Self-Care in Anxious Times

If you're soaking up all the negative stuff that goes on in the world it can be really hard to feel safe ourselves unless we work hard to.
Ignorance is bliss sometimes and you have nothing to feel guilty about by looking the other way when you have to.

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Hey there you. Hope you're well and handling things with great confidence and calmness. Easier said than done, people tell me though. Not that I need people to tell me, therapists are human too. For now, at least, before the robots take over. I'm a positive kind of guy and even I get sucked into the negativity of what's going on in the world and often need to practise what I preach and certainly keep my news watching to a minimum. If watching the news encourages you to donate something to an emergency relief charity or something, then that's great. Something positive can come out of it. But if all being glued to negative news does is make you feel more and more helpless, more and more anxious, then that could have quite a negative effect on us. 'cause it primes us to experience it elsewhere as well. Priming is like hearing a funny joke, laughing and then hearing a less funny joke, but laughing again more than you would've done if that had been the first joke. That's just how brains work, because you've been primed to find things funny. But if you prime yourself for stress, pain, and helplessness, then it doesn't take long for exposure to bad news to influence your sleep, make you shout at your kids. And shouting at your kids isn't gonna prevent antisemitism or provide medical aid for anybody. All it does is make things worse. And it's no secret that bad news gets more views than good news. So if someone wants your attention, whether it's for ad revenue or it's for attention around a pub table or something, they are gonna bring up the bad news. But you can care about other people and the pain and suffering they experience and still care about yourself. It doesn't make you selfish or cruel to be happy even though there are others that aren't. And you certainly don't have to make yourself ill. Like you might have heard me say before, the brain doesn't know the difference between fact and fiction. If you watch horrible things, your body will respond as if those horrible things are going on for real to you, even though you might be thousands of miles away. And everyone's sensitivities are different. It's why some people love horror films and some people hate them. Some people love true crime stories and others just wanna watch comedy programmes. 'Cause the crime stuff just feels too real. Thing is we feel the pull towards the things we fear though, don't we? There's this unconscious process running in the back of our mind that says, the more I understand something, the more protected I'll be from it. But for most situations, that's not true. It just tightens up our body, makes us stressed and anxious. Every cell in your body, every muscle is contracting and sending signals back and forth between your brain and the rest of your body that you're not safe. The world is not safe, you're in danger. Get ready for fight or flight, and we can get so used to feeling tight and stressed that it feels normal. So it's worth checking your body for tension, sometimes. Your jaw, your shoulders, are you holding your stomach tightly? It might be bracing itself for a punch, you see. Our unconscious mind isn't smart enough to know what to try and prevent. Stress can even make us store fat in case the reason for our anxiety is that crops must be failing. So we might need to compensate and deliberately loosen our jaw, soften our muscles, and tell ourselves that we are safe and that everything's gonna be okay, you know. 'Cause your mind has been getting conflicting messages. You've not been acting as if you're in any danger, but you are engaging with danger through the news or social media. And for a lot of people, that's gonna have an effect. For some, it's just sadness that we move on from. For others, it's anxiety and they don't move on until they balance caring too little for other people with caring too much, which stops us from caring for ourselves. And if this is you or you need to pass this advice onto others, then think about what I've been saying on here today, please. As is always the case, there's more to keep you on the right track over on my Patreon page. Head over to patreon.com and look me up. And for the same price as a five pack of curly wurleys each week, you can support the show and get some mental health boosting goodies instead. Have a great weekend, everybody. Take care of yourself. Speak to you soon. Bye-bye.