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
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
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.
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 their 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 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 over 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 Addie, Amy, Barbara,
Susan, Michael, Karen, Laura, David, Jenna, Amir 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 to 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 Kemba 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.
That'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, 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 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 onto 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'd be talking about, I'd be like, no, let's not get rid
of it. Let's use it and let's embrace it and listen to it. He would
go, anyway, when we come back, we're gonna get rid of the fear.
We're gonna totally get rid of it. You're not gonna 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, it's a 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 a 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 and every feeling.
Imagine if you Expected every person to put the Lucy down before
there was a chance of evolution continuing. Not going to
happen. So 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
as 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
we shouldn't do that either. 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 enlighten
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 favorite
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 colors. We've
been seeing in 60. In 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, 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, 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
anyway, 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 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 end is the happiest
and the wonderful things and the entertainment and the joys we
get out of life. And on the other hand 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 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
for the same part of the 1 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. I
take that 5 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 in 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. Very interesting. Look, I think I'm
going to stop the podcast. I just want to thank everybody that
does donate. You guys are 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 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
it'll do it 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? I really need
to fight? Hear it, then decide. And that is the whole thing.
Include everything. Take care. Have a wonderful week. And I'm Steven
