A Simple Tool for Confident Living in the Age of Anxiety

The Scream Edvard Munch, who lived from 1863 –1944, was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionistic art.  His best-known composition (painted in 1893) is "The Scream" which has become one of the most recognizable paintings in all art.

It has been widely interpreted as representing the universal anxiety of modern man.  With this painting, Munch met his stated goal of “the study of the soul, that is to say the study of my own self."  Munch wrote of how the painting came to be:

“I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood.  I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired.  Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord.  My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear.  Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature.”

In the Norwegian language, the word he used for scream literally is "shriek."  Imagine the existential angst he was feeling to use that word.  He later described the personal anguish behind the painting:  “For several years I was almost mad…You know my picture, ‘The Scream?’ I was stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood… After that I gave up hope ever of being able to love again.”

Considering his childhood, that despair makes sense.  He grew up with a cold, angry and foreboding father who was a fundamentalist Christian who used God as a punishing and revengeful authority.  Little Munch was always being threatened by violent punishment for his forays into creativity, imagination, and play.  So even as an adult, Munch felt alone, isolated, and incapable of being loved.  He lived with the constant fear of rejection.

The Age of Anxiety

This painting is more contemporary to today than ever before.  Psychologists and sociologists are calling this new millennium the age of Anxiety.  Fear, they’re saying, is the defining emotion of our time. Think back on this initial decade.  First, there was the Y2K hysteria, which portended widespread computer failures and a massive breakdown in public services.  Next, uncertainty gripped the nation as we awaited the results of the disputed presidential election.  This was followed by the start of the stock market's protracted crash as well as a surge in unemployment.  Then came the California energy shortage in which the world's fifth largest economy and the most populous state in the country experienced the kind of rolling blackouts typically associated with developing countries.

Finally, there was the tragedy of September 11th, the anthrax scare, and a steady stream of government warnings that we are no longer safe. In the midst of this turmoil, major U.S. corporations such as Enron and WorldCom collapsed because of corporate malfeasance by executives and accounting firms, and tens of thousands of people lost their retirement savings. Now there is the threat of bioterrorism, the possibility of successive wars, and growing multinational, multigenerational hatred of the United States and of Americans.  And we’re in what is unarguably the worst recession since the Great Depression – everything is uncertain, including who to trust as a friend.  Fundamentalism in religion increasingly creates enemies and terrorism of all kinds.

In the midst of this environment, in my work as a coach and pastor, I hear stories often of people wanting to move in one direction for their lives but instead finding themselves moving in another; people who claim to be trying, but repeatedly finding themselves failing; people who are bored and stuck yet unable to make the changes they know they want to make and to make those changes sustainable.

Which raises significant questions.  If we know what we want (for the most part), why are we unable to act on it?  Why are we unable to follow the directions given by our conscious minds and reach our goals unimpeded?  And when we do try to do the right things, why are we often unsuccessful?

For so many people, this is a source of much heartache.  Whether it’s a tortured relationship or a difficult job situation, we often feel regretful after we realize we’ve made the wrong choice.  Why do we continue to make these choices, and what steers us toward them in the first place?

The Science of Fear

Experts call this the “rip current of human nature.”  A rip current is the very powerful surface flow of water that is returning to the sea from close to the shore.  It can turn an eerily calm-looking body of water into something extremely dangerous that has the power to drag swimmers out to sea.  Many people who get caught in rip currents eventually drown from sheer exhaustion of trying to swim against the current.

Say the experts, the unconscious is the rip current of the human mind.  From a distance, it’s calm, barely noticeable, and difficult to anticipate.  And at its core lies the threatening force of fear.  Much like a rip current is helpful to surfers who rely on its force to pull them away from the shore, fear may be helpful if it urges you forward toward your goal.  But like the unpredictable rip current, fear can also drag you away from your goals and destinations.

Significantly, our brains are wired to default to fear.  It's the survival mechanism in play - the need to instinctively and instantly respond to a threat or danger to our system to protect our species.  The brain picks up on a threat (via our senses through the thalamus) and sends an immediate signal to the amygdala, the part of the brain called the "guard dog."  When that amygdala switch is flipped, it instantly sends a signal to the hypothalamus which engages the whole body's fight or flight systems (the heart starts pumping faster, cortisol increases, the eyes dilate, the muscles contract, breathing rates increase) - everything is mobilized instantaneously for engagement to protect itself.

