Stop and Read the Signs
“The most profound personal growth does not happen while reading a book or meditating. It happens in the throes of conflict, when you are angry, afraid, frustrated. It happens when you are doing the same old thing and you suddenly realize that you have a choice.”
-Vironika Tugaleva
The signs are usually subtle. The muscles of the neck become tense, we go still, the jaw clenches, there is a stiffening of the shoulders. But more often, we don’t even feel it. Our minds have forgotten how to perceive it. Because it happens so often.
But make no mistake, both the body and the mind feel the brunt of this repetitive stress. It wears us down. We feel things getting out of our hands and we don’t even know why. We snap at the people around us, we feel directionless, we feel joyless, we sleep poorly.
Maybe we decide to meditate, and maybe it helps a bit. When it doesn’t work, we tell ourselves we haven’t figured meditation out yet. We are doing it wrong; we are not doing it often enough. Meditation becomes another thing that gets added to our ever-growing and ‘essential’ to-do list. We find ourselves ‘failing’ at it too. Another anxiety gets added to our busy days.
Could there be a possible solution?
The solution is different for different people. However, there appear to be some key components of the process of setting our lives in order.
Picking up the signs
In Intensive Care Units, sick patients are placed under continuous monitoring. Their heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, and many such parameters are closely watched. Small changes from the baseline are sometimes harbingers of bigger problems. Some of these bigger problems can be averted if these signs are picked up early.
Similarly, each of us must get to know our personal ‘alarms’. Signs that tell us that we are feeling overwhelmed. Irritability, tiredness, unexplained sadness. From early childhood, many of us have learned to double down, to work harder, to ignore these signs. We have turned down our sensors.
We need to become good readers of our internal signs. When we see our body mounting this kind of response, we need to slow down or stop altogether, if that is possible. And then, take stock of the situation.
Finding the cause
The next step is finding the cause for this stress. If we have swept our problems under the rug for years and years, this answer may be hard to come by. Complete commitment and ample time will be required to get to the depth of the matter. Sometimes the stress is multifactorial, and cannot be dealt with properly till all the factors are understood and modified.
Journaling helps, but merely listing the events of the day is not helpful. The School of Life offers an alternative. It is called philosophical meditation. It involves posing to ourselves three questions: What is making me anxious? What’s caused me pain and how? What’s exciting me?
The more we do this, the more adept we get at it. Even our deepest secrets are revealed to us by this daily, honest inquiry. It is not possible to hide from oneself endlessly.
Another method of uncovering hidden conflicts is talking to someone we trust. If we are lucky enough to have friends or family members who listen to our problems and act as a sounding board for us, then we should enlist their help. A therapist can be particularly helpful when such help is hard to come by.
Treating the symptoms
We need to build for ourselves an emotional first-aid kit. Psychologyposts has some suggestions on how to hack our happy hormones. It features the usual suspects: playing with a pet, listening to music, getting some exercise, getting some sunshine, etc.
We need to come up with our own list. Maybe we enjoy cooking for the people we love. Or maybe colouring is our de-stressor of choice. The emotional first aid kid may also consist of actual objects that you can access to feel better. Bonnie St John talks about this in her very brief interview on Pinkcast. She suggests having a place to store thank you notes, pictures that give you joy, etc. Something that you can look at, or hear, and instantly feel a brightening of the mood.
In the short term, this works well. However, lasting solutions arise from addressing the underlying cause of our pain. From editing our lives.
Treating the cause
Once the cause/causes is/are clear, the Serenity Prayer can help us decide the course of action:
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”.
Some decisions are easy. Start for the office a little early, so that the rush hour traffic and the resultant delay can be avoided. Hire a cook who can cook at least one healthy meal every day and give some much-needed rest. Hire a trainer for a few months so that fitness is prioritized. Delegate the cleaning of the home to a professional cleaning service.
The crucial step, however, is to not miss out on things we can change, but have just gotten used to enduring. These decisions are tough. Like ending long-standing but emotionally manipulative relationships. Shutting down a business that we love but which is no longer financially sound. Moving to a smaller city to live near our parents.
If we view the situation honestly, these decisions also fall under the purview of ‘the things we can change’. It may take time to build up the courage, but we must change ALL the things that are contributing to our pain. One by one.
What is left behind, then, are the things which are not in our hands. We just have to let them go.
Maintenance
Now suppose we did the hard work of figuring out our truths and we went ahead and did something about them. We have reached a state of peace and calm. We did well.
But this process of mental cleaning is not a one-time event. Just as our houses need regular cleaning, so do our minds. Alain de Botton suggests that for every hour we live, we need ten minutes to sift through our thoughts. We may or may not agree with his estimate, but there is no denying that we need plenty of time to understand our thoughts.
This system of early detection, first aid, diagnosis, and treatment needs to be repeated over and over if we wish for clarity in our lives.
Prevention
In the course of this ‘data collection’ about ourselves, we will recognize some of our triggers. Some toxic people and some toxic circumstances precipitate a great deal of stress at every encounter. We must recognize our triggers and avoid them as far as possible, instead of constantly trying to fight our nature.
On the other hand, some conditions are uniformly stressful. A lack of sleep and a delayed meal can make even the best of us vulnerable to external stressors. For some of us, one extra cup of coffee does the same. We need to be aware of these universal triggers, too.
Learning about ourselves
The better we understand ourselves, the more efficiently we can correct our course. Living is somewhat like drawing. We draw for a bit, then we step back and assess our progress. We correct our mistakes, draw some more, and then step back again. Time and time again.
