How Not to Panic
Scenario planning for the next apocalypse
I’m interrupting our regularly scheduled post this week with some timely food for thought.
Writing is a process of meaning-making for me. The Hustler’s Manifesto most often represents my personal struggle with a topic rather than any sort of “expertise.” These posts sometimes feel like shouting into the void, so if you’re also making meaning around fear and potential panic this week, join me in the comments below so we can make meaning together.
As we move through yet another fear-inducing scenario, I’m sitting with how not to panic.
My instinct is to solve problems; that’s what I’ve built my career on; it is one of my greatest strengths and core to who I am. When shit hits the fan (or is about to hit the fan), my knee-jerk response is to preemptively solve the problem, usually before clearly identifying what the problem is.
While I always advocate focusing on one’s strengths, sometimes our strengths are also our blind spots, and we have to build systems to mitigate them intentionally. For me, that means creating systems to force myself to look at the whole before I start dissecting and solving the fragments.
Alexander the Great did the same thing with the Gordian Knot. When he came across an incredibly complex knot, he unraveled it by pulling out the lynchpin holding it together instead of trying to untie single threads.
When faced with complex scenarios, the natural instinct is to start working on the threads instead of pausing to find the lynchpin. This fragmental approach makes us feel like we’re doing something in helpless situations but also leads to a lack of focus and wasted efforts.
When things are urgent, the ability to slow down is your most powerful tool.
How to not panic in five steps.
1. Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking
You cannot see a scenario clearly if you are operating from a place of fear. Conveniently, last month we talked about fear and how to see past it.
“Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence.”
― Rumi
Fear-thinking often feels like scenario planning because you’re running through all of the possible terrible things that could happen. But this puts you in “fight or flight” mode (activating your sympathetic nervous system), which helps you react quickly to threats, not proactively consider possible scenarios' medium- and long-term implications.
As Rumi says, you have to get to a place of silence, activating your parasympathetic nervous system (the “rest and digest” part), so you can think critically, weigh options, and see possibilities. The simplest way to do this is to pause and go through all other steps before making any decisions.
2. Curate actionable information (and then gut-check it)
It is easy to get stuck in a panic mentality when you’re bombarded with fear all the time from the outside world (e.g., media, gas prices, social media, texts from your grandma, email forwards from uncle Jerry). I gather a diverse set of information from various sources and then do my best to focus on what is actionable, not just fear porn. I then gut-check outside information against my own lived experience to see how it resonates. The combination here is essential—I’m not just relying on my gut or just relying on external sources—I’m actively balancing both at all times.
3. Get some perspective
The word “unprecedented” has been thrown around a lot in the last few years. What we think is “unprecedented” usually isn’t—we are just so limited by our living memory that we believe we are the only people who have ever experienced what we’re going through at the moment.
Last month I mentioned that I recently finished Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio, where he takes a long view of world history and upheaval to uncover patterns in political and economic cycles. Many of the things happening in the world politically and economically right now are right in line with the pattern model that he describes. Examining historical patterns can help you get perspective in terms of potential scenarios for the future. It can also help you see past your immediate fears by recognizing our moment in time as part of a broader pattern.
Getting perspective personally might entail getting advice from someone older than you. Younger generations often think that their problems and solutions are unique when previous generations have probably gone through similar scenarios already and have valuable insights on what works.
4. Solve immediate problems, not hypothetical ones
One of my rules for turning uncertainty in your favor is short-cycle planning. Sometimes we preemptively solve problems that aren’t problems yet because it makes us feel like we’re controlling something that we can’t actually control. Solving hypothetical problems can lead to solutions that turn into liabilities when the ground changes under our feet. Use your short-cycle planning strategies to solve problems as they arise and use then use the information from the success or failure of those cycles to better plan for future scenarios.
5. Focus on your locus of control and risk
When the sky is falling somewhere, it feels like it is falling everywhere. While we absolutely live in an interconnected world and should always operate with empathy toward the struggles of others, we also need to be cognizant of where the global struggle ends, and ours begins. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do what you can to help others; it means that you need to know when to separate your direct issues from broader ones. If you’re constantly enmeshed in the suffering of others, it will be much harder to summon the strength to deal with challenges when they are on your doorstep.
Along these same lines, when assessing how to deal with a potential crisis, focus on variables that you can control and focus your planning around them. You have to conserve your mental energy in a crisis, and expending it on battles that aren’t yours to fight or circumstances outside of your control will drain you.
Finding calm instead of panic not only serves to make you better able to deal with crisis, it also contributes to a field of peace.
The more we serve peace day to day in personal life, the stronger our prayers become…Every time we let go of self-righteousness, we strengthen the field of peace. Every time we resist a call to arms, every time we put ourselves in another’s shoes, every time we act from the knowledge that we are not separate, every time we look for someone’s humanity and divinity when it hurts, we tilt the course of distant events into alignment with those choices.
- Charles Eisenstein
Whether it is your latest work crisis or the next apocalypse, removing yourself from the tangle of fear thinking will not only make you better able to deal with uncertainty, it will add to a mentality of peace and silence that we all desperately need right now.
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© Sarah Duran 2022
Find out more about me and my company, Fruition Initiatives, here.
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The Obvious Disclaimers…
This information is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended as, and shall not be understood or construed as, professional advice. What you decide to do with this information is up to you and all repercussions are on you.