Get to know your brain
How that wonderful brain of yours works and how to make it your friend
In this chapter, we’ll look at the way your remarkable brain functions, learn to identify some of the triggers that lead you to self-sabotage and begin the process of harnessing your enormous potential. We like to think of it as making friends with your brain. And, in order to make friends with someone, or in this case something, we need to get to know it a little better.
There is still a lot that we don’t know about the brain and how it functions but we are lucky to be living now. The amount that we do know has exploded over the last 10 years. But, before we look at the amazing things that a brain can do, we need, perhaps, to think about the important concept lurking beneath the idea of making friends. You are not your brain.
For any of you who hold religious or spiritual beliefs, that statement will be a given. For others who live in a more secular universe, it can be quite disorienting. A question we have been asked often when we’re leading training sessions is ‘But surely I am my mind?’ or even the inevitable follow-on ‘If I am not my mind, who am I?’
Either way – no, you are not your mind. One of the most important maxims to remember is that you don’t have to believe what you think. Take a moment to say that to yourself slowly – you don’t have to believe what you think. Just because your mind misbehaves occasionally and tells you that all the people in your office became a little quieter than usual as you walked in – and that must, of course, be because they were talking about you – you don’t have to believe it, let alone act upon it. During the programme, we’ll teach you how to notice and explore your thoughts in a more detached way and reframe the ones that have led, in the past, to needless upset, self-sabotage and lost opportunities.
All we can say is that, if answering this question is important to you, then you will be in the best possible place to begin your quest by the end of this book. Or perhaps you will find that, as your positivity and confidence grow, you will gain a sense of self that provides you with all you need.
How your amazing brain works
Your brain is a truly amazing organ, a kind of biological computer, with a complex and wonderful communications system. The briefest of descriptions about how it works.
Your brain, spinal cord and peripheral nerves make up a complex, integrated information-processing and control system known as your central nervous system. Together, they regulate all the conscious and unconscious facets of your life, from your thoughts, ideas and physical movements to your dreams.
The brain consists of about 100 billion neurons, which need to communicate with each other over minute distances. Each message sent uses electrical activity and is called a neural impulse. The gap between the neurons is called a synapse, so the message (or impulse) crosses these gaps. There are from 1,000 to 10,000 synapses for each neuron.1
The capacity, to which you have access, is colossal. To achieve everything outlined in this book is easily possible for you with the help of this monumental assistant. To give you an idea of the magnitude, scientists postulate that the processing speed of the human brain is a billion billion (called 1 exaFLOP) calculations per second. And, just as incredible, unlike modern supercomputers which have to use enough servers to fill a small city and use enough energy to power 10,000 homes, the human brain consumes less energy than a dim light bulb and fits beautifully into the human head.
Our brain developed, through evolution, to help us to survive. If we couldn’t be the most frightening or the fastest, we’d be the smartest. And when basic survival was paramount it all worked well. The brain was the servant and it produced top-class information that led to lots of eating and procreating and the avoidance of more wild beasts than we can imagine. For many of us, however, because of a combination of information overload and the huge number of things about which we can be anxious or worried, that relationship has been turned upside down. The brain has become the master and it sends us off on roads that lead to the large-scale wasting of time, to untenable levels of stress and anxiety and, for some people, real trauma and pain. It’s a vicious circle; more worries means less control, less control means more worries. It’s time to hold out the olive branch.
The first stage of making friends with your wonderful brain is to begin the journey towards awareness. What is your brain doing this very minute? How does it spend its time? Has your mind wandered to other things, even while you’ve been reading this chapter? There is no shame in this; this is where the punishment stops!
Exercise 2.1: Image Breathing
To begin the process of awareness, we’re going to do the Image Breathing exercise from Chapter 1 (page 7), but on a slightly deeper level. This time, you are going to think of your own image, something that means something to you.
We have a golfer friend, for example, who imagines on the in-breath the golf club swinging back. The out-breath is the club hitting the ball and the ball being propelled, by the breath, into the distance.
Choose an image now that you feel would work for you. And, if it doesn’t work this time, change it. If you can’t think of an image, just focus again on the wave on the beach, but this time adding more detail to the picture. Take the four breaths.
