Brain Archives - Page 3 of 29

Stressed? Try to Avoid Future Life Crises*

October 3, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Stress is not a useful term for scientists because it is such a highly subjective phenomenon that it defies definition. —American Institute of Stress

In 1936, Hans Selye, the so-called “father of stress,” defined it as the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change.

It didn’t take long before Selye’s definition expanded to include any unpleasant situation a person was exposed to, their physiological reaction to the unpleasant situation, and the long-term consequences of these reactions (such as an ulcer or a heart attack).

In a 1951 issue of the British Medical Journal, one physician commented that “stress in addition to being itself was also the cause of itself and the result of itself.” Selye himself said that “everyone knows what stress is, but nobody really knows.” And that is pretty much where things are at today.

What Is Stress?

The Global Organization for Stress provides six different definitions of it:

Worry and Anxiety: the worry experienced by a person in particular circumstances or the state of anxiety caused by this. (the Kernerman English learner’s Dictionary)

Bodily or Mental Tension: a physical, chemical or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation…and a state resulting from a stress is one of bodily or mental tension resulting from factors that tend to alter an existent equilibrium. (the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)

Strain and Overwork: strain felt by somebody: mental, emotional, or physical strain caused, e.g. by anxiety or overwork. It may cause such symptoms as raised blood pressure or depression. (the Encarta World English Dictionary)

Mental or Emotional Disruption: a mentally or emotionally disruptive or upsetting condition occurring in response to adverse external influences and capable of affecting physical health, usually characterized by increased heart rate, a rise in blood pressure, muscular tension, irritability and depression. (the American heritage Dictionary of the English Language)

Threat to Well-Being: stress is a term that refers to the sum of the physical, mental and emotional strains or tensions on a person. Feelings of stress in humans result from interactions between persons and their environment that are perceived as straining or exceeding their adaptive capacities and threatening their well-being. The element of perception indicates that human stress responses reflect differences in personality as well as differences in physical strength or health. (the Gale Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders)

Emotional or Physical Threats: stress is a biological term which refers to the consequences of the failure of a human or animal to respond appropriately to emotional or physical threats to the organism, whether actual or imagined; the autonomic response to environmental stimulus [that] includes a state of alarm and adrenaline production, short-term resistance as a coping mechanism, and exhaustion. (Wikipedia)

Getting Closer…

And a seventh definition from Robert Sapolsky, Professor of Biological Sciences and Neurology at Stanford University and author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers:

If you are a normal mammal, a stressor is a challenge to homeostatic balance—a real physical challenge in the world—and the stress-response is the adaptation your body mobilizes to reestablish homeostasis.

Only Sapolsky’s definition of stress connects back to Selye’s: the stress response is your body’s reaction to change and its attempt to return to or preserve homeostasis—the physiological equivalent of the psychological status quo.

Although “everybody knows what stress is, but nobody really knows,” we think we know enough to be able to measure it.

The most commonly used measure of stress (the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale) doesn’t distinguish between negative stress (distress) or positive stress (eustress). It lumps all stressors together, assigns them a value, and provides you with a numerical score that is supposed to indicate how likely you are to become ill. As I am finding myself saying more and more these days, yikes!

More on stress next time, specifically the difference between negative and positive stress, how we experience stressors, stress and change, and how knowing what you want and developing a reliable sense of personal agency may be your two best defenses against the potential ravages (which are very real) of your body’s stress response.

As you consider all the different definitions of stress, think about how you would define it.

*Non-ironic advice from a stress-reduction website.

Persevering Is a Habit

September 13, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

So Is Not Persevering

Persevering means steadily moving toward your desired outcome regardless of setbacks or obstacles, adjusting course as you go.

Perseverance is the P in IAP. If you don’t create a plan for getting back on track when you (inevitably) can’t or don’t follow through with your intention, one misstep can easily do you in. Your brain essentially reads it as an “end process” command, so that’s exactly what it directs you to do.

Until your brain learns to read missteps differently, you have to refocus and redirect it to get back on track. That requires System 2 attention.

Here are some steps you can take.

Pause. Acknowledge what happened. Check to see if you got some new information from the experience. Maybe you did; maybe you didn’t. If you did, how can you incorporate the new information into your intention or action?
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Consider your desired outcome. Use the Desired Outcome worksheet if you find that helpful. Is this something you really want? If not, go ahead and “end process.” If it is something you want:
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Make a new commitment to your intention. Communicate your intention to yourself by more than just thinking about it. Fill out a new IAP Card (adjusted based on the new information, if applicable). Read your intention out loud or communicate it to another person.
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Focus on your new intention, not on the previous one. In fact, tear up the old IAP card and toss it into the trash. Move forward instead of thinking backward.
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Train your brain to “pause and refresh” by rewarding yourself each time you do it. It’s a habit like any other habit. If your existing habit is to “end process,” you need to reward yourself for changing it to “pause and refresh.”

