Just One Thing (JOT) is the free newsletter that
suggests a simple practice each week that will bring you more joy, more
fulfilling relationships, and more peace of mind.
A small thing
repeated each day adds up over time to produce big results.
Just one
thing that could change your life.
(©
Rick Hanson, 2010)
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This newsletter comes from Rick Hanson, Ph.D., neuropsychologist, founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, PsychologyToday.com contributor, and meditation teacher.
See Rick's workshops and lectures for therapists and the general public. | |
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My Offerings
· Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom - Written with a neurologist, Richard Mendius, M.D., and with a Foreword by Daniel Siegel, M.D. and a Preface by Jack Kornfield, Ph.D., it's full of effective ways to use your mind to change your brain to benefit your whole being.
· Stress-Proof Your Brain -Meditations to rewire neural pathways for stress relief and unconditional happiness.
· Meditations to Change Your Brain - Three CDs of powerful guided practices, plus practical suggestions, for personal transformation.
· Meditations for Happiness - Downloadable program (3 CDs worth) on gratitude, inner protectors, and coming home to happiness.
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What makes you feel threatened?
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The Practice
Don't be intimidated.
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Why?
On the Huffington Post, I recently used the example of Stephen Colbert's satirical "March to Keep Fear
Alive" as a timely illustration of a larger point: humans evolved to be
fearful - since that helped keep our ancestors alive - so we are very
vulnerable to being frightened and even intimidated by threats, both
real ones and "paper tigers." With this march, Colbert is obviously
mocking those who play on fear, since we certainly don't need any new
reminders to keep fear alive.
This
vulnerability to feeling threatened has effects at many levels, ranging
from individuals, couples, and families to schoolyards, organizations,
and nations. Whether it's an individual who worries about the
consequences of speaking up at work or in a close relationship, a family
cowed by a scary parent, a business fixated on threats instead of
opportunities, or a country that's routinely told it's under "Threat
Level Orange" - it's the same human brain that reacts in all cases.
Therefore,
understanding how your brain became so vigilant and wary, and so easily
hijacked by alarm, is the first step toward gaining more control over
that ancient circuitry. Then, by bringing mindful awareness to how your
brain reacts to feeling threatened, you can stimulate and therefore
build up the neural substrates of a mind that has more calm, wisdom, and
sense of inner strength - a mind that sees real threats more clearly,
acts more effectively in dealing with them, and is less rattled or
distracted by exaggerated, manageable, or false alarms.
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How?
(The "hows" in this JOT are mainly about understanding.)
The
nervous system has been evolving for 600 million years, from ancient
jellyfish to modern humans. Our ancestors had to make a critical
decision many times a day: approach a reward or avoid a hazard - pursue a
carrot or duck a stick.
Both
are important. Imagine being a hominid in Africa a million years ago,
living in a small band. To pass on your genes, you've got to find food,
have sex, and cooperate with others to help the band's children
(particularly yours) to have children of their own: these are big
carrots in the Serengeti. Additionally, you've got to hide from
predators, steer clear of Alpha males and females looking for trouble,
and not let other hunter-gatherer bands kill you: these are significant
sticks.
But
here's the key difference between carrots and sticks. If you miss out
on a carrot today, you'll probably have a chance at more carrots tomorrow. But if
you fail to avoid a stick today - WHAP! - no more carrots forever.
Compared to carrots, sticks usually have more urgency and impact.
Body and Brain Going Negative
Consequently,
your body generally reacts more intensely to negative stimuli than to
equally strong positive ones. For example, intense pain can be produced
all over the body, but intense pleasure comes only (for most people)
from stimulating a few specific regions.
In
your brain, there are separate (though interacting) systems for
negative and positive stimuli. At a larger scale, the left hemisphere is
somewhat specialized for positive experiences while the right
hemisphere is more focused on negative ones (this makes sense since the
right hemisphere is specialized for gestalt, visual-spatial processing,
so it's advantaged for tracking threats coming from the surrounding
environment).
Negative
stimuli produce more neural activity than do equally intense (e.g., loud, bright) positive ones.
They are also perceived more easily and quickly. For example, people in
studies can identify angry faces faster than happy ones; even if they
are shown these images so quickly (just a tenth of a second or so) that
they cannot have any conscious recognition of them, the ancient
fight-or-flight limbic system of the brain will still get activated by
the angry faces.
The
alarm bell of your brain - the amygdala (you've got two of these little
almond-shaped regions, one on either side of your head) - uses about
two-thirds of its neurons to look for bad news: it's primed to go
negative. Once it sounds the alarm, negative events and experiences get
quickly stored in memory - in contrast to positive events and
experiences, which usually need to be held in awareness for a dozen or
more seconds to transfer from short-term memory buffers to
long-term storage.
In effect, as I wrote on Huff Post, the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.
That's why researchers have found that animals, including humans,
generally learn faster from pain (alas) than pleasure. (For more on the
neuropsychology of the negativity bias, and references, see the slide sets on my website.)
That learning from your childhood and adulthood - both what you
experienced yourself and saw others experiencing around you - is locked
and loaded in your head today, ready for immediate activation, whether
by a frown across a dinner table or by TV images of a car-bombing 10,000
miles away.
What to Do?
To
keep our ancestors alive, Mother Nature evolved a brain that routinely
tricked them into making three mistakes: overestimating threats,
underestimating opportunities, and underestimating resources (for
dealing with threats and fulfilling opportunities). This is a great way
to pass on gene copies, but a lousy way to promote quality of life.
So
for starters, be mindful of the degree to which your brain is wired to
make you afraid, wired so that you walk around with an ongoing trickle of anxiety
(a flood for some) to keep you on alert. And wired to zero in on any
apparent bad news in a larger stream of information (e.g., fixing on a
casual aside from a family member or co-worker), to tune out or
de-emphasize reassuring good news, and to keep thinking about the one
thing that was negative in a day in which a hundred small things
happened, ninety-nine of which were neutral or positive. (And, to be
sure, also be mindful of any tendency you might have toward rose-colored
glasses or putting that ostrich head in the sand.)
Additionally, be mindful of the forces around you that beat the drum of alarm - whether it's a family member who threatens emotional punishment or political figures talking about inner or outer enemies. Consider for yourself whether their fears are valid - or whether they are exaggerated or empty, while downplaying or missing the larger context of opportunities and resources. Ask yourself what these forces could be getting out of beating that scary drum.
This mindfulness of both the inner workings of your brain and the
outer mechanisms of fear-promotion can by itself make you less prone to needless fear.
Then you won't be so vulnerable to intimidation by apparent "tigers" that are in fact manageable, blown out of proportion, or made of paper-mache.
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