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The First 30 Seconds: Why Every Feeling Is a Gift

Your body's fear response is not a fault. It is thirty seconds of something brilliant.

You hear two cars crash outside your door, or a horn behind you, or the word "bear" round a campfire, and before you have thought a single thought your body has already moved. This week I walk through what actually happens in those first thirty seconds, a bit of it borrowed from David Ji's book Destressify. The adrenaline, the heart, the sugar your liver lets go, the hands that go cold so a cut would bleed less. None of it a malfunction. All of it the body doing the most competent, protective thing it knows.

Then I want to go further than the science. Fear is a gift. So is anxiety, alertness, even stress. We are taught to get rid of them, and I once sat on a show whose whole aim was to delete fear for good. I spent every break arguing the other way. The trouble is never the feeling. The trouble is when it takes over, when it runs eight hours a day, when it stops you doing the things you want to do. So we keep the whole stick, the joyful end and the hard end, instead of chopping the bad bits off and ending up with nothing. We hear the feeling, we understand it, we let it be there, and then we decide. Hear it, then decide. That is the whole thing.

Key topics:

• What really happens in the body's first thirty seconds, step by step
• Why none of it is a malfunction, and why the calm ones round the campfire did not survive
• Fear, anxiety, stress and alertness as gifts, and the show that wanted to delete fear
• The healthy and unhealthy version of every feeling, including the misread "everything is just thoughts" version of Zen
• The stick you keep chopping, and why you end up unable to tell the joy from the pain
• Only ever seeing three colours, and what we miss when we numb the spectrum
• The five second gap, and hearing the feeling before you decide what to do

Companion meditation: IPM 104 on Inner Peace Meditations. [insert IPM 104 title]

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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With thanks this week to:

A warm welcome to Susan, a brand new monthly supporter.

And a special word for Stuart, who reached two years as a monthly supporter this week. That is not a small thing.

To everyone who supported the show across these past two weeks: Addie, Amy, Barbara, Michael, Karen, Laura, David, Jenna and Mia, and Johnny.

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