Your Body in Conflict, Part 3

Your Parasympathetic Response

Your parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for getting you back from your high state of arousal, allowing your cognitive functions to come back online, your digestion to resume functioning, and lowering your breathing and heart rate to more comfortable levels. Clearly, when we are in conflict or negotiation, this is a much-preferred state to be in.

The Vagus Nerve

However, there is one response that is governed by the PNS, specifically the vagus nerve, that can really throw you off. When we sense threat, one branch of the vagus nerve (the dorsal vagal branch), sets us up for a very primitive protection response. This is one of the oldest responses that we have and which we often see in animals who are on the verge of being eaten by a predator: playing dead.

Playing Dead

Depending on the acuteness and level of the threat, as well as the general state of our nervous system, this response can vary between mental and emotional disconnection from the social environment to a disembodied “not being here”, to actual physical collapse. This extreme depression of our normal responses to environmental and social cues serves to trick the attacker into thinking that we are already dead, so no point in trying to kill us. Generally, not a useful response in situations of social conflict and negotiation.

If you think that this must be a rare occurrence, think again. Most of us live stressful lives where our mental and emotional reserves are often on the verge of depletion. In this situation, the level of threat that we experience from relatively minor conflicts and other threats can be enormously magnified.

 Most of us, at one time or another, have experienced a feeling of complete deflation and a desire to crawl under the covers for days after a nasty remark from a powerful or important person in our lives. At other times, in a conflict situation, we may experience a feeling of complete intellectual and emotional shutdown; not knowing what to say or how to respond to something while in hindsight you know exactly what you should have said or done!

In short: when we are in a situation of prolonged conflict with seemingly no way out, we are at higher risk of dorsal vagus reactivity, and therefore despondent behavior and intellectual shutdown.

Consequently, when we look at conflict from the perspective of the sympathetic nervous system on the one hand and the para-sympathetic on the other, we want to cultivate the ability to stay in -or otherwise return as soon as possible to- a balanced performance between these two branches of the autonomic nervous system.  What does this look like? We want to have enough arousal and energy coming from the SNS to be able to energetically make our point, but also enough calm, intellectual and emotional openness, through an optimally activated PNS, to effectively engage with others in a process of emotional give and take.

It is important to realize that your conflict partner(s) deal with the same processes and what’s more: they can feel where you are in your process, if they have learned to be aware of their own and other’s physical expressions of sympathetic and para-sympathetic arousal.

Shortcuts to Rebalancing the Autonomic Nervous System

So, what can we do to balance our sympathetic and parasympathetic arousal? While we are unlikely to fully control these autonomic responses, there are a few techniques available to us that can dampen high states of arousal. The most practical and useful techniques that I use are a combination of a certain breathing pattern and a focus on specific physical sensations. Granted, these are not techniques that will be available to you without a significant amount of practice, but they are well worth the effort.

The breathing technique is to inhale deeply, and very slowly release, taking at least twice as long for your out-breath as you did for your in-breath. This technique will decrease your heart rate and increase the oxygen supply to you brain.

Focusing on specific physical sensations involves choosing an area of your body, such as your legs, buttocks, hands or shoulders that you monitor for increased tension with the intent to keep those body parts as tension free as possible. This technique will allow you to notice when the tension is rising and relax before the stress levels get so high that you cannot influence it anymore. Do not focus on anything that you can’t actively relax, such as your heart trying to explode out of your chest, or your churning guts or your splitting headache. Using these techniques will also allow you to decrease the threat of tunnel-vision that we referenced in our discussion of the sympathetic response, thereby regaining our ability to think creatively about solutions to our conflict.

Good luck with you practice!

Your Body in Conflict, Part 2

A slightly deeper dive into the Autonomic Nervous System

In part 1 of this series about the body in conflict we referenced the fact that the emotions and the bodily responses that we experience during conflict -or any life event for that matter- are mediated by the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). Let’s take a look at what that really means.

The autonomic nervous system is the part of our nervous system that we generally don’t have control over, meaning that it will do its job without our conscious direction. It is roughly divided in three parts:

 

• The Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS); responsible for readying the body for action through increased heart and breathing rate, release of cortisol and epinephrine (adrenaline) and a host of other responses that come in handy when one needs to work, fight or flee.

 

 

• The Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS); responsible for getting us to sleep, digesting our food, sexual arousal, repairing damage to bodily systems and other mechanisms to keep the system in working order.