Research is now showing that most of this process is actually taking place beyond our consciousness.  Our brain picks up external inputs (like even a fearful expression on someone's face, even as seemingly insignificant as eyes that show more white than normal - the posture of fear) and interprets it as a potential threat - and the fear response kicks in.  The brain needs as little as 10 - 30 milliseconds of exposure to flip the fear switch (far beyond our level of consciousness).

Which means, as experts are now realizing, that many of us are living in an almost constant physiological and emotional state of anxiety (much of it not even in the scope of our awareness).  Falling asleep with the TV on, for example, impacts our brains response, and the amygdala still sends its fear signals picked up from the drama taking place on the screen that impact bodily response, even though we're "sound" asleep.

Imagine all the fearful input we're receiving every day - the news, people's reactions, TV, movies, music, dangerous sounds all around us.  But then add on top of all that our own thoughts - the perceived "threats" we insist are coming our way from others, even those close to us - our almost automatic assessment that other people are not liking us or are displeased with us or think we're stupid, dumb, or you-name-it.  Even though we might be making faulty assumptions, our brains still interpret these signals as "danger," kicking into gear the fear response via our highly trained and instinctually-wired amygdala.

So for one thing, we should do more monitoring of how much fearful and anxiety-producing input we're allowing into our brains.  Do we tend to listen to people who use fear motivation (e.g. so much of politics and religion these days)?

But in addition, the problem is that not all input is in reality something to be feared.  We make faulty assumptions all the time.  And unless we intentionally refuse to flip the amygdala switch, our systems go straight to fear mode.  And we end up living in high stress, unnecessarily.  No wonder so many of us feel drained and exhausted.  No wonder we so often find ourselves sabotaging our success or desires to move forward effectively with our dreams and goals.  We're flipping the wrong switches in our brains.  We're not living intentionally enough and instead are letting our default instincts control us.

A Simple Tool to Moving Ourselves Forward

Dr. Pillay, Harvard neuroscientist and psychiatrist, encourages a rather simple strategy to help us overcome this fear tendency.  It's not by any means the only strategy but it is effective.  Here's the way he puts it:

"Sometimes it helps to take a lighthearted look at what we're feeling.  Life is short.  Experiences do come and go.  And our brains, because their fast, unconscious responses are like barking dogs, are not always barking or frenzied for an actual reason.  If we take every physiological sensation and narrative seriously, then we are assuming a certain conscious responsibility that is entirely outside of awareness.  So if you are afraid, you might be able to calm yourself by asking yourself, 'Now what is my brain up to?'  It helps to give yourself this feedback because it can stop the vicious cycle of 'Oh my God ...' that then leads to a greater sense of catastrophe."  Dr. Srinivasan Pillay, Life Unlocked, p. 44.

This simple stopping and phrase-speaking is enough to delay the amygdala's instinctive fear response.  The interruption is just long enough and strategic enough to allow the secondary brain signaling system to be fully engaged.  Upon sensory input, the thalamus sends the signal to the cortex (the more advanced outer layer of brain cell connections that are involved in evaluating and processing the signal).  Because the cortex takes longer to process the visual information, its assessment is more accurate than the amygdala's.  When you see a coiled rope, for example, out of the corner of your eye (or perhaps aren't even realizing it), the amygdala would automatically assume it's a coiled snake and kick into gear your fight or flight response.  But when your cortex is allowed evaluation, it assesses that the object is in fact a coiled rope (not snake), and it calms down the amygdala and turns off the body's fear response.

For this reason, it's important for us to often take the time to ask ourselves about the fear we're feeling (unless of course we're being chased by a mugger, in which case we're better off letting our bodies react instinctively and instantly into the fear mode).  Is this is a legitimate threat to our system?  What is the nature of this fear?  Is it simply my self-defeating feelings and self-thoughts that I've accumulated and chosen to hang on to through the years?  Is it worth allowing to control my entire system?  Is there any truth to this fear?  And even if there is, is it necessary for me to cave in to it?  Am I allowing this fear to flip the amygdala switch too automatically instead of sending it on the cortex where it can be accurately evaluated and I can develop a more proactive response?

"Now what is my brain up to?" instead of "Oh my God ....!"

"Knowing that fear can turn on your amygdala without your conscious knowledge may help you feel more certain about the need to develop new neuronal connections" by using tools like this simple one.  "If you are feeling limited in your life in any way, examine your life through the lens of 'Am I afraid?' even if you don't feel afraid" (Dr. Pillay, p. 45).  Our instincts are wonderful - we're wired to protect ourselves from real danger and threat.  But our instincts can also lead us astray if they're not based on reality or if they're not helping us go where we truly want to go.  We can take control of them.  It's nice to have the choice!

