Thoughts on soothing

Young babies are unable to self-sooth. Parents have to comfort them by feeding, swaying, shushing, or swaddling them, or whatever means that suits the baby’s mood on that particular occasion. Many of these behaviors imitate the environment inside the womb: sideways movement, loud white noise, and confined space. Sucking is another innate behavior that babies use to sooth. That’s why pacifiers work. As they grow, humans acquire new self-soothing behaviors. For example, they start singing themselves to sleep and require less and less soothing from adults.

As babies turn into kids, then into adults, they become more in control of their emotions and learn to self-regulate better. But the need for self-soothing never goes away. Sources of stress, frustration, and anxiety are abundant in daily life, and part of growing up is developing a way of dealing with them.

The main sources of stress are sameness and novelty. Sameness leads to boredom, which can itself lead to either restlessness or rumination, that is, thinking deep thoughts. Boredom can be so stressing that it can be used as torture. For example, solitary confinement is a form of punishment that involves prolonged sensory deprivation. On the other hand, too much novelty leads people to feel lost, outside the comfort zone, and full of doubt. Sure, it can be fun for a while, but humans need routine and rite to make sense of the world. Otherwise, every action involves a carefully considered decision, leading fast to complete mental exhaustion. Imagine a person being transported 100 years into the future. At first, they would have trouble understanding many of the new technologies and customs but, after a while, they would settle and develop some form of routine to help her cope.

Humans are born curious, our brains constantly seeking new information, unable to tolerate doing too much of the same thing. At the same time, we also have trouble making sense of too much information at once and dislike getting overstimulated. We need just the right amount of engagement to keep ourselves happily entertained. In fact, we already have systems that provide the right dose of stimulation to keep us hooked. Social media, good movies, slot machines, and video games, are designed and calibrated for exactly that purpose.

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

― Blaise Pascal

Whatever the source, when people get stressed, they get the urge to do something to cope with it. Unfortunately, adults are expected to refrain from sucking on a pacifier in public in a civil society, but they get around this limitation in multiple ways, some even more shameful, as fidget spinners. The most popular form of adult pacifier is the smartphone, widely used as a distraction from daily boredom at multiple times and circumstances. It’s hard not to notice the abundance of people frantically touching their black glassy rounded rectangles in any social setting. Smartphones provide soothing in different ways. The first, most obvious one is by providing a means of social interaction (calls, text messages). Second, they are able to provide novelty via social media posts and news. Thirdly, these devices provide ways of getting immersed in content like video games, comics, and books.

Perhaps the greatest source of anxiety is our most fundamental fears: existential angst (fear of death) and shame (fear of loss of status). Consider, for example, the anxiety a speaker feels before giving a public speech. It arises because performing poorly could lead to a loss of relative status in the eyes of others, which, at an evolutionary level, could limit one’s chances of survival and reproduction. This effect is, of course, subconscious; no one would consciously frame it in such terms. In fact, thinking logically about fear and putting the chain of thought into words can be an effective way to deal with it and to recognize that it is often unjustified. Fear of death, by contrast, is often more visceral. For example, when facing a steep ski run, one’s heart races and adrenaline surges.

Among the many ways people try to calm themselves, some are more beneficial and sustainable than others. While some prefer to practice sports and read books, others indulge in alcohol and cigarettes. For other activities, like work, video games, and religion, it’s not universally accepted where they stand on the beneficial-detrimental scale. Even methods that are usually praised, like meditation and flow (a focused state of high productivity), are hard to grade without the specific context. For example, achieving a state of flow might seem like a good way to deal with a troubling issue, but in some cases it may be better to confront the issue head-on and resolve it rather than using flow as a form of escape.

Add the need for soothing and a society that values work as a virtue and you get workaholism. For the workaholic, work is not just the means to an end, but something intrinsically valuable, no matter what it produces. Deep down, however, he works because it distracts him from boredom and rumination; because it’s easier to ignore problems with activity, even a worthless activity, than trying to understand and solve them.

By understanding more behaviors as a result of the need for soothing, we can better channel our negative emotions into more productive endeavors. The idea that we need to get better at recognizing and managing our emotions is nothing new, but looking at things from the lens of soothing gives us a new perspective. It reveals that we never really outgrow the need for a pacifier, whatever shape it takes. It’s up to each of us to choose the right one.