“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
-Mark Twain
So last week was rough. Sorry for not getting a post out. I just could not get my head together enough to focus on writing. My son was due for surgery in Houston last Friday, and we flew on Wednesday to meet with the medical team. All week I kept putting off sitting down and writing something, and I even told myself (believe it or not) that a really good window of free time would be Friday morning during the surgery. I’d have like 3 hours of just sitting around and waiting. Needless to say, that was not a good window of free time. I am an idiot.
But the point of this week’s post is not how shitty it is to watch your child go through surgery. The point is how the fear of something is almost always worse than the reality of that thing. We all resort to thinking the worst, and imagining terrible outcomes, when our brains consider unknown events. Last weekend was a lesson for me, but I also wanted to identify a solution to this that I can share with you all. Let me try to put the pieces together and frame this in a way that you can utilize when you come across difficult moments.
Greek and Roman Stoics said that emotions are downstream of belief, not separate from it. Fear is not a reaction to danger, it's a result of your judgment that something bad is about to happen, and that you can’t do anything about it. I’ve been studying that this week in reflection of how overwhelmed I felt last week. There are 3 questions that I could have asked myself in order to calm my brain:
What are the worst possible outcomes that my brain thinks could happen?
What are the more probable versions of those outcomes?
Have I done as much as I could to prevent these outcomes?
The first question helps you vocalize the crazy shit in the back of your head that’s preventing you from thinking clearly. Even just saying it out loud or writing it down takes away some of its power. For example, I was obviously terrified that my son wouldn’t wake up from anesthesia. But what was the more probable outcome? That he would come around just like the millions of other people having surgery that day. The other times he’s come out of anesthesia he’s been pretty miserable and confused but overall fine. So why would this time be any different? And finally, had we done as much as we could to prevent that outcome? Duh. We specifically went to this doctor and medical team because they have an unbelievable track record with this particular surgery.
So the next time I’m freaking out and unable to get out of my head, I intend on using the above framework and talking through my fears. It absolutely would have helped me last week, but I’ll keep you updated on the next time I’m able to utilize it. Please let me know if it works for you!