THE MAGIC OF YOUR ANXIETY IN OUR CRAZY WORLD
As we know, our daughters will not inherit a perfect world from us.
Who knows besides climate change, what issues they will have to contend with in their lifetime.
But there is an unstoppable force inside us all waiting to be unleashed, and there hasn’t been a better time to demonstrate our daughters how to harness it.
And this energy comes from a very unexpected place.
An untapped, almost endless reservoir…
Of worry. Fear. And anxious thoughts.
And there is pure magic in these emotions.
They have the power to blast through your challenges -
as long as you look to science, instead of the news cycle to pave your way through your obstacles.
So as 2021 awaits us all, with plenty of uncertainty to go around, we can learn to offer hope, a healing, or put a creation out into the world…
One anxious thought at a time.
Let me explain…
Our brains are wired in a way that when we are scared and anxious, it searches for more information to try and calm the anxiety. To get some kind of reassurance that my candidate will become the next president, or that this pandemic will end soon enough… so that I can finally drop the anxiety and feel better.
And so our brains have had plenty of time to search for answers in 2020… and unsupervised, many of our brains have landed in dangerous territory:
The news.
First, I would love for you to remind your daughter what the media’s #1 job is.
Because it is not to educate. It is not to bring you the facts. It is not to help you make informed decisions. And it is not even to bring you the current events.
Rather, to keep you watching.
To keep you reading.
To keep you scrolling.
And so the more unsafe and anxious you feel as a result of the news, the more you’ll keep going back.
But the news of course is just another human’s arrangement of certain facts, which are carefully chosen to match the narrative of that particular reporting.
Highlighting the one 25-year old who happened to die, instead of the 45 million who recovered.
And don’t get me wrong.
I rock an NPR tote bag.
But in turbulent times, the news can further incite fear and interrupt your life in 3 important ways:
Since your brain is built to collect evidence, when listening to the news especially about the pandemic, all it will begin to see is extra danger.
Instead of grounding its response in science and the most relevant data to stay safe and healthy, it will fixate on the 1 person instead of the 45 million. It’s like wearing red-colored glasses with the word danger written over it – focusing in on the germs at the playground, the store, on counter-tops, on shopping bags.
And this leads to exhaustion – the energy-drain of processing overload. The news, the fear, the drama. It becomes a vicious cycle of having too much outside input coming into your brain.
Which then leads to misdirection – losing your focus and taking away from who you want to be, how you want to show up, and what you want to create.
Because what you are doing is flooding your brain with everyone else’s dramatic thoughts, instead of your own intentional ones.
Which of course then weighs you down.
So if any of this is happening to you, the good news is that your brain is active.
And all it needs is a new job description to redirect it.
Currently, some of us may have hired it as a full-time worrier, which our brains tend to do really well. And will automatically direct you to a news outlet more times than you can recall.
But to get some of your power back, you have to stop stoking it with extra dramatic news, and instead navigate it towards science for answers…
and then just tune in to your own low-level hum of anxiety.
And say hello to it.
To your fear. To your worry. To being scared.
Just let it be there. Because your anxiety has something very valuable to offer you, besides trying to keep you safe:
Energy.
Anxiety has energy behind it. And lots of it.
Anxiety usually urges us to scroll, read, over-think… wants us to take some kind of action in order to find a way to feel better.
And this energy is magic.
You have an opportunity to create something here based on all the momentum you have because of the current state of affairs in the world.
And if you utilize that energy properly, you could offer a healing, a creation, a value, that completely trumps any worry that you have going on.
And you do it in a way that you let all the scary thoughts be there… without reacting to them, solving for them, fighting them, or researching them.
Just gently guiding that energy towards your goals, towards your new creations.
With intentional thoughts.
With intentional goals.
Our daughters, over their lifetimes, will have to look to science and learn to generate their power through their challenges, instead of being consumed by them.
What a year for us moms, to practice blazing their trail…
