Turbulence and Safety

The world feels turbulent these days.

For many, this feels like they are exposed to a tornado of noise and chaos. The noise and chaos are driven by fear (scarcity, envy, hate, separation, isolation), which activates our threat response and garners our attention. The fear and separation we feel in our daily lives can make us sick. As the world grows in size and scale, it also grows in information and entropy. In fact, it is estimated that information on earth has increased from 59 zettabytes in 2020 to 157 zettabytes in 2025. A zettabyte is equal to 1 sextillion bytes (10 to the 21st power) or 10x10x10… twenty-one times. This amount of information is beyond anyone’s ability to process.

Staying balanced in a world where the increasing cacophony of information and complexity is no small task. But while this is a great challenge for all to navigate and be noticed in this noisy world, advertisers, salespeople, politicians, and media sources have adapted specific strategies to attract our attention.

Their solution?

Take advantage of our primal reflexes. Specifically, our threat response. As survivors of a challenging evolution that involved avoiding predators to survive, we are armed with reflexive threat responses. We selectively pay more attention to negative input (loss) than positive input (gain). In fact, we are twice as likely to tune into loss as we are to gain - this is called aversion bias.

While aversion bias is an important survival tool, it also has negative ramifications today. We tend to extend these survival reflexes to more mundane threats today, like not getting likes or followers, not getting preferred jobs, not being paid enough, not having the right job or being criticized on social media. These can trigger the same threat response. In addition, external agents that want our attention know that negative advertising - in media, entertainment, politics, and social media - gets our attention.

Many of us live most of our daily lives in this fear- or threat-response, which preferentially activates our sympathetic nervous system (fight-flight), as opposed to our (Zen) parasympathetic nervous system. Long-term, over activation of our threat-driven sympathetic nervous system causes us to age biologically and also predisposes us to chronic dis-eases (diseases).

To our bodies, unbalanced activation of the sympathetic nervous system results in flooding our system with toxic hormones like epinephrine and norepinephrine, which elevates blood pressure and heart rate; cortisol, which elevates our blood sugar and weakens our immune system; and blocks the effects of oxytocin (our trust hormone) and dopamine (our pleasure response). This is like constantly accelerating your car engine over the red tachometer zone as you drive it. Eventually, the car’s engine will fail, as will our bodies.

In addition to driving our threat responses, today’s world also orients us to living in the finite, and away from the infinite roots of our health and healing.

From the best research studies, the things that make us healthy and live longer are infinite - connections, gratitude, abundance, harmony, love, forgiveness, acceptance and wholeness.

In our finite world, we see ourselves as separated from others and vulnerable to the unpredictable fates that determine our futures. This separation is known as duality and is driven by fear (hate, envy, comparison, arrogance, ego and scarcity). To feel safe, we orient our lives to do more, be more, compete more and accomplish more. We believe we must achieve to survive and thrive. We celebrate wealth, position, title, power, fame and celebrity - finite states.

Fear separates, love connects. The dizzying amount of input for most of us is confusing and like turbulence in a plane, it makes us grip our life tighter while removing a lot of the joy and exhilaration of just being. Like when we were children, our goal is to get back to our infinite roots of being present and appreciating each moment, each person and each opportunity to serve and help others.

This frame shift to having your eyes open and really seeing makes all the difference. It allows us to find the calm in the storm. To have the turbulence cease and to connect with our infinite roots.

To find health and heal, we need to reconnect with each other and ultimately, back to the fragments of ourselves. Looking in, not out. The Sufi poet Rumi reminds us, “Yesterday, I was clever and decided to change the world. Today, I am wise and decided to change myself”.

Not only refocusing on the miracles that surround us, but also refocusing on the miracle that is each of us, will take us from a view of the finite to one of the infinite. It has been calculated that the odds that each one of us is alive as us is 10 to the 2,685,000 power. Compare this number to the total number of atoms (which are the elements that construct our visible world) in the universe is 10 to the 80 power.

Our presence as a perceived individual is impossible, but here we are. We should appreciate each moment in this great adventure we are experiencing.

Albert Einstein reminds us we are all made of energy (as detailed in his famous formula, E=mc²), as is everything we experience. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. So, at the frame of our energy foundation, we are eternal and infinite.

Thus, it seems the key to surviving the chaos and noise is maintaining our equipoise by staying in the calm center of the storm. Connecting to our infinite, calm roots, while enjoying the grand adventure of our finite, separate lives.

Centering ourselves on our internal infinite state - love, gratitude, service, abundance - can allow us to see these storms as passing moments, soon to be replaced by blue skies and calm weather.

By reconnecting to our infinite roots, we will find our way through the noise and chaos to a calm center, resolving the beautiful signal that is us. Not just you or me, but all of us.

Connected. Together. Unified. Infinite. Whole. Healthy. Healed.