Super Brain (10 page)

By the same token, you should increase the predictable routines that help defend against stress. Everyone needs a good night’s sleep, regular exercise, a steady relationship, and a job they can count on. The regular habits aren’t just good for you in a vague general way—they help you avoid depression by training your brain in a positive direction.

As part of feeling helpless and hopeless, depressed people tend to be passive in stressful situations. Unable to see a fruitful way to fix such a situation, they deny themselves key decisions that might work; instead they lean toward making no decision, which rarely works.
They put up with the bad situation for too long. When depression isn’t present, you can generally figure out what to fix, what to put up with, and what to walk away from. Those are basic choices that you must make throughout your life.

If you know that you are prone to depression, it’s important for you to deal with problems more promptly and directly than you otherwise might, because the longer you wait, the more chance you give the depressed response to set in. I’m speaking of ordinary situations like a potential conflict at work, a teenager at home who is overstepping his curfew, or a partner who isn’t doing his part of the housework. Depression makes you overly sensitive to small triggers, leading to a sense of helpless resignation. But if you act early, before you reach this stage, you have room to manage an everyday stress and the energy to carry out your decision to do so. Learn how to make such decisions promptly, ignoring the little voice that warns you not to make waves. You’re not making waves; you’re heading the depressed response off at the pass.

The depressed response: Subtler causes of depression are more difficult to undo than outside stress
. If you don’t want to be overweight, it’s much easier to avoid putting on the pounds in the first place than losing them once they are on. The same holds true for depression. It’s much easier to learn the right response to stress than to unravel the wrong one. The right response involves emotional resilience, which allows you to let go of stress rather than to take it in. Undoing the wrong response requires retraining your brain. But even so, some overweight people manage to lose the pounds, and a brain that has been trained to respond with depression can be untrained.

We all have self-defeating responses, and we don’t like what they do to us. It takes time and effort to replace them with better alternatives. In the case of depression, it is now well recognized that changing the self-defeating beliefs of a depressed person can lead to recovery. Beliefs are like software programs that keep repeating the
same commands, only beliefs are more pernicious, since they dig in deeper with every repetition.

Here are some examples of the ingrained programming that automatically comes into play when you’re feeling depressed, followed by alternative beliefs that counter the depressed response:

TRADING OUT TOXIC BELIEFS

1. It’s all my fault
.

Instead, you could think: It’s not my fault, it’s nobody’s fault, the fault hasn’t been determined yet, it may be nobody’s fault,
or
finding fault does no good—we should be focusing on the solution.

2. I’m not good enough
.

Instead, you could think: I am good enough, I don’t need to compare myself to others, it’s not about good or bad, “good enough” is relative, I’ll be better tomorrow,
or
I’m on a learning curve.

3. Nothing will work out
.

Instead, you could think: Something will occur to me, things have a way of working out, I can ask for help, if one thing doesn’t work out, there’s always something else,
or
being pessimistic doesn’t help me find a solution.

4. I knew things would go wrong
.

Instead, you could think: No, I didn’t know, I’m second-guessing, I’m just feeling anxious, it will pass,
or
looking backward is only good if it leads to a better future.

5. I can’t do anything about it
.

Instead, you could think: I can do something about it, I can find someone to do something about it, I always have the option of walking out,
I need to study the situation more thoroughly,
or
being defeatist isn’t helping me make things better.

6. It was just a matter of time

Instead, you could think: I’m not a fatalist, this was unpredictable, this too shall pass, it never rains all the time,
or
being fatalistic robs me of free choice.

We are not saying that all the alternative beliefs work all the time. You must be flexible. The nasty trick of the depressed response is that it paints everything with the same brush. You feel helpless about repairing your car’s transmission (who wouldn’t?) but also about getting out of bed to face the day (a sign of depression). To become flexible, you must beat the depressed response at its own game.

How to do that? If your automatic reaction is associated with sadness, helplessness, and hopelessness, refuse to accept it. Give yourself a moment, take a deep breath, and refer to our list of alternative responses. Find one that works. This takes time and effort, but it will pay off. Learning a new response forms new neural pathways in the brain. It also opens doors. What kinds of doors? When you are depressed, you tend to be isolated, lonely, apathetic, inactive, passive, and closed to change. The new doors have exactly the opposite effect. By introducing a new response, you resist the temptation to fall back on old, stale beliefs. Instead of being isolated, you realize that other people are good for you. Instead of being passive, you see that taking charge is also good for you.

Another strategy is to break down the depressed response, which feels so overwhelming, into manageable pieces. The best tactic is to take one step at a time, choosing a piece you feel ready to handle. Inertia is depression’s best friend. You will always have a hump to get over before you can actually do something positive. So don’t turn the hump into a Himalayan peak.

Pushing yourself over the smallest hump urges the brain to give
up an old pattern for a new one. You are actually expanding your awareness when you let in fresh impulses from the source, which is the real you. Behind the mask of depression, which is a behavior tied to a fixed response, lies the real you, the core self that can direct the healing process. To put it simply, you alone have the power to create healing. Depression creates the illusion that all your power has been stripped away. In truth, once you find an opening, you can reclaim the real you, step by step.

