6/11/2023 0 Comments Dancing in the dark song![]() Movement can help what Amelia and Emily Nagoski (in their book “Burnout”) call “complet the stress cycle.” Even indoor physical activity relaxes muscles and can improve sleep. Getting outside to move, in any way, is helpful. For me, I have found a few things helpful: And as the Delta variant complicated our hope that widespread vaccination would restore some certainty and predictability to life, the start of the semester rocked by a campus surge in COVID, I am certain that many of us are feeling the physical and emotional impact of the past year’s trauma.Īs van der Kolk describes, there are multiple approaches to how we can help our bodies and minds process and move through the sense of paralysis. I’m guessing I’m not alone in this state (though I may be one of the few folks on campus expressing this by screaming these lyrics). ![]() Hey there baby, I could use just a little help. And here is where “Dancing in the Dark” comes in as Springsteen sings in the opening verse: Rituals, habits and plans are all integral forces for my own sense of resilience, and having all three of these questioned again and again and again takes a traumatic toll.įor me, this toll often comes in the form of a mental freeze coupled with a general state of exhaustion. The plans we make about our future, even those most ambitious plans that motivate our hard work and hold out promise for great things to come, even these can feel more tenuous than ever. The habits we form, even around simple things (like eating in a regular spot in Peirce) can be disrupted on short notice. ![]() The rituals that provide guideposts in our lives - graduations, funerals, weddings, family reunions - have been upended, rescheduled, restructured or just plain canceled. In addition to the fear and confusion instilled by the pandemic, the anger and frustration generated by regular displays of racial injustice, the catastrophic natural disasters that reflect the increasing impact of climate change on our planet, political unrest and tumult resulting in tragedy all over the world, we have continued to live in a state of what feels like perpetual uncertainty. Van der Kolk not only dives into the neuroscience behind how trauma impacts both brain and body, but also shows how a range of different therapeutic approaches may help to mitigate these effects.īy every measure, the past 18 months have been traumatic for us all. The psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk writes about this in his bestselling book “The Body Keeps the Score” (and, to anyone looking for a not-so-light but nonetheless counseling and informative read, I highly recommend it). Reminders of trauma elicit physical responses: muscle tension, elevated heart rate, difficulty breathing or just plain exhaustion. ![]() Difficult things are not just remembered the physical responses we have to those difficulties are imprinted on our brains and in our bodies. The power of the brain presents many paradoxes, including that some of its functions aimed at boosting human resilience also introduce points of fragility. And that is a feeling that I have known in the past, and that I have felt recently. The Boss is singing about writer’s block, the feelings that underlie that block, his yearning to get through it and his pleas for help. But as I sit around getting older (“there’s a joke here somewhere and it’s on me”), the song seems to resonate most with my moments of melancholy (the John Legend version captures this well). “Dancing in the Dark” evokes memories of my teen years, with its opening synthesizer riff (every song in the ‘80s seemed to open with a synthesizer riff) and a music video featuring a pre-”Friends” Courteney Cox. And lately, “Dancing in the Dark” has been in heavy rotation. When I am feeling energetic and joyful, I love listening and singing along to “Badlands” while picking up speed on my bike on the Gap Trail. In my darkest moments, selections from the album “Nebraska” dominate. My playlist regularly reflects my mood, especially which Bruce Springsteen songs I’m playing on repeat. ![]()
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