Now What? What to Do When Things Fall Apart

Hey everyone, welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today and if you've listened before, welcome back. We all face moments when life takes an unexpected turn. You're suddenly laid off, your partner leaves you, or you get diagnosed with a serious illness. Maybe you lose faith in something that had previously been a big part of your life.

Or you see things going off the rails in ways you can't control. The road you thought was going one way, suddenly veers in a completely different direction. And what that comes, intense and completely normal, feelings of loss, disappointment and uncertainty. Today we're going to be talking about how to navigate those situations, including the concrete steps we can take when things fall apart. I'm joined as usual by clinical psychologist Rick Hansen. Dad, how are you doing today?

really good for us. And in my heart are countless people I've known numerously over 50 years plus, for whom their life did fall apart and they were talking with me about it. And I've had my own moments. I don't know if you're old enough yet or I don't know if you would say you've had these moments too for yourself, but they're very real. And I think the very first step

is to recognize that that's what's going on. I kind of draw on my wilderness experience a little bit. It's like recognize when a storm is coming in or actually lightning is crashing around you.

Name it, and that can initially be a little helpful to realize, well, no wonder I feel freaked out, scared, sad, angry at people who are not doing more than I think they should do. And all the rest of it, no wonder. So that's a part of it and another part of it.

is to just recognize common humanity in a way. And I'm just reflecting here on a parable that comes from early Buddhism, a true story, apparently, as best we know. And there are comparable stories elsewhere. It's a story of the mustard seed, very briefly. A young woman from a lower status background in an arranged marriage was dropped into a family that really mistreated her. She got pregnant.

The baby was born, but soon became ill and died. And out of her mind with grief, she wandered off to see the Buddha who'd been roaming the neighborhood, as it were, and said, please, can you give me a medicine that will bring my child back to life? And you say, I can. It needs to be made of mustard seeds that come from households that have never known loss.

She said, OK, I'll go find those mustard seeds. And then she went from house to house in her village and in district. And no, no, no. She could not find a single household that had not known loss. And so she goes back to the boat. And he draws her attention to this in a kind way. And it doesn't bring her baby back to life, but helps her appreciate in common humanity. We stand with others in inevitable suffering of various kinds. That's a very haunting story. And we can each feel our own version of it.

Gosh, who among us has not had people that we thought were friends or allies let us down, right? Who among us has not lost faith in something important? Who among us has not gotten the diagnosis of a serious condition, maybe, or known someone who has? So there's a sense of coming humanity and all that.

And then the last thing I'll just say as a bit of a preamble for where we're going, tons of things can help. There really are things that can help. They rarely can change what has actually happened. We're not going to focus on that. We're going to focus on what you can do inside your own mind and in your actions and in your relationships that can really help.

I can't help that, I'll do it. There's this wonderful scene in The Lord of the Rings, the final book where Frodo and Sam are crawling up the slopes of Mount Doom and everything's falling apart. They're being chased by the Nazgul. Their friends are all dying. Storm, Soren is victorious and all the rest of that. And then Sam looks up at the storm-racked sky and he sees suddenly in a rent in the clouds, a little cab.

He sees a bright white twinkling star, and he reflects to himself that there is always beauty, there is always hope, there is always something mysteriously magnificent, that's forever untouchable by the disasters of various kinds. And just knowing that, which is my third point here, there are things that will make it better, can really help.

Yeah, what are you saying to your dad reminds me of a phrase tragic optimism that I've been orbiting a lot over the over the last couple of weeks here, but it's basically the idea that we can find meaning and hope even amidst the more inevitable parts of life that you're describing.

I think that whatever we do about things is embedded in a broader question of how do we want to be about that? How do we want to think about the world? How do we want to relate to it? Do we want to be surprised constantly when bad things happen? Because I think that that's the case for some people. They're kind of constantly surprised when the other shoe drops. But the other shoe dropping is just a part of life.

So there's this healthy balance where we don't want to live in fear of the shoe, but we want to understand that the shoe tends to drop. The shoe tends to come to us. And a lot of this is about how do we want to be about it? From that being flows a lot of doing, as we talk about on the podcast all the time, and that doing typically takes these four loose steps that I found while prepping for this episode, and this is embedded in a lot of broader thinking that other people have done about how to be about situations like this.

First, we do some amount of slowing down, studying ourselves and dealing with whatever very understandable emotions are popping up, right? That's kind of the first step. Typically, the second step, we take an inventory. We figure out what's really true. What's going on? What are the facts? What information can we gather? Was somebody else in the room where it happened? Is there another opinion that we can get about what's going on? All of that.

Then we deal with various feelings of loss and disappointment. We're probably going to talk about that quite a bit during this episode. And then we make a plan. We make a plan and we take action based off of that plan. Those are the four steps that most of this goes through. I want to start with the first one, which is really about studying yourself. This also, I think, connects to a lot of your work. You do a ton of stuff with people around anxiety, regulation, dealing with complicated emotions. You've done a lot of that in the office with people as a clinical psychologist.

And so I would sort of just toss the ball your way here. Is there anything that you want to flag right off the top? I was reflecting that the shakier the ground, the more important it is to find your footing. I go immediately to physiology, the body.

And what are the things that stabilize the body? The body is the origin point of being, which is the field in which doing then proceeds. The body, what's the state of being in the body? And so just good old fashioned stuff. Try to have some protein with every meal to regulate your blood sugar.

Try to avoid too much. Maybe one day is okay, but don't make it a weekly habit. Doing things that are self-medicating. Tons of binging on sweets, alcohol, dope, whatnot.

Breathing, exhaling, immediately slows the heart rate, engages the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system, three breaths in which the exhalation is twice as long as the inhalation. That's an experiment people can run at any time. As you know, some of the favorite brain hacks, you know, I learned when I was writing my book, Neurodarma, are to lift your gaze to the horizon.

Another one is to get a sense of anything as a whole. Your body as a whole, the room as a whole, maybe the big picture perspective on the current situation. I myself, I can't help but just too much science fiction as a kid. I'm very aware of current events, historic clay, I'm pretty knowledgeable, and it really helps me to pop out and see planet Earth kind of twirling around the sun.