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Three Ways To De-Clutter Your Life

I came across a news story from Las Vegas, Nevada several weeks ago that was quite stunning and sobering.  As husband Bill James told authorities this last month, he woke up from a nap back in April and couldn't find his wife anywhere.  He assumed that she had wandered away. She had recently had a mini-stroke that left her disoriented, and he worried that she had suffered another.  So authorities launched a massive hunt for the woman, using sniffer dogs and even helicopters equipped with infrared to search the desert.  Husband Bill even set up a Facebook page to promote the search and offered a $10,000 reward. According to the report, four months later, on August 28 the search came to a terrifying macabre ending when the husband spotted her feet sticking out from the pile of junk that filled the room in their house from floor to ceiling.  She had been buried beneath a mountain of garbage and clutter in her own home.   The collected clothes, trash and knicknacks in this woman's house was so extensive that the police sniffer dogs had searched the home without finding her corpse.

"For our dogs to go through that house and not find something should be indicative of the tremendous environmental challenges they faced," police spokesman Bill Cassell said.

Apparently, according to family friends, Billie Jean was a compulsive hoarder, with a passion for shopping for trinkets and clothes. One friend said that Billie Jean referred to the room where she was found as "her rabbit hole."  Sari Connolly, a friend of' Billie Jean's, said she had become so obsessive in her hoarding that she kept people out of her home, even refusing to let them use the bathroom.  The police spokeman told the Associated Press that the house had only small amounts of clear space so that people could get around, and that the home was filled with strong odors from animals, garbage and food.  So who would think that her body would be decomposing right in her own home, a victim of her cluttered life.

Apparently, this isn't the first time this kind of terrifying story has taken place.  This last May, an aging Chicago couple was trapped for two weeks after being buried in their belongings. When they were rescued, they were found to have rat bites on their bodies.  In 1947, police found a body inside a Manhattan row house. Brothers Homer and Langley Collyer had filled the house with possessions, including a Model T chassis, 14 pianos and more than 25,000 books.  Both brothers were found dead among the clutter.

Imagine dying underneath your own clutter - losing your life in every possible way, even before physical extinction.

I'm reminded how important it is to regularly evaluate our lives and de-clutter when necessary.  Have you ever considered what kind of "clutter" you might have in your life, "junk" you might be hanging on to that is in reality extinguishing your life little by little?

Emotional Clutter

Perhaps it's emotional clutter.  Resentment.  Guilt.  Shame.  Insecurity.  Anxiety.  Lack of confidence.  Sense of failure.  Anger.  Addiction to conflict.  The more I go through my own personal journey, and the more I work with people, the more I realize how easy it is for us to hang on to this clutter - to simply let ourselves live with these feelings or self-defeating thoughts and beliefs - to refuse to do the hard work of processing these emotions and resolving them in effective ways.

An assistant professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, who commented on Billie Jean's tragic story, observed that people often hoard because they find it impossible to make decisions, organize themselves or focus on immediate tasks.  In other words, they have the inability or lack of internal strength to address the current chaos in their lives.  And ironically, all the things they end up accumulating provide a twisted kind of comfort while they're being gradually smothered to death by them.

By hanging on to our emotional clutter, we become "slaves" to our automatic reflexes, those brain functions involving conditioned feelings and thoughts (most of which, according to experts, revolve around fear, our instinctual response to perceived danger, our ego's sense of threat). And we all know that often our instinctual fear reactions are not based on reality - they're only ego survival tactics.  Often when we choose to face our emotional fear, we end up discovering that there wasn't any basis to that fear or that we had the necessary strength to push through that fear-producing experience into the light of emotional freedom.

But many of us live our lives on auto-pilot, allowing these emotional clutterings to control us and corral us in self-defeating ways.  And unless we de-clutter, we end up losing life bit by bit, suffocating under the load of our junk.  And unfortunately, the gradual decomposition of our own lives emits a painful stench to those around us, too.

Decluttering Our Emotional Clutter

So what does it look like to declutter?  What are proactive ways to declutter?  Here are a few ways experts emphasize.

1.  Identify your clutter.  What are the negative emotions or thoughts or limiting beliefs that you are hanging on to?  Are they serving you well?  That is, are they helping you live a life of freedom, moving you forward toward the kind of person you want to be?  Are your relationships filled with joy and hope and warmth as much as possible?  Be honest with yourself.  Is there a more healthy and effective way for you to live?

