Staying Calm Is a Civic Duty
Panic and stress are contagious. So is peacefulness.
There will be no shortage of ways to remember 2020, but from our bodies’ collective point of view, the most vivid memory may be one of panic. The sirens, the hand sanitizer, the darting across the sidewalk when someone moved too close. The virus wasn’t the only thing that was contagious this year — our extended state of high anxiety was, too.
But now that the Electoral College has voted, and the vaccine is being administered in the U.S. and U.K., the tenor of life feels slightly different. Calmer.
It would be easy to write this off as mystic nonsense (or at least confirmation bias), but it’s deeper than that. Panic and stress and fear are contagious, but so too are calm and rest and release. A deeper understanding of this dynamic — which has to do with our autonomic nervous systems, and how we evolved to live with and respond to one another in groups — can perhaps help us live more grounded and generous lives. And if some sense of “normal” descends upon life during the next four years, it can also help us find more compassion and support for those who always live life in a hyper-vigilant state.
Calmness is collective
The human nervous system’s tendency to co-regulate, or match what other humans close to it are feeling, has been well studied in one-on-one settings, such as in a caretaker’s ability to co-regulate with a child having a tantrum. But co-regulation can also be a larger group dynamic. Perhaps one of the best places to feel that play out for yourself is a yoga studio.
Naomi Annand is a yoga studio owner and the author of Yoga: A Manual for Life. (Disclosure: she is also the yoga teacher who first animated these concepts for me in real life.) She has a memorable way to describe the feeling in a room when a group of people have managed to down-regulate their nervous systems in a collective effort: yoga soup.
“There’s a certain amount of getting into a flow or a rhythm, and I feel often a bit like a music conductor,” Annand says of teaching a class. “It’s almost like the atmosphere in the space changes — it gets more dense and turns into a yoga soup. After some movement and breath… the stuff is coming out, it’s suddenly merging into each other and so everyone is realizing we’re all just part of this thing, this collective. And you might think, ‘That thing that I’ve been fixating on or feeling very stressed about is actually not my own. It’s shared. It’s everybody’s.’”
A less poetic description of this dynamic can be found in polyvagal theory, developed by neuroscientist Stephen Porges. Polyvagal theory posits that there is a part of our nervous system that is primed for social engagement. It helps us reach a calmer, more regulated state by detecting and responding to all kinds of non-verbal and social cues of connection, such as a smile on someone’s face. A yoga class serves a kind of laboratory where, through practices like mindful slow movement, deepening the breath, and chanting, practitioners can connect not only to their own body’s ability to down-regulate from a stress response, but also benefit from that of others in the room. (Interestingly, Annand says she’s seen this play out in online classes during the pandemic, too.)
The wellness industrial complex has trained us to think of the work of being calm and centered as a solo, private endeavor to help us survive cutthroat capitalism. But an understanding of the collective nature of our nervous system can tell us otherwise. And it doesn’t just have to happen in a yoga studio. Building this “resilience and intimacy,” as Annand calls it, within ourselves is something we can do in many other practices throughout our lives, from therapy and meditation to prioritizing rest over productivity. We can then use the energy we gain from that practice for more civic-minded pursuits, like organizing in our communities and providing places of respite for people who don’t have it, rather than shutting ourselves into little caves in order to deal with all the stress.
Calmness is a duty
In the context of 2020, remaining calm is a kind of call to action. When you create a feeling of connection and stability in yourself, you can use that base to act in support of people who are more vulnerable, or those who are forced by our unequal world to live life in a hypervigilant state. Even if the external conditions of next year do allow some of us to calm down a bit, the underlying problems we face — a climate emergency, racial injustice, the inaccessibility of adequate food and housing, the proliferation of conspiracy theories — will still be there.
Staying calm is not about bypassing the truly horrific things happening in the news or the real injustice that many people face. On the contrary, cultivating a calmness and intimacy in oneself is what gives us the fortitude to not look away. It helps us encourage others to do the same. It’s when we are calm that we can best go beyond our own well-being and bolster our ability to engage with the world in a more justice-minded way.
