Why “Being Responsible” Might Just Be Fear in a Trench Coat
Got a very convincing list of reasons why you can’t do the thing you want? This episode is for you. Hit play.
You have a list. A very convincing list of reasons why you can’t, shouldn’t, or aren’t ready to go after the thing you want. And here’s the wild part – your brain built that list on purpose. It thinks it’s keeping you safe. Spoiler: it’s not.
In this episode, I dig into one of the stickiest places people get stuck – fear. Not the bear-chasing-you kind of fear. The quieter, sneakier kind that shows up as procrastination, perfectionism, overthinking, and a very logical-sounding list of reasons why now just isn’t the right time.
Welcome to Laughter Revolution. I’m your host Marla Simlett. And I’ve built this podcast on the simple belief that while life can be heavy, getting through it doesn’t always have to be. Because laughter!
Which I’ve come to know as one of the most underutilized yet powerful tools in our toolbox to help us unstick our stuck, to move forward in our lives, to be more resilient, and to become our greatest selves.
So today, I am going to talk about fear and how it keeps us stuck, because it’s a particularly sticky place for a lot of people. And how we can use laughter and the positive energy of laughter to move us from fear to freedom.
So let’s get into it.
Now, a couple months ago, I made a decision. I decided that I was going to take six months and go on a solo travel journey.
Now, for some of you, that may not seem like a big deal, but for me, it was humongous! Because for years, decades even, I had been thinking about this but always coming up with this host of reasons why I couldn’t or shouldn’t do it.
Stuff like, “Marla, there’s no way you’d be able to manage that on your own. What if you get sick? What if you get injured? You can’t afford it. You are going to be lonely out there, and you can’t manage that. What if you get lost?” And one of my particular favorites, “Marla, you are plain just too old to do something like that.”
So I suspect most of you have a list like that. Might not be related to travel. Maybe it’s about a career decision you need to make, an opportunity you want to check out, or maybe a relationship or a move in your life that you want to pursue. And every time you think about it, that list of reasons comes up.
Now, hands up anyone who doesn’t have a list like that somewhere in their life. Yeah, I didn’t see one of you put your hands up, so I know it’s true. Something that we’re all dealing with.
And if you’re like me, those reasons make a lot of sense. They feel like wisdom. They feel like being responsible. They feel like good common sense. Now I’m no mathematician. I will speculate, though, that about 98% of the time, that’s not true.
Can you guess what it’s really about? Yeah, fear.
And here’s the thing. This type of fear, the type that isn’t about a bear chasing us through the woods or a bus barreling towards us on the street. It’s usually not very helpful, and really, it just keeps us stuck. It gets in the way.
So it isn’t helpful. It gets in the way. But we all have it. So what the heck is going on?
Let’s talk a little bit about fear. So really deep down in the center of your head, in the center of your brain, there’s this little almond-shaped piece called the amygdala. And the amygdala has a number of jobs, but one of its main jobs is to detect threat and to keep us alive.
Think of it like your 24/7 security guard. The minute your security guard detects a threat anywhere around you, it pushes the panic button. And what happens in your body is that adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormones, start rushing out into your system. Your breathing gets a little more shallow. Your heart rate picks up. The blood rushes from your head and your digestive system out into your arms and legs so you can get ready for fight or flight. And this happens in a millisecond before we even have time to register what’s happening or have a conscious thought.
But the thing is, this security guard isn’t all that bright. He is doing his job, but he can’t recognize the difference between a real threat and what we could call a perceived threat. A bear chasing you in the woods and getting lost in a strange country? For the security guard – same, same.
When I started to notice that and when I started to dig into that a little bit more, I developed the Marla Fear Rule. And the Marla Fear Rule is that if it isn’t likely to kill me or maim me right now, fear is probably misplaced. And it’s time to take a look and figure out what’s actually going on.
So as you know, Laughter Revolution, I like to bring laughter in to help with some of these problems.
So I’d like to introduce you all to Little f. “Hey, everybody”.
Now, Little f is what I call that fear that comes in on a perceived threat. Little f is smaller and quieter than his brother, Big F, who comes in with all those body sensations that I talked about.
And he is actually harder to detect because he’s a little bit sneakier, a little bit more stealth. So I don’t often get shaky hands or clammy skin or all those things when Little f comes in. But I get those lists that come up in my head because Little f is a master of disguise. He puts his trench coat on over his security guard outfit, and he comes in looking like:
Procrastination.” Oh yeah, I can’t get to that right now. I’ll do that next week”.
