This might be sipping a cup of tea. This might be a moment of, of quiet in your house. This might be a moment of relief after finishing something. It doesn't have to be an ecstatic moment. It can just be a mildly positive sensory moment. That's enough. So you pick one of these moments and then you just dive into it a little bit and you think, where in my body do I feel this? How do I describe this sensation? All right, so that's the first part of this practice. Pick one moment, pleasant moment to savor in your day. And then here's the second part. Right before you go to bed, right before you're going to sleep, go back over that one moment that you savored during the day. And think of it again. Think about where you were. Think about the sensory details, where you felt it in your body. Think about all of those details. Relive it. Okay? So that's the second part. The third part is once a week at least, pick one of those moments that you savored and tell somebody about it. Tell them about what you felt. Tell them about that moment. Okay, so super easy, hardly any time. Three minutes a day, and then once a week telling somebody about it, maybe for two minutes. So small, such a small amount of time. But this helps you practice three different ways of savoring that have been shown in research to give these benefits that we talked about. So you're noticing a moment. So right, that's one way to savor, is to notice the present moment. You're going back over it in your mind at the end of the day, so you're reminiscing about it. That's another way to savor. And then the third way is to tell someone about it. So all of these three things have been shown to really help with these baseline wellbeing levels, increasing positive feelings generally in your life.
I share those positive moments. I do it by talking to a friend. I have a friend that I share voice messages with almost every day, and one of the things that we share back and forth is we tell each other about one moment from our day that we consider a high from the day before, and we tell about some pleasant sensation, some beautiful moment, some moment when we felt happy and we go over it. And the, the sharing about it I have found really does amplify the intensity and the duration of those positive feelings. They end up occupying a bigger space in my awareness in the week overall. As I look back on my week, those things stand out because I talked to somebody about them. I told someone about them. I had not only had to notice them in the first place and savor them and enjoy them, but I talked to someone about them.
So again, this practice is not about forcing yourself to feel happy in the middle of all of this difficulty that we're going through. It is about training your attention to register things that are present right now in your situation, on this page of the book of Where's Waldo, that your brain is not noticing right now, that actually are resources for you. It's training your brain to register signs of safety, signs of beauty, signs of enjoyment, signs of nourishment. So that threatening information is not the only thing that your attention is aware of in your life. And this may seem like the very last thing that you want to spend energy on right now, but let me tell you, it has worked for me. When during the pandemic, when I had long COVID and I was deathly ill and I had trouble breathing and I couldn't sleep, and I had heart pain and I had, I couldn't remember anything and I couldn't read, and I couldn't, I didn't have any energy. And I had terrible digestive pain and nobody knew what was going on with me. And there was this world pandemic and all these people were dying and nobody knew what to do. Talk about upheaval, talk about anxiety. But I started doing this practice because I saw research that it made a difference in people's wellbeing. And so I thought, Hey, I need those benefits. I'm gonna do it. And what I found was that even in the middle of all of this suffering that I was experiencing and the pain and the unpleasantness and all of the all of the negative emotions and negative sensations that I had throughout my day, I could still, even with all of those things, I could still enjoy the feeling of the sunlight on my skin for a moment. I could still enjoy looking at a really beautiful flower for a moment and just marveling at the way that the light hit its petals and it reflected color in all directions. And I honestly have to say that it did enhance my number. It increased the number of positive emotions that I felt in my day. It increased my life satisfaction overall. It increased my ability to deal with the stressors that I was dealing with at that time. It broadened the scope of my attention so that I didn't only think about my pain and my suffering and my anxiety, but I also thought about pleasant, beautiful, comforting, wonderful sensations that were pre present in my life right then. That they were on this page of the Where, where's Waldo Book. My brain had been focusing exclusively on Waldo or on the threats, but there were so many other things on this page. And because of this and other practices, I was able to get a handle on my anxiety. I was able to be so much more creative and productive than I would've been otherwise. Even though all I could do was work maybe five minutes a day on my doctoral dissertation, I was able to do it. I was able to make progress on it, and I was able to form the bed work of the work for this anxiety podcast, which I'm sharing with all of you right now. This is my effort to contribute to the resolving the problems in this world. And I was able to do it because partly because I was able to engage in practices like savoring that helped my brain to get out of a threat response where I had reduced blood flow to my brain and reduced cognitive capacity and get into a challenge response where I'm able to solve problems and I'm able to do above my normal level of production, I'm able to rise to the occasion and meet this stressor. So I just used that as an example to help you to see that even in the middle of all of this that's happening right now, this is a worthwhile practice for you to engage in because this is something you can control. And when you focus on something that you can control the arena of your choice, then you start to feel less anxiety because your brain is working within parameters, where it has autonomy, where it actually has influence and power over your situation. So try it. It's really simple. Pick a one moment in every day to savor. A pleasant sensation. Again, it doesn't have to be an earth shaking, ecstatic sensation. It can just be mildly pleasant. And then think about where do I feel this in my body? Think about it for a minute. Feel it in your body, and then at the end of the day, review it in your head. What did I savor? What was that moment? What was it like? Where was I? How did it feel? And then once a week, pick one of your savoring moments to share with somebody. All of these things are proven ways to help you to get this, this list of benefits that we've talked about. Try it out. It's small. It seems ridiculous, but it will make a difference in what your brain sees, what you perceive, and how you feel and experience, and the resources that you have to meet the problems that you face today. Thanks. Give it a try and we'll see you next week.