Trust Your Brain and Your Brain Will Trust You

The Little Engine thought he could, and he made it up the mountain. By force of sheer will, he overcame the challenges before him, and succeeded where before he had failed. 

TLE’s now retired, sitting on a sofa, watching TV. Next to him is a bowl of potato chips. He knows he shouldn’t eat them. A few are okay, but not the whole bowl. But there goes his hand, dipping and lifting the crispy treat to his mouth. “I can stop,” he says to himself. “I think I can!” And then he shoves the fistful in, and sighs as he flips channels on the TV.

We’ve all got bad habits. And we’ve all got routines and motions we go through, without even thinking about it. How do we break out of these ruts, and become the people we know we want to be? The key is confidence. It really is all about believing in and trusting yourself.

Those new-agers were right, but science can back-up some of the claims, by pointing to key areas in the brain. Consider self-control, which is occurs in the frontal part of your brain. This is an area with high energy demands, and you can literally run out of fuel necessary to control yourself (scientists call this “ego depletion”). Now consider the deeper, emotional part of your brain, the ones that want what they want NOW. You’re fighting temptation all day to the point you’re literally tired of fighting, and since the reward for staying motivated is less insistent than the reward for giving in now, you give in.

You run out of that very will that kept TLE chugging up the mountain.

Trusting yourself can replace that emotional want with a different emotion all together. This is reminiscent of the way the brain chooses to give control to the heuristics that you use for routines, and a more conscious executive decision making process. Your brain will choose the method that has the most confidence—it’s easier to drive a car to work, letting your brain handle the lefts and rights while you mental prepare the big speech for your boss. On the other hand, you wouldn’t expect to automatically drive through a city you’ve never been in before, or you’ll end up hopelessly lost.

So, if you’re confident in your decision, then making that decision will be its own reward. Instead of your frontal brain fighting against the pull of your emotions, you harness those emotions to actually push yourself up that hill.

The Little Engine that could should picture himself as a happier engine, sitting in a place where there are no chips. By choosing to concentrate on a positive outcome to his decisions, he can trust himself to execute those proper decisions. Then he can pick up the bowl, take it into the kitchen, and go back to this TV, with the bowl now out of sight.

References:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/addicted-brains/201311/the-key-quitting-self-trust-part-1
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/2013/11/12/should-habits-or-goals-direct-your-life-it-depends-2/
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2013/april-13/why-wait-the-science-behind-procrastination.html

Talking Away Those Brain-Stress Blues

A man, middle-aged, reasonably healthy, walks into his living room. He’s a cleared an area in front of his gas-fireplace, and sits down, crossing his legs. He sits with god posture, eyes closed, arms loose in his lap. He takes a long deep breath, lets it out slowly. Another deep breath, another soothing exhalation. The man appears relaxed, at ease, content.

Blood flow in his cerebral prefontal cortices slowly decreases. He takes another breath, opens his mouth, and says “womba.”

He exhales. Breathes in. “womba choo dee latta.”

His posture straightens just slightly. He inhales. “womba choo dee matta fen, fenno chum de ganafed. Arrana sanipe. Arrana sanipe dee matta fen, womba choo dee matta fen ro sanipe, sanipe dreepa, sanipe dreepa saaaaaa….” He inhales, exhales, his lips murmuring more nonsense syllables.

