Emotionally Intelligent People Use a Brilliant 4-Word Phrase to Rewire the Brain and Reduce Stress
It can seem obvious, but it takes work to actually make a difference
It’s a common antidote to dealing with anxiety: putting things into perspective. Sure. Easy enough, right? Think again, Deepak Chopra.
What does it mean to “put things into perspective”? It’s expounded on from all corners of the internet, serving as the go-to mantra for self-help gurus. But as a behavioral scientist, I’m not sold. In most cases, it’s a vague, blanket-style statement that has little practical meaning. It doesn’t do much at all to reduce a person’s anxiety. And anxiety, we know, is best resolved through actionable coping-based tactics.
The emotionally intelligent see valuable insights in this four-word phrase. They see what it really means when you say “put things into perspective.” It begins with the brain.
The anxious brain and perspectives
The brain’s default is to process stressors in relation to the self. The innate response is to evaluate all possible negative events as something directly relevant to the self. To the anxious brain, it’s always “me! me! me!” We call this egocentric stress, and it’s a hindrance to our basic psychological functioning.
At its worst, egocentric stress can be highly debilitating and distressing. It happens because of a key area in the brain: the medial frontal gyrus (MFG). The MFG covers a swath of spongy brain folds on the outside middle region of the frontal lobe. It is the seat of our identity. It is your “you.”
The MFG’s anatomical location in the brain with respect to its neighboring brain areas is curious. Below the MFG are the negative emotion areas; on one side are evaluative areas; and on the other side are the attention areas. It’s a clustered network of brain regions that fire together, so that any time a potentially bad situation happens, it is automatically considered:
- Emotionally charged (emotion areas)
- Judged (evaluative areas)
- Focused on (attentional areas)
And most of all,
- Personally relevant (MFG region)
This default structure of the brain can lead to rumination. A person may shift attention back to the anxiety, over and over again, leading to a dysregulated emotion-based processing. In fact, people suffering from depression tend to show patterns of hyper-activation in these brain areas.
Back to our four-word phrase. “Putting things in perspective” ultimately means rewiring the MFG and its neighboring connections. It means engaging in strategies and tactics that separate the ‘you’ from the anxiety.
Putting thing into (time) perspective
Scientific evidence says a highly effective way to pull ourselves away from the negative event (and thus reduce anxiety) is to alter our perspective on time. We humans are highly skilled in mental time travel. It’s called chronosthesia and it’s the brain’s natural ability to be constantly aware of past and future versions of ourselves. It’s believed to be the basis of human consciousness — what separates us from our closest primate relatives.
It’s important to understand that when we recall (the past) or forecast (the future), we do so in varying degrees of temporal/psychological distance. We can think of events that happened yesterday, a week ago, a decade ago, and so on. Likewise, we can imagine a future of tomorrow, next month, or 20 years from now.
Not all temporal distances during mental time travel are equally effective for changing perspectives. Distant memories/forecasts are “lived” in the mind’s eye through an observer or objective perspective. Near memories/predictions are “lived” more in a subjective or first-person perspective.
What this means, then, is that separating yourself from anxiety (i.e., putting things into perspective) is best done by generating experiences that are more distant in your mind to gain greater objectivity. Here are a few exercises that you can try out.
Future/retro reflection
Imagine yourself and your life a year from now. You might not know exactly what this will look like, but do your best to envision what you might be doing, how you’ll be behaving, who you’ll be interacting with, etc. Get as concrete and specific as you can. The goal here is to simply see your future self as some objective individual. Then, pretend that your future self is looking back at the current moment and to the situation that’s causing you stress or anxiety.
Answer the following questions using this perspective change:
- How does your current self feel about the stress you’re encountering at this moment? Write out the emotions you’re experiencing.
- How does your future self feel about the current stressful situation? Write out the emotions you think this future you would experience.
- What things can you imagine your future self knows that your current self doesn’t? Can your current self come to know these things?
When you’re experiencing stress, pulling yourself out of the present is an effective strategy. It causes rewiring in the medial frontal gyrus, which allows you to “see” yourself (from the past or in the future) as more objective and less subjective. It results in your stress getting experienced in a more impartial, less emotional way. You’re wiser through gaining a different view.
So at this point you’ve not just heard the line “put things into perspective” — you’ve actually gone and done it.
That’s the real difference.
You can view the article here.