Episode 10: Managing Chaos

Hello, friends. I’m your host, Crys Cain. It is August 20th, 2020 as I record this. And thank you so much for inviting me into your ears again. It’s been exactly one month since my last episode. And what have I done in the last month? I’ve discovered that doing solo episodes takes a lot of time for me. I don’t feel comfortable sitting down and freestyling, and I’m just much more comfortable with a script. Without one I tend to go on incomprehensible bunny trails.

What does that mean for the podcast? I’m still figuring that out. I’m committed to showing up, even if inconsistently at first, and accepting imperfection. So, I’ll still be doing this for a while, at least a year. I’ve got to have some commitment. But, in the last three weeks I’ve written a grand total of 794 words, all of which happened today, not counting what I’ve written for this podcast, and I will absolutely include that as soon as the transcription is complete.

Now, one of those weeks I took off for my son’s birthday. Big old four years old. The next was wrecked by shoulder pain so ridiculous I felt like I had a migraine in my shoulder, which leaves a handful of days before and after that I have absolutely no excuse for it, but I was probably doing some admin work, so that’s all right.

If you can’t tell, I’m trying to convince my inner critic to bugger off nicely. So this week, I wanted to talk about managing chaos, and I have this theory, this analogy that I’ve been using for a while called chaos buckets. I also call my four-year-old a chaos bucket, but that’s something a little bit different.

So this idea grew out of a study that Susan Cain referenced in her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. All my introverts love that title, and my extroverts are probably amused or slightly offended. This study was performed and was ongoing when the book was published by Professor Jerome Kagan of the laboratory for child development at Harvard, and it started in 1989.

He took 500 four-month-old infants and predicted that he’d be able to tell in 45 minutes which babies were more likely to turn into introverts or extroverts. Spoiler, He was pretty spot on. Here’s how the test went: he exposed the babies to a bunch of new, mildly stressful experiences and recorded their reactions. About 20% got loud and moved a bunch, but about 40% were pretty chill, and the remaining 40% were somewhere in the middle.

So which group do you think correlated to the extroverts? Is it the loud ones or the chill ones? If you guessed loud, you’re wrong. Now Kagan’s team wasn’t just watching the babies. They were measuring heart rate, blood pressure, finger temperature, and some other things related to the nervous system, trying to measure the reactivity of the amygdala.

The amygdala is often referred to as the lizard brain, that instinctive sense of self preservation that nudges our emotions along. It’s what triggers the fight or flight instinct, though it’s not its only purpose. Kagan’s hypothesis was that infants who are born with a highly reactive amygdala would a wiggle and howl, when exposed to new things, chaos, and grow up to be children who are more likely to feel wary of meeting new people. One last note about the study is that the correlations weren’t a hundred percent, but there were surprisingly accurate. And introversion and extroversion are on a spectrum with most people falling somewhere in the middle. But if you’d like to learn more, I’ll link to the book in the notes. I really enjoyed it.

So chaos buckets! All that backstory to get to the main topic. So my completely nonscientific theory is this: we all have a chaos bucket. The capacity of which we have to deal with chaos. Some are larger, some are smaller, and they all have a hole in the bottom.

The hole also varies in size. The size of the bucket is our capacity for chaos, for new information that can be anywhere. That can be anything from a song playing in your house or your neighbor’s house, as long as you can hear it. It can be your kid screaming. It can be watching a video of a class, processing new information. Everything you do adds a little bit of chaos to your bucket. The hole in the bucket is how quickly you process and clear the chaos.

So everything that happens around us adds a stream of chaos pouring into our bucket. None of us want an empty bucket, but neither do we want a too full bucket. The empty bucket equals unfulfillment, boredom and ennui, which is a way of saying utterly, and warily and bored, and I use it every possible chance I get. Overflowing buckets lead to emotional breakdowns, outbursts, running away, etc. I think that generally, the more extroverted you are, the larger your bucket and the larger the hole in it, the quicker you process chaos. Which means that you need to pour a lot of chaos into it to maintain a comfortable level.

The more introverted you are, the smaller your bucket, the smaller, the hole in it, the less chaos you want in your life. And the more easily you get overwhelmed. What I like about this analogy is that it’s flexible, and it does kind of encompass all the complexity of the amygdala and everything it does.

Someone who has a large chaos bucket with a smaller hole, might be able to spend their entire spring break partying hard, but then feel really comfortable taking a week’s break while their chaos buckets drains to a point where they feel uncomfortable and need to add more. Someone who has a small bucket with a large hole, might be able to process decently large amounts of chaos regularly, as long as nothing upsets the balance.

So how is this useful? Having an understanding of your capacity for chaos, the size of your bucket, and how quickly chaos flows through it, gives you a tool to manage overwhelm or boredom. Since explaining my theory to my nanny, one of the most extroverted people I know other than my son, she regularly jumps to her feet after too long sitting, chilling, and talking, and grabs the kid and runs to the beach shouting, “I need to fill my chaos bucket!” I am far more prone to overwhelm. I have a relatively small chaos bucket and its rate of flow varies. But when I get overwhelmed, I now know that I need to eliminate as many sources of chaos as possible and wait as my bucket empties.

So how about you? What does your chaos bucket look like? Do you tend toward too empty or too full? Are you pretty good at managing it? Let me know in the comments at www.writeawaypodcast.com.

If you want to help support this podcast, you can buy me a coffee at www.ko-fi.com/cryscain