These days, I find it difficult to go to places where I have to wade through masses of humanity. To have an auto driver say no, when you ask him to ply you home. Or have somebody break a queue in a food stall. For me, this metaphorical elbow in my ribcage is tantamount to hostility. So I avoid such spaces where this unconscious hostility is inflicted on us. It is possible. I go to quiet bookstores, or choose a time to shop when there is less crowd. I avoid rush hour commuting unless required. Apparently, all these precautions can make me live longer! And happier!
I was amazed to read that living in a hostile environment can age you faster. It’s simple, however, to understand why exactly: hostile spaces add to our overall mental stress, creating an overload. There is actually a label for this: cognitive load. It is somewhat akin to how when your email box is full of spam, it crashes the system. Now that we have drawn the appropriate connection, we can get down to brass tacks and define this idea of a hostile space.
For a person who has lived a life of discrimination in a village, living in a city could be liberating. For a city dweller whose building has gone for renovation and is now suddenly surrounded by new neighbours too busy for him, the city could feel hostile.
Where neighbourhoods change – from cosy tight social groups to large sprawling complexes — some people may feel isolated and lonely. Other examples include living in conflict zones, violent neighbourhoods, or spaces where micro-aggression makes you feel bad about who you are. As the world drops its boundaries, and begins to link peoples, it has also created its inner barricades of prejudices. Prejudices are atavistic responses, a biological biochemical remnant that triggers a reflexive response in our body and mind, to pick out an aggressor and protect ourselves in the jungle. Unfortunately, that has not changed at all, much. We still have all those responses stored inside of us, and this impacts us long-term, even though we no longer live in a jungle.
Elizabeth Blackburn, the Nobel prize winning biologist who I quoted last time, and will continue to quote in subsequent columns as well, says that perceived hostility, or living in unsafe spaces, can shorten our telomeres, those protective bits inside our cells. This can negatively impact our longevity too.
It was found that those who lived in megacities where the sense of being lonely in a crowd was common (admit it, we have felt it also, sometimes) had highly over-stimulated fear centres. It was as if they were on alert all the time. (This was part of the Lindenberg-Meyer study done in Germany).
Psychology Today magazine published an article that summed this up: urban spaces can create a sense of isolation and loneliness, that leads to clinical depression, suicidal tendencies, abnormal sensory arousal, anxiety disorders, to name a few. Another study said the dopamine centres were overtly aroused, leading to addictive behaviours. Also this aggravated schizophrenia as well. This could explain irrational violent behaviour, where an overactive fear centre goes into a defensive and offensive behaviour.
While we may accept that these studies all have something valid to say, we just cannot all of us sell our city flats and move out to villages now. Even if for most of us, that is a dream. So what is the solution?
These are simple tricks, but effective. Even a few of these will release the coiled tension that you do not know you are lugging around!
The columnist is a well-known yoga teacher, who has written three books on the topic. You can find her on Instagram @high.on.yoga