WELLBEING IS SOCIAL IN NATURE

If safety is the medicine, connection is the food.

One of the most important lessons of the pandemic, something that everyone in the world experienced firsthand, is the degree to which our experience of connection– with ourselves, one another, and the Living World– undergirds our experience of wellbeing.

Deprived of touch, deprived of the ability to be together, deprived of the ability to see one another’s faces, global mental health plummeted during the pandemic. It has not fully recovered.

Our wellbeing is social in nature.

Vivek Murthy, the US Surgeon General, issued a report in May of 2023 explaining that isolation, disconnection, and loneliness had the same impact on mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes per day!

What this means is that our moment-to-moment experience of wellbeing, of vitality, is related to our ability to reside in the neurobiology of connection.

It is possible to transform our experience of wellbeing.

And although there are many wonderful modalities that exist in order to do this, you can take more sovereign agency over this process by understanding several simple yet profound truths about how your Autonomic Nervous System organizes your life.

1) SAFETY FIRST: Safety is the pre-requisite to opening the doorways to connection. Cultivating safety– the moment-to-moment embodied experience of feeling safe, is the first task.

2) YOUR ANS IS ACCESSIBLE: Your Autonomic Nervous System, although the deepest part of your nervous system, is accessible to you directly through the portals of connection in your body: the face, the voice, the ears, the eyes, the hands, the feet, the skin, the belly, the genitals. Through working with these portals to connection, you can change the neural inputs to the deepest parts of your nervous system.

3) THINK OF CONNECTION AS FOOD: In the same way that you would not forget to eat for several days, recognize that feeding yourself connection is the nourishment that feeds your lived experience of wellbeing. Wellbeing isn’t a thing. It is a practice. It is not a noun; it is a verb.

4) FIGURE OUT WHAT KIND OF CONNECTION YOU FIND NOURISHING: Some people like to be alone and connect inward. Some people like to connect to their bodies through movement. Some people like to connect through their hands creatively. Some people like to connect with others socially. Some people seek connection through pets, some through nature. There are thousands of ways to nourish our connection systems. Find ways to nourish connection that are meaningful to you. Then putting time into them feels rewarding, and not like an obligation. If you want help exploring this, we have created what is likely the world’s most sophisticated Atlas of neurally restorative connection practices. You can learn more about it here. But remember, this doesn’t have to be complicated or costly. Prioritize cultivating connection and relatedness, and you are feeding your health-creation systems.

5) COMMUNITY IS THE STRONGEST FORM OF REBELLION: Since wellbeing is social in nature, building community with others gives us profound nourishment. The proper unit of human flourishing is the village. Finding and creating communities around shared interests, whatever they are– from things we are studying together, to groups that go forest bathing, bird watching, basket-making, or anything really, give us the benefits of community focused around something that is meaningful to us. If you build community around something you find nourishing to your connection system, then Wow – that’s a powerful supplement to the cultivation of enduring wellbeing.