Consider how easy or difficult you found the exercise. Stay comfortable and relaxed; we’re going to do it one more time, but this time, if your mind wanders, notice the thought or thoughts for a moment before you let them slip away. After the exercise, open your eyes, keeping the feelings of relaxation and focus.
Noise
Gradually, as you move through the programme, you’ll learn to notice thoughts, without letting them damage or control you. If something comes into your mind fairly often, then it is likely that it is a thought that is worthy of some rational consideration. But you don’t have to do its bidding. And you don’t have to get caught up in the negative spiral of one thought leading to another, bringing up the emotion of a past experience, and so on. This is what we are going to look at next. Mind Fitness is never about suppressing the negative. Apart from anything else, keeping the lid on negative thoughts and emotions is a truly exhausting process. You can spend all your energy ignoring a thought that’s hammering at your mind, trying to get in. It feels huge, so loud that you are sure that it will drown you, but, surprisingly, once you recognise that it’s there, it almost always loses its volume and vehemence.
There is a great mini-exercise that you can do to get yourself used to noticing without following the trail. Stand somewhere you can see cars passing. Let yourself notice them without following them. I love to do this with boats on the banks of the Thames. We call these automatic negative thoughts ANTs. You won’t stamp them out; having them is part of being human, but you can learn techniques so that the ANTs don’t overrun your wonderful mind.
You may find that a persistent obtrusive thought is linked to an unhelpful belief that needs to be picked out from the line-up when we get to Chapter 4. Many people find that it is when meditating or doing a mindfulness-based exercise that these unhelpful beliefs make themselves known.
So where do these thoughts come from? We said that the average person has up to 60,000 thoughts a day and that only a very small percentage, perhaps 5 per cent, are ‘spent’ on the activity or task in hand. The rest of the thoughts that come cluttering are referred to as Noise.
Past-Future Noise
There are two main kinds of Noise. The first is Past-Future Noise and the second is Negative Self-Talk. We’re going to look first at Past-Future Noise. We said that mindfulness is bringing our attention to the present moment in order to experience life more clearly and more fully. Contrasted with that is the almost universal tendency of dwelling on the past and thinking forward to the future or potential futures. Clinical psychologists state that worrying about the past leads to depression and worrying about the future to acute anxiety.2 In prehistoric times, when the dangers, although incredibly real, could be counted on one hand, they were dealt with as and when they presented themselves. Now we have so many worries that our brain labels as ‘dangers’ that we are constantly on alert, constantly scanning our past experiences for errors and mistakes, constantly anxious about what is to come.
Worrying about the past
Across all cultures, a common part of the human experience is to replay situations or events in our minds, often reworking them slightly so that we gradually take on a stronger role, defend our position, win an argument or let people know what we really think. While a certain amount of calm, balanced reflection is positive, allowing us to learn from our experiences and to realise when we have moved off course and begin to course-correct, this kind of ‘if only’ replaying is almost always negative. It results in the negative emotions we felt being brought from the past into the present and being painfully re-experienced. It can lead to the sensation of being trapped in the situation. This worrying about the past is called ruminating.
It is often said that successful people consider their failures fully but as quickly as possible; once they have learned any lessons, they move speedily on to the course-correct. Instead of dwelling on past failure, they will dwell on past success.
For others it is all too easy to let past problems take a weighty control of our lives. It leads to ‘why?’ and ‘why me?’ thinking. We all know people whose identity is so closely rolled up in their problems that the problems have become who they are.
Certainly, there is only one way to make sure that our future is better than our past. That is to accept who and where we are and, in this moment, this present, make changes.
Worrying about the future
The other part of Past-Future Noise is the equally vast amount of time we spend worrying about the future, in fact, worrying about possible futures. It is, essentially, ‘what if?’ thinking. Too many of us look back at the end of our lives and realise that we spent a great deal of time worrying about things that never happened.
So why do we spend so much time on this worry? It is psychological fear, fear of something that might happen, not of something that is happening to you now. Often, your brain recalls similar situations, or the most similar it can find, that have caused you anxiety and blends them up into a stew of potential trauma that would blight the resilience of the toughest individual. And that is perfectly natural. When it comes to protecting you, the brain only has the past to go on. In a situation of extreme and complex danger, say a battlefield, this would be incredibly useful. In day-to-day life, it’s best to give it a smile of recognition and let it go.
