All energy is contagious

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we?

[00:00:16] Sometimes the best thing you can do when you are in a high stress situation is not to react or at least not to react right away. You can take the temperature down of a room by simply not feeding it more of the same energy, or if that's too hard, not feeding it any more energy at all. So I've got two real life examples for you today.

[00:00:44] My grandmother has dementia. A little while ago she was staying with my. and some days she wouldn't realize where she was and she'd have a panic attack. Now, you know, imagine you don't remember everything you should. You're not sure where you might be and you don't know why you feel this way. A panic attack is not entirely uncalled for here, but a panic attack is like a big heavy stone rolling down a hill.

[00:01:12] It's very hard to stop and it just keeps getting worse. I remember entering the room and she was having a panic attack. There were concerned people all around her and they were trying to calm her down and get her to eat something, and that just made her panic harder because the vibe in that room was just hectic and chaotic.

[00:01:33] Instead, we cleared the room and people stopped telling her to calm down. We cleared it of everyone else's anxiety, and then I sat down beside because she remembered who I was. I picked up a spoon and started eating some of that ice cream that was in front of her and telling her about my day. It was all very mundane, you know, when I got up, what I ate for breakfast, what the weather was like when I went for a walk, I did it cheerfully, and without really focusing all my attention on her, it was like I was just talking about my day while having a snack.

[00:02:11] Under five minutes She calmed down. And when she started breathing again, she also started to slip back into herself a bit, a little bit, and that was it. It was not a long moment, but it taught me a lot about anxiety. Meeting anxiety with anxiety just makes for more anxiety. You know? Actually, I'm gonna revise what I said in the beginning.

[00:02:35] I think I always default to changing the energy I show up with. I know that if I'm feeling anxiety and someone stays quiet or takes time, too much time to respond. That generally makes me more anxious as a chronic overthinker than anything else. We often want to, or try to match the energy of the people we hang out with.

[00:02:56] They're more low key, you know, we try to be more low key. If they're hyped up, we try to get more hyped up – because really all energy is contagious. My second example is from work. I had a teammate who was panicking really hard. This is maybe eight years ago? She was feeling stressed out on, unsure, and trying to figure out what went wrong, and here's what we did.

[00:03:21] I smiled and then I said, okay, let's figure it out. Between you and me, we've got this. And then very calmly and very deliberately, I asked her to show me what was going on and walk me through what she thought might have happened. Sometimes you need to just walk through the thing that's making you panic instead of calming down by thinking of something else.

[00:03:42] As she walked me through what she had done and what she could see was happening, I could see her breathing slow down and her eyes get thoughtful as she started to analyze exactly what had happened. Focusing on the details of the problem, removed that overwhelm she would've felt, you know, the thing that originally caused her to have a panic attack. Sometimes when you look at the problem from a big picture perspective, it actually is the worst thing you can do, and that event taught me a lot about managing my own anxiety. You know, sometimes the big picture is scary, and in that case, look at the details. The minutia of a situation can actually really help you focus.

[00:04:31] And make things less overwhelming, even when there is a lot of it. So anyway, that's what I've been thinking about today.

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.