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Pandemic Panic Prevention
Your environment is designed to put you in a state of panic.
The entire world is gearing up to stimulate your fears. Newspapers, TV news, politicians, magazines, online blogs and social media all gain attention by exploiting our brain’s reaction to calamities. They all benefit when we are acting from a state of primal fear.
We engage our natural fear response from internal reaction or outside triggers. Either way, it impacts our entire physiology. Our entire body prepares us to defend our lives or flee the danger. The fear response is initiated in the amygdala region of the brain. When a stimulus is perceived as threatening the amygdala activates all areas to prepare our motor functions for a response. It releases stress hormones that can help us short term, but do damage in the long term.
These physiological changes can help us be more responsive to physical danger. Our brain becomes more focused and hypervigilant. Our pupils dilate, we breathe faster. Our heart rate increases along with blood pressure. The major muscles gain blood flow and glucose while other functions are reduced.
However, long term fear response creates a state of anxiety. This is crippling for a significant number of people…the estimates range from 10 to 20% of the population. For the rest of us, we can still manage day to day, but we miss many creative opportunties.
News, politicians, political groups and your community all benefit from maintaining your anxiety. When you are in a state of fear, your belief systems bypass your neo-cortex, or thinking brain. As a result, it is easy to manipulate large groups of people to react and benefit the fear creators. When you are in a state of fear, the news sources can create reactions that benefit them.
The problem is, in a state of fear, you are blinded to opportunities. There are so many opportunities in chaos. In my twenty years of floor trading, the most money I made was when everything was broken, the volatility was unpredictable and price was disconnected from value.
When a significant number of people are in a state of fear, their decision process distorts prices away from long term value. This produces investment, career, entrepreneurial and business opportunities.
What state of mind is most conducive to seeing advantages in these value distortions? The mindset that is most productive has the following qualities:
1. Awareness of our own internal mindset
2. Acceptance of what we discover in our internal state
3. Clarity of our highest mindset experience
4. Trusting ourselves to engage whatever comes at us
5. Open to creating new beliefs and roles for ourselves in new chaotic environments
Moving our state of mind in this direction is challenging enough in a stable environment. In a chaotic environment, it is even more of a challenge. However, if you just journal your response to these five states, this awareness can lead to significant mindset expansion.
Creativity in Chaos is the name of a new weekly live online group I have created. Its mission is to support you in moving to a mindset that can not only survive but thrive in the chaos and aftermath of this pandemic. You can learn how to join us here.
Where do you see the herd fears, and where are the opportunities? Let me know what you think in the comments section below.
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