Perhaps I’m wrong. I doubt that NASCAR fans are very PC. What does PC have to do with it, you wonder? While it shouldn’t have anything to do with it, it has been made to.
NASCAR will be starting their season of live racing May 17. They will be trying to enforce strict COVID-19 safety protocols for the racing teams. Will this be too PC for some people?
President Trump complained that it was too PC when the Air Force Academy sat their graduates 10 feet apart at their graduation instead of the 6 minimum. He pushes us to open things up before they are ready to meet safety standards.
While President Trump has been unwilling to model safe practices or allow his staff to, if NASCAR does, as they say they will, it could take some steam out of the movement of disdain some people have for safe practices. Will they turn their wrath on NASCAR, that NASCAR officials have fallen for the liberal media lie that there is a pandemic? NASCAR is a pretty macho sport, so I doubt that would get any traction. NASCAR, though, has a pretty high degree of professionalism. They have relied on engineers to make the sport safe when it used to be deadly dangerous. Now they are relying on other science-based experts to create safe pandemic health practices. If NASCAR follows safe practice protocols as they say they will, and we all are able to see it, this will be helpful modeling. Just what we need.
Other sports will be watching. The self-discipline it will take in sports like baseball will be greater than in NASCAR. Get this – baseball will become easier to watch. Yes. Baseball players, coaches and managers have well-established habits to reduce tension that involve spitting. I will not list them. No more. Can’t spit anymore. What a relief! They will need to learn new methods for reducing tension. Hopefully, the new ones will be easier for the rest of us to watch.
Am I safe for you to share space with? What are the cues that you use, consciously and unconsciously? What is your radar looking for?
Human beings and animals unconsciously look for signals of safety or danger as we encounter each other. We used to rely on body language and facial expressions to tell us whether a person was physically and psychologically safe to be around or interact with.
With the pandemic, the type of danger we now pose for each other is invisible. What you are scanning for is whether I pose a risk of infecting you. There may not be visible signs that I am infected. There may be no runny nose or cough or red eyes. I may not know that they are carrying the virus. So we are all coming to rely on other cues – safe or unsafe behavior. When you encounter me you look at what I am touching with my hands. Am I wearing a face mask? Am I aware of my distance from others and doing what I can to keep safe distance? I either help you feel safe or not based on these things. These are what our safety radars are now scanning for. And this is relatively new, so it is still stressful to get used to.
This radar is actively scanning any time we leave home. Seeing people wear masks, we relax. No mask, we are on caution. Several people talking at safe distances, we are happy. Too close to each other, we feel threatened. All of these calculations happen consciously and unconsciously. Our radars will become a much more active as stores and other activities open up. This is an added stress we aren’t fully used to yet.
Stores like Costco and Mendard’s are now requiring face masks of all customers and that we keep at least 6 ft spacing from each other. We can only touch products in order to put them in our carts. We can’t feel fruits or vegetables and then return them to the display. If we see someone doing so, we wonder what else has been touched. Airlines will require face masks to board their planes. These requirements will signal to their employees that they are as safe as we know how to make it. And it will signal the same to us as customers. The safety radar gives us a green light in those places.
Then there are stores that will only request or suggest that we wear masks. Knowing this, our radars will signal caution. If we go in anyway, radar blips will go off as we see people without masks or not keeping safe distance. We know full well by now that some people in our communities won’t wear masks or keep safe distance as a matter of some sort of principle. Some store owners feel the same way. So if stores won’t do all they can to protect their employees and customers, blips of danger go off on the radar. These signals will move us to avoid those situations in order to be safe.
Some stores say they will only do the minimum that the state requires them to do. Caution! Anyone who only does the minimum because they have to is not fully appreciating the nature of the risk of COVID-19.
Some of us are vowing now to only shop at stores that require masks while others are boycotting them. For many of us, the requirements of masks and safe distance signal safety, that the store cares about everyone’s safety. They will do what they can, not just the minimum.
