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Keeping the brain in mind – or how to grow your own brain

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Recent neuroscience, over the past 20 years has scientifically proven that it really is entirely possible to take steps to totally change the structure and function of your brain – in effect ‘re-wiring’ it so that we become happier, mentally healthier and are able to express love, kindness and compassion for yourself and others more readily. Furthermore, by taking deliberate steps to develop your brain in positive ways, the research actually suggests that you’ll be more successful in life and work generally too.

The concept is called “self-directed neuroplasticity” by the researcher Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz in his book, “The Mind & The Brain” (Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force). Schwartz puts forth a compelling argument that you aren’t at the mercy of genetically-predetermined brain activity. Rather, you are in the driving seat because you play a decisive role in influencing your own brain’s structure and function by deciding where and how to focus your attention.  You can do this by actively choosing what to think about.  In his book, Dr Schwartz uses brain scans to prove the efficacy of self-directed neuroplasticity and these show how OCD patients, stroke victims, musicians, and more have used this approach to change their brains for the better. Dr Rick Hanson and Dr Daniel Siegel have also made tremendous contributions in this field.

What is neuroplasticity?

It used to be the case that medical science considered that our brains were more or less ‘set’ by the time we reached adulthood. Neuroplasticity (Neuro = nerve, Plasticity = changeable or malleable) is a term that describes how your brain is capable of constantly changing its internal shape, connections and functions in response to your environment, thinking, emotions, behaviour, as well as injury.

What is self-directed neuroplasticity?

Since we know that the brain remains plastic and ‘re-wires’ itself for our entire lives, self-directed neuroplasticity is a tool that we can use to consciously control how we want our brains to work. So, for example, if you want to increase your ability to feel and express happiness you might start a gratitude journal.  You are ‘forcing’ your brain to behave in a certain way – for example in the case of keeping a gratitude journal your brain quickly adapts to experience and express a sense of gratitude more often and more readily. Similarly, anytime you learn a new skill (e.g. how to play a musical instrument), your brain structure and function changes and will adapt to whatever you challenge it with.

Using Self-Directed Neuroplasticity

Everything that your brain is exposed to will have an influence upon it; your behaviours, environment, social group, sleep cycle, supplements, drugs, etc. By becoming aware of what influences your brain will help you to consciously change those influences that may be causing more detriment than harm.  Here are some steps that you can take to harness the life changing power of self-directed neuroplasticity:

The baby-steps of awareness: You may be aware of a variety of things that you’re unhappy about and/or things in your life that you dislike. Choose one thing at a time and become aware of the particular habit, mood, etc. that you’d like to change. Don’t try to run before you can walk – only try to change one thing at a time.

Attention: When creating self directed changes, focus all of your attention on implementing a healthy thought pattern and behaviour. Of course, this will require effort, but remember that whatever you focus your attention on will become your reality. If you choose to focus on feeling down, angry or depressed, these feelings will amplify. If you choose to concentrate on gratitude, this attention magnifies your happiness.

Volition – you’ve got to want to do it: At the beginning of attempting to change your brain, it’s going to be uncomfortable. We are all set in our own ways and self-directed neuroplasticity is not an entirely comfortable process and you do need to make a little effort – but it is undoubtedly effective. Attempting anything new is often scary – imagine throwing yourself into water without knowing how to swim – your brain either adapts and figures something out or you drown. While the “sink or swim” example is pretty extreme, you may well face some degree of internal resistance near the beginning of your change. Although our brains are so adaptable, they do tend to want to keep repeating the patterns they’ve already learned. With plain old willpower and consistently focusing on gratitude instead of depression (for example), your brain will adapt, and you’ll soon find that your general mood ‘set point’ will be much higher on the happiness scale.

Just do it: Be consistent and engage your new neural pathways for at least 15 minutes each time any unwanted thoughts occur. This helps because it shifts your focus away from the bad, and onto the good, and this is what leads to permanent brain changes over time. Ultimately, feelings of depression will be overpowered (and more difficult to produce) due to the fact that it will be easier, mentally and physically to express and experience happiness.

The beauty of the changing brain: Over time, and with consistent focused effort, your brain changes become more solidified. However, there is one caveat: use it or lose it! Remember that your brain is constantly in a state of change and that you must keep ‘feeding’ it with the positive changes that you desire – the more you practice a healthy behaviour, the easier it is to maintain. It is well known that Buddhist monks who practice mindfulness or forms of meditation involving compassion tend to rarely experience depression – this is because their brains become “wired” to preferentially express positive emotions after years of practice.

