The Neuroscience of Mindfulness

The astonishing science behind why everyday hobbies are good for your brain

Dr Stan Rodski B.Ec. D.Sc(Bio)

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781460708316
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Neuroscience
• Index: Biological Sciences

Our Emotional Sixth Sense Neuroscientific studies are finding that our brain circuits for emotions are just as tangible as circuits for our other five senses. Advanced imaging techniques can now observe this. Recent fascination with colouring -in for adults joins a long list of techniques that have been employed by humans to calm the brain and help us with our emotions. Our ways of dealing with this intuitively have included tasks with some return for our time and effort. Tasks such as knitting and gardening. However, we now enter a world where these tasks are redundant for many of us. We employ gardeners and buy scarves. The discoveries of focused activities which take our minds away from the emotions of day to day living are returning again but in new formats such as colouring-in books and even lego building blocks for adults.
In this book, Dr Rodski explores the science behind these activities and many others which we humans crave for to help us through our emotional world. The world of mindfulness, the world of our 6th sense.

PART 1

WHAT IS MINDFULNESS?

WHY OUR WORLD NEEDS MINDFULNESS

Why is it that while we are better these days at watching our weight, exercising and eating right and we have a better understanding of the lifestyle issues that can help us manage our stress, the fact of the matter is our health is getting worse? Lifestyle-related diseases like type 2 diabetes are growing, and our stress levels are getting out of control.

All of us are consumed by our high-tech, very fast world, surrounded by forces we don’t really understand. But then this world actually starts to affect our health, and it becomes a serious, serious business.

People have often said to me, ‘Isn’t the world easier now that we have all this technology to help us?’ In centuries past you would lose half your children as part of a normal existence; horrific wars would be a fact of life for everyone. Yes, those things were horrific, but they came and then they went.

Now we have wars every night in our living room – through our TVs, through our PCs, through our tablets, through our phones. Every day we hear and see and discuss the horror of kids being shot down in a school playground. We live permanently surrounded by stressful events. We would never have heard about those things 100 years ago. We watch the six o’clock news and most of the first thirty minutes is just blood and murder and accidents. We sit in front of our screens and we think, ‘Oh, well, I’m used to that.’

But you know what? There’s a part of our systems that just keeps itself alert. Even if we’re blocking those images out consciously, our subconscious system – which is one of the reasons why we’re still on the planet – is telling us to be afraid, telling us that something is going to get us or hurt us or kill us. This fear is always just below our conscious surface. ‘Look at that home invasion on the TV screen. When are we going to be next?’ The likelihood of your being next is so small it’s unbelievable, yet because it’s in your face every night your stress hormones are constantly heightened.

Technology is delivering huge amounts of pressure in other ways too. Firstly, it’s displacing us, taking over a lot of mundane jobs that once gave people an income. But it also means we can do everything more quickly, which has got everyone multitasking, working faster and faster, expected to achieve more.

The smallest error can really hurt you now! A one-second mistake in which you send an email to the wrong person can be a BIG error, depending on what the message says. We’re all faced with little errors that have big impacts, which causes us a lot of stress too.

We’re demanding ever higher performance from ourselves. But the usual method – putting in longer hours – has backfired. We’re pushing ourselves harder and harder to keep up. Too many of us are reporting to our doctors that we feel we’re at breaking point. We are getting exhausted, disengaged and sick.

Meet Brog

No matter how sophisticated and clever we think we are, our bodies are still genetically programmed to behave the same way as those of our prehistoric ancestors.

Imagine that a person called Brog lived 150,000 years ago. This was before towns and cities existed – long before those wars that wiped out whole populations – and the activities of Brog’s daily life were largely survival-based.

Brog had to go out and hunt for his food, a dangerous venture that had to be performed regularly. Meat was important, as this protein was critical to the evolution of the human brain.

And nature ensured that Brog had the best possible physical mechanisms to ensure survival.

If Brog encountered a large and dangerous animal, such as a lion, he had a split second in which to decide whether to fight or run away. In other words, Brog perceived a situation involving either challenge – ‘Aha! Fur-wrapped food with teeth and claws! Somebody get the fire stoked!’ – or danger – ‘Uh-oh! Trouble, run away!’

This is referred to as the fight-or-flight response.

For this to occur, a biological mechanism evolved called the SAM system (sympathetic adrenal medullary system). By means of the sympathetic nervous system (whose job is to perceive danger), the hypothalamus in the brain sends a signal into the adrenal glands (which are above the kidneys). The signal reaches a part of the glands called the adrenal medulla, which is responsible for secreting a hormone called adrenaline (epinephrine), which rapidly circulates throughout the body.

