The Simple Solution For Staying Sane When It Feels Like the World is Ending

are cold on the kitchen floor. Flick open a news app the other day, as I'm grinding my beans, thinking about my cold feet, I read in very bold font us attacks Iran Now like you probably did. I had quite a physical reaction to this because I know that as a world, as a planet, we don't really come

back from something like that easily. The last three years or so, though, has been a steadily escalating level of chaos in our news feeds, no matter where we look or try not to look, And depending on your algorithm, you're getting a perspective on death and destruction, calamity and chaos and fire and flood and horror and more and more and more and more and more and more and more. It can be a lot. The other day chatting with

Sally Gould. She's a paramedic who's written a book about her job and the things she's learned doing that job. She talks about keeping a bucket empty and that there's only really so much space between our ears for all that kind of stuff, and you've got to actively work to keep that bucket empty, and that is really important.

So the other day when a friend of mine who lives in Africa, she's Dutch, she lives out of there, she reached out to me the other day It's gone, how the fuck am I supposed to handle all of this at the same time as raising my door? I love to a voice note, but I thought, you know what, this might actually be useful. That's what I want to talk about today. Right after the break gooda, thanks for being here. Just really quickly. We have a live show

coming up on the sixth of July. Phil O'Neil, Mary Watt's, Marley Silver, Nadia Townsend, Zoe Don't Lodge and myself will be telling stories at story Club. It's a live comedy storytelling show. We do it once a month, six point thirty on the sixth of July. Tickets are in the show notes it's a super fun show. It's really really great. I'd love you to be there. There's also a substack

for that as well as that. In the show notes, there is a link where you can pre order my new book, So What Now What, illustrated by Campbell Walker, also Not as Truthless. It's an incredibly powerful book, and there's a little bit from that book. I want to talk to you about today because I got a text the other day from my friend she lives in Africa, Osha, how are you are you finding ways to saying these days?

It's all such a mess? And she and I kind of had a bit of a back and forth, mostly voice notes and stuff, But the core of what I was telling her is that, look, it takes work. It takes work to say sane in these days and ages, this day and age, these days and ages. I don't know what the grammatically correct way of saying this, but at the core of it is a willingness to be with how messy things are and still go about your

day in alignment with what you value. You can notice those emotions, you can still enjoy the delicious cup of coffee, the call of a bird in the morning, the smile of your child, because when I was really, really sick, I know what it feels like. When I was really sick, I couldn't hear the giggle of a child. Or I could, but I wouldn't do anything to me. I couldn't see an azua blue sky just peerless and just piercing. I couldn't notice the beauty of nature and physics and symmetry

that exists in a flower. I couldn't appreciate how incredible each of those things is because I had such a global, catastrophic sandbag of doom stuck on my brain with just like ruminating anxiety and terrifying paranoid delusions. It was fucked.

It doesn't have to be that bad, though, because there's a bit of a trap rolling around, And so I was telling my friend, there's a bit of oh, how can you blank when children in blank ah blank every single day, And that's a bit of a trap, and I would advise you to not fall into it, because there is a space to grieve the horror of the world, the horror of war, the horror of starvation, the horror of inequality, and there's also space to connect with the

world around you and enjoy delight and joy in your actual life, the life you can touch, not the far away life that people are upset at you because you're not being upset. Because I think that is bullshit. All right, I'm done with that. It's a lie. It's a trap, and I don't like that. I don't like this trap because it does feel it's got a controlling element to it. I kind of need to model it over a bit more. But this is what I was telling my friend. It

feels a bit controlling, a bit. No, no, no, you have to be upset and mad and sad or outraged at this thing, and if you don't, you are just as bad as those people over there. That's fucking bullshit. Don't fall for it. We can feel sad, we can grieve, we can be present to enormous tragedy, horror, sadness, unfairness, inequality, and we can also giggle and enjoy the sound of a rainbow lorikeet twiddling by. It's not a zero sum game to be able to hear the giggle of a