Some people and stores think we should trust their judgment about safety instead of requiring standard safe practices. It is unreasonable for me to expect you to trust my judgment when you don’t even know me. Furthermore, I am fallible; I can slip up. Do I always catch my hand before it touches my face? Don’t I wish! Our radars won’t give people a green light who think we should trust them when the don’t follow best practices. There is too much uncertainty. How can we know what they mean by safe? A small percentage of employees admit to not following safe practices at work. No, I won’t trust their judgment. I need their employers to require safe practices of them.
Early in this pandemic people were fond of saying that we are in this together. Now it is clear that we are not. Some people haven’t even bothered to educate themselves about safe practices, despite the best efforts of public officials and medical experts. Some people are misinformed and act like experts. A few are actually hostile toward people wearing masks.
Some people don’t realize that they still need to protect the medical system from being overwhelmed so their neighbors can get the elective surgeries that are on hold, and the hospitals can begin to financially recover. Their awareness and concern does not extend beyond themselves.
Sadly, we are not in this together. Some people have opted out. While the public health threat may be from a small minority, they may be enough to keep this thing spreading if we don’t require things of them.
Picking where we shop based on requiring best practices is the best we can do to protect our health care workers, hospitals, store employees and each other. Hopefully it will encourage more business to have these requirements, rather than subject us to the least people are willing to do.
Have you stopped being excited about another Zoom invitation?
It is a bit paradoxical. We are hungry for social contact and the resumption of our group activities, by doing so by ZOOM is tiring. Along with the other kinds of fatigue we are experiencing as a population, we have now added Zoom fatigue.
Zooming has become wildly popular as a way to connect with groups of people socially and as a way to conduct business. Private music lessons, medical appointments – all kind of things are now being done by Zoom.
Along with all of its benefits, Zooming, it turns out, is very taxing for the brain. The brain is highly efficient in its use of energy because the energy supply it draws from is very small. When, as a community, we demand more electricity than the power plant is putting out, parts of the grid shut down. So it is with the brain when we overtax it, which Zoom can do.
What we are used to in small group gatherings is seeing each other’s faces in the same setting. On Zoom, everyone is in a different setting, sometimes wildly different backgrounds. This is the problem for the brain. We are all in different places, so we see different backgrounds along with the faces. When the focus switches back and forth so quickly among so many places, the brain goes, “Where am I?”
Then, quickly we are in somebody else’s home or in their Hawaiian vacation, or in an imaginary background, with the body in front of it moving like a ghost. And then we find our mind’s looking into people’s rooms, intrigued to see what books they have, or knickknacks or artwork. While we might find the intriguing, it does add to the brain fatigue. Nor is it the point of connecting by ZOOM. It is easier for the brain if we all choose plain backgrounds, like a blank wall.
In large group events, like classes and conferences, we don’t have to see everyone’s faces all at once. We are in rows facing the speaker or panel. The back of people’s heads is not distracting like it is seeing closeups of people’s faces. The brain then tries to interpret facial expressions, which is often a waste of energy.
For social events, since we can’t yet meet in person, it is comforting to spend some time in gallery view to see everyone’s faces. Then, in the discussion, it may be good to give preference to switching out of that to reduce stress on the brain, depending upon the length of the session. For large group gatherings with people we are not close to, the gallery view may not be worth the mental energy.
The brain is also taxed by having to deal with audio breakups. It tries to fill in the gaps to figure out what was just said. Such overloading of bandwidth can be reduced by having your device connected to your router with an ethernet cable. Or, if you can’t do that, have your device as close as possible to the Wi-Fi router.
And/or, I suppose, space the ZOOM sessions out so they do feel welcome. They really are helping with the stay-at-home part of this collective Rx we are part of. Even with the opening up process starting, it may take a vaccine before we no longer have to rely of ZOOM.
Am I prepared to be safe and keep others safe, assuming any one of us could be infected without knowing it?
Am I ready to engage in team building with others, to be kind and encouraging, with the generous assumption that they also have positive intentions, even when it sure doesn’t look like it? This assumption is a gift we give each other that goes a long way.
