Hot and Bothered

Yesterday was the first day of spring.  Where I live, the temperature was a record-breaking 83 degrees F.  And today, the record set yesterday was broken when temperatures reached 84.  This comes at the tail of a record-setting string of March days above 70 degrees.

While the unseasonably warm weather has been mostly enjoyable, it is also worrisome.  And I gather, from what I've been reading in the brain science literature, that I am unlikely to be the only one who is "going there" in these unusual circumstances--our brains being wired, as they are, to respond anxiously and to look for the dark side.

So what am I worried about?

Well, of course, there's the whole global warming thing.  As I shed my accustomed layers, I can't help but think of Al Gore's friend, the boiling frog.  Having taking my share of science classes, I get that we shouldn't freak out about a strong trend that may prove to be insignificant in the long run.  But still . . .

And then there is my immediate concern with the flora in my region, my neighborhood, and my yard.  On NPR's All Things Considered last week, in a segment entitled "What's the Impact of Early Blooms?," Melissa Block interviewed Jake Weltzin, an ecologist and the executive director of the USA National Phenology Network.  Phenology, Block informed her listeners, is the the study of the effect of climate on the life cycles of plants and animals.  Phenologist Weltzin told us that

We are seeing strong trends almost wherever we look.  In the last decade, we're actually now starting to be able to say OK, well, we see patterns of plants and animals coming earlier.  And we have better and better climatological records, temperature records, and we can start to link those together.  And there's a paper coming out it seems every week now that's saying OK, here's a trend in bees coming out 10 days earlier over the last 130 years, and we can attribute that to warming temperatures.

When Ms. Block asked "If a plant or tree does bloom or leaf out early, does that affect its seasonal cycle for the rest of the year?," Dr. Weltzin answered, it seems to me ominously, that

We don't really know for a lot of plants. And we're just starting to get that information organized. Some plants do, indeed, have a deterministic life cycle, which means that if they come up early they will shut down early. Others are indeterministic and they'll grow and grow and grow all season long.

He was clearer about bugs, asserting that early bug growth is correlated with early plant growth, and that scientists are concerned about more problems from "bad bugs" this summer--like the mosquitoes who carry West Nile virus, for example.

On Monday, I opened the local paper to learn that "Wisconsin maple producers endure worst year in memory," answering Friday's question from a Yahoo contributor "Will an Early Spring Ruin Your Pancakes?  Yes, apparently.


On top of global warming, plants and bugs running amok, and the end of breakfast as we knew it, there is my fear of a blisteringly hot summer.  Again, I am not alone, as readers and callers, columnists and bloggers and weather analysts have expressed this apprehension.  And again, "scientific" study yields little in the way of clarity or prediction.  All seem agreed.  This summer may be hotter than usual.  And it may not be.

So to review.  We are probably experiencing global warming, but we kind of knew that, right?  The plants and trees are all screwed up, and we're in for a swarm of bugs, which were already in evidence in my grandchildren's backyard yesterday--several weeks ahead of schedule.  And it may or may not be extra hot this summer.

All of this should probably not stop me from enjoying the blooming violets and primroses encountered on my walk today; or the reprieve from wearing the heavy winter coat I'm entirely sick of after six months; or the opportunity to sit in the grass with my summer clad grandkids this afternoon.  Indeed, neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, author of Buddha's Brain:  The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom advises us to soak up such positive sensations and experiences to counteract that negativity that is our brain's natural state. 

So I guess I'll just have to suck it up and deal with the balminess, the sunshine, and the gift of this crazy unseasonal season.  And anyway, it's supposed to rain tomorrow.

Brain Basics: A User's Cheat Sheet

In the category of resurrected wisdom . . .

Some months ago, I bookmarked an article I came across that was originally published in August of 2009, more than a year before I started writing Put it to Bed.  I have a whole store of such resources, kind of a personal tidbit library.  I periodically visit this cluttered virtual chamber, in search of "writing juice," something that will trigger the process of thought and invention that gives me something to say.

This particular piece caught my eye at the time, and again this morning, because its title resonated with the self-help fatigue that intermittently overcomes those of us who tend to read our way through problems.  "Why do so many self-help books sound the same?" was written by neuroscientist Dr. David Rock for his Psychology Today blog Your Brain at Work:  Using Neuroscience to Improve Daily Life.

In it he says 

It's not that authors are plagiarists, it's that there are a small set of quirks about the brain that require a lot of attention, if you want to succeed in the modern world. The reason these quirks require attention is that they are not insights we might learn automatically, like how to breathe: they require learning, like a language. And these quirks are often hard to remember because in many cases they go against what seems logical.

He identifies the following as five of the bigger quirks:

• The brain is built to firstly minimize danger, before maximizing rewards. This means people tend to naturally err on the side of cautious, even when the opposite would be better. This is an overarching organizing principle of the brain.

