"What If We Stopped Reacting to Everything?"

The Bravery of the Pause: Choosing to Respond, Not React

Photo by Bogdan Farca on Unsplash

Do you know what’s brave?

Responding instead of reacting when you can.

You know what’s really hard?

Responding instead of reacting when you can.

I know! I know! Reacting is important a lot of the time. Like below, where Jack the Puppy decided to eat an old sugar container he pulled off a shelf in the gardening shed.

When we react, it’s instantaneous (or pretty close), right? Our amygdala (that little bit of our brain that puts us into fight or flight) gets in control and we’re like, “Boom! React! Survive! Do this! We must respond quickly to the danger of the dragon attack!”

That danger might just be a cranky email. There is no dragon attacking.

Our amygdala does not care. It just wants us to survive that cranky email.

And that’s the thing. When we react to survive to a stimuli like an email that isn’t really a threat, we often respond in a frustrated/defensive way.

That happens with social media posts that outrage us all the time, right?

But when we do that and don’t take a pause it can hurt our reputation. It can hurt a relationship with others even. We can make things worse instead of making things better, which will give more for our amygdala to do. So yay for the amygdala I guess.

Not so much yay for the rest of us.

There are great things about reacting. In an emergency? It’s super helpful a lot of times to get right to it. In high-pressure situations? Same thing.

But the negatives are that our reactions aren’t all that logical a lot of the time. They aren’t deliberate and we can quickly lose control of ourself and the situation.

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POLARIZED THINKING

All of this makes me think of polarized thinking.

We all sort of settle ourselves into a world of polarities. You are this or you are that.

I was recently in a meeting on Zoom while I was sick and my voice was struggling because it was that kind of sickness and everyone else in the meeting was very excited about a potential question to political candidates posed as do you see the town as a community or as a commodity.

I was not into the question. I loved it as a sound bite and thought it was brilliantly crafted (there was alliteration!), but I didn’t love it in its polarization, that whole us-vs-them aspect of it.

Life isn’t that simple. Government isn’t either. There is a whole lot of nuance in this world. And when we reduce things to this or that it helps solidify us as a team but it also keeps us from making bigger teams.

Robert Talisse wrote for the Greater Good,

“Belief polarization, also called group polarization, is different. Interaction with like-minded others transforms people into more extreme versions of themselves. These more extreme selves are also overly confident and therefore more prepared to engage in risky behavior.

“Belief polarization also leads people to embrace more intensely negative feelings toward people with different views. As they shift toward extremism, they come to define themselves and others primarily in terms of partisanship. Eventually, politics expands beyond policy ideas and into entire lifestyles.

“But that’s not all. As I explain in my book, as society sorts into “liberal” and “conservative” lifestyles, people grow more invested in policing the borders between “us” and “them.” And as people’s alliances focus on hostility toward those who disagree, they become more conformist and intolerant of differences among allies.”

Whew. That’s a lot, right? But it’s important.

I think the more we react rather than respond the easier it is for us to lean into both belief polarization and polarized thinking.

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WHAT IS POLARIZED THINKING?

It’s that all or nothing way of thinking.

It’s about thinking all is good or all is bad.

It’s a pattern of thinking that can take over and maybe keep us from seeing the world or our community as being as beautifully complex and intricate as it actually is.

Mind Chicago has some great examples of this at its extreme, which I’m quoting below:

“Polarized Thinking: “Because I make a lot of mistakes at work, I am a bad person”

Mindful Thinking: “I’m new to this job, so I’m making mistakes. They do not diminish my worth as a person.”

Polarized Thinking: “My friend is always late - they don’t value me.”

Mindful Thinking: “I’m feeling frustrated and bothered that my friend is late. I can be clear with them on my feelings and consider a different strategy when it comes to meeting up because I know they are trying the best they can.””

You can see that difference, right? I think it’s a lot like the difference between responding and reacting. When we react (maybe sending an angry text to our friend the moment they are one minute late), it’s a lot different from when we respond.

And as a person, I’m trying to stay away from those sound bite moments that are great at polarizing and stripping away the intricacies of the community, making it easier for us to go into polarized thinking and reactions instead of responses.

Maybe you will, too?

It’s hard! But I think it’s potentially worth it.

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QUICK NOTE

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COMFORTING

I also have a once-a-week Substack over here and it’s mellow and I share a poem (not my own, God forbid, there’s nothing comforting about those), soup recipe, and other comforting things there. It’s just quietly hanging out there. You can come hang out, too.