Fake joints - by Cindy Crabb
I have this trick for dealing with agitating situations, like driving in New York, or feeling socially awkward at a show. I don’t actually smoke pot because it makes me paranoid, but when I’m doing something stressful that mostly involves me staying still, I pretend that I’m smoking a giant joint. I imagine holding it between my fingers and then taking in that deep, pursed lips inhale, hold the breath a minute, and let it out all smooth and slowly. Then the vague, slow, scan of the world, not looking so much as taking the colors in (that part doesn’t work quite as well for driving, but you get the idea).
I like that knowing about how the body works makes so many things make so much more sense, like this thing I learned this week about the nervous system.
Modern understanding of the human nervous system is that it has three main parts.
The sympathetic nervous system increases your heart rate and energy when you’re doing fun stuff, tells you to sweat when the temperature gets hotter, widens your pupils when you need to see more, and all kinds of basic things like that.
The parasympathetic is the rest and digest part.
The ventral vagal is for connection, and is enlivened when you are feeling in connection with self, other, spirit, nature, or culture.
They all have unconscious activities they’re always moving in and out of, trying to keep the body in a state of homeostasis.
And they have modes they go into when in a survival state.
The sympathetic nervous system is the part that goes into the fight, flight, fawn, protest, protect responses when you’re in survival mode.
I’m a sympathetic nervous system type.
That part I knew already.
The cool thing I learned about today is that when you’re in the non-survival, just playing vibe, the sympathetic nervous system is stimulated by a particular part of the brain called the reticular formation. Because it’s a brain thing, it can easily get turned on or off, in a millisecond.
But when your survival mode is triggered, the sympathetic nervous system gets turned on by hormones instead (adrenaline and a cascade of others) and the hormones travel through the entire body's blood stream. If you go from a survival trigger to recognizing you’re not actually in danger, it still takes 8-11 minutes for the hormones to work their way out of your circulatory system.
So you’ve got to do something for those minutes to help your body not retrigger itself.
It feels so much better to say “I’m going to walk around the block so my sympathetic nervous system has a chance to reset,” rather than, “I have to walk around the block to calm down.”
And that’s why, when I’m at a party it takes imagining smoking an entire fake joint and then I feel a whole lot better and can go say hello to my acquaintances or try and make new friends.
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