To free the mind, we must first release the body
This week, the Everyday Mystic considers how we can rewire our anxiety-ridden brain, with techniques that focus on the physical body
I always thought I had a really good memory but the older I get the more fallible I realise it to be. Memory is reconstruction, not simply recollection. To make a memory the brain stores a map, a set of neural markers with details of how they connect to recreate events and information. We reconstruct events or information from the map. It's all terribly fallible as several cognitive elements can influence or even distort memory.
Not only can we misremember, but we can give importance to some elements over others. We give precedence to the traumatic event but not to the fact that we survived it; that’s evolutionary biology at work. If we didn’t, we’d very likely find ourselves in the traumatic situation again, and this time not be as lucky.
Memory depends on perception at the time and lots of other influencing factors, such as stress level, how well the body is functioning and even our vitamin B12. Not to mention, it places what’s important to the person making the memory at the top of the list. When we say ‘making memories’, we are exactly right.
This means that we store not only the map of memory but also all feelings surrounding them. Gabor Maté says the body keeps the score. I’m not so sure it’s just that. The body knows what the brain has encoded. It plays the music, but it’s the brain that calls the tune. The body is the interpreter between the world and our consciousness but that’s a two-way street. It tells the brain what’s happening, but the brain tells it what happened and may happen.
Every event can have significance, but negative experiences take precedence because they are cautionary tales. That is unless the experience is too traumatic and in that case, the memory may be blocked, hidden or not formed at all.
Anniversaries are a case in point. They are prompts for our brains and consequently our bodies to be alert to the possibility of pattern repetition. If it’s a good event, we feel excitement, and if it’s not so good, we feel anxiety.
At an anniversary we are particularly susceptible because our brain and body are on alert for similar circumstances. After all. our brain is a pattern recognition engine also, and all because anything can be seen as a potential threat.
Excitement is our brain putting a positive spin on anticipation. The expectation that things will work out in our favour otherwise, we’d never try anything that had a risk element. However, when this becomes worry, problems can start.
Even if life was just series of seemingly inconsequential negatives, one piled on top of another for years, the brain and body can stitch them together to form a low, nagging anxiety.
Even where there is no evidence of traumatic experience our brains are on high alert because of the huge volumes of information that we ask the brain to process. Alongside this is the idea that it’s largely the wrong kind of information. Relentless streams telling us to be relentless cause our brains to assume that threat is constant. The information is also at odds with how our evolutionary biology works. We’re simply not wired to be ‘always on’. That’s why contact with the natural world is so calming. We’re turning down the stimulus, asking the brain to process less artificial information and more of the stuff it’s designed for.
Now imagine someone carrying trauma who has to negotiate the information overload. The brain, already on high alert, can become either supercharged into constant anxiety or overwhelmed into the numbness of depression.
The body sees the potential for events to replay everywhere, all the time. Think of it as a constant reminder of anniversary after anniversary. Until we remap our brain our body will continue to feel the effect of negative, threat-based memories. To do the rewiring and remapping, we have to create a different response and that can only be done by telling the brain that we are safe.
To do that isn’t just a matter of understanding why an event caused us to feel a particular way. We have to actively engage with the brain through the body and vice versa. No amount of intellectual understanding will complete the process until the body feels safe too.
It can seem like a catch twenty-two. The body has to feel safe but it can’t until the brain changes its outlook and the brain won’t as long as the body doesn’t feel safe. That’s why therapies that teach coping, reframing and somatic techniques (relating to the body as distinct from the mind) are vital. They remap the brain in tandem with convincing the body that the environment isn’t out to get you.
These therapies use body awareness, breath work and movement exercises to be more aware of bodily sensations and release stored emotions, while other therapies work on making sense of the why of it all.
I can assure you they can work miracles together. I did all the cognitive therapy in understanding the reasons for my patterns of thought, behaviour, and reaction. It was only when I added the idea of telling my body to relax and not be anxious in tandem did I finally let go of the nagging feeling of ‘missing something.
Mind, body and soul are cooperating, finally, and life is good. I live at peace with my own body, and it isn’t being loaded by my brain hanging on to the past like a millstone, and if I can learn it, you can too.