podcast

Hi everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. From the beginning of this podcast, we've been talking about loads and loads of strategies. You've started to accumulate quite a library, but sometimes it helps to have somebody just walk you through how you actually apply some of these strategies. Sometimes as a piano teacher, I like to take a lesson to just practice with my students where I don't teach them anything new, no new concepts, no new music, no new theory. I just show them how to actually apply things that we've already talked about. So I want to do that with you today. Since I can't do an individual coaching session on you, the listener, right now, I'm just going to walk you through a coaching session I did with myself recently, because getting a chance to see how I apply different strategies that we've talked about might help you to understand how you can apply strategies for yourself.

So there was a day recently where I was extremely upset and extremely anxious to the point where I just, I couldn't do anything. All I could do was pace. Scroll the news, to try and find more about this thing that I was anxious about. I was clearly in a threat response. This lasted for about three quarters of the day. Finally, about 4:00 PM I said, Hey, hey, sit down. Let's do something about this.

So, as I said, I was clearly in a threat response, extremely upset, extremely anxious. So I realized that the thing that I needed to do first was to get the story that I, my brain, was telling that was creating this emotion out in the open because it wasn't totally conscious. I mean, I knew that I felt really anxious and upset, but I couldn't really put words to it. So I started to write down in my notebook everything, a sort of brain dump of what I was feeling, just unfiltered. I wasn't gonna judge any of it. I was just gonna see what was coming out, how I was feeling, the different reasons that my brain was giving for why I was feeling this way. But I did it in the third person. We had a whole episode about how it can really help if you can talk to yourself in the third person. So instead of saying, I'm feeling this way such and such, you say, you, you are feeling this and that. So that's what I did. I sat down and I wrote in my notebook, I'm just gonna read to you what I wrote down.
Just keep in mind, this is unfiltered emotion. There's a lot of extremity in it, and this is gonna reveal a lot of my political feelings because what I was upset about at the time has to do with different political situations in the U.S. So I apologize for that. Those of you who don't agree with me politically, I hope you'll hang tight because what I'm doing is just trying to show you the situation and how I worked through it. And this kind of thing can, can apply in various different situations that will be different from time to time. So I'm trying to show you how it's done so that you can apply it to your own situation. So I apologize ahead of time for those of you who don't agree with me politically, those of you who I might offend. Just let me read this so that you can see how I work with this brain dump that I do. Okay?

So here's my brain dump. You are upset about insecurity about vulnerability. You're angry men would do such a thing as Epstein's Island. You feel like that could have been you. You're angry at the system obstructing justice at the moment, and all the billionaires being protected. You're angry that a child molester is president of the United States. You're angry he can stamp all over the delicate balance of power that upholds societal trust and safety and get away with acting like a dictator because other Republicans won't stand up to him. You're angry that some criminals are above the, the law, apparently. That makes you feel unsafe and no, that no one seems to be doing anything about it. You're angry that Trump's ice agents are killing Americans. That such a villain and clown can be in charge of your country, which you hold dear and want a good future for. You feel like someone has put duct tape over your mouth to silence you. You don't know what to do or how to do it. You're afraid for the future of your children. You feel like Trump is threatening their future. You wish you could eliminate Trump and all the evil billionaires running mafias in the world, but you can't. Life feels hard and heavy.

So there's my brain dump. Ugh. A lot of times after you do a brain dump, you may just feel worse. But what's really important after you get that brain dump out and you see how you feel, and you start to uncover the story that your brain is telling, that's giving rise to those feelings, is to start to be able to modify that perspective in some way, right? So I can see how it is that I feel, and I can see the story that my brain is telling that is making me feel this way, that is producing this emotion. So obviously what's happening here is that I'm seeing the demands in my world as enormous and way, way, way too big for my resources, totally crushing. And that's why I'm feeling all of these, all of these emotions. So the next step was really to sit down and say to myself, is that really true? I mean, apparently what you're seeing is that things are going from bad to worse. The world is getting worse. Your country of origin is falling apart. Things are getting more dangerous. Rich tycoons are put in power, are getting away with lawlessness and oppressing other people. The world is more dangerous than before. You're surrounded by evil people, basically more bad than good in the world.

