If only I'd remembered to set my alarm clock!
The adult human brain weighs only about 3 pounds. That's about 2% of your total body weight.
Incessant mind chatter, spinning thoughts and the chronic bodily tensions that accompany an overactive mind are par for the course today. Most people who live with chronic stress seem to think it is just another symptom of high tech, full catastrophe living. No worries! We are all maxed out these days, right?
Wrong!
Chronic
stress is not a necessary evil. It is a warning signal from your
brain that you are in trouble. It's serious. Chronic body tension and a distracted mind, along with other symptoms such as distraction, memory lapse, anxiety, depressed mood,
insomnia, increased or decreased appetite serve as memos from your brain that you are not receiving the service you need for optimal functioning. These disruptions need to be addressed by reducing or eliminating the source of
chronic stress.
The most interesting
research on the
source of chronic stress points to the brain's
default mode network (DMN). The DMN, active when your mind is not engaged in specific cognitive tasks, is responsible for the stream of self-referential thoughts or mind wandering that is commonly called "autopilot thinking." When the DMN is overactive, it becomes a source of chronic tension.
Most
people today can identify with a mind that won't "turn off." Continual mental activity inhibits relaxation, connection to the environment and other people, peaceful sleep and keeps you in a state of chronic distraction and even self-consciousness.
Scientific research has linked hyperactivity in the DMN to depression, ADHD, insomnia, PTSD and other
health conditions. What can be done about it? It turns out that you can deactivate this noisy brain network whenever it acts up. If you're skeptical, so were researchers. Marcus Raichle, MD, the original DMN researcher, explained in the March 2010 edition of
Scientific American:
"In 1998 we even had a paper on such findings rejected because one referee suggested that the reported decrease in [DMN] activity was an error in our data. The circuits, the reviewer asserted, were actually being switched on at rest and switched off during the [cognitive] task. Other researchers, however, reproduced our results for both the medial parietal cortex -- and the medial prefrontal cortex (involved with imagining what other people are thinking as well as aspects of our emotional state). Both areas are now considered major hubs of the DMN."
It boils down to this: You can "turn off" the part of the brain that destroys your inner peace. Engaging in specific kinds of cognitive tasks, also known a sawareness practices, has been scientifically proven to alter brain circuitry (not just brain chemistry, but actual circuitry) without the use of drugs.
When awareness practices involve connecting to the external world, as with many Zen practices and some variants of
NLP or Neurolinguistic Programming, resting the DMN has proven particularly effective.
About the author:
Mike Bundrant is a retired mental health counselor, NLP trainer and publisher of Healthy Times Newspaper.
You can find Mike at inlpcenter.c
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