Tending the Group Ecosystem

Years ago, I worked on a habitat restoration crew. The ten of us shared the year together, spending our days cutting blackberries and planting native trees and our weekends drinking cheap beer and dancing to bad music. Most of us were young, in our early 20s, using the job as a bridge to figure out what the hell we were doing with our lives.

After a few months of spending so much time with these other humans, I began to notice a pattern. It felt like we inhabited a shared mood: one day dark and stormy, another day silly and lighthearted, still another melancholy and withdrawn. Even as I was experiencing my individual highs and lows, it felt like there was another layer to my emotional landscape, one that didn’t belong just to me.

Though I had been experiencing this phenomenon my whole life, I had never felt it quite this distinctly or had such a consistent, long-term connection with a group of others.

Human beings are neurobiologically designed for relationships. Evolution has shaped us to function as interconnected parts of a whole. As a species, we can survive in nearly any ecosystem on this planet, but only when we work together.

The group is our natural habitat, in a way. 

When humans come together, we create dynamic living systems. Just as clusters of cells cohere to make up our organs, and our organs work together to create and sustain the living whole of our bodies, human relationships interconnect to create increasingly complex social systems.

We are cells in a collective body, and our relationships with each other define the health of that body. 

As individuals, we have nervous systems that attune and respond to our environment, clusters of nerve cells collaborating to detect and respond to information in our internal and external world. Similarly, groups of humans develop a sort of shared nervous system. We are like a murmuration of starlings moving in synchrony, no single one of us leading, but somehow reading and responding to each other with unconscious grace.

We constantly and unconsciously attune and respond to each other's states, what researchers call emotional contagion, empathic resonance, and co-regulation.

You’ve likely experienced this in various areas of your life. In a meeting, one person expresses doubt about a proposed course of action, and the apprehension ripples through the group. You sit down to dinner with your family, and a sullen teenager pulls everyone into their orbit. Or maybe you’ve known “collective effervescence”: the unity and righteous indignation of a crowd at a protest, the resonant joy at a concert, the electricity of inspiration and hope at a spiritual gathering. 

What this means is that one person can create ripples through a system, but also that those around us profoundly influence our experience as an “individual person”. It means that when I go up, others go up, and when I go down, it creates a gravitational pull that affects everyone. What we call “culture” in a human system is the collective pattern of our interactions with each other, the ways we go up or down (or sideways) together.

Consider what arises in imbalanced systems. The flock of starlings scatters and splits, becoming more vulnerable to predators. A body incurs compromised health and can’t function without external support. 

Just as our nervous systems can get stuck in states of dysregulation, so too can the collective nervous system of a group or community. Our base level can become a state of distress, with pervasive anxiety, perpetual frustration, or deep levels of burnout and exhaustion. 

When our individual system is under-resourced—if we lack sleep or connection or feel overwhelmed—it takes very little to send us into an activated or dysregulated state. Similarly, if a group is under-resourced, if it lacks time and space for connection, if there is unpredictability or inconsistency, the collective “feel” is often one of anxiety, anger, or apathy.

So how do we influence this collective state toward balance? First, it’s crucial to attend to your own state if you’re in a role of leadership or influence. But individual regulation is just the beginning. In any group, though mine might be the “keystone” nervous system, everyone else is ping-ponging off of each other as well. 

Just being aware of this phenomenon is helpful. It allows for a modicum of conscious choice when you feel yourself getting pulled into an emotional state that feels misaligned with the goals of the group. But you can also integrate intentional and research-based strategies into the culture of your team or classroom that invite collective regulation. 

Bringing regulation into the group isn’t just about making people feel good: it builds our collective capacity for difficulty and makes us more resilient. When we build elements of regulation into the culture of a team or a classroom, there is more space for creativity, learning, and innovation. We spend less time navigating the frustrations of interpersonal dynamics and more time attending to the work at hand. We have more bandwidth and energy available to do hard things.

