Where does a feeling actually come from, and what happens in the first thirty seconds of it?
The amygdala flags something before you know it. A second or two later the adrenaline is in, the heart is up, the blood is heading for the big muscles. That is not your body malfunctioning. That is your body being brilliant. Picture a campfire and somebody says, what was that. You want the person who feels the fear. Every feeling has a healthy end and an unhealthy end of the same stick, and we keep trying to chop the stick in half.
One thing to try: Take five seconds between the feeling and the reaction. Not to fix it. Just to let it finish arriving.
In this episode
(1:44) The first thirty seconds, and the book it comes from
(2:58) The amygdala flags it before you know
(4:12) This is the body working, not failing
(5:03) The campfire, and who you want with you
(7:42) Love is blind, and then it is the toilet seat
(10:27) Finding out you had only been seeing three colours
(12:56) I would not want a life with none of it
(14:03) Stop trying to chop the stick
With gratitude to
Addie, Amy, Barbara, Susan, Michael, Karen, Laura, David, Jenna and Mia, and Johnny
Where does a feeling actually come from, and why does it hit before you have decided anything?
You are round a campfire and somebody says shush, what was that. Or two cars go into each other outside your front door, which happened to me the other day. Before you know a single thing about it, your body has already started.
The heart of it
The alarm goes off before you know anything is wrong. That is the design working, not failing.
Every feeling has a healthy end and an unhealthy end of the same stick, and we keep trying to cut one end off.
This comes from a book called Destressifying that I read years ago, and it lays out the first thirty seconds plainly. A small alarm in the head, the amygdala, spots the threat and wakes the body without telling you. A second or two later the adrenaline is in. The heart speeds up and pushes blood to the big muscles. Breathing quickens and the airways open. The liver puts stored sugar into the blood for instant fuel. The small vessels in your skin and fingers tighten, so a wound would bleed less, which is why your hands go cold and a bit numb. The pupils widen, hearing sharpens, and the world goes high definition. Digestion shuts down, because there is no point digesting lunch if you are about to become lunch.
All of that before you have decided anything.
This isn't the body malfunctioning. This is the body with a brilliant response.
Round that campfire you want the person who feels the fear. They might be wrong about the bear, and they will be wrong plenty of times, but over a few hundred thousand years theirs are the ones still here.
I went on somebody's podcast years ago and the host had titled it something like, today we get rid of fear, kick it out of the park. Every time we came off air I was saying, no, let us not get rid of it. Then the break would end and he would say, when we come back, we are getting rid of fear for good.
Fear is good. Anxiety is good. Alertness is good. They are only a problem when you live there, eight hours a day, and the body never comes down.
We keep trying to chop off the end of the stick with the bad bits on it. And what do we get? A shorter stick.
Keep cutting and eventually the joy and the grief are on the same inch of stick and you cannot tell them apart any more.
One small thing to try
Five seconds. Not to fix the feeling, not to work out what it means. Just enough for it to finish arriving.
Then one question. Do I actually need to run here? Do I need to fight? Hear it, then decide.
Your body will do the thirty seconds again today, and again tomorrow. When it does, nothing has gone wrong. It means the thing is working.
Questions people ask
Should I be trying to feel less anxious?
Not as a target, no. What you want is for it to arrive, do its job, and leave. It is living inside it that wears the body out.
Is any of this medical advice?
None of it. I am not trained and I would not pretend to be. If this is with you most days, see a doctor. This is about the ordinary spikes.
Why does my body react to a car horn like it is a bear?
Because the part that raises the alarm has no idea what century it is. It has not been updated. That is not a fault in you.
Found this helpful? Leave a review. Finding something hard that isn’t covered here? Tell me, and I may make an episode about it.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
acceptance · mindfulness · present-moment
Read the transcript
Hello and welcome to this week's Stillness in the Storms. I'm Steven Webb, your host, and this is the podcast
that helps you find a little peace in difficult times.
It's the time when you have it least and you need it most. And this podcast has helped with a
bit of wisdom then.
So, just before I start, this episode is going to be about the first 30 seconds and why every
feeling is a gift. I've just been doing my workout and I haven't done my workout for a long time,
if not probably 12 months. And what this is what my workout looks like. So you imagine you're at an
airport and you look down the Runway and you see these really small people waving their arms around with like,
ping pong bats. Yeah, that's my workout for like 10 minutes. But I've. I've got a challenge coming up I
would like to do in September and I need to be a whole lot stronger than I am, especially in
my shoulders and my arms. And I've just done it for 10 minutes and my. Wow, that was hard. But,
yeah, I'm doing it anyway. Just before we actually get on with today's show, I just want to thank because
it's been two weeks, so there's a couple more names. So addy Amy Barbara, Susan, Michael, Karen, Laura, David,
Jenna and mia and Johnny. Thank you. You are all awesome. And yeah, you guys keep the podcast
free from adverts. So on that note, I'm very aware that you don't want me dribbling on early on the
podcast. You came here for podcast? If you want to contact me, you can always go over StevenWebb.uk find my
other links. So what am I talking about? The first 30 seconds. This comes from a book I read a
number of years ago now by David G. He's another meditation teacher and he wrote a book called de-stressify
Really easy read. It's one of those books that just explains the world in the simplest terms.
