Stop the Seeking Cycle

Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, Jerusalem

Mammals are wired to look for novelty in the environment, a behavior called "seeking." Your brain is wired to seek and it gets a dopamine hit each time it does. Dopamine is the same neurotransmitter stimulated by drugs like cocaine and speed. It makes you feel focused, energized, and good at first, but after a while you just feel stressed, sketchy, and burnt out. 

The complement to the seeking system is the reward system. Finding the object of seeking, such as food, sex, or shopping sprees, creates opiates - the drugs that calm you down, make you blissful, and unwilling to seek. The opiates counterbalance the seeking, and keep it from getting caught in an endless cycle. The trouble is that evolution did not favor animals that sat around all fat and happy - they were probably the first to become dinner for those others who kept seeking. This means that the system is rigged: there is much more desire to seek than to be rewarded. We would rather look than actually find.

Our ancestors evolved in a world where almost nothing interesting ever happened (lots and lots and lots of quiet time). But now we live in an environment with an endless supply of intense novel stimuli - books, movies, television, music, internet, texting. Our brains are so full! We are stuffed beyond the limit but can't stop pressing the seek button. It keeps us trapped in an unsatisfying loop of always wanting and never being satisfied. 

But there's a way out: Every so often take a break from new information. Our brains require some real down time. Down time doesn't mean watching Netflix (which is just a bunch of emotional stimulation and more novelty seeking) or hanging with friends. Down time means deeply quiet, really simple, totally open time in which you are not working, accomplishing anything, or taking in new information. Down time means staring at trees, or strolling aimlessly in a forest. Even in the city, it's not hard to just kick back and watch the sky. If this sounds boring, that's the idea. Give yourself a break from doing, thinking, working, judging, evaluating. Let yourself get bored!

- Michael Taft, "Downtime for the Stone Age Brain"

Down Time for Your Brain

Tomales Bay, Inverness, CA. By Della Chen

Meditation was invented around 500 BC. Before that, people had little need for it. Life had been simple enough to allow the brain the down time it needed. But with the construction of modern societies, people's ability to cope with the novelty overload they were experiencing began to break down. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by "desire" and "seeking." Seeking causes suffering. Because it never ends! As soon as you get one thing, you crave more or you want to make sure that thing won't go away. To combat this affliction of modernity, the Buddha prescribed meditation. 

There are many misunderstandings about it. Some people think it means sitting with your legs crossed and trying not to think. But that's impossible! Your brain's job is to think -- it's not going to stop. Meditation is more about just sitting there without doing anything on purpose. It is essentially getting out of the way, and allowing the brain eventually to revert to its natural state - the state your brain evolved to be in most of the time. A kind of alert, relaxed openness. Not thinking about anything in particular, but not striving to remove thinking either. Not seeking, in other words. 

Meditation is, in a sense, unnatural. Cavemen didn't sit around meditating. They didn't need to, because everything was much slower, spacious, and gentle. It was low impact on the brain. But with the rise of modern society (India at 500 BC), people couldn't find enough down time to return their minds to a natural state. There was too much novelty, too many new ideas, too much cool stuff to do, talk about, and see. So we can think of meditation as an unnatural way to return to a natural state. 

Our brains need down time. Your quality of life will skyrocket. The majority of interesting, exciting, novel stimuli you're getting are probably composed of empty calories anyway. So go walk in the park, sit in the tub, watch the trees sway outside your window. And try meditating. There are many apps to help with this and meditation centers popping up. Or ask me for some more ideas! 

PS Watching TV is not down time for your brain. It's actually a stimulant. Sorry, guys. 

- Michael Taft, "Downtime for the Stone Age Brain"

Hardwiring Happiness: Build Your Inner Strengths

Hillside Avenue, Mill Valley, CA

What you have in your bag as you make your way down the twisting road of life are your inner strengths. They include positive mood, common sense, self-compassion, integrity, inner peace, determination, self-esteem, and a warm heart. Strengths can be skills, perspectives and qualities and also positive feelings such as calm, contentment and caring. One third of our strengths we're born with and two thirds are developed. You get them by growing them. Great news! That means we can develop the happiness and other inner strengths that foster fulfillment, love and inner peace. But how?? Read on ...

This series is extracted from Rick Hanson's highly recommended book, "Hardwiring Happiness." Please refer there for more information. 

Hardwiring Happiness: Let Be, Let Go, Let In

Photo in her home by Gayle Smith

Imagine that your mind is like a garden. You can simply be with it, looking at its weeds and flowers without judging or changing anything. Second, you can pull weeds by decreasing what's negative in your mind. Third, you can grow flowers by increasing the positive in your mind. In essence, you can manage your mind in three primary ways: let be, let go, let in. 

LET BE

Letting your mind be, simply observing your experience, gives you relief and perspective. It's like stepping out of a movie screen and watching from twenty rows back. You can explore your experience with interest and (hopefully) kindness toward yourself, and perhaps connect with softer, more vulnerable, and possibly younger layers in your mind. In the light of an accepting, nonreactive awareness, your negative thoughts and feelings can sometimes melt away like morning mists on a sunny day. 

