Fear and Facemasks

Last summer I did a 10-day meditation retreat, that many people refer to as brutal.

Is it strange that sitting quietly for 10 days can be brutal?

Not at all, if you look at our physiology and brain. And it applies to wearing protective facemasks too.

Your body’s survival processes have been honed over millennia to give you the best chance of living in a world of physical predators. Humans have thrived because we have survived together in groups.

This is how it works;

If you detect a threat, like a snake on the ground or a tiger in the bushes, your body automatically shifts into the fight/flight or freeze state. Changes include heart rate, pupil dilation, blood flow to the muscles, blood pressure and levels of the hormones adrenaline and cortisol.

Your body is beautifully primed to take action and help you live another day. You’re ready to fight it off, run away or collapse and play dead. The emotions related to it are anger, fear and fright.

Threats trigger this survival response to possible danger, something moving fast towards you or low pitch sounds that indicate a large growling predator.

Your brain is sensitive to facial expressions of people around you, for the same survival reasons. If someone close is showing fear, surprise and anxiety we go on alert and look for the danger they are reacting to.

A whole group can respond to the threat immediately, so these facial cues were essential for the survival of the group. Many thousands of years ago.

We also feel calmer when the people around us look relaxed. When they see no threat, we feel safer. Smiles are a social way we communicate that we are not a threat too. Smiles show us we are welcome, and we feel safer and more cared for. At a deep, unconscious level.

And when we are around people but not interacting and sharing smiles, we feel deeply uncomfortable. We’re not getting the normal social cues that we are safe. It’s one of the reasons that shunning can be devastating because it triggers our physiological response to threats.

What does this have to do with my meditation retreat?

Our instructions were to stay silent, make no eye contact, and no attempt to communicate with the people around us. No facial expressions, and no smiles. No social cues that we were safe.

Despite the retreat centre being a calm, closed environment which is obviously safe, it was disturbing. I was surprised at how much it shook me.

And facemasks?

Now you can see the problem with facemasks.

We lose our primal social cues of safety when among others if we’re all in facemasks.

Our threat detection system gets triggered and we feel isolated. No wonder some people are resistant to wearing them.

Even more so, because I’ve noticed people avoiding eye-contact or speaking less to strangers when wearing facemasks.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big advocate of everyone using facemasks to help contain the coronavirus.

It just needs a solution that understands our basic physiology.

One way to help yourself is to make eye contact with others when wearing facemasks. People’s eyes and eyebrows can still communicate visually.

Another is to speak to the people around you. Our nervous system pays close attention to tone of voice too. The lilting up-and-down variation in a speaking voice also communicates safety. When we are afraid, our vocal chords get tight and this vocal variation disappears.

Talking to strangers around you will help calm the nervous system of them and you. It will feel much better to talk.

Finally, I have seen facemasks with plastic windows, so that people can see your smile.

Maybe they’re not such a quirky gimmick.

Maybe this is a genius idea to address the stress that facemasks create.