Avoiding Risk is Risky

Black-and-White Risk tree, ready to be climbed.

Though We Don’t Think of It That Way

Mention the word risk in certain crowds and you’ll elicit bombastic responses like: “Without risk, and lots of it, you’ll never be successful. You gotta be at the table to win.” In this context risk is equated simply with “something that you might lose money on.”

It makes sense that we focus on external financial risk. Those results are easy to gauge: Payoff equals rising income. But what about internal risk? What about emotional or psychological fallout from paths not taken? We don’t talk about them as much, but these fallouts play a huge role in our lives. They affect our most important relationships — our friends, families, marriages, our selves.

I started a conversation on this topic yesterday on an app called Anchor. If you hit play below, you can hear stories of these types of risks:

“I’m a healthcare professional. I wanted to strike out on my own rather than work for the man (for lack of a better word). I can see how me being indecisive was harmful to my relationship. At the time, I thought ‘Let’s not take a risk to save my wife from worrying about me as my own boss.' That thinking actually harmed our relationship.”

“I was considering leaving a job I really loved. I'd been with this company for a really long time. I was considering leaving to join a startup. I thought to myself ‘Oh, this is risky. This is really risky.’ A good friend of mine convinced me it was just as risky to stay. He said even if it wasn’t a great job, I was potentially missing out on learning about a new career. About myself.”

Avoiding Risk

Some people think they can avoid risk altogether by just sticking with the status quo. Bad news! This type of non-decision decision can lead to less visible outcomes like anxiety and depression which, in turn, affect everything in our lives, including our relationships. We don’t talk about invisible emotional risks, but they are there with every choice we make. You don’t opt out of emotional risk just because it’s not as outwardly apparent as financial risk.

As an overthinker, I know how tempting it is to try to control outcome by seeing decisions from all sides. Please don’t confuse my invitation to look at the two sides of risk — rational and emotional — as an invitation to overthink.

Drumming up potential positive and negative consequences for big decisions is part of rational, external risk assessment. Often deciders lump emotional components in that assessment at the same time. To truly understand the emotional component of risk is to accept that it’s a bit trickier than that: it probably can’t be understood by thinking too much.

The Role of Intuition in Anticipating Emotional Risk

Risk tree in full color as seen on a wall of our house. Also goes by name of: Change Tree, Intuition Tree, or Luck Tree, depending on the season.

Remember your last big decision. Deep down, didn’t you know what you wanted to do? Much has been written about the wisdom of following gut feelings (Steve Jobs: “Intuition is more powerful than intellect”). To sort out the role of emotional risk, you have to take the time to check in with how you’re feeling.

Getting clear-eyed on risk means facing both rational and emotional risks. And let’s complicate this a bit further: there’s also a problem of lack of ultimate control. For overthinkers who want to understand all angles of a problem, this can be a particular challenge.

It’s Not All Up to You

Joining that startup could lead to a huge pay off. Staying at the well-funded enterprise company you’ve been at for years could turn out to be great. Luck will play a role in outcome. The best we can hope for is mapping our own rational and emotional risks with a clear head and heart.

Then we let go.

A Loose Stab at a BV Podcast: Listen to People Pleasing

This appeared during a search for "juicy." That's how I think of the Topic we're covering today.

If you haven't heard it before, a few things to note about The Beautiful Voyager podcast:

• It's recorded and served entirely through an app called Anchor. This means you can't subscribe to it through your normal channels. You can listen to it here or if you have downloaded Anchor.
• It is in a format that is unique to Anchor, where it's broken up into "waves." There is an initial 2-minute wave, and then subsequent 1-minute waves. Each are labeled by topic.
• Sometimes you'll hear people ask question in the middle of the podcast. Anchor is incredibly interactive, which is its strength, but it can make for confusing listening.
• The current episode, embedded below, is episode 3. To hear previous episodes and read about the origins of the podcast, check out this post.

Without further ado...

Progress! When It Happens, It Feels So Good.

Building a community for overthinkers from scratch is a formidable challenge.  It's in the nature of stress and overthinking to avoid being seen. We don't really want to think about the issues that bother us. And don't even think of bringing up the A word (anxiety). 

Tiger's eye was the first BV avatar, pre-star.