The habit of depression: If you have ever lived around an alcoholic or any other addict, you know that they behave in predictable pendulum swings
. When they are sober or off the drug, they sincerely repent and never want to return to their habit. But when the addict is faced with a temptation to drink or shoot up or overeat or fly into a rage (depending on what their habit happens to be), their good intentions fly out the window. Willpower disappears, the habit takes control, and only getting a fix matters.

Depression also has an addictive side, in which sadness and hopelessness take charge. “I can’t be any other way” is the common cry of both the addict and the habitually depressed person. In many cases, a “good me” and a “bad me” are warring against each other. For the alcoholic, the “bad me” drinks, while the “good me” is sober. For the depressed person, the “bad me” is sad and hopeless, while the “good me” is happy and optimistic. But in truth depression casts its shadow over everything. The best moments are merely a prelude to a relapse. The “bad me” is going to win in the end; the “good me” is merely its pawn.

The war is unwinnable, every victory is only temporary, and the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth. When a war is unwinnable, why fight? The secret to beating any fixed habit is to stop fighting with yourself, to find a place inside that isn’t at war. In spiritual terms, that place is the true self. Meditation opens the way to reaching it; the world’s wisdom traditions affirm that no one
can be denied peace, calm, silence, the fullness of joy, and reverence for life. When people frown and tell me that they don’t believe in meditation, my response is that they must not believe in the brain, because four decades of brain research have proven that the brain is transformed by meditation, and now newer evidence suggests that genetic output also improves with meditation. That is, the right genes get switched on and the wrong ones switched off.

To challenge the depressed response, it’s not sufficient to simply go inward. You must activate your real self and bring it into the world. Until you can prove the usefulness of new responses and beliefs, the old ones will keep a foothold in your consciousness. You are very used to them, and they know the quickest way to return. Therefore, breaking the habit of depression involves doing a combination of inner work and outer work, as follows:

WORKING BOTH SIDES

INNER WORK: CHANGING WHAT YOU THINK AND FEEL

Meditate.

Examine your negative beliefs.

Reject self-defeating reactions to life’s challenges.

Learn new responses that are life-enhancing.

Adopt a higher vision of your life and live by it.

Recognize self-judgment and reject it.

Stop believing that fear is okay just because it’s powerful.

Don’t mistake moods for reality.

OUTER WORK: CHANGING YOUR BEHAVIOR

Reduce stressful conditions.

Find fulfilling work.

Don’t associate with people who increase your depression.

Find people who are close to who you want to be.

Learn to give of yourself. Be generous of spirit.

Adopt good sleep habits, and exercise lightly once a day.

Focus on relationships instead of distractions and endless consumerism.

Learn to re-parent yourself by finding mature, emotionally healthy people who can love, who are accepting, and who do not pass judgment.

Every physician and therapist has met hundreds of depressed people who desperately want help, but how many were on the road to recovery? Most put their faith in a pill or lapsed into a state of exhausted resignation. In some cases, drugs can relieve symptoms, but mild to moderate depression doesn’t require a disease model, which often does no good. Current findings bear this out: in cases of mild to moderate depression, antidepressants barely surpass the placebo response (which leads to improvement on average in 30 percent of patients). They become more effective only when the depression grows more severe.

The three elements we have been focusing on—outside causes, the depressed response, and the habit of depression—offer a new approach. They give you the power to reverse the underlying conditions of your depression. We aren’t saying that the cause of depression has been found, because in the end your depression is entangled with everything else in your life, including everything that is going on in your body.

Because of that, you must reshape your life on many levels, which you can only do consciously. Sometimes it takes very little to get out of depression, if escaping a bad job or a toxic marriage can be seen as simple. At least it’s direct. At other times depression is like a fog that cannot be grabbed in any one place. But fogs can lift. The best news is that the real you isn’t depressed and never has been. By setting out on the path to finding the real you, you will accomplish more than healing your depression. You will emerge into the light and see life in a new way.

PART 2
MAKING
REALITY

YOUR BRAIN,
YOUR WORLD

A
s you move through this book, you will see that mind, brain, and body work seamlessly together. Life is a continuous process. The deeper you master this process, the closer you are to arriving at the goal of super brain. A researcher like Rudy, looking at data about neuroplasticity, can marvel at how the brain creates new pathways. But the greater wonder is that mind can create matter. For that is actually happening in the brain, and it takes place thousands of times a second. Whether it is the rush you feel after winning the lottery, or the “fine free careless rapture” that the poet Robert Browning felt in the song of a thrush, both experiences require the brain to find a physical representation. Rapture needs chemistry, as does every other thought, feeling, and sensation. Neuroscience has established this fact quite firmly.

We want to take you to where real mastery lies, where “brain” doesn’t sit in its earthbound compartment while “mind” floats airily above. The difference between them is man-made and misleading. Mind and brain are merged, and the place where super brain is born lies at the control switch that you can learn to operate.

The subtle regions of awareness are where the real power lies.
When someone steps up to receive the Oscar for best picture, they often exclaim, “This is a dream come true!” Dreams are subtle but powerful. Your personal vision sets the course of your life in motion. But first it must set the brain in motion, after which come action, possibilities, opportunities, lucky breaks, and everything needed to make a dream come true. This process we will call reality making. It’s a continuous unfolding, and although science pays attention to the products of the brain—synapses, electrical potentials, and neurochemicals—these are gross expressions. Reality begins at a much subtler, invisible level.