Put your own oxygen mask on first
A few nights ago I was scrolling through Instagram before bed (which is not a habit I recommend, for the record) and came across a post demanding me to “speak out” against an international tragedy. The message was clear: if you’re seeing this and you are not speaking out about this issue, you are a shit person.
I’m convinced that this social media trope of demanding that others speak out is counter productive for a couple reasons. For starters, it’s a tool of the echo chamber. Shaming people into “speaking out” such that they just thoughtlessly share something without making sure they’re properly informed is a great way to spread misinformation and promote destructive tribalism. Second, it keeps people dysregulated and impedes their ability to take real, productive action. It’s a threat signal to the nervous system. Also, it’s virtual signalling, performative, and in my opinion, bullying.
Now, I say this with the full awareness that I have engaged in this behavior in the past, which is one of the reasons that I’m choosing to “speak out” against it now.
To be clear, this is distinct from speaking out substantively about something you care about. That’s cool. If you feel passionately about a thing, and have educated yourself on the issue, by all means, speak out. I’m specifically addressing speaking out by shaming others for not joining you in the speaking out.
Technology has made it not only possible to track multiple global tragedies at any one time, it’s actually difficult to avoid awareness of them. Our brains evolved to manage the drama of a group of a couple hundred people at best, so this is beyond overwhelming.
But it does feel like there are some big things out there that really do deserve at least some of our attention, right? There is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza that our government is complicit in. Climate change is happening before our eyes. And don’t even get me started on our more local dumpster fire. I could keep going, but I’m actually not trying to be a threat signal to your nervous system. How do we choose what to pay attention to?
Now I speak from deep personal experience when I say that this is a situation in which you really should think about putting your own oxygen mask on first. It is not selfish to focus on you if you don’t have the capacity to take on the problems of the rest of the world. It’s the most important thing you can do for the world.
Right now, collectively, we are extremely dysregulated. Fear and anger rule the world, it seems. You can help by breaking that cycle and creating a pocket of calm, focused action.
To start, I want you to ask yourself two questions:
How do I feel most of the time?
Are my own basic needs met?
Let’s dig into each of those.
How do I feel most of the time?
If your answer to that question is initially something along the lines of, “wtf are you talking about, Talia,” don’t worry, you’re not alone. And this is the perfect place to start.
There are three states we’re looking for here: anxiety, anger, and shutdown. If you don’t immediately know whether you are dominated by one of these states, or a combination of all three, you probably are. But to start exploring this, I highly recommend a daily journal practice. It will help you understand your thoughts, which will lead you to your emotions.
If your thoughts are dominated by catastrophizing, congratulations, you’re probably anxious. If they are dominated by all the ways in which you have been wronged, you’re probably being led by anger. If they are dominated by the sensation that nothing matters or you are regularly engaging in numbing or avoidance behaviors, you might be shut down. It’s also likely that you swing between all three.
What this tells you is that your nervous system is dysregulated (i.e., you are in fight, flight, or freeze mode). Your physical health is suffering, your ability to concentrate and follow through is suffering, and you’re really not much good to anyone. But that’s great news! You now have something productive to focus on. And you should not be worrying about anyone else who you are not directly responsible for keeping alive until you can get this figured out.
The even better news is that learning to regulate your nervous system is a huge gift to everyone around you. Humans are herd animals and one of the underappreciated ways in which we communicate is through nervous system co-regulation (or dysregulation as the case may be). Our bodies pick up on the arousal level of everyone around us and we tend to unconsciously match the general arousal level of the group. If you can learn to regulate your system and stay regulated, even when others around you are freaking out, you will help to break the cycles of panic and rage that groups are so prone to.
This is important because generally nothing good comes from action that is taken out of rage or panic, but we’re collectively doing a lot of that these days.
Because this idea of nervous system regulation can itself be a bit overwhelming, it’s best to start as simply as possible. First, you can practice the belief that your thoughts create your emotions. This allows you to start taking accountability for your own emotional experience which will allow you to break free of unconscious co-dysregulation.
Second, learn one breathing technique you can use when you feel anxious, angry, or shut down. This will physically help your nervous system to shift out of fight/flight/freeze and into a regulated state. Staying in that state will get easier over time, especially combined with thought work.
If you’re ready to dive into more detail, you can Google “polyvagal theory,” or reach out to me and we can really nerd out about it.
Are my basic needs met?
This is a bit more straightforward. Do you have food, shelter, clothing, access to reliable transportation, access to healthcare, a stable source of income sufficient to reliably meet your basic needs (including saving for your stable future), and a stable sense of connection and community?
If you answer “no” to any of those (including the last one!), you would be well-justified in focusing on that before trying to solve the world’s problems. You need these things to be a fully-functioning healthy individual. And again, this is a contribution to the greater good. Healthy, fully-functioning individuals are needed to create healthy, fully-functioning communities. Healthy, fully-functioning communities are needed to create healthy, fully-functioning states, and so on. Everything is everything else. It’s not “selfish” to start with you. It’s totally necessary.
And then what?
Okay, so now that you are regulated, healthy, and fully-functioning you’ll probably actually have the ability to make this decision yourself. But I will give you one tip: focus your extremely limited life energy to not more than one major cause. And you will have the most impact if you choose one that is connected to your immediate community. For example, I feel that sustainable and equitable access to food is an important issue globally, so I volunteer with my local farmer’s markets.
As far as how to think about global tragedies, my current thought is this: we have very limited individual capacity to move the needle on this, so giving it too much attention is probably not productive. We have delegated responsibility for the details to our government, so using the mechanisms we have as constituents makes sense. (Like contacting your representatives to make sure your positions on issues are known.) You may argue that this is ineffective because our government sucks, and I wouldn’t fight you too hard on that. In that case, your cause might be politics and godspeed to you.
If you have the financial resources (only if your basic needs are already met), giving money to organizations that are working to make a concrete difference in the issues you care about is probably the most impactful way for you to contribute. And having a fair amount of experience working with nonprofits, I can tell you that these organizations would likely agree with this.
Beyond that, I really don’t believe it serves anyone to make yourself miserable over every tragedy that every other human on earth is facing. Working to make the world a better place from you outwards is most effective and depends on you having the attention and energy bandwidth to do so.
