Fight and Flight
Back to the future, part 4 - Afterthoughts - about the mind
In my earlier blogs on "Back to the future", I talked a little about mind. Theories about the mind abound. I see the mind as a distinct human capability that facilitates our rational (or irrational) understanding of the world. It's our biological survival mechanism, no more than that. The mind is simply a tool, one tool through which we seek to understand the world. It works by detecting similarities and differences in the world around us, of associations and dissociations too. It's like a pattern recognition engine and as such it operates at a relatively slow speed. I see our world of feelings, emotions and intuition existing separately and outside this concept of mind. Intuition, our sense of knowing without any rational basis for understanding, is something that operates at far higher speed than our minds and is capable of even changing our rational perception of time.
The mind functions with stress. There is healthy and unhealthy stress. Certain levels of stress are necessary for our survival. Without stress we would do nothing and accomplish nothing. We need stress to create and to work, we even need levels of stress to cause us to get out of bed in the morning! Stress is the first resort of the mind beyond its rational powers of pattern recognition. It can be healthy.
We live in a world now where there are billions of decisions being taken each second, where stress levels are increasing to almost universally intolerable levels. The American Medical Association wrote that stress is a major determinant in 80% of our illnesses. Note that stress is not a cause although it can be. But 80% of our illnesses are brought about by stress, stress running at high and unendurable levels. That is completely mind-boggling.
It's no surprise then that the people who survive best in our corporate cultures are those who can cope with higher levels of stress than others. The people who inhabit the mahogany or glass corridors of power within our corporate worlds are those who can endure potentially unhealthy levels of stress.
They also tend to be those who, in my view, have the most highly developed and well-articulated powers of intuition. Intuition is of great benefit in overcoming stress. Intuition coupled with an actualised and aware emotional self produces the charisma we look up to in our leaders. It is their sense of awareness, self-esteem and confidence that gives them the ability to lead and attracts our admiration of them. My notion of a psychologically well-developed and stable individual is one where they have an integrated and actualised mind (intellect), intuition and advanced state of emotional development, somewhere near self-actualisation.
I'll come back to that point but want to stay on track in developing this idea of mind. Beyond stress, our human defence mechanisms start clocking in. The first of these is our tendency towards "fight or flight". I learned recently from a friend that there are companies now that teach methods of understanding and working with our flight or fight responses to situations. I have experience of other organisations that use biofeedback mechanisms to help control the panic that this state evokes.
I'll share one very evocative example of what this fight and flight stuff feels like. A long while ago, I gave an hour-long talk on the future of computer architectures. 130 people had paid £200 each to hear me speak.
The first nasty little demon that went to work on me, firing up my stress levels to fight and flight proportions was that wicked little demon that I call my inner critic, sometimes it's my conscience but generally this small monster is less helpful than that. I see conscience as part of my emotional affective make-up but the "inner critic" is part of my mind and that's an important distinction.
So off it went, this demon talked to me and said things like, "So these guys have paid £26,000 to hear you talk for an hour? What do you think of that? Do you feel hearing you is worth that sort of money? Who are you trying to kid? No way is what you have to say in an hour is worth £26,000 ($52,000). So this had better be bloody good! Are you sure you are up to this?" It went on and on, this little monster fired up my anxiety to almost terror levels. I wanted to run away!
Fortunately I had been trained in giving presentations and I knew what I had to do. To make matters worse, my pre-booked taxi to take me to the conference venue failed to show. After remonstrating with the taxi firm, one did finally arrive, but got stuck in traffic close to the venue. I needed to be on time, not to let my audience down and ended up running the last few hundred yards to the venue. I drank water and got myself in good order for the presentation. But I was still in fight or flight mode.
I walked onto the podium and the conference organiser put on one of those radio microphones, the sort that hangs round your neck. It fell to my left and suddenly what I could hear being amplified around the room was my heart beat running at about 140 beats per minute or so. Boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom through every loud speaker in the hall. I could hear it and so could my audience. I grabbed the mike and shoved it over to the right side of my chest. This rapid heartbeat is typical of fight and flight. It was beating so fast and my mind had sent messages to my body to pump out the adrenalin needed to run and run very fast.
But I knew this one very well. I had learned the first few minutes of that presentation off by heart. No notes were needed; I could have given the presentation in complete darkness. I started speaking, going for the high-impact opening of the sort that grabs the audience's attention. I knew after two minutes that I had them hooked, I could see them listening and being engaged by what I had to say. It was at this point that I felt my heartbeat slow, my body relax, my intuition take over and that I switched over to working in a way that I instinctively knew would carry me through this performance. My talk was very well-received. So it is possible to get through fight and flight but only by reversion to our intuitive, emotional or feeling selves.
