Fear, False Alarms, & Firefighters: Our Saturday Night

Faulty Alarms

Your Journal Prompts for This Week:

What types of alarms, signals, or warnings do my mind and body send to me to alert me that something might be off, wrong, or unsafe?

How do these internal alarms protect me, and what do they signal me to do?

How can I work with these internal signals to better assess when a warning is a false alarm? What can help me feel a greater sense of safety within?

Beep, beep, beep! Fire, fire, fire!

That was our Saturday night soundtrack, courtesy of our rented condo's fancy dual Carbon Monoxide Detector & Fire Alarm. It has one of those creepy automated voices that repeats the word "Fire!" over and over again.

With no sounds or signals of a fire in sight, we weren't really sure what to do. Do we run out of the house? Do we try to pry it off the wall while it is blaring in our ears and try to shut it off? Are we supposed to call 911?

(Full disclosure, we only just recently made it through season 2 of the show This Is Us, and if you've watched that show, you know why faulty smoke detectors might freak us out.)

After trying to call around to local fire departments, we did indeed finally call 911, and were told to get out of the house in case it was actually Carbon Monoxide. So we waited outside for the fire truck to come, now also a little worried that there was an unseen force making its way through our home.

Fortunately, the firemen found the place to be negative for Carbon Monoxide, and diagnosed us with a faulty fire alarm. Since it was hardwired, they had some difficulty pulling it off the wall and finally silencing the thing. And apparently, these newer, fancier alarms malfunction quite a bit--the firefighters said they see it often, and we certainly weren't the first ones that day.

It's interesting to me that these newer, fancier alarms are designed to provide us with extra protection, to make us feel extra safe, but in doing so, they sometimes overdue it, becoming unnecessarily difficult to silence and leading to some unnecessary scares.

Since this experience brought up my anxiety, it made me think more deeply about it. I've struggled with anxiety since I was a kid, and over the years of therapy, I've learned that its primary role (or so it thinks) is to protect me. But all day long, it's capable of giving me a number of false alarms.

We've all built up our own protective layers and put up our own internal alarms. These might originate from our anxiety, our ego, or our past experiences and trauma. Sometimes these protective layers truly serve us, alerting us that something is indeed wrong or unsafe, and other times, they can spook and rattle us with false alarms. "Better safe than sorry," is what they often say, but at what point does that extra protection stop being truly helpful? At what point does it prevent us from living fully and joyfully?

Learning to sort out true from false alarms in our own minds and bodies is a process that will be different for each of us because of our different lived experiences. I believe the practice of yoga helps us with this, as it helps us connect to our bodies. And the practice of journaling helps us tap into our minds. Everything is truly interconnected.

What does your internal alarm system look like? What are the alarms for and what do they alert you of? I encourage you to start by exploring the journal prompts above.

My wish for us is that we all get to know our inner alarm systems, and once we feel greater safety, may we help those in need of extra protection.

With much love & gratitude,
Marcy