Tag: Stress

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 40 and Forgetting

When I first committed to writing “something” every single day I didn’t have a lot on my schedule. I was busy with routines for my recovery (I’ve been busting my ass to overcome an autoimmune issue that presents in my spine) but most of those obligations didn’t require coordination with anyone but myself and my doctors. It can be a full time job between medicines, supplements, treatments, testing, and insurance. But it wasn’t hard for me to find time to write something. Hasn’t always been polished but I’ve always got “something” out the door.

Today is the first day since that commitment to write pushed up against a building set of obligations to other people and projects. My medical stuff felt easy and part of a natural routine. And I didn’t take any downtown for recovery between obligations. I used to buffer my obligations with naps or even whole days of rest. Increasingly I have the capacity to do big blocks without any breaks. Which is how I find myself at 9pm without having set out a quiet block to write my thoughts.

I cannot tell you how exciting it is to have a productive day of work and healthy habits and find myself thinking well huh 15 hours have gone by since I woke up and yet I found no time to write? I look back and see no there really wasn’t an hour or two where I was in bed on my phone. That’s a first for me in quite sometime. I don’t feel exhausted or depleted. I feel if anything pleasantly energetic. Like I need to begin my bedtime routine to let myself come down. And I cannot wait to pick back up what I didn’t accomplish today first thing in the morning.

My human capacity to forget is kicking in. I’m forgetting what it was like to be unable to walk. I’m forgetting what it was like to be in so much pain I couldn’t think clearly. I’m forgetting the soul crushing exhaustion that took all but the most basic activities from me. I wouldn’t mind forgetting the bad parts to be honest. If I could just remember the emotional depths and new strengths I discovered I’d be pleased. I’m sure I’ll have a flare soon and become newly intimate with the ways pain overtakes all life. But I enjoyed forgetting it today. And maybe if I’m lucky I’ll have more time to keep forgetting.

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Chronicle Politics

Day 38 and Better Fear Than Anger

Culturally in America we’ve lost touch with the value of fear. Which is a shame as fear is a root emotion (along with sadness and happiness). We’ve became enchanted by anger instead. But anger is not a root fear. Anger is the steam rising off of fear. Cultivate, explore and release your anger and underneath you will find the fear that drives the issue.

We’ve decided we don’t like fear though. We’ve perverted it into a weakness. Especially during the pandemic. Anger on the other hand as won cultural acclaim in America. We use phrases like “right to be angry” and “righteous anger” rather than exhuming a deeper truth that will be more revealing. Fear is good though. It cuts deep. Fear shows us the child that lives in our innermost self, revealing the terrors and traumas children feel from being powerless, abandoned, and small.

Even as we cultivate strong bodies and swift minds as adults, the child who was betrayed by the accidental lapses by our parents remains inside of us. In psychology they call that the inner child. Perhaps your inner child is angry. Mine often feels anger. But at her heart the child is just scared. But rather than answer the questions raised by our fear and overcome it, we are seduced by the power of the anger steaming on top. We cultivate heroics to nurture the anger. Americans craft elaborate myths about the heroic value of anger.

I’m not suggesting you are not angry. Or that your anger has no place. Nor am I invalidating the source of your anger. I am however asking us all to dig deeper. Learn why you are angry. Then go deeper. Find the fear of the child that is inside you.

My fear? That I’ll be abandoned by my people during this pandemic. Just like I was abandoned as a child. I got angry seeing the choices people made. But underneath it was simply the fear that repeated a childhood trauma that I wasn’t important enough for anyone to save me. Knowing that helps me save myself. I take responsibility for my own fear. I can use it as an edge if others don’t work on their anger. But I’d rather we as a nation work through our shit instead.

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Chronicle

Day 37 and Boundaries

I recently did a Twitter poll where I asked folks what they used to develop their emotional capacity. I listed therapy, meditation/mindfulness, coaching and “nothing” as the options. A full third of respondents choose nothing.

This really took me by surprise as much of my follower base is made up of folks in the technology industry along with significant business and finance types. Most have Silicon Valley mindsets tend to prioritize hobbies like biohacking and performance. Having insight into your mental and emotional state has become a burgeoning part of the quantified self movement. So finding out that a large number of people don’t invest in their mindset was, to quote Geoff Lewis, a narrative violation. I really thought we were all committed to parenting our inner children along with our Wim-Hoff breathing, weight lifting and protein eating.

But maybe I shouldn’t find this odd. It’s much easier and certainly more linear to put gains on your squat and cut your fat mass to show your abdominal muscles. The math on that can be done on apps and coaches can help along your progress. It’s trackable. Clear metrics for success exist. OKRs for your body. But learning to let go of self limiting beliefs, check your desire to self victimize, or refrain from vomiting your emotions all over your friends is less quantifiable.

