Name: It's OK to feel overwhelmed. Here's what to do next | Elizabeth Gilbert
Uploaded: 2020-04-06T08:37:57.000Z
Duration: 1 h 2 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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You think, uh, he's a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad days So many emotions, but all bad, Happily But it's just so aware that among the people listen to their summer in really tough times Right now I hope this is gonna be a beautiful hour of therapy and helping its in its own way.

Um, because we have with us just on extraordinary author, An extraordinary mind.

Um, Elizabeth Gilbert, obviously known for her tarnishing bestselling success with eat, pray, love.

Um, although her favorite book, from my point of view is called Big Magic, where the subtitle is Creative Living without Beyond fear, Creative Living beyond fear.

Now, when you think about it, that is a pretty good agenda for, uh, this conversation.

I think, um, Liz describes the emotional landscape of our lives.

I've I've read and I'm not even her target audience is really extraordinary in during that she given amazing Ted talk 11 years ago.

Been seen like 19 million times or something.

How long, people, They're just open to the creative genius coming in from the outside.

Um, so it is a delight to welcome to that head connect stage.

Where you are you who you living with or staying with?

I don't want to brag, but I'm in New Jersey, Um, where anybody would want to be.

I've got a little house out in the country and I think I'm on day 17 of no human contact other than virtually on damn well I'm not anybody who you need to be worrying about right now, So I'm good.

Well, so you're in a way, you're you're having ah, relation experienced.

What so many people having I mean, this the days of isolation for many people on brings with it lots of difficult emotions in a way.

And we're gonna we're gonna go through many of them.

I hope in the next hours, I'm I'm hoping to talk with you about Let's have a journalist here about anxiety, loneliness, curiosity, creativity, procrastination, grief, connection and hope.

Well, bef aid just a little light tasting menu of all the massive human emotions.

I think I think it's probably good toe dive straight in with the anxiety that I know a lot of people are feeling right now.

But for yourself, your loved ones and just for this time and for the world and how we all get through this Have you been feeling anxiety it Listen, how how do you think of it?

Think you would have to be either a sociopath or totally enlightened not to be feeling anxiety at a moment like this.

So I would say that the the first thing I would want toe encourage everybody to do is to give themselves a measure of mercy and compassion or the difficult emotions that you're feeling right now.

I think sometimes our emotions about our emotions become a bigger problem.

So if you're feeling frightened and anxious and then you're layering, shame on top of that because you feel like you should be handling it better, or you should be doing your isolation better.

Or you should be creating more while you're alone, or you should be serving the world in some better way.

Now you're just multiplied the suffering, right?

So I think that the antidote for that First of all, it's just a really warm, loving dose of compassion and mercy towards yourself because this is if you're if you're an anxiety, you're a person who is suffering right now, and that deserves a show of mercy.

The second thing that I would say about anxiety is this.

That here's what I think is the central paradox of the human emotional landscape that I'm finding particularly fascinating right this moment, and it's really come to light for me.

So they're these two aspects of humanity that don't match at hence the word paradox.

But they really define us, and the first is that there is no species on Earth more anxious than humans.

It's a hallmark of our species because we have the ability slash curse.

And also, once you've lived on Earth for a little while, you have the experience to recognize this terrifying piece of information, which is that literally anything can happen at literally, any moment to literally any person.

And because we have these vast, rich, colorful imaginations, we can see all sorts of terrifying movies in our heads about all of the possibilities and all of the scariest things that could occur.

And actually, one of the scariest things that could occur is occurring.

It's something that people have imagined in Vic Shin and imagined in science, and it's actually happening right now, so that's quite terrifying.

The paradox is that in that level were very bad emotionally at fear and anxiety, because we would stir ourselves up to a very heated degree because of our imaginations, about how horrible can get and it can get very horrible.

The paradox is that we're also the most capable, resourceful and resilient species that has ever lived on Earth.

The history has shown that when change comes to humanity, either on the global level, like it's happening now are on the personal level.

We're really good at it, were really good at Adaptation and and I think that if we can remember that, it can help to actually mitigate the fear.

And you can remember it in a historical perspective by looking at what humanity has gone through and what we have not only survived but figured out how to thrive through, and you can also look at it personal level.

You could make an inventory of what you yourself have survived and notice, as I often notice.

My panic and my anxiety about the imagined future is deadly on my nervous system.

But I actually have discovered that when there's an actual emergency in the moment, I tend to be pretty good at it.

Um, you'll see that repeated in history and so many examples.

I think about the heartbreaking and devastating phone messages that people were leaving for their loved ones from the towers on September 11th.

And you can hear the calm, the common people's voices.

The biggest emergency ever was happening, and in that moment, intuition told them what to do.

The important thing to do now is to make this phone call, and I think if you can trust that when the point of emergency actually arrives, you'll be able to meet it, and then when the world changes, you'll be able to adapt to it.

I mean, I guess there's a reason why fear is there.

You know, I didn't just evolved by accident.

It's supposed to direct our behavior and help us avoid danger.

It's just that sometimes it gets out of control and actually gets gets in our way and damages us.

I mean any, any specific advice and, like how someone could turn their fear into something useful at this moment, Can I tell you a story that that I'm using as a Touchstone for myself right now?

And drying Wonder and and inspiration from though some of you may have heard of a young woman named Amanda Heller.

She was in the news recently because she got lost in Hawaii in the wilderness for 17 days, and there was a massive, massive hunt for her because she had left her car.

She gone first, simple hike, had left her phone in her car, went off of the woods, took a wrong turn and then had this disastrous 17 days fell off a cliff, broke her leg, walked for 40 miles on a broken knee, lost her shoes in a flash flood.

She had to sleep, packed in mud in order to protect yourself from the cold and mosquitoes.

I mean, just harrowing story of survival.

I met her recently, and she was so lit and radiant with this kind of serenity and this kind of wonder and joy.

And I and I said how you like this, You know, you went through one of the most traumatizing things that a person could go through that well, first of all, if I discovered that I can survive anything going back to this idea of how resourceful and adaptive humans actually are.

But the piece of her story that I am just using, like a life, a life raft right now is that she said on her second day in the jungle, when she realized that she was truly and very much in trouble.

She'd already spent one night in the woods and she was completely lost.

And no one knew where she was and she was full of terror.

She said she closed her eyes and she grade or asked a request.

She made a wish to herself, to consciousness, to the universe.

And she said, Please take my fear away and when I opened my eyes have it be gone and have it be gone and have it not come back and you open your eyes And it was gone and it was replaced by intuition.

And I think intuition is a little bit the opposite of fear, because fear is the terror that you feel about a frightening, imagined future.

Intuition can only happen when you're in the moment.

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It's OK to feel overwhelmed. Here's what to do next | Elizabeth Gilbert

anxiety

extraordinary

meditation

massive