A Conversation on the Upper & Lower Limits of Joy

We spend copious amounts of precious energy worrying. What if it goes sideways? What if it fails? What if it doesn’t work out? What if I get hurt? What if the other shoe drops? What if, what if, what if. Worrying feels like a self-protection mechanism while it’s simultaneously hobbling us from moving forward. We can become so creative in our possible demise scenarios that we become wracked with anxiety that paralyzes us into inaction. Humans have evolved well beyond cave paintings and primitive tools, yet we cannot seem to outgrow our basic responses of fight, flight, freeze and fawn.

• Fight — take action to eliminate the danger

• Flight — run away in an effort to escape the danger

• Freeze — immobilize in the face of the threat in hopes it passes

• Fawn — Abandon your own needs to avoid conflict

We like to pretend that we are eons away from our primal ancestors as we drive around in fancy cars on our way to specialized jobs in which we are overpaid to do relatively menial work unnecessary to our actual survival. We seek the thrill of endorphin rushes we no longer get chasing and being chased by wild animals and neighboring tribes so we mimic it with a constant stream of caffeine, dramatic new stories and creating problems in our lives to simulate the need to survive. The more primitive parts of our brain seem almost disconnected from the reality we exist in and seek to match up current life events with primal responses. It’s as though when we are faced with something out of our comfort zone we forgo our more modern coping tools and mechanisms in favor of pure instinct. Instinct cries out from the dark recesses of the psyche that anything new, different, and better is the devil. Comfort is king for the human mind, and even if that ‘comfort’ is an awful situation it is, after all, what we know.

Comfort is knowing the upper and lower limits of your experience. Comfort can be a warm cozy bed, a long-tenured career or a paid off house. It can also be an abusive relationship that you have learned to survive by managing the other persons behavior and modifying your responses. It can be an unfulfilling job in which you dread going to work daily and count down the days to the weekend, spending every penny you earn to recover from the feeling of slowly dying at your desk. Most people are familiar with the lower limit — can it get any worse? I hit rock bottom. It’s only up from here. We don’t mind scraping our faces across the rough stuccoed floor of our internal pools. It lets us know that we cannot possibly go any further beyond this and we can often rebound off the floor upwards into something less painful. The lower limit is the maximum amount of suffering you are willing and able to deal with.

What we are not as comfortable or familiar with is the upper limit. Our upper limit delineates the maximum good we allow ourselves to experience. Each of us has a (often subconscious) set of rules that define who we are, how we live and what exists in the realm of possibility for us. I recall years ago telling my long time therapist that, “People like me don’t have houses with pools.” I said it as plain as day and she looked at me like I had grown a second head. Trying to maintain her composure and not laugh, she asked me to repeat what I had said and then if I really believed that. When I said it consciously, I thought, well that sounds kind of strange and crazy and limiting. It was as though I had formed an absolute truth about my life during my childhood years based off our economic status and decided that was going to be that for my entire existence.

Most of us have these upper limits with how much money we can make, what kind of relationship and love we can have, what we can do for a career, how we spend our time, the friendships we have, even down to what our body looks like. The upper limit sounds like this:

I’d be happy if I can just make $150,000 a year for the rest of my life

All I want is to not have any credit card debt

Marriage is hard, but as long as she doesn’t cheat on me, that’s good enough

Not everyone does what they love, I want good benefits and a company with growth

I will never look as good as they do, I just want to lose ten pounds

There is nothing wrong with stability and consistency, but there is an issue with the lack of creativity, expansion and belief that we can stretch past that if you want to go from an ordinary life to an extraordinary one. This is where we smack straight into worry, anxiety and fear. Realizing what your upper limits are — the stories you’ve told yourself about who you are, what you are worthy of, what is possible for you, is the first step. Once you begin poking and prodding at that glass ceiling of sorts, things can get awfully uncomfortable. The primitive mind roars awake in an all-out effort to protect you from the impending doom of stretching beyond your limits. Your internal parent says, “Can’t you be grateful for what you have? Why do you always have to push for more? Sit down and be thankful.” Pushing against that upper limit sounds like,

What would my life look like if I moved?

What if I was in the best shape of my life?

How would I feel if I loved myself? What if someone loved me the way I love?

Say if I had unlimited resources or time, what would I do?

What if I could succeed at what I am passionate about?

Our survival skills come in kindness, what our mind really wants is to keep us safe even if safety is the very thing that is slowly draining our life force. It means well, and it’s important to keep that at heart. In its last ditch attempts to lure you back to comfort it hits you with fear in some crippling and cruel ways. Your mind betrays you in essence, telling you that you are nothing, nobody, a farce, a fuckup and that what you want will be yanked away at the last minute, leaving you in the final free-fall of your limited life. Rude, right? It loves you, but it can be scathing in its efforts to keep you right where you are, between your established limits.

Becoming aware of the mind’s efforts to “help” and “protect” allow us to explore beyond. We can look at the feelings of anxiety and excitement — the human experience of these two emotions is identical. Elevated heart rate, shortness of breath, extremely dilated or contracted pupils, increased body temperature, a fluttering sensation in the stomach, adrenaline prickling in the fingers. In fact, anxiety is a state of excitement, yet we often consider anxiety “bad” and excitement, “good”. Likewise we can see the similarities between worrying and wishing. Both are fantasizing about for something that hasn’t happened yet. When we worry we are projecting negative fantasies on our future based on current events. When we wish, we are imagining positive outcomes for upcoming choices. Instead of letting the primitive mind drag you back to the depths of its cave by the hair, try shifting language.

“What if this works out better than I imagined?”

“What if it all goes right?”

“What if what I want happens sooner than I think? Am I ready now?”

“What if I have everything I need to become who I want to be?”

“What if they love me as I am?”

“What if I could get anything I wish for?”

The world of possibility that opens up once the upper limit is raised or removed (if that’s even possible), becomes akin to another dimension. No longer bound by self-imposed, cultural or societal restraints, you are free to develop and grow. What’s even more interesting is that there is a booming subculture of people who work to lower the bottom limit — increasing the tolerance to discomfort, pain, and endurance. They take ice baths and cold showers and fast for days and run hundreds of miles without sleep. It is seen as extreme and adventurous and courageous. Lower the bar! Increase the pain threshold! Stay hard! If you apply the pressure to both and move both of those limits outwards, the range of your human experience has multiplied massively. I ask of you, of myself, of all of us — can we dedicate the same care, time and attention to pushing the upper limit higher as well? To spend as much time fantasizing about the best possible outcome as we do worry about the worst case scenario? We are not here to pay bills and die, we are running out of years, if now is not the time to push upwards, then when? What if the possibility for it to all work out is right around the corner?