LET GO

Think of all the stuff - physical & nonphysical - we cling to that creates problems for us and others: "shoulds," rigid opinions, resentments, regrets, status, guilt, the past, bad habits. Letting go is a conscious choice to not buy into thoughts that cause suffering, to let go of tension in your body, to surrender to the way it is as opposed to the way you want it to be, to accept the constantly changing and impermanent nature of life, to snap out of a self-centered view and broaden perspective into the wider world. Remember that this requires a conscious choice to make these efforts and you may have to go against your natural instincts at first. 

"If you let go a little you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot you will have a lot of peace. If you let go completely you will have complete peace." - Ajahn Chah

LET IN

As you can see, just being with your mind may not be enough. You also need to work with it, making wise efforts, pulling weeds and growing flowers. You can't expect these inner strengths to spring into being on their own. There need to be active, goal-directed efforts to nudge your mind one way or another. The following posts will focus on Letting In ... 

Here is a helpful article by Rick Hanson on letting go of bodily sensations, thoughts, emotions, wants, and of the self. 

Hardwiring Happiness: Grow Goodness in Your Mind

Richard Diebenkorn, "Woman on a Porch"

The brain is the organ that learns, so it is designed to be changed by your experiences. Amazing! Whatever we repeatedly sense & feel & want & think is slowly but surely sculpting our neural structure. Prolonged, repeated mental/neural activity - especially if it's conscious - will leave an enduring imprint in neural structure, like a surging current reshaping a riverbed. 

The brain takes its shape from what the mind rests upon. If you keep resting your mind on self-criticism, worries, hurts, comparisons, then your brain will be shaped into anxiety, depression, anger, sadness. On the other hand, if you keep resting your mind on good events and conditions, pleasant feelings, natural pleasures, positive things, moments & people in your life, then over time your brain will take a different shape - one with optimism, a positive mood, a sense of worth, strength & resilience.

What you choose to pay attention to - what you rest your mind on - is the primary shaper of your brain. And, on the whole, you have a lot of influence over where your mind rests. 

Hardwiring Happiness: Install Positive Experiences

 Eduardo Garcia, "The Wave," Cuba

Here's the catch: In order to transfer positive experiences from short-term memory into long-term storage, you have to install them in the brain. Otherwise beneficial experiences, such as feeling cared about, are momentarily pleasant but have no lasting value. Meanwhile, because of negativity bias, your brain is rapidly & effectively turning unpleasant, negative experiences - feeling stressed, inadequate, hurt - into neural structure. 

So ... in order to install positive experiences into your brain: 

1. Look for good facts and turn them into good experiences.

• This can include positive events or positive aspects of yourself and of the world - the taste of good coffee, getting an unexpected compliment, a beautiful sunset. 
• Try to do this at least a half dozen times a day. There are lots of opportunities and it takes about 30 seconds. You can do it on the fly in daily life or at special times of reflection. 
• Notice any reluctance to feeling good - such as thinking that you don't deserve it, or that it's selfish. Or that if you feel good, you will lower your guard and let bad things happen. 
• Barriers to feeling good are common & understandable - but they get in the way. So acknowledge them to yourself and then turn your attention back to the good news. Keep opening up to it, breathing & relaxing, letting the good facts affect you. 

2. Really enjoy the experience. 

• Most of the time, a good experience is pretty mild, and that's fine. But try to stay with it for 20-30 seconds in a row - instead of getting distracted by something else. 
• Sense that it is filling your body, becoming a rich experience. The longer that something is held in awareness and the more emotionally stimulating it is, the stronger it becomes in your memory. 
• By doing this, you will increasingly feel less fragile or needy inside, and less dependent on external supplies. Your happiness and love will become more unconditional, based on an inner fullness rather than on whether the momentary facts in your life happen to be good ones. 

3. Intend & sense that the good experience is sinking into you. 

• People do this in different ways. Some feel it in their body like a warm glow spreading through their chest, the warmth of hot cocoa on a cold day. Others visualize things like a golden syrup sinking down inside, bringing good feelings and soothing old places of hurt. Or you can try feeling like a sponge absorbing the experience deep into your bones. 
• Any single time you do this will make only a little difference. But over time those little differences will add up, gradually weaving positive experiences into the fabric of your brain and your self. 

For more, please check out Rick Hanson's ample & freely-offered writings on these topics. 

Confronting the Negativity Bias

Robert Frank, "Canal Street - New Orleans, 1955"

Evolution has given us a brain with what scientists call a "negativity bias," which makes it prone to feeling threatened. This bias developed because the early humans who were mellow and fearless and who did not notice the shadow overhead or the slither nearby are the ones who got chomped. The ones that survived to pass on their genes were nervous and cranky, and we are their great-grandchildren, sitting atop the food chain.

Your brain is continually looking for bad news. As soon as it finds some, it fixates on it with tunnel vision, fast-tracks it into memory storage, and then reactivates it at the least hint of anything even vaguely similar. But good news gets a kind of neutral shrug: "Eh, whatever." 

In effect, the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.

So, for starters, be mindful of the degree to which your brain is wired to make you afraid, wired so that you walk around with an ongoing trickle of anxiety to keep you on alert. And wired to zero in on any apparent bad news in a larger stream of information (e.g., fixing on a casual aside from a family member or co-worker), to tune out or de-emphasize reassuring good news, and to keep thinking about the one thing that was negative in a day in which a hundred small things happened, ninety-nine of which were neutral or positive. 

Read more here