Esther Perel The routines rituals and boundaries we need in stressful times TED
Transcriber:
Helen Walters: Hi Esther Perel,
thank you so much for joining us
and I want to get right to it.
So we’re more than a year
into this pandemic now.
And I think one constant,
whether we’re really
acknowledging it or not,
has been heightened
stress levels, shall we say.
So I’m sure you’ve seen this
in your practice and in your work.
And I’m curious, what are you
recommending to people
who are coming to you wanting to know
how to regulate stress effectively?
Esther Perel:
So, hello, Helen, here it is.
You know, we’re living in a time
of existential anguish, of isolation,
of universal grief, economic insecurity,
prolonged uncertainty.
And we have a tendency
to call all this feelings stress.
But stress is multidimensional.
Researchers Susan David and Elissa Epel
emphasize the importance
of having to break it down into parts
so that they become manageable.
We have despair.
We have anxiety, exhaustion,
sadness, anger, irritability.
All these feelings are part of stress.
And when they are named and framed,
we can better regulate them
and deal with them.
Prolonged uncertainty at this moment
is that notion that we are uncertain,
but we also don’t know
how long this will last.
This is not your typical disaster
where you have a warning and a planning
and an onslaught and a post.
We are in it and we
don’t know for how long.
We experience a sense of ambiguous loss
where things are gone but still there,
and it really prevents
a sense of mourning.
Buildings are standing.
They are physically present,
the office buildings,
but they are emotionally hollow.
Family members are in nursing homes
or in other countries.
They are emotionally, psychologically
very, very close to us,
but they are physically absent.
And that sense of ambiguous loss
is most exemplified
in what we are experiencing at this moment
as the loss of Eros.
And the pandemic gripped the world.
And then the pendulum that swings
between freedom and security
has snapped off its hinge.
There is a constant, extreme
emphasis on safety
and it cordons off.
We avoid the spaces where we can
experience happenstance,
chance encounters, mystery, surprise,
all those elements of Eros
that create a sense of aliveness
and vibrancy in our lives.
That is the place where creativity
and curiosity also meet.
So what are some of the things
that people can do
once we understand stress in this way
is to create routines
and rituals and boundaries.
Routines to separate
the different activities,
the different roles
and responsibilities that we inhabit,
rituals because they create
sacred time and sacred space
and boundaries, because they
create delineation, demarcation, borders,
and those are really necessary for us
to experience a sense
of groundedness and structure.
And the second thing
that really helps with stress as well
is actually to create space for Eros.
There’s a reason people at this moment
are seeing plants grow, seeing bread rise,
creating things,
making things out of nothing.
Because when you see life
emerge in front of you
or something change in front of you,
it functions as an antidote
to deadness and to stress.
HW: It’s true. I can’t tell you how many
of my friends have adopted puppies
in this time.
Everyone’s a dog owner.
EP: You know, we usually thrive
on this casual sharing
of personal stories with coworkers
or going to a place for lunch
that we hadn’t gone to
and wanted to explore
or talking to a kind stranger
on the commute.
All of these enlivening
moments of our lives,
surprise moments of our lives,
are currently not there.
So the puppy, it really gives us
all of that, you know, a pet amongst us.
So not just any pet, you know,
an animal, a child.
Those are natural sources
of surprise and mystery and spontaneity.
They bring the Eros right in front of us.
HW: I love that because I think
it’s such a good analysis of where we are
and what we’ve all been experiencing.
I think the flip side of this almost is
there’s basically
no such thing as control.
Right? And so I’m curious, you know,
for those of us who used to have a life
that we understood in some ways –
so we had the office, we had the home,
we had these places where we could go
and we kind of understood
how the world was structured –
with the collapse of those roles
and the collapse of those boundaries,
how do you regain a sense of yourself
in this new world
and what are your tips
for kind of establishing the boundaries,
like these new boundaries?
EP: We are not working from home,
we are working with home
and we are sometimes sitting on one chair.
I was doing a session for “How’s Work?”
with a newsroom,
and one of the people was talking
about how she has a new baby.
She sits at home, she’s nursing.
She’s the mother. She’s the colleague.
She’s the manager. She’s the reporter.
She’s the spouse. She’s the daughter of.
She’s the friend.
She has all those roles coming together,
merged in one place,
ever without having to leave
her dining room table.
And the mute button
is basically her only boundary left
between one world and the other.
So what has she lost?
She lost the sense of community,
of collective support
that she gets at work,
the ability to commiserate.
She lost being a woman who is a mother
who goes to work and is a working mother
because now she’s actually working
and mothering at the same time,
the whole day in the same place.
That’s a very different experience.
And for her and every
working parent at this moment,
it is essential to communicate
boundaries with partners.
We were talking yesterday –
and with colleagues as well.
We were talking yesterday.
Your child came into the room
and basically you notified,
I am home, I am alone,
my son is here and he may show up.
And indeed he did.
And there is something very different
when we don’t try to hide
our multiple realities,
but we actually integrate them
in the midst of the situations
that we are in.
Carving out a special sacred space,
physical space
to delineate the separations,
I think at this point
is extremely important.
That involves, you know,
even changing clothes.
We are usually very localized people
and we change, we move to another place.
We have a ritual of preparing
the things that we need to put in our bag,
to go to the gym, to go to the restaurant,
to go to see friends or family.
None of these markers are currently there
to give us that embodied sense
of experience.
We are exhausted, basically.
We use the word a lot,
but we don’t always attribute exactly
where that exhaustion is coming from
and it comes from the loss
of these delineations and demarcations,
these boundaries that are
very, very grounding to us.
