Welcome to the 19 new subscribers who have joined us since last time and are interested in Experiments in Regenerative Living. I’m really grateful for a little of your time and hope you enjoy this week’s newsletter
If you would like to join 49 handsome, thoughtful people on this journey, then please subscribe (free of course) here:
I often feel like I am waiting for someone to tell me what to do. This starts from the moment I wake up when I struggle to get out of bed, until my partner, Kathryn, comes in a little irritated by my inaction, or the door bell rings, or I’m about to be late for work. I’m waiting for an external signal, I’m relying on other people’s expectations and willpower to motivate me. This extends beyond my morning routine, almost as if I’d like someone to sort out what I’m going to eat, to wear, to work on, to do with my spare time.
There’s a certain safety in helplessness, in rarely asserting my own power within a situation. But this is where the proverbial snake eats its own tail. Because I invoke just as much power, all be it from a different angle, through acting helpless. Every time Kathryn has to get me out of bed or a friend or colleague has to chase me up about something, I’m sending a signal that I care less about the situation than the other person involved. Perversely I’m saying ‘you need me to do this more than I need me to do this’. When the ‘this’ is living my own life, that’s a rather nihilistic power play.
So why have I brought this up? Because this newsletter contains a declaration of intent: the intent to reclaim some agency, to participate, to act, to experiment. And I want to experiment, but I can’t help myself from indulging a little deeper into why taking action can be so hard (for me).
Learned Helplessness
My understanding is that learned helplessness is a state of separation from ones own source of power. It comes from having little sense of control over a situation, or a habitual sense that someone or something will come to your rescue.
But I see something hopeful in the term ‘learned helplessness’. It is not saying I am helpless, it’s saying somewhere along the way I’ve picked up this trait. In my work as a mental health nurse, I’m always holding onto the idea that change is possible for the people I support. That people can unlearn or relearn behaviours, habits or dogma that play a role in shaping their lives.
Analysing my own sense of helplessness, I could say my parents were so willing to put my needs before their own that I learnt to rely on them taking care of me. I could say that from a very young age I’ve been a rather sensitive soul, finding life somewhat overwhelming. Managing these overwhelming feelings has resorted in me filling my time with dissociative, pacifying habits - watching television, oversleeping, playing video games, surfing the internet and drinking alcohol.
But maybe alongside this, my learned helplessness is a symptom of a broader cultural helplessness. The world we live in is extremely different from the world we evolved over millions of years to be best adapted to. Our lifestyles contain huge amounts of exposure to abstract sources of psychological stress. Technological developments continue to increase how exposed we are to what’s going on all around the world, and in response we need to be more purposeful about taking downtime from this hyper-stimulating environment to make sure we aren’t overwhelming our nervous systems.
Learned helplessness also seems to have something to do with whether people have positive beliefs about the future - a key theme of this newsletter. Most people reading this will be millennials, the first generation in recent history to believe that they are going to be worse off financially than their parents. Home-ownership in young people is down, inflation-adjusted income is down and debt is up. But this negative outlook extends beyond economics - speaking as a millennial - from many angles the future looks a bit fucked.
Feeling positive about the future is a primary source of motivation to work towards achieving long-term goals. Young adults need to believe that they have the power to positively impact their own lives and the lives of the people around them. If the generations of young adults growing up now don’t learn to believe these things are possible, then how much more of a problem in society might learned helplessness become?
Bonus-ball (conspiracy-ish) theory for cultural learned helplessness:
Maybe living as the subjects of a ruling class for a couple of thousand years has domesticated us, in the same we we’ve domesticated dogs, cows or sheep to unknowingly live lives much less exciting than their wilder cousins. How much of our lifestyles are an unconscious multi-generational submission to the whims and desires of kings, queens, earls, dukes, millionaires and billionaires, who we serve better when we centre our lives around tedious jobs, buying crap and thinking democracy means choosing between Labour and Conservatives every four years.
To flip that round, what’s our responsibility as wealthy Europeans in forcing much of the rest of the world into submission, where their assumed role has been to serve our needs for the last few hundred years. Lots of the sharpest edge of colonial conquest was done before we were born but it seems we still materially benefit from the psychological impact it has had on people round the world.
Reclaiming agency
Anyone who has lived with me can attest to the fact that I use the computer too much. They might more specifically say ‘Will sits on his laptop all day, on the sofa, in his pants, slowly roasting his testicles’.
My relationship with the Internet is a complicated one. We all have so many uses for it but I want to address my most common use. I aimlessly surf the web as a dissociative practice. I lurk on websites, rarely posting anything, mainly acting as a passive recipient of information. I have been stuck, paralysed, on the Internet for whole days, and during Covid lockdowns I’ve leaned back into this habit. I acknowledge that locked in at home during a global pandemic, this habit served a useful purpose as a coping mechanism and distraction. But lockdown is (sort-of) over and my plans with this newsletter require me to use lots of interesting digital tools and do lots of research that the Internet makes much easier. I want to get into the right relationship with it so that it can serve me and my curiosity rather than doom-scrolling myself into further paralysis.
So how am I going to learn to overcome this helplessness? By learning hopefulness.
The original work on learned helplessness tried to show how rats, dogs and humans give up when they learn that nothing they do in a situation matters, and this goes on to effect their future behaviour in similar situations. But Steve Maier’s well-received, more recent work has suggested it’s not quite that simple. Rather than helplessness being learnt, it’s more appropriate to say that helplessness is the default but that it can get further entrenched by exposure to difficult situations. He suggests what we can learn over the course of our lives is agency and hopefulness. He says that the human frontal cortex gives us a unique ability to do just that, to learn hope by cultivating experiences where our actions shape the world around us and teaches us that what we do matters. Fellow renowned helplessness and agency researcher Martin Seligman, says that this can scale up from the individual, so that hopefulness can be culturally accrued.