Setbacks and obstacles are part of life. There’s no point chastising yourself over them, making excuses, or allowing them more power and control than they deserve. Just take a moment to assess your situation, decide what to do next, and take that step.

Perseverance is key to reprogramming your brain’s autopilot. And the key to perseverance is pausing.

Storying: It’s a Lot Like Breathing

July 2, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Just as breathing is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop breathing, storying is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop storying.

Your unconscious (System 1) monitors and manages your physical functions such as alertness, arousal, breathing, circulation, and digestion. Actions you take, including many of the lifestyle choices you make—as well as the circumstances of your life—can affect these functions.

You can consciously attend to some of them—breathing, for example—some of the time. But you can’t attend to any of them all the time. And you can’t consciously control them because you don’t have enough System 2 bandwidth to handle the job.

In addition to maintaining homeostasis by managing physical functions, System 1 also manages things like your sensory perceptions, your awareness of being located in space and time, your immediate reactions to events, and the vast majority of choices you make each day.

You can consciously attend to some of these functions, too, some of the time. But you can’t prevent System 1 from managing your mental processes and your real-time reactions any more than you can prevent it from managing physical functions. Although you might wish to have more say, moment-to-moment, it’s good that you don’t.

Storying Is Automatic.

One of the mental activities System 1 regularly engages in is weaving your experiences into coherent stories. I call this storying, because there doesn’t seem to be a better word to describe it. Storytelling and narrating both describe relating a story in some manner: either something that already happened or something that is—or is being—made up. Your brain is neither relating a factual account of past or present events, nor is it fabricating your stories out of thin air. Editing may be a more accurate term, but that implies the preexistence of a story to be edited.

The process of storying includes interpreting events and experiences as they occur for meaning and relevance, deciding which details are worth remembering, adding or subtracting for effect and coherence, reorganizing sequences, if necessary, and incorporating the resulting story into your ongoing life story based on your current beliefs and model of the world. Your brain is so good at this and does it with such speed that you aren’t even aware it’s happening.

Just as breathing is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop breathing, storying is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop storying. (Your brain is you, so you are storying, whether or not you’re conscious of doing it.)

There’s No Such Thing as a True Story.

But just as you can consciously focus your attention on your breathing to calm yourself or remind yourself to be present, you can consciously focus your attention on your brain’s storying, at least from time to time. You can learn to be skeptical of the stories your brain spins. You can allow for the possibility that your stories are often interpretations, explanations, rationalizations, and justifications. No matter how satisfying, they are not true, not fact, not an accurate reflection of reality. Your unconscious may be more or less biased than another person’s unconscious, but everyone is biased to one extent or another.

We are the great masterworks of our own storytelling minds—figments of our own imaginations. We think of ourselves as very stable and real. But our memories constrain our self-creation less than we think, and they are constantly being distorted by our hopes and dreams. Until the day we die, we are living the story of our lives. And, like a novel in process, our life stories are always changing and evolving, being edited, rewritten, and embellished by an unreliable narrator. We are, in large part, our personal stories. And those stories are more truthy than true. —Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal

Storying doesn’t just help you make sense of your own world; it also helps you make sense of the rest of the world. And you’re not the only person storying. Everyone else is doing it, too. Consider the implications.

Our Similarities Are
as Important as
Our Differences

June 20, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

We tend to identify and characterize Enneagram types by focusing on what makes each one different from all the others. One of the ways the brain makes sense of the world is by categorizing the things in it, and as Leonard Mlodinow says in Subliminal:

One of the principal ways we categorize is by maximizing the importance of certain differences.

Emphasizing differences is one of the shortcuts the brain uses to help us function and survive in our fast-paced, sometimes dangerous world. And there’s value in exploring those differences, which are actually critical to the survival and advancement of our species from an evolutionary perspective.

Life on earth is chancy. In the pursuit of successful reproduction, every animal must navigate the equivalent of cats trying to eat you, weasels trying to cheat you, and a flood carrying away your winter’s supply of food. Life is risky. And the key to personality is that there’s no single solution that answers every risk.