And overthinking. “Oh, but what about this, and what about this, and ooh, maybe that could happen”
Or decision paralysis, where you go out and you’re talking to everyone else, asking their opinion, but never actually doing anything.
It can also come in as perfectionism, and that’s a favorite one for my Little f. “Oh, well, you can’t do that right now because you have to do it right. You have to have all your ducks in a row and get it perfectly, and so we better work on that a little bit more”.
So hello, list of reasons. That’s Little f actually doing his job, protecting us from threats, even if those threats are fake news.
And what happens to us is that when those lists come in with that feeling of perceived threat, it kills action. Because there’s actually a term called probability neglect, where when we’re under threat, our brain overemphasizes the threat and what could happen, and underemphasizes our ability to deal with it. And because what we focus on expands, the more that we’re focusing on all the things that could go wrong, the less likely we are to move forward. And that messes with our confidence. We may be confident people who know we can do things, but all of a sudden, we can’t figure out how that could happen. And that keeps us stuck.
So me and Little f, we go way back. We have a long relationship, and I’ve been stuck in quite a few places over the course of my lifetime. But what I’ve come to realize is that fear doesn’t mean stop. Fear is information, not the enemy.
And if you take nothing else from this podcast, I’d love for you to remember this:
You can be afraid and do it anyway.
What? It’s true. You don’t have to be fearless to move ahead and face your fears. And we often see people who we think of as courageous, and we think, “Oh my God, they’re so brave. They don’t have any fear at all.” But what courage actually is, is feeling the fear and doing it anyway. And that’s the place we want to get to.
That brings us to our Laughter Toolbox section. I always love to give you some helpful tools to work your way through what we’re talking about.
When it comes to Little f, I have a five-step process, and I’ll go through that quickly for you, and hopefully it’ll be something you can try out.
So Step 1 is – I need to recognize Little f. I need to know when he’s coming in. So if I’m feeling a little bit scared or a little bit panicky, I check my body. What are the body signals that are coming up for me? What is the list that’s coming into my head that sounds familiar because it’s played over and over again? What are the actions or inactions, as it were, that are happening that don’t fall in line with what I know to be true or what I want to do and know I can do?
I also like to bring laughter in at this point because sometimes when we’re trying to identify something that has felt really scary for us and figure out what it’s about, we’re focusing on that threat, and so that feeling in our body, that panic button actions, continues.
So bringing a little laughter in helps to lower the stress hormones. It brings more oxygen to our brain. It brings in those feel-good hormones and puts us in a better place to recognize Little f when he’s there and move on to the next steps.
However that looks for you, I love my IGG, my internal giggle generator. So I might just giggle a little bit and then move on. But you can do whatever works for you to bring in the laughs and bring in the giggles.
Step 2 is what I call greet and appreciate. “Hey, Little f. Look at you coming in here. Thank you so much for coming in because you think I am under threat and you are trying to help me out.”
The point of this is that we often deal with our emotions or the things that come up for us with shame, judgment, blame, and harshness. And that’s not helpful. So welcoming in Little f, recognizing that he’s there, and thanking him for doing his job… I see Little f as a toddler, and he’s coming running in, trying to do his job. And what we do with kids, or what I hope we do with kids, is we acknowledge that they are doing… they think they’re doing the best they can. We thank them for doing that, and then we redirect them. And so that’s this piece of it, welcoming Little f in, thanking him for his duty.
And then listening is Step 3. What is Little f afraid of? What are the threats that he’s trying to protect us from? For me, going on a trip, it is loneliness. It’s worrying about what other people think. It’s worrying about getting lost. Although as my husband keeps pointing out, I really don’t have a sense of direction, so that one is probably pretty valid. But understanding a little bit more about what those reasons are.
And then move into Step 4, which is digging in a little deeper. Because I’d love to tell you that laughter is going to solve everything, and it does help with a lot of things. But it’s really more of a reset so that we can move into some of the deeper work of figuring out why does that worry, threat, or scary feeling come up in the first place? Where does it come from?
And so you can do whatever process that is for you. Some people go to counselling. Some people talk it through with friends or family. You might journal. You might meditate. Whatever works for you to dig in a little bit deeper so you have a better understanding about why Little f is there.
