On anxiety and risk tolerance: for those struggling with friends and family members who are more or less anxious than you.
Susan Cain
#1 NY Times bestselling author, BITTERSWEET and QUIET. Unlikely award-winning speaker. Top 10 LinkedIn Influencer. Join the Quiet Life Community (for people who don’t necessarily love communities) at thequietlife.net.
The reason this feels like such a struggle is that many people are uncomfortable with (and disdainful of) the emotion of anxiety.
So I’d like to offer another way to think about it.
Here’s what anxiety is: the (unpleasant) emotion your body uses to get you to take what it considers the appropriate level of risk.
It works just like physical pain, which is the sensory experience your body uses to get you to remove your hand from the hot stove.
Anxiety causes you to ruminate, which in its healthy form helps you to come up with solutions to the problem of risk levels you consider too high. It’s what gets you to wipe down the counters, wash your hands, stay the F home.
Once you’ve taken all the steps you can possibly take, the anxiety usually subsides a bit. It certainly becomes a lot less useful. That’s a good time to exercise, listen to music, etc., so you can tamp it down.
BUT HERE’S THE THING: we all have different levels of risk tolerance. If you think of anxiety as the lever your body uses to align you with your own personal risk tolerance level, then of course you’re going to have different amounts of anxiety from your friends and family members. Because you all have different perceptions of risk. Which is natural, and good, and to be expected.
This doesn’t make your differences any less…different. But it does depersonalize them a little. If you’re struggling with a friend of family member, try using the language of risk tolerance.
And...let me know how this goes, and if this idea speaks to you. I would love to hear!
Regional F?rs?ljningschef p? PreZero Recycling
4 年Thank you for writing about this important topic. There is still so much shame attached to sensitivity and we need to learn to see this as natural differences so that we can help each other get out of the isolation that shame creates.
Leader | Strategist | Storyteller | 2019 BI Woman to Watch | Risk All-Star
4 年Love this. Thanks for sharing!
Director at Asurion
4 年Not only is thinking of all the things that could go wrong normal, it’s also the basis of our success as a species. Karl Popper stated it succinctly in his description of the emergence of the mind: “Letting our theories die in our stead.” That is, rather than rashly taking an action and dying, our ancestors *imagined* taking an action and *imagined* dying from it, and chose a different action. Theoretical Me dies, not Actual Me. Recognizing and mitigating risks is a human superpower (when used). For me this allows me to respect, and even defer to, another person’s perception of risk: maybe their theory is more accurate?
Technical Author, Educational Consultants (Oxford)
4 年Faith, is the only resource. When we seek it, comfort, will follow.