2.  Harness your attention.  According to brain experts, our natural, instinctual, first response to life tends to be fear.  This is because our brains were designed to instantly activate under threat for our survival - the fight or flight response central to the amygdala, the small front part of the brain.  But no longer having to live with the threat of extinction by dinosaurs or bears or lions, that instinctual brain response gets redirected toward less obvious threats - like threats to our ego survival, our sense of esteem and self-confidence - fear of being rejected or ridiculed or failure.

The problem is that we tend to allow our brains (by choosing to simply "float along") to keep stimulating our fear response when we don't need to, causing our whole physiological system to live in a high state of stress.  And this constant distress damages both our minds and our bodies.  No wonder it's simply easy hoarding stuff - keep everything external to distract us from our internal chaos.

Here's the way Dr. Pillay, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and brain expert, in his latest book Life Unlocked, describes the powerful way out:

"Fixing your attention stops the frontal cortex from randomly provoking the amygdala.  The frontal cortex is like an electrode that can buzz the amygdala, but if we occupy it with other thoughts [positive, hopeful, honest thoughts], it will not randomly shoot current toward the amygdala.  If your attention is scattered and chaotic, though, the frontal electrode will randomly activate the amygdala and cause fear.  Harnessing attention allows the amygdala to react to other high-impact positive and negative emotions, and in the absence of fear, even negative emotions can feel less unpleasant.  Similarly, fear can make even positive emotions feel overwrought or too activated, and we often come to regret these states of forced happiness.  Thus attentional depth is critical to overcoming fear.  One way to develop this depth is by using the power of intention."  (p. 66)

What are you giving your attention to?  Dr. Pillay is showing us that unless we intentionally direct our attention to dealing with our destructive emotions and limiting beliefs, and unless we work to resolve and let go of those feelings and thoughts, and then apply our attention to the positive outcomes and hoped for states of empowering feelings and being, we will continue to be overcome with fear.  We will destroy ourselves from that fear.  And we will then do whatever it takes to distract us from that debilitating fear - by hoarding or medicating or dying.

3.  Choose to become a minimalist.  Once you harness your attention on what needs to change and on what you want to change to, you can summon the courage to let the "clutter" go.  And here's the power of it:  decluttering inspires more decluttering.

Blogger Joshua Becker described the dynamics of his physical cluttering and decluttering this way:

"Clutter attracts clutter.  It just takes one piece of junk mail, one article of clothing left on a chair, or one receipt not filed properly to get the clutter momentum started.  What I have found over the last three weeks is that the opposite is also true.  When a surface is left clean, that one piece of clutter seems out of place and calls you to put it away.  Since I minimalized my office and removed all the clutter, I can’t stand the idea of leaving one piece of paper sitting on my desk – and so I put it away.  Since I minimalized my wardrobe, I can’t stand the idea of leaving one shirt laying on the floor – and so I throw it down to the laundry.   Since we minimalized the living room, I can’t stand the idea of leaving my shoes in the corner or a book on the table - and so I put them where they go right away."

The power of attention placed on both confronting and changing (decluttering) is exponential and transformative.  Our higher brain centers are called into action and stimulated, the amygdala fear center is deactivated, and the nerve pathways toward powerful action are electrified.  Positive motor skills kick in.  And we begin to live the life of freedom, forward momentum, and transformation we want.

Ambrose Redmoon once wrote:  "Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."

Billie Jean, hoarding stuff in her house, never learned that truth.  And finally succumbed to her clutter.  A tragic lesson to the rest of us to declutter and learn how to really live life.

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How Hope Can Trump Fear

This last Saturday at Second Wind we began a new series ("Applying Your  Spirituality To This Week's Glocal Hot Spot") in which we're taking a very current event happening in the world and asking what the story tells us about the journey of spirituality.  How does this event inform and shape our spirituality so that we develop a real-world kind of spirituality, a perspective on faith and the spiritual life that works in real life, that embraces contemporary life in a relevant way.  Saturday we focused on the story unfolding in Chile with the 33 trapped miners which has already broken the record for the number of days miners have been imprisoned underground.   Experts are predicting that it will be at least another 3 months before the men are able to be rescued, provided more collapses don't take place.  A heartbreaking story, to say the least. Imagine if you were a family member or one of the miners.  How would you be feeling?  What would keep you alive and hanging on?  Would you hope for a good ending, even if the possibility existed that it might not happen?  Would you allow hope to set you up for a potential catastrophic disappointment?  Does hope work?

