Serenity in Stressful Times – TPW384

I'm a natural worrier and you may be too. This week we're looking at ways to keep our worry and anxiety under control and find serenity no matter what our circumstances. Cultivating serenity can help us be more productive We live in stressful times. A long global pandemic and all the social, economic, and emotional effects of it, not to mention political hostility. As I record and publish this episode, armed conflict is underway in eastern Europe. So many things are happening these days that have the potential to cause anxiety, fear, and various forms of unease. Much of this is a response to a sense that we have lost control, that we are at the mercy of forces and threats beyond our control. It’s an unnerving, disturbing feeling.   I’ve certainly experienced all of this myself. I’m a worrier, naturally tending to look for worst-case scenarios, which leads to struggles with anxiety and fear. Lately I've been thinking about how the seemingly constant threats to our safety, security, health, even survival--and our emotional response to them--affect our ability to accomplish the things we want to accomplish--to be productive.  As one article I read recently notes, “anxiety . . . harms our ability to be in control, making us feel paralyzed. Anxiety clouds our judgment — it’s a disorienting experience when facing a threat we can’t understand." Another article says anxiety makes us less focused, more irritable, less engaged, among other things, quoting Hanna Stensby, MA, a marriage and family therapist as saying, “As you fret over something you can’t control, you lose the ability to concentrate on the task at hand, engage your creativity, or formulate new ideas. . . .”  The bottom line is that when we are stressed, anxious, or fearful, we are, in essence, in survival mode, and in that mode it’s hard to be productive in any sense. So as I’ve been observing--and experiencing--this, the question in my mind has been what can I do about it? I don’t want to live in a state of stress and anxiety, distracted and unfocused and unable to accomplish the things I care about.   But I’ve also thought about the teaching I’ve heard that if we focus on what we don’t want, we’ll just get more of it. Just last week as I was driving home from Florida I listened to Ryan Holiday”s book, Stillness Is the Key, in which he talks about that very concept. And that’s been my experience: the more I think about not wanting to be anxious, the more anxious I feel.   So what’s the alternative?   Instead of thinking about what I don’t want to feel, I asked myself what do want to feel? How do I want to be in the world? And the word that came to mind was serene. That's not a word people would necessarily associate me with. So I’ve been investigating the concept of serenity--what it is, what it means, and how can I develop and sustain it. What is serenity?  “Serenity is a state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled”. It is not pie-in-the-sky pretending bad things don’t exist, but the skill of not letting those things throw you off balance. Even in the midst of the storm, being able to remain calm. How does it help productivity? When we are calm and serene, we are less distracted and therefore better able to focus, to stay in the moment, to work effectively at the things we need and want to do. We are happier--and as we’ve discussed many times before,