Tag: covid-19

Resist irrationality: fight or flight in a time without lions

Posted on by Suki

I’ve been thinking about a problem we humans have. I can express it in a formula:

Fight or flight response

+

Triggering media

+

Safest time ever to be a human

=

Extremely illogical behavior

Let’s pick that apart:

Fight or flight response

Photo by Tambako the Jaguar on Flickr

The fight or flight response is a very important function of our “lizard brain.” It’s what gets you to stop and fight when there’s a threat you can manage, or run like heck otherwise. It floods your body with adrenaline, gets your heart pounding, sends oxygen to your muscles, and leaves you totally exhausted and drained when it’s over.

We humans obviously needed this in the past. When faced with a hungry lion, we needed to be able to bypass our pre-frontal cortex “professor brain” and act quickly. But although fight or flight is very useful in situations of physical danger, it’s become maladaptive for modern times.

+ Triggering media

Photo by Picasa on Flickr

A lot of what modern media does is to tap into our lizard brains. Youtube cranks, 24-hour news, and social media all benefit when our hearts are pounding and we are full of emotion. They don’t do so great when we’re feeling calm and rational, because that’s the time when we’re more likely to want to hang with friends or take a nice walk.

The reason we like to be triggered by scary movies, news that makes us angry, or reading about the latest insults being traded by a comedian and a Fox News host is that it feels good. Our fight or flight response is set up to give us a huge payoff if we respond appropriately. Why? So that we feel up to doing it again if we need to.

So we like triggering media precisely because it makes us feel like we’ve been chased by a lion… and lived to tell the story.

+ Safest time ever to be a human being

This is a really hard one to get through to people. We are living in the safest time ever to be a human being. Don’t take my word for it. Read the numbers! Even with Covid, we’re still better off than we were (especially before the invention of antibiotics and vaccines).

And the things we’re actually scared of—sharks, strangers, earthquakes—are actually not that dangerous. Take a look:

Causes of Death in Comparison

= Extremely illogical behavior

There was a burglary on my block. As is often the case, the criminals were not the brightest of bulbs. They were caught because, um, they left the iPhone they stole from the house ON and it was pinging their location all the way to Nevada.

Oops.

But that doesn’t stop my neighbors from worrying that the endtimes are nigh, and shouldn’t we be recording the license plate of everyone who drives onto our street? Unfortunately, systems like that result in way more harm to innocent people than they do to criminals being thwarted.

When our children were little, we were the only family on our block that allowed our kids to play outside alone. We do not live in a war zone! (In fact, people in war zones often allow their kids to play outside. What choice do they have?)

Our country was much more dangerous in the 1970s, when my husband’s parents let him ride his bike over the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan and my parents didn’t ask to meet the parents of kids I visited. Yet parents now seem to believe that a child-snatching stranger is always hiding in the bushes.

We’re suffering from maladapted flight-or-flight, and we have to consciously resist

Yes, bad things happen. But bad things don’t stop happening when you shut yourself into a padded room. That’s how you make sure that a bad thing really will happen: You will be stuck in a padded room!

Yes, the human population is currently being ravaged by an awful disease. But the fact that someone was probably killed in a car accident near you in the last week doesn’t stop you from driving. The fact that multiple people near you died of heart disease doesn’t stop you from reaching for that éclair. Our media is terrifying us, and it feels good. The only way we can stop it from feeling so good is by resisting consciously.

Yes, the future of our beautiful planet is currently a bit bleak. But people who focus on bleakness, who revel in the human attraction to fatalistic, negative thinking, don’t get stuff done. And right now, we need people to Get Stuff Done. Global climate change is terrifying, and it’s making us freeze in place. We need to resist that urge and move forward.

  • Resist by being informed
  • Resist by being educated (and not by the University of Google, but by experts in their respective fields)
  • Resist by learning ways to calm yourself and practicing all day every day
  • Resist by being open and loving toward other human beings
  • Resist by not going immediately to fear-based decision-making

Resist.

As we progress, let’s not regress

Posted on by Suki

I walked up to the front door of my health club and waited. The owner opened the door and beckoned me in; he was not armed with a touchless thermometer.