Still you can track your meditation minutes in Calm or your time with a professional coach which your venture fund offers with their new fangled mental health benefits. So why is it that a third of people happily clicked that they were fine not doing anything for their emotions?

I suspect it has something to do with the challenge of knowing yourself and that knowledge necessitates drawing new boundaries. The further one gets in a journey of emotional and mental health the more one has to let go of habits and people that undermine us. Sometimes it can even mean giving up all the things we thought made up our life. Such is the high price of happiness. People may reasonably make the calculation that it’s too high a cost. That being unhappy isn’t so bad. That boundaries are too expensive for someone like them. So they tolerate what they’ve always known as the unknowns of pursuing happiness is too much.

It’s quite likely I’m overthinking this one as I’m currently reminding myself of the value of boundaries in my own life. Perhaps it’s as simple as being a fish in water. If you don’t know the water is there why question it? A third of people may have never considered the benefits of questioning their existing beliefs and emotions. Which saddens me a little. But also reminds me that investment in emotional growth is a significant edge.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 35 and Workflows

For someone that thrives in chaos I hate change. Once I have a workflow for an application or device I dig in hard. Part of this is because I have shockingly poor user experience intuition. It takes me longer than average to learn to use even the most simple applications. But part of it is how I learn. I dive in deep to master a new skill and then jealousy horde the knowledge out of fear that someone will change a design or form factor to the point where my muscle memory cannot be relied upon. That would mean a complete reset of my capabilities requiring a day of learning. That’s mental overhead and the stress of doing my work poorly while I learn. I bring this all up being I got a new phone.

My old one was getting sluggish and my husband loves buying gadgets so a new one appeared after I had merely whispered that my old device may not be long for this world. The new one is sleek and fast and lovely but it’s significantly bigger than its predecessor.

And even an inch requires me to completely relearn muscle memory for how to hold the phone, how fast I can type, and where the apps do or do not bleed out the edge. I kid you not when I say two days into using it I’ve already developed a callus on my pinky from holding it up vertically while thumb typing. I hope my pinky hardens over fast as damn this phone is heavy.

This frustrates me as I spend my day on my phone and have a significant amount of my workflow baked into mobile apps (I’m writing this in WordPress’s excellent iOS mobile app) as my spine gives me trouble if I spend all day in even the nicest office chair. So I type a lot while lying down with the phone over my face. You can see how I might get a pressure callus from this nonsense now as the grip I’ve developed relies heavily on the right pinky to hold up the device. This worked well on a lighter shorter device. Not so much here.

I know I’ll adjust in a few days but the minor irritation that comes from having a workflow be disrupted has its cascade effects. It does just enough to knock you off kilter that it can sour a mood or inhibit creativity. I’m sure there are lessons in here for how app onboarding and product sales can be managed to ease stress or buy in for consumers. But for me it’s probably just a minor callus and an extra Ativan. And a bit of writers block as I get frustrated with just how uncomfortable my hands feel with something new.

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Chronicle Finance

Day 33 and Psychological Safety

Creativity is scary. Any time you build something new fear lurks around the corner. Because even if it’s not rational, your perception of risk rises when your potential for failure is at its highest. Perhaps this is why when you take a conscious risk you unconsciously try to mitigate any unnecessary additional risks. This has a number of significant consequences for businesses. You want to feel safer when you take risks so you seek out psychological safety from your associates. The principle is simple. You will only take risks if you believe you don’t be punished for it. Psychological safety has been shown to be crucial for teamwork.

I’d wager this is a factor in why startup teams tend to be homogeneous as human nature makes it harder to trust what we don’t know well. Which is fascinating when you consider that diversity is also an important factor in financial performance. And as much as this principle of psychological safety been discussed for team performance, there is one area in startup land where feeling safe is rarely cultivated: venture capital.

Venture’s entire culture is steeped in cliches of competition and combativeness. Which seems odd for a group that theoretically prizes high performance. Wouldn’t they benefit from cultivating psychological safety the most? If entrepreneurs are solving entirely new problems with high chances of failure feeling like they can trust their financial partners should be a top priority. And surely plenty of ink has been spilled on picking good partners in the literature of startup advice. And yet the atmosphere of distrust is pervasive. Venture capitalist and entrepreneur are constantly managing the information flow between each other. Which is exactly the opposite of what creates the necessary safety to take creative risk. So why isn’t this discussed more?

Imagine a fund who instead of poking holes in your data or lobbing grenades in your plans instead showed it was sensitive to the parade of fear and doubt that pervades most decisions. You’d get more done by a mile. Ideas could be refined instead of defended. Plans could be buttressed and shored up rather than rationalized. Having safety will lower the kind of inhibiting social pressures to show “that you are always crushing it” perhaps enough to produce startups that actually do go on to crush it.

