ASM230 This Feels Hard

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welcome to ask science mike it's a weekly podcast where we believe that every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response i'm your host mike mccarg and it is so good to talk with you today um for those of you who are regular listeners i took a vacation last week so i didn't post on social media other than some minor amplification of the work that marginalized advocates are doing around police brutality right now i didn't do any texting i didn't do any emailing i didn't do any work for a whole week wow so i'm back i feel good i feel renewed and um gosh rest is so important and i forget that um but i want to you know thank uh tanner and victory uh for encouraging me to take a break that i needed after doing the virtual book tour 21 stops uh was a lot especially when i also had a midweek book club that's actually still going on the official book club for those of you who pre-ordered it still still has several weeks remaining so really excited about that uh but i just decided you know i was going to um restock a little bit which is important because i have so much planned to share with you all and i thought today would be a nice day to take a breather even on the podcast i got i got some rest and i wanted to invite you into some rest at all so or as well so before we get into that as always a few announcements right up at the top number one and this is a this is a major announcement i mean this is this is a this is a big announcement uh we're working on a new show format for ask science mike i mean a major revamp this podcast has been basically unchanged uh since the first episode came out in what 2014 it's been a while and um i i've just i've i've got a vision for something new that i would like to try and i know a lot of you rely on this podcast to be consistent and predictable and i appreciate and understand that and i'm trying to look at what is great about the program and how we can lean even more into that and what i like about this program is that it is focused on you it is audience focused and so i want to leave lean even further into that i like that this show helps us balance learning to think critically while also learning to live empathetically and those two things aren't often included together and you all are teaching me how to do that so i'd like to lean more into that and frankly one thing i'm learning is that a lot of this audience is much younger than i thought uh so shockingly so frankly to me um and when i say this audience i mean people who follow my work and not people who listen to ask clients mike so y'all believe it or not there's a very large segment of people who want to be involved in my work who just don't really do podcasts because they're they're younger and podcasts just aren't a format that interests them so i'm trying to figure out how to create a program that is multi-platform that is an exceptional podcast and stands alone as a podcast and is focused on an excellent audio presentation but also works on other platforms especially streaming video platforms so that's kind of what i've been thinking about what i've been working on with victory who's my producer and tanner who kind of handles all the operations for everything i do i've been talking that over with brent and caitlin and greg and andrew and all the people who are involved in ask science mike and there's not more to say right now but there's going to be more to say soon about what that looks like i'm really really really excited about it and for those of you who are patrons we'll be talking to you about specifics first and we're actually in the middle of producing a pilot episode for you to watch and see and listen to they'll be available in an audio format of course i am still a podcaster but i just wanted to kind of share that with you i'm so excited about it we've been working on it for a long time and we're finally getting close to moving forward with it obviously some of our our plans had to change because of covet 19. so we've been looking at what does it look like to create a new show in the middle of physical distancing and safer at home orders and all of that so i'm really excited about it can't wait to share it with you the other thing is my events i have been starting to do events again and those events have been virtual i've been doing online events and not just my book tour i've been invited in to speak for educational institutions and different churches in congregational organizations and i've been doing all that in an online format and in this era folks it's going to be some time before we can safely gather together again in larger numbers i just want to let you know that if you're involved in an organization where you have time you need to fill that could be a church that could be online coursework that could be a company whatever it could be an online conference i am well set up to do those sorts of things i have a really nice camera i have professional lighting professional audio i have fiber internet and so i've been doing a lot of virtual speaking events and that might be outside of your imagination of what you thought i could do before so if you need someone to speak on a virtual basis just go to mikemcarg.com speaking there's a form you can fill out there and tom who is the best in the business we'll get back with you and talk to you about what it's like to bring me in in a virtual capacity for events i'll be very transparent here speaking is the main way that i made my living and the loss of my um speaking income has been devastating for me and for my family so um i'm trying to find new ways to bring that work back so that i can basically pay my bills and eat you know i love science mike it's a wonderful program i'm so grateful for the patrons here and at science mike just about covers its costs and uh and that's it i don't actually derive any significant income from the podcast you know in a good month i might make four or five hundred dollars in what is now my only income source um so if you have ever thought about bringing me into speak uh now is the time also that is true for many people whose work you enjoy you know i talk to a lot of folks who are writer podcaster communicators and most of us make the overwhelming majority of our income from speaking and events so i know everybody's having a hard time right now with the pandemic uh and i'm so sensitive to that and if you're in a position to hire speakers virtually we could really use the