 

• The Enteric Nervous System (ENS);                in addition to obvious tasks related to digestive processes, the ENS is responsible for the production of the majority of serotonin in our body. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter (chemical messenger) that contributes to a wide array of bodily functions but is best known for its role in creating a feeling of well-being and happiness. The ENS has a mind of its own and works largely independent of the brain, which is why it is an important additional source of information: that gut feeling!

 

 

As stated in part 1, how we experience conflict and how we respond to conflict is in large part determined by the state of our autonomic nervous system. Now that we have identified the three parts that make up the ANS, we can take a closer look at these interactions.

Your Sympathetic Response

Conflict is always the consequence of a perception of threat. This threat can be physical, emotional, financial or status related. When we perceive threat, the autonomic nervous system jumps into action. Generally, we see activation of the sympathetic nervous system as the primary response; a readying of the body to respond to the threat by fighting or fleeing. Our heart and breathing rate increases, we start sweating, our blood pressure rises. While these responses are very useful when we are actually going to fight or run away, they generally are less helpful when we have a conflict at work or with our spouse.

One of the less useful features -in a modern context- of the fight or flight response is the narrowing of our conscious awareness. The body is primarily focused on survival and less important things, like hanging onto one’s job, are not so much in the picture. We also have less access to the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which enables us to perform high level cognitive functions, such as situational analysis. Instead, the brain makes quick and dirty decisions of the yes- or- no and black- and- white variety. Obviously, this does not support thoughtful and nuanced discussion about difficult subjects.

In part 3 of this series we’ll discuss the parasympathetic nervous system and its role and contributions in conflict situations.

Your Body in Conflict, Part 1:

Emotions, Expressions and the Autonomic Nervous System

Conflict is an inescapable aspect of everybody’s social life. No matter how great a communicator you are or however nice a person; you will encounter conflict. While many people try to avoid engaging in conflict, sooner or later we will have to confront it, or suffer significant consequences to our health, productivity, relationships and happiness.

Which way are you going with this?

Communication rules our Life!

Conflict, ultimately, is always the consequence of something that was communicated, not communicated or poorly communicated. Because communication is the lifeblood of any relationship, an inability to fully and precisely communicate what you intend has consequences that may range from not being able to reach one’s goals to intractable and paralyzing conflict.

What are you communicating?    

 We are virtually always communicating something; by the way we dress, what and the way we speak, our facial expressions, how we hold and move our body and even by the way we breathe or sweat.

What we communicate affects our audience first on a physical-emotional level and only secondarily on an intellectual level. This is even more acute in conflict situations. To manage our conflict situations effectively, it is crucial that we are both able to accurately read what the other party to the conflict is communicating as well as what we are communicating on this physical-emotional level.

The Stress of Conflict

Conflict situations are inherently stressful. Depending on our personal and professional history we have all developed a set of skills and defense mechanisms to deal-or not deal- with it. Hopefully, our conflict behaviors are heavily weighted towards social-emotional skills and less towards defense-mechanisms.

A defense-mechanism is a way to cope with the unpleasant emotional, physical and psychological effects of the conflict on us. It can take many forms such as aggression, dismissiveness, defensiveness, rationalization, avoidance and infinite combinations of those. I’d like to touch just lightly on one defense mechanism that I have observed in my personal life as well as in my capacity as a mediator and communication coach.

What are you saying to me..?!!!

Defensiveness in Conflict 

 Defensiveness. This is likely the most discussed and recognizable of the common defense-mechanisms. A person is defensive if they are pre-occupied with the need to come up with reasons and excuses for the behaviors or transgressions that they are accused of. Often it will take the form of a counterattack: “but you…”, or “I did it because you always…”. The problem with defensiveness is that it interferes with your ability to actually listen to what is being said, much less to understand the emotional impact the alleged behavior has had on your conflict-partner.

Listen if you want to be heard…                                                                                         

Being able to truly listen and acknowledge how the other person feels is not the same as admitting to the behavior or its alleged intent. People, generally, are only able to listen to your side of the story if and when they feel that they have fully been heard by you. This is where truly skilled communication comes in. To allow your conflict partner to feel truly heard, it takes more than “I hear you”.

I feel you!

Emotions Speak Louder Than Words   

More important than the words, is the emotional message that you are conveying. The emotional message is expressed by your body language, your facial expression, the tone and rhythm of your voice. These bodily expressions are closely tied to the state of your nervous system. We’ll discuss the role the autonomic nervous system plays in communication -and conflict situations specifically, in a future post. Suffice it to say right now, that your ability to be aware of and intervene in your autonomic nervous system responses, largely determines your success in managing conflict.

