When I was a resident physician, I remember working nights in the ICU. I was sleep deprived, taking care of really sick patients I did not feel like I knew how to properly care for, and watching people die all around me. I remember being chronically anxious, worried that I would make a mistake, feeling like there was no way I could get through the rotation. Then I had a bit of an epiphany, which has stuck with me since: I reflected on how many other doctors before me had done this– had been in the ICU at night, had all felt this way, and had gotten through. All these other people had been able to work through fear and anxiety and watching people die. If they did it, I can do it. My feelings of anxiety or exhaustion or overwhelm were not unique to me– everyone before me had felt these things too.

That expansion beyond myself, that I am not so unique, that these challenges are challenges faced by thousands of people before me and will be faced by thousands of people after me has helped me get through a huge number of difficult situations in my life. When we focus on ourselves, when we magnify our own sense of self and uniqueness, we often make ourselves miserable in the process. We end up isolating ourselves.

There is a paradox at work here, because we learn that happiness comes from within. We are told that if we want to be happy, if we want to resolve our anxiety and depression and trauma, we must look inwards. There is truth to this, and looking inwards is important. Self reflection, honesty with ourselves, learning how to be at peace with our thoughts are all fundamental to our happiness, and skills I help people with daily. But looking inward can easily become preoccupation with ourselves. Self-awareness can slide into self-absorption, and attending to our suffering can become rehearsing it. When I fixate on my trauma, anxiety, or depression in an effort to “take care of myself,” I can actually make things worse. My problems become the center of my attention, and my suffering can begin to feel uniquely mine. The point is not that my suffering is irrelevant—it is deeply relevant. It is simply not the center of the universe.

Awe and de-centering

In contrast, think of a time when you experienced awe. We find it at different times– I can find it looking into the night sky in the mountains, seeing the stars above and feeling tiny in relation to the universe. I often feel it in Sequoia groves, surrounded by massive trees that are thousands of years old. Think about a time when you felt awe, when you felt small, and what happened to your sense of your problems, your anxieties, your worry about the bill you just received that didn’t seem quite right? Those problems suddenly also seem small– silly, in the face of the magnitude of that awe. When we are reminded that we are just a speck in the universe, the problems that revolve around self melt away. As a resident, I was able to connect the challenges I faced to something larger than myself– generations of doctors that came before me. When we connect with awe, we connect to something larger as well. In each case, the movement is from me to something much larger than myself.

Awe de-centers us. It moves us away from the idea that we carry on a daily basis that puts me at the middle of everything. But that decentering can arise in many ways. It can arise when we are reminded that we are a part of something larger– perhaps our family, our country, or our generation in human history. We can decenter ourselves through meditation or prayer, intentionally reminding ourselves of our smallness, our interconnectedness. We can feel that sense of self-importance disappear when we are involved in helping others, working on a cause or a project that is bigger than any one person. The change does not come from our conscious mind telling us a story to decrease our suffering, but instead from a recognition that perhaps our problems are not as central as we thought.

Shrinking Difficulty and Minimizing

Sometimes we recognize this intuitively, and try to turn it into a coping strategy. We tell ourselves “it’s not that bad.” But decentering ourselves is not about minimizing our pain. When we turn outwards, many of our problems naturally shrink of their own accord. Our challenges do not shrink in response to a command, they shrink as a consequence of the reminder that we are not the center and not separate. The self feels like the most obvious thing in the world because we experience everything through it– but that doesn't mean it deserves all the attention we give it. We experience the world from inside our own heads, so it is easy to mistake my perspective for the perspective of the world. The more we can see ourselves as one small part of a much larger web of people, circumstances, history, and life, the less tightly we have to hold on to “me” and “mine.”

There is a deep irony in the way we try to make ourselves feel more secure. When we make ourselves the center of our attention, we naturally become focused on me and mine: my possessions, my status, my success, my problems, my future. We try to increase our wealth, recognition, and social standing, imagining that these things will make us feel more secure and important. But the more we organize our lives around protecting and improving ourselves, the more there is to protect—and the more there is to fear losing. The goalposts keep moving. There is always more to acquire, more to accomplish, more to defend. In trying to make ourselves feel secure, we create an increasingly elaborate project of ourselves, and the more absorbed we become in that project, the smaller our world becomes.

Something Larger

The alternative is not to care less about ourselves, but to remember that we are not as separate as we often feel. Our lives are woven into the lives of other people, our communities, the natural world, and generations that came before and will come after us. When we turn our attention toward those connections, some of the tightness around me and mine begins to loosen. We don't have to convince ourselves that our problems aren't important. We simply begin to experience them as part of something larger than ourselves.

I didn't get through ICU nights because I learned how to stop being anxious (I wish!), but because I stopped treating my anxiety as a story about me. I realized that thousands of other people had stood where I was standing: afraid, exhausted, overwhelmed, and uncertain. They had cared for sick people and watched people die. What I was experiencing was not uniquely mine.

I try to remember this when I find myself caught in the tight circle of me and mine. Sometimes we do need to look inward, understand our thoughts, attend to our suffering, and take care of ourselves. But looking inward can make the circle smaller. At those times, we may need to do something simpler: look up. Look around. Notice the people beside us, the world we're part of, the generations that came before us and those that will follow. We are not as separate as we feel. Our problems will still be there, but we don't have to experience them as though they are happening to an isolated self at the center of the universe. We are part of something much larger.

Love,

Doc

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