• Too much uncertainty feels dangerous. It feels like possible pain so we avoid it.

• Our conscious processing capacity is small, which makes us terrible at a lot of things, including predicting what might make us happy.

• Our capacity to regulate emotions is limited, depletes fast and needs to be used quickly to be effective.

• Our intentions and goals alter the information that the brain pays attention to.

So this is why I struggle with procrastination, and why I spend so much time reading about procrastination.  Because, although I am not encountering so much that's cutting edge, uncharted, or unique, still I need to hear what I already know, at some level, again.  And again.  And yet again.  In picking up one more "handbook," "guide" or "program," I am setting my intention; giving my tiny conscious processing capacity another shot at the material; becoming more familiar with the unknown and uncertain; and learning more about what will make me happy.  

Sometimes I wonder why we ever left the cave.  We are apparently so ill-equipped for the world we inhabit.  We inherit this life-long project of training our outgrown brains for the way we want to live.  And it's a lot of work . . .

Procrastinating 101: Of Old Brains and New Conditions

Chapter 3 of The Procrastination Equation:  How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done, by Dr. Piers Steel, is entitled "Wired for Procrastination:  Putting Off is Human Nature."  And that's what I love about it.

No, not the title, silly--the brain-science-based humanity of Dr. Steel's depiction of this oh-so-common behavioral pattern.  [Note:  not "affliction," "scourge," "condition," "pathology," or "curse."]

In Dr. Steel's view, we put things off because of the way our brains are built.  Procrastination is the unintended consequence of a process of natural selection that favored individuals who approached the four "F's"--feeding, fighting, fleeing, and [ahem] mating--with just a bit too much alacrity, i.e., responded quickly/impulsively.  Freud spoke of a horse and rider, Plato of a split team of horses drawing one chariot--and much later, the Heath brothers relied on Jonathan Haidt's elephant and rider (see my earlier blog posts on their brilliant book, Switch:  How to Change Things When Change is Hard) to describe the difficulties we experience in governing our actions.  In Steel's account, these metaphors grow up, ala neuroscience, and become the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex.

The limbic system, seat of emotion and desire, drives procrastination, as the overmatched prefrontal cortex, with its executive functions of planning and future orientation, struggles to exert control over our hardwired impulsiveness. These structures of the brain evolved because of survival advantages enjoyed by individuals with the characteristics they embody.  But evolution is tripped up by the considerable lag time in the millenia it takes for change to occur.  Thus, the world for which our brain was adapted no longer exists.  It has been supplanted by one in which our developed reproductive edge becomes--you guessed it, p-r-o-c-r-a-s-t-i-n-a-t-i-o-n!

But let Dr. Steel himself tell it like it is:

In the environment where we evolved, we drank when thirsty, ate when hungry, and worked when motivated.  Our urges and what was urgent were the same.  When we started to anticipate the future, to plan for it, we put ourselves out of step with our own temperament, and had to act not as nature intended.  We are all hardwired with a time horizon that is appropriate for a more ancient and uncertain world, a world where food quickly rots, weather suddenly shifts, and property rights have yet to be invented.  The result is that we deal with long-term concerns and opportunities with a mind that is more naturally responsive to the present.  With paradise lost and civilization found, we must forever struggle with procrastination.

This neuropsychological structuralism presents the same difficulty as the structuralist sociological theories, French and otherwise, that confounded me as a graduate student long ago.   Then, it was the problem of preserving agency and mutability, while avoiding  "bootstraps" prescriptions and blaming the victim.  In identifying social and economic "structures" that explained individual situations too neatly, there sometimes appeared little room for change, particularly for those individuals on the bottom.  Here, in the science of the newly imageible brain, the temptation to "blame" our brains for our lack of self-control presents itself.  "The dog ate my homework" could easily become "My amygdala made me do it."

However, Dr. Steel doesn't plan to let us off the hook so easily.

Bottom line:  procrastination is not our fault, but we have to deal with it nonetheless.

The book's subtitle and its opening paragraphs contain more than a hint that we readers are going to be held to an expectation of pulling ourselves up from postponement, with or without bootstraps.

Along the way, if this chapter, and the companion pieces I located on YouTube are any indication, we are in for an instructive, nonjudgemental, and entertaining time of it.   Cesar Milan, Left 4 Dead, Seinfeld. . . this guy is watching my TV, and playing video games with my sons.  And demonstrating his bona fides as a once-if-not-future king of procrastination. 

Dr. Piers Steel on The Neurobiology of Procrastination

Next week, it looks like sociology's turn, in Chapter 4--"ProcrastiNations:  How Modern Life Ensures Distraction."

Done for the Week: More Time on the Hamster Wheel

Another week.  Another few dollars.  And continuing fatigue and overcommitment.  It must be midwinter.

Here's what I slogged my way through last week. 

