My Top 3 Tools for Life: Part 1 - Mastering the Art of Pausing

[Barb Nangle]

Photo Credit: Gary Barnes

This is part one of my series about the top three tools I learned about in 12-step recovery. Mind you, I have an entire tool shed of tools now, thanks to recovery. But these three have been at the top since the very beginning and remain there. They are: pausing (the topic of today’s essay), reaching out, and keeping the focus on myself. The next two essays will be about those topics.

Before recovery, I’d heard things like, “Count to 10 before responding when you’re angry” but it never occurred to me that that could apply to me. After all, I was hardly ever angry (or so I thought). I didn’t make the leap to the fact that counting to 10 is a way to pause, or what the effect might be. I just wasn’t that aware.

Why pausing is so important.

I'm going to start with why pausing is so important. Then I’ll talk about learning to do it in the moment no matter how stressed you are. Many of us react rather than respond to situations, especially when we're stressed out. The problem with that is when we react rather than respond, we haven't put any thought into our response. We've just let our bodies take over. The most likely thing to come out of us is not from a place of calm thoughtfulness and often, can make the situation worse.

When we pause, we’re much more likely to be able to respond thoughtfully. That’s because when we pause, we take the time to breathe, catching our breath and calming ourselves down. The reason this is so important is that when we’re calm, we can think clearly. When we're stressed, we can’t. That’s because stress puts us into “fight-or-flight” mode. In that mode, our bodies are poised for action, not thinking. 

During stress, we can’t afford to spend the energy required for thinking, which is an enormous amount of energy. We need all that energy to go toward taking action (i.e., fighting or fleeing). Our bodies are so intelligent that when the stress response occurs, our higher-order thinking is no longer accessible. That’s so we don’t expend energy on that so it can be conserved for taking action. In the modern day, our bodies continue to work as if our lives are under threat. Today, the kinds of “threats” we encounter are things like comments from colleagues, approaching deadlines, traffic jams, or arguments with our lovers.

You may have noticed that when you're really upset, whether it's anger, fear, sadness, or some other difficult emotion, it's hard to think clearly. That's normal. I like how David Bayer refers to these types of emotions. He calls them “primal” emotions, which are contrasted with “powerful” emotions or states of being. When we're in primal states, the bulk of our body’s energy has been rerouted so that we can fight or flee rather than think. Our bodies are “wired” to protect us so that we can stop thinking and start acting. 

The thing about the modern day is that stressors come to us in ways that affect our bodies as if our lives are at stake when they're not. That means we react to things as if our lives are under threat when they're not. Unfortunately, when we react like that, we often make things worse rather than better. Pausing allows us to catch our breath, relax our bodies, and internalize the message “I’m safe” so that we become calm and are then able to think clearly. This is possible because our respiratory system is the only part of the autonomic nervous system that we can affect. The other parts of that system are not under our conscious control. This is quite the gift!

This is really important. If you want to have a well-lived life, thinking clearly matters. This doesn't mean we don't pay attention to our feelings at all. Of course, we do. But feelings are feedback to be taken into consideration, they shouldn’t be considered as the only information we use in to make decisions.

How to pause when stressed

Once I understood the importance of pausing, I thought, “Great idea, I have no idea how to do that!” 

Getting to be able to pause was monumental for me. It seemed like an insurmountable task because I’d been a reactor my entire life. I wasn’t aware of that until recovery though, I didn’t know there were other options. So learning to pause and respond instead of react was extremely difficult for me.

Part of my inability to pause, I think, came from the sense of urgency I lived with at all times before recovery. I felt rushed all the time, and like I had to have an answer for everything, even if I had to make it up! What I learned about pausing is that it’s like just about everything else in recovery – it’s a process and it takes time to learn.

This is how the process of learning to pause unfolded for me. It’s not a fast process, but it’s a deep process. I promise you, if you allow yourself time and are patient with yourself (i.e., don’t beat yourself up about it) over time you’ll be able to pause even under the most stressful situations. That’s the case for me now.

It starts with reflection. When a situation doesn’t turn out the way you would have hoped, or you’re not particularly proud of the way you handled a situation, take time to reflect on it. In my early months and years of recovery, I’d act out my usual dysfunctional patterns and see that that was not what I truly wanted to do. So I’d reflect on it and think, “I could have done X instead. That would have been a good time to pause.” Noted.

Taking that time to reflect was not easy or natural for me (even though I’ve always thought of myself as an introspective person, I was not reflective). What that meant is that sometimes it would be a couple of weeks after something happened that I realized I could have paused and chosen a different response. 

Then another time, I’d do something similar that wasn’t the healthiest thing and realize again that I could have paused. This time maybe it was a week later rather than two weeks later that I took time to reflect. Over time I started to see the gap in time closing between when I did something dysfunctional and the time I realized it was dysfunctional and that I had other options! That is, I could have paused and responded.

I got excited, because I thought, “Pretty soon I’m going to realize it before I do or say anything reactive and will be able to pause!” And that’s exactly what happened. It wasn’t a linear process – sometimes I remembered and sometimes I didn’t. But now, pausing is very much a part of the fabric of my life.

Paying attention to this process will help to sensitize you to the kinds of situations in which you’re reactive rather than responsive. You’ll be more aware of situations that are likely to trigger your reactivity and will see them coming and be able to stop, pause breathe, and think clearly, “How do I choose to respond to this situation?” 

What to say to give yourself time for pausing, reflecting, and responding

If you don’t know at the moment how you want to respond, there are a variety of ways to give yourself the time to pause.

“I need some time to think about this.”

“I’m not sure, I’ll have to get back to you.”

“I don’t know” (this was HUGE for me - I somehow grew up with the idea that saying IDK was unthinkable!)

“I’m going to have to get back to you.”

“I’m gonna put a pause on that for now.”

Some examples of pausing

If you receive an email that you know will be difficult for you to read, pause until you have the psychic space to deal with it. If you read it and it enflames you, pause before responding. Even if you type up a reply immediately, pause before sending it, then come back and re-read it again when you’ve had time to calm yourself. Or have another person read it first.

If someone asks you to help them move and you’re really not sure you want to, say, “I’ll have to get back to you.” Take the time to think about whether you actually want to help them move or not. If not, perhaps there’s another way you can be supportive if you choose to. You don’t have to answer immediately. If someone pushes you to answer immediately, say, “If you need an immediate answer, it will have to be no.”

Sometimes a pause will be very long. I once took 18 months to decide if I was going to go back to an organization where things unfolded in a way that left me unsettled. 

What I’ve learned over time as I’ve gotten better and better at pausing is that in addition to being able to use my thinking brain as a result of pausing, it also allows me to seek my Higher Power for assistance. When I was constantly reacting to situations, I couldn’t even think of reaching out to my HP.

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