Emotions are experienced and expressed in and by the body. Conflict always has a strong emotional component. If we are not emotionally invested in an issue, then there is no point in having conflict about it. Body awareness is therefore a crucial component of being a skilled and effective communicator and conflict manager; what you are not aware of, you cannot manage…

Globalism, Multi-Culturalism and your Brain

How an increasingly global, interconnected world will challenge you to adapt or perish.

Our brains and body have evolved over the last few million years in response to a number of factors. Going from primarily quadruped to biped, traveling larger distances to forage for food, using tools, developing sophisticated symbolic language and living in increasingly complex communities, among them.

Pressures and opportunities

It seems reasonable to say that the rapid changes in our human societies in the last one thousand years and even more so in the last one hundred, have accelerated pressures and therefore opportunities for human evolution. Of course, when speaking of evolutionary change in species, this time-frame is just an insignificant blip. It is, however, reasonable to assume that we will continue on this path for the foreseeable future -if we don’t destroy ourselves first.

Mono- or multicultural adaptation

As our world metaphorically shrinks, we have two basic ways of responding to the demands that this shrinkage brings with it. We can either retrench and try to hold on to what is no more (our culturally unchallenged, homogeneous environments of yore) or we can try to figure out what adaptive behaviors, both in our short individual lives and from an evolutionary perspective, will serve us best.

We can see how people in all realms of life are trying to figure out which path to take, be it in politics; reactionary or progressive, in work life; follow the old career pathways that worked for previous generations or reinvent what the meaning of work and career should be now, in communal life; build community online or in person, and in the way we communicate; iPhone or eye-contact.

It is likely that adaptive behavior will look differently depending on the person, their stage of life and development, and from an evolutionary perspective; what allows us to survive and thrive in the short term may turn out destructive for the species in the long run.

The future is global and multicultural

What does this all have to do with the title of this post? The long-term trend for human behavior, adaptation and evolution has been in the direction of travelling larger distances, dealing with new physical and social environments and developing increasingly sophisticated ways of seeing, communicating with, and interpreting the social world. It has helped us to conquer the planet -often to the detriment of other species- and prevented us from going the way of the Dodo and Dinosaurs as well as other competing hominins (=modern humans, extinct human species and our immediate ancestors).

The challenge

It seems that we have reached an inflection point in human history where our technical prowess maybe taxing our emotional, social and cultural flexibility and ability to the breaking point, at least as far as it concerns current generations. Here again we confront the question: do we fight it? Or do we acquire the skills that we need to adapt as fast as we possibly can? If history is any indication, then it’s not much of a choice: adapt or perish. Given the fact that our line of homonins has been able to adapt quite spectacularly, I’m optimistic that we will.

What does it take?

Call me biased, but I believe that the glue that hold our complex societies together is communication. We have evolved to be a super-social, interdependent species. However, being a competent communicator in one’s own cultural environment doesn’t necessarily translate to competency across cultures.

To be a competent cross-cultural communicator one first has to learn to truly see and preferably feel-in-to the shared principles -with their associated emotional significance- that guide people’s behaviors in other cultures. It is only then that we can infuse our communications -verbal and otherwise- with the sensitivity-to-context that makes them effective.

What does it do?

Practicing multicultural communication is a high level emotional and cognitive skill. We are challenged to use our highest level emotional, cultural and executive intelligence to piece together a new reality that was not truly visible to us before. As with everything; practice makes us better, and what we practice is what we become. Becoming a competent multicultural communicator allows us to roam the world, opens doors, enables us to truly see, and empowers us to pick and choose what we want to engage with in order to live our best life.

The practice

Becoming a better communicator in any (multi) cultural context always starts at the same point. We practice listening deeply to those who are different from us. We take advantage of the fact that we are all humans with the same basic mechanisms for meaning making, the same basic fears, needs and desires. We all wish to be seen for who we truly are, we require safety, connection, dignity and respect. When we listen from that place, we facilitate expanding our ability to see beyond our own cultural limitations and to understand what we could not before.

As always, I look forward to your comments, questions and experiences.

P.S.  A Photographic Cultural Voyage to Andalusia

I was recently made aware of a unique opportunity to expand your cultural horizon in an exciting and extremely fun way. The Cultural Psychologist/Executive Coach Anne Ferrier and International Photographer Wayne Eastep have banded together to offer a cultural photography voyage to the South of Spain. The goal is to guide you to see Andalusian Culture and Landscape through a new lens -literally and figuratively. Jam-packed with cultural experiences, cultural competency and photography classes, it promises to be both an experience of a life-time as well as a life-changing personal growth opportunity. For more information go to:

www.globalcitizentours.com/workshops/