Done for the Week:  Feb. 7-13

1. Continued off-season race training, still fighting a sinus infection and an intestinal bug; biked once
2. Finished Buddha's Brain:  The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom, by Rick Hanson
3. Stepped up volunteer support to transitioning nonprofit, due to death in colleague's family
4. Worked my two part-time jobs
5. Published 5 blog posts
6. Wrote 3 Gratitude Journal entries
7. Meditated 3 times
8. Attended candidates' forum on county's jobs emergency
9. Watched our 2 teams play 2 basketball games
10. Attended Issues Night
11. Attended showing of 9500 Liberty and panel discussion on anti-immigrant legislation
12. Attended two yoga classes
13. Learned some new html tricks
14. Babysat for my grandson; watched Babe (the Pig)
15. Spent two scheduled sessions on "novelling"
16. Took my dog to the dog park with my son and husband
17. Had Happy Hour soup date with my husband
18. Sent medical information to my sister, to help with my mom's care

Last week's focus goal was to "ease into the coming week, and to resist getting drawn into the vortex of other people's agendas."  This goal fell victim to the unexpected death of my colleague's brother, which led me to take up some significant slack in our organization's ongoing overload of work and crises.  What can I say?  If there is some other way to handle this kind of thing, I don't know what it is.  The best I can aim for, I suppose, is to trim my list of "subject to's," so that there are fewer goads to abandonment of my "best laid plans."  I will keep the same focus goal for the coming week, and try to breath before volunteering, or assenting to requests.

As I continue to try to endure, and not magnify, the stress of my life at this stage, I am helped by others' suggestions and outlooks.  This past week, I followed the recommendation of my yoga teacher, and read Rick Hanson's Buddha's Brain:  The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom, item 2, in red, on the list above.  My rapid response assessment this morning--as I prepare to rush out the door to a family birthday breakfast, followed by a protest rally, office time and an afternoon of child care, a birthday dinner and movie, and a few other things I'm going to try to cram in--is that reading this book was the most important thing I did last week.  I will write more about it later, but obviously its subject pertains to my never-ending battle for . . .

And now, I'm off to try to put into practice some of what I learned.

Songs From Inside the Chrysalis: My Playlist for Befriending Change

On the heels of yesterday's post about change fatigue, I'm ready to change my tune (sorry, pun intended).  Many of the things I've been reading lately about neuroplasticity argue against staying stuck in word-mode--my favorite hang-out.  Music is often mentioned as another avenue to brain change.  Of course, my music therapist friend could have told me long ago (but didn't, probably because she couldn't get a word in edgewise!) about music's positive effects on brain waves, breathing and heart rate, and state of mind, as well as its other potential health benefits. 

I am not sure, not having made a thorough study of this area, if we should be looking to genre, tempo, rhythm, intonation, form, or some other musical aspect as we seek to employ this art form instrumentally (eek!  another pun!).  I have seen reference to possible negative effects of music, so I suppose I am taking some chances here.  But I decided to throw caution to wherever it is that hesitance might be jettisoned, and choose some tunes to listen to.  The hope is that their sentiments might inspire and move, if not sooth, this halting changer.  

This approach is clearly not neuroscience, or a valid investigation of--well, anything.  The idea is merely to try an aural wash of change, to see what happens when I listen to a dose of change songs.

In addition to  focusing, in typical word-aholic fashion, on lyrics, I chose the following songs for personal listenability, applying my own general taste along with a sense of adventure.  Every one of them has the word "change," or one of its declensions, in the title.   Each is linked to iTunes, to allow readers to hear a brief sample, or to purchase the entire song.  Because iTunes and I apparently don't use the same sampling criteria, I have provided lyrics excerpts. 

1.  Changing Inside,  Mark Abis

These days I’m walking the road alone

Returning once again to my only real home

Waking up early, staying up late

Reading a book I borrowed from my friend the heavy weight

Finding a new way to begin

Living without but living within

My eyes are opening to what might appear

As waking up to the simple fact that I’m here

2.  I Am Changing, Jennifer Holliday

I am changing, seeing everything so clear now
I am changing, I'm gonna start right now, right here
I'm hoping to work it out, and I know that I can

3.  Forever Changing, The Owls

the time to finally begin
will go right when you appear


forever changing
you don't have to hurry
forever changing
you don't have to worry

4.  Dream About Changing, Sally Seltmann

I close my eyes and dream about changing. 


I'm sailing a ship on a lake that never runs dry.
Something exciting because I'm a little I'm a little bit shy.


