Ep. #420: How to Be a Functional Human When the World Is on Fire

Welcome to the Not Your Average Runner podcast. I’m Jill Angie, a certified running coach, and your running BFF here to help you start running. Feel confident and love the journey no matter your size. Now, if you’ve ever felt like you just weren’t meant to be a runner, think again. I believe that running is for all bodies, even yours.

This podcast is your warmup buddy, giving you tips, motivation, and the support you need to lace up and get moving. I’ve helped thousands of women become runners, and now I wanna help you. Let’s go.

Hello my friend and welcome back to the podcast. Today I wanna talk about something that has been sitting heavy with me with a lot of us lately, and I’m guessing if you are listening to this, it’s. Been sitting heavily with you too. And that is, uh, the state of the world, um, very specifically the state of the United States.

And the feeling right now that every time you open your phone or you turn on the news, there is another headline that just makes your stomach drop. And. It’s a lot, right? It’s a fucking lot right now. And it’s not just one thing, right? It is the constant accumulation day after day. It’s the sense that nothing is stable.

Every day brings a new low, and you are like, where is the bottom? What is it gonna take? And I think I speak for a lot of my listeners when I say we are feeling. Enraged, scared, heartbroken, numb, all of the above, and that’s a very normal response to a deeply abnormal situation that is. Happening right now.

And I think what’s really hard about this is that most of us are, you know, in addition to the chaos, we are still expected to function. Like everything is business as usual, right? We go to work, we gotta make dinner, we gotta get our kids to sports, and we have to answer emails and we have to get dressed and act like the ground isn’t constantly shifting underneath our feet.

So. Today I kinda wanna talk a little bit about how to be a functional human when it feels like the world is on fire. And I don’t mean how to stay positive and how to rise above it, or I don’t. Also, also, I don’t mean how to fix anything. Um, just kind of how to stay engaged and take care of yourself without falling apart.

And I think that’s, the bar is pretty low at this point in time. And uh, you know, one of the things that I hear over and over again from my community, from my friends, from people I coach, is that a lot of us are feeling a mixture of sort of rage. Helplessness. And this is a really, really tough combination because people care deeply about what is happening right now.

They are paying attention. We are all paying attention, too much attention probably. Uh, we’re hyper informed. We’re not asleep at the wheel, but at the same time, we feel completely powerless. We don’t know how to fix anything. We don’t know how to really. Affect any kind of change and you cannot stop the headlines.

You can’t control what comes next. And it kind of feels like no matter how outraged you are, and every day I’m kind of like, oh, well there’s a whole new level of outrage I didn’t know. I could feel, um, it doesn’t matter how much it happens, like the machine just keeps rolling. And again, that combination of caring deeply and feeling that rage, but also feeling powerless is absolutely brutal on your nervous system.

And you know, we constantly are sort of immersed in this just ongoing adrenaline rush in our bodies is not good for us and. There’s also right this unspoken pressure that if you unplug, if you say, I can’t watch the news, I can’t, I don’t wanna know what’s going on, because it’s too hard that you’re being irresponsible, that you’re like checking out and, and you just don’t care and, and you’re failing some sort of moral test.

So I wanna challenge that idea a little bit because for real, being constantly activated. In your brain on, on all the things that are going on and constantly in that soup of like rage and helplessness mixed together, um, being in that state is not the same thing as being effective. So when you are living in a state of nonstop outrage, that does not make you more useful.

It makes you exhausted and reactive and frozen, and people in that state don’t change things, right? They burn out and then they’re not effective at all. So, uh, the first place I wanna start is news consumption. ’cause this is a big one, and this, I, you know, I think is probably responsible for like 80% of all of our suffering.

Right now. The way the news is delivered is not designed for human brains, okay? It is designed, well actually take that back. It is designed for human brains, but not in the way that we want, right? The, the. Constant feed on social media. The constant feed on the various news websites, um, is designed to keep you clicking and refreshing and escalating emotionally, right?

