On narrowed perception, impossible choices, and the exits we stop seeing

Something interesting happens when we feel trapped.

It starts with our perception. It narrows while our attention contracts. We become hyperfocused on the threat and the need to find a way out.

This makes complete sense if you are in the woods and encounter a bear. Your brain does not need to contemplate twenty possible interpretations of the situation. It needs to help you survive it. Focus narrows and you look for the most practical, immediate means of escape.

But the same response is far less useful when the thing making you feel trapped is your career, your business, your marriage, or a decision you have been unable to make for the last two years.

These modern-day problems usually require exactly what a threat response makes harder to access: the ability to see possibilities we haven’t considered before. Possibilities that become accessible when we can perceive what is happening clearly, while remaining flexible and poised to act.

Instead, we often get caught in a loop.

We feel trapped, so we freeze. Our focus narrows while our mind starts working overtime trying to solve the problem. We think about it in the shower. We obsess in the car on our commute. We ruminate at 2:00 in the morning. We have the same internal conversation for the hundredth time.

Should I stay? We scan the horizon and see several more small threats attached to the big one we just identified. Should I speak? Heart racing. Palms sweaty. Should I leave? We scan for exits and don’t see a door. What if I do this instead? New layers of complexity appear, with more threats attached to them. But what happens if I do that?

And suddenly we’re locked in. Exhaustion descends and everything feels impossible.

This enormous amount of thinking can initially make us feel as though we are actively working on the problem. But thinking and movement are not the same thing. Sometimes all that thinking actually narrows our ability to perceive possibilities and evaluate what we see.

We keep running through the maze, searching for a door. Eventually, exhaustion sets in.

Now we’re an exhausted person with narrowed attention, scanning for exits while our field of vision has become so restricted that no exit is visible.

And still we search.

I see this play out in remarkably different circumstances.

A physician may have spent two years thinking about leaving medicine. By the time we talk, she has considered every option she can think of. Private practice won’t work because of the financial risk. Working fewer hours won’t solve the inbox problem. Administration means meetings she doesn’t want. Leaving clinical medicine means giving up an identity she spent decades building. Staying means continuing something she already knows is unsustainable.

Ask her what her options are and she can give you a highly intelligent explanation of why none of them will work.

And she’s probably right about some of them.

But notice what has happened. Every possible direction is being evaluated primarily for its threat. The question is no longer simply, What could I do? It has become, Where is the danger in doing it?

I see the same thing in relationships.

Someone desperately unhappy in a marriage may spend years moving between two possibilities: stay or leave.

Stay, and nothing changes. Leave, and the family changes. Finances change. Friendships may change. The children will be affected. Their partner may fall apart. They may regret it. They may discover that what they thought was the problem wasn’t actually the problem.

So they do neither. Instead, they think…and think….and think some more. They gather more information, have another conversation and wait for enough certainty to make one of the choices feel safe. Except neither choice is ever going to feel completely safe.

Meanwhile, there may be possibilities between stay exactly as we are and leave tomorrowthat have become nearly invisible because the mind has organized the entire problem around two threatening exits.

This is part of what I call the Desperation Cycle:

Feeling trapped → freezing → narrowed focus → racing/repetitive thinking → greater feelings of constraint → exhaustion → even less capacity to see alternatives.

And this is one of the reasons I become very curious, very engaged when someone tells me:

“I don’t have any options. I’ve been over this a thousand times and there aren’t any real options left.”

Maybe.

Sometimes there really are significant constraints and no easy choices.

But sometimes the problem isn’t simply that you have no options. It’s that you’re trying to perceive them while your entire system is organized around threat. And from inside that state, options can become extraordinarily difficult to see.

Thankfully, there is a surprisingly practical and efficient way to interrupt this process.

It doesn’t require solving the problem first. In fact, trying harder to solve the problem can be part of what keeps the cycle going.

Interrupt the cycle in the right place, and something begins to change. Your field of vision widens. The maze that appeared to have no doors begins to look different.

And suddenly, some of the exit signs that were there all along start lighting up.

I’ll write about that next.