Hey, welcome back to Practicing Human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little

better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode we're going to talk about what is the

minimum effective dose of anxiety in order to get things done.

More to come on that in a moment, first let's settle in with the sound of the bells.

So a few days ago at the beginning of this series of COVID-19 podcast episodes, I recorded

an episode titled, How to Panic While Remaining Calm, and in that episode we talked about

five steps or stages we can go through when meeting a particular fear response.

And if you listen to that episode, you remember that stage three was about working with your

what ifs and what is, what is is, let's just say what ifs and what is.

So what ifs are the, this is the thinking about the future, what if this happens, what

if that could happen, a lot of times when I talk about the what if mind, I talk about

it almost with a neurotic kind of tone, what if this, what if this, what if this, but

the what if mind can be very calculated and logical, what if this happens, right, I

should take action.

And so we talked about how too much what if can lead to a lot of anxiety, but too much

what is, which is dropping into what is here right now, can lead to not taking enough

action for the future.

So there's a stance between what if and what is, but the what if mind helps us see, okay,

what do I need to do?

What is an action I need to take?

And step five of that five step process is about examining and looking at is it possible

...