This strategy could shift the dynamics of a firm’s competitiveness too. In group dynamics of status and posturing prioritize deal flow among only in group group members which disadvantages everyone by increasing competitive deals and rising prices. Funds who who have psychological safe founder relations will then disproportionately control what deals get done as the creative risk takers will seek them out. That kind of deal flow would be a major leverage point. Rather than getting stuck fighting for the same deals everyone agrees on (which isn’t a sign of quality no matter how much we want it to be so) venture fund that sticks to prioritizing psychological safety will spend more time with productive risk taking that builds the future.

Developing emotional capacity isn’t a platitude. It’s grueling work that takes place over years, sometimes to little effect given our innate resistance to change. But it is truly transformative.

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Chronicle Finance Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 28 and Limbic Memory

Today I want to talk about how this past year has set in motion the next hundred years of human imagination. Yes, I think it’s that important.

Mental elasticity is an incredible thing. We humans learn quickly and have a seemingly endless capacity to adapt to impossible things once we’ve wrapped our minds around it. Sadly though, forgetting doesn’t come as naturally to us as learning. Once we’ve seen the impossible happen, we never forget. Instead of storing miracles and crisis in the front of our minds like new knowledge, to be reinterpreted as new and possibly ephemeral, it goes right to our limbic back brain.

The limbic system is set in the deep structure of the brain where it regulates autonomic or endocrine function in response to emotional stimuli. It’s part of our survival response encoding. Which is why trauma is so crucial to evolutionary pressure. Those that survived, generally did because they took an impossible situation seriously. It becomes a part of our reactive unconscious survival instinct. And boy is this going to have consequences for American millennials.

The last year has had its share of impossible things occur. And we’ve gone about our business adapting to things that couldn’t possibly happen before. Early doomers were dismissed on the pandemic, political Cassandras ignored until an insurrection occurred, and now a new kind of financial mania which Stalwart Joe at Bloomberg calls an “upcrash”. He explains the impossible inversion using 1987’s Black Monday 22% drop.

Once people became aware that such a severe crash in so short a time was even possible, the likelihood that it could happen again was never dismissed. The consequences aren’t as big, but in a sense, what we’ve seen in GameStop could be thought of as a Reverse 1987. Upcrash. A gain so fast and rapid, that it might previously have been thought to be impossible.

Why do I include a seemingly jokey memetic internet troll in a list of traumas? Because a positive memory is just as jarring to our limbic memory as a bad thing. We overweight good experiences just as heavily as bad. Once the impossible becomes real our bodies retain the memory.

We’ve now got sense memory for global pandemics, political instability and positive market manias in America. Things we haven’t had for three generations (or more in the case of political instability). And the consequences, most of which remain unknowable, for these visceral impossibilities won’t leave our bodies till we are dead. We are stuck with the paranoia and exuberance of this last year till our grandchildren are in charge.

So we’ve just tossed several intense traumatic evolutionary events onto American millennials that not a single institution can do shit about. And I’ve honestly never been more excited for what our chaotic future might bring.

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Chronicle Preparedness

Day 23 and Learning Anxiety

It all started with basil. Buying those plastic clamshells filled with herbs felt like insult on every grocery bill. You pay a couple dollars for wilting produce to complete some elaborate recipe you got from the New York Times (because Bon Appetit would never do you wrong that way) and are subsequently bathed in a broth of guilt and regret over your ambitions and poor budgeting.

Now a normal person would probably start an herb garden and enjoy its seasonal bounty. No winter herbs for you but plenty of summertime basil. But I am a yuppie. A full David Brook’s hippie turned bohemian consumption machine.

So on Black Friday I bought an Aerogarden. It’s a good Boulder company so that felt nice. Until I learned that it’s owned by Scott Corporation otherwise known as the purveyors of Miracle-Gro. But because I’m a yuppie I can let that one go even if I’ll cry indignation in public. I want my easy year round herbs.

So fast forward a few months and this is the best consumer product I’ve purchased all year. Up there with the $14 stovetop espresso maker. So I’ve got stars in my eyes about how in our townhouse we can do more than herbs. We can grow tomatoes! We could get two Aerogarden and grow lettuce too. Imagine if we could stack them. And so my husband and I start a familiar cycle of manifestation wherein he and I churn our cycles on making something we want a reality. He handles the logistics. I handle the the desires outcome. Together we have both decent ideas and follow through. The trouble is when we try to switch rolls.

“Oh honey there are Aerogarden subreddits. Check it out before you decide what we should do.”

