Safety signals: absence of threat is not presence of safety

You’ve worked really hard for months on end and it’s finally time to take a break. You feel like the holiday you have planned can’t come soon enough. The final stretch has been one big time crunch with work deadlines, holiday arrangements, packing, domestic tasks to ready your home for vacation. Then finally, anticlimactically, everything is suddenly done (or abandoned), you hop in your car or board your plane and after some travelling you arrive at your destination. You’ve been dreaming of this moment for months, imagining in vivid detail how you’ll lounge about, sipping on a drink, lying on the beach, strolling around. You could just feel how gloriously relaxed you’d be. But now that your holiday is finally a reality, the actual experience is a bit underwhelming – try as you might, you can’t keep your mind from returning to the final rush of the run-up to the holiday. Your mind keeps reminding you of things that you just didn’t get to, of tasks delegated to others that might not get done to your standards, of various things back home that are now unsupervised. Even though you know better, you check your phone from time to time and each time you do, you are instantly transported all the way back to the context you travelled all this way to leave behind for a while. Instead of lounging about, you feel listless. Instead of sleeping in, you wake up early, feeling a bit bored and uninspired. This goes on for a few days and you think to yourself that you might just as well have stayed home for all the relaxing you’re doing here.

Holiday vibes

But then, gradually, your normal life back home starts to fade into the background a bit. You start developing a little holiday routine. You start growing accustomed to your new surroundings – the weather, your accommodation, the sights, the smells, the activities. You feel how your guarded posture starts softening. The tension in your shoulders starts relaxing. You breathe a bit easier. You find that your spirit is more lifted, your demeanour becomes more playful, you joke around more. You notice that you start thinking of the future and the fun and interesting and creative things you could do in your life. Your curiosity is piqued and you naturally start exploring your new environment. Your experience of the passage of time becomes different. The days start feeling simultaneously long and full of enjoyable activities but also strangely fleeting.

Why is this the paradoxical experience of going on a holiday? Why does it sometimes take a week or more to start feeling different from how you did back home, despite your environment being dramatically different? Changing your circumstances does not necessarily immediately translate into a change in physiology. The nervous system is biased towards maintaining a diffuse state of readiness. This allows an organism to respond rapidly to unpredictable changes in a chaotic environment. However, because the absence of threat does not mean the presence of safety, it takes not only the removal of threat and uncertainty, but also the perception of sufficient safety signals, for an organism’s nervous system to lower its guard. When you arrive on holiday, the threats and uncertainties of your usual environment have been removed, but gradually, as the safety and predictability of your new environment starts becoming apparent to your nervous system, the defensive readiness and vigilance start giving way to energised relaxation.

Diffuse defensive activation

But how does a person end up in a state of chronic defensive activation in the first place? When an organism perceives a threat to its survival, its time horizon necessarily contracts. It discounts the future while the present becomes disproportionately important. It becomes defensively activated. However, because the environment is perceived to be unpredictable, the physiological arousal is diffuse. Think of “battle stations” on a warship – all hands are on deck, and the entire vessel must be ready for anything. All defensive and offensive and manoeuvring systems are online. Nobody is eating or sleeping; repair and maintenance are suspended. Resources that would otherwise be allocated to replenishment, maintenance and longer-term functions are shunted to the maintenance of the current state of readiness. These adaptations are completely appropriate in the face of imminent danger, but what happens if this state is maintained long-term? In an organism, the stress hormones accomplish the shunting and mobilising of resources. This is part of normal physiology, but when demand exceeds the organism’s adaptive capacity due to extreme and unremitting stress, it starts moulding the organism – resources continue to be committed to immediate demands while tissues and functions that are less immediately necessary receive less investment. Chronically under-resourced tissues like skin, muscle, connective tissue and immune structures start incurring a maintenance debt and eventually start degenerating. As immune regulation becomes impaired, the organism becomes prone to generalised inflammation. Metabolic rate becomes depressed in an attempt to conserve scarce resources.

What is the subjective experience of this physiological state of defensive activation being maintained chronically? In a person, this state is not necessarily perceived as acute fear, but more as a sense of being unable to switch off. The mind continually returns to unfinished tasks, unresolved problems, potential complications. Even when demands are removed, relaxation feels impossible. The future recedes and immediate problems dominate the mental space. Minor issues acquire disproportionate weight. Most mental energy is spent on tracking, anticipating and checking things rather than on exploring possibilities. Uncertainty becomes difficult to tolerate. Perspective narrows. Curiosity, play and creativity become difficult to access. Thought becomes more directed and effortful, with less room for the associative, intuitive and exploratory thinking that emerges when the mind is not occupied with immediate demands.

