A mindful pause takes you from reactive to responsive

Why take a mindful pause? As all human beings, you will at times be affected by pressure. You cannot fake being calm. To respond effectively to the situation, your priority is to find a way to restore calm. It helps to understand why we are reactive. 

Why we are reactive

To do this, you have to understand how deeply ingrained in us it is to be reactive. It is something that has been wired in us through the ages. Think about it in terms of evolutionary value. An animal or a primitive human who over-reacts might be wrong part of the time, but they will survive and have offspring. Those who under-react might be right some of the time, but they die and don’t reproduce when they’re wrong. In other words: evolution has favored those of our ancestors who tended to be very reactive. We inherited this trait from them.

Now, while this trait has been valuable evolutionarily, it is much more problematic in civilized life. It is inappropriate and even damaging in most circumstances of our life. For instance, when you play baseball, it doesn’t work to see the ball as a threat that must be avoided.

Calm under pressure

mindful pause
Photo: DHS

Conversely, I’m going to give you an extreme example of what it’s like to stay calm under pressure. Think about the action movies where the hero has to disarm a time bomb due to explode in the next few minutes. You and I would be so unnerved by the pressure that we would be unable to function. The heroes succeed because they manage to insulate themselves from the pressure, living in a bubble of calm as they focus on the problem. 

Danger mode

When there is danger, our nervous system goes into fight-or-flight mode. It gives us a tremendous energy boost that makes it possible to run away or fight for dear life. All of our body resources are channeled into survival. As a consequence, there is little to no energy available for non-essential tasks, such as thinking. In a life-or-death situation, our ancestors needed to run away quickly or fight fiercely, not think. In the civilized world, complex problems cannot be resolved through fight-or-flight. It usually works better to fight smarter than to fight harder. And brute force isn’t very good at disentangling a tangled cord.   

So, in the civilized world, we need to interrupt the reactive response that we naturally have and give ourselves a chance to see the situation accurately. It takes a mindful pause to do this. 

The mindful pause

The mindful pause is an acquired skill. We train ourselves to do it through repeated practice. The same way baseball players, tennis players, and golfers learn to slow down their movements mindfully. 

You slow down what you’re doing or even stop for a few moments. You shift your attention to what’s happening in your body. Checking where you might feel some tension, for instance, in your neck or shoulders. Paying attention to your breathing, in your chest, in your belly. Nothing may come out of it. There’s no pressure to perform. You’re just making room for sensations, feelings, or ideas to come up if they do.

Here’s a simple way to get a (mindful) grip.

Adapted from The Proactive Twelve Steps: A Mindful Program For Lasting Change