Recession—what a scary word! I wonder when you hear that you become frightened, fearful, and worried; you wonder what you're going to do and how you're going to survive. One of our basic instincts is survival, and a part of our survival in today's world is being able to provide for ourselves. And recession, or lack of financial security, is the main thing, right? We won't be able to provide for ourselves the way we need to. The money that you work so hard for does not extend as far as it needs to. So the recession is real, and it can be scary. I will tell you that. However, we are in a unique position to prepare for it. So it's important to understand what happens to you when your basic survival is in danger. So when we were, you know, cavemen and women and so on, cave people, let's say, we needed to survive, and we needed to be able to use our resources and manage threats.
So, evolutionary speaking, we develop the ability to feel anxious, nervous, alert, hypervigilant, and ready to act when our survival is in danger, as well as remember the times when we have experienced situations where our survival is in danger. So if in our history we had drought, we would be sensitive when there wasn't, when we're seeing a pattern of food scarcity. So biologically speaking, evolutionarily speaking, we have already established defense mechanisms internally that we use to react to the potential danger of not being able to provide for ourselves. And we remember the times when we didn't have what we needed, whether it was due to a lack of financial stability growing up, whether it was personal or cultural, whether it was historical, whether you grew up in an environment or in a family that struggled to provide or went through the 2008 recession, etc.
So the point is that we have this memory of what that was like. So it's very natural for you to get that anxiety. But if you were to think of this anxiety as an alarm system, think of it as telling you something. Then you're able to start to plan ahead and use your rational mind to make changes so that you can protect yourself. So the first and most important strategy is to acknowledge the anxiety as a defense mechanism to assure your survival, rather than a crippling symptom that gets in the way. It's important to acknowledge the anxiety as a fear based on history, but not as a helplessness that you're experiencing right now. If you are able to see anxiety as an alarm, then you can be queued in and start to make choices that will protect you from this possible danger, such as recession or not being able to provide for yourself. The money you make is not enough. Oftentimes, when we feel anxiety, which is an autonomic nervous system response, like I said, it's based on history and your intuition based on your nature. We forget to pay attention to the logic, right? We feel the anxiety, we go into panic, and then we allow the emotions to take over. At that point, we can solve problems. We can come up with solutions. However, if instead we take the anxiety as an alarm, as a, you know, hey, something's going on, we feel the fear and say to ourselves, It's okay, I have time, I have resources, I have abilities. This is something I can now change. Then we can calm ourselves and then start to strategize on how to survive the recession that is coming.
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