Can Relaxation Help Save The World?

Preface

This isn’t meant to be clickbait: Technically Spiritual is very well aware that, for example, the climate crisis has dire action items beyond “relaxing,” the pandemic was a sign for healthcare reform (revolution?) beyond “relaxing,” etc.

However, stick with us for just a minute and notice how many of our world’s problems are, when you really get down to it, not root causes, but symptoms.

Let’s look at how we, as humans, both the masses and those in positions of power, get “cut off” from empathy:

• What makes us make rash decisions?

• What takes up so much space that we don’t have space for even the most important issues?

• What makes us act out of anger or fear instead of love and awareness, and what can we realistically do about it?

Can Relaxation Help Save the World?

In our current age, we are constantly berated not just with content, but with despair-inducing content. This is not without purpose – there is of course immeasurable benefit to circulating information about real, scary issues we’re facing as the human race. But there’s also, now, the largely immeasurable negative impact of that constant exposure to harsh truths.

There is so much information (and misinformation without a realistic way to research it all) that, as individuals, each one of us is facing despair and burnout on a regular basis. Our minds are so inundated with fearful subjects that we are fast-tracked to immobility instead of action.

Here’s How It Works

Media companies (like Youtube) and news and social media profit off of more extreme content because distressing subjects yield better engagement. These corporations have no concern for our nervous systems. While we mean to go to these sources for comfort, they’re not designed to comfort us– they’re designed to essentially evoke our fight-or-flight response. 

When in this state, we are fixated on what’s in front of us, hence why we can’t stop watching the news and can’t stop scrolling. Our sight quite literally narrows, making it more difficult to see a broader perspective of the world (catch up on our past content about this - how technology is not ethically neutral - here and here). Thus, what happens next is that we are more reactive, more impulsive, and more likely to either spiral or go numb. We lose track of our intentions. Our fight-or-flight engagement is their profit, and they have no incentive or regulations not to take advantage of that. Thus, when we look back over the last few decades, both those in power and the masses have been making decisions from that place of fear and dysregulation. 

Those of us who get caught up in the constant news cycle or social media spiral, which we’d dare to say is the majority of people, tend to move through our days in a constant state of fight or flight. This leads us to being out of touch from our ability to deeply and truly connect with one another or to make good, forward-thinking decisions.

The constant urgency and promised demise of so many issues has left us no space at the end of the day. No space to just be instead of do. No space to connect, person to person. No space to hold compassion for those unlike us. No time to do anything but work, keep working, and then use our resources to buy more conveniences, because we’re so busy working all the time.

(Going to interject here that this is not a commentary on capitalism, the 1%, or the very real other factors at play aside from information overload… But rather a deep look at one of the roots we may be able to have an impact on, you and me, right now!)

At the very root, at the deepest human core we can drill down to, what we find is that we’ve lost time, space, capacity for empathy. We’ve either used it all up every morning when we scroll Instagram for 15 minutes, or we were cut off from it long ago in the midst of this long-term burnout.

It’s no wonder it’s impossible to see posts like “Be more empathetic! Care about your neighbors!” OR “Take time for yourself! Log off! It’s okay! Self care!” on Instagram without backlash in both directions.

It’s because we do in fact need to do both of those things, but posts on Instagram, doomscrolling, and taking in more content will not help.

So What Will Help?

Going inward. Connecting with self. STOPPING the content ingestion. Turning off your computer, right now, (yeah - stop reading the very thing we’re writing) and instead being, in silence, with your self.

Cultivating presence with yourself is the first step in being able to cultivate presence, and therefore meaningful interactions and change, with others.

We all need to relax.

Seriously. Relaxing doesn’t mean stopping your activism. It doesn’t mean that activism and information-sharing isn’t as important as ever - we’re not saying that.

We’re saying: the world and its people would be a lot better off if everyone was 10% better at pausing, taking a deep breath, and going inward (developing a compassionate relationship with your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations) before making those outward decisions, actions, and communications.

There’s a great deal of wisdom and peace we can draw from and productively use when we tune into our inner world and cultivate a deeper awareness through practices like meditation. There’s a great deal of benefit we can have on the outer world by tuning into our inner world.

No one questions how regulations were placed on television decades ago in order to protect viewers, or warnings on cigarette boxes. But the fight to regulate tech companies, like social media and “news” giants who profit off our despair and data, is harder than ever.

So until we can right all the wrongs in this space, until we can adjust our environment to be safer to our nervous system, and while we’re fighting for a safer digital landscape, we must tap into our inner resources and rely on ourselves: Our personal power to tune out what does not serve our causes, and to tune into what keeps us human.

Many things can save the world. Being empathetic is at the root of all of them. And our ability to truly relax is crucial to cultivating empathy.

As humans we need to create more space for being instead of doing, especially in a world that’s filled with devastating news, where it’s so natural to want to numb out, and where rested activists and those fighting for positive change are sorely needed. By tuning into ourselves and filling up our own cups, we create more energy for what matters most.

Being engaged in social media is built to feel like action. Only it’s not, and drains you as if it is. Though news and tech continue to drain our collective empathy over time, we have the power to use it the right way, and that begins with taking care of ourselves. The world depends on it.