The uninuitive reason why the world feels so chaotic? We're in an astonishing detox
Why I'm hopeful about what may emerge from our unusual times
Chaos is perhaps the most humbling force — razing what once steadied us (e.g., our banking system), questioning what we thought was long settled (e.g., democracy), and introducing wildcards we don’t yet know how to address (e.g., AI).
Over our tumultuous last few years, I’ve often wondered, why does it feel like we individually and collectively are experiencing more chaos than ever?
The lens that helps me make sense of this is that perhaps we’re in a detox phase in a larger cycle of renewal.
As I’ve written about before here, we tend to mistakenly believe that life flows linearly, but all of life (even history) has its own cycles of change — like the seasons of the year.
The challenge is that when cycles are thwarted, or don’t have the space to be fully metabolized, the system gets stuck.
It’s akin to how computers fragment — the system gets weighed down by fragmented files, it’s harder to register new information, and it takes a lot more work to do simple tasks. Or, when toxins build up in our body, our biological systems have to work that much harder — showing up first as discomfort, and if unaddressed, later as illness.
And at some point, our systems no longer have the capacity or integrity to accommodate the fragmentation or toxicity, and so our computers or bodies seemingly shut down to give us the signal that we can’t keep running the way we have, and that it’s time to defrag and purge the toxins.
That is, the resistance or chaos are often signals that what’s out of balance is begging to be brought back into balance.
The unintuitive wisdom is that whenever any living system comes back into balance, symptoms can often get worse before we heal. It may feel like we’re regressing, but similar to the way our liver works with toxins, the old needs to be broken down and reintegrated before the new can be built.
Last year, I went on an anti-inflammatory diet for a few months to clear excess stress hormones that had accumulated in my body during the pandemic. As a part of this diet, I cut caffeine out of my diet for the first time in decades. The result wasn’t pretty. For a few weeks I felt not just classic withdrawal — exhaustion, irritability, and fogginess, but also a backlog of emotions that I’d been numbing with caffeine.
Without caffeine to bypass emotions like grief, it was tender to ride the waves of what had gone unfelt. But as I metabolized and integrated these old fragmented emotions, the clearer and more in sync with my body I felt. And as the old status quo hum from stress hormones dropped away, I discovered how quiet and vibrant my body could feel — lucid, naturally energized, and able to hear what my body had been trying to communicate to me for years (things like ‘Sleep!’).
So, what in you is begging to be brought into balance?
Metabolizing what’s gone undigested is perhaps one of the most powerful ways we can exercise leadership and contribute to collective healing during this decade.
I’d love to hear. Drop a comment below.
Melissa’s Reading, Watch & Listen List
What’s making me hopeful?
Isabel Wilkerson interviewed by Krista Tippett (78 min)
I read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste during the pandemic, and what stuck with me was her metaphor of thinking of our country like inhabiting a beautiful old house: “If you live in an old house, you know it’s never done…. Systems need constant monitoring, …repair, sometimes overhaul. …And it’s on us …so it can remain standing for generations to come.” I love the hopeful realism of this reframe of what it takes to continually come back into balance. [Apple, Spotify]
What’s making me curious?
The Quiet Diet
I didn’t know this until last year, but it’s metabolically expensive for our body to synthesize stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. So, our bodies hang onto them and they only get flushed out with soluble fiber. Unless we have a diet high in lentils or beans, the stress hormones triggered by life and coffee / tea circulate endlessly in our systems — keeping our nervous systems in perpetual high alert. Detoxing on the Quiet Diet (aka, the Hurd Protocol) for ~2 months was transformational in helping me drop my baseline stress levels!
I’m curious what regular “detox” habits work for you?