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As the year ends, we can look back and reflect on the messages and advice well-meaning people have offered to help us cope with the COVID pandemic.
One recurring theme is that COVID has provided an opportunity for us to review the way we live and to make significant changes. Whilst this is true for some of us, this opportunity only works in our favour if we are able to assess our experiences and situation with compassionate curiosity. However, the physical and mental states that support compassionate curiosity are very different from those that cause the restless anxiety or persistent unease that many of us have felt this year as our relationships, routines and livelihoods have been battered by lockdowns, ill-health and political and economic uncertainties.
Fear, anxiety, anger and disengagement are feelings we associate with our threat brain response, which has understandably been on high alert this year. And whilst those feelings may well have motivated us to take important survival orientated actions—which is what they are intended to do—these feelings do not support us to think deeply or to make effective long-term decisions.
Our threat response shuts down higher cortical functions such as our ability to problem solve, to imagine and evaluate potential future scenarios, to remember success, or to bring balanced perspective, compassion and patience to our experiences. Thus, unless we are in a life-threatening situation, making significant decisions when we are anxious and afraid is rarely a good idea. Being with our experiences—which means compassionately noticing what is happening in and to us, and waiting for our threat emotions to pass (which they will), enables us to make wiser decisions.
Unfortunately, doing nothing, waiting, relaxing and reflecting are underrated capabilities, and in many cultures, we negatively re-frame these responses as procrastination, indecision, laziness, rumination or navel-gazing. Our global orientation to difficulty and challenge is "do something." Yet if that something is to be effective we need to first understand the problem we are seeking to solve. The scientist Albert Einstein is reported to have said that if he had an hour to solve a problem upon which his life depended, he would spend 55 minutes trying to understand the problem and only five minutes solving it.
Understanding is dependent on our ability to approach our problems in a non-threat brain state, and from there, to nurture a relationship between intuitive and logical reasoning. This means paying attention to different kinds of intelligence. Rational, logical, data-driven evidence provides us with a certain kind of intelligence whilst body sensations, dreams, "gut instincts" and common sense provide another. Both are valuable, and when we are in our safe brain state (one of compassionate curiosity), we are more receptive to these multiple intelligences and more able to accurately make sense of them.
All emotions pass if we allow them to. However, when we give our emotions overly dramatic significance by, for example, making a life-changing decision in response to them, we are at risk of getting caught in powerful yet polarized narratives about ourselves and our lives. Our decisions become a pressurised choice between either this or that and we feel compelled to reject, leave, change or replace one "thing" (be that a person, situation or experience) for another. Recognising and accepting the paradoxes and complexity of our lives enables us to develop compassionate curiosity, and cultivates what the author F. Scott Fitzgerald described as "first-rate intelligence" which is, "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
This year, we have had ample opportunity to experience opposing feelings and thoughts in our relationships, at work and in our disrupted routines. For example, I both love you and dislike you. I want to stay at home and I miss the office. I want to socialise and I enjoy my own company. Instead of choosing between these feelings and thoughts, we would do better to allow them to interact and learn something from each other. We can do this in dialogue with ourselves and with trusted others, as we ask, "how can I—and we—learn to understand and respect these opposing feelings, thoughts and needs?'"
It is the compassionate acceptance and patient integration of our opposites that soothes our threatened brains and enable us to freely and wisely choose.