child enjoying something and feel that joy. Because you can feel that joy, that does not mean that you do not care and feel sad and grieve and be aghast at the horror of the tragedy of a stranger's child who is suffering on the other side of the world. You can have both of those things. I've been a funerals where people laugh their ass off at the same time as having just buried their child. As humans, we have the capacity to do both. We can do both,

and it's okay to do both. And you're not betraying one or the other by doing both because we can do both. So don't believe that bullshit, all right, don't fall into that trap, because it's just going to rob your life of fucking joy. To be honest, what good are you to anybody if you get stuck in that place. If you get stuck there and your kids like, come on, let's do this thing, or your partner's like, come on, let's do this thing, and you're like, but I can't.

I've got to read and scroll more about this horrible thing, because if I'm dit, I'm going to be and people looking upset at me that I like, fuck off. You can be upset and sad about one thing and still connect with other people with joy and happiness and enjoy watching the football team when or your kid dance or whatever. But if that position sounds familiar to you and you find yourself stuck there, how do you get out of

that spot? Well, I'll take a leaf out of my new book and I'll chat to you about it in just to mate. So, what's a way that you can get unstuck when you're trapped in a spot where staying sane and trying not to be crushed by all the negativity in the world is staying to feel beyond your reach. Well, it starts by understanding the part of your brain that is trapping you there, and then using that part of your brain and the thing that it does very well to help you get back out of the hole that

you're in. Let me explain. So, our brains evolved to survive in a world where avoiding death was the priority. You and me and everyone you know. We are pretty much identical to fossils found three hundred thousand years ago.

Nothing really has changed about us. We are exactly the same as these human beings that lived, and so when we have this fight or flight thing, it's a very valid evolutionary response because unlike your appendix, or if you're a man, your nipples fight or flight was really important, and it kept us alive. We evolved in a time where death was all around us every day, not just from other humans who wanted our food as shelter, but creatures that would stalk the earth, that would eat us alive.

Not just saber tooth tigers, but all kinds of horrific, bloody beasts. Not just that there was no CPR, there's no antibiotics. A cut could kill you dead, all right. We as humans evolved with everyone around us dying horribly all the time, so we were rightly quite averse to that happening to us, and anything that might possibly give us clues that this sort of thing was coming towards us, that a death was coming for us. We wanted to

get out of there, all of us. We're all the descendants of the most jumpy and the most frightened of our ancestors. This evolutionary survival trait, this fire or flight thing, also gave us a wonderful gift, the negativity bias, which is the thing our brains do. It's really great for survival and it delivers fantastic results for reactionary news outlets coming up. The devastating scam targeting podcast listeners claims, get another victim with police powers to stop it. How you

can protect yourself and your children. Next, here's an ad for some shit that you didn't realize you need until just now, But now that you know it's there, you can't sleep at night until you own it. It's a good business model, man. Here's how it works. The more we see terrible things happening, the more we get this false view that we live in a world where terrible things happen everywhere and all the time. But that is

not actually true. Yes, it is true. The most awful things you could imagine are probably happening as we speak. And at the very same time, somewhere there is a basketful of labrador puppies making little cooing noises, waggling their tails because a little family of toddlers have just walked into the same room as them and they're starting to pick up these little puppies. Both of those things exist in our world at the same time, and they can exist at the same time, and they have to exist

at the same time. Now, we shouldn't eliminate this negativity bias. It's quite useful. We do need to manage it, however, we need to manage it so we don't make poor decisions that are based in fear. But when that negativity bias is really hammering us, it can be almost impossible to see the beautiful things and the good things all around us. So when we start to believe that all the world is terrible, we become susceptible to a thing

known as the frequency illusion. This is the idea that this is a bad thing, and that's a bad thing. Oh my god, there's bad things everywhere. Now you know the frequency illusion. There was a time where as far as you were concerned, there was no one anywhere on the street ever that ever walked anywhere with a stroller. And then you peed on a stick. There were two stripes on that stick. And now everywhere you look you are being stalked by the upper baby two point oh like.

