Count to 10 and Think
By: Leah Shannon
I have just come from a week in Dallas, TX where I met and spent some time with Cindy, a lovely woman from Idaho. She is 64 years old – a fact that she repeats quite often with something in between wonder and pride. She has clear blue eyes, a ready smile and a most lovable guilelessness. We were perfect companions for each other. Having an insatiable interest in people, I would easily ask one question that would prompt stories upon stories of life that I can’t even imagine. We were from two different worlds. I, raised in Asia, let loose in the corporate world in New York and fascinated by frivolous cerebral pursuits. She was from Boise and Yuma and regaled me with stories of one who was first married at 17, divorced with two kids at 21, making it on her own in an era when that was an exception. She shared her own experiences with racism in a tumultuous time (she is Caucasian) and her surprise at her own latent prejudice – she had married a man who is ¼ African American who did not have the courage to tell her until 3 years into their relationship – and even with this fraction, she struggled with the love she felt and the subliminal conditioning she had growing up. She tells this story wide-eyed, impressing upon me the incredulity of such thoughts even crossing her mind. Love won over and persists to this day, she happily shared, her eyes more than once welling up with tears at the memory. She was always an entrepreneur. Running a furniture store and then a string of other businesses when that failed. I learned about her family, her life. Clearly, I had crossed her path at a time of change and I was her willing nondirective therapist. She and I were as different as night and day – but we are both passionate about life and are both in the cusp of a beginning. She is 64 and she is rarin’ to start something new. You could see it emanate from her pores. And with that kindred ground, we hit it off like we were old friends.
Conversation with Cindy is peppered with adages that make me smile. As with everyone I met in Texas over 50 years old. It is alternately amusing, frustrating and enlightening to get oracle-like answers when you really just want a categorical response. It is the stuff of legend that I thought screenwriters had made up!
As we were having our final meal together before we part ways, Cindy showed me pictures of her family, lovingly describing each person. She talked about being beside her father in his final moments and asking him what he would like to share with them before he died. What he would want them to remember as they led their lives. His response was “Count to 10 and think…when someone asks you a question, count to 10 and think before you say anything.” And we both paused and chewed on that sage response for moment. There are many variants to this that we have all heard before. “Take a deep breath” is one. “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Don’t engage in knee-jerk reactions in heated conversations. Don’t say things you may later regret. And a piece of advice I give clients who have food cravings is to drink a glass of cold water, wait half an hour and see how you feel.
The bottom line is, heightened emotions often elicit reactionary responses that don’t keep the larger – more important — context in mind. Resulting in consequences that are in turn often much worse than the situation at hand.
On the plane ride home, I was reading a very interesting article by Brian Christian in The Atlantic about The Loebner Prize — where Artificial Intelligence machines try to fool humans into thinking they are human, and humans try to convince other humans that they are in fact human — within a 5 minute pseudo-synchronous chat. Seeing the interactions of computer-human and human-human, Christian observes that much of human conversation is “stateless” – “unanchored from context…each remark after the first is only about the previous remark.” When we are emotional we speak on “stateless, knee-jerk” terms that are “reflex reactions to the very last sentence of the conversation than…the issue at hand or the person [we’re] talking to. All of a sudden, the absurdity and ridiculousness of this kind of escalation becomes quantitavely clear.” The best AI machines operate on this plane – generating convincing responses to the last thought/sentence that the human typed and as a result is able to carry on a very plausible conversation – a conversation that is familiar to all of us. To convince the human on the other side of Christian’s chat window that he is de facto human, he “steers himself toward a more “stateful” response, demonstrating forethought and context consideration. “Better living through science!”
Like many of Christian’s own realizations in the article, it is amazing that it takes a contest between humans and computers to help drive home the point that Cindy’s father was making. And this is an oft-repeated piece of advice. Why is it so hard for us to do it then? This implicates two sides of the conversation spectrum – the perfunctory how-are-you-I’m-good-thank-you-and-you automated exchange to high stakes emotional exchanges. The former results in an empty banal two minute waste of time and the latter into something ultimately producing nothing but possibly regret and a compounding negative situation.
While banal is benign, an emotionally charged response is not. Our ingrained fight or flight response pushes us to react in defense from the verbal charge. Counting to 10 and thinking allows us to maybe rise a little bit above the emotion and give us space to think and contextualize. Taking a deep breath engages our parasympathetic nervous system, physically countering the rise in adrenalin that makes our heart race and pushes us to blurt things out. We slow down when we count and when we take deep breaths. Stress levels go down, we mitigate the fight or flight response, allowing us a moment to consider the larger conversation, the more meaningful context. Giving us the ability to have a REAL dialogue, a human one. An empathetic one. And yes, a less damaging one. Even a productive one! It is definitely great advice, what Cindy’s father gave. A nice rule of life to add to the list. Count to 10 and think.
Leah Lizarondo Shannon is an Integrative Nutrition Counselor and Food Educator. She runs FullWell and works with the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine as a Food for Life instructor.
www.befullwell.com