New Lockdown Rituals Help Us Cope

23 Dec New Lockdown Rituals Help Us Cope

When a patient who suffers from insomnia comes to me, one of the first questions I ask is if they are using their bed for any activity other than sex or sleeping. If they aren’t, I recommend that they move other, unrelated activities to some other place. I do that because to prime themselves for sleep, they need to associate their bed, at a very primal level, only with sleep. If the bed becomes associated with other more wakeful activities, laying down and sleeping may become difficult. Our bodies and minds tune into places and activities in unconscious ways that we have established over time. It is hard to will ourselves toward the tasks at hand when the environment has changed. It is especially difficult when the environment changes in ways that are stressful and not conducive to rest. How can we expect to be productive and alert when working in a makeshift office in our bedroom? If all goes well, we should be conditioned to fall asleep! In response to the current disruption, many experts are suggesting the establishment of a routine, exercise, and maintaining contact with others. But these very sensible suggestions often don’t go very far.

One of the reasons that many of us are having issues of productivity in our makeshift home offices is that, on top of the shock, fear, and confusion that the pandemic has brought on, the lockdown has also upset our habits and sensory environments. Our anchoring places around the city and offices, the ones that prompt us to work, socialize, relax, and exercise, the ones that sustain, motivate and energize us, are out of reach. Most of the time, unless we venture out for a short walk, for groceries, or to look at whatever landscape we have outside our window, we find ourselves immersed in the sensory experiences of our sheltering places, the same people and pets, or lack thereof, day after day. As many people report, all days seem the same. We do not need to call in the neuroscientists to know that encounters via a screen, either for work, fitness, or social purposes, are not the same in quality and intensity as the ones in the flesh — or at least not just yet. GiampieroPetriglieri, a former therapist, expressed this clearly and concisely in one of his tweets, which I report below:

I spoke to an old therapist friend today, and finally understood why everyone’s so exhausted after the video calls. It’s the plausible deniability of each other’s absence. Our minds tricked into the idea of being together when our bodies feel we’re not. Dissonance is exhausting.

With the lockdown, we are also missing the ritual of transition — the time, space, and sensorial experience that allows us to shift between activities and different states of mind. In our lockdown, we may be still exercising, doing psychotherapy, and working remotely, but our rich, sensorial experience of actually going places is greatly diminished. Our present “going” is often no more than a few steps, while previously it included habitual ways of grooming, taking the subway, visiting some establishment where we were “regulars,” sipping some coffee, listening to music or reading, thinking and preparing mentally for what lies ahead, or fantasizing about the lives of some of the random, interesting people that cross our paths. These experiences had tactile, auditory, olfactory, and visual dimensions that anchored us and prepared us to shift to the next state.

Let’s take the example of psychotherapy. As my patients tell me these days, teletherapy is working just fine for them. But if I press further, they also tell me that something is missing in teletherapy. They are still getting the same benefits from the conversations, but the majority of them would prefer to come in person. Therapy, they say, is not only about our conversations. It is my office, in which they settle and can let go, a neutral place that is away from their everyday experiences. It is not only the 45 minutes they spend with me. Therapy starts in the traveling time to my office, when they start thinking about what they want to talk about. If they are not pressed for time, at some point, either before or after, they stop at a coffee shop to think about our work together and to do some errands in the nearby shops, which are all infused with the experience of therapy. Therapy is a web of activities and experiences, of which my office is but the center. After therapy, they would travel to the next activity, and that travel would help them mentally transition, close off the more exploratory and raw part of themselves they had opened in therapy, and let other parts of their complex selves take center stage.

Now that much of this rich, sensory, spatial-temporal dimension in all our activities is gone, we are scrambling to designate part of our homes (or car) as our “office” or “gym.” We can put on our office clothes, either from the waist up or in full, and try to continue with work as usual, but the imaginary picket fence that delineates our new work space is often trespassed upon by the sights of familiar objects around us, by our children and pets, and by the smells coming from the stove. This is not to say those familiar elements don’t have their advantages. Some of us are discovering how good and cozy it can be to work from home. For one, it saves a lot of time. But there are also challenges. Motivation, concentration, and energy may not be the same. Some people are also experiencing the other side of the problem. At home, they hyper-focus on work, and without the help of the usual work structure and boundaries, they have a hard time taking breaks and knowing when to stop, with the result that they work excessively.

It is imperative to recognize the impact that these sensory and spatial-temporal losses are having on us, and to come up with ways that offer a “link” to that part of our self that we are not able to access so well. I suggest that a focus on ritual may help us mark transitions more successfully and settle into activities and states of minds that normally do not belong to our home. For instance, for patients who are having trouble settling into work mode, I am suggesting that they reinvent in their home some of the practices that were part of their trajectory to the office before. They can still maintain those twenty minutes of Kindle, Audible, or news that put them into their work mode, even if they are not sitting in a subway car. If switching between Zoom therapy and a Zoom work meeting feels too jarring, I also ask them to explore how it feels to transition in and out of their therapy sessions with a reinvented version of the old traveling routine, or something to that effect.

As human beings, we are adaptable, so the longer the lockdown continues, the more we will find a new flow and create new habits. But in the present, it would be helpful to intentionally create rituals.

