3 Steps to Feel More Connected
Fleeting moments of kindness can deeply influence our mental health and emotional well-being
A little more than a year ago, as the Covid-19 pandemic was spreading like wildfire through my community, I experienced a moment that I have been thinking about ever since.
After a few weeks of quarantine, we were running low on food so I took a trip to the grocery store. I wandered up and down the aisles, staring at the large gaps on the shelves where the toilet paper and canned goods used to be. It felt like a bad zombie apocalypse movie, when the main character realizes too late that they should have joined all the looting and now there’s nothing left. Yet the store was almost empty, which was strangely comforting, so I continued on my way and grabbed what little I could find.
After a few minutes, I turned my cart down a new aisle and saw a family at the other end, walking toward me: a young couple with a cute child, maybe three or four years old. If this had been a normal time, I would have felt a spark of human connection. Seeing the little boy would have reminded me of my own son at that age, and how I used to take him to the store with me. I would have looked from the child to the parents and smiled warmly.
But that’s not what I felt.
That day, I felt fear. I felt threatened. I felt a visceral urge to turn around and go back the other way, and that’s exactly what I did. These people were nothing more to me than possible vectors of the virus. I didn’t want them anywhere near me, and I’m sure the feeling was mutual.
It might seem strange that of all the dramatic and horrific things that have happened over the past few years, this one moment stands out in my mind. I’ve wondered about it myself. To me, this small fragment of a memory represents so many things about the ongoing tragedy that we’ve all been living through. How quickly and dramatically things can change. How many things we take for granted. How fragile life is. How interconnected we all are.
Perhaps more than anything else, however, this encounter showed me how powerfully our perspective shapes our relationships and how we interact with our fellow human beings. In that moment, as I turned the corner and saw these people walking toward me, fear and anxiety narrowed my perspective. My brain flipped into threat mode, activating my body’s stress response and triggering the impulse to freeze, flee, or fight.
This moment taught me that in times of great upheaval and uncertainty, it takes a conscious intention to stay connected.
The science of human connection
I study the human mind as a scientist. I have always been fascinated by the dynamic range of human experience. How we can be so confident and resilient in some periods of life, and overwhelmed in others?
One of the key insights gleaned from the research we do at the Center for Healthy Minds is that feeling connected to other people has a unique power to influence our mental health and emotional well-being. Our relationships can even get under our skin and influence our physical health. Feeling isolated, lonely, and unsupported can be as toxic as smoking, not exercising, and eating poorly, and can put us at risk for anxiety and other mental health issues.
On the other end of the spectrum, there is a wealth of scientific data suggesting that feeling cared for, and being motivated to care for others, is a key dimension of human flourishing.
In a new scientific framework on the plasticity of well-being that our center recently published, connection is one of four core pillars of a healthy mind. We know that perceived social support can be protective against depression, for example, and compassion can help us respond in a healthy way to challenging situations, even altering what happens to our blood pressure and stress hormones when we get stressed out.
From the research we know that how we feel about relationships and interactions is the most important factor. It is not whether or not we are physically isolated or surrounded by other people that counts. It is how we feel that counts. We can feel completely alone in a crowd of people, or be physically alone, yet still feel cared for and supported.
And the good news is that although we can’t always control how many social interactions we have, or how they go, we can train ourselves to feel more connected — even when we are alone.
Training the mind to connect
One of the most exciting areas of research into the science of human connection looks at meditation. The benefits of mindfulness are well-documented, but scientists have also been studying other forms of meditation, including strategies to cultivate qualities like appreciation, kindness, and compassion.
It turns out that these forms of meditation have far-reaching benefits. They have been found to decrease depression, anxiety, and psychological distress, and increase positive emotions and overall well-being. There is even evidence that connection-based meditation practices can increase altruistic behaviors and reduce unconscious bias.
What all this research suggests is that in moments when we feel disconnected from other people — when we feel lonely, threatened, or apathetic — we can use simple strategies to shift into a state of connection. Not only that, when we use these strategies, we activate important networks in the brain that help us feel safe, cared for, and supported.
Now this might all sound like a lot of work, but training the mind is much easier than you might think. Here are three simple steps to use these strategies in everyday life, when we need them most.
Step 1: Check the weather
One of the most helpful skills when it comes to mental and emotional health is the ability to step back and check the weather patterns in your own mind. Are you calm and collected? Stressed? Agitated or upset? The key to this particular skill is to observe your own thoughts and feelings without judgment. Bring a sense of openness and curiosity to your inner experience, even an attitude of warmth and acceptance.
To use my grocery store threat response story as an example, the first step would have been to simply notice that I was having a reaction. To notice that my shoulders tensed up, my breathing quickened, and I felt a surge of adrenaline. I might also have noticed my mental and emotional state — that I was feeling threatened and that this was coloring the way I was seeing the family I encountered.
Moments of awareness defuse the charge of our emotional reactions and give us the space to respond instead of react. If you want to get a feel for this, you can try this brief guided meditation.
Step 2: Activate your brain’s care network
Once you’ve tuned in to your state of mind, you can make a conscious choice to reconnect, or to strengthen a connection you already feel. One very simple way to do this is by practicing appreciation. Notice something positive about the people around you. Consciously direct your attention to their good qualities, even something small, like their expression or something they are wearing. In fact, it doesn’t really matter what you appreciate. It is the act of consciously choosing to notice the positive that matters.
In that moment when I felt the urge to avoid the family I encountered, I might have paused for a moment and shifted my perspective to something positive. I might have simply noticed the way they seemed to care for each other. The fact that the little boy was holding both his parents’ hands. I might still have turned around, but smiled first, leaving the interaction feeling connected instead of threatened.
Appreciation creates a burst of positive emotions. It feels good to appreciate someone, and it feels good to be appreciated. Here’s another guided meditation to try for yourself.
Step 3: Strengthen the connection
Moments of connection can be fleeting and fragile, so once you’ve planted a seed of appreciation or kindness, that seed needs to be nurtured. One simple way to do this is to repeat a simple phrase over and over in your mind, one that affirms and strengthens your newfound sense of connection. For instance, I might have noticed that the people I ran into at the grocery store were just like me. They were scared too, and just wanted their little boy to be safe and healthy. With that recognition, I could think to myself, “May you be healthy and safe. May you be healthy and safe.”
Words have a powerful effect on experience. Repeating a caring phrase like a silent mantra helps us stay rooted in a state of connection. And not only that, because your mind is usually churning with restless thoughts, repeating a phrase like this naturally calms the mind and soothes the nervous system. It strengthens attention and helps us feel more grounded, and less distracted.
If you want to try this for yourself, check out this meditation.
Make connection your new baseline
With practice, fleeting moments of appreciation and kindness will grow into something more enduring and stable. Connection will become your new baseline. This shift in experience maps onto a shift in the way the brain functions, and the way the body responds to stress. Science tells us that this transformation is within reach for all of us. It just takes a little patience, and the willingness to open our hearts to others.
