Mindshifting - The Basics
How to harness the power of brain change to stay calm and rational in the face of change.
I will be appearing on ‘Live with Mitchel Weisburgh’ on Substack Live to discuss Mindshifting and neuroplasticity on Thursday, June 26, at 1:00 pm Pacific Time.
For a while now, I’ve known how important it is to stay comfortable. We often think of comfort as a luxury or as a state where you don’t grow or change, but this isn’t true. Comfort is the condition the brain needs in order to learn and grow. While no one can be comfortable 100% of the time, spending more time than not in a state of discomfort can lead to negative changes in the brain. The goal is not to stay in your comfort zone all of the time, but rather to learn to identify when you become uncomfortable and to learn how to return to comfort.
I recently learned about Mindshifting, a technique developed by Mitch Weisburgh designed to take you out of fight/flight/freeze and put you into a calmer, more rational frame of mind. Being able to do this has profound implications for the brain. The more time you spend in fight or flight, the more at risk you become of being chronically stuck in fear or anxiety. Having effective strategies to get yourself out of fight or flight gives you the ability to see life from a calmer, safer, more rational perspective.
The Limbic System
When you feel overwhelmed, become afraid, or are emotionally triggered by something, your limbic system is the first to activate. Your limbic system is the part of the brain that is responsible for your fight/flight/freeze response. This part of the brain becomes activated in two to three seconds. When people are overwhelmed or hurt, the automatic response is to feel helpless. In reality, you often can influence situations for the better. When your limbic system responds to a stressor, like a snarky comment or a change in your life, it can evaluate 30-40 possible responses in just a few seconds. All of this happens below the level of your conscious awareness.
As your limbic system is evaluating the situation and looking for possible responses, it’s figuring out:
1. What’s happening here?
Once it knows what’s happening, the next question is:
2. How will I respond?
After you respond, your limbic system then rationalizes your response. Again, this happens below your conscious awareness…unless you understand this process and learn to observe your behavior.
The limbic system uses past experiences to determine the best course of action, even if past experiences aren’t relevant in the moment. The response your limbic brain chooses might be out of proportion to the event itself.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say Sophie is a busy mom with a child in soccer, a child in band, and a child in preschool. She knows that if her kids’ schedules change, it will cause the preschooler to have a tantrum, something she is strongly motivated to avoid. At the last minute, she gets a call saying that after-school band practice has been cancelled because the band teacher has become suddenly ill. Her child has missed the bus and needs to be picked up from school. This will require her to bring the preschooler along, meaning he’ll miss his nap. Sophie becomes emotionally triggered and snaps at the school secretary without realizing it because she assumes her preschooler will tantrum. As she’s driving to the school, she rationalizes her sharp response by thinking, “They should have known about this ahead of time!” Once she arrives at the school, she’s so upset, she doesn’t notice that her child is disappointed about missing band because it’s his favorite part of school. Even though she’s still upset, she hasn’t realized that her preschooler fell asleep in the car and remained asleep as she put him to bed at home.
In this scenario, Sophie’s reason for becoming upset was that she wanted to avoid having her preschooler throw a tantrum, but the tantrum never happened, even though the schedule changed unexpectedly. This is an example of reacting emotionally based on experience. Had Sophie been aware of how her limbic system responds to stress, she could have chosen to respond differently.
Part X / The Saboteur
Since your limbic system can cause you to react irrationally, it is sometimes called ‘Part X’ or ‘The Saboteur’. Sophie’s Saboteur was acting up when she snapped at the school secretary and didn’t notice that her middle child was disappointed. She would not normally respond this way, but could not change her behavior because she was not aware of her Saboteur.
A Basic How-To
The first step is to recognize that you’ve been triggered.
You know you’ve been triggered if you start blaming others, feel angry, or suddenly irritated. When you begin the task of learning to recognize you’ve been triggered, it’s natural to notice only after you’ve reacted irrationally. This is normal. It takes time to learn to identify the Saboteur in the moment. If you find that you only recognize that you’ve been triggered after you’ve overreacted, try writing it down.
