Rewiring Your Brain: An Article from Jennifer Forsberg Meyer

Rewiring Your Brain: An Article from Jennifer Forsberg Meyer

The Rural Life / By Jennifer Forsberg Meyer

Rewiring Your Brain

Sometimes things intersect in a way that makes you sit up and take notice. This happened to me recently. It started with some spectacular nature programs—the BBC series available on Netflix. My husband and I love them, and have so far zoomed through “Life,” “Life on Earth,” “Nature’s Great Events,” and more. We ration ourselves to one episode a night.

They are beyond fabulous. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve turned to my husband and exclaimed, “Did you know that?! I had no idea!,” I could buy a new recliner.

As we watched these splendid programs, the concept of “eat or be eaten” was burned into our consciousness. This was especially true with “The Blue Planet,” the program featuring the astonishingly varied life forms in Earth’s oceans. Watching these marine creatures strive to avoid becoming each other’s lunch, I tried to imagine what it’s like to know that, at any given moment, a predator might be stalking you from the front, rear, one side, the other side, above you—even below you.

Your sudden death could come from any direction at any instant!

No wonder, I thought, that some primeval ancestor of ours finally decided to take its chances up on land. There, at least, you’d know nothing can attack you from underneath, plus there are fewer predators to swoop or pounce from above.

It had to provide at least some relief from that extreme vulnerability.

At the same time I was watching these programs, I was reading Hardwiring Happiness, by Rick Hanson, PhD. Hanson is a neuropsychologist, a senior fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and a New York Times best-selling author. I was well primed to hear his main message, which is that our brains have a built-in “negativity bias.” This stems from the millions of years our species spent in the same manner as the animals in those BBC series—trying to eat lunch, not be lunch.

Simply put, we evolved to pay much more attention to negative stuff, because the penalty for not doing so could be dire. For example, if you missed a meal, you’d go hungry awhile, but you’d still live to eat—and mate and pass along your genes–another day. If you became someone else’s meal, however, you’d never pass your genes along, ever again.

Ergo it was OK if you forgot how to get back to that bush with the particularly delicious berries, but potentially deadly if you forgot where the lion path was.

That’s how a preference for clinging to negative thoughts and ideas got hardwired into our brains. How does that preference manifest itself today, in the modern human?

Imagine you’re at work, and everything goes well the entire day, but then one thing goes wrong. Which thing do you think about as you’re falling asleep that night?

As Hanson puts it, our brains are like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones. Worse, it can become a vicious circle, because the more you dwell in negative thoughts, the more you’re reinforcing the pathways in your brain that lead to negativity. This can cause you to feel anxious, irritable and blue, not to mention less patient and understanding of others.

The wonderful news, says Hanson, is that we don’t have to remain at the mercy of this “wiring” in our brains—we can change it. By consciously savoring the positive experiences we have every day, plus dwelling on the positive memories we already have stored, we can begin to overcome our brain’s tilt toward the negative.

It sounds ridiculously easy, and it is—when you remember to do it. And therein lies the rub. Because of course our brains keep trying to get us to focus on all the negative things in our lives, instead. Hanson has specific tips for what he calls “taking in the good.”

Many videos describing his method are available free online at YouTube.com. If you’re interested, I recommend you start with this 13-minute clip of Dr. Rick Hanson at TEDxMarin in 2013.

I’m giving it a try. I figure I’ve nothing to lose but those negative thought-loops—and everything positive to gain.


 

Jennifer Forsberg Meyer is a biweekly columnist with The Mountain Democrat in Placerville, California, where this column first appeared on October 26, 2015.



Dr. Ramani Durvasula is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and expert on the impact of toxic narcissism. She is a Professor of Psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, and also a Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg.

The focus of Dr. Ramani’s clinical, academic, and consultative work is the etiology and impact of narcissism and high-conflict, entitled, antagonistic personality styles on human relationships, mental health, and societal expectations. She has spoken on these issues to clinicians, educators, and researchers around the world.

She is the author of Should I Stay or Should I Go: Surviving a Relationship With a Narcissist, and Don't You Know Who I Am? How to Stay Sane in an Era of Narcissism, Entitlement, and Incivility. Her work has been featured at SxSW, TEDx, and on a wide range of media platforms including Red Table Talk, the Today Show, Oxygen, Investigation Discovery, and Bravo, and she is a featured expert on the digital media mental health platform MedCircle. Dr. Durvasula’s research on personality disorders has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and she is a Consulting Editor of the scientific journal Behavioral Medicine.

Dr. Stephen Porges is a Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, and Professor Emeritus at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Maryland. He is a former president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research and has been president of the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological, and Cognitive Sciences, which represents approximately twenty-thousand biobehavioral scientists. He’s led a number of other organizations and received a wide variety of professional awards.

In 1994 he proposed the Polyvagal Theory, a theory that links the evolution of the mammalian autonomic nervous system to social behavior and emphasizes the importance of physiological states in the expression of behavioral problems and psychiatric disorders. The theory is leading to innovative treatments based on insights into the mechanisms mediating symptoms observed in several behavioral, psychiatric, and physical disorders, and has had a major impact on the field of psychology.

Dr. Porges has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers across a wide array of disciplines. He’s also the author of several books including The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation.

Dr. Bruce Perry is the Principal of the Neurosequential Network, Senior Fellow of The ChildTrauma Academy, and a Professor (Adjunct) in the Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago and the School of Allied Health at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. From 1993 to 2001 he was the Thomas S. Trammell Research Professor of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine and chief of psychiatry at Texas Children's Hospital.

He’s one of the world’s leading experts on the impact of trauma in childhood, and his work on the impact of abuse, neglect, and trauma on the developing brain has impacted clinical practice, programs, and policy across the world. His work has been instrumental in describing how traumatic events in childhood change the biology of the brain.

Dr. Perry's most recent book, What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, was released earlier this year. Dr. Perry is also the author, with Maia Szalavitz, of The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, a bestselling book based on his work with maltreated children, and Born For Love: Why Empathy is Essential and Endangered. Additionally, he’s authored more than 300 journal articles and book chapters and has been the recipient of a variety of professional awards.

Dr. Allison Briscoe-Smith is a child clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma and issues of race. She earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard and then received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. She performed postdoctoral work at the University of California San Francisco/San Francisco General Hospital. She has combined her love of teaching and advocacy by serving as a professor and by directing mental health programs for children experiencing trauma, homelessness, or foster care.

Dr. Briscoe-Smith is also a senior fellow of Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and is both a professor and the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the Wright Institute. She provides consultation and training to nonprofits and schools on how to support trauma-informed practices and cultural accountability.

Sharon Salzberg is a world-renowned teacher and New York Times bestselling author. She is widely considered one of the most influential individuals in bringing mindfulness practices to the West, and co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts alongside Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein. Sharon has been a student of Dipa Ma, Anagarika Munindra, and Sayadaw U Pandita alongside other masters.

Sharon has authored 10 books, and is the host of the fantastic Metta Hour podcast. She was a contributing editor of Oprah’s O Magazine, had her work featured in Time and on NPR, and contributed to panels alongside the Dalai Lama.

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