work and a lot of us are pretty good at it okay so again mikemcarg.com speaking i'm doing virtual events they are helping and i enjoy them you know they're i'll be honest they're not the same they are not the same as being in a room together with people um and yet it is still nice i mean for example the book tour i just did 21 stops each event was between a short one was 45 minutes a long one was two and a half hours and um i really enjoyed it i really enjoyed it because the way i do events is we use a platform that and lets people join me on camera not a zoom where everyone's on camera but you can bring people up a person at a time and we can really talk and you know when so many of us are spending so much time at home it felt nice just to see people and just to talk with people and what i noticed compared to events i've done in the past online when i would do longer form live streams is that it was really consistent in the attendance the people who arrived at the beginning stayed all the way until the end and so culturally virtual events just make more sense but as i talked with all of you on the book tour and i i counted it was uh several hundred people uh almost 500 people i think across the arc of all the events um some themes came up in what we talked about and you know what when i do an event that i host it is all about uh all about you all about what people want to talk about i definitely prefer um being responsive to an audience over sharing what i think is important and the theme that seemed to come up from all the events and all the questions at every event was this feels hard right this feels hard i just hear that over and over and over again it feels hard right now things feel difficult i feel tired i feel anxious i feel sad i feel overwhelmed i feel confused i feel disempowered and so i thought that would be great today just to talk about that the feeling that all of this is hard and the first thing i want to say is that yes all of this feels hard because it is hard we are living in extraordinarily difficult times right now i mean even when compared to the arc of human history right now is a genuinely difficult time to be a person on planet earth and there's a lot of reasons for that we're starting to experience regularly for the first time the impacts of global climate change so that was the backdrop before things got acute just this year but we were already seeing an intensification in our seasonal natural disasters 100 year floods seem to be happening every year historic wildfires are happening every year major hurricanes are happening more often and more often and more often tornadoes all of these things we look at the news we say is this uh are we just being shown more of the world or are there genuinely more challenging things happening with weather and it turns out both are true climate change is injecting basically more energy and more atmospheric turbulence into our atmosphere and is actually producing more intense events and those catastrophes well they they create stress on our bodies and on our families and on our communities and so we have that backdrop already and then in the middle of that we have a novel virus called sars cov2 which in a disease presentation is called covid19 and we find ourselves in a global pandemic and our response as a species has been uneven at best to this pandemic it has revealed major weaknesses in our globalized economy as well as in the structures of different national societies in the united states in particular has been revealed in a very unflattering light the way that our economy distributes income the way that we allocate resources towards social support and towards health care the role that education and science literacy play in our society and in our institutions all of these things have been revealed to be very lacking especially in the united states but also all over the world by coven 19. and that means we feel isolated and we feel anxious some of us feel trapped in our homes and are desperate to get back out and feel oppressed by a government and others of us feel like we are being forced against our wills to return to workplaces that don't yet feel safe and that is hard well we'll set aside for a second the polarization and the politicalization of world view around sar cov2 around masks and opening up and how to handle the economic disparity let's set that aside just for a moment and i just want to say what we all share in common right now is fear and anger and a need to feel some measure of control over our lives again in my conversations and in my research that thread seems to be universal at the left and the right among people of all different races and ethnicities and gender identities and sexual orientations ability levels everyone feels afraid and angry and wants to feel some measure of control over their lives again and so we are moving through different psychological coping mechanisms and so there's a template offered basically for the people who are more white more conservative more straight more religious a social script is handed to those folks by media and by civic institutions and social institutions on how to psychologically cope our meaning making which we so desperately need begins to get in the way of common sense measures that would benefit everyone's health it's very strange to me that masks have become controversial if everyone wears masks we are getting increasingly good data that everyone wearing masks meaningfully impacts the spread of covet 19. for the better it reduces transmission rates especially when used in conjunction with physical distancing and the fact that that has become a point of polarization shows me how desperately we need meaning in our lives as a storytelling species now don't get me wrong people who are less white and more progressive um and more queer we have our own social scripts that get in the way of taking useful and right action and what i've noticed now obviously i am more progressive um my beliefs tend to be more aligned with on what my beliefs on what societal actions we should take tend to be more aligned with marginalized people than those who have historically held privilege like myself by the way i don't deny that for a moment but what i'm noticing is everybody wants out of the quarantining isolating box as fast as possible we just go about it differently conservatives uh well they a lot of them strap ar-15s to their backs and walk the capitals and shout in the face of police officers more on police in a moment while progressives