As already mentioned, the practice of mindfulness is proven to have a profoundly positive effect in ‘growing’ our brains. One of the ‘golden’ rules of psychology is that we tend to get more of what ever we focus on. It’s a generalisation of course. So, if we find ourselves frequently focussing on what we don’t want then sadly, that’s the direction our brain may grow in. On the other hand of we instead focus on the direction of travel we aspire to, that’s in tune with our values, then almost miraculously, that’s the way our brain structure will be forged. All of the popular mindfulness meditations will be valuable, including the ‘Mountain’ a wonderful guided visualisation including a great metaphor for resilience, and especially ‘Loving Kindness’, otherwise known as ‘Metta’ meditation which teaches us to focus on compassion for others as well as for ourselves.

 

With many thanks to “Grow your own brain!” Self-Directed Neuroplasticity, article by Jayney Goddard MSc, FCMA, FRSM, FRSPH

 

Nick Cooke, for Mindfulness Now, is offering a full day online CPD training on the above title, interactive on Zoom on Saturday 5th February 2022. The cost of attending is £130 for Mindfulness Now /CEC students and graduates and £160 to all others. Training manual and CPD certificate for 7 points included. To book please call 0121 444 1110 or email info@cecch.com.

Nick Cooke
Nick Cooke

 

 

 

Mindfulness Help Needed – Now!

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It’s certainly been a challenging 18 months hasn’t it! Who would’ve thought that our lives would change so dramatically virtually overnight towards the end of March 2020? Many would say that their lives were put on hold completely. Not only that but many of us had to contend with personal loss and the grief that followed – not an easy task at the best of times but when coupled with restrictions and social distancing, everything was a whole lot more challenging.

So, you’d think that with the advent of those restrictions easing completely over the coming weeks and months everyone would be simply jumping for joy! And, of course, many are. But for a number of people this change in proceedings brings its own set of challenges and potential pitfalls. You see, as a species we tend not to like change. We get used to things as they are. When the first Lockdown occurred in March last year, some people found it incredibly stressful – the thought of not being free to go wherever we liked, to see whoever we chose to, whenever we wanted (things that we’d taken so much for granted) sent us into a downward spiral. But as things went on, perhaps we started to get used to this ‘new normal’ – working from home, avoiding the morning rush hour, seeing friends on video chats rather than going out to a pub or restaurant, having the time to spend in nature, to exercise more, to watch that box-set that we’d kept for a rainy day. It all started to feel ok. Even the masks that we were instructed to wear gave us a sense of safety once the initial embarrassment and discomfort wore off.

And so now we are told that none of these restrictions need be in place anymore – we can suddenly go wherever we want, do whatever we want, with whoever we want… even mask wearing is no longer mandatory. And that should just feel great! Shouldn’t it?… But does it? There’s obviously still a risk out there, the news tells us that every day. And we’ve kind of got used to doing things a bit differently, haven’t we? Do you remember? As a species we tend not to like change.

Now, for many people, this easing of restrictions might feel a bit disconcerting, but they’ll cope just fine. But for others it will be challenging beyond words. Mindfulness can help in both scenarios.

Mindfulness helps us to train our minds to understand our minds. Far from asking us to have a positive outlook, but rather to befriend the more negative aspects of our thinking. So, we may still experience emotions such as sadness, frustration and fear (after all we are only human). But, with mindfulness as a framework to look out from, we may experience these emotions in a fundamentally different way and, as a result, they may no longer feel quite so overwhelming.

Mindfulness helps us to understand what’s going on – in our minds and in our bodies. It allows us to take a metaphorical step back to observe things and to take stock so that, instead of reacting in unhelpful ways, we may begin to respond in a more gentle, self-compassionate kind of way.

In a nutshell, mindfulness doesn’t take away life’s difficulties. How could it? Instead, it helps you to be ‘ok’ with them. And, rather curiously, this can help things to feel a little easier.

All of us have a sense of responsibility towards others as well as ourselves as we, in the UK at least, begin to emerge from this pandemic. In particular, we as mindfulness teachers may recognise that we have a unique opportunity to help those who might be facing struggles. They might be frontline workers – doctors, nurses, paramedics – who are now suffering from the after-effects of trauma; they might be people who have lost loved ones as a result of Covid; they might be people who have themselves fallen victim to the virus but have recovered; they might be people suffering from the effects of Long Covid. They might also be people whose lives have changed simply as a result of all the changes that have happened in the last eighteen months.

Everything changes – and mindfulness helps us to be ok with that.