Oh, lately, I've been geeking out about Pluto. What a strange, strange. I am going to call it a planet. Anyway, and then the Pluto lobbies gotten to your dad to take you in and then galaxy altogether. Yeah, I'm not going to disrespect, you know, the master of Hades, right? There are nine planets. God damn it, you know. Anyway, what am I talking about? So these are physiology things and comfort.

Really pleasure. Pleasure is good for the body, bubble baths, flannel shirts. I'm noticing that you and I are wearing roughly the same shade. We did not plan this, but I like my flannel shirt. I bet you like your t-shirt. We love a deep green. Yeah, no, I think that you're pointing to a couple of things here, Dad, just like right off the top. Meet your basic physical needs.

establish a routine if you can eat, sleep, and move. Those are mine right off the top. Yeah, eat, sleep, move, drink water. One of the best ways to help your body process, whatever it's trying to work its way through fear, anxiety, disappointment, is by doing normal stuff.

and reestablishing routines that you might have slipped on, because you could get away with it. You can get away with a lot of stuff. You can get away with, sorry, I interrupted you here, but not sorry. I think you're right on here. That's a great point. Yeah. You can get away with an extra 10-pound brick in your backpack when you're jogging at sea level on the beach. But if you're calling your way up 20,000 feet, dragging your friends along, you cannot afford that extra stuff.

So that also has to do with what are the toxic influences you drop in and how important it is to reestablish whatever those routines were. For me, one of the things that I experience with things get really disrupted, like if there's been even something on the level of just a disruption of rapport inside of a relationship, like I have an interaction with a friend that goes sideways, scaling all the way up to more of the stuff we're describing.

Uh, one of the things that happens after that is you get the sense that like nothing will be the same again. You know, everything has changed, everything, everything is different now. What am I going to do? All of those feelings and one of the best ways to reestablish, you know, some version of either this two shall pass or I really will find a way to make it out of here is by again, getting that sense of like, Oh, I can still do these things that I like doing. Oh, I can still walk around outside and be okay.

Oh, I can still reach out to that friend. I can still talk to my parents. I can still, whatever it is for you. Pizza still tastes wonderful. Pizza still pretty tasty. You know, like all of that kind of re-establishment of routine really helps remind your brain like, oh, life does indeed go on here. And so that for me has been a really helpful resource that like re-establishment of the normal in this.

Yeah, I want to add to that something that's become very far-grounded for me recently, which is that when things are going OK, and we're also able to distract ourselves with various routines and pleasures and so forth, it kind of helps us manage the fact that certainly most people in developed countries of the world live in a way that's extremely strange given how we evolved into literally our biology. For example, just being bombarded with sound.

on a regular basis, visual complexity, trying to track these tiny little squiggles and turn them into meaning on a phone or a book or reading, et cetera. It's weird, just the pace. So one thing I would add that I find really helpful to re-regulate the body is as best you can, given your circumstances, try to spend more time in truly natural settings.

It could be simply a postage stamp-sized park in Manhattan. Suddenly, it's an oasis of quiet and trees. Or maybe you actually are able to get out to a lake or the ocean or some body of water. You're just out.

If you can look up at the nice guy, take a few minutes to just appreciate the vastness. Look at the moon and just nature, trees, the wild. That too will tend to really help your physiology settle back down again. So that physiological level is the base of all of this. If you can't regulate the body, you can't regulate your emotions. If you can't regulate your emotions, you can't regulate your decisions. It flows up from there.

Obviously, a very important level in all of this of bodily regulation, if you want to think about it that way, is physical safety. And sometimes in these disruptive experiences, our safety really is at risk. If your physical safety has been compromised by what is going on around you, of course, that's the first thing you have to address. And most of the time, that is a very time sensitive issue.

I'm about to talk a lot about slowing down and calming things and giving yourself a little space. You often can't do that until you are in a safe enough environment. And so if you aren't in a safe enough environment, you have to move very quickly to the making a plan and doing something part. And then you get the backfill, the more emotional regulation slowing down, figuring it out part of all of this. I just want to say that I sort of a disclaimer to what I'm about to talk about.

I'm really glad you brought it up for us. I remember speaking with a police officer 30 plus years ago who said there's no correlation whatsoever between the family income or the cars people are driving and the frequency of spousal abuse. It's just as common in the richest neighborhoods. It has the poorest ones.

It's startlingly common, and if it's at all possible, or if it's occurring, the standard advice is to very quietly get help for yourself of one kind or another before trying to fix the relationship.

Hmm. I'll just say that. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Keep on going. So assuming that you've established that, you're in that safe enough environment. My first piece of advice to almost anyone, including myself, when something like this has happened is snow down. If you can, let a little time pass. Time does not, in fact, heal all wounds, but it helps a lot. Broadly, we make really poor decisions under stress.

If you're rattled by something emotionally overwhelmed freaking out, your brain's threat system is an overdrive. And one of the things we talk about on the podcast fairly frequently is how the brain finds evidence for what it already believes. So if you're already looking out at the world from a stance of feeling anxious and threatened, you're going to find a lot of stuff to confirm that belief.

If you're looking out at the world from a stance of feeling satisfied, pretty much good, resourced in your relationships, you're going to find a lot of stuff to confirm that belief. The brain is a confirmation finding machine. Everything that we can do to let the immediate charge of what's going on, whether you've discovered some infidelity, you've heard about something awful that's happening at your church,

If it's possible for you to buy a day before making an irrevocable choice or buy an hour, I would recommend it if you can pull it off. Almost all my mistakes in life, most of them have involved anger and not slowing down. I would say a fair fraction of them. A couple of things here. One is to connect this idea of slowing down with what we talked about earlier about raising your level of being, especially you can.

So you're investing in yourself if only by taking some time to get a bubble bath or walk in the woods and you are then setting yourself up. The you that you will be tomorrow or a week from tomorrow will be better able to make a key decision than the you you are today.

That's a way of thinking about that. Second, I do want to go back very briefly to this idea of how to help your body. And it's really interesting finding that most hunter-gatherer bands walk five to six miles a day.

And in modern life, we deal with a lot of chronic stress without moving. And so again, when the bottom falls out, if you can, physical activity metabolizes cortisol. And those folks back in the Stone Age, they had to deal with a lot of scary, stressful things, but they walked off the cortisol, they walked it off.

