This is a six-part reconnection series that was contributed to NZ Mental Health Awareness Week 2022 by Dr Karen Faisandier and Naturopath Felicity Leahy.

We covered reconnecting with yourself, your relationships and community, and your place (tūrangawaewae) including your ancestral land or places in nature such as mountains and bodies of water. We discussed ideas to experiment with if you are someone who doesn’t identify a sense of place anywhere at this time. We also explored the idea of identifying any unhelpful connections that have formed for you while going through this weird and stressful time and some ways to unhook if these no longer serve you. 

It’s been personally beneficial to reflect on all of these aspects of our own lives and we hope it offers something useful to you. 

 

1) Reconnect with yourself 

Have you taken some time and space to reconnect with a very important person - yourself? This relationship is important to any other relationship you may have in life, as when you are in your best place you can share it outwardly.

Have given yourself permission to grieve, process, and accept the experiences of the pandemic? With grief, there can be both obvious and ambiguous losses - deaths and missed ceremonial opportunities (funerals, weddings, births, graduations) are examples of obvious losses. Ambiguous loss sneaks up on you and involves the many subtle changes that leave you feeling lost - these often involve parts of your routine and the many “little things” that add up to living like “normal.” Any feelings about these losses are valid even if your mind tells you it was necessary or that you haven’t had it as “bad” as others.

Have you checked in to see where are you at now? Are you different as a person? I certainly am. It has been said that we only truly grow from adverse times not from easy times - during adversity we find ways to adapt, we grow new skills, and we find our resilience. We sometimes experience post-traumatic growth which is the surprising upside to stressors or trauma that can occur. Author Susan Cain refers to the concept of bittersweetness - how the light and dark of life are intertwined but that we can “transform our pain into beauty” - or turn the bitter into sweet.

“For me, the growth has been about finding new concepts, resources and strategies to help myself through a time of great change as well as in helping others as a psychologist - all the usual things didn’t seem to quite fit anymore. I also connected with a deep desire to ensure that joyful and nourishing experiences were prioritised for the future and this was something I encourage others to do - this is a way to reconnect with and nourish yourself”. Karen

 

2) Reconnect with others

When it comes to reconnecting with people, how do we do this when our very relationships have been a source of threat and strain - activating our behavioural immune response (BIS)? 

The BIS is one of the strategies we evolved to avoid infection. Only, instead of white cells and antibodies, it drives us to avoid people who might be infectious by eliciting feelings of disgust, fear and even rage in response to signals of infection. It works to prevent exposure to illness in the first place, saving our biological immune system as a backup system and preserving our costly physical reserves. With BIS activation we may want to avoid people, especially those we perceive as infectious. Do you recognise the BIS response in yourself at all during the pandemic? Different people experience different BIS triggers depending on what they have determined to be the risks for their situation.

Avoidance of people clashes with our deeper human need for attachment as we are wired for connection in order to be our happiest and healthiest - this includes making eye contact, smiling and other facial expressions, voice and tone, body language, and physical touch. This mostly gets lost when we connect online or via text (no matter how many cute emojis we use) with even Zoom and Facetime being suboptimal forms of connection. Masks and physical distancing can also make us feel more disconnected due to not being able to see smiles or facial expressions whilst cueing us to keep vigilant to a threat. 

Fragmentation has occurred in many of our relationships during the past few years in part due to repeated BIS activation. We’ve heard lots of different and sad accounts of how this has strained or even ended family, friend, romantic and workplace relationships - so how do we heal this now to move forward? 

A very good first step involves acknowledging that there have been many very different experiences during this time and that everyone has been doing their best to cope and survive with the resources, skills and support that they have available. I heard it put something like this at the height of the pandemic fear - “we are all in the same muddy waters but we are each in very different waka”. Many of us have responded with fight-flight or freeze during this time of uncertainty and it has been human to do so. 

By gaining self-awareness of fight-flight-freeze we can respond rather than react - using strategies like grounding and breathing to calm our threat response and have more of a chance of being able to hear what it’s been like for someone else and have some compassion for that. This is what secure connection is truly about - to feel seen and understood, safe and accepted even when we may see and experience things differently. 

 

3) Reconnect with places 

Some of us lost our connection to place during the pandemic as our ability to connect with loved ones and travel to places both near and far was limited by lockdowns and travel restrictions. 

It also resonated on a personal level, as in the last few years I’ve begun to notice that certain geographical places enhance my mental and physical well-being to a significant degree. It was small things at first - I would sleep better, or certain physical symptoms would be lessened. And the longer I would spend in these places, the better I would feel.

I also remember a friend remarking to me that when she returned to live in her homeland after more than a decade in New Zealand, she described it as “the weight just falling off my shoulders”. Even though her time in New Zealand was enjoyable, being back in her ancestral land calmed her nervous system and resulted in an increased sense of well-being and calm.

And so I wanted to understand more - what is it about places that can enhance our mental well-being?

As is so often the case, ancient cultures have recognised and conceptualised so much of our human experience. One of the most well-known and powerful Māori concepts is called Tūrangawaewae.  It is often translated as ‘a place to stand’: 

• tūranga (standing place)

• waewae (feet)

Tūrangawaewae are places where we feel especially empowered and connected. They are considered to be our foundation and our place in the world. Tūrangawaewae would typically be thought of as places like marae, often where ancestors had lived for generations. But it also includes elements of the natural world, such as mountains and bodies of water. 

