I’ve looked back at that day so many times over the years. In life, you can’t always prepare in advance for what the day will bring. Sometimes you find yourself at the top of a mountain and you have to figure out what to do. You need to put aside the fear and give it a try. Then comes the beautiful moment when you realize you can ski. Maybe not well, but you’re making progress. 

Have you ever wanted something so badly that you found it was hard to think about almost anything else? If you have, you might have been experiencing what’s called “scarcity mindset”. Scarcity mindset is a sort of tunnel vision that occurs when you want or need something so badly that all other things fade to the background (Vedantam, 2017).

There are a LOT of ways that we can practice emotional numbing. Some of us might use alcohol or drugs, others might turn to a never ending to-do list to avoid feeling. Even if we don’t use any of those approaches, we can still move through our days with a “just don’t think about it” approach that puts certain feelings away in a box instead of learning how to deal with them (Michael, 2020).