Going one step further down this process, one on from fight or flight, is the reaction to walk away. This really is a biological response. We have all seen it work in cats and dogs, for example. When dogs and cats sense a bad smell or someone they don't like, what they do is get up and walk away. It is often the very best way of dealing with danger, just getting up and walking away from it and moving into some safer space.
Finally, the last resort of the mind is the unconscious. The unconscious is the place where we often stuff fears, anxieties, anger and feelings about ourselves and others that are too difficult for us to cope with. I wrote about this in my blog "Back to the Future part 2". There I wrote, "The unconscious is the last resort of the mind. I don't trust mind. I recognise it serves my sense of survival well but that is as far as it goes. The unconscious is that place where we push down all the muck, slime, hurt, pain, anger, anxieties and all those other things that are too difficult for us to face and to look at about ourselves. It's the stuff that we repress in our unconscious that frequently comes back to bite us. We project these "shadow" parts of ourselves onto others often to justify doing hurt and violence towards them. It's these dark parts of our unconscious that we turn outwards to do hate, violence, racism and prejudice, or else we turn it inwards to do addictions, depression, suicides and other crippling behaviour."
I'll stick with this view. The unconscious is a very powerful defence mechanism. The trouble with it is that it leaks!
It leaks through projections, its outward turning manifestation or those crippling behaviours I talk about here. It also leaks into our conscious mind through dreams and comes out in our behaviour towards others, often our very worst behaviour.
We all have unconscious selves, none of us have mastered the art of remaining fully conscious, although I am trying in all that I do every day to become more and more conscious but I do not believe that I will ever reach a state of enlightened full and actualised consciousness. I have lots of fears and anxieties too that I know exist in things that I have pushed down into my unconscious mind. Frequently, I try to call these fears and anxieties to account, to try and understand them. I know that simply by taking a good long look at them often, by holding them in my hand, allowing myself to experience what I need to feel I can work to understand what is happening in my unconscious mind, by drawing out and admitting what I feared into the open.
It's not always easy to do this. I know that in facing some of my anger and fears that I have had to allow myself to feel rage, deep sadness and to weep. It's hard to do that often especially in a world that encourages us to disregard aspects of our feeling selves or that encourages us to believe that sadness and weeping is a form of weakness, and that anger is basically wrong. But it is what we need to allow to happen in ourselves in order to recover our wholeness, our ability to function as properly feeling and balanced human beings.
Finally, I'll repeat some words from Ian Lungold that have been haunting me lately. He said, "Remember your mind is not your friend!" He talks about the hostility of the unconscious parts of our selves of the sort that would have us kill others or ourselves. He is so right. So remember your intellect is not your friend! If you take nothing else from this, take this message home.
The mind functions with stress. There is healthy and unhealthy stress. Certain levels of stress are necessary for our survival. Without stress we would do nothing and accomplish nothing. We need stress to create and to work, we even need levels of stress to cause us to get out of bed in the morning! Stress is the first resort of the mind beyond its rational powers of pattern recognition. It can be healthy.
We live in a world now where there are billions of decisions being taken each second, where stress levels are increasing to almost universally intolerable levels. The American Medical Association wrote that stress is a major determinant in 80% of our illnesses. Note that stress is not a cause although it can be. But 80% of our illnesses are brought about by stress, stress running at high and unendurable levels. That is completely mind-boggling.
It's no surprise then that the people who survive best in our corporate cultures are those who can cope with higher levels of stress than others. The people who inhabit the mahogany or glass corridors of power within our corporate worlds are those who can endure potentially unhealthy levels of stress.
They also tend to be those who, in my view, have the most highly developed and well-articulated powers of intuition. Intuition is of great benefit in overcoming stress. Intuition coupled with an actualised and aware emotional self produces the charisma we look up to in our leaders. It is their sense of awareness, self-esteem and confidence that gives them the ability to lead and attracts our admiration of them. My notion of a psychologically well-developed and stable individual is one where they have an integrated and actualised mind (intellect), intuition and advanced state of emotional development, somewhere near self-actualisation.
I'll come back to that point but want to stay on track in developing this idea of mind. Beyond stress, our human defence mechanisms start clocking in. The first of these is our tendency towards "fight or flight". I learned recently from a friend that there are companies now that teach methods of understanding and working with our flight or fight responses to situations. I have experience of other organisations that use biofeedback mechanisms to help control the panic that this state evokes.
I'll share one very evocative example of what this fight and flight stuff feels like. A long while ago, I gave an hour-long talk on the future of computer architectures. 130 people had paid £200 each to hear me speak.
