The Antidote to a Global Crisis
Even when a pandemic is not simmering on the horizon, we often struggle to find those prized and fabled states called meaning and purpose in our everyday lives. We get distracted by worries, lost in negative thought. We procrastinate and self medicate. We daydream of romanticized goals, advertised abundantly, like wealth, fame, even infamy. With our lives now connected on a global scale, it feels like meaning must come from a global place. Meaning and purpose work as salves for depression and fear. Their absence in one’s life is painful.
In the face of COVID-19 our anxieties can be amplified, but it can also motivate us in helpful ways if that motivation is aimed in the right direction. After years of practicing as a psychiatrist, I have come to see most things as existing less in binary, black and white terms and more often on a spectrum. Our current crisis threatens to push us down the spectrum toward specific psychological patterns like catrastrophic thinking and compression. I suggest that an effective strategy for moving away from helplessness and panic is to focus away from global fears and superficial goals and toward sources of meaning in places that are figuratively and literally local; the levels of the town, neighborhood, family/friends, and self.
In my discussions with patients who suffer from anxiety disorders, they often talk about waking up with fear, being overwhelmed by the day ahead. It is no accident that these feelings are commonly worse in the morning. This tendency of the mind to project into the future can occur in a variety of situations and time frames (one that I sometimes notice is anxiety the night before a big family trip, my mind wanting to worry about the whole thing at once). The brain is scanning ahead in time, whether through the coming day, week, or far into the distance, trying to anticipate all of the obstacles and stressors that might arise. We compress all of those events into one overwhelming ball of insurmountable stress and our bodies are tuned to react to those scary thoughts. The magnitude of it all renders us small in comparison.
When our minds try to grapple with the problem of the pandemic, they are faced with compression of both time and geography. We look into the days and weeks and months ahead and it is uncomfortable to have trouble seeing what lies before us. We want information but too much or too little leaves us feeling overwhelmed and vulnerable. This situation we find ourselves in reaches everywhere on the globe, giving it the feeling of being massive and inescapable, some lumbering titan from a Lovecraft story.
While the mind believes it is doing us a favor by playing through worst case scenarios, catastrophic thinking can become a habit. As I often point out, if I instructed you to sit where you are and spend the next several minutes thinking about someone who you love in a car accident, even though we know it is not really happening, it wouldn’t take long for your body to begin reacting. Heart rate, muscle tension, and breathing increase. The stomach feels off, the palms sweat. We spend so much of our mental lives lost in cascades of thinking about all of the most terrible things that could happen and we then suffer whether they come to pass or not. When we perceive too many threats from too many angles, as in the case of a global pandemic, we are rendered paralyzed and ineffective. The answer is to focus our attention and efforts in the opposite direction. To get our sense of purpose and connection and meaning locally.
What is it that fuels our relentless pursuit of meaning? Ernest Becker recognized that the source of many of our deepest anxieties, desires, and character traits is the ever-present fear of death. We human animals have the blessing of consciousness, self-awareness, imagination, but also the curse of recognizing our own mortality. While mostly unconscious, the tension caused by this dichotomy, of being a superior mind in a creaturely body, is much of what drives our search for meaning, and ultimately, (imagined) immortality. We want to be the hero. We want to cheat death with our immortality project whether that proves to be a timeless novel, a big building with our name in two-story high gold letters, or a family of several generations to carry our memory on beyond us.
Although we may intellectually recognize how essential vulnerability is to our aliveness and every significant expression of it, we remain astonishingly averse to being vulnerable, expending tremendous resources on constructing elaborate and ultimately illusory defenses against this basic condition of being alive. - David Whyte
When we think of meaning, we don’t always notice that it has levels. It is easy to feel that to have a chance at immortality we would have to write like Shakespeare or create like Newton or lead like Lincoln to make that kind of lasting impact on the future. To ensure our legacy. It doesn’t take long to recognize that these are not likely to be options. We feel insubstantial and defeated. But meaning can be sought and found on various levels. I would argue that some of the more local levels are much more likely to be attainable and rewarding, instead of unrealistic and disappointing. There are many possible ways to achieve these goals. The strategies I will mention are not one size fits all, making self reflection an important part of choosing how to deploy your energies.
One level, and perhaps the largest scale to consider engaging with during the current crisis, is the small city or town level. You can learn a lot about how the community around you functions, the hierarchy of leadership, and projects on the horizon by exploring your city's website while things like town hall gatherings and city council meetings will be on hold. Investigate ways to help out from home like donating to local charities or manning a crisis hotline. Consider your unique talents and the population of people who could benefit from them. Write emails to people on the council or local government and ask them questions about things you want to understand better. They could become new connections, sources of information or support, someone who may also be able to learn something from you. Build a local network by overcoming the fears and self doubt that keep us locked in our little bubbles and routines. At the least, consider making plans to become more involved on this level after this crisis has passed.
