How to Deal with Life’s Pressures (Anxiety, Overwhelm and Stress)
Where does the pressure actually build up? Not in the big things. In the notifications and the small unanswered stuff, in a cooker nobody thinks to let out.
Where does the pressure actually build up? Not in the big things. In the notifications and the small unanswered stuff, in a cooker nobody thinks to let out.
A river with no rocks and no twists in it is not a river anybody stops to look at. Some days I do not want to meditate or do anything useful. I want to sit and let the moment settle, and that is allowed. We all have our vices and nobody is without them. The cooker keeps building until you notice it, which is why nature works so well. It asks nothing of you.
One thing to try: Notice when the cooker is building, rather than when it goes off. The noticing is most of the release.
In this episode
(0:07) Preparing for the quiet before life gets loud
(1:40) The chair, the weather, and April doing all three things
(3:22) A river with no rocks is not worth stopping for
(5:12) Some genuinely good news, for once
(7:54) Wanting to sit and do nothing. Not meditate. Nothing
(9:06) We all have vices, and nobody is without them
(10:51) The pressure cooker, and the notifications feeding it
(12:19) Why nature gives you peace. It asks nothing of you
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Where does the pressure actually build up?
Not in the big things. In the notifications, the small unanswered items, the things you meant to reply to. A pressure cooker that nobody thinks to let out until it goes.
The heart of it
Awareness is the whole of it. You cannot release something you have not noticed building.
The release is not a technique. It is a gap between what arrives and what you do with it.
Nature works because it asks nothing of you.
I do a meditation to the sound of a babbling brook, and something occurred to me halfway through it. That water would have no story to tell without the rocks. A stream with no bends and nothing in the way makes no sound at all and nobody stops to listen to it.
The river is the banks and the fish and the depth and the rocks. All of it. And we want the equivalent of only the nice bits of ours.
My own build up is overwhelm, and I know the signs now. I get confused. I avoid things. I cannot concentrate on anything. I feel like I have far too much on and that I am letting people down. And then I want to shut the curtains, turn everything off, and sit doing nothing at all. Not meditating. Nothing.
That last bit is allowed, by the way. Sometimes what you need is for the moment to settle rather than to be worked on.
Family is where it shows up sharpest. My daughter comes with a problem and I want to fix it immediately, because I care. Somebody else brings the identical problem and I can sit and talk it through calmly, which she has noticed and finds unfair. Emotional charge is the difference, not the problem.
That is why we like the beach and the forest. We can be there and not have to do anything with it.
The phone is the opposite. It rings and it feels like an instruction. It is not.
One small thing to try
Notice when the cooker is building rather than when it goes off. That noticing is most of the release.
Learn your own signs. Mine are confusion, avoidance and the urge to run. Yours will be different and they will be consistent, which is what makes them useful.
Then let one thing go unanswered on purpose. The notification. The email that can wait. Practise the fact that arriving is not the same as requiring you.
Questions people ask
Is it all right to just sit and do nothing?
Yes, and I do it. Not every difficult moment needs a practice applied to it. Sometimes the most useful thing available is letting the moment settle without helping.
Why is family harder than everybody else?
Because you care more, so you are more charged, and because we quietly expect the people closest to us to already know. They cannot read your mind, and you would not want them to for long.
What if the pressure has already blown?
Then look backwards for the signs rather than forwards for a fix. Every blow up had a build up, and finding yours is what stops the next one.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
stress · anxiety · overwhelm
Read the transcript
Hey, welcome to Stillness in the Storms. I'm Steven Webb, your host, and this podcast helps you to have a
little inner peace when you need it most and to prepare you for a little quietness when life gets a
little difficult. And this week I want to talk about the pressure cooker of life and how everything just, it's
a constant building up and how we release it and how I release it and what kind of techniques and
things I do in life to release. And bearing in mind I'm paralysed just below the neck. I have carers
that need to do everything for me including literally wipe my bottom so I know about the pressures and I
know about the stresses of life. But I'm also a politician. I'm on the local council I'm I've just been
elected the deputy mayor elect so I will be deputy mayor if I get re-elected in May next month. I
will be deputy mayor of Truro in the Uk. How amazing and what amazing opportunity that is to...