The Washington Post last week reported about Jerry Linenger  who was the only American on the Mir space station in 1997 when a small fire caused a crisis that left him isolated in space for four months with two Russian astronauts. Cut off from his family and facing a lot of stress, Linenger endured a period of uncertainty that provides a good parallel to what the 33 Chilean miners are facing.

The initial explosion terrified and galvanized the crew of six. After the fire, the connection between the two modules that made up the space station was cut, leaving Linenger alone with the Russians. Over the next months, the Mir lost its oxygen generator and had serious trouble with the carbon dioxide scrubber. The toilets malfunctioned, and communications broke down. But the worst aspect, Linenger said, was being led to expect something that failed to materialize.

"Expectations unmet are a horrible thing," Linenger recalled, "especially when you're already psychologically stressed. The biggest dips for me and the others is when we were told something would happen and it didn't."

Among the many examples he could point to, the one that remains raw after 13 years is when he was told he would be able to speak with his pregnant wife at a time when potentially life-threatening problems had begun to mount.  "They said I could talk to her for a short time as we passed over a ground antenna near Moscow," he remembered, "and I prepared for a week. I wrote down what I would say and then crossed things off and added new ones. I was so excited. But the time came, they said she was on the line, and all I got was static. And then another emergency started and we were cut off entirely. After that, I expected nothing and was psychologically more healthy."

What do you make of Linenger's conclusion?  Is it healthier to simply not hope, to not have expectations, in order to prevent disappointment?

Though I can appreciate the need to try to minimize emotional pain from loss and grief (I've gone through this many times myself), the truth is that according to recent neuroscience about brain formation and function, hope is one of the most significant brain functions to not only taking away fear but also to producing profound life transformation.

As we know, our brains were originally wired for fear responses - it was to protect humans from being gobbled up by predators - it's the basis for the fight or flight response.  And according to recent research, fear is so wired into our brains that the brain actually "senses" fear-producing stimuli even at an unconscious level (before we recognize it).  When something dangerous occurs outside of awareness, the conscious brain reacts to it.  In other words, as experts are telling us, your brain prepares you to respond to danger faster than it does to other tasks, and it starts to respond to frightening things before you even realize they are frightening.

And unless this wiring tendency is proactively dealt with, fear always trumps everything.  And when we live in fear, our stress levels stay heightened, causing us to live on increased cortisol which keeps our physical and emotional systems over-stimulated and thereby more susceptible to disease and deterioration.

I'm reading a book right now written by Dr. Srinivasan Pillay, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the former director of the Outpatient Anxiety Disorders Program and the Panic Disorders Research Program in the Brain Imaging Center at McLean Hospital.  Dr. Pillay is writing about the recent neuroscience findings about the brain and fear and how to overcome the tendency to be paralyzed from from fear:  Life Unlocked:  7 Revolutionary Lessons to Overcome Fear.

He says that hope is the choice to make the assumption that something is possible.  Instead of allowing the facts to justify fear, we use hope to reveal new facts and remove the fears.  This is precisely what people like former South African president Nelson Mandella, world-class athlete and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong, and countless others have done every day.  Rather than wait for their fears to disappear or for facts to back up their hope, they used hope to create new facts and reach their goals.

According to brain science discoveries, hope and fear both wander around in the unconscious parts of our brains.  They both require amygdala activation, and whichever one is stronger will win the amygdala for its own use (the amgydala is the almond-shaped part of the brain, a mass of nerve cell bodies, designed to be the danger alert system, "the guard dog of the human brain."  "It's so powerful and efficient that it alerts us to danger in our environment within tens of milliseconds of detecting it.").

Dr. Pillay's point is this:  "To be processed by the amygdala, emotions have to stand in a queue, with their order determined by their strength - the strongest soldier gets to the front of the line.  If fear is strongest, then it will grab the amygdala's power and dominate all the other soldiers in the line.  If hope is stronger, then it will be preferentially processed over fear ... So we have to develop a strategy to help hope 'bulk up' and have an intelligence that supersedes the intelligence of fear.  This isn't easy because, as we've learned, our brains are structured so that the amygdala processes fear first in order to protect us from danger."  (p. 52-3)

This certainly explains why it's easier for us to give in to the impulse of fear instead of building hope.  But it also explains why it's so important for us to choose hope, to give intentional attention to hope and what it is we're hoping for.  Regularly imagining the state of life that hope is directed to.  Those specific activities build up our hope response.  And when we hope, says Dr. Pillay, we stimulate out brain center (amygdala) to use its mass of nerve pathways to empower our bodies to act in harmony with that hope instead of short-circuiting it with fear.