That sounds innocent enough. I click in on the link. Cue instant panic. Post after post after post about optimizations. “I bought a pollinator” and “I pulled out seeds to improve lower light filtration” and honestly I can’t even type out anymore it’s giving me hives.

Why? I don’t learn this way. But my husband does. My husband learns by seeing. A bunch of questions, and a lot of show and tell, gives him the confidence to dive into a project. He is the master of the Subreddit. A king of the DIY Youtube tutorial. I on the other hand can only learn by doing. I take one step. I don’t milk myself. I gain confidence and then I take another step. I have done a lot in my life with this “one foot in front of the other” method. And I know it works for me. Because if I start seeing too many complex steps and tools or gadgets I immediately undercut myself. I assume it’s too complex for me. A hobbies forum assumes a degree of detail and devotion I believe I can’t ever muster. I’m too much of a dabbler for that.

So I panicked. I kept reading the threads and slowly convincing myself I could never handle this hydroponics shit. Look at how complex all these set ups were. Look at all these questions I never thought to ask before I just started doing it. This panic surfaced despite the fact I was reading posts by people about the identical device I have. Which all evidence suggests I have been using correctly for months without even once looking at a subreddit or forum for hacks.

A hydroponic garden made by Aerogarden with six different herbs growing

I very nearly talked myself out of getting an additional Aerogarden at all by attempting to learn the way my husband does.

And he didn’t mean to spook me. He got excited on the forums and wanted to share it with me. I thankfully caught myself in the emotion before I let it run away from me too much. But it was a valuable lesson in not judging yourself for not having the same style. My method of learning is more any better or worse than any other. It just happens to be the one that keeps me excited to keep going. And that’s half the battle with learning something new. If you get bummed out the fire dims and you won’t continue learning. And that’s really where you fail.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle Media

Day 21 and The Fast

A perennial topic for the harried is the benefit of fasting. A timeless religious tradition and spiritual practice, fasting cleanses the mind and body. Typically when I fast I do it with food. And I generally do my 7 day water fasts over the Holy Nights between Christmas and epiphany. But as I push through the final stages of healing my previously chronic illness I am considering a media fast instead.

I have a consistent meditation practice but the kind of mindfulness that comes from a break in the information flow seems more appealing. I’m exhausted from the constant crisis of the past three weeks as we careened from Georgia to the Capital insurrection to media deplatforming and silencing to finally the Inauguration. I had my hilarious shopping binge where I picked up every relaxation facilitating product I could find. But perhaps it’s time to admit I need some forced distance between me and the information firehose.

A proper retreat requires a significant break with outside stimulation. Which I’m not entirely sure is necessary. But I am concerned about overstimulation from media arcs both political and pandemic related. In Dr. Sepah’s original writing on dopamine fasting he presented it as a way to regain control over automatic rigid behaviors that have negative stimulus triggers.

In his words this type of cognitive behavioral therapy “weakens the classical conditioning in a process called ‘habituation’, which ultimately restores our behavioral flexibility.” So perhaps rather than seek a fast or a retreat or a detox I’m simply looking to break the impulses and anxiety that the media arcs have implanted in me. I do not wish to engage in the narratives of anxiety or jubilation (neither have inherently more truth) when they are not my own impulses or emotions.

My energy and my emotions are my own. I need them for my own health. They are not meant to be manipulated by outside players with their own agendas. That I need my energy for my own reasons should not even need saying. Media or political players don’t own me. There is no moral obligation that I stay tuned in. My attention cannot save anything but myself. So I will explore putting some distance between myself and the media for a but. My goal is to break from reactivity that was created externally. I’ll still be writing daily. And I suspect I’ll dabble in the bits of Twitter that bring me enjoyment and connection. But I’ll give myself the space to heal.

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Chronicle Politics

Day 12 and The Shopping Binge

It’s always the after effects that get you. Last Wednesday’s insurrection riots in the capital left me reeling. This of course is a choice. But taking responsibility for the emotional turmoil is taking a few more days than I’d hoped. I let in too much stress and worry over an event that I can do nothing to improve and is miles away.

Which isn’t to say that I shouldn’t be upset only that I know I’ve let more stress into my life this week than I can comfortably handle. And while I’m lucky to have many routines that help reduce unnecessary anxiety like a meditation practice and a daily hike into the mountain foothills, I decided I should greet this crisis with a bit more force.

So ironically an exercise about about creating more is now chronicling what I consumed today. What an American way of handling things. I went on Amazon and binged on through an essential oil diffuser, a salt rock lamp, some paper and pastels, a white sage smudger and a Tibetan singing bowl for more meditation practice. Lets hope some improvements in my environment and a little bit of creative activity can keep me from worrying to much.