In the concept of tūrangawaewae, a strong connection to the external world is mirrored by an inner sense of security and foundation - essentially, an enhanced mental well-being - just like the response my friend experienced when returning home.  

Have you ever considered the role of place in your mental well-being?

Are there certain places where you feel uplifted, well, energised and creative? 

 

4) How to find a sense of place 

For many of us today though, we no longer live in a place where we grew up or where our ancestors have lived for generations. Humanity is much more mobile, so we may have left our place of birth and settled somewhere else. 

Or for some, it’s possible that fractured relationships mean we don’t feel a resonance with our place of birth or origin - it may not be somewhere we associate with strength and harmony. 

Studies on human connection to place tell us that when people experience a loss of place it can result in a lack of personal direction, addictive behaviours and a feeling of unease and anxiety. People may be entirely unaware that a disconnection from place is why these feelings have emerged until therapy helps them understand the link. 

So for those of us who are no longer connected to places that feel like home, it becomes important to work out where a sense of physical, mental, and spiritual security can be sourced. 

In exploring my own connection to place, and in speaking to others who have fractured relationships with place, these are some of the ideas we came up with about how to reconnect: 

• If you know where your special places are, recognise their importance to your mental well-being and commit to spending more time there on a regular basis.

• If you’re an emigrant, is it within your means to connect with your homeland or other places that you feel drawn to?

• If you can’t visit but wish you could, can you connect with these places through movies, books, art, photography and memory? This can help you to remember how these places make you feel.

• If you don’t feel like you belong anywhere, or are unaware of places that resonate with you, look to where you are now.  At a conference I attended, the respected Maori healer Donna Kerridge said …. “the first thing I ask anyone who comes to me for help with their health is: “how are you connected to your community”? 

By connecting with your local community - being part of local groups, volunteering or participating, getting to know your neighbours, exploring and caring for your local beaches, parks and forests - a sense of belonging and connection to place can be created from where you already are. 

 

5) Unhook from unhelpful connections

But what about when we turn to external sources of substitute “connections” in an attempt to meet our needs - which can grow to become habits or even addictions? 

We know from both research conducted throughout the pandemic, anecdotally from clinical work, and our own experiences that reliance on dopamine-firing habits such as food, internet, alcohol and other drugs, as well as gambling, porn and workaholism each went up - this makes sense due to increased stress and uncertainty, the loss of many other forms of reward, and the changes to our ability to meaningfully connect with each other due to travel restrictions, lockdowns, and many of our relationships moving online. 

When we are disconnected from the people and places that help us to have meaning and to thrive in life we may turn to strategies we have used before to cope with difficult emotions, soothe, and calm down the nervous system - and to compensate for the lack of true connection. When stress becomes long-term we can develop habits that become hard to break - and when we stop we can even feel uncomfortable with a withdrawal-type experience (even from non-substance using behaviours like device checking - these still fire the powerful dopamine-opioid reward pathways).

So my question to you today is what have you become connected to that may no longer serve you? 

• Devices/social media

• Working

• “Doomscrolling” (problematic news consumption)

• Alcohol or other substances

• Coffee

• Porn, gambling or online shopping 

• Junk food

• Something else?

With long-term stress, fear or anxiety, the brain's frontal lobe' connection to the emotional limbic brain can erode - this means that you may lose your usual regulation capacity and can form habits or even addictions that were not there to this extent previously, or you may be vulnerable to relapse if you have a history of such things in the past. The good news is that it is possible to reset and strengthen the capacity to self-regulate again and to be better able to turn towards other resources, rewards and connections if that is what you desire.

 

6) Changing an unhelpful connection

If you identify that you want to change your connection with an unhelpful habit, there are some steps you can take. 

1. Take an honest appraisal of your behaviour.

2. Set a period of abstinence to reset your reward pathways (1 month is a good start).

3. Reflect on how you’d like your relationship with the habit to be going forward.

4. Brainstorm what you’d like to add in for rewards, the things you’d like to do more of instead of the habit - including how to connect with yourself, others and important places of connection. 

5. Ride out any withdrawal discomfort - when you stop any dopamine-firing behaviour your brain will require a period of resetting (if you are regularly relying on alcohol, medications or drugs please check with a health professional that withdrawing is safe for you). 

6. Nourish your brain - healthful food, sleep and movement help provide physical and emotional resilience with resetting. 

7. Have a strategy for stress, anxiety, agitation, difficult emotions, or feeling flat, bored, tired, and unmotivated - which can all occur temporarily after stopping use as your brain resets its reward pathways. 

8. Talk to someone if you find it hard to make the lasting change you desire - it can be hard to change a habit or addiction but learning from slip-ups and setbacks really can help to improve your response in the future. 

Lastly, if you plan to add the behaviour back in once you have had a break then set some guidelines for yourself. How much, how often, and any times you won’t do it, and what are the signs that it is becoming an issue again (e.g., increasing cravings for it, losing control over the amount of use)?