Mindfulness and Machine Guns

Viktor Frankl in his confronting but brilliant book?Man’s search for meaning?makes the following observation with regards to mindfulness:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.

That is a profound statement and comes from a profound book. If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend that you do.?

Unlike Frankl’s eloquent and considered observation of mindfulness, I like to think of mindfulness with reference to military rifles, and more specifically with reference to AK-47s and M4s.

Now before I get shouted down by the hardcore gun-nuts out there, I realise that neither of these rifles are machine guns, and therefore the article title is technically incorrect.?

I don’t care.?

The title sounds cool and it’s staying. For those of you who don’t know one end of a rifle from the other, fear not, all will be explained.?

Back to the topic of mindfulness. I think of our brain’s impulse control mechanisms as akin to us walking around with a military rifle in our heads. It is very capable of doing a lot of damage if it discharges in an inappropriate fashion, but likewise, if we learn how to appropriately apply the safety switch to it, and some good trigger discipline when we do choose to fire it, then we can be far more calculated, accurate, and appropriate with the proverbial bullets that we do unleash.?

The operative word here is ‘choose’, and key to achieving that is bringing our responses into conscious thought and not simply the knee-jerk involuntary reactions that our?reptilian brains often want to spit out. ?

Before I drill down into the analogy of AK-47s vs M4s inside our craniums, let’s take a deeper dive into what constitutes our brain’s impulse control mechanisms.?

Whole books can and have been written on this topic alone, so I won’t even attempt to provide that level of detail here. What I will provide is my ‘dumb-doctor’s’ explanation of the key players in neural impulse control.?

First and foremost in this discussion is the?reptilian brain; which you can think of as a scaly critter in the depths of our brains whose itchy finger is constantly poised on the trigger of our mental assault rifle.?

The reptilian brain is the most primitive part of our brains and is responsible for the?fight and flight?response that everyone is familiar with, as well as other urges that begin with the letter ‘f’ (which I will leave to the reader to decipher).?

These neural networks were some of the first to develop in prehistoric organisms and served them well in the provision of impulsive reactions to immediate threats such as predators, as well as to find prey and mates etcetera.?

Modern-day humans still have all of this same neural hardwire deep in our brains, although in a 21st century world its utility is significantly diminished.?

Apart from providing a bit of a giddy-up in an emergency, the reptilian brain is largely unnecessary in day-to-day life, and when it activates is more likely to get us into trouble than out of it.?

Anyone who has found themselves initiating a road-rage scenario or losing their cool with their kids will know this only too well. The untamed reptile in our minds can be very bad news!?

Fortunately, as humans evolved, we have developed a highly sophisticated?neocortex,?or ‘new brain’ to help tame the reptile. The neocortex is an amazing piece of hardware and is responsible for all the higher brain function that humans enjoy, including sensory perception, cognition, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning and language.

Specific areas of the neocortex are linked directly to the reptilian brain and, when well-developed, can tame the reptile and help keep it on its leash.?

This is the space that is created between stimulus and response that Frankl refers to, and it is this space that we aim to prolong through deliberately training our brains through practices such as mindfulness and meditation. ?

While there are many subregions of the neocortex that we know interact with the reptilian brain to allow enhanced impulse control, for simplicity here I will refer to these regions collectively as the?prefrontal cortex (PFC).?

The PFC (not to be confused with KFC, which ironically a well-developed PFC will help you eat less of!) can be thought of like the safety switch for the reptilian rifle in your head.

?Following on with this analogy the reptilian brain (a key part of which are the amygdalae (pleural – there’s two of them!)) is the rifle’s trigger. This concept is diagrammatically represented in figure 1.?

Those of us who are not mindful are often walking around with our safety switch set to fire and with a finger poised on the reptilian hair-trigger to go off at the first suggestion of stimulus. The reptile wants this, like any wild animal its preferred state is off the leash and free to act on its animal impulses.

In the last 20 years there has been a huge amount of interest on the impact of mindfulness and meditation on our brains and with advances in the ability to read brainwaves and scan brains we now have the answers. What we know definitively is that mindfulness and meditation change both the way the brain fires in stressful situations and, over time, start to change the structure of the brain to optimise its response in high stress situations.?

Studies on long-term meditators show thickening of the PFC and stronger connections between it and the reptilian brain. With consistent meditation over time, shrinking of the amygdalae has been demonstrated, as well as lower release of stress hormones both chronically and in acute high stress situations.?

Basically, we can train our brains to be less reactive to stress and allow us to make more calculated and deliberate actions in high stress situations, as opposed to handing the reins over to the reptile to cook off without consideration of proportionality or consequence.?

Looping back to the analogy of the AK-47 and the M4, the relevance here is in the difference in their safety switches. Both have an option to keep the weapon on safe, fire it on semi-automatic (one shot per trigger pull), or fire it on fully automatic (hold the trigger down and spray bullets everywhere!).?

The difference being that the AK-47 goes straight from safe to fully automatic with one click of the safety switch (it takes a second click to get to semi-automatic). This is akin to an untrained brain where a small amount of stimulus can cause a reptilian response that is often disproportionate to what’s appropriate and can lead to regrettable actions.?

The M4 on the other hand goes from safe to semi-automatic with the first click and then requires a second click to go to fully automatic. This is what we can train our brains to behave like with deliberate mindfulness and meditation practice allowing us to have better control over our responses to stressful situations and either choose to leave our reptilian rifle on safe, or to fire it deliberately on semi-automatic with well-aimed shots.?

When it comes to how much meditation you need to do to have this effect, the answer is not much. As little as 10-12 minutes done most days will start to optimise impulse response neural pathways in just a few weeks. Like any training effect, the more you do and the longer you do it for, the better the result.?

A great place to start if you’re not a meditator already is guided meditation apps. I use one called 'Calm', which has a 10-minute ‘daily calm’ focused-attention meditation, but there’s plenty of others like it.?

One last word on meditation before I wrap up this article. There might be some out there who have given it a go and thought it wasn’t for them because they couldn’t calm their minds. Don’t be disheartened by this, it’s completely normal.?

When our brains aren’t meaningfully occupied they click into a pattern of thought known as the ‘default mode network’ (DFN), often referred to as the ‘monkey mind’. These thoughts are often profoundly negative and focused on the anxiety of something coming up in the future, or ruminating on a negative event from the past, both of which fuel the release of chronic stress hormones.?

When you first start meditating and try to quieten your mind, the DFN will start spinning in overdrive and the monkey will hop on the treadmill and run at a million miles an hour to distract you.?

This is normal.?

The process that trains our brains and helps strengthen our impulse override mechanisms is catching our mind wandering and bringing back to focus. At first it will seem like you’re constantly doing this, but this is the process. Being able to quieten your mind during meditation is the end state – stick with your practice and you’ll get there in no time!

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Until next Friday, stay safe, and don’t forget to have some fun!

Cheers,

Dr Dan Pronk

If you want to read more of my story or our work on resilience, you can check out one of my books! All are available through Amazon globally and on audiobook.?

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