Some Unsolicited Advice #5

A few weeks ago we started a series in which I share some completely unsolicited advice… if you’re looking to pick up from the beginning, you can do so here (which I recommend doing, if you haven’t done so, since there’s a lot of semi-important context in there, as well point #2 here , #3 here , and #4 here ).

Long story short (since the initial post was some nine-thousand words): I wrote a book that you can read here ; however, instead of leaving it as an e-book that very few people will ever read (it is titled “Some Unsolicited Advice” after all), I figured it’s worth sharing the points and lessons learned in a more consumable format, as a rolling blog series where I add one or two new items every week (or every other week, depending on how much time I end up having), making for quicker and easier reading than dumping an e-book and calling it a day. And in this way, over the course of a year (or less, depending on the cadence), all the points will get shared in bite-size, more easily readable chunks. Today, we continue with the fifth point of this series…

5. Things are always worse in our minds.

As noted above, simply the act of asking ourselves the question, “is this what I so greatly feared?” is often, by itself, an invaluable reminder that our minds have a strong propensity to make things seem a whole lot worse than they ever turn out to be in reality. In my first draft of this document, the title for this point was originally: “Things are almost always worse in our minds.” But after doing some thinking on it, I honestly can’t recall a time when my mind didn’t concoct some asinine, batshit alternate reality that wasn’t orders of magnitude worse than anything that ever happened in actuality. The mind is a wonderful tool, but left to its own devices, more often than not, it’ll go crazy with what ifs, useless speculation, and wildly unfounded fantasies, and if you let it, it’ll happily drag you along for the ride like a helpless ragdoll tethered to the back of a runaway car, blasting down a hill on this road we call life, with no brakes and no sign of stopping.

In our more primal days, it made sense that this perma-terrified brain is what largely kept us alive and away from the many things that could and would do us harm in the wild. But now, in our current post-scarcity world, while still useful at times, the gravitational pull of fear tends to get in the way a lot more than it ends up helping. Most commonly, the resulting effect is that our minds tend to do a really good job of talking us out of the very thing or things in life that we stand to benefit the most from doing or going after. Rather than seeing opportunities for growth, the mind focuses nearly exclusively on the terrifying nature of the unknowns—speculating and building complex narratives about just how bad things could end up—and corroborating those narratives by spinning grand and largely unfounded stories of risk, injury, and even death. And, faced with what feels like a mounting pile of evidence, it makes a whole lot of safety sense (not to mention being easier) to stay put as opposed to venturing out into the unknown and risking it all.

Of course, this is absolutely a useful safety mechanism in true situations of life and death, but in our modern-day world, this primal inclination for safety, stability, and security (coupled with our own neuroses) stands opposed to the reality that we tend to only ever really grow when and where we push ourselves well beyond the confines of our comfort zones. For this reason, it’s important to always keep in mind to search for the truth behind our fears and recognize that things are always worse in our minds than they are in reality. And then armed with that understanding, work backwards to a more rationally founded representation of the possible outcomes, whether that’s done by trusting in the data or even engaging in the exercise of asking if the end reality is truly as bad as it would appear in our mind.

As long as we can take a moment to keep perspective and not buy into the stories our mind spins, we at least give ourselves a shot at countering the strong urge to run back to what is safe and familiar in the midst of the alarms and sirens going off in our mind. That’s all this item is really about—just a reminder that our minds will always make things seem scarier than they actually are. And if we know that, then we can take the exaggerated input from our minds with a pound of salt, and work to more accurately to understand our options and their respective implications. But knowing alone doesn’t make it any easier to execute, which, as we know, is the only thing that needs to be done.

In retrospect, one of the most laughable examples of my mind being exceptionally wrong during my time spent traveling, was the wildly overblown fear and trepidation I had towards backpacking in Western Europe or Australia due to their presumptively expensive nature as a function of being westernized countries, with westernized prices. I’d always wanted to visit Europe and Australia, but anytime someone mentioned that I should go there, my mind instantly jumped into overdrive and quickly reminded me that those places were far too expensive for someone as cheap, poor, and on a budget like myself - and if I did make the ill-advised mistake of going to either place, I’d inevitably end up going broke in no time at all.

Of course, all of this was presented by my mind as factual and irrefutable evidence, all without having ever been to either destination… For sure these places would be more expensive than slumming around hostels in Southeast Asia - it all made sense (the mind always does when speaking to itself), and I had no reason or data to believe otherwise, so I accepted this as truth and lived and traveled accordingly, always writing it off whenever the idea was suggested. I fully and genuinely believed that traveling to Europe and Australia was beyond my reach, and an exclusive privilege reserved for the upper middle. That is, until I said fuckit and actually went.