It is easy to forget the simple fact that we make our future by what we do in the present. If we are filling our present with future worries and fear, this will be in the ground plan moving forwards, and so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our fears and worries are intrinsically linked to the negative beliefs we have about ourselves and, as we learn to draw these out into the open and to challenge and change them, the future-based Noise will shrink and lose its power.
That isn’t to say that we can or should ignore all thoughts about the future. A certain amount of planning is necessary and, in fact, makes life a whole lot less stressful. We have found, for example, in our work with businesses, that some managers and directors are supremely good at planning in their organisation, but don’t use these skills at all when it comes to their personal life and goals.
With both Past and Future Noise, to get lost in these thoughts is the mind becoming master. The worry kicks in and one negative thought moves on to another; this introduces an even worse imagined possibility or another threat or anxiety, and so on. As we mentioned before, we call these automatic negative thoughts ANTs. Don’t let the ANTs steal your brain!
The first stage is recognising that this spiral is starting and realising that just because the possibility of x happening has entered your mind and latched on strongly enough to have ‘convinced’ you to have six more related thoughts, it doesn’t mean that it will. It doesn’t even mean that you believe that it will. Think about that for a moment. In fact, in a universe of infinite possibilities, the chance that the movie you have created will play out exactly as you have imagined it, is small. If this is low-grade worry it will result in a sense of ‘dis-ease’. It will affect your judgement, making you risk-averse, scared or suspicious of change. In more extreme cases, as you imagine the stressful situation, your fight or flight will kick in, with all the physiological effects. Your stomach will tighten and your heart will race just as if that event was happening. Your brain does not distinguish between real or imagined experiences.
Once you start to recognise that your brain has hooked into a negative thought and the ANTs are on the march, you need to take charge and gently bring your focus back to the present moment. This is a quick exercise that will halt the spiral and give you the space to begin a new thought process that is more balanced and positive. It is the mnemonic of now, so it’s really easy to remember.
Exercise 2.2: NOW
N – Notice: just glance around and notice one thing that you can see.
O – Observe: bring your close attention to the object that you have chosen; observe it in detail.
W – Wonder: bring a spirit of curiosity to the object you are observing. A negative thought cannot co-exist with positive engaged interest.
Remember that any sense works only in the present and will bring you back into the moment. This exercise, which focusses on observing, may work best for those who operate in a strongly visual way. Perhaps you love colours, imagine in 3D and always notice details. You may, however, be a person that instinctively functions in an aural way; you may feel most alive when playing music, listen more than you watch in a theatre and remember the words used in a conversation rather than the body language or facial expressions. If this is you, then focus in on a sound that you can hear instead of what you can see. Or you may be a person who naturally works kinaesthetically. Perhaps you love to dance, gesture often and tend to ‘act out’ a situation when you tell people what happened. If so, then move a part of your body when you do the exercise and concentrate on that.
It is finding the best way for you to bring your attention to the present. Or you could do the Image Breathing exercise, or others that we detail later. Remember, you don’t want to battle with your brain; it isn’t about conquering, it’s about making friends. Bringing your attention to the present whenever you start to find your thoughts wandering to the past or future in a way that is not helpful will start to move you towards a greater appreciation and sense of wellbeing. We do not enjoy a life that is lived almost completely through memory and anticipation. This is important to remember, even if the remembering and the anticipation are largely positive; it’s great to have things to look forward to, but excessive counting down the days to holidays can, for example, result in us missing out on a lot of life during the count. Our memories are precious and recalling them can give us great warmth and strength in later life, but living our life in highlights is no substitute for a deep appreciation of the simple and constant pleasures of our lives.
We’ve been asked many times why we have automatic thoughts. Well, most of the time they do a pretty good job. The fact that our brain can work automatically allows us to function in the way that we do. Imagine trying to do an activity such as playing football or driving if you had to give a single instruction for every physical action and thought required. We probably wouldn’t even be able to tie up our football boots or get into the car! We are never going to rid our minds of automatic thoughts, nor would we want to, but it is possible to drastically reduce the tendency towards past-future negative spirals by reframing our beliefs, which we will focus on in Chapter 4, and by recognising the early signs and using a mindfulness exercise to bring the ANTs to rest.