Remember when someone swerved in front of you on the highway without indicating? That sudden fright woke you up, didn’t it? It probably felt like a combination of shock treatment and some seriously strong coffee. That was the effect of the hormone adrenaline. You just had a Brog fight-or-flight moment.

Adrenaline causes your body to stop digestion in the stomach so that all energy and blood can be redirected to the muscles. This will help you in either doing the ‘macho’ thing by fighting – in this case, swearing, hooting or extending a central digit to the offending driver – or mustering enough energy to get out of there.

Energy, in the form of glucose, is released for rapid action. Your heart rate increases, and the pupils of your eyes enlarge (dilate). Simultaneously, your sinuses and other mucous membranes stop secreting mucus. Your entire body is focused on one thing, and one thing only: either fighting, or running away as fast as possible. You literally feel wide awake when adrenaline is racing through your body. It’s nature’s caffeine.

After the challenge or danger is over, your brain switches from the sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic nervous system (responsible for the everyday working of your internal systems). The secretion of mucus resumes, your heart rate and breathing slow down, and your digestion kicks back into operation. (We’ll look more at the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems in Part 5.)

(Interestingly enough, sexual arousal, orgasm and post-orgasmic ‘glow’ involve the same process, switching from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system. There’s a direct biological connection between sexual arousal and the physical arousal related to danger, and it’s not surprising that some people confuse the two.)

External versus internal threat

The SAM system was originally designed to deal with external threats to survival in a harsh and dangerous world. There were no supermarkets where Brog could buy food, so he had to hunt to survive. It was also extremely unlikely that he would remain free of injuries for long – whether major injuries from fights with animals and other humans, or simple cuts and scratches from living a primitive life. The challenges and dangers in his life were short-term and external. The SAM system was ideal under these circumstances.

But for the most part, today’s world is a very different place. How many people do you know who – of necessity, not choice – encounter wild and dangerous animals on a daily basis? How many still hunt wild animals for food? (And no, an irritable cow does not qualify as a wild animal.) Also, injuries are generally much scarcer than they used to be.

We have grouped together into large communities, an arrangement that offers protection for each community member, and we have eliminated most of the external threats from our environment. Our food supplies are regulated to such an extent that, if we have the money, we can basically buy anything we want (though getting a job to earn the money can be another issue).

There are still certain external dangers, including crime, but there are systems in place to regulate these. Many people also have some degree of choice regarding these things, such as moving to a different neighbourhood or installing a security system. There are certainly parts of the world where many dangers are still external, but even these are much less extreme than they were for Brog 150,000 years ago. For most people nowadays, threat is no longer external. Instead, most of the threats we face are internal. These include fears and anxieties around failure and rejection.

But surely we know the difference between real (external) danger and imaginary (internally perceived) danger? Why would we respond to a fear of failure as if we were facing a hungry and dangerous tiger? How is that possible?

There are two answers to this question:

1. Your conscious mind may know the difference, but your unconscious mind may not. The unconscious mind does not distinguish between real situations and imaginary ones. Have you ever had a nightmare and woken up dripping with sweat, your heart pounding? You were safe in bed, yet your body responded to the images in the nightmare as if they were real. Similarly, for the unconscious mind, ‘If he leaves me I will just die!’ is as real as if you were actually facing a life-and-death threat outside of yourself. The other important thing to remember is that your body responds to your unconscious mind more than it does to your conscious mind. (We’ll learn more about this in Part 2.)

2. There is plenty of evidence to demonstrate the phenomenon called behavioural conditioning. The first person to document and research this was Ivan Pavlov, in 1928. He developed what he called a ‘conditioned response’ in dogs by ringing a bell when he fed them. After doing this for a while, he could get the dogs to salivate as if there were food on the way, just by ringing the bell. The dogs became conditioned to associate the food with the sound of the bell. This association continued, even when the bell was rung without the provision of food. The point is that, since the time of Brog, our prototype cave person, we have been genetically conditioned to respond to danger in a specific way. Actual injury or pain has been linked to failure, and this association has been carried forward to today, despite the absence of real danger if you fail. A long time ago, if you failed, you could die. Today, this is unlikely, but it still feels as if it could happen. The same could apply to a whole range of emotional perceptions. We now fear emotional hurt in exactly the same way as we o...