Unlike many people around the world, we may live in neighborhoods where we aren’t used being unsafe when we leave our home and do simple things like going to the grocery store. Now, with the pandemic, we need to get used to being unsafe. With the opening up process, we will be less safe than during the stay at home phase, especially with and research showing all essential workers are not following safe practices and others being openly defiant. So, we need to get better at this.
We, citizens all over the world, have been drafted into a global war against COVID-19. This isn’t really voluntary; it is a moral obligation. In this war there are two divisions with different roles, actually quite similar to how the body defends itself against the invasion of a virus.
The first unit in the body to deal with a virus is the innate immune system, whose job is to provide a barrier to prevent the spread of the virus within the body. On the level of society, this is the role we have been conscripted by our governments to play, to form a Citizen’s Division, so to speak. When these barriers are breached by the virus, the adaptive immune system gets triggered.
The job of the adaptive immune system is to actually kill the virus and eliminate it. This is the role our scientists, science-based corporations and medical teams are playing for our society. Scientists and corporations are famously competitive with each other. But now, they have suddenly started cooperating like never before. Corporations are releasing patented information, previously kept secret. Scientists are sharing their findings as they come in, with no concern for who gets credit. The whole scientific and medical community world-wide will be deserving of a Nobel Prize, not just individuals.
And we, in the Citizen Division, are doing pretty well with our job of containing the spread of the virus. But some cracks are showing. Unlike the scientists and medical professionals, we weren’t trained for this. Remember how hard it was at first to keep track of what we touch so we don’t infect ourselves or others? Or even to remember to wash our hands thoroughly?
What we have to do now involves more emotional and mental self-control than some of us have developed. It is like this. Your car may have a lot of little things wrong with it, but if you never drive over 45 mph, you don’t even notice them. They don’t matter. But when you try going 110 mph, the car might shake, be hard to steer, and the brakes might fail. So it is with our mental and emotional self-control. Under the demands of the pandemic, our weakness are showing. We may need some fine tuning to do our jobs without turning on each other or just throwing in the towel and going AWOL. That would be deadly.
The scientists and medical systems are cooperating like never before. Scientists are usually highly competitive with each other. Now they are cooperating. So are science-based corporations, sharing patents they used to keep as trade secrets.
The Citizen Division has also been impressively unified, but now it will get harder.
To engage in team building, we may need to be better able to tolerate negativity in others and better able to control it in ourselves. Maybe they aren’t expressing their concern very diplomatically or skillfully. I had no idea how good people can be at this till I observed professional diplomates in action. It was impressive. They put people at ease in a genuine way, first, by being calm and confident themselves. They look past an angry delivery to try to find the heart of what is upsetting the other party. The intensity of a person’s response tells us how strongly they feel about what they are saying, or how close to the edge they are. Pushing back with equal intensity is simply not helpful. We can be calm and considerate without losing our own voice.
Brain studies show people are not able to hear your point of view until they feel you have understood theirs. This is a pickle when both people have the same conflicting need at the same time. So we have to be the ones to start by being empathic toward them, or it may never happen.
So, help the other person be calm by being calm yourself. If you haven’t mastered this yet, it may be better to say nothing until you can do it well. Most of these encounters are brief in situations where we can’t sit down and have a heart-to-heart. They are busy and we are too. And neither of us really wants to do this anyway.
Second, let’s try not to take offense when someone expresses upset about our behavior. If a defensive response wells up inside you, that is the time for the deep breath you are tired of hearing about. Try to see what they are seeing. They may have a point, but we can’t see it yet. Safe practices are actually a bit more complex than we think. Maybe the other person understands something about it we don’t. If you are unable to take this calm approach, maybe apologize for it, like “I’m sorry. This is really hard for me. I don’t take criticism well.” You might as well say it rather than proving it by being reactive.
We notice someone not following safe practices. We feel threatened. Now what? The goal is to effectively recruit them into safer practices in a team building way. People have worked on this. The book Giving Voice to Values, is about confronting people about their behavior. It suggests we try out ideas in advance for what to say and then practice saying them several times before we are in the situation. Their follow-up research shows it produces good results. These responses are something to brainstorm with family and friends. The goal again is teambuilding.
