The One You Feed - Mini Episode: Fear: How to Cope in Uncertain Times

Episode Date: March 15, 2020

Eric talks about how to best deal with fear during these uncertain timesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and

conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, WeezyWTF, and me, Mandy B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engage in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests

to relatable stories that will resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go-to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join in the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC.

Follow The Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen. Hey, everyone, it's Eric here with a mini episode. And I want to talk about fear because it is something that we are all dealing with right now, right? It's probably the only thing that's more contagious than the Coronavirus right now is our fear around it. And I'm not going to say whether that fear is justified, how afraid we should be. I'm not going to say whether the way that we're responding as a country or as a society is the right way, because those questions are way beyond my pay grade. And I don't think any of us know right now. But here's what I do know. Fear will corrode us from the inside out if we're not careful. I also know that our mental, emotional, and physical health are really important in times like these in dealing with crises.

So it's important that we find ways to allow the fear to be there, allow ourselves to stay informed about what's going on out there, but also not let the fear and the agitation control us, take us over, because that wears us out. It wears us out mentally, emotionally, ultimately, physically, and that does not help us or the loved ones around us in our communities that depend upon us. So we've got to find a way to engage with this in a skillful, useful way. We've got to find a way to feed our good wolf when it comes to dealing with this circumstance. And that's kind of what I'd like to spend just a couple minutes talking about in this short episode. Several different ideas came to mind for me when I started working on thinking about wanting to say

something brief here about all this. And the first that came to mind was the author Mark Nepo, who we interviewed recently. That episode will be coming out. But he and I were talking and he had a line that really stuck with me that said, we've become addicted to the noise of things falling apart. And he actually, that line was written outside of this context, but in this context, it makes a lot of sense. We are very much addicted to the noise of things falling apart in general. And in this particular circumstance, many of us are addicted to watching what's happening. I find myself turning to Twitter and the news way, way, way more than I normally do. And again, some of that is good, but a lot

of it's not. And what I am is I noticed myself sort of becoming addicted to the news cycle, to the spin, to the speed, to the urgency, to the whole thing. And that I can tell isn't good for my insides. You know, the other thing that he said about this, we become addicted to the noise of things falling apart. And I love this. He said, but things are also always coming together. Things are always falling apart. That's the nature of things. But things are also always coming together. It's just that those coming together moments are a lot more quiet.

And we have to actually make a point of turning towards them, of turning towards something deeper. And that's really, I think, the first pointer I would give here is that what we want to do is we want to continue to turn towards what's deeper in us, what's deeper in our spiritual practice, what's deeper in our personal practice, what's deeper in our lives, right? A lot of us are getting time to spend more time with the people in our lives that we love than we normally do. And we could look at this as a burden. And for a lot of us, it's a surprise and it's a change. But this is also an opportunity to have the people we love closer to us to spend more time with them

and more care on them. And so how can we find a way to nurture that, enjoy that and appreciate that in any sort of crisis? There's the there's the classic, I don't even know if it's true that the Chinese character for crisis is opportunity. I don't know if it's true or not, right? But in any situation, there are opportunities and there are opportunities in this situation. And one of the most obvious is the time that we can spend together that we don't normally have, the chance to perhaps slow down just a little bit and spend a little bit more time together. So that's one pointer. But in general, to turn more towards those deeper underlying parts of life that are coming together that are beautiful and wonderful that simply don't get our attention because the clamoring noise of everything

falling apart shuns them out. Where can we turn to those more in this time? The other idea that I think is really important is we had the guest Linda Graham on the show, and she talks about resilience a lot. And one of the things that she says is how you respond to the issue is the issue. So for us, how we respond to what's happening right now is the issue for each of us. Personally, our individual response is the most pressing issue for each of us, right? And this gets to where are we putting our attention? What are we paying attention to? And so it made me also think of Stephen Covey's idea of the circle of influence versus the circle of concern. And what Covey basically says, and you have to imagine two circles, there's a big circle, that's our circle of concern. And then inside of it is a smaller circle, which is our circle of influence. Circle of concern are

all the things that we care about that we worry about, right? So the news, the Coronavirus, or the response to it, all of that, that all falls in the circle of concern. And we do need to be concerned. And we do need to be concerned and we do need to spend a little bit of time there. But the smaller circles are circle of influence. This is what we can actually do something about, right? And what Covey says is the more time we spend in our circle of concern, but not inside our circle of influence, our circle of influence actually shrinks. And conversely, the more time we spend in our circle of influence actually shrinks. And conversely, the more time we spend in our circle of influence, the larger it grows. And so in this case, I think it's really worth looking at where

are we spending our time. If we're spending all our time engaging in the news and the crisis beyond what's instructive or helpful, then we're in our circle of concern. And again, I'm not here to tell you how much that is. You have to find out for yourself. But I think that idea of how much of this is instructive and how much of is it helpful, those are useful ways of saying, okay, I've got what I need from there. Now, let me move back into my circle of influence, right? And in the circle of influence are all the ways that we can take care of ourselves and take care of our loved ones. Really, our mental, physical, and emotional health

is really important. So the fundamentals of self-care here are very valuable. Are we eating healthily? Are we getting a good night's sleep? Are we exercising? Are we meditating? Are we seeking wisdom from sources that we trust and know? So when we do that, we're strengthening the pillars that will see us through this storm. And the other thing is that fear has an energy to it, right? And so by taking positive action, we actually channel that energy into productive direction instead of allowing it to sort of twist us up inside. And so I want to just give a couple of short practices that I think might help us in this time. And so one thing that's important to know, I think, is that fear is fed

by our thoughts, but we feel it in our bodies, right? And so what we want to do is it can be helpful to drop down out of the thinking mind into our feeling senses. It's a way of allowing that fear to work with it directly and a little bit more skillfully. And so there are two practices that I'd like to bring forth for you to contemplate. And the first is from another recent podcast episode with the guest Fleet Mall, who introduced us to the practice of straw breathing. And straw breathing is just a type of breathing. One thing that we know is that when our exhalation is longer than our inhalation, it tends to stimulate our parasympathetic nervous system. And that becomes a signal to our brain that we're not in a fight or flight or freeze state of danger

and our limbic system can relax. So any type of breathing that is going to allow the exhalation to be longer than our inhalation is going to help in this. And straw breathing is just a type of breathing of doing that. And in essence, you can practice it with or without a straw. If you have a straw, it's great. You can practice it with or without a straw. If you have a straw, it's great.

