Ever feel like a
P     A     N     E
without hopes of
B      E      I      N      G
a Window.         .        .
Depending on what study you google
there are up to 70%
who feel inadequate
who feel like they are
NOT ENOUGH.     .    .

Jenice Kim

If your self-worth seems to rise and fall according to what other people think, you’re not alone. But you can challenge this mindset and find a new way of valuing yourself, says psychologist Meag-gan O’Reilly.

(This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community.)

“How often do you get asked ‘What do you do?’ and feel like that question is going to determine how much attention or respect you receive?” That’s a question posed by Meag-gan O’Reilly, staff psychologist at Stanford University’s Vaden Health Center in Palo Alto, California, in a TEDxSJSU talk.

Perhaps you had the stomach-sinking experience of seeing your questioner’s face change or their eyes glaze over when they hear your response. It’s lousy. Instead of being seen and appreciated for all of your complicated individuality, you feel like your worth has been judged in a flash — and found wanting.

But getting a nod of approval is also unsettling, says O’Reilly. “Even those of us who seem to be winning at these conditions stand to lose because conditions change with time, age or unexpected hardships.”

For some of us, these encounters echo earlier occasions in our lives when we felt like our value as a person was determined by other people — usually adults — and fluctuated depending on what they thought of our latest grade, game, performance or accomplishment. O’Reilly says, “Think to yourself for a moment: What were some of the early messages you received about who you needed to be to show up in the world as meaningful?”

No matter how deep-rooted these experiences and feelings are, we can free ourselves from thinking that we’re not enough. This undoing may take a while to happen so we should be patient, cautions O’Reilly. “It’s a process, and I call it lifespan work.”

Here’s how we can start challenging the not-enough mindsets in ourselves and in the people around us, according to O’Reilly.

1. Do what makes you — not other people — happy.

Feeling like you’re not enough can sometimes lead you to take on certain friends, hobbies, projects or jobs that you think will make you look good in other people’s estimation. O’Reilly asks: “When was the last time you did something not because it’s going to show up on your resume, not because it meets that condition of worth you’re wrestling with, but just because you enjoyed it?”

It’s important to pursue the things that you genuinely enjoy because “it softens our stance toward ourselves,” says O’Reilly. “It allows us a zoomed-out perspective and gives us a chance to experience ourselves and others in a non-conditional way.” When you’re in the flow of doing what you love, you can shake off the weight of judgements and expectations.

2. Recognize that you have value — period.

Believing you’re enough does not mean that you should lower the bar for what you’d like to accomplish in life, emphasizes O’Reilly; it’s just that your personal enoughness remains constant and isn’t affected by your actions. She says, “Please go and achieve much. But do it in such a way that you know there’s a floor or a baseline of worth that you cannot descend below.”

Contrary to what some people fear, recognizing our inherent self-worth does not mean that we’ll be full of our own self-importance. O’Reilly says, “An inflated sense of self-esteem sounds like … ‘I can do it, I’m the best,” whether or not that’s actually true.” Inherent value, she adds, “sounds like ‘This is important to me, and I’m going to do my best … but it doesn’t define me.’”

3. When you meet new people, go beyond your job, title or school.

If we’d like to remove the judgment associated with the “So, what do you do?” question, we can also change how we respond to it. “The next time someone asks you what you do, don’t provide an occupation or field of study,” says O’Reilly. “Instead, share with them something that you cherish about yourself; try to break interpersonal ground with them and not start with labels.”   I really paid attention to this because I hate telling people, “Oh, I’m a minister or I’m a chaplain.”

4. Respond with love and acceptance to the successes and failures of your family, friends and colleagues.

Similar to the previous point, we need to try to model a new way of being if we want to ease the not-enough mindset in the people around us. Given how achievement-oriented society can be, says O’Reilly, “this is difficult … but a person is not a product and we need a culture that delineates the two and helps us see that one does not define the other.”

Wouldn’t you like the most important people in your life — young or old — to feel like they are enough? By appreciating them and showing that your care for them is unconditional, you can create change that will ripple outwards. “Enough is enough with these worth wars we’re waging,” O’Reilly says. “Think about how radically different our world and relationships would be if each of us actually acted like we all had inherent value.”

The greatest ways I have come to feel
E  N  O U  G  H
is creating moments making
Others feel
E       N       O       U       G       H
.          .          .THE CARING CATALYST CHALLENGE:
DON’T TRY IT.     .     .
D O
I T
(every time)

 

S O M E
say it’s been the worst thing about the
P A N D E M I C
a
simple
touch. . .

Humans
U S
W E
are made to be touched — so what happens when we aren’t?

 Mary Halton most recently shared some of her FEELINGS
and thoughts about this very thing
and it’s anything but
S h O c K i N g

Nadine Redlich

Our bodies are designed to respond to touch, and not just to sense the environment around us. We actually have a network of dedicated nerve fibers in our skin that detect and emotionally respond to the touch of another person — affirming our relationships, our social connections and even our sense of self.

So, what happens when we don’t receive that?

This was one of the first questions that neuroscientist Helena Wasling PhD considered when social distancing restrictions were introduced to curb the spread of COVID-19. Based at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, she has studied these nerves — known as C tactile or CT afferents — and their importance to our emotions for over a decade.

“What struck me very early on, in the first week of being told that we were restricted from touch,  was that people no longer knew how to behave,” she says.