I recently visited my Mum and the first day I was there my phone decided it was not loving the 3-hour zoom call I was on and self-destructed in a heat death. The result was that for the rest of the time at Mum’s I didn’t have a portal to the internet ready-and-waiting in my pocket. I then proceeded to read the first book I’ve read in about a year, found I had a lot more time to twiddle my thumbs, and a couple of days in, Kathryn and Mum both commented that I seemed more relaxed and more present with them and the world around me. Alas, on leaving Mum’s my phone magically started working again and the old habits quickly crept back in. It was a weird coincidence that I’m grateful for, as it’s led me to this week’s experiment.
For me, feeling hopeful is about the world around me feeling more positive. The crucial word being feeling. Yes, I want the world to be a better place but it’s worth acknowledging my experience of this will always rely on a subjective feeling.
I slip into dissociative states to help manage overwhelming feelings. So, if I’m going to come back into my body and connect to my feelings more often and more deeply, being able to tolerate more intense experiences would be really helpful, so that I have less need for dissociative states and behaviours.
The keystone habit
In Charles Duhrigg’s book, The Power of Habit, he discusses the idea of keystone habits.
We have habits everywhere in our lives, but certain routines - keystone habits - lead to a cascade of other actions because of them. Some people notice when they exercise that they want to eat more healthily, or they sleep better, or their thoughts flow easily. When they don’t exercise they might stay up unnecessarily late, eat junk food and feel more disorganised. In other words doing exercise is the habit that helps the rest of their habits naturally fall into place.
I wanted to use the same logic to address using the Internet too much. I know from experience that journalling, meditating, exercise and cold-water swimming all have unexpected knock-on benefits for me.
But for this experiment I’ve chosen to commit to immersing myself in cold-water every day, and to say that until I’ve done this I can’t use the Internet. When I immerse myself in cold water the rest of my day seems to go better, I feel less stressed, I also tend to be outside more, it opens my world up, I feel more connected to my body, I feel un-shockable and I feel more alive. By saying that I can’t use the Internet until I’ve done this I’m sending myself the message that, actually, checking the Internet isn’t the most important thing in my day, which is good because I don’t want it to be. All this makes me less likely to be stuck at home using my phone.
In the ten days I’ve been experimenting with this I’ve been in the river early in the morning on two occasions, I’ve swum in the sea once in Cornwall and once in Devon and the all the other days I’ve ended my shower with a 30-second cold blast. I feel good that I am taking advantage of the fact I live in Devon, after all being near the sea was a big reason for moving here. I have definitely noticed a strong desire to go on my phone some mornings and I’ve definitely spent some time later in the day zoning out on my phone and there’s even been a couple days this has leaked back into old habits but on balance I feel I’ve done well. My life’s busy at the moment and I’m managing alright with that.
Alongside this new habit my brother Benji is kindly giving me a Light Phone he hasn’t been using. It’s pitched as a minimalist phone - just does calls, texts and music. Ben bought it to use at the weekend but considering how much he’s enjoying analysing Luton Town’s weekend football performance I can understand why he hasn’t quite managed to surrender his smartphone. I’ve also bought a cheap watch so I don’t need to check my phone for the time. Though if Samuel Peyps’ 17th century diary is anything to go by even looking at your watch can get addictive.
My phone breaking just as I got back to Mum’s was the first moment of serendipity these last few weeks. The second has come in the fact that I’ve just accepted a new job working with a local mental health team that uses Open Dialogue, a really interesting new approach to supporting people through mental health crises. Turning up to the office yesterday to drop off some documents, I appear to have landed myself an easy way to keep to the commitment of daily cold-water swimming, as the office happens to be 150 steps from the beach.
Invitations…
Consider what acts as a keystone habit for you. What’s an activity that when you engage in it seems to make you more likely to engage in other activities that have a positive impact on your day?
Move your phone charger out your bedroom and get an alarm clock or a watch instead?
Come swimming with me in the Dart or in the sea (I’m pleased to have two takers for last newsletter’s invitation to listen to the Dawn Chorus together)?
Check out this survey I did a few years ago on the cold-water swimming community where we asked people what had been the benefits of the practice for them?
And as always, reach out to me if you’d to contribute to the newsletter?
Zinc shoutout
This week I’d like to highlight the work of my fellow Zinc pioneer Bea Herbert who is the founder of States of Mind.
States of Mind work to improve the wellbeing of young people by providing them with the psychological skills, knowledge and self-awareness to thrive in the world. They focus on understanding and addressing the social causes of distress for young people. Bea has opened my eyes to how much children at school have to say about what matters to them and what changes could be made to their school experience if we just did a better job at listening to them. Recently a working group of young people from States of Mind spoke to the Education Selection Committee (group of MP’s who critique the Department of Education), discussing young people's autonomy, individuality and wellbeing and asking the committee to collaborate with them to inform practical changes in education going forward. Exciting stuff.
Disclaimer - I knew this would happen. That I’d end up writing more about my psychological blocks from doing stuff rather than actually doing stuff. But I’m ready now. The next newsletter is going to highlight a practical deep dive into a regenerative field (I’m aware I’m slightly deluding myself that anybody cares 😛). Bye for now.
Loved reading this. Keep it up.