The Red Queen’s Challenge: Stretching Your Mind in Today’s Chaos

I really appreciate the need for warming up. I need to stretch hamstrings, calf muscles, neck and wrist joints more than just once a week. It feels good when I do, and I pay a price when I don’t. But I wasn’t aware how important it is to do warm ups for my mind.

I am finding that in order to wrap my mind around all that is going on in my world, I need to do some mental stretching. If I don’t, all too often I feel overwhelmed. That, in turn, leads to isolation, and that turns into trouble for me.

I am not talking about actually going to the gym, going for a jog/ride/swim or whatever aerobic exercise you regularly perform to stay in shape. All these are great for getting oxygen to your brain and keeping your body in top working order. What I am talking about is having an equivalent “gym routine” that will support your mind in taking in all the impossible things that are going on in our world today, and making sense of them.

The Power of Habit and Routine

Without question, developing good mental habits and routines helps to counter-act the sense of overwhelm that can come from information overload. I suspect that like me, you have one or two websites you check for your news, one or two settings for notifications so that you don’t miss important (to you) information, and perhaps you make the occasional foray into new territory when a friend makes a recommendation.

The problem with this, however, is that it can become like a well-worn cart track. You may never get out of the grooves, and because you don’t stray, there may be things you are missing or even more importantly, things you no longer question.

Let Me Explain

Just like the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, we are all being asked to believe at least six impossible things before breakfast every day now. I don’t have to stretch for examples. Just this past week news coverage spanned two old men running for President, conversations about their cognitive and moral fitness for the office, a number of people dropping out of races for varying reasons, starvation and genocide in the Middle East, Oscar snubs and predictions on who will win what, weather extremes of cold/hot, wet/dry, and snow/floods around the world, auctions of TV memorabilia and sanctions of imports of goods, outbreaks of measles and approvals of new medications for cancer, spring training for baseball-college basketball-tennis championships-and football trades.

Here’s the thing. This is the new normal – I don’t hear folks saying, “My God! There is too much chaos going on in the world. I long for the days when things were simpler!” Nope. I just see people of all ages swiping from one screen to another, taking in bits of humor, drama, horror, anime, cute animal videos, rape, starvation, sex, abuse, politics and sports all in the time it takes to wait for the take-out order to arrive.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is the filter our minds use to selectively choose what things to pay attention to and what to ignore so that we don’t ever have to experience that discomfort of being wrong. More often than not, the filter has been shaped by the family and community we were raised in, how we were educated and what we were taught, and whether we have been exposed to different values, beliefs, and ways of relating.

Some of this is generational. Those of us born in the Dark Ages before the internet, had local newspapers, radio, and then television. I can still remember going to movies and watching “Movietone News”. (Do you remember John Cameron Swayze’s voice?)

Back then, there were three network news companies. The “trusted sources” who shared the nightly news (all men), gave us the headlines and in-depth reporting as journalists, not pundits. Local news was rich with small town newspapers, radio stations, and weekly broadsides that included sales, jobs, apartment and shared living situations, and legal notices.

Geographic and Religious Values

Some of this was geographic. I grew up in Chicago. I still am proud of my “Midwestern Values”, which folks in my generation would have easily listed as work hard, save your pennies, and don’t be too quick to judge. These were shared values, unquestioned and reinforced at every level of society.

Some of this was religious. I grew up in the Protestant Heartland. Regardless of how one worshiped, we all worshiped God. Like many of my classmates, during elementary school I got off early on Thursdays to attend catechism classes. It was what we all did. I was aware of the differences between Jews and Catholics, but I had no idea of the nuances between Lutherans, Methodists, Unitarians, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians, much less Evangelicals, until much later in my life.

The Seductive Power of Confirmation Bias

If we visit the same places every day, read the same headlines, hear the same explanations from the same people, point fingers at the same villains, and defend the actions of the same folks (who, after all, are just like us), then it is really very easy to arrive at the conclusion that what I believe must be right.

It is for this very reason, however, that it is very difficult to give all that up much less even consider the possibility that I might be wrong.

Factions and Fractures

So, we end up with factions, schools of thought, religions and political parties. We have defenders and contenders on all sides proclaiming to be the right way or the right choice or the right solution. We back our arguments with “evidence” cherry-picked from our “trusted sources”. We make and then enforce rules for inclusion and exclusion and then come up with procedures to make sure the rules are followed. This is the way of all civilizations.

It would be wonderful if all it took to bring things into balance was sitting down with different people, discussing different ideas, and finding ways to share the best of the best to improve everybody’s life. If Google or Siri or Alexa could identify the product we needed and have it shipped overnight. If there really was just one book we needed to read that held all the answers.

If we all could agree on what needed to be done and then found a way to do it.

But there doesn’t seem to be.

Here’s My Suggestion

What I suggest is that you do some mental warm-up exercises. Do some “opposition research” and spend some time in other worlds or other cultures than you would normally visit. You can do this online by reading news from around the world or listening to radio or podcasts from other countries.

Stretch your own thoughts and beliefs by coming up with answers to the following questions:

Why am I having such a strong reaction to _____________________?

What information am I using to come to that conclusion?

What experience(s) have I had to support/contradict my conclusion?

What information have I overlooked or dismissed in order to make myself be “right”?

What would be different if I believed the “opposite”?

Hopefully, this kind of mental flexing will keep you in good shape for whatever is coming out way.