How To Feel Safer In A Chaotic World | Dr. Raj Panjabi

Dan Harris (0:03)

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. We live in an increasingly uncertain and unstable world. At least it feels that way. And quite understandably, you might be tempted to approach this constant upheaval by trying to control everything compulsively or alternatively curling up into a ball of denial.

Neither of these is a winning strategy.

We are going to talk to somebody today who has some much better ideas about how to navigate the dumpster fire of modern life. His name is Dr. Raj Panjabi. He's a Harvard Medical School physician who also served as a Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the White House National Security Council under President Biden. Time Magazine has listed him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, which is not bad. His new book is called Safer, A Playbook Turning Fear Into Action and Crisis Into Community. Dr. Panjabi, welcome to the show.

Raj Panjabi (1:06)

Thanks for having me on, Dan.

Dan Harris (1:07)

It's a pleasure to have you on. Nobody's put me on any lists of 100 most influential people. I'm going to just try to sit here and control my resentment. But very, very nice to meet you. I'm really interested in talking about the book. One of the things that you talk about is that in the face of uncertainty and upheaval, a common kind of signature move of a human is denial.

Why do we do that? Is there an evolutionary explanation?

Raj Panjabi (1:35)

I found out that there is. I used to think it was a character flaw. If you didn't take a threat seriously enough, and then it came back to bite you, and I kind of experienced that the hard way. I start the book off talking about this experience of our infant daughter developing a life-threatening illness, and I missed it in my own living room, and for a while, felt a deep amount of guilt as a parent, but also as a doctor. I trained health workers around the world to find heart failure. That's what she ended up having.

When I started to do the research on Safer, I found that denial is the first feeling we tend to experience in a crisis or at times of deep uncertainty. And it turns out it's not a character flaw. What you learn is that it's actually hardwired into our brain evolutionarily. And here's the thing I learned. If you think back to our pre-human ancestors out on the savanna, they'd have to kind of be aware of a leopard was going to jump off a branch and try to attack you. But if you always thought a leopard was going to jump off a branch and attack you, your brain simply can't sustain that level of vigilance. So it became a way to adapt, and we started to believe that whatever is happening today is how tomorrow will be as well. That's a phenomenon that psychologists actually refer to as normalcy bias.

That is actually a good thing, but it also makes us less capable of assessing when tomorrow won't be like today.

Dan Harris (3:11)

We need normalcy bias or else we're just constantly on high alert and running our nervous systems into the ground. However, we also need a system for recognizing threats as they arise.

Raj Panjabi (3:26)

Yes. Yes, we do. And part of the reason I wrote this book as a playbook, it's an eight-state play guide for navigating crisis and uncertainty, is because I wanted to figure out how we overcome that denial when it's the right, you know, right time to do it. Like if your child has a slow moving health condition, like mine did, that just tips over all of a sudden and you don't see the signs coming. How do you see the signs coming? Or, you know, when you're sitting there doom scrolling on your screen and thinking about all the bad things happening in the world, should we be alarmed or not alarmed? So the macro crises and the ones that happen every day, turns out there is a way to deal with it. I experienced, like many people, crisis as chaos. But what I learned is actually there's, it's not formless.

There's really eight themes that come up. And one of them is denial, but we also tend to, the next experience is usually feeling alone. You think about someone in your life, or if you've had a severe diagnosis, or you just got laid off, you'll feel isolated. We're often assessing our risk.

Change happens often in a crisis. Critical information is always shifting. And then there's other themes that come up, like conflict. You remember during the pandemic, the challenge during mandates, people felt controlled. And then there's vulnerability that pops up, and hopefully some adaptation, but you have to change and evolve when there's a crisis. And the last one is uncertainty. I mean, sometimes, like in the case of my daughter, we're not sure why the heart failure happened. She's still alive, thankfully, she's nine now. But we don't know if it was an infectious cause, which she did have a virus grow out of her heart, or if it was a genetic cause. And we may never know what the cause is. So it may come back, it may not come back.