FINDING YOUR GROOVE IS HARDEST WHEN YOU'VE LOST IT

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#lost #grief #groove #self-control #psychology #disorientation #loss #divorce #fired #jobless #anxiety #fear #strategy #planning #jeremy sherman #biology #decisionmaking #lifecoach #strategicplanning #foresight #depression
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The Undone Conundrum: Getting your bearings is hard when you’ve just lost them. The more disoriented you feel the harder it is to get reoriented.

I think of my everyday life as like driving on winding uncharted roads, constraining myself to stay with constraints on both sides. I think of our behavior as a product of our self-constraint, self-control, self-discipline, or de-liberation and our accumulated external constraints as “grooves” that help limit our behavior down to a range of habits that keep us grooving through life.
When our external grooves are reliable we can ignore them, or assume that we’re running on self-control alone. If you’ve had a supportive partner and satisfying work, you can feel like you’re self-made.
But sometimes our external grooves widen, get wonky, or wash out, leaving us poorly and shallowly held. Your partner leaves. Your friend turns on you. You lose your job. Someone important to you dies. It’s like the path giving out on a hike deep in the woods. It’s a disorienting ungrounding feeling just when you need to feel grounded enough to get your bearings.
You become disoriented, unmoored, flustered, skittish, hypersensitive, flailing, defensive, “fragid” (fragile and rigid). You lose your resilience. You’re easily thrown off balance just when you need your balance most so you find new external grooves to hold you.
Call it the Undone conundrum, trying to find your new groove when you’re most freaked out at having lost your old one.
It’s how people end up in disastrous rebound relationships, how people who hit rock bottom don’t always climb out into a healthier groove, and how when the going gets tough, people lurch into cults, simply to be held again, why, when flustered we should count to ten but are too upset to want to. It’s why we remind ourselves to turn the other cheek but can’t when we’ve been slapped, and why grace under pressure is so hard to achieve.
You’ve heard the saying. Don’t just do something; stand there. It’s like counting to ten or like the line from the Tao “Have you the patience to wait for the mud to settle and the water to clear?” In an emergency, you can’t afford to, but often you can; you just don’t feel like it. So:
Distract: One way to pause when you don’t feel like it is to upstage your anxiety with something stimulating. Parents often distract tantrum-throwing toddlers and it works for adults too. When I’ve lost my groove and need time to calm down, I might watch a lot of engrossing TV. Just to pass the time. Of course, that can become a dangerous groove too, like drowning your sorrows in booze. But within reason, it enables you to ease into your disorientation in ways that enable you to reorient in ways you won’t regret.
Self-grace: I like the mantra “I just have to be sad for a while,” a self-soothing sentiment that settles me down because it reminds me that reorientation takes time.
Say what you need to hear, but carefully: When you’ve lost your external groove, you’ll have to rely more on your internal ones, which you’re likely to try to firm up with self-affirmations like it’s not my fault, no regrets and I’m perfectly fine. Many people scorn their exes and the meanies out there who dealt blows to their external grooves. It’s therapeutic but can be taken to excess. It can lead to “I once was lost, but now I’m blind syndrome” where feeling the sting of a lost groove, and resolving never to feel such pain again, people lurch blindly into any groove that reassures them that they never will.
Gradually, subtly learning: As the mud settles, the water clears and we calm down, we can visit more carefully the question of what, if anything, there is to learn from the loss of our external groove. Sometimes there’s nothing to learn. Sometimes there’s a big lesson to take from it. More often, there are minor adjustments to make, a tweak here and there, not the big whipsaw of “I once was lost but now I’m blind.”
Eventually, upstaged: With patience, one can find new external grooves engaging and true enough to the life one can and want to live that will upstage the grief, disorientation, and fragidity (again, fragile rigidity) of having lost one’s groove.
But give it a beat. Because it takes time to settle down and get your wits back when you’re thrown into the undone conundrum.

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Jeremy Sherman, PhD studies human nature from the chemical origins of life to our current situation He tries to make a gap-free scientific approach to understanding ourselves more easy and useful to our everyday lives, feelings, thoughts, and actions. For 26 years, Jeremy Sherman PhD has collaborated closely with Harvard/Berkeley neuroscientist and biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon.
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