This is how I’ve been calming my political stress.
In my last post, I talked about calming our emotions by “befriending uncertainty.” I’d like to give more specifics on how I’ve been doing this. Maybe this post will help prepare you for a tough Thanksgiving conversation—although this year, Zoom is bringing new possibilities for how things might go! 🙂
My focus here is political stress, but this technique helps me with other stress as well. It’s a series of steps that often calm me, so I can more clearly figure out what action to take. Each of the steps has a word I’ve highlighted below: Notice, Name, Explore, Humble.
1. Notice and pause.
When we’re feeling triggered, sometimes it’s obvious—we might feel physically shaken, with a pounding heartbeat and scattered thoughts. But other times, imbalance is far subtler, more like a mild preoccupation. Someone said something on Facebook and we want to respond. We feel more or less calm, but it’s hard to concentrate on anything else.
Whether the imbalance is explosive or subtle, this step is about noticing when it’s taking us over.
To me, the clearest sign of imbalance is often urgency. There’s a desire to act and to “fix,” right now. Most conversations can wait, especially on social media, and when I notice myself wanting to act right now, it usually means I’m not fully calm. That means I should probably wait before responding.
This noticing step is the hardest one, at least for me. When we’re triggered, we’re not fully in control. The triggered part of us is adept at convincing us we need to act now. But through practice and paying attention, this step becomes easier, and we can convince ourselves to pause before acting.
When I described this step to my husband, he likened it to something he learned at a ten-day meditation retreat. Often, the most challenging meditation moments were when itches arose, he said—in a roomful of silent, motionless people, the urge to scratch was overwhelming!
But instructors taught the meditators to resist the urge, instead using the itch as an exercise in focus. Exploring itches became one of the highlights of meditation. They were opportunities for growth, and the trick was catching yourself before scratching and forcing yourself to pause instead.
Noticing imbalance is like that. Don’t scratch the itch! Just think, I’m not calm right now. It’s time to pause.
2. Name and honor your feelings.
Again, sometimes naming seems straightforward: “I’m angry!!!” But usually, there are other emotions mixed in with the strongest one.
Anger is our inner protector, our warrior. It tries to shield us from more vulnerable emotions—fear, worry, anxiety, embarrassment, shame, sadness, grief, trauma. Pausing to explore and name such feelings, I often discover that I have several of them jumbled together.
Each time I discover a feeling, I spend some time with it. I allow myself to embody it, concentrating on where I physically feel it in my body. Is it a burning in my chest? A tightness in my belly? A tension in my face? I breathe with it and let the sensations take me over for a few moments so that I fully feel the emotion.
Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says we often banish unpleasant feelings to an inner “basement,” locking them away so as not to feel them. This backfires—when they do eventually come up, unwelcome feelings can take us over.
Instead, Nhat Hanh teaches us to welcome these feelings “up from the basement,” sitting with them and exploring them like old friends. “Hello, anger. Here is a cup of tea. What do you have to teach me?” Paradoxically, if we let our unpleasant feelings know they’re welcome, their power over us diminishes. They’ll still arise, but they won’t overwhelm us, because we’ve befriended them.
I sometimes try to honor my feelings with actual words in my mind. I honor you, anger. I honor you, grief. I honor you, fear. Welcome.
3. Explore your feelings.
I also try to explore precisely why I’m feeling this way. What was it the other person said that made me angry, embarrassed, and/or afraid? Why did I react so strongly? Did my background play a role?
A few weeks ago, I was driving to an appointment when I heard Ari Shapiro interview a politician on the radio. The interview left me angry, but it took me the rest of the drive to figure out why.
I finally realized that the politician had been disrespectful to Ari, but in such subtle ways that I’d missed them at first. He’d kept his tone congenial, but when Ari had asked direct questions, he often hadn’t answered them. Instead he’d used the interview as a political platform, repeating talking points rather than being thoughtful. He’d also often been misleading, with lots of straw-man portrayals of his opponents. And finally, he had belittled Ari—at one point, when Ari had asked a serious question, the politician chuckled as if Ari had been silly to ask such a thing.
Then I realized I was really angry not on Ari’s behalf, but on my own. Ari is a professional and is used to political posturing, but I had wanted candid, serious answers to the questions. They’d been my questions too. The politician had disrespected me. It took me a long time to realize this, because his tone and words had sounded respectful—except when put into context.
And beneath my anger were feelings of anxiety and despair.
Taking time to parse out why we’re feeling what we’re feeling is instructive and empowering. It often does take time—hours or days. But pausing at this step to journal, think it out, or talk with a trusted friend is well worth it.
4. Humble yourself and embrace uncertainty.
This final step is the new one for me, and the one that’s been making the biggest difference lately. It’s the mantra I mentioned last week: the recognition that I don’t yet know what to do, and that that’s okay.
I really do this step throughout the process—at the beginning and alongside each other step. As I’m naming, honoring, and exploring my feelings, I often picture them all together in my mind’s eye. Here is the messy jumble of my feelings, I think. I don’t know what to do about them yet, and that’s okay.
This mantra helps my triggered, “fixing” mind to fully let go. That part of me is learning that before I can truly fix anything, I first need to let go of fixing and embrace not even knowing how to fix things. Otherwise, if I act too soon, I might speak from anger or fear and make the situation worse.
In this step, I think thoughts like this:
I don’t have a resolution yet.
I don’t know what to do.
I don’t have the answers right now.
…And that’s okay.
For me, it’s the humility of this step that brings calm. I’m opening myself to possibility, uncertainty, and loss. I’m choosing to simply exist for the time being with my jumble of emotions. I’m accepting the unknown.
Abrahamic religions have wonderful teachings about humility, and I think of them as I do this practice. The word Islam means surrender. St. Augustine, fifth-century Christian philosopher, says the most important aspect of devotion to God is the abandonment of pride, because it’s our pride that draws us away from God. For non-believers, this wisdom can translate to the way pride pulls us from our open hearts and deepest selves.
As I embrace the unknown, I feel myself humbly surrendering my prideful desire to know, fix, or win. Letting go of these is a great relief.
Taking Action from a Place of Calm
This path doesn’t always get me where I need to be. Sometimes my imbalance is too powerful and I have to start over, or return to Step Three (Explore) and do more journaling. And I’m not always disciplined enough to follow the path, so that I act from my “fixing,” unbalanced mindset instead.
But when I can follow it—Noticing, Naming, Exploring, Humbling—I arrive at last in a place of “not knowing,” and it’s powerful and transformational.
And magically, paradoxically, it’s from this place that the right action becomes clearest. After taking the time to return to humility, I can at last speak and act from a place of clarity, calm, and compassion.