This is also a good time to review what we know about effective communication. Many of us have had workshops. There is a ton of good information on it on the web. This is a good time to review it. But we won’t use it if we don’t have adequate mental and emotional self-control.
In order to succeed at weakening the pandemic, we must address the process of role modeling. It is a significant factor that shapes our behavior.
Babies follow the lead of the adults in their lives, right from the start. You giggle, they giggle. This is how bonding occurs. Later, they play at doing what they see adults doing. When they are around other children their age, they observe and follow each other. This is how we get socialized. And it never stops. We keep being strongly influence by what others around us are doing, especially those in positions of power.
When it comes to who we model ourselves after, the powerful, rich and famous have especially large sway. Inherent in us is the belief that we will do better if we are like the people who are doing the best in our society and are in control. There is some truth to that. If you want a job and you look, think and act like the person interviewing you, you are more likely to get hired. Unfair, but true.
Some people, when they acquire positions that carry becoming a role model, respond in a conscientious, responsible manner. They are even careful to not give opinions about things they really don’t understand because they know large numbers of people will be influenced by what they say. It is one mark of professionalism that you know what you know, you know what you don’t know, and you have the self-discipline stay in the lines.
Other role models are not careful with their power to influence others. A man in Africa died because he followed President Trump’s suggestion that a certain medication might protect people from COVID-19. Now, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan reports that his state received “hundreds” of calls after President Trump suggested at a press briefing that ingesting household disinfectants could be a treatment for the coronavirus. Mr. Trump was dangerously wrong about these things, but that doesn’t stop his opinion from carrying more weight than it rationally deserves. He is, after all, practicing medicine without a license with the full weight of his position.
We might wonder how you could hold daily press conferences not following social distancing guidelines well after you have prescribed them for the nation and imposed them on the press corps sitting right in front of you. How could you require Dr. Fauci to stand right behind you, shoulder to shoulder with other officials? How could you say you won’t wear a face mask just minutes after telling the whole country to wear them? How could our leaders not be following their own advice on such a deadly matter? The answer is worth knowing, and it is worse than we might hope.
The problem isn’t just one person. I’ve looked at reviews of research on how power affects people. As I go through the list, you may think both of examples and exceptions. We can be especially grateful for the exceptions.
The common saying should be extended like this: “Do as I say, not as I do, because I am not a good role model. Don’t follow my example.” Here’s why. Power tends to reduce people’s concern for safely and loss. When people get more power, they tend to get more strongly focused on self-interest rather than what is best for others. When they make decisions for others, they may not even intend for those decisions to apply to themselves. I will repeat and underline. They may not even intend for those decisions to apply to themselves or those in their inner circle. The more important power is to a person, the more likely these characteristics are to be true of them.
Let’s show some gratitude to people who are exceptions. How do some people in role model positions not succumb? They do so by having sound moral principles that they keep in front of themselves routinely. They know they must rely on them. With humility, they recognize that they can learn from unimportant people and they routinely seek them out for their insights. Want to know how to make hospitals safer? Research shows that the keenest observers of the total situation are the ones with the least control. So, ask the people who disinfect the rooms what they observe. They may be noticing wht others are too preoccupied to see.
As restrictions are lifted, we will notice more who is following best practices and who is not. If there are many who are not, one thing that will counteract the tendency to follow them is that we will rightly see them as a threat to our safety and the safety of others. Also, we can keep from following lax behavior by keeping our principles in front of us and letting them be what shapes how we think and act.
Just like children, we are also influenced by our peers. And they are influenced by us. Let’s take that responsibility conscientiously by being consistent in following best practices when we are in public. This can matter more than who people see on TV, especially when it is pervasive and consistent. We can be hopeful about that.
Managing this pandemic is a lot like managing a flood in a controlled watershed. The engineers can only let a certain amount of water through control points at any time without unleashing total disaster.
