From Fear Mongering To Awareness: Reclaiming Your Nerve

When fear stops shouting and starts humming, life gets strangely quiet. We unpack how constant alarms from news cycles and social feeds train the nervous system to adapt, why that adaptation looks like numbness, and how to rebuild attention without feeding panic. Our north star is simple: awareness returns agency, fear mongering steals it. So we draw a hard line—no catastrophe predictions, no certainty sales, no lone expert act—just honest inquiry, raw evidence, and many voices.

We walk through the psychology of desensitization, from doomscrolling to empathy fatigue, and name the social incentives that keep us exhausted. Tired people don’t question; distracted people don’t organize. If your emotions feel flattened, it’s not moral failure—it’s biology under load. The way back isn’t more adrenaline. It’s noticing: what used to bother you and doesn’t, how your body reacts, where you still feel a spark of discomfort. If you can still notice, you can still choose.

That ethic guides how we handle the paranormal and the personal. We share a 3 a.m. moment that shook our family—a mysterious voicemail in a loved one’s voice months after he passed—and we hold it with care instead of spinning a horror script. Maybe it was a hello. Maybe a comfort. Maybe a mystery we don’t need to solve to be moved. Grief isn’t only absence; it’s inheritance, the traits and truths that keep living in us. We talk haunted places, historical threads, and why humility belongs in every investigation. No one knows everything, and pretending to does harm.

If you’re ready to trade dread for clarity and keep your humanity intact, press play. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend who’s felt numb lately, and leave a review with one thing you’ve started noticing again—we’ll feature our favorites in a future show. Stay aware, stay human, stay strange.

Chapters

• 0:00 When Fear Goes Familiar
• 0:40 From Panic To Awareness
• 2:06 Why I Started This Podcast
• 4:00 Biology Of Numbness
• 6:08 Stay Conscious, Not Certain
• 8:20 A Family Sign After Loss
• 11:30 Interpreting The Voicemail
• 14:20 Grief, Memory, And Inheritance
• 16:02 Community, Collabs, And Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

