Fear, hypervigilance, and how to be brave anyway — the second-ever Taco’Bout, with holistic counsellor Charnie Tuckey. Tacos and margaritas were served. So was some hard-won wisdom.

Where it started

This topic found me, not the other way around. I generally embrace a glass-half-full mentality — comfortable taking risks, launching ventures, starting events that “might work, might not.” But the stabbings at Bondi Junction Westfield knocked something loose. I used to live near there. My kids head to that centre whenever we’re back. People I’m connected with were in that space that day. And I caught myself wondering: if I went back, would I be scanning for exits?

“They say that life’s a game — and then they take the board away.” — Alan Moore

Surely, I thought, I can’t be the only one who relates. So we put it on the Taco’Bout menu: has our need for certainty increased? When does caution become hypervigilance? And can the need to be certain hold us back — even bend our moral compass?

Who gets to feel certain?

Charnie’s answer came from the holistic angle: it depends what you’ve been exposed to. “Whoever has been exposed to a lot of uncertainty is probably going to be a lot more resilient in uncertain times. And people who have been exposed to a lot more certainty are going to be clutching for what’s familiar.”

She’d lived it. COVID arrived at a pivotal moment for her business — she’d just expanded, and a week later was forced to close the doors, no idea where things would go. “Through those experiences, I feel like I’m a little bit more relaxed around that sort of stuff — because you come out the other end of it, and you are okay.”

When caution becomes hypervigilance

The line between sensible caution and hypervigilance was the question I most wanted answered — because my reaction to Bondi Junction felt like it sat right on it.

“It’s stored, undigested energy in your body that hasn’t found completion yet. It’s buzzing around, and you’re constantly on red alert for anything that could remind you of whatever created that caution in the first place.”

And here’s the part worth sitting with: it doesn’t have to be something that happened to you. It can be the messages you receive — the news cycle, the shared posts, the “did you hear what happened down the street?” conversations. You can inherit hypervigilance secondhand, consuming fear you never digest.

The woman who didn’t know

Here’s the twist: when I first brought this topic to Charnie, she had no idea what had happened at Bondi Junction. None. She isn’t a hermit — she runs businesses, she’s on social media daily. But she uses it as a tool to put good things out, not a firehose of things to fear. Her news for the day: “You wake up, you look out the window — that’s the weather. You look at your appointment book — that’s what’s booked in. What are we doing for dinner?”

Everyone who walked into her salon that week carrying the news was visibly carrying it. She wasn’t. “I do think there’s value in staying informed,” she said, “but you can send love and well wishes to people going through something without taking it on.” (Related: we discovered mid-event that you can still buy an old Nokia for twenty bucks on eBay, original Snake included. The room took notes.)

Experiencing it — without it happening to you

What about people who can’t unplug — first responders, paramedics, the people who walk toward the thing? Charnie described the skill that training builds: acknowledging what you feel while staying separate from it. “It’s stepping out of the situation and viewing it from the outside looking in.” You carry an invisible toolbox, she says — every hard thing you’ve moved through leaves a tool in it.

What my body knew

That mind-body thread is personal for me. Years ago at Variety, the Children’s Charity, I worked in the appeals department — day after day of files about children who needed equipment, so often because of something that happened at birth. And I was pregnant. The saturation had me convinced: birth is dangerous, birth is dangerous. What broke the loop was a Calm Birth weekend — meditation, grounding, understanding what my body was actually built to do. When the time came, I wasn’t catastrophising. I was present. I actually enjoyed it.

As one wise voice in the audience put it: much of modern life is disassociation — “there’s no connection until there’s a forced connection.” The practice is choosing connection before life forces it.

Shark or man

My friend Eleanor Limprecht — the author — had just written a piece in The Guardian titled “Shark or man: I am less afraid to swim in the ocean than run in the forest alone,” and gave me permission to read from it. Ocean swimming is thrilling and the primal fear of sharks is always there — but her logical mind knows only four people died of shark attacks in Australia in 2023, against a hundred struck by lightning and 1,266 lost on the roads. Then one night before a solo trail run in regional Victoria, she lay awake for hours — remembering Samantha Murphy, who went for a run and never came home.

“People mistake certainty for right and uncertainty for wrong. But life is much less black and white. It’s more important to coexist with our fear of the unknown — while taking steps to avoid the really dangerous situations.” — Eleanor Limprecht

Eleanor’s one question for me: “Do I get a margarita out of this?” The room voted yes.

Making friends with uncertainty

So what do we actually do? Charnie’s toolkit, straight from the salon floor — literally: she’d recently rolled butcher paper down the bench at 9.30pm, colour processing, client alongside, to build a decision-making tree. Write the decision. Map the worst, middle and best scenarios. Then score each against your values. “You’re going to be happier for longer if you’re making decisions that align with you — rather than what it should look like according to somebody else’s expectations.”

Add to the toolbox: rolling with resistance (“your path from A to B isn’t always a straight line — sometimes you go off route, learn a couple of things, and extend the timeline”), the audience’s Tim Ferriss contribution (“ask what’s the absolute worst that could happen, whether you could recover — and what good might come even from that; the worst decision is indecision”), and the emerging science of recreational fear — horror movies, ghost tours, safe scares that train our response to real anxieties.

What is actually happening right now

And underneath it all, the ground floor: come back to the body. Mindfulness doesn’t have to mean a meditation class — mine is a cup of tea on the veranda, really listening to the birds, asking what is actually happening right now? Charnie’s version: find where the feeling sits in your body, name it (“name it to tame it”), remind your nervous system that right now, in this moment, you are safe. The fear is usually about a path that hasn’t happened — and mostly never does. The stress about it is the only part that’s real.

There’s never going to be a failure. There are only lessons you learn along the way — tools for the box you carry into the next uncertain thing.

---

Charnie Tuckey is a holistic counsellor, businesswoman and hairdresser of nearly three decades, who studied community services and holistic counselling to make holistic support affordable and accessible to the people who need it most. She’s also part of a bigger Social Gain story: with Rose Prout of Centric Movement, she was one of the first believers — together they were the first sponsors of the Dubbo Women’s Festival and creators of the Moment Lounge. This was the second-ever Taco’Bout — where the recipe was well and truly set: one spicy topic, one local expert, one room of curious minds, tacos and margaritas for everyone.

Eleanor Limprecht is an author and friend of the region who later returned to Dubbo as one of the Inspired by Her authors at the 2026 Orana Every Woman Festival.

At the end of this night we announced the next topic: death, with end-of-life doula Kaz Hamilton — and here’s what we learned.