I don't want to say push an agenda. Agenda sounds terrible. I don't like that word. But what an amazing
opportunity it is to push forward some of the things I believe in. And like climate change, like
accessibility and fairness and helping other people out and social prescribing, things like that. So what an
amazing opportunity. So I'm really excited about that. But there's one other news that I want to share with you
this week and it's just so amazing and awesome. I've got my chair. Yes, I've got my electric wheelchair and
it's just such in good timing with the weather coming out and the sun coming out and it's April. I
know april's either full of showers or storms or sunny. That's what the flowers and the trees now need to
blossom. They need the rain and the showers and the sun. They need everything. And that's really what our life
needs. Our life needs a bit of everything. And I don't know meditation yesterday on Facebook, which I do a
meditation Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, 2 p.m. Every day, Uk time. You can join me on Facebook just go to
Facebook and type in The Inner Peace Guy, you'll find me. And or go to my website, connectwithsteven.com
and you'll find a link to my website. And I'm live. Also, I do trips out and about in my
chair which I film life but
What was I just about to share with you? I was about to share, I did a meditation and we
were meditating to a babbling brook, which I didn't even know what a babbling brook was until last year. And
really, it's just, if you're not sure, and I'm sure everybody knows this, I'm sure I was the last person
to ever find out what a babbling brook was. But it's like a a stream that's...
Not very fast. Not very slow. But it's just coming down over some rocks and it's making a nice little
noise. Natural fact, I'll put a babbling brook Here you can hear it in the background now.
That's what it is. I was doing the meditation. I was sitting there thinking that river, that water would have
no story to tell if the rocks were not in the way. Think about that.
If that river was just plain and it was just smooth and there was nothing in the way, no waterfalls
or no twists and turns and no rocks or anything like that, we wouldn't even hear it. We wouldn't even
enjoy the river, would we?
Yeah, think about that. The water needs the rocks in its life to tell the story, to make the
noise I thought that's a wonderful metaphor yesterday. I thought I was really good. Include everything. The river includes the
fish. The river includes the banks. It includes the depths. It includes the algae includes the rocks. Everything
makes up the river. But
yet we only want part of the stuff in our lives that make up some of our experience. We only
want the happiness and the good stuff.
And we want to push away and get rid of all the other stuff. That's just not the reality. So...
Anyway, what's gone well this week on positive news I'm gonna I was gonna share that every week with you
guys. And let's look through it now. What went right this week? Well, we have Britain's greenest day ever.
Apparently, according to the National Grid, wind made up 39 of the
energy mix, solar 21 and nuclear 16. I know that's controversial about nuclear, but nuclear is still a
very clean energy.
Okay, we've got to learn what to do with the waste. Perhaps we could shoot it off in the space
or something. But but these figures, it said, meant that the power plants in England, Scotland and Wales produced
39 grams of Co2 for every kilowatt hour of electricity. The previous record was 46
grams. I'm not going to sit here and say I know what all that means. I just means it I
just know it means good stuff. You know, we're getting there. We're improving things. Hello, cat. Where's the fire?
Cats just come running in crazily behind me and stopped and scratched. This is funny in there
Just like the cats go running crazy like everywhere and then suddenly they get a scratch and they'll stop, scratch
and then they'll carry on. Yeah, we should do that a little more. Just stop. Anyway. Bee
Friendly Face Mask was launched. Littered face masks blight the landscape and pose a threat to wildlife. But what if
allowing our face mask coverings to be carried away in the breeze was actually good for the environment? Enter Dutch
designer Marinad has invented a biodegradable face mask that leaves bee friendly flowers behind.
Now then, the idea hasn't actually that they're making the master and all that, but they don't know if it
actually works yet so But yeah, that's good news. It's getting there. We're like in the right direction. If we've
got to have these masks, at least if they are going to be thrown away, at least they have some
kind of purpose. The starry nights were the least light polluted for many
decades, which is good. And we can see more stars. I don't know how they measure that. I just look
up and don't see very many when I'm in the city. And the countryside I see loads. I've
always wanted to spend a night out in the middle of a field, in the middle of nowhere where there's
not much light. Of course it has to be warm and it has to be nice. And now I've got
a wheelchair that can tilt back a little bit. I can I could just go and sit in the middle
of the field and just spend the night looking at the stars. Now
that seems like a wonderful romantic lovely thing. The truth is I'll get to two o'clock in the morning I'll
be bored. And I'll probably be terrified. I'll be thinking there's some wild boar around me or something like that
that's about to come and jump out on us. But I don't know about you I've always fancied doing that.
That would be really interesting.
Right, let's get back to today's podcast. I want to talk about the pressure cooker of life.
What do I mean by that?