When I was first creating the Facebook group, I thought I'd be lucky to get 20 people to join. I remember being nervous on behalf of the first brave souls who liked the page. I wanted them to feel comfortable and safe, which can be a feat when you're starting something new. No one wants to be the first to the party.

That's why this past week has felt like such a massive accomplishment, though the numbers might not seem like it to others in the media or tech worlds. The first in a week of firsts: we hit over 100 likes on the BV Facebook page (Multiply by 10 to grok the magnitude considering the topic). 100 likes! I'm thrilled.

Then I created a very special map which, with the help of a bunch of other beautiful voyagers, has grown into a very cool organic project. There are now over 60 lighthouses on the map, lighting up the place so that other overthinkers know they aren't alone. The naming of lighthouses has turned into something unusual and specific. It makes the site feel like it's ours. That's what I've always wanted. 

Look at all of those lights!

And the newsletter has quadrupled in size in that time as well.

I want to take a moment to appreciate how far the Beautiful Voyager has come. I know we still have miles to go, but it's about process, not outcome, right? 

I especially want to thank everyone who's helped as a creative early adopter (the people who support ideas before they're fashionable), joined the FB group, or shined their light from their lighthouse. You're the reason I'm doing this in the first place. 

I Wish I Had Known That Amorphous Pain was Not a Given

This is what amorphous carbon looks like on a structural level. Seem familiar?

If there's one thing I wish I knew as a twenty-year-old, it's that migraines, nausea, and stiff necks didn't need to be a regular part of my life. I don't blame my doctors, asking me vague questions I couldn't answer. I was a crappy communicator when it came to describing what I felt. I didn't know how to sort and label the chronic pain that came at me from so many angles. I just chalked the whole ball of pain up to being a migraine person and tried to move on.

Here I am meeting my nephew for the first time. That's a huge scarf tied around my head in the attempt to kill a migraine.

But over time my headaches got worse. In my late 30s it was harder to ignore the impact on my life. I started seeing more doctors and tracking everything I experienced, meticulously noting how my hormone cycle intersected with my other symptoms. This was the point at which I finally started to articulate everything I was feeling. A neurologist was finally able to help by diagnosing me with Generalized Anxiety.

Why am I telling you this? I believe I am not alone on this terribly confusing path. In the time since I was diagnosed, I've talked to tens of people with similar symptoms who also didn't realize that anything could be done about it. They were like me: living with chronic pain, not knowing that anything could change. Simply talking with them has made a huge difference for me, and, as they've told me, for them. 

What do they have in common? They are people who have always thought deeply about things. They've frequently wondered if others ever feel the same way they did. They are often researchers, always looking for the answers. Their friends and family have told them not to think so much ever since they were little kids. They're sensitive and aware of the suffering of others. Another way to put it: at times, it feels like they get stuck in their heads. 

I explain to them that I think of these as the common traits of overthinkers. 

In response, they tend to either say, "Nah, that's not me," in which case, we move on to other topics, or their ears prick up. "That sounds familiar," they might say. "But what's wrong with overthinking, exactly?"

My response is always the same: If you aren't experiencing pain or adverse effects, there's nothing wrong with being an overthinker. But too often overthinking has an obsessive "got to figure things out" quality. As a BV* I know puts it, "In obsessing over figuring things out, you tend to neglect your priorities and what is important in your life."

Or, as a concrete litany of ifs: If your shoulders and neck are so tight that you need to take medicine for them every day. If you experience lightheadedness or dizziness regularly (or if you faint). If you have migraines that affect your ability to work. If you have nausea that makes it uncomfortable to travel or engage in other activities you love. If physical pain that's hard to pin down but reoccurring. If if if.

When again the person I'm speaking with starts to nod, I know that it's time for me to reassure them that they are far from alone. Others have felt--are feeling--this way. I tell them that life doesn't have to be like this. "You don't have to feel this crappy," I say.

On my 40th birthday AKA the day I finally started to realize that I didn't have to feel amorphously bad anymore.

For many of the people I've spoken with in the past year, this is the beginning of a new way of thinking. It's confusing and difficult to accept that it's your mind that can be hurting your body the way that it is, but for many of us, it's true.

"You don't have to feel amorphously bad anymore," I say. "There are many, many things you can do to feel better. But one of the biggest things can happen right now. It starts with realizing that you don't have to live this way."

I had a hard time figuring out what this post should focus on. Press play to listen to a great discussion I had about it beforehand on Anchor.

