Here’s a life-coaching session in five words: Never watch a weasel dance.
Metaphorically speaking, that is.
You see, when weasels go hunting, they locate their favorite prey—rabbits—and then, right out in the open, perform a bizarre murder dance. They flail, they leap, they spin and somersault so frenziedly they make Olympic gymnasts look kind of sluggish.
This fascinates the rabbits, who stop and stare at the dancing weasel. They’re so amazed that they just sit there, unmoving, as the weasel jitterbugs right up to them and kills them.
We humans aren’t that mesmerized by literal weasels, but we’re susceptible to the frenzied dance of human predators. And right now, it’s like we’ve wandered into a weasel rave.
Follow the News, But Don’t Stare at the Dance
Scroll through your news feed, and you’ll see weasel dances everywhere. Weird political events unfold by the hour. Bizarre claims and announcements come at us from trolls on the internet, from billionaires, from top government officials, from the Magic Eight Balls we’ve dug out of our closets in a desperate attempt to get a handle on it all. The news reads like a three-million-ring dancing-weasel circus.
It’s horrifying. It’s fascinating. If we don’t look away, we may get so stunned that we can’t make wise decisions or take necessary actions.
Of course we need to be aware of the dancing weasels. If we don’t keep track of them, we’re dead meat. But please, friends, don’t reread twenty different versions of the same shocking news. Don’t ruminate, giving the weasel dance every ounce of your attention even when you’re supposed to be raising your children or performing surgery. Above all, don’t follow strands of hysterical rhetoric down online rabbit holes. That strategy puts us in a small mental space, where weasels love to hunt.
That dangerous place, that mental spot where we’re extremely vulnerable, crammed in tight, and out of options, is called anxiety.
In my recent book Beyond Anxiety, I describe the tightening grip anxiety has on our brains. I call it the “anxiety spiral.” Billions of people are living with it right now. If you’re one of them, you might see no way forward, no way out of a terrifying moment in history. You’re entranced by weasels. But you can escape. You can break free and leap into freedom by interrupting the anxiety spiral in your brain.
Here’s how to switch from stunned, hypnotized anxiety into calm, intelligent action.
Step 1: When Bad News Hits, Anchor in the Present Moment
The moment you become aware of something scary or insane—some new version of a weasel dance—your brain launches a biochemical fire drill. Adrenaline surges, heart pounds, logic evaporates. This is not the time to make decisions.
It is time to access mindfulness and equanimity, two qualities experienced meditators have wired their brains to access. You can get the same wiring by getting still, breathing deeply, and noticing that right in this red-hot second, you’re okay.
So don’t tweet, don’t rant, don’t order enough canned beans to last through the apocalypse. Instead, try this: Inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for six. Repeat until you can detach from the madness enough to appreciate what Deb Dana calls “glimmers”: a flower, a photo of your loved ones, a comfortable pair of socks.
Bring your frightened brain home to the present and let it see that you are physically safe. Anchor yourself in this perspective.
Step 2: Be Kind to Your Anxiety Creature
Most people fight their anxiety. They attack it, resist it, push it away. This just makes things worse, because your anxiety is an important, valuable part of you, and because, just like a rabbit watching weasels, it’s fundamentally a frightened animal. It doesn’t relax when it’s being actively attacked—how could it? So instead of fighting your anxiety, try what I call “KIST”: Kind Internal Self-Talk.
Approach your anxiety as you would a petrified bunny, or any other small, frightened animal. Be kind. Be gentle. Offer your anxious self kind words. Inside your head (unless you enjoy concerned glances from bystanders) say things like: “I know you’re scared. That’s okay. I’ve got you. May you feel calm. May you be happy. May you feel safe.”
Kind Internal Self Talk does three things:
- It shifts your identity from the panicked creature to a compassionate, wise aspect of yourself.
- It stops your spiraling anxiety spiral by offering an internal narrative that calms rather than inflames.
- It brings your attention back to your own internal state, breaking your hypnotic focus on the dancing weasels.
Step 3: Ask, ‘What Can I Make?’
When we’re in scary circumstances, anxiety asks, “What should I do? What should I do? What should I do?” This is part of the paralysis, because when your anxiety is active, you literally can’t think creatively about what to do next.
Instead, ask yourself a question that wakes up the creative parts of your brain, pulling energy away from the anxiety spiral. That question is, “What can I make?”
You could, for example, make a phone call to your congressman to discuss concerns. You could make a cup of tea and create a small space of meditative silence as you sip it. You could knit a hat, write a haiku, paste up a vision board, color a mandala, find a funny meme and repost it to your buddies. Any creative action, even a small one, pulls you away from anxiety and into a mental state of absorbed attention in the present moment.
From this place of creativity, you will still be aware that the weasels are dancing. But you won’t be hypnotized. You’ll be able to pull your attention away from them (they hate that) and access the part of yourself that thinks up solutions to any problem. Even the problems the world is facing right now. Panic never creates peace. But from peace, you can create anything.
Step 4: Connect with Beloved Friends (and Animals, and Trees, and Rocks)
In our state of paralyzed anxiety, we feel isolated and disconnected. Any act of re-connection breaks the fixation on the murder dances, and turns our single point of creativity into a whole much greater than the sum of its parts.
Anything you can do to connect will have this effect. Play with your dog. Listen to a wise and/or funny podcast. Read the biography of someone you respect, and connect with their spirit. Go among the trees or big boulders, who will tell you, “It’s okay. Weasel dances always end, and life persists. I’ve been watching for a hundred years.”
Finally, know that pretty much all of us are rabbits in a field of hunting weasels. Reach out to calm and comfort people you know, and then people you don’t know. Find and create the bonds of kindness and fellowship that form stable communities.
This last instruction is crucial, because here my metaphor breaks down. We aren’t rabbits or weasels. We’re social primates. We need to connect with one another to be mentally healthy.
The dancing weasels will tell you that focusing on them is the way to feel connected. Try it, and see if they’re right. When you obsess over a person who’s ranting online about their personal superiority, do you feel deep, relaxed peace and a sense of growing compassion, or a kind of stunned hypnosis and growing alarm?
If the answer is “peaceful and compassionate,” keep observing that person. If the answer is “hypnotized and anxious,” look away, look away, look away.
No matter what happens, we all have within us a still, silent core that hums with kindness and gently moves us to action. Focus on that inner sanctuary, and you can move through the weasel circus without losing yourself or being victimized by performative acrobatics.
However frenziedly the predators dance, you can walk your true path in peace.
Much love,
P.S. Want to see the weasel dance?
[Viewer warning: A rabbit does get caught and killed by a weasel at the end of the video.]
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