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Home » How to Cultivate Calm in the Midst of Chaos: Lisa Powell Graham (Transcript)

How to Cultivate Calm in the Midst of Chaos: Lisa Powell Graham (Transcript)

Here is the full text and summary of Lisa Powell Graham’s talk titled “How to Cultivate Calm in the Midst of Chaos” at TEDxOneonta conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

I feel like the year 2020 should have come with a warning label. Buckle up, humans. It’s going to be a wild ride. I’m not sure how any of us could have ever truly prepared for all the challenges we’ve faced as we’ve endured the global mass trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet thanks to my mentors who helped me heal from traumas in my own past, I had built up a toolkit of skills well before 2020 that helped me keep my sanity when it felt like the world as I knew it was imploding.

And thank goodness for that. Because the onslaught of bad news these past few years has been more than surreal. It’s been downright overwhelming, exhausting, demoralizing. It’s become way too easy to doom scroll on social media or fall into despair. So if you too have felt overwhelmed, anxious, depressed, or scared at times during these past few years, welcome to the club. You’re totally normal and you are so not alone.

In fact, a 2022 survey conducted on behalf of the American Psychological Association showed that a shocking 87% of adult surveyed, that is almost 9 out of 10, agreed that it feels like there’s been this constant stream of crises over these past few years. One crisis after another. We’ve been dealing with the pandemic, plus economic challenges, inflation, and climate change. It’s no wonder we’re so stressed.

Stress and anxiety can compound our troubles and harm our health, yet there are no guarantees that life will suddenly get easier or less complex.

So what do we do when the world feels like a dystopian hellscape? And where are the superheroes when it feels like the whole world is on fire?