As the ANTs come to rest, you may find that you reframe the way that you see the world around you. We live in a culture that is highly future-focussed. Many of us have, from an early age, the idea that what happens in the future is more important than what is happening to us now. If we do x now, then wealth, happiness, fulfilment and freedom will be the reward at some point in the future. The consumer society perpetuates this focus; we are encouraged to feel dissatisfied with our current lot in order that we purchase x and x to make us more satisfied in the future. While having goals (achievable goals) is positive and energising, it is a balance that needs to be watched. If we find that most of our ‘doing’, our ‘present’, is just a means to achieve a future goal (or avoid a future pain), then finding more joy in the present will certainly reinvigorate your life. It may well also reinvigorate your goals and your dreams.
Exercise 2.3: Past Noise
In your notebook, write down five situations that you have remembered over the last day or two. Often, we can manage to locate five from the last hour!
Write them out and just put a tick next to them if remembering them made you feel happy. We don’t want to demolish those memories that give us strength and meaning. If, however, recalling the past was a negative experience, put a cross.
Continue to add to this list over the next week. Also start to notice when the Past Noise comes. Often it is weapon of self-sabotage at times when we most need to be focussed on something important.
Exercise 2.4: Future Noise
In your notebook, write down five situations that you have recently projected forwards to negative or worrying conclusions.
One at a time, go through the list and spend a minute re-imagining the situation playing out in a way that is advantageous to you or would bring you joy. It doesn’t matter how unlikely that feels to you at the moment.
Negative Self-Talk
The second type of Noise, as we said, is Self-Talk and, of course, it is Negative Self-Talk that is damaging. This is the critic that knows all our foibles and fears and will sit on us at every opportunity. These thoughts might be connected to Past-Future Noise, for example blaming yourself for something that happened, or telling yourself that you could have done better. Of course it’s essential to be able to reflect on our actions to sustain our moral compass and develop our abilities to course-correct, but we do not need to judge. Later in the book, we’ll look at the transition from punishing ourselves to evaluating with a kindly but clinical eye.
Negative Self-Talk is also the million things we tell ourselves that we cannot do and, amazingly, we believe these little pests! Most of us have a fair few that we can bring to mind with little difficulty: ‘I’m not the sort of person who can learn a language/do maths/change a plug/travel/learn IT skills/meditate.’
The list is endless. The Negative Self-Talk can, in fact, be really personal – ‘I’m too fat/not clever/not funny/boring/I have no imagination’, and so on. Can you imagine how outraged we would be if we heard someone voicing these to someone else!
Sometimes these thoughts come from something that was said to us once a long time ago in a specific situation; it’s possible that this wasn’t correct or was, at least, a harsh version of the truth, even at that time. For some people, it can be like living with a vicious gremlin in their head, always ready to leap out and attack.
But the great news is whatever the reason they are lurking in your mind they can be changed. As you learn to detach yourself from them through the mindfulness exercises and you learn to refocus the beliefs that have fed them over the years, they will gradually lose their power until they rarely come knocking.
Negative Self-Talk can also be related to fears and phobias. It may be that you have situations that frighten you. We all know that common fears can turn the most confident person into a jabbering wreck! Through the Mind Fitness process I have conquered my fear of heights and Andy can have a picnic in the summer without dancing round every time he hears a wasp!
Exercise 2.5: Forest of Self-Talk
As with some of our other exercises, this one requires a little use of imagination.
Start with a picture of you in the centre, drawn or a photograph – whichever works best for you.
Now draw a few trees around you and give each tree a speech bubble. Fill each bubble with a Negative Self-Talk statement.
If you have drawn your trees but can’t think of any Negative Self-Talk to fill the speech bubbles, it’s often useful to lower your defences by doing one of the mindfulness exercises to see what turns up. It’s perfectly fine to build your forest gradually. Leave your picture to hand and, as and when you become aware of a stream of Self-Talk, fill in a bubble.
