Am I going crazy?
Or is it just anxiety, or frustration, or paranoia, or discomfort with something different? (I hate change!)
Or all of the above?
I go to the grocery store and I feel like I am in a war zone: security guards directing traffic, everyone hiding behind masks. What’s going on?
As I enter the battle zone I scan the half-empty shelves looking for the last roll of toilet paper. Another customer at the end of the aisle is looking in the same direction with a sinister sneer. Has he discovered the cache? Will I have to take him out before the security guard notices?
Yes, I am going crazy.
This is not what is happening. It is just the opposite – a responsible citizenry taking every precaution to do what is the best interest of the public. There is nothing sinister about the situation other than that some people are getting sick and others are hoarding toilet paper. (What the … ??).
And it will all be over soon and we will all be better for it.
So says my brain.
But tell that to my nervous system. Totally jacked up. Irrational reactions to everything and everyone. Ridiculous if I think about it.
But I am not thinking about it. I am reacting to it. That’s the issue.
Not just me of course. This is the way we humans function. We react first and think second.
For the most part, our thinking is not much more than an attempt to rationalize or justify or excuse our instinctual reaction. In fact, when we are in reaction mode we can’t think properly at all. Our nervous system preempts the functioning of our frontal lobe (where we do our logical thinking).
Our thoughts, actions and behaviours are derivative from our instinctual assessment. Our nervous systems (plural) react to subconscious stimuli long before the brain gets engaged, and send a message to the brain as to whether the situation is safe or not – long before we have had a chance to think about it.
So much for the myth of the rational human being.
Normally this serves us well. At least it keeps us alive and safe. However, if there is a fairly steady diet of uncertainty or trepidation or fear we abandon our social adaptations and retract into a reactive mode. Every person becomes a threat, every situation becomes a hazard. We become isolated, depressed, paranoid.
And this is not good.
We need to feel positive about our social environment and the people around us before we feel good about ourselves. This is coregulation. Being in positive engagement with others settles us down, stabilizes our nervous system, makes us happy and content and loved.
Consider the following quotes from Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, (a very readable exploration about our nervous system for anyone interested. I have replaced the term “ventral vagal,” with “social engagement” to make it more familiar. Also, I have neglected page reference numbers as I have in many cases blended quotes.)
Safe and Social Connectedness is a biological imperative … We seek opportunities for co-regulation. The ability to soothe and be soothed, to talk and listen, to offer and receive, to fluidly move in and out of connection is centered in this newest part of the autonomic nervous system. Reciprocity, the mutual ebb and flow that defines nourishing relationships, is a function of the ventral vagus (sic: social engagement system). In a social engagement state, we have access to a range of responses including calm, happy, meditative, engaged, attentive, active, interested, excited, passionate, alert, ready, relaxed, savoring, and joyful. … The social engagement state supports compassionate connections. It is this state that slows our heart rate, softens our eyes, brings a kind tone to our voice, and moves us to reach out to others. This same social engagement energy supports self-compassion: the act of reaching in to be with our own suffering with kindness. Compassion practices, through the activation of the social engagement nervous system, bring health benefits including reduction in stress and enhanced immune function.
Our common human experience is to feel soothed in the presence of others and distressed when we are left behind (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003). We live in a culture that encourages autonomy and independence, and yet we need to remember that we are wired to live in connection … that our physiology is regulated in connection to one another. Co-regulating connections invite a sense of belonging and feeling safely tethered in the world.
People neither thrive nor survive if they live for a prolonged period with high stress and anxiety, without the experience of positive social stimulation. More Dana:
In African Bantu, ubuntu means a person becomes a person only through other people. I am human because I belong. As a result of decades of studies, we know that being separated from social connection, isolated from other people, is a lifelong risk factor affecting both physical and emotional health. Social disconnection and social exclusion activate the same pain pathways as experiences of injury.
