Page 63 - Time Special Edition Alternative Medicine (January 2020)

nalized thoughts: planning, thinking and worrying. ingrained in the way these networks
Those internal ized thoughts are where trouble lies.
Everything that competes for our attention, he
explains, falls into one of three categories: threat,
pleasure or novelty. And unfortunately, we have
evolved to prioritize threat. That’s how early man
protected himself from mortal dangers like preda-
tors, flood and fire. Today most of the threats we
encounter are of our own making, such as anxiety
about upcoming engagements, guilt over things we
have done or said, and fears of the future. At first
glance, those “threats” don’t seem to pack the men-
ace of a hungry sabertooth cat. But they engulf our
attention like black holes all the same. And once we
are sucked in, it’s extremely difficult to free our-
selves from the gravitational pull.
Making escape even more sticky is the fact that a
stressful state often becomes the brain’s default set-
ting, one it slips into almost automatically. Blame
human biology. The plasticity of the brain allows its
frequently used nerves and networks to become well
worn, like a rutted country road, and your thoughts
end up stuck following routes that take them some-
where other than where you want them to go. Soon,
obsessing over perceived threats is your norm; you
go to bed with your head spinning with them and
wake up still churning. “This is nobody’s fault; it’s
Just as stress is often a learned pattern, so
too, with practice, is being in the moment.
are set up,”
Sood says.
The stress response was always meant to be an
emergency measure only, a quick and focused re-
action to impending and immediate disaster. But
modern-day threats—job security, your faltering
401(k), your daughter’s new boyfriend—tend to
linger. And neither our brains nor our bodies were
designed to manage that kind of sustained strain.
So they protest. And that rebellion takes the form of
heart disease, hypertension, stroke and depression.
Fortunately—and here is the point of Sood’s
training—just as those well-worn negative neu-
ral pathways can be created, they can also be re-
directed. The key is learning to recognize what it
feels like when you begin to slip into the default
state. Only then can you work on breaking free of
its grasp. Eventually what once took conscious effort
to adjust becomes another ingrained circuit—and
the new default. “It’s more a life skill than anything
else,” says Sood. Rebuilding that mental infrastruc-
ture means being able to focus on the task or expe-
rience at hand, shutting yourself off from any other
distracting thoughts. It’s what meditation experts
are advocating when they talk about “emptying the
mind” or “being in the moment,” and it’s what they
hope to accomplish when they ask clients to con-
centrate on their breathing. Of course, the more in-
grained the stress pathway, the more difficult this
seemingly uncomplicated task can be.
Sood says you just have to train your brain one
thought at a time. Be more attentive to external
rather than internal experiences. Start with those
very first thoughts of the morning: Don’t be en-
snared by responsibilities; welcome the day in-
stead by thinking about five individuals you love.
Picturing their faces one at a time, remind yourself
why you are grateful and happy to have them in your
life. Then, throughout the day, find reasons to take
10-minute breaks to draw yourself away from your
pressure-filled routines. When you’re with friends
or family members, treat them as if you are meeting
after a long time apart; pay attention to what they
say and how they are feeling. Sometimes a change
of scenery helps, so take a walk. Make sure it’s not a
march to the finish, though, consumed all the while
by the chaos in your head. The purpose of getting
away is to get away.
Oh, and if on one of your strolls you happen to
stop by a rosebush, you know what to do. 
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