Hope isn't a naive, feel-good fantasy approach to life.  It's central to using our brain structure to facilitate positive, profound life transformation.  We do need fear, too.  We need to feel fear to keep us from dangerous situations - we need the fight or flight response for survival.  But we can't live there - we end up destroying our systems if we do.  So we must "bulk up" hope.  We must choose to imagine what we truly want our lives to become.  We must spend time directing our attention to that picture.  We must allow our emotional, rational, physiological systems to mobilize us toward that preferred future.

No wonder many of the sacred scriptures of the great faith traditions talk about hope and setting our minds and hearts on the object of our hope.  "Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see."  (Hebrews 11:1)  Confidence.  Assurance.  And the rest of that chapter describes how those qualities lead to dramatic and transforming action.  Maintaining that kind of hope is what empowers us to take necessary steps to bring it into reality.

It's significant that all the families of the 33 trapped Chilean miners are staying on the mining site in a tent village that they're calling Camp Hope.  They are choosing to stay focused and to embrace hope.  Like Elizabeth Segovia, the wife of one of the trapped miners (reported by CNN).  The day before the tragic mine collapse, she received a piece of great news - she was pregnant with a girl - an ultrasound had confirmed it.  The next day, her world collapsed.  She cried and cried.  As the weeks went by, she found herself talking to her baby girl inside her, "Daddy's okay?  Daddy's okay!  It's going to be alright!"

Last Thursday, Segovia got a handwritten letter from her husband Ticona proposing they name their daughter Esperanza Elizabeth -- esperanza is Spanish for hope.  "First, because we never lost hope," she said, and "second, because it's the name of the camp where the families are living; and third, because the 33 miners never lost hope either."

With her daughter due to arrive in less than two weeks, and her husband due to arrive in perhaps four months, Segovia plans to make a video of the birth to ensure he doesn't miss it altogether.  "We have to record the birth in great detail, as well as everything that happens to my baby day by day so we can show him," she said.

What do you need to hope for in your life?  What is your preferred future?  What do you need to hang on to in order to stimulate your brain center into powerful action?  Where are you most fearful?  Is your fear paralyzing you?  Can renewed hope in you create new facts to bolster that hope and bring transformation?  Esperanza.  Hope. Best to hang on to it!

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The Spirituality of Stress: Gender and Sexual Orientation Inequality

Dr. Robert Sapolsky is considered one of America's leading scientists doing work on the psychosocial and physiological effects of stress on human life.  He began his ground breaking research back in 1978 by studying baboon troops in Kenya.  One of the things he noticed was how a baboon's status in the troop impacted it's physiological condition.  He noticed, for instance, that the males at the bottom of the hierarchy were thinner and more nervous in general. “They just didn’t look very healthy,” he said. “That’s when I began thinking about how damn stressful it must be to have no status. You never know when you’re going to get beat up. You never get laid. You have to work a lot harder for food.” So he would shoot these baboons with anesthetic darts and then, while they were plunged into sleep, quickly measure their immune system function and the levels of stress hormones and cholesterol in their blood.  What he discovered was stunning.  These lower status baboons were living in a state of chronic stress - they had to fight for everything and continually "bow" to those males at the top of the totem pole.  And this chronic stress, measured by Sapolsky via their blood samples, revealed that it was a profound chemistry problem that he and other specialists have shown to be true over and over again since that discovery.

Here's how a recent article in Wired magazine described it:  When there's stress like this, "a tiny circuit in the base of the brain triggers the release of glucocorticoids, a family of stress hormones that puts the body in a heightened state of alert. The molecules are named after their ability to rapidly increase levels of glucose in the blood, thus providing muscles with a burst of energy. They also shut down all nonessential bodily processes, such as digestion and the immune response. 'This is just the body being efficient,' Sapolsky says. 'When you’re being chased by a lion, you don’t want to waste resources on the small intestine. You’ll ovulate some other time. You need every ounce of energy just to get away.'