But the idea is you breathe in normally, and then you exhale in a slow, controlled manner as if you're breathing through a straw. You can play with different countings. So for example, I might do an in-breath of four, hold for eight, out-breath of 12 through the straw, or in-breath of four, hold for four, out breath of eight, right? They're just different. You got to find the pattern that sort of works for you. There isn't a one size fits all, particularly because everybody has different capabilities in breathing, but you want your

out breath to be longer than your in breath is the basics of it. And by doing it slowly, rhythmically counting it and breathing out through the pursed lips like you have a straw, it helps to slow our fear response. It helps us to relax. So I'd encourage you to try some straw breathing or other ways of deep breathing. It's a very good fear response. The thing about it is most of us tend to try it when we're really highly stimulated and we're like, all right, I'll take a couple deep breaths and the world doesn't change overnight from taking two deep breaths and

we abandon the practice. So this is a practice that you can do over time and we actually get better at doing the more we do it. So I'd encourage you to just work it in. I've started doing this straw breathing at the beginning of my meditation practice, because what I find it does is it actually settles me down in general. And so I might do 20, say, cycles of that, breathing in for four, holding for eight, out for 12. I might do 20 cycles of that before I drop into meditation. Again, it's just a way of engaging our parasympathetic nervous system and turning down the fear response. And then the other is a on-the-spot spiritual habit that you can turn to when you feel fear taking hold. So this won't make the fear disappear, but it'll open up some more space inside of you so that you're not as possessed by the fear.

So one of the things that all these spiritual habits have in common is they have a trigger or something that prompts you to practice them. And the trigger for this is just to notice that you're caught in the trance of fear or the grip of fear, or you're locked in fearful, ruminating thoughts. So I'm going to lead us through this practice. It's going to be a very short, just a couple minute sort of guided practice that I'm going to lead you through here. So just take a moment and settle in and close your eyes and just pause and notice and name the fear you're experiencing. You can just say, I'm feeling fear right now, or you can name it more specifically you want, but let's pause and just notice and name the fear we're experiencing here for just a moment or two.

Now, place a hand on your belly and breathe into your hand so that your belly expands. So you're breathing in, you're feeling your belly expand, and now slowly exhale. And as you do, just sense your body and mind letting go of tension and fear. Just notice any lessening of that that occurs. It might be dramatic, it might be very little, but again, just as you exhale, sense yourself sort of letting go a little bit. And let's do a couple rounds of this. So keep your hand on your belly and breathe into your hand so that your belly expands. And then slowly exhale and sense your body and mind letting go of tension and fear as you do that. I'll let you do just a couple more rounds of that at your own pace. Now, move your attention to feel where your feet touch the ground, or if you're sitting where your seat

meets the chair, and feel supported by the earth beneath you. And just keep your attention there for another moment or two. Wherever you are grounding yourself with your feet or your body, feel the connection you're making with the world beneath it. And now sense where you feel any tension or tightness in your body, and gently see if you can relax a bit in those areas, letting go and breathing into them. So what you want to do is notice an area of tension. As you breathe in, sort of imagine that area, the breath is going to it,

and you can almost on the in-breath imagine just the gripping just a little bit. And then on the out-breath, you just let go. Just let the tension and everything drain out of that area. So I'll give you just a couple moments to do that with a couple different areas in your body. And now finally, let's just take a moment and rest in this state of presence, in direct contact with that which is here right now versus being lost in the imagined future. And sense what's opened up inside of you, giving you some space between you and the fear that you're feeling.

So, that was just a very short practice. You can do this same practice in a much longer way on your own there's lots and lots of guided meditations out there sometimes when we're really trapped in the fear it can be helpful to turn to guided meditations to have somebody who comforts us a voice we find, talk us through some of this. So there's tons of them out there. Insight Timer has countless ones. We've had sponsors on the show like Calm before that have lots of great meditations out there. There's lots of sources of them. But you might find that if in your own quiet meditation that you're a little bit too jumbled up, a guided one can help. But when we name the fear and sense that we're more grounded in presence, we become less gripped and identified

with the fear. And when we do that, we can become clear on what right action might be. So this slowing ourselves down, our becoming more present, our dropping into the body is going to make our response better and clearer. So those are just a few thoughts on everything that is happening right now. I know there's a lot going on. There's a lot of fear. And I just would encourage you to spend the time that you need to understand what's happening. But don't fall into the addictive cycle of that being everything that we pay attention to. Let's not be addicted to the noise of everything falling apart. Let's make sure that we pay attention to. Let's not be addicted to the noise of everything falling apart. Let's make sure that we're taking time for ourselves to go within,

to do practices that nourish us like exercise, eating right. And all these things are going to help us cope better our emotional, mental, and physical health. Our physical health, our immune system is strengthened by calm and it is weakened by excessive fear and stress. So excessive fear and stress is not going to help us cope with this. So I wish you some degree of inner stillness amidst all of the outer chaos right now. If I can help with anything, send me an email, eric at whenyoufeed.net, and be good to yourself and those around you in this difficult time. Take care and talk to you soon.

Bye.