Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match video exactly.
Emma Rusher: Have you ever felt the world is f-cked? Don't take it personally. That's according to psychotherapist Andrew Sloan. In Why Things Feels F*cked, Andrew guides us on how our nervous systems react to the pressures of modern life and offers tips to make small changes to help us move from stuck to free. Andrew, welcome to Audible. Your book title is resonating with a lot of people right now. You open in the book with, "You are not alone and you are not broken. The world is." Andrew, why do things feel f-cked?
Andrew Sloan: Wow, this is so different for so many different people. When I think about what we're all being impacted by, it's a monumentally fast and fractured world that I think we call it normal.You know how fast and maybe fractured we feel with each other as we move through the world? I think we've kind of found a way to calling it normal. And what I've discovered is that it is far from normal. It is far from normal for our nervous systems to be in such a fast and fractured world. I've kind of spent the last 10 years thinking about this. Why do people come to me feeling so stuck? Why have I personally felt so incredibly stuck inside of my life?
So, the last 10 years, I've been on a bit of a journey to go, “What is that about? How can we understand it and sort of orientate ourselves to it?” But then more importantly, how do we actually take steps that we can control, through it, to a better life for ourselves, but also being more available for each other in a world that feels, I think, at times really frightening and a world that feels really highly pressured. Nine out of 10 people in the UK right now, and I would think that's kind of similar to maybe our Australian context, are feeling really high levels of stress and really high levels of pressure.
ER: Nine out of 10.
AS: Nine out of 10. And this is the pressure cooker that I think we're feeling underneath our skin, but we're experiencing it in our relationships back to ourselves, but each other, our friendships, our families, in our workplaces, and then at every other level of our community, all the way up to politics and how that's unfolding for us right now. So, yeah, things are feeling quite f-cked.
ER: As an integrated psychotherapist, you write that the modern world has hijacked our nervous systems for disconnection. Can you break down a little bit about what's actually happening in our bodies and why we're responding that way?
AS: The systems of disconnection have been set up by a billion nervous systems over history that have all made decisions out of fear versus safety. And that's not because we're bad, and I don't think that's because there's a master grand conspiracy happening. I think it's a myriad of these decisions all adding up to systems that sort of disconnect us versus connect us together safely. And in our nervous systems, fear sort of wins. When we grew our nervous systems in small hunter-gathering groups, we needed to prioritise fear inside of them to survive. And so that tiger running our encampment needed to be seen as a tiger, even if it was a shadow, because it was the difference between us surviving and not surviving.
"It is far from normal for our nervous systems to be in such a fast and fractured world."
So, what we notice in our news cycles today is that fear wins. Those positive generative stories around safety are left off the headlines. I don't know about you, but my feed has to be purposefully curated towards better stories and stories of safety and joy in the world. And so that sort of infiltrates how we set up our schooling systems, how we set up our political systems, how we set up our workplaces. Only 26 percent of us are in workplaces where safety rules the dominant logic or the culture of our work. That relegates like 74 to 76 percent of us in workplaces that actually take away our sense of safety and togetherness and connectiveness. And we've got a workplace crisis as one of these systems of disconnection. They make us combative and protective and defensive rather than curious, open and safe with people. And 70 percent of that, by the way, is actually our one-to-one relationship with our leader. It's that safe—
ER: Very personal.
AS: —human connection. It's so personal. It's that safe human connection that makes all the difference. So, our nervous systems are then activated. And in the book, we talk about the different levels of the nervous system all the way from green, which is the calm, curious, and open mode, up towards the activated, the momentum, the inspiration, the forward movement in the yellow zone. We then trip up into potentially sometimes the orange zone of anger. That's also the place for assertiveness and clarity, but it can also be the place for rage and unbridled anger. And then we have the red zone where we go to freeze in place and where we have to really slam the brakes on because things have become too overwhelming. And predominantly what the systems have done is invited us to be above the green zone, not connected to safety, openness, and curiosity, and sort of headed north to have to put our brakes on.
For me, that has shown up in my career and my personal history as sort of moments of extreme overwhelm and needing really to crash out and to find myself in high levels of fatigue at times. And so this is when we might have a shared experience of anxiety and depression. And quite often, the world's systems are pulling us into either level and keeping us there in some ways until we can do this sort of thing we're doing, looking at each other's eyes, seeing each other's faces and having a connective conversation is the biggest move we can make, putting our phones down and truly connecting with another human—
ER: Being present.
AS: —is the green zone of our nervous systems. It's the antidote, or one of them.
ER: Thanks for breaking that down for us. I think what I really enjoyed about your audiobook was that you've used your decade of a clinical experience, but also you open up about your journey. Can you tell us a little bit about that and when you were stuck and what led you to free?
