The notion of "productivity" has frequently popped up as a theme in my counseling practice.  Suicidal ideation, body image, and fitness also drop in repeatedly. Of course, there are plenty of other themes, and I'm compelled to add that each individual's experience WITHIN various themes is still infinitely unique. Nobody fits into a tidy little box of experience and personhood. Now... TikTok.

Slides down the TikTok rabbit hole can keep me plugged into my phone for an arguably laughable amount of time, but whatever. While any aspect of social media can have its dark side, it can also be entertaining, informative, funny, interesting, and thought-provoking. The latter is what comes to mind as I've stumbled across a recent trend of people working out, with a statement along the lines of: "I don't train to be strong or to look good. I train so I don't kill myself."

First of all, I'm down with some dark humor, don't get me wrong. Second, fitness and movement can absolutely be effective tools in anyone's coping, self-care, and self-regulatory toolkit, and I 100%, whole-heartedly encourage it. Third, this trend still compelled me to get on here and start clicking away at this blog.

So many of us live with expectations of go hard, work harder, and "be productive" or else some nagging part of us, big or small, is going to tell us we're not worth the air we breathe and the space we occupy and the love we want. The TikTok videos I mention specify fitness to keep dark, suicidal, nagging, and negative thoughts away, but the fixations can be pretty much anything: work, school, kids, extracurriculars, fitness, friends, family, parties... and all of it frequently filtered and posted to social media like heavy merit badges of being busy busy busy. The more we do, the faster we spin, the harder we go, the more worthy we lean into believing we are, the more value we convince ourselves we will someday earn, or, more to the point here, the further we imagine we get from our own darkness, pain, and vulnerability. We spin like tops, afraid to slow down, afraid of stillness, avoiding quiet and a clear glance inward. Our compulsive spinning distracts us and provides a mask so we don't have to see the things we don't want to look at. We keep spinning, while all too often, fear and shame still sit nestled in the eye of our storm, waiting for our inevitable encounter with life's speedbumps.

You might have just rolled your eyes at me, so please allow me to clarify. It's entirely possible that you simply have a lot of interests and find yourself enthusiastically participating in all the things life has to offer-- or one thing extensively. If that's the case, fantastic! I guess the question, then, might also be: Who are you in boredom? Are you worthy of love and affection when you're not on the go? Of pride? Of respect? Are you worthy, period? Are you enough? Are you emotionally safe (and does your nervous system know that)? If you found yourself forced into stillness--maybe through injury, illness, an aging body, job loss, or any other factor--how might you answer these questions? 

LIVE-FAST-DIE-YOUNG-FEEL-NO-PAIN and I'LL-SLEEP-WHEN-I'M DEAD may sound exciting, with this notion peppered through songs and such for decades. While it can make for arguably decent entertainment, we could dissect this load of glamourized shit extensively, but I'll try to keep this part brief. Our bodies literally need sleep and rest. Regardless of what we do we're going to feel some degree of pain. Living perpetually fast won't necessarily lead to an early finish line, and it's even less likely to lead to a painless one.

What if we allow ourselves to slow down? What if we are entitled to some stillness? What if we could learn to settle into our own skin? I can sense some of your eyes rolling (again) all the way through the internet as you read this. I know: What the hell is this crunchy hippie psychobabble garbage? Necessary. That's what it is. And, it's science (I'll get to this below). I'm not asking you to douse yourself in essential oils or sit naked on your lawn under the glow of a full moon to ground your root chakra or whatever, but if that's your thing, have at it--just not my scope of practice. I'm encouraging you to reflect, cut yourself some slack, and work to face any potentially buried time bombs of shame and fear and doubt so you can diffuse them. We can't go hard all the time and not expect it to catch up to us. Something will inevitably give, and my hope is that a screeching halt won't catch you off guard, with a painful collide into all the things you've been avoiding. I've seen it time and again, especially through my work in skilled nursing facilities-- residents of all ages, contending with their unsorted, distorted thoughts, fears, shame, and doubt, while simultaneously navigating physical health complications and new realities. All of this can be addressed at any point in our life, but why not get a head start?

How is all this squishy, emotional, let's all look inside ourselves and find peace stuff science, you ask? Let's look at the parasympathetic and sympathetic branches of our autonomic nervous system. The parasympathetic branch, often referred to as the branch responsible for rest and digest, plays a crucial role in regulating our heart rate, blood pressure, stress response, and digestion. This branch acts in concert with the sympathetic branch of the nervous system, our fight or flight response, keeping our nervous system in check with a functional flow between the systems. In fight or flight, blood flow to the gut is restricted while blood flow to the heart and muscles is increased in order to better facilitate fighting or fleeing in service of survival. Once a perceived threat has passed or been managed, we need our parasympathetic branch to pump the breaks to bring our heart rate back down so we can re-experience calm and safety so we can rest and digest.

When we are constantly on the go, chronically avoiding uncomfortable thoughts and emotions, functioning in patterns of distorted thinking, and channeling all that nervous energy into constant and/or intense activity (whatever that may look like), we're stuck in a sympathetic response to life. We're stuck in some degree of fight or flight. My friends, this response is not sustainable, and I'm not just talking about the irritability, anxiety, or depression catching up to us and wreaking havoc on our emotional and social existence, as if that's not enough. I'm not just talking about the whole system shutdown that can happen when the primitive dorsal vagal part of our nervous system takes over in a parasympathetic spike and has us playing dead in a state of physical and emotional collapse because we got too flooded in sympathetic. I'm also talking about the physical health implications related to our heart, digestive systems, and beyond that can happen as a result of a chronically dysregulated system. Your head is stuck to your body, just like mine. The science confirms that whatever is going on emotionally will have a physical manifestation, and, likewise, whatever is going on physically will have an emotional impact, for better or worse.

The science also confirms that we have some control in finding that balance. For starters, we simply can't address the things we're not willing to look at (like shame), so I encourage you to slow down every now and again and ask yourself, who are you in stillness? What is important to you? What brings you peace? What brings you joy? What centers you? What helps you feel seen, safe, and connected? **For my trauma survivors, this does NOT imply an expectation of re-experiencing trauma.**

Here's a little activity for you to get the ball rolling: I encourage you to do a values inventory for yourself. Go through this list from Brene Brown's website (or some other list; none will be exhaustive), crossing off values in favor of other values that resonate more with you. Do this two by two, trying to narrow it down to 5 or fewer. If you can make down it to one value "to rule them all" (Lord of the Rings nerd alert), congrats and you win the high five, the gold medal, the blue ribbon, AND the hypothetical trophy. Once you have a few core values, consider how you might be living your life congruently or incongruently with them. What do you notice? Who are you at that center? How does that you show up in the world? How would you like that you to show up in the world?

Values.pdf (brenebrown.com)

If you can't find this quiet place yet, or if you, like so many others, find that it's filled with fear, shame, anger, doubt, emptiness, or some other seemingly unbearable discomfort right now, it's worth mentioning that it's not at all unheard of to have a nervous system that has become wired to actually distrust and feel really uncomfortable when faced with calm and stillness. I encourage you to reach out. You know how to find me, and if I'm not the one, there are plenty of therapists and other helping professionals and community members out there who could be. Get connected, and know that you are not alone.