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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.