The modern neighborhood is perhaps the cohort closest to mirroring the prehistoric tribe, the social context in which our nervous systems evolved. The neighborhood held a more prominent place in our social lives not that very long ago. Now we mostly reside in virtual neighborhoods. We are often much closer and connected to people halfway across the globe than someone we have lived next to for ten years. Don't forsake your virtual relationships, but your pal in Reykjavík can't give you some of her medicine when your child is sick. Making an effort to strengthen relationships with those who share intimate geography is a worthwhile pursuit. Start a neighbor group on Facebook. Ask them about themselves, their kids, their dogs. People love to talk about themselves (I’m no exception). Make comments that let them know you heard what they said. Reflect back what seems important to them in a way that makes them reply, “yeah, that’s right!” They’ll become a friend and an ally in one conversation.
I have met countless people who faced overwhelming stressors and had no friends or family to turn to. For those of us blessed with such supports, we owe it to those relationships to maintain them, to water them, tend to them. I learned a phrase that has stuck with me. Go first. In a relationship where there may be some distance, the natural tendency is toward passivity. We think about calling or writing or getting together but it’s easy to just wait on them. You think, “if they want to hang out, they’ll call.” But of course, they are thinking the same thing. Go first is an important mantra to provide that extra nudge toward connection. We fantasize about a connection with people like celebrities and the rich and powerful, but we truly gain from the relationships closest to us. Now is a perfect time to reach out. Go first. Get Local. But don’t ignore the final and most important level. It doesn’t get more local than the self.
The fact that most of the mental processes that lead to our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors take place largely hidden away in the subconscious makes it difficult to recognize when distortions in thinking are affecting us negatively. We tend to accept most of what our minds suggest to us, right or wrong, accurate or sensational. Safe or terrifying. A trick of the mind that is challenging to notice and to stop falling for. If your goal is to play Mozart on the piano, you have to take lessons, receive instruction, and practice for a long time until it becomes ingrained and automated. If you want to develop skill at reducing anxiety, seeing people and situations more clearly, better controlling extremes of emotion, coping in healthy and productive ways, practices like mindfulness meditation and cognitive behavioral therapy are much more straightforward, helpful, and even enjoyable than they can seem at first glance. These are skills like any other. There are no shortcuts. The Stoics were teachers of mindfulness and arrived at many of the same ideas and approaches that the Buddhist meditators discovered. On the topic of worry, and really more specifically compression, one of the great Stoics Marcus Aurelius wrote:
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
He recognized this problem of compression and urged people to see that if you are not completely overwhelmed by the present moment, that fact is a good predictor of your ability to cope with other moments in the future. After all, the future is just a collection of present moments. You will only have to face them them one at a time, as they come.
Methods of self reflection like journaling, meditating, and psychotherapy are ways of seeing through some of the narrative that starts spinning when we are very young and that we then repeat and elaborate on in our minds endlessly throughout our lives. Our inner mental life does not exist to show us reality in crystal clarity. It functions to hide from us what it thinks we can’t handle and lie to us about what we want to hear. One disciple of Freud referred insightfully to character traits as “secret psychoses.” It is the story of who we think we are, what we are about, what is expected of us. The filter through which we see the world. But it is not always true. It’s just the one that sticks to us and that we accept. When that manufactured narrative doesn’t jive with our true, authentic selves, or with the reality of the world around us, it is the cause of much suffering.
Finding ways to better understand yourself so that you can make decisions that fit with your true desires and values and goals is the real name of the game. When you understand yourself better, it will be more clear which types of localized actions will bring the most meaning to you. Journaling regularly is a great way to look inward, but the most time tested strategy is mindfulness meditation. If you want to better understand your mind and what it is up to, you have to sit and observe it at work. The best advice I could give about mindfulness meditation is to read and learn about it before and while you try it to neutralize unrealistic ideas and expectations before you abandon a skill and a strategy that is free, has no side effects, can be done anywhere, and is all but guaranteed to help pretty much anyone to some noticeable degree. Consider the Waking Up app as a wonderful guide to the practice. A subscription is free if you cannot afford one.
As animals, our nervous systems do not like the feeling of helplessness. Worry and anxiety are bad for our bodies. They burn up energy and distract us from what matters. No one can stop bad thoughts from popping up, but there are ways that we can shorten their half-life, and that makes a big difference. This pandemic is a force of nature and, by definition is overwhelming. The opposite of being overwhelmed and helpless is empowerment, purpose, meaning. Now is the time to seek that meaning in ourselves through introspection, in our friends and families through connection and shared experience, and in our neighborhoods and towns through networking and service. The global view is impossible to take in and to process. It represents chaos. Focus your view on the local and find the ways in which you can bring some order to your corner of the world.
3.21.20
