Dealing with <*splodey noises*>, part 2

The three-legged stool of embodied effectiveness

“Put down the phone.”

I was sitting doing the spiritual work I do, listening for the parts of me that tend to be too overwhelmed and distracted by everything to speak. I had a question, which my partner had helpfully suggested I meditate on: what is the next action?

Some days I just get stuck, like a rusty gate.

And some days the voice I need just shows up when I listen for it.

Part 2 of 3: what we need to keep going

Last week I said I’d talk about effectiveness this week and what’s needed to keep the internal engine of it going. I’ve been using “effectiveness” as a kind of synonym for “efficiency,” even though they’re not precisely the same thing. But what I’m talking about is how to stay functional enough in the face of this chaotic world, and while “effectiveness” makes more sense for talking about how you keep yourself taking the next action, “efficiency” is a great way to talk about how our bodies organize to get that action done, once they feel safe enough to do it. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, catch up with last week’s post, especially the parts about safety and efficiency.

But wait, is this about my doomscrolling?

I mean, partly, yes. But what I soon learned was that it was about pleasure, and about rest.

Because here’s what’s going on, this voice said to me. When you sit there — after a session, or at the table when dinner’s over, or on the toilet, or wherever — and decide to just check social media for a second, and you conceive of it as “a break” or “a little treat” or a way of staying connected…

My sibling in Christ, it is none of those things.

Here’s how it tends to look: I open the browser or the app, I start looking at stuff. If there was something I went there specifically to do, I forget instantly and start looking at all the other stuff instead. The stuff I look at makes me feel angry, sad, afraid, helpless, guilty. Maybe in the course of it I find a silly reel or meme that makes me feel a little better. And pretty soon half an hour has passed.

The more recently this happened, the worse it is. But I can tell you that I’ve been on this kick since friggin 2001 when I started with Livejournal, and while I still use Dreamwidth to keep up with my more personal musings (everybody loved to call their journals “musings,” didn’t they, ah), back then good-ol’ LJ had this deeply addictive quality for me too. I’d scroll my friends list for hours rather than write. Good times, good times.

But that’s not all

We all know about the harmful and addictive qualities of social media, right, like this isn’t news? I know I’m not offering some huge revelation, here.

But what really sank in the other day when I heard this was the quality of addiction we don’t talk about as much, which is this:

When I do that, I think I’m doing it for pleasure. Even after all these years. But every single time, it’s not fun, it doesn’t feel good, and it’s not restorative.

So what the hell am I doing it for?

Shifting a habit

I’ve been working on keeping my phone out of my bed. That is: I try only to look at it before bed and after waking as a means of telling the time, turning my lights off, starting or stopping the white noise track I’m playing…basically functional practical things around bedtime and waking. I’ve been working on this practice since the start of the year. Sometimes I’ll let myself check texts, or scroll through my email real quick to see if there’s anything important. But when I’m really doing well, I just see what time it is, turn the noise machine off, then write in my journal with a pen. Or at night, I’ll get in bed, turn the machine on, then read a book until I’m ready to sleep, when I turn off the lights. I’m not perfect yet, but I’m doing pretty well.

Thing is, it’s not great when I look at other stuff on my phone…really at any time. But especially social media. And what that voice was trying to tell me is that not only is it not helpful: it’s actively harmful, at least if I want to be at all effective.

The three prongs of effectiveness

Here’s what you need, that voice told me:

• Pleasure.

• Rest.

• Work.

Again, this may seem pretty simplistic at first blush. But these are almost literally it, in terms of what humans need. And friends, this culture has fucked up all of them.

So rustic! Anyone else here nervous about it being so close to that ledge? The metaphors write themselves. (Image by MiSebastian on Pixabay.)

Newsflash: we need pleasure to stay alive

Pleasure was where the voice started. It’s what you’re looking for, right? it seemed to say, about my glowing little screen and restless thumb. A little pleasure, a little joy, something to do between the bouts of work.

But it’s not pleasurable, is it? It hurts, it numbs, it angers and exhausts you. So stop it. But more importantly: what to do in its place?

Because pleasure? It’s absolutely vital. You need it. I need it. We all need to feel good, regularly, or we languish and even die.

Our culture is supremely non-awesome, though, at providing actual pleasure — nourishing pleasure, wholesome pleasure, restorative pleasure — because it’s so desperately ashamed of our need for it. Instead of pleasure we get entertainment, addictive numbing, excess. I know, I sound like some kind of religious nut right now, but hear me out: how do you tell the difference between pleasure and compulsion?

It’s fairly simple, really. One of them feeds and sates you. The other keeps asking for more, until it doesn’t even make you feel good anymore.

Here’s the tricky part, though: most things that bring pleasure can also turn into compulsions. This isn’t a judgment on what kinds of things you do to feel good. It’s more asking for a pause and taking stock: is this thing I’m doing actually working as a source of restorative pleasure?

Back to social media…

Let’s take a look at the example I gave above, of my own habits. Back in the day, when I was using Livejournal all the time, we were all just figuring out how to use these kinds of tools — we’d never had anything like them before. My usage started out as simply writing my thoughts into the void, the way I’d been putting them into a notebook since I was 10. Then, using the interests function started connecting me with other people. After a little while, I started meeting some of those people in person. Then, as I met lots of other people in person, we started adding each other on Livejournal, much as we’d do with Facebook years later. The many hours I spent there were a combination of writing longform deep introspection about my own life, and reading similar tracts from people I knew and cared about. It took up an alarming amount of time and could tip into compulsion at times, but mostly it was deeply restorative pleasure. Why?

