Biofeedback

 

The crescendo lapse-running in high school during which we had to touch the line at the same time as a terrorizing ''beep'' might very well be the source of my strong aversion to alerts, alarms and notifications. Then, during internship, came those dreadful pagers that would beep at night, making you jump out of your call bedroom at Notre-Dame hospital and rush to the nearest phone at the end of which you never knew what was awaiting: a patient with low oxygen saturation, cardiac tightness, low sodium, high potassium, ear pain, post-operative agitation, high glycemia or someone needing (so to speak) to be pronounced dead. Even if I learned intuitively to reframe my role and take the pressure off my shoulders as I realized that the goal was not to actually fix any situation for good but stabilize the patient enough until the next resident or day team would take over, I was still triggered for decades after that, hating the pager with a passion. Sound alarm, vibration, it didn't matter. It had just overactivated my amygdala too often. I had had enough of my own personal life trauma to try to process and heal from, I had no bandwidth for such a modern invention.

That is probably why I am described as a ''slow adopter'' of technology. I didn't have a smart phone until about a decade ago.

And that's probably why I never got an Apple watch until a loved one offered me one last week as I am training more consistently for my trail-running adventure. For me, a watch simply wasn't really a watch if it was just a black square on the wrist. There is something just wrong about a watch that doesn't tell the time until you look at it or swipe it. Moreover, I was bothered by a watch that needed to be recharged everyday. Don't we have enough of our phones, tabloid devices and laptop computers to recharge ? Don't we have a big enough collection of chargers ? Plus, I was afraid I would be giving a little bit more of my freedom away by feeling the need to count my steps all the time, to monitor my calorie expenditure or to obsessively figure out if I can bring down my running speed.

Then, I succumbed when my enthusiastic, technology-geek gifter indicated that the background could be... Snoopy. Yes. You had me at Snoopy. Great, now I can say a complete goodbye to the little that was left of my attention span. Not only there is a Snoopy background, but it is actually animated. Like I can be watching a mini cartoon any minute of the day !

But then, having studied biofeedback in physical therapy, I also understood its benefits for achieving a goal and reinforcing a desirable behavior and outcome. It does something to the psyche to know that your action leads to a metric, a result. Like the baby discovering that once he drops something on the floor, an adult will come pick it up, and repeat the sequence every time the baby drops it, on purpose, for fun. To see the relationship between cause and effect and be in full control of it. Pure bliss. Or it is as if something eventually opens up in our awareness, a connection is made through biofeedback. If you are mother, think about the first time you saw your baby on ultrasound, and suddenly realized that these new sensations you had been feeling all along were not gas after all. They were your baby's somersaults in utero ! Watching the screen is like biofeedback. And after that magical discovery while you laid supine, under an ultrasound probe and its cold gel on your belly, whenever you have the belly sensation, you KNOW that your baby is tickling you, and you are filled with gratitude for your precious child's movement and life energy ! Suddenly everything makes sense, there is no ambiguity, there is something so grounding about being more conscious of a reality, knowing what is happening, especially inside our bodies, bringing the invisible to the visible in the form of charts, curves, numbers...

Now, I will be in really good shape (and not only physically), if this concept can be adapted to cure my refractory procrastination in front of this daunting and never-ending task of organizing my papers... Seeing on a screen the number of papers to categorize or shred diminish while seeing a golden star to congratulate me for the immense square-footage freed up from that clean-up ! That would make me feel like the unopened mail, the notes I took and cannot even make sense of, crazy ideas, doodles, old receipts etc are no longer controlling my life or mental space...

I guess that is what this is all about: having an illusion of controlling something (the number of calories we burn, the distance we walk) in a world where we control pretty much nothing of significance. Meanwhile, I will continue to use technology judiciously. As much as I appreciate this new tool for the purpose of my training, to ensure I am on track in terms of endurance and distance, it didn't take long to realize that I need to take it out of my wrist while I drive and use the driving directions from my phone, because the watch vibrates whenever I am supposed to turn and it startled me. No thank you, I refuse to relive those unpleasant pager days !