How do you react?

An article by Eduardo Horta

When someone arrives and tells you something you don’t like, what do you do? When you are insulted, surprised by a scream or you see a scary image, what do you do? When someone frightens you, what do you do?

You react, right?

An immediate reaction. Most of the times, such a quick reaction that you could easily describe it as automatic. This system is embedded in your mental functioning and it has served us well throughout our evolution as a species. When we detect a stimulus, a sound, a smell, a body sensation, an image or a flavor, we react. Mostly when we anticipate a threat. We react in a automatic and quite determined way.

However, we are very far from our natural habitat, where that mechanism was developed and became so important. Now the reality is different, but when we are told something we don’t like, still, we activate the same mechanism. We keep feeling our response as automatic. As if there was no other possibility. It’s just the way it is.

In fact, this is not true. There is a space between the stimulus and the response. The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre said that it was in that space that our freedom laid. The freedom to choose our response. The freedom to decide how we want to be in the world and how we want to react to what happened to us.

One way to recover that space is to be aware of our bodily reactions when receiving the stimulus. Through that awareness we can feel the signs of an automatic response building up, and thus prevent it. Another way is practicing mindfulness. It allows us to gain conciseness of our mechanisms of response, reduce the levels of emotional activation in order to be able to respond in a more intentional way.