1. Write down the trigger (Ex, Sophie’s child’s band practice being cancelled)
2. Write what you assumed to be true (Ex, her preschooler would tantrum because of his missed nap)
3. Write what you realized was true after the fact (Ex, she was upset because of past tantrums, but her preschooler was not phased by the change in routine).
4. Put your journal aside and document the next time you get triggered and react emotionally.
Over time, doing this practice may help your subconscious learn that your fears aren’t necessarily reality. In addition, reflecting on what happened in this way may increase your ability to be aware of your behavior in the moment, giving you the ability to respond differently.
The second step
Once you are able to identify your Saboteur or Part X when it acts up, find a way to calm yourself.
You can choose a mindfulness activity like focusing attention on your nose or fingertips, feeling your breathing, or orienting to your environment by noticing what’s around you.
Use a fidget toy
Take a short walk
Count to ten
Use constructive self-talk, such as, “Perhaps I can work through this,” or, “I know this is a momentary upset and I can feel better.” Using constructive self-talk can put you into a more rational frame of mind.
Third step
When you are calm, you have activated your prefrontal cortex, which is the seat of rational thought. It’s also called the Sage Mind. When your Sage Mind is activated, you can respond to the situation constructively. The Sage Mind has many powers, but to keep this brief, I’ll name two:
1. Connection – When your prefrontal cortex is activated, you can connect with others. When you’re connecting, you’re getting to know someone with a genuine interest in learning about them, not to judge them or fix them.
2. Innovation – You can create ways of overcoming obstacles. When you innovate, you get curious about the situation and can find creative ways of resolving conflict, solving problems and communicating with others.
Now, let’s see how Sophie could have used this.
When her child’s school called to tell her of the unexpected cancellation, she could have felt her feet on the floor to ground herself and said, “Perhaps my preschooler will be all right.” Doing this may have given her the ability to recognize her urge to snap at the secretary, and then she could have chosen to say, “Thank you, I’ll be right there.” Instead of fuming about the change in schedule during the drive to school, she could have continued to calm herself down by listening to soothing music or thinking about her positive bond with her children. If she had done this, she might have arrived at the school feeling like herself. This would have enabled her to realize that her preschooler didn’t tantrum. She also would have recognized the disappointment in her child and would have consoled him. This would have been a more pleasant experience for all concerned.
How I Used This Recently
If you read my notes, you may have seen that I joined a bell choir this week. I’ve sung in choirs since I was seven, but I haven’t tried bell choir since I was a teenager, and I’m now in my forties. When I was a kid, bell choir was really unpleasant. My memories are of all the things I couldn’t do: not being able to see the notes, not being able to hold the bell correctly, not being able to figure out how to make the bell ring, and feeling a little stupid for not being able to ring a bell. (I mean, how hard is it to ring a bell?!). Ultimately, I felt overwhelmed and misunderstood when people just kept telling me how to hold the bell, when to ring it, etc.
When I went to rehearsal this week, I stood at the table with all the bells laid out, looked at the music, and all those negative experiences came flooding back. But this time, I reminded myself that my previous experience was a looongtime ago, and I’ve changed a lot since then. I also reminded myself that I understand my visual impairment and that there are ways I can alter the music to make it easier to see. As we got going, I became frustrated that I couldn’t ring the bell at the right time. Realizing I was stuck in my head and not oriented to my environment, I looked around at the other (also new) bell choir members. Everyone was struggling. Almost no one was ringing their bell on the beat because none of us (except the director) had done bell choir before. After a while, I realized I was catching on and that everyone had different rates of learning. Some people were learning to read music faster than I, but I was learning other parts more efficiently than others. All of that is normal. That’s just part of being in a choir. Once I realized all of this, I settled in and really enjoyed my experience. Had I gone along with my limbic mind (feeling scared and overwhelmed), I’d have been miserable.
In Conclusion
I share this with you because being able to recognize when you’re in fight or flight and having a strategy to get yourself out of it is a vital life skill. It enables you to have more positive relationships, gives you more options for how to respond, and gives you more opportunities in life. It also helps to keep your brain in a calmer state, making positive brain change possible and contributing to better brain health overall. Everyone gets triggered from time to time, so it’s not about avoiding all triggers. It’s about knowing how to get back to a positive emotional state when you get riled up. When you can do that, you can transform your life.