“A lobster’s shell”

“I want to be able to do the things I cannot do so that I am able to be better at the things I can”- Capt. Shoukat Mukherjee

One of my favourite stories is about how lobsters grow. It turns out this humble hard-shelled animal can teach us a thing or two about how to cope with stress.  I am not the only person who likes this story, so does Rabbi Twersky. One day he was sitting in the dentists, and picked up an article about how lobsters grow. At first he thought "I don't care how lobsters grow!" but he was interested and so he read on. 

A lobster is a soft mushy animal that lives inside a rigid shell. That rigid shell does not expand, so how can the lobster grow?

Well, as the lobster grows that shell becomes very confining, and the lobster feels uncomfortable and under pressure. It goes under a rock formation, to protect itself from predatory fish, casts off the shell and produces a new one. 

Eventually that shell becomes very uncomfortable as it grows, and so it goes back under the rocks... the lobster repeats this numerous times. 

The stimulus for the lobster to be able to grow is that it feels uncomfortable. 

Now if lobsters had doctors, they would never grow!

Because as soon as the lobster feels uncomfortable, goes to the doctor gets a valium, it feels fine and never casts off its shell.

So I think we have to realise that times of stress are signals for growth, and if we use adversity properly, we can grow through adversity.

This idea is very much like the Learning Zone Model by Senninger.

If you want to feel secure

Do what you already know how to do.

But if you want to grow…

Go to the cutting edge of your competence,

which means a temporary loss of security.

So, whenever you don’t quite know

What you are doing

Know

That you are growing…’

In order to learn we have to explore and venture out into the unknown. We already know our immediate surroundings, which form our Comfort Zone. In the Comfort Zone things are familiar to us; we feel comfortable and don’t have to take any risks. The Comfort Zone is important, because it gives us a place to return to, to reflect and make sense of things – a safe haven.

Although it is cozy to stay in our Comfort Zone, we have to leave it in order to get to know the unknown. We need to explore our Learning Zone, which lies just outside of our secure environment. Only in the Learning Zone can we grow and learn, live out our curiosity and make new discoveries, and thus slowly expand our Comfort Zone by becoming more familiar with more things. Going into our Learning Zone is a borderline experience – we feel we’re exploring the edge of our abilities, our limits, how far we dare to leave our Comfort Zone.

However, beyond our Learning Zone lies our Panic Zone, wherein learning is impossible, as it is blocked by a sense of fear. Any learning connected with negative emotions is memorized in a part of the human brain that we can access only in similar emotional situations. Experiences of being in our Panic Zone are frequently traumatic, and any sense of curiosity is shut down by a need to get out of our Panic Zone. Therefore, we should aim to get close to, but not into, our Panic Zone.

In the transition from Comfort Zone to Learning Zone we need to be careful when taking risks that we don’t go too far out of our Comfort Zone – beyond the Learning Zone – into the Panic Zone, where all our energy is used up for managing/controlling our anxiety and no energy can flow into learning.

Importantly, these three zones are different for different situations and different for each person – we all have our own unique Comfort Zone, Learning Zone and Panic Zone. For example, for a child who has grown up in chaotic family circumstances, drinking out of a dirty cup might be perfectly normal and within their Comfort Zone, whereas sitting down for a meal together might be far out of their Comfort Zone to begin with – for children with different experiences this might be the other way around. Where one zone ends and the other starts is very often not as clearly visible as in the illustration above. This means that we must never push someone else into their Learning Zone, as we cannot see where one zone leads into the next. All we can do is invite others to leave their Comfort Zone, value their decision, take them seriously and give them support so they won’t enter their Panic Zone.

We need some stress in order to be able to grow.

One thing Rabbi Twerski doesn't mention in his story, is that for the lobster to grow it must also make itself vulnerable.

When a lobster first emerges from the old shell, its new shell is soft and offers little protection. It can take several hours before it reaches its full size and for the shell to start hardening. 

Just like lobsters, vulnerability and stress are key ingredients in enabling us to grow. 

Some of you have seen Brené Brown videos. She studies human connection — our ability to empathize, belong, love. In a poignant, funny talk, she shares a deep insight from her research, one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity. A talk to share. A talk to understand and implement

Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability. In an excerpt she says that we all feel vulnerable at some points in our daily lives:

“Waiting for the doctor to call back. Being laid off. Laying off people. Having to ask your husband or wife for help because you are sick. Being turned down. Asking someone out. This is the world we live in. We live in a vulnerable world. And one of the way we deal with it is we numb our vulnerability. And I think there is evidence. We are the most in debt, obese, addicted, and medicated race of all. The problem is that you cannot selectively numb emotion – you cannot say “here’s the bad stuff, here’s vulnerability, here’s grief, here’s shame, here’s disappointment – I don’t want to feel these, I am going to have a couple of beers and a banana muffin”. You cannot say, ‘I don’t want to feel these’. You cannot numb those hard feelings, without numbing the other emotions, you cannot selectively numb, so when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness, we numb everything. And then we become miserable and we start looking for purpose and meaning and then we feel vulnerable and then we have a couple of beers and a banana muffin. And it becomes a dangerous cycle.”

So one of the things we need to think about is to know why and how we numb. Part of it is because the more vulnerable we are, the more afraid and scared we become. This is what politics is today. There’s no discourse anymore, there’s no conversation – there’s just blame. In research ‘blame is described as a way to discharge pain and discomfort’ and we are constantly fleeing from our own emotions, in an effort to block out the basic feelings which move us in the right direction. Stress is an emotion but we perceive it differently just because there are some pharmaceutical companies which tell us that stress is life threatening – they tell us that whenever you are stressed you are in the panic zone. And we listen to them – because again we are merely controlled by our own emotions – our love for ourselves.

Let’s not shut ourselves out and be scared to confront our own emotions – let’s learn not to numb our feelings.