Moving and Changing

“Nothing happens until something moves.”

Albert Einstein

Some stress researchers emphasize the concept of allostasis instead of homeostasis. Where homeostasis means “remaining stable by staying the same,” allostasis means “remaining stable by being able to change.” They emphasize adaptability as the crucial element in stress management.

Adapting, changing…. they’re both forms of movement. Not necessarily physical movement, but it’s a shifting, a moving from one viewpoint to another, one mindset to another, one strategy to another.

As a beginning teacher, I often fell prey to the idea that if my students didn’t understand something I had taught them, the solution was to simply to teach it again… the same way… but maybe just a little louder this time.

That’s what we often do when we encounter difficult or stressful situations — we do what we always did. We repeat the SAME ACTIONS that clearly aren’t helping… but we just do them more forcefully, and with greater efforting. If we just TRY HARDER… we’ll figure it out.

And sometimes we do.

But many times we don’t. We just exhaust ourselves with all the efforting… and then feel even worse because we haven’t “solved” the crisis.

What if we didn’t try harder? What if we tried differently? more gently? with greater awareness and attention? What if we varied our approach, and asked, What happens next?

Metaphorical Movement Practice #1: Variation

The next time you’re feeling stuck and stressed, take a moment to pause and breathe. Use the breath — or whatever practices you have found most helpful — to slow down for a moment so new options can open up.

Ask yourself:

• Is there a different way to do this?
• What haven’t I tried?
• How does so-and-so do this?
• What if I …. turned it upside down? took a break for 10 minutes? turned it off and on again? pretended I was so-and-so completing this task? imagined how a five-year-old would do this? pretended it was the first time I ever tried to do this? asked for help? did 10 jumping jacks and tried again? ….

You get the picture. EXPERIMENT.

Think of a baby learning to roll over, or walk. She plays with her body in all sorts of ways, moves her neck in one way, then another, tries to flip left, then right …. She doesn’t try to roll over a few times and then say, “DAMMIT! I’m never going to get this!!!”

She keeps trying — not the same thing over and over again, but different variations of movements, until the combination of practice and muscle development and movement allow a successful completion of the action.

Like mindfulness, variation can be a practice. It’s hard to innovate in one area of our life (especially a challenging one, like stress), without practicing smaller variations elsewhere. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• For a week, do a simple daily activity differently. Brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand, take a different route to work, order a different coffee, sit in a different chair in your meeting, clean your house in a different order. GO WILD! 😄 Just play with introducing small little variations into your day.
• Expose yourself to different ideas and opinions. Read the whole editorial even if you disagree as soon as you see the headline. Try to understand the other side of an issue.
• Read a book on a subject that you are interested in, but don’t know a lot about. Perhaps even read a book that you know might challenge your ideas.

Metaphorical Movement Practice #2: The Goldilocks Zone

I want to share a famous story from the life of Siddhartha (before he became the Buddha): One day, as Siddhartha was still living as wandering ascetic, starving himself and depriving the body of its needs in a very “effort-full” search for enlightenment, he came upon a lute teacher and his student. Siddhartha heard the teacher tell his student, “If you leave the string too slack, the instrument won’t play. Tie it too tightly, and the string will snap.”

According to legend, this is where Siddhartha discovered the famous “Middle Path” of Buddhism. Enlightenment comes not through a hedonistic search for pleasure, on the one extreme, nor through a rigid program of starvation and deprivation on the other. It’s about finding the “Goldilocks zone,” the space between relaxation and effort, between laxity and rigidity.

As we consider the stress in our lives, it’s about trying to find that Goldilocks zone between FREEZE and FIGHT, between not being able to play our instrument at all, and snapping under all the pressure.

Though this sounds challenging (more on how to do this in a minute), I also find it very empowering. It reminds me that managing and reducing stress is not (necessarily) about being calm. We NEED a certain amount of nervous system activation just to get through our day; the inability to even muster this energy is a hallmark of depression.

So we don’t need to feel all this pressure to be “relaxed” all the time! Feeling “at ease” is not the same as “getting a massage.” As I said in the first lesson for this week, we can learn to BE WITH the stress and STILL BE OKAY. Not too loose, not too tight, just enough movement to play the instrument with the right amount of effort.

I love these words from Carl Honore:

“The slow movement is not about doing everything at a snail’s pace. Nor is it a Luddite attempt to drag the whole planet back to some pre-industrial utopia. The movement is made up of people who want to live better in a fast-paced, modern world. The slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word: balance. Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and be slow when slowness is called for. Seek to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto – the right speed.”

• For one thing, try single-tasking. Multitasking is for computers, and you are not a computer! Though this may seem less efficient, trust me, in the long-term you will feel less rushed. When you can focus your attention on one thing, you make fewer mistakes and sustain your concentration.
• Experiment with slowness (see the previous lesson). What does it feel like to do something with only 80% effort vs. 100% effort? (In this case, effort refers to physical exertion, not mental concentration/awareness).
• For a few days, account for how you spend your time. You may not even realize how quickly you do some things that need more attention, or how slowly you do something that could eat up far less of your time. You may find lots of “wasted” time, too…. time that felt busy but was really occupied with TV, Facebook, etc.
• Escape time altogether. How? Through meditation. Your regular practice of spending a few moments focused on the breath, with nowhere else to go or do, removes you from time.