Listen to Fear; Find What Feels Good.

Adopt a growth mindset. Demonstrate grit. Feel the fear and do it anyway. In fact, that icky anxiety you’re buzzing with is just your lizard brain’s “resistance” to growth and you can use fear as a compass that orients you toward personal and economic success. If you’ve spent two seconds exploring grindset culture—and clearly I have—you know it’s full of these messages. So many productivity gurus advertise leaning into our fears to find the edge of our comfort zone and push ourselves to new heights. But is this really the best approach? Is growth always good? Should we, at least occasionally, listen to fear?

My Bipolar Disorder attaches an unusual lens to the question, but I think that lens is illuminating. 

Paranoia is an intuitive sign, driven by your body’s innate connection to your ecosystem, to enter a period of contraction. 

For the last decade and a half, I’ve been conducting an in-depth field study of anxiety and paranoia. Socrate’s declaration that “an unexamined life is not worth living” tickled my existential angst at just the right age to inspire a lifelong addiction to therapy. To, essentially, navel gazing. I’ve often found that looking closely enough at my own navel, it could be anyone’s, though. 

What universals have I discovered through more than a decade of introspection?

Number one, just like in Pixar’s Inside Out, memories are stored with the tint of the emotions you were experiencing while making them. I have, as a natural part of my disordered mood cycle, prolonged periods of chronic, low-grade anxiety, or sometimes several proximal incidents of acute attacks. As a result, anxiety’s icy blue hue often dominates that top-of-mind space that my pattern-seeking narrative mind uses to decide its next actions. 

That’s how paranoia is born. 

It’s just a string of anxious moments scattered through time but connected by an almost animistic narrative. Misfortune and unease are imbued with the agency of vague, ever-shifting entities. In the context of chronic anxiety, connected cognitively to all the other inconveniences that are painted the same hue, a frayed phone charger can become the fingerprint of your shitty landlord, the CIA, drug cartels, time travelers, demons, or aliens.

This is a normal part of my cycle, so I figure it must be instructive in some way. To understand how important it is, we need to examine the stage of mood cycles that precedes it. To hear my paranoia’s message, I have to think critically about the explosion of clarity, creativity, productivity and growth characterized by hypomania.

Like milk left out on the counter overnight, anxiety is spoiled hypomania. Something that once felt nourishing, hearty, and refreshing that has since become tainted over time.

Hypomania is the part of the bipolar sin curve where I am rising toward the ecstasy of pure Being. Broken down linguistically it essentially refers to “low-grade” mania. You’ve experienced it if you’ve ever tried uppers. Some muggles I know can even induce it via too much caffeine, but I try not to pathologize it for them; they have a right to feel that excitement without it being compared to my clinical diagnosis.

But most people know the downside to too much cold brew: getting spooked. 

Hypomania feels great. You know I’m experiencing it because I’m bursting with essays, projects, poems, TikToks and podcast episodes.

But sometimes I get, well, too productive. Too grandiose in my ambitions. I’m expanding, expanding, expanding, until—sometimes—I’m expansive as God… and then, like a dog’s shock collar restricting them to their own front yard, I get a zap that tells me to contract.

Charles Eisenstein offers a compelling counterpoint to the productivity gurus’ thesis. In The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible he posits that our emotions aren’t arbitrary signals guiding us toward growth or holding us back from it, but evolved mechanisms that calibrate action toward harmony with the environment.

He argues that instincts that inspire pleasure have evolved over millions of years to inspire individual organisms to contribute to the equilibrium of their ecosystem. 

Might fear be the same thing? 

Is the fear that business visionaries, productivity gurus and public intellectuals tell me to push through actually an important signal from my subconscious that the actions I’m considering will contribute to the planetary and civilizational crises we face?

This idea’s veracity is evident in the world out my window, where it is snowing in the Silicon Valley mountains for the first time in the 30+ years I’ve lived here. Our obsession with growth and productivity has driven us to the brink of environmental disaster. 

The planet is in crisis, and we’re being called to listen to our bodies’ wisdom and protect the natural world around us. In the context of the catastrophes caused by the central-bank-mandated pursuit of infinite economic growth on a finite planet, the productivity gurus’ thesis that growth can’t happen without fear merits a closer look.

So I think my fear might be telling me to contract. In fact, in the face of fear, I feel called to become fully still. To sit on a cushion. To meditate. To breathe. The best cure for fear is to feel it without aversion. By diving into the wave as it approaches, you avoid being knocked over by it.

When the fear hits, it’s obvious I have to burn off some karma. The fear warns me that whatever content or project I’m producing is in danger of being imbued with the arrogant colonizer shadows I inherited through being born into privilege. Whenever I have that familiar messianic delusion that I have all the answers, the fear follows to slow me down.

But stasis isn’t desirable either. Frozen, paranoid paralysis is not what this essay advocates.

Yoga with Adrienne‘s motto, “Find what feels good,” is useful when seeking balance. 

When practicing Hatha Yoga, the best advice is to sink into each stretch until you’re just at the edge of your comfort zone. If you’re experiencing acute pain, back off a little. If you aren’t feeling anything, drop into the pose deeper. Find what feels good and just breathe there for a while.

In this way, you are growing. You are becoming more flexy and more closely attuned to the traditionally ideal posture. But you aren’t pushing so hard you might injure yourself. 

Instead of obsessively chasing growth and productivity with mindless abandon, for the sake of status, or simply because society told us to, we can use our bodies’ innate emotional awareness to drive healthy growth. If we cultivate observation of intuitive fear and pleasure, orientation toward sustainability will be automatic. 

Healthy balance between growth and sustainability depends on playful curiosity and openness. Instead of calibrating to fear as a compass or opposing it as an obstacle to be overcome, we can embrace its invitation to slow down.  We can learn to honor the wisdom of our bodies and the natural world around us, and use that wisdom to guide us towards a more sustainable and fulfilling way of life.

So let’s find what feels good, not just in our yoga practice, but in every aspect of our lives. Let’s cultivate a sense of balance and harmony that allows us to pursue growth and productivity without sacrificing the health of our bodies, our communities, or our planet. 

What feels good, feels good, first of all… but it might also be just what we need to avoid catastrophe.