We Want Fast And Want It All - But Don’t Realize How More And More Space Is Being Taken Away From Us
How the lack of your physical and mental space affects your well-being
Hello out there - in a rushed world,
Here comes your weekly permission to Un-rush and Slow Down.
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IMPULSE
We Want Fast And Want It All - But Don’t Realize How More And More Space Is Being Taken Away From Us
How the lack of your physical and mental space affects your well-being
Let’s talk about the physical and mental space that is increasingly taken away from us.
Every one of us wants to travel, go to restaurants, buy lots of stuff, and consume endless online content. (Or, at least, too many people on this planet wish to do all this.) Did you notice how much your available space on an airplane, in a restaurant, or in your brain has been reduced?
And while you might have gone along with this so far, you may not have realized how negatively this affects your physical and mental well-being. Someone or something being constantly in your space causes stress.
We asked for the fast lane
We want to fill our time with experiences and our brains with ever more content. And we want it now, and fast, and then even more of it.
Collectively, we increase the demands on the physical and online worlds, and the world delivers. We make providers and suppliers across the world thrilled because they keep producing products, services, and content and keep over-developing destinations, transportation, and hospitality services. To fill our needs and their pockets.
In order to do so, they have to take space away from us so they can fill the limited space there with more people and stuff. That includes our mental space, which gets trashed with too much information and stimuli.
Meanwhile, we go along with it and accept it as normal to be treated like that.
Reducing physical space to conquer the masses
We get squeezed into airplanes. Almost every airline made their rows closer and their seats narrower. You have less space for your legs or buttocks. And you arrive with three hundred more fellow travelers than once upon a time at your destination to share a geographical space that hasn’t expanded.
You go to a restaurant and almost wipe the breadbasket off your neighbor’s table while trying to get into your chair. Squeezing more tables into a restaurant to use every inch of space not only makes you uncomfortable, but as an extra goodie, you can also follow your neighbor's table conversation, or you can’t hear your own conversation because of the increased noise level due to the higher density of customers. There is nothing against having a good conversation with a neighboring table in a restaurant. In fact, we had lately some very nice exchanges with quite interesting people in restaurants in Lisbon, for example. The point is that we are forced to squeeze into a reduced space and are sold the story that this is a great experience.
Some months ago, I cancelled a restaurant reservation in Munich because I suddenly realized that they limited the time we could occupy our table. Sorry, that is not a pleasant dining experience when the restaurant tells me, already beforehand, when I have to leave.
Now. Some of you will say, that’s how it is today, it’s normal! No. This is not normal. I know my cancellation will not change the restaurant’s attitude, as they will easily fill up the reservation. But at least I feel better to have avoided that treatment and, instead, had a much nicer dinner experience in a different restaurant where we could sit with our friends late into the evening chatting and sipping away. This. Is normal.
Online consumption
You go on social media platforms, let’s say, Facebook, and the stuff of main interest—the posts you want to read—is squeezed into one third of the page. What the hell? The other third is covered with useless ads, and the third column only houses some small navigation buttons on an over-empty space. And what exactly is the logic of this?
I can barely read an online news article because it’s squeezed into a narrow, long column, while the other half or two thirds of a page are occupied with ads, pop-ups and flying saucers. Perhaps the idea is to keep people distracted with all the popping, moving, and sliding of useless information flying across your screen so you can barely concentrate on the actual part of the content, which would only make you realize how the quality of content has gone down.
So much of our physical and mental space has been tightened, leaving barely any space for the stuff that is essential, of interest, or needed.
There are countries where the physical and mental space of their people is occupied and controlled by the governing bodies. There is a reason why people are unhappy.
They don’t have a choice. We do.
Why is this important to think about?
Stress has become a serious issue that affects our health, body, and immune system.
The term “stress” emerged out of the field of engineering to describe the actual physical strain put on a structure but has now been broadened. So, the root was in the Latin word strictus, meaning tight, compressed, drawn together, and drawn tight. The transfer to a purely psychological sense came later, around 1955.
Here we go: compressing, tightening, and reducing space is stressful. Loosen up, open up space, and reduce pressure, which is relaxing and more comfortable.
Another example. Studies have shown that communicative open-plan offices were not such a good idea after all. You might think the open structure gives space to breathe without feeling tightened in. But the lack of privacy, plus the noise and other distractions turned out to be stress factors. Office noise is associated with physiological stress reactions and psychological costs. Not having a sense of control over access to oneself triggers stress.
There are plenty of possibilities to take your space back
As with most things, it’s about your awareness of what is happening to your well-being and then attacking it. Being conscious of how your private space is taken from you and how this contributes to your feeling stressed, annoyed, aggressive, or short-tempered helps you create your own ways of reclaiming your space.
Space is precious; take it back
Having mental and physical space is something precious. Even if the world is inhibiting more and more of our space - the space we need around us to feel ourselves and be able to breathe - we can take it back.
We can escape to nature to have some space to think, spread our arms to embrace the surrounding space, and breathe. Nature feels good and also gives a feeling of spaciousness. The positive effects have also been suggested by numerous studies. Activities in natural settings or exposure to nature, greenery, plants, etc. have important stress reduction and restoration effects.
Experiments have found that there is, in fact, a difference between walking and taking a break in an urban setting with no green in sight or walking in an area heavily populated with vegetation, trees, patches of grass, or flowers. After experiencing a period of mental stress, e.g. solving a demanding cognitive task, test persons who took a break with a walk in an environment that includes nature reported more positive emotions and performed better on subsequent cognitive tasks than did participants who walked in an environment without greenery.
You know the drill with the digital overload of our brains, reducing mental space to focus or think clearly. It’s in your hands to reduce your online consumption of news, social media, information, and whatever else we let our brains enter from the outside world bombarding us with “content”.
Space is calming; expose yourself to it
If you are squeezed into public transportation, move through masses of people, or have a constant noise level from traffic and tons of chatting people around you, it is challenging to feel relaxed and comfortable.
There is a reason why we take a look inside churches or temples, take a seat, and enjoy the calming effect of a spacious place and its silence.
Put yourself in an uncluttered, simplified space and you calm down and can think clearly.
You have the power to reclaim your space
So many areas of the world around us invade our space and try to take it away from us. Whether it is physical space or mental space.
If you are aware of it, you can make choices and be in charge of your space. Physical and mental. To feel in control of our lives, we need to manage the basic boundaries of our mental, physical, and personal space.
There will always be situations where we can’t avoid being squeezed in. But being aware of it, I focus on myself, stay calm about it, and find my way to “get space” again right after I got “squeezed” in.
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