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Equanimity: A Creator’s Greatest Asset

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We tend to value excitement and avoid anxiety. However, if you actually sit with the two emotions as they materialize, you’ll notice that their sensations are largely the same. Both elevate your heart rate, create a tingling in your chest, make your body tense, and can even make you sweat. The primary thing that separates one response from one another is the psychological framing of them. In 2019, I published a two-part series on anxiety that consists of over 17,000 words and 160 illustrations. As I was doing the research for this series, it fascinated me how techniques like CBT and exposure therapy use reframing to gradually shift one’s perception of their biological responses. In other words, most forms of therapy aren’t designed to eliminate the physiological spikes, but to instead have the patient reinterpret them to neutralize their poignancy. Of course, there are limits to the power of reframing. It’d be naive (and perhaps irresponsible) to urge someone to reframe their situation

Equanimity: A Creator’s Greatest Asset Archive ↓ Best Posts All Posts Recent Posts Newsletter Book Courses ↓ Thinking In Stories The Examined Writer Reflections Equanimity: A Creator’s Greatest Asset By Lawrence Yeo Excitement and anxiety are close siblings that are mistaken for distant cousins. We tend to value excitement and avoid anxiety. However, if you actually sit with the two emotions as they materialize, you’ll notice that their sensations are largely the same. Both elevate your heart rate, create a tingling in your chest, make your body tense, and can even make you sweat.

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