So in the book, David explains exactly what happens when we get frightened or,
you know, we all sat around a campfire and you hear a big grizzly bear. I'm sure you've all experienced
it on a regular weekend or you're. Or you hear a car bump. Like, me and Kember was just outside
of our front door the other day and I heard two cars crash into each other. Like, what's that? Instantly,
that fear? Or someone beeps that horn behind you. Anything that just frightens us, our body goes into this
really quick 30 seconds of preparing for the worst. So what happens? David explains
that your brain spots a threat before you do. A small alarm in the head. The amygdala flags it and
wakes the body. And it doesn't alert you at this point. And within a second or two, the adrenaline floods
in. Your heart speeds up. It drives blood to your big muscles, ready to run or stand your ground. Your
breathing quickens and your airways open, putting in more oxygen. Your liver releases stored sugar
into the blood for instant fuel. Your tiny vessels in your skin and fingers tighten so
a wound would bleed a lot less. That is why your hands go cold and a little numb it's why
your feet also do the same thing. You don't want to feel a cut on your foot if you're running.
The blood itself gets readier to clot. It's the same reason the
pupils widen, your hearing sharpens, the world seems to go in high definition and time seems to slow down.
The digestive system completely switches off. No point in digesting lunch if you're going to become
lunch. And all of that before you've even decided anything. That's before the fight, flight
or freeze. You
know, this isn't the body malfunctioning. This is the body with a brilliant response. You know, we're all seeing about
Ai and robots. Robots aren't going to have this for way, I don't know, decades, decades yet.
Okay, they might need it. So it's a bad example, but you get my point. But very often we've had
ancestors over the years that this has evolved because they needed to. And we all the
people that didn't have these brilliant responses, all the people that the
body didn't react with fear and react with all these different evolutionary feelings, just didn't
survive. You know, you imagine being in a forest all sat around a campfire and you're all playing music
and then suddenly somebody says, shush, what's that? That bear. And you've got people that are frightened and you've
got one person, ah, don't worry about it, it's all going to be fine. And half you go, nope, we're
out of here, we're going to run. Now then they may run prematurely, they may get it wrong, but they're
going to survive over the millions of years with that fear inside of them a lot more often than the
people that, ah, don't worry, everything's fine. Now then we can go on about how it's misfiring or in a
different podcast. That's not what this is going to be about. What I want to talk about is these feelings
are not Malfunctions, the feeling of fear and anxiety and all these feelings that
we look at as
undesirable because they don't feel comfortable. We're very often taught to get rid of, to reduce.
I went on to a podcast years ago, and the host titled the podcast, today we're going
to get rid of fear, kick it out of the park. And during every break, after a segment that we'll
be talking about I'll be like, no, let's not get rid of it. Let's use it and let's embrace it
and listen to it here we go anyway, when we come back, we're gonna get rid of the fear. We're
gonna totally get rid you're not going to feel fear ever again in your life. And I just thought that's
totally the wrong way to be. Because fear is good. Anxiety is good, alertness is good, Stress
is good. It's just not good when we're there all the time. You imagine if your body is constantly doing
that 30 seconds, that's where it makes us ill. That's where it makes us not survive quite as long as
we probably could, not into old age if we're constantly on that fight or flight. But the balance and the
middle way, like I talk about the middle way all the time. It's about the balance. We need some of
those feelings. We need the joys you cannot live in. You know when you fall deeply in love and you
have that, Like Mark Twain says, love is blind. Well, it is. Well, lust is blind. In the first three
months, they can literally leave the toilet seat up. They could eat you out your house and home, and you'll
be like, ah, it's fine. They're so awesome. It's so nice to have them around. Three months and two weeks,
they leave the toilet seat up. And you're saying to your friend, I can't believe it. He leaves the toilet
seat up. And I can't believe he. He finishes my sentence when I haven't even got halfway through what I'm
saying. He cuts me off and vice versa, the other way. So you cannot live from that. Love is blind
because that's just adrenaline. That's just a feeling of euphoria and desire that evolved
brilliantly. So we can look past our differences, so we have offspring. So evolution carries on. So you
imagine how humans would have probably died out years ago if it meant that every single time to have children,
we had to wait till we got on perfectly and we matched every energy in every feeling. Imagine if you
Expected every person to put the Lucy down before there was a chance of evolution continuing. What's going to happen?
As always, I go off topic.