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*BV = beautiful voyager, an overthinker who experiences physical symptoms as a result of stress.

A credo! A credo, I say!

Ships Lighting the Path for Each Other by Ricardo Paes

If you’re like me — an overthinker with physical symptoms like neck and shoulder pain, stomachaches, or headaches — you’ve most likely spent years and hundreds of dollars trying to feel better. Perhaps, like me, you’ve approached your doctor, acupuncturist, chiropractor, homeopath, or naturopath appointments with ever-dwindling hope: “This will be the time I start to feel better.”

I wish I could go back in time and tell myself that what I was looking for all along was not a single solution, but a pervasive feeling of control. If only I had known then that nothing from the outside could bestow a sense of control upon me.

"Nothing from the outside could bestow a sense of control upon me." Sound familiar?

In the middle of last year, I was forced to stop looking for my answer from external sources. I was forced to reckon with myself and figure out a new approach.

It started with the realization that my needs were not the same as anyone else’s. I had my own thumbprint of anxiety. As a result, I would need to build my own personal toolkit of tactics to figure out how to feel better.

I wanted a serious toolkit, of course, like this one.

“But you’ve tried to feel better before,” I reasoned with myself. “How can you know what tools should be in your toolkit now?”

That had to change too. To be able to evaluate a tactic, I changed how I approached them. Instead of thinking that the answer would be bestowed upon me from an outside source, I faced reality. The answer I was looking for really was inside of me (and no, I’m not from Kansas, though my husband is).

I needed to learn how to tune in to my physical response to the world and listen to the anxiety-driven cortisol and adrenaline rushes I had always run from. Though I’d spent years thinking about what’s wrong, this was an entirely new process.

Riding the wave.

I learned a new trick I now call riding the wave. The wave is the hormone rush you get when you experience anxiety. Riding it involves accepting that our minds and bodies have information to offer us if we can learn how to listen to them. For me, this was a crucial step. In the past, when a therapist asked “How do you feel?” I had no clue what the answer was. All I felt was pressure to perform. This is the reason I wasn’t diagnosed with anxiety until I was 39 years old and an experienced neurologist spotted the symptoms at a migraine appointment.

I learned that any destressing tactic — even something as simple as going for a walk to distract myself —wouldn’t work unless I was using my own inner compass. I needed to be able to receive basic feedback to know whether the relaxation method I tried was actually working. Since I never knew how to do that in the past, I was always stuck in my head. Closing the feedback loop is what allowed me to finally add tools that actually worked to my own unique toolkit.

So where does the credo come in? Here it is! It’s why I feel The Beautiful Voyager is different than anything else I’ve seen. Why I feel I need to keep creating it. Why I want other ships to join me and light the path:

Beautiful Voyagers help each other.

We believe that lighting the path begins by sharing toolkits, tactics, and tales of the wave.

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Take a Listen to a Discussion About This Post! You'll hear my voice first.

The First Launch of The Beautiful Voyager Podcast

Ricardo and I recording our intercontinental podcast

You are looking at the two hosts of the inaugural Beautiful Voyager podcast recording an early episode as it sets sail. Imagine it as a modern day KonTiki stubbornly nudging its way along looking for the trade winds. Take a listen to our trailer, released March 3:

Ric (an illustrator who lives in Japan and is as wonderful as he sounds) and I met through Anchor, the incredible app I've been spending a lot of time on and that I've written about here.

We quickly went on to create our first episode called Biases & Disclaimers on March 4:

Earlier tonight we launched our second episode! It's called The Anxious Child. Check it out.

If you listen through, you'll hear an amazing set of comments and questions following the podcast. This is why we chose Anchor as the space for our podcast, unusual though it might be. We really wanted it to be a collaboration with the community there. And we would love others to join too! Just take a listen to these episodes and comment wherever you like--on Facebook, Twitter, or here. We'll be sure to share your thinking on the wave so that it gets discussed with a larger group.

Here's to new frontiers and setting sail!

A New App Called Anchor & The Power of Vulnerability to Heal Stress

The director of the 1959 comedy Pillow Talk loved the split screen technique. Is this why he chose a script about a party line, perhaps?

At 7:08 AM this morning my 6-year-old daughter see-sawed on the edge of a temper tantrum. She didn’t want to be standing on a cold wooden floor in her nightgown. She was ready to fight every to-do on the unhappy Monday morning list scrolling out in front of her.

