I’ll get right to it and tell you that today I’m talking about the concept of restraint – and you should know that I literally groaned to myself when I realized I needed to write this one.
A quick sidebar about my writing process: I keep a running list of topics (see my essay on lists — it’s a bit of a problem). Usually I pick whatever feels most alive when I sit down, or something from the list resurfaces and demands attention. But every so often, a topic that isn’t on the list keeps showing up — in books, in conversations, in life — until I know I have to write about it or risk a cosmic slap across the face.
This is one of those times.
But back to the groan. I groaned because I don’t really want to write about this. It feels boring and unsexy. Who wants to talk about holding ourselves back? Who wants to talk to mostly women who do mostly so much self-censoring and denying of true pleasures about refraining?
It feels much more enlivening – and fitting in our culture – to preach the paradigm of going for it – of grasping, of throwing caution to the wind, of being audacious and bold. Those are the topics that get met with the hearts and the hell yeahs. It would be awfully hard to market a book or a course on the “Art of Holding Back.”
But here we are today, sitting at a moment in time that might actually be calling for us to practice this very art. Its absence seems to have left us pretty lost.
We’ve grown so used to instant gratification that shoes arriving Thursday instead of Wednesday feels like an injustice. A slow website feels unbearable. Our DoorDash driver hits traffic and we’re offended. I’ve learned that if I write more than twenty words on Instagram, no one reads it. Who has the time?
These examples speak to our collective intolerance for waiting, which is one way in which the absence of restraint plays out. Waiting requires us to hold on an impulse – the impulse to blow up, to change course, to keep scrolling. When we do wait, we are restraining the part of us that tells us we can’t wait or is desperate for a different distraction.
We see the cultural rejection of restraint in plenty of other ways too, though – in ways that are undermining our relationships, destroying our discourse, and killing our planet. That sounds pretty dramatic, but I think it holds. So many of us were not only never taught the skills to refrain – we were told we shouldn’t have to. We were encouraged to say what we feel and take what we want. The world would have to adjust. This is the rallying cry of modern capitalism.
But, of course, the world hasn’t adjusted. We’ve become so accustomed to buying what we want the second we desire it that the earth is buckling under the weight of our over-consumption. We’re so encouraged to say what we think and not hold back that healthy discourse can feel like a distant memory. Somewhere along the line our culture decided that the concept of restraint was offensive to our sense of liberty – and liberty won out.
This is all so far at the cultural level, though. It’s a little easier to shake our heads at the collective, to say that we should all stop buying so much stuff or insisting on such immediacy. But I’m not here to talk so much about the culture as I am about you and me.
When we start talking about practicing restraint on an individual level, I think most of us get a little irritated. We tend to see ourselves as restraining ourselves all the time. After all, we rarely have what we really want, right? But I think what’s closer to the truth is that most of us struggle a lot with restraint.
I was reminded of this recently when I hosted a book club on The Anxious Generation. As a group of moms, the conversation turned from our kids’ screen use to our own, and everyone there acknowledged a fairly compulsive relationship with their phone. We all talked about valuing the idea of less digital time, but still finding ourselves so often reflexively scrolling. We offered each other suggestions on phone baskets, apps, and boxes that keep you literally locked out from grabbing your phone. When we have to install a keypad to keep us away from our own stuff, something just might be broken.
That’s not to say it’s anyone’s fault – at least at the individual level. Again, our brains have been hijacked by technology that hacks our dopamine and our culture is structured around immediacy. But what we’re left with as individuals is a deficit in our ability to hold back.
It’s not just about our tech use, of course. When I talk about restraint, what I’m really talking about is our struggle to insert some time between stimulus and response. Between receiving the frustrating text and firing back a snarky response. Between getting the hard feedback and deciding to give up. Between seeing our kid struggle and stepping it to solve it.
Restraint in these contexts is essentially about taking a beat. Victor Frankl famously wrote that between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space lies our growth and freedom. What he didn’t explicitly name is that in that space – the space of restraint – lies all of the discomfort. It’s the space where anxiety and agitation live. It’s where our mind is nagging us to do something to get rid of an intolerable feeling.
Keep swiping up to avoid feeling boredom.
Fire back to avoid feeling hurt.
Add to cart to avoid feeling longing.
Rescue to avoid feeling useless.
We struggle to restrain ourselves from the immediate impulse because we’re so afraid of what that space in between will feel like. We worry we can’t tolerate it or that it will overtake us. Oftentimes we don’t even know what the “it” is – we’ve become so used to moving quickly so we don’t have to find out.
Which is exactly what the practice of restraint is all about. I don’t advocate restraint for the sake of moral righteousness or because self-denial is so virtuous. Far from it, in fact. Restraint here is about holding back from immediately partaking in what feels relieving or good precisely so that we can figure out what happens when we don’t.
When we give ourselves the beat, we see what itchiness arises. I can guarantee there’s excellent data in that space. When we sit with the harsh text instead of firing back, we get to examine what about it actually activated us. When we refrain from the exercise that has become compulsive, we get to see what feelings it’s been keeping at bay. When we retrain ourselves from immediately fixing the problem created by our coworker, we get to see what gets stirred up for us when things aren’t resolved.
I’m not suggesting that any of this is particularly enjoyable. Restraint by its very nature is the practice of sitting in discomfort. And that again is the point – to better understand our own discomfort and then learn to be with it without running from it. We practice being with it because the inability to do so is what causes nearly all of our suffering.
In When Things Fall Apart, Tibetan Buddhist, Pema Chodron, describes this kind of refraining as the key to not causing harm, a central value for her. When we are in habit loops of needing to escape or protect from our uncomfortable feelings, we hurt others and ourselves. Restraint is not abstaining, she clarifies; it’s cultivating a type of pause that lets us be gentle, awake, and compassionate – both internally and externally.
When playing with the practice of restraint, I think it helps to focus on what you are doing instead of solely on what you are holding off from. If you are working on not compulsively looking at your phone, every time you notice the urge to pick it up you can commit to taking two breaths and asking yourself what you are feeling. If you’re practicing restraint in online shopping, you can be an anthropologist of your own internal landscape and watch what happens when you leave items in your cart. If you are refraining from yelling at home, you can feel the hot energy build and then decide if or how else you want to expel it (Hot shower? Scrubbing counters? Writing an email to your congressperson?).
I want to circle back to my comment earlier that many of us feel like we’re constantly restraining ourselves, given how much we hold back and all the things we don’t pursue. In some ways, I think that’s true. It’s as if we end up restraining ourselves so much on the things that matter – living lives that don’t even feel like our own – that we have so little of the energy to practice healthy restraint for the things that are simply distractions or numbing agents.
What I’m talking about here, again, is healthy restraint. The kind that gives us the space to pause and breathe and figure out what’s actually going on inside of us. The kind that gives the power and growth that Victor Frankl promises. The kind that is admittedly uncomfortable, but where transformation starts to happen. Maybe it could be kind of sexy after all.
Questions for Reflection:
- Where do you find yourself reacting compulsively – in certain habits, patterns, or ways of responding?
- What thoughts or feelings come up even just imagining restraining from an urge you often have?
- What feeling tends to be hardest for you to be with without doing something (e.g. helplessness, anger, restlessness, grief)?
