Feeling Safe in an Unsafe World

August 7, 2020

To talk about feeling safe in an unsafe world, I’m going to use a very reductive model of the universe. This is admittedly oversimplified, but it’s useful as a starting point: A profound psychological need that we have as human beings is a sense of safety. We yearn for safety. To some extent, this is the result of evolution. Our distant ancestors who were more attuned to danger were much more likely to pass their genes down. And as a consequence of thousands of generations of human beings, the result is that we are a profoundly anxious species. And a sense of safety is necessary for us to overcome that anxiety and get on with our daily functioning.

This is also the result of what we might think of as the curse of consciousness. Consciousness offers many advantages, but it also renders us aware of our mortality in a way that other animal species are not. Certain intelligent animals–elephants, ravens, some species of whale–do seem to indicate an awareness of death, but it seems unlikely that they’re aware of their impending individual mortality. [1] We as human beings suffer under that burden uniquely, and so creating a sense of safety around us is profoundly important and yet often difficult.

We believe the path to safety lies through establishing a greater sense of certainty and control over our environment. When we can predict what’s going to happen with some certainty, when we can exert some agency and control over what happens, we feel safer. But what is the relationship between these two dimensions? Is it linear? What I see in my practice is that we often act as though it’s non-linear, with greater amounts of certainty and control yielding increasing returns on our sense of safety.

But this way of thinking presupposes the existence of a relatively safe and predictable world. In a predictable world, the initial amounts of certainty and control that we can exert don’t grant us that much additional safety because it’s already a relatively safe environment. So we strive at the outer limits to obtain even more certainty and even more control. We look to create an environment in which we can be almost 100% certain about what’s going to happen in the future and in which we can act with tremendous control and authority and agency. Extreme amounts of certainty and control are vitally important to us because we believe that they’re necessary in order to experience a meaningful sense of safety.

But what if the non-linear relationship is inversed? What if greater amounts of certainty and control yield diminishing returns on our sense of safety? This reflects a world that is somewhat unpredictable, somewhat chaotic, somewhat unsafe in which our initial efforts to obtain a degree of certainty and control over our environment actually grant us a tremendous amount of safety and security. But further efforts at the outer reaches to gain more certainty and control may do relatively little to change our sense of safety.

What if we take this argument a step further? What if we exist in a very unpredictable, very unsafe, and profoundly chaotic world? In that context modest amounts of certainty and control may go a long way toward establishing the safety that we really need, and efforts beyond that point are going to be relatively useless. The events of the last few months have caused us to ask, “What kind of world do we live in?”

I would suggest that we live in a world that is less predictable, more chaotic, less safe. And as a result our initial efforts to establish some control and certainty may be all that we need to afford us the requisite sense safety that allows us to function effectively. But it’s also worth asking, “What if there isn’t a relationship here at all? What if there is no relationship between our actual safety and our sense of certainty and control? What if control is an illusion?”

The eminent psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp stated very definitively: “Control is an illusion.” [2] The sense of control that we enjoy is entirely illusory, and we pursue it only to create a sense of safety. But what if we go a step further and ask, “What if safety is, too? What if the sense of safety that we’re striving to achieve is also an illusion?” If so, then that poses a difficult question that we have to wrestle with: How do we feel safe in an unsafe world?

I don’t have a definitive answer, but I have a provisional one, and that’s emotional regulation—which does not mean emotion suppression. We can’t suppress our emotions for any sustained period of time. If we try, it’s usually counterproductive and sometimes makes the feelings that we’re looking to hold at bay even more intense. But there are some practices that we can pursue that will allow us to develop our capacity for emotion regulation. We can remember them by this simple, cheesy acronym: MESS. I’m not a fan of cheesy acronyms, and this is literally the only one that I use in my practice and my teaching.

M for mindfulness, and the most reliable path to a mindful state is meditation. There are other practices, such walking, time in nature, certain forms of exercise. The research on meditation suggests that if we meditate on a consistent daily basis for about 10 minutes, we’ll start to experience some distinctions in our ability to regulate our emotions after about two months. [3]

E for exercise, and a regular commitment to physical activity is important because emotions are physiological events before they register in consciousness. When we’re more regularly active on a consistent basis, we’re better attuned to what we’re feeling earlier in the process. [4]

S for sleep, which is incredibly important–an ample body of research shows that when we are not well rested our ability to regulate our emotions diminishes significantly. [5]

And another S for reducing chronic stress. To be very clear, I’m not suggesting that we should be striving to live in a stress-free world–that’s impossible, especially these days. Nor do we need to view stressful experiences as inherently negative–it’s how we respond to those experiences that matters. But there are often a number of low-level chronic stressors in our life that we can minimize or remove with some modest changes. [6]

By committing to these kinds of simple practices on a consistent basis, we can enhance our ability to regulate our emotions and take some meaningful steps towards feeling safer in an unsafe world.

Footnotes

[1] On animals’ awareness of death: