Community

We can’t do it alone. We need interaction with other human beings. Connection is an essential nutrient. We need to be able to rely upon each other. This interdependency stems from our evolutionary roots as a species. We flourished in tribes.⁹⁵ But currently in modern-day life, we find ourselves isolated and alone in many ways.

Unfortunately, as described above, many stress management practices assume that you are alone. Do an image search for anything related to meditation, and you’ll find hundreds of pics of a person with a folded leg silhouette, palms up to the sky, forefinger meeting the thumb, against a serene sunset backdrop. Looks beautiful. But it also looks lonely, boring, and not very relatable to our everyday lives.

Typically, starting out in mindfulness involves a lot of distractions, discomfort, and doubts – the opposite of what that image is trying to convey. This is why breathing exercises, meditation, or any mindfulness technique is best performed in private. Yet, there’s something problematic about that. When you’re in the mix, work and life responsibilities are coming at you from right and left, people in your life are demanding your attention right here and now. It’s unreasonable to expect yourself to be able to abruptly shut off and go straight to your happy place with ease and grace.

Can you imagine yourself in a meeting with your boss, maybe your quarterly performance review. It’s not going well. You can tell your boss is displeased and is looking to eat you for lunch. But, you stop, close your eyes, go inward, and imagine yourself nailing a perfect tree pose on a warm secluded beach. Breathe in, hold, exhale, hold. Namaste. You’re now practicing, with full intention, your uber powerful stress reduction technique. Repetitively inhaling until your belly protrudes as far out as it can go, then letting go with a deep “hawwwuuuhhhhhh,” all while your boss is staring at you, waiting for you to finish up. Doesn’t sound practical, does it? Perhaps this is why your boss wants to talk to you about your performance at work.

To avoid any confusion, there is definitive value to mindfulness practices.⁹⁶ They are tools that have their time and place. That time and place is when you have the time and space. Mindfulness practices should be part of your everyday life. Attending to your breathing pulls you out of your monkey mind and back into your body where you belong. Yoga increases physical and mental strength. Running is good for your heart and your mind. Carving out time for these practices will make a big difference in your life. However, these practices have their limitations.

Since there’s only a select set of times and places you can engage in these practices, what else could help during these times when the whole day is such chaos? What could help distract you from your problems long enough to get in a good laugh and the confidence to continue to submit C+ work at your job? What can keep you going when you’re in the thick of it? Your friends!

Meditation can calm down your nervous system and give you the poise in the moment you need it the most. On another level, meditation can’t always build you back up the way that friends and family can. For some situations, meditation and other mindfulness techniques have nothing on good old venting sessions with your BFF.

We likely have all made it through some difficult and challenging times with the help of our friends. And, these are the friends who don’t exactly practice textbook “active listening” either. Rather than summarizing what we just said and reflecting back our emotions with intentional mirroring of our facial expressions and body language – like the textbooks say we should – our most ride-or-die friends offer us a gift far greater. They allow us to momentarily blame others for our problems.

In these moments of need, they opt out of trying to help us take real responsibility for our mistakes. They are biased, and their lack of solid evidence for this support is questionable. Yet, this irresponsible and mostly undeserving support gives us the confidence to go back out in the world and try another day. We might be in the wrong, but they're still be behind us. It’s loyalty over logic with our close friends. We all benefit from a healthy dose of this blind and biased support. At a certain point, a good friend will let you know when you’re really off track. But, up until that point, they’ll work hard to find a way for your illogical complaints to make sense in one universe or another.

There are two important points to remember here. First, in measured doses, solitude is a good thing. It is critically important for us to be able to be alone with ourselves. Spiritual journeys or solo quests have traditionally been a part of the human experience. There is something transformative and invaluable about walking the path in the dark woods by yourself and coming out the other side a changed person.

Second, although solitude has its place, community and support from others is massively important to our mental and emotional wellbeing. When you come down the mountain from your spiritual quest with a beard down to your chest, it’s much more meaningful if you can regale your friends with stories of your journey around the campfire. Likewise, catching up on what you missed in their lives while you were gone is also part of the healing nature of relationships. We just need connection in our lives to feel and be well. Community and support from others close to us is very protective against mental illness.^97–98

The problem with modern life is the chronic and widespread absence of opportunities to connect in real ways with others. Real connection sometimes includes that kind of listening, empathy, and support that blatantly disregards the facts. It includes supportive eye contact, nodding, unhappy pouty faces, and near excessive use of the words “literally... seriously... totally... dude... girl... & bro.” Most importantly, good listening is followed by a moment of silence, followed by a quick fist pound or a warm hug.

In modern-day life, we are all too often mindlessly hanging out with each other. Instead of listening with attention in conversations, our minds wander, we think ahead to our response, our eyes search for our phone and other screens. There’s an automatic pull on our conscious attention – away from those standing right in front of us. When others are expressing pain and frustration, it’s not always easy to hold that space or just listen. Those moments in life, when nothing intense or exciting is happening, have become hard for us. It may just be due to the barrage of distractions that invade our everyday lives. When conversations hit a lull, we often fall back into our monkey mind. It’s like our brains have learned to crave busyness. Constantly returning to our ever-expanding to-do list in our mind is a hard habit to break.

It feels like an undying thirst for any kind of input. Our thinking brain seems to constantly need something to chew on. Things that excite, entertain, reward, or even irritate you all have the power to capture your attention. Their grip is tight. However, these distractions distance us from the people in our lives. Even when we do listen, we sometimes fall into the trap of trying to fix, in part because fixing feels a lot more exciting that just listening.

Similarly, when we begin to feel depressed, anxious, or mentally foggy, our first instinct can be to suppress, ignore, and just try to push on through. Out of a fear of being a burden, we keep the darker stuff to ourselves. In the absence of others in our lives – listening to us, talking to us, supporting us, and seeing our pain – we recede inward. We are then always walking the path alone, which is a risky way to go. It sets us up for depressed moods, anxious thoughts, and a distracted mind.

In modern-day life, we can be surrounded by people, and totally alone at the same time. Loneliness is a kind of anemia. We need connection in our daily life, just like we need the mineral iron and other nutrients, to have energy and feel well. So it’s best we do what we can to foster our support relationships and seek ways to belong to a community.