Troy Terwilliger’s Reviews > Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose > Status Update

The toddlers dove into the spaghetti challenge with curiosity while the adults struggled, their efforts were stunted by social anxiety, need to establish social hierarchies and subliminal competition. Essentially the toddlers wasted no time while the adults led with their ego. Why do we cut off our own curiosity?

Fear says: “Categorize this, control this, run from this, or kill this.”
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Curiosity says: “Observe this, touch this, wonder about this.”

Almost done! This one is really worth the read. The advice is so bizarre but so unique to the anxiety experience.

Curiosity and fear are linked, like watching Dateline. When we relax enough to follow our curiosity through the fear: we have intrigue. “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Letting go for fun!

Managers vs. Firefighters: are trapped in stories. Exiles are trapped in illusions around feeling safe.

Take two quick inhales through your nose (one deep breath, followed immediately by a sharp "top-off" inhale to fully inflate the lungs), then let out a long, slow, sighing exhale through your mouth. Doing this two or three times pops open the tiny air sacs (alveoli) in your lungs, allowing carbon dioxide to dump rapidly. It triggers the vagus nerve & sends an immediate biological command to the heart to slow down.

When you lock yourself into that pressure cooker, your right hemisphere and your somatic (body) intelligence are the ones that begin to suffocate and scream. The Right Brain doesn't care about your 5-year plan, your credit score, or your social status. It cares about connection, art, the present moment, wild nature, and absolute freedom. The Body cares about rhythm, rest, sensory beauty, and safety.

This is one of Beck's most profound psychological call-outs. We often think that the antidote to imagining our worst-case scenario (catastrophizing) is to imagine a perfect-case scenario (fantasizing about lying on a perfect beach, totally stress-free, where nothing ever goes wrong).
But Beck argues that they are actually the exact same left-brain trap.

When you look at Whole Brain Living—the neuroanatomical framework pioneered by neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor and heavily utilized by Martha Beck—the distinction between happiness and joy isn't just semantic. It is mapped directly to entirely different quadrants of your brain.