Girl comes running with a book in her hand
I open to the first page it says 'yes you can

5.  Changing All Those Changes, Buddy Holly

I should have reconsidered all those things I said I'd do
so now I'm changing all those changes
that I made when I left you

6.  Changing Horses, Dan Fogelberg

Looking farther than you'll ever hope to see
Takes you places you don't know
Search for someone you can't ever hope to be
And still you go
Oh, still you go

7.  Better Change, Fogelberg again

You better change before the sun goes down
You better leave before you are the last in town
You better raise your fortresses or tear them down
Tear them down...tear them down

8.  Ever Changing Times, Aretha Franklin

And me, ever changing time
Everything is going so much faster
It seems like I'm
Watching my life, and everything I do
Wonder if the dreams that I believed in
Can still come true

9.  Changing, Four Bitchin' Babes,

People I used to be
don't even say hello to me
I'd like to introduce my selves to each other
But they keep. . .

10.  Changing Opinions, Philip Glass

Maybe it's the hum
Of changing opinion
Or a foreign language
In prayer
Maybe it's the mantra
Of the walls and wiring
Deep breathing
In soft air

11.  Change, Tracy Chapman

How bad, how good does it need to get?
How many losses? How much regret?
What chain reaction would cause an effect?
Makes you turn around,
Makes you try to explain,
Makes you forgive and forget,
Makes you change? Makes you change?

 

I welcome reader's suggestions for pieces to include in future playlists.  There are more change songs out there than I could wade through in a lifetime.  Apparently, more than a few of us are dealing with the metamorphosis thing.

This is My Brain on Procrastination

One of the books I am currently reading is The Stress Answer:  Train Your Brain to Conquer Depression and Anxiety in 45 Days, by Dr. Frank Lawlis.  This is relevant to my blog topic, because procrastination is depressing, and produces and reacts to states of anxiety.  It is also instructive because it deals with change, which I am attempting, in terms of brain plasticity.


The concept of brain plasticity--how its close friends refer to neuroplasticity--is finding its way into common parlance.  It even had its own PBS special.  Wikipedia tells us that

The brain consists of nerve cells (or "neurons") and glial cells which are interconnected, and learning may happen through change in the strength of the connections, by adding or removing connections, or by adding new cells. "Plasticity" relates to learning by adding or removing connections, or adding cells. During the 20th century, the consensus was that lower brain and neocortical areas were immutable in structure after childhood, meaning learning only happens by changing of connection strength, whereas areas related to memory formation, such as the hippocampus and dentate gyrus, where new neurons continue to be produced into adulthood, were highly plastic. This belief is being challenged by new findings, suggesting all areas of the brain are plastic even after childhood. . . .Decades of research have now shown that substantial changes occur in the lowest neocortical processing areas, and that these changes can profoundly alter the pattern of neuronal activation in response to experience. According to the theory of neuroplasticity, thinking, learning, and acting actually change both the brain's physical structure (anatomy) and functional organization (physiology) from top to bottom. 

This, of course, is great news for those of us old dogs who need to learn a few new tricks.  Like getting things done before they don't matter anymore.  


Dr. Lawlis's practical book applies what we are still learning about how the brain changes, and how we can promote and establish new neural connections to support the new behaviors we desire.  Since this blog is really all about behavioral change, I am keenly interested in what he has to say.


I figure my 45 day clock doesn't start until I finish reading the book.  But about halfway through, I have been particularly heartened by the framework for change that he presents, which consists of these 5 principles:

• Principle I:  Neurons that learn together become attached.
• Principle II:  Experience and need can change neurological bundles.
• Principle III:  Suspension of thoughts or elimination of specific experience can allow neurological changes to happen immediately.
• Principle IV:  Times of growth and change are opportunities for learning and relearning.
• Principle V:  New pathways can be changed and improved.

In chapters on various manifestations of what Dr. Lawlis terms "stress storms," including anxiety patterns, attention deficit, obsessive-compulsive patterns, depression, and chronic worry (could I possibly exhibit all of these?), he employs these principles in outlining programs for change.  His programs are guided by research, his decades of psychotherapy practice, and his own experience, and are quite eclectic compilations which include, among others, use of music and rhythm exercises, breathing exercises, attention to nutrition and sleep, use of supplements, medication, psychotherapy, and use of a Bio-Acoustical Utilization Device (BAUD) and an emWave device.  While his gold standard would have us all submitting to costly brain scans of one type or another in order to confirm our problem patterns, he provides self-assessment scales which can serve as the "poor woman's" substitute.   


One of the most useful ideas I have picked up so far in the few days I have spent with this book is this, under the subheading "Hare Today, Gone Tomorrow:"

For real change with long-lasting success, the brain has to compile, rewire, and reshelve a plethora of new neural connections.  To achieve this, the process must be done consistently over time, and at an even, unhurried, deliberate pace.  

Heeding this admonition, I see that the change project in which I am engaged, with all its aspects, needs a bit more patience than I have been applying.  This recovering procrastinator is very grateful for my plastic (and ultimately biodegradable!) brain, which I intend to treat with a lot more gentleness and respect, given the miracles I am expecting of it.  And of me.