Air Crash
I have to admit and share that this incident has deeply saddened me. I don’t know any who perished. I do know how the system works and knowledge of what happened—the failures.
But the loss of life hit hard anyway. I was just reading the following this morning. It seems fitting so am sharing:
Rebecca Soffer, the co-founder of Modern Loss, describes this as “collective grief.” It can happen as a result of tragedies like the plane crash, health crises like the pandemic, and even the deaths of beloved celebrities or public figures. “If it feels like grief to you, it probably is,” Soffer said in a blog post from 1-800-Flowers, noting that distressing news stories can also trigger memories of past traumas. “These are real feelings that deserve validation.”
So how do you grieve something that didn’t actually happen to you? Start by validating how you’re feeling — there’s no need to judge the grief you’re experiencing or compare it to those who are intimately affected — and reflecting on why you might be having a strong reaction. It can then be helpful to set limits on how much news you consume; consider checking in on updates once a day rather than keeping up 24/7.
Soffer also recommends channeling your feelings into action when applicable, using meditation techniques to stay in the present, and reaching out to your community for support. It’s times like these that we need to lean on our people most.
I want to share a story... Its long AND worth the read.
Transform stress from something bad that happens to you into something that you can channel to be more productive way and also help you feel calmer.
Starting off with a story about Almanzo and his farming family. In the 1800s and they survived off of what they grew. Before the 4th of July they've got their corn starting to sprout in the fields and the weather starts to get weird and it seems like it's going to freeze. So before they go to bed the parents start to worry a little bit about the crops and they don't go to sleep they stay up and they watch the temperature. Sure enough it does start to freeze! So they get all the kids out of bed in the middle of the night and the only way to save the corn is to pour water on each of these tiny little stocks before the sun comes up. If they don't the corn will freeze, they'll have no harvest that year. So every member of the family anxiously runs through the night hand watering each little corn sprout in their acres and acres of fields and by the time the sun rose they've managed to save most of their crop they were exhausted but they were also proud that they were able to make an impact. After they did the rest of their morning chores they were able to sit back and relax and appreciate the hard work that they've done.
So, the stress response is your body's activating response when you sense a threat (any negative emotion, fear, worry, concern, stress anxiety) and in Almanzo’s case this was their livelihood about to be destroyed. Our body turns on the sympathetic response, it sends out some adrenaline to spur you into action, it heightens your breathing and your heart rate to prep you for performance. Almanzo and his family used their stress response to spur them into action. The worry helped them to be vigilant to not sleep, to take this impressive physical action. This stress response potentially saved them from complete crop failure and struggling for that entire year. So, anxiety isn't just something bad that happens to you and it serves a function. Our modern language confuses anxiety with anxiety disorder and it's given this negative connotation to the word anxiety but anxiety isn't out to get you, it's your body and mind’s performance mode. The stress or the anxiety response can help you have more energy and get more done. After setting into action your body naturally comes back to neutral. If you know how to channel it, you reframe anxiety to think of it as motivating energy to resolve problems.
Anxiety can become a powerful tool.
Instead of just something bad that happens to you that you want to avoid you can develop the way of being that treats anxiety as power generated in a power plant in like how a power plant generates power.
Let’s talk about a modern problem that we all have. One of the reasons that so many people struggle with stress and anxiety is that we face a few modern problems that make it a lot harder for us to deal with stress than Almanzo and his family back in the 1800s because our ancient brain isn't so good at dealing with modern stressors. (didn't have TONS of negative news at their fingertips, their mental, emotional and physical energies was focused on their farm to survive only)
We all need to take an intentional approach to managing anxiety.
The first problem that many of us face is that so many of our modern stressors are connected to problems that we can't solve physically. (miles away, outside our control)
In Almanzo’s case when they were worried they got that jolt of adrenaline and cortisol and they were able to use that physical energy to solve a physical problem. They didn't feel stressed afterwards because they burned off the adrenaline and cortisol when they were running around solving the problem. For many of us our modern stressors are things like deadlines and assignments, traffic noise, and our crops are sitting at a computer instead of planting corn. If I'm stressed about a problem at work I may not sleep in an attempt to solve the problem tossing and turning all night, due to the adrenaline and the cortisol staying in our system, until we physically burn them off. (very harmful)
Media consumption. Our ancient brain is much better adapted to the world of Little House on the Prairie than it is to our modern media. Almanzo and family may have gotten a newspaper once a week or heard the news from town occasionally, but that news was often about local events. The news was brief and infrequent and actionable. Meaning small doses of stress about the local news could be resolved by taking action. For example, if a couple from town got married, they could give them a present. If a barn burned down in town, they could go help their neighbors build a new one. This is the opposite of what we have today so these 24/7 streams of disaster around the world.
These trigger our stress response as if as if we're in physical danger, but they don't give us any place to act, to create safety, get rid of the stress hormones.
If you wake up in the morning and you just start scrolling through your social feeds or you start watching the news, you're basically giving other people the power over your adrenaline glands.
I do not recommend starting the day off with the news (I haven't watched it in 7 years), instead sitting back for a second and think what do you want the tone of your day to be (HOW DO YOU WANT TO FEEL)? Do you want it to be upbeat, calm, self-assured, peaceful and positive, uplifting, motivational, energetic… happy?
What kind of media does that for you?
Take what is useful and disregard the rest.