We don't get to do that very much. So if you're really rattled, it can really help to literally detoxify yourself of the metabolic residues of a stress response by physical movement, if only just walking.

Yeah. And so, okay, we've short ourselves up a little bit. We've dealt with some of the physical layer of all of this. Something we haven't actually really talked about in the first 20 minutes is dealing with the emotional layer of it. The emotional first aid aspect that, again, is something that you do a lot here, Dad. So I'm just curious how you would approach that. So somebody is emotionally overwhelmed. They're in a safe enough environment. They've resourced themselves a little bit, but they're still really feeling anxious, disrupted, scared, sad,

And how do you start going in there? Yeah, I have these steps I personally do. I think of them as my first aid kit. And with practice, they can be very come very quick, but I'll just kind of name them. I think of it a little bit like a preflight checklist too. So first is notice that you're upset.

We've talked a bit about that already, but just name it. Like, wow, I am so angry. I'm so shocked. I feel like I can't breathe. Whatever it is. Notice that you're upset. Notice that my mind is starting to have vengeful fantasies about my next door neighbor. Hmm, interesting. Notice that you're upset. Okay. Second, compassion for yourself. Ugh, it hurts. Self-compassion is really important.

Third, i'm a big believer in moxie kind of a determined muscular getting on your own side being for yourself picking yourself back up off the mat do you knock down and being fundamentally determined.

to do the best you can by yourself in this life with what you've got. You may have only 1% of your normal battery charge inside yourself. Well, what can you do with that 1%?

And then fourth, make a plan. What's the plan? It really helps to have a plan. A bad plan is better than no plan because you'll quickly discover that it's a bad plan, which will help you make a better plan. So make a plan. If only to get through the moment or if only to make a plan, but make a plan and then start taking action, what that might be. Have a comfort meal, just go to bed early,

Figure it out tomorrow, call a doctor, get a second opinion, reach out to friends, meditate, make a plan of some kind and then go forward. So for me, that's there. And I should add, of course, I set it fast. Social support is really important. Yeah.

You know, we're not, we didn't evolve to bear our sorrows alone. We really didn't. And it's really important. I'm so struck by the sad fact that loneliness and social isolation are epidemic, both in the developed countries and more and more around the world. And some of that social isolation in particular lands on certain groups on average, let's say. So anyway, reaching out to other people is really important too.

Yeah, and I do want to say something about that here actually, which might land with people these days a little bit. It's very easy to have this sense, particularly when something happens to you socially. Some of the scenarios we're describing have to do with a partner doing something that's problematic or some fallout in your social group or whatever it might be. It's really easy to get the sense that a person simply has no allies.

That is very uncommon. For some people, it is the case. I do want to give a nod in that direction. But most of the time, there really are some people that are present, are interested, can be supportive of you. Part of the job in this process is sometimes to find who those people are and to be very engaged in that process of figuring out who those people are for you that you really can rely on.

Particularly when you've just gone through a moment in time where your typical social group kind of exploded for whatever reason. I had a situation that was kind of like that a couple of years ago where sort of a meaningful part of my social group sort of blew up for a bunch of different complicated reasons. It's very disruptive. It's very easy to feel disconnected from other people.

And the more disconnected you feel in that moment, ironically, kind of the more that you feel like there really is nothing there for you. The more important it becomes to find something that's there for you, or to reconnect with a new group of people who can be supportive of you in that way. Yeah, and on that note, while we don't have much control over the social supplies coming to us, we have a lot of influence.

over the friendliness, respect, appreciation, kindness, compassion, even love that flows out from us toward us and love feeds us in all its forms, whether it's flowing in or flowing out. So that's something to really emphasize too. There's research on this too. In a way, when things fall apart, they're torn apart. They're torn and the fabric is ripped.

And interestingly, even though it can seem really annoying, because oh my gosh, I have to do something now, it can really help you to engage in reparative activities, right? Like, for example, be kind to other people deliberately or plan a tomato, do the dishes, organize your drawer, repair in some way.

volunteer, go to the hospital and read to people who are in hospice, tutor a little kid, something, repair. Alongside all of that, also, limit the obvious stressors. If there's something that's freaking you out, particularly if it's freaking you out out in the world,

Consuming a whole bunch of media that is by its nature loaded toward emphasizing the negative, freaking people out, keeping people watching, jamming up ad revenue, whatever it is, is probably not going to be the most restorative practice for you right now. And the brain often tells us a story around how much information we need in order to be able to make a good decision. We're going to talk about that in a second in more detail.

But a lot of the time that kind of information isn't actually information at a certain point. It becomes a sort of weird like you're watching the car crash opening happening over and over again. On a more sort of personal level, if you just broke up with a partner or something, constantly checking their Instagram account, constantly checking their Facebook profile, keeping tabs on who they're hanging out with. It's just probably not very healthy for you right now.

And I understand the pull of that. I understand the desire to scratch the itch, but you're really just kind of reactivating yourself every time that you engage in that content. And it also reinforces ruminatory processes in the brain. There's a huge difference between productive emotional processing of any kind and rumination.

The reality is that the right amount of worry for most people is the amount that moves them toward doing something, moves them toward more restorative action, moves them toward taking a little time for themselves, moves them toward processing some of those emotions, whatever. The funny part is that we tend to spend the most time obsessing and thinking about the things that we have the least control over. What's going on in their mind? Am I going to be hired? Do they like me back? What will the test results say? We have no control over any of these things.

And so the brain, because it wants to do something, it's desperate to do anything. Just thinks and thinks and thinks and thinks. We've done a lot of content on rumination in the past. We've done episodes on it. I mostly just want to kind of like nod in the direction of those episodes because otherwise we'll be talking about it for another 30 minutes here. But is there anything you want to toss in kind of quickly that?

Oh, I love what you said there. And it's so poignant and ironic and pointed. It makes me think about century deprivation tanks. They were the thing in the 70s, tell people sometimes do them. And what you find is that when people, when external inputs drop out, the brain just starts inventing stuff, including hallucinations. So the rumination is not exactly that, but there's something kind of akin to that.

