Regain control in an unpredictable world | Checking In with Susan David

Apr 15, 2020

Many of us are feeling stuck right now, forced to adapt to a world that we have little control over. But if we focus too much on these uncontrollable aspects of our lives, we greatly increase our suffering. Learn why our routines and habits are so important to our wellbeing -- and how there are ways we can exercise control even when every day feels unpredictable. (Audio only)

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hi Ted Talks daily listeners we've got something a little different today we just launched a podcast with psychologist Susan David who's tedtalk you've heard before on this show the new podcast is called checking in with Susan David each week she's going to give strategies that can help people cope with this Global pandemic and we hope it'll be useful long after this extremely difficult moment passes so today we have an episode of checking in that we thought you'd enjoy and

afterwards if you want to hear more subscribe to checking in with Susan David on Apple podcasts Spotify or wherever you listen new episodes will drop every Monday

hi everyone well when we spoke last week I mentioned how my husband and I had gone from exchanging Post-it notes of what groceries need to be collected into now exchanging emergency contact information in these coronavirus times as you all know a lot can happen in a week my husband's now packing his bag ready to sleep in his laboratory for the next month as he goes and sees patients at the MGH and we have the recognition that he likely won't be able to come home for fear of infecting me and the children

as might be expected this is thrown a lot of my routines and my expectations into disarray

the virus pandemic has disrupted lives and routines around the world often leading us to feel that we are stuck in a new normal one that is not of our choosing and one that we have no control over

so how do we regain a foothold when it feels like everything is up in the air this is checking in with Susan David

today is about regaining your power your foot hold your sense of agency and to do this there are two key ideas that I want to focus on first is getting unstuck mentally from thoughts emotions and narratives that maybe imprisoning us all of us in pessimism or disempowerment

the second is getting unstuck in our behaviors creating small pockets of control that we can then build on

getting unstuck in these two ways mentally and behaviorally will help all of us to regenerate to care for those who need us and to respond effectively to the situation at hand

these are things we all need a little bit more of right now myself included so first getting unstuck mentally

we need stories to make sense of Our Lives they helped us to organize our experiences and stay grounded but not all stories produce this result we can often as human beings climb into stories some of our stories were written on our mental chalkboards in grade 3 about who we are what we are good at and what kind of life we even deserve and as we're finding as the virus causes our routines to crumble and forces us to rearrange ourselves the stories that hook us can prove especially destructive

mm it's the uncertainty of the past few weeks you might have noticed yourself rigidly clinging to your old stories maybe you've created a story a belief that you need uninterrupted long hours and blocks of time to get your work accomplished and have decided now that it will be impossible to get anything done with the kids at home all day or maybe you've convinced yourself that the close quarters of kickboxing ring is the only place that you can let off steam and clear your head and that social distancing has condemned you too much

it's of simmering frustration and inactivity whatever story you're hooked on it's likely going to make it harder for you to regain your foothold and adapt your temporary new reality because of this it becomes critically important to unhook ourselves from stories that might be trapping us causing us to be frustrated or even self-defeating when we're stuck in a thought an emotional story we are seeing the world from that perspective we are immersed in it and we see it as being

reality so one of the ways that we can start to unhook ourselves to get unstuck is to change our perspective and start loosening the grip that the story might have on us I'm going to share some proven techniques that can help us to take this view to move ourselves Beyond being stuck in our story to what we call the Met of you being able to step out of the story because it isn't serving us and who we want to be right now in this current context

in Zen Buddhism it's common practice to contemplate paradoxes like what is the sound of one hand clapping there are probably paradoxes from your own life right now that you could chew on in a zen-like fashion maybe you just adore your children but now that you're spending every moment with them are driving you absolutely Bonkers perhaps you have fled a Corona virus hotspot and you fill it once relieved to escape and guilty about your privilege

or you may relish the Independence that having your own business gives you but are now staring into cancelled contracts without outside support

give yourself time to dig into the paradoxes created in your own life as a result of the virus psychologically this is really important instead of denying reality or getting stuck in it embracing and accepting these seeming contradictions will help you to process them to problem solve and to move forward in healthy ways a second strategy is simply to have a laugh humor is an excellent way to step out of and unhook from narrative

they are not serving us and as long as you aren't using humor to deny or to mask genuine pain finding something funny about the present circumstances can help you to accept them and then create healthy distance from them I sometimes do this thinking that if there were beings and another part of space looking down on us at Earth they would be observing with interest and curiosity all that is unfolding in our little world

so if your cat rushes across your keyboard in the middle of an intense work call or you find yourself telling your children to go potty while you're off mute give yourself permission to laugh about it after all we're all in this differently but together

another strategy is to change your point of view changing a point of view is one of the most critical ways that we can start getting unstuck I've seen this in the work that I do with clients frequently people will describe how they simply have no way forward when it comes to a particular situation it might be a job that they feel bored in or a relationship that's not working out I'm at ask that person what do you see as options here what strategies might you use and the person might say

nothing I don't have options I don't have strategies that's why I'm talking to you and then I do something that is well known in Psychology help the person to change their point of view I'm at said of them I see that you feel stuck and that you have no options imagine for a moment that we bring the wisest most loving and kind person that you know into this room with you now

you tell the person your problem and the person offers a perspective one that you hadn't thought about what might that perspective be

