A Guide to Adventure for Scaredy Cats Like Me
Rafting the Grand Canyon for My 50th Birthday
This month, I am going on a bucket list Grand Canyon rafting adventure. I decided years ago that I wanted to gift myself this excursion when I turned fifty years old to mark this essential turning point in my life. Big parties aren’t for me, but big adventure is.
Confessions of a Nervous Traveler
The thing is, I’m scared shitless. In the weeks leading up to this adventure that we spent two years saving for and all year planning, I’m wondering what the hell I was thinking. I’m not a big “river person.” Even when I go tubing, I like to be tied to other people, so I’m not abandoned floating alone in a mysterious eddy. I don’t know how to “read” the river. On the first and only river trip I ever took, my ducky overturned in the first five minutes. The Grand Canyon has massive white-water rapids. What was I thinking?!
If you have never considered yourself scared, neurotic, anxious, high strung, wimpy, fearful, overly-cautious, or have never passed on an adventure you really wanted to do because you were too scared to do so, then stop reading here.
If however, you have always wanted to but were too afraid to: hike the PCT, backpack around South America, travel to Bali, rock climb, solo camp, solo hike or solo travel, skinny dip in an alpine lake, hang-glide off a cliff, live off-grid or in a tiny home, go on a vision fast or any other big brave move that requires radical courage, continue on.
ADHD, Trauma, and Inherited Anxiety
I’m very much a scaredy cat. I have PTSD from multiple traumas in my younger years that have wrecked my nerves. My whole life I had undiagnosed ADHD, which has unsurprisingly been connected to nervous system dysregulation, increased stress responses and difficulty calming down. I used to tell people that I had a chronic illness called LAT, Low Adrenaline Tolerance, which I completely made up. Turns out I was kinda right though.
Are you convinced yet that I’m more of a scaredy cat than you? If not, read on.
Adding epigenetics to the mix, I have ancestral trauma inherited from being of Ashkenazi Jewish descent and although my Romanian ancestors thankfully migrated to the States prior to the Holocaust, Jews had been consistently violently persecuted for two thousand years of diaspora prior to World War II. This shows up in my family as neurosis. I was taught subconsciously that to worry was to somehow control the situation. This is most likely a result of the hypervigilance required by my ancestors for survival. In my family, irrational fear is completely normalized and enabled. My mother is afraid of elevators, for example. My aunt refuses to fly.
An Adventurous Scaredy Cat Surrounded by Adventurers
And yet, many people still consider me adventurous. How can I be both a scaredy cat and adventurous?
I have backpacked around Asia, South America and the Middle East. I spent three days and nights alone in the woods fasting. I lived in bush Alaska for several years. I live off the grid. I love to snowshoe by myself in the Rockies. These things, plus my general love of outdoor sports, travelling off the beaten path, and living an alternative lifestyle, make me appear to be adventurous.
But, I have so many friends that are way more adventurous than me.
When I tell people in my community that I am rafting the Grand Canyon this summer they get so excited.
“Oh, you got a permit!” they exclaim. They are referring to the highly coveted and difficult to get permit required to raft a self-guided journey through the Grand Canyon down the Colorado River.
“No, I did not,” I tell them with one sarcastic eyebrow extended. “I am paying professionals to safely guide me down Crystal Rapid. Do I look crazy to you?”
That’s just the kind of super brave and adventurous people we hang around with—river rats, ski bums, dirt shredders, Earthship builders, hostel hoppers, ridge runners, ayahuasca tourists, vanlifers, chalk junkies, and spiritual pilgrims.
As Eric and I like to joke, we’re outdoorsy but we’re not that outdoorsy.
Eric is much braver than me. He’ll scramble up the side of a mountain without a trail in search of a perfect view. He’s always out discovering new trails. He’ll speed down mountains on a bike and down hills on skis. He’s got an agility and bodily confidence that I admire. And while he’s not with me on all my adventures, I’m happy to have him along when I do.
Living Beyond Fear
So, if I’m such a scaredy cat, why go on an adventure at all?
Elizabeth Gilbert writes on her blog, “My fear wants me to stop, because my fear wants me to be safe, and my fear perceives all motion, all inspiration, all work, all activity, all passion whatsoever as potentially life-threatening. My fear wants me to live a smaller life. The smallest imaginable life, ideally. My fear would prefer that I never got out of bed. Your fear is the same. Exactly the same as mine. I guarantee it.”
To live in fear is to live a small life. Allowing fear to control your life will always limit you.
Ultimately, my desire for adventure is stronger than my fear. I have been travelling since a young age. My first travel adventure sans family was with the foreign exchange program in high school when I went to live with a family in Italy. In college I lived in Israel and worked on a kibbutz. After college I moved to Alaska and that’s where I discovered my outdoorsy-ness. I was a crew leader for the Youth Conservation Corps, building trails in grizzly country and living without plumbing. I moved out to the bush soon after to work at a school in an Athabascan village and that’s where my heartiness was truly challenged—riding on snowmobiles, x-country skiing past moose in 40 below, winter camping along the Iditarod and more.
Building Confidence Through Experience
It's important to note that my sense of adventure has limits. Knowing my edges and meeting them within my comfort zone is important to my nervous system. There are certain risks I am unwilling to take and certain types of activities I refuse to do. I do not like downhill skiing. I do not like to zipline over jungles, jump out of airplanes, bungee cord off bridges, jump from cliffs, or rock climb. I avoid heights as much as I can as they make me feel dizzy. I will not travel on a swinging bridge or Via Ferrata unless I absolutely have to.
