Cultivating Compassion When Things Feel Scary

Are you finding it harder than usual to give others the benefit of the doubt? Are you judging yourself or others for being overly cautious or overly reckless? This is normal. When people feel threatened or afraid, we tend to judge others more harshly. 

Fear brings out our self-protective behaviours, for good and bad. The COVID-19 pandemic threatens all of us. We are all afraid and functioning with less information than we want.  We must rely on experts or make decisions that we feel unqualified to make. 

When others make different choices for themselves that we are making, it tempts us to question our assessments and their trustworthiness.

How can we cultivate compassion in these times? 

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Bite-sized chunks of wisdom about self-leadership for you to chew on.

Cultivating Compassion When Things Feel Scary
Episode 22

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Today, I want to talk a little bit about the challenges of compassion in an age of anxiety.

One of the things that I've noticed, talking to friends, family, and clients, is how many people who, before the COVID-19 pandemic, were generally compassionate people, generally found a way to give other people the benefit of the doubt, to be generous in their offers, who when they weren't compassionate to other people, tried to understand why, and really wanted to be better and more generous. And lots of them are having a really, really hard time right now, and are finding themselves irritable and not as generous as they would like to be, seeing people and wanting to get accusatory and name-calling, and they want to know what's going on. Why have they become meaner people at this point?

It's totally normal.

Compassion is a part of the human condition that is hardwired in, but it is hardwired in the later developing parts of our brains. Our most instinctive, oldest brains don't function with compassion. They see people as objects, and they activate when we are afraid. When we are afraid, we get tunnel vision. We treat people as objects, rather than as people. We operate from fear, and so we fear other people rather than love, where we connect with other people.

And it's just not possible to be in an amygdala-driven, threat assessment mental space and have access to our compassion. The two parts of the brain don't talk to each other.

We see this under normal conditions, in places where we have developed defensive, protective mechanisms against other people, when we had experiences where we were rejected, or punished, or humiliated for taking some kind of interpersonal risk, and so we have established that it's threatening to get the response that we get when we do those things, and then we don't take those interpersonal risks.

Whereas when we're coming from a place of love, and openness, and connection, we find our compassion and our empathy, and we do have the courage to take those interpersonal risks, and to bounce back from taking them, and to trust that we can be generous without being taken advantage of. If we are afraid of being taken advantage of, then we start seeing the person as an object again, and we put up those defence mechanisms, and we don't function from compassion.

The problem with not having access to our compassion is that if we don't have access to our compassion, we don't have access to connection and belonging, and as human beings, we need connection and belonging.

Now, one of the things that we've been seeing quite a lot of is people trying to expand their social bubble so that they create a community that they think of as safe, and "Our bubble: we're safe, and everybody else is dangerous." And in fact, we want it so badly, that lots of people are breaking the social distancing rules in ways that make social distancing less effective, and they're justifying it because they need the connection, so they create their safe bubble, or their perceived safe bubble, and once they've got a perceived safe bubble, their sense of connection, and love, and belonging is satisfied, and they have compassion in that circle.

Of course, this is tricky, because fear permeates everything, and even within our bubbles, even if we think that they're safe from the pandemic, we still have all of the same interpersonal risks that we have to make when we are in relationships with people, and so fear is still very much a possibility, and in fact, people who haven't learned to live in close quarters with each other with ease and equanimity are finding this lockdown period very challenging.

So, compassion is particularly challenging now, because every other person is actually a threat. Every other person is a possible carrier of a virus that has a substantial risk of serious illness, with long-term consequences, or possibly even death, and so we are justifiably afraid of every other person in the world, particularly because we know that there's a long period of transmission of the virus before people get sick, and we know that there is asymptomatic transmission, so even people who look healthy are dangerous. If we knew that only people who looked sick were dangerous, then we could isolate them, and feel safer.

So, compassion right now is an incredibly difficult thing to cultivate, because we're fighting against a threat assessment system that is saying people are dangerous. But what about the compassionate self?

I'm going to offer you some tools for cultivating compassion, but first I want to offer you some thoughts about what makes it safe to cultivate compassion in an age of anxiety.

Compassion is what is required for us to create a sense of connection, community, and belonging with people. It is this sense of connection, community, and belonging that brings out prosocial behavior in people instinctively. If we cultivate compassion for others, it helps us help them feel safe, and when they feel safer, they become more generous, so there's a virtuous cycle there, in terms of social interaction.