By going and seeing for myself, I quickly realized that it wasn’t even half as bad as I thought it’d be; not only could I survive and get by in those allegedly expensive places, but I could thrive. I vividly and fondly recall the moment I realized I was going to be fine in Australia. I had just landed, fresh in from Southeast Asia - armed with a full load of fear that had been fed by stories of the minimum wage being over twenty dollars and the cost of a meal being absurdly high. I was sure I was going to be toast and broke within a matter of weeks. I expected everything (particularly food) to be excruciatingly expensive, but I was just too close to Australia to not go (I had been in Bali at the time), and who knew when I’d have the chance to go again – and so I went, unsure how long I’d last, or what waited for me once I got there.

And yet, once faced with reality, in one fantastical instant all of the fear and uncertainty that had been manufactured by my mind vaporized instantly only a few short hours after landing in Australia, when I paid my first visit to a Coles supermarket. Inside of this supermarket I found the prices to be completely reasonable (that is, they were comparable to US-supermarket prices), and if nothing else, I knew at that moment, perusing up and down the aisles and seeing the prices on canned tuna, beans, and oatmeal, that I’d be able to survive Down Under, and I was ecstatic. I don’t know if I can accurately describe the feeling in that moment as anything short of jubilation and sheer relief… I couldn’t stop smiling, and was practically downright giddy to realize that I’d be ok. In looking back on the trip, this was one of my most savored moments. Not unlike the feeling I had when standing on the beach in Boracay, a week into my trip into Southeast Asia, gazing out into the vast, blue ocean - where I was similarly jubilant in knowing that I had sold it all, had stepped into the unknown, and there I was, not just alive, but living. You can’t buy those moments or the feeling they bring, and even now I get goosebumps thinking about either one of those memories – where, despite all the voices telling me not to, I did, and became better for it. The reminder is the same: the fears that the mind concocted were overblown, and after pulling back the curtain, there was no wizard of oz, there was just relief.

Relief from weeks of accumulated stress before arriving (would I be able to afford Australia? Was I making a mistake? Would I go broke? How would I get home?), it all evaporated in an instant, the moment all my fears were unfounded and overblown. It was incredible. Sure, there was no way I would be eating out at restaurants while there, and I’d still have to be highly conscious about what I spent and where I spent it, but had I listened to the well-reasoned and well-intentioned voices in my head, I would have likely never gone to Australia (or Europe afterwards) — all due to a misplaced, but an unproven belief that western countries were far beyond my means as a poor backpacker. Unless you have a special brain that doesn’t over-rotate on every unfounded fear, things are always worse in our minds.

An important corollary to this point that is also helpful to be reminded of now-and-again, is to “not suffer imagined troubles.” As noted above, things are always worse in our minds, and with it comes a whole lot of worrying about this thing or that thing, or every other thing in-between — often causing us to suffer not only when our fears become a reality but also all of the times those fears never materialize — which is most of the time. When we give the imagined fears space in our minds, we suffer an endless and steady stream of imagined troubles, many of which never come true, and on top of that, for those that do come true, we suffer them not only in the moment but also in multiple times advance of the moment as we think about and ruminate on that which has not yet transpired. Of course, this isn’t to say we shouldn’t worry about things, but after a certain point, where worry becomes rumination, it’s often no longer a productive exercise - to the point we’re likely doing more harm than good. If we play through a potentially painful scenario twenty times, and that painful scenario never comes to pass, then we’ve suffered twenty times for a thing where we didn’t need to suffer at all. And if it does come to pass, we’ll have suffered twenty-one times, when only one of those times was truly necessary. As much as possible, don’t suffer imagined troubles, since as Seneca rightly remarked, “We often suffer more in imagination than reality,” and ain’t that the truth. As always, easier said than done, but worth doing all the same.

The bottom line here, as we all already know, is that while your brain is just trying to do its job, it’s also always going to blow things out of proportion. And if we let it go unchecked, we’ll end up fearing pretty much everything all the time. The solution sounds simple but is hard to do, and that is to push back on your brain and prove it wrong. I don’t know who said it first, but there’s a quote along the lines of “action cures fear,” and it couldn’t be more true. As something I witnessed time and time again while traveling, if we can prove to the mind that this certain thing that it thinks is scary is not actually so scary (e.g., visiting a foreign country, getting on a plane, jumping off cliffs, etc.), then the brain can learn and adjust. And after doing any given thing enough times, the things that would have once scared the absolute shit out of us will no longer have the power to hold us back from going out and doing what we want or need to do.

And that’s it for round five! Of course, if you want to skip ahead at any point, feel free to buy the full book on Amazon here . Thanks!