"SOOTHE THE SAVAGE BEAST!" AND "AVOID UPSETTING HIM!
REDUCING ANXIETY TO THE MINIMUM, INSURING CALMNESS
THE SAVAGE BEAST WITHIN
Although there is no "being" (such as a beast or a devil) inside you, the metaphor in the title is useful for our discussion.
What we have inside of us is a primitive (almost savage in terms of ignorance) mind, one that must be managed by the higher brain and trained as needed.
Until we do that training, we must do all we can to manage this mind, which we usually call Lennie (like in the play Of Mice And Men) as it is developmentally handicapped.
"JOB 1" OF THE PRIMITIVE MIND
The primitive mind, besides running our basic systems, has the key job of looking for anything that matches its data about possible threats to our survival and when it spots one it will send out danger alarms and chemicals to get us to move quickly to protect against the danger.
Fortunately, it has us step out of the way of an oncoming car seemingly without thinking, bypassing the higher brain in favor of immediate action to save our lives. It is a great function that is crucial to our living.
FAUX DANGER
The only problem is that it sends out information and signals regardless of whether our higher brain would see that there is no danger. The information it sends out is anything "associated" with the perceived incoming "data". It coughs up everything, with little screening. So we get a pile of data related to danger, all of which cause danger chemicals to be emitted - so we get upset and ready for action - but in most cases the danger signals are not the ones that we as cavemen needed. We "make up" stuff and then we create the idea that if we don't have it our life is threatened (or diminished in some way) - but there is no actual danger to our body or our survival. The danger is "fictional" or what we call a "faux danger", a false one. The fear from it we canll "faux fear". Of course, fear occurs whenever we think we are in danger, and it is wired in, so, technically, the fear we feel is legitimate in terms of being a natural, wired-in emotion. So, fear is not illegitimate in and of itself, but the fear we call a faux fear is based on something that is not a legitimate danger of sufficient magnitude to warrant fight or flight and the negative chemicals that just plain feel bad to us. Fear, indeed, is called the best motivator, as it gets your rear in gear quickly.
It is just that we didn't have to invoke that process in the first place.
THE NECESSITY TO INTERVENE
So it is up to us to spot the falseness of the perceived danger and to cut the fear off as soon as possible. (Who is "us"? See Who I Really Am.)
To do this, we have to "tell" the primitive brain that "all is well" and it is a false signal or nothing to worry about.
And, since the primitive brain is already in a bit of an "upset", we need to do what is called "soothing".
And, the process is similar to soothing a child.
"Oh, don't worry, I'll protect you. I have this under control. Everything is ok. Everything will work out just fine. I love you and I will keep you safe."
You say virtually the same thing to yourself (the primitive mind part of yourself) and you say it from the "I", the higher brain. It may sound silly to talk to yourself this way. But you might have noticed that you already do that - some call it your "inner voice", which would include not only the higher brain talking to the lower brain but the lower brain "talking" to the higher brain (or anything that will listen).
The lower brain mostly though talks in chemicals and electrical signals causing sensations in the body. We call those sensations in the body "feelings", because we feel them. The problem is that when we get those "feelings" they are not stated in explicit, clear verbal language, so we interpret them and convert them to a kind of word conversation. And, relatively often, we misinterpret them, because they are in fact hard to interpret - we have to guess what they mean. Read Wrongly Interpreting Feelings, And Body Signals! A Source Of Great Harm. The "wisdom" disciplines realize this fact, so they don't take their interpretation, in the form of "thoughts", seriously. They say, "oh, there goes a thought flowing through my mind" and their system is to not believe it, though they might pay attention to a certain type of thought-signal. Otherwise they realize that A Thought Is Just A Thought, An Emotion Is Just An Emotion.
Note that you probably do very little of this in a direct, productive way. (Eating sugar is not a productive way of soothing one's upsets!)
Notice that the primitive mind when it can't really nail down any danger kind of generalizes itself into alertness by saying something like there must be something wrong out there and I must protect against it , predict it rightly, etc. This become a "constanct vigilance statement, usually explained as "the feeling" that "something is wrong" - and that is something we must train it out of so that we can relax and rely on the fact that it will spot a true danger or that we can alert ourselves to areas we have cognitively determined are ones for us to look at to see what we can do to protect ourselves against using also our powers of prediction. .... we do that on purpose and we don't go "primitive" on ourselves by allowing it to always be "predicting" doom and gloom or "something is wrong" (of course the extreme of that is the hyperparanoid depressive mind). It is an imbalance in thinking, one that we can "true up" to a right balance.
See Something Is Wrong - Unclear Thinking, Huge Costs". A reply might be something like an ongoing "things are good, life is good, I am capable of responding and handling anything wehn it occurs, I am the master of my life and need not worry about anything, I am safe...
DON'T DO ANYTHING THAT WILL UPSET HIM!
The term "beast" is used here to illustrate the level of harm that it can create, both physically and emotionally. And the key to a good life is always about how well you maintain your emotional well-being, for it is life itself (actually it is the "Quality" of life itself).
Leave him lots of safety buffer!!!!
Whenever we run ourselves down, we have low energy reserves that are likely to run out at the wrong time. The primitive mind knows that, so it draws on our reserves from other parts of the body, including the mind, to protect against that danger. It also finds it has to try to balance everything off itself, so it has to pay more attention, even hyperattention to any dangers that could squash the energy reserve. If the energy reserve is high, then, of course, it doesn't have to watch out for those things. The irony is that when we need to preserve energy, we spend a huge amount of it looking for dangers and doing all we can to prevent them from happening - and we get more warn out.
Although we can "see", in a sense, the idea of losing our energy physically, we often don't see that it happens to our psychological energy (which is actually a physical thing).
And our attentional energy. if we mostly fill up our limited attention pipeline with, say, worried and being on the alert against someone maybe not liking us, then we have only a few attention units left to pay attention to other things that could be even more important. That lack of attention units is dangerous and the primitive mind goes into danger mode and feels more on edge.
The person who fills up his schedule with no buffers ends up with more frequent conflicts and failures, so he is setting himself up to "lose" more often - he can't avoid it, after all we are not perfect human beings able to skirt closely to the edge without falling over it occasionally.
SOOTHING IS A SPECIAL SUBPART OF "COPING"
We need to develop ways to "cope" with life or we'll be left in the helpless child condition, always feeling danger (because he doesn't have ways to cope successfully with life). Develop those. Start with Coping With Life - The Essential Skill Leading To All Else. (Essentially, these are either tactics, procedures or strategies that we need to develop as they come up and/or before they come up if it is a big item.)
