Well…for most of you reading this, the election results are probably not what you were hoping for.
To the extent that you found the results shocking– if that’s one of the words that comes to mind (or to tongue-tip) to describe the state you find yourself in, you would be dealing with endogenous opioids in the body. Endogenous opioids are the body’s endogenous painkillers, and depending on how forcefully and systemically they are released, will undergird a continuum that ranges from feeling spacey, forgetful, or ungrounded, to feeling really out-of-it, surreal, dream-like, or dissociated. A pretty good gauge of how much un-metabolized opioids are moving through your system is how far along this continuum you find yourself.
Endogenous opioid release is the neurochemistry of the lifethreat response, the neurology of which is the sub-diaphragmatic vagal systems in the guts. The place where you experience a gut feeling.
Safety originates in the guts.
So to the extent that you are finding your posture collapsed, not having interoceptive contact with your deep belly, not feeling grounded, your Grounding System has been shifted into a lifethreat response.
For some, depending on your context, geography, immediate assessment of safety/ threat, etc., this might be a sort of fog you are moving through, whereas for others it comes may come in waves of upheaval, or feeling ungrounded. Understanding it as the autonomic correlates of overwhelm and lifethreat help you to orient into how to work with this as it arises in the body.
Without being interventionist, sometimes languishing in this state is not particularly useful. Sometimes staying in contact with a sense of feeling shocked, and hopeless, and outraged, and defeated might be useful.
You may find that you can move the levers on the lifethreat response, to the extent that you can grasp them, in one of two different directions. Maybe have a look at the two options below, and notice if one is more appealing to you. You could also alternate between them.
One is toward anger/fear (high-energy states involving the Movement System), which can help metabolize some of this energy. Going into your car, rolling up the windows, and screaming at the top of your lungs would be a way to metabolize some of this energy. Putting on gloves and hitting the wall, or pounding a punching bag, might be another. As you do this, maintain it as an awareness practice by utilizing movement to harness the sense of being overwhelmed and transform it into self-protective responses. As these begin to flow through you, notice if you can begin to interocept in the deep belly, finding the inward tone of your digestive tract, feeling your viscera from inside. Let the body move, let yourself belch and fart and shake if the body wants to do this. Give the body permission to rage, to thrash. Let gestures of self-protection move through your arms, legs, face, voice, etc. (this transit harnesses adrenaline)
The other direction you can move is toward an affiliative tend-and-befriend or intimacy response. This means circling up with trusted others or a trusted friend or companion. Just holding one another, or holding space for one another with no agenda; simply to witness and be present with one another, is a way to do this. This creates a space where grief, anger, whatever is overwhelming can simply begin to move through. Some of us can do this in nature in communion with the living world. Some of us might do it with our arms around the neck of our dogs. By allowing ourselves to be touched by grief, in a place where there is enough holding, enough oxytocin, we can begin to metabolize these energies as tears, as shaking, letting the animal body move through what it needs to move through. (this transit harnesses oxytocin)
Without sugar-coating the severity of what is happening politically, the site where all of this moves through your experience is the terrain of the body. And our ability to continue to metabolize, rather than accumulate, the allostatic load of these days is determinative of our ability to have access to our deepest choice-making and strategic awareness, which we are going to need. The body here is the site of exploration.
One of the things that this election, and its outcome will likely surface for many of us is acute contact with our moment-to-moment sense of safety, which is something that is usually happening in the background, e.g., outside of conscious awareness. If you did yourself the kindness, for the next several days, of really paying attention to this–of noticing when you felt less safe, and giving your body extra time to attend to this, make accommodations, and actively seek safety (maybe you leave a meeting early, maybe you go to your car, maybe you spend more time in the fortress of your home, etc.), as well as noting when you are feeling more safe, more seen, more able to fully be yourself, and really allowing yourself to receive the nourishment of these moments, it would likely support your deeper experience of wellbeing.
Should you be interested in obtaining greater fluency with the entire map of Autonomics, and understanding how we can harness it to turn on the primary drivers of flourishing, The Neurobiology of Connection will arrive in hardcover November 30, and is available in digital format (epub) right now.
gracias, Gabriel. your piece lit up a more 'chronic' pattern iye had aleady 'known' about intellectually but not seen in this more focussed waye : far beyond any immediate 'state' that maybbe arising (mostly a sense of 'neutrality' that is borne of stress-exhaustion), and having worked into thy earlier drafts and thus somehow more into the roots of the thing, your post allows mye to contextualise (and i ye also have in minde thy post on the Tennis Court Happening...) iy seem to start seeing more mutability than iye had hitherto. Needs must, that iye work with thy pre-publication draft hard copy and have no access to thy final version, nevertheless, seedlings and dandelion heads seem to be blown by thy breath so that here and there, they whisper something of what iye need when iye may be in the moment of needing such as cometh.