“You can just walk in now,” he said.

“Well, that makes your job easier,” I replied.

“Yours, too!” he said. “Just scan your card and you’re good to go.”

Here’s the thing: I always knew that getting my temperature taken was jive. The CDC concluded pretty early on that temperature is not a reliable indicator of infection with Covid-19. All that work to take people’s temperature achieved nothing as far as health was concerned; not a single feverish person had arrived at our club in the last year.

So I’m happy enough that we don’t have to do it anymore. However, something positive came with the useless waste of time and batteries: people started to get to know each other.

Making connections

Before Covid, I didn’t know the owner of my club by sight, and certainly had never had a conversation with him. But as club membership dwindled and we were forced to exercise outside (fine for me, since I swim), club employees left, too. Soon it was usually the owner who checked people in, and we got to chatting.

In the past, I was happy to see the front desk manned by one of the more personable employees, but often the young person at the desk was more interested in their phone than the club members. The forced interaction at the club’s front door came from something horrible, but created something meaningful.

Let’s identify the changes we like

Photo Courtesy of Never.Edit

As I write, the world at large is gripped—in some places—with a worse situation than ever. The loss of life is tragic. But in coastal California, it really feels like things are getting back to normal. Cars full of kids head to school in the morning. Neighbors who had been out and about during the work day are disappearing back into their jobs.

These changes are part of a return to normal life, but they don’t have to be a return to the parts of that pre-pandemic life that weren’t so great.

Families are spending more time together than they did in their busy, pre-pandemic lives. (And they’re mostly happy about that!)

Adults are rediscovering passions or pursuing new ones.

Some kids have found that distance or hybrid learning actually works better for them.

…and try to make them stick

There’s no reason why we have to go back to “normal.” Normal, well…. normal sucked. The traffic. The overly busy families. The poor being evicted from their homes. The sterile interactions with people in our community. The people whose job it is to connect with you looking at their phones…

Let’s make sure to identify those things in our lives that have improved, and remember that as life gets back to normal, we can make them part of our new normal.

Picking the scab off the nuclear family

Posted on by Suki

The nuclear, 2-parent family, the gold standard of American parenting, is a relatively new concept. In the past and present, America and communities around the world function well—perhaps better—with a more communal approach to raising children.

The pandemic, I’ve noticed, has been picking at the scab that holds the nuclear family together. Quarantined families, in many cases, have become truly nuclear. A few of my students report that they literally haven’t had a face-to-(masked)face conversation with another human since last March. Most of my students report that they are spending way more time with their families than they ever did.

Of course, in some cases this has been a wonderful gift that Covid has given families. Many of us were stressed out and overscheduled, and the last nine months gave us some breathing room. We rekindled interest in cooking or crafting. We had time to play board games with our kids. We finally got around to painting their bedrooms.

But let’s face it. The human organism was not designed for the nuclear family. We thrive in situations where small communities trust and support each other, shifting the responsibilities of raising children to multiple adults who each have skills to offer. In that situation, no parent needs to be the perfect parent for their children.

But here we are, so what do we do about it?

Some families are thriving, and to you I say, good job! Enjoy!

But other families are experiencing more stress than ever:

  • Spouses have seen their relationships deteriorate
  • Teens are angry and resentful, or depressed and withdrawn
  • Kids are missing daily infusions of joy they used to have when they and their families interacted with others

I’ve been talking with my teen students on how to deal with this, and here are the fixes we came up with.

Remember that you can’t control other people’s emotions

This is such a hard lesson! Depending on our personalities, we respond to our family members’ emotions (especially negative ones) by either blaming ourselves or blaming them, internalizing negative emotions or lashing out with them.

Remember that we can control our reactions

We want to blame our reactions on others, but really, how we react is our choice. But it is true that we have to practice reacting appropriately. Few of us are born ready-made with Zen-level patience!

We can do a few things to practice controlling our reactions:

  • When we react badly, go back and figure out what we should have done. Then tell the person we reacted to about it—aka, apologize.
  • Try to stop when we see ourselves following a pattern of reacting and blaming.
  • Practice the healthy responses when possible.