As you learn to notice the Noise, whether it be Past-Future or Negative Self-Talk, you become a more practised observer. You will know if your mind is giving you helpful pointers or ideas, or if it is delivering ANTs, which you can acknowledge and move on. You will be in control. Remember, the Noise is not the self. The self, freed from the Noise, is more content, more insightful and kinder. You will gradually be able to bring more and more of your full attention to the present moment. There are times in life where you will have experienced this by accident. A sunset that is so beautiful that you can see nothing else. A picture in a gallery that takes your breath away. Watching your child tie his shoelaces for the first time. The world you see will be more vivid and your connection with it will be a brighter, richer and deeper experience.
Pavlovian Triggers3
So why is it not as simple as just deciding to focus on the present? It’s because of the way your mind works. The brain functions by looking into past events that seem similar to the current situation and using these to determine a ‘solution’ as well as a physiological response. The amygdala makes Pavlovian associations that we are not consciously aware of. A Pavlovian trigger is a conditioned response (in the same way that Pavlov’s dogs were trained to respond unconsciously to various signals and commands.) Basically, it works in this way: if I ‘see’ this or ‘hear’ this, I will ‘feel’ this. Moments that spark an unconscious reaction are referred to as Pavlovian Triggers.
The reaction occurs without pause and with no decision and no understanding. In extreme cases, as with people suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) the amygdala enlarges as it becomes more metabolically reactive.4 This is, of course, a million miles from the full analysis of advantages and disadvantages that would lead to good problem-solving and decision-making!
It could be, for example, that a piece of music was playing during a traumatic argument with an ex-partner. You may not even be aware of the memory, yet when you hear this piece of music your stomach will tighten and your mouth will become dry. It may even happen when you are standing in a crowded station and have not even noticed that the song is playing in the café that happens to spill out onto the concourse.
Smells are often very powerful triggers and ones that we are even less likely to be conscious of. Your new boss wears the same perfume as a controlling figure from your childhood – you just can’t pinpoint why this compassionate and competent woman fills you with a sense of unease. You get the idea of how often this can occur. What is being activated is a pain pattern from your past.
Experts believe that the advent of social media has increased the triggering of the amygdala exponentially and this could be one of the many reasons for the current and ongoing dramatic increase of anxiety and stress-related illness.
You may be aware of a few of your triggers. If so it’s worth starting a list in your notebook. As you work through the book and gain greater awareness, particularly when you begin identifying beliefs, you will become aware of more of them. As the triggers have led to cycles of repeat performances, they may well have become embodied in your sense of identity. ‘I’m always so unlucky in … ’ ‘I am the kind of person who … ’ ‘I always choose partners that … ’ ‘It’s me, isn’t it’ – so often a cry of unrecognised victimhood.
As with the Self-Talk, once you have acknowledged and accepted that they are there, the power of these triggers begins to wane. You will be able to use one of the mindfulness exercises, perhaps the short NOW exercise that we did earlier, to bring back your control as soon as you feel the first tightening of the stomach or whatever sign you recognise as approaching stress. The one that we have found most effective when we are leading training sessions is called Foxhole in My Mind. The first version of this exercise was ‘invented’ by President Truman in the Second World War. He was asked by his aides how it was that he was able to remain calm in the most stressful situations. He told them it was because he was able to take himself away from the situation whenever he needed to, that he had a foxhole in his mind.
Exercise 2.6: Foxhole in My Mind
Begin, as usual, by making sure that you are sitting comfortably. Take two breaths, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth, now close your eyes.
The first stage of the exercise is to imagine a safe and beautiful place. It can be somewhere that you know from personal experience or a place that you have already ‘seen’, say from a book or film, or you can imagine somewhere completely new. As you think about the place, try to build in as much detail as possible. My Foxhole is an underwater Egyptian city. I imagine the details on the statues, the texture if I touch the rock, the temperature of the water. I can see, in detail, the fish that are swimming by me. I am usually floating, but I know what the sand feels like if my feet touch the ground. Once you have taken time to establish the place, imagine yourself moving through it. Notice how you feel in this safe and beautiful place.
