The Boston Consulting Company runs an analysis every year looking at the skills that thriving individuals and companies share. In the last 8 years, there have been 2 skills that have always made the top 3 spots.
Innovation
Creativity
Unfortunately, if you’re not a neuroscientist, local biohacker or aura reading psychic you like the thousands of others have no idea how to sharpen this skill. Luckily for us, science is giving us a helping hand and we can take a look into the data for a helping hand.
Shall we sharpen our blades?
Your Brain on Stress
Good news your here and alive (hopefully), the bad news is that you have a supercomputer in your hand but a caveman in your head. Which makes a mismatch as you might expect.
Our beautiful age of technology has given us a lot of things, connection across the world, incredible photos at our fingertips, smashing candy skills, flying birds in slingshots, yes indeed if we look at the book 1984 by George Orwell I can say “we’ve made it.”
But what’s the unlikely gift that all this new tech has given us?
High blood pressure, headaches and despite our modern advancement in healthcare we have had a steady growth in average sick days taken.
There are many factors to point the finger at but we are going to generalize all of it into everyone’s favorite word.
STRESS
Stress does 3 really great things for you.
Makes you stupid: stress draws blood and energy away from the frontal cortex where creativity is drawn from as well as making you focus on negative outcomes instead of bad ones.
Makes you sick: stress places focus on next second survival, not long term immunity.
Makes you slow: despite our perceived notion that time is actually passing more quickly, we are accomplishing in that time much less, because our brain and body are multitasking. To both accomplish the work at hand and survive whatever is stressing us.
Silence is the new Coffee
With this chronic stress in our lives, we have officially become the “tired, wired and stressed culture” not a title I’m extremely proud of.
The good news is that neuroscience has shared a solution that we’ve known about for thousands of years.
Introducing…. Silence.
Before you run for the hills let me explain.
When I say silence what I’m really pointing the finger at is meditation. Simply said meditation is the process of focusing the mind on a singular mundane task and returning our focus to that task for a period of time. The most commonly used task is to focus on breathing.
Sound too easy?
Try it out before you sit atop your high throne.
Set a timer for 5 minutes and focus on breathing. How many seconds went by before you forgot about it?
Your focus has been hijacked by our world. Fortunately, we have tools like this to get it back.
The Neuroscience of Silence 101
While I’m sure a riveting textbook explanation about the process of vasodilation, shifting neural pathways, shrinking your amygdala and many other fun lecture-like presentations would have some of you crazies out there jumping for highlighters, we are going to keep this functional.
When we quite the mind we give it a chance to process information, our brain acts like a supercomputer, constantly scanning the environment and looking for things that may harm it our benefit survival such as food. It then stores that information in interesting and weird ways until it can be processed. The caveman way would have been to have a high-intensity moment followed shortly by rest and processing of the event. Nowadays we don’t have that time.
So we continue to compound and save this information until we lose the ability to even store any more information and things like depression or anxiety come in. All signs the brain is shutting itself down so that it can integrate and process life.
Meditation gives you the ability to integrate and process at superhuman speeds, faster than you could naturally if we still had the caveman lifestyle.
Here’s how.
When you direct your breathing you drop your high-stress brain state into something called relaxation, think about your significant other playing with your hair. That feeling you get when your eyes are rolling back in your head and you are a zombie just breathing.
You can naturally turn on that form of relaxation and inside of that relaxed period of time you give the 95% of your brain that you don’t have typical control over, the ability to get to work.
Suddenly all that power that was going to keeping you alive is turned toward integration and unwinding stress patterns which are stored in the body. Can you say bye bye neck and back pain.
When you continue to do this for a period of time you train your brain and body to have a larger bandwidth of experience so that every time you get an email from your boss you don’t suddenly get hives. The switch is subtle at first but with regular and highly recommended reflection time the results are incredible.
What to Expect
Research shows a lot of potential for meditation, from thickening the connection between the hemispheres of the brain which allows for more innovation and novel ideas. To increased activity in the frontal cortex, which means less anchoring to ideas and more creativity. Less reactive teams, heightened immunity, less sick days in offices when properly implemented, better eating habits(when you’re not stressed you want better food). All with 10 minutes a day of some breathing.
Sounds too good to be true, but the literature is abundant and coming out at exponential rates.
Here’s how to get started:
How to breathe
Like the creation of all new skills, it takes time to get better at it.
I recommend starting with just 5 minutes per day of square breathing. This method is simply:
Breathe in for 4 seconds
Hold for 4 seconds
Breathe out for 4 seconds
Hold for 4 seconds
Repeat for 5 minutes.
This exercise is a short break in the action which gives you a chance to integrate life and get back on top. Studies also find that this form of breathing can be 10x more restful than a nap!
Reflection is vital to combine with this strategy. When we are making changes to neurons it’s hard to physically see. Keeping a journal and doing a daily reflection on how your mind, body, and spirit feel on a scale of 1–10 was a great start to my journaling obsession. This way you’ll gain insights to changes and literally have data to graph improvement.
Increase your time 5 minutes every week. Your results will show you when you’ve reached your threshold. Even today having done intensive neuro and biofeedback for 3 years my limit is around 30 minutes but the results of that 30 minutes last all day.
The big take away is to realize that your caveman brain needs time to breathe and integrate life. When it doesn’t you body and relationships suffer. The quick solution is breathe.
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