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Hey everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. I wanna 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, 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's, 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. So if you wanna get out of this habitual way of seeing the world, you are gonna 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 wanna 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 wanna 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 didn't, 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, he said that he remembers thinking, wow, maybe this is it. This is, this is how my life ends. luckily he was able to finally get free of the wave, come up, gasp for air, get a way 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, 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 he, 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 when we, we weren't gonna 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 gonna 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 'em. 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 long 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 really sketchy route and I got kind of off trail at one point. And I, 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've been all alone. I thought about another time when our family was on a trip and we had terrible car trouble in the, suddenly in the middle of the trip. And our, our, our clutch went out and we were on this really narrow mountain winding road. And if a, if a truck had been coming in the other direction at just the right moment, uh, 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 heat, 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, 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, um, 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 on a hike and we came upon it, it was a huge one. Um, but it had just instants 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've been in hunting mode and it probably would have, um, bitten one of us. Because we, we came upon it just kind of around a corner and we, we, we couldn't see it ahead of time Anyhow, that was another close call. There was another time when I was on a, um, a, 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, um, getting into our things that were, were near where we were camping and ripping them apart and things like that. And anyway, we didn't, we didn't end up end up having any, any bad run-ins with the bears, but we, 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, um, 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 luck, you know, luckily we did have good medical care and I, and I didn't die. So those 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 canceled of mine. You know, where we're waiting, 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, 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 uh, probably something most of us can relate to. I remember, uh, 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, um, 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. And I saw it and it was gone in a minute because we were going fast the other direction and, 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 were 10 different close calls that I thought of, for myself, different, 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, uh, 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 am, how are my resources gonna 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. They don't really co-exist 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. I have been teaching pianos for over 30 years, and there were several times during that 30 year, over 30 year span ,when I decided to give some piano lessons to different students for free because I saw that they had need and that maybe they didn't have the means to pay for it. I just wanted to make it easy for them to take piano lessons. But funny thing about it was that I found that whenever I offered piano lessons for free, my students did not practice. It was really strange. Only when my students would pay for the piano lessons, I guess they felt invested and then they would do the work on their own that it took to learn the piano. Because learning the piano, just like learning to have new mental habits and break out of anxiety, it's not something that you can do by snapping your fingers and just deciding, Hey, that sounds nice. I'd like to do that. It's something that you have to practice right? Something similar happened when I started working as a coach for people with anxiety. And when I first started out, I was hardly charging anything because I just wanted experience. I wanted to have a lot of clients. I wanted to be able to get good at coaching, and so I just wanted to make it really accessible for people . But the funny thing was that I found that when I was hardly charging anything, when I would teach different strategies to people that they could do, that had been really shown by research and that had had worked for me and that I'd seen work for other people, when I taught them these different strategies that would really work in their lives, they didn't do them. They didn't practice them, they didn't. It was just like the piano students that I taught piano for free. Because they weren't really invested in the coaching, they didn't do the hard work that it took to create these mental habits on their own. And strangely enough, when I started charging more for the coaching, what I found was that the clients that I had, they worked hard when I gave them a new strategy to try, they really tried it, even though sometimes it would take effort on their part. And why am I bringing this up? Well, it's because of what we were talking about, about developing 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, these little kids that you know, they have so much else going on in their lives and maybe they don't feel like piano's 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 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 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 of all the ways that my resources have taken me out of situations of extreme mortal danger, how I've survived.

So of course, this podcast is full of strategies. We have strategies week after week. Sometimes it might feel a little overwhelming, but you just need to start working on a couple small ones. Pick a couple small ones. This is one small one you could pick. 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, you, 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 gonna 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 and join me again next week.