In the case of the pandemic, though, we have the advantage of being able to slow the rate of snow melt in the mountains by slowing the rate of infections. That is the point of the behavioral restrictions, so we don’t have more COVID-19 cases than a hospital can handle. We don’t want to flood out and totally destroy the medical system. The behavioral practices are succeeding. The daily rate of new cases is slowing. Still, many medical systems have not returned to being able to also do the surgeries and other treatments we want them to do.
I don’t think all of our leaders are reinforcing the gains enough with certain parts of our society. Too many of us are losing site of the goal and the progress. They are only seeing the suffering that is being caused by the behavioral restrictions and want it to end. Too many are beginning to feel that continuing the restrictions is becoming pointless. Some of them are now taking to the streets and pressuring decision makers.
Part of what is happening psychologically is also that people are losing the big picture. That happens when the brain is under stress. It can’t take in as much information. Physically, we actually lose peripheral vision when under stress. The brain has to protect itself from being overwhelmed with information, so it blocks things out. The focus then becomes on what is most immediate. That is when we need each other’s help to keep perspective.
With social distancing, how far apart should you to be from the next person?
Six feet? We all know that, right?
One problem with how we think about a standard like 6ft social distancing is that our minds tend to turn the minimum into a maximum. We forget that we are told that six is the minimum safe distance and that there are situations where it needs to be more than six. We want the minimum to be standard for every situation. So, six always becomes the answer. While this makes things a lot simpler, and the brain likes that, it is a potentially deadly error with COVID-19. What, then, is a safer way to think about social distance?
At the recent graduation ceremony at the Air Force Academy, the cadets were made to sit 8-10 feet apart, not just the standard 6. This is because the reason for the rule, the “why” of it, is to keep each other safe from what we are all expelling from our lungs. And that distance depends on what we are doing with our lungs in shared space. The cadets would be cheering. The contents of their lungs would be projected farther than if they were just sitting quietly. So, the organizers wisely went with 8-10 feet, not just six.
Since safe distance depends upon what we and others are doing with our lungs, we need to know what that is to know what the safe distance is
With what we are doing with our lungs, we are told if everyone is resting, 6ft is apparently fine. With just about anything else, it is looking inadequate. While the research needs to catch up, at this point it looks like 6ft is not enough if anyone talks, laughs, sneezes, is walking, biking, running, deep breathing, doing yoga or other exercise. Why? Because with those activities the lungs are being emptied with force. And force creates distance for what is in the lungs.
Unfortunately, I haven’t seen that anyone yet has looked into minimal safe distance for singing, like singing in church or in a choir. Nor have I seen anything about how far the virus goes when blown through wind or brass instruments. Musicians are taught to project, and that might mean the contents of the lungs go a greater distance than in other activities. We shall see. Musical groups are eager to get back together. But that may not be wise without the research.
In addition to knowing what people are doing with their lungs, we need to understand the shared air space. Will we be rebreathing other people’s air? Is the space enclosed or open? Is the air stagnant? Is there air flow that will dissipate the virus or relocate it? Which way is the wind going? Are there people there? This all takes situational awareness. And that situational awareness needs to occur when our minds are on other things as well. We need to be good at it while multitasking. We will need to have these calculations become automatic.
One other mistake to watch for in our thinking comes from the symbolic meaning face masks carry. Do they mean we are safe, or do they mean the situation is dangerous? If we take them to mean we are safe, we will be fooled into thinking we don’t need to social distance. Masks do not eliminate the possibility of transmission. They only reduce them. Because of this common cognitive error, authorities feel the need to keep reminding us that a face mask is not a substitute for social distancing. It is meant simply as additional protection. They are right to remind us of this. The real meaning of the mask is that the situation is not safe.
But face masks and social distancing also convey the important message that we care about each other. Let’s focus on that.
“You would never know there was a pandemic going on.”
