Finding Some Calm within the Chaos
Our nervous systems are incredible. They’ve evolved over hundreds of thousands of years — sophisticated, elegant responses to promote our survival. Pity then that they just don’t handle uncertainty or chaos very well, given where we find ourselves (the fact that the only constant in life has only ever been change is not lost on me and is the topic of another day).
When I train aid workers before they travel to conflict zones, I see the full range of human responses to threat: fight, flight, freeze, fold, friend… And I’ve been seeing all those same reactions in people over the past few weeks.
All completely natural and understandable. None of them that helpful to deal with the complexity and uncertainty we’re all facing.
See, when our stress response is triggered, the body prioritises all the survival systems. It’s not that interested in digesting food, for example, if it thinks it’s about to become food for a lion…which is essentially how the body processes all threat. It can’t distinguish between a lion or an angry boss or a global pandemic for that matter. All very helpful to avoid being eaten by lions. Not so much if you’re trying to get on with running a business, getting your work done, or being a good parent/partner/friend/colleague. Because this ‘fight-flight’ reaction causes neocortical inhibition and blocks our social engagement system — basically, according to my teacher Mark Walsh, we get stupid and mean. When we’re activated like this, we end up with all-or-nothing thinking and primitive — read ineffective — response patterns.
In order to be productive, to be creative, to be authentic and to be in connection with other people, we need to calm our nervous systems down and get out of this reactive cycle.
When I was in officer training in the RAF, we called this ‘the cigarette break’. [And I want to be clear that I am absolutely NOT suggesting or even condoning smoking as an effective response to stress.] What ‘the cigarette break’ is is a pause. A breath. A deep in-breath and a long exhale. When, as a junior officer, everything seemed overwhelming and I didn’t know what to do next, one of the instructors — normally the wise old Sargeant — would lean in and remind me to breathe. Deep breath in, deep breath out, now what the f*** is going on?
It’s so simple and yet so friggin’ hard to do. Especially when the proverbial is hitting the fan.
Even with all this training behind me, I still find myself at times during this lockdown oscillating between the need to do EVERYTHING, especially to clean constantly and rearrange shelves…you know, super useful things…and then an inability to do so much as get out of bed. I get caught in a loop of judging myself for not doing enough, for not being enough, then the shame of being so hard on myself kicks in and off we go again in an exhausting merry-go-round of different renditions of my inner critic.
And yet, in all the turbulence, there is a little voice asking “Could we just take a pause? Maybe a breath?” And I remember that everything is okay, even the stuff that isn’t.
Or as another one of my teachers often quotes,
“the World is perfect as it is, including my desire to change it”
— Ram Dass
I have long struggled with the tension between my desire to slow down and my desire to take action. How do I find the balance between stillness and doing? How do I tap into the quiet depths of my inner stillness without losing my fire and passion? When things around me are going wrong, where do I find the balance of taking action and not running around like a headless chicken?
In the midst of the chaos and uncertainty, it can be so easy to think we have to DO something to get out of it; in the words of Winston Churchill, “If you’re going through hell, keep going”. It feels sensible to keep moving because if you stop then the monsters are bound to get you.
Except I’m starting to realise that being in a crisis is very much like being in quicksand. The more you struggle, the deeper you get sucked in.
Slowing down isn’t necessarily about doing less, although I highly recommend that too. It’s an energetic thing, a state of mind. It’s about not jumping from one thing to the next, always busy being busy. It’s about connecting to your inner — natural — state of calmness. Being centred. Being the eye of the storm, rather than caught up in it.
That stillness is accessible to us all the time. It does take practice to connect with it, which is why creating physical and temporal space for the practice of slowing down is so helpful.
I’m not saying action isn’t called for. What I’m suggesting is that a considered response rather than mindless reaction is probably going to get you further. When we can surrender and accept the world exactly as it is, we open up the space for new possibilities and to start actively coping with what’s happening for us.
And it all starts with creating a little bit of space to breathe.
If that’s feeling like one of those “simple to say, not so easy to do” sort of things, then get in touch. Pop me an email or book some time for a chat and I’ll share some ideas and practices that have helped me and hundreds of other people. Because we all need a bit of help sometime, finding calm in the chaos.
Originally published at https://www.thepracticalbalance.com on April 23, 2020.