Even if you don’t consider yourself to be a tactile person, touch is — or was — embedded in the social structure of our lives. From meeting a new colleague and evaluating their handshake to giving a friend a long hug when we haven’t seen them in a while, it is one of the fundamental ways we have all learned to relate to one another. “To take it away is a very big intervention,” says Wasling.

New York based psychologist Guy Winch PhD agrees; “Touch is something we associate with emotional closeness, and we associate the absence of it with emotional distance. We may not fully appreciate it, but in pre-pandemic life there were literally dozens of small moments of touch throughout the day.”

This is significant not just in the landscape of our minds, but that of our bodies. Being emotionally and socially responsive to touch is so biologically fundamental to us that CT afferents are present over almost every inch of our skin, absent only from the palms of our hands and the soles of our feet.

These nerves are, Wasling explains in her TEDxGöteborg talk, particularly attuned to three things: a light touch, gently moving, and around 32 degrees Celsius (89F). Which just happens to be human skin temperature. So they are programmed to be most responsive to a gentle caress from another person.

Rather than simply telling our brains that this touch has happened — this is the role of other receptors in the skin that help the primary somatosensory cortex to processes physical sensations — CT afferents instead send signals to the insular cortex. “This is a deeper part of the cortex that deals more with your emotional equilibrium,” explains Wasling. “So you will get kind of a vague sensation. In the best of cases, it will be: ‘That was nice. I’m accepted. I feel safer now. Someone is counting on me.’ CT afferents also have pathways to parts of the brain that deal with who you are socially.”

For people who have now been living without that connection for a long time, it can be incredibly difficult, says Winch. “I have friends and patients that I work with who have not been touched in a year. At all. Not a handshake. And they are really suffering for it. There’s something that feels very distancing and cold about not having any kind of option for an embrace, and that can leave long lasting scars.”

Hugs, the form of touch we probably all miss the most, are particularly important and emotionally nourishing, says Winch. “When someone’s crying and we hold them, we’re doing it to comfort, but what it allows them to do is cry more. People usually will hold it together until somebody puts an arm around them, and then they’ll break down because that hug represents security and safety, and because of the closeness we feel when we know and trust that person.”

Moreover, the benefits of touch that we are missing out on are not just emotional and social but also physical; it can reduce pain and stress, as well as giving us a general feeling of wellbeing. These are the areas, says Wasling, where we may be able to support ourselves when we need to go for prolonged periods without social touch.

Here are some of the ways that we can ease the difficulty of living without this closeness — both for ourselves, and the people in our lives.

Take a shower or have a warm bath

Although it doesn’t elicit quite the same physiological response as interpersonal touch, Wasling says the slow movement of the water on your skin is likely to generate a CT afferent response. Having a warm bath also relaxes your muscles, which can help to alleviate tension.

Cuddle a pet, or ask to walk someone else’s

“Just being close to a furry animal has been shown to lower your stress, reduce your heart rate and your blood pressure,” says Wasling. You also have a social relationship with your pet — they rely on you and need you to show up for them.

There’s been a noted increase in people adopting pets during the pandemic, and at least one study has identified the potential therapeutic benefits of human-animal relationships when we are denied our normal level of human social interaction.

If you are able to see anyone in person, be wholly present — even if you can’t touch

When we remove touch from our social interactions, we should consider what else we can emphasize instead. “Maybe we could be better at looking each other in the eyes, if we do have physical meetings,” suggests Wasling. “We can make sure that we see each other, because touching a person is a way of saying that ‘I see you, I acknowledge your existence.’”

Don’t be afraid to have deeper, more meaningful conversations where you really listen — especially if you know someone might be isolated or lonely. While these interactions don’t activate the same touch-based neural pathways, they still stimulate our social sense of belonging and intimacy, says Winch.

Don’t just “check in” on people who are alone — connect with them meaningfully

It feels like everyone from our employers to the Twittersphere to US vice president Kamala Harris is reminding us to check in on our single friends. But are we going the right way about it?

“When we say ‘check in’ that’s like a checkbox. Tick; done,” says Winch. But that really isn’t enough. While the boredom and frustration of lockdowns are similar experiences for everyone, being isolated from the regular physical closeness of friends and family is uniquely difficult for people who are alone; the elderly, those who live by themselves, and those who are in high risk categories and cannot chance even one hug.

“If you just check in, that’s not going to be sufficient. You should be talking for at least 15 – 20 minutes for that to be a meaningful conversation. You have to really connect,” says Winch. If you’re both feeling Zoom fatigue, try each taking a walk while you talk on the phone.

If friends have described feeling ghostly or unreal, do your best to appreciate that the absence of touch has been a significant emotional loss for them during this time. One that you may never fully understand. Try not to say “I know how you feel,” if you are not in the same position.

“You know that when you touch things, they’re real to you,” says Wasling. “One of the reasons why I think touch is so important is that it makes you convinced you have a place in the social world of other people.”

As we look towards a vaccinated future, it is difficult to know right now how the pandemic will change our social attitudes towards touch in the long term. Will we still shake hands? Hug colleagues? A UK study conducted from January to March 2020, mostly before lockdown measures were introduced, found that 54 percent of people already felt they had too little touch in their lives. So we may well want this aspect of our lives to return as soon as possible.

But one facet that worries Winch is how the pandemic has actually reshaped our relationship with touch; “We took the thing that represents something so close, intimate and important, and now it represents something that’s actually dangerous and you should avoid. Even if we don’t fully register it, we are going to feel surges of anxiety at the idea of getting a hug. It’s going to take a while to bring us down from the danger alert of touch.”