So I started to take a deep breath and ask myself, okay, is this perspective really accurate? The next strategy that I used is one that we talked about also last year, which is involves knowing the stories of your ancestors. I'll link that up in your, in the show notes as well. But anyway, I started to ask myself, okay, is it really true that things are getting worse? What about my Grandma Jarvis, for example? What about her lifetime? Was it easier than mine? So I started thinking about her. She was born in 1910. When she was four years old, world War I started and it lasted until she was eight. The year that World War I ended, the Spanish flu Broke out, broke out, which was one of the deadliest pandemics in history. In a lot of ways way worse than COVID-19, as far as the number of people that it killed, because where COVID was killing like one in every 400 to one in every a thousand people, the Spanish flu was killing one in every 30 people. And where COVID was mostly hitting the elderly and people with weaker, um, immune systems, et cetera, the Spanish flu was killing young, healthy adults. So it must have been a really, really scary time. Then when she was 19, the stock market crashed, and the bottom dropped outta the US economy. Eight months later, she became engaged to my grandfather, but it took them two years to be able to get enough money to have to get a ring, and they spent four years trying to get their finances together so they could just have enough money to be able to get married. So four years to get enough money to get married, and then the first five years of her marriage, it was really difficult economically. They ended up incurring really heavy debts because of their situation and their lack of funds to cover the things that they needed. And I remember her telling me once going to the grocery store and just crying and crying because she didn't have enough money to get both of the things that she desperately needed and she was gonna have to choose between one of them. So in 1939, she is 29 years old. She has just given birth to her second child. And world War ii breaks out, which lasts for the next six years. So I had to ask myself, is my lifetime really more tumultuous? Is there really more upheaval, more craziness going on in the world than there was for my grandmother who went through all of this before she was even 30?

Then I started thinking about my grandmother's grandmother, who would be my great, great grandmother, uh, who was born in England. And what I know about her story. In 1836 is when she was born, she was third in a family of 10 kids. They were extremely poor. And at that time the poor in England didn't have much recourse in order to just have enough to eat. Every single person in the family had to work. So when she was five years old, she went to work in a needle factory and her job was to turn this little wheel to run some of the machinery and, and they made a little stool for her so that she could reach the wheel. Can you imagine a 5-year-old all day long working in a factory? So this was her childhood. And then at age 22, she ended up marrying a man, a young man who had also worked in the needle factory from a young age, and he had poor health basically for the rest of his life because the dust from the needle factory had compromised his lungs at a very young age. So immediately after they were married, they started saving to be able to immigrate to America. They had met some Mormon missionaries and they wanted to immigrate to Utah. Took them two years to get the money together, and then they went on a vessel to the new world and took them six weeks on the ocean. And my great-great-grandmother, Sarah, was sick almost all the time during this journey. And then the, the boat only got them so far and they ended up having to traverse basically half of the United States by hand cart. And as I said, her husband wasn't very strong because of the steel dust and that had compromised his lungs. And so she had to, uh, push and pull the cart a lot of the time. And she had a little baby at this time, and the baby wouldn't always stay in the cart to ride, and sometimes the baby would fuss so much and just insist on being held by, by Sarah, her mother. And, but the mother's trying to pull the cart and so she would sometimes even put the baby in the apron and put the corners of it in her mouth so she could carry the baby and help push the cart at the same time. So I had to ask myself, are things really harder now? Are things really worse now than they were during my great-great grandmother's lifetime?
Another thing that I thought of as I read through my brain dump, my emotion dump was an episode that we had a few months ago that I'll also link up in the show notes. It talks about how when you have been consuming a lot of news, your brain tends to see things outta proportion, see things in a warped way, and your brain tends to start to think that the world is more dangerous, more threatening than it is. And that is because the news media generally only reports really sensational threatening information. That's the kind of stuff people perk up and pay attention to. And they leave out all of the other stuff that's going on in the world that's not threatening. one of the things that my brain had decided, which I distilled from my brain dump, was that not only is the world getting worse, but that I am surrounded by evil people. That there are more bad people in the world than good, or in other words, there are more people trying to take advantage of other people and oppressing other people then there are caretakers in the world trying to help other people. But I started to remember this research that talks about how when you've cons, been consuming a lot of news, your brain sees threat out of proportion. And I started to ask myself, is it really true that there are more people in this world trying to take advantage of other people than there are caretakers? And I realized, you know, I, my brain feels like these people that oppress other people are everywhere because I have been reading about a lot of these scumbags. But in action actuality, there are selfless people all around me, caretakers, um, mothers, grandmothers, fathers, healthcare workers that are right here all around me, in my neighborhood, in my city, in Brazil where I live and also in the United States, that are holding families together, that are taking care of children, that are taking care of the elderly, that are taking care of the sick, that are taking care of this hungry. And I made myself go through and start trying to picture the faces of, of people that I could list in my neighborhood that I know do this because I've seen them, people that, uh, spend their time taking care of their children and making sure they get to school and picking them up afterwards. People that dedicate themselves to taking care of old people, people that spend almost all their time taking care of sick people. All the healthcare workers in my city. People that dedicate their lives to making sure that hungry people have what they need. There's people in my neighborhood that I know that do this, that work on this every month. And, and I started to think also of people that I know in the United States that do this all the time, and I realized they are everywhere even though they are unremarkable and they're not in the news. These kind selfless people are all around me, but they're kind of invisible because they don't show up in the news and so they don't occupy our attention because people aren't talking about them. But they're all around. They're actually probably for every oppressing exploitive person out there in the world, there are thousands of caretakers.