Don’t underestimate the strength of a cranky cowgirl.

As she started to howl I took a deep breath and said, “I’m actually kind of nervous.” She stopped and looked at me with a mixture of surprise and skepticism. “Why are you nervous?” she asked.

“I’m going to have to start looking for a job soon,” I said. “I don’t want people to reject me and say no.”

“Well if they do…you just keep asking until someone says yes.” She walked to the dresser and grinned. Then suddenly she was putting on her pants.

Wait, what happened there? Why was she able to interrupt her tantrum to help me? And why did that, in turn, seem to make her feel better?

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hey, whatcha talking about on that party line?

For a little over a week, I’ve been logging (many) hours on a new app called Anchor. It calls itself “radio by the people.” In truth, it’s more like those telephone party lines from the 60s moved to a beautiful shiny new modern home. The fun and simplicity of the app belies something deep that’s taking place there every day.

But first, a look at Anchor and how it works.

It starts with speaking out loud to your phone. You record a 2-min-or-under message and then you caption it. Here’s an example of one of mine. (This is what it looks like if you hit one of the discussions from social media, i.e. you’re not a user and you’ve just had a wave shared with you):

https://anchor.fm/w/9AA2D0

If you’re a member of the community and using the app itself, this is what that same discussion looks like:

You play through each response in order, scrolling down and responding as you go if you choose. As you can see, it’s an asynchronous spoken conversation with people who start as strangers. (That just sounded like the beginning of an 80s sitcom. Cue Balki Bartokomous.)

Anchor is being used in all sorts of ways. And here’s where it gets interesting for someone examining the role of anxiety in our culture. Anchor is particularly revealing about the transformative power of vulnerability.

I surely don’t have to convince you that stress and anxiety are issues facing America today. We live in an era where people are always looking for new ways to escape. The entire Trump campaign is a barnacle that is capitalizing off of the human desire for relief and escape from stress.

This is how Anchor fits in: In the two weeks I’ve used it, I’ve received more clearer and more direct objective perspectives on my thoughts and feelings than on any of the other platforms combined. The people I’ve met are funny, smart, and thoughtful. We’re from a wide variety of backgrounds. We all share something in common: we want to share our experiences to help others and we want to keep the conversations real. It's the interplay of helping others and being helped through new perspectives that leads to a true calming of stress symptoms.

Growing up in the Midwest as a Gen X’er, stoicism and individualism were highly prized and coveted traits. If you felt undue stress or needed help, you’d do it privately, seeking out an “expert.” My experience on Anchor reinforces for me that things are changing. We’re now looking for help in all directions. We know that by helping others, we help ourselves, and that it feels good. Anchor creates a space for an easy give-and-take — especially for people who are willing to be vulnerable. Since the help many of us need is to trust ourselves, learning to be vulnerable is an important first step. Vulnerability is a daunting challenge for the anxious and stressed among us.

This brings us back to my daughter and this morning. What was it about me revealing my nervousness that immediately calmed her down?

I have a few speculations. By revealing myself, I may have helped her:

- Feel less alone.

- Show her how much she knows and how she can learn from herself. “Just keep asking!”

- Feel strong and insightful.

- Maybe I should ask my Anchor crew what they think about it.

It may seem counterintuitive, but when a cranky cowgirl is about to start screaming in front of you, leading with your own fear can be the bravest thing you can do.

Two Skeptics Discuss: What is Intuition?

Two old pals hanging out near the longing of great hearts.

Panio and I met when we both lived in New York shortly after we graduated from college. We worked in book publishing: he at Crown, me at Harcourt. Our love of books was at the center of our lives. He's always been (and will always be) a writer. I thought of myself (and probably always will) as a reader. We've now been friends for over 15 years.

We talk about life the way that old friends do, investigating the world that surrounds us together. If you read this Q&A, you'll see why Panio is one of my favorite people to talk to. 

I asked him if we could dig into this topic together for The Beautiful Voyager crowd. He was game! 

M: You and I were recently talking about how as we're getting older (we both turned 40 this year) we're both finally learning to listen to our intuition — be it about work or what to do on a Saturday. What's the deal? Why didn't we listen to our intuition before?