When opportunities for connection are missing, we carry the distress in our nervous system. Our loneliness brings us pain. Lonely people suffer from health and mental health problems including compromised immune function, heart disease, and depression — all issues related to autonomic function. While feeling lonely sometimes prompts us to reach out, loneliness also increases our watchfulness for threat … A lonely person feels not only unhappy but also unsafe… Chronic loneliness sends a persistent message of danger, and our autonomic nervous system remains locked in survival mode.
Some of the daily living problems can be anxiety, panic attacks, anger, inability to focus or follow-through, and distress in relationships. Health consequences can include heart disease; high blood pressure; high cholesterol; sleep problems; weight gain or loss; impaired immune function, a chronic lack of energy, and digestive issues and psychological consequences might present as dissociation, depression, or withdrawal from social connection. … the sense of being alone, lost, and unreachable.
What to do?
Stop wearing masks? Run around hugging everyone?
Of course not. That might solve one problem but it would exacerbate another.
We don’t need the change the situation, only our perception of it. Our fear-based nervous systems react equally to the perception of danger or lack of assurances of safety as they do to real danger. The principle spooky effect of people wearing masks is not so much the mask itself, it is that we can’t see the whole face. We don’t know if they are smiling or scowling. This leaves us having to assume what they are thinking and feeling, never really knowing for sure.
We need more information, more visual and auditory cues. We need to learn to see through the mask and find cues that will assure us that the other person standing in front us in the checkout line has our best interests at heart, irrespective of whether they have a cart loaded with toilet paper.
Fortunately, there are a lot more ways of reading a person’s heart, including the sound of their voice and wrinkles around their eyes. Deb Dana:
We send cues of safety and invitations to come into connection through the signals of tone of voice, facial expression, the tilt of the head. We communicate, one nervous system to another, that it is safe to approach and come into relationship. As a surveillance system, when the cues perceived through another’s face, voice, and gestures are ones of safety, the Social Engagement System affirms the possibility of connection. When the cues are ones of danger, we move into watchfulness. Through the Social Engagement System, we sense whether others are safe to approach and signal that we are friend, not foe.
Our eyes send, and search for, signals of safety. The area around the outside of the eyes that wrinkles into crow’s-feet is where our search for cues of safety begins. We can feel the power of the eyes to send cues of safety or danger and experience the neuroceptive response by experimenting with a variety of ways to focus.
Sound is one of the strongest triggers of a neuroception of safety. The autonomic nervous system recognizes features of prosody—the music of the voice. It is not the words themselves, but the patterns of rhythm and sound along with the frequency, duration, and intensity of speaking that reveals our intentions. The autonomic nervous system, via neuroception, is listening beneath the words for sounds of safety and friendship.
So how to resolve this dilemma?
Change what we see and how we see it. Don’t look at the mask. Look at the eyes. Listen to the tone of the voice. Look for the crow’s feet.
And smile harder! Risk wrinkling your face. We wear our heart not on our sleeve but on our face. And when we smile at others with a crow’s feet smile there are two benefits. The mere action of smiling soothes our nervous system and also encourages the other person to smile back. Co-regulation and self-regulation: a win-win.
Tango Tips:
Yes, I am writing for a dance audience even though few of us are dancing these days. But my focus these days is to assist in keeping us all in a healthy emotional state so that when we do return to the dance floor we bring the requisite warmth and affection. The distance from street-level to dance floor is very short and we will be making that transition soon, hopefully.
Consider this: Does smiling at your partner before you make your approach and enter into an embrace make any difference? Rhetorical question. It makes all the difference. Much more so than the casual encounter with another customer in the grocery store.
Does our tone of voice convey something about our mood and in turn affect the mood of our dance partner? Absolutely. Our feeling of connection is based almost entirely on our feeling of safety with and acceptance by our partner.
And it also equally affects our ability to dance. I am always amazed at how my dancing varies according to how I feel about the person with whom I am dancing.
If you want to keep your tango wits about you, watch for my blogs that refer directly to the importance of the Approach in Tango.