Following best practices got us to the point where reopening activities may soon be possible. Then, our behavior will continue to be a deciding factor in whether it is successful or harmful. But applying coronavirus best practices to old settings is not going to be easy. The Florida beaches have been reopened and a reporter noticed she was the only one with a face mask. She was the only one doing social distancing. For everyone else, it seemed to be a normal day at the beach. One person interviewed even said it was a welcome break from having to think about the pandemic. That will not be sustainable.
This is exactly what public health officials feared would happen and will continue to happen. The beachgoers had not prepared themselves mentally to carry safe practices into their beach experience. There was no group pressure to conform. So, they behaved at the beach the way they always have.
One of the things working against successful re-opening of activities is state specific learning. What we learn in one setting does not automatically generalize into other settings. We have to be deliberate about it or it won’t happen. What is more likely to happen is that we will be like the beach goers and act like we did before.
A helpful process for this is mental rehearsal. Before going to the beach or back to work, you imagine as clearly as you can doing so while following social distancing, wearing a facemask, keeping control of what you touch, and doing good hand cleansing. Repeat this several times before you go. The repetition will give you really good momentum and help you see when you or others start to deviate. We may need to give other people reminders, something many of us are uncomfortable doing. But that is part of being in this together.
Another big thing that shapes our behavior is how those around us are acting. When they don’t follow best practices, we are less likely to. We don’t want to be the only one. But when we keep the behavioral standards in mind before entering the situation, we are less likely to drift to how others are acting.
Already, in the essential service of grocery stores, more and more managers are feeling the need to protect their employees from careless customers. They are considering eliminating in-store shopping and only doing online shopping with home delivery or curbside pickup. This means other customers are witnessing careless behavior that are public health hazards and letting it go.
Careless behavior in a store is not just between the customer and the employee, it is between the careless customer and everyone else present. So, to be successful with having open stores and businesses, we need to exercise more mutual accountability.
Since beginning these blogs on the psychology of dealing with the pandemic, I have stressed mutual vulnerability and mutual responsibility. Those are what motivated following best practices. Now we must add mutual accountability. It is through mutual accountability that new behaviors become the norm. This is really hard. Holding others accountable and being held accountable by peers is very uncomfortable. It works best if we assume good intentions on everyone’s part. What we are doing then is bringing a person’s attention to what they had lost track of. Then our response will be to thank the other person, not get upset or defensive.
Even if the person does not care about best practices, this approach of assuming the best has the greatest chance of bringing out the best in them. If it brings out their worst, then they need to experience that they won’t just get away with putting others’ health at risk.
It can be difficult to act graciously when you feel unsafe or angry. If we remind others as we would like to be reminded, it won’t be woke scolding. It is really a way of collectively taking ownership of safe behaviors instead of blaming the government for imposing it on us. So, our skill set for reopening needs to include the willingness to hold others accountable and be open to them doing the same when they notice our lapse.
It is time also to remind ourselves to watch for thoughts that justify making exceptions for ourselves and others. We covered this in an earlier blog, Dangerous Thoughts.
I dreamt that I was in a marathon. But I’m a sprinter. I hadn’t signed up for this race, and I couldn’t get out of it either. And no one knew how much farther it was to the finish line. I felt distress and confusion and saw the same in the faces around me. Terrified, I woke up.
I woke up to find it was real. We can’t get out of this and don’t know how much longer it will be. But is it a race we are in to get this over? I decided to go back to sleep and finish the dream.
This time I found myself among a flock of geese high in the air on a long migration. This was very different from the marathon. Despite the dangerous situation, it felt strangely peaceful. Geese can only migrate by sticking together and working together. The flock felt strong and committed. By flying together, migrating birds actually create the conditions that make such a long journey possible. No geese are strong enough to do it on their own. Flying together in formation, they create draft that eases their way so they can go farther and farther. They must stick together, simultaneously helping and being helped. Helping and being helped. Pulled along by their combined effort, they can go many times farther than they ever could alone.
This is how front-line pandemic workers are doing it. It is demanding, dangerous and of unknown duration. And it is only possible by sticking together as a team. Together, they create the conditions that make it possible. Even though they may not know the person working next to them at any given moment, they are in the same flock, honking reassurance to each other.
