REDESIGN (WEEK 1)
DAY 6: SELF REFLECTION
Fill out Day 6 on your workbook. The hope with today’s exercise is to remind yourself that you have already overcome a lot in your life and the next battle can be won as well.
DAY 6 MICRO-SCIENCE
Placebo Effect
The brain is an incredible organ and one of its most fascinating abilities is to trick itself in countless ways. To understand why this is possible it is important to realize that the most of us view the brain as one entity that is always aware of what its different parts are up to. Similar to the way a basketball team has individual players but works in coordination with their teammates to make things happen. The brain doesn’t quite work like that, however, it’s more useful to think of the brain as a large city with so many moving parts that it would be impossible for each distinct part to know what the other parts were up to. Because the brain is so complex it makes sense that communication between different areas of the brain is not always seamless. This may explain why the brain is so suggestible and can convince itself of just about anything given the right circumstances. The placebo effect is one of those instances where the brain convinces itself that the medication, therapy, or even the surgery one is getting will be helpful. Then even if the treatment is a total sham, the treatment works and the patient gets better.
It is as if one area of the brain is yelling for pain relief and just wants you to do “something.” Another area of the brain receives information that your doing “something” about it and then the pain goes away. The “something” you did, however, may have just been to take a sugar pill with no active ingredients, but the part of the brain that had the original pain doesn’t really care. It is just happy that its responsibility to create action is complete. This is often why just picking up the phone to call your doctor often results in a dramatic drop in symptoms.
I tell you this only to point out the power of your thoughts to heal yourself. There are thousands of studies to show that the placebo effect works. The main point I’m trying to make is “DO SOMETHING” about your problems: talk to a therapist, phone a friend, take a walk and believe that it’s going to help you! Your brain can heal itself but it needs some indication that your taking control and taking action.
- FACT: People can know something is a placebo and still have their symptoms disappear shortly after taking the placebo.
- TAKEAWAY: The brain wants you to address the problem in some way and even if the brain knows it’s a sham it doesn’t care.
DAY 6 MEDITATION
Trauma Resilience
So often when we face a challenging stressor we forget all the hard times we have already been through and overcome. Those prior challenges, whether we acknowledge them or not, gave us trauma resilience that will help us overcome the next challenge. However, in the heat of the moment we never stop to think about what could go “right.” Our brains are quite adept at contemplating what “will” go “wrong,” but to counteract this human tendency it’s always helpful to remind ourselves that we have “been here before” so therefore we can “do it again.”
- FACT: Two sets of baby monkeys were studied. One set never left their mothers side for six months. The other set were periodically released into a cage with monkeys they didn’t know. At six months both sets were released into the cage with monkeys that were unfamiliar. The set of baby monkeys that had “gotten through” the stressful situation before adjusted well. The baby monkeys that had never gone through anything hard before failed miserably at adjusting.
- TAKEAWAY: Adversity makes us stronger. People with “easy” lives are actually at a disadvantage and can be quite fragile when a real stressor hits.
DAY 6 MEDITATION
Set the timer for three minutes and in your own head run through a timeline of your life and try to pick out all the tough times you have overcome. But most of all, regardless of the outcome of those challenges, remind yourself that you’re still here to tell the story.
DAY 6 MOVEMENT
Learned Helplessness
There were some amazing (and pretty unethical) studies done in the seventies looking at what a dog will do if he is stuck in a locked pen with a electrified floor. The researchers discovered that the dog will eventually give up trying to escape the cage and lie down, accepting there is no way out. The fascinating part, however, is that even after the fenced barricade is taken down, the dog will still not attempt to escape when they are electrified. The dogs were suffering from what psychologists today call “learned helplessness.” This is pretty crappy thing to do to a dog and it is a really crappy thing to do to a human. This same experiment plays out in the human world today when a child is called “stupid” at a young age. If you repeat a message enough times, whether it’s through electrifying a floor or labeling a human as incapable, the message becomes deeply engrained regardless of its truth. “Learned helplessness” for certain tasks then becomes the status quo for people who were told they were incapable in some way. Often times this results in people not even trying to complete a task at all, totally convinced they will fail before even starting.
DAY 6 MOVEMENT
Today’s task is to pick something that you have been told your “not good at” or pick something you have convinced yourself that your “not good at” and do that thing. For instance, if you gave up on being a good cook because your first four pies sucked, go and try to make a pie.