3 Truths About Reality Your Brain Doesn’t Want You to Know
What if you didn’t have to change your brain or overcome limiting beliefs to be a highly functioning individual? What if all it took was a shift in perspective and an understanding of how your brain works to unleash a whole new wave of creative ideas and stress relief?
Neuroplasticity is a buzzword these days. It’s liberating. The idea that we can have some continued impact on our brains throughout our entire lives provides a boost of agency and optimism. It turns learning into a life-extending activity; curiosity jumps to the frontlines of life-enhancing qualities.
The Truth about Neuroplasticity
So, how does it work? According to the neuroscientist Mark Robert Walden, we can’t actually change our brains. Trauma, disease, drugs, abuse, anxiety and stress cause structural changes to the brain that stay forever. In reality, the brain shifts activity from one network in the brain to another. Neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to form and reorganize synaptic connections, actually happens in small areas of the brain related to learning, memory, intuition and social awareness.
The thing is that it only happens when we feel safe and calm. Only then with the axons—those long, slender projections of your nerve cells—explore their environment. Stressed or feeling danger, the axonal tips withdraw, connections break, and if the stress goes on for long enough, they shrivel up and die.
So stay calm.
The Truth about Stress Responses
It’s habitual to blame the amygdala for stress responses. This almond-shaped mass of gray matter that is part of the limbic system gets a bad rap, when in fact it acts as a filter—and it plays a key role in learning.
The reality we see, hear and experience arises from our very own interpretation of what your brain has already experienced. And our responses stem from our imagination, which is a like a carnaval soothsayer, always trying to predict the future. Fear, for example, stems from a purely imagined guess about what could possible happen next. Ninety percent of worries, fears, and doubts are memories from the past rising up and being filtered in with fantasies being projected onto the future.
What to do about it? If you can sit back and watch anxiety happening, it goes away. In a state of mindful awareness, we discover that most of our problems are imaginary. So is our pleasure.
The Truth about Limiting Beliefs
All our lives are spent forming new beliefs, memories, and behaviors. Beliefs reside in the brain, and once they are there, they are there. We don’t actually change them. Our conscious mind can, however, impact that elegantly coordinated whirl of constantly changing synaptic activity found between the ears.
What to do about it? When we pay attention to limiting beliefs, we activate them. If we pay attention to something else, these areas of the brain become quiet. Try feeling the soles of your feet, or focusing on something outside the window. And slipping into a state of mindful awareness ousts the brain from the old belief train.
Juggling Brain Networks
The brain works as a whole, shifting among three different networks:
The thinking network, or focus network, also called the executive control network—you might think it’s important, but when it’s active, only a small portion of the brain lights up.
The default network, or imagination network, which lights up a whole lot of the brain. This is where you go when you daydream.
The salience network, which contributes to emotions, meaning, empathy, and social relationships. It’s like the awareness center, what you use when you use your conscious mind to watch your conscious mind.
Relaxed, mindful awareness awakes the salience network in the brain, which is the part that brings balance, that activates synaptic plasticity.
The idea is to favor a back-and-forth between the focus network and the imagination network, between focus and unfocus, using the salience network as a tipping mechanism.
When we become aware of how we are thinking, how the imagination works, and then we learn something new, we boost our neuroplasticity.
Brain Power Hacks
Use the conscious mind to watch what’s going on in your mind.
Increases blood flow in the brain with aerobic exercise or yawning—it makes it really hard to worry about anything.
Yawn, stretch and unfocus for 60 seconds every hour to get out of your thinking brain, out of your imagination (fear or pleasure)—then you can learn something new.
Daily, contemplate your deepest, innermost values. This will actually stimulate your brain.