They want you to. Be in a state of rage and helplessness because it means you keep coming back to look for more news and to look for any evidence that maybe things are gonna be okay. And your, when your brain sees all of those threats, right, that’s what it wants to do. It wants more information. It’s just like, I gotta, I gotta look for just a crumb of evidence that, that something is not.

That something might be okay. So we keep scrolling and we keep clicking and we keep, you know, looking and looking and looking and it feels like staying informed. And it feels like connecting. I mean, I will say that. You know, there’s a certain satisfaction in connecting with other people who are in the same emotional and mental state that you’re at on social media, because you’re like, okay, it’s just not me.

It’s, it’s not just me. But what happens is it also keeps your brain in that soup of. Of adrenaline and stress hormones. And what that does is, you know, you may feel a little bit of a blip of connection, but ultimately it leaves you dysregulated and drained and again, not effective in your life. So I’m gonna make a suggestion.

Here’s something concrete that you can try that’s been working for me, is to choose. One or two places where you are willing to get your information from. That might be a website, it might be like a social media account. I don’t know. I’m not, it’s not up to me to decide for you. Um, I will say, please do your research and make sure that you’re not, um, you know, tapping into something that is, is just out there to, to get clicks and likes and isn’t there to actually share the truth.

But that being said. Right. Choose one or two trusted sources that you feel like, yes, I am getting, um, helpful information from these people. And then decide ahead of time when you’re gonna check it. And maybe it’s like, I’m gonna check it in the morning while I eat my breakfast. I’m gonna check it in the evening, you know, before dinner, whatever.

Um, please don’t. Don’t be scrolling your phone as you’re laying in bed trying to go to sleep. I, I will tell you when I do that, I have apocalyptic dreams, absolutely apocalyptic, scary ass shit, and I always can trace it back to, oh, that’s right, I saw that one reel, or I saw that one news story and it stuck in my head.

And then I had a dream about. People getting, you know, sucked out of protests by drones, right? Like, it’s so, it’s so messed up. So please don’t do that. Like, if you wanna scroll social media, here’s, here’s another trick that I will share with you. If you wanna scroll social media before you go to bed because you’re like, Hey, it calms me down.

Set up a separate account and all you follow are like animal videos or crafting videos or something like that. So you know that that is just going to feed you information that feels good and that leaves you feel uplifted instead of drained. Okay? So you can have two social media accounts, you can have multiple, and you can use them for different purposes, and you can.

Use, use one where you, again, literally just kitten videos or whatever, whatever your favorite thing is, and, and that algorithm will show you what you engage with. And so you can actually really guide your algorithm by engaging with only things that you want to see. And then you can have another account where you’re like, okay, I only go to this account when I’ve got my designated time to check the news.

And, um. I promise you, if you can separate those things out, you’re gonna have a different experience. And I also want you to know you don’t need real time updates on every awful thing that is happening right now in order to care, in order to, um, take action. You don’t need to know every, you don’t need to know the second something happens.

That it, that it happened, right? You can, you can curate and batch things so that you go on once or twice a day and say, okay, what happened? And that gives you a chance to protect your nervous system and give it a break from the constant feed of chaos. And that helps you have the energy to actually take action, the action that is right for you when the time is right.

Now another thing that is important right now, I mean it’s important all the time, but particularly right now, is learning how to process your emotions without drowning in them. And what I mean is anger, grief, fear, despair, right? They are very reasonable responses to what’s going on right now. Um, the goal is not to talk yourself out of it and say, oh, I don’t need to feel angry.

Right? No, no, no. They are normal responses and I encourage you to allow yourself to feel them, but there’s a difference between feeling the emotions and making them your whole identity and literally living in them constantly, so when emotions don’t have anywhere to go. They get stuck in your body and that is when you start to feel frozen and heavy and exhausted and disconnected and and ineffective.

Right. Emotions need movement and physical movement. Yes. We’ll talk about that in a moment, but also just. You know, any, you, you can’t just like sit in them and just continually feed yourself the things that are recreating those emotions. So if you’re reading the news, right, you’ve, you’ve said, okay, twice a day I am gonna read the news schedule time to immediately go for a walk or do something physical right afterwards so that you are disconnecting from the feed in front of your face and allowing your brain to process and, and have the emotions, but also not.

