Self Care – Safety
Noted psychologist and author of the fantastic book Resilient, Rick Hanson identifies three pillars of wellbeing – safety, satisfaction and connection. In this post, I am going to look more deeply at each of these and argue that if we are feeling lack in one of these areas, then seeking fulfilment in the other areas is just not going to meet our needs. Given the cross-reactivity of pleasure circuits in the brain, we will likely get a temporary relief from our negative feelings but this will not last, and it also has the risk of leaving us with undesirable consequences.
Safety
Safe is defined in the Oxford English dictionary as “protected from or not exposed to danger or risk; not likely to be harmed or lost” and the truth is that most of you reading this blog post are likely, objectively speaking, safer than humans have been at any previous point in history. And at the same time, we have a sophisticated predator detection and response system known as the sympathetic (fight-flight-freeze) nervous system which is ready to spring into action at the slightest provocation.
The hilariously funny and brilliant sisters Amelia and Emily Nagoski wrote the fabulous book Burnout, which contains lots of evidence based advice on how to “complete the stress cycle” and give your body the sense of safety it craves. When a threat is physical, such as a tiger attack, this completion occurs naturally with some kind of physical activity (running away, fighting the tiger off, hiding) and resolves with you being eaten or living to run away another day, celebrating joyfully with your friends and family.
Cross Talk
Fortunately or unfortunately, the threats to our safety we perceive on a regular level are more nebulous and have more to do with relationships and status than actual physical danger. Threats to connection are often misperceived as safety threats. Threats to satisfaction – we are cold, tired, uncomfortable, in pain – are also often misperceived as safety threats. In another area of cross-talk, we often misperceive one area of safety threat (hunger) to be happening in many different situations. Bad day at work? Eat. Argument with your spouse? Eat. Bored? Eat. Anxious about war/world hunger/COVID? Doom scroll Twitter while eating.
We misinterpret arguments with loved ones as threats to our safety and react accordingly. We misinterpret pain signals from our body as dangerous and react accordingly.
It is not difficult to see how this cross-talk gets set up. As infants, wholly dependent on the adults around us for food, warmth, shelter and nourishment, the sweet high fat warm milk we drink every few hours represents safety to our immature little brains.
Self Care
What does this all have to do with self care?
Most activities of self care are items in the connection and satisfaction boxes such as call a friend, take a bath, eat some delicious but not nutritionally necessary food.
If your basic lack is in the area of safety, then you have to consciously work on increasing your internal sense of safety in order to give yourself emotional stability in the face of threat. At its core, this safety work is identity work. If you really know who you are, what your values are and you know that you have your own back, then non-physical threats are less damaging to you. So how do you build a relationship with yourself?
Building a relationship with yourself is the same as building a relationship with anyone.
- Spend time with yourself
- Gaze into your own eyes and marvel at their sparkle
- Be curious about yourself and your likes and dislikes
- Accept yourself just as you are
- Don’t break commitments to yourself
Practically speaking, you should set aside 20 minutes a day to spend with yourself and maybe 60 minutes once a week. This is not a time when you should be trying to accomplish anything else apart from maybe meditation or a thought dump.
Gazing into your own eyes is easy – you can do this morning and night as you brush your teeth. Think about the last time you held a baby, or fell in love – every time you looked at their beloved face, you almost drowned in the brilliance of their eyes. Your eyes are just as brilliant.
Being curious about yourself and your likes and dislikes is an interesting and ongoing skill to build – on the one hand, you want to honour your likes but also be a little more willing to try something new, just like you might to please a new friend. If part of you is thinking – hey, maybe we should dye our hair blue, try to go with it rather than shutting that part down with the long sordid story of the last time you dyed your hair blue and what Becky in eighth grade said about it.
The counterpart to this is that although I think cultivating curiosity and flexibility is a great way to get to know yourself, you do want to be careful not to force yourself to do things you truly don’t want to do. Remember, when you feel safer, you will be more open to exploration. Your task right now is to accept yourself just as you are. Don’t let yourself be mean to yourself – would you let a friend talk to you that way or would you say those things to a friend?
Finally, get really serious about not breaking commitments to yourself. Put your exercise and meditation plans on the calendar. Plan your food in advance. Set limits on your work time. And meet those commitments to yourself. Every time you break a commitment to yourself, you weaken your relationship with yourself. This damages your sense of self and intrinsic safety.
Some final thoughts to leave you with – when you have a sudden urge to eat, drink, shop or hop on social media (common buffering techniques) especially if the urge is strong, sudden and overwhelming – take a few moments to try to drop into your body and figure out what is really going on. The only problem that eating can fix is hunger. The rest of that stuff never fixes anything. If you identify that you are feeling unsafe, spend some time working on the relationship with yourself.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the post and this series. Please drop me a note at info@daniellemichaelsmd.com