All our lives, we hear about fight or flight – our body’s response to threats to our well-being. I got the impression that we are under near-constant existential stress. It’s like there are no other experiences except a panicked or hostile reaction to threatening stimuli. There’s a lot of this in life, but there are other experiences worthy of examination too. 

In one of my support groups, I learned that, just as your body has a fight-or-flight stress response, your body has a safety and contentment system. When I heard that, you could have knocked me over with a feather. You mean there are good responses to external stimuli? That filled me with hope for my poor limbic system, that my brain might do more than provoke overreactions to another email from Tracy, the worst person on the team. 

Safety and contentment starts for us when we’re babies – the experience of our mothers and fathers holding us and gazing lovingly at us. Maybe we’re gazing back. Everything in that moment tells us we are perfectly safe and all our needs are met. We have a lot of these experiences. I would even say we have more of these experiences than we have threatening experiences. It’s just that most of the time, when we are safe, we are ruminating about the terse email we’re going to fire off to Tracy. 

In Gabor Mate’s marvelous In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, he has some content I can only paraphrase here, but he says that all addicts are seeking to activate their own soothing system with the opiate shortcut, shopping, or whatever their addiction, because it activates the sections of the brain that were left underdeveloped in childhood, usually because of neglect or other trauma (Adverse Childhood Experiences). We have a big reaction to the safety and contentment system when it comes online, and I was so relieved to learn I could trigger it with meditation instead of drugs. 

There is great news about the safety and contentment system. You can get better at engaging it with practice. Meditation helps. When you are safe and have much to be contented about, experience it. If you’re a mindfulness practitioner, your present moment includes the feeling of nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be upset about, just the luxurious joy of needing to do nothing but breathe. 

When we get better at engaging the safety and contentment system, we see how much more of our time we could spend without feeling under any kind of threat at all. Because we’re usually not under threat; it’s usually in our heads. Our brains are probably the main source of threatening feelings we have. By getting better at doing something different with our brains, we can retrain ourselves to see all kinds of good around us – including when we can feel safe and content.