These two things – the overburdened, defensively activated physiology and the subjective mental experience of hypervigilance and overwhelm – are in fact one phenomenon, seen from two sides. What you experience cognitively is what this physiological state feels like from the inside. Your nervous system senses the environment and assesses the relative safety of it, but your current state is also used as an input in this assessment. The environment in question is both the internal and the external environment. If you are isolated, cold, underfed, exhausted, in pain and inflamed, this in itself is perceived as evidence that your environment is unsafe – regardless of how safe it actually is. Furthermore, your thoughts also form part of this internal environment. The mind dwelling on unfinished tasks, continually anticipating complications, ruminating on what has gone wrong, registers as threat. Anticipated threat activates the same processes in the body that actual threat does. What compounds the problem of a chronically activated defensive posture is that it is itself depleting, and a depleted body is more prone to becoming defensively activated. The mindset associated with this state also triggers defensive activation – the condition thus tends to become self-perpetuating, folding in on itself. However, a state with numerous points of entry also has numerous points of exit – and we’ll get to this shortly.

Modern signal deficit

Why does our modern environment induce this state of overwhelm so readily? Most of us are in fact relatively safe and well-resourced most of the time, but that safety doesn’t register because our nervous systems are attuned to specific safety signals that are absent in our modern environment. Each animal has unique needs when it comes to safety signals: cats need somewhere to hide, mice need darkness, pigs need to be able to root. In each animal’s natural environment, the presence of these signals is an accurate measure of its safety. Without them, their nervous systems cannot stand down, and that is appropriate because in an environment without these features, these animals are not in fact safe. What are the safety signals that humans are attuned to and that our historical environments supplied? These are generally things that we don’t even think about: the freedom to act on your own initiative, and the ability to shape your surroundings by doing so, bounded work (mostly physical) followed by rest, sunlight during the day, darkness during the night, refuge, quiet and warmth and breath, food arriving on a regular schedule and eaten with others, the company of familiar companions, thoughts mostly occupied by things relevant to the immediate environment and personal interests, a reserve of resources and capacity as buffer against unforeseen events.

In our current environment we don’t necessarily perceive acute danger, but rather constant low-grade threat and unpredictability – abstract, diffuse, unresolvable. Our information landscape bombards us with potential dangers and aspects of our modern environment that used to feel secure are increasingly perceived to be fragile and untrustworthy. However, there is little we can actually act on and the effect of our actions seems very limited, so the perceived threats are never resolved. We are mostly confined indoors under artificial light. Our environments are often noisy and crowded with strangers. Our lives are sedentary. Most of us do work that doesn’t have a strong relevance to our immediate environment or interests. Our work is unbounded in scope and time. Our food is energy dense, but nutrient poor, arriving on an irregular schedule, often eaten hurriedly and alone. We feel spread thinly with very little surplus capacity or resources to absorb adverse events. Our attention is fragmented and we cannot sustain concentrated thought long enough to resolve pending issues. In our modern environment our nervous systems are no longer able to accurately gauge our relative safety and in this ambiguous landscape the default is toward defensive activation. To help our nervous systems register safety appropriately, we need to supply the missing safety signals deliberately.

Supplying safety signals

For many of us it is not possible to completely change our circumstances overnight. Fortunately, we can still supply the missing safety signals to our nervous systems even if we cannot yet change our adverse circumstances. The nervous system cannot distinguish between a boundary or condition you create for yourself and one imposed by your environment – when you supply a safety signal, it assumes this reflects the state of the environment and adjusts accordingly. For each of the following areas, even a small but clear and consistent signal is registered and can start easing defensive activation. The signals also compound, each one easing the state enough to make the next easier to supply, so rather than attempting one large change, it would be better to make several smaller ones.

Agency and influence. When we are able to deliberately choose something and exert influence over our environment, we feel less vulnerable and more like free agents within it. The action itself is more important than the magnitude of it. The nervous system registers that acting on the world influences it and that evidence transfers to perceived threats we cannot act on directly so that the stress response they elicit is considerably reduced. So start with something approachable, preferably physical, where the result will be visible and immediate. Repeated actions with visible effects, even if they are small, are what supply the missing safety signal that you have volition and can influence your surroundings.

Rhythm. Our nervous system expects rhythm in our activities and environment: light and darkness, sleep and wakefulness, company and solitude, sound and silence, activity and rest, movement and stillness. Rhythm means predictability to our nervous system – after rise comes fall, after tension comes release – and a more predictable environment is a safer environment. For most of us, the contrast between the poles of these axes has been lost and this means an inherently more ambiguous environment. Bright light early in the morning, avoiding screens after dark, and complete darkness in our bedrooms at night restore contrast to our light environment. Sufficient sleep on a regular schedule stabilises the circadian rhythm and gives the body the time it needs for repair. By setting aside time to be present with loved ones (watching TV doesn’t count) and also time in silence with only our thoughts and no distractions, we restore contrast on multiple axes. If we can bound our work to end at a specific time most days, this provides a signal to our nervous system that activity has ended and rest can begin. It’s especially helpful if the boundary between work and rest is demarcated by a little ritual like shutting down your laptop or pulling into your driveway or shutting your office door. Practically this means being as strict as possible about computer work ending at a certain time or place and phones being switched to do-not-disturb mode, preferably placed in a different room. Daily physical activity followed by stillness and rest provides contrast on the last two axes.