say we support safer at home orders but then we just sort of like on the down low go from house to house pollinating communities with covet 19 like bees pollinate flowers y'all this is i am very concerned i am very very very concerned we never really fully implemented safer at home orders we didn't lean all the way into them and so we we slowed the we flattened the curve some but we can't talk about a second wave because in most places we haven't finished the first wave yet new york could see a second wave the new york area there they actually trended down significantly and if they see a resurgence in new cases that would be a true second wave but for the rest of the country most of us are still headed into our first wave and it is not a stretch of the imagination whatsoever to imagine that by this fall the number of deaths in the united states could double could double and how does that feel when i say that how does that feel how does that make your body feel it makes me feel tense makes me feel tension in my shoulders in my back it makes my face feel hot excuse me i had to sneeze i feel afraid i feel angry and i feel sad when i think about that so we can talk about what we need to do what we need to do is invest heavily in social support do what we can to protect the economy culturally we should just all be wearing masks we should be keeping our distance from one another as much as possible we should be increasing health care system capacity as case loads will inevitably rise again as we are reopening our economies out of necessity i think a lot of the states are moving forward like california not because they believe covet is over but because states can't print money and without an economy they can't afford to respond to coven 19 in the first place so we all need to do those things we need to play our part wash our hands social distance masks all those kinds of things face coverings i suppose more accurately we could get in a situation where masks are in short supply again but we also need to take care of our bodies and our feelings as that happens it's very important that we take care of our bodies and our feelings as we move through this difficult time we'll talk about that right after this break to hear a word from our sponsors i think maybe more than ever i love kiwico because we're home all the time y'all at least we are at my house we have been taking physical distancing orders very seriously at the mccarth house and so we have upped our kiwi co subscriptions we get four crates a month we set them on the diner dining room table and we negotiate who gets what crate four different lines we get a eureka crate a maker crate a tinker crate and a doodle crate and that's age appropriate for the four people in my household there were two adults and two teenagers but kiwi co offers on a subscription basis sustainably produced designed in 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60 off your first month of any line any kiwi co line um let's see i built a trebuchet uh recently i built a ukulele yeah that's right built my own ukulele um my daughters have been building uh let's see a camera obscura uh handmade soaps they built they made soaps that we're actually using to wash our hands in our home uh a hydraulic arm like a crane so these are really significant projects that when you're done with uh if you don't want to keep them they're recyclable they're made of recyclable materials so really they're they're phenomenal couldn't be better kiwico.com ask sciencemike to get started today you will not regret it before we talk about how to take care of our bodies i would be remiss if we didn't talk about what has happened after the pandemic let's talk about george floyd let's talk about in the middle of a pandemic i think more of america than ever waking up and going wow racialized police brutality is our real problem it seems in a very significant way we've hit some kind of tipping point where people who previously would have done kind of both sides have their problems thing i suppose the the evidence at this point is overwhelming you know i watched so many videos from these protests and i was appalled to see the way that people were treated by police forces all over the country including right here in my city of los angeles appalling absolutely appalling and so here we are in the middle of a pandemic as i record this word like day 22 of mass demonstrations and those demonstrations are so important and so necessary and they are working listen to me they are working now if i had my choice would i have mass demonstrations during a pandemic of course not of course i would not right now we should all be staying home as much as possible and yet the moment has come when there's the critical mass to make a difference so i am grieved by the loss of life that will come from these protests but the loss of life the second wave we're going to experience is not because of the protests we have already had inconsistent safer homeowners we already had economies reopening early and so as we hit the second wave friends don't be deceived that the protests cause the quote second wave unquote our national state and local responses did that but it is likely that the protests are having a spreading effect as well however they're at least in my mind morally justified risking your life to protest police brutality is very different than risking your life and other people's lives because you feel your individual liberty is in some way wounded because you have to to wear a mask or your kids can't go to summer camp or whatever nonsense mostly affluent white people were talking about prior to the protests but all this is weighing on our bodies and our psychological composition as well partially because for at least for a lot of white people this might be the first time you've really felt helpless in the face of governmental action right let's be honest white people are used to calling the mayor we're used to writing a letter to a judge we're used to participating in a system that benefits us and seeing the benefit immediately and now we see white people marching in solidarity with black people and they're getting knocked to the ground and hit with batons and sprayed in the face with pepper spray and tear gassed and we're seeing that when you're white and you defy the system of white supremacy white supremacy has no problem kicking you out of the club and i'm not gonna do a this episode is not actually a commentary on whiteness or white supremacy we will have more of those