AS: Well, I think as a queer person in the world, I progressively felt stuck in the first few years of my life up against the straight normal. I used to look into adults' eyes and just see puzzlement in front of me, this queer little kid just on the back of the late '80s and early '90s, where queer and gay was synonymous with the AIDS epidemic at the time and HIV. And I think that kind of created a big disconnect between me and the people who were loving me at the time. That laid tracks in my nervous system that really kept me separate from people for a very long period of time.
So this, as I describe in the book, is sort of the layering of our nervous system of our early experiences, a big reason why we start to feel really stuck. It's those really early years that cook up into our adult years. And when we don't tend to those patterns, they really dominate our modern and present relationships and how we feel in the world. So, from 13 to 21, I was in a Christian cult and through that time received a lot of love and acceptance within that faith, but then absolutely rejected at 21 when I disclosed my same-sex attraction. Finding a way to help that the church wanted me to take, that really controlled how I felt about my queerness and limited the access to great support that I actually really needed at 21.
Then from 21 to 35 and 40, I'm 41 now, I've been on a progressive journey of healing myself, investing in my own healing because no one else was coming to save me and I had to kind of do it myself. And yeah, feeling panicked for the first time about six years ago after already doing many years of therapy, but actually finding that my body was still holding really unsafe experiences and needing to create safety for myself in those things and get the right network of support that I felt powerful in and safe within to explore those really challenging experiences.
This, for me, is the foundation of self-leadership. It begins with safe relationship, and then we get to choose what happens next around our own self-insight, making great choices in our lives that expand, not contract, what happens next, and most importantly, create really beautiful, co-creative relationships where we both can be powerful and creative together. We don't have to overcome each other. We don't have to overpower each other. I've kind of taken you on a journey of why things felt really awful for me, but then this 10-year path out, right? I've codified it in this book. I've probably given people too much, right?
ER: Well, that's what I love about it, too, though, because I've listened to it once and I know I want to go back again when I need to. I really enjoyed how you've gifted listeners with the resources that you can watch and read on Audible while you're listening to really solidify a lot of the points that you're making and the frameworks that you're talking about. How did you decide to bring your work to audio? Because it's a different experience for people.
AS: It is. And I was so proud that right at the top of Audible, we have access to this downloadable experience where the frameworks, the illustrations, and the tools live right in the same user experience. I am so proud of that because I toiled with bringing these tools and these frameworks to life for the reader. I wanted them to feel like they were seated next to me almost in conversation with me, almost like I was drawing on a napkin, "Hey, I think it might look like this,” and “Where are you at in this?” is often how I support people.
"Putting our phones down and truly connecting with another human is the green zone of our nervous systems. It's the antidote, or one of them."
So, pulling that together for the audio version was incredibly exciting because I could lay out both the self-leadership model that I just spoke about, the nervous system map, which tells us a story about what's happening inside of our human bodies because of how the world is shaped and how our past experiences are shaped. And then all the way through the other tools and reflection questions that sit inside of the book to go back to.
Some of the greatest lovers of the book have sent messages to me and say exactly what you're saying. It's like, “I've read it and I've scanned it. Now I'm going back to mine the insights and those reflection questions and take them to others in their life to enrich the conversation.” And that's what this book was always meant to be about. It's a resource, it's a multifaceted resource, a diverse resource, to take into conversations with the people we love or the support systems we're putting in place to handle how stuck we feel or how fractured the world feels right now. And it's a beautiful thing to be able to offer, really, truly.
ER: It's a real gift when you're listening, to have that. When someone's listening to us right now or watching us and thinking quietly, "Oh, that's me heading north from green, maybe amber, maybe orange, maybe red." What is the one thing you'd like them to try?
AS: Well, I think that safe human connection is great when we can get it, right? But not all of us have that privilege all of the time, every moment of the day. And so when we can, if we can, we want to connect with safe humans. It turns out that some humans just aren't safe. They inadvertently judge us or shame us or criticise us. In those moments we can't find that judgement-free, open, spacious relationship, we actually can use our bodies to create more safety, so we can find different moves in the world towards safer people. So, 80 percent of that calm, open, curious mode is from the body to the brain. It actually moves up the vagus nerve inside of our bodies, and that is a superhighway from the body to the brain. Sometimes we think we should think our way to calm, think our way to peace, think our way to openness and curiosity. It's just not how it works. That's a small part.
ER: We're in these human bodies.
AS: Yes. We're in this human body and we've got a really complex network of neurons, brain sort of neurons in our gut and our heart and our head that actually is all connected. And so if we're feeling really activated, if we're finding ourselves feeling routinely unsafe, we might want to try elongating our exhale. Now, for some people that are feeling really stuck at the moment, hearing a therapist say just breathe differently can be really frustrating. It can be. But bear with me.
