How to not take things personally: The science of stimulus-response
As we approach the end of the year, we may start notice within ourselves - and others - feelings of exhaustion, burn out, feeling frazzled or overwhelmed. There are seasons that are influenced socially and symbolically.. for example, the beginning of academic years, the end of a calendar year, holiday breaks, shortened days, different temperatures... all of these can affect us in different ways. For many people, as we approach the end of the year, there are potentially different gatherings, breaks from routine, and added expectations about what 'should have' happened this year, what didn't happen, unwanted patterns we didn't want to have repeated... All of that can influence our internal state, as well as the internal states and behaviors of the people around us. While there is so much that we cannot change, there is power in getting better at how we tune in to ourselves and how we stay as open as we can to new possibilities. Many of those new possibilities come from a more intelligent, flexible and sophisticated way of interpreting and responding to our own fluctuations, and emotions - AND doing the same for how we respond and react within our interactions and communications. Below is an article and podcast about a modern perspective on Stimulus-Response - and how we can use this wisdom to not become overwhelmed by the behaviors, reactions and expectations of others. Taking things too personally can lead to overamplified emotions and reactions that distort our thinking and relationships. The good news is that we can get better at navigating challenging interactions, feelings, and relationships when we understand how unconscious influences play a role in our response. To help us understand all of this, an important framework is the Stimulus Organism Response Model. This is in comparison to a Stimulus-Response Model. A term we use for the basic stimulus-response (SR) model is “unmediated”. It means that there is no in between process or mediator between the stimulus and the response. The SR model can sometimes be applied to single-cell organisms that have fairly simple stimulus-response systems. If an event occurs, it's fairly predictable what their response will be* If we were to try to apply this SR model to more complex organisms, however, we would see that something's missing from the equation. For example, if a traumatic event, such as a natural disaster occurs, that's the stimulus. According to the SR model, we can reliably predict a person's response. Or if an event like winning a lottery happens, we would also, using the SR model, be able to more or less predict the response for every single human that that happens to. Because according to that model, it's the event or stimulus that directly causes the response. As we can see from those two examples, and as a lot of research has demonstrated*, humans do not have a universal, identical response to events like the lottery or tragic events. *I go into this more in-depth in my book **see research citations Listen on: Spotify Apple Podcasts What we need to realize is that… Every interaction between humans is an interaction between two complex nervous systems with histories. Humans are complex and adaptive, meaning that a lot of things evolve and emerge from our interactions and our relational dynamics. That can't be simplified into a very simple equation.