what is so fascinating is that this individual who one moment had been saying that they had no options might now when they're seeing a perspective from a different person someone who's loving kind and wise have many options to suggest what the psychological strategy is doing is it's basically moving someone out of the perspective of being immersed in their story they're worth being stuck into an alternative View and this is something that we can use in our own lives right now

of course one way we embody our narratives are stories about ourselves is through the hey viewers what we do every single day our routines what happens when those routines get upended why our routines and habits so important especially now habits specifically those that are grounded in our values like Health connection and Community are foundational to our well-being

they keep us exercising having special time with our family and calling our mom on good days and bad when we're paying attention and when we're not no matter how frazzled we are in the morning we always remember to brush our teeth and to fasten our seatbelts as soon as we get in the car habits also make our good intentions durable so that our mental resources are freed up for other tasks and opportunities when our key routines and habits are pulled out from under us we can become destabilized and this becomes even

more the case when complexity and learning us into the picture

we now find ourselves in the world of uncertainty not only with respect to the virus and the day-to-day lives that we might have taken for granted but as a social species we may even feel very cut off from our tribe our extended family or our beloved work colleagues and even for modern human beings this can feel life and death scary depending on who you are your environment your context your routine might have been upended in a whole range of ways

be someone who's used to the structure of going to work now finding yourself floundering aimlessly wandering how to fill your time or you might simultaneously be trying to run Zoom calls and meetings homeschool your three children and put food on the table without any time available to you you might even fit into the third category the Warriors the health care workers the Emergency Services professionals who have had their day's going from 8 hours to 16 hours and a wondering when this will ever end

and for all of us the experience can be incredibly destabilizing that feeling of being ungrounded of not knowing how to Anchor oneself into the here and now not being able to get a sense of agency and predictability over the current situation when faced with this level of uncertainty fear falls in the gaps We Begin catastrophizing ruminating lashing out or getting stuck in patterns of avoidance or inside our heads

it's critical Vin for us to regain a sense of predictability so that we are anchored in the Here and Now

after all it is the here and now that we need to respond to We Can't impact what isn't in our control we cannot control the kids in the neighboring Town her defining social distancing and playing football we cannot control the person living in a different state who buys more toilet paper than they need and we cannot control what gets included in the speech of some other politician If We Hold too much concern and too much focus on these uncontrollable as

six of Our Lives we greatly increase our suffering

but what we can do is make tiny tweaks create small pockets of predictability in our lives when you think about these tiny tweaks often a really good place to start is with sleep diet and exercise the temptation to spend all day on the couch Feast on frozen pizza and step late watching the next episode of Taiga King on Netflix is incredibly strong right now when you're living in a context of self quarantine that's the path of least resistance

but make a point to get proper rest if the occasional salad take a run a bike ride or some other kind of physical activity that you can do while maintaining social distance our bodies and minds are profoundly intertwined and the better you take care of the former the better equipped you'll be with a letter and this will help you to adapt to the new circumstances and regain your foothold

psychological researcher and scientist Lisa Feldman Barrett talks about it in these terms that when you get enough sleep when you move your body when you exercise effectively what you're doing in essence is your replenishing your budget the budget of psychological and physiological resources that you then have available to you to address the reality of the circumstances at hand and the stresses that might be thrown at you so first connect with the routine if you normally get up at 7 a.m. see

you can keep getting up around that time see if you can establish some sort of structure for your family because the kids need a two second is to try to create some small habits small changes that bring us closer to ourselves to our values and our intent

but what's really important for all of us is this caveat we are not running a marathon here we are trying to enter a space into coping into being effective and to really resetting and connecting with ourselves in the midst of chaos and so there's nothing wrong inherently in partaking in that extra chocolate every once in awhile or watching their TV program but just understand at some level whether you are doing this as a default emotion regulation

strategy is it something that you're using to help you to control the environment or are you doing it in a way that is a chosen intentional Comfort the letter can be really helpful it can provide you space to process and to simply just be you're not in charge of every decision that a politician makes or exactly what's going on in the hospital's right now what we can do is we can decide what we can influence and what we can influence tends to be our

own behaviors how we respond and how we engage with the reality that's unfolding in front of us to use the beautiful sentiment of one of my daughter Sophie's favorite books when either poo we are all of us braver than you believe stronger than we seem and smarter than we think as you go through the coming week I hope that these tools help to get you unstuck and to regain your foot hold both mentally and in your behaviors I hope they're helpful

I hope that they give you back your sense of power and agency in some small way but what I wish for more than this is for all of us that we go through the week with Grace now is not the time for Perfection it's time for simple progress whatever that means to you

it's not the time for iron wool grit but rather for Grace it's not the time for judgment but for compassion and it's not the time for white-knuckled control but rather having the wisdom and the courage to sometimes let go that's all for today if you enjoyed this episode of checking in with Susan David please subscribe rate and review the show or simply tell a friend who needs some extra support right now we really appreciate it

be well stay safe and let's check in next week

hey Ted Talks daily listeners I'm Adam Grant I host another podcast from Ted it's called work life and it's about the science of making work not suck next time how to tackle loneliness your 40 seconds of interaction of positive caring interaction has measurable impacts on both people 40 seconds 40 seconds listen to work life with Adam Grant wherever you get your podcast