“We were never meant to understand. We were meant to feel”

Alan Watts

“Life is a set of sensory experiences and then we die”

Chris Williamson

Goal – feel life dont think

I have found it far too easy to get lost in the sauce of daily life. Worrying about what could be and questioning what has been. It’s constant. Over and over. Nonstop. The mind is relentless.

Genetics haven’t been all that nice either. My brains’ got this wonderful bias towards runaway rumination & near-panic anxiety. I have this other wonderful tendency to not sleep that well, which makes for a perfect recipe for low mood regulation and feeling like doggy-cakes. (pretty sure the brain is staging a coup)

But I’ve also learned how to mitigate the downsides. Ultimately, anxiety can be good. If we fkin listen.


It tells us what we like. It tells we what we don’t. Very strongly, sometimes so much that we can’t think and feel like doggy-cakes…but it does tell us. And I’m pretty sure that’s what they call intuition.

It’s the body’s warning signal. It’s the “hey f##ker, listen up… this sucks. Do something about it!”. Anger is when we don’t deserve said maltreatment. Anxiety is our brain’s warning system.

Historically, that fear has kept us alive. “I’m scared of those saber-tooth tigers… maybe if I stay away I’ll stay alive” and “I’m scared of those purple berries… maybe if I don’t eat them I’ll stay alive”. Bingo, you live another day.

Unfortunately, it seems our brains don’t always know the difference between legitimate fear and just made up worry. So our brains default to a kinda-worry-all-the-time sort of state. That way we error on the side of caution… and that means survival, right?

The tricky part is that modern day, we’re actually in mortal danger. (thanks Alex Honnold for your insights). It’s true, though. So our brain makes up stuff to worry about. If we don’t do something about it (sometimes especially if we do do something) the feeling amplifies

evolved, right?

We’re working with brains that evolved to keep us alive. Ancestors’ brains would go into intense fear and then be able to recoup. Cortisol, relax. Cortisol, relax.

Now, however, the ‘danger’ never seems to go away. It’s omnipresent and our brains stay in a perpetual fight-or-flight mode. Deadline from the boss. Emails to send. Possible a speeding ticket. What if the power goes out?

The dangers aren’t really real. They consequences are real, but they don’t come remotely close to fatality. But our brains process the fear the exact same… or rather it is felt as anxiety – a lower level, but more prevalent ‘fear’.

Or as Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks likes to say “Anxiety is unfocused fear”.

He suggests that writing down these anxieties, we can turn them into legitamate fear. And then we can think about the genuine, realistic worst thing that could happen. That’s the fear. And what’s the actual probability? Likely pretty low.

If we don’t address it, this low level fear sits around as anxiety like a puddle of water on wood floors that never evaporates – It slowly kills us.

We might die alone starving in the streets… but the probability is pretty damn low.

Fear

Running out of money and getting caught in the rat race scares the shit out of me. But by writing down the things that lead to this type of life and ways to avoid it…helps me deal with the genuine fears. The anxiety is no longer able to fester unconsciously.

I guess I write this all to suggest that we spend a lot of time worrying about things that aren’t even real. But we haven’t taken the time to figure out what part of the fear is real. For sure easier said than done, though.

It feels difficult, if not impossible to will the mind to not run rampant.

Alternatively, I’ve found specific exercises, such as Arthur Brooks and Thich Nhat Hanh to be extraordinarily useful. Writing things down calms my mind. Running calms my mind. Meditation calms my mind.

These are simple things that we aren’t taught in High School… nor college… nor adulthood. But they’re simple things that other humans have already figured out. Let’s add them to the Collective Conscious.

Status or Happiness

And we are left picking up the pieces chasing the almighty dollar (chasing status, really) because we don’t know where else to go. A serious over-generalization no doubt, but just what I observe.

As a society, we spend extraordinarily little time on self-reflection and self-improvement. Why do I say that? Because nobody talks about it in a public setting… ever. It’s scary. It means being vulnerable.

“Thoughts disentangle themselves through the lips and through the fingertips”

Dawson Trotman

Perhaps that’s why I feel far more safe shouting in to the void of my tiny little computer screen and shipping it off in the comfort of my room in my blue Eagle America underwear.

It just seems silly that collectively we spend so little time understanding how to feel good. These tools exist. People have figured it out. The yogis in India have existed for thousands of years. Meditation has existed for thousands of years. Varied breathwork has existed for thousands of years.

It slowly is becoming less stigmatized in the West, less feminine if you will. But it’s absolutely crazy to me that we stigmatize… oh I don’t know Feeling Good?

We stigmatize processing and feeling emotional. And why? I’d argue because again it requires a level of vulnerability.

Perhaps that’s part of my goal – to popularize the public conversation surrounding feeling good. It’s why the work of people like Andrew Huberman and Matthew Walker are so incredibly important: Popularizing protocols to increase our quality of life.

Yet instead, in public school we are taught to memorize the Quadratic Formula and the day of the week Shakespeare took a dump. Yes, there’s absolutely value added there, but if we haven’t even spent time understanding our own psychology and what makes us have an enduring, quality, enjoyable life… what are we doing?

Note:

• Chuck Mcgee hosts free 1-hour sessions on breathwork, Sundays 11am (PT).
  I’ve experienced noticeable benefit.
• (11 min) Wim Hof Method