America today has a handle on physical relaxation. We have our favorite Lazy Boy easy recliner with attached drink caddy that keeps the cold ones at our finger tips, as well as the four entertainment center remotes and the TV Guide. A few of us have even splurged on the $6000 Super Relaxomatic Shiatsu Massage chair with both the leg massagers and the hand massagers. So relaxation in the form of complete loss of the need for muscle motor function has been achieved. I guess the final step will be home versions of iron lungs so we don’t even need to breath on our own.
With such a technical mastery of the skills of physical relaxation, why are Americans so stressed out? Why have stressed caused diseases become so common? Why are the majority of Americans using some sort of mood altering medications or substances every day?
The answer to this question that I am going to give you is something you probably have never heard of or thought about – brain lateralization. What the heck is that? Shouldn’t I be focusing on core values, spiritual principles, heart connection, or at least meditation exercises?
Yes, these are all valuable paths to greater mental and emotional relaxation, but do you understand why? I believe that with understanding you can creatively adapt to find ease in any life situation. When all you have is specific exercises and concepts to focus on, you become somewhat frustrated because you tell yourself you know what you need to do, but you just don’t have the time to do it right now. You accept being stressed out now and tell yourself you will do some yoga, or meditate, or read from spiritual works when you have time later tonight.
What if there was a way of understanding your brain that allowed you to move into relaxation any time without loosing your action momentum? What if this understanding could even improve your efficiency and effectiveness in your work and personal life, while simultaneously improving your mental and emotional health? Sound interesting?
Here is the concept in a nutshell. There are lots of parts to our brain. The most obvious distinction is the separation between the right brain and the left brain. For simplicity I will write about lateralization between these two halves of the brain, but understand that integration of all the different parts of the brain is what we are seeking.
Different areas of the brain do different things. For example when we look at something with our eyes, the visual image is broken up into lots of aspects and processed in different areas of the brain. One part of the brain sees the edges of things, another sees color, another sees relative light value differences, several other parts reassemble these parts and compares the compilation to memory for recognition of what we are looking at. Still other parts of the brain add in our historical relationship to the interpreted image and any emotional reactions are mixed in. This is all shuttled to the action assessment part of the brain to see if we want or need to react to the image in some way. If so, then this information has to be sent to the motor cortex to initiate muscle action, and so on…
The brain is complex. What would happen if parts of this whole process were shut down? How would you see if you could not process the edges of things? What do you do if you don’t have the ability to recognize things? As you can imagine, if any part of this complexly integrated process is inhibited, we will encounter major stress. We will not be happy.
Neurology has studied people with brain injuries to specific areas that produce exactly these kinds of problems. It is very challenging for folks with brain injuries to cope with life.
Most of us spend much of our day with a major brain dysfunction caused by brain lateralization. I believe this problem is the most common cause, the actual origin of our stress. Our cognitive processing occurs primarily in the front of our brain. The two halves process very differently. Typically the left side processes focused logical thinking, mathematics, and threat assessment, while the right half processes global integration, artistic appreciation, and feeling relationships.
Depending on the situation we are in, most of us will use one side of our brain primarily to process life and how we relate to it. How frequently we choose the same side forms our personality. If we want to balance our checkbook we use our left brain. If we want to connect in a loving way with our loved one, we will tend to shift into right brain processing. This makes sense to us because we are accustomed to things working this way. Some people almost always stay in their left brain to relate to the world, while others prefer to stay in their right brain all the time. Everyone is different as to when they choose to use one side or the other. Using just one side is brain lateralization.
Here is the big picture I want to share. We are designed to use our whole brain all the time. Any time we don’t use our whole brain we get stressed. We have gotten used to the feeling of working from only one side of our brain at a time and so generally don’t recognize the stress involved, but it is there. Where we do feel the stress is when we encounter a life challenge that our chosen brain half does not know how to relate to. Most often that side of the brain is not built to deal with these types of challenges, while the unused side deals with them easily. But if we are lateralized, we can’t access the processing skills of our unused side. Because we don’t know how to deal with life we feel bad and seek out medications and drugs to block the bad feelings.
If however we allowed ourselves full access to both sides of our brain, most challenges would be met with ease and grace. Sometimes we have to make leaps in maturation to meet a challenge, but even these leaps are much easier when we have a whole brain to work with.
But sadly, we train ourselves from very early ages to ignore one half of our brain and preferentially use the other half. This may be because we want to please a parent by being like them, or the nature of our life challenges may force us to use one side most of the time to cope with the demands on us. Culturally there is simply no support for whole brain thinking. If you are raised in a culture of artists, they will vilify left-brain thinking, while a culture of hard-core realists will negate airy-fairy thinking from the right brain.
So how do we start to build whole brain thinking? The first step is to value whole brain thinking. Challenge yourself to see the value of the thinking processes of people who are very different from you. See life through other people’s eyes. Feel life differently. This will start to exercise your non-dominant brain hemisphere. If you are the artistic sort, find ways to see the mathematical geometries in structures you appreciate. If you are a left brain dominate, work on feeling appreciation for different flavors of foods.
There is a natural cycle of brain processing. Every 20 minutes your brain wants to shift sides in processing. This is paralleled by a shift in which nostril you will dominantly breath through – right nostril for left-brain and left nostril for right brain. I believe this has to do with using the sinuses to cool the blood flow to each hemisphere differently based on activity. We can use this physiological nostril breathing effect on the brain to train/exercise our ability to use both hemispheres. Alternate nostril breathing is a yogic technique used for thousands of years for this exact purpose. Simply find a relaxed posture and use your finger along side the nostril to block airflow as needed. Breathe in through the right nostril slowly then exhale slowly through the left nostril, then inhale through the left nostril and exhale through the right. Repeat this process for several minutes. There, you have trained your brain to do a bit of whole brain functioning.
Another simple technique I show patients in the office is to lightly touch and hold the area of the forehead above both eyes simultaneously with the first two fingers of each hand. These reflex points open up the blood flow in the midbrain area to help us process anxiety and decrease stress. As we do this the communication between the right and left hemispheres begins to open up and balance.
Whole brain functioning looks more like processing is alternating between each side fairly quickly – maybe 30 seconds each side back and forth. But in reality, once you have the skill fully in place, both sides are processing simultaneously. It is only your focus of attention that is shifting back and forth. It’s looking at everything from many different angles at a time.
I am just lightly touching on a very deep subject here, but the core idea is that the actual origin of most of our stress is that we have not allowed ourselves to use our full brain capacities to deal with life. Without full brain functioning we are not able to chart solutions in our life that meet the needs of both our heart and our head. The resulting failures to resolve these challenges in our life replay over and over as the stories of stress we live day by day.