This is the twenty-first in a series of articles where I take a look at key words and phrases that play an important role in the work I do, helping people discover ways to live and love like they mean it.
You can view the entire series here.
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Although we’re all molded and shaped by our early experiences, we don’t have to remain prisoners of our past. And even though our brain is wired to respond in a certain way, it can still change and grow.
That’s right—we can actually change the way our brain is wired. Sure, we can’t erase our past programming. But we can create new pathways that are able to override what’s already there.
In other words, we can “upgrade our wiring” so that fear no longer needs to be entangled with the fibers of our feelings.
Why Can Rewiring Be Required?
Experiences with our caregivers in our early years are instrumental in establishing the early wiring of our brain. But for many of us, our adult brain is still operating on wiring that was established in these first few years of our lives. Wiring that informs us how to be and, equally important, how not to be in the world.
But for many of us this wiring is outdated and not applicable to present day living. So instead of loving or living like we really mean it, we move forward on autopilot, at the mercy of our old brain wiring. Without a clue that outdated wiring is in control, we wonder why we’re having such a hard time, why our relationships aren’t more satisfying, and why we don’t feel more connected. We ask ourselves, “Is this as good as it gets?”
Only when we recognize and attend to what’s going on inside of us and find the courage to open up and be fully present with ourselves and in our relationships, can this picture really change.
Change is Proven Possible
In the last few years, great advances have been made in the field of neuroscience that have changed our understanding of how the brain works, develops, and changes. While we used to think that the hardwiring of our brain was set in stone by the time we reached adulthood, it’s now well understood that the brain is “plastic”. That means it remains malleable over a lifetime and reorganizes or “rewires” itself in response to new experiences—a process that is known as neuroplasticity.
How to Upgrade the Wiring
The key to upgrading this wiring lies in having new experiences with our emotions in which we allow ourselves to be more fully present with our feelings and eventually come to experience them free from fear.
The more we avoid and fear new experiences, the less opportunity we have to face and overcome those fears. If we keep avoiding our feelings, we’ll never know what good can come from being with them. We’ll never see that they really aren’t something we need to fear. We’ll just keep traveling down those old pathways that get us nowhere.
To change, we need to make a concerted effort to travel in a different direction. We need to find a way to face and diminish our fears and begin to experience our feelings in a new and positive way.
Over time, the more we travel in this new direction, the more we experience and manage our feelings, the more our fear will melt away. And while we’re doing this, we’re actually rewiring our brain. We’re breaking the old associations between fear and our emotions and laying down new pathways in which having and expressing our feelings are now experienced as something positive.
It’s Not Easy
It’s hard to try something new, to travel down an unknown path. We’re likely to feel anxious about doing it. When I finally began to make space for my feelings, I was practically frozen with fear, like the proverbial deer in the headlights. I had no idea of what to expect, and it terrified me. But there is a solution that can make facing our fears less scary. The trick is finding a way to begin to reduce anxiety enough so that we can start to dip our feet in and give being with our feelings a shot. We don’t have to jump in all at once. Just a little bit at a time.
The Role of Emotional Mindfulness
Doing the same thing over and over again won’t lead to change. That will only reinforce what we’re doing already. Instead, we need to do something different, something new. We need to have the kinds of experiences that will grow our capacity to be emotionally present with ourselves and others—the kinds of experiences that will help us to develop what I call “emotional mindfulness”.
This way of being, as the phrase implies, is mindfulness with a particular emphasis on our emotional experience. Remember, while our early relational wiring is evident in the ways in which we respond to our feelings, the whole process is largely unconscious. We don’t realize what’s going on inside of us—that we’re having feelings and responding to them in unhelpful ways. We don’t realize that we’ve been triggered and mental models for dealing with our emotions in our relationships have taken over. But, we need to. The way out is by attending to our emotional experience.
Emotional mindfulness applies the basic principles of mindfulness, or moment-to-moment awareness, to our emotional experience. Simply put, it’s about attending to, being present with, and making good use of our feelings—both with ourselves and with others.
Practicing the skills of emotional mindfulness changes the way our brain operates. By focusing our attention in positive and constructive ways, we can free ourselves from old habits and fears, befriend our emotional experience, and develop new ways of relating. Rather than suppressing or acting out, we can find a balanced way of being with our experience in which we can abide and work with what’s inside of us and engage with our partners in a healthier, more meaningful way.
The Benefits of Emotional Mindfulness
Cultivating the skills of emotional mindfulness isn’t just a good idea—it’s now empirically proven to alleviate distress, optimize functioning, and improve our overall mental health. Following the publication of my book in 2009, Living Like You Mean It: Use the Wisdom and Power of Your Emotions to Get the Life You Really Want, the emotional mindfulness-based self-help approach that I introduced there was used as the basis for research conducted through Linköping University in Sweden. Several studies in which participants read about and practiced tools to develop emotional mindfulness, found it to be an effective treatment for anxiety, depression, and social anxiety.[i]
As we clear away the static caused by our old wiring, reflection helps to shift and expand our point of view, enabling us to more objectively see ourselves, our partners, and our relationship dynamics.
When we’re mindful, we can see the path toward freedom. We can slow things down. We can stretch the space between stimulus and response and make a choice that’s more aligned with our greater good.
