1: What we feel impacts what we see. And hear.
“People who are scared take in a scene differently,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
“Our ears, for example, immediately adjust to focus on high and low frequencies—a scream or a growl—rather than midrange frequencies, which include normal human speech,” David notes. “Anxiety narrows our attention and diminishes our peripheral vision.”
When we feel happy or joyful, our peripheral vision expands.
2: Which is why empathetic people are so valuable.
“A person who feels safe because of the reliable and empathetic presence of others will see the world as a wider, more open, and happier place,” David suggests.
Being empathetic is not just about the words we say. It’s how we make people feel. “Becoming more empathetic is not some intellectual enterprise,” he notes. “It is training our body to respond in open and interactive ways.”
When someone has experienced a traumatic event, to heal they must “live through experiences that contradict what happened to them earlier in their lives,” David notes.
“Someone who has been abused has to experience intimacy that is safe,” he writes. “Someone who has been abandoned has to experience others who stayed.”
We experience these feelings at the cellular level. “The rational brain is incapable of talking the emotional body out of its own reality,” David notes, “so the body has to experience a different reality firsthand.”
Empathetic people provide that physical presence.
3: “When two people are close to each other and trust each other,” he notes, “they may be just talking over coffee or they may be hugging, but something is communicated from body to body.
“They physically calm each other’s viscera, they co-modulate each other’s heart rates to produce ‘cardiac calming.'”
Columbia University physician Martha Welch calls this condition “co-regulation.” Being together physically produces “higher vagal tone,” a comprehensive state that occurs when our gut and innards feel secure and serene.”
When we have a higher vagal tone, we experience life differently. Literally. “As the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett writes in her book How Emotions Are Made, “You may think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: What you feel alters your sight and hearing.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Are there a person or people in my life who make me feel calm and secure? How would I need to show up to have this impact on the people I love and care about?
Action: Experiment showing up this way.
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