All Roads Lead Back
to the all or nothing mentality
I’m at Jiffy Lube again.
It’s not my oil this time. This time, my car bottomed out. Well, not actually. The splash shield fell out and then was dragging on the road for 3 hours as I drove to Utah.
This is a great reminder for anyone thinking about road tripping; always have duct tape. I was able to tape the front up so I could finish the leg of the trip and once again find myself in awe of the versatility of tape.
So far, the issues my car has faced have been pretty easy to resolve for 4500 miles of driving. An oil leak here, a small knick in the windshield there, and now this. All reasonable, all things I know I’m capable of handling.
Some notes I’ve collected while on the road:
keep a pillow in your car so you can change up how you’re sitting if you’re driving more than 6 hours
that upper bottle neck part of Texas has the best rest stops
if a storm starts in Oklahoma, don’t be a hero, just pull over
you will get windshield damage in New Mexico, there’s no escaping it
don’t always trust Google reviews, sometimes when a hotel is 60 dollars, it’s going to be shit no matter what the reviews say
download podcast episodes BEFORE you leave
if you think you can hold it, just go to the bathroom
take screenshots of the map if you’re driving on a mountain, sometimes there will be aroad closures and you’ll have to go back down and then around on the otherside all the while having absolutely no service
So far, the trip has made me have much more faith in my ability.
But, as I was driving through Utah with high winds testing my tape’s strength, a deep fear began to set in.
Was I pushing my luck? Has my clock run out?
You might think that’s an absurd thought, but isn’t that how we think about other things?
That there is a limit to how many times you can skydive, or rock climb, or eat gas station burritos before something bad happens. There seems to be an internal clock of probability that if we test it too much we will experience the worst.
I’ve heard climbers develop a sudden fear of heights, or electricians suddenly become claustrophic, skiers afraid of avalanches, surfers afraid of the ocean. It seems as if that internal clock starts sirening off, telling us that we’ve reached our limit.
Fear is an odd emotion because we tend to personify it. Fear seems to sit outside of us; a shadow being sitting on our chests. It exists in the reality rather than within us.
My new experience of impending doom reminded me of a Ted Talk I saw in Chicago.
Kristen Ulmer, once regarded as the most extreme female skier in the world, retired in 2003 because she became overwhelmed with fear. Someone who’s had more than 60 near-death experiences, woke up one day and realized she just couldn’t work with her fear any longer.
After that, she worked with monks for years and began studying the psychology of fear and our relationship to it, even writing a book, The Art of Fear.
During the talk, she spoke a lot about how fear is just an emotion and one of the reasons it controls our actions is because we are conditioned to try and eliminate our emotions. We push emotions down as they come up instead of moving through them.
Clearly fear has been on my mind for quite some time.
But it’s not necessarily the fear that fascinates me, it’s our relationship to it. How can someone who is known to jump out of helicopters while doing back flips onto a mountain, suddenly become paralyzed by risk, while someone who may have never even climbed a tree before become obsessed with soloing up a mountain.
What makes a thrill seeker?
Sensation Seeker
I didn’t even think of myself as a “thrill” seeker until I read about Marvin Zuckerman’s subtypes.
He refers to them as sensation seekers.
Which, sounds way more fun to me than thrill.
On a biological level, sensation seekers tend to have thinner levels of grey matter in the brain, causing them to perceive less of a threat, seeking greater thrills. It also holds a high heritability. So basically if you have a high tolerance to thrill, your ancestors might have hunted mammoths or something. I don’t know.
Obviously the heritability is just one small part of the sensation seeker mindset, and it seems environment has a large part in it as well, so you can train yourself to being predisposed to or against risk.
Which is probably what happened with Kristen.
There are four main subtypes of sensation seekers:
thrill and adventure seekers: need physical activity that leads to a sense of exhiliration
boredom susceptibility: crave novelty in any and every form
inhibition challenger: seek out unique social engagements
experience seeker: need consistent new experiences
Normally people are a combination of those four, and I’m sure there is a lot about thrill that is yet to be discovered.
Sensation seekers normally have crave novelty, may have higher sex-drives, move frequently, probably like more unique food or constantly listening to new music.