Parenting peels off scabs of its own

Parents generally find that parenting peels off the various scabs that they formed to deal with life. Some parents don’t want to question their own reactions, and it becomes especially hard for them once their teens assert themselves as individuals. My teen students see that all the time, and it’s confusing to them. As parents, we can help them by verbalizing what’s going on.

“Hey, I’m sorry I’ve been complaining so much. Being stuck in the house and going to Zoom meetings stresses me out!”

“When I was growing up, my family just kept out of each other’s way so we never had to face the fact that we didn’t get along. But now, we’re stuck together so let’s try to figure this out.”

Be empathetic about our teens’ situation

Teens are stuck in between. They hopefully experienced some independence before Covid hit, and now they are stuck with and completely dependent on their families. We parents need to acknowledge that and support our teens in seeking whatever independence they can find—and that’s usually going to be done through a screen.

Don’t give up on each other

I tell my teens whose families are struggling that it’s important not to give up on their relationship with their parents. If we assume that our family members are doing the best they can, we will feel better about our relationships with them. We all have to cut each other some slack right now.

With care and patience, scabs will heal.

For goodness sake, parents, be nice to your teachers, OK?

Posted on by Suki

My life in the last several weeks included multiple surgeries for family members then sending our youngest kid off to college. County up in flames, 901 of our neighbors have lost their homes, many more have been evacuated from their homes for who knows how long, and the air quality was rated the worst in the world many days running.

Also, we are going into the most contentious, nasty election season ever.

Oh, and there’s that little thing we call a pandemic.

Oh, and classes started. And I’m a teacher.

It’s important to be empathetic

That teacherly side of me knows that parents are under a lot of stress. They are navigating tons of new territory, from (as one mom I interviewed said) “getting to know my kid again,” to learning how to do their job online, to waiting to find out how their kids’ schools are going to deliver education, to figuring out how to fill out myriad mystifying government forms.

This world is a big, fat mess. That much we can agree on.

I forgive each and every one of you who is in over your head and says things you (probably) wouldn’t have said in more relaxed times. I realize that when parents contact me about their students, they are often reacting to stress unrelated to my classes.

Remember it’s not [all] your teacher’s fault

I’ll start by admitting I’m not a perfect teacher, and I’m not the best teacher for every kid. One of the reasons I believe so deeply in homeschooling is that it offers kids the opportunity to learn in a variety of ways with a variety of teachers. Who doesn’t love a smorgasbord?

But please understand: I am an online teacher, and I can solve exactly one of your child’s problems: I can deliver a high-quality course in the subject that I am teaching. That’s all.

Don’t play the blame game

The #1 best parenting advice I can give you is not to protect your mistakes from your kids. If you messed up and signed up for a class late, admit it. If you messed up and didn’t read the instructions, admit it. If you messed up and didn’t test the software ahead of time, admit it.

Your acceptance of your imperfections will make your kid a stronger person, I promise!

And then suck it up and get the job done

  1. Define the problem. Don’t shoot off an email or make a phone call before you have figured out what the problem actually is.
  2. If you screwed up, all you have to do for your teacher is explain and apologize. Their job is not to fix your mistakes.
  3. If you need help, figure out who can help you. Hint: It’s not necessarily your teacher.
  4. RTFM! Yes, there are way too many instructions for accessing online education. That’s why you should start early and make sure you understand as much as you can before you ask questions.

If you screw up, be gracious

Your teachers are under a huge amount of stress just because of their job. You have no idea what else is happening behind that sunny face on the screen or voice over the slides. Our job more closely resembles improv theater than you might imagine.

A simple apology goes a long way.

If you:

  • Blame a teacher for your own mistake
  • Get angry at a teacher for software they have no control over
  • Tell a teacher that you expected more when the teacher is giving all they can give
  • Mess up some aspect of your kid’s education and then try to pin the blame on the the teacher…

Say you’re sorry, give them the benefit of the doubt, and…

Then move on

Because that’s what we teachers are doing, too. Through pandemic, fires, hurricanes, family troubles, financial trouble, and toxic politics, we are there every day, our smiling faces or voices welcoming your children to a little chunk of sanity.

This is hard. Join us in figuring out our way through it.

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