Rachel Broomfield

Why I Love Blue Monday

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Yes, today is the, so called, ‘Blue Monday’, the third Monday of January, which in 2019 is the 21st of the month and I’m told by certain ‘experts’ that I’m likely to be miserable, worried and possibly depressed, for a number of reasons.

 

I will have failed my New Year resolutions by now. I’m maxed out on my credit cards after the big Christmas spend. The nights are long, the days are short. I’m not getting enough daylight. I’m feeling cold and I most likely have a cold that doesn’t seem to go away. My diet has failed and I put weight on over the past month. My holidays seem to be as long away as they could be. My clients are too ill to make the journey to come and see me. What else could possibly go wrong?

 

Hang on a mo!! – I’m sitting in the Bryant Room at the beautiful Midland’s Arts Centre in Birmingham, overlooking the lakes and the park. It’s very early and the sun is rising and the sky has a blueish tinge. The ducks and geese are tuning up their voices. This is the start of my ‘Blue Monday’. I’m setting up training manuals, pads and pens, looking at my list of participants and feeling a deep sense of gratitude – eagerly anticipating greeting my fellow trainers, Rachel and Aston and all of our new trainees.

 

Mindfulness is a way of life that I’m very privileged to enjoy, to teach, and to train others how to teach. Our training has come a very long way from a humble beginning, 6 years ago to now being internationally recognised, attracting students from 11 countries, externally accredited and probably the most successful training course in the UK, training in 7 different locations. Teachers who have graduated from the Mindfulness Now programme work in many diverse environments including within the NHS, who have funded many students places. Others work in the charity sector, in schools and in commercial organisations. Many are therapists who wish to increase their range of skills.

 

Not gloating or being complacent, or taking anything for granted. Just a sense of amazement really and an immense amount of gratitude. Mind you – I do have a cold!

 

Happy Blue Monday

 

Nick Cooke

Acknowledging the stillness within

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Acknowledging the stillness within

Mindfulness and Stillness

Mindfulness is often seen as an activity in which stillness takes precedence. Perhaps, however, there might be two ways of looking at this stillness.

On the one hand, physical stillness is a very calming thing. Allowing our body to have some degree of quietude allows our minds to become more still too. This is the prevalent way of ‘being’ during formal meditations – gently taking up a sitting or lying position that is relatively easy to maintain for at least the next few minutes, if not an hour or more. Although we might experience some degree of discomfort during that time, for the most part, we can bring our awareness to whatever we choose, whether inside of us (thoughts, feelings, sensations) or outside of us (sounds, situations). During a guided formal meditation, our attention is often brought back to a focus by the one who is leading the session. Often, we find it easier to be still when someone is guiding us.

This kind of still meditation is a method we can use in order to become more mindful of the present moment.

Allowing Stillness into Our Lives

Sometimes, however, we can struggle with allowing this stillness into our busy lives. We are so used to being on the go all the time that being anything like still and quiet seems completely alien to us, and often impossible when we have schedules to run to. We have become human doings instead of human beings! Having to be on the go all the time.

However, there are also ways in which, as we allow mindfulness into our lives and practice it more and more regularly, we can train ourselves to recognise this stillness even amidst the busiest and most hectic of times.

Improved Cognitive Understanding

We learn that we can recognise our thought processes more and more, and not become so entwined in reacting to things to which we don’t need to react. With this kind of cognitive understanding, we learn that our thoughts are not who we are – they are simply our thoughts. And, as our thoughts change from moment to moment, so too can our approach to any situation. Could we not recognise that, perhaps (at least sometimes) what our thoughts make of the world are to do with a way of thinking that is a little more negative than what reality is actually showing us? And when we acknowledge this, does that not put us in rather more control of any given situation than we’d previously thought?

Visualising Our Thoughts

It is sometimes said that if we see our thoughts high up above us – for example, floating like clouds across the sky, or printed onto helium-filled balloons in our imagination, then it might be easier to put a little distance between who we are and those thoughts.

In a more formal setting, we can picture the embodiment of our everyday experience as a lake – the surface often gets disturbed by things that happen to us but we can also imagine the vast body of water below the surface which remains completely still and peaceful, unperturbed by any external events.

It is this stillness that is always within us, somewhere deep down. Somewhere, perhaps, that we often find difficult to acknowledge but is always there none-the-less.

Mindfulness can help us to acknowledge that simple stillness within.

