Do you find your mind frequently jumping from one disconnected thought to another? Are complete sentences lost in the interruptions of your day? Does your mind ruminate until overthinking takes you down a foggy path?
The new normal? Thoughts in bullet points, emotions in symbols, conversations in texts, physical bodies seen but not felt.
So many connections yet only surface relating. You are together on devices yet not physically.
Awareness is sucked into multiple dimensions of distractions on screens. Our devices have become another appendage and we go into an identity crisis when we don’t know where they are. Like a frantic overprotective parent, we desperately seek their return.
Human beings are hard-wired with a drive for the “felt sense” of social and emotional connection. In other words, human beings need physical touch for our health.
The family psychotherapist Virginia Satir affirmed, “We need 4 hugs a day to survive, 8 hugs to maintain ourselves, and 12 hugs to grow.”
Research has found people feel better on days when they get one hug and worse on days when they had a conflict with other people.
Surpriseingly, on days people receive a hug the same day they had a conflict with someone their mood was still better.
We are born to live in the context of human relationships. We especially need the “felt sense” of another’s loving, kind energy, partly for survival and partly for human connection. Our brains and bodies are built to help us move away from fear and toward love.
The tone of another’s email, social media, and texts are often our inner projections resulting in hurt feelings and verbal reactions.
Standing in the presence of that person and feeling their field of energy, we might have a different experience. Face-to-face we stand in each other’s humanity.
Our technology is a tool that like any tool can be used to hurt or help. Tools need to be used responsibly or they become weapons of destruction. In this case our loss of emotional and physical connection.
Our humanity must not be sacrificed in the service of technology. Technology needs to help us save our humanity.
How many hugs have you had today?
Blessings,
Deborah