Feeling Angry, Anxious & Afraid? This can help!

The news is not our friend nor un-biased. It’s a fear-generating engine that gets paid by your engagement. The online content algorithms (that all use AI) and AI-specific apps are specifically designed to be a confirmation bias echo chamber that keeps you actively engaged with them. The people who create content are motivated by the likelihood of your engagement, not truth.

Your engagement is the driving factor in all of these. Where – and to what – you give your attention matters immensely and it is directly responsible for your emotional state.

Our circumstances do not create our emotional state, our thoughts do. We have thoughts about circumstances and that’s what determines our emotions. Thoughts are always the bridge. It is impossible for us to have emotions without thoughts preceding them.

We humans very often confuse our thoughts about reality with reality itself. I have spent nine years working with clients and teaching students how to identify which is which. And even myself, despite working daily with separating thoughts about situations from situations themselves, can still find myself believing my thoughts are actual reality when they’re not.

Our thoughts are our attention. It’s where we focus. And our brain is always seeking out confirmation of its beliefs, regardless of whether it’s truth. Spoiler Alert: Our thoughts are very often wrong.

Gasp! I know, right? How dare I say that?

This may be a new and shocking (maybe even unbelievable) concept to you. And, yet, our runaway minds are responsible for most of our suffering. And there are reasons for why our thoughts may lie to us, mostly because our ego is trying to keep us safe even when there’s only imagined threats. There are volumes of books on the intricacies of this, so I’ll try to keep it high level here and provide an example.

My recent echo-chamber of confirmation bias has been around AI expeditiously killing our planet, and therefore all of life…in addition to numbing our minds and sucking users into a co-dependent cycle of addiction, resulting in a society full of depression, anxiety, and psychosis.

There is a TON of content out there telling me that all of the above must be true. Everywhere I look, I’m being fed this story. (This also happens to make my brain believe that it’s a worse and more widespread issue than it might be.)

Can you pick out the circumstances separate from the thoughts about it?

I’ll help (because this is my own personal work I do ongoing – to relieve my own suffering). And I’ll break it down into bullet points for ease.

Circumstances/Reality:

·      AI requires both large spaces of land and large quantities of water.

·      Almost all websites and apps are using some form of AI, whether it’s your search engine, social media platform determining which content to serve you, or companies using AI-customer service tools. (Even my word document asked me if I wanted AI to write this blog for me.)

·      Research is indicating that people are addicted to both AI and social media.

·      Research is indicating that time spent online (with AI, social media, or news) is a direct causation of depression, anxiety, and (in some cases) psychosis.

My thoughts about the above (uncensored to be honest, vulnerable, and in integrity):

·      There’s no escaping AI. AI is everywhere.

·      Too many people are using AI for dumb reasons. Their mild and brief entertainment is killing us all.

·      AI isn’t worth the toll it’s taking on our planet.

·      AI isn’t worth the toll it’s taking on our mental and emotional health.

·      Companies should stop using AI.

·      People should stop watching the news.

·      People should stop using AI apps.

·      People should stop using social media.

·      People should stop using search engines.

·      People should be aware and care that they’re killing the environment.

·      Our behavior as a society is expediting the planet’s demise and our own deaths.

·      Wild animals are dying because people want to create AI images.

·      All of our forests will be gone, and therefore all the animals that inhabit them will be dead soon.

·      Society has relinquished all its self-sovereignty over to AI, which means we will lose our ability to think and act independently.

·      We will be wholly dependent on AI for everything forever until we die.

·      I dislike anyone who uses AI on purpose because they’re a bad person.

Yes, this got quite doom and gloom very quickly. The brain works like that, if we’re really honest about it and are willing to truly examine and observe our thoughts.

These thoughts create the following emotions:

·      Anger

·      Fear

·      Anxiety

·      Grief

It’s actually my emotions that are my flag to do self-inquiry on my thoughts. So, if you are feeling similarly, it’s your invitation to do your own reflection and identification of what we coaches call “painful thoughts” and “limiting beliefs.”

I use a process called “The Work” (developed by Byron Katie) to examine the limiting beliefs I identified above. I have an expanded version that I developed, based on Katie’s work, that I offer as a free resource on my website.

For brevity, I’ll share that when I did “The Work” on the painful thoughts about AI, I realized that:

·      I can’t possibly know for sure that anything predicting / imagining a future state of death and destruction is true.

·      The only constant is change. I cannot predict the next minute let alone day, month, year, or decade out.

·      Anything “future-predicting” only exists in my mind as imagination, not reality.

·      I can’t control other’s behaviors, nor can I judge them because it isn’t my life to live.

·      All judgments of others are advice for myself presented as a mirror and projection.

I also know that the only thing I can control is myself and whether I believe my thoughts or witness them as just passing ideas. I am the one who determines my emotional state based on that. Do I want to live in joy or fear? Peace or anxiety? Do I want to act from a place of freedom or frozen by hostage-thought captivity?

Here's where I take my power back! When I can distinguish reality (truth) from my limiting beliefs (lies), my emotions shift. When I'm no longer in a state of fear (that freezes us or causes us to disassociate/numb), I regain my empowerment and ability to take embodied action from a grounded and centered place.

I know that my own actions of engaging with the news, social media, and online platforms have a direct impact on my thoughts and therefore emotional state because the reality is that they use a business model specifically targeted at using fear to increase my engagement. It works exactly as it's supposed to! AND, I can't project that others should stop using them without disengaging myself. The "should-ing" wasn't for them. It was for me.

If self-facilitating “Thought Work” is a skill you’re interested in learning how to do, you can book an appointment with me…OR…attend my retreat in Tuscany this September, where we’ll dive deeply into how to DISCERN TRUTH from lies (even and especially the lies we tell ourselves) and how to find PEACE in pure PRESENCE, as well as learning how to live in the present moment fully (rather than being preoccupied with the imagined future). Details on Tune In In Tuscany can be found here!