38. BANDWIDTH

I don’t know why I didn’t have this sixth sense or whatever it is all along, but part of me thinks maybe it means I’m growing up, evolving into a real superhero. Like maybe the world knew I couldn’t handle it before, but now, now I’m finally becoming me and the world knows it. Or maybe I’m just learning to listen to myself.

-  Kelly Thompson, The Girl Who Would Be King

There’s a popular school of thought these days that the only limits a person has are the ones they impose on themselves. It’s a nice philosophy, and it inspires people to take control of their lives, which is probably a good thing.

It’s also not entirely true.

I wanted to bring all the soldiers who served under me in Afghanistan home alive. Turns out, I don’t have the ability to stop an errant pilot from blowing up my platoon with a 500-pound bomb. Turns out, there are actual things over which I have no control. Now, I could wail about how it should have been me – and believe me, I did – but it doesn’t change that those soldiers are dead and I’m not, and nothing I could have done would have changed that.

Because we’re all a part of the world, seeing the world for what it is partly involves being honest with ourselves about our own strengths and limitations. And while it may quite possibly be correct that thinking in terms of limits makes people accept constraints that don’t exist, that also doesn’t change the fact that there are very real limits to what we can accomplish, especially on our own. If we try to do too much, or try to change things we can’t, we will leave ourselves vulnerable to stress.

Now, stress often gets a bad rap. Yet, as the Yerkes-Dodson Law shows, stress can be a good thing. In the right amounts, stress motivates us, makes us stronger, and helps us learn¹. It’s when stress damages our ability to act that it becomes a problem, either by being too little or too much, and in those cases stress can cause us to lose sleep, forget basic things, develop tunnel vision or even misperceive our environment.

Hebbian Yerkes-Dodson Law

Unfortunately, our bodies don’t distinguish between types of stress, like school or work or the threat of civilization ending climate change. All our bodies know is they can handle a fixed amount of stress. When that amount is exceeded, they begin to shut down. If we look at stress in terms of bandwidth, the body is a pipeline that can only take so much. When we go over that amount, we break, no matter who we are. It might be a minor fracture, or maybe a catastrophic failure, but we break.

Being able to manage stress matters, because in the real world, there are things we don’t control. Our service will make a difference, but the truth is that a lot of the results are not up to us. Our choice, is to either let our bodies eventually be overwhelmed from the cognitive dissonance that will result if we ignore that fact, or to empower ourselves to figure out how to deal with that reality. If we want to make a positive, lasting impact on helping our communities face climate change, we’ll need to do the latter to have any chance at success.

1. Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, New York, W.W. Norton & Company: 2017.