Resilience : Practical exercises: Arriving

A systems view of biological health

Section 4: Practical exercises

4 : Arriving

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This topic is about the natural role of the cognitive mind and the use of conscious attention, and how that affects more subconscious survival layers - what I tend to call internal bodyguards.

If you think of yourself as a hunter-gatherer - a lifestyle that we had for most of the past two million years of human evolution - there is a particular way that attention is used. Your nervous system has evolved according to that style of attending to the world. Your entire body-mind takes its cues from how you consciously use your attention. It is is intensely interested in conscious attention because that is (i) how it finds out about the status of the external world and (ii) how it knows what you are going to demand of it.

Hunter-gatherers live in an environment that is mostly safe, that provides everything they need, that they know intimately, but also one that they are endlessly curious about the little details that will give them more mastery and ability to navigate it.

They do not wander around fearfully looking for danger - because (a) this kind of mindset would not allow them to find food very efficiently, and (b) as a community they have tried and tested strategies for dealing with any animal that might pose a threat. As someone who has grown up in a western environment you might not do very well if dumped in the Kalahari, but bushmen have grown up in the African savannah, and dealing with a lion is to them - when working together as a community - not much different from crossing a busy road might be for you.

Neither do they get bored - the environment is alive. If you walk round a typical city street, you know the predictable behaviour of buildings and pavement, of traffic lights, of cars, even of people. With this lack of vitality and change that is found in a living environment - accompanied by information and sensory overload [1] - the tendency is to numb out and switch off, and adopt a state of dis-engagement with the immediate environment. Which becomes habitual.

A habitually disengaged way of tending/attending to the world is taken by your internal bodyguard to be dangerous in two ways.

Firstly, simply not paying attention incurs risk (if you are hunter-gatherer), so the subconscious begins to attend in place of the conscious/cognitive mind. This is as it should be, with the caveat that it is only the congnitive mind that can see the nuances that will allow a "step-down" of the alarm status. So if you go onto high alert it becomes difficult for your whole body-mind to return to a state of "safe-enough". Many people are walking round with unresolved, uncompleted, un-integrated danger-alert responses from past events maybe decades old, because the modern bored/disinterested/switched off/comfortably-numb way of attending to the world does not fully calibrate the body-mind to your present environment.

Secondly, a disengaged attention is also an overwhelm survival response, so habitual disengagement sends a subtle but consistent message to the body-mind that the environment is overwhelming - i.e. exceedingly dangerous. The body-mind then tends to go into submission physiology, which is in reality a version of PTSD.

So "Arriving" is really (simply!) about paying attention - in the way you would if you were a Hunter-Gatherer. It is a very matter-of-fact but nevertheless interested and engaged appraisal of your immediate space, of the contact sensations (how you are supported and contained) and a few more superficial interoceptive sensations (such as the movement of your body as it breathes itself).

Arriving is a basic prequel to ALL of the subsequent exercises. Most people find that just Arriving significantly regulates their nervous system's state of arousal (down when it is too high, up when it is too low).

Audio resources

The basic protocol is provided in the Audio track below.

A shorter version is provided here :

A simple description of the process is as follows :

Start by having a light awareness of your body, and then placing the main focus of attention on your vision, be aware of the room around you with your eyes. Become curious about little details that are of interest – pictures, windows, reflections of light – whatever gives you some small sense of appreciation. Now include your ears, brifly noting any noises from the house or from outside and how familiar they are.
Decide where you want to be in the room, and get yourself as comfortable as possible. Now look round and check that the room is safe. This might sound a little OTT, but it is necessary to deliberately check that you are safe. Spend a few minutes just checking out the corners, getting a sense of where you really what to be so that you feel safest and most supported. Use your head and neck – deliberately moving your head slowly to scan the room.
Repeat the first step - being visually aware of the room around you. Become curious about little details that are of interest – pictures, windows, reflections of light – whatever gives you some small sense of appreciation.
Notice how your body responds to all of this, including where in your body you feel any sense of appreciation.
Now start to notice in detail the specific sensations and shapes of contact. When you have done this, remind yourself that these contacts connect you to the building, the ground and the whole of the landscape you are in.
Similarly extend that in detail to all the specific sensations from the rest of your skin - air on exposed skin, clothing, perhaps movement as your body breathes itself. When you have done this, remind yourself that these sensations have defined how you are contained.
Now place your attention on your body, and say "Here we all are, together – we are [safe]" (or whatever you have found). Feel if your body responds. It may not change at all, but it might "hear" what you have just said, and relax in some small way, or become more energised. If some part of your body does respond, then smile at it internally.

References & Notes

1 For instance (just looking at one environmental stressor - noise), 50dB noise levels in a rural village equates to a tractor with its engine running about 25 metres away. But these levels of noise are ubiquitous in a city and are therefore "normal" and unremarkable - except that your sensory syusstem is working very hard all the time to filter the background noise out so that you can hear and identify things of importance. There are many research articles including one showing that even caterpillars get noise-stressed when they are within 100m of a motorway. One recent study found a substantial incerase in the rate of heart failure as noise levels increase: Teng Yang, Xin Hu et al (2023) Long-Term Exposure to Road Traffic Noise and Incident Heart Failure: Evidence From UK Biobank. JACC: Heart Failure 11(8) part 1 pp986-996 ISSN 2213-1779 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jchf.2023.04.003.