With this sequence of strategies, right, first doing this brain dump so that I could tell what it was that my brain was thinking, what the, create, the stories it was creating that were creating my emotions, and then starting to, broaden my perspective, change my perspective on my demands and my resources, through thinking about my grandmother's times, my great-grandmother's times, thinking about the caretakers all around me in the world, it helped me to see that my perspective, that things are going from bad to worse and things are getting more dangerous, and that I'm surrounded by oppressive, selfish people, that maybe that's not accurate, right? Nowadays child labor is not such a common thing as it was in my great, great grandmother's time. I'm not going through the Spanish flu and the World War I and World War II and, and the Great Depression, just like my grandmother did before she was 30, and there are thousands of wonderful caretakers in this world for every one selfish, oppressive person. But what I found after I did this exercise was that finally I was able to calm down enough that I could think again, and I wasn't just upset and pacing and scrolling and not able to do anything. I was able to calm down and actually think about my situation, think about what it was that I can do, what's the best that I can do in the situation, and start working on that. It helped me to get out of threat and back into challenge. It helped me to realize that it's not hopeless. This world's worth investing in. We are actually making progress, even though sometimes it doesn't look that way. Let's keep working on it. So it's not about, you know, toxic positivity like we've talked about before. It's, it's about getting your, your brain out of threat and into challenge. And these are some different strategies among the many that we've talked about that you can use to help get you out of threat. 'Cause we're not gonna solve the problems when we're in a threat, response because threat reduces the blood flow to our brains, among other things. And we just can't think, we can't operate, we can't perform anything that takes cognitive power. Unless you're actually running away from a tiger, it's probably not your best option. Let's get back into challenge. Find the different ways that are gonna help you to manipulate your brain's perception of the demands that you're up against so that they don't look so oppressive, that change the way that you see your resources. After I thought about my grandmother and my great-great-grandmother, I thought, gosh, you know, if they could do it, with situations that were so much harder than mine, maybe I can too. It really made me feel like I have bigger resources than the way that they looked before. So just finding those ways to manipulate your perception of the demands and the resources so that you can get back into challenge, so that you can make a difference in your own life and in the lives of people around you. So that's it for today. Hope it's helpful in some way. See you next week.