The Tragedy of Hypervigilance and the Vulnerability of Rest

Imagine for a moment being an adolescent, perhaps somewhere between age 12 and 14, and every time you sat down to rest, or had a moment to yourself, or had just finished a ton of homework and were just sitting down to regroup, one of your parents comes in, notices that you “weren’t doing anything,” and then berates you for being “lazy.”

When I got home from school every day, I immediately did my homework so that I’d have time to play or watch TV (or play with the TV on). I was a good student and would complete my homework relatively quickly. It was definitely still work, and often wasn’t “easy,” but my pace often made my mother dubious. She’d go over my homework and check to see that I did everything right. When there were no mistakes (which was most of the time), it seemed to annoy her on some level. Eventually she came to the ponderous conclusion that the reason I finished my homework quickly and correctly was that I was actually lazy and didn’t want to work.

Let’s marinate on that for a moment (and no, it won’t make more sense or become easier to understand).

Her reasoning was that I hated work so much, and was so lazy, that I purposely did well in school so that I would have less work to do. My academic performance had nothing to do with any kind of effort or ability on my part. Her conclusion was that because schoolwork was “easy” for me, it wasn’t actually work; and that all of my achievements, including graduating summa cum laude in both high school and college, getting a full scholarship in college based on my grades, and winning numerous awards for academic achievement, were all evidence that I had “fooled everyone.” I wasn’t actually smart. I was just lazy. And the work I had done to get where I got wasn’t actually work. So, growing up, even when I WAS doing work, it never counted. And when I wasn’t doing work, well, that was evidence of how lazy I actually was.

This overall climate made any kind of real rest or relaxation not just a challenge, but an absolute anathema. Being noticeably idle brought about criticism, judgement, and castigation to the point that I always had to look busy; and a closed door to my room always meant I was “just goofing off” or “being lazy.” When I did do homework, I always had to make sure the door was open so that they could see I was working. Not that it mattered, because that “work” wasn’t “real work.” Yes, I know how mind-numbingly loopy this logic is. Maybe that’s why I’m a philosopher.

And now, here I am, just a few weeks shy of my 53rd birthday, and I am still challenged by opportunities to rest. If I’m not mindful when there is nothing pressing, and I decide to sit down for a few moments to “relax,” my chest gets tight and I get very fidgety and antsy. If I’m not careful, I can end up scrolling or trying to find something else to do. Again, if I’m not mindful, my brain will fall into fight-or-flight mode, expecting to be attacked … or attacking myself, berating myself internally for “being lazy” or “being useless.”

My worst moments of anxiety and panic rarely come before a particularly stressful task, but almost always hit me during moments of “down time.” This, of course, makes it even harder to relax and rest.

The origin story of my brand of hypervigilance — of how I’m constantly on guard especially when I have an opportunity to slow down or relax — pales in comparison to those in abusive households where physical harm comes unpredictably and without warning, or to BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks who feel an ongoing and prolonged sense that their lives are in danger at any given moment. THAT is hypervigilance in its most extreme and clinical definition.

Regardless the degree of hypervigilance, or the trauma that sparked it, there is a tragedy to it. Hypervigilance forces us to hyperfocus on imagined outcomes in order to try to anticipate and strategize methods to avoid those outcomes. We basically become so focused on avoiding danger that we miss a million other red flags and/or make a million small “micro-errors” that ironically bring us right to the result we’re trying to avoid. If I become hyper-focused on not doing the thing that annoys my partner while we’re on vacation, I then end up distracted, missing things that are being said, questions being asked, exits on the highway, etc., upping BOTH of our stress levels until I end up annoying my partner in the very way I was trying to avoid.

Even in literature, if we think of characters like Oedipus, Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, or Othello, we see that they were so hyper-focused on a specific outcome, often ones they were trying to avoid, that they careened toward disaster, missing every subtle warning sign along the way. And none of them could ever really rest.

Hypervigilance doesn’t just steal our ability to rest, it makes rest into something to avoid, or even fear.

We condition ourselves into working against our own best interests. And if we have bad actors who are looking to deplete us, they can often take advantage of that very tendency. I was so conditioned to being on guard, that “rest” itself was never actually rest; it was something that left me open for attack. So any “rest” became performative, because if I actually rested, something bad would happen.

I think we can see a lot of this happening in our current political climate. The “chaos” coming from the current administration is absolutely orchestrated and has only one point: to relentlessly and perpetually keep people off-balance, confused, and — ideally — afraid. It is to keep people in a state of constant vigilance so that they cannot rest, or stop, or take a moment to care for themselves (or others), beyond putting out the immediate fires that pull us away from root causes and systemic change. We feel as if the moment we stop, someone will get hurt.

Rest requires vulnerability; and vulnerability requires a perceived sense of safety. In order to rest, we need to feel safe enough to momentarily “set aside” our responsibilities. The problem is that when it seems like your own existence (or that of those you love) are at stake, it’s very hard, perhaps impossible, to set aside that duty of care for even a moment. It’s as if there is a constant drain on our resources, like our energy is perpetually going toward making sure that we (and/or those we love) will be safe. And it can feel like a never-ending battle where we never, ever gain any ground.

While we may not be able to change the external circumstances in which we find ourselves and the responsibilities therien (jobs to do, bills to pay, people to take care of, ICE agents to avoid, fascism to overthrow), we do have the ability to rethink how our energy flows, and potentially where it will be most effective.

For me, I realized that I needed to stop thinking about my own energy passively. That is to say, I needed to flip the equation. Instead of thinking about where my energy was going, or what sucking it out of me, I had to think about it more actively: to what (or to whom) was I giving my energy? Thinking about my own energy, effort, and care as being something that I give (rather than something that is taken from me), I gave myself just enough agency to break out of whatever trance of inadequacy, inability, or inefficacy in which I was trapped. I had to take responsibility for what I was willingly giving my energy to.

If we think about it that way, it makes things like doomscrolling, engaging in online fights, or even just having those ridiculous arguments with relatives or philosophical gadflies into something over which we have much more control. It’s not a question of getting “sucked in” to things, as it is to what/whom we may be giving away our energy, attention, and/or our beloved executive function.

And if we’re fighting bigger fights where people’s wellbeing is at stake, we can much more strategically focus our energy into where we can actually help, or do some good.

This isn’t to commodify time or energy, because thinking of our energy specifically in zero-sum game terms then renders volunteerism, charity, and compassion moot. No. Choosing to invest our energy toward compassion and service gives us a deeper satisfaction that resonates with our higher selves.

Where we focus our attention matters, and when we realize that it is a choice, and that we do have to make mindful decisions about where it goes, and how we might rest, then we can think about it differently. Our energy, our power, is a gift; to whom, or to what, do we wish to give it?