Kind of close. Yeah, yeah. No, like you're, there's, there's, but the space has been created and you're filling it with thoughts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't like ruminating. So I'm probably a good person to talk about because I can ruminate. Uh, one, it helps to realize that you don't like it.

And oftentimes, and I think Judd Brewer would say some good things about this too, in rumination, a lot of which is about anxiety, we get caught in this loop in which we fantasize, we think at some level, we hope there's a reward that will be coming to us, dopamine yet, if we just figure it out, right, if we just get to it. So we go through this loop with this hope for reward, we don't get it, but

That is a matter because we're delusional. We go a little yet again and again. It's because it's reward-seeking in a weird kind of way. It really helps to realize this is not rewarding. This is an election. I don't like it. You might even want to jack it up a little bit. It's like a biggie smell in the room.

Please don't send me angry letters that I'm being a betrayer to Richard Schwartz and IFS right now because I'm being mean to parts of myself. I'm just talking, not being skillful here. It's okay. You know, you're updating the reward value is the way that like you put it in habit formation or some adjustment. Yeah, I'm undermining that. Yeah, totally. It's like realizing that it's full scope.

You have to decide you don't like it. And remember that decision. That really helped. Second, use it to try to get to the bottom of things. I mean, rumination is a defense against feeling very often. And a defense against acceptance. A lot of the time it's a defense against acceptance. And the feelings you'd have if you accepted things. The grief, the worry, the disappointment, the shame, the remorse sometimes where you'd have to face.

Try to get to the feelings and you'll just notice if you get to the feelings, your brain stops ruminating. What's underneath it all? What's the deep fear, the deep concern of the deep unmet need that you're grappling with in this more superficial level? Second useful thing is if there is something useful in the rumination, put it into action.

Write it down, tell somebody about it, implement it, and then move on. You don't need to think about it anymore. And then last, these are really cool. This is a cool neural hack. Simply tune into the internal sensations of breathing. Chest rising and falling, air flowing in and flowing out, try it. You'll notice that when you do that,

rumination really declines. And that's because when the insula starts getting active, as you tune into yourself, your internal sensations, it acts like a circuit breaker that reduces activity in the default node network, which is the ruminator. And one way to disrupt it is through, like I'm saying, the interoception.

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So now that we've done all of that, and we've already spent quite a bit of time here, but I think that it's great because for a lot of people, this is going to be the part of the process that is the most necessary and the most difficult for them, that basic landing in OK.

I still feel bad. Let's be clear. Still feel like shit, but we've gotten through the sharp tip of the spear here and we can start to move out into more of that, making a plan and doing something about it part that you were talking about there, dad.

I'm so sorry, and I hope I'm not just adding sprinkles to the frosting on the cake of this first of our four major topics, but I think I would be really remiss if I did not mention. Do you want to deflect something here? Yeah, one more thing, which is when things fall apart, they have changed. And often there's a shocking sense of things that we thought were once reliable are not reliable.

They're not trustworthy, we can't count on them. When we think about the future, it doesn't look as trustworthy or as safe. Therefore, it's especially important to turn toward and to really foreground in your awareness those things that are reliable for you.

Now you alluded to some of this before about returning to normalcy, as best you can, just like the taste of pizza, et cetera, et cetera. Also, what are the things that really endure? All the good you've ever done in your life will always have been done. That's reliable. The love in your heart, the goodness in your heart. That's reliable. Awareness, the spaciousness of awareness, which is never tainted by what passes through it, that's reliable. The heavens above.

the vastness of the universe. That's reliable. Deep within us all is a fundamental stillness, a fundamental quality of stillness that is wise and benign and inherent. It's innate. People may not be aware of it, but if you look for it, you will find it. It's there. And for many, they do find that there's something reliable in a mysterious ground of all, so be it.

I just want to name these and as someone who's recently back from a three week meditation retreat, that focused on this kind of stuff, I can really attest that these are the deep roots of equanimity. And as people have a sense of that deep in their own being or they're out there in the world, that's a good refuge and place of strength when things do fall apart.

And I think there are versions of that that could be useful for almost everyone. I've gotten a lot of value out of going for a walk, which is something we've said a couple of times already here. And that sense of reconnection, even like the Lord of the Ring story that you gave earlier, that sense of reconnection to something larger than yourself, larger than your moment, I think is enormously valuable for so many people.

Now we've gone through that. We've had those experiences. We've grounded dad. We've resourced ourselves. It still sucks. Let's be clear. It still sucks, but we've gotten to the second stage of the process, which for me is really gathering information. When we've taken the sting out of it, now is when we can start learning about what's actually going on.

We can't act without being willing to face reality. No, a lot of people, many, many people. No, I don't want to see the fear desperately fear facing reality. They don't want to take a hard look at their relationship or their finances or their friends or their church leaders or their politicians or whatever else because it's freaking scary man.

And they don't want to look under the bed and discover what's actually down there. I've told the story on the podcast in the past. I was terrified of checking my bank balance for like a solid five to 10 year period from about the age of like 17ish to the age of like 2627. I hated it. It was like so painful for me.

for a whole bunch of different reasons, and I had developed this real aversion around it, and I had to triage myself and pendulate myself to use Peter Levine's language through that process over time where I made it a habit, I forced myself to do it, you just touch it a little bit at a time and it becomes easier over time.

I really get fearing that process and you still got to do it. You got to gather information. You got to recognize the facts, right? Do you need a second opinion? Can you talk to an expert? Can you talk to somebody else who was there? Can you reach out to your friend who knows a little bit more about this thing than you do? And then you use that information gathering process to get really real.

Can I build on that and connect with people who've who are already five or ten steps farther than you down this particular road? Sure. Yeah, they do are gone through an experience like this. Yes, absolutely. Totally. Totally. They had a partner who cheated on them and they did whatever they did. Yeah, absolutely.

And then from there, I think that we can go through a really interesting process of figuring out the difference between, this gets a little complicated, but the difference between objective facts. So what is true out in the world? Like real verified statements. And there is the level of those objective facts. And then there's the level of what we feel like we know for sure. The things that aren't quite an objective fact, but we can be very confident in them.

Our friend has our back. Our dad will pick up the phone if I call him. There you go. Whatever it is. It's not quite a universal truth, but we're pretty confident. And then you have to go down a layer. I love what you're doing here. Which is the layer of assumption. What are the things that you think are true, but you do not know for sure?

