Reactivity vs Proactive Mindset
This article makes a case for thinking about mindfulness in the context of interaction. It describes how our perceptions are inherently relational: We are wired to make stories from situations. These stories are not necessarily accurate, and understanding the biases helps us respond appropriately to situations.
Assumptions: the stories we make up
You see somebody frowning. What’s your reaction? You might be assuming that this person is angry at you. Another story you could tell yourself is that things are not going well for this person today.
The stories we make up might or might not be true. The point is that we are wired to make up stories to make sense of what we see, especially when there is an emotional component to what we see. This is like what happens when we see two dots and “see” the line between them, as if it were drawn. We automatically infer the story’s pattern, relationship, the arc of the story. That story feels true. It feels so true that we are not even aware that it is just an assumption that would not be considered fact in a court of law or a scientific context.
The story is not always an accurate representation of reality. Does this mean that our mind, brain, and nervous system, are deficient? We might legitimately consider them deficient if they had been instruments designed to provide accurate, objective information, the way a scale would be deficient if it didn’t measure weights accurately. But that is not what they evolved to be.
The evolutionary need was to help our remote ancestors survive by making instant decisions in difficult situations. Hence, the development of our ability to ‘see’ patterns. Our mind fills in the line between the dots, so to speak. We experience the situation as part of an unfolding story. That is, we get a sense of the arc of the story, and a sense of what’s next. We experience this as gut-level feelings, with a sense of absolute certainty, just like we ‘know’ beyond the shadow of a doubt that the earth is flat.
In other words, Life is interaction. This is a very concrete reality: It manifests in such essential characteristics as animals breathing or plants drawing nutrients from the ground. Life is interaction, and human life is no exception. We are not detached observers, but we are in constant interaction with the natural world and the social world. We experience situations as stories because stories are what it takes to capture the dynamic quality of life as interaction.
So relational mindfulness involves being aware that (1) life is interaction, (2) we experience situations as stories, and (3) while these stories feel true, they are not necessarily objectively true. Relational mindfulness also involves having a sense of how to deal with the limitations of the relatively crude processing that occurs in pattern recognition and story-making.
It is useful to put these limitations in context
Often enough, the threat that our forebears reacted to was real. In any case, reacting made sense even if the threat was not real. If you ignore a real danger, you die and don’t reproduce. You might be wrong if you react to a false alarm, but you live to reproduce. So, the sense of absolute certainty we have about what we perceive is understandable when we place it within the context of how we evolved. We are alive today because our ancestors had absolute certainty about the truth of their perceptions. We inherited that from them.
However, our environment is no longer the environment in which our ancestors evolved. We no longer live in very small tribes of hunter-gatherers. For millennia, we have been living in complex societies. The type of dangers that threaten us has changed. And so has the value of the automatic threat reactions that evolved earlier. In some cases, these reactions may be very useful. But, often enough, they put us into more trouble. So, we need to be able to override our reactivity to respond appropriately to what is actually around us.
Reactivity has to do with the more basic structures of the brain and nervous system that evolved early for survival. In a dangerous situation, these parts of the nervous system are activated into ‘fight or flight’ mode. Our organism literally reconfigures itself to channel all available energy into fighting or running away from danger. Resources that are not in service of ‘fight or flight’ shut down, so that the energy can be allocated to what is the one and only priority.
Peripheral vision (in a literal sense and in the sense of having a larger perspective) is not an essential survival quality, and it shuts down. The more we are under pressure, the more certain we feel about the nature and magnitude of danger. This felt sense of absolute truth is all the greater as there is less connection to the mindfulness circuits, which tend to give us more nuanced information.
So, the shift from reactive to responsive, from mindless to mindful, involves shifting into our mindfulness circuits. We cannot turn off the ‘fight or flight’ circuits, which are hard-wired and essential. But we can lessen their intensity by engaging other parts of the brain and the nervous system that are less primitive. These circuits evolved in conjunction with our becoming more and more social animals. The social engagement circuits are involved in regulating our moods and interactions, as well as in processing more complex information. When these mindful circuits are engaged, frantic energy is channeled into poised energy, and we can do due diligence to derive a response appropriate to the situation at hand.
The context of interaction
Whether we are reactive or more mindfully responsive, we are engaged in interacting with our environment. The difference is that when we are mindfully responding rather than reacting, we use all our resources to potentially get a better response than if we were just relying on our more primitive equipment.
To do this, we need to shift from exclusive reliance on the primitive ‘fight or flight’ circuits to the more mindful circuits related to social engagement. It takes intentionality. Unlike animals or our very distant ancestors, we do not operate solely on instinct. We have the capacity to make choices moment by moment. And we need to use this capacity to respond appropriately to the requirements of the social world we live in.