We do not need to be terrified of the virus. We need to be appropriately protected against the virus. Fear is a warning signal from our emotional systems that we need to pay attention to a risk. If we keep conscious of the risk, and we use our compassionate self, which is also creative, and from that place, choose to take responsibility for mitigating the risks, then we don't need the fear to keep reminding us. And once we take those actions of taking responsibility, we can let the fear go a little bit.

Now, for most of us, the fear-based response is deeply, deeply ingrained in us, and we actively need to cultivate the compassionate response. This is because we have a natural tendency to learn fear-based responses faster than the opposite, and in general, unless we spend 75% of our time, or more, coming from a place of compassionate caring and openheartedness, we default to a downward spiral that is fear-based and self-protective.

So, if you're finding yourself in a place and time when you are functioning predominantly from fear and self-protection, it takes effort to practice and build the compassion so that you develop the habit of spending 75% of your time or more thinking and processing from that compassionate space. If you're used to the language of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, this is about defaulting to the parasympathetic nervous system.

So how can you do that? There is the classic Buddhist practice of metta, which if you follow me on Instagram or Facebook and you see my stories, there is a metta practice that I post almost every day, and that consists of saying in your mind, or aloud, over and over again, because you want to actually create the neural pathways that support this way of thinking, first by thinking about yourself, then by thinking about someone neutral, then by thinking about someone who's been kind to you, and then by thinking of someone who is an opponent of some sort.

And the practice is to think of this person and to wish them ease. You just express the wish for them to have ease, "May you have ease. May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you be strong." These wishes, we practice saying them, "May you feel happy. May you feel safe. May you be healthy. May you feel at ease." We say these over and over again, in order to wire in these as our primary attitudes. And we say them once thinking about ourselves, or for a period of time thinking about ourselves, and then for a period of time thinking about someone neutral, and then for a period of time thinking about someone who has been good to us, and then for a period of time thinking about someone who is an opponent of some sort. The idea is to expand our ability to be compassionate by creating new neural pathways that connect these compassionate thoughts with thoughts of each of these different people. So that's one tool.

Another tool you can use is purely cognitive. When you see someone behaving in an antisocial way or a defensive way, you can remind yourself that that behavior is a sign that they are feeling afraid. They are scared. And then you can cultivate your curiosity. What is it that they're afraid of right now? What are they protecting themselves from? As soon as you start engaging your curiosity and start thinking about their perspective, you are training yourself in compassion. You are adding to the percentage of time that you are driven by that parasympathetic nervous system, and you are creative and able to feel connected and not defended.

Another thing you can try doing when you see someone that you're not feeling compassionate towards is you can try to imagine who they were when they were a playful, innocent child, before the world had weighted them down, before they had become afraid of whatever they are now defended against. Imagine them as a child, a young, playful, innocent child, and let that soften your heart towards them, because that child is still living within them, and all of the bad behaviors, antisocial behavior that you're witnessing, that you're having a hard time being compassionate about, is designed to protect that child.

And there's a final approach to increasing compassion that is really counterintuitive, and that is that if you are able to separate the part of you that feels the fear from the part of you that chooses what to do about the fear, you start to be able to have the choice, and the choice allows you to decide whether you are going to let the fear rule you or whether you're going to find compassion. And the way to build that witness is to start small.

You can really train that witness by focusing in detail on the sensations that you are getting from any one part of your sensory input, so from your sight, your sound, your interoception, your taste, your smell, touch. Focus intently on that, and when you notice that your mind has put thoughts in, notice those and turn your attention back to the sensation that you're focusing on.

Practicing the noticing and turning back to the sensation that you're focusing on is training the habit of observing yourself, and when you have the habit and the skill to be able to observe yourself, then you start to be able to have the choice. "Oh, I notice I'm afraid. I'm going to choose to activate my compassion by imagining them as a child, by reminding myself that they're scared, and getting curious about what they're scared about, or by using them as an object of metta practice."

Metta practice, you can do in the moment. You can be on a Zoom call with somebody, and they can be irritating you, and you can take a deep breath and, thinking inside your head, think, "May they feel safe. May they be happy. May they feel at ease."

I hope some of these tools will be useful if you find yourself being less compassionate than you want to be while you are under the stress of this time. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you feel safe. May you feel at ease.

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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.