I suffer from overwhelm and every now and again things build up and I feel like I want to run
away. I feel like I want to draw the curtains, close the doors, I want to turn everything off and
I don't really want to do anything. I just want to sit and I just want this moment to like
dissolve or settle. Not meditate, not do any of those things, just do nothing you
ever get that feeling where you just want to sit and do nothing? And that's normally when I'm very overwhelmed.
When I talk about the pressure cooker, what I'm what I'm saying is the meditation and all those other things,
it's all about recognising when the pressure is getting a little more. And what we're doing
is trying to release that pressure before it gets too much. It's trying to recognise, become aware of what's going
on in our lives. Awareness is everything. That is really a massive, massive understatement.
In order to deal with anything, you have to become aware. It's like if someone drinks an awful lot or
someone takes a lot of drugs to escape life you know It's very often we notice that an alcoholic needs
to recognise they're an alcoholic before they can do something about it well a person addicted to thinking or addicted
to disconnection or computer games or food or anything. It really doesn't matter because we all have
our vices. Nobody is...
Perfectly without vices, you know. We all have our habits. We all have our good and bad things. Or deemed
good and bad and from a human relative perspective. I
suppose the larger part of my spiritual journey and the larger part of my less suffering is recognising when
I'm feeling the pressure. Recognise when a feeling or when things are arising. And instead of allowing it to build
up, I let the pressure off earlier. And when I mean by let the pressure off, I mean create a
little gap between what's arising and how I deal with it. So you know my family trigger me. I think
that's normal for families all over the world. And when they trigger me, sometimes I want to react. And that's
because you're emotionally charged with family. You care about them. You love them. So when my daughter comes to me
with the same problem as someone else comes, When my daughter, I react to it. I want to fix it.
I'm more emotionally charged by it. Somebody else can come to the same problem and I'm like, okay, let's just
talk about this well let's just have a conversation about it. And my daughter is like, what? Really? How did
you do that? Why did you you know So it's really difficult when it's family members because you care deeply
and you want to fix it and you want to reduce their suffering. I get it. And and also we
think they should know better as well when When our partner or someone comes to us about something, or when
they make a mistake and they say something wrong, we think they should know better because we think they should
know us um
they We think they should be in our heads really. Until they're in our heads, then we want them to
get out of our heads. So the special Cooker is always building. Always building. Whether it's notifications from Facebook, whether
it's what you got to do is whether it's feelings or emotions. Thoughts. And nowadays, there's more pressure on us
than ever before with work and family and commitments and judgement and social media. Everybody's got answers to everything.
Tune into this podcast. I've got the answers to your inner peace. You know, everybody's got answers to everything.
And everybody's giving us advice and everybody's telling us how to do things. But really, the best advice is, here
we go or advice but the best advice, I invite you to just... Recognise when the pressure cooker is building
up a little bit. Recognise your signs that the pressure is getting on top of you and take a step
back let's go ah, I don't need to do anything with this. That's the magic phrase so many times.
There's most of what's arising in our lives we don't have to do anything with
yeah that's why we like the beach. That's why we like the forest. That's why we like being out in
nature because we can be there and not have to do anything with it. That's why we don't like the
phone ringing because we feel we've got to do something with it. You don't. Don't answer it you know Don't
answer that notification from Facebook. Do nothing with it. Don't go into your emails. You
know, we don't have to answer that call of nature. That's why we find so much peace in nature, I
think. So that's my podcast for today. Just a general chat really. Just become aware
of when things are building up in your life and take a step back and you'll prevent so much more
hassle. You'll prevent a lot of your suffering just by becoming aware of what triggers you. And my big one
is overwhelm. And I've got the signs have been overwhelmed. What are my signs I I get confused. I avoid
things. I cannot concentrate. I feel like I have too much to do. I let people down. I feel like
I want to run. They're my signs. And it doesn't happen so much anymore, but I always have that build
up. You know, it will always build up in the ebb and flows of life. So I'm Steven Webb and
I'm your host of Stillness in the Storms. If you could share this episode, that would be amazing and awesome
and you'd be my favourite person this week. Honestly. Thank
you. And you can head over to connectwithsteven.com. Book in a virtual coffee, completely free.
If you would like help with something, by all means, there's also a coaching call on there that just
message me and say what you might need to help with. I don't know if I can help you or
not. Sometimes just to listen is enough. I'm here. Reach out anytime. Take care. And
I'm gonna go and enjoy my chair. I love you guys. Have a good week and I will see you
next week for some more positive news and some more advice on how you can have a little stillness and