None of the words come from any known language. He does this for an hour.

~~~

Glossolalia is the technical term for speaking tongues, a phenomena seemingly reserved for Pentecostal church meetings and Haitian voodoo rituals. Actually, glossolalia occurs all over the world in a diversity of cultures, including Japan, Egypt, and India. Adherents claim to be speaking a divine or lost language, either by channeling a holy spirituality or as the result of a gift from a god or ancestor.

But there’s more glossolalia than just nonsense syllables and church devotion. In 2006 a group of scientists studied the brains of those who could, at will, speak in tongues, and found that brain activity was different than for a control group. Another study, performed in 2010, found that people who spoke in tongues had lowers levels of the so-called “stress” hormone cortisol. This evidence suggests glossolalia is not merely a psychology phenomenon, but a biological one.

The scientific case for meditation as a means to reduce stress is well established. But glossolalia is not meditation. Andrew Newberg of the 2006 study, speaking to Dick Hanson and the DANA Foundation for an article on glossolalia, points out that as far as the biology of the brain is concerned, “In some sense, [glossolalia] is the opposite of the concentrative process of meditation.”

While it’s easy to dismiss the subject of speaking in tongues as nothing more than pseudo-scientific gibberish, the results of these studies suggest there’s more here than meets the ear. We live in a hectic, non-stop, information-overloading world, so any technique that one discovers to reduce stress and increase relaxation has to be worth taking the time to explore.

(But maybe try this one alone.)

Your Brain was Built to Procrastinate

But here’s the good news: you can redesign it to get things done.

Very basically, we procrastinate because we have two brains. Our old brain, in the limbic system, does everything automatic, and drives us to take care of the basics. You rarely forget to eat, for example, because your limbic system will remind you. Or newer brain, with parts like the frontal cortex, deal with higher concepts, like all the steps needed for going to the grocery store. If the frontal cortex doesn’t keep the idea of going to the store fresh in our minds, and we’re not hungry, there’s no motivation to go. So we put it off. Until we’re too hungry to wait any longer. And since our limbic system doesn’t bother with grocery lists and recipes, it goes for the shortcut, (often the fast food option).

It’s like the limbic system and the frontal cortex speak a different language. But the frontal cortex can take foreign language classes, so to speak, and develop heuristics—little sub-routines that automate certain processes (like driving a car—after a while, it’s not something you have to think about doing, it’s just something you do). This is similar to how we develop habits, like your weekly-whether-you-need-to-or-not trip to the grocery store.

So far so good. But what about non-routine things that we don’t want to do? Like paying taxes? It’s February 22nd, still plenty of time to get the paperwork done. Your frontal cortex won’t motivate you unless it can think of a reason, a reward or a consequence, so doing taxes leaves your mind until something reminds you of it later. April 15th is too far away for your frontal cortex to find very compelling.

They key is to give yourself a more imminent reward (or consequence). And not something arbitrary. If you say to yourself “I’ll eat a piece of cake as a reward for doing my taxes,” your limbic system might pipe in with “I want that cake now.” Or, it might even say “cake? We don’t want cake at all.” In fact, if you have control of the reward, it’s harder to force yourself through the task when you always know you can have it anyway.

So, you’ll need to give yourself a different kind of reward. The reward of getting the thing done itself. Actually, this can be very motivating, once you’ve started the task. But you’ve got to start the task! This is why “just do it” works when you “just do it.”

Here’s how you trick yourself into starting something you don’t want to do but will be glad you did: allow yourself to not finish. Set a timer for 25 minutes, and promise yourself you can stop when the timer is done, whether you’re finished or not. And then, when the timer goes off, stop. Take a break. Then set the timer again.

This is called “the pomodoro technique” and its effectiveness is based on how your brain responds to rest, in terms of memory and learning. With this technique, you can actually “learn” how getting something done is its own reward.

Is Your Brain Addicted to the Internet?

Probably not.

Many factors go into whether a person becomes addicted to something, including but not limited to genetics and their environment. Some people seem to be prone to addiction than others, and some things are more potentially addictive than others. Since everyone’s on the internet all the time, it makes sense that people are nervous about internet addiction.

But there a competing theories about what addiction even means. An article in internet addiction in Scientific American defines addiction, loosely, as “a disease of the brain that compels someone to obsess over, obtain and abuse something, despite unpleasant health or social effects.” The key word there is “disease.”

Another definition of addiction describes it as increased behavior despite increasing consequences. Note the difference. Rather than focus on compulsion and the nomenclature of disease, this definition focuses on behavior and consequence. It’s a subtle but necessary point: you can have a disease and not know it. Or you can do things that are bad for you but not know why.

So what? So, which definition do you use if you want to treat your so-called addiction, the why or the what? A recent study shows that in people who have self-reported internet addiction, there are physical differences in the brain. So do we find people with altered brains, and yank them off the internet? Or do we look for people who shun their family, friends, work, and other obligations, and toss ‘em in an MRI to see how their brains look, letting the ones go who have “healthy” dorsolateral prefrontal cortexes?

The reason we need to be careful with slap-dash diagnoses of “addiction” is that too broad a brush paints too many, and too fine a brush misattributes otherwise peculiar behaviors. Consider a study done on London Taxi drivers, which show that those who successfully obtain “The Knowledge” (a working mental map of London’s serpentine streets) have a somewhat larger rear hippocampus and a somewhat shrunken frontal hippocampus. Are we going to call them study-addicts and start taking more busses and subways?

The internet is just like anything else—a tool to obtain the things we want. If what we want requires sitting in front of a computer for ten hours a day, six days a week, its probably not the interntet—or your brain—that’s the problem.

But if you’re still worried, why not try a few brain training games, and exercise your mind.