conversations in the future i have friends i would like to bring on and include those conversations a better conversation about that was uh i think last week we we ran my conversation with tory williams douglas that was a great great starter great primer but that backdrop of the grief we're all feeling a grief about climate and grief about the pandemic and grief about racialized police brutality all of that is hitting our bodies at once and we just feel what tired and afraid and angry and emotionally volatile we see we're numb and feel nothing and then we feel everything something minor happens in our homes and we erupt with emotion anger fear sadness and all that's exacerbated because often we have friends and family who are on the other sides of ideological lines of division and see the world completely different to the point that it feels like a twilight zone episode you know for me when i consider some of my family who thinks masks are a liberal conspiracy or something and that the police are absolutely right and everyone just needs to comply that feels like the twilight zone to me but for them the fact that i am saying defund police forces feels like the twilight zone to them right here's my point underneath all the issues we're facing the discussions we're having the actions we're taking is our emotions our feeling brains and we have to pay attention to that that's what this whole episode is about i named all the problems we're facing just so you can hear someone say they're facing that problem too so you would feel less alone but the heart of what i want to talk about today is just our feelings so much more of our brain matter is devoted to our emotional brains than our thinking brains our thinking brains are in many ways just a servant of our feeling brains and as we're going around trying to think of solutions and problem solve and doing meaning making i think one of the reasons we are manipulated so easily by media where we're manipulated so easy by civic and social institutions why our family systems get into such conflict it's because we're not aware of and paying attention to our feelings and because we're not aware of them they mind we mindlessly take over our actions we're not even aware of it you know my friends who are philosophers say that everyone has a philosophy and if you aren't aware of your philosophy it just means that your philosophy runs you and you don't run your philosophy that's true of our feelings friends your amygdala is down there deep in your brain driving actions shaping thoughts your paleo mammalian brain your limbic brain is down there shaping thoughts using feeling and i think one of the things we need in the united states and around the world is an emotional awakening a mental health intervention of epic proportion where we learn to acknowledge and learn from the feelings that our body offers us because all of our feelings belong but they feel overwhelming and they feel intense so here's what i'd invite you to do begin a daily practice of grounding yourself what does that look like it means putting your phone away turning off the television getting away from all media sitting somewhere quiet as best you can now we're we're at home a lot of us have small children we don't have a lot of space to ourselves that's okay that's okay we can still turn off screens set down books and focus focus on what focus on our bodies and as we look into our bodies i like to sit somewhere comfortable i like to plant my feet on the ground i like to take my shoes off so i can feel the floor i especially enjoy carpets and rugs and i just take a moment and feel that why because the more i feel the carpet i'm actually wiggling my toes right now on the carpet in my studio pulls me out of my head and into my body in terms of where i'm aware as i do that i might take some deep breaths that feels nice so i do it again if that's all i do that's nice but i like to do more i like to scan my body and see what i feel and where i feel it and how big it is in my belly in my chest my back my shoulders my neck my scalp my hands my face my eyes just looking for physical sensations hot cold tingling numb fluttering tightness tension coiling uncoiling just paying attention to those sensations really really noticing them because often paying attention to them we begin to connect with our emotions and as i go through that ritual many days i will find that i cry or feel angry or feel afraid or all three and i just let my body experience all of those emotions and as i get through those feelings i feel better on the other side now i don't feel perfect i don't feel endless bliss or something ridiculous like that no i just feel more grounded a little more resilient and i do that ritual every day and i am learning and this is hard for me i am a very performative workaholic to rest more to get enough sleep every night to get up in the morning every day to try to be consistent in those patterns and as i do that i find that i have access to more energy not less that i have the ability to take more actions and not fewer this feels hard because it is hard and when life is hard it is more important than ever that we take care of ourselves because if we don't take care of ourselves then we can't help anyone else we can't help our families we can't help our neighborhoods and our communities if we don't take care of ourselves then we can't do the work of solidarity in creating a more just and equitable society so if everything feels overwhelming right now it's because things are overwhelming right now my friends there's nothing wrong with you if you feel sad or angry or depressed or overwhelmed today and i'm inviting you to do something you may have never done before and that set aside time every day and you may have to drop something you enjoy to make the space for it but to take time every day even just five minutes and connect with your body and connect with your feelings and start to get in touch with the emotions that live inside you so that you can work with them and not against them we're going to talk a lot more about that in the weeks to come but i thought today it would be good to just take a moment and reflect on how hard all of this is and how much work we will have to do together to make things better and friends know that i'm always here with you as we move forward together and getting to know our feelings and being in touch with our feelings working to make a more equitable world thank you for listening my friends and i'll talk with you again next week