It's a terrifying monster from a Stephen King novel. It follows you everywhere. It's in every car park, over, every shoulder, every left and ctinema whatever. It's called a frequency illusion. Now we can deliberately exploit this thing. Abrain does this frequency illusion to get a brain to start to see more of the wonderful things around us and start to get things back in balance. And it's all got to do with getting lucky. And I'm not talking about the

Pharrell Williams Daft Punk getting lucky. I'm talking about luck. And this is the thing I wrote about in the new book. So what now what? It's a very simple trick. I do it at nighttime when I put Wolfgang to bed. Just try to notice three times every day when you got lucky. I don't know, you caught a green light, you got an excellent casp Today, Audrey and I got a bang shotgun Rockstar park right in front of the Vinnie with us bootful of stuff. We did a big

toy clean out. While Wolf is at school. He doesn't notice yet that the do blow's gone. Well that's fuck off park right in front, like amazing. I don't know. You heard a moment where two magpies were having a conversation from two different trees. And there's beautiful melody in the morning, like little lucky moments like that, just beautiful moments. Just look for three. Find another person at the end of the day, tell them this is the three you know,

ask him what three things happened to you? Here's three things happened for me is where I got lucky, because by starting to notice when things go well, we start to notice when things go well, and overtime, our experience of the world changes because when we get stuck in that negative version, oh my god, we just start to see how terrible the parking is, and how magpies are terrible and they swoop everywhere, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But to make it happen, you've got to do it regularly.

And to do it regularly you need to make it a habit, which is why I do it. At night, when I'm putting Wolf to bed, I either ask him, Hey, what went well for you today? Or you know, did you get like you did? I got really lucky today. This happened. It was incredible. And by doing that every day, it starts to help remind us that, yes, while terrible things do happen in the world, I'm not saying they don't. They absolutely do. The world in itself is not all terrible.

In the words of Hans Rosling from the brilliant book Factfulness, it's this great line, things are bad, but they're getting better. That doesn't mean that the bad parts are bad. They

are bad, but it's not all bad. There's good everywhere, And that's the part that we can actually have some controlling, Because when there's everything bad and there's far away, you're looking on the telly, you're looking on your phone, and it's it's often very far away or not immediate to you, and it feels so uncontrollable and you can't do anything about it. The only part of all this that we can control is what we choose to put into the

world around us, the immediate world we live in. Worrying about things we can't control and can get us caught in a loop that's very hard to get out of. What we can control is how much good we put into the world around us. Are we giving the benefit of the doubt to our spouse? Are we being kind making sure we're calm around our kids and trying to understand that the air they're tired, their brains are growing, they don't have any impulse control. Are we holding the

door open for a stranger. Are we offering to grab a coffee for somebody when we're heading down the shops? Are we helping out the people around us because helping other humans and being kind to other people. That really is the only thing that we can control. It puts good into the world that we live in, that we exist in, and makes the world that we exist in a better place to be. And also it unlocks things

inside us that make us feel good. Helping another human really is one of the only things that helps bring sustainable happiness. That's another wonderful evolutionary trait we are wired to connect. It's survival of the friendliest. In the words of Richker Brickman, like I said, I'm not saying terrible things in this world need be ignored. That's not the

case at all. But I am saying it's no good to get caught in a trap of like cyclical morning and then feeling your pressured to write something a comment or a post or whatever, and you get stuck and like trying to one up yourself on how bad can you get and scratching that itch, and it's like ex mera and blur. It's a fucking trap. Man. You are capable of having something good and something hard in your brain at the same time. You are. You have the space inside of you. The more we practice it, the

better we get at it. The better we get at it, the less the news can destroy us. And that's the long version of what I sent to my friend in a voice note far far away in Africa. I hope it was helpful. If you want to get that book, where a Little Better is from The Getting Lucky Trick,

you can find the link in the show notes. If you want to come and hear me tell a story about my neighbors when I was fifteen, because that's the theme of our next Story Club show, Everybody Needs Good Neighbors, you can find that link in the show notes as well. Get on substack. If you need to email me, send us your email at gmail dot com. I'll see you back here on Wednesday. Thanks for listening.