The brain is an amazing organ with an incredible ability to learn from experiences.
However, this is not always a good thing
It has the tendency to habituate, meaning to do the same thing over and over
- It is great when you brush your teeth but not so good when you have to think creatively how to cope with a situation that you have never been in before.
- This is why we tend to do the same things over and over and are slow to give up bad behaviors
The brain has the tendency to match patterns with the past
- “Oh, this is just like that thing that happened before.”
- We draw conclusions from just one example form our past. You don’t need a scientist to tell you that is not a big enough data pool.
- Example: Hurricane Katrina
- The ones who stayed in town were the ones who have survived the past Hurricane from before. Their brains said “this is the same as that.” But it wasn’t.
- Younger people heeded the warning to evacuate because they didn’t have the pattern to habituate.
According to research, a broader perspective allows you to come up with more solutions and better plays of action.
Resiliency experts have discovered that it is important to see that you are not the only one going through this change.
- This will help you feel less alone in your pain which leads to feeling less stress
Auto-pilot
- It takes less work so it makes sense from an efficiency standpoint
- When the environment is stable, it serves us very well
- During change we have to fight against our brains tendency to look at the situation and see the “same old thing,” when it is actually encountering something new.
Our brains haven’t kept up with this new complexity and keeps searching for patterns based on the past even when they are not useful.
Re-source: Reassessment
We share many of the structures with all mammals and even reptiles
- Therefore we are hard-wired to act in ways that were useful in the past (like when we were being chased by animals in the wilderness)
- This is not well suited for the challenges that we face today.
- This part of our brain is constantly scanning for danger but often gives us inaccurate information
- “sounding the alarm unnecessarily”
Because of the advantage there used to be in perceiving danger quickly, the brain is hardwired to “scan for the bad” and when it inevitably finds negative things, they get stored immediately and are made available for rapid recall.
In contrast, positive experiences are usually registered through standard memory systems and thus need to be held in conscious awareness for 10-20 seconds for them to really sink in.
- Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.
- This built in bias puts a negative spin on the world and intensifies our stress and reactivity.
Many of us have the bad habit to receive what is happening to us as a tsunami when it is only a 5-foot wave. We tend to ignore the good and focus solely on the bad
We need to keep perspective so we can be effective in handling the change
- We don’t have to be at the mercy to the tendencies of our brain that don’t serve us well.
- Becoming aware when we are in one of this habitual thinking ruts is the first step towards making a different choice.
“See as if for the first time”
- If this were a new situation (job, relationship, etc.) How would I be behaving? What would I be doing differently? What would I notice that I am now taking for granted? How would I explain this to someone who knows nothing about it?
- Keep a fresh perspective
craving and resource from “Adaptability” – How to survive change you didn’t ask for – by M.J. Ryan
