Episode 43 Shownotes - The 50/50 of Every Human Life

Hey, my friends. Welcome, welcome. When this airs, I will just be getting back from a hiking trip with my family for the kids’ spring break. If you have listened to prior podcasts, you will know that I have a huge wanderlust and a bucket list of 25 epic trips in 25 years. Most of the trips on the list are outside of the US. But, even though my husband and I are vaccinated, my kids are not, and there are major restrictions in travel outside of the US still, so this spring break was one that we decided to stay local and do some hiking. It’s a good time to be away from crowds and 4 teen boys can carry good packs. I’ll share some pictures in the Facebook group of our adventures. I have to admit, I was hoping to complete our Patagonia trip that got cancelled at the start of the pandemic. Even though we had insurance, our trip was not reimbursed, but we got a credit to use within a year. Well, here it is, a year later, and the borders are still closed, so it’s looking like we will not be completing the trip. But you know what? Life is 50/50. There is some really awesome stuff and some crappy stuff, and that is just LIFE. This has been so much on my mind lately, that I really wanted to just dedicate a whole episode to this concept.

As Americans, we have been brainwashed into thinking that life should always be good and happy and if it isn’t, all we need to do is buy something, or eat something or do something or drink something. We think it is intolerable to be sad, lonely, bored, hungry, or uncomfortable. Think of all of the TV commercials show happy people smiling and eating, drinking, buying. They really do lead to us as a society thinking two things. First, that we should be happy almost all of the time, and second, that if we are not happy, something OUTSIDE of us needs to change to make us happy. Really think about it. The only sad people you see on commercials are for antidepressants – hey, eating and drinking aren’t making you feel great all the time? You MUST need some meds to fix it! This message is really awful I think. You aren’t happy always? There MUST be something wrong with you! Here, take some drugs to make fix it! For sure, this is NOT to say that medication is not needed if you are feeling bad ALL the time. Life should be 50% good, so if it all feels awful, clearly, you need help and I encourage you to get it as soon as possible. But for the rest of us, this message is so challenging, because the truth is, all lives have some highest of highs, and some lowest of lows, along with a some “meh” in between. When we are fixated on life always being great, when we try to get rid of our negative emotions, we actually create MORE negative emotions by suppressing and avoiding them. One of the places this is SO easy to see is with eating to feel better. I love how Brooke Castillo puts this. She tells us, “The pain seems so much more difficult than the cookies. But it’s not. The pain covered in cookies becomes pain covered in fat covered in more pain. Pain is hard. To go through and feel the emotion instead of avoiding/distracting takes courage”. It is easy to see that if we feel sad, and eat to feel better, and gain weight, we still feel sad, but now we are fat and sad, not just sad. Being fat makes us more sad and stressed. And paradoxically, we eat more, to avoid feeling bad. We are becoming more and more incapable of just being present with our emotions. So many of us think, oh, not me. I know that life has it’s ups and downs. Intellectually, we all know this. But if you are someone who as soon as you have a minute of downtime can’t just sit and be present, if you have an overwhelming urge to surf on your phone, you may need to work on this. Our phones and what they give us in the moment, meaning the ability to distract anywhere, anytime, from any feeling that is not awesome, is creating a race of people that are going backwards in our humanity. Just like animals can’t delay gratification, or plan for the future, or allow discomfort for future good, we are creating the same for ourselves, where we teach our kids that it is ok to distract ourselves from every less-than-awesome feeling. I see this all the time in my kids – it is almost ludicrously clear, but they don’t want to see it. They have a tough assignment due. They know it will be hard and not fun. So they waste time on their phones. Watching funny videos that make them happy. Complaining with their classmates in massive group texts that bing every 5 seconds. Surfing randomly, thinking it is “Research” for their paper, but is clearly just going down the internet rabbit hole. Sound familiar? The result is that the paper is still due, and now there is a time crunch, and it feels worse because they have to do it, and now it comes with sleep deprivation in addition. And because they rushed through it, they got a worse grade, so the bad feelings continue and are multiplied! The urge to surf and distract increases, and now they are circling the drain. I coach them all the time – allowing the negative emotions of getting started will get you over the hump and working on it and feel better in the long run.

What is the cure for this? What we need to really accept is that part of life is going to feel like a$$. The challenges each of us face vary, and the truth is we don’t get to pick our battles. Some of us are given physical disabilities, some medical problems like cancer, some children with big, stressful issues. But NO life is without challenges, and when we look at someone and think they have none, we just don’t know them well enough. In truth, I don’t think we want lives with no ups and downs. If all of life was perfect, I think it would actually be pretty boring. If we don’t experience grief, we are less able to experience encompassing joy. If we never feel fear, we are less able to appreciate comfort and security. If we don’t understand that much in life is fleeting, we are less able to see the wonder and joy of those perfect moments when they are present. By letting the negative emotions be there, we can get past it, instead of adding to it, making it bigger and dragging it out longer.

