The most important thing I did during the triage p…

Transcript

The first and probably most important thing I had to do during the triage phase of my retirement, which was those first three months where I was sort of surprised by the anxiety and worry and frankly panic that I was feeling, was I needed to break what I'm calling, you know, looking back at it as my doom spiral. And what would happen is I would start worrying about, like, is the stock market going to hold up for my retirement? And so I'd go out and I'd search it. And you know how it is when you search anything, like you go search some kind of health thing. It's not good. It's never good. And so I'd get these, like, you know, the stock market is going to crash, dudes. And, you know, people's retirements are going to, you know. You know, be vaporized. And so then you'd start reading, like, more stuff from those people. And you'd get more and more bad news. And, you know, you go on social media and a lot of the algorithms reward, you know, how much time you spend on a specific post or subject. So, for example, on this platform, you know, if you spend a lot of time on a video, it assumes that you like that kind of content. So, you know. In my doom spiral, I'd watch a video on, you know, the U.S.'s financial condition. And if it were, you know, bad news, you know, the algorithm would say, oh, he seems to like these stories about how the U.S. is in financial trouble. And so I would get into this spiral. And sometimes it was, you know, platforms doing it to try and serve me the content. It thinks I want. And sometimes it was me just going out and looking for bad news. But I broke the doom spiral by, for example, on this platform. If a video came up that was negative or, you know, made me anxious, I would get out of it immediately. If one came up that was positive and provided me with some assurance, I'd watch it all the way through, sometimes twice, because that's how you reward a video. Or I'd comment, you know, I'd just say, great content, thanks. And the platform would say, well, he must like this kind of content. So it would show me more of that kind of content. So I also listened to anything positive I could get my hands on. So I watched YouTube videos on positivity and, you know, self-encouragement, self-soothing. I downloaded audio books that were positive, like, you know, even like, even just like self-help type books. Just because. Because they are positive. And what I did is I just, I got away from all, like, news, social media that was, like, negative or, like, fighty. I just, I just blocked out all, all negative input and just kept putting positive things in my mind. It's actually the way I turned my life around when I was young and really struggling. It's the same thing I did then. I just only let positive things in my mind. And I'm not like... I'm not like one of those secret guys or whatever. I just, I've always been susceptible to what I hear. Like, if I'm around somebody who's grumpy, I get grumpy. I'm not, I'm dysregulated. So I, I need to, to feed myself stuff that, that looks like what I want to feel like. So the main thing, though, is that do whatever it is that works for you to break that doom spiral. Because once you get in that, you can't think. You can't think straight. And you can't make the decisions you need to make to start kind of digging yourself out and making plans for really enjoying your retirement. And once I broke the doom spiral, you know, then I started thinking, like, okay, well, what do I want to be now? What do I want to do now? Like, you know, what would make me happy? But I couldn't think like that when I was in the doom spiral because I was just in a panic the whole time. So you got to break that first. And I know that sounds like advice. And I think it kind of is. And I shouldn't give people advice. But it worked for me. It may not work for you. But for me, the biggest problem was I was feeding into my own panic. And I had to break that cycle. Once I did, I could start thinking more clearly about what I needed to do next.