And separating out objective fact from like 99% confidence interval from the things I'm assuming, but maybe they're true, maybe they're not is a very important part of this process because it's what allows us to then go back and fill in the gaps of our knowledge.

To get to more true over time. Does that make sense that oh, I think it's fantastic and I love this this archaeology of doubt Yeah, totally the deep dive and very on brand for me. Yeah. Yeah and doubting your doubts. So this is really good. I was just reflecting that one of the forms this takes for people is either I couldn't or they won't.

These rules that people have that that are kind of propositions about reality, right? Well, I couldn't say that or impossible or they won't. Are you sure? Yeah, you're sure. Yeah, exactly. Right. It could sound very, I don't know what, complicated. Howdy. Yeah. But often we just presume limitations. You want to know something? Read Jonathan Livingston's sequel.

and illusions by Richard Bach, where people basically argue for their limitations. And that can often get really surfaced. The other side of it too is that when things fall apart, not in any way shape or form two, put a lipstick on that pig, et cetera. And very often it opens up new possibilities for people.

And it really helps us to make use of those possibilities if we don't walk into it with what you've talked about for us as limiting beliefs. Yeah, totally, totally. And I think that whole process, that kind of information gathering process needs to be informed by self awareness.

Are you the kind of person who tends to argue for your limitations, like you're saying your dad? Or are you the kind of person who tends to play really fast and loose with what's possible for you? Are you the kind of person who tends to be a pretty good judge of character? The kind of person who tends to give people a lot of allowances when maybe you shouldn't.

What are you like, and how does that inform this information gathering process, and you can ask other people about it, hey, do you think I'm underreacting? Do you think I'm overreacting? Like how can we assess what's really going on here? Then from there and information gathering, I think a big part of it is figuring out what the full range of outcomes are.

For people like, what's the median outcome? What's the worst case scenario? What's the best case scenario here? How likely do you think each of these things are? And if you can go through a process of figuring that out, you're really in a place to make a great decision.

No first two, one thing that comes up, when things fall apart, often what needs to happen and starts moving to the foreground is priorities. What are your absolute priorities? What do you really care about? Yeah, and it can get kind of real. If what's falling apart is you've got to flee your country or your house is burning down,

What do you grab on the way out the door and what are your priorities? And if you're very concrete, very quickly. Yeah. Very, very dear friend of mine, bless his memory. On his 70th birthday, started feeling really bad, went to the ER and soon found out that he had terminal cancer.

all in his birthday. And he had a deep spiritual practice, a remarkable person as well. And as he said to me, when we went for a walk a little while later, everything became extremely simple for him. It's sort of life as he knew it had changed. And a whole collection of enterprises and thoughts and plans, he was just game over.

And what we're left were a really, really different set of priorities. So one way to guide ourselves as we take inventory and we, we reckon with things is to know for yourself what's most important and realize that you may have to let go of a lot of other stuff.

And that process of letting go, I think, transitions really beautifully into the third thing that we wanted to talk about, which is the process and loss and disappointment piece of this, which I think in a weird way is sometimes a part of it that gets a little left out by people because there's such a focus on what do we do next? Like, how do I solve this problem? How do I address this issue? How do I fix it?

Sometimes there's nothing to fix to your point with your friend. You know, this is a thing that has happened. It is the irrevocable truth of his life from here on out until his life ends. And it just kind of sweeps the game board and it's just about relating to it and processing that.

And one of the things that I mentioned at the very, very end during the recap of last week's episode, so you didn't actually hear a dad, which was about how to make a good decision, how to make good choices, a big part of making a choice at all. And there are often situations where we don't want to make a choice.

Partner cheats on us. We're going through some kind of a restorative process around that and We're at rubber meets the road time and it's do we stay do we go you know for whatever reason? A lot of people defer that choice They kick the can down the road a long time and they don't want to make the choice because they don't want to come to peace with the fact That one of those options goes away once they make the choice

Choosing one thing means you're not choosing another thing. This is just the way that life works. And I find for myself in my life that that was a major issue for a long time, I was trying to keep my options open forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and it led to me doing nothing. Because if I did something, I wouldn't be able to do this other thing. And I was, I was unable to kind of work with the related emotions that came up from that. That might be true for some people who are listening.

And so just like learning to be with that active like releasing and letting go of attachment to some other kind of outcome, something you wanted, something you were hoping for, it really stops people from moving on a lot of the time. You know, using the example with your friend, you know, a lot of people would be doing the opposite of what he did and wouldn't be open to letting it change the game board and would just be trying to like cling to the possibility of something different or like denying it or whatever it is.

Yeah, that's really relevant for us. And his last, I think, roughly 15 months, 18 months, were witnessed by a lot of friends, a group that I'm part of. And it was an inspiration and a teaching to all of us.

I'm reflecting here a bit that first, when there is a loss to your point, it can sometimes take a while for people to realize that they're not coming back or we can't regain function in that arm or we just can't do that kind of work anymore.

Things change and it can take a while for people to realize that things change. I think a little bit here in a way about this wonderful book, because I love this sort of stuff. I think it's something like who dies or who lives, who dies. It's basically about true stories of survival, the plane crashes, your car breaks through the ice. And one of the really, really key determinants of who lives is who can recognize that things have changed.

really quickly and not cling to what they thought was true or what used to be. So that's one part of it. I also think there's a lot of general teaching here around grief. One of the major teachings that people refer to is the notion of a path of grief or the stages of grief, like Koopla Ross and all of that, which I just want to name really quickly, that work was done in a specific kind of context. And one of the important distinctions that people have drawn more recently in contemporary work on grief

is acknowledging that there actually isn't a linear path of loss, which was also present in Coopla Ross's work as well. It's one of the things that she said very explicitly that kind of got lost a little bit when it became more of a pop psychology thing. But the idea that people move from stage to stage. You'll have a moment where things feel really okay, and then you'll have a moment where they feel bad again, and then you'll have a moment where they feel awful, and then all of a sudden it'll be kind of okay, and then it'll be awful again, and that's really all right. That's very, very normal.

