Elbow Bumps and Pandemonium - Blog#26 - 28 March 2020

Meet the Beatles - 2012

The elbow has never competed with the brain, the heart, the stomach, or our gonads for favorite body part awards. But it has gained ground on its more popular rivals recently, on the strength of its newfound survival value. The recent battle between humans and viruses for control of the planet has left handshakes, hugs, and kisses sidelined, replaced by elbow bumps and other greetings. We have seen foot tapping, peace signs, thumbs up, waving, quasi-shakes (moving your unextended hand up and down as if shaking hands), and other awkward gestures. “Namaste,” the traditional Hindu greeting, with the hands pressed together accompanied by a slight bow, has escaped our local yoga studios. “La bise” (the traditional barely kiss-each-cheek greeting) is plunging into the deep freeze, perhaps to be replaced by air-kissing, sometimes without the kiss even being finger launched! Sacre Bleu! What has our world come to? In a word, survival, our most basic motive, fueled by death anxiety, our most basic fear. The coronavirus has invaded, an invisible alien, spreading from Area 51 in Wuhan, taking over our fellow humans, infecting invisibly, so we don’t even know who is who. Are thee friend or foe? It is safer to regard everyone outside of our tiniest circle as a threat, though we debate the cost, like insurance underwriters.

Our needs compete. Survival, health, and safety are more primal, and typically trump our needs for attachment, affiliation, and affection, though we seek compromises. We have largely divorced ourselves from nature in recent centuries, as we congregate in our concrete jungles, but now social congregation itself is a risk. How can we tolerate social distancing? On the other hand, how do we keep our amygdalas on leashes, so we control our anxiety, instead of letting the internal demons take over? How do we prevent a pandemic from escalating into pandemonium? The word “pandemonium” was coined by John Milton in his classic poem, Paradise Lost. He combined a pair of roots, “pan” (meaning: all) and “demonium” (evil spirits), to form a word that now describes all hell breaking loose. How apt.

A certain amount of anxiety is inevitable and beneficial in response to a survival threat such as COVID-19. We all want to minimize negative emotions (e.g., anxiety, sadness, frustration, anger, guilt, shame), though these emotions have positive functions as well. They alert us, like physical pain if we get too close to a fire, that our emotional welfare is endangered. Anxiety signals a threat, whether real, imagined, or exaggerated. Sadness is a response to loss, frustration invites us to question our expectations, and anger is a sign of injustice (again, either real or manufactured). But negative emotions can also multiply out of control, as sadness yields to depression, anger metastasizes into violence, constant worrying escalates anxiety toward panic, and group panic spurs pandemonium. Thus, each negative emotion has a healthy and an unhealthy version. We can get ourselves in trouble at either extreme, by suppressing healthy negative emotions, or by manufacturing extreme ones. With COVID-19, we can ignore the threat, be crushed by it, or cope with it.

Anxiety motivates fight-or-flight maneuvers (social distancing = flight) intended to guarantee survival or at least reduce an emotional threat. Loneliness motivates affiliation, the urge to connect. Particularly nowadays, feelings of anxiety and loneliness clash, as do their underlying motives, safety/survival and attachment.

Our anxiety motivates corrective action, to limit our exposure and risk. On the other hand, uncontrolled worrying escalates anxiety. Thoughts influence feelings. Thus, expectations set up frustration, blaming begets anger, and worrying (a thought process) drives anxiety. The Serenity Prayer is helpful here. It makes no sense to worry over something we can’t control, and it makes perfect sense to attack problems that we can control. If only we can muster the wisdom to distinguish between what can and cannot be controlled, the choice forks toward taking charge or letting go. Changing any habit requires two steps: creating a Plan B (e.g., the Serenity Prayer), and catching the lousy habit early, before it gains momentum. Catch yourself worrying, and transfer your energy into planning and action to reduce your threats, via social distancing, safe social contact, brainstorming income alternatives, developing sanitation strategies, etc. But tolerate, get used to, and even embrace the uncertainty, taking pride in your resilience. There is a large portion of our dilemma that is unpredictable, and beyond our control as individuals. We do much better when we accept that which we cannot control. Mindfulness techniques invite us to accept some anxiety as a normal response to threats. Notice the anxiety, accept it without judgment, and watch it float downstream, at least for now. When we try to suppress inevitable negative emotions, we sometimes find them multiplying instead (“What you resist persists” is shorthand for the Carl Jung quote). But idle worrying and catastrophic thinking are worse than a waste of time. Catch them, and move your mind toward something you can control. Limit your news watching to perhaps a half hour a night, to stay informed without becoming a captive of the media. Remember that stressors have two components: the external threat, which we often don’t control, and our internal response to that threat, which we can. Focusing on the uncontrollable leaves us feeling helpless and anxious, while taking action toward controllable goals is empowering. Our choice of responses can either minimize or multiply the stress. We can train ourselves to become more conscious of our passive or active role in responding to stressors, and more deliberate in our choices. Otherwise, mindless preoccupation with the external stressor, such as nonstop worrying or news watching, leaves us feeling more helpless and anxious.