And then Step 5 is the countering with reality. So this is very cognitive behavioral, but it really is important at this point because if we’re overemphasizing the threat and underemphasizing our abilities, we really need to switch that dial so that we have a real sense of the reality of what’s happening.
Now again, I love to bring laughter in, so I will often start with what I like to call a doom and gloom improv session. Before I make that list or start thinking things through, I do this first.
If you don’t already know, one of the core tenets of improv comedy is the yes, and. So one of the participants says something, and the other person has to agree and add to it to keep the momentum going. Yes, and.
So for Little f, I like to bring in his counterpart, Cathy Calamity, because they work really well together. They are BFFs. And so I bring them in, and I might do a little improv with them.
Sometimes I do it out loud. I’m not above talking to myself. Sometimes it’s just in my head to get the giggles going. So that might sound something like this.
Little f might say, “Oh my God, there’s no way that we can go on a trip because we are going to get lost.”
Cathy Calamity chimes in, “Yes, and if we get lost, we are never going to make it home.”
“Yeah, and if we never make it home, we are going to starve to death because we don’t speak the language, so we can’t get food.”
“Yes, and if we starve to death, we are literally going to die on the street.”
“Yeah, and if we die on the street, oh my God, cats are going to eat our face.”
Yes. And whatever comes from that.
So just having fun with that helps to release some of the tension and stress that might still be being held by these reasons so that you can again counter that with, “I’m pretty sure getting lost in the age of GPS and all of the other things. Compasses. You can tell I’m not very good at not getting lost. You can actually ask people for directions”.
Countering that with what is actually likely to happen reminds us it’s not such a big deal, so that we can start to feel confident again and start to feel like we’re back in the driver’s seat.
Now let me move into the next section, which is our Laughter Revolution Laughter Lounge. I’ve mentioned before, I want this to be more than a podcast. I want to build a community, a revolution even, if I dare say it, of like-minded people who want to learn and grow and share and laugh together, redefining how change can happen.
So I invite you to come to the Laughter Lounge by sending me your ideas, the things that are working for you. Have you tried the five-step process with Little f? How did that work for you? What makes you laugh? What makes you giggle? Is there a place you’re particularly stuck and you’re wondering how laughter can help with that?
Send those in to me and we’ll talk about them and share them in the Laughter Lounge so I can feel like we are all together and building this community.
You can do that by connecting with me on Instagram. You can post in the comments below if you’re able, or you can send me an email at [email protected].
So I’m looking around the Laughter Lounge today. “Hello, hello, hello, hello”.
Yeah, pretty empty. Oh, wait a minute, there is someone here in the Laughter Lounge with us today.
We have Sylvia from the Lower Mainland here in BC, who has sent in a clip for us, that I can share with you in the comments or in the show notes.
So Sylvia and me, Canadian, and I don’t like to brag, but we’re some of the funniest people on the planet. And Sylvia has sent in a great example of Canadian humour that I hope you’ll enjoy. It made me laugh out loud.
It’s a clip from the Red Green Show, which aired years ago. But comedian Steve Smith had developed this character, Red Green, who’s a handyman. His motto was, “If you can’t be handsome, you better be handy.” And so this is a clip of one of his handyman tips.
Thanks Sylvia for sending that in, and I hope everybody gets a chuckle out of it, like I did and like she did. So that’s it for the Laughter Lounge
What’s next? In three weeks, I leave on my trip. A new episode is coming, and I already know Little f is going to have plenty to say.
I also know there’s another sticky spot coming up for me as I unpack my baggage with luggage. So I hope you’ll join me for the next episode as I’m getting ready for my trip and talking a little bit more about how laughter is going to help me deal with that issue, and hopefully help you as well.
So that’s it for today’s episode. Thanks so much for joining me. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you did and you want more, hit subscribe so that you can be alerted to whenever a new podcast comes out, every second Thursday.
Feel free to pass on the link as well to anyone else you think might need a little learning and laughter in their lives so that they can join the revolution. The more, the merrier.
You can also subscribe to my Laughter Revolution Digest. And I recommend you do that if you’d like to follow along a little more closely with me on my trip. Because I’m going to be sharing pictures, information, and all of the things that I’m learning and laughing about while I’m away.
You can subscribe by going to my website, marlasimlett.com, and hitting the subscribe button there.
Thanks for being here. This is Marla Simlett. This was Laughter Revolution. Remember, until next time: Laugh more. Be well. Become your greatest you.