Cancer comes with so much of this negative 50% challenge. Patients need to adjust to their new diagnosis, which often is one of the hardest things they have ever had to deal with. Then they need to navigate through scheduling appointments, getting testing, waiting for results, and struggling through treatment. Then after, there are follow up visits, more testing, worries about recurrence with each cough, ache and pain. If this is your life challenge, the bottom line is this is your negative 50%, and if you try to suppress those negative feelings, you will just add to them and make them last longer. So often, I see people eating and drinking after cancer to feel better. When you consider that both alcohol and obesity are risks for recurrence of many cancers, we can see that this is not optimal. So how to deal with these emotions when they seem really overwhelming and impossible? Well, we have 2 options. One is to allow the emotion, and know that just like joy, happiness and love are not always present, fear, anxiety and grief will not always be present. We can make space for them, not push them down, and instead let our brains work through them. We can also understand that the negative emotions are created and heightened by our negative thoughts. Our thoughts can either increase the fear, grief, and anxiety, or they can decrease them. Mo Gawdat, author of “Solve for Happy” puts this in an easy to understand way. “Once the thought goes, the suffering disappears! When a rude person offends you, he can’t really make you unhappy, unless you turn the event into a thought, then allow it to linger in your brain, and then allow it to distress you. It’s the thought, not the actual event, that’s making you unhappy”. This may seem like it isn’t true with a cancer diagnosis, but clearly thoughts can either help you get through the tough times, or make the tough times last longer. Thinking “My cancer might recur and I might die, while my family has to sit and watch me suffering” is certain to prolong the fear over a thought, equally believable, that “to the best of my knowledge, I am cancer free today”. I think a two pronged approach of allowing, not suppressing, the feelings, along with working to find the best thoughts you can, will help you limit the amount of time feeling awful.

But there is something that amazes me sometimes. I see people who say they want to feel better, but don’t seem to want to look for any positives, or even entertain the possibility that positives exist! It is almost like they are attached to their sad story and don’t want to change it or even consider that it could be any other way. They want to be the victim, and have everyone around them feel sorry for them. Friedrich Nietzsche puts it in the most amazing way. “Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.” If how you experience love is from feeling like people feel sympathize and support you, then you have to have lots of things going wrong to for them to show you they care about you. This leads to 2 competing drivers – one wanting to feel better and one, maybe even completely subconscious, of wanting the attention you get from people who feel sorry for you. This may be tough to hear. If this was how love was shown to you as a child or young adult, you may not have even been aware of this. But take a look at how you are describing your challenges, what you say about them, whether that is what you most often talk about. Whether you feel driven to talk about problems over good things. Whether all of life’s issues are the fault of someone or something else. These are hints that you are living your life in victim mode. This is important to recognize, because this, too, is the result of thoughts you can change. These thoughts may be on autopilot and you may not be aware of them, but it is something to look for if it seems like you are always focused on what’s going wrong instead of what’s going right. If you realize you are living in this space, change is possible. You can change your programmed thoughts with time and a bit of work. This involves first, recognizing that you have a programmed thought process that is not helpful in life. Second, you need to bring awareness to the thoughts you are having, and the feelings they are generating. As part of this, you also have to become aware of how the thoughts you currently have ARE serving you. Make no mistake, if you have used them enough that they are on autopilot, there is some benefit to them, and if you don’t figure out what you are getting from them, it will be much harder to change. Finally, you need to work on creating new thoughts, and then thinking them, over and over, until they become your default thought. When you notice your brain thinking the old thoughts, reroute to your new thoughts. It is often helpful to write the thoughts and post them places you will see them frequently. You may want to post them on your computer screen, put them on your phone as your lock screen, or on your mirror. The more you see them, the more you will think them, and the quicker the change to the new thoughts will be. If it sounds like work, it is! But living in victim mentality, where everything is someone else’s fault, means we have no power to change anything if we can’t change the circumstances or other people. Unfortunately, I have found no way to alter reality or force other people to consistently bend to my wishes. If you figure that out, let me know the secret. Moving into accepting reality, not blaming it on others, and letting it just be crappy sometimes actually leads to more positivity in our lives.

A way to look at it when things are rough is thinking – oh, yes. Deb said there would be ups and downs. This is a down day. It’s ok for it to be here today, I don’t have to shop it away or drown it in prosecco. If I allow it in, let it be present, my brain will process it and it gets better. We’ve spoken before on this, but when I am in the midst of anxiety and fear (my most common negative emotions), one of the things that is most helpful is getting out of my head. I imagine my brain is like the agitator on a top loading washing machine. It spins and shuffles, and rearranges the stressful thought, but they are still there. I am dwelling on it, constantly turning the thought over and over, examining it, wondering about it, wishing it away. Get out of your head. Go into your body. What do you FEEL in that moment in your body? I always find a sort-of nauseous, fluttery feeling in my chest. If I examine it, breath into it, it loosens its grip. Track the other sensations in your body, breathing into them, staying firmly out of your head and in your body. It is amazing how this calms our brains, and allows the thoughts to reset.

As I think about our human lives, and how we deal with our challenges, and especially things that are life threatening, a quote by Pope Paul VI comes to mind. Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now! There are only so many tomorrows. I love this. If we went through life more intentionally, knowing that our days are limited to a certain number from the very first one, maybe we would worry more about today and less about 10 years from now. This leads me to another two quotes that I will end on today. One that tells us that we can’t dwell on the negative, but need to let it go and really live by Louis Boone, who tells us: The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have. And the other, by Adlai Stevenson, which is full of the joy I wish for all of you. It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts. And so today, don’t extend your misery by trying to escape it. Don’t try to make yourself always feel good by doing things outside of you – eating, drinking, shopping, searching for thrills. Don’t believe that if you aren’t happy all the time you need to be on meds. Create peace by managing your mind. Welcome ALL of life – the good and the bad. Be open to finding the silver linings. No matter what today offers, I am going to take it and live it, because it is one of the numbered days of my life, and I want to live it all, and instill LIFE into even the hardest of those days! Hope this inspires you today, and I’ll talk to you soon!