Staying curious
As we passed the one year mark in pandemic life, I have been thinking a lot about kindness. Kindness towards each other, and ourselves. I recently came across this article with a clickbait title around how the pandemic has made many people more selfish. As a collective, we have been feeling more pressure and stress on an ongoing basis, and as a result, our innate impulses have led to acts of self preservation and little extension of care beyond ourselves and our nuclear family. On the one hand it makes sense, though admittedly I did not click in and read the whole article because the title alone was depressing. I can see how we might have faced a major loss of empathy, but I think that is directly related to this uncontrollable, unimaginable and unpredictable circumstance that we somehow globally find ourselves in.
Clinical psychologist Christine Runyan says that this stress, felt in varying degrees across the board, has stimulated many peoples’ fight or flight systems. Since there has been no declarative ‘end’ to the pandemic, this subtle yet constant uncertainty has impeded our parasympathetic nervous system from taking over (which regulates our rest and recovery). This stress can often lead to selfish or singular thinking, difficulty to focus and a rigidity that can sometimes cause an inability to hear differing viewpoints clearly. This year, she said, has shown her that “as much as we try to create so much ‘connection,’ we actually see how insufficient it is” (it being the structures we have created for ourselves to stay connected).
Staying connected or reconnecting to people to stay grounded feels harder right now. But despite the pressure and fear that has become more prevalent, our ability to be compassionate and kind is not lost- it might just be buried deeper down. Kindness is innate; we are born good and kind, says Professor Keltner from UCBerkeley. At Art of Kindness, we talked about how this innate kindness stems back to Darwinism. However, so does our propensity to be selfish (a school of thought some might recognize from Richard Dawkins). So in this fight between these two natural feelings, how do we activate our kindness and empathy genes? While it’s important to raise awareness around what is happening in a pandemic world so people do not feel alone, it is also important to emphasize that this loss of empathy we might be facing will not be permanent. But in the meantime, we need to take care of our ability to to be kind.
One way we can take care of ourselves right now is by continuing to be curious. Dopamine is linked to the process of curiosity. It’s responsible for assigning and retaining reward values from information gained. Furthermore, more recent research shows that greater amounts of dopamine are released when the stimulus is unfamiliar, the reward unknown. So being curious and engaging with our senses and things that are foreign to us is extremely beneficial because our senses are the information source for our nervous system. Through our senses we can travel- we can imagine and we can engage with memories and stories, bypassing our thinking brain and straight into feeling. Straight into connecting.
Engaging with our senses can help us feel comforted, hopeful and pleasant. This experience can be induced by different forms: listening to music, lighting a candle, going for a walk, and looking at art. We are reminded often, though maybe not enough, that engaging with the arts directly impacts our ability to be empathetic. It can help break myopathy, rigidity or fear that has arisen from the stress on our nervous systems that promotes our selfishness. It can help us flex our kindness muscles. What we look at and how we nourish our creative selves has a direct impact on our wellbeing. Engaging with the arts and being curious with the stories can compel us back to connecting — springing forth a refreshed desire to share these experiences with others. So as we move towards reconnection in person all over the world, don’t forget to keep seeing, stay curious and look at art. It reminds us that while separated, we are still interconnected.
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/05/731346268/kindness-vs-cruelty-helping-kids-hear-the-better-angels-of-their-nature