Wallow in them. Okay. Um, you can write down everything you’re furious about and then close the notebook and walk away from it. Uh, you can stretch. Stretching is a great way to release emotion for sure. Uh, a yoga class, especially a reto, a restorative yoga class that allows you to like sit in the poses for a while is super helpful.

Um, and you know what? You may start to cry and that is okay. Crying is a great way. To handle emotions. Um, you could cry, you could just schedule time to cry. You could be like, okay, all right, I’m gonna look at the news and then afterwards I’m gonna sit and cry for 10 minutes. It’s okay. You’re allowed to do that.

Um, the pattern is to feel it and then process it, whether it’s through physical movement or you know, something else, and then let it go. Because when the pattern is to feel it and then scroll and like refeed it and spiral and repeat like that doesn’t feel good. And that’s when we get stuck. Now, another thing that helps right now, especially, you know, when, when everything feels overwhelming and we feel like we have to do all the things and we, we don’t even, you know, we’re, we’re watching the news in.

Minneapolis, and we’re watching the news in LA and we’re watching the news in Chicago, and we’re just like, I, I don’t even know where to look. I want you to get very clear about where you actually have agency, okay? You cannot fix everything. Nobody can fix everything, and trying to carry the entire world suffering in your heart is going to break you.

So instead, ask yourself. Where can I act? What is actually within my reach? And that might look like donating to an organization you trust, making calls, writing letters, sending emails, volunteering locally, showing up to a protest, uh, supporting people in your immediate community, supporting your neighbors, and even having hard conversations.

Where they matter. And there are so many resources out there to help you find a place to act that makes sense for you, for who you are as a person for the amount of time, for the resource that you have available to you. Like you can Google it and, and I encourage you to do it. And actually the taking the time to Google ways that you can help feels really good.

It feels really good. Like that is the first step to kind of creating agency for yourself, and then I want you to let that be enough. Alright? Deciding like how you’re gonna show up and, and showing up in those specific ways and not feeling like you have to do everything. Let it be enough, okay? You don’t have to respond to every outrage.

You don’t have to carry the whole thing on your shoulders. Do one aligned thing and then you could step back and that’s not apathy. That is sustainability. Do one aligned thing, step back, and then come back and do another aligned thing later. You don’t have to do it all. Now I wanna talk about bodies.

Because your body is where all of this is landing right now. Stress. Stress doesn’t live just in your thoughts. It lives in your shoulders and your jaw and your sleep and your digestion. And this is especially true in midlife. When hormonal shifts make the stress hit a lot harder. Okay? But the other thing about midlife is.

Thanks to those hormonal shifts, your tolerance for bullshit is lower and your body is less willing to just sweep things under the rug, and that is your superpower right now. Okay? Because this phase of life often gets framed as we’re losing things, right? Our bodies are changing. We no longer look finger quotes, young or youthful, or.

I don’t know. I guess maybe if you’re getting a lot of fledge plastic surgery, you do still look useful. But really, like a lot of, a lot of people, a lot of women look at midlife as the downhill and losing things and. I feel like this phase of life is, is about you gaining things and one of the things that you’re gaining is clarity.

Okay? You spot nonsense faster, you stop people pleasing. You have a much sharper sense of what matters and what absolutely does not, and you kind of lose interest in like performative optimism. So midlife is where you actually get to live the way you want to and you speak your mind, and that makes you powerful.

And that power is something you can bring to any actions you are taking to help recreate or create the world that you want to live in. So this is where movement becomes incredibly important. And that is, um. I wanna clarify that. I’m not saying movement like exercise, um, as self-improvement, but as regulation, as self-regulation because movement brings you back into your body when your brain is spinning, walking, running, dancing, stretching, lifting, something heavy, like whatever it is.

Movement not to burn calories, but to discharge stress, to let, to process the stress and let it flow from your body, reminds you that you’re here. It helps keep your nervous system from living in that constant state of alarm. And consistency really matters much more than intensity here. So we are not saying like, you have to go and move and like beat the shit outta yourself to, to make a difference.