The second stage of the exercise is to give yourself an Action Trigger (not to be confused with Pavlovian Triggers) to take yourself in and out of this space. Using a trigger will help you ‘move’ to the foxhole more quickly once your brain makes the automatic connection. My Action Trigger is two taps of my right hand on my left shoulder. I know people who use a finger click, a clap and even a raised eyebrow, a good one to choose if you want to do the exercise unobserved in busy meetings! Once you have chosen a simple action, try the exercise one more time, this time activating the experience with the trigger – staying in the space for say, one minute, and then using the trigger again to bring yourself out.
This is an exercise that takes a fair amount of time to do the first time as you build your picture, but, afterwards, is a quick and effective mindfulness exercise to be used when Pavlovian Triggers threaten to send you into a spiral of stress and panic. Try to make sure that each time you go into the exercise you put in something new, so that it always stays fresh. It is the equivalent of the sunset that takes your breath away. The more often you do the exercise, the quicker the physical levels of stress, such as increased heart beat and raised levels of the stress hormone cortisol, will come down as you trigger and go in. I have done it so often that I can usually beat my trigger. I barely have to lift my arm and I am under the sea!
Pleasure Triggers
Pleasure Triggers also work in a way that we are not consciously aware of. Dopamine is the chemical most often referred to as the ‘pleasure neurotransmitter’.5 The sensation of pleasure associated with eating chocolate, for example, comes from a release of dopamine. The chemical is released, however, not on eating but on our anticipation of eating! Many scientists believe that it is the neurological basis of addiction. We are not trivialising the seriousness of addiction and sometimes a package of support needs to be put in place, but certainly the programme can be used to change the mindset that sustains attachment to detrimental habitual behaviours. If you realise as you feel the rush, that your mind has taken you to future-focus, anticipating the piece of chocolate or the next cigarette, you may be able to bring your attention back to the present. This will reduce the urge and this, in turn, means that making changes in behaviour becomes easier with practice. If you need your dopamine hits there are more healthy ways of getting it, which we will look at in the chapter on positivity!
As you learn to observe your negative thoughts and to recognise triggers, they will, as we have said, lose their emotional charge. You will gradually feel more at peace with your mind; you will come to accept it and value it. It is a part of you and your wonder, not the enemy.
Exercise 2.7: Chapter Recap
A short practical exercise to reinforce what we have covered.
We’d like you to put in a few pinches of imagination to this chapter’s recap. It will help you to remember what you have learned.
Draw a picture of the brain as you see it and put in little sticks coming out of it. At the end of each stick, write one piece of information about the brain that you know so far.
We have learned:
- You are not your brain
- How the brain works
- How to bring your attention to the present moment
- How Past-Future Noise can disturb you
- How Negative Self-Talk can disturb you
- How Pavlovian Triggers work
- How Pleasure Triggers work
Questions and Answers
- My concern is that I have many Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs) that I’d like to deal with, but, along with that, I have a long-held need, superstitious belief almost, that if I don’t think the worst about something that could happen in the future, it will tempt fate, making it likelier to occur.
We do hear these types of concerns during our workshops. A long-held belief can be entrenched and changing it will feel strange. Try to accept this and begin the process. - I have a lifetime of Negative Self-Talk. I am my harshest critic. It’s absolutely entrenched. It’s who I am and what I do. I really don’t think I’m able to change that.
Many of us routinely condemn and damn ourselves. We speak to ourselves in ways that we could never even imagine treating others. There are many parts to making change, the first is acceptance. Another component is compassion, towards ourselves and to others. We can learn to be kinder to ourselves. That’s not abdicating responsibility. It’s simply accepting who we are, not damning ourselves for our errors. Steadily, we can create new neural pathways to cement that change. It takes time, practice and commitment, but it can be done.
Conclusion
You are not your brain but it is a vitally important part of you. And it is jaw-droppingly complex and awesome. The neocortex of the human brain contains 300 million pattern processors;6 these are responsible for the storage and recall of patterns which result in all human thought. In fact, computer design principles for pattern processing were developed from the biological basis of pattern processing by the mammalian brain. How amazing is that?
It’s easy to see why it is a very powerful enemy if it is working against us. But when we can harness that power, that capability, when we can make friends with our brain, we can realise our enormous potential. And when we have put ourselves in the strongest possible position, it becomes so much easier to make changes to the lives of other people and to become genuinely effective in the areas of your life that give you meaning.