And just appreciating the normality of that and not beating yourself up as you move from stage to stage is also, I think, a part of the process. There are also a lot of really good specific practices that people have for different kinds of emotional releasing or grief work of different kinds. I think committing things to the page is always fantastic.

something I've really learned to appreciate myself about myself over the last year or so, is I hold so much stuff in my brain. I have a real habit of just thinking, thinking, thinking, and being like, okay, I need to remember to do this tomorrow, and then I need to remember to do this in a week, and oh, that thing happened, and I'm kind of ruminating about it.

It just gets gummed up in there, and a great way to solve that problem is by just writing it down, like commit it to a journal, write it into your notebook, just get it out of there, like release the stuff from the top of your head, and you'll often find that it stops fizzing around as much inside of you.

I wanted to just, I appreciate what you said. They're my own kind of visual stages of grief and so forth is like a spiral moving through quadrants, pick your metaphor, either moving up or moving down to being fundamentally, truly, stably at peace about it all. But as you're saying, you move through the different sectors and then having moved through them, you're now more available to move through them even more deeply.

That I think is real, and it's important to not let people hasten you, tell you, gosh, aren't you over by now on the one side? It's really important. Second, though, I myself, grappling with some losses and sorrows and wounds, have found a lot of value in finding that moment. It's a little bit like the Goldilocks spot, the sweet spot, not too hot, not too cold, not too tall, not too short, where it feels kind of like the just right spot where you give yourself permission to turn a corner.

You're still going to think about that person from time to time. If you're reminded, you're still going to win, still going to affect you, but you're not ruminating about it. It is no longer is the good to put it all on time ago, invading your mind and remaining.

And it can really be necessary to affirmatively and actively give yourself permission and even encouragement to turn that corner. You're not denying what happened down that other street. You're just giving yourself the freedom to move down a different road at this point.

Very important to be able to do that for yourself. And as part of that, I do think that grieving is loving and we could say even more broadly, the reason that we're rattled by things falling apart is in some ways because we loved what was happening or we loved what

was possible. It hopes now dashed, unfortunately. So there's love in it. And one of the most reparative things to do at the worst of times is to find goodness in your own heart for other people, for other beings, and for yourself, finding that warm heartedness, that goodness, that lovingness is really reparative. Because very often what happens is that when there's things are disrupted, there's a loss of relatedness, other compounding losses sometimes,

You know, if a relationship ends that might put financial stress on you that might lead you to be disengaged from a friend group, these losses compound. And so you're less able to give what you used to be able to give in your heart and you're less receiving less, probably, from other people. So it's more important than ever, even though it's counterintuitive and incredibly annoying. You're like, oh, I'm running on empty. Why do I have to love?

Well, because it works, you know, because it's good for you to love even, you know, with things are really horrible. It's like on the worst day of your life, what's the most important thing is to find someone to love. That's really sweet, Dad.

But I think that it's also really true and a great resource for people as well. And, you know, as a kind of doing, and that's the last thing we wanted to really talk about here and highlight is the taking action piece of it. First of all, try to make some kind of a plan. Use your information to make the plan. We've already talked about that a bit.

Don't walk into that important conversation on that meeting with your boss, that interaction with your partner, and just feel like you're going to vibe your way through it. Okay, it's probably not going to go great. So have something that you've already thought about. The piece of this that I think we haven't talked about so much is the relationship between doing and fear. We tend to be the most anxious, as I said earlier, tend to ruminate the most about the things that we can do relatively little about.

But most of the time, we can find something that we can do about them, even if it feels like it's a drop in the bucket, even if it feels like it's only tangentially related, whatever it is. And that doing, that focus on what you really can control, is one of the best selves out there for all of the emotional aspects of this.

And it's going to be particularly effective for you if it comes from some kind of values-driven place. One of the things that we can really connect with when things get hard, as you were describing with your friend, is the sense of what really, truly matters to us. And for a lot of people, most of the time, that's going to look like some kind of moral action out in the world or inside of their own life.

What can you find inside of your life that you can be a little more moral about, a little more connected to, a little bit more related to? What's the friendship that is kind of like calling you in this moment? What's the kind of space around what kind of people are you being drawn to now, maybe informed by what's recently happened to you? And that's something that I've been really thinking about a lot recently as a real resource for people, like what do you really care about and how can you connect with it more these days?

If you think about the media that people consume, especially for entertainment, if 50% of the entertainment we consume is full of explosions and corruption and lethal threats and murders and burglaries and all the rest of that, if 50% of the media we consume is like that, even though statistically,

It's a one in 10,000 kind of probability in our, in our life. It's going to increasingly prime us toward this background, my asthma of, of dread and unease that tends to prime people to want quick fix solutions of some kind, make that threat go away. Okay. With that as backdrop and for other reasons too, when things fall apart, it's really important to ask yourself, does this affect me directly?

What actually affects me directly? What are my actual interests in this matter? And then, you know, make your plan, take action for what actually is affecting you or likely to affect you, or maybe others you care about, that's within your scope of influence. And I think for a lot of people, when they kind of stare out at the miasmic dread and they burrow it down to, well,

What's the actual likelihood of that bad event happening to me? And what can I actually do to protect myself against it? Okay, I'm going to take those steps. But to not get so primed by the negativity bias, basically, and keep zeroing down to, what are my material interests in this issue? Okay, my friends are badmouthing me behind my back. What a shocker.

All right. Well, is my life in danger? Nope. Is my life savings in danger? Nope.

My job at Jeopardy, nope, my health's okay, yep. My dog still does me, you bad, right? You know, you just kind of realized that a lot, we're not that affected by a lot of the stuff we fear and we worry about and kind of obsess about. So anyway, it's a long way of saying that I think it's really helpful to really identify what matters to you that you can do something about and then for sure do it.

And the rest of it, take a breath and appreciate the life you've had and do the best you can tomorrow.

That probably sounds super trite when I think about it. But it's really true, because I think a lot of people don't do what they can and the obsessed about what they can't. Yeah, I think that that's what you're really highlighting here, Dad, is that it's not so much about the hallmark cookie cutter of it all. It's about the reality that people spend a lot of time talking and thinking about the things that they can't really do too much about without necessarily doing much about the things that they actually can do a lot about.