Nope. Short, boring, repeatable, you know, low intensity movement is incredibly stabilizing in chaotic times. It really, it becomes that sort of touchstone that you can rely on. I will tell you, I have been going for a walk like. 30 to 40 minute walk every single day no matter what, for the past several months.

And that has just become the part of my day that I know I can rely on to check out from everything else and to just let my body start to feel like itself again. And it’s, it’s just been a really, really powerful routine. I haven’t been running, I’ve talked about that last month on the podcast. I haven’t been running.

Um. I’ve just been walking and there is something about it that is really restorative. So, uh, whatever movement feels good to you, let’s, let’s create space to make that happen. And here’s, here’s the thing too. It doesn’t need to be a really long period of time, okay? When the world feels like it’s on fire, right?

Like it does now, you’re like, oh, I, it’s, you know, to make a difference, I’m gonna have to work out for an hour a day, right? I promise you that any movement is gonna give you mental relief. Really, it again, it doesn’t have to be running or anything like that. Slow walking for five minutes. Just going outside.

I, and I know it’s cold, it’s cold in Philly. I’m like, even if it’s 10 degrees out, I’m like, my ass is out there completely bundled up. But that time outside with. Daylight on your face is so helpful. So slow walking for five minutes a day is enough to help you reset your nervous system. You wanna do more or you don’t wanna walk, you don’t wanna go outside, that’s fine.

I get it. Um, but the movement, the consistent movement is the magic. And in a moment, I’m gonna share a way to get started with that. If you’re, if you’re starting from ground zero with movement, I’m gonna talk to you about. How you can get started with that. But I want you to know if everything, if everything feels heavy right now, and I’m pretty sure it does for you, if it doesn’t way to go, tell me your secrets.

Um, but here’s your permission slip, right? You don’t need to be helpful. You don’t have to, you don’t have to like, be toxically positive and be like, no, no, like, everything’s gonna work out. You don’t have to, right? You don’t have to have all the answers, you don’t have to have any answers, honestly. You just gotta stay steady enough to keep going, and that probably is gonna look like narrowing your informational input so that it’s not a constant stream coming at your face.

Um, choosing one place to act that feels aligned with who you are and how you like to interact with the world and the resources that you have available at your disposal. Um, moving your body gently and consistently. Taking time for yourself and letting yourself start really, really, really small. Okay? So if you’ve been listening to this, uh, episode and you’re like, yes, Jill, I am actually paralyzed by everything happening in the world, and I do wanna start moving my body, but I am, I’m at zero.

I’m an absolute zero. This is precisely why I created the Midlife Movement Makeover. It is not a fitness program. I mean, okay, technically it is a fitness program, um, but it’s not a glow up. It’s not like a 30 day hardcore challenge or anything. It’s really what it is, is a support system for midlife women who want to start moving again.

And, you know, do it without pressure, without shame, and without, you know. Feeling overwhelmed and feeling like they’re fucking it up and failing, right? So this program is for the days when you do not feel motivated, uh, when everything is too much, when your body feels unfamiliar, when you just want a clear, doable next step instead of another big plan that you’re failing at.

Okay? You don’t need to overhaul your life. You don’t need to push harder. This, this is the starting point, and you can learn more about the midlife movement makeover at not your average runner.com/midlife. That’s not your average runner.com/midlife. I’m also gonna have a link over in the show notes and check it out, and if that feels like the right kind of support for you right now, I would love.

To have you join. Um, this is a self-study program. There is not a start and finish date for this program, so again, you get to make it fit into the life that you have right now. So I hope you take care of yourself, my friend. I will talk to you next month, on the first Thursday in March. And in the meantime.

Get out there and, and do something fun for yourself. Support yourself, take care of yourself, and I’ll talk to you soon. Okay.

Real quick before you go, I’ve got a fun challenge for you. Take my exerciser personality quiz to find out exactly what kind of exerciser you are and how to make running feel easier and more enjoyable.

Just head over to not your average runner.com/quiz to take it and get your results. That’s not your average runner.com/quiz.