The other night, I was watching a TV show. The person in the hospital bed flatlined. The old ticker was not tocking. So those good doctors pulled out the paddles. You know the scene. The doctor yells, “Clear!” And then they jolt the guy back to life.
It looks like the heart magically starts beating again.
It made me wonder how it worked.
But how defibrillators work really surprised me.
First of all, a defibrillator does not restart a stopped heart.
If the heart is completely still and not beating, shocking it won’t help. There’s nothing to reset. There has to be some electrical activity in that heart. A defibrillator can’t create a heartbeat out of nothing.
But what it really does is to stop a big mess.
Sometimes the heart isn’t stopped at all. It is in a state of chaos. The heart is firing over and over again like crazy. The electrical signals are all over the place. The muscle quivers instead of pumping. When all of this happens, the heart quits moving any blood. As such, the oxygen doesn’t get where it needs to go in the body.
So. Essentially, everything is technically “on,” but nothing is working.
And that is when the medical people select the defibrillator.
The machine delivers an epic shock. But it doesn’t jump-start the heart. Instead, it stops everything all at once.
So while the heart is stopped and still, it then has a chance for its internal / natural pacemaker to turn everything back on. The heart essentially resets itself. And just like that, the person comes back around. Things start working again.
Defibrillators give the body a chance to do what it already knows how to do.
Switching gears now. Do you ever have days when you feel out of sorts? When everything is just wrong. Maybe you’re grumpy, or tired, or just all jacked out of shape for no good reason. Well. Wouldn’t it be great if we had our own pair of little paddles that we could use to touch our little troubled minds and hearts and put things back on track again? Sometimes that’s all any person needs. A little zapper. Just a little something to stop our funk and let us reset.
All we need is a pause. A little bit of a do-over. A little reset button.
Maybe the button already exists. A ten-minute meditation. Or a ten-minute walk in the garden or in the woods. Or maybe just ten minutes sitting with the cat on our lap and hearing her purr. Maybe we already have ways to defibrillate.
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“Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is relax.”
— Mark Black
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“Your calm mind is the ultimate weapon against your challenges.”
— Bryant McGill
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“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass… is by no means a waste of time.”
— John Lubbock
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“Within you, there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time.”
— Hermann Hesse
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“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.”
— Ram Dass
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