• It had a creative component

• It rewarded slowness and consideration

• It was connective to detailed and deep aspects of friends’ lives

Later, when Facebook and eventually Twitter and Insta came to the fore, it was a different matter. While many of the people were the same, the culture these platforms cultivated didn’t reward the same things. Expressing individual creativity was replaced with being a “content creator.” Slowness and care in responses to people were replaced by “move fast and break things.” And while people might still be called “friends,” the connective aspects became overshadowed by competition and envy.

And now we’re back to co-regulation

A big part of what makes a pleasurable thing restorative and therefore helpful with effectiveness is that it contributes to nervous system regulation. A thing that brings pleasure — fun, joy, whatever you want to call it — tends to relax the muscles, slow down breathing, distract from your troubles, and activate the ventral vagus nerve — what’s known as the “safe and social” setting in polyvagal theory. Less technically put, pleasure makes you feel good (duh), and can bring your nervous system back to a safe state. If it’s something done with other people, it can often do that even more effectively.

So it doesn’t really matter what it is

Any pleasure can become an addiction or compulsion, though some are less prone to it than others. Things you do with other people are somewhat less prone to it: playing a game with friends, making music with people, dancing with a group, having sex, going on hikes, reading books together, cooking and eating together, or whatever.

All of these can be solo, too: maybe it’s comforting food, a good book, a well-wrought TV show or movie. Maybe it’s a video game, or a glass or two of wine, or a weed gummy, or a masturbation session. Some of these are things that some people can’t touch without ill effects. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be effective pleasures for others.

The point is that people need pleasure to be engaged with others in ways that have tons of obvious health benefits, and also to regulate their nervous systems and help them calm down. Which prepares us for:

Rest. You know you need it.

The second leg of the tripod, as the wisdom I received goes, is rest. Rest is separate from pleasure, but intimately connected to it: it’s really hard to wind down and get to sleep or any kind of restorative down-time if you don’t have something pleasurable to get your brain and body out of work-mode.

I’m not gonna spend a ton of time here talking about rest and sleep and how screwed up our society’s relationship with it is…hundreds of pounds of ink have been spilled about it already, and I’m happy to point you to a double episode of Ologies about it, which I dug listening to and found really helpful. (There are transcripts too!)

But yes: while I’m spending much less time on this here, what I mainly want you to understand is that the Rest leg is just as big, long, and important (um?) as the Pleasure leg. Sorry this is getting weird. Point is: Rest and Pleasure are heavily interlinked, but separate and equally important needs.

Which leaves the third leg!

Work, or The Work

The third part of this whole structure is what we call Work. By work I don’t just mean remunerative tasks, or a job. Work is anything we do in life where we exert effort to see a result. It’s job work, but it’s also housework, childcare, caring for social circles, gardening or caring for your yard, walking the dog, calling the doctor’s office or the insurance company or the mechanic, paying the bills, and on and on. Notice that some of this also has pleasurable aspects, or can. Think of the seat of the three-legged stool as the plane that connects all these legs: not only are the legs supporting that plane, but the plane puts the legs in contact with one another. You can also imagine the triangle of extra wood that might form supports for the legs, one to the other, in some stools, as a conduit for the connections between the various legs.

Beyond the metaphor, though, the message I got about Work was that having Pleasure and Rest in balance were what makes Work possible as something more than dissociated drudgery or manic striving. When Pleasure and Rest are fully engaged, all work becomes The Work.

What is The Work, you might ask. In my spiritual tradition, it’s part of a question we’re always asking of ourselves, finding out what it is we’re meant to be doing in this world, both on the macro scale and in every moment. But the question doesn’t have to have a spiritual component if that doesn’t speak to you. It’s more about finding a way to make what you’re doing in the world meaningful and fulfilling to you. Being present in the moment, putting yourself into your work, is how to make your efforts matter. That’s what makes work into The Work.

But to do that, the other two legs have to be engaged.

One more thing:

Notice that when we think of this three-legged model, that the legs must be of equal length if they’re going to hold up the structure.

This means that whatever your Work is, it shouldn’t take up more than a third of your time. Pleasure and Rest are just as important.

This can be very hard to achieve in these crushing circumstances. But it helps if you find ways to make some of your work pleasurable, and allow that some pleasurable pursuits require work.

So what does this have to do with me, and the moment we’re living through?

A lot, actually. We’re being challenged, and we’re gonna keep being challenged, by increasing instability and chaos on multiple fronts. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it’s going to take to make it through this, and to continue trying to make a better world in spite of the forces arrayed against us.

This EDM cover of one talented man’s poetic expression of frustration with our present moment, and which I’ve had in my head for a solid 24 hours, might help.

veryveryvinny

A post shared by @veryveryvinny

For me, as usual given my work, it starts with the body, and it starts with the self. It increasingly reaches outward and gathers people to us as well, of course, But it has to begin from a place of as much stability in our own bodies as we can each muster.

Starting from a place of understanding that our pleasure matters is, to me, the thing that keeps us from going insane and gives us hope. Allowing pleasure into our bodies then makes way for rest, which restores our strength and makes it possible to keep going. And these pillars in turn transform work into something with value and meaning, something energizing even when it’s hard, and if you dare, something sacred.