"But glucocorticoids have a nasty side effect: When they linger in the bloodstream, as they might due to chronic stress related to low rank, damage accumulates. It’s the physiological version of a government devoting too many resources to its defense department, Sapolsky says. The body is so worried about war that it doesn’t fix the roads or invest in schools. Interestingly, the effects of stress appear particularly toxic to the brain."

One of the profound impacts of Dr. Sapolsky's research was to show how even one's status in a social group led to a state of chronic stress with the related physiological symptoms being able to be clearly measured and repeated.  The long term impact was hugely negative:  increased heart rate and blood pressure, a rise in arterial plaque even when fed a low-fat diet, and more than twice as likely to suffer from heart disease and a correspondingly premature death.

Numerous studies among humans since those early primate studies have reconfirmed the powerful negative effects of stress caused by subordination in position and status.  When people have a sense of control and power over their lives, stress decreases and health increases.  When they don't, stress with all the negative effects, especially when it's chronic, impacts the entire system - and the system ultimately dies.

Here's the way Wired put it:  "The moral is that the most dangerous kinds of stress don’t feel that stressful. It’s not the late night at the office that’s going to kill us; it’s the feeling that nothing can be done. The person most at risk for heart disease isn’t the high-powered executive anxious about their endless to-do list — it’s the frustrated janitor stuck with existential despair."

Or, it's the person who because of gender or sexual orientation feels consigned to a "lower status" in society - who feels a sense of powerless because the policies or practices of an organization and laws of the land conspire against their ability and opportunity to rise to higher levels of position and acceptance in their environment.  The tragic result of creating this state of imposed potential helplessness and powerlessness is that we as a society, whether intentionally or not, are reproducing experiences of chronic stress and sentencing such people to the risks associated with major health problems.  Inequality and prejudice do impact stress levels.

In my opinion, this makes our contemporary religious and social issues of women's ordination and same gender marriage hugely spiritual issues.  The fact that in our religious and political organizations we've developed a hierarchy of acceptance and status, denying equality in position and power and therefore rights and opportunities based upon gender and sexual orientation, means that we are also denying a quality of life with its proven and profound health benefits and longevity to some and not others.  We are ironically mirroring the baboon troops that live purely instinctual survival existences.

Isn't this in distinct contrast to the model of life Jesus described himself coming to bring to all?  "I have come that people will have life, the abundant life!"  (John 10:10)  Jesus was about lifting people up, increasing their quality of life, empowering and building up people in an atmosphere of equality and acceptance.  As opposed to the thief, he pointed out, whose sole purpose is to steal, to kill, to diminish and destroy life for others.

When we develop pyramidal hierarchies where there's an "upper" and a "lower" based upon gender or sexual orientation, and then we develop practices and policies that ensure that the value of that "status" is chronic (and then we top it off by using religious / spiritual language to justify our pyramidal laws and values), we are no better than thieves, stealing from them the abundant, free, and high quality life Jesus came to give them.

Research has also shown another tragic outcome of the state of chronic stress.  The stress response can get hardwired into our system especially when it happens at an early stage in life, making people more vulnerable to stress-related diseases and conditions.  Here's how it works:  "The physiology underlying this response has been elegantly revealed in the laboratory. When lab rats are stressed repeatedly, the amygdala — an almond-shaped nub in the center of the brain — enlarges dramatically. (This swelling comes at the expense of the hippocampus, which is crucial for learning and memory and shrinks under severe stress.) The main job of the amygdala is to perceive danger and help generate the stress response; it’s the brain area turned on by dark alleys and Hitchcock movies. Unfortunately, a swollen amygdala means that we’re more likely to notice potential threats in the first place, which means we spend more time in a state of anxiety. (This helps explain why a more active amygdala is closely correlated with atherosclerosis.) The end result is that we become more vulnerable to the very thing that’s killing us."

Meaningful and effective spirituality is about empowering ourselves and others to experience the highest quality life possible.  It's being faithful to the kind of life Jesus said he came to give freely to people - the abundant life - a life where people can become the very best they can be at every stage of life.  And genuine spirituality involves facing the structures, policies, practices, and beliefs that people put into place that are diminishing and destroying life for others - facing them and changing them.  Equality and justice are spiritual issues that impact the quality of life for all people!  To fail to address them is to diminish our own souls, our bodies, and our whole lives - for when even one person in this world is diminished we are all.  And when one person is lifted up, we all are lifted up, we all are enhanced.

