Imagine this: you’re at a work meeting and someone spills their coffee. What happens? Typically a number of people jump into action and start frantically helping. The desire to act when something uncomfortable happens is enticing. Many of us crave having a role and finding some way to be helpful when something out of the ordinary happens. Although the motivation seems to come from a good place, does it really?
Let me paint another picture. You’re outside with friends, walking down a trail, and one friend trips on a rock falls down hard onto her forearms. What happens? A smorgasbord of frenetic energy descends, everyone wanting to make sure she’s OK and asking rapid-fire questions. The person who took the tumble doesn’t have a moment to check herself and assess the damage. She has to respond to those around her first!
What is actually happening in these examples? Most of the people involved are reacting to their anxiety. They get worried, which is normal, but letting the worry move into reactivity isn’t healthy. We don’t stop to take in what’s actually needed or create space for the person to tend to themselves and the situation.
As a result, the coffee spiller and the faller end up having to manage the anxiety of those around them. They don’t get a moment to breathe and resolve their own disrupted nervous system from the incident and tune into what’s needed. They go into ‘firefighting’ mode, an unconscious state that leaves them trying to soothe everyone else.
We can use these examples as metaphors for what’s been happening globally for the last three years. We’ve taken this habit of reactivity to an all new high. We’ve become a society of reactivity and anxiety. It’s possible our baseline has become more compulsively anxious.
When anxiety is in the driver’s seat, it feels intense. We all know the feeling of flutters in the heart and the desperate need to solve the problem. When we’re anxious, we take shallow breaths, our vision narrows, and we’re unable to see the big picture; we make quick decisions, have irrational thinking, and lack connection to self and others.
This state of anxiety is deeply contagious. When someone jumps into this state, we can’t help but mirror their nervous system. Anxiousness is more intoxicating than calm: it’s not that we want to be anxious, it’s that anxiety has such a strong magnetic pull on our nervous system that we can’t help being attracted to it.
Think about a day you’ve woken up feeling calm, steady, and relaxed. You walk outside at lunch and there’s a parade of people going by, and a man is yelling at another man for taking his parking space. When you get to the grocery store, there’s a woman who has collapsed and paramedics are trying to get her on a gurney. Then you go home and your partner is upset about something at work and is reactive and feels intense to be around.
How do you feel now? Likely over-stimulated and not calm.
Our nervous system is wired to react to stimuli. It’s designed to be on guard and attentive to anything that might cause us harm. Those of us who experienced a lot of instability as a child tend to be more sensitive to these kinds of stimulation. We tend to get more quickly pulled into feeling anxious and responsive.
It doesn’t matter which category you fall into, what matters is that you have skills to counter the reactivity of your nervous system. Being calm is a skill, and it’s something we have to work on daily. It’s not something you learn about and can easily fall back on whenever you need it. It requires consistent practice.
As I write this, there’s a gun range beside my house. The noise of the shots (happening right now) are immensely destabilizing and uncomfortable to be around. I feel it all over my body, I just want to get up and leave, and I often do. The thing is, in our everyday life there are going to be lots of triggering experiences. It’s up to us to manage ourselves in loving ways to find our calm when we’re far from it.
If we don’t have the skills to settle ourselves, we contribute in negative ways to the people around us and it just keeps trickling outward. Our energy moves to other people. If our energy is frenetic and uprooted, we create more of that in the world. If we’re able to bring ourselves back into homeostasis, we deliver peace and the ability to listen into the world.
Social media creates frenetic energy and it’s taking up precious moments of our days.
However, calm is also contagious, and calm is soothing, and most of us are attracted to what soothes us.
There are many tools that can help us develop the skills for calm, but if we don’t prioritize developing those skills, we will be more of what we don’t want – agitated.
Things that help us create calm:
- breathing mindfully and deeply
- Practicing Yoga
- Meditating
- Journaling (or writing down your inner experiences)
- Practicing doing nothing, just sitting, not reading, no writing, just sitting.
- Being in nature
- Having relationships with people who also embody calm
- Spending less time with people who are highly reactive (which is harder if they’re your child)
- Connecting inward
- Prioritizing sleep, healthy food, and water.
If we don’t start taking calm seriously, we will live in a world run by humans that are reactive and who promote anxious behaviours (think Elon Musk).
love,
Noelle