Your Inner Stunt Player

Back in Episode One, I spoke about loving fear and how you can find a way to do that if you listen to the message your fear is alerting you to and preparing for the danger. I also talked about how we can view our life as a movie and yourself as every part in it, including the one who is hired to fear the danger. Let’s go deeper into that idea.

How do we get to know our inner stunt player? Who is she? Does he specialize in a particular area? How much of a challenge does she need to get her adrenaline going? Is he addicted to adrenaline? These are some interesting questions that may have much greater influence on your movie than you realize.

Our inner stunt players are the part of ourselves that steps into risk the dangers of life.
Each stunt player has what you could call a “threshold of stimulation”. This means there is a moment when something has stimulated you enough to trigger that rush of adrenaline, for your danger signals to start flashing within you.

Keep reading to discover why it helps to know it and how to gage your threshold.

WHAT IS MY THRESHOLD OF STIMULATION?

Suppose you want to wake up at five in the morning to get to the airport. Here are some different possible actions people take to wake up on time:
1. You simply set one alarm, go to bed, wake up when it goes off in the morning, and move on with your day.
2. You need a backup alarm because you hit the snooze button frequently.
3. You set the alarm, plus a backup but wake up every hour of the night in a panic that you have overslept. You might as well silence your alarm because your inner one is already screaming.
4. You need to set four alarms near you and a fifth one across the room?
What does this mean?

1. If you are #1, then you have a natural, average threshold of stimulation.
2. If you are #2, your threshold is higher. It takes a double alarm to get you going.
3. If you are #3, your have a lower threshold. You have a silent alarm that is easily stimulated to get you going.
4. If you are #4, you are a five-alarm person who takes a lot of stimulation to get the same adrenaline rush that #3 gets, just from thinking about it.

Why is this helpful to know?
We need to verify the danger is real, so we don’t overreact to imaginary stimuli. We want to be sure we aren’t creating a danger to feed our five-alarm natures. We want to be able to thrive among people of all thresholds.

Many times, what stimulates us is different from what gets other people going. What triggers your fears and how you go about coping with them will inevitably cause you more stress, if those you have cast in your life are operating on a different threshold. Once you understand your threshold and the thresholds of the other players, you can begin to create coping strategies.

Post a comment about what your threshold is and how that mixes with the players in your life. And next time, I will talk more about how thresholds of stimulation can protect us or cause chaos. Remember, our happy ending of the series is aiming to help you fear less and love more.

Ask me questions!