Whatever that thing is, if that thing is having the conversation you need to have with your friend, who you know is like talking some shit or whatever, or having the conversation you needed to have with your spouse, or having a confrontation with your boss, or whatever it is, like there are real things to happen here.

getting real about where you want to live, where you want your grandkids to live, whatever it is. Sure, do the thought experiment. We had an episode a couple months back about some version of that. I'm forgetting what we titled it, but it was essentially about how to live in a wild world. I think that episode has aged extremely well. There's a lot there that you can do, that you can relate to. There are ways to think about this that are restorative for people. Coming out of all of that,

I think there is kind of like a secret fifth step here that maybe we'll close the episode with. And that secret fifth step is what do you want to think about long term? How do you want to be about this long term? And this is the meaning making process disruptive events shatter our homeostasis.

They really changed the way that we view the world, the way that we view ourselves. And again, as you said earlier, Dad, this is not intended as like a lipstick on a pig thing, but it's a real thing. You know, assuming that you survived the event, whatever the event is, there's now this space that is opened up to decide how you want to be from now on.

What do you want to learn from this? What do you want to do differently in the future? How do you want to let this event inform your future choices? There's a ton of research and it is actually somewhat controversial research that I want to let people know about if they're not familiar with it on what's called post-traumatic growth. Basic idea is somebody goes through a traumatic event. Do they experience growth coming out of it? The reason it's controversial is because, hey, we don't want people to go through traumatic events and trying to turn them into this like good thing that happens to people is completely in sight.

So that's not what we're doing here. But the basic finding from that research is if people are able to think about whatever the traumatic event was and connect it to some aspect of themselves that they now view positively, that they now have a good relationship with. Those people are the ones who by and large were able to integrate it and move on in a healthy way.

And so that just speaks to this meaning-making aspect. This aspect of it where it's about figuring out, okay, this happened now what? Which is, in some ways, the theme of this episode as a whole. I have, you know, to myself, you know, live well, meanwhile, basically do the best you can. This is the live well, meanwhile episode, man, totally. Yeah. Is there anything else you want to say about that?

I think we've said a lot, and what I'm aware of for us is that our process of talking about this has felt, for me, at least very modulated benign, kind of the color of our shirts, green, positive, the kind of muted.

You know, and there's some way in which it would be a little bit like, you know, if you imagine a major sporting event, highly competitive, if the announcers talked about it in the ways that you and I are speaking here. It's like golf, golf announcing. Yeah. Okay. Except it's the Super Bowl.

Yeah, except imagine if he's approaching the line, they're lining up, they've chosen the play, and the quarterback is dropping back to pass. Yeah, very NPR, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Or if you imagine talking about some kind of hurricane or war zone. With like, wow, now what? Yeah, I don't want to be really clear. I got it. Yeah. But even though we're not trying in any way, shape or form in our tone, I guess that's what I'm getting at, to be a spiritual bypass. And

It's, you know, not withstanding the ways in which our tone is very rounded and soothing and probably in comforting.

The shit hits the fan is often jagged, chunky, stinky, and it's blowing you away. It's blowing you away. And people do all kinds of stuff on the worst day of their life. I've done all kinds of stuff when I was freaking out, not all of which I'm proud of. Let me tell you. And that's part of the mix. And I want to also just make sure that tonally, we just want to

acknowledge that when the shit has the fan, it can be really, really shitty. And it often also becomes permanently shitty in all kinds of new ways.

it is real. And so I just kind of want to, you know, get that in with a certain fire. Yeah. And that's the context within which all of this matters. Yes. Like that's that is the in some ways, that's the whole point of doing this episode, right? If it weren't that way, if it were just NPR voice the whole way through,

We wouldn't need to do this episode because it would just be like, oh, yeah, just veg with it. You know what I mean? Yeah. So it's the fact that it is so that way, that it's so disruptive, so intense. So all of those things that makes it so important to be that way about it. Yeah. Yeah. That's very good.

Today I talked with Rick about, now what? What can we do when things fall apart? And there are two layers to this conversation for me. The first is a lot of practical stuff. And we walked through these four different steps that people can go through after they've had one of the worst days of their life.

What can we do to regulate ourselves, to slow down, to study our emotions, to take the first thing out of things? Then once we've done that, how can we gather information and particularly get the information that we need in order to make some really good and very important decisions?

Then, how can we deal with the feelings of loss and disappointment that naturally come up when something like this happens? Then finally, how can we make a good plan and move into action? And particularly, how can we move into action in ways that both supports our life in the future while also supporting our psycho-emotional state, a psycho-emotional state that has been really rattled by whatever it was that happened?

It's normal for these steps to blur together a little bit, particularly the second and the third one can flip-flop. Sometimes you need to start by making an immediate plan in order to get out of diff, a dangerous situation, all of that. Sometimes they occur simultaneously, but this is a typical path that tends to work well for people.

And one of the big takeaways from it is it's about a balance, a balance of slowing down without freezing the balance of feeling the feelings without getting trapped in them, moving into action without bypassing our emotions, you know, some classic being well, middle path stuff here. But then with all of that acting, all of that doing, there's a bigger question about how do we want to be about things like this?

And what I've really found with that, more recently, is this sense of what's called tragic optimism, which is how we find meaning and hope amid the inevitable disappointments and difficulties of life. And you can make a real argument that Buddhist philosophy and a whole, a tradition that I was really raised on,

Is this kind of the study of disappointment? It sucks, now what? And that was a lot of what we explored during this episode. But as Rick sat at the very end of it, it is very easy for our kind of typical being well-toned to sort of downplay the severity of what's going on here.

Even me saying something like it sucks now, what can feel like very blazay, very kind of throw at. We didn't spend a lot of time during the episode for I think understandable reasons, talking about the intensity, the enormity, the severity of what can really happen to people.

of the kinds of emotions that they can experience, of the feelings that they can have about whatever's going on. That is not kind of a soft toned NPR vibe when that is happening. It is often brutal. It is intense. It feels overwhelming.

It's because it's that way that we took the tone that we did. It's because it's that way that we moved into this slightly analytical approach about the whole thing. That's what can really help people. It's because things are that way that we need to be able to develop these various skills that could really support us during a hard life.

