Visceral

The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without it we should be bored, and this boredom would drive us to seek a more solid means of escape. But diversion amuses us and leads us unconsciously to death.
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670)

On October 22nd, we introduced Brené Brown’s ten guideposts for wholehearted living. Today we continue with Guidepost #8: Cultivating Calm and Stillness—Letting Go of Anxiety as a Lifestyle.

Brown discovered that the wholehearted people she studied weren’t free of anxiety—they were aware of it. They had stopped treating chronic stress as the price of a meaningful life and started treating calm and stillness as essential practices.

Calm, Brown explains, is the ability to bring perspective to complicated situations without being hijacked by reactivity. It’s pausing before responding. It’s asking: Do I have all the information? Will freaking out help? Calm doesn’t mean suppressing emotion—it means not letting fear and anger drive the car. And because anxiety is contagious, choosing calm doesn’t just change us. It changes the room.

Stillness is different. It’s not about emptying the mind or focusing on nothing. Brown defines stillness as creating a clearing—an emotionally clutter-free space where we allow ourselves to feel and think and dream and question. For many of us, this is terrifying. If we stop long enough, the truth of our lives catches up. So we keep moving, hoping reality can’t find us if we stay busy enough. The irony, of course, is that running from exhaustion is what exhausts us. Anxiety feeds on itself.

For me, in early recovery, that restlessness the Big Book talks about was visceral. I couldn’t stand being in my own skin. The idea of sitting quietly in a room alone felt impossible. I stayed in constant motion because stopping meant feeling everything I’d been running from. Recovery meant learning to tolerate that discomfort long enough for it to pass, discovering I could survive my own company after all. Calm and stillness weren’t gifts I was given. They were capacities I had to build, one unbearable moment at a time.

In her book The Dance of Connection, Harriet Lerner writes that we each have patterned ways of managing anxiety. Overfunctioners tend to move quickly to advise, rescue, take over, and micromanage rather than look inward. Underfunctioners tend to get less competent under stress. They invite others to take over and can get labelled as the irresponsible one, the problem child, or the fragile one. Understanding these behaviours as patterned responses to anxiety, rather than fixed truths about who we are, helps us see that we can change. Overfunctioners can learn to embrace vulnerability in the face of anxiety. Underfunctioners can work to amplify their strengths and competencies. What is learned can be unlearned.

Brown suggests practical starting points. Breathing is the simplest—just taking a breath before responding slows us down and starts spreading calm. We can count to ten, or give ourselves permission to say, “I’m not sure. I need to think about this some more.” Stillness doesn’t have to look like sitting cross-legged in silence. Mine is the 30-minute walk to and from the office. For others, it might be fishing, swimming laps, or sitting with a cup of coffee before the house wakes up. The key is finding what opens us up—not what the practice is supposed to look like.