A caveat: not all, but many of the people who have their schedules optimized and are able to diversify and mix their meaningful social, leisure, sport, and extracurricular activities, are still reporting a high rate of dissatisfaction. Even nailing down the prefect schedule and feeling an increase in motivation may not cancel the sense of loss. As New Yorkers, we have accepted the compromise to live in cramped and often unsightly quarters because of the action, inspiration, and energy we gather outside. The feeling of a life well spent includes being out and experiencing, in person, the energy of the city. The loss intrinsic in the lockdown is, for many people, unavoidable.

Among the rituals brought about by the Pandemic is our meticulous dressing before going out and our long and stylized hand-washing each time we come back in or unpack our groceries. These practices have a practical function, but have also a ritualistic component. They help dispel the fear of death and contagion. They mark the boundary between inside and outside our home, reestablishing a sense of safety and control. They help us soften the terrifying concept of our death and frailty, which is now in the forefront of our minds; after all, surgeons wash their hands before and after surgery for the same reason — because, besides the practical purpose, it is a ritual that gives them a sense of power and control. That liminal space of soap and water also helps them enter into a state of mind that allows them to operate to their fullest ability, beyond doubt and human fears.

Recently, the ritual of giving thanks to the essential workers unites hordes of New Yorkers at 7 PM. The hand clapping ritual, as Time Out magazine reported, was initiated by the international PR agency Karla Otto.[1] The magazine does not say if anyone had sponsored it. With almost devotional fervor, we lean out of our windows and clap, ring bells, bang tambourines, and ululate like a hungry wolf to the full moon. For a moment, we let go of our evidence-based civil acceptance of the lockdown and come out to express our disappointment, frustration, restlessness, and pent-up energy, as well as our gratitude for the health workers. This ritual helps us mark the days. It connects all of us, through sounds and voice, through our shared bodily presence. It’s five minutes in which we let go and become a bit feral, and then come back to our small places a bit more upbeat and also more docile and less potentially rebellious, ready to resume another evening of lockdown activity. Other rituals seem more grassroots, like the sudden emergence of bread makers, plant growers, and beard growers, who are experimenting with new ways of being that are less mediated by consumerism, during this state of isolation.

Interestingly, not everyone is passively enduring the isolation of the quarantine. People are finding ways to actively mark this period of quarantine as separate from the rest of their lives; for instance, by setting aside the usual products and using new “pandemic” home and body essences, textiles, and foods that they find soothing, empowering, or activating. This enables them to find ways to manage their feelings in this difficult time, while protecting themselves from negative associations they may have with their pre-quarantine sensorial experience and products.

The pandemic’s quarantine is not a proper rite of passage. There is no prescribed pattern indicating how to proceed or what we will become. However, choosing to see the pandemic as a rite of passage may help us make the most of it. If we are fortunate and privileged enough to be healthy and somewhat at ease, we can make a conscious effort and set an intention for how we want to be transformed during this liminal period of isolation, and the way to do that is by creating rituals and habits that set us on a new path. As the anthropologist Victor Turner wrote in The Forest of Symbols, ritual does not reinstate the status quo, it opens a space for change. Or as he put it, “Ritual is transformative, ceremony is confirmatory.”[2]

We can use this time of isolation to let our minds wander to see how much more we can be — as individuals, workplaces, families, and as a society. The pre-pandemic, socio-economic straightjackets that tied us down to our particular position in society may still be in place. In fact, we are lucky if that is the case because the alternative is to have lost our jobs. But we have now been freed of much of the repetitive habits that contributed to our inertia and short-sightedness. Furthermore, as we face our own frailty and possible finality, we are simultaneously missing and increasingly questioning our old ways of being. People tell me they want to have a different life than the one they had before the pandemic. For instance, they do not miss the nightlife, the consumerism, the superficiality, the rat race. They may not go back to their morning rituals of expensive, brand-name, blended beverages, which they thought were necessary for them to transition to awake time. (Many adamantly refused to even start the day before their first cup!) Now many people feel much humbler and down to earth, and less into appearances, comparison, or dominating and defeating others.

At an institutional level, in my classical psychoanalytic institute, I see seeds of change that only a pandemic could have brought about. The institute’s ideology, presentations and curriculum have been strictly psychoanalytical forever (even if, at an individual level, members can have a holistic approach, like I do.) And yet, since the pandemic began, new, unprecedented offerings are coming out, such as a weekly meditation for members and candidates, and even a non-psychoanalytic workshop (worth one Continuing Education Unit) that provides tools to regulate hyper-arousal.

Is this only a temporary stance, or a possibility to stretch into new territory? Can we rebirth ourselves? How can we let go of some of our straightjackets, safety blankets, self-centeredness, rigidity, and meaningless habits? This time of isolation may provide the space and time for us to invest fully in new habits, setting an intention for the future as if it were already present. Maybe the initial premise — to set a ritual that would make us more productive and shift our minds to work during the quarantine — was too limited. Maybe we should use this special time to actually rethink ourselves and our environment.

[1] New Yorkers are planning a citywide clap for essential workers to happen every Friday Time Out by Shaye Weaver. Posted: Friday March 27 2020

[2] Victor Turner. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Cornell University Press 1986 (1967): 95