Attending to group regulation isn’t about pandering to fragility, but cultivating strength. 

These efforts can not only improve the relationships that folks have with each other, but also minimize the difficult behaviors that arise out of dysregulation, disconnection, and reactivity. Although these behaviors express themselves differently at different developmental ages, the foundations of regulation are the same.

Regulation requires that we work from the bottom-up, creating a sense of safety and belonging by attending to the needs of the body, cultivating connection, and building in consistency and predictability. When I say “bottom up,” I’m referring to the sequential nature of our neurobiology—the fact that we can only get to our higher functions of reflection, critical thinking, and imaginative problem-solving when we’ve attended to our mammalian needs. 

A state of regulation requires affirmative answers to the questions: Am I safe? Do I belong? If you are working with a group and you can take intentional measures to meet these needs, it creates the conditions for collective balance.

To nurture regulation and resilience within our groups, then, requires two things: incorporating predictable cues of safety and creating consistent spaces of belonging. 

We receive cues of safety through our bodies; it is not an abstract concept but a felt experience. There are four elements of regulating through the body: meeting physiological needs, engaging in movement, integrating rhythm, and attending to the senses.  

Asking folks to engage their bodies may feel out of place in a serious project meeting or a learning-focused university classroom. Those things might be fine for an elementary school classroom, but a board meeting? The older we get, the more disembodied we tend to become, and the less socially acceptable it is to do jumping jacks or create a secret handshake with someone. 

We can overcome resistance and slowly introduce physicality into our group culture in simple and subtle ways: taking stretch breaks, normalizing walking meetings, or taking a moment to land and breathe when first arriving. If you ask folks to do something that seems weird or edgy (or downright playful, *gasp*), you can always start by saying, “research shows that movement helps us think more clearly” to justify your request with science.

And don’t underestimate the influence of the sensory environment. Fluorescent lights, chemical smells, irritating noises–even if we’re not picking up on these consciously, they subtly stress our systems and wear down our capacity to stay regulated. Turn off those damn overhead lights and bring in natural light or warm artificial lighting. Play some music to encourage a particular mood or energy. Bring in seasonal bouquets to brighten up the space.

The cues of regulation received through the body invite physiological safety. A sense of belonging—feeling connected to others while having the space to authentically express my individuality—is crucial for psychological safety. When both elements are in place, there is a collective letting down of defenses, a relaxing of our guard. 

You belong here might be the most regulating message we can receive. When we create spaces where people feel this, it helps to create a healthy, vibrant system.

There are many ways to create a sense of belonging within a group, but the most impactful ones are the simplest. Create space for people to get to know each other—the things they have in common and the things that make them unique. Laugh and play together. Talk about things that matter. Solve interesting problems. Celebrate successes and share appreciations. As a leader, my willingness to be vulnerable and authentic, to show and share my humanity, creates a ripple effect that offers permission for others to do the same.

We must integrate both factors into the culture of our group regularly for them to be effective. The more consistency we build into our shared experiences, the more we reinforce a foundation of predictability. We build trust over time, individual drips of water filling a bucket. Repetition reinforces connection, and routine and ritual invite regulation.

When I worked on that restoration crew all those years ago, we collaborated to restore ecosystems that were affected by fragmentation and imbalance. Little did we realize that in the experience of doing so, we became our own living system. Just as we introduced native plants back into urban natural areas, removed invasive species, and sought to bring integrity into these spaces, we found our own cadence of regulation and a balance of our own. 

You, me, and the space between us are the primary building blocks of our human systems. When we intentionally invite regulation into our relationships through cues of safety and belonging, we invite balance into the whole. In a world wrought with fragmentation and imbalance, we need this more than ever.

If you’re curious about exploring ways to put these concepts into practice and invite more group regulation into your spaces, I facilitate team development programs and professional development trainings that intentionally apply embodied practices and deep connection. Reach out to connect and schedule a call!