What else can you do? Breathe. Breathing is your most primal interaction with the world. When you are anxious, or entering potentially dangerous environments out of necessity, breathe deliberately, slowly, deeply, and mindfully before entering. Exercise. Aerobic exercise is particularly helpful in reducing stress. Walk, run, bike, check out online yoga, nurture your body in ways that minimize your viral exposure. Upgrade your nutrition, and protect your sleep. Spend time outside; get some sun, safely. If you smoke, now might be a good time to quit, so your lungs are in better shape to fight the virus, though you will need other, healthier ways to soothe yourself. Take the time to review your lifestyle for self-nurturing upgrades. Start up that hobby you’ve been wanting to get off the ground.

Death anxiety is our most primal source of anxiety. William James, the prominent American psychologist, described death (in The Varieties of Religious Experience,1902) as “the worm at the core” of the human dilemma. Our civilization provides improved protection from predators, but we cannot eliminate the certainty of death itself. Our evolution has provided us with increasingly complex brains, which allow us to envision the future, including a future without us in it! Presto: existential death anxiety, our fear of eventual death. No one gets out of here alive. Death is the ultimate disconnection. As the death toll of COVID-19 mounts, our death anxiety rises, like a caboose on the virus train. We disconnect socially in order to reduce the risk of ultimate disconnection (death), but we end up lonely, seeking more attachment.

Mental health requires connectedness, both internally (it helps to like oneself and one’s body) and externally. Externally, we can connect socially, romantically, environmentally with nature, and spiritually (either with religious spirits or a more secular group consciousness, merging with life, love, humanity, etc.). Connect with nature. Tend to gardening in your back yard, nurturing the life force of plants, while creating a pleasant environment where you and your family can safely commune. Lay on your back and check out the night skies. Find Orion, and its bright blue binary star, Rigel, as well as its red giant, Betelgeuse (which would engulf Mars and perhaps Jupiter if it traded places with our Sun). Feel your place in the immensity of the universe. If you are religiously inclined, feel God’s presence, in everything. Connect to your loved ones, via random acts of love and kindness, and phone calls to whomever you hold dear. Engage your family in games and creative interactions. Get to know your lover better. Pick a year of his or her life, in childhood or the teens, and ask them to describe their experience, good and bad. Open yourself to emotional intimacy, to counteract disconnection. And practice gratitude. As we face threats and losses, count your blessings, for the gift of life, the presence of love and friendship. We tend to take things for granted until we are close to losing them, but the threat of death can invigorate our appreciation of life, and spur our loving behaviors. Resist divisive rhetoric that invites you to view the other as the enemy, even as you protect yourself. Review your self-chosen life purposes, and the sources of meaning in your life. What can you do to pursue them with more gusto? As we temporarily disconnect from friends and perhaps work, we can find creative ways to restore our attachments in other ways. We are all in this together. Thank you for listening, and for cooperating in our species-wide response to the viral threat.

To read more about anxiety management, check out Ed Chandler’s Psychomechanics – Tools for Self-Regulation of Emotions, available on Amazon. Or, if you are interested in secular approaches to spirituality, the chapters of Psychomechanics are also included as the third/final section of Beyond Atheism – A Secular Approach to Spiritual, Moral, and Psychological Practices, also available on Amazon. Or explore this website (edchandlerandbeyond.com) to see Ed’s photography and stained glass, in addition to his writings on psychology, spirituality, anthropocentrism and prejudice.