Decades ago, I read an article about self esteem and how daily positive affirmations were a way to instill confidence, peace, and happiness in yourself. Ever the experimenter, I tried faithfully to repeat my chosen affirmations daily, rattling off a list of 20 qualities I aspired to be.
Turns out that saying positive affirmations, while not necessarily harmful, is not very helpful to improving wellbeing. The reason for this is that our brain is wired to learn best through
Sensory-rich
Meaningful
Personally relevant
experiences. Simply repeating words on a page, no matter how much you want them to be true, will never change your fundamental beliefs. And won't change the way you engage with yourself and your world.
So what DOES allow one to change for the better?
Great question, and one that neuroscience has made astounding strides in answering. The brain, it turns out, is exceptionally malleable, even after childhood. You can't build a lot more actual brain tissue, but you can STRENGTHEN the connections in the brain so that certain pathways grow stronger and others grow weaker.
What this means in practical terms is that you can change your habitual ways of feeling, thinking, and responding quite dramatically.
What this means in practical terms is that you can change your habitual ways of feeling, thinking, and responding quite dramatically. You just have to EXPERIENCE being different...acting differently...thinking differently...enough times and in a meaningful way. So how do we do this?
Dr. Rick Hanson has a useful acronym, HEAL, that helps me remember how to "download new software" into my brain over time. Let's say, for example, that I want to feel more calm and peaceful.
H is for Have the experience.
I can recognize when I'm having an experience, even a minor one, of calmness and peace. It might be when the kids are running around playing and I'm drinking my cup of coffee and watching them from a distance.
Alternatively, I can try to manufacture the experience, but often this isn't even necessary. But if I wanted to create an experience, I could make myself a cup of coffee and intentionally drink it slowly on the porch, purposely focusing on the calmness and peace of the experience.
E is for Enrich the experience.
Here's where you make it juicy. You can savor the coffee longer, pay attention to the sounds of the kids, smells, taste, temperature of the coffee, feeling of the mug in your hand, bodily sensations as you are experiencing peace.
A is for Absorb the experience.
You make a conscious effort to "drink the experience in." You might imagine it soaking into you, or warming your heart with a golden glow, or whatever imagery works best for you.
L is for Link the experience.
This one is optional, and probably shouldn't be used until you're comfortable with the first 3 steps and have practiced regularly for a few weeks. But essentially, you shift your attention from the positive experience, to briefly recall a negative experience or belief (for example, you remember a time when you felt frazzled and distraught), then shift your attention back to absorbing and experiencing the positive one. This is also called PENDULATION- a fancy neuroscience word that that's also helpful for healing trauma. We'll get into pendulation more in a future blog post.
Ok, that's it for today. I'm writing this from the infrared sauna and my phone is about to turn off from excessive heat damage :)
Love and peace to you all--
Dr. Nicole
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