Feed What You Want to Grow

Lately the energy and self-study work I've been doing has very much brought to mind the idea that we need to feed what we want to grow.  That can come off as a cheesy "positive psychology" that can leave us feeling like a failure if we fail to achieve the life we'd like to have.
 
But modern science supports the idea that we CAN affect our reality through our inputs.  In his book, The Brain: The Story of You, David Eagleman writes:
‘Here’s the key: the brain has no access to the world outside. Sealed within the dark, silent chamber of your skull, your brain has never directly experienced the external world, and it never will. Instead, there’s only one way that information from out there gets into the brain. … Everything you experience — every sight, sound, smell — rather than being a direct experience, is an electrochemical rendition in a dark theater.’”
 
The electrical impulses themselves are neutral, but in order to conserve energy and survive, our brain has developed mechanisms to improve efficiency, such as using the Reticular Activating System to sort and filter what is most important.  This bundle of nerves just above the brain stem determines what the brain will focus on and uses neuro-shortcuts or habit loops to strengthen and reinforce what it "knows."  This can help or hurt us.  Early experiences, for instance, can create harmful beliefs that we aren't good enough, or good ones like, most people are basically good. When the beliefs form our outlook, our brain chooses its focus to reinforce it.
 
The good news is, we can affect our brain system and its pathways.   In her Dec. 13, 2015 article, “Epigenetics:  How Your Thoughts Change your Brain, Cells, and Genes,”  Debbie Hampton wrote that “expectancies and learned associations have been shown to change brain chemistry and circuitry which results in real physiological and cognitive outcomes, such as less fatigue, lower immune system reaction, elevated hormone levels, and reduced anxiety.” 
 
EXAMPLES
Let’s look at some examples where this effect was tested and proven.  In one of the pieces I read about this topic (Science Proves Your Thoughts Influence Your Reality and Shape Your Brain for Better or Worse-You Choose, 11/28/22) writer T. Cheney wrote:
 
"In Jonah Lehrer’s book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, he tells of experiments conducted by Frederic Brochet in 2001 at the University of Bordeaux. Appropriately enough, the experiments involved wine. In the first one, Brochet took two glasses of the exact white wine, colored one of them red with food coloring, and proceeded to get observations from 57 wine experts. The experts described the “red” wine in terms of its “jamminess” and other red wine jargon. Not one of them identified it as a white wine.

In another test, Brochet took the same medium-quality Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was labeled to look like a fancy, fine wine while the other was labeled to resemble a common table wine. The wine experts gave the exact same wine in different bottles very different ratings. The wine in the expensive bottle was described as “agreeable, complex, balanced, and rounded” while the identical wine with a cheap-looking label was said to be “weak, short, light, flat, and faulty.”"

Lehrer writes:
"What these wine experiments illuminate is the omnipresence of subjectivity….Our human brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that prejudices feel like facts, opinions are indistinguishable from the actual sensations. If we think the wine is cheap, it will taste cheap. And if we think we are tasting a Grand Cru, then we will taste a Grand Cru.”

And this one is really wild.  Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer studied hotel room attendants who regularly went up and down stairs, pushed vacuums, stretched and other forms of movement for their cleaning work.  When surveyed they all said they “didn’t exercise.”  Half of the 84 women were told their work-related movement met the standards for the Surgeon General’s definition of an active lifestyle, the other was told they did not.  When measured a month later, the group who believed they were active saw a decrease in weight and waist-to-hip ratio and a ten percent drop in blood pressure. None of the maids had changed their routines. The only difference between the groups is how they viewed what they did…and the body responded as if it they exercised more even when they hadn’t!

So what does this mean for the average person who has accumulated a lifetime of experiences and beliefs? Cheney writes:
“Every situation or event, past, present, or future becomes what your brain defines it to be. In this way, your experience of reality is your own creation. Your brain even physically responds by reinforcing neural connections that coincide with your predominant, habitual thinking, a concept known as neuroplasticity. In other words, your recurrent thinking patterns physically shape your brain’s form and function which then reinforces and encourages more of the same kind of thinking.”

TOOLS TO USE
You can influence your brain in two main ways: internally by your thoughts, feelings, hopes and imagining; and externally, by the ways in which you seek to develop or reinforce inputs. 

Internally, we can use these three tools to in effect “reprogram” ourselves:

• Mindfulness-which disrupts and changes the Default Mode Network (that groove of habits and pathways).
• Meditation-which increases our neuroplasticity and helps us form new pathways.
• Visualization-Imagining a situation fires neurons and affects the chemicals released very much like actually doing something, again strengthening and making new pathways in the brain.

The discipline we practice in yoga to stay present and mindful helps us be conscious about building new habits, thereby changing our "default."  Our meditation actually builds up the size and activity in parts of our brain dealing with learning, memory, emotional regulation, and perspective and as well as neural connectivity and cognitive function according to Dr. Sanjana Gupta (What Happens to Your Brain When You Meditate Every Day?, verywellmind.com, January 6, 2024.)

​Externally, we can shake things up!  Generally, we want to stay open to new and differing stimuli. For instance, we might:

• Have new experiences like traveling, meeting new people or learning something new.
• Do things in a new way.  That’s why I change up how we get into shapes, the order we do things, and being playful and mindful about how to move.
• Change your routine.  Even stepping off your nondominant foot, or changing your exercise or habitual practices helps your brain become more adaptive and resilient.
• Be social.  Really listen to your friends and loved ones.  Put yourself in new social situations or enter them with a more open mindset. 

 
It can be daunting to undo a lifetime of old inputs and pathways which affect our beliefs and systems of reaction to them.  But I personally know it can be done.  I struggled with intermittent, sometimes deep depression as a youth into young adulthood in response to trauma.  Over the years I’ve very consciously worked to change from a stance of victimhood and hopelessness.  Am I a work in progress?  You bet!  But I know that I am a resilient, capable and amazing person whose life includes an abundance of everything I care about—including joys large and small.  Does it erase every hard time?  Oh no, but my toolbox is full and I know I can handle what comes.  I am so grateful for the practices of yoga, meditation and Sacred Anatomy Energy Medicine which help me to grow and thrive.