…are only the dimensions.
That line is a quote from the novelist Ellen Glasgow taken from a NY Times article about one of the more tricky therapeutic situations clinicians face and that many of us face throughout life when we realize we keep doing the same thing over and over again despite a desire not to.
Apparently researchers in Portugal found that rats, when stressed enough, lose their cleverness and fall into predictable routines that become self defeating. Stress floods the brain with chemicals that manipulate the brain’s neurocircuitry. As a result, the higher brain functions responsible for decision making and goal directed behavior, in other words, our ability to change our mind and act in accordance to new values, are impaired. Consequently the same old neurons keep firing and we keep doing the same thing over and over again.
Using this as a hypothesis, it would then make sense that certain kinds of earlier trauma, childhood abuse of all kinds, addictions, floods the brain with stress chemicals that then undermine a person’s “good intentions” (higher brain function) in the future. And so it would see that then fate takes over. People live their lives along predictable self defeating behaviors and begin to think that this is just how life is. These are the cards dealt to me and I have to live with them.
But this is not necessarily so. The brain is also elastic. It can rewire itself. It makes me think of tiny electricians who run around pulling wires from over here and plugging them in over there. How is this achieved? In the case of the Portugese rats it comes from removing them from a stressed environment. I guess that translates into taking them from a sterile room and placing them in a dark alley full of fresh edible trash. Or, you take a New Yorker and send him to the Bahamas for a month.
We’ve all had the experience of nice stress free vacations that change our attitude. Beaches, mountains, lakes, what have you, and we begin to think why we can’t have this everyday. But this is impractical unless you have lots of money. The trick is to induce a stress free experience to the brain in the midst of everyday stress. And it does not mean hanging out at the local watering hole after work to decompress.
Perhaps this is where the power of meditation comes in. There are numerous studies that show meditation induces a stress free experience for the brain and that long term practitioners of meditation tend to have more relaxed lives and are more adaptable to stress and coping with stress than others. I suppose prayer could do the same thing. Or nurturing stress free environments at home. This would include healthy eating habits, nurturing relationships, exercising.
The bottom line seems to be, what we give the brain is what the brain will give to us.