The first nasty little demon that went to work on me, firing up my stress levels to fight and flight proportions was that wicked little demon that I call my inner critic, sometimes it's my conscience but generally this small monster is less helpful than that. I see conscience as part of my emotional affective make-up but the "inner critic" is part of my mind and that's an important distinction.
So off it went, this demon talked to me and said things like, "So these guys have paid £26,000 to hear you talk for an hour? What do you think of that? Do you feel hearing you is worth that sort of money? Who are you trying to kid? No way is what you have to say in an hour is worth £26,000 ($52,000). So this had better be bloody good! Are you sure you are up to this?" It went on and on, this little monster fired up my anxiety to almost terror levels. I wanted to run away!
Fortunately I had been trained in giving presentations and I knew what I had to do. To make matters worse, my pre-booked taxi to take me to the conference venue failed to show. After remonstrating with the taxi firm, one did finally arrive, but got stuck in traffic close to the venue. I needed to be on time, not to let my audience down and ended up running the last few hundred yards to the venue. I drank water and got myself in good order for the presentation. But I was still in fight or flight mode.
I walked onto the podium and the conference organiser put on one of those radio microphones, the sort that hangs round your neck. It fell to my left and suddenly what I could hear being amplified around the room was my heart beat running at about 140 beats per minute or so. Boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom through every loud speaker in the hall. I could hear it and so could my audience. I grabbed the mike and shoved it over to the right side of my chest. This rapid heartbeat is typical of fight and flight. It was beating so fast and my mind had sent messages to my body to pump out the adrenalin needed to run and run very fast.
But I knew this one very well. I had learned the first few minutes of that presentation off by heart. No notes were needed; I could have given the presentation in complete darkness. I started speaking, going for the high-impact opening of the sort that grabs the audience's attention. I knew after two minutes that I had them hooked, I could see them listening and being engaged by what I had to say. It was at this point that I felt my heartbeat slow, my body relax, my intuition take over and that I switched over to working in a way that I instinctively knew would carry me through this performance. My talk was very well-received. So it is possible to get through fight and flight but only by reversion to our intuitive, emotional or feeling selves.
Going one step further down this process, one on from fight or flight, is the reaction to walk away. This really is a biological response. We have all seen it work in cats and dogs, for example. When dogs and cats sense a bad smell or someone they don't like, what they do is get up and walk away. It is often the very best way of dealing with danger, just getting up and walking away from it and moving into some safer space.
Finally, the last resort of the mind is the unconscious. The unconscious is the place where we often stuff fears, anxieties, anger and feelings about ourselves and others that are too difficult for us to cope with. I wrote about this in my blog "Back to the Future part 2". There I wrote, "The unconscious is the last resort of the mind. I don't trust mind. I recognise it serves my sense of survival well but that is as far as it goes. The unconscious is that place where we push down all the muck, slime, hurt, pain, anger, anxieties and all those other things that are too difficult for us to face and to look at about ourselves. It's the stuff that we repress in our unconscious that frequently comes back to bite us. We project these "shadow" parts of ourselves onto others often to justify doing hurt and violence towards them. It's these dark parts of our unconscious that we turn outwards to do hate, violence, racism and prejudice, or else we turn it inwards to do addictions, depression, suicides and other crippling behaviour."
I'll stick with this view. The unconscious is a very powerful defence mechanism. The trouble with it is that it leaks!
It leaks through projections, its outward turning manifestation or those crippling behaviours I talk about here. It also leaks into our conscious mind through dreams and comes out in our behaviour towards others, often our very worst behaviour.
We all have unconscious selves, none of us have mastered the art of remaining fully conscious, although I am trying in all that I do every day to become more and more conscious but I do not believe that I will ever reach a state of enlightened full and actualised consciousness. I have lots of fears and anxieties too that I know exist in things that I have pushed down into my unconscious mind. Frequently, I try to call these fears and anxieties to account, to try and understand them. I know that simply by taking a good long look at them often, by holding them in my hand, allowing myself to experience what I need to feel I can work to understand what is happening in my unconscious mind, by drawing out and admitting what I feared into the open.
It's not always easy to do this. I know that in facing some of my anger and fears that I have had to allow myself to feel rage, deep sadness and to weep. It's hard to do that often especially in a world that encourages us to disregard aspects of our feeling selves or that encourages us to believe that sadness and weeping is a form of weakness, and that anger is basically wrong. But it is what we need to allow to happen in ourselves in order to recover our wholeness, our ability to function as properly feeling and balanced human beings.
Finally, I'll repeat some words from Ian Lungold that have been haunting me lately. He said, "Remember your mind is not your friend!" He talks about the hostility of the unconscious parts of our selves of the sort that would have us kill others or ourselves. He is so right. So remember your intellect is not your friend! If you take nothing else from this, take this message home.
|