ER: There's science to it.
AS: It is science and it is a really powerful tool to actually begin and end with the breath. These micro moments of safety that we can fill our brains with actually build up over time. These small changes often, as I talk about in the audiobook, actually build up a different capacity in our bodies to actually move through the world quite differently. And so that elongation of that exhale actually contributes an amazing effect in our bodies. Quite often we'll find our breath really short and shallow, but what would it be like not to change the inhale, but just to elongate the exhale. Now there's also other things we can do, right? Our access to nature is monumental to—
ER: Really enjoyed how you spoke about that.
AS: Yeah. It's so significant. Our nerve endings and our neurons and our human bodies, they weren't designed for this modern life. They were evolved in natural spaces. So, when we actually have access to looking at a body of water, it actually downregulates our nervous system to calm. When we look at trees, when we have our feet on the earth, these are the things that actually also work. It sounds a bit woo-woo maybe, but having five or 10 minutes away from our desk—
ER: Being conscious about that.
AS: —and being really present in nature is monumental to navigating the world just as it is, right? In the chaotic, the ever-changing and the fast pace, taking those micro moves of breath and nature are two of the things that I would offer to people to shift. There's a whole myriad of other things. In the audiobook, we've got a calm model that sort of sits there to really invite people to understand, how do they connect with their bodies and each other? How do they anchor and ground? How do they use their natural orientation reflex to look? And then how do we move low and slow to build more calm inside of our bodies? And that's one of the resources in the downloadable PDF.
ER: In the audiobook, you speak about the importance of belonging and building a safe community around us and the benefits that that can bring. Can you explain why it's so important?
AS: I think it's because this world is actually not getting any less chaotic. It's not going to change any less frequently than it is right now. We are on a trajectory here through AI and changes in the workplace and changes in our communities. It's rapidly expanding, the pace of change. It's never felt more anxious. It's never felt more brutal. It's never felt more incomprehensible, what's happening. The only path out of that is back to each other. And the greatest antidote to why things feel f-cked is our sense of safe, connected relationships.
In the last chapter of the book, I talk about, how do we cultivate belonging back in everything that we do? How do we prioritise and centre belonging in the systems of work, life, play, love, all of those parts of what makes life really great? I start to think about how do we take self-leadership, knowing ourselves, making great choices alongside each other, not overpowering each other, but creating really beautiful, creative relationships together into everything that we set our minds and our hands to in this world.
"We can start bit by bit, making small changes often to create more safety, more belonging, and more connection in everything we do. That's my hopefulness. That's my optimism for the future."
Belonging, what we know, and a lot of this is from Indigenous knowledge, actually reshapes how humans can achieve great things together. And so I end the book, and it's my most favourite illustration, and it's in the downloadable PDF, is how do we create safe harbours of connection with each other? And what would it be like as we move into the next part of our day, next part of our week, to actually create safe harbours for people, to create safety and connectedness and calm, and that be the impact we have on people as we move through this world. What would that do? What would that create over time? And that's my hope for a chaotic world and people who feel stuck in it, is that we can start bit by bit, making small changes often to create more safety, more belonging, and more connection in everything we do. That's my hopefulness. That's my optimism for the future.
ER: You talk about how building excellence is in micro steps at a time.
AS: It is, yeah.
ER: Could you share one step that you're going to take today towards that?
AS: It's a beautiful thing because sometimes we think it needs to change big and quick. And what I know about sustainable change is it is small changes over time to create great things for us. And it's those soft, gentle, nuanced changes, those subtle changes that actually change things and make it last. One thing that I know I'm doing more is trying to slow down my transitions from one thing to the next because I often rush and hustle. Slow down that gap between the thing and the thing.
ER: It's like you were saying before, doing an exhale.
AS: Yes. It's the same thing but a bit bigger.
ER: Taking that moment between things.
AS: Actually slowing how I walk, because I've got a really fast walk. Slowing down my transitions from this to that. Looking up, how do I orientate myself to the sky and the ground in those transitions? And being really mindful and trying my hardest to down the phone, down the feed, down the digital connection that I'm constantly hooked into, and maybe popping on an audiobook rather than sitting inside of the feed, and being really present to one thing. So, it's these small changes that I'm trying to make. Even now, I'm challenging myself to be courageous enough to shift into a calmer posture with a bit more space.
ER: Thank you for giving us space today to think about these things and equipping us in the audiobook with agency and very practical ways for us to not just feel reactive to this fast-paced, f-cked world and take some agency back. Thank you.
AS: Thank you for having me.