Rachel Broomfield, Mindfulness teacher and trainer

Mindfulness and pain reduction

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All in the mind? – Opening ourselves up to a different approach

Medical research suggests that we can use our mind and our mind/body connection to be aware of painful feelings as they arise and to, in effect, stop struggling with them. When we use our mind to become aware, as in mindfulness practice, then something unusual happens. We begin to start a gentle observation of something (painful sensation) rather than being wrapped up in, and/or fighting it.

With a little practice, something very special begins to happen. We notice that the pain may start to dissolve, as if by magic! People who have experienced this for the first time are frequently amazed and begin to appreciate how doing something a little different can open the door to a new realisation that pain comes in two varieties, primary and secondary, which both stem from different origins.

Primary pain, as the name suggests arises from a physical incident of some sort which produces the pain, whether that is illness, injury, surgery or other medical treatment. It could be thought of as the body’s reaction to this incident. Secondary pain, or suffering, closely follows and is concerned with our reaction, at a conscious and subconscious level, to the primary pain.

Pain Reduction

Pain is a warning that something is wrong with the body. It is therefore irresponsible and unethical to remove pain unless we can be sure that the pain is symptomatic of a non-threatening or serious illness. In reality, how can we ever be sure of this? It is therefore preferable the help the Client to reduce, rather than remove pain and to enable the Client to have a degree of control over the intensity of pain.

Pain is a complex phenomenon and much mystery still surrounds just how it ‘works’.

The ‘gate control theory’ of pain is based upon the principle that when our nerve cells are stimulated by injury or disease – ie potentially painful stimuli – the message is transmitted to the brain. Along the way, at the spinal column and in different areas of the brain, the information is interpreted and acted upon.

Touching a hot stove results in a reflex action that causes your hand to pull back faster than the message took to reach the brain. But if you burnt your hand, then the continuing pain is ‘analysed’ in the brain – and experienced as a dull ache or a sharp twinge or whatever. In another part of the brain, the degree of discomfort is registered and appropriate action taken.

Psychological therapies including clinical hypnosis seem to have the effect of being able to separate the various ‘interpreting regions’ so that the level of discomfort can be modified, for example. Distraction, visualisation and NLP are three methods of achieving pain reduction in this way.

When working to achieve pain—relief it is sensible to allow some discomfort to remain, especially in cases of chronic suffering, where it serves to remind you of the underlying condition. The aim is to reduce the level of discomfort. Establishing a scale of pain in your imagination – varying from 10, the worst imaginable pain, to 1, pain-free – and deciding on where the Client’s level of pain lies and comparing this ‘reading’ before and after some therapy, will help you to assess the success of the practice.

The Buddha, The Arrow Sutta

This teaching is often summarized as “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” We have in life two forms of distress in life. The first arises from the unavoidable events that occur in life: the pains, insults, rejections, losses, separations, ageing, sickness and on. Such events quickly give rise to inevitable, uncomfortable physical expressions, such as feeling that the wind knocked out of us, a hollowness in the chest, a tight stomach, dizziness, tears, etc. The second form of distress lies in our thought based reactions to the event: “Why me? This is unfair. How do I change this? What will happen now?” We add more anguish to the mix by taking universal experiences personally, trying to escape the unavoidable.

These optional, second arrows of torment can -play out in different ways:

  1. We can blame and denounce others for shooting us with those first arrows [their rejections, insults, dismissals, wrongs of all varieties] and feel picked on by the universe.
  2. We can castigate and condemn ourselves for being human and not avoiding life’s inescapable disappointments, reaching the conclusion we are particularly damaged or fated to misery.
  3. We can chase short-term distractions and pleasures: stuffing our feelings with food, retail therapy, deluging ourselves in work, seeking refuge in television or sex, drugs and alcohol…

All of these approaches distract us until they eventually let us down. No matter how much we blame ourselves or others or keep ourselves busy, the discomforts we’ve been avoiding and abandoning resurface; from high-flying financiers to destitute heroin addicts, whatever diversionary tactics we choose will wear thin and return us to emotional conditions of vulnerability, loss, emptiness. No matter how much we’ve been sweeping under the rug, we will have to face the challenging feelings from which we’ve been hiding.

The spiritual solution is to put aside the distractions and to attend to the uncomfortable feelings directly after being hit with those first arrows. How does it feel to be fired? dumped? rejected? abandoned? Not good, but if we hold the sensations in our awareness, it turns out they’re not as overwhelming as we thought; with compassion and care the body softens, the mind becomes less agitated, the impressions arise and pass. It turns out we can survive being hit by an arrow, so long as we don’t shoot too many into ourselves in return.

How to learn more

Please follow this link to a one-day CPD training which The UK College – Mindfulness Now is presenting on Saturday 8th July 2017