There's a moment when fear stops feeling sharp and starts feeling familiar. That's the part that scares me. Not the chaos, not the headlines. The way we've learned how to just live with it. This episode isn't about panic. It's about the things we've normalized without even noticing. Things that would have been shocking 10 years ago barely register now. Violence, surveillance, suffering, instability. The nervous system adapts, but at a cost. When nothing shocks you anymore, something inside of you shuts off. And this is why everything feels so distant now. Doom scrolling creates emotional flattening. Tragedy becomes background noise. Empathy, fatigue is real and very dangerous. You're not cold, you're just super overloaded. Fear used to warn us. Now it just hums in the background. We are living in a constant low-grade emergency. How that changes behavior, dreams, and relationships pretty much all depends on you. Systems benefit from exhaustion. Tired people don't question. Distracted people don't organize. And let that sit in. If this is making you uncomfortable, that's not a bad sign. Discomfort means something in you is still awake. Don't lose that. We did not become numb by accident. Fear did not disappear. It went quiet. Pay attention to what no longer scares you. All over social media now, all I see is fear mongering. And there's a huge difference between fear mongering and awareness. So fear mongering tells people something bad is coming, offers no agency, keeps listeners anxious, stuck, and dependent, feels urgent and unresolved. What I want to do instead is, you know, name psychological pattern people already feel, explain why it feels that way, and return agency to the listener and end with awareness, not dread. Awareness says, notice this. So you don't lose yourself in it. Fear mongering says, be afraid and keep listening. You're not selling fear, you're naming numbness. That would probably be my main message to most of the social media influencers today. Um, and I just see too much of it. And this is a big reason why I decided to make a podcast is to really talk about events that are happening, personal experiences, haunted locations, you know, historical events, historical locations again, right? Bring people on, interview them, and hear all different angles and walks of life. And I really just want to reach out and tell you guys that fear takes control away and awareness gives it back. Being self-aware is huge, and I think it really needs to be studied because I see a lot of negativity in the social world today, and I see no facts backing anything up, just people splatting out bullshit and not talking facts, right? And if you guys have been following me for quite some time and listening to these episodes, all of my evidence that I bring onto this podcast is all raw and authentic. It's not edited. Um, obviously, I'm not gonna share all of my evidence on here because there's bigger plans in the future, right? Um, besides just the podcast. But even like when we talk about celebrities in LA and even some political stances, it's we do talk mostly factual, right? Because we don't I I love having a spooky podcast, but I will never ever condone fear mongering. And you know, of course, some of this shit's gonna freak people out that listen because, you know, they're like, ah, ghosts, you know, paranormal. Um, you know, we've talked about conscious swapping and all this just crazy stuff, right? But it's never like there's a huge difference being like psychologically so involved where you don't have a taste of reality, right? Versus just talking about it and you know, hearing different, I guess different views, right? And even showcasing some evidence and saying, hey, I don't know exactly what an afterlife looks like, but it there is something, right? After after death, there's something. So again, I really just want to put a lot of emphasis on that. You don't need to panic, you just need to stay conscious. That's where change actually starts. Don't claim certainty, don't predict catastrophe, don't position yourself as the one who knows. That is one of my biggest pet peeves, too. Like when you walk into a haunted haunted location and somebody asks you questions, and then they'll ask a question and a question, and then be very narcissistic and say, Oh, I've been doing this for so many years, and you know, I'm a psychic medium, and I know this and that. Like, right off the rip, I do not trust them. Um, no one knows everything, nobody knows all of the answers, and that is a fact. So, you know, I just kind of want to start this new year off with some episodes explaining what I do, why I do it, why I have a podcast for new listeners, and what I hate seeing, and fear mongering and the bullshit on social media is a huge issue for me. You know, our human brains are not built for constant emergencies. So when the alarm never turns off, the system adapts. We normalize what we're exposed to repeatedly. The brain trades fear for numbness to survive. There is biological, not moral, failure. Numbness isn't weakness, it's a survival response. This removes blame from a listener. So when you're scrolling on any social media and you're seeing this constantly, you're essentially being desensitized, right? Fear makes you react, numbness makes you come comply. Awareness is the antidote to desensitation, not panic, not obsession, just noticing. Notice what used to bother you, notice what no longer does. Notice how your body reacts and just your thoughts. If you can still notice, you have not completely gone numb. The strangest thing happening right now isn't ghosts or glitches or dreams. It's how quietly we learn to live with things we once would have stopped everything for. Fear is loud, and this was never loud. This was about noticing because the moment you stop noticing is the moment you stop choosing. Stay aware, stay human, stay strange. Okay, so I want to tie this into the whole fear-mongering thing and explaining things and noticing patterns and all these things we've talked about, right? So I'm an open book when it comes to children, right? Especially my nephews, my niece, um, even my kid as he gets older. I think it's very important to stay transparent, right? So my godson Ryder has been on this podcast a couple times. And he's always been interested in paranormal afterlife. And we've we've taken him to a couple places. Um, once he, you