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The Spirituality of Google's 'Undo Send' Button

Have you ever said or done something that the moment you let it out you wished you could take it back?  A lot of us live with a lot of regret along this line ... because you simply can't take back things you've said or done that might have been hurtful or disrespectful to others.  And our human tendency is to react quickly when our egos are threatened. So many of us do it regularly, in fact, that Google has added a feature to Gmail called "Undo Send."  Once you hit "Send" Gmail holds the email for five seconds, during which time you can stop the email from going out.

Wouldn't it be great if in the rest of our lives we had the option to simply hit an "Undo Send" button?  Unfortunately, once we've spoken the word or committed the act, it can't be retrieved.  Our words or actions hang out there creating consequences that can't be erased or undone.

But perhaps there's another 5 Second option that might prevent the words or behaviors in the first place.  The key, in real time, is to avoid the unproductive "Send" in the first place.  What would happen if we tried using the 5 second option before we hit Send?

Effective and healthy spirituality is about paying more attention to the way we are present in the world, learning how to live with greater awareness and compassion.  Which makes this 5 Second Option a potentially deeply spiritual practice.

Here's how it works.  Peter Bregman, the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, spoke to a friend of his (Joshua Gordon, a Neuroscientist and Assistant Professor at Columbia University) about this issue of why it's so natural for us to react negatively to a person or circumstance that threatens our egos.  And is there anything we can do about it?

Dr Gordon pointed out :  "There are direct pathways from sensory stimuli into the amygdala.  The amygdala is the emotional response center of the brain," he explained. "When something unsettling happens in the outside world, it immediately evokes an emotion.  But pure raw unadulterated emotion is not the source of your best decisions. So, how do you get beyond the emotion to rational thought?  It turns out while there's a war going on between you and someone else, there's another war going on, in your brain, between you and yourself. And that quiet little battle is your prefrontal cortex trying to subdue your amygdala.  Think of the amygdala as the little red person in your head with the pitchfork saying 'I say we clobber the guy!' and think of the prefrontal cortex as the little person dressed in white saying 'Uhm, maybe it's not such a great idea to yell back. I mean, he is your client after all.'   The key is cognitive control of the amygdyla by the prefrontal cortex."

So Bregman asked him how we could help our prefrontal cortex win the war. Dr. Gordon paused for a minute and then answered, "If you take a breath and delay your action, you give the prefrontal cortex time to control the emotional response.  Slowing down your breath has a direct calming affect on your brain."

Which begs the very practical question, how long do we have to stall?  How much time does our prefrontal cortex need to overcome our amygdala?

Dr. Gordon's response:  "Not long. A second or two."

Sounds like Google is onto something with its 5 second "Undo Send" option.  Apparently there's significant biological / physiological / psychological (and dare I add, spiritual) reality to actually being able to overcome our immediate urge to react negatively and aggressively toward someone or something that is threatening our ego and beginning to make us want to attack back.  Imagine in the moment choosing to press "pause," taking a few deep breaths for 5 seconds, and allowing the immediate emotion to drain away even just a bit, so that you can then at least begin the process of trying to respond positively and with no regret later.

Peter Bregman applied the strategy to his recent situation:  "When Bob yelled at me in the hall, I took a deep breath and gave my prefrontal cortex a little time to win. I knew there was a misunderstanding and I also knew my relationship with Bob was important. So instead of yelling back, I walked over to him. It only took a few seconds. But that gave us both enough time to become reasonable. Pause. Breathe. Then act."

I don't know about you, but for me this 5 Second Option isn't as easy as it sounds!  I find it extremely difficult in practice when I'm facing some deep emotional feelings being stirred up and my buttons are being pushed left and right.  Maybe that's why the great spiritual traditions of the world have developed rituals and disciplines they call spiritual practices.  These disciplines and behaviors that are designed to produce greater peace and calm and centeredness in the midst of life's turmoil take intense practice.  Change doesn't happen over night.  Transformation comes as the result of determined discipline to engage in new thinking and new behaviors.

Which also (and most importantly) means you and I need to be patient with ourselves and with others.  We need to hold ourselves, including all of our mixed up and all-over-the-board reactions to life, gently.  We must give ourselves compassion, too - to honor ourselves as we are with the goodness we have in us that we ultimately want to express and let out more often than we do.  Maybe this self-gentleness and self-kindness would empower us to more readily hit the Undo Send button.

What would it look like in your life for you to use the 5 Second Undo Send button?  How much practice do you need to make this strategy more of a natural response, your more automatic default mode?  Pause. Breathe. Act.  I'm going to keep practicing this one.  I need it.  And living with regret isn't worth it.

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