Refuge, quiet, warmth, breath. Just as a cat needs a hiding place in its environment to feel safe, humans need a space that is secure, quiet, warm and tranquil. A refuge from the chaos in our lives where we know it is safe to relax and breathe deeply. It doesn’t have to be an entire yoga studio or bath house. Any comfortably warm space that is free of news, noise, work and interruptions – a quiet corner in the garden, a comfortable chair by the fireplace or heater, a bathtub – can provide the safe haven signal if you endow it with this purpose and keep the association intact.

Food. Having enough food is the most direct measure of being provisioned. It’s the part of the environment that your body is built from. Eating too little, whether from dieting, skipping meals, or simply being too busy, is read as scarcity as surely as a real shortage would be, and the body responds by economising. If nutritious food arrives on a predictable schedule this signals to the nervous system that the body has sufficient energy and nutrients to perform all the essential functions as well as repair and maintenance. The body can afford to invest in long-term health. If meals are enjoyed in pleasant company, this combines the signal of adequate provisioning with one of being socially embedded. How can you prioritise this in your life? Maybe it’s taking a break from work while you eat your lunch somewhere calm with a friend. Maybe it’s reserving some nights in the week to prepare dinner with loved ones. If shopping and inspiration are obstacles, maybe it’s signing up for a meal-kit service.

Familiar company. Our nervous systems expect proximity to a clan. Defensive activation is dampened by being surrounded by trusted others – a potential danger is assessed as less dangerous when we have allies. However, social isolation is now a worldwide epidemic with one in four people reporting that they feel lonely. How do we supply the safety signal of social connection in our lives? We can make a routine of spending face-to-face time with friends and loved ones – date nights, a standing dinner appointment with friends, social or sports clubs, board game nights, interest groups that meet regularly. We can do chores together like cooking, gardening, walking the dog. A pet in the house supplies some of the same signals. Again, it’s the small consistent signals that count.

Attention: near, bounded, closed. Our thoughts form part of the internal environment that our nervous system reads for danger, and the question that matters is not whether a thought is worrying but whether it can be resolved. A concern about something immediate that we can see and act on can get resolved one way or another. A concern about something we can neither verify nor influence, which describes most of what reaches us through a screen, never gets settled: it simply stays open with the status “possible danger, magnitude unknown, no available action”, and while it stays open the guard stays up. What we allow to occupy our attention therefore determines whether our nervous system’s assessment of danger ever gets to complete. The way out begins with drastically limiting the consumption of news media. Next, close the loops that are already open in your mind. An unfinished task intrudes on attention until a plan exists for it, and the intrusion stops when the next step is decided, not when the task is done. A written list with one concrete next action beside each item does this reliably. Lastly, displace what remains by occupying the mind on purpose with what is immediately around you: the task at hand, the people in the room, the interests that absorb you. The fullest form of this is the flow state, where the mind is completely absorbed by something immediate, engaging, challenging and significant, to the extent that time passes by unnoticed. Of course, the same absorption can just as easily displace sleep, movement and company, so it belongs inside the time you have set aside for it.

Reserve. Beyond having enough resources for the moment, nothing conveys safety like also having surplus for the future. This applies to time, money, energy and attention alike. Unscheduled hours in the week are a surplus of time; an emergency fund that is never touched is a surplus of money; fuel left in the tank at the end of the day is a surplus of energy; a mind with room to wander is a surplus of attention. All of these supply a safety signal of reserve capacity that allows the nervous system to stand down.

Back to the holiday

Think again about the holiday experience. What were the safety signals that the environment supplied? Sun in the morning, darkness at night. Regular meals eaten leisurely with loved ones. Days with a routine but no deadlines. Companionship without demands. A pleasant space of your own. Attention on your immediate surroundings (eventually, once you stopped checking your phone). Empty time (that seemed like boredom at first, but led to curiosity). Agency over what to do with your days. All the signals discussed above, all at once, and it still took a week to relax. This illustrates the inertia of defensive activation. A signal is only believed once it reliably repeats.

We cannot live on holiday, but we can notice which of the signals the holiday supplied are missing from a regular week. This will be different for different people. For some it will be meals with trusted others. For others it will be an hour of extra sleep or an afternoon with nothing in it. Each of these safety signals is just that – a signal. The threshold for a signal is much lower than the threshold for changing our circumstances. That is the key. We can substantially lower our perceived stress and its impact on our bodies by making relatively minor but deliberate changes to our everyday lives.