Symmetry of Mind
Welcome back! I’ve got a question for you.
What do you get when you mix a ferocious lion, a terrified mouse, and millions of years of evolution? The human brain!
Our brain is an unbelievably specialized organ, forever changing and adapting to our experiences. Over time, parts of our brain learned to do specific jobs; this is the reason why neuroscientists have studied the brain and its parts at such great lengths. They discovered that there are specific neural areas of all shapes and sizes that have learned to do very specific tasks, better than any other area of the brain. We have different areas for hearing language, speaking, writing, reading, seeing, thinking, feeling, smelling etc. In fact, any behaviour, thought, or emotion probably has its own unique neural location or is made possible by the connections between diverse brain regions. Pretty cool, right? But as interesting as this is, how might we use this knowledge to benefit our experience and improve our resilience?
For starters, if we know that the brain has specialized areas for specific tasks, we can target those areas, or their respective abilities, to further improve those skills. Take attention for example; we’ve explored attention, its neural components, and how we might be able to improve our ability to attend in past articles. We know how important attention is in the journey to resilience but if you haven’t learned that yet, go read this. Knowing the neural origins of attention has absolutely optimized our ability to further improve our attentional abilities.
This principle of specificity can be made personally relevant when it comes to structuring your day-to-day routine if you have particular goals in mind. Think of the common axiom, “Use it or lose it”, or even more accurately “Use it to improve it”. With this knowledge, we can confidently invest a little time and energy into relevant practices and habits to reach our goals.
I don’t know about you, but one of my main goals at Our Blue Sky Minds is to develop resilience, and luckily for us, there are plenty of brain regions that are involved in resilience that can be optimized. So, where do we start?
Research in the field of neuroscience of mental health has actually looked at this question before, so a lot of the heavy lifting associated with the initial stages of discovery has been done, and we get to reap the benefits. Resilience has been found to involve many, many areas of the brain due to its complex, contextual nature. To get closer to the answer, researchers flipped the question on its head from “how do we create resilience” to “what does it look like when we don’t have resilience”. Their findings suggest that individuals who say they “lack” resilience, also demonstrate a “shift” in activity (activity typically represents blood flow or metabolic activity) to the right side of the brain and away from the left. Why might this be happening in populations suffering from depression, anxiety, and/or other related psychopathological states?
The right side of the brain can be thought of as the “prey” brain or the part of the brain that has been specialized in prey-related behaviours like vigilance, safety, emotional evaluation, intuition, and imagination. I won’t go too far into depth about how these particular cognitive tasks became more relevant for prey animals, but for the sake of understanding, you can build the association between “right side of the brain” and “prey behaviours and cognitions” without risking too much scientific inaccuracy.
And with a little imagination, it’s not hard to imagine that psychological states like depression and/or anxiety, which are often associated with feelings of excessive emotional evaluation, chronic vigilance/scanning for threat, strong (often unsettling) imagination, and altered cognition, is the result of a shift in activity away from the logical, predator brain, and towards the emotional, prey brain.
So with this in mind, developing resilience can be conceptualized as an attempt to balance activity between the hemispheres; a little logic mixed with a little emotion. This gives us 2 very useful signposts to follow on our journey to resilience; avoid or limit a lifestyle that biases one side of the brain over the other (too much left hemisphere activity can be detrimental as well), and consequently to structure your lifestyle in a way that creates activity and stimulation of both hemispheres.
“Cool, now what the heck do I actually do??”
Activities that tend to balance activity between both hemispheres include:
Talking about your emotions
Writing
Meditation
Exercise
Setting and striving for goals
Visually scanning your environment (looking back and forth slowly)
Studying/learning about things that interest you
Deep breathing
This list includes far more behaviours that become more and more personally specific. A good harmless schematic you can follow is to take a look at your average day-to-day behaviours and routine and start introducing the “opposite” behaviour. If you’re a constant go-getter who can’t sit still; invest some time into sitting still. If you’re a person who excels at chillaxing; go out and exercise or learn a new skill. If you’re a freely-flowing artist who lives with your head in the clouds, learn to ground yourself. If you’re an overly aggressive person, learn patience. The list of examples is endless.
Resilience is best thought of as one’s ability to maintain some sense of stability amongst the chaos life throws at you. Preparing for these inevitabilities through practices and attitudes like the one we just spoke about is the most potent step you can take in creating and maintaining resilience.
I hope this helps, and I’ll see you all next week.
Cheers
