Image credit: Muhammad Ridha from Pixabay
I tell my kids that our brains are just like our bodies - they adapt and shape themselves according to how we use them. Recently I wrote a short piece of copy work on this topic for my teenage son to use in his handwriting practice:
"The main signalling cells in the brain are called neurons. Signals pass from one neuron to another, forming patterns of activity (sometimes called 'neural pathways') in the brain.
Each state of mind, like happiness, anger, frustration, curiosity, compassion, calmness, anxiety, determination, or courage, activates a specific neural pathway or pattern.
Each habit does too, like going to the fridge for a snack, picking up the phone, picking up a book, going outside in nature, tidying something away or leaving it lying around.
When a neural pattern gets reinforced through repetition, it gets stronger and the 'pathway' becomes more like a 'highway.'
Highways are easy to travel along but harder to exit from, and sometimes you find you've built one you don't like being on. The solution is to practice noticing that you don't like it, and slowing down to look for an exit. The more often you do that, the better your brain gets at building exits. Then, gradually, that highway diminishes from lack of use.
Your habits of thought and action are literally maintaining, building, and shaping your brain in an ongoing, never-ending process that you can be in charge of, if you pay attention to it."
Thinking about all this after my son had finished his copy work, I came to the conclusion that this principle doesn't just apply to our brains.
Our habits of thought and action are also constantly shaping our lives and our relationships with each other and the world around us. What we focus on and engage with repeatedly gets stronger; what we don't engage with diminishes.
In this sense, our attention is like a form of leverage; even though I don't occupy a position of "power" in the generally accepted meaning of the word, I actually do have significant power to shape my life and my experiences of my world.
The paradox is that I can make a difference in my outer world most easily by tending to my inner world. When I feel better on the inside, my life feels better. And then the world around me feels better too.
Prompt and resource for further exploration
Do I have "neural highways" that sweep me away into states of mind I don't enjoy?
How could I support myself to notice I've gotten swept away, and slow myself down to look for an exit?
Recently, I found this resource called "Get Bigger Than What's Bugging You." It's a free course that arrives by email over five days.
I've been using it a lot. I've found it helps me make a transition from "I feel tense and anxious" (swept away along a neural highway in a direction I don't want to go), to "I'm sensing that something in me feels tense and anxious."
It sounds simple, but the difference is profound. Suddenly, instead of feeling like I am my mental state, I become aware that I am the one who is aware of my mental state.
Instead of being swept away by the feeling, I find I can zoom out from it and get a kind of a birds-eye view of it. Instead of being hijacked by it, I'm present, observing it, and I can contain it.
These uncomfortable feeling states are not the enemy, they're just trying to get our attention. Once the feeling, the "something in me," has my attention and I'm no longer trying to suppress or ignore it, it can relax. A memory might come up, or an impression, an image, or just a shift in my feeling state -- a deeper breath or a loosening of tension.
Quite often, that's all it takes to get me right off that highway and into a much more comfortable state. At the very least, it gets me looking for exits.
If you try it, I hope you find it as useful as I have 🙂
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