Permanent link for Your brain is a museum and you are the curator of exhibits on April 27, 2020

In the midst of a global pandemic, it’s important to be the curator of what goes into your brain.

The curator of a museum accepts items and arranges exhibits to impact your thoughts and feelings, and perhaps even to shock you. Imagine you are entering a museum that is dedicated to the Holocaust. Can you imagine what kinds of exhibits might occupy the space and what thoughts and feelings the curator would be eliciting in you? What would the tone and mood be like in that space? Or imagine that you enter a museum that has exhibits focused on the stories of inspiring women in history. How would that impact your thoughts and feelings differently? What mood(s) would the curator be hoping to evoke?

Every day we are bombarded with information to curate. The media offers unlimited items to place into our brains. Click-bait links sensationalize things that turn out to not be sensational at all. Clicking on a headline like, “So-and-so Destroys So-and-so” turns out to be 10 paragraphs about something that was Tweeted and will probably be forgotten by tomorrow. Media decides for us about the order of our news feeds and the size of the font used to grab our attention. Often the larger font and lead story is dedicated to things that provoke the emotions of anger, anxiety, fear, and sadness. Why? Because it sells. It stimulates the fight-flight-freeze part of our brain that tells our glands to release stress hormones. Our brains are wired for our survival and anything that provokes anxiety and fear is given top priority in our brains as if the bad thing is actually happening to us right now. So, this headline gets top billing in our brain. A steady diet of this creates chronic exposure to stress hormones which can negatively impact our physical and emotional health.

Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson has said that our brains are “Velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good”. The brain locks onto anxiety and fear immediately, but it takes 20 seconds of savoring a positive event for it to become “wired” into the brain. On a practical level, can you think of a time when someone has given you a lot of praise? Or think of a time when someone said something negative about you. Which one sticks in your mind long after the conversations are over?

You are the curator of what goes into your brain. You get to decide what it focuses on. The following are some ideas about how to curate your own brain exhibit:

• Curate the amount of fight/flight/freeze material that you allow to enter your brain. Have times of the day which are completely free of corona-virus information. Think about limiting your news exposure to once a day. Consider limiting the number of controversial and provocative things you read on Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit. Or limit your time spent dealing with relationship drama. This will allow your nervous system to experience periods of calm.
• Increase your exposure to positive people, news and experiences. During these experiences, intentionally focus on the good feelings you are having for 20 seconds, like you would savor the first bite of an amazing meal. Review that experience over and over in your mind. That will allow the positive to “wire” itself into your brain.
• Spend time doing deep breathing, mindfulness and meditation. This activates your parasympathetic nervous system (rest, digest, heal) and decreases sympathetic activity (fight, flight, freeze).
• If you are struggling with anxiety and fear, try asking yourself this question—"Am I safe right here, right now?” If you are safe right here and now, remind yourself of that, take a deep breath, and try to move on.
• Another useful question to ask is, “What’s the next right thing I can do to move towards calm and away from fear?” Then do that next right thing. Don’t think too big at this point. All it takes is a small step in the right direction like taking a short walk or putting in a load of laundry.
• Remember that we aren’t trying to “not have” fear and anxiety. The brain doesn’t work that way. You can’t tell yourself to not think about a pink elephant because you have to think about it in order to not think about it. You are trying to give your brain an “instead of”. For example, “Instead of focusing on this, I am going to focus on this other thing instead.”
• Distractions are okay, in moderation. Sometimes we need to distract ourselves with an activity that minimizes our focus on negative things. However, it’s important to maintain some balance and not use distractions as a way to deny or numb ourselves from difficult things.
• Seek out positive experiences and positive people. Help someone out. Look for news stories with a positive message. As Mr. Roger’s mother once said, “Look for the helpers.”

Take care of your mental health and curate what you allow into your brain.

- Les White, LMSW, CAADC

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