know, got a little bit older. He's now 15. Um, I think the first time I took him to like a cemetery, I think he was 13, almost 14. So very recent, right? Um, okay, so my dad passed away. You guys know this. Uh, Papa, my dad, was Ryder's bestie, right? They they love, they were just so close, and he rider has actually taken this very well and very surprised. So, anyways, where I'm going with this is there has been a lot of signs that my dad has, I guess, been around, let's say. Okay. Um, so when Ryder called me last almost, well, yeah, week from, well, it is 3 38 a.m. on a Sunday. So last Sunday, a week ago, um, Ryder was sending me text messages and called me and was like, what do you think about this? Antila said this this literally happened. Um I had to take a step back outside the box, even though I'm into the paranormal. I kind of had to, I had to speak of this in a adult way, right? Because we don't, again, fear-mongering and giving people wrong intentions. Um, but it absolutely did happen. And it is absolutely true, and there has been a lot of situations that my whole entire family has been feeling and seeing, and yeah, so I again I can't speak facts, I can't say for sure, but I personally believe that there is obviously an afterlife, right? There are stories that we tell while someone is alive, and stories that only exist after they're gone. This is one of those. This isn't just a ghost story, it's about what remains, and this is Tales from the Ashes. What my father is continuing to leave behind. Okay, so again, last week, my godson Ryder sends me this screen recording, and then he says, Look at the voicemail I got last night from a random number. Then when I woke up this morning, my whole call fee was wiped and his voicemail. This is so weird. Okay, so a lot of people could say, okay, that could have been an old voicemail from my dad. However, he got home from work and then fell asleep. I know it's so weird to say that my godson is working now. Oh my god. Anyways, um, at three in the morning, he got a phone call. He swiped it, he said, Ah, it's someone's pranking me. Then his phone went off again. He got a voicemail. He was half asleep, so he opens it up and he hears this from my dad. So he screen records and is like kind of out of it, right? Loopy, half asleep, and says, Ah, I'll deal with this in the morning. Um, when he woke up, he thought maybe he would had maybe dreamt that. But when he went back into his um voicemails, there was nothing. And he thought, oh wow, that's weird. I must have just dreamt it. And then he looked through his screen recording in his you know gallery and he played it and he was like, Oh my god, that really did happen. So the fact that a number like a random number called him and left him a voicemail and it was my dad definitely does not seem like a coincidence, right? Um, my dad's phone has been off for months, right? Because he's been gone now for probably just over four months. Or no, probably about four months, right? So um, you know, he was asking me about it, and I straight up told him, and you know, some people would, you know, say, oh, you shouldn't tell him that psychologically, that could put fear in his brain, or he could get the wrong intentions. But here's the fucking thing like we don't know what happens to us when we die. There's a lot of different thoughts on it. And I mean, there's people that come back from literally the grave, not you know what I mean. They die, they come back and they talk about their experiences. And I don't think writer is a liar. I absolutely 1000% believe in my godson. I mean, I do this stuff, right? This is like my fun, this is my research, my life's work into the paranormal and things that I have, you know, felt and seen my whole entire life experiences, right? So he was like, What do you think, Auntie Lissa? And I said, I think that could be legit, and I think either Papa has a message for you, or maybe that was just Papa saying hi, but I don't think it's a coincidence that a random number called his phone and left him a voicemail at three o'clock in the morning. The thinnest time, aka witching hour, the veiled, thin veiled time. I mean, come on. But why I kind of uh brought that into this episode is that there's no way to talk about things, and there's even just to say, hey, in my opinion, or this or that, but then there's a whole nother like fear mongering would have been, oh my god, writer, I think Papa has is, you know, he's not rested and he's you know haunting you, and you know, he, you know, I could go on and on and on, right? That to me that's fear mongering. And instead of fear mongering, hey, right, maybe he just wanted to say hi and tell you that he's okay, you know, maybe he's he's a little upset how he left, right? He doesn't like how he left things because he did leave very abruptly. But yeah, I mean there's a way to go about everything, and I just have a huge issue with fear mongering, and that's all I see now. And just remember, when someone dies, memory gets rewritten. We soften edges, we sharpen others. Loving someone doesn't always mean that they were simple, it means that they were real. The strange part of loss isn't missing someone, it's realizing how much of them lives inside you without permission. Grief isn't always about absence, sometimes it's inheritance. When someone dies, you don't just lose them, you gain clarity whether you want it or not. Ashes don't mean the story is over, they mean the fire has finished speaking. What comes next is quieter and somehow more honest. This was a tale from the ashes. I'll see you next time. Thank you again for listening. And as always, you can find Strange Duranged Beyond Insane podcasts on any platform you listen to your podcasts on. We are on most social media platforms too. Um, I do try to keep up on that. And, you know, email us, text us through Buzz Sprout. You know, we get that text directly. And I always say us because this is a communal podcast. I do have a lot of guest speakers on, and I'm looking forward to a lot more collabs in this new year, have the dice rolling on some projects that I want to do. So I kind of always try to keep it not just about me doing the podcast. It's, you know, me and us, right? So whoever is on here, I appreciate everybody. And again, um, you know, give me some feedback and let me know what you want to talk about next. All right, you guys, take care.