The Captain’s Dashboard

I was boarding a flight the other day and it got me thinking about how we measure and integrate our many internal experiences.

As I entered the plane and looked into the pilot’s cabin briefly, I noticed the Captains Dashboard.

I even took a pic real quick…

There are all these gauges and dials.

I have little idea what they are all measuring and controlling, and the fact that there are so many of them only makes it that much more confusing to me. 

I am not a pilot.

I’m pretty sure one of those gauges is measuring altitude and another is measuring air pressure, but I have no idea which is what or, and more importantly, how all of that data is integrated by the pilot in order to take off, fly, and land the plane.

Our Internal Dashboards

We can imagine that we have internal dashboards that are similar to the captain’s dashboard only instead of measuring direction and wind speed or whatever, they measure all kinds of internal experiences like hunger, thirst, fatigue, body temperature, anxiety, mood, muscle pains, heart rate, balance, breathing…

I could go on. 

So, we have these internal dashboards that are covered with gauges and dials and we are all expertly trained to read them and integrate the multiple datas points so that we can function in the world, similar to the way the pilot integrates multiple gauges to take-off, fly, and land.

We even come fully trained when we are born at the genetic level by millions of years of evolution. It’s all innate. 

We are actually born knowing how to read the many cues, which is extraordinary when you think about it for a second. 

It’s like our body’s users manual is coded into our DNA.

We know when we’re hungry or thirsty. We know when we’re cold or tired. We know when our muscles are sore. We know when we have suffered an injury. We know when our heart is racing or our palms are sweaty. We know when we are scared or sad. Etc etc.

Yet amid this culture that has fostered the displacement of our natural selves, we've arrived at this spot where we don't read our dashboard so well anymore. 

It’s either poorly tuned or we neglect or maybe some of both.

Regardless, we’re not accurately assessing what is going on inside of us and the quantified self is probably not helping the way it is being marketed to us. (I wrote more about the problem with the quantified self here.)

We can connect the obesity epidemic to this loss because we are clearly not reading nourishment and hunger cues so well.

And it also seems like we are not measuring our sleep and rest well either or emotional regulation.

I observe all this when I look at obesity rates or sleep patterns or road rage etc.

Tuning Back In

Still, we are all the captains of our own vessels no matter how much the modern world might have contributed to gauge distortions.

We can recalibrate. 

We can tune back into this part of ourselves that is an able captain by birth! 

And we can begin using that more accurate internal information to make decisions like when and what to eat or how to prioritize rest or how we want to move our bodies.

If you think your captain’s dashboard might need a tune up, here are some things you can do today:

1. Turn off your phone. Put it in a drawer. Throw it in a lake (just kidding about the lake… sorta)

2. Stretch your body. Nothing crazy, maybe reach for the sky or touch your toes. Then, take a few minutes to note how that feels. Maybe you feel stiff in your neck, maybe your legs are tight.

3. Take a walk in nature. (This is not just a plug for the Walkabout that begins Tuesday, Aug 1.) Take a run or a swim… Look at the things around you and intentionally reflect on how you feel when you do this.

4. Tomorrow morning when you get out of bed, stop for a minute and label your energy level. Are you dragging? Are you energized?

A lot of this is stopping and taking note for a minute. 

Taking the time to reflect on how we are feeling - getting conscious about what was for our ancestors mostly an unconscious or automatic process.

Reflection is an integral part of re-tuning and so that’s where we want to begin.