The Space Between Stimulus And Response
By: Rob Walker
Tags: Pandemic, Compassion, Emotional Health, Emotional Wellbeing, Psychology

Emotional Agility is the ability to ‘Be’ with Ourselves

Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash

We’re told and think that we have to be happy and positive all of the time. Like it’s a natural thing to want to be successful or fit and healthy or have a really good career or job. These things are put on us by our peers and that is how life is. It can lead to a lot of stress and anxiety though and because it’s such a normal thing we can end up chasing our own tails.

When we're emotional we tend to do one of two things: We either judge them, belittle them, rationalize them and push them to one side or we brood on them and we get stuck in them.

We didn’t choose these circumstances that we find ourselves in with this pandemic and things are tough, having to isolate and forego mixing in society.

Viktor Frankl was a survivor of the German death camps and he made the most profound human statement when he said, “There’s a space between stimulus and response and in that space is our power to choose and it’s in that choice that lies our growth and freedom.”

We naturally get caught up in what we are doing, whether that be scrolling our Facebook or Twitter feeds, getting emotional at what we read or hear, engaging with the news, and getting angry. We get hooked where there is no space between stimulus and response. We catastrophize and things get blown up out of all proportion.

Now is a time when we need a space between stimulus and response and we do that by being open about what we are experiencing by saying “what do I need to do here to think about that space?”

Emotional agility is the skill that is foundational to wellness within ourselves to be healthy within ourselves, every day.

Applying emotional agility in today’s climate.

Right now we need to bring those skills with greater courage and strength to the situation that we are all now spending more time by ourselves without socializing or getting distracted by normal everyday things, like commuting to work or being distracted outside of our homes, so we are really having to start thinking about ‘what have I got in this space in this context right now?’

When we think about Social Distancing a better way for all of us to be thinking about it is Physical Distancing.

We need to be able to look for meaningful quality interactions that are really critically important to us right now.

Loneliness can come to anyone even in a crowd. You don’t have to necessarily be ‘alone’ to feel lonely. Loneliness is a function of whether our interactions are meaningful or not and emotions tell us a story and behind our most difficult emotions are signposts to the things that we care about.

If you’re finding yourself feeling lonely, as an example, what is that loneliness the signpost of? The loneliness is often the signpost that you value presence and connectedness and that you don’t have enough of it right now. That loneliness is telling you that there is something that you value that you need to be moving more in the direction of.

I listened to a renowned psychologist this morning giving a TED talk. Her name is Susan David, Ph.D and she’s South African by origin, it was a joy listening to her and it amazes me how some people can have such brilliant minds. This post is taken from that talk. She used a phrase which was Sawabona which means “I see you and by seeing you I bring you into being.” It means to look at the person beyond the person, looking behind the eyes, looking into their soul and the love and light and heart in the person in front of you.

It’s a connection where we can use meaning that will bring us out of loneliness. With meaning that brings us out of social isolation that is really profound.

When we feel lonely or sad or angry we immediately say that that is how we are, which is a normal default way of describing how we’re feeling.

That is not how we are.

When we say that, we are saying that we are our thoughts & emotions.

Thoughts and emotions don’t own us, we own them.

What we are doing is saying that “I Am” — “All of Me”, 100% is those emotions or thoughts.

That singular experience.

What we are doing with that is we are starting to define ourselves by our emotions. We are not our emotions, we own them, they do not own and define us. What we do is to show up to our emotions with compassion and curiosity but we also don’t want to get stuck in our emotions.

A simple strategy that can be really helpful is instead of saying “I am sad”, label your thought, your emotions, or your feelings for what they are. They are not facts! They are thoughts and emotions, they are a feeling so you might say something like, “I’m noticing the feeling that I’m sad.” “I’m noticing the urge to keep going on my social media feed or that I’m noticing that I’m getting the urge to shut down the conversation with my spouse.” “I’m noticing the thought that things are never going to get any better.”

This is all a Mindfulness technique where what you are doing is you are labelling your thoughts, your emotions, and your feelings as, thoughts, emotions, and feelings, and when you do this what you start doing is to create that space between stimulus and response.

No longer are you defined, you’re now able to see them for what they are and then you can start saying, “I’m noticing that I’m feeling sad”, and ask what is that telling me about what I care about?

As well as doing something huge to help someone it’s the small, values connected actions that make a difference. A phone call where you could be that person's day today.

Being compassionate with yourself in that you look at how you are feeling and you are aware that what you are feeling is normal and that it isn’t you. That it’s ok to feel bad or sad or angry or lonely.

Being compassionate moves us away from the judgement and the labelling and the ‘not enough’ and ‘never enough’ and into the space of resilliance.

Coming together as a community and being value connected and saying “how can I help? What are the little Big ways that we can help?” is fundamental.

This right now is the Marker of our ability as humanity to come together and to fight back against this Pandemic.

Things can be seen to be going either of two ways. The world’s conducting this massive psychological experiment that we’ve never had done before.

Some people worry that we are going to drive each other crazy, that we are going to bring out so much fear and anger. There’s already a blame game going on between nations and possibly between different communities which in some scenarios gets very dark and on the other hand there are thousands and thousands of just amazing stories with help & love & creativity. Are we overall going to find a way of persuading each other to be our better selves?

In psychology, there is a term called ‘Mortality Salience’. Which is the idea that our death becomes moved from something that we can conveniently avoid to something that is much more at the periphery, even if we aren’t directly experiencing something it’s much more salient to us.

When we experience this mortality salience we tend to become much more ‘us and them’, we become more biassed and there are a lot of predictable psychological responses when we experience this.

We also know that human beings have through time, had a well of wisdom and humanity.

We try to solve the world’s problems with our minds. This is a time where we actually need to move away from our minds and into our hearts, into our breathing, our seeing, our compassion, our wisdom, our fortitude.

When we look at the psychology of generosity and community you can see that through history there is this experience of human beings coming together.

We can come through this, but it comes from a place of being able to see ourselves and the other and to see with comapssion.

Compassion doesn’t mean saying that the man who hoards toilet rolls is doing either the right or the wrong thing, but it’s saying “what is this person experiencing inside of themselves that might be driving a particular response?

Our collective stimulus is to stay safe and our response is to keep ourselves to ourselves.

The openness of the beauty of who we can be as human beings is the sustainable way forward and our space.