One sentiment that is, in my opinion, easily identifiable in our modern culture is the concept of “Safetyism.” When I say this word, I mean an obsession with safety, being risk averse to the point of being pathological. The increase in fear in our consciousness is very apparent, so what could be driving this heightening fear? I think the truth of the matter is that people have a perception that things are more dangerous than they are because they have been informed by a less than credible internet source or their perception is skewed by their feed. As an example, many people believe there’s more violent crime being committed now than some years ago. Meanwhile, FBI data illustrates a different picture of this, showing that since the 1990s, crime is overall on a downswing. What could be the reason for this stark contrast? I would posit that it relates to the availability of information through the internet and social media. It’s much easier for violent crimes and atrocities to come into our immediate purview since we now have access to the internet. This creates a mirage that crime is all around them, and in fact, likely to occur at any time. The data shows us otherwise.
What I have noticed is that this brings about an air of fragility among many people. They think that by walking outside their door, they are incurring substantial risk and could harm themselves. There is fear of rigorous exercise because you could “get hurt,” walking alone to schools or bus stops, fear of allowing younger people to explore without constant supervision, fear of having actual conversations on the phone or leaving voicemails and more. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explore this concept in depth in their book “The Coddling of The American Mind.” The idea is that people’s perception of relative safety is much worse than the reality backed by data.
Despite the modern obsession to “be safe,” people seem completely comfortable consuming incredibly negative media, eating terrible food, not moving at all, and living a sedentary lifestyle which creates massive chronic disease in the population. I would argue that the obsession with safetyism heavily contributes to people developing those chronic diseases because they are too afraid of things that will help them avoid it. Paradoxically, the thing that is going to kill them is likely not the boogeyman around the corner that they have developed in their mind, it’s the chronic disease that on some level manifests from fear of doing something hard or different.
For example, if you are too afraid to work out intensely (CrossFit, weightlifting, whatever), that will have a negative impact on your health because you, for some reason, view it as unsafe. The evidence will lead you to understand that it is a much worse outcome to develop metabolic illnesses (type II diabetes, etc.), in part, due to a lack of rigorous and intense exercise. Further, like it or not, a lot of our health institution’s recommendations for how we should eat are, at this point, either incorrect, or only partially correct. If you want to have a healthy diet that will nourish your body and lead to good outcomes, you need to investigate alternative media sources which means stepping outside your comfort zone and accepting the unsafety that perhaps our institutions have been leading us awry.
All of this is to say, I’m not encouraging you to make flagrantly risky decisions, but I am simply connecting the dots that people that are fit and healthy are that way because they make consistent efforts to be that way. These efforts involve, in a sense, risk and vulnerability. For example, making a substantial change to your diet and doing the research or working with a coach to understand what might be effective for you. Another example is walking into a fitness community for the first time to do a kind of fitness you’ve never done before and are clueless about. Another still could be that a social media platform or dating app makes you feel like shit and the best way to deal with that is to delete it. All of these things might yield a feeling of unsafety because you need to get uncomfortable if you want to grow and learn. The discomfort is currency for success in the long run and the obsessions with safety gets us nowhere.
Thinking about self-limiting beliefs today. Are there limiting beliefs that you’ve held in the past that have kept you stuck? How did you move past them?
This is the perfect place to build your tribe! Feel free to authentically and boldly share what’s going on with you, relevant parts of your health and wellness journey or any helpful information you might come across.
NOTE: This is a community for men. Women are wonderful, but if they are found in the community, they will respectfully be asked to leave.
Keep Thriving,
Coach Greg
When I was a younger man, I discovered a community and a whole world within dance music. When I started to fall in love with this scene, I began going to events where people danced until sunrise, were obsessed beyond measure with niche artists that no one’s heard of (but we gag over), and made fast friends with the strangers standing next to you. When going to events, the thing that I probably loved the most was how connected to people I felt. I felt as though I had permission to say hi to the strangers next to me and ask them about themselves. Some of my closest friends to this day came from these sort of interactions - probably because if a person is at that sort of event, you can ascertain that you have things in common.
Experiences like this are healing. Most of the time, we walk around judging each other as if we’re high and mighty, everyone is in our way as we indulge our egos and try to get through our respective days. But in these moments, we can mostly let that go and connect to ...
I’ve been reflecting about the concept of rest and why it appears to be very difficult for many of us in the current state of affairs. When I say rest, I mean both physically and mentally…but especially mentally. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that we’re all very overstimulated and I think because of this, our ability to push the “off” button has become…suspect, at best.
We are existing at the corner of hustle culture and an attention economy (social media, instagram, etc.) that has made it seemingly difficult to unplug and just be. I often find that if I’m honest with myself, a lot of time that I’m “resting” I’m not even rested, nor relaxed because I’m consuming two or three forms of media at once. This is not relaxing….it might be relaxing if we’re just intentionally allowing ourselves to scroll but the thing about a living, breathing algorithm is that we don’t even know what we’re going to get sometimes. We could be trying to relax and in pops a ...
Yes, I know the title of this might turn some people off but hear me out. We have entered a state of affairs where the concept of medicine is entirely divorced from the spirit in the Western world. Even in psychological medicine where the topic of consciousness is very relevant, most dare not to enter the realm of belief, God, higher powers, or anything of the sort. Certainly, there can be plenty of merit in discovering why we think the way that we do, or trying to think better thoughts. Though frankly, I do think as a society we are incredibly excellent at analyzing ourselves to death with little in the way of results. It’s all well and good to understand why you’re crazy, miserable and unhealthy, it’s an entirely different thing to actually behave differently.
While a certain side of me does empathize with this idea that we need to intervene at the level of thought or simply in the body to help people get better, I question how we as a species can divorce the soul from this equation. I ...
