Ysiad

todo::
* 30 minutes on the programming tutorial
* Day Four of journaling about Fear/ Worry & Anxiety
* Do something social – Went to house of yes

habits::
* Meditation – Day 690
* Journaling – Day 33
* Yoga – Day 32
* Cold shower – Day 5

reflections:: 9:06am. I’ve actually been working on the journal post for the past 20 minutes or so and got caught in a loop fixing the number counts after I realized I forgot to hit publish on the 01.26 journal post. I woke up around 7am, took a cold shower, did yoga, etc. Glad to be back on my normal routine. Something I’m realizing is that when I need to really jump out of bed, sleeping by myself in a comfortable bed is just not conducive to it. Sleeping on the couch downstairs is better.

Fear / Worry & Anxiety is getting extremely intriguing. A baseline reaction to fear is to not show up to important things. Because it’s scary and we’re wired to believe that life-or-death situations can injure or kill us. Totally makes sense for when that’s what we were dealing with – maybe the gains from jumping into that river or from going into the dark away from camp just aren’t worth it. But today we have the same sorts of reactions to situations where showing up just gets us experience and is part of getting stronger. I could imagine that from a certain vantage point – perhaps from the perspective of people in the past who only lived until 30-40 years old and got seriously injured before that – we’re basically living in a video game with close to infinite lives. Imagining a situation where the default is not dying for a while so long as we do not do something particularly risky, one thing to prioritize for is having fun and staying interested in continuing to play the game.

I’m realizing that my default reaction to fear, worry, or anxiety is to dismiss it. Now I’m realizing that is “fake” progress and a lost opportunity to understand things better. Lately I’ve been trying an opposite approach of leaning into the fears and expressing them.