That’s just me. That’s where I draw the line, but everyone is different. Those things don’t interest me enough for me to push myself to do them. If I really wanted to, I would find a way to inch myself into them with baby steps to build up courage.
Doing something that I really want to do that scares me is expansive in a way nothing else can be. Going on an adventure that makes me anxious and pushes my edges, will almost always end with a sense of pride in myself. I will also be able to do it again with less fear the next time, knowing that I met that edge and enhanced my belief in what I am capable of.
How to Build Adventure Courage: 7 Tips for Scaredy Cats Like Me
1. Check Statistics Before You Go
If you are worried about dying in a rapid while rafting the Colorado River or flying in an airplane or traveling to Africa, check statistics. Don’t rely on anecdotal evidence. For everything you are afraid of, there are five terrifying stories of how that happened to someone somewhere. Ignore them. Instead do a little research to see what the probability is of that thing you are scared of happening. You will be surprised. If the risk is too high for your comfort, don’t do it. However, the fact is that almost everything is less risky than driving in a car, so if you’re willing to get into a car every day, one of the leading causes of death, than everything else is cake.
2. Create an External Sense of Safety
What can you do to make yourself feel safer? Do you need to go with professional river rafting guides instead of your friend’s cousin’s co-worker? Do you need anti-anxiety medicine to get on the plane? Do you want to go with a tour company to Peru instead of on your own? Do you need to carry bear spray with you on the hike? Take whatever precautions you need to feel safe so you can go. Don’t get machismo and think you have to be tough and do it a certain way because that’s the way your ex-boyfriend did it. You do you. Maybe this time you will go with a guide and next time you will go alone.
3. Practice Internalized Safety Techniques
Not everything is under our control. There are only so many precautions we can take and then it’s out of our hands. You can learn somatic practices to calm your nervous system such as grounding, deep breathing, chanting, tapping, shaking, etc. You can create a relationship with your wisest self through journaling and meditation, the part of you that is always calm and at ease and that transcends the scary stories you recycle. You can imagine a safe place that you can go to in your head when you feel worried. If you are spiritual as I am, you may sense that your angels or ancestors are protecting you. You may trust that whatever happens is meant to be and is for the highest good.
Practice often whatever methods you need to find a sense of safety within so that when you find yourself dysregulated, you have them easily at hand. Remember that no amount of worry or anxiety will give you control or change the situation, so it is pointless to worry. Return to an internalized sense of safety to find calm. I like to chant So Hum, So with the inhale and Hum with the exhale, meaning I am That which is everything.
4. Use Self-Compassion to Calm Anxiety
Along the same lines of internalized safety, we can utilize self-compassion to self-soothe. Just as you calm a nervous child, you can do the same for yourself. In the tenderest voice you have, assure yourself that everything is going to be okay.
Physician Gabor Maté says in his book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, “Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer. Along with our ability to feel our own pain go our best hopes for healing, dignity and love. What seems nonadapative and self-harming in the present was, at some point in our lives, an adaptation to help us endure what we then had to go through.” You are calming your own inner child who developed whatever stories you are telling yourself that are worrying you in the first place, such as that you are not capable, safe, supported or enough. When I remember to do this, it works remarkably well.
5. Is It Anxiety or Excitement?
Sometimes I get the two mixed up. They feel kind of similar and there is a tendency for our human brains to latch onto negative feelings. If every time I think about rafting, I imagine a giant rapid pulling me under, I’ll feel anxious. But if I think of laughing as the water sprays my face, I’ll feel excited. If you start to feel anxiety, ask yourself if it might be excitement instead? I created a new word to help me out; nervcited!
6. Meet Your Edges with Kindness
Be honest about your edges and find ways to meet them with compassion. As I said, I’m a scaredy cat so I have a lot of edges. My big one is heights. I have adapted, when necessary, like when I was a tour guide last summer and I had to walk people over the 850-foot-high Rio Grande Gorge Bridge every weekend. Familiarity reduces anxiety. But otherwise, I avoid activities that involve heights. Another edge for me is darkness, but I learned to make friends with the dark on my vision fast because it was important to me to do so. I wanted to feel comfortable camping alone and so I met my edge compassionately by going with a guided group in sacred ceremony. How can you meet your edge tenderly to create more headroom? Read more about that here.
7. Build Physical Confidence for Outdoor Adventures
Practicing yoga, as well as strength training have helped me to feel stronger and more physically capable. This helps me a lot to overcome my fears of adventuring. Yoga as an embodiment practice has taught me balance, strength, agility and flexibility both internally and externally. Lifting weights has improved every single physical activity that I do from plastering walls to swimming in rivers to lifting luggage to hiking up a mountain, basically everything. The external can mirror the internal. Feeling a sense of confidence in your body can lead to more confidence within.
Finding Courage: You Can’t Be Brave Without Fear
It’s entirely normal to be nervous before any big unknown. As I head out on my Grand Canyon rafting adventure, I recall this quote from Georgia O’Keefe, one of my all-time role models for life and aging, “I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.” You can’t be brave if you’re not afraid. True courage is stepping up when you are scared to do so and overcoming your fear of adventure.
Share Your Adventure Stories:
What tips do you have for scaredy cats who want to adventure? What has worked for you?
What tips do you have for scaredy cats who want to adventure? What has worked for you?
Blessings on your grand river voyage! I'm so glad you are going with a guide because I would have hired a guide, too. I am also a scaredy cat who nevertheless loves adventure.