Sensation seeking can even look like a habit of procrastinating because you love the thrill of finishing something right at the last minute.
Those prone to more thrill, want to feel everything life has to offer. They want to understand what it means to be alive and are open to pushing themselves into that uncomfortability to do it.
And others don’t seek out thrill because they are prone to comfort over sensation. Neither is good or bad.
But, it’s made me realize why a lot of people in my life think I’m insane for packing up my car again and driving around the US.
I never classified myself as a sensation seeker because it always seemed so innate within me. I want to explore the mountains and get my pilot’s license and do a rock climbing trip and learn how to paraglide and go backpacking and try new cities. I thought all of my interests made me spacey and unclear about life, when in reality it means I’m just interested in life. I want to experience it all. And that’s okay.
Finding the limit
So how can I be a sensation seeker while also having this fear while driving through Utah?
For me, the fear seems to come up as conditioning. This pressure to view life as limited. That we have a limit to how much we can experience.
I call it All of Nothing syndrome.
We are conditioned to believe that we have a finite amount of good experiences in this life, so we must get extremely clear on what we are going to choose to experience.
If you feel paralyzed by your decisions, you probably grew up in an environment where you had to defend every one of your interests. You probably could only go into something if you were dedicated to completing it. As if there was no point in exploring the interest if you weren’t completely sure you were going to follow through with it.
So now, you may be curious about flying a plane. Or you may find yourself watching rock climbing videos and wondering how they do it. Or you may just want to start knitting.
But, as you start thinking about yourself exploring that activity, that fear comes up and sits on your chest again.
Who are you to be interested in something like that? If you aren’t going to make it your life’s work, why are you even going to try? What if you’re horrible at it? What if you get hurt? What if you waste all your time on this hobby that doesn’t even lead you to anything?
And that’s when we let fear take over and decide we can’t do any of those things we were curious about.
I’ve even found it difficult to decide on where I want to live because of that all or nothing mindset. If I choose one place, then I have to assimilate and make friends and find a routine and make the place a part of my identity. But, what if I’m unhappy there? What if I make no money or don’t develop any friendships? What if I become depressed there?
And down I go through the rabbit hole until I’m left floating through states, literally, until I can get through this fear and find a place to land.
Which also means all or nothing can turn you into a thrill seeker or cause paralysis.
I’m afraid of intimacy and “settling” so I instead seek out passionate, intense romances and would rather live out of my car than choose an apartment where I would have to *decorate* and make homey.
While others may never start that business because they are so convinced that if they aren’t sure it will be a success, it isn’t worth pursuing.
To me, it feels like this all or nothing mindset is always connected to sensation seeking. It just shows up for us in complex ways.
Subtle Activation
What is your relationship to fear? Do you sit in your fear? Put yourself out of your comfort zone? Or does it feel larger than you? Outside and like you have no control?
What about your relationship to change? Does fear come up when you think about change? Is there anything that you would like to change that you have pushed off due to fear?
What does ‘all or nothing’ mean to you? Do you find yourself falling into that trap? Or do you feel comfortable with the nuances of every experience?
Write 3 things you would love to experience if you had no fear? If you knew you could not fail.
Is there any smaller activity that could bring you a similar experience? For example, if you want to sky dive but are afraid, what would it feel like to do indoor sky diving?
Also ask yourself what you have all of nothing thinking around. Is it a business idea? Relationships? Moving?
One of mine is relationships. What is the point of me going on dates or dating casually if they don’t lead to a committed relationship? Where we experience that all or nothing mentality is in direct alignment with what we fear and where we are blocked.
Or when we, I don’t know, suddenly develop a fear of driving after driving through multiple states, it’s because we have a perceived limit on an experience. This is also all or nothing, in a way.
The conditioning is centered around the belief that we only get so many chances. So many good experiences. So many sensations.
But, what if we started viewing experiences as “yes, and.” Yes I am driving across the country and I am going to have a place that feels like home. Not everything has to be so finite, black and white. People go their entire lives seeking adventure while never getting hurt while others can walk outside and trip on the step.
Shit happens at every stage of our experience so there is no one way to experiencing it. There is no set amount of experiences we can have and there is nothing wrong with sampling as much of those experiences as possible.
with Love,
Talula
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