Two things distinguish the human personality from that of a mouse. One is our profoundly social lifestyle. Most mammals evolved to fend only for themselves, but a few species found that the benefits of cooperation outweigh (if only by an ounce) the self-centered simplicity of a solitary existence. Our social life is etched into the personality of our entire species. Instinctively, we communicate. Biologically, we’re built to share. Without ever meaning to, we care. Not everyone cares equally, but even the nastiest person you know cares more than the nicest weasel or bear.

Our other distinction is the sheer size of our brain. Our tremendous wattage, plus the social instincts, yield nuances of behavior that we don’t see in other creatures. And when the nuances mingle and collide, amplifying or offsetting one another, our personality becomes complex. —Hannah Holmes, Quirk

As we explore each type in the Enneagram classes I teach, we talk about what that type has to offer that the rest of us benefit from. We acknowledge the value of each type’s differences.

Even so, focusing exclusively on our differences can be problematic—especially in light of that other set of shortcuts we use known as cognitive biases. It can be a very short hop from different to bad or wrong or undesirable, whether those we categorize as different share a nationality, religion, age, political affiliation, or personality type.

So I’ve always appreciated the fact that the Enneagram symbol and system doesn’t just differentiate individual types, it also delineates their relationships and interconnections and encloses all of them within a single circle.

Although it’s our differences that tend to get played up; there’s equal—if not greater—value in exploring our similarities.

Find the Common Ground

You can easily identify what you have in common with the other types by locating yourself on the Contact Points chart below. If you’re a type 2, for example, what you have in common with types 3 and 4 is the Feeling center. What you have in common with types 5 and 8 is being part of the same triad. What you have in common with types 1 and 6 is taking the Compliant stance. And what you have in common with types 7 and 9 is having the Positive Outlook coping style.

The patterns of connection within the Enneagram make it clear that we aren’t really as separate from each other as we sometimes imagine we are.

To quote Lennon and McCartney:

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

What’s New, Pussycat?
Novelty and Your Brain

May 2, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Are you curious and adventurous, constantly looking for new sensations and experiences? Do you tend to get bored easily? Are you quick to lose your temper? Extravagant or impulsive? Do you make decisions before you have all the information? Take risks? Enjoy being in the middle of chaos or disorder? Maybe a bit of an adrenaline junkie?

If you answer yes to most of those questions, you’re probably a neophiliac, but don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of the term (which has nothing to do with dead people, by the way). Neophiliacs are people who not only enjoy novelty, they actively seek it out—sometimes going to extremes to experience it.

Is That a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Early research into the novelty-seeking personality trait found it to be associated with conditions like attention deficit disorder and antisocial behaviors such as alcoholism, drug abuse, compulsive spending, and various other risky, unsafe, and illegal activities. So from that perspective, novelty-seeking is definitely not good.

But more recent research suggests that novelty-seeking actually keeps people healthy and happy and may even be the quintessential human survival skill* that helps us adapt to and cope with changes of all kinds and degrees. So now novelty-seeking is viewed in a much more positive light.

But trying to classify novelty-seeking as either good or bad doesn’t make a lot of sense. Since its reputation has improved, many people who should know better have been advising us to make a point of including more novelty in our lives by, for example, taking a different route to work. If your life is so lacking in novelty that taking a different route to work is the only way you can get it, you may have bigger problems to worry about.

Does Your Brain Like Novelty?

The fact that your brain responds to novelty doesn’t necessarily mean it likes it. Your brain pays attention to new things because it has to figure out what they are, whether they’re potentially pleasurable or harmful, and what you need to do about them. Novelty wakes up your brain’s reward system, which is involved in learning and memory, and the amygdala, which processes emotional information.

So you become more alert, aware, and emotionally aroused. Because dopamine has been activated, you are motivated to explore the situation in search of a reward. But the purpose of this amped up state is not to make you feel good; it’s to ensure your survival. It uses making you feel good to help you remember what you did and what you learned.

Is It Actually Novelty You’re Seeking?

The real question is: Do you tend to seek novelty for its own sake or is what you’re seeking providing you with novelty?

There’s a purpose for your brain’s response to novelty. When you encounter it in the course of doing or learning something new, undertaking a challenge, or accomplishing a goal, what you experience has relevance to your life. So focusing your attention on it and remembering it is meaningful.

Simulated or vicarious novelty may be pleasurable and emotionally arousing in the moment, but it’s superficial—a replica of the real thing.

If you’re up to something, you’re bound to encounter plenty of novelty along your path. And when you do, it will enhance your cognition and your experience, it will increase your well-being, and it will motivate you to do and be and want and contribute more. That’s one of the best aspects of being human. And that is good!

*Winifred Gallagher, New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change