P: There were surely a number of factors; the biggest one for me was that intuition works in the realm of feelings. We’re a skeptical society, data driven, rationality loving, it’s brain-brain-brain all the time, and for a long time I played into that. When faced with a decision, if I’d feel a twinge of something, urging me to do or not do something, I’d push it aside and try to reason my way through it instead — for all the good that did. There’s that moment when you just know something is a terrible idea, that this job or project or person is a bad fit and going to make you unhappy, and yet you willfully disregard the feeling and do it anyway because there’s no clear reason not to. And then? It blows up in your face. Or vice versa, this sense that here’s a thing you should absolutely do, but the math doesn’t add up, so you let it go — only to regret it. Those experiences had to happen enough times for me to concede that maybe something I was feeling could be right, that feeling can trump thought, not just in my heart, but out in the world.

M: Is it intuition the right word for it? That's a word with bad connotations, right?

P: It’s true, it’s got lousy connotations — sounds childish or imaginary. “Gut” is much more respected, but I think that’s probably just sexism at play, as men love to talk about going with their gut. And “instinct” isn’t quite right because it doesn’t get at the idea that there’s learning behind intuition. I wish there were a word that combines wisdom with self-knowledge. There probably is — in German.  

M: What kind of advice would you give your kids about intuition? How do you think intuition is informed by experience — how do you think it changes over time?

P: That’s perfect framing, because I often think of intuition as being like a parent. It frequently tells you something you don’t really want to know right now. Like your mom or dad, intuition has your best interest at heart — it’s trying to help you, to protect you — but especially when you’re younger, you just don’t want to hear it, because then you’ll have to do something other than the careless thing you really want to do.

You’ve got a young child, like I do, so I’m sure you’ve seen Frozen. I remember during my first viewing, when Anna meets the dashing prince and he’s sweeping her off her feet, I found myself thinking, “What’s he hiding? This is too easy. This can’t be right.” And then he turns out to be a devious asshole and it was almost a relief, because like every parent in the audience I knew something was off. To be fair, that’s not a great example of intuition at play, that one’s more about identifying storytelling tropes, but they’re really not that different. In many ways, I see intuition as a kind of highly nuanced pattern recognition. It’s our brain sorting through all of these set-ups and inputs and consequences and then trying to ferret out what’s causality, so that we can replicate the good results and avoid the bad results going forward. There’s a pretty sophisticated set of data that needs to be gathered, with all sorts of false positives that we need to learn to discard. And then — the really hard part — the results get translated into feelings. Which we have to then acknowledge and interpret, another highly nuanced skill that takes time to develop.   

So, long-winded advice… pay attention to what you’re feeling. Don’t ignore it. Don’t belittle it. You don’t have to act on it impulsively, or at all, but at the very least, listen to what you’re trying to tell yourself through your body.

M: Should everyone be listening to their intuition, or do some people have bad intuition?

P: That’s a fascinating idea: bad intuition. I always assumed everyone had good intuition but they responded to it with varying degrees of appreciation. Of course there are people who always seem to make that key mistake again and again — what if they’re just following earnest yet terrible inner advice? I hope that’s not the case.    

M: Intuition is a weird concept but it seems important.

P: Yes, though I haven’t always been great about listening to intuition, I’ve been drawn to it. In fact, last week I went back to a novel I started writing when I was 26 and saw that the first line was “He should have known better.” So even back then I was obsessed with this idea that we intuitively know things, and yet for all sorts of reasons — pride, fear, desire — we discount them. At its heart, intuition is about identifying and communicating the truth. We live in an era that privileges reason above all else — it’s been that way for centuries — but there are limits to just applying intellectual analysis to our lives. It’s cognitively exhausting, and it’s not entirely accurate. It reminds me of how behavioral economics has come to dominate the field, because this idea of a “rational actor” has been disproven over and over by actual human experience. Intuition exists in this hazy yet critical realm between intellect and emotion. And it’s tailored to you. It’s made by you and it makes you. It’s your parent and your child. What’s more important than that?  

Thank you so much for sharing these thoughts about intuition, friend. I am so glad to have you in my life!

Panio Gianopoulos is a writer and editor based in NYC. His work has appeared in Tin House, Northwest Review, Salon, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rattling Wall, Big Fiction, Catamaran Literary Reader, Chicago Quarterly Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of the novella A Familiar Beast and a forthcoming collection of short stories, How to Get Into Our House and Where We Keep the Money.