How Understanding Neuroscience Helps Me Get Unstuck

Last Friday, when a friend of mine and I walked around outside, we bumped into each other walking by accident, but it was normal for me. Usually, when I bump into someone, especially a male, I feel like I brushed against a hot stove, and I feel burned and singed somehow. But when I bumped into this particular friend, I felt nothing. And, when he had a drink at the pizza place where we eat—I don’t know if it’s liquor or not, but it looks like it to me—I had no instant bad memories. Usually, when someone is drinking what I think is an alcoholic beverage, I am catapulted into bad memories immediately. But I’m not when I’m with this particular friend. It is amazing how plastic the brain is, isn’t it? How new experiences can form new neural pathways. My understanding of neural plasticity is that the brain can both learn and unlearn unwanted ways of thinking in favor of new, better ways of coping. But this type of learning takes time. When I blame my brain cells, how brain cells function, rather than blame myself for repetitive mistakes, it creates a willingness in me to try new styles of coping. It allows me to sort of play around with or try on new ways of acting. Self-blame keeps me stuck. Realizing that it’s my brain and not me that is keeping me stuck helps a lot. I’ve read a lot of books on how limited the human brain is. These books help me to understand how and why my brain works the way it does and help me be more patient and compassionate with my emotional self. When I pamper my emotional self, I feel heard and I sort of validate myself, and this creates enough space for me to step away from the behavior that I know and try something brand new. I see that, for me, to become healthy, to work on recovery, I must let go completely of many of the ways I’ve been thinking and coping over the last 40 years. And it takes huge amounts of faith to abandon what I know in favor of something I’ve had no experience with. Finding compassion for myself helps me make these huge leaps of faith. Understanding neurobiology confirms that yes, I am a human being, limited, and allowed many mistakes but still able to grow and learn … over time, through taking risks, again and again. In this respect, my symptoms are like habits; they are structured responses to certain stimuli that have formed over time. This means that I can unlearn them too, but with Practice, Time, Patience, and COMPASSION FOR SELF during this learning phase. Self-compassion gives one the patience to be kind to oneself, and self-compassion gives one the right to take the time to learn and make mistakes and go through the normal trial-and-error process of practicing a new skill or behavior before it can become a routine. I can unlearn my behavioral symptoms. I separate my symptoms into behavioral ones and cognitive ones. In the past, I assumed that what I thought drove how I behaved, that how I thought about what was happening determined how I interpreted what was happening as either good or bad, and that this value judgment then drove my emotions, with my emotions in turn driving my behavior. But now I know that I can change those old neuronal relationships, those old neural pathways and connections, by withstanding the uncertainty of the unknown, ie, by trying “on” or trying out new responses, by engaging in new, unfamiliar behaviors. This feels sort of like putting the horse before the cart, where I change my behavior first, without changing my thoughts. Without yet understanding why I do something, I figure out where I want to be or how I want to feel emotionally, and I aim to feel that way the next time a situation arises that pushes my buttons. I practice the feeling change before the thought change. This sort of opens the door to a brand new way to view a situation. I have then created a new reality—I have opened up the possibility of another way to cope. For instance, at a restaurant today, I was feeling intense paranoia and wanted to hide under the table. But, instead, I watched my friend, and he appeared calm and almost sleepy. He was resting his face on his hand, with his elbow on the table. He looked casual and unencumbered. I tried on the same stance, I too rested my arm on the table with my face on my hand and adjusted my facial expression to match his. Then I did not need to hide under the table. It may seem at first that changing a behavior won’t work. Like, the behavior change won’t stick unless you understand why and how the behavior is driven. But I have learned that this is not always true. I suffer with a very stubborn mental illness, and out of sheer desperation to feel better, to get out of paranoia and self-sabotage, I decided that my brain is only doing what it’s always done and that it is not my fault that I keep repeating the same old maladaptive behaviors. My brain is in a rut, plain and simple. I am not choosing bad behavior. I am not being willful or lazy or stubborn. My brain has created a groove so deep that it literally cannot do anything different. As in the television commercial in which the elderly person shouts “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” I too have fallen into a hole and can’t get out. It’s not my fault that I do bad things, it’s my brain’s fault. And once I realize how human it is to fall into a rut, to acquire and maintain a habit, then I can relax and stop beating myself up for being so “stupid.” I can stop feeling self-hatred for being so “lazy” and instead can shake off this bad behavior with a laugh, and say to myself, “That old brain of mine! There it goes again, getting stuck again. I will just roll up my sleeves and go about the calculated business of finding my way out of this habit.” To get out of the rut, I take small steps to change the old behavior into a new one that I have determined will give me the outcome that I want. Change then becomes more of a step-by-step math equation, where if I do A then I will get B, and if I do B then I will get C. I become more hopeful as I begin to see that there are definite things I can do every day to work on changing into who I want to be and how I’d rather be feeling, which is to feel good, to feel better about myself, to believe that I can rather than that I’m screwed and I can’t. I write down a plan; I write down a plan in steps so I can plainly chart my progress. And it is always encouraging to see progress. You may think that changing behavior alone is not effective and that in order to obtain lasting change, you must understand why you are doing something. But this is not necessarily so. I can change my behavior much quicker than I can change my patterns of thinking, and, luckily, simply changing how I do things (changing my behavior) positively influences why I do them (changes my thinking) too.