HW: I don’t know if you saw that video
of the dad who was on telly with the BBC
and his kid came in
and then another kid came in.
He kind of strong-armed
the kid out of the way.
And I think what’s beautiful about this
is that we have, you know,
I think that we are all learning
how to roll with this.
And, you know, now my son
will come and join a meeting
and everyone’s just like waves
and is like, “Hi Jack,”
and, you know, and then he gets bored
and wanders off again.
And that’s kind of, you know, in a way,
I think that’s a really beautiful outcome.
I mean, it’s a very lucky outcome
because I’m very lucky
to be able to work at home
and have that kind of
fortunate aspect of my life.
But I just think it’s a beautiful outcome.
EP: But you know,
what’s also very striking
is that you’re not trying to hide it
and to whisk him away.
In a way I think, you know,
we are integrating your home life,
your reality as a mother
alone at home with your child
who is also working
as part of our conversation.
And I think that this for me reflects
a very interesting change in this moment,
which is a kind of an anti-small talk.
You know, people are literally
speaking about the things
that they usually try
to keep outside of the office door.
We usually bring our whole self to work.
Right now, we are bringing
our whole work to our personal world
and that merging is creating
a very different
set of conversations as well.
And those conversations
are part of the collective resilience
that helps us deal
with the loss of control,
the prolonged uncertainty
and all the other stressors
that we mentioned.
HW: So how does this affect
our ability to feel productive?
I’m curious about that feeling of, like –
at the end of the day
I just did a really –
I nailed that project,
so I did that really well.
And I feel really good about that.
I’m going to close the door and I’m going
to leave and I’m going to go home again.
EP: I’m going to frame this
a little differently.
Zygmunt Bauman, the sociologist,
basically made this
very, very apt observation.
In abnormal circumstances,
when people have abnormal responses,
that is actually normal.
So this notion of wanting
to continue to be how we used to be
is one of the things
that we need to release.
We – this is a time
where we try to face our uncertainty
by being even more productive.
And so we end up working seven days
instead of understanding that
what really will help us get through this
is a sense of mass mutual reliance,
a deep sense of interdependence
that we are in a shared experience
and that collectively
we need to go through this.
That in itself will help
us remain productive,
but not the amount of hours
that we are putting in
or the notion that we have
an outcome that is as good
as it would have been
if none of this was happening
because it is happening.
We can’t pretend
that none of this is happening.
And I think that when we are able
to acknowledge our reality
and then respond accordingly,
it actually A – makes us more productive,
B – makes us less stressful
and C – maintains
our sense of connection,
which ultimately is our greatest
source of resilience
for dealing with this kind of situation.
HW: What are you hearing from managers
about how they’re dealing with this
in terms of their people
and their organizations
and how are you helping them?
EP: So what I hear from managers
are the same stresses
that we’ve just mentioned,
is a new emphasis
on not just on relationships
and the importance of relational
intelligence in the workplace,
but of mental health and wellness,
of an integration
of an entire emotional vocabulary
that involves empathy
and trust and psychological safety,
at the same time as we are discussing
performance indicators.
What I bring to the conversation
is really how do you create
these anti-small talk exchanges,
conversations with a team,
and every team has
a different culture for that.
But it is about helping people,
inviting people to talk
about how the big events
that are happening
at this point in the world
are also manifesting
in their personal lives.
And I give them the example
of my own startup, of EPGM,
where we on Friday have literally
shrunken the length of the meeting
and have taken a much longer time
to check in with each other,
about self-care,
about the divisions
that take place in our own families,
about what have been the resources
that have been most useful.
But it has become really a resource pool
that has deepened the connections
and that has also fostered the resilience
and has had very clear effects
on the productivity.
So I shared that with the companies
that I work with and talk about stress
and boundaries and communications
so that it helps people understand
what they are going through,
but particularly that this is
a shared collective experience
they’re going through
and not just something
that is happening to them alone.
Acute stress or pandemics fracture
and create divisions
because uncertainty leads people
to want to confront the loss
of their sense of mastery and certainty.
And so it often invites
a kind of polarization
about the worldview itself.
To create a shared vocabulary
counters all of that.
And that is primarily
what I do at this moment
when I work with companies
or cofounders or managers,
is to – what you were saying before,
it’s to name it,
to frame it, to distill it,
and then to be creative
in how to respond to it.
HW: I’m curious for your thoughts about
what does this mean for the future of work
and how we should prepare for it.
EP: Look, there’s a lot of discussions
about the future of work
that centers on the remote
versus in-person
and all of those things.
I think for me, what this pandemic
has really taught us
is that relational intelligence is not
just a soft skill for the workplace,
that mental health is really
at the center at this moment
of how we show up at work.
Work is a place today where we seek
belonging, purpose, development,
and way beyond just
putting food on the table.
It is an identity economy.
And those fundamental existential needs
that people are bringing in,
psychological needs
that people are bringing to work
are part of how we are going to redefine
the future of the workplace.
There are tendencies to talk about it
in relation to technology, to AI,
and all those things are really important.
But because of the technology,
because of the AI, because of
all the loss of the human touch,
the conversation about
how we maintain humanity,
how we maintain social connection,
how we allow people to show up –
You know, people always say,
I want to bring my whole self to work.
And I say we already do.
All the skills
that we cultivate in our lives
and in our childhood, growing up,
they show up with us at work
and this moment has really
made that beyond clear.
HW: Esther Perel, it’s always
a pleasure to talk to you.
Thank you so much
for sharing your insights with us.
EP: It’s a pleasure for me to be here.
Thank you.