But what I want to talk about really is embrace all of it. None of these feelings are
something we need to totally get rid of. We need to hear them, understand them, embrace them.
We shouldn't delete them, we shouldn't try to remove them. But if they control us, if that stress is there
eight hours a day or that fear is stopping us do the everyday things we want to do, then it's
taking over. And the same thing is if that lust and desire is causing us to do things we shouldn't
do in a moral society according to virtues and laws, then that we shouldn't do
that That's then the unhealthy version of it. So there's a healthy version of stress, anxiety, fear.
There's an unhealthy version of
enlightenment. Some would argue, well, that's not enlightened. Well, maybe, maybe not, I don't know. But if
you're literally, well, nothing is real and the universe doesn't really exist and thoughts are just thoughts and there's no
and
we can do what we like and we can ignore laws and all that, well, that's a really unhealthy version
of Zen Buddhism. It's not really what Zen Buddhism actually says when we connect back in. But I
think you get my point. And I think we try to deny feelings way too much as if they are
a problem and we can liken it to you. Imagine getting to the end of your life and someone
comes along and says, oh, by the way, you know that your favourite band that you've been listening to, you've
only been listening to one of their albums, they had another five albums. You'd be like, what? Why
didn't anybody tell me? So my whole life I've only been. I'd be like getting, I don't know, 60. And
someone says to you, oh, by the way, you've only been seeing three colours. We've been seeing in 60 and
the same way as just experiencing life, all of these are just experiences. Fear and anxiety. They're
an experience that if we step back and pause, listen,
we
don't have to know what to do with it. We don't have to be that wise guru that knows exactly
what to do with every feeling coming up. But if we just pause, just stop,
you know, find the lay-by stop the car,
just take
a little time out. And very often when things are arising, you don't have to do anything with it anyway.
And nowadays that fear and anxiety is misfiring all the time. It doesn't
know that car horn, you know, 500 yards up the road, isn't a bear gonna eat you?
That's the reality. The subconscious mind, that amygdala right at the base of your head
has no idea in no idea. The concept of the world we're living in now, that fear when we walk
in the room, when the energy is different than the energy we come in with and we automatically jump to
conclusions,
you know, that feeling isn't wrong, but we can understand that we're jumping in the story. And that's where it
very often goes wrong, I think.
And how many times have you been feeling a little stressed or feeling anxious? And we go to
the doctor and we always want to get rid of it. Now and I'm not saying if we suffer from
any of these things on a regular basis that we shouldn't go to the doctor and speak to the doctor.
Absolutely. I am not a trained person in any way.
So don't take my advice for medical in any way. I'm just saying if
it temporarily pops up,
we don't always have to listen. We don't always have to allow it to take over our lives.
And I wouldn't like to live a life that I've never experienced fear. I wouldn't like to live a life
that I've never experienced a little anxious anxiety or
a little jealousy or a little guilt or shame,
because I think they're the opposite ends of the same stick that I talk about. You know, we have a
stick and one hand is the happiest and the wonderful things and the entertainment and the joys we get out
of life on the other end is the horrible experiences we have. And what we do is we keep trying
to chop off the end of the stick with the bad bits. And what do we get? We just get
a shorter stick and you don't chop the end off with it, you just bring the the stick shorter.
That's a tongue twister. And then you end up with, in the end, you end up with a stick that
is so short that the joys in life and the undesirable feelings in life are the same part of the
one inch stick, and we can't tell the difference anymore and we're just in a mess. You
know, keep the stick as long as possible. Stop trying to chop the stick
take that five seconds gap and I think next week I'm going to do a podcast about when we take
that five seconds gap, what can we do? We're very often that gap. We ask what the world can do
for us now. What do I need help with instead of asking what the world needs from me now to
show up? So I think that might be next week's podcast. Let me know by messaging me if that would
be helpful in last week's podcast. Plus it will tell me if you actually listen this far that'd be interesting
Look, I think I'm gonna stop the podcast there I just want to thank everybody that does donate. You guys
are absolutely awesome You're enabling me to do more podcasts. You're enabling me to do more inner peace meditations on
inner peace meditations podcast. And I'm just so grateful to you. I'm so grateful to you for feeling all your
feelings for being here, showing up, sharing, reviewing, leaving comments and just being you.
I
wouldn't want to change any of you. You're all awesome. Thank you. Don't forget to go over to StevenWebb.uk and
sign up to the Weekly Calm. I'll be sending out the newsletter in about an hour's time because I'm going
to go and write it now
and I just want to end with, your body would do the 30 seconds thing again and it'll do it
today and it'll do it tomorrow and do another day. When it does, know that it's not your fault. It's
a gift. It means the body's working. That's fine. Just pause after, you know,
do I need to run? Do I really need to fight? Hear
it, then decide. And that is the whole thing. Include everything. Take care. Have a wonderful