And it all starts with studying yourself. That's what we spent probably the most time talking about actually. And the first priority with studying yourself is studying your body, regulating your physical system, regulating your nervous system, allowing yourself the time and the space that you need to calm and to land and to arrive and settle and whatever is going on around you right now.

And the first step here is meeting your basic physical needs and establishing a routine. Eat, sleep, and move. One of the best ways to help your body process what's going on is by doing normal things and doing them in a thoughtful way and in a way that really supports you through whatever's happening.

Our emotions start with our physical body, and if we're not taking care of our physical body, we cannot take care of our emotions. Most people are stapled to their couches, stapled to their chairs. I don't say that as a criticism, I say it as a fact statement. And we are built to walk, to move around, to be in nature. If we're taking ourselves out of that environment, we're taking away one of our body's fundamental regulatory processes.

And it's very normal when bad things happen to us, you know, when an animal is wounded, it curls up, it retreats into its little hole, it tries to buy itself some comfort and some time. That is a totally understandable process. There's a real place for it. And from there, you got to get out. You got to be outside a little bit. You got to take a walk around the block, give your body an opportunity to let some of that steam off.

From there, we're applying some emotional first aid. We're feeling the feelings without judgment of them. We're leaning into practices that soothe and calm us. Maybe high on the list are some of those physical practices I talked about. For me, it's going to the gym. Then there are plenty of practices like mindfulness, meditation,

You know, becoming a vegetable for a minute in a healthy way in a way that's restorative for you as Rick said, taking a bath, cooking a comfort meal, self-compassion practices. If you find those accessible at an episode recently with Chris Germer, we talked a lot about self-compassion. There's a lot in that that I think could be helpful for people.

And then a huge piece of this of the emotional aspect of it that we talked about a lot throughout the episode is social support. Under the worst conditions, what's the most important thing to have? Friends. Bottom line and a story. It is a normal to want to isolate yourself when things are hard. And some of the things that we mentioned as examples throughout the episode can be very socially complicated or can activate a lot of feelings of shame.

When we feel ashamed, it is very difficult to connect with other people. We have to move through a lot in order to do that. I understand that it's very hard. I'm also saying that it's going to be very helpful for you if you're able to make that happen. Alongside that, we limit our stressors. We do the obvious stuff. If a relationship just ended, spending a lot of time looking at your ex's Facebook is probably not going to be the healthiest for you.

Scanning through their Instagram to see who they're hanging out with, probably not great. If something scary happened in the external world and you don't feel like you're going to really gain more information from following the news, you're just going to gain more stress. Mainlining, you know, CNN or Fox or your channel of choice wherever you live is probably not going to be the healthiest thing for you.

From there, we try to gather information. What's going on? What can we do? What do we know for sure? What's an objective truth out in the world? And then what are we just making a lot of assumptions about? Particularly, as Rick said, are we making a lot of assumptions about our own capabilities? Are we imposing restrictions on ourselves that may or may not exist?

Many people, as I said, really fear this process. They don't want to find out what's true because they're scared of the truth. But we can't make a good decision without finding out what's true. So some of what we're doing in the first step is resourcing ourselves in a way so we can bear the second step here. Then we're processing some of the loss and disappointment associated with whatever happened to us. A big part of that, I think, comes down to releasing attachments.

We all have things that we want to go a certain kind of way. And when they don't go that way, a huge piece of the pain is that our brain keeps on trying to kind of hang on to the path that is now no longer open for us. And that's one of the things that really activates rumination because we haven't gotten down through the emotional layer to the acceptance piece to feeling the feelings that are brought on by the acceptance of reality. And that's what keeps us churning away in the ruminator.

There's a lot that's been written about Lawson grief, the Kubler-Ross stuff, many other people. Mary Francis O'Connor, who we had on the podcast, she's done fantastic work on grief. To say some of the things that you've probably already bumped into, writing and journaling, any kind of form of art or creative expression. For me, that's dancing a lot, as you probably know, if you listen to the podcast, I find that a great way to get some feelings out of the body.

For some people, it's going to be a little bit more ceremonial, spiritual practices, ritual, whatever it is that you can connect with. Again, as you probably know, if you listen, that's not really so much for me. But for a lot of people, that's an incredibly valuable practice.

Then we try to move into action. And I think that action also exists in all of these steps, to some extent, right? The action of taking care of your body, the action of processing and emotion, the action of gathering information and moving into action helps us out with the emotional aspect of this so much. Figuring out what we can do helps us come to peace with all of the things. And there are so many things that we can't do, that we can't change, that we can't affect.

Maybe most importantly, how can we take actions that are driven by our values? Loss, painful experiences, all of it are in a kind of weird way, an opportunity to test our values under pressure. We find out the things that really matter to us, the things that we actually care about when everything else is swept away.

For many people, this is going to look like some form of community-driven or socially-driven action. How can we connect with other people? How can we support other people who are suffering? How can we find a sense of relationship with people who have gone through an experience like this in the past? That was something that Rick really emphasized.

And how can we then use that to inform the process that we go through about the person that we want to be in the future? This is the meaning-making part. This is the part where we reflect on the experience and make some choices about how we want it to affect how we think about ourselves, how we want it to affect how we think about our values, what we care about, what we invest our time in.

And in a way, this loops us back to the very beginning. How do we want to be about change? Difficult experiences, when everything falls apart, they completely shake the snow globe of your life. They break your homeostasis. And now that it's been broken, how do you want it to be? What do you want this new world to look like that you're living in?

And there can be a freedom in that sometimes if you're able to make it through all those other stages, if you're able to make it through the grief, if you're able to make it through the painful emotion, there can be a kind of opportunity there for some learning, some growth and some integration coming out of whatever it was that happened.

If you've had experiences like the ones that I described during this episode, I hope that you found the material that we talked about today useful for you. I hope it was helpful. I hope it was supportive. I hope it was validated. And if you have questions about anything that we've talked about, feel free to reach out. You can find us at contact at beingwellpodcast.com. If you're watching on YouTube, you can leave a comment down below, maybe talk about your own experiences. If you're comfortable sharing that.

You can also find us on social media pretty much everywhere. And if you'd like to support the show in other ways, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash being well podcast. The best way to support the show though is by telling other people about it. We all know somebody who can be supported by the conversations that we have on the show by the topics that we explore. So until next time, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon.