The dynamics of Stillness

As we are far too aware, we live in a world of sensory overload. Each of our senses is in a constant state of overstimulation.  Our eyes are constantly taking in information and processing it at lightning speed. My three teenage children I am sure have adapted to the information age by accelerating their information processing speeds. They make rapid decisions on what information to retain and what to discard on their smart phones all the time. The consequence of this is they have little awareness of their environments, least of all nature. But it is not just teenagers. My parents’ generation are now doing the same, locked into tiny screens. We all do it. It is not just our visual sense that is over-stimulated. Especially in the city there is just so much background noise. Just listen right now, how many layers of sound can you The dynamics of hear? For me, it’s the dishwasher, the radio in another room, the plane, the road, oh and the birds behind all that.
The natural consequence of this stimulation is we screen out 99% of what our senses can pick up. Our brains make fast, unconscious decisions every moment as to what is significant. What is important can be registered in basic ways: is it a threat, is it important to us, like a phone-call? Sadly, the birdsong is one of the first to be screened out.

In my work as an osteopath, I spend a lot of my time treating children. When I was first practicing over 25 years ago I would rarely see anxious teenagers, unless a child had been subject to trauma; anxiety was not the norm. Now I see many anxious teenagers, but gradually, over the years, the age of children coming to see me with symptoms of anxiety has reduced. Ten years ago I would see eight and nine-years-olds; now it can be children from four or five upwards suffering with anxiety.
This is an unwelcome development that we can relate to a variety of causes: social media and social pressures, school pressures, family dynamics, global and environmental anxieties. But an important cause for me is sensory overstimulation.
An interesting phenomenon I see in practice is what we would call a ‘rate change’. There is a motion we can detect in the tissues of the body, like a slow breathing. This seems to be like a slow rhythmic motion within each cell, which could relate to cellular metabolism (that is, cells taking in nutrients and gases and expelling waste). This motion has a rate, which is usually two or three cycles per minute, which could link it to the delta waves of the brain.
If an animal is in a state of distress, if it is injured or threatened, its ‘rate’ rises to eight to 14 cycles. This could be a function of the autonomic nervous system, pumping substances like adrenaline or norephranine into the blood: your classic fight or flight response.
What is interesting is that children are usually in the slow, normal rate, but when anxious can speed it up. Unfortunately, most adults inhabit this rate most of the time. So, from this, we could conclude that most of us are physiologically in a low level of anxiety always!