Fighting Your Lizard Brain
Living Happy
I’m blind on my left side. Normally, this isn’t an issue except when I’m trying to play softball or tennis or merge onto a highway in the U.S.
And normally, I’m a pretty mellow human. I don’t hit people. I don’t yell insults at other drivers or even get cranky in long lines at the grocery store or when I’m stuck in traffic
One day back when I was in college, I was walking through the Mall of New Hampshire with my boyfriend when there was a sudden massive pain on the left side of my jaw. My whole world was black. And then I realized that my hand was grabbing this woman’s arm. Not grabbing. Clutching.
The pain shattered through my jaw and I blinked hard and let go of the much taller woman’s arm and she went in a Valley Girl voice, “Ohmygod. Sor-ry.”
And I said sorry back while my brain was busy processing all the things that had just happened:
1. Intense pain from a blow.
2. Blackness in vision
3. Coming to a second later clutching this woman’s arm in my hands so hard that she couldn’t move away.
I had reacted without thinking and I had reacted in a way that was the total opposite of my character.
“Wow,” my boyfriend said, “you were intense.”
Yes, I was, or my lizard brain was. In that crowded mall, the woman had slung her purse somehow that it smashed against my jaw. According to my boyfriend, it was a pretty big purse. I reacted instinctively, galvanized by the pain to blindly stop the threat and protect myself.
How did that happen?
In our brains we have the limbic system or lizard brain. This is where all our super basic emotions are quickly processed. The limbic system is what makes us jump out of the way of a speeding car, duck when someone throws banana bread at us. Our hearts pound. Our reactions are fast and automatic.
Sound okay, right?
The issue becomes when our lizard brain gets a little carried away. Sometimes that limbic system controls far too much of our lives and gets reactive and over-controlling.
As humans we’re prewired for basic reactive emotions—some positive and some negative. More than that though, our brains are constantly thinking to the future (30 to 50% of the time), trying to figure out what to do next or what will happen next.
In his podcast, The Art of Happiness, Arthur Brooks says,
“It might seem like, to be able to focus would be an easy thing, or to only be in the present would be the most natural state. But that isn't true. Anybody who's tried it knows that, immediately, your mind starts wandering off.
That's what the Tibetan Buddhists call, the monkey mind.
It's a great metaphor. Your mind is a monkey that's just jumping around frenetically. You wanted it to sit still. But it jumps off to the next tree, looking for tasty fruit.
And it's happy, you know, in its way, that is, if the tree is full of fruit,
and the fruit is accessible. But you can also, on top of not being able to calm down your monkey, you can have an unhappy, frenetic monkey, that can't find any fruit in those trees, or where the fruit is out of reach.
“Well, a lot of people today have a lot of unhappy monkeys. And a lot of people who don't feel peace about the current moment, not just because of the coronavirus epidemic, because a lot of things that are going on in our lives, it's a hard year, personally. And it's a hard year for us as a nation and, in fact, as a world.
So finding peace is tricky.
But furthermore, just looking at the future doesn't look good either.
So I can't be in the present.
And the future seems grim, a lot of unhappy monkeys out there.
What I'm talking about is pessimism. And pessimism is a huge problem.
It's been studied by social psychologists pretty extensively.
Pessimism is associated with suicidal tendencies, with depression, with anxiety, with just low subjective well-being. If only we could get our pessimism under control, even if we can't calm the monkeys, at least the monkey could be more positive.
If we could be more optimistic, our lives would be better.”
On that podcast, Brooks talks to Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who founded positive psychology. While the president of the American Psychological Association, Seligman wanted to do a 180 in psychology and instead of asking what was wrong with people, ask and study what is right with people, what it is that makes life worth living.
Seligman offered a comparison to physical fitness. Imagine a world where there were no gyms, no Ys, no runners or bikers, and only physical trainers because the focus was only on repairing injuries rather than making the body stronger. That was how psychology was working.
But, what you have to do, Brooks says, is to overcome your brain’s negativity bias, the push towards pessimism. And this comes from our limbic system working against our want of happiness.
So, he suggests using opposite signal strategy saying,
“If we have goals to raise our happiness, become better in our work or overcome our fears, our limbic system will sometimes work against these goal. It is exactly in that moment when we need to reverse course and send our brain the opposite signal. This brings us in control of our instincts and helps us reshape our behavior rather than allowing our limbic system to hijack our goals and send us off track,” he said.
So, how does this work? Here you go, direct from Brooks’ course:
“The essence of the opposite signal strategy is to work toward the goals or behaviors you want in the long-term by sending your brain the opposite signal of your natural impulses in the short-term. This often means embracing something painful. For instance, we might feel like we are addicted to something like caffeine or social media. When we feel the urge to indulge our impulses, we can deploy the Opposite Signal Strategy by doing something different like drinking a glass of water and going on a walk. The purpose of the Opposite Signal Strategy is to deflect our energy away from gratifying our natural impulses and direct it toward our desired goals or behaviors.”
Pretty cool, right?
REFERENCES AND ROUND-UP
More on Martin Seligman
Brooks on THE OPPOSITE SIGNAL STRATEGY TO COMBAT LONELINESS.
STORIES AND LINKS FROM THIS LAST WEEK!
Our paid subscriber post about having a gratitude attitude that actually works.
Free access posts:
EXTRA LINKS
An article at the Washington Post.
An article at the New York Times.
XIV, Dalai Lama, and Cutler, Howard C. The Art of Happiness, 10th Anniversary Edition: A Handbook for Living. Penguin Publishing